This 500-word response blogpost was originally corresponding to Jacques Attali's first chapter of his seminal, 1985 monograph, "Noise: The Political Economy of Music."
The posting's original home is on a class-run WordPress site, but has been reposted here.
Reading like a sycophantically Dantean anti-allegory of sorts, Jacques Attali presents his theoretical reading of music’s historiographical development from meritorious, sociocultural unifier and disillusioned “background noise” to an epicurean foreground obsessed with consumption, control, and misplaced trust. Having burst its semiotic fetters, what’s contemporaneously considered “music” is explained by Attali to merely be the artifice for clandestine serfdom and state-sanctioned reprogramming, albeit inordinately disguised under the decadent visage of fabricated realities.
The West, in its pursuit for Enlightenment, has become globally deaf. That once illustrious vestibule, man’s ticket to true knowledge, is now lowly, “fetishized” fodder for voracious miscreants who don’t know what they have lost and use every opportunity to squander what they have left. In short, Attali’s book describes the processual death of music’s former occupation as a living record of social history at the hands of greed and consumption. However, by bringing the reader’s awareness back to music’s essential ontology as “organized noise,” mankind may yet be able to recover from the proscriptive hand of bureaucratic destabilization, whose sticky fingers have created synthetic dialectics. Continuing, the unfeeling machine has also atomized the “pure sign,” destabilizing and decontextualizing its body, proceeding further to sell its severed body for deplorable profit.
Despite poetics and reiterative banality, Attali’s crux is that when the itinerate jongleur was sacrificed in the name of the sedentary minstrel, “Music” died and was replaced with “music,” a pithy copy. The lower-m, vernacular self-coined, is insinuated by Attali in his naming of the “formidable subversion,” crafted by the tyrannical deviant and his minions who are cruel in methodology and unremorseful in despotism. The elan vitale and accompanying raison d’etre of “pre-capitalist” [or pre-Renaissance] music, what Russian Musicologist Boris Asafiev abstractly calls “sonorous fluid,” was forever lost. Ultimately, to such vile revelations, Attali provides little relief, opting in for an Adornian-qua-postmodernist paradoxicality. As the theological anecdote reads “the truth shall set you free.”
Among Attali’s delineations and taxonomies of music’s power-laced, tripartite subterfuge and messy, developmental infralinearity from a network of stable cultural codes to its current form as a “prophetic” cultural arbiter of multi-layered coercion, I felt particularly drawn [among other things] to two points. The first being his instructional “destroy your society” schema, while the latter summarizes Attali’s thesis. The DYS model charts the moving and abolishment of “ritual murder” for entrained “novelty,” all the way to the emergence of the indiscreet reification, unchaste consumption, and blithering immortality of object ownership. Sound familiar? Secondly, to show the extent of music’s submission to the powers of “production, exchange, and desire,” Attali describes the dilogy underneath, a process I call differential absolutionism. Although societies are created through heterogeneity, the economies that fill these spaces only exist to erase them.
A damning proclamation, and one that renders any attempt at escape utterly fruitless. And yet, between noise and silence there lies music, and perhaps through an intrepid search for the “battlefield to knowledge,” we can learn to “hear” not music, but its vital core.
“Fear — Clarity — Power — Freedom”
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