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Jacques
Attali’s Revision of Baudrillard in Noise
by
Jeff Shwartz
Jacques Attali is the author of over fifteen books, and the former chief
economic advisor
to Mitterrand. However, he is best known in American academic circles as
the author of Noise:
The Political Economy of Music. His other books in English translation are
Millennium: Winners
and Losers in the Coming World Order and A Man of Influence: The Extraordinary
Career of
S.G. Warburg. Noise has been primarily read by music scholars such as Susan
McClary, Alan
Durant, and John Corbett, however, in this paper, I intend to read Attali
not as a theorist and
historian of music in society but as a critic of Jean Baudrillard's critical
theory.
Noise draws heavily on Baudrillard, particularly on his Symbolic Exchange
and Death.
Baudrillard's theories of symbolic exchange are the primary source for Attali's
analysis of the
commodity status of music.
Attali in Noise may be the most significant critic of Baudrillard, because
he neither tries to
dismiss Baudrillard's work by testing its fidelity to its sources (Marx,
Marcuse, Barthes, McLuhan,
Debord, et al) nor to reattach it to any of the utopian traditions Baudrillard
has broken from.
Instead, as I will show, Attali accepts the full fatality of Baudrillard's
work, its apocalyptic
character, and is still able to tease out a thread of hope. In the remainder
of this paper, I will
synopsize Noise, pointing to its debts to and deviations from Baudrillard.
The main thesis of Noise is that music has what Attali calls a "prophetic"
character.
Because music is less concrete than other art forms, it is able to more
rapidly move through modes
of signification and exchange, so its organization as text and commodity
anticipates future social
structures. As Attali puts it:
Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the
rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can,
the entire range of possibilities
in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become
visible, that
will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the
image of things, but the
transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future (11).
This understanding of music as prophecy puts Attali, as political economist,
in a prime
position to theorize about the future, since contemporary avant-garde musical
practices should
point to the emergent modes of social order.
First, Attali plots the history of music as commodity in four stages: sacrificing,
representing, repeating, and composing. In the first stage, Attali, like
Nietzsche, finds the birth of
music in ritual sacrifice, paganism, Classical tragedy, and Carnival. He
writes "before the
commodity, music was a simulacrum of the sacrifice of the Scapegoat"
(26). Music as sacrifice
functions as the channeling of noise, of disorder, into forms such as tragedy
and Carnival which
affirm society's bounds by providing an outlet for chaos. Under the system
of music as sacrifice,
music is "centralized on the level of ideology and decentralized on
the economic level," (31)
meaning that, although the social function of music is fixed, its production
is not. The musician as
shaman/priest/etc. is not a specialized professional. The production of
music is not yet the
production of a commodity, instead, music as sacrifice has only use-value
(25); it cannot be the
object of exchange.
The stage of music as sacrifice can be compared to Marx's idea of primitive
communism.
Music, like all other products, is created only for the needs of the community.
It is not stored or
exchanged but is held in common.
Music becomes professionalized when it enters the next phase, that of representation.
As
Attali writes:
Music becomes a spectacle attended at specific places: concert halls, the
closed space of
the simulacrum of ritual-a confinement made necessary by the collection
of entrance fees.
In this network, the value of music is its use-value as spectacle. This
new value simulates
and replaces the sacrificial value of music in the preceding network. Performers
and
actors are producers of a special kind who are paid in money by the spectators.
We will
see that this network characterizes the entire economy of competitive capitalism,
the
primitive mode of capitalism (31-32).
The regime of representation is that of Modernity: the artist is a professional
who
produces on command, turning out pieces and performances as a baker would
pies or a cobbler
shoes. Attali's chapter on representation (46-86) is his most extensive
piece of historical work,
tracing the musician as worker from full-time domestic servant at a noble
court, to freelance
performer/composer, selling his work to many clients, to a position of relative
independence and
autonomy, no longer dependent on commissions for most work, writing instead
for publication
(53-54). Attali compares the working conditions of Bach, Handel, and Beethoven
to exemplify
this change. Bach's working contract (quoted 47-48), is exactly that of
a butler or cook. He is
expected to live with his employer, maintain certain standards of decorum,
and perform on
command, in return for a modest salary. This is "a relation of domesticity
and not one of
exchange" (48), analogous to the difference between a chef in a private
home and one in a
restaurant, since Bach's music was only for the pleasure of his master,
not for resale.
