In a thoroughgoing engagement with Adorno's fierce critique of "standardized light popular music," Dialectic of Pop tracks the transformations of the pop form and its audience over the course of the twentieth century, from Hillbilly to Beyoncé, from Lead Belly to Drake. In the first major philosophical treatise on the subject, Agnès Gayraud explores all the paradoxes of pop-its inauthentic authenticity, its mass production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive novelty, its precision engineering of seduction-and calls for pop (in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded music) to be recognized as a modern, technologically mediated art form to rank alongside cinema and photography. If you can’t find the resource you need here, visit our contact page to get in touch.Įstablished in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.Ī philosophical exploration of pop music that reveals a rich, self-reflexive art form with unsuspected depths. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.Ĭollaborating with authors, instructors, booksellers, librarians, and the media is at the heart of what we do as a scholarly publisher. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
Orange Flame then helped bring that brand to life by creating hand-drawn branding elements.
The firm chose "Dialectic" because of its literal definition of two-way discourse and collaboration. This almost unique sense of extreme collaboration spurred them to rebrand.
Taking a cue from software development, the firm adopted Agile methodologies and began using design thinking to create solutions that were more elegant and more collaborative with the architects that hired them. A "right" solution was discovered decades ago, so there is little incentive to explore the boundaries of what else might be.Īlong comes Larson Binkley, a mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering firm that dared to break itself out of that mold. The engineering profession is steeped, in some cases, in seemingly immovable traditions and best practices.