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On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening
... So, apart from how each of the objects illustrated above might be seen as symbolizing different musical meanings, they all also refer to and uphold the idea of the musical work. Thus, because the illustrations are not only presented separately but also occur together, they emphasize the idea of a 'musical whole' or 'aesthetic totality' that Adorno (2001) describes as desirable. In other words, the cellophane-wrapped products in Figure 1 can be understood as representing not only a variety of meanings but also the idea of a musical whole. ...
... Moreover, artistic values are articulated when the music is made into something that stands in contrast to everyday experience, often by being constructed as an extraordinary experience. The aesthetic dimension of symphonic music is further articulated when it is promoted as a 'musical whole' and an 'aesthetic totality' (Adorno, 2001). ...
The overall aim of this article is to investigate how different ideas about classical music are expressed in advertising campaigns and what ideological grounds are used to construct music as a valuable resource. Based on a case study of how the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (GSO) presents its music and concert performances in marketing campaigns, the article examines how commodification is used as a marketing strategy. A discourse-analytical perspective is used to demonstrate how values that are communicated to a listener are involved in value exchange processes that, although based on neoliberal ideology, also acknowledge traditional norms of aesthetic value. While this value exchange process enables aesthetic value norms to be reproduced, it is also involved in ongoing negotiations about which values should apply today and in the future.
... Such a positivism is associated with the fetishization of the 'divine' music and its performers by the secular rulers and lords of the epoch. Apparently, Schmelzer knows his classics [40]. At the contrary, according to Schmelzer, Cusanus reacts to a positivizing of music performance as making audible the divine (see below), comparable to the revival of a synesthetic mysticism in a much later period, e.g. in the work of some early 20th century composers (see ¶ 2. Sergei Prokofiev's neo-classical revolution and contemporary music) ( Figure 6). ...
... Crossing out the religious connotation(s) may be wise, in accordance with the apophatic tradition, as Cusanus had acknowledged. Otherwise, it may equally lead to the fetishization of music, as formulated by the critics of the polyphony in Cusanus' epoch (see above) and today [40]. An important lesson to take-away, is found in the enfolding-unfolding paradigm. ...
In this paper we elaborate on the question how to bridge the gap between contemporary (New) music and the tradition of the past, often called ‘classical’ music. First we analyze the notion of tradition (in classical music) as being distinct from traditional music, nationalism and traditionalism. A central role in this paper is dedicated to the role of counterpoint education following J.J. Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum in the development of Central-European classical music between the late Renaissance and late Romantic periods. The developments in the 20th century New Music reveal several important trend breaks. The controversies raised during the early Renaissance, regarding the practice of polyphonic singing, are discussed with respect to their impact on music development in later ages. From these controversies and the re-discovery of Nicholas de Cusa’s view on mysticism, the experience of the non-experience in polyphonic music is elucidated. Herewith, an illuminative heuristic is found in the enfolding-unfolding paradigm both in music and pictural arts, from the Renaissance till the present.
... This clearly suggests a complex intersection of distorted ethical and professional dynamics within the academic context and a hyper-fetishistic neo-liberal intentionality. Yet, the fetishistic relationship to music is not a recent phenomenon; its roots extend to an earlier phase of capitalism that preceded the emergence of the culture industry (see, for example, Adorno, 1991Adorno, [1938). Throughout the film, the (post-)Marxist idea of music fetishism is combined with the features of radical trivialisation and moral and institutional transgression, 20 Although Pope was primarily referring to a particular poetic style, his concept is potentially applicable to musical discourse as well. ...
... This clearly suggests a complex intersection of distorted ethical and professional dynamics within the academic context and a hyper-fetishistic neo-liberal intentionality. Yet, the fetishistic relationship to music is not a recent phenomenon; its roots extend to an earlier phase of capitalism that preceded the emergence of the culture industry (see, for example, Adorno, 1991Adorno, [1938). Throughout the film, the (post-)Marxist idea of music fetishism is combined with the features of radical trivialisation and moral and institutional transgression, 20 Although Pope was primarily referring to a particular poetic style, his concept is potentially applicable to musical discourse as well. ...