The quoted letter from Handel, one of the first composers to work outside
the court
system, discusses his success at promoting his own concerts, though he clings
to the court in that
he finds it much more respectable to sell subscriptions for a series of
concerts than to sell tickets at
the door, which might lead to a lower class of patron (50-51).
Finally, Beethoven is also represented by a letter, in which he negotiates
with his
publisher (69-70). By the nineteenth century, composer and performer have
become separate
professions and the composer has become the figure of the Modernist artist,
following a vision
alone, then attempting to market the resulting text to an insensitive industry.
Again, there is a parallel here with Marx's work. Under representation,
the
musician/composer generates surplus value, which is appropriated by is/her
employer, whether
this employer is Bach's master impressing visitors with his skill, Beethoven's
publisher selling his
works and paying him a minimal royalty rate, or Handel's promotion of his
own concerts.
Technological change ushers in the system of repetition at the end of the
nineteenth
century when sound recording technology emerges and rapidly becomes the
dominant form of
musical experience (85). These changes were somewhat anticipated by changes
in the role of the
composer from performer to conductor to simply creator of the text, so that
the score came to be
something to be commonly understood, performed, and interpreted in the composer's
absence.
However, the effect of recording was far deeper than this move from spectacle
to text.
Under the mode of repetition, music becomes an object and its experience
becomes
private. The initial intended use of recording: the preservation of performances
(89), rapidly
vanishes, so that "today the performance is only successful as a simulacrum
of the record" (85).
It is in the chapter on repetition that Attali's debt to Baudrillard becomes
clearest. First,
Attali's first three stages of political economy can be mapped onto Baudrillard's
three orders of
simulacra: the counterfeit, production, and simulation (Baudrillard 50).
Under the regime of
sacrifice, music takes place in circumstances which require its ritual authenticity.
When musical
skills and knowledge become secularized, it becomes possible for music to
have the quality of the
counterfeit. The possibility of the inauthentic performance inaugurates
the order of
representation, which clearly fits Baudrillard's "production."
Finally, as the last quotation from
Attali makes clear, repetition, the order dominated by the commercial exchange
of sound
recordings, is the condition of simulation. As has been extensively demonstrated
by Andrew
Goodwin, John Mowitt, and myself, recording simulates performance. Especially
in
contemporary popular music, it is very rare that a recording represents
a performance in real time
and space, but live performers are expected to replicate this hyperreal
text. This is truly a case of
the copy replacing and erasing the original.
However, simulation is not the only significant Baudrillardian concept in
the repetition
chapter. More significant, because more original, is Attali's use of Baudrillard's
linkage of
commodification with death.
For Baudrillard, capital is not only the objectification of workers' time,
as for Marx, it is
also the control of their deaths. A provocative comparison can be made to
the "Power over Death
and Life" section of Foucault's History of Sexuality. For Foucault,
power not only appropriates
its subjects' lives as labor; their deaths too are produced and regulated,
while Baudrillard,
contrarian that he is, writes:
Labour therefore everywhere draws its inspiration from deferred death. It
comes from
deferred death. Slow or violent, immediate or deferred, the scansion of
death is decisive: it
is what radically distinguishes two types of organisation, the economic
and the sacrificial.
We live irreversibly in the first of these, which has inexorably taken root
in the différance
of death.
The scenario has not changed. Whoever works has not yet been put to death,
he is
refused this honour. And labour is first of all the sign of being judged
worthy only of life.
Does capital exploit the workers to death? Paradoxically, the worst it inflicts
on them is
refusing them death. It is by deferring their death that they are made into
slaves and
condemned to the indefinite abjection of a life of labour.
