Sharing Things(１)： Collaborative Agents in Free Improvisation

Reading Karen Barad was like finding a how-to guide for destabilizing the classical, solidity-based metaphysics which have long oriented humanist ontology and characterized the world as a deterministic and categorizable variety of stable, isolated, individualized, atomized me's, you's and them's. The nonsense of this “commonsense” has long seemed obvious to me, easily evidenced by even the most common transmaterialisations that facilitate life--such as eating, breathing, interacting, etc. Eating, for example, obviously brings about profound changes in both my body and the object I might eat. Things together with things become different, undermining notions of independence and making the idea of stable individualization seem absurd. From Barad's methods for revealing and analyzing a more subtle, accurate and undeterminable ontology of intra-actively becoming and entangled agents, I took away the implication that everything is involved, always has been and can't not be. Or, rather, nothing exists and everything proves it. Human and nonhuman agents engage in collaborative entanglements, bringing about becoming. Notions like this made me excited to test Barad's ideas in analyzing the art practice that I know most deeply: freely improvised music. Practitioners of free improvisation often describe it with terms like “becoming one” or “sharing the moment.” However, Barad provides language for examining collaborations (both human and non-human) with greater nuance and clarity, but also provides a means by which to venture beyond humanist-centered ontologies and explore realms of objects. Thus, in this article, using Barad's and Object Oriented Ontological concepts as tools for building experimental apparatuses, I do a detailed analysis of an entanglement between a human and non-human object (specifically, me improvising with a tenor saxophone). With this serving as something of a case study in post-humanist ontology, my examination expands in order to more generally explore how human and non-human agents intra-act in collaborative becoming, and how this awareness provides potential ways for exceeding the human-centered constructs that delegitimize the body in general and individual becoming bodies in particular. The results, I argue, are that bodies can't not possess the autonomy and openness that humanism tries to reduce into its determined and classified roles of purpose and meaning. As well, I argue that bodies can only be understood as individuals in both form and time.