The aim of this paper is to examine what I call “dehumanised musical bodies” in the psychological horror films The Perfection and Nocturne. These multi-deficient neo-liberal bodies are exposed to the stereotypical, strikingly negative image of the sophisticated world of art. Particular attention is paid to the provocative treatment of classical music, focusing on the non-normative institutional practices and ethical reconfiguration of their representatives. A strikingly raw form of musical dehumanisation is found in the film The Perfection, whose soundtrack combines ambient sounds of terror and popular tunes with great classical works by Handel, Mozart and Casadesus. The film Nocturne, on the other hand, offers a more contemplative audio-visual aesthetic with a deceptive hierarchisation of the classical music repertoire. Mozart’s music is frivolously devalued, while Saint-Saëns’ “Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor” is used as a narrative device for a destructive manifestation of power that leads to an avalanche of conflict between the sisters. Such explicit play with the classical music signifiers drastically deviates from conventional musical protocols and leads to alienation and, ultimately, transgressive neo-liberal dehumanisation of contemporary musicians.
... Diving beyond the metaphor Techniques & Culture , Suppléments aux numéros dominate their intellect and senses. Such viewing is not just passive but "regressive" (Adorno 1978(Adorno [1938). This tradition asks: surely a person watching a home movie is not really diving? ...
... Diving beyond the metaphor Techniques & Culture , Suppléments aux numéros dominate their intellect and senses. Such viewing is not just passive but "regressive" (Adorno 1978(Adorno [1938). This tradition asks: surely a person watching a home movie is not really diving? ...
... This notion of associating societal order with an economy of sensual stimuli leads directly to Theodor W. Adorno's critique of the aesthetic enhancement of sonic material. In the popular music of the mass media, the "blind and irrational emotions" (Adorno [1938] 2002, 295) of being affected are formed to match market demand. Sonic material (in its "certain richness and roundness of sound" and its "rhythmical patterns" that are constructed to fulfill the recipient's "desire to obey" [Adorno 1941]) becomes a standardized product of cultural industry, to which the means of production that shape it belong, in a classical capitalist sense. ...
Scholars consider sound and its concepts, taking as their premise the idea that popular culture can be analyzed in an innovative way through sound.
The wide-ranging texts in this book take as their premise the idea that sound is a subject through which popular culture can be analyzed in an innovative way. From an infant's gurgles over a baby monitor to the roar of the crowd in a stadium to the sub-bass frequencies produced by sound systems in the disco era, sound—not necessarily aestheticized as music—is inextricably part of the many domains of popular culture. Expanding the view taken by many scholars of cultural studies, the contributors consider cultural practices concerning sound not merely as semiotic or signifying processes but as material, physical, perceptual, and sensory processes that integrate a multitude of cultural traditions and forms of knowledge.
The chapters discuss conceptual issues as well as terminologies and research methods; analyze historical and contemporary case studies of listening in various sound cultures; and consider the ways contemporary practices of sound generation are applied in the diverse fields in which sounds are produced, mastered, distorted, processed, or enhanced. The chapters are not only about sound; they offer a study through sound—echoes from the past, resonances of the present, and the contradictions and discontinuities that suggest the future.
ContributorsKarin Bijsterveld, Susanne Binas-Preisendörfer, Carolyn Birdsall, Jochen Bonz, Michael Bull, Thomas Burkhalter, Mark J. Butler, Diedrich Diederichsen, Veit Erlmann, Franco Fabbri, Golo Föllmer, Marta García Quiñones, Mark Grimshaw, Rolf Großmann, Maria Hanáček, Thomas Hecken, Anahid Kassabian, Carla J. Maier, Andrea Mihm, Bodo Mrozek, Carlo Nardi, Jens Gerrit Papenburg, Thomas Schopp, Holger Schulze, Toby Seay, Jacob Smith, Paul Théberge, Peter Wicke, Simon Zagorski-Thomas
... DiY is a political and philosophical movement which has been applied in a vast array of contexts, including political activism (Wall 1999), philosophy (Bakunin 1989;Proudhon 1994;Bookchin 1995;Chomsky 1999), economics of mutual aid (Kropotkin 1902), cooperative projects, resisting commodification of art (Adorno 1982), and use of digital and communication technologies (Di Scipio 2013;Ippolita 2014). DiY as a practice was born from the confluence of British rave culture (youth movements which organized illegal parties in the 1980s and 1990s) with a series of protest movements which shared an anti-authoritarian bent in struggles for social justice. ...
