17 Jacques Attali – Noise
Normally, the point of this newsletter is to present you with a sound, its context, and some potential ways to consider it. Today, the recommendation is not to listen but to read. It has been 55 years since Jacques Attali published Noise, and if anything, the book is even more devastating now than when it came out. The 150-page essay is filled with insights about sound and music that connect to our work, but on a larger scale it’s a model for the kind of ranging, provoking analysis that is largely absent from public discourse.
The central concept of Noise is that music is prophetic of society, but that the prophecy can only be accessed if one breaks with the purely technical, aesthetic, and cultural analyses that dominate the academic treatment of music. Attali’s case study is western music and civilization over the last three centuries. He does not however embark on a typical historical recounting. From the onset, Attali is clear that he is not theorizing about music, but instead theorizing through music. Although Attali is an economist by training, his analytical approach is distinctly in the critical theory tradition, following the methods of theorists like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer.
In the opening pages, Attali lays out a huge proposition about the prophetic power of music: “the political organization of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth,” which he says “is almost entirely present in embryonic form in the music of the eighteenth century.” So to explain contemporary social relations and political organization under the late-stage capitalism of the 20th century, Attali traces the evolution of music in Western society from the minstrels of Europe to the stars of contemporary pop charts. His conclusions about the state of things read as bleak now as they did when he published the book in the 1970s, but today, the real kicker is Attali’s hopeful final chapter.
After positing that music is at its root a simulacrum of the ritual sacrifice that helps those in power stay in power, which was then turned into a mere representation of that ritual in 19th century competitive capitalism, and then finally emptied of all meaning by the repetitive commodity culture of the 20th century, Attali ends the book with some hope. He suggests there might be a rupture coming—that consumption will implode under its own weight and people will gain the space to compose for themselves, and not just music but in a much larger sense: there will be the chance that all types of labor could break free from the use and exchange ends that constrain it. We would finally be able to act—not for some goal or aim—but purely because we derive some pleasure or satisfaction in taking that action.
Attali pinned part of his hope on the proliferation of new tools, technology like tape recorders and computers, which he saw as democratizing the music production process and making more individual composition possible. Since he published the book in 1977, the number of those tools have ballooned with the internet and increased computing power. People have exponentially more access to devices and software that allow them to create and distribute their work, yet we’re mired deeper than ever in the meaning-destroying, repetitive, commodity culture Attali so acutely described. Attali prefigured the “prosumer” utopianism of the late eighties, when some thought the internet would change consumers into active participants who could build community through their own individual creation. The failure of that utopianism makes reading Attali’s precursory wishful thinking all the more stinging.
This, though, is the power of Noise. Even the parts that have been proven wrong, are unclear, or filled with unsupported claims, are still deeply evocative. Like the best critical theory texts, Attali rips apart the established way of considering a subject and opens up whole new questions and framing for further research and thought. “This book is not an attempt at a multidisciplinary study,” Attali writes in the first chapter, “but rather a call to theoretical indiscipline, with an ear to sound matter as the herald of society.” I am not sure even exactly what that means, but it captures the spirit of the book. It’s aggressive, unapologetic, and provoking.
The kind of rigorous, deep critique Attali builds through Noise is what feels so lacking in public discourse today. So much criticism in contemporary media is intellectually thin, unambitious, and easy. So much work in academia is narrow, cautious, and deferential. I’d love to read a similarly ranging, speculative, and informed take on all sorts of things. It would be particularly refreshing to have a Noise-level take on contemporary podcasting and radio. The theoretical indiscipline—the mixing of critical theory, political economy, anthropology, and good old curmudgeonly attitude about something most people treat with either avuncular affection or intellectual indifference—would be a great mode to provoke reflection on the medium Chris and I work in.
While a sound is not the primary recommendation of this newsletter, we do have one bit of audio that could serve as a music prelude of sorts to Noise. It’s a performance of a bit of music from what’s considered the earliest surviving French musical play, Jeu de Robin and Marion. It was written around 1282 by Adam de la Halle, one of the period’s foremost jongleurs, or traveling musicians, who, Attali argues, were creating music with a social role and potential for meaning that would eventually become entirely impossible.