Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Jacques Attali. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music opens with an ambitious program, the critique of two and a half millennia of Western knowledge. While this initial statement is perhaps more symbolic than substantive, Noise does undertake a significant historical revision of the last three hundred years of Western music. In doing so, it contributes some of the most innovative and important theoretical advances to date in twentieth-century musical scholarship.

The central premise of the book is that music is prophetic. Attali finds the political economy of the western world in the twentieth century to be the natural outcome of its political rationale and political structures in the nineteenth century. In and of itself this is not a groundbreaking assertion, but the true innovation of Attali's work comes in finding nineteenthcentury European political theory contained, in nascent form, within the structural codes of eighteenth-century Western European music. In Attali's view, music's "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" (p. 11). Thus, music announces a society that is to come, heralding the political, economic, and cultural order of succeeding generations.

Students of cultural Marxism will immediately notice the novelty, blasphemous or revolutionary depending on one's point-of-view, of Attali's claim. Noise is, at its heart, a reversal of the orthodox reading of Marx's base/superstructure model. By situating music as annunciatory of political economy, Attali is rejecting the economic determinism and reflection theory inherent in much critical cultural work. This theoretical claim is the...