Noise

I'm gonna do a group presentation on Attali. Share some excerpts here:

Attali examines the relation between music/ordering noise/aesthetic and economic/history of people/social organization. Inversed relation between superstructure and economy. Superstructure anticipates new modes of production.

Music and social codification:

Music is the social codification of sounds caught up between noise and silence, rooted in the technologies and ideologies that it reveals and produces.

Reciprocal interaction:

“The noises of a society are in advance of its images and material conflicts”.

“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)

“the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way” (Jameson, xi)

Mirror: Music, as a mode of immaterial production, is a mirror that “reflects a fluid reality”; “the principle of giving form to noise in accordance with changing syntactic structures” (10)

Power:

Music is the organization of sound that links a power center to its subjects; is an attribute of power in all of its form. “Noise is inscribed from the start within the panoply of power”. (6)

monopolization of communication; controlling the noise; institutionalization of the silence of others

Totalitarian states: censorship laws

Parliamentary democracy: law of economy (more subtle, new, less violent)

A little history of musicians in the pre-capitalist era

The musician’s position in most civilizations: simultaneously excluded/separator in terms of the social hierarchy and superhuman/integrator in terms of the sacrifice rite and the divine.

Before 14th century: musician as vagabond and jongleur; a permanent circulation of information between the court and the popular

14th-16th Domestication: paid for salaries, and therefore they were “economically bound to a machine of power, political or commercial, which paid him a salary for creating what is needed to affirm its legitimacy”. (17)

Three zones: music as tools of three power forms

Ritual power--forgot fear--music as sacrifice

Representative power--believe in harmony--music as representation

Bureaucratic power--silencing the noise--music as repetition

Composition...becoming