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 Schônberg's Society 
for Private Musical Performances". This fanciful statement would have shocked 
Schônberg 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
