#mode of existence

It is a space where standardization coexists with the negotiation of identity, where the commodity coexists with affect, and where the music industry intersects with grassroots practices. For this reason, popular music today is neither a promise of the future nor its negation, but rather a mode of existence in the present: a way of being audible, visible, and present in a world that increasingly offers fewer alternatives beyond the logic of the commodity.

Its political dimension no longer consists in producing utopias, but in organizing experience—of the body, memory, community, and affect. It seems to me that it is precisely within this contradictory and dynamic space that the contemporary significance of popular music unfolds.

At the same time, however, affirming popular music as a “mode of existence” carries a certain theoretical risk. It threatens to naturalize a system in which the possibility of “living within it” begins to replace the question of whether it can be transcended at all.

When visibility, representation, and affective intensity become the primary stakes of musical practices, it is easy to overlook the fact that they are increasingly managed, monetized, and optimized by the very same mechanisms that once constrained cultural imagination.*

*That is to say, the same system that today declares inclusivity and diversity has long defined the boundaries of what can be thought, imagined, and recognized as possible within culture.

Syllabus:

Marek Jeziński, Popular Music as a Form of Cultural Memory, “Kultura Współczesna” 3(96)/2017

Theodor Adorno, On Popular Music, “Res Facta Nova” 2015, no. 16

John Fiske, Reading the Popular, Chapter 5a: Madonna, 1989

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Introduction), 2014

The Unstoppable Rise of Reggaeton (Jhoni Jackson) / A Love Letter to Reggaeton (Eddie Cepeda), Crack Magazine 2018–2019

Tomasz Lada, Everything Goes: Polish Pop 1990–2000, in 1990, Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2025

DISCUSSING ONTOLOGICAL IDEAS A talk by Un Sun Moon

Correction 1: Planetary orbits as spherical

In Chapter 1, The Principles of Creation, the section on the mode of existence of the four-position foundation talks primarily about elliptical motion, and secondarily about spherical motion. The main point of the discussion of spherical motion is the fact that the relationship between subject and object is not rigid. There's a lot of flexibility and variety within a single relationship. The Principles mentions that because the angle of revolution between subject and object is constantly changing, the elliptical movement becomes a spherical movement. The text also explains that when the elliptical movement of the subject partner and the object partner on a single plane becomes a spherical movement in a three-dimensional orbit, the dynamism and creativity of the universe unfolds; and that variations in each orbit's distance, shape, state, direction, angle, force, and velocity are manifest as the beauty of creation in its infinite variety. This is all very true. Love - and relationships of all kinds based on goodness - should be full, pleasing, rich, and three-dimensional, not flat, stifling, oppressive, or monotonous. A two-dimensional relationship has to develop and be transformed into a three-dimensional one.