Introduction

CARLO DIAZ

Orpheus Instituut / University of Chicago

By 1980, the music theorist Leonard Ratner had arrived at a novel way of thinking about the eighteenth century within his discipline, focusing on the gradually accumulated meaning of musical topics—styles, melodic figures, harmonic progressions. This approach centred culture at large as the primary driving force of musical creativity and recast the composer from a genius of musical originality to an expert user of musical objects common to all. ¹ Ratner’s theory stood in stark contrast to other approaches common in music theory of the time, which often—in the United States, at least—focused more on quantitative analyses of music’s physical properties and internal structural proportions within isolated compositions.

One year later, Rosalind Krauss published an article that questioned the originality of art in modernism, thereby demonstrating that no matter how hard an artist pushes away from culturally inherited techniques and styles, they will nevertheless arrive at a practice that can easily be slotted into a familiar frame of understanding. ² Again here, the trace of a shared culture among artists is given priority over the unique contributions of individuals. Again here, stark contrast is provided to a preceding view of art production—often exemplified by the writing of Clement Greenberg—that focused heavily on the physicality of artistic media and the originary power of the individual artist. ³

Much like each asserted about the artists they discussed, neither Ratner nor Krauss claimed to pull their theory out of thin air. Ratner traced his analyses to music treatises by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, Johann Georg Sulzer, and Johann Mattheson; whereas Krauss traced hers to the poststructuralist philosophy and literary criticism of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. But these references are quite different from each other. Ratner and Krauss didn’t draw from the same intellectual domains and neither author seemed to have much effect on the other. What I’d like to illustrate here is that an objective study of the eighteenth-century past and a generative critique of twentieth-century contemporaneity arrived at remarkably similar understandings of artistic production at roughly the same time quite independently of each other.

One could speak of a zeitgeist here—Ratner’s thought bears subtle resemblance to broader trends of his time in contemporary cultural studies while Krauss’s is clearly influenced by her deep knowledge of historical artistic cultures much like the one Ratner studied—but I’d like to draw attention to temporality instead. My thought here—and the one that initiates this publication—is that there is a moment in both the writing of history and the making of art where a similar negotiation between temporalities takes place. This is not a bridging, as in the chronological sense, either from the present to the past or from the present to the future, but an experiential dealing with, in a more phenomenological sense. The writings of both Ratner and Krauss represent an imagining beyond what is known, beyond what is here in the present to be seen. Though historians and artists deal with opposite ends of a chronological spectrum of time, they deal with the same end of its phenomenological cousin, if you will. In other words, both are engaged in imagining the non-present.

Questions to guide the pursuit of this proposition include: In what way are historians and artists tied together by a similar reliance upon a unified faculty of memory-imagination? What might each party gain by reinterpreting this faculty as referring to a unified temporality of the non-present rather than a bifurcated temporality of past and future? And how might this reinterpretation enable the two parties to share and retool each other’s deep back catalogues of concepts and methods?

This publication is an opportunity to begin imagining from a temporality that progresses from past to present to future to one that functions as an interface between presence and non-presence—between what is seen, heard, or felt in a moment to what has existence not through the physical sensory mechanisms of the body but by being conspicuously not there.

My own thinking on this topic began in the philosophy of history, particularly in a reading of the protracted exchange between Hayden White and Paul Ricœur between the 1970s and the early 2000s.

White wrote primarily in protest against an objectivist doxa he saw in the historical tradition, arguing that every effort at historical representation—from the biographical narrative historiography of the nineteenth century to the quantitative sociocultural historiography of the twentieth century—has embedded within it some kind of ideological project revealing much more about the person who wrote it than the topic they addressed. He argued that the historical discipline as a whole therefore needed to be either fundamentally rethought or completely eradicated. ⁴ This might sound familiar to those who know Richard Taruskin’s or Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s analyses of the early music movement. ⁵

Ricœur didn’t take the opposing side of this argument but attempted to find a middle ground between White’s analysis and the initial purpose of the historical discipline simply to find some academically rigorous mode of collective memory. Ricœur acknowledged the former as a substantial insight but also respected the latter as representing a moral good. White’s work is sometimes read to suggest that it is impossible to know or say anything truthful at all about the past; that a historian’s work is no more grounded in reality than, for example, a novelist’s; that every historian and every writer of fiction simply gives their own perspective on and from the present; that a historian’s telling of the past is no better than anyone else’s. Ricœur gives a poignant example to undermine this in the form of Holocaust denial. While he accepts White’s argument that the moment a second sentence is added to a lone fact the story they produce in combination cannot be called purely true, he maintains that there can still be facts within it; that even though there can’t be one representation of the past that is correct, or even more correct than others, there is nevertheless a reality underlying historical narratives that sets them apart from fiction; and that there can nevertheless be a moral good embedded within communication about them, which will inevitably take narrative form. ⁶

