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Angus Carlyle is a Senior Lecturer at the London
College of Communication. Former editor of ‘Theme Park’, He writes
extensively on technology, art and culture and also works as an arts consultant
in the UK and internationally. Jacques Attali is a celebrated economist, professor
and writer. A curious and brilliant mind, He addresses a wide range of subjects,
whether they be economic, political or philosophical. The interview was an opportunity
for both men to the focus on the ideas developed in ‘Noise’
Many years ago, I spent a summer holiday in a small cottage in the South of France.
Long after the sun had gone down and my friends had retired for the night, I
would place a deck chair next to the swimming pool and read David
Toop's Ocean
of Sound
until overcome by sleep.
With the stars bright above and the nocturnal chorus
of crickets, owls calling from the nearby woods, and bats clicking overhead,
everything
seemed in its proper place, the vivid soundscape that surrounded me at one with
the immersive themes of Toop's book.
On the voyage home, I bumped into two other friends, Mark and Julia - who had
been conducting an archaeological investigation into Cathar religious sites -
and relayed the
experience of my pool-side meditations.
By coincidence, they too had spent their
time in the company of another book about sound. For them, it had been Jacques
Attali's
Noise.
As we headed back to Britain, we inevitably compared notes.
The warmth of Toop's
work apparently contrasted with a certain iciness detectable in Attali's; the
crowd of concrete references to specific music and musicians that populated Ocean
of Sound appeared distinct from the less well inhabited pages of Noise; Ocean
of Sound was to a certain extent sealed off from the political whereas from its
first
sentences Noise
was welded to it; Toop favoured a lyrical style and Attali, perhaps no less poetic,
a linguistic density that made an aphorism of almost every sentence.
For Mark and Julia, one of the striking aspects of Noise was the strangeness
of the biographical identity of its author, whose books on economics, they reported,
could
be found on the shelves of the hypermarkets they'd visited.
From 1981 until 1991, Attali was a conseiller special in the French Socialist
Government and in the first volume of his diary of that experience, Verbatim,
Attali
acknowledges that even before we get to his texts that extend beyond conventional
economics, his was a strange position. “Naturellement, ce text est marqué par
l'étrange rôle que j'y ai tenu: l'intellectuel dont le Prince se méfie assez
pour le tenir en
lisière, mais qui il a assez confiance pour en faire le témoin de toutes les
rencontes, le filtre de tous les documents, pour lui confie maintes missions
et l'accept comme son
confident quotodien”.
As the origins of the preceding quotation demonstrate, Attali's relationship
with the economic is not solely a function of his publications or his academic
pedigree. Indeed,
despite having 3 million books translated into over 20 languages in circulation
worldwide, many know Attali through the economic organisations with which he
has
been involved.
He was the Founder and President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development whose function was to assist the former Soviet Union during its
'transitional phase' – an occupation which led one writer on notbored.org to
characterise Attali as “Mr. Eurobank”. More recently, Attali was commissioned by
Boutros-Ghali to conduct an investigation into the smuggling of weapon- grade
nuclear material, an investigation whose results were published in L'Economie de
L'Apocalypse.
More recently still, he has had a significant role in several venture
capital, equity and consultative organisations and has established PlanetFinance,
dedicated to combining microfinance with a dynamic exploitation of internet resources
in an effort to re-address the world's gross economic disparities.
Although Attali's public work has not been insulated from controversy, it is his writing
which, for me at least, has the real potential to provoke.
There cannot be many individuals who have come as close as Attali to the corridors of
global power yet still find the opportunity to assert, as he did in 1999's Fraternité,
that “utopiais [are] only, in the final analysis, the name given to reforms that are
really awaiting a revolution so these can be carried out”.
Ultimately, though, for all their merit, I'm less interested in Attali's social diagnoses –
implausibly universal in reach - or his general futorology – not eccentric enough for
my tastes - nor his much vaunted identification of a nomad society – after all,
Deleuze and Guattari, among many others, had been there before – nor am I
particularly excited by his award-winning novels and plays.
For me it is Noise: A Political Economy of Music where his most potent ideas find
expression.
On many occasions Attali's book has been used to provide a theoretical basis from
which to address those types of music whose acoustic properties are assumed to
define them as 'noise' – everything from 1980s Industrial to American Hardcore to
Japanese onkyo. This parallel is, to a certain extent, right. Attali frequently endeavours
to persuade his reader that there is a variety of inextricable connections between
noise and pain: between the brutality unleashed by a threatened Establishment and
the disorienting discord let out by the Establishment's intended victims; between the
convulsions that accompany the creation of a new society and the apparent chaos of
the sound that announces its imminent arrival.
Yet, although noise is identified by Attali as a metaphor for violence, the applications
of Noise are by no means limited to any defined musical style (indeed, these
applications are by no means limited to music itself.
