Music and Economic Planning

Abstract

The Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective is a group of friends who listen to music together and is named after a bar in Pittsburgh where the collective was conceived. In this article we consider ways by which music might be a mode of planning opposed to individuation and measure, and beyond the instrumentalities to which music itself is often submitted. We do so by thinking about how jazz—where it takes on the improvisatory character of the busker, rehearsal, or jam—becomes a form of love. We consider the song as an expression of antagonism that the song itself cannot contain. We ask if we might conceive music as a mode of criminality opposed to the violence and discipline imposed upon the body by capital. We look to understand capitalism by situating the plantation system at its center. We ask what sort of place our listening takes place in and how the song might inhabit it. We wonder what it might mean for all of this to remain unresolved, and how to remain attuned to that irresolution as a form of planning social life.