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REVIEW: JACQUES ATTALI'S "NOISE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MUSIC"
Attempt to discuss music in relation to politics have always seemed fraught
with danger. By its irreducibility to mere words, music has encouraged and
shunned such attempts, which can lead even a sophisticated theorists like
Theodor Adorno to state that, in Stravinsky's music "the relation to fascism
is beyond question". Men of Power, too, from Plato to Zhdanov, have been
uneasy about music's ambivalence, and have sought to control it.
In "Noise: The Political Economy of Music", published in France in 1977 but
only recently translated into English, Jacques Attali displays no fear of
such precedents in discussing the links between change in music and change in
society.
Attali is one of those French intellectuals who made the transition from 1968
gauchisme to accommodation with Power. He seems to have adopted the slogan
"Imagination to power!" as his own: he became Mitterand's Special Councellor,
his "Ideas Man", even while continuing to write prolifically on subjects
often far from his home territory of Economics. (He has been previously known
in this country only for the controversy around his "Histoires du Temps",
when lengthy unattributed quotations from other writers were found to have
been included in the text.)
Attali sets himself an ambitious task: by means of "theoretical indiscipline"
he intends "not only to theorise about music, but to theorise through music.
The result will be unusual and unacceptable conclusions about music and
society, the past and the future". He constructs his political economy of
music around four successive codes:
- Sacrifice: the ritual code based on fear, when violence is channelled into
acceptable rituals binding the group.
- Representation: the code based on exchange and harmony.
- Repetition: the age of sign exchange, dominated by a "speech without
response" and a code of normality.
- Composition: the possibility of passing beyond sign exchange into a new
community.
Attali's interest is in the breaks between these codes, when "noise" intrudes
and shows the potential of another form of organisation. He will try to show
that, contrary to Marxist models which consign music to a "superstructure"
relative to the "productive" base, music has often anticipated developments
in production. Furthermore, music has been experiencing the current social
crisis for some time, and can now be the harbringer of another social order
altogether.
In the Sacrificial code, music channels chaotic violence, affirming the very
possibility of sociality upon which power rests. The musician occupies an
ambivalent position as the reviled and revered victim (such as the griot in
West Africa). This analysis rests heavily on Rene Girard's notion of the
function of the scapegoat in establishing order. In the European Middle Ages,
musicians were sometimes Court functionaries, sometimes vagabonds: no
distinction existed between High and Low Culture, and music had no value
outwith its performance in a setting.
He locates the emergence of the code of Representation in the 18th century:
no longer an activity, music became an object of exchange. With the rise of
publisher and promoter and the emergence of copyright, music no longer had a
"use value" outside exchange. And internally, harmony would prefigure
developments outside music: "The concept of representation logically implies
that of exchange and harmony. The theory of political economy of the 19th
century was present in its entirety in the concert halls of the 18th century
and foreshadowed the politics of the 20th."
The Star system, too, emerged earlier in music than elsewhere, with the
constitution of the classical repertoire "when Liszt in 1830 began to play
the music of other contemporary composers in concert and Mendelssohn played
Bach... Liszt gave repertory a spacial dimension and Mendelssohn a temporal
dimension"
By the first decade of the 20th century, harmony was in crisis. The emergence
of the code of Repetition came through the intrusion of two types of noise:
internal noise as possibilities within harmony became exhausted and external
noise through the invention of recording equipment. "Once again music was
prophetic: it experienced the limits of the representative mode of production
long before they appeared in material production." Drawing on Baudrillard's
conception of hyper-reality, Attali considers music to have predated
contemporary marketing and government strategies in its acceptance of lack of
meaning and substitution of chance and statistical events.
The invention of the record (like that of the cassette in the 1960s) was
originally expected to serve as no more than a supplement to Representation.
But instead it instituted a new society of Repetition and mass production.
Music became "a strategic consumption, an essential mode of sociality for all
those who feel themselves powerless before the monologue of the great
institutions... conformity to the norm becomes the pleasure of belonging, and
the acceptance of powerlessness takes root in the comfort of repetition". In
Pop Culture, the charts are consumed in their own right: pure sign exchange
outwith supply & demand.
In the absence of meaning, the role of the Music Industry in socialising
children into consumers and in managing demand becomes crucial, but always
difficult faced with the very silence it has itself created. The greater the
repetition, the lower the efficiency in producing demand: this seems to
replace the tendencial decline in the Rate of Profit. And pirating of
recordings creates even more problems. This, then, is another problem of the
intrusion of internal and external "noise".
The breach in this code is far less easily defined. Attali can suggest only
that Repetition's very omnipresence means that the only possible challenge is
the assertion of "the right to compose one's own life". Developments such as
Free Jazz could be moves towards what Attali confusingly calls Composition -
by which he basically means improvisation! This will be "inventing new codes,
inventing the message at the same time as the language... (The) musician
plays primarily for himself, outside of any operationality, spectacle or
accumulation of value; when music, extricating itself from the codes of
Sacrifice, Representation and Repetition, emerges as an activity that is an
end in itself".
