Resisting songs: negative dialectics in pop

Popular Music ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Bloomfield
Keyword(s):  
Television Advertising ◽  
Soap Operas ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Crack Open ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Closed Circle

But there isn't Al. If Al were there he would be giving a private performance to Chris Roberts as patron: an odd conception in the present-day world. In fact Al Green sings in a domain that is public although the musical commodity of the disc or tape turns it into a potentially solitary experience. In his comment Roberts has been captured by the Romantic understanding of the song: that its essence is (artistic) interiority made exterior. He is not alone in his fantasy of access to the pop singer. It constitutes the prevailing, if unformulated, view – a considerable irony in the postmodern world of late capitalism. The past few decades have witnessed the development of a global light-entertainment industry whose cultural objects partake in an increasingly closed circle of signification through pop videos, television advertising, soap operas and the tabloids. This (hyper)reality coexists today with the pursuit of the ever more soulful vocal, as if in a doomed attempt to crack open the reified commodity, by dint of the singer's passion to force something human across the gulf between exchange value and use value.

COMMODIFICATION ship. As a consequence of colonial occupation and the discourses and practices generated and maintained by colo-nisers, the idea of colonialism may also be said to designate the attributes of the specific political and epistemological discourses by which the colonising power defines those who are subjected to its rule. Postcolonialism refers in literary studies to literary texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European powers at some point in their history. Commodification—The process by which an object or a person becomes viewed primarily as an article for economic exchange - or a commodity. Also the translation of the aesthetic and cultural objects into principally economic terms. The com-modification of an object or the raw materials from which it is produced is a sign of the transformation from use-value to exchange-value. The term is used in feminist theory to describe the objectification of women by patriarchal cultures. Through the processes of commodification, the work of art lacks any significance unless it can be transformed by economic value into a mystified, desired form, the labour having gone into its production having been occluded. Commodity fetishism—Term used by marxist critics after Marx's discussion in Volume I of Capital to describe the ways in which products within capitalist economies become objects of veneration in their own right, and are valued way beyond what Marx called their 'use-value'. Commodity fetishism is understood as an example of the ways in which social relations are hidden within economic forms of capitalism. Condensation—A psychoanalytic, specifically Freudian, term referring to the psychic process whereby phantasmatic images assumed to have a common affect are condensed into a single image. Drawing on the linguistic work of Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan compares the Freudian notion of condensation to the work of metaphor. Connotation/denotation—A word's connotations are those feel-ings, undertones, associations, etc. that are not precisely what the word means, but are conventionally related to it, especially in poetic language such as metaphor. The word

2016 ◽  
pp. 34-47
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Psychic Process ◽  
Objectification Of Women ◽  
The Aesthetic

scholarly journals A NEW SOLUTION CONCERNING CHOICE-OF-LAW FOR THE ASSIGNMENT OF DEBTS

2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 665-696
Author(s):  
Alison Xu
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Private International Law ◽  
Choice Of Law ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Exchange Value

AbstractThis article explores a solution to the choice-of-law issues concerning both voluntary and involuntary assignments arising in a domestic forum. The focus is on English private international law rules relating to cross-border assignments. A distinction is made between primary and extended parties as the foundation for choice-of-law analysis. Drawing on insights from the distinction of the use value and exchange value of debts found in economics, this article proposes a new analytical framework for choice-of-law based on a modified choice-of-law theory of interest-analysis.

Revisiting Television in India: Mapping the Portrayal of Women in Soap Operas

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudhansubala Sahu
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
The State ◽  
Soap Operas ◽  
Intellectual Community ◽  
Visual Texts ◽  
The Past ◽  
Phases Of Development

This article attempts to map the portrayal of women in popular soap operas on television in India. It begins with the discourses around portrayal of women on Doordarshan in the pre-liberalisation era and goes on to analyse a few soap operas in the past one decade. With substantive review of visual texts, it aims to disprove the claim that there is a paradigm shift especially with respect to the portrayal of women in the contemporary and so-called progressive soap operas. It concludes by comparing all the phases of development of television in India with respect to construction of women and stating how very little and inconsequential change has occurred in this regard in spite of all the efforts from the state and the intellectual community.

scholarly journals How Rocks Die: Changing Patterns of Discard and Re-Use of Ground Stone Tools in Middle Bronze Age Cyprus

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 8869
Author(s):  
Andrew McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ground Stone ◽  
Changing Patterns ◽  
Middle Bronze Age

Cultural objects are thought to have a lifespan. From selection, through construction, use, destruction, and discard, materials do not normally last forever, transforming through stages of life, eventually leading to their death. The materiality of stone objects, however, can defy the inevitable demise of an object, especially durable ground stone tools that can outlive generations of human lifespans. How groups of people deal with the relative permanence of stone tools depends on their own relationship with the past, and whether they venerate it or reject its influence on the present. A case study from the long-lived site of Prasteio-Mesorotsos in Cyprus demonstrates a shifting attitude toward ground stone objects, from the socially conservative habit of ritually killing of objects and burying them, to one of more casual re-use and reinterpretation of ground stone. This shift in attitude coincides with a socio-political change that eventually led to the ultimate rejection of the past: complete abandonment of the settlement.

