Serdecznie zapraszamy na seminarium lekturowe z doktorem Paulem Rekretem (University of Westminster, UK) zorganizowane we współpracy z Wydziałem Filozoficznym UAM.
Time: 24th October 2025, 10 am – 1 pm.
Place: Instytut Kulturoznawstwa UAM, Szamarzewskiego 89, Budynek AB, sala 10
Title: Between Work and Sound: Mediating the Material and the Ideal in Popular Music
This seminar invites participants to engage with Paul Rekret’s recent work — Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (Goldsmiths Press, 2024) and his article Sensuous Abstraction: Hip-Hop, Money and the Popular (Journal of Cultural Economy, 2025) — which together explore how popular music mediates the relation between the material and the ideal in capitalist modernity. Rekret approaches music not merely as cultural expression but as a site where labour, value, and subjectivity are sonically negotiated. In Take This Hammer, he traces the historical entanglements of work song, refusal, and crisis, showing how popular music transforms the experience of labour under capitalism and offers a sensuous form of negation and utopian desire. In Sensuous Abstraction, he extends this inquiry to hip-hop’s late-1990s aestheticisation of money, situating the Bad Boy Entertainment era within broader processes of financialisation and gentrification. Together, these texts propose a dialogue between Marxist cultural theory and the Black radical tradition, revealing how popular music’s sonic textures and performative gestures both register and contest the abstractions of value, property, and capital.
Obligatory readings: Please read the Chapter 1 from Take This Hammer and the article Sensuous Abstraction: Hip-Hop, Money and the Popular. Both readings can be accessed here.
Paul Rekret is a cultural and media theorist whose interests span philosophy, contemporary cultures and political economy, especially in the field of music and sound. He is author of three books and two edited volumes, of which Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (Goldsmiths Press 2024) is the most recent. He currently co-programmes the series 'Public Listening’ at Camden Art Centre and he is a member of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective. His writing has appeared in journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Theory, Culture & Society and Viewpoint and regularly for publications including The Wire, Art Monthly, Cure and Frieze, among others. He teaches in the School of Media & Communication at the University of Westminster.
