Metaphysics of Pop:
The aesthetic structure of recorded music

Instructor: Alphabet Collection Date & Time: February 3rd, 10th, 17th, 24th 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: Pop music is probably the most impactful art form ever, even if only from a quantitative point of view. No other aesthetic category, movement, or object has ever reached that many people with such dominating force in a planetary scale. However, pop still lacks any serious effort to be understood in its own terms, that is, to be placed in a broader history of cultural artifacts as a galaxy of specific rituals and mythologies. Derived from the positions of Adorno or Bourdieu, the main theoretical pursuits to define pop so far have offered only its critique as a system of exchange, economic or symbolic. More than that: they have described pop as a variation of musical styles in addition of to a brand new art form shaped by recording media. These suppositions have inhibited a deeper survey of the signifying structures of pop, such as its common compositional morphologies, its relation to the electrical imaginary, its specific manipulation of time and space, its indexical performativity and construction of body doubles, and its unprecedented intimacy with processes of technogenesis. This Seminar will sketch a metaphysics of pop music based mostly on its aesthetic experience. Of course, such an analysis should not foreclose materialist notions – for example, the role that pop has played as a geopolitical weapon (i.e. the cold war), how it maps scenes onto territories, producing a standard historicization of the world or the very commodification of self in the name of “”democratizing genius””. Of course, we cannot explain pop without discussing its continual uprooting of local traditions and racial formations and its claims of authenticity and universality. Pop is also the true and pretty face of the American military-industrial complex. Still, it can also be transcendental, and it possesses the most effective tools for worldmaking, for the design of atmospheres, for the embodiment of fantasies, and for the emancipation of collective intelligence through repetition, immersion, and dissociation. There is a phenomenology of pop listening and a poetics of the pop studio that philosophers and musicologists have ostensibly overlooked. The goal of this Seminar is to start bridging that gap.

Session 1-What Do We Mean By ‘Pop’? We will discuss the most common theoretical approaches to pop music and sketch its short history, from folk to hyperpop, addressing issues of aesthetics, the socio-technical affordances, and the identity implications of globalized music.

Session 2-Poetics of the Studio: We will tackle the abilities awarded to music by the studio setting, such as free manipulation of time-space, indexical performativity, symbiosis with the technical apparatus, and the design of atmospheres, which lead to a common compositional morphology.

Session 3-Distribution, Mediation, Localization: We will address the aesthetic effect of the market and the media tools that archive, distribute, mediate, and localize pop music, detailing the phenomenology of listening to recorded music and the pop artist as the creator of a persona and a scene.

Session 4-Pop High Modernism: We will conclude by trying to see pop as an art form in itself, describing its rituals and mythologies of immersion, explosion, and emancipation to fit it into a wider history of art and agency.

This Seminar is offered in partnership with DIS. DIS is a New York-based platform for entertainment and education that invites leading artists and thinkers to expand the reach of key conversations bubbling up through contemporary art, culture, activism, philosophy, and technology.

IMAGE: John Kilduff, Tecnics Record Player, 2018

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