Jacques Attali: Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977–) [FR, EN, ES, TR]

“Attali’s essential argument in Noise: The Political Economy of Music is that music, as a cultural form, is intimately tied up in the mode of production in any given society. For Marxist critics, this idea is nothing new. The novelty of Attali’s work is that it reverses the traditional understandings about how revolutions in the mode of production take place.

Attali believes that music has gone through four distinct cultural stages in its history: Sacrificing, Representing, Repeating, and a fourth cultural stage which could roughly be called Post-Repeating. These stages are each linked to a certain “mode of production”; that is to say, each of these stages carries with it a certain set of technologies for producing, recording and disseminating music, and also concomitant cultural structures that allow for music’s transmission and reception.”

French edition
Publisher PUF, Paris, 1977
301 pages

English edition
Translated by Brian Massumi
Foreword by Fredric Jameson
Afterword by Susan McClary
Publisher Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1985
Theory and History of Literature, Volume 16
ISBN 0719014719, 9780719014710
179 pages

Reviews: Edinburgh Review (1986), Dana Polan (SubStance, 1988), Ronald M. Radano (Ethnomusicology, 1989), Steven Shaviro (2005), notbored.org (n.d.), J. Szigeti (2014).
Outline: Theodore Gracyk.
Commentary: Eric Drott (Critical Inquiry, 2015).

Wikipedia

Bruits: essai sur l’economie politique de la musique (French, 1977, added on 2021-4-11)
Bruits: essai sur l’economie politique de la musique (French, new ed., 1977/2001, added on 2013-9-25, updated on 2021-4-11)
Noise: The Political Economy of Music (English, 1985, updated on 2012-7-24)
Ruidos: ensayos sobre economía política de la música (Spanish, trans. Ana María Palos, 1995, updated on 2021-4-11)
Gürültüden müziğe: müziğin ekonomi-politiği üzerine (Turkish, trans. Gülüş Gülcügil Türkmen, 2005/2014, EPUB, added on 2021-4-11)

Aihwa Ong, Donald Nonini (eds.): Ungrounded Empires. The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (1996)

In the last two decades, Chinese transnationalism has become a distinctive domain within the new “flexible” capitalism emerging in the Asia-Pacific region. Ungrounded Empires maps this domain as the intersection of cultural politics and global capitalism, drawing on recent ethnographic research to critique the impact of late capitalism’s institutions–flexibility, travel, subcontracting, multiculturalism, and mass media–upon transnational Chinese subjectives. Interweaving anthropology and cultural studies with interpretive political economy, these essays offer a wide range of perspectives on “overseas Chinese” and their unique location in the global arena.

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF

Richard Maxwell (ed.): Culture Works: The Political Economy of Culture (2001)

Tears down the imaginary walls separating culture, economics, and politics.

When we read best-selling books, go to movies, visit art museums, go dancing, take in a game, we customarily ignore the political economy that hammers these features of culture into shape; normally, at such times, we’re not thinking about corporate board room votes, lobbyists, public funding for the arts, the end of the Cold War, stock swaps, intellectual property, or the class divisions of public space. This book aims to change that by offering readers a number of ways to link cultural experience to political economy—to become aware of the ways in which political and economic realities and decisions determine the outlines of spaces and activities in everyday life.

Unsettling and provocative, Culture Works tears down the imaginary walls separating culture, economics, and politics. Writing across the established borders between anthropology, sociology, art history, economics, communication and media studies, political theory, and performance, the authors seek to show how particular economies and power relations work in familiar and central cultural experiences: art, beer, advertising, dance, sport, shopping, the Web, and media. Their essays provide a series of lucid, critical accounts of various aspects of the political economy of culture and its attendant issues of production, consumption, corporatization, and the struggle for meaning. A refreshing example of a politics of writing and critical thinking that cultural studies and political economic analysis can produce when working together, the result will change the ways in which readers experience, consider, and understand culture works.

Contributors: David L. Andrews, Michael Curtin, Susan G. Davis, Danielle Fox, Chad Raphael, Anna Beatrice Scott, Ben Scott, Inger L. Stole, Thomas Streeter.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2001
ISBN 081663601X, 9780816636013
Length 259 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF