Cage, Reich, and Morris: process and sonic fetishism
Wilson, Samuel J. (2023) Cage, Reich, and Morris: process and sonic fetishism. In: The sound of Žižek: musicological perspectives on Slavoj Žižek. Žižek Studies, 2 . Peter Lang, pp. 139-161. ISBN 9781433178986
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Text (Version of Record that has been published Cage, Reich, and Morris: process and sonic fetishism by / edited by Samuel J. Wilson. The original work can be found at https://doi.org/ 10.3726/b20311. Peter Lang © 2023 .All rights reserved.)
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Abstract
Fetishism is often characterised as the obscuring of the social relations immanent to the processes of production. For the fetishist, power seemingly emerges as a characteristic of an autonomous object, not the heterogeneous processes that determine the object. Seemingly at odds with the magical fetish object, much art music and sonic art since (at least) the 1960s onwards foregrounds processes over objects. Indeed, the processes of production are often explicitly traced sonically: John Cage and others prescribed processes through which performers might enliven and sonically explore a variety of objects, with inde terminate results; Robert Morris presented a wooden box for exhibition, from which emerged the recorded sound of its own construction (Box with the Sound of its Own Making [1961]); Steve Reich conceived of Music as a Gradual Process (1968), expressing an interest in a "compositional process and a sounding music that are the same thing". I use Zizek's account of fetishism to complicate commonplace assumptions about products and processes in music. Crucially, in The Plague of Fantasies, Zizek suggests that postmodernism connotes a fetishisation of the ephemeral, often manifested in a staging of production. In this view, fetishism - a fetishism related to but distinct from Marx's and Freud's uses of the concept - still might function where one turns away from products produced and instead puts on show one's processes of production. This chapter thus theorises musical product, process, and fetishism in a manner taking us beyond Adorno's (1938) infamous proposal that the "counterpart to the fetishism of music is a regression of listening". It contributes to a critical theory of musical production, under which artistic production is related to broader (nonartistic) regimes of production - a connection more firmly established in studies of visual and plastic arts, but underdeveloped in philosophies of music.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
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| Additional Information: | All rights reserved. |
| Keywords: | Robert Morris, John Cage, Steve Reich, Slavoj Žižek, psychoanalysis, philosophy, politics, process music |
| Depositing User: | Karen Smith |
| Date Deposited: | 01 Jul 2026 14:14 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Jul 2026 14:14 |
| URI: | https://theplace.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/21 |
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