07. Jan 2019

ŠUM#10.1 / Domen Ograjenšek: Fever Theory

ABSTRACT: In the early 2000s, motifs in popular music began to shift from the sweet addictiveness, introduced and made prevalent by the “Teen Pop” genre of the 1990s, to the unbearable agonic invasion into teen-pop subjectivity—”Overprotected” (Spears), “Can’t Get You Out of My Head“ (Minogue), breakups, and breakdowns. The article traces these shifts foremost in the period of the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The sonority of the pop scene is considered in its complex integration into the mechanism of control, which it not only supports but also produces, and its autonomy and power are examined in relation to the ideas of Marc Couroux (“ear worms”, “soundscapes”, “phonoegregore”). The article procedes to critically engages with Couroux’s conceptual means, writing strategies, and above all, the question of the new aesthetic paradigm (the so-called “aesthetics after finitude”, characterised by a certain anti-humanistic rehabilitation of the autonomy of aesthetic qualities, unburdening aesthetics of its humancentric binds), central to his work. The aim of this is twofold: firstly, to conceive the “post-human” as an active principle of sonic imagination and not as a matter of the author function and individual expression; and secondly, to outline the idea of mass culture as a constitutive part of this imaginary.

The full text was published in ŠUM#10.1 and is available in Slovenian only.