UC San Diego

Among Objects seeks to explore the concepts and structures of thought that underlie Western percussion ontology. As an artform, percussion is often understood as not being rooted to a material practice, but instead defined based on practitioners’ intentions and relationships to any number of materials, from conventional instruments to so-called “found sounds.” This dissertation, itself invested in the ethical dilemmas of the art form, seeks to complicate this understanding. I begin, through a phenomenological lens, by analyzing the structures of action and consciousness that make such an ontology possible. I then illustrate, through the concept of touch, the contingent bodily and material elements that support these structures and mediate this action: conditions that are often overlooked in accounts of the artform. I argue that the predominant ontology of action is shaped by certain orienting structures of power, and that percussion’s ontology must be understood based on the consequences of these orientations. I proceed to imagine and outline a metaphysics of percussion rooted not in subjective action but in a form of inter-objective self-interpretation. Within this framework, the percussive work or event creates a more complex object of which the human is just one component part, rather than master or sovereign. The dissertation closes with a discussion of how, given this alternative metaphysics, the relationship of percussion to violence takes on a different form: no longer something that one commits only by choice, but something that is immanent to the embodied, material, and cultural practices of the artform. Given this understanding, I argue for an embodied, object-oriented ethics to help create and maintain a more habitable percussive world.