Our goal in this chapter is to examine the DiY (Do it Yourself) movement’s organizational philosophy, with particular focus on the concept of independence. Beginning with an examination of organizational practices in two DiY artistic events held in the Naples area, we will illustrate the tension inherent an independent approach to organizing: on one side it emphasizes the importance of personal relations and volunteerism, encouraging self-organization and self-production, with a predilection for direct action, on the other it also affirms the need for political activism which results in practices of resistance, non-professionalism, self-marginalization, and counterproductive work behaviors, generally considered in contrast with common sense. Connecting these contrasting tendencies to issues deriving from anarchist idea of theoretical praxis and Foucault’s definition of utopia and heterotopia, we argue that DiY and independence can indeed give rise to positive social initiatives informed by rigorous philosophical discussions. In particular, they can be associated with forms of organizational ethics based on immanence and performativity, attentive to the process over the product, which find resonance in recent critical organization studies and theorizations of organizing outside organization.
... This would lead to political delusion, manipulation and coherence, and would remove any idea of opposition. Press and mass culture are one factor preventing utopia from being realized, ruining private life, and preventing the development of autonomous minds (Adorno, 1991). ...
The development of technology leads to mechanical reproduction of artworks. This tendency brings the paradox whether mechanical reproduction of artworks enlightens or blinds society. Optimistic perspective of Walter Benjamin and Lippmannian school on reproducibility faces pessimistic view of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to compare W. Lippmann, W. Benjamin, T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer’s views and summarize by checking suitability of two schools’ perspectives in advanced technological century.
... In the on the Fetish-character in Music and the Regression of Listening, Adorno (1991) argues that the consumption of popular music contradicts the objective interest of those who consume it. The key reason for his insistence on this position in his argument is that popular music has lost the possibility of autonomous art and become an accomplice of capitalist ideology, thus depriving the masses of the possibility of resistance or criticism All in all, Adorno (1991) believes that popular music has the characteristics of fetishism, which leads to the degradation of people's listening and appreciating ability. The consumption of popular music contradicts the objective interests of those who consume it. ...
... At twenty, he is still at the stage of a boy scout working on complicated knots to please his parents. (Adorno [1938] 2001 , 52-3) ...
... See, for example,Adorno (2001),McClary (1993), Subotnik (1995),Kingsbury (1988) andNettl (1995). ...
During the last three decades music scholars have provided a growing amount of critical accounts of what they contend is a fundamental conceptual support behind the performance of classical music, namely the belief in aesthetically autonomous and endurable musical works free-standing from any cultural and social context. According to this ontology, the primary obligation of the performer is to present and interpret the musical work, a performance ideal that has been claimed to foster a musical culture obsessed with perfectionism and permeated by problematic relations of power. Such critical assessments have of late migrated beyond the academic discourses of music scholars into the venues of popular culture, a phenomenon evidenced in particular by a variety of recently released feature films. This article argues that current screen media representations of classical musicians are involved in a complex critical dialogue with deep-rooted aesthetic ideologies clustering around classical music and its performance. Although such representations advance a view of classical music culture as being deeply permeated by structural inequalities, performance anxiety and unreasonably high standards of perfection, they don’t necessarily reject the notion of the musical work or devalue the high-art status and emancipatory potential traditionally ascribed to classical music.
... In his critique of the commodification of artistic expression, Theodor Adorno suggests the commercial power of mass popular music intoxicates the fetishistic listener, who falls victim to an irrational and recurring search for pleasure in hit songs. 28 The fetishization of modern music tech nologies and sound reproduction, commonly called audiophilia, is also most often dis cussed in Marxist terms. Although, like the Freudian subject, audiophiles are usually male, their fetishist devotion is not classified as psychosexual. ...
Music and sound can signify sexual desire and arouse sexual desire. Auditory stimulation can become a fetish, and “auralism” can be understood as a form of queerness. This chapter, based on participant-observer research in online kink communities, sketches an account of auralism or auditory fetishism, rarely studied in comparison to other fetishes. The example of auralism shows the limitations of Freud’s vision-based account of fetishism as a disavowal of castration. While Freud believed that only men could be fetishists, attention to auralism shows that female fetishists are abundant (as do many other examples that contradict Freud’s claim). Recent musicological discussions of violence, pleasure, mastery, and control in music listening point toward further BDSM-linked aspects of auralism.
