Organized by the AMS Music and Marxism Study Group.
The AMS Music and Marxism Study Group welcomes members and anyone interested in music’s relation to capitalism to our inaugural session, which will feature a conversation with Dr. Marie Thompson (Open University) on the topic of "Music/Reproduction/Crisis."
Social reproduction names the activities, relations, and formations that produce capital’s workers and, along with them, the strange commodity of labor-power. Social reproduction also includes the maintenance of "surplus" populations excluded from the wage and the formal economy – that is, children, the elderly, some people with disabilities, and the unemployed. "Care" – the nurturing relations that help secure individual and collective wellbeing – is a core component of both social reproduction and the production of capitalist societies, even as it is simultaneously externalized by and frequently inadequate within capitalist societies. Indeed, transformations enacted by neoliberalism, post-Fordism, and financialization have resulted in a crisis of social reproduction, which impacts the production and care of children, the maintenance of families, households and other forms of kinship and community, the provision of welfare, and the availability of "life-making" resources, including housing, healthcare, and education.
Music and its technologies of mediation do not just bear the traces of this crisis: they actively participate in this crisis, promising a cost-effective solution to its effects. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, reproductive sound technologies have proliferated, appearing as tools that can automate, enhance, and assist in the rearing of (pre-born) infants, the management of the household, the facilitation of sleep, and the provision of social care, promising to create productive workers, "competitive" children, and "independent" elders. In so doing, these auditory devices offer a commodified technological fix to the social and economic problems associated with austerity, the rescindment of the welfare state, and the externalization of social reproduction onto individuals and families.
Dr. Thompson will explore these issues, focusing in particular on music's role in managing the contemporary crisis of social reproduction, in conversation with Stephanie Doktor (Temple University) and Eric Drott (University of Texas at Austin), followed by a Q&A with online attendees.
