Hałas Jacquesa Attali

Jak zapowiadałem, fragmenty książki "Bruits. Essai sur l’économique politique de la musique", z angielskiego tłumaczenia "Noise. The Political Economy of Music", którego dokonał Brian Massumi, wydawcą jest University of Minesota Press.

Może warto wyjaśnić założenia: Muzyka nie tylko jest wyrazem jakiegoś porządku, ale też zwiastunem tego, co ma nadejść. W niej pierwszej pojawiają się oznaki nowego. Attali wyznacza cztery etapy: składanie ofiary (ofiarowanie), reprezentowanie, powtarzanie i kompozycję. Przejście od pierwszego (muzyka jako simulacrum mordu rytualnego, kanalizowanie przemocy, naśladownictwo jej) do drugiego następuje wraz z unieruchomieniem muzyków, uzależnieniem ich do panujących, przywiązaniem do instytucji. Muzyka traci wszelkie właściwości katarktyczne, przestaje w jakikolwiek sposób odnosić się do rytuału, a staje się wyrazem mocy władcy. Attali pokazuje jak twórca tracił niezależność, a wraz z rozwojem rynku dla jego działań - jak był usuwany poza nawias, jak zmniejszał się jego wpływ na to, co działo się z jego twórczością (kwestia praw autorskich). Następny etap pojawia się wraz z technologią nagrywania. Attali zwraca uwagę, że wynalazki takie jak fonograf początkowo przewidziane były jako zwiększenie możliwości reprezentacji, ale ich rozwój (a przede wszystkim wykorzystanie produktów) skierowały się w stronę repetycji (głównie masowa konsumpcja muzyki, jej znaczenie dla grup młodzieżowych). Ponieważ w systemie ciągłej powtarzalności zanika różnicowanie, muzyka przestaje gwarantować istnienie ładu, gdzie dało się dostrzec różnice organizujące świat. Ten system też upadnie, a Attali dostrzega zwiastuny kolejnego - kompozycji (dlaczego nie improwizacji?), gdzie muzyka będzie samozwrotna, niezależna od wszystkiego, co zewnętrzne, będzie rozmową grających.


Najpierw czysto teoretyczny fragment, str. 19-20:
Music is inscribed between noise and silence, in the space of the social codification it reveals. Every code of music is rooted in the ideologies and technologies of its age, and at the same time produces them. If it is deceptive to conceptualize a succession of musical codes corresponding to a succession of economic and political relations, it is because time traverses music and music gives meaning to time.
In this book, I would like to trace the political economy of musie 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. The simultaneity of multiple codes, the variable overlappings between periods, styles, and forms, prohibits any attempt at a genealogy of music, a hierarchical archeology, or a precise ideological pinpointing of particular musicians. But it is possible to discern who among them are innovators and heralds of worlds in the making. For example, Bach alone explored almost the entire range of possibilities inherent in the tonal sys­tem, and more. In so doing, he heralded two centuries of industrial adventure. What must be constructed, then, is more like a map, a structure of interferences and dependencies between society and its music.
In this book, I will attempt to trace the history of their relations with the world of production, exchange, and desire; the slow degradation of use into exchange. of representation into repetition; and the prophecy, announced by today's music, of the potential for a new political and cultural order.
Briefly, we will see that it is possible to distinguish on our map three zones, three stages, three strategie usages of music by power.
In one of these zones, it seems that music is used and produced in the ritual in an attempt to make people forget the general violence; in another, it is employed to make people believe in the harmony of the world, that there is order in exchange and legitimacy in commercial power; and finally, there is one in which it serves to silence, by mass-producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring all other human noises.
Make people Forget, make them Believe, Silence them. In all three cases, musie is a tool of power: of ritual power when it is a question of making people forget the fear of violence; of representative power when it is a question of making them believe in order and harmony; and of bureaucratic power when it is a question of silencing those who oppose it. Thus music localizes and specifies power, because it marks and regiments the rare noises that cultures, in their normalization of behavior, see fit to authorize. Musie accounts for them. It makes them audible.
When power wants to make people forget, music is ritual sacrifice, the scape-goat; when it wants them to believe, music is enactment, representation; when it wants to silence them, it is reproduced, normalized, repetition. Thus it heralds the subversion of both the existing code and the power in the making, well before the latter is in place.
Today, in embryonic form, beyond repetition, lies freedom: more than a new music, a fourth kind of musical practice. It heralds the arrival of new social relations. Music is becoming composition.
Representation against fear, repetition against hormony, composition against normality. It is this interplay of concepts that music invites us to enter, in its capacity as the herald of organizations and their overall political strategies - noise that destroys orders to structure a new order. A highly illuminating foundation for social analysis and a resurgence of inquiry about man.
For Fear, Clarity, Power, and Freedom correspond in their succession to the four stages Carlos Castaneda distinguishes in his mysterious description of the initiatory teachings of his master, the sorcerer Don Juan Mateus. This convergence is perhaps more than coincidental, if music is a means of understanding, like the unbalanced relation to ecstasy created by drugs. Is the sorcerer speaking of drugs when he explains that:
"When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize, for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning. He slowly begins to learn—bit by bit at first, then in big chunks. And his thoughts soon clash. What he learns is never what he pictured or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid. Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. . . . This is the time when a man has no more fears, no more impatient clarity of mind—a time when all his power is in check. . . . If a man. . .lives his fate through, he can then be called a man of knowledge, if only for the brief moment when he succeeds in fighting off his last, invincible enemy. That moment of clarity, power, and knowledge is enough."*

Don Juan's knowledge by peyote is reminiscent of the prophetic knowledge of the shaman, of the ritual function of the pharmakon. And of the interference between stages in the deployment of systems of music.
Music, like drugs, is intuition, a path to knowledge. A path? No—a battlefield.