As a pertinent example I found
myself having to order another copy of Noise after my original was borrowed on long
loan by a performance artist). Instead, the fundamental theses developed by Attali in
the first edition of his extended interpretation of Brueghel's painting 'The Carnival's
Quarrel With Lent' largely escape the specifics of time and place. It is true that in his
second edition, there are more temporally and geographically located references.
There is also, for me anyway, the disappointing decision to clarify things, as Attali told
Ian Simmons at nthposition.com, “to use a simpler, less academic language in order
to reach a larger audience. I realised, more than before, that the talent is to use
simple words to explain difficult concepts and not to hide simple concepts behind
difficult words”.
Noise, then, is a broad phenomenon which Attali first explores in cybernetic terms as
“a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in the process of
emission." Understood from this perspective, noise cannot be associated with any
specific music, since its identity will shift with the passage of time. As Attali asserts,
“[w]hat is noise to the old order is harmony to the new."
What, for Attali remains consistent, however, is music's structural relationship with
society. "Music runs parallel to human society, is structured like it, and changes when
it does." Stated like this, however, this sounds too close to some sub-Marxist cultural
determinism. Attali's argument is odder than this, though. For him, music is not
reflection, “[m]usic 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. It makes audible the new world that will
gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is
not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the
future”.
Thus, the trajectory of historically successive paradigms of musical organisation –
representation, repetition, composition – worked as trailers for the main features of
successive paradigms of social organisation.
At this point, we can see how Attali's work, rather than being divideable into two
separate enterprises – the economy and its analysis divided from music and its
analysis – comes full circle. Thus Attali, again in the interview with Ian Simmons,
reported that he always uses “music to try to analyse the evolution of society by
using what I can see in the evolution of art and music in particular.
For instance, in
France, I saw in the music of the 80s the beginning of the upheaval in the suburbs. I
was the first to point out - in 1985 - the arrival in our world of the ‘nomadism’,
through portable and mobile devices, which is obvious today:
I saw it through the
success of the Walkman, the first of a long list of nomadic devices. I also predicted
the decline of the Soviet Union and the need to support these countries, and
proposed the idea of the EBRD after listening to rock and roll music in the Soviet
Union and the failure of the system to suppress it. I have also been trying to analyse
the influence of new technologies on music. The free flow of music is announcing a
totally new economy based on the free exchange of signs, information and services.
Reciprocally, my understanding of the relations of power and geopolitics helped me, in
this new version of the book, to understand better the strategies of the majors in the
music industry”.
It is not only these enterprises associated with Attali’s work - the analysis of music
and the analysis of economics - that come full circle. If we return to the discussions
my friends and I had as we traveled back from our respective vacations, it is
meaningless to artificially segregate Toop and Attali, to divide aesthetics from ethics,
to separate the artistic from the economic.
As Attali’s book demonstrates, to omit
the economic dimension is at best naive; at worst, it is dishonest.
In what follows, Jaques Attali explores further with Vibrö the intersections
between
music and the economy.
Vibrö:
You
have
recently signalled that 'laws' of economics derived from conventional models
based on
scarcity may not be appropriately applied to the emerging
information economies. Can you explain your thinking behind this argument?
Jacques Attali: According to one law of economics, if I give something, I don't
have it anymore; but if I give information, I still have it. According to another
law of
economics, the value of a good increases with its scarcity. The value of an
information tool, such as a language or a telephone network, is increased by
the
numbers of users.
V:: Are the financial markets - like the futures market - not, in the most precise terms,
information economies. If they are, how is their growth sustained, especially as the
real, 'material' economy has experienced a year-on-year decline?
JA: The financial markets
are not obeying to the laws of information economies, because what is sold is
not
information, but time. And there are other economic laws
for time: I cannot give time. I can only lend it. The futures market is a market
where people exchange time and not information. The value of a scoop, for instance,
is not
the value of an information, but the value of knowing this information before
others. It is a value of time. More generally, anything is made of matter (or
energy) ,
information ( or form) and time. Each of these observes three different sets
of
economic laws.
V: Does the notion of a pure information economy depend upon information having
some value outside the existence of corresponding carrier or artefact (whether that is
a CD and packaging or book with cover or web-site restricted through paid access)? If
there is such a carrier does what apparently looks like an information economy
actually then respond to the laws of scarcity (there are only so many CDs, books or
access codes in existence)?
JA: Exactly. The problem of the insertion of culture in the market economy is : is it
possible to make it artificially rare, through licenses, patents, cryptology or will the
pirates be always able to circumvent this artificial scarcity? In my view, this battle will
always be won by hackers.
V: From Georges Bataille and others including Marcel Mauss and Guy Debord we have
heard intimations of the possibility of a gift economy or a solar economy. In your
wonderful text "Noise" you see the opportunity for composers to transcend the
"stockpiling of lack". Is this transcendence a move towards a gift economy?
JA: Yes it is. It may be the beginning of a society where people are finding pleasure in
exchanging their compositions, in giving joy to others. A gift economy is a society
where the one who gives is the consumer (the pleasure to give) and where the
receiver is the one who produces ( an opportunity for someone else to give). It is a
radical inversion of the economic laws.
