Objectless Listening

Abstract

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, music held a central place in the writings of philosopher Timothy Morton. Building on ideas first articulated in Ecology Without Nature (2007), Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013) argued that twentieth-century composers began to treat musical instruments in radically different ways than their predecessors. Whereas earlier composers regarded instruments primarily as 'materials-for human production', contemporary composers engaged them in ways that drew the listener’s attention to their 'thing-ness' and 'non-human-ness'.

Within musicology, a related discussion has developed around the degree of attention paid to the physicality of instruments when listening to music, particularly in Western instrumental art music. Andy Hamilton has, partly in response to contemporary compositional practices, formulated a 'two-fold thesis' as a modification of Roger Scruton’s anti-physicalist 'acousmatic thesis'. Morton’s writings, however, remain largely disconnected from these debates, and since musicologists have not yet engaged with their work, the first part of this text aims to bridge that gap by assessing and situating Morton’s ideas in relation to the musicological field.

In the second part, I draw a connection between Morton’s aesthetics and the influential 'thing-centered' art movement Mono-ha, in order to explore another dimension of their thought: its resonance with Buddhism. Morton is a student of Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and since the work of Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s brothers—Mingyur Rinpoche and Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche—has figured extensively in my other texts, and as I have also received instruction in this tradition, I attempt to assess Morton’s OOO-informed musical aesthetics from within a Buddhist framework.

The era of OOO 

In hindsight, Morton’s active involvement with the Björk retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 2015 seems to mark the high point of Object-Oriented Ontology’s (OOO) tenure as the 'trendiest' philosophy of art and aesthetics. Björk’s endorsement gave OOO visibility beyond the art world, where Morton had already achieved prominence through collaborations with artists such as Olafur Eliasson. At the same time, OOO’s instigator Graham Harman was also active in the art world, frequently giving talks at museums and art centers. Between 2011 and 2016, it often felt as if OOO was everywhere in the art scene. Since then, however, its influence has steadily waned, and it is no longer as prominent as it once was.

A first reason for OOO’s popularity may have been its focus on things and objects. This made it an accessible ontology—after all, everyone encounters and handles objects every day. Even when writing about something as seemingly 'immaterial' as music, Morton was primarily concerned with its materiality—most notably the physical presence of instruments themselves.

A second reason for Morton's popularity in the art world was their deep interest in, and serious engagement with, both popular culture and art. In terms of music, Morton not only wrote about established experimental figures like Keith Rowe (and free improvisation in general), John Cage, and La Monte Young, but also drew extensively on EDM, rave music, drone music, and My Bloody Valentine (their favorite band). These examples—ranging from art music to popular music—were used to illuminate key aspects of Morton’s theories of OOO (2013b). This interweaving of philosophy and cultural references made their writing accessible and engaging for many readers outside of philosophy. Morton’s analyses of Cage and La Monte Young will, in particular, be taken up below.

A third reason for the appeal of Morton’s OOO was its environmental focus. From the outset, Morton’s work was animated by questions of how humans relate to the environment and to nature, which made their thinking notably topical. They examined how certain ways of engaging with objects could either enable or block constructive responses to ecological crisis. In the first book to feature discussions of music, Ecology Without Nature, Morton’s conclusion was fairly straightforward: as long as 'Nature' is thought of in dualistic opposition to 'non-Nature', we remain caught in a Romantic framework that hinders the cultivation of more viable cultural responses to environmental catastrophe. In this book, Morton analyzed how this dualism expresses itself in aesthetics and, perhaps more importantly, suggested how aesthetics might undo this dualism—a line of thought that is developed more fully in the later book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013).

Relation to musicology

Despite OOO’s cultural prominence, few scholars in musicology or music theory engaged with Morton’s ideas about music at the height of its popularity. This absence is somewhat surprising, since Morton’s writing on music can easily be situated within ongoing musicological discussions about virtuality and materiality. Joseph Nechvatal (2014) expressed surprise at encountering Morton’s concepts in Seth Kim-Cohen’s Against Ambience (2013), though this may be less unexpected given that Kim-Cohen is not a 'traditional' musicologist but a philosopher of music attuned to developments in the art world. Aside from this instance, however, Morton’s work—despite its clear relevance to the field—remained largely absent from contemporary discourse in music theory and musicology.

Perhaps one reason for this lack of engagement is that Morton’s discussions of music were often too general and short on concrete musical examples to attract sustained attention from musicologists. None of their major works—Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007), The Ecological Thought (2010), Realist Magic (2013), or Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013)—fails to mention La Monte Young (and all but Realist Magic discuss Young’s music to some extent). Yet Young’s works are never described or analyzed in any detail, and Morton, even in the most recent of these publications, repeats factual errors—such as the claim that La Monte Young was a student of John Cage. (That Young attended some of Cage’s "Experimental Composition" classes at The New School in the late 1950s is hardly grounds to call him Cage’s 'student'.) This combination of a somewhat sweeping approach to both the music and its historical context, together with an apparent unawareness of related musicological discussions, may explain why Morton’s ideas about music floated past largely unnoticed by the field.

Ambient poetics, mediality, and materiality

Ecology Without Nature is, to my understanding, the first of Morton’s publications to introduce discussions of music that can be meaningfully related to musicological debates on materiality and virtuality. The book unfolds as a survey of techniques—tropes, literary devices, and rhetorical strategies—through which so-called 'ecological' or 'environmental' art attempts to make contact with its own conditions of appearance. Though primarily a work of literary criticism, it also turns toward visual and sonic forms: Mark Rothko’s colour fields, Andy Goldsworthy’s landscape interventions, and the music of Keith Rowe, John Cage, and La Monte Young. These musical examples are especially significant for our purposes here, for they help define a kind of ecomimesis that Morton calls ambient poetics—a notion later taken up by Kim-Cohen in Against Ambience.

When an artwork seeks to evoke or bring to life the atmosphere that surrounds it, it performs ambient poetics. In doing so, Morton (2007) writes, "ambient poetics seeks to undermine the normal distinction between background and foreground" (38). Music in which the surrounding ambience becomes activated by and begins to vibrate with the sounds produced by the performers exemplifies this process. According to Morton, this typically occurs when the music draws attention to its own medium: the work begins to listen to itself, revealing its own mediality. It is through this self-reflexivity that the ambience becomes resonant; by drawing attention to its medial condition, the music is shown to already be of the same substance as its environment. The apparent division between musical sound and ambient sound thus dissolves—revealed to be an artefact of perception rather than a property of the world.

Morton notes that "[w]hen ecomimesis points out the environment, it performs a medial function, either at the level of content or at the level of form. Contact becomes content" (2007, 37). A 'medial sound' thus points both outward and inward at once: to the world it emerges from and to the medium through which it speaks.

