Bruits: essai sur l'economie politique de la musique

English language

ISBN:: 9780816612864

No rating (1 review)

Noise: The Political Economy of Music is a book by French economist and scholar Jacques Attali which is about the role of music in the political economy. Attali's essential argument in Noise: The Political Economy of Music (French title: Bruits: essai sur l'economie politique de la musique) is that music, as a cultural form, is intimately tied up in the mode of production in any given society. Although this idea is familiar in strands of Marxism, the novelty of Attali's work is that it reverses the traditional understandings about how revolutions in the mode of production take place:

"[Attali] is the first to point out the other possible logical consequence of the “reciprocal interaction” model—namely, the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way. The argument of Noise is that music, unique among the arts for reasons that are …

Noise: The Political Economy of Music is a book by French economist and scholar Jacques Attali which is about the role of music in the political economy. Attali's essential argument in Noise: The Political Economy of Music (French title: Bruits: essai sur l'economie politique de la musique) is that music, as a cultural form, is intimately tied up in the mode of production in any given society. Although this idea is familiar in strands of Marxism, the novelty of Attali's work is that it reverses the traditional understandings about how revolutions in the mode of production take place:

"[Attali] is the first to point out the other possible logical consequence of the “reciprocal interaction” model—namely, the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way. The argument of Noise is that music, unique among the arts for reasons that are themselves overdetermined, has precisely this annunciatory vocation; that the music of today stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility which is that mode of production’s baleful mirror image."

2 editions

Jim Brown reviewed Bruits by Jacques Attali

Music is prophecy

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Attali takes the reader through networks of music, through different wasy of disciplining noise: sacrificing (music as ritual, as the murder of the scapegoat, and as oral culture), representing (music as a player representing what is on the page for the audience), repeating (recording music and transforming it into a commodity), composition (and emerging network in which the musician plays "for himself" and is not concerned with the commodity). The latter network indicates some kind of hope for Attali, even if he says he's not offering value judgements, and it's embodied in composers like Cage.

"Music, the organization of noise...reflects the manufacture of society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. An instrument of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge." (4)

"Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it …

Attali takes the reader through networks of music, through different wasy of disciplining noise: sacrificing (music as ritual, as the murder of the scapegoat, and as oral culture), representing (music as a player representing what is on the page for the audience), repeating (recording music and transforming it into a commodity), composition (and emerging network in which the musician plays "for himself" and is not concerned with the commodity). The latter network indicates some kind of hope for Attali, even if he says he's not offering value judgements, and it's embodied in composers like Cage.

"Music, the organization of noise...reflects the manufacture of society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. An instrument of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge." (4)

"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" (11)

"I would like to trace the political economy of music as a succession of orders (in other words, differences) done violence by noises (in other words, the calling into question of differences) that are prophetic because they create new orders, unstable and changing."