Old Gear, New Concept: On Obdurance [keynote]

Drawing on extensive research to be published in Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies (forthcoming, The MIT Press), this paper examines hardware professional audio recording technologies–gear–and their presence in today’s music and audio technology cultures. Today’s production praxes are reliant on computer-based digital audio workstations, software plugins, and digital distribution and dissemination of recorded music files. Yet gear–technologies including microphones, consoles, and signal processors–is ever-present in professional and amateur production domains. Compared to their skeuomorphic counterparts, gear is expensive, cumbersome, heavy, time consuming to integrate into workflows, energy inefficient, and space-dependent. Why then, do we need it? What are the reasons for its ongoing appeal and success, decades after the introduction of DAW-based systems, which dominate 21st Century production workflows?

This paper shows how gear is enmeshed in a multifaceted schema of representations including sex, war, secrets, heritage, canon, iconicity, among other themes that participants in music and audio technology cultures build and maintain themselves. Gear fetishization and valorization cuts across music and audio cultures including online fora, trade shows, and events. The extra-audible potential of gear is vast; seductive and engaging, it is highly relational, centered in social formations, upholds traditions, maintains exclusivity and conducts boundary maintenance work. Critics and philosophers have framed the ‘past-in-the-present’ as ‘resurgence’, ‘technostalgia’ and ‘hauntology’ , however, this paper introduces a novel theoretical lens seen at the heart of all relations between participants and their gear–obdurance. Drawing on studies in philosophy, STS, and record production, this paper shows how obdurance connotes stubbornness, resistance to influence, and unyielding presence. Obdurance also implies holding onto the past, and onto a tradition or custom or habit. Where heritage implies the death of gear and a retrospective gaze towards historicized gear pasts, obdurance accounts for the present and the future: why is gear here? And why it isn’t going anywhere.

Keywords: obdurance, audio, technology, gear, fetishization, valorization