Ever since Friedrich Meinecke proposed the distinction between the terms "cultural nation" (Kulturnation) as expressed in fine art and "Statsnation" (political nation), the cultural sphere of nationalism or nationalist idealogy/culture has been quoted either out of context or misquoted/misinterpreted to demean other cultures and reinforced ostensibly to carve out a false or "imagined" national identity in the Indian context and more so in the Indian popular culture. Does it reflect the culture of the majority populace in India? Why does it hegemonize other cultures? With the mainstream narratives and myths that underlie the Indian media, popular culture galvanizes around terms like nationalism, national identity and others. The main aim of this article is to unravel and deconstruct the notion of national culture and all the accompanying terms associated with it. It becomes significant in the present socio-cultural-politico-Indian context with its approach towards feudalism and postcolonial imperatives. The main question is how these terms are appropriated and subverted to form a new meaning, perhaps a historical revision. Randomly, nine Indian films were chosen for observation. The analysis reveals that a microscopic minority invokes the metanarrative of hypernationalism and cultural homogenization to placate the democratic forces and achieve their hidden agenda. Since it is value-based, its recommendations too primarily belong to the moral turpitude of those who are in power. 116 Introduction Indian popular culture especially the visual media plays a vital role in shaping the minds of the people and the Indian popular cinema owes a lion's share in this regard. Indian popular cinema, rather than entertain, has taken on its cudgels the task of reinforcing dominant cultural values. It is characterized by biopics, fantasy, fairytales, gender issues, historical revision, hypernationalism (most recent addition), Indianness, melodrama, nationalism, stereotyping women, romance et al. in this regard, the Indian cinema constructs specific images, narratives, and settings (either due to crass commercialism or instilling 'cultural values') and molds public opinion. Subjects like identity-Indian identity and the notion of Indian women, Indian culture, nation, and nationalism occupy the center stage in the Indian visual media comprising popular cinema and Television serials, sops etc. The easy targets are the Indian migrants-NRIs (non-resident Indians) who feel pround of their 'lost' or 'left' land to seek greener pastures abroad, glorifies their ancestral culture in their new settlements and promote their abandoned heritage. The main research problem here is what are the factors that help to define and redefine cultural nationalism, national identity, nationalism and national culture? More so, how these took shape in the Indian socio-politico-cultural landscape especially after 2014. While foraying into these areas, this paper aims to address the following research questions-what is nationalism and national culture? Is there any such idea of a national culture in India? Who frames these guidelines? How are these reflected in the Indian popular culture? How does colonialism, Indian feudalism and Postcolonialism react to this idea of nationalism/national culture in the process of shaping a pan-Indian cultural identity? Endless questions arise in this regard, but for want of space and time, this study refrains from making further inroads. This article gains significance due to the alarming situation caused by this cultural appropriation and historical revision. During this process of investigation through analysing nine Indian films (which are randomly selected), this research work stumbles on a startling observation about the partisan role of 'paid or bought media,' partisan bureaucracy, a committed judiciary, the feudalistic setup and the pre-colonial mind of the people in power who are all set to revise history and set 'wrong things right.' Without entering into a cavernous scrutiny of the theories of culture studies, this work makes an impartial inquiry into its applications. Besides this, it will study the impact on humans and how they operate under trying circumstances. It shall also try to probe into the notions of nationalism and a host of other related areas that have become a contested site, especially after the Second World War. Since this article is interdisciplinary, it amalgamates culture studies, literature and its bearing on the minds of the young generation. It involves reading of the mind through not literary science as such, but through the developments in the cultural institutions-the Indian popular cinema.
The growing trend towards gamification makes further conceptual discussion necessary, especially when it comes to very problematic contexts of work. This is true, for example, when highly alienated manual labour, such as in Amazon warehouses, is gamified. The history of ideas of gaming as well as Marxist conceptual reflections on human activity can help to clarify fundamental problems in this context. It can be shown that perhaps not every gamification that puts play in the service of labour is to be seen as a perversion of labour, but at least any gamification is unacceptable that instrumentalises play to make joyless, unsatisfying or uncreative manual labour more bearable for workers. With Friedrich Schiller, Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and Friedrich Engels one can argue that play for work and work as play can be pathways to human freedom. Many digital games, however, exhibit the ambivalence of gamification: Not only does work become like a game, but games takes on features of work as well. Forcing people to play contributes to their dehumanization rather than enhancing human freedom.
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.
What does the urban (post)colonial condition sound like? To what extent and how is France's colonial history audible today on the streets, specifically in the Parisian quartiers populaires? Musical and sonic production has long been entangled with social movements in France and her overseas territories, and genres such as hip hop and raï have been closely associated with the urban spaces of Paris's racialized neighborhoods and with political resistance. This Element refines and extends these analyses up to contemporary antiracist and environmental struggles. Its novelty lies in telling these narratives from the perspective of the urban field recordist, reinventing the bourgeois figure of the flâneur as a feminist-decolonial activist and configuring listening as an expressly spatial practice of mapping the city. The discrete binaural microphones tucked in her ears capture everything from Franco-Maghrebi musical dissent through the sounds of police brutality and carceral capitalism to transcolonial reverberations with struggles elsewhere.
