Jacques Attali : NOISE the Political Economy of Music

Skenováno pro studijní účely --------------~-------- ----_._---_._------ --- Noise --~--.--------~------------------.--------.-.-----.------ The Political Economy of Music ------------- Jacques Attali Translation by Brian Massumi Foreword by Fredric Jameson Afterword by Susan McClary Theory and History of Literature, Volume 16 University of Minnesota Press HE'= SO Minneapolis I London ;TA Skenováno pro studijní účely The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges translation assistance provided for this book by the French Ministry of Culture. English translation, Foreword, and Afterword copyright © 1985 by the University of Minnesota Tenth printing 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system. or transmitted. in any form or by any means. electronic. mechanical, photocopying. recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press III Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Translation of Bruits: essai sur leconomie polilique de la musique © 1977 by Presses Universitaires de France Cover illustration: Carnival's Quarrel with Lenl by Pieter Brueghel the Elder; Kunsthistorisches Museum. Vienna Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Attali, Jacques. Noise. (Theory and history of literature: v. 16) Translation of: Bruits. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Music and society. 2. Music-Economic aspects. I. Title. II. Series. ML3795.A913 1985 780'.07 84-28069 ISBN 978-0-8166-1286-4 ISBN 978-0-8166-1287-1 (pbk.) The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Skenováno pro studijní účely Contents Foreword by Fredric Jameson vii Chapter One Listening 3 Chapter Two Sacrificing 21 Chapter Three Representing 46 Chapter Four Repeating 87 Chapter Five Composing 133 Afterword: The Politics of Silence and Sound by Susan McClary 149 Notes 161 Index 171 Skenováno pro studijní účely Skenováno pro studijní účely Foreword Fredric Jameson The present history of music, Noise, is first of all to be read in the context of a general revival of history, and of a renewed appetite for historiography, after a period in which "historicism" has been universally denounced (Althusser) and history and historical explanation generally stigmatized as the merely "dia chronic" (Saussure) or as sheer mythic narrative (Levi-Strauss). The richness of contemporary historiography, however, by no means betokens a return to simpler narrative history or chronicle. Rather, the newer work can be seen as the renewal of a whole series of attempts, beginning in the nineteenth century, to write something like a totalizing history of social life, from the "expressive causality" of German Geistesgeschichte, or of Hegel himself, to Spengler or even Auerbach-all the way to the "structural causalities" of a Foucault or of the Annates school. Music, however, presents very special problems in this respect: for while it is by no means absolutely unrelated to other forms and levels of social life, it would seem to have the strongest affinities with that most abstract of all social realities, economics, with which it shares a peculiar ultimate object which is number. The paradox is immediately underscored by the fact that the author of Noise is a professional economist; meanwhile, the recurrent phenomenon of child prodigies in music and in mathematics alike perhaps also suggests the peculiarity of the numerical gift, which would seem to demand less practical experience of the world and of social life than does work in other fields. Yet, to use a well-worn Marxian formula, economics is generally considered to be a science of the base or infrastructure, whereas music traditionally counts vii Skenováno pro studijní účely viii 0 FOREWORD among the most rarefied, abstract, and specialized of all superstructural activi ties. To propose intelligible links between these two "levels" or types of cul tural and intellectual phenomena would therefore seem to demand the production of a host of intermediary connections or "mediations" that are by no means obvious or evident. Max Weber, in whose time such methodological issues began to arise and whose own work poses them with a still unequaled lucidity, told this story in terms of a properly Western harmonic music whose very emergence constitutes an interesting historical problem in its own right ("Why was harmonic music developed from the almost universal polyphony of folk music only in Europe and only in a particular period, while everywhere else the rationalization of music took a different path-usually indeed precisely the opposite one, that of development of intervals by divisions of distance (usually the fourth) rather than by harmonic division [the fifth]?")