Paper short abstract:

I would like to use Janos Kornai's term "shortage economy" to analyze institutional strategies and DIY practices dealing with reproduction of sound. I will focus on the routines of the sound engineers in the Polish Radio, as well as on the vernacular DIY practices of the subcultures members.

Paper long abstract:

In my paper I would like to use Janos Kornai's term "shortage economy" (concerning the centrally-planned economies of the communist states of the Eastern Bloc) to analyze institutional strategies and DIY practices of everyday life dealing with recording and reproduction of sound. My analysis will focus on the routines of the sound engineers in the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in their daily struggle against material adveristies (shortage of magnetic tape, broken mixers and tape recorders), as well as on the vernacular DIY practices of the various subcultures members (including home made sound systems, instruments and recordings). I will discuss the analog media (especially tape and compact cassettes) as the main vehicles for the cultural change and the development of the counter-culture in the Polish People's Republic. They produced the growth of vernacular DIY tactics of recording, reproducing and sharing the music, literary works, political speeches and religious texts (so-called "third circulation of information"). In consequence Polish society in 1980. became more liberal and a civil society idea started to develop. The tapes become part of the contemporary discourse on cultural memory, individual identity and power relations, evoking senses both symbolic and metaphorical, such as recording, registering or preserving (sound history), copying (testimonies and evidence), deleting and erasing (memory), and acting frequently as "proof" and "witness". This issue should be approached with regard to three principal contexts: economic, technological and social, while the conclusions ought to raise some questions related to the anthropology of communication.