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Mythological discourse is conventionally understood to be concerned with form over content abstract types over concrete instances. Roland Barthes (1972, 143) has argued that myths' abstraction lets them function as "depoliticized speech": by tying together timeless cosmic orders and ordinary histor…

We have no shortage of explanations that place the blame at the foot of capitalism itself: in the ceaseless production of desire that capital demands. The musicologist Eric Drott (2018c, 333), for instance, convincingly argues that the promotional materials for music streaming services "transfigure…

Chapter 6, "Parks and Recommendation," builds on that discussion of space by examining a set of spatial metaphors commonly used by the makers of music recommendation: pastoral metaphors that figure technical workers as gardeners or park rangers who tend to the music space and the listeners who trav…

Conventional ways of thinking about access mislead researchers into thinking that, once they have cracked through the black box's wall, knowledge will be waiting there for the taking. But access is not an event; it is the ongoing navigation of relationships. Access has a texture, and this texture -…

[...] Given Bourdieu's central role in developing practice theory, it would be surprising for him to suddenly come down on the side of structural determinism, arguing that people are simply recipients of large-scale social forces. Instead, Bourdieu's theory of taste hinges on his understanding of t…