Agnès Gayraud: la philosophe de la pop

Agnès Gayraud / Photo: Vincent Ferrané

It's hard not to love the French philosopher and singer-songwriter Agnès Gayraud; she's French, she's a philosopher, and she's a talented singer-songwriter - so what's not to love?

At any rate, I like her (even if some of her records are a tad too arty and sophisticated - or Simonesque - for my tastes) and I'm very tempted to read her new book, Dialectics of Pop (2019), in which she explores the many paradoxes of pop music and calls for it to be recognised as a modern, technologically-mediated art form that fully deserves to rank alongside film and photography.* 

Oh, and she also delights in taking on the Frankfurt School's chief bore, Theodore Adorno, famous for his dismissal of popular culture; particularly popular music; particularly American forms of popular music, such as jazz. According to her publishers:

"Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive art form that recognises its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking 'against itself'."

Pop music may never quite achieve the status that Gayraud wishes for it - and she may struggle to convince many of her fellow philosophers that Kylie should be accorded the serious critical attention given to Kant - but hers is an interesting attempt to make the case.   

Notes

Agnès Gayraud, Dialectics of Pop, trans. Robin Mackay, Daniel Miller, and Nina Power, (Urbanomic, 2019).

* For those less tempted to read Gayraud's 464 page book, there's a convenient 11 minute interview with the author on YouTube in which she discusses the work and summarises her main arguments: click here. 

Play: La Féline, Comité Rouge (Official Video With English Subtitles): click here. Taken from the album Triomphe (Kwaidan Records, 2017), this, I think, is a good example of her work as a singer-songwriter.