The substance of labour and exploitation is indifferent in this symbolic
relation. The
power of the master always primarily derives from this suspension of death.
Power is
therefore never, contrary to what we might imagine, the power of putting
to death, but
exactly the opposite, that of allowing to live-a life that the slave lacks
the power to give.
The master confiscates the death of the other while retaining the right
to risk his own. The
slave is refused this, and is condemned to a life without return, and therefore
without
possible expiation (39-40).
It is this quality of commodities, that they are encoded with the deferred
deaths of their
makers, which leads to the crisis in the phase of repetition. Attali offers
two versions of this crisis,
one dystopic, in the style of Baudrillard's many apocalypses, and one utopic,
which is Attali's
great contribution to the criticism of Baudrillard.
Attali's apocalypse, which he captions "The Political Economy of Repetition,"
is a
variation on the Marxist classic of overproduction (128-130). As production
becomes more and
more efficient, a greater variety of products must be made to maintain demand.
The music industry
already displays this in a heightened state with the constant introduction
of new recording media
(CD, DAT, Mini-Disc, DCC) and enhanced reissues (gold CD, 20-bit remastering)
aimed at
compelling consumers to upgrade their collections by repurchasing music
they already own.
Similarly, the increased availability of imports, bootlegging, archival
work, and other reissues
make sure that, even if one's musical tastes are quite narrow, one cannot
stop consuming. There
will always be a new product, even if there's only one song a person likes,
there will always be a
remix, a new cover version, a live take, or at least an import with a different
picture on the sleeve.
Production has already grossly outstripped consumption. It would not be
difficult to buy more
music than one could listen to in one's lifetime; any serious fan already
has a backlog of CDs that
have never been played. Attali predicts that:
The few aspects of life that still remain noncommericalized now (nationality,
love, life,
death) will in the future become trapped in exchange. Their spectacle will
be put up for
sale, but also their accessories, and afterwards their stockpiling. The
usage of services
(entertainment, health, food) will thus be transformed into a hoard object
(129-130).
and sees two possible responses to this inflation of production and subsequent
imperative
to consume. The first is that:
Consumers-a necessary detour in commodity consumption, until it is discover
how to
produce them as well-could be replaced by machines to use and destroy production,
eliminating human beings once and for all from the repetitive economy they
still
encumber today. The commodity could also disappear: just as money has become
the
accountable substitute for dialogue, the commodity could be replaced by
the pure sign, a
convenient way to stockpile-record jackets; tickets for travel, restaurants,
clothes, life,
death; passports; love certificates. The political economy of nonsense will
have been
founded: without man or merchandise (130).
Attali's other possible response to the crisis of over-repetition is that
death will become
the ultimate collectable. As every experience becomes stockpilable and overproduction
makes
every consumer an obsessive collector, people will begin to accumulate the
means of their own
deaths.
Repetition today does indeed seem to be succeeding in trapping death in
the object, and
accumulating its recording. This is as two step operation: first, repetition
makes death
exchangeable, in other words, it represents it, puts it on stage, and sells
it as a spectacle.
[...] Then in the second step, not yet realized, death will become repeatable,
capable of
trapping use-time; in other words, purchasing the right to a certain death
will become
separable from its execution. Thus people will collect means for killing
themselves and
"death rights," just as they collect records-rights to different
deaths (happy, sad, solitary,
collective, distant or with the family, painless or under torture, in public
or in private).
(126)
One's own death is the ultimate absurd collectable, because no one needs
more than one
death, yet overproduction compels the hoarding of every possible object.
The deferred death of
the worker which Baudrillard finds in capital becomes the deferred death
of the consumer.