"One of the media that medial statements can point out is the very medium of the voice or of writing itself. Since the sound of music is  available via the medium of, say, a violin, then a medial musical passage would make us aware of the “violin-ness” of the sound—its timbre." (2007, 38) 

Somewhat frustratingly, Morton does not provide any concrete examples of the kinds of violin passages that would make us aware of its mediality—its 'violin-ness'. Both Paganini’s Caprices and Helmut Lachenmann’s Toccatina can, in very different ways, be said to reveal the 'violin-ness' of the instrument: Paganini by drawing upon a range of idiomatic techniques—chords, arpeggios, harmonics, left-hand pizzicati—in a display of virtuosity; Lachenmann by exposing the fact that the violin’s sound arises from the friction between bow and string, transmitted through a resonating body. In their later writings, however, it becomes clear that Morton regards Lachenmann’s approach as the more medial of the two, since it renders the instrument’s physicality itself audible—by, for example, foregrounding the noises produced through unpitched (tonlos) bowing directly on the instrument’s body.

Among the books discussed in this essay, Ecology Without Nature contains the fewest normative claims about what kind of art might foster a new ecological awareness. Morton is, in fact, largely pessimistic about ambient poetics’ capacity to achieve its implied aim of dissolving the boundaries between nature and culture, inside and outside, subject and object. More often than not, they argue, such works end up reinscribing the very divisions they seek to overcome. In their subsequent book, The Ecological Thought, however, Morton states more explicitly that any aesthetic practice that wishes to call itself environmental "must deeply explore materiality" (2010, 107). The discussion of the 'medial statement' for the violin can thus be read—retrospectively—as an early formulation of a musical practice that does explore materiality in depth, for here the "contact" that becomes "content" is nothing other than the instrument’s own material presence.

Already in Ecology Without Nature, Morton is careful to ensure that their insistence on materiality is not mistaken, when applied to music, for the kind of anti-technological attitude characteristic of Acoustic Ecology. For Morton, to "deeply explore materiality" does not mean that only live, acoustic music performed in front of an audience qualifies as environmental. They criticize Acoustic Ecology’s rejection of "schizophonic" listening—experiences in which the listener is not in direct contact with the original sound source, as in electronic or acousmatic music—calling it a form of Romanticism that longs "for an organic world of face-to-face contact in which the sound of things corresponds to the way they appear to the senses and to a certain concept of the natural" (2007, 42). For Morton, focusing on materiality in music does not simply mean insisting that the sounds of performance must originate from material objects present in the same space as the listener.

In The Ecological Thought, Morton explicitly argues against such a valorization of the local and the tangible. On the contrary, they emphasize dislocation as a crucial feature of the ecological awareness to come. In contrast to the celebration of place found in the work of Næss, Heidegger, and thinkers associated with Acoustic Ecology, Morton invites us instead to recognize the dreamlike, illusory quality of reality rather than reifying 'places' or material presence. In this respect, they align themselves with the electronic composer Francisco López, known for blindfolding his audiences and immersing them in electronic sound environments that suspend the concrete, material world 'right here', drawing the listener into a space where sound becomes untethered from place.

In neither López’s nor Morton’s case, however, is dislocation about affirming virtuality for its own sake—as if space were somehow better than place. Their perspectives are not so much techno-utopian as they are traditional—or perhaps we could call them pre-materialist. López’s opposition to Acoustic Ecology stems not despite but because of his commitment to ecology as a practice (Morton 2010b), and Morton’s view resonates with shamanic and Tibetan Buddhist worldviews (2010, 27)—a connection I will return to later.

This emphasis on materiality culminates in Morton’s Hyperobjects (2013). If The Ecological Thought argued that truly environmentally attuned art must explore materiality in a profound way, and Ecology Without Nature demonstrated that many attempts to dissolve the boundary between artwork and environment—whether through ecomimesis or the aesthetics of Acoustic Ecology—ultimately prove futile, then Hyperobjects at last offers concrete musical examples of art that is genuinely medial, engaging with materiality in what Morton considers the 'right' way.

In Hyperobjects, Morton locates many of these musical examples in the work of twentieth-century composers such as John Cage and La Monte Young. These composers did not simply extend the tradition of Western art music; in forging their own paths, they became known as "experimental" rather than "classical" composers. Unlike their predecessors, the experimental composers no longer treated instruments as mere materials-for human expression or production. Instead, their compositions invite the listener to attend to the instruments in and of themselves, rather than as means to an expressive end. Morton writes that "gradually the inside of the piano freed itself from embodying the inner life of the human being, and started to resonate with its own wooden hollowness" (2013, 165)—a striking image of an instrument that has ceased to serve as a vessel for channeling human feeling or ideology and has begun, instead, to reveal its own material presence. 

Cage and Young each developed their own strategies for realizing this shift. Their manipulations of the piano were not acts of domination, but gestures of attunement—ways of responding to the instrument’s agentive powers rather than imposing will upon it. Cage altered the piano’s sound by inserting objects between the strings, thereby relinquishing expressive authorship and allowing sounds to assert their own anarchic autonomy. Young, by contrast, experimented with the instrument’s tuning, composing the first major work for a seven-limit, justly tuned piano. As Morton puts it, "instead of coming up with a new tune, Young decided to work directly with tuning… This is the music of attunement, not of stories" (2013, 166).

When listening to Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano, Morton (2013) writes that "we are hearing the piano as object, as open to its nonhumanness as is possible for humans to facilitate" (166). In fact, the piece is "a deliberate attunement to a nonhuman" (166). This statement clearly extends the notion of the 'medial statement' for the violin introduced in Ecology Without Nature, but invests it with greater philosophical weight. The work does not simply point to itself and, by extension, to its environment; rather, this self-reflexive act brings about an attunement to the instrument’s nonhumanness. For Morton, this is what it means to deeply explore materiality.

It is easy to see why a philosopher associated with object-oriented ontology (OOO) would privilege such listening experiences. The movement is, after all, concerned with the "nonhuman turn": a shift away from anthropocentrism toward a heightened sensitivity to the agencies of things—a responsiveness to "the call of things", as Jane Bennett puts it. Morton situates this orientation within what they call the "Age of Asymmetry", a condition in which humans and nonhumans face each other on equal ontological footing. The following passage, worth quoting at length, conveys this vividly:

 "So the Age of Asymmetry is not a return to animism as such, but rather animism sous rature (under erasure). It’s called the Age of Asymmetry because within human understanding humans and nonhumans face one another equally matched. But this equality is not like the Classical Acceleration era of the Anthropocene. The feeling is rather of the nonhuman out of control, withdrawn from total human access. We have even stopped calling nonhumans "materials." We know very well that they are not just materials-for (human production). We have stopped calling humans Spirit. Sure, humans have infinite inner space. But so do nonhumans. So does that piano note at the end of “A Day in the Life.” So the Age of Asymmetry is also like the Romantic phase, because we have not lost the sense of inner space. This feeling of inner space has only expanded, since we now glimpse it in nonhumans. Some even find it in other "higher" primates, some in all sentient beings, and some (the real weirdos such as myself) in all beings whatsoever: eraser, black hole singularity, ceramic knife, molasses, slug." (2013, 172)

What is described here is markedly going one step further than when Latour in the nineties called for philosophers to recognize the distributed agency of actions–the fact that actions involve "a coalescence of human and nonhuman elements" and, therefore, "the responsibility for action must be shared among them" (Latour 1999, 180-182). It is also one step further than when the editors of Material and Nonhuman Agency (2008) wrote that the clay of the potter's wheel is just as much "a functionally co-substantial component of the intentional character of the potting experience" (2008, xiv) as the potter. Both of these are examples of OOO-adjacent movements to recognize nonhuman agency, but none of them go as far as Morton in considering everything to be of one sentience. In Morton's work, the nonhumanness of objects is revealed not as mere matter but as something not extramental. The 'inner space' of the subject is 'expanded' to now be in everything, and it is through an attunement to this field of sentience that permeates all phenomenality that the appropriate environmental attitudes are fostered. 

