'Resistance and Conduction'

Part of the Critical Studies Research Group's 5th International Conference, this year on 'Resistance'.

I want to think about resistance by way of the music of Lawrence “Butch” Morris, a musician I greatly admire whose work I have been trying to study for years. I am interested in his theory and practice of conduction as a mode of (black) aesthetic resistance but I am also interested in something like the resistance to conduction as a particular mode of improvised compositional leadership in music making. Morris’s performances were amazing examples of group dynamics and organization but they were also profound examples of the age-old tension between the imperative to resist external domination and the danger of reifying or acceding to forms of internal domination. At stake are old questions concerning sovereignty, which in black musical terms is usually manifest in relation to the figure of the soloist but which, in Morris’s work, is played out in relation to his own instantiation of the figure of the conductor. Anyway, I hope that by trying to consider the tension between resistance in conduction and resistance to conduction that it might be possible to make a small and tentative contribution to the study of the thermodynamics of revolution.