In this paper, I argue that the concept of culture industry developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno had a decisive influence on Jean Godefroy Bidima’s critique of black African modernity. Drawing on some of his writings, I seek to demonstrate how Bidima’s philosophical endeavor inherits the concept of culture industry and applies it to the modern context of black Africa, where it is transformed into the concept of colonial industry. In both cases, the same critical perspective is at play, namely to formulate a broad critique of how cultural products (artworks in Horkheimer and Adorno, and philosophy in Bidima) are deprived of their substance in order to align with the mystification of the masses. The critique of the culture industry, which serves in Adorno as a fundamental critique of the production of modern art and its decadence into mass production, serves, revisited in Bidima, as a critique of modern black African philosophical discourse. With the light provided by this connection, I propose a rereading of Bidima’s critique of Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, the latter being presented as a promoter of a “discourse of mastery” in black African modern philosophy.
Peter Franklin, Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classical Hollywood Film Scores Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 [208pp. ISBN: 9780195383454. £46.99 (hardback); ISBN: 9780190246549. £31.49 (paperback)], 28 screen stills, index.
Don DeLillo, the contemporary American novelist, constructs a vivid posthuman acoustic allegory in White Noise, which exposes postindustrial silent sound-scapes resulted from technological noises, signifying the human subject's latent critique and reconciling potentiality towards the postmodern everyday life. By employing "white noises" as important acoustic cues of death, the novel uncovers how "sound imperial-ism" accelerates the alienation of the human subject, leading to the loss of subjectivity.
Ressentiment seems to be one of the key concepts of our time. But what is the use of the concept of ressentiment for understanding and analyzing the rise of anti-gender, anti-migrant, anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, homo- and transphobic, and masculinist as well as antisemitic and anti-Muslim sentiments, as they are articulated in populist movements all over the globe in varying constellations and to different degrees? This essay argues that, although it is a productive category for the diagnosis of our times, ressentiment alone is too weak a tool for critical theory. In order not to lose its force and not to become a psychologizing and individualizing interpretative term, ressentiment needs to be understood as a mode of regression and therefore should be embedded in a theoretical framework for understanding crisis that allows us to address the social structures that enable, necessitate, and nourish ressentiments.
Este texto tem por objetivo contribuir para a superação de um duplo déficit presente nas produções bibliográficas que conjugam Direito & Arte, relativo tanto à ausência de marcos teórico-metodológicos apropriados a tais articulações, quanto à ausência de uma teoria social que lhes sirva de pano de fundo. A partir de tal problema, apresenta-se ao leitor as posições de alguns dos principais nomes do marxismo e da primeira geração da teoria crítica quanto à teoria e à crítica estética, passíveis de serem apropriadas pelas pesquisas em Direito & Literatura, Cinema, Música, e além.
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.
The purpose of this study was to find out the effect of pubertal maturation on self-esteem of adolescents. The sample comprised of total 180 adolescents (V to IX class). There were three groups indicating three phases of pubertal maturation i.e. early, mid and late. In each group there were 60 subjects. Further in each group there were 30 male and 30 female. The self-administered rating scale for pubertal development adapted from an instrument described in Peterson et al. (1988) was used for assessment of pubertal development. Indian adaptation of Battle’s Self-Esteem Inventory for Children by Kumar (1977) was used for the assessment of self-esteem. The data were analyzed through mean, ANOVA and Newman Keul’s multiple comparison test. The results indicate that pubertal maturation and gender both have significant effect on self-esteem.
[Keywords : Pubertal maturation, Self-esteem and Gender]
When new technologies emerge, they inevitably bring to mind many of the same questions that media scholars have been asking for decades. In this study, we will analyse Apple AirPods through a theoretical framework based in the writings of media ecologists like Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, as well as media theorist Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno is included here because very few articles in media ecology scholarship discuss his contributions to media research. The exclusion of Adorno from media ecology appears to relate to his different ontological assumptions about media. While Innis, McLuhan and Postman contribute to the ‘structures and patterns narrative’ of medium theory, Adorno clearly fits into the ‘power and resistance narrative’ of critical/cultural studies. However, there are more significant connections between Adorno and the field of media ecology than have been previously acknowledged. In particular, there is a confluence between Adorno’s writings and others by media ecology scholars like Postman and Lewis Mumford, particularly in Adorno’s arguments about technology and music. In this article, we consider the question: can Adorno’s writings on technology be considered appropriate for inclusion in the media ecology canon? In this article, we will explore representative essays from Adorno’s extensive body of work on music reproduction technologies and discuss the parallels between his arguments and those made by others in media ecology.