In a sense, Morton might seem to align with familiar lines of thought that advocate some form of panpsychism as a corrective to reductive materialism—an orientation that could, in turn, offer a counterweight to environmental devastation driven by over-exploitation. Yet Morton’s connection to Buddhism suggests a rather different interpretation, given the centrality of śūnyatā (emptiness) within Buddhist thought. When Morton writes that what we conventionally think of as the “inner space” of a subject extends to all beings and objects, this does not imply a monistic ontology. Rather, it points to a view in which all things are relational and nothing exists extramentally.

Similarly, when the Buddhist poet Saigyō wrote of the entire natural world as awakened, he did not mean that the world’s objects possess unlimited awakened 'souls', nor—even as Shapiro (2011, 7) suggests—that "life requires cognition at all levels", although that interpretation comes closer. Nor did Saigyō conceive of cognition as part of a single, overarching sentience. Instead, he saw all things as elements within an interdependent system in which distinctions between 'living' and 'non-living' matter lose their meaning, and intentionality or teleology are not the exclusive domain of animals. As LaFleur (1974) explains, Saigyō treats the phenomena of nature—the objects around us—as if they themselves are the Tathāgata. By effacing the self and immersing himself in their non-humanness, Saigyō enters into direct communion with what the Chinese Buddhist tradition sometimes calls the 'one mind':

"Saigyō found what was religiously meaningful to him when he was encompassed by a willow tree, when he felt united with the moon, when he yielded his life to the sky, when he gave over the remains of his body to the safekeeping of a pine tree, and when his heart and mind were "taken" by the blossoms of spring. The action involved is always one of giving, yielding, and surrendering—as if it is the Absolute to which he is giving himself." (LaFleur 1974, 237)

From this perspective, Morton does not speak of 'objects' because they exist intrinsically as substantial things, but Morton discusses objects as a way of pointing to an indeterminate field of śūnyatā—emptiness—within which sentience is distributed beyond what we conventionally recognize as the domain of the sentient. Saigyō’s blossoms of spring, pine trees, and moon can, in one sense, be called 'objects'. Yet the phenomenology of attunement to them bears no trace of conceptualization or reification. Likewise, for Morton, the point is not to reify objects but to surrender oneself to them—bringing attention away from the composer’s will toward the 'will' of nonhuman sounds—in order to recognize the infinite and interpenetrating distribution of agency and dependent origination, and thus attune not to intrinsic entities but to the field of emptiness itself.

It is this ungrounded quality of emptiness that I take Morton to gesture toward with the notion of dislocation. The emphasis lies not on affirming the ground on which we stand—as a graspable, usable substrate for human activity—nor on affirming the field as a kind of universal sentience. Rather, it is a recognition of groundlessness itself: a mode of relational being in which self and world, sentience and substance, lose their fixed boundaries.

Questioning Morton's Framework

Morton’s main claim is that a perception of music’s materiality—and, by extension, its nonhumanness—is made possible not through the listener’s will, but through affordance structures in the music itself, which effortlessly attune the listener to a mode of listening centered on the medium. For this to occur, Morton argues, the 'message' must be stripped away so that attention can fall solely on the medium. As he puts it, we must remove 'storytelling' from music in order to attend to its 'object-ness' and the materiality of its sounds and instruments. Only then, Morton writes, can there be a "music of attunement, not of stories" (2013, 166).

This position rests on the assumption that musical attention is mutually exclusive—that we cannot attend simultaneously to both materiality and narrativity. Yet we must ask whether this is truly the case when listening to music. If such mutual exclusivity were absolute, how could pre-experimental Western art music have been hailed by modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg as 'pure' precisely because of its supposed non-referentiality and fidelity to its medium? Even though this earlier music retained what Morton would call a degree of 'storytelling', its narrativity was weak compared to other art forms, allowing notions of musical purity and medium-specificity to develop long before the rise of experimental music. It is therefore worth questioning whether Morton’s analysis—that only certain twentieth-century experimental composers make such attunement possible—can be sustained.

The Acousmatic Thesis

In his 2009 manifesto against non-cochlear art, Kim-Cohen challenged what he perceived as the prevailing consensus among critics, scholars, and musicians: that music is essentially non-referential—an art form concerned solely with sound, devoid of the political and social engagement he sought in sound art. As Kim-Cohen writes,

"music has always functioned according to Greenbergian precepts. As a practice, music is positively obsessed with its media specificity. Only music included, as a part of its discursive vocabulary, a term for the foreign matter threatening always to infect it: 'the extramusical'." (2009, 39)

The term extramusical can refer both to the ways in which sung texts or program notes are seen as contaminating the purity of musical experience, and to the way music itself generates a virtual world in which everything external to it—even the instruments used to produce it—is cast as extramusical. When Greenberg spoke of painting—the primary medium through which he developed his modernist art theory—the material of art always included tangible elements such as canvas and oil paint. This stands in contrast to theorists of the Common Practice period, for whom the idea of musical material rarely encompassed the instruments themselves; instead, it referred to abstract entities such as melodies, harmonies, or, in Eduard Hanslick’s formulation, “tonally moving forms.”

Commenting on this same consensus, Andy Hamilton (2009) observes:

"There is a persisting tendency within music aesthetics and musical thought in general to say that musical sound is not really the sound of anything—at least not anything material. Music, the most abstract of the arts, is divorced from the material world. [...] Hence the acousmatic thesis [...]: that to hear sounds as music involves divorcing them from the worldly source or cause of their production." (2009, 147)

The acousmatic thesis is the term Hamilton uses to describe the account of listening given by Roger Scruton, who perhaps more than anyone else developed the consensus view described by Kim-Cohen into a comprehensive theory of music. According to Scruton, musical sounds are perceived as "pure events" without any "bridges to the physical world" (2009, 26). When we hear sounds as music, we no longer perceive their material causes; they become 'virtual' or 'acousmatic'. Yet such a statement is not simply a restatement of a consensus view, nor merely an abstract theory derived from reasoning. It is, I would argue, the expression of a practice of listening. It is not primarily an epistemology of musical experience but a phenomenology. In other words, it did not arise exclusively among intellectuals such as Scruton when theorizing about music. Music was conceived as 'divorced from the material world', and its basic material as abstract tones and harmonies, precisely because this reflected the dominant mode of listening cultivated through paradigmatic examples of Western classical music—especially the symphonic tradition.