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* Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), str. 57, 60

A teraz coś bardziej szczegółowego, str. 99-100:
These associations, similar to author's associations, enforced payment of royalties to the authors, performers, and publishers of the works. In effect, repetition poses the same problems as representation: rent presupposes a right to industrial produc­tion, in other words, a right to monitor the number of pressings and number of copies sold, to which the royalties are proportional. And it also presupposes the confidence of the authors, who totally delegate the management of their eco-nomic rights to experts working for associations whose function it is to valorize their works.
The author's associations thus played a decisive role in determing the relations between musie and radio. In law, the radio broadcast of a work was deemed a public performance on July 30, 1927 (by decision of the criminal court of Marseilles),** and consequently the law of 1791 became applicable. There was a fleeting attempt to develop another position. L. Bollecker, in a 1935 article in the Revue Internationale de Radioelectricite, makes a distinction between radio broadcasting, which consists in transmitting waves through space, and reception, which consists in transforming those waves into sounds. In this view, only reception is representation, and it is generally private (it would only be pub­lic if the loudspeaker were public). Radio broadcasting, for its part, would be a new form of publishing. An extraordinary fantasy of spatial writing, the marking of space. Bollecker, however, was not followed: since waves are not durable and are immaterial, radio broadcasting remained a form of representation.
The opposition to the use of records on radio was resolved in France by a contract between SACEM and the private stations concluded in 1937. After that, radio stations had to pay for representation and reproduction rights.
The performers and publishers would continue to be excluded. They were recognized as having no claim. The difficulties associated with the evaluation of copyrights and related claims in representation resurface here, because the multiplicity of sale and listening sites make it difficult to collect payment.
In addition, there arise specific obstacles to monitoring recordings, because free access is taken to a new height: today it has become possible for each listener to record a radio-broadcast representation on his own, and to manufacture in this way, using his own labor, a repeatable recording, the use-value of which is a priori equivalent to that of the commodity-object, without, however, having its exchange-value. This is an extremely dangerous process for the musie industry and for the authors, since it provides free access to the recording and its repe­tition. Therefore it is fundamental for them to prevent this diversion of usage, to reinsert this consumer labor into the laws of commercial exchange, to suppress Information in order to create an artificial scarcity of music. The simplest solution would be to make such production impossible by scrambling the quality of the broadcast representation, or by truncating it, or again by taxing this inde­pendent production, fmancing royalty payments on these unknown recordings through a tax on tape recorders—this is done in Germany. The price of musie usage is then based entirely on the price of the recorder. But the number of recordings could increase without a change in the number of tape recorders. We could then conceive of a tax on recording tape, which would mean paying music royalties in proportion to the exchange-value of nonmusic.
This problem of monitoring recording already announces a rupture in the laws of the classical economy. The independent manufacture of recording, in other words, consumer labor, makes it more difficult to individualize royalties and to define a price and associated rent for each work. It is conceivable that, at the end of the evolution currently under way, locating the labor of recording will have become so difficult, owing to the multiplicity of the forms it can take, that authors' compensation will no longer be possible except at a fixed rate, on a statistical and anonymous basis independent of the success of the work itself.
At the same time, usage becomes transformed, accessibility replaces the festival. A tremendous mutation. A work that the author perhaps did not hear more than once in his lifetime (as was the case with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the majority of Mozart's works) becomes accessible to a multitude of people, and becomes repeatable outside the spectacle of its performance. It gains availability. It loses its festive and religious character as a simulacrum of sacrifice. It ceases to be a unique, exceptional event, heard once by a minority. The sacrificial relation becomes individualized, and people buy the individualized use of order, the personalized simulacrum of sacrifice.
Repetition creates an object, which lasts beyond its usage. The technology of repetition has made available to all the use of an essential symbol, of a privileged relation to power. It has created a consumable object answering point by point to the lacks induced by industrial society: because it remains at bottom the only element of sociality, that is to say of ritual order, in a world in which exteriority, anonymity, and solitude have taken hold, music, regardless of type, is a sign of power, social status, and order, a sign of one's relation to others. It channels the imaginary and violence away from a world that too often represses language, away from a representation of the social hierarchy.
Music has thus become a strategic consumption, an essential mode of social­ity for all those who feel themselves powerless before the monologue of the great institutions. It is also, therefore, an extremely effective exploration of the past, at a time when the present no longer answers to everyone's needs.

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** On March 22, 1927, M.Privat, manager of Eiffel Tower, was ordered by the civil court of the Seine district to pay 3,000 francs in damages for having broadcast whitout authorization pieces of music listed with SACEM. On appeal, the First Chamber of the court of Paris tripled the indemnity.

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dwa wywiady z autorem
po francusku
po angielsku