Recent critical studies in International Political Economy (IPE) have engaged with the ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations. However, outside of postcolonial critiques, this temporal turn in IPE has not considered how subjects share time or how coevalness is produced. This paper explores the problem of coevalness by asking how music produces shared time and plural temporalities. It analyses a collection of experimental electronic music, 4 Women No Cry, arguing that mobilising vulnerabilities through the co-presence of bodies in ‘musicking’ points towards possibilities for subjectivity beyond the individuated, sovereign, autonomous individual subject and for an intercorporeal subjectivity emerging from the intertwining of material and social relations. This article thus does not offer an ‘IPE of music’ but rather asserts, via music, a deepening of the critique of temporality and of subjectivity, opening further possibilities for political critique in IPE.
This is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It treats those forms as inextricably intertwined, and sets them in a wide variety of social and critical contexts. The book comprises four sections – Histories, Techniques and Technologies, Mediation, Identities – with 16 thematic chapters. Each of these explores a musical or cultural topic as it developed over many years, and as it appeared across a diversity of musical practices. In this way, the text introduces both key musical repertoire and critical-musicological approaches to that work. It historicises music and musical thinking, opening up debate in the present rather than offering a new but closed narrative of the past. In each chapter, an overview of the topic's chronology and main issues is illustrated by two detailed case studies.
The chapter examines the literature and demonstrates that status is a relational term, supportive of social relations that are constructed on basis of both social norms and social interests, and thus subject to manipulation. In this view, status relations, defined as a social mechanism that is more stable and consistent overtime than many other social relations and conditions (e.g., social relations based on reputation), are still possible to shape on basis of strategic and tactic interests. The chapter examines how status beliefs can be manipulated in both laboratory experiments and in social settings, and thus shape preferences and outcomes.
p>Since popular music has become an industry, the notion of 'authenticity' has played a role in shaping a cultural identity of 'resistance' to commercial products. This thesis focuses on French rock music as a product conveying a cultural identity, and examines its constitution or invention as 'authentic' by looking at the interconnectedness of artists, music producers, the media, the state and the audience. In the early 1980s in France, French rock music developed in parallel to the setting-up of 'independent' record labels, which attempted to produce music autonomously from powerful companies. This material determinant, and the cultural identity derived therefrom, is known as 'alternative'. Its paradox lies in the desire to represent a form of opposition to the contemporary conditions of production, in a music product in fact reliant on them.
Assessing the rarity of academic studies on French popular music, Chapter One establishes the theoretical framework within which the concepts of 'authenticity' and 'resistance' are studied. Following the pluridisciplinary method of Cultural Studies, it examines the historical, political and economic background to the evolution of French popular music, and underlines the role of national traditions, such as republicanism, in shaping the concept of 'dissidence'. Chapter Two analyses the industrial and state determinants that contribute to the production of French rock music. With case studies of record labels and artists' interviews, this chapter argues that the production of distribution of an 'alternative' music culture maps conflicting zones, and is relative to external pressures. The fact that the French Ministry of Culture promotes its rock music also raises the debate on 'cooption', as it appears that the state sanctions a discourse of 'resistance'.</p
For the past twenty years or so, the Austrian cultural theorist Robert Pfaller has been positing and analyzing the concepts of “interpassivity” (as opposed to interactivity) and the delegation of enjoyment both in sacred rituals and in relation to various media of reproduction (such as video recorders and photocopiers). Steintrager and Chow argue that Pfaller's insights into delegation as a key and understudied feature of media ecologies are particularly relevant today, as delegation of various activities has intensified. However, the latest media and technologies, which gather so much information about us that we end up in a state of informational debt, pose a challenge to his thesis that delegation is an unconscious strategy for seeking relief from the onslaught of images, commodities, and information.
To contextualise the work on which this book is based, the introduction discusses the basic elements that gave rise to this project: Its theoretical underpinnings, the domestic academic milieu in which it was conceived and the specificities of the empirical research. First, it situates the research at the intersection of new jazz studies and Bourdieu-inspired cultural sociology and elucidates why combining these lines of inquiry holds considerable potential for contemporary jazz research. It then shifts the perspective by offering insights into the institutional constraints that have so far prevented this line of enquiry at the domestic academic level. This is followed by a self-reflexive elaboration of the epistemological implications involved in the transition from being an outsider observer to obtaining insider knowledge of the meaningful cultural practices that characterise the Hungarian jazz diaspora. The remaining part of the chapter presents a concise summary of the rationale behind the book and an overview of its chapters.
Available here, uploaded with the permission of T&F – https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003132790/genesis-structure-hungarian-jazz-diaspora-ádám-havas
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is often read through the lens of psychoanalysis and taken as a model of postmodern fiction with its indeterminable, norm-subverting, hermeneutic narrative. Yet, as Pierce Inverarity, the ultimate capitalist, stands as the absent center of the mystery, this paper re-approaches Lot 49 and proposes that buried beneath its detective/mystery threads is a potent critique of the political-economic milieu of the sixties California. The various tropes, from the captive Rapunzel, Remedios Varo’s triptych, the duplicitous Trystero, to the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, knit out a world that is consolidated by economic activities and above all commodity fetishism. The article contends that Lot 49 is a reply to the sociopolitical discourses and the civil movements of the sixties. Drawing on economic and communication activities, Lot 49 breaks down the conventional binary distinction and demonstrates a complex interplay of capital, credit, and rhetoric that fabricates a postmodern world of which “all that is solid melts into air.”
Frankfurt School's critical theory provides a framework to study mass media. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer, two of the most prominent theorists of the School, coined the term "culture industry" to discuss the state of the entertainment sector. However, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School were either dead or they simply did not analyze the case of video games when the medium became an important agent both in social and economic terms. The main argument of this paper is that, as an inseparable part of the entertainment sector of today's capitalist societies, video games are eligible for an analysis as products of the culture industry. It is argued in the study that the fantasy worlds of video games divert people's attention away from the problems of capitalist societies. Further, the commodities are claimed to be getting increasingly standardized and are aimed at providing easy pleasures to consumers. Besides, a discussion of video games is carried out in accordance with the view that the video games of today seem to cater more to casual gamers than "serious" gamers, transpiring a dichotomy akin to that of high culture versus low culture.
Elizabeth Wurtzel’s early career as a music journalist not only gave her a foothold in publishing but also informed her work as a memoirist and cultural critic. Like past music writers, particularly Ellen Willis, Wurtzel broke away from ‘objective’ critical orthodoxy and found musical touchstones to complement and amplify her most introspective writing. Often dispensing with linear narrative (or strict veracity), Wurtzel assembles episodes from her life (in the case of autobiography) or history as one would arrange songs on a mixtape, with subjective impressions and reference points channelled through music. As a medium for young-adult communication, the mixtape thrives on idiosyncrasy and both a deflection and absorption of inchoate emotion. Commiseration and a plea for empathy embed themselves within a mix’s ‘code,’ along with elements of gift-exchange; a similar urge to pack subjectivity into existing discourse distinguishes Wurtzel’s writings. Re-Evaluating Wurtzel’s body of work as an outgrowth of her ‘mixtape aesthetics,’ we encounter a bold alternative method for the collection and transmission of knowledge in life writing and cultural criticism.
In this article, I discuss deconstruction and cultural resistance to commercial culture as a strategy practiced by the Residents in the 1974–1980period. The band questioned the mechanisms governing popular culture by a critique of novelty cults, rock-idol worship, simplicity of chart hits, and the art-promotion strategies following practices of commercial advertising. Their LPs deconstructed, reversed, mocked, and distorted the music industry as commercial profit-gaining undertaking. The group’s esthetics include references to the primary forms of rock and roll music, modernism, and the avant-garde of twentieth-century music and are rooted ideologically in the Surrealist and Dadaist movements.
In scientific work, sonification (i.e., the use of nonspeech audio to convey information) is primarily thought of as a novel way to communicate post hoc research findings to lay audiences but only rarely, if ever, as a component of the research itself. This article argues that, rather than any inherent epistemological limitations of sound as a medium of scientific reasoning, this framing reflects a sociohistorical tendency to “silence” experimental techniques as they become widely adopted—both in terms of the literal silencing of noisy instrumentation and the elision of the role of sound (along with other nonvisual sensory media) in received discovery accounts. This tendency is well-illustrated by the history of electrophysiology research, particularly the case of the electrical penetration graph (EPG), an instrument used by entomologists to study how insects feed on plants. Combining participant observation, interviews, and analysis of EPG technical literature, this article recovers the unacknowledged role of sound in EPG’s exploratory stages and gradual emergence as a standard laboratory technique as well as its gradual silencing as a consequence of this standardizing process.