In describing this mode of listening, the phenomenologist Don Ihde (1990) observes how such music creates a virtual world that seems to suspend its physical origins. Ihde’s account emerges from close listening and a careful attempt to describe the phenomenology of the experience. The moment we begin to notice the physicality of the instruments, he explains, the sense of virtuality collapses. If, for instance, a performer in a Romantic symphony produces an unintended noise, the illusion momentarily breaks apart; similarly, if some external sound distracts us, we can find ourselves 'thrown out' of the music and back into 'reality'. As Ihde writes,

"the flight of music into ecstasy is quickly lost if the instrument intrudes as in the case of having to listen to the beginner whose violin squeaks and squawks instead of sounding in its own smooth tonality." (Ihde 1990, 99) 

This smooth tonality leads Ihde (1990) to note that he "does not even primarily hear the symphony as the sounds of the instruments," for "this ecstasy is … the occasion for an illusory phenomenon, the temptation toward the notion of a pure or disembodied sound" (99). Ihde’s observation parallels Albert S. Bregman’s analysis of orchestral sound as a fusion of virtual rather than material sources. According to Bregman—whose work on auditory perception remains foundational—the instruments function as "generators of components of the timbre, and the orchestral timbre arises out of a fusion of these components. They act more like the individual oscillators in an electronic music studio" (Bregman 1990, 489).

Scruton treats this mode of listening as universal—indeed, as what makes listening musical in the first place. On his account, to hear sounds as music is to sever them from the source or cause of their production. This claim becomes controversial only if we read it—as Scruton intends—as a prescriptive theory defining what constitutes musical listening as such. In that case, Kim-Cohen and Hamilton are justified in critiquing its generalizing and universalizing thrust. But if, instead, we read Scruton’s account phenomenologically—as a description of a particular listening practice that he takes to be paradigmatic (and which, as I will argue below, we might also find compelling)—it aligns closely with the accounts given by the phenomenologist Ihde and the perceptual psychologist Bregman.

Two-fold thesis

That the acousmatic ideal has increasingly been called into question reflects a broader shift in musicology from a focus on text (the score) toward performance, social context, and embodiment—all of which seem to render Scruton’s anti-physicalist theory obsolete. Hamilton (2009) lists several arguments against Scruton’s anti-physicalism, each arising "from the fundamental fact that music is an art of performance" (167). Drawing on Richard Wollheim’s work in the visual arts, Hamilton formulates a two-fold thesis as a corrective to Scruton’s acousmatic thesis.

This two-fold thesis recognizes music’s capacity to let us hear-in 'tonally moving forms', just as we see-in a landscape in a painting. Yet, at the same time as we hear-in such musical forms—or see-in a depicted landscape—we also aesthetically attend to the physical marks through which these forms appear. In painting, these marks are the paint on the canvas and the painterly style; in music, they are the physical and material aspects of the instruments (and, in an extended sense, their performers).

Scruton does not deny that we hear or pay some, albeit peripheral, attention to how sounds are made, but he denies such features any musical significance. As a correction, Hamilton’s two-fold thesis maintains that listening to music involves both acousmatic and non-acousmatic dimensions—and that both are genuinely musically meaningful. 

This raises an important question: does the fact that scholars have turned from score to performance, and from the virtual to the embodied, necessarily mean that listeners’ habits have also changed? I find it telling that Hamilton’s corrective to Scruton largely arises from his encounters with contemporary repertoire—Lachenmann, Cage, Harvey—works that challenge the boundaries of purely acousmatic listening. Scruton, by contrast, had no reason, within his more conservative framework, to account for such works. If Scruton’s acousmatic thesis can be criticized for turning a phenomenology of one kind of listening into an ahistorical, universal epistemology of how to hear sounds as music, Hamilton’s text can likewise be argued to lack historical perspective when, like Scruton, it treats one explanatory model as valid across all kinds of music. Rather than attempting to replace Scruton’s theory entirely, a more nuanced view would recognize the historicity of listening modes: different music demands different kinds of listening.

For example, Mani. Gonxha (Billone, 2011) for two Tibetan singing bowls depends intimately on embodied, ritualistic performance. The tactile, manual engagement of the performer handling the bowls is central. Focusing only on the virtual, disembodied ‘tonally moving forms’ (the acousmatic dimension) would miss fundamental aspects of what it is to hear this work, which includes a theatrical element beyond the acousmatic. In describing this piece, Hamilton’s corrective moves us much closer to accurately capturing what is meaningful in the experience of the work. In contrast, for a Romantic symphony, Scruton’s emphasis on acousmatic listening is sufficient; Hamilton’s added attention to physicality and performance would be superfluous with regard to what the adequate mode of listening to this music is really like.

There is, however, one way in which Hamilton’s theory might apply across multiple modes of listening: it helps explain the added value of live performances compared to recordings. Scruton’s conception of sounds as ‘virtual’ and music as ‘disembodied’ struggles to account for why hearing Cage’s One⁶ for solo violin feels richer when experienced in the same room as the performer. Hamilton’s point is that this added richness cannot be separated from the music itself. In this respect, he identifies a genuine weak spot in Scruton’s theory—one that must somehow be addressed—though it remains uncertain whether Hamilton’s own ahistorical and musically universal two-fold thesis fully resolves it.

For Scruton, and for the mode of listening he endorses, to hear the piano primarily as an object is to cease hearing it as music. To hear the instrument as an object is to perceive it in a mundane, non-musical, instrumental way governed by conceptuality. For him, the instrument merely delivers the Music (with a capital M)—the springboard that enables leaps into a non-conceptual attunement to the virtual space of music.

In the mode of listening described by Morton, this relation is somewhat reversed: music (for instance, the score) becomes what enables a non-conceptual attunement to the instrument. Morton attributes this shift to experimental composers motivated by a desire to engage more deeply with materiality itself. Their music no longer treats instruments as "materials-for" the production of virtual worlds or—as Bregman put it—as anonymous components of an orchestral timbre.

Unlike the theories of Scruton or Hamilton, Morton’s account introduces an explicitly historical dimension, arguing that listeners had seldom attended to the piano as an object until contemporary composers invited them to do so. This insistence on the historical development of compositional and listening practices is a key contribution their work makes to musicological discussion. Whether Cage’s and La Monte Young’s piano works indeed invite such listening, however, remains open to debate.

While it is true that Young’s compositions draw attention to tuning itself and that Cage’s works for prepared piano foreground unique timbres, one may still wonder whether the listening modes they invite differ as radically from the one Scruton describes as Morton suggests. A work like Billone’s Mani. Gonxha is indeed distorted by Scruton’s account. Yet even though Cage’s prepared piano and Lachenmann’s music heighten our awareness of the physicality of sound production—by making tones more 'noisy', complex, and indeterminate—we must ask: do we truly hear the objects that produce the sounds in the sounds themselves?