Modern Museum and Paramuseum: Existential Alienation and Actualization

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-2) ◽  
pp. 410-425
Author(s):  
Denis Ignatyev ◽  
◽  
Anastasia Nikiforova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
The Past ◽  
Synergistic Approach ◽  
Historical Objects ◽  
First Time ◽  
Scientific Life ◽  
Northwestern Russia

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of alienation of culture in a modern museum and the processes of actualization of objects and phenomena of history in the space of the paramuseum. In the center of the author’s attention is the theme of creating the illusion of existential comfort. It explores the contradiction between the need for museification of culture in order for a modern person to be able to appeal to it when building one’s own identity, and the constant desire to place the culture of the past on a safe reservation. The issue of aestheticization of cultural objects in the museum space and the role of a museum in interpreting, preserving and distorting their meaning is raised. The museum, created as a repository of antiquities, a collection of masterpieces, today has become the most sensitive system that responds to changes in the life of culture and society. An axiological analysis of modern museums shows their growing popularity as an element of the entertainment industry, while their aesthetic, analytical, and intellectual role is becoming obscure. Respect for the museum as a keeper of cultural memory, for the focus of scientific life is disappearing. Instead, a simplified “attraction museum” and paramuseum is coming to the fore, creating endless games with historical objects, reconstructions, visitors and interpretations of the events of history and culture. The authors of the article are among the first to turn to the concept of “paramuseum” and give it a comprehensive assessment. For the first time, a scientific classification of paramuseums (on the example of paramuseums of northwestern Russia) is proposed. Their main features and characteristics are identified. A synergistic approach to the processes of actualization and alienation of cultural objects in the museum environment made it possible to include the viewer, the recipient, as the third, necessary component of this system. This made it possible to conclude that museum values are alienated or updated not by themselves, but only in relation to the “person watching.” Thus, modern museums and paramuseums are a form of value-based self-consciousness of society, demonstrating the total stratification of post-culture society, its fragmentation into value clusters that can represent culture as a whole only in the process of analytical consciousness, but not in the collection of subject series.

Alternatives to Commodification

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-158
Author(s):  
Christoph Hermann
Keyword(s):  
Use Value ◽  
Market Exchange ◽  
Separate Section ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
Private Profit

This chapter discusses alternatives to commodification. The opposite of commodification is de-commodification. De-commodification imposes limits on the commodity character of goods and services traded on markets, but it does not provide for an alternative. Following an understanding of commodification as subjugation of use value to market/exchange value, the chapter argues that an alternative must seek to “free” use value and reinstate it as the primary goal of production. Or put differently, an alternative to commodification must focus on the satisfaction of human needs rather than the expansion of private profit. Three elements are crucial for the promotion of (collective and ecological) use value: democratization, sustainability, and solidarity. The chapter discusses each one in a separate section. It then brings the three elements together into an alternative vision that is called use-value society.

Devalorization

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-99
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail
Keyword(s):  
Use Value ◽  
Primitive Accumulation ◽  
The Core ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Mode Of Presentation ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Theory Of Value

This chapter shows that the process of primitive accumulation or direct appropriation is and must be internal to Marx’s theory of value. This is the case for precisely the methodological reasons Marx describes in his postface to the second edition of Capital. The core concepts in the “mode of presentation” (use-value, exchange-value, and value) describe the strictly immanent conditions or core “logic of capitalism” but are also derived from the historical “mode of inquiry.” Since primitive accumulation is part of the historical mode of inquiry, there must be a conceptual place for primitive accumulation in the mode of presentation itself. If not, then the mode of presentation is strictly speaking inadequate to the mode of inquiry—something that any dialectician, and Marx himself, must reject.

Mapping the Commons in Istanbul

2020 ◽  
pp. 638-657
Author(s):  
Başak Ergüder
Keyword(s):  
Use Value ◽  
Public Benefit ◽  
The Third ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Infrastructure Finance ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Northern Forests ◽  
Basic Features ◽  
Urban Commons ◽  
Privately Owned

In the study, bids for Üçüncü Köprü (The Third Bridge), Üçüncü Havalimanı (The Third Airport), and link roads in Northern Forests will be examined to map urban commons in Istanbul. Two coordinates will be followed for mapping urban commons. First coordinate is the conceptual one which regulates the differences of fundamental conceptions relating to urban commons. At this level, use value will be analyzed in terms of public benefit which is in regard to basic features of urban commons. In second coordinate, urban spaces including exchange value and privately owned such as bridges, roads, airports and highways will be analyzed in terms of infrastructure finance. The aim of the study is discussing the “tragedy of commons” within the context of investments to be made for the urban commons and bringing into question the future of urban commons upon the basis of Istanbul example.

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