Reviews and Comments

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."

This is a great critical review/history of community organizing, with a particular view about how organizing became "professional." A useful critical take on Alinsky, but also a discussion of how organizing's "spadework" (a term coined by Ella Baker to describe the difficult work of cultivating personal relationships and preparing the ground for longer-term organizing) might be the better place to focus energies rather than on what Petitjean calls the "crème brûlée" of militant liberalism with its "crisp layer of conflict tactics and antiestablishment rhetoric on top o fa mellow cream of commitment to class harmony, compromise, and liberal pluralism. Significantly, the professional dimension of [organizing] work was baked into the créme from the beginning." (21)

This book also introduced me (I'm sure this is mostly because I'm just uninformed) that the distinction between organizing and mobilizing written about in Jane McAlevey's No Shortcuts actually originates in the SNCC critique of MLK's SCLC. SNCC's was interesting in organizing (the slow work of spadework) while it saw MLK primarily doing "mobilizing" (focusing on gathering large groups of people for protest rather than on involving the bulk of those people in the organizing work).

I love that this book is just a bunch of machines for generating text, much like Cage's music. I'm thinking of staging a reading of some of these lectures with students (which will involve reading passages of text to meet certain time requirements and sometimes having multiple speakers talking over one another).

Two favorites:

"All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing." (126)

"Any sounds of any qualities and pitches (known or unknown, definite or indefi- nite), any contexts of these, simple or multiple, are natural and conceivable within a rhythmic structure which equally embraces silence. Such a claim is remarkably like the claims to be found in patent specifications for and articles about tech- nological musical means ( see early issues of Modern Music and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America). From differing beginning points, towards possibly different goals, technologists and artists (seemingly by accident) meet by inter- section, becoming aware of the otherwise unknowable ( conjunction of the in and the out), imagining brightly a common goal in the world and in the quietness within each human being." (65)