Scruton’s central claim about sound is that it "cannot be related easily to its causes by the perceiving ear, and [is] not imprinted, in the manner of visual images, with either the contours or the location of the things that produce [it]" (2009, 28). He explains—accurately, I believe—that

"[t]he physical events that cause my auditory perceptions are not represented within my auditory field, so a description of the intentional object is not a description of the physical events. The auditory field, unlike the visual field, does not depict its cause." (Scruton 2009, 26) 

The non-locatability of sounds is what Scruton means by describing them as 'pure events' existing in a 'virtual world'. I believe Scruton’s phenomenology here is accurate, especially in moments of musical attunement (Stimmung) that are nondual in character and marked by aesthetic detachment—moments that are not about us as individuals trying to obtain something from the world. In musical attunement, sounds are heard neither as 'out there' nor as solely 'in here' (Wallrup 2012).

Scruton’s phenomenology aligns closely with Dharmakīrtian epistemology: what appears in consciousness is a non-conceptual 'mere sound', and this sound bears no trace of externality. Only through subsequent conceptualization does the perception of sound become something understood as having a 'material cause' in the form of a 'physical object'. Such listening is no longer musical but practical—driven by intention rather than non-doing. It thus produces an artificial dualism that obstructs the direct, non-dual engagement with sound characteristic of musical experience. 

A similar point is found in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa, where the sound of a bell—"the sound of [a] bell due to contact with a hand" (Gold 2015, 107)—is said not to be directly perceived but only "settled through inference [anumāna]" (Gold 2015, 107). To hear the 'material cause' or a 'physical object' in a sound is therefore to move away from direct perception and to impose conceptuality onto the experience. From this perspective, Hamilton’s corrective to Scruton’s view would amount to imbuing 'mere sounds' with conceptual categorizations not present in the sounds themselves.

From this non-conceptual view of listening, Morton’s emphasis on materiality might at first seem to imply an analytic rather than attunemental mode of perception. Yet Morton is not describing a conceptual or objectifying perception but a spontaneous attunement to the sounds of instruments themselves. Their critique of Acoustic Ecology’s anti-schizophonic Romanticism, as well as their interest in the 'dislocationist' aesthetics of López, would be difficult to reconcile with any aesthetics that seeks to affirm or reify physical objects through sound. Morton’s concern is not with standing apart from sound but with a mode of absorption in it.

Michael Fried, of course, famously critiqued Minimal Art for being inescapably 'theatrical' precisely because it could not achieve absorption. By foregrounding their own material presence, minimalist works, Fried argued, distance the beholder: the art object becomes just another object encountered in a dualistic world. Yet this description does not fit the experiences Morton describes—nor the art of Lee Ufan, whom we will examine later. Morton’s descriptions instead evoke an immediate intimacy with materiality: a deliberate attunement, a Stimmung, to the 'non-humanness' of objects themselves. The listener is not absorbed in an escapist sense, as in art that transports its audience into a virtual world, but they are nonetheless nondually attuned to another form of presence.

Morton’s call to explore materiality, therefore, should not be interpreted as urging us to hear the physical objects that produce sound in a naive realist sense, even if their language can sometimes suggest that. Instead, it is about exploring sound itself, not the instruments as physically located entities. Sounds, as Scruton beautifully illustrates in a metaphor resonant with Buddhist overtones, are like rainbows: they have no simple location and possess transparent edges. Similarly, Vimalakīrti describes how when we "hear sounds as if they were echoes" (Thurman 1976, 26), we perceive them as they truly are—divorced from any material cause, just as an echo is not the sound of a direct object. Calling this 'an exploration of materiality' can be misleading if we assume material means only actual physical stuff. We must instead understand 'material' as referring to the building blocks of musical perception: empty, virtual, nondual sounds. Their significance arises not from the objects that produce them, but from the experience of attuning to them with non-involvement—that is, without projecting our intentions or concepts onto the sounds.

Music without representation: another two-fold thesis

According to Morton, one of the ways contemporary composers have encouraged listeners to focus on sounds themselves is by eliminating 'story-telling' (2013, 166). Such a statement assumes that musical attention is mutually exclusive—that story-telling and close attention to materiality cannot coexist. Whether or not we accept this assumption depends on what we mean by 'story-telling' and by 'close attention to materiality'. By examining the most 'extreme' form of musical story-telling—musical representation—we may be able to draw some conclusions.

A contrasting—and perhaps more literal—application of Wollheim’s concept of ‘seeing-in’ than Hamilton’s can be found in the work of Giorgio Biancorosso. In Biancorosso’s usage, ‘hearing-in’ designates musical representation. In an illuminating passage, he explains how the theme music from Jaws ceases to function representationally when we attend too closely to its physicality or materiality. In other words, when we focus on the sounds of the instruments or on any other musical parameter, we no longer hear the shark in the music. "To hear the shark in the music", Biancorosso writes, "is essentially, then, a process of disambiguation underpinned by selective attention. This is not to say that alternative aspects of the music go unperceived; rather, our attention is fixed firmly on what the music represents (its 'recognitional' aspect)—the 'shark'—rather than on its formal (or 'configurational') aspect—the motive qua motive” (2010, 315–16).

In a clarifying footnote, Biancorosso further elaborates that

"the substitution of a stream of musical sounds for the agency of the shark ensures that some awareness of the medium will always be lurking beneath the threshold of our attention. But by the same token one could also argue that rather than calling attention to the medium, the deployment of music heightens the impression of an unseen presence, stressing as it were the absence of the image, and further driving attention away from the sonic medium as such" (Biancorosso 2010, 326).

If the Jaws soundtrack is what Morton takes as paradigmatic of music that embodies 'story-telling', then Biancorosso’s examples and analysis corroborate Morton’s thesis that music must be stripped of narrative content in order for listeners to attend to the objecthood of its sounds. Only when there is nothing left to 'hear-in'—when the representational layer has been removed and listeners are left with the bare surface of sound—can full attention be directed toward materiality itself. In such moments, as Morton puts it, contact becomes content.

Most instances of musical 'storytelling' are, however, far less extreme than the representational use of music in Jaws, and in these cases, the demand for mutual exclusivity between narrativity and materiality becomes less convincing. One might even argue that some level of narrativity persists even in the abstract and non-representational examples used by Morton, such as La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano. The poetic subtitles of its sections—such as The Ancestral Lake Region—perhaps suggest a less "pure" conception of musical expression on Young’s part than Morton imagines.