! He summarized the complex determinants of the process as follows: Thoroughly concrete characteristics of the external and internal situa tion of the Church in the West, the result of sociological influences and religious history, allowed a rationalism which was peculiar to Western monasticism to give rise to these musical problems which were essentially "technical" in character. On the other hand, the in vention and rationalization of rhythmical dancing, the origin of the musical forms which developed into the sonata, resulted from certain modes of social life at the time of the Renaissance. Finally, the devel opment of the piano, one of the most important technical elements in the development of modern music, and its spread among the bour geoisie, had its roots in the specifically "indoor" character of North ern European civilization.2 Weber's great story, as is well known, the master narrative into which the con tent of virtually all the research he ever did was reorganized, is that of the emer gence of rationalization-so that it is not surprising to find western music des cribed as one of the peculiar, forced products of this strange new influence (which Weber liked to derive from the rational enclave of monastic life in the Middle Ages). Elsewhere in the same essay he speaks of the "material, techni cal, social and psychological conditions" for a new style or art or medium; and it is obvious in the passage quoted above that the play of "overdetermination" between these conditions is complex indeed: material influences include, for example, the whole history of technology (and in particular the invention and production of musical instruments). What Weber calls the "technical" factor surely involves script or notation, a matter that in music goes well beyond a sim ple transcription of sounds and whose categories (tones, keys, etc.) will them selves generate and direct musical innovation. Meanwhile, the social realm, through the space of performance itself, simultaneously forms the public for Skenováno pro studijní účely FOREWORD 0 ix music and its players alike; whereas the "psychological" confronts us with the whole vexed question of content and of ideology, and indeed ultimately the very problem of value that Weber's own historical analyses are explicitly concerned to suspend or to bracket. Weber notes, for instance, the association of "chromat ics" with "passion," but adds: "It was not in the artistic urge to expression, but in the technical means a/expression, that the difference lay between this an cient music and the chromatics which the great musical experimenters of the Renaissance created in their turbulent rational quest for new discoveries, and therewith for the ability to give musical shape to ·passion.' "3 In Weber's brief remarks, it would seem that the word passion is meant to name a specific and historically original new form of psychological experience, so that the vocation of the newer music to express it is not, for Weber, a sign of value, but simply an item or feature necessary to complete the historical description. It might indeed be well to distinguish two versions of the problem that begins to come into view here: one is that of a musical semantics, that is, of a relation ship between musical signifiers and historical, social, psychological signifieds; the other is that of aesthetic value proper. Of the first of these Theodor Adorno has said: "If we listen to Beethoven and do not hear anything of the revolution ary bourgoisie-not the echo of its slogans, but rather the need to realize them, the cry for that totality in which reason and freedom are to have their warrant we understand Beethoven no better than does one who cannot follow the purely musical content of his pieces."4 This seems straightforward enough until Adorno added what was always the "guiding thread" of Frankfurt School aes thetics: "Music is not ideology pure and simple; it is ideological only insofar as it is false consciousness."5 The seeming contradiction between these two positions can perhaps be adjusted by a Habermasian appreciation of the universal (that is, non ideological) content of bourgeois revolutionary ideology as such; Adorno will himself complicate the situation more interestingly by factoring in the arrival of an age of aesthetic autonomy: "If [Beethoven] is the musical proto type of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the prototype of a music that has escaped from its social tutelage and is aesthetically fully autono mous, a servant no longer."6 Yet if the question of musical value seems quite unavoidable when this line of inquiry is prolonged, the dramatic reversal we associate with the Russian For malists is always possible: content of that kind (a new kind of passion, a new universal revolutionary ideology and enthusiasm, etc.) is itself the result of for mal innovation. It is because the music of a given period is able to express new kinds of content that this last begins to emerge-a position which, translated back into linguistics, would yield a peculiar version of the Sapir-Whorfhypothe sis. It is because language happens historically and culturally to be expanded in certain ways that we are able to think (and speak) this or that new thought.

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