08/20/2025
Congratulations to Jonathan Kay for his successful EWP phd dissertation defense!
The Integrative Impulse as Dark Precursor of Sonocultural Transindividuation: An Autoethnographic Apprenticeship to Musical Signs
Abstract
This dissertation emerges from the cultural, ecological, and psychosocial crisis of our time—a convergence of planetary degradation, algorithmic capitalism, and the erosion of collective imagination. Within this context, the sonic and improvised arts—once crucial vehicles of counter-cultural resistance, spiritual experimentation, and revolutionary world-making—have been increasingly neutralized by the culture industries. Their subversive and transformative potentials have been subordinated to neoliberal logics of commodification and reframed as lifestyle accessories or aesthetic ornaments. At the same time, this foreclosure and capture hides a historical problematic that invites an apprenticeship to signs of the ‘outside’: and gestures toward affective, ethical, and ontological possibilities of a becoming that embodies such a problematic of world-making. The present dissertation explores the methodological and philosophical dimensions of such a Deleuzo-Guattarian apprenticeship through an autoethnographic inquiry.
The analysis reveals how, through this apprenticeship, I, as subject of the autoethnography, discovered an integral attractor that led me to consider solutions to the cultural problematic I inhabit as a representative of my place, time and culture. I identify this attractor as an integrative impulse—a speculative force situated at the perspectival vanishing point of becoming and actualization, where pluralism = monism. I interpret this impulse as a Deleuzo-Guattarian dark precursor immanent to modernity’s problematic—“a historical horizon for the release of the plural as radical expressions of univocity.” This research draws together different perspectives of psycho-cosmological individuation through Sri Aurobindo’s revolutionary spirituality, Debashish Banerji’s theory of Integral Posthuman Creativity, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s metaphysics of becoming, and Gilbert Simondon’s notion of the transindividual.
The autoethnographic analysis reveals how engagement with jazz, free improvisation, and Hindustani raga music, invoked more-than-human potentials and conjured counter-cultural and revolutionary forces of the ‘outside’. The study redefines experimental improvisation as sono-ritual: a posthuman, cosmotechnic operation that precipitates transindividual sound-bodies through relational attunement. These become generative sites of ontoethical transindividuation, where ethics and ontology co-emerge. This dissertation thus reclaims the sonic arts as insurgent cosmotechnics: modes of becoming that carry the potential to recompose the fractured ontologies of our time into a new, posthuman ethics of transindividual life.
The inquiry culminates in aesthetic intuition—an integrative faculty that affectively reorganizes the sensorial and ethical field according to the perception of an integrative impulse. The dissertation culminates in an original composition entitled for a people to come, which is a sono-ritual that serves as an experimental site of improvisation and speculative worlding. This composition actualizes the dissertation’s theoretical concerns through embodied sonic practice, proposing a plane of composition where transindividual sound-bodies can emerge, resonate, and gesture toward collective futures not yet imagined. As such, it functions as a living instantiation of the integrative impulse—a call, a conjuring of ‘a people to come’.
Committee Chair: Dr. Debashish Banerji
Internal Committee Member: Dr. John Bagby
External Committee Member: : Dr. Stephen Zepke
An East-West Psychology doctoral dissertation defenseby Jonathan KayThe Integrative Impulse as Dark Precursor of Sonocultural Transindividuation: An Autoethn...
