Music, Machines, and Clocks
Marek Korczynski · Cornell University Press eBooks · 2014
This chapter explores how workers heard and used music in relation to their sensing of alienation. Music was important for workers because it helped them combat the sounds of alienation and the experience of the passing of slow, alienated time. The chapter also examines the fragility of music as a resource against alienation. It studies this battle against alienation on the same way that E. P. Thompson navigated similarly arid debates on class. Thompson argued that the most fruitful way to approach class was to see it as a lived social process in which people were intimately and actively involved as agents. The chapter uses this as a way of understanding the lived experience of labor as a social process.