Ricœur argues that the work of refining the historical discipline sits not in manoeuvring it away from its exclusive orientation toward the past as it actually was but in better understanding and more frequently laying bare the relationships between memory, testimony, documentation, archives, judgement, and emplotment that exist in every historian’s practice. He argues in favour of clarifying the intercourse between fact and meaning rather than simply abandoning fields such as history in which this intercourse is often particularly vexing.

Some further questions: What if we slightly changed the course of this argument, starting as Ricœur does from the initial observation that memory and imagination are intimately entangled but moving forward differently than him? ⁷ What if we dismissed the urge to separate imprints in the mind—visions of that which is not there—into those that are truthful and those that are not? What might the debate between White and Ricœur look like if we let go of the desire for truthfulness in our understanding of the many different forms by which we conjure what does not seem to be there?

What is the non-present?

For a start, it’s fundamentally a negation. It isn’t positive being or occurrence but some kind of lack thereof. It is what isn’t present, temporally or spatially. So what then is presence? And what does it have to do with historians or artists?

Presence underlies scientific knowledge. A scientist can be more certain about things that are right in front of them right now—present in time and space, available for immediate study—than things that are not. There is more certainty in examining the colour of a wall right now than in imagining that it may have been darker in the past or might become lighter in the future. A colour can be captured as a frequency of light now and reproduced as nearly exactly the same colour later. But to trace back or project forward the change in that colour due to the fading of pigment in sunlight over time is a matter of much less epistemological precision. But neither historians nor artists are scientists.

Every historian knows that whatever has happened in the past may leave traces in the present but is itself quite gone. Those traces—artefacts, testimonies, memories—might suggest the past but they are not the past itself. So if history is the study of the past, it is not merely the study of artefacts, testimonies, and memories. It is perhaps something like the eking out of their non-present: looking for what it is about them that suggests what is not there in them to be seen—their use long ago, their original manner of production, their former shapes or qualities, their trajectory through time and space to their present being in the present moment. History, then, is not a practice of perception but imagination. History is only about traces of the past insofar as there is something those traces lack.

Artists know something similar. They do not produce something out of nothing, but neither do they simply clone objects that already exist or mimic practices that have already been performed. Insofar as art is the making of the new, it entails a study of non-presence in the sense that it is about what’s just beyond what exists or is happening at its moment of creation. It’s about a particular version of what isn’t there at the moment of creation. Artistic work attempts to instigate poetic encounters that don’t yet seem likely to happen but which someone feels they lack.

Non-presence in this sense, then, in the sense in which it seems to operate for artists and historians, is about more than simply what is absent. It’s about what seems like it could be, used to be, or ought to be. And here is where it becomes more complicated than simply renaming a combined past and future as the non-present.

Think of Jennifer Walshe’s Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde. ⁸ Walshe imagines memories of things that never happened. She and her colleagues recount a fantasised history of the Irish musical avant-garde, composing in the guises of various invented musicians from different points in the long twentieth century that seem akin to what may have happened in particular times and places … had they happened at all. Where does an act like this sit in chronology? If memory is reality and imagination is fantasy, a false history is a temporal abomination. It is not an instance of collective memory because it is not a true depiction of the past, but neither is it a vision of the future because it asserts pastness and makes no explicit attempt to depart from that pastness. It is not original (future-directed) art in the sense that Rosalind Krauss spoke of in her essay mentioned above, nor is it simply an expression of Walshe’s own artistic presence. It could be described as Niall Ferguson describes similar cases—as a thought experiment to refine one’s understanding of the true past by imagining how it may have been different. ⁹ It could also be thought of as a critique of the historical discipline akin to Hayden White’s. But maybe it could also be heard as a more abstract inquiry into the multi-layered temporality of human experience. In “Other Presents,” Walshe’s contribution to this publication, she situates this work in relation to her more recent projects using machine learning to imitate the human voice. Through these projects, Walshe ties together many interlocking questions about what it means to be human, what it means for a human to be present, and how the idea of “presence” can be infused with many different kinds of time and space.