More broadly, in much art that we find meaningful, our attention rarely rests exclusively on materiality. Art almost always invites some leap of imagination beyond the perceptible surface. This holds true even for austere, minimalist art such as that of Agnes Martin. As Tiffany Bell beautifully observes:

"[For Martin,] nature remained a constant point of reference. Although she continuously denied that her work represented landscape and mostly stopped using titles that evoked natural imagery, she continued to use metaphors from nature to describe the experience of seeing her work and the feelings she wished to convey. Most beautifully, she compared the experience of looking at her work to watching clouds and never seeing any the same, or viewing waves of the sea, continuously breaking on the shore always the same but always different. In her art, a contrast between material presence and the suggestion of something other - a memory or feeling - is always present." (Bell 2017, 29)

What Bell describes here is how art can be both highly abstract and minimal—drawing the viewer’s attention to its raw materiality—while simultaneously opening onto poetic evocations and metaphorical imaginings beyond the material. I take this to be a defining feature of much minimal art that we find deeply meaningful.

The idea that a focus on the sensuous qualities of appearances can coexist with the suggestion of something beyond what is directly perceived is long recognized in traditional Japanese arts such as flower arrangement (kadō 華道 or 花道) and rock-and-sand gardens (karesansui 枯山水). In these practices, the placement of flowers, stones, and sand often evokes larger and more distant landscapes—vast scenes of rivers and mountains. As the preface to the kadō manual Ikenobō Sen’ō kuden explains:

"with a little water and a short branch, one can represent a spectacular scene with many rivers and mountains, a beautiful scene of eternal changes amid the ephemeral." (Shirane 2012, 100).

In Japanese aesthetics, this quality is expressed through the concept of mitate (見立). Haruo Shirane defines mitate as follows:

"Mitate, which means something like "to see X as Y," does not refer to the replication of a distant object or landscape so much as its evocation through one or more physical features, such as a figuration of rocks and sand. The kare-sansui could thus suggest a specific or general distant landscape while appearing natural in its configuration." (Shirane 2012, 96-97) 

As Shirane notes, the presence of likeness or evocation is not mutually exclusive with naturalness. In the terms of Japanese aesthetics, mitate can coexist with zōka—the quality of ego-less naturalism that seeks to present things as they are in nature. The distant image is present at the same time that the arrangement appears natural.

We can, however, imagine situations in which the representational or narrative dimension of an artwork dominates and becomes the sole focus of attention. Dùshùn (杜順), the first patriarch of the Huáyán school, described a process in which the shì (事)—the particular phenomena—can obscure the lǐ (理)—the universal principle of emptiness. Although emptiness is the true nature of all things, phenomena can take on forms that conceal this truth. It is like seeing only the depicted landscape in a painting without recognizing the pigments and canvas that make it possible, or perceiving a sculpture so lifelike that one sees only the human figure and not the material from which it is made.

In music, a similar process occurs when narrativity and metaphor overwhelm perception, resulting in what Biancorosso called a "process of disambiguation underpinned by selective attention." When music becomes too heavily symbolic, metaphoric, or narrative, we encounter the same situation as in the soundtrack to Jaws: in order to "hear the shark", we must ignore the music’s material presence.

As an answer to our question of whether musical attention is mutually exclusive to the extent that we cannot attend to both materiality and narrativity at once, we might say that, while it is possible to create situations of mutual exclusivity between symbol and phenomenon, this is not necessarily the case. I would even suggest that it occurs only in extreme instances. What I mean to suggest by evoking the art of Agnes Martin and the traditional arts of kadō and karesansui is that there are artworks in which material presence and evocative suggestion coexist in deeply stimulating ways. Indeed, this interplay between what exists and what is imagined often gives art its power and meaning.

Yet there is an important distinction to be made here. Hearing the shark in Jaws arises because the mind projects depth behind the sound, as though the sonic material were merely a sign pointing to a hidden cause or narrative. This is an interpretive move—an attempt to penetrate beneath the surface, in which narrativity overtakes material presence. The evocations that occur in Martin’s paintings or in flower arrangements, by contrast, invite no such projection. Here, imagination moves along the surface rather than beneath it: the work’s materiality remains fully present even as it gives rise to associations. In this mode, the imagination does not attempt to read through phenomena but plays with them, taking their very suchness as a springboard for thought and perception.

OOO and Mono-ha 

This sensitivity to the immediacy of things—the refusal to penetrate beneath appearances—finds a striking parallel in the work of Lee Ufan. Although Lee does not use the term ambient poetics, he articulates with great precision what it means for materials to simultaneously disclose themselves and their surrounding environment. When artworks achieve this, they function as mediators—the noun form, we might say, of Morton’s adjective medial.

At the beginning of his career, Lee was closely associated with the art movement Mono-ha, often translated into English as the "School of Things". Both Morton and Lee, in other words, emerge from thing-centered movements. Yet in neither case is the aim to reify things or objects. In his writings, Lee is more explicit about this than Morton. Despite the movement’s name and its apparent concern with objects, Lee repeatedly emphasizes a focus on non-objects. For this reason, his writings provide a particularly clear lens through which to understand what I take Morton to mean by an Object-Oriented aesthetic.

The works of Mono-ha often consist of clearly recognizable things—typically pre-existing natural or industrial objects—placed directly on the floor of a gallery or within an outdoor exhibition site. As Yoshitake (2012) describes,

"Collectively, Mono-ha represents a tendency to present transient arrangements of natural and industrial materials—such as charcoal, cotton, dirt, Japanese paper, stones, wood, glass, light bulbs, and steel plates—directly on the floor or ground and interacting with their architectural spaces or outdoor sites." (Yoshitake 2012, 1)

Encountering these installations means engaging with matter directly, without the mediation of predetermined representational, narrative, or symbolic frameworks. In Mono-ha works, materials are not employed to construct symbolic structures but are presented in their raw, untransformed state. In Lee’s sculptures, untreated stones, sheets of glass, and industrial steel plates are among the most frequently used elements.

Yet, if we think this art is about raw objects, we are as mistaken as when assuming that OOO is about objects. The so-called 'School of Things' is, in fact, only marginally concerned with the things themselves. Describing his use of stones, Lee (2018) explains that he "turned to stones because of their otherness and their connection to the outside world, which is not identical with the self," and that "they strongly suggest unlimited externality" (74). In other words, it was not a fascination with stones as such that led Lee to use them, but rather their capacity to point beyond themselves—to something 'meta-physical'. 

Lee frames this in terms of a renewed relationship between externality—or "over-there-ness"—and internality—or "here-ness"—one that suspends both the conventional dualism between an art object and its surroundings and the interest-driven subject–object dichotomy we normally impose on the world. Rather than a separate subject encountering objects placed within a site, Yoshitake (2012) describes how "the elements of the encounter become presented as inseparable and nonhierarchical" (1). The artwork, in this sense, "brings about a key condition to open and be opened by the work" (1).

