Not without my music: music as a social fact

Society is not a mere sum of individuals but the result of interacting individuals, and individuals are also the result of such interaction. This article draws from the idea that this interaction, that constructs us as individuals, happens also through music. The importance that music has in the process of making up a society is clearly brought to light in the role that it plays in the three basic parameters of the social logics: identity, social order and the need for exchange. Given that all these aspects are implemented in situations, there is the need to give the appropriate heuristic value to the situation as a discrete unit of analysis. The epistemic value of situations lies in the fact that we can hardly understand social phenomena in general without taking into consideration the social behaviours in specific situations (Knorr-Cetina 1988). It is in concrete situations where practices develop, i.e., “actions”, and “most cultural knowledge is stored in actions rather than in words” (Carlson 1996: 27). We, as individuals, would be incomprehensible without the constant exchange with other people but we also can affirm that without many of the things that surround us, we ontologically could not be. And in this regard, music, as technology, can also be conceived as a real extension of our body. Our present society has created and developed powerful musical technologies and media, and these, as actants (Latour 2005), have made possible the emergence of a total musical availability and a new subject characterised by the all-embracing musical listening. With this new subject, the possibility of implementing itself in music is offered as never before. Today we have the possibility to live being constantly embedded in music, and this is what enables music to become a real extension of our body.This article is a reelaboration of a keynote talk presented at the 1st Conference in Ethnomusicology and Anthropology of Music. Methods, approaches and perspectives for the study of music within culture (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2-3 July, 2015) which has been published in Catalan (Martí 2015). The present version has been elaborated within the framework of the Spanish National R+D project on posthumanism (FEM2016-77963-C2- l-P).Peer reviewe