Alternative Soundscape Paradigms from Kamau Brathwaite and the Mighty Sparrow

This essay asks how the soundscapes represented in Caribbean literature and music provide alternative paradigms for conceptualizing noise and silence. As American and European sound studies have drawn from the writings of John Cage, Murray Schafer, and Jacques Attali to articulate alternative practices of listening and soundmaking, they have marginalized black experience. Caribbean noise, formed out of resistance to slavery and colonialism, has been excluded from informing those alternative practices. The depths of sonic experience revealed by soundscapes of Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry and the Mighty Sparrow’s calypsos concern the impact of centuries of Atlantic slavery on black hearing and speaking. They expose the racial and economic determinants of sound studies’ advocacy of indifferent listening and pure sound environments. In contrast, Caribbean histories of resourceful hearing and soundmaking bring distinctive sonic cultures to challenge established listening practices and provide ways of questioning canonical definitions of noise and silence.

Street Music

For centuries, street musicians, or buskers, have been plying their trade the world over. However, the study of street music and musicians is an emerging field of research. It is richly interdisciplinary and reaches into many fields, including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, human geography, law and legal studies, marketing, and musicology, as well as tourism and urban studies. The topics on which scholars write largely include noise and regulation, protest, aesthetics of space, and studies of street musicians in particular cities and countries on every continent. The genres of music include street cries and brass bands, along with studies of solo instruments such as the harp, violin, voice, and accordion. The literature on street music can be categorized into three overlapping areas: historical, ethnographical, and philosophical and social. Historical studies are concentrated on street cries and street singing. Ethnographical studies are evident in a range of historical studies but also in contemporary accounts of artists from New York to Moscow and Rio de Janeiro to Melbourne. Encounters with buskers provide not only insight into the reasons they perform, but also the repertory they play and the influence of audiences and technology on their performance. Where and how musicians perform also tell us about the precarious place street musicians occupy in the cultural economies of place, especially in relation to the use of digital culture and e-commerce as a means of making money and publicity. Philosophical and social inquiry asks questions about the nature of the space street music occupies; the ways in which it is and owned, shared, or a contested space; and the psychology of creativity in the moment of performance for both musician and audience. At the heart of much of the literature on street music is the way street sound and music has been captured over the centuries. Early modern studies rely on texts—and textual analyses—to speculate on the style or mode of singing that street criers and performers used to disseminate their messages or to perform. Studies from the late 18th century rely on artworks such as woodblocks, engravings, etchings, and oil paintings to depict the sound. In the 19th century, musical transcriptions begin to appear as a way to approximate the sound of the street (usually sounds created by solo performers), but today transcription is less of a requirement. Video-recording and other forms of digital imaging are capturing the sounds and music of street musicians and their sometimes international careers. Some studies adopt theoretical approaches drawing on the work of such writers as Michel de Certeau, Erving Goffman, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Attali, and Richard Florida.

Postmodernism vs wholeness: socio-political discourse

The purpose of the article is to examine the ideological origins and political consequences of postmodernism in the contemporary world. The article uses such methods of scientific research as the comparative method, the retrospective method, and the hermeneutical method. The author of the article claims that in the context of the collapse of the project «Modern» and the idea of a mechanistic man, postmodernism becomes the ideology of Western civilization. At first, postmodernism identified itself only in the narrow world of philosophical circles, but even then it declared itself as a worldview of radical completion of the era of wholeness, «Big projects», «metanarratives» and universality. Prominent representatives of this ideology were the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, who proclaimed «rhizome» as a new social ideal, in which, as in a mushroom, there are no roots, centers and supports. In the same way, a contemporary man, according to their worldview, should not take root anywhere or in anything: neither in value, nor in culture, nor in spatial terms. A person in society becomes an unrooted nomad who is not able to cognize the world or transform it. As a result, the world is rapidly divided into a nomadic paradise of nomadic Hedonists and a nomadic hell for most of the world's population. According to a European representative of the elite, Jacques Attali, this situation is becoming an irrevocable socio-political reality.