Tim Ingold’s contribution to this publication, “Not Yet and Already There: On the Imagination of Real Life,” does something similar. In previous work, Ingold argues that the distinction between reality and fantasy has no right to be taken for granted. ¹⁰ Present and non-present can easily be taken to mean real and unreal, respectively, but this may not be the most fruitful path. Here, what causes one to imagine or what the effect of that imagining may be is often far more important than what is actually imagined and whether it is objectively true. Comparing a stark divide between reality and imagination to that between science and religion, Ingold has argued in favour not of “creat[ing] a space where religion can flourish alongside science in easy accord, with their labours neatly divided between the spiritual and the material sides of things,” but of blending the two modes of knowledge, as reality and imagination are in human experience. “If it is to be conducted ethically—with care, attentiveness, and commitment, and with due acknowledgement of our debt to the world for what it has to teach us—then science is religion in action. And conversely, as a disciplined, systematic but open-ended way of knowing in being, religion must at heart be a practice of science.” ¹¹ In “Not Yet and Already There,” Ingold brings temporality into this conversation about reality. Looking to Henry Nelson Wieman, John Dewey, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead, Ingold asks what it means for objects or experiences to be here with us in the present, whether by being repeatedly remade (as for music) or by simply failing to be unmade (as for physical objects). In what ways does this idea of the present as either a continual undergoing of cultural change or a layered perdurance of the physical world complicate typical understandings of the historical and the contemporary, or of the past, present, and future?

In her 2020 book, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History, Priya Satia shows how the historical sensibility of Victorian British politicians shaped not only their own idea of the past but also their actual present reality as well as the present and long future of those subject to their will. Regardless of what was there for real, available to be seen, they neglected to see what might have complicated their imagining of the past. They willed into being a present that never existed until they transformed it from their idiosyncratic historical fantasy into the real life of many more people besides themselves. ¹² Beyond a conscious image of something that is not present in time or space, non-presence, then, in some cases also refers to a feeling of lacking or longing, a thought that something ought to be there, or an instinct that something must be there even after being told time and again that it certainly is not. In her contribution to Imagining the Non-Present, “Transcending Time and the Self: The Shared Political and Social Potential of Contemporary Composition and Historically Minded Performance,” Satia brings this discourse into relation with musical practices of invention and history. She questions the premise of this publication, asking whether we really perceive or understand the present differently from either the past, the future, or the non-present. How can we understand what we see now without relating it to what we’ve seen before? She also complicates the idea that all this imagining occurs within an individuated self. If the imaginings, writings, and performances of the individual come to be understood as part of a broader social and temporal picture, their time horizon suddenly and greatly expands. The past, present, and future come to be understood as fundamentally intertwined into a single, rich temporality.

Other chapters pick up on several of these themes. Mark Dyer follows Jennifer Walshe’s investigations of the relationship between music history and the making of new music, which comes into particularly close contact when adopting machine learning as a methodology for composition. Bryn Harrison, Pablo Galaz Salamanca, and James Wood each zoom into a much smaller time scale to reflect on how we ontologise musical “things” as we listen to a performance. Harrison observes his own compositional practice through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, ¹³ asking about the subtle shades of meaning created by repetition through recorded playback, repetition through performative imitation, and repetition-with-difference as the basis for musical development. Salamanca digs into the ontological space between a musical object as an excerpt of notation versus as a sequence of sounds. What is required of such an object, whether notation or sound, for it to be understood as such? And how can this concept of musical objecthood so readily cross boundaries between these two vastly different media? Wood proposes a novel understanding of musical temporality that eschews the chronological linearity more typical among Western approaches to music. Looking to a diverse array of musicians including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Code Orange, and Charles Mingus, Wood explores the possibility of music existing within what he calls “plastic time,” and asks what kind of musical politics such an understanding of temporality might enable. And finally, Caroline Wilkins returns us to a phenomenological approach similar to Tim Ingold’s, asking how prioritising a musician’s bodily experience more highly than their propositional knowledge about certain historical styles can result in a musical performance that seems to transcend time. From this perspective, historical music and contemporary music need no longer be considered separate disciplines, as each contributes equally and indistinguishably to the actual habitus of the modern-day performer.

Across these diverse lines of inquiry, we may start to lose sight of chronology and reality. The present may start to lose identity in opposition to the past and future. The real may start to lose identity in opposition to the unreal. Presence and non-presence might perhaps begin to indicate a difference in the feeling of something either occupying or evading oneself, selfhood being here a whirl of perception, emotion, volition, and spirituality blended through mind and body. Many normal presumptions about the factuality of the past and the persistence of stable forms and patterns into the future are expedient. It would be difficult to imagine devaluing these thoughts entirely. They are what allow us to do many basic things every day. But here, we set them aside in order to give our concept of non-presence an opportunity to germinate.