ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the body’s possession and dispossession in recent music, with particular emphasis on what this means forperformers and listeners. Nonetheless, this follows from a longer history of imagined possession in artistry. Possession’, read most literally in terms of ownership, might mean something different too, beyond our own bodies, for denizens of an age characterised by renting not owning, access to services rather than the accumulation of concrete goods, and conditions of precarity and mobility. The body can no longer be — if indeed it ever was — the subject’s saving grace, a material touchstone onto which the subject can graft stable existence. Bodies are now conceived in multiple and contradictory terms. Extended instrumental practices, including decoupling, make visible that bodies are extended through their instruments. The soloistic presentation of the body is, to borrow Lachenmann’s phrase, ‘in dialogue with those already existing’.
