Noise And Social Synthesis I:
Reappraising Attali and the political economy of music

Instructor: J.-P. Caron Date & Time: January 14, 28, February 11, 25 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: The concept of noise has been the subject of a number of recent approaches. One may count amongst them Cecile Malaspina’s An Epistemology of Noise, Mattin’s Social Dissonance, Inigo Wilkins’ forthcoming Irreversible Noise, among many others. Common to these recent approaches is criticality towards the concept of noise as indexing a form of indeterminacy, or as embodying the negative, an approach that was exemplified, within a previous generation of noise theorists, by Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music. In a manner much of its own, the book offers a model of music as the sacrificial ritual of noise -modulating different forms the relationship of music to noise takes in the successive societal stages of representation, repetition, and, finally, composition. Far from being categories pertaining only to aesthetic theory, these are modes of organization of economy, foreshadowed, according to Attali, by the distinct connections music entertains to noise.

While agreeing with the more contemporary assessment of Attali’s “ineffabilism” in his use of the concept of noise, in this seminar we intend to critically reappraise Attali’s book under the light of two recent developments that are, in the face of it, unrelated to the concept of noise. The first would be Kojin Karatani’s reconstruction of the phases of political economy as different modes of intercourse as presented in his volume Structure of World History. The second would be the publication, by the collective Subset of Theoretical Practice, of its “Atlas of experimental politics”, where Karatani’s categories are used in a different context where they are seen as ways to operate (in Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s parlance) social syntheses that beget different societal forms within a multilayered perspective on the constitution of social worlds. The initial hypothesis of the seminar stems from the possible coincidences between Attali’s periodization of the history of political economy, replicating his different aesthetic models of noise; and Karatani’s modes of intercourse: sacrifice/gift economy, or mode A; representation/plunder and redistribution, or mode B; repetition/capitalism or mode C. The parallel breaks, though in the prospective categories of Attali’s composition and of Karatani’s mode D, which corresponds to his idea of communism- to which a third hypothesis is adjoined in the figure of the STP’s communist hypothesis- that offers us an invaluable opportunity to discuss the prospective futures these frameworks are able to make thinkable.

Session 1-Introduction/Sacrifice: We introduce the basic tools to be referred to in the seminar while tackling Attali’s first mode of noise/music intercourse.

Session 2: Representation: We delve into the chapter on representation in Attali’s book. The enclosure of the space of performance and the use of money to purchase entrance makes it a hybrid category from the point of view of Karatani, mixing the State logic of enclosed spaces (mode B) with the fluid logic of value (Mode C).

Session 3-Repetition: The death of the author and the rise of molders are the object of the third session, which are read as symptoms of the stage of late capitalism in Attali’s book, which will be related to Karatani’s mode C. Also, the dependency relations between modes B and C, and the already capitalist stage of representation in Attali will be brought into the discussion of the category of repetition.

Session 4-Composition; Mode D; the Communist Hypothesis: The most polemical category, composition, is thought of by Attali as a way out of the control imposed by repetition. This category focuses on the disinterested pleasure in music-making, rehearsing a somewhat Kantian theme of emancipation from means to an end. But its focus on the individual makes it prone to Châtelet’s criticism of Attali as propounding an anarcho-mercantilist form of sociality. This will form an opportunity to propose anew a discussion of the communist hypothesis as presented by the Subset of Theoretical Practice, as the idea that the total space of possible organizations is bigger than the space of capitalist organizations. Whether this formulation is sufficient or not to escape Châtelet’s indictment will be the subject of the discussion.

IMAGE: Large crowd of people, view from above, Date Unkown

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