(Download) "Utopian Music and the Problem of Luxury (1)." by Utopian Studies # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Utopian Music and the Problem of Luxury (1).
- Author : Utopian Studies
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 191 KB
Description
MUCH UTOPIAN THOUGHT grapples with the nature and/or necessity of discipline. Utopias of both the right and the left stress the need for discipline for the sake of cohesion, while anarchistic utopias reject outright the idea of discipline as the preserve of illegitimate authority. Discipline and its obverses, luxury and disobedience, are political issues of classical origin, constitutive of a long aesthetic discourse with serious implications for utopian design and imagination. Utopian discipline has usually been thought of in terms of the organization of people in a visualized space. Here I wish to consider the nature and legacy of discipline, and its obverse, luxury, in temporal aesthetic terms, in music. Susan J. Smith writes that "art matters for the study of society because artworks are cultural productions, which ... are inextricably bound into politics and economy" (502). Our attempts to illustrate this point have hitherto been almost exclusively visual; music, she laments, has yet to be considered properly in the geography of cultural politics. As much as the visual arts, music is linked to power, argues Smith: "Talk of harmony in sound paralleled the visual discourse of order" (507). Equally, Robert Walser writes of noisiness being "always relative to whatever articulates order in a discourse or a culture" (197). If music can provide a soundtrack to utopian discipline, then a lack of discipline has its sonic emblem in noise. I intend here to delineate the implications of music and noise for utopian design, with particular reference to issues of discipline and luxury. "Luxury" is a fraught term, which in our own day is rarely used without the word "goods" implied or appended. In the longer view, however, luxury is a complex and dialectically fascinating concept. At various times, and in various contexts, luxury could refer to greed and sloth; it could signify general excess; or it could denote the violation of hierarchy, wherein people do not know their "right" place in society. Luxury, in Plato, in More, and in a great many utopian constructs, is necessarily absent. With the intensification of capitalism in the eighteenth century, luxury became a critical political and aesthetic concept invoked against the extravagance and excess of the newly powerful merchant and trading classes. It is only present in societies as are, societies which depend upon consumption, conspicuous and otherwise, as a propulsive economic force. When luxury disappears, so does the engine of jealousy and exploitation. As a strong moral concept, luxury is a critical euphemism for the twin evils of money and private property, generally absent from the ideal society (Jameson 36).
 "Utopian Music and the Problem of Luxury (1)." by Utopian Studies # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}