Battles in Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) present special problems for game immersion because of their sheer ubiquity and repetitiveness. This is particularly true of games that require the player to “grind”—that is, to engage in repetitive fights in order to level-up characters and thereby gain tactical advantages later. This paper argues that battle music is first and foremost a variety of functional music, a genre that fans measure not by its sonic beauty but by its psychological effectiveness. This point leads directly to a number of pressing questions: How do battle themes function? How do these functions relate to the all-important concerns of immersion and interactivity? How do we evaluate the effectiveness of battle music? And finally, what would a preliminary theory of battle music composition look like?
This article examines how the grind of JRPG fighting manifests as an integral part of battle music composition, analyzing three standard conventions in detail: (1) a clear opening audiovisual rupture, (2) a fanfare as cadence, and (3) a sustained period of harmonic stasis underpinning busy surface textures. This last phenomenon creates a sense of “musicospatial stasis”—that is, a musically induced sense of stasis that intermingles with and projects itself onto the visual and narrative fields. Because the repetitive grind of JRPG battles interrupts movement through the overworld, battle themes should be understood as ruptures in the sonic environment, just as the battle stage is a spatial rupture in the overworld. Battle themes therefore make little sense as analytical objects out of context: by definition, they signal a break that impedes the player’s movement throughout a larger environment.
This essay presents Theodor W. Adorno’s case pro and contra the regulation of the work-concept in a tradition that long sustained a great 1800 divide. The case is made through the provocation offered in Lydia Goehr’s Imaginary Museum of Musical Works that “Bach did not intend to compose musical works.” The essay investigates the many references to Johann Sebastian Bach in Adorno’s aesthetic, social, and philosophical writings to show that his Bach case was not merely illustrative but paradigmatic of every case he made for a critical theory of possibility. Adorno’s case was an urgent matter of rescue and justice, made by linking Bach’s compositions to Arnold Schoenberg’s paradigmata of a possible music through the mediation of the work-concept for which Ludwig van Beethoven was made in the tradition paradigmatically to stand.
This book discusses aspects of ethnic and cultural identity that are reflected in poetry, songs and song lyrics. The authors are scholars from around the world who have contributed their expertise in a variety of fields to our most comprehensive survey of world music yet.
These varied scholarly studies are unified by their common address of an issue that could appear simple on the surface: songs reflect, project and store people’s concepts of their national and ethnic identity. Moreover, folk song and popular lyrics do this as effectively as more formal carriers of normative collective identity such as anthems. The complexity of the issue becomes evident when one realises the multiplicity of the factors at play: lyrics, musical score, performer, performance, audience, language, paratext and, above all, the ethnic national contextual arena in which these factors combine. Add to this the nuanced elements of irony, burlesque, parody, satire and political commentary, and a folk song or top ten hit can yield incisive insight into the self and social identity-construction of the public who consume and, in one sense, co-create these songs.
The Gibson Les Paul is one of the most iconic electric guitars ever made. Although there is a vibrant scholarly literature surrounding the Les Paul’s symbolic entanglements with issues of race, gender, and class, few have considered the ecopolitical entanglements involved in producing a key material dimension of that guitar’s signature sound: Honduran mahogany ( Swietenia macrophylla ). Fiji is one of the main harvesting sites of Honduran mahogany, and this chapter charts the social and environmental transformations that occurred following this wood’s introduction to Fiji in the 1880s, considering especially the increasing demand for mahogany as it has been driven by the popularization of the Les Paul since the mid-twentieth century—an issue that, to this day, continues to define forestry in the region. By examining the global commodity chains and infrastructures underlying Les Paul production, this chapter focuses on the role that Honduran mahogany, or the “White Man’s timber,” as it is called by some locals, has played in reconfiguring Fijian landowners’ definitions of what constitutes a forest, sustainability, and justice. In doing so, the chapter interrogates the power relations and ontological politics in which different actors, species, and things are enmeshed. Ultimately, the chapter shows that the aesthetic investments of musicians in particular timbres are rooted in broader legacies of timber-driven colonialism and plantation capitalism.
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