Dossier : Le groupe des Dix, des précurseurs de l'interdisciplinarité – Science et politique : initiatives et influence du Groupe des Dix

L’objectif du Groupe des Dix, créé en 1969, était d’intensifier les relations entre science et politique. Des chercheurs et des hommes politiques ont participé, entre 1969 et 1976, à des rencontres qui avaient pour but d’aider les politiques à prendre des décisions de façon plus rationnelle. L’influence du Groupe des Dix peut s’évaluer à travers l’impact des différents ouvrages rédigés par chacun de ses membres, mais aussi par la création du Centre d’études des systèmes et des technologies avancées (Cesta) sur proposition de Jacques Attali, conseiller du président de la République de 1981 à 1991. Le Cesta est à l’origine de la mise en place d’un projet de coopération technologique européenne. Il participa également, dans le cadre de la promotion des nouvelles technologies, au développement des sciences cognitives en France, en organisant, en 1985, le premier colloque rapprochant informatique, psychologie et neurobiologie.

La propriété : la perception au figuré d’un droit pourtant bien réel

L’auteur nous présente deux ouvrages qui analysent la propriété d’un point de vue historique d’où ressortent des notions non pas juridiques, mais plutôt culturelles et philosophiques. Le premier de ces ouvrages, Au propre et au figuré : histoire de la propriété, de Jacques Attali, constitue une réflexion sur le phénomène de la propriété et sur la raison d’être de cette institution. L’auteur nous y fait découvrir un aspect déconcertant de la propriété par sa relation avec l’homme et la mort. Par le deuxième ouvrage, Pourquoi la propriété, d’Henri Lepage, l’auteur montre plutôt la légitimité et le rôle créateur de richesses de la propriété. C’est donc sous un éclairage « économique » et s’apparentant parfois au droit naturel que la propriété y est alors présentée. Le droit moderne s’inspire t-il de ces différentes notions de la propriété ? Dans la dernière partie de son exposé l’auteur s’interroge ainsi sur le sort que les règles de notre droit réservent à la propriété en examinant tour à tour la position du législateur international (par le biais des conventions et traités internationaux) et celles du législateur constituant, tant canadien que québécois. Il appert alors que le droit de propriété moderne n’est plus un droit absolu, non plus d’ailleurs qu’un droit fondamental.

Sonic Generosity

This chapter introduces the concept of the “musical gift” and locates its presence in Sri Lankan contexts. It also considers the historic relations between musical giving and the identity paradigm in European history, and the relations between musical gifts and musical commodities. Finally, the chapter considers writings in the ontological turn and new materialism in religious studies in tandem with writings on secularism to argue for a new narrative on global music history for music studies. Contra Jacques Attali and numerous other writers on the political economy of music, the chapter argues for the persistence of musical efficacy, enchantment, and giving in the modern world.

Review of XX-XXI centuries Globalism theories

Article analyses ideology of globalism throw theoretical heritage of its main creators - Karl Popper, Jacques Attali and George Soros. Among determination of the main statements: creation of singular global society, global governance structures, and panhuman culture, author also take a review of some globalists approaches to the future world transformation. Article defines basic pillar of globalists ideology: futuristics, social projecting, antiteleologism, ultimate development of human liberty.

Audio Culture

The groundbreaking Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum; September 2004; paperback original) maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, Audio Culture traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical production and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture. This new and expanded edition of the Audio Culture contains twenty-five additional essays, including four newly-commissioned pieces. Taken as a whole, the book explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, ambient music, hip hop, and techno via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers. Instead of focusing on some “crossover” between “high art” and “popular culture,” Audio Culture takes all these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another. While cultural studies has tended to look at music (primarily popular music) from a sociological perspective, the concern here is philosophical, musical, and historical. Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Ornette Coleman, Pauline Oliveros, Maryanne Amacher, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Eliane Radigue, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. Each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts, and the volume concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.