V: Are there any historical antecedents of gift economies in music, where the value of
the sound depended upon its donation rather than what was received in return or
what ritual / sacrificial function was performed?
JA: I suppose that for any musician, its pleasure is not to receive a financial reward
but to see the illumination of faces and the dancing moves of his listeners. Therefore,
any musician is consumer of the pleasure given by its production. Any artist is, in fact,
the vanguard of the gift economy. Any person receiving another one and having
pleasure in doing so is also a consumer of the gift economy: Any act of hospitality (
and art is hospitality) is an embryo of gift economics.
V: Is the ultimate gift economy in music when the composer produces only for
himself / herself?
JA: It is the ultimate first phase. The gift economy is enjoying the pleasure of making
music. But this is also a beginning. It is said in the Bible that we have to love the
others like we love ourselves. Which means only that it is impossible to love others if
you don't love yourself first. It is equally impossible to please the others if the
composition is not, first, on occasion to enjoy its own creation. Therefore, after
having found the pleasure of composition we can drag others in our own creative
universe and share composition with listeners becoming co-composers.
V: Are their parallels between
such gift economies and what is allegedly occurring with
MP3 distribution?
JA: Yes. The MP3 is not going to be a lucrative business, because it is from the very
beginning a gift economy, where people give for the pleasure of giving and of creating
by mixing others gifts. The future economy of music will not be based on selling tunes
on the net, except if it become possible to organise the encryption of it. I doubt,
except if the whole MP3 standard is given away and replaced by a new one,
controlled from its conception by the majors. It is possible.
V: Can you explain to our readers
why sound does, as you argue, operate as an early warning system of coming economic
and social developments?
JA: It is difficult to explain in a few words what is detailed in my book Noise!
I can only say that being an art of information, it is quicker to explore the
possible scenarios in
music that in material life.
V: If it can be a "herald" of the future, do current developments inspire optimism /
pessimism?
JA: Optimism , because we see more and more people going to composition, and
willing to be active. But also pessimism if composition transforms the world into a
juxtaposition of autist composers. It is up to us to make the best use of it.
V: Walter Benjamin famously claimed that the aura of originality and authenticity was
destroyed in the act of mechanical reproduction. Do you think that the history of
recorded sound has borne out his prophecy?
JA: It is not true. We are always tempted to think that creation and life will die with
us. Recorded sound was an opportunity for millions of people to discover musics
which where before only for privileged people. And to listen at the best interprets. This
has given to more and more people tools for creation. Walter Benjamin's thesis
means than creation can occur only in the realm of ignorance. It is a very aristocratic
and the pessimistic view of the world!
V: Do you think that sampling - irrespective of questions of legality and morality -
may have operated to restore something like the aura in the digital age? What I mean
here is that samples frequently retain the warmth and crackle of vinyl (something that
could easily be filtered out by DSP) so that the recording medium itself is audible and
as such this recording medium itself is employed to betray an aura of human
presence?
JA: Sampling is a new way of creation , getting away from the too sanitised DSP
music. It is demonstration that the real demand of the audience, is to listen at life,
which is the main nostalgia in a world of artefacts.
V: Are you conscious that "Noise" has
inspired a many working at the cutting edge of sound production, many of whom
were born after the book was published?!
JA: I have been told that more and more in these last years - apparently more in the
Anglo-Saxon world than in France ...
V: Does your consciousness of the profound problems associated with the
corporatisation of music affect your ability to buy it and enjoy it in good conscience?
JA: It makes me less naive in front of the production of stars, in all kind of music, and
orient my curiosity to very new fields.
V: What music do you listen to?
JA: Everything. These days, I rediscovered the records I bought when I was 14:
romantic piano music as well as Alban Berg, and Satie. I am also interested these
days in the new directions of Indian music.
V: Marshall McLuhan predicted the return of acoustic space after its prolonged
subordination to visual space and visual culture. Do you think the primacy of the visual
is ever likely to be overturned and, if it is, would the social changes that engineered
this fundamental paradigm shift have implications for the economic system?
JA: We are going to enter into a 3D World incorporating sound and movement in
space. We are going to produce the work of art by a travel in the imagination of the
creator. The next artistic revolution will be to find a way to travel in time. Music is
already a travel in time: create order , giving a meaning through art is a way of
fighting against the natural entropy of the world.
V: Finally, a particularly ambitious question, one which I appreciate has no right
answers but one which your work with the UN and other NGOs might offer particular
insights to. Can technology be harnessed to provide any solutions to the global
economic iniquities?
JA: It is possible. I am spending
a lot of my time to day on that. I have created an organisation PLANET FINANCE
which is using new technologies to help very poor
people, mainly women, to create their own jobs
More info about 'Noise' of Jacques Attali:
http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/aesthetics%20of%20music/attali'snoise.htm (
in english)
http://users.skynet.be/aecoute/txt/dossiers/bruits.htm
("Bruits" Paris, PUF, 1978. - in french)
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