Not the least unsatisfactory aspect to this vision is that, while Attali's
use of economics in discussing the previous codes has often been
illuminating, the attempt to do so in relation to the code of Composition is
inconsistent. While he rightly emphasises the imminent ruin of musicians'
organisations when they tried to become self-managed economic units, it is
nonetheless from these failed attempts that his examples are drawn. And this
has been the commonest problem in musicians' collectives themselves: the
replacement of collective activity self-representation as a promotional body.
The quality of Attali's analyses of his four codes fluctuates wildly. As with
Baudrillard (to whom Attali's analyses of Representation and Repetition are
often indebted), "theoretical indiscipline" sometimes produces exciting new
angles, but at other times means that arguments are built around absurd
examples. For example, he is content to give us a tabloid vision of
California as land of Snuff Movies and Suicide Motels: just proof that
Repetition no longer satisfies the need for sacrifice.
A particularly bizarre section "proves" noise to be a simulacrum of murder,
mixing the walls of Jerico, Information Theory and the "fact" that a
sufficient intensity of noise could kill. Any value which that last example
might have surely relates more to the dangers of the technological
abstraction and intensification in the past century than sacrifice in ritual.
Curiously, Attali makes use of the story of Odysseus and the Sirens, as did
his predecessor in the Political Economy of Music, Adorno. In both cases, any
illumination provided is more for their argument than Homer's story. For
Attali, Odysseus takes on the role of scapegoat and suffers the Sirens' Song;
he omits the allurement of their song. Adorno and Horkheimer (in "The
Dialectic of Enlightenment") made much more of the story. The Song expressed
the fatal attraction of contemplating the past, of returning to the state of
nature and infancy. Odysseus responds by introducing a division of labour:
while the sailors row, oblivious to the pleasures of the Song, he listens,
but has renounced the possibility of responding to the Song - it has become
Art.
Historical simultaneity is a temptation rarely resisted. Attali's talks of
"Red Vienna, where the street in revolt would attempt the only organisation
ever to initiate the self-management of concerts, with Sch?nberg's Society
for Private Musical Performances". This fanciful statement would have shocked
Sch?nberg the "conservative revolutionary" and the members of that
"progressive" salon group (which existed from 1918 to 1921). In fact the
Society's purpose was to give frequent, well-rehearsed performances of pieces
of modern music, whose repetition would bring familiarity and understanding
and constitute an appreciative audience for modern music.
His history of 20th century, particularly Jazz, is not all it could be. The
record industry, we are assured, could not really develop until electrical
recording became available in 1925. What then of all those recordings of the
Original Dixieland Jazz Band and King Oliver, or of Louis Armstrong's Hot
Five, the first specifically recording group, already well into it's stride
on acoustic recordings? His omission of any mention of Bebop is curious,
given that it was intended to be impenetrable to the (mainly white)
"recuperators" and perceived by musicians of the previous generation as
noise. It's development during the years of the musicians' recording ban (and
consequent estrangement from the mass Black audience) would also make it
interesting in relation to Attali's Repetitive Code...
Similarly, Attali's version of Free Jazz and its institutions are superficial
and over-optimistic. Organisations like the short-lived Jazz Composers' Guild
and the Chicago AACM were never as successful in breaking with the Industry
than he thinks (although the latter has had a profound impact on musicians in
its area). It is also curious to see Carla Bley mentioned as an exemplary
black musician!
The time when the book was written is particularly evident in its
consideration of Rock Music, where Attali seems prepared to accept its
festive, rebellious ideology ("The Man Can't Bust Our Music" - CBS campaign
slogan) as more than mere simulation of festival. There are still hints of
tendencies towards certain fashions and styles: a line seems to run from the
Russolo's glorification of machine-age noise to Jimi Hendrix - and apparently
beyond to Composition. It is perhaps more evident now that each style exists
only as a distinction from that preceding it: a reversal of values making
obsolete all previous accumulation of records, trousers or whatever!.
Against this, it must be said that the book is often fascinating.
Particularly outstanding are the sections describing the development of
copyright and the suppression of "subversive" 19th century French cabarets.
In the problem of how a songwriter should be remunerated by the publisher,
resolved by the introduction of copyright, Attali sees the situation of a
whole category of "molders" under what will become the order of Repetition.
The strangest feature of the presentation of the 1985 English translation is
the Afterword's attempt to link Attali's code of Composition to the emergence
of the "New Wave". If this suggestion relates only to most people's initial
perception of Punk as "noise", one hardly needs a book to tell us that this
is how changes in the mode of music are commonly perceived. Any suggestion
that Punk was anything resembling "Composition" must surely be ludicrous.
Surely only a few hardcore fans still believe that the "anger" in Punk is
"natural" - even most of them recognise it as an aesthetic. Rather, we can
suggest that the initial irruption of changes in musical code, whether Rock &
Roll, Psychedelia, or Punk always presents itself as natural. This leads back
to doubts about Attali's Compositional order, when he emphasises that it will
bring a new bodily unity: "The consumer... will institute the spectacle of
himself as the supreme image" - pure Narcissism. And so perhaps it isn't
surprising that the Afterword finishes by adapting "Composition" to the New
York Arts scene.
From Edinburgh Review 75 1986