Attali goes beyond Baudrillard in offering a utopia, a fourth stage of musical/political
economy, which he calls composition. For Baudrillard, resistance is only
possible by means of
what he calls "fatal strategies." To break down the system, one
should not proceed through
subversion or resistance but through excessive submission. Working from
Mauss and Bataille's
work on potlatch and the gift, Baudrillard writes that, since authority
maintains itself through
unreciprocable gift-giving, as in the gift of life given the slave by his
master previously described,
one can only fight back by refusing to take these gifts seriously.
Power, faced with this symbolic "blackmail" (the barricades of
'68, hostage-taking),
loses its footing: since it thrives on my slow death, I will oppose it with
my violent death.
And it is because we are living with slow death that we dream of a violent
death. Even this
dream is unbearable to power (43).
Terrorism and suicidal recklessness are not grounds for utopian transformation.
While
one may see in practices such as body modification, substance abuse, daredevil
sports, and unsafe
sex a kind of resistance to the definition of the self as labor and the
command to maintain the mind
and body as efficient machines in the service of capital, as Chalmers argues
in his essay on heroin,
this does not lead to hope for social change, only acts of symbolically
rich yet futile defiance.
Attali's vision of composition is much more accessible. New forms of symbolic
exchange
can emerge from the crisis of overproduction/over-repetition. While the
chapter on composing
is the shortest in Noise, it resonates with many developments in underground
music scenes, where
music making attempts to escape the circuit of commodification and repetition.
For Attali, the
stage of composition will be a return to that of sacrifice, when music will
be created within
communities for immediate use.
This can be seen in a neo-primitive, anti-technological form in the work
of Hakim Bey.
He advocates "immediatism," the practice of art which is temporary,
intended for immediate use,
and which attempts to create and address a community, without mediation
between artist and
audience. Bey's work has gained considerable popularity among musicians
working in free
improvisation, especially those also inspired by non-Western musics.
On the other hand, I am suspicious of the desire to work outside of "media."
After,
guitars and crayons are media much the same as computers and camcorders.
A more interesting
example of the move towards composition can be seen in recent dance club
music. While the DJs
play records, they mix, sample, loop, and otherwise alter these records
in such extreme ways that
the DJs themselves are the artists while the musicians who make the records
are usually unknown,
the recordings themselves are uninteresting to listen to unaltered and are
usually not even
available to the general public. Techno, house, or ambient music begin to
move outside the
system of repetition, just as free improvisation can, in that the music
has so far resisted being
reduced to a stockpliable sign.
Works Cited
Attali, Jacques. A Man of Influence: The Extraordinary Career of S.G.
Warburg. Bethesda, MD:
Adler & Adler, 1987.
---. Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order.
New York: Times Books,
1992.
---. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: U of MN
P, 1985.
Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage, 1993.
Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological
Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism.
Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991.
Chalmers, Martin. "Heroin, the Needle and the Politics of the
Body." Zoot Suits and Second-Hand
Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music. ed. Angela McRobbie. Boston:
Unwin-Hyman, 1988. 150-155.
Corbett, John. Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenestein.
Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
& Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: U of MN P, 1987.
Durant, Alan. "Improvisation in the Political Economy of Music."
Music and the Politics of
Culture. Christopher Norris, ed. New York: St. Martin's P, 1989. 252-282.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. New York:
Pantheon, 1978.
Goodwin, Andrew. "Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Age of Digital
Reproduction." in On
Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. eds. Simon Frith and Andrew
Goodwin. New
York: Pantheon, 1990.
McClary, Susan. "Afterword: The Politics of Silence and Sound."
in Attali 1985. 149-158.
Mowitt, John. "The Sound of Music in the Age of its Electronic Reproducibility."
in Music and
Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception.
eds. Richard Leppert
and Susan McClary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Schwartz, Jeff. "Writing Jimi: Rock Guitar Pedagogy as Postmodern
Folkloric Practice." Popular
Music 12: 3 (1993). 281-288.
"Jacques Attali’s Revision of Baudrillard
in Noise"
was Presented at the Rethinking Marxism Conference
Novemeber 1996
http://www.geocities.com/jeff_l_schwartz/attali.pdf
copyright
© Jeff Schwartz
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