This emphasis on encounter and relational openness was central to the artists’ understanding of mono ("things"). In a 1970 roundtable discussion published in Bijutsutechō (美術手帖), focused on elucidating the term mono, the artists of Mono-ha made it clear that one of their aims was explicitly not to locate the artwork in the physicality or objectness of the objects themselves. Their intentions with mono were instead articulated in five key points, which Yoshitake (2012, 4) summarizes as follows:

"1) the explicit rejection of creation and individuality, which the artists associated as part of a broad artistic category known as "Non-Art" (非芸術 Hi-geijutsu); 

2) an attempt to locate the work not in its objective form as a physical object (物 butsu), a tactile material (物質 busshitsu), or a found object (オブジェ obuje = objet), but in the structures through which things reveal their existence; 

3) affective sensations arising from charged "encounters" (出会い deai); 

4) the liberation from intentions, methods, or concepts in order to reveal the essential state of things; and 

5) one’s intimate contact with the world through shigusa (仕草), an interactive act that dissolves the subject and object as distinct entities." (Yoshitake 2012, 4) 

As is clear from this, Mono-ha art concerns itself less with the objects themselves than with the relational field through which they are revealed. Its focus lies not on the particular physical forms of things but on the conditions that allow their presence to manifest. From the Buddhist perspective—which Lee explicitly invokes in one of his key texts—this orientation corresponds to śūnyatā or tathatā: emptiness or suchness, the true state of things and the underlying principle through which phenomena come to appear. As a viewer, one senses a spaciousness, an infinity, and a groundlessness that unfold in the encounter with these works. It is not a matter of looking at objects that merge with their sites, but of experiencing how the works open a disclosure of being and emptiness.

The artworks achieve this not through acts of individualistic or symbolic expression—by the artist attempting to convey a narrative or meaning through the materials—mirroring Morton’s claim that narrativity must be diminished for the quality of mediality to emerge. Nor is it accomplished by emphasizing the sensuality of the objects themselves. As Yoshitake (2012) notes, the aim is "to locate the work not in its objective form, but in the structures through which things reveal their existence" (37). In a typical Mono-ha exhibition, objects are carefully arranged so that all elements—the space, the materials, and the perceiver—interact in ways that enable a nondual mode of being. It is through attention to the relations and gaps between objects and spaces, figures and grounds, subjects and objects that such a mode of being becomes possible. What is disclosed in this mode of being is nothing other than the indeterminate and ambiguous field of dependent origination: the dependent nature of figures and grounds, subjects and objects. 

"What goes from "here" to "over there" and comes from "over there" to "here" meets at the artwork, which opens up as an ambiguous place. This situation is the source of what the word Mono-ha means." (Lee 2018, 238)

Lee writes of his work that it eliminates "everydayness and arouses fresh perception" (Lee 2018, 72). Building on the relational and non-dual qualities highlighted in Mono-ha, we can interpret 'everydayness' as what Yogacāra philosophy calls the conceptualized nature (parikalpita-svabhāva): the mundane, dualistic way of perceiving the world through habitual conceptual frameworks. 'Fresh perception', in turn, gestures toward the perfected nature (pariniṣpanna-svabhāva), in which the ordinary subject–object structure is suspended and the dependent origination of phenomena—the dependent nature (paratantrasvabhāva)—is intuited without the overlay of conceptualization.

The Mono-ha artists held that it is precisely this ambiguous space that the art should attune the perceiver to. Yet, as emphasized in the Bijutsutechō discussion, this state of ‘fresh perception’ need not be devoid of affectivity. On the contrary, arranging the objects to facilitate affective ‘encounters’ with the artwork was recognized as a way of allowing the pre-dualistic mode of perception to manifest epiphanically. This provides an important parallel to the earlier discussion of mitate. It might be tempting to assume that ‘pure perception’ of mediality requires the absence of associations or affect. Yet, just as mitate can coexist with mediality, so too can the experience of mediality be affectively charged while remaining entirely non-symbolic.

Neither mind nor matter

 

Mono-ha and Morton’s OOO aesthetics are not concerned with objects as they relate to ordinary, conceptual life. Equally important is that they are not about gaining access to an object in a so-called ‘pure’ state, uncontaminated by our subjectivities. While the artists of Mono-ha can be said to work with materials in themselves, this does not imply that the art aims to reify or reveal materiality. The perfected nature should not be misinterpreted as some ‘pure’ way of perceiving objects as they ‘truly’ are. When Lee (2018) invokes the Kantian term Ding an sich (thing-in-itself) to describe the content of artistic revelation—"[c]ontemporary art culminates in revelatory things, what Kant called the thing in itself" (86)—it would be mistaken to take this as a claim that the goal is to perceive objects in some objective state. For Kant himself, even when he wrote as if every object was an appearance of a Ding an sich, the notion of objects as existing in an independent, objective reality is incompatible with his theory of knowledge. As Scruton (2001) observes, one must therefore "consider the thing-in-itself to be a nonentity" (57). Lee’s artistic revelations are not about achieving some ‘unfiltered’ or ‘perspectiveless’ encounter with an essential object; no such Ding an sich exists.

It is equally important to stress that the "revelatory things" Lee describes are not about reifying perceptions. If the Ding an sich is not a realist, external object that causes perception, it would also be mistaken to assume that it is merely the perception of an object as an intransitive appearance (vijñaptimātra, or a Vorstellungen in Kant’s terms)—a real appearance that is not the appearance of anything real. Just as the Yogācārins did not claim that 'everything is merely perceptions' (vijñaptimātra) as an ontological statement about reality, so too does Mono-ha not attempt to affirm any form of ontological idealism. Rather, the goal is to open an ambiguous space in which the dependent nature of phenomena is apprehended with clarity. To say that art opens one to the dependent origination of phenomena is to recognize that neither the object side nor the subject side exists in a pure, independent state.

Lusthaus (2002) makes an important point, noting that for the Yogācārins, vijñaptimātra is "an epistemic caution, not an ontological pronouncement" (6). The soteriological goal extends far beyond merely seeing everything as perceptions. I take this goal to be closely aligned with that of the Mono-ha artists, who similarly examine the causes that produce the impulses to "attribute some status or another to the ‘objects’ we cognize and experience" (Lusthaus 2002, 26). Crucially, whereas Mono-ha seeks a temporary suspension, a momentary attunement to the relational field of phenomena, the Yogācārins aim for a permanent overcoming of these impulses. For the Yogācārins, the use of vijñaptimātra, Lusthaus emphasizes, "is thus hermeneutical and soteric, since its aim is the rupture and definitive overcoming of cognitive closure [vijñaptimātra], not its reification" (2002, 26).

This point is echoed by Siderits (2007):

"The dependent [paratantra(svabhāva)] is what is left when we strip away from the imagined [parikalpita(svabhāva)] what is wrongly imputed through our use of concepts and the subject-object dichotomy. But to the extent that we are thinking of it at all – even if only as the non-dual flow of impressions-only – we are still conceptualizing it. So if, as the Mahāyāna sūtras seem to hold, conceptual proliferation (prapañca) is the most fundamental expression of ignorance, then there remains something to be stripped away from the dependent. Thus we arrive at the perfected mode of taking our experience, which is just pure seeing without any attempt at conceptualization or interpretation. Now this is also empty, but only of itself as an interpretation. That is, this mode of cognition is devoid of all concepts, and so is empty of being of the nature of the perfected. About it nothing can be said or thought, it is just pure immediacy" (Siderits 2007, 178).

