Attali, Jacques. Noise.
Attali’s project in Noise (or, as published in French, Bruits) is not to theorize about music, but to “theorize through music” (4)—and, more specifically, to theorize political economy through music. For Attali, music is “illustrative of the evolution of our entire society” (5). By studying the history of music, he claims, we can trace the trajectory of Western political, economic, and social organization. Attali is not the first to employ this “musical historicism,” as Jameson calls it in his introduction. Attali’s critical contribution lies not in his methodology, but rather in his claim that music anticipates (not just illustrates) political thought and structure. Music “heralds, for it is prophetic” (4). Attali sees the politics of the twentieth century as rooted in the thought of the nineteenth and heralded in the music and music listening practices of the eighteenth. His book traces three stages of music and economics’ simultaneous development. First, he theorizes a stage of “sacrifice,” preceding music’s commodification, a stage in which music was a “simulacrum of ritual murder” (24). By this he means that music imitated murder in its sacrificial channeling of noise’s “violence” for the sake of social order and political integration. The second stage, one of “representation,” marks the advent of music as commodity. In this stage, music production enters the sphere of the marketplace through people’s purchased access to live performance. Finally, in the stage of “repetition,” or the era of recording, music becomes stockpileable and endlessly reproducible. As “representations” or singular performances of music lose value, a political economy focusing on “the production of demand, not the production of supply” (103) emerges. Though his portrayal of this final stage is bleak, he ends optimistically. He sees in the music of his historical moment the seeds of a “new theory of power” and a “new politics” that could follow in the wake of an “elaboration of a politics of noise” (132). This would follow not a new kind of music, but a new way of making music—a way he terms “composing.” He sees the music of his moment as the beginnings of this “composition,” music “produced by each individual for himself, for pleasure outside of meaning” (137), music promising a more liberating mode of production.
Though published almost forty years ago, Noise remains one of the most frequently cited texts in the field of sound studies. The secret to Attali’s enduring legacy, I think, is the way he compellingly articulates relations between sound, music, and social control. Listening to music, Attali claims, is “listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political” (6). Attali’s understanding of power as the appropriation, categorization, organization and control of noise has been generative for many scholars regardless of discipline and/or historical concentration. Attali is as important for Picker in his discussion of Dickens, Carlyle, and the anti-street grinders movement in nineteenth-century Britain as he is for Isaac Weiner in his work on Islamophobic noise ordinances in twenty-first century America. Since I am interested in listening to oral reading, I hope to use Attali in my discussions of noise and distraction during scenes of reading. How do speaking readers aim to (and often fail to) gain power over their listeners by eliminating and controlling “noise”?
