Close
Take this Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis
04 October 2024, 5:30 pm鈥�7:30 pm
We welcome you to this Marxism in Culture book launch for author Paul Rekret.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
-
IAS ForumG17, ground floor, South Wing最准的六合彩论坛, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
Connecting contemporary changes in work and the economy to tendencies in popular music, Take This Hammer (Goldsmiths Press, 2024)听shows how song-form has both reflected developments in contemporary capitalism while also intimating a horizon beyond it. From online streaming and the extension of the working day to gentrification, unemployment and the emergence of trap rap, from ecological crisis and field recording to automation and trends in dance music, by exploring the intersections of work and song in the current era, not only do we gain a new understanding of contemporary musical culture, we also see how music might gesture towards a horizon beyond the alienating experience of work in capitalism itself.
There will be a presentation of the book, with responses by Anthony Iles, Ash Sharma, and Marie Thompson, followed by general discussion.
All welcome. No booking required.
The Marxism in Culture seminar series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis.听Both "Marxism" and "culture" are conceived here in a broad sense. 听We understand Marxism as an ongoing self-critical tradition, and correspondingly the critique of Marxism's own history and premises is part of the agenda. "Culture" is intended to comprehend not only the traditional fine arts, but also aspects of popular culture such as film, popular music, and fashion. 听From this perspective, conventional distinctions between the avant-garde and the popular, the elite and the mass, the critical and the commercial are very much open for scrutiny. 听All historical inquiry is theoretically grounded, self-consciously or not, and theoretical work in the Marxist tradition demands empirical verification.听
About the Speakers
Anthony Iles
Anthony Iles is a founding member of Full Unemployment Cinema, an former editor with Mute/Metamute (2005鈥�2022), coauthor, with Josephine Berry, of the book No Room to Move: Art and the Regenerate City (2011),听 and with Tom Roberts, of All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal: Reading History from Below (2012). He was editor with Mattin of the anthology Noise & Capitalism (2005) and commissioning editor of the anthologies Anguish Language: Writing and Crisis (2015), and Look at Hazards, Look at Losses (2017). Essays and reviews by Anthony have been published in Variant, Cesura//Acceso, Mute, Radical Philosophy, Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, and Logos. He is presently working on the anthology Abolishing Capitalism Totally: What Is to Be Done under Real Subsumption? (forthcoming, 2024)
Paul Rekret
Paul Rekret is the author of Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence听(2017); Derrida and Foucault: Philosophy, Politics, Polemics听(2018); Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (2024) and听editor of George Caffentzis's Clipped Coins, Abused Words & Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money听(2021).听He has published in journals and magazines including South Atlantic Quarterly, Theory, Culture and Society, Critical Quarterly, Viewpoint, Frieze, The Wire and The New Inquiry. 听He is a member of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective and is a Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster.
Ashwani Sharma
Ashwani Sharma is a senior lecturer in film and screen studies at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He is working on a book on race, visual culture and cultural studies for Bloomsbury Academic. He is the co-editor of Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Music, and the founding editor of darkmatter听journal. He is a poet and has cowritten Suburban Finesse.听
Marie Thompson
Marie Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at The Open University, UK. She is the author of 听(Bloomsbury, 2017) and from 2020-2024 she led the AHRC project . Thompson is also a founding member (with Annie Goh) of , a project that uses the legacies and histories of cyberfeminism to critically and creatively interrogate the relationships between gender, technology and auditory culture. 听