Mono-ha is thus ultimately about breaking the conceptualized nature and revealing the world in a way that approaches the perfected nature, as described by the Yogācāra philosophers. In his text Beyond Being and Nothingness: On Sekine Nobuo, Lee explicitly draws upon Buddhist soteriology as an explanatory framework. Discussing Sekine Nobuo’s 1968 piece Phase—Mother Earth, Lee describes how Sekine creates a structure enabling objects to be perceived as nondual, nonconceptual emptiness. Through the artistic act of making Phase—Mother Earth, objects were "transmogrified into dharmakāya" (2011, 112). The dharmakāya refers to the unconditioned, space-like nature of reality, synonymous with the nature of awakening. Gyurme Dorje (2006) describes it as "the ultimate nature or essence of the enlightened mind, which is uncreated (skye-med), free from the limits of conceptual elaboration (spros-pa'i mtha'-bral), empty of inherent existence (rang-bzhin-gyis stong-pa), naturally radiant, beyond duality and spacious like the sky" (452). To say that Sekine transformed material into dharmakāya is thus to say that he transformed ordinary material into the awakened nature of reality—conventional truth into ultimate truth.

Later in life, Lee would publicly deny any connection to Buddhism. In an interview with Sook-Kyung Lee, he stated, "I don’t know either Zen or Buddhism very well. Those terms actually contribute to the misunderstanding of my work" (2014). This rejection, however, should be understood as a response to the persistent Western tendency to label his art as 'Zen', especially as his later sculptures began to resemble the rock-and-sand gardens (karesansui) of Zen temples. The idea of Zen acted as a conceptual filter, shaping interpretations in ways that misrepresented Lee’s intentions; for this reason, he felt compelled to reject the association. This, however, does not imply that the connection to Buddhist concepts is entirely absent. Even as Lee later distanced himself from explicit Buddhist terminology, the underlying structures and perceptual aims of his work—attuning viewers to the nondual, relational, and "awakened" nature of phenomena—remain deeply consonant with the soteriological and phenomenological concerns of Buddhism.

I would argue that Buddhism offers an even more fitting framework for understanding Lee’s art than Kantian philosophy. Nonetheless, Lee frequently invokes Kant—not to make a theoretical claim, but to articulate an experiential one. Reflecting on the experience of Richard Serra’s steel structures, Lee writes: "A person standing in their presence is overwhelmed by a sense of strangeness and brute silence. Is the act of seeing finally transformed into an encounter with a mysterious Ding an sich?" (2018, 105). As anyone who has encountered Serra’s monumental works can attest, the 'thing in itself' to which Lee refers cannot be identified with the steel as material, the object fashioned from it, or our mere perception of it. Rather, the sublime impression arises from the presencing of an unspeakable groundlessness—something closer to what Siderits calls "pure immediacy" than to Kant’s thing-in-itself. Lee names this a "world of silent otherness" (2018, 105), precisely because it resists determinate judgment; there is nothing that can be said about it.

Serra’s steel structures are prototypical of the kinds of objects Morton identifies as non-human. They possess an unmistakable, immersive—indeed, as Lee put it, a "world of"—otherness that affords immediate, nonconceptual encounter. As in Mono-ha, where objects and spaces are arranged to disclose the dependent and indeterminate nature of phenomena, this encounter does not objectify the materials. What Morton evokes in speaking of non-humans and their quality of otherness is an objectless perception—an attunement to relationality and presence without reifying the object—rather than an object-oriented one. This parallels the approach of the Mono-ha artists, who were not concerned with locating "the work in its objective form as a physical object (物 butsu)" (Yoshitake 2012, 4), but with opening an experience beyond objects. In this way, Lee’s reflections on Serra, Morton’s OOO framework, and Mono-ha all converge: they point toward a mode of perception that suspends the subject–object dichotomy, revealing the world in its nondual, relational immediacy. It is precisely this nondual immediacy—this capacity of art to momentarily dissolve the habitual stance of separation—that gives both Lee’s and Morton’s aesthetics their soteriological dimension.

The soteriology of music

Beyond their shared focus on mediality and the presence of non-speakable otherness in art, Lee and Morton converge in treating modes of perception as soteriological. Just as Mono-ha aims for a temporary suspension of the conceptualized nature to reveal the dependent, relational field of phenomena, Morton emphasizes that even the subtlest aspects of musical listening—how attention is directed, how sounds are apprehended—shape the perceiver’s relation to the world. In this sense, listening and encountering art are not merely aesthetic acts but practices that cultivate attunement to reality as it manifests without conceptual imposition. Yet, Morton crucially argues that this does not happen due to the whim of the listener, but that works of art have the power to attune the listener to a way of being.

Morton's philosophical approach to music is thus not too entirely dissimilar to that of a thinker like Adorno. Both argue for how compositions' resultant modes of listening and the acts of cognition engaged therein can either keep listeners stuck in our old habits and volitional formations or guide them toward a form of 'enlightenment' (although what they define as 'enlightenment' and which kind of music that would lead us there could not be more different). 

In this context, Tia DeNora’s caution is important:

"While music may be, seems to be, or is, interlinked to 'social' matters—patterns of cognition, styles of action, ideologies, institutional arrangements—these should not be presumed. Rather, their mechanisms of operation need to be demonstrated. If this demonstration cannot be achieved, then analysis may blend into academic fantasy and the music–society nexus rendered ‘visionary’ rather than ‘visible.’ " (DeNora 2000, 4) 

Morton’s examples, taken in isolation, may appear idealistic and risk falling into what DeNora calls 'academic fantasy'. Perhaps this explains why their work inspired relatively little response in the musicological community. In this text, I have sought to flesh out Morton’s ideas and critically examine their analysis of Cage and Young in order to clarify how these composers’ music actually works. Rather than being a mere fantasy, I have shown that by being attuned to music's medial quality, the listeners practices a mode of listening that is soteriologically valuable.

In Morton's hands, mediality is not merely a way of entering the seemingly minor debate between Hamilton and Scruton over whether the physicality of sound matters, but becomes a question of skillful engagement. Comparing Morton’s ideas to those of Mono-ha artists such as Lee Ufan, I have shown that the goal is not to grasp objects in themselves, nor to objectify perceptions, but to attune to the nondual immediacy of phenomena—a temporary encounter with what Yogācāra philosophers call the perfected nature (pariniṣpanna-svabhāva).

In the end, the aesthetics of Morton and Mono-ha remind us that perception itself can be an ethical and transformative act. Whether through sound or matter, both invite a mode of listening and seeing that loosens the grasp of conceptual thought and opens awareness to the relational ground of existence. To listen objectlessly is thus not to withdraw from the world but to encounter it more intimately—as a field of dependent arising where self and other, sound and silence, art and life, momentarily disclose their shared, empty immediacy.