I'm editing down an article on Jacques Attali, Foucault, music, & neoliberalism. I've posted some outtakes before, and here are some more. They're somewhat disjointed, as outtakes tend to be, but they're generally about Attali's theory of subjectivity.
"Composer" as deregulated prosumer
The obsolesce of commodities and the commodity
form makes commodity fetishism a decreasingly salient and compelling form of
subjectivity and intersubjectivity. “The mass repetition and distribution of
uniform models, interchangeable with money, totally obstructs communication by
way of object-related differences” (Noise 121). Commodity fetishism is this
latter form of communication: I use differences among consumer goods or brands
to communicate my social status and affiliations. But now that commodities, the
“C,” are out of the M-M loop, we use other methods and media for identity
formation and social intercourse. The economy thus becomes, as Attali puts it,
the means and medium for “the production of the consumers themselves” (131);
this echoes Read’s claim that “subjectivity itself becomes productive” (33).
This self-production takes a specific form. We are, as Foucault puts it,
“entrepreneurs of ourselves.”
This
shift from producing goods to producing consumers is the reason why “we don’t,”
in the words of 30 Rock character Jack Donaghey, “make things
anymore.” Instead, as Attali argues, there is “a new kind of consumer good,
necessarily implied by the very rules of competitive exchange—success” (Noise, 68). Business help us
produce and “cultivat[e]” (Noise 118) ourselves as successful enterprises. The larger economy is structured to assist
each individual in the quest to entrepreneurially exploit oneself as human
capital—hence the explosion in service industries like beauty, health, and
recreation.[i]
Businesses are invested in helping us invest in ourselves because it’s not just
we individuals, but the businesses themselves that profit. Facebook, for
example, feeds on our narcissism and our sociality—its users aren’t its
clients, but nor are they its employees. They are, rather, “prosumers” or
producer-consumers.[ii]
The
“prosumer” model is not a new, 21st-century Web 2.0 phenomenon. Its
roots, as Attali argues, lie in 19th century music publishing, which
produced not just sheet music and pianos, but also “a rapidly expanding market
of amateur interpreters” (Noise 69). In using consumer technology and mass
media, these “amateur interpreters” produce themselves as musicians and as
music fans; in so doing they generate even more surplus value—in the form of
human capital or “use time”—than is generated just in the sale of pianos and
sheet music. This prosumer ethos continues into the twentieth century, when, as
the slogan would have it, home taping threatened to “kill” music.[iii]
As a teenager in the early 1990s, I made mix tapes by recording songs off the
radio on to cassette tapes, basically circumventing the exchange of music as a
commodity. Somewhat similarly, musicians used samples from other records as the
foundation of their own tracks. About 30 years before the music industry
actually did this (e.g., with social listening, games like Rock Band, and shows
like American Idol), Attali argued that it could save itself from the threat of
“amateur interpretation” only by “reinsert[ing] this consumer labor into the
laws of commercial exchange” (Noise 100); “the consumer…will thus become a
producer” (Noise 144). In Noise, then, Attali identifies the “prosumer”
business model about 30 years before it entered mainstream consciousness. The
prosumer, remember, isn’t producing goods so much as him or herself as human
capital. It doesn’t matter so much what kind of music (or music fan-objects
like playlists or YouTube video mixes) one makes, but how the process of
composing makes oneself. With the prosumer, we have passed from the society of
the spectacle into the consumer-producer as “spectacle of himself” (Noise 144).
***
Attali’s
composing subject is the neoliberal, entrepreneurial subject par excellence.
It’s not surprising, then, that composition is a fundamentally deregulatory
practice. “Composition necessitates the destruction of all codes” (Noise 45)
because only in a deregulated marketplace of ideas and affects can subjects
optimize their creative capacities. It does this by using the very same
deregulatory processes found in neoliberal free-marketism and mid-century
avant-garde composition. For example, Attali describes composition in terms
comparable to Steve Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process.” For Attali, composing
involves “inventing new codes, inventing
the message at the same time as the language” (Noise 143), or, in different
terms, composing “creates its own code at the same time as the work” (Noise
135). For Reich, “the distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note
(sound-to-sound) details and the over all
form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon.)”[iv]
In both accounts, the macro-level code emerges from generative, micro-level
processes.
These
generative processes appear to be random because the composer is not directly
choosing each individual musical event—the process is, as Riech puts it,
“impersonal” (MGP). However, in this style of deregulated composition, “musical
processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of
complete control…by running this material through the process I completely
control all that results” (Reich MGP). Reich’s musical processes—like swinging
a microphone over a speaker to generate feedback, or setting two identical tape
players to play the same looped recording in and out of phase—articulate the background conditions within which
individual sonic events arise. Reich’s (and Cage’s, and the serialists’)
musical processes are the background conditions that allow for deregulated
sonic production. As “program producers” (40), Reichean and Attalian composers are
de/regulators; what they compose or arrange is the ‘code within which’ sounds
are generated. In this way, Cage and Reich’s role in the relations of musical
production is analogous to the role of commercial and governmental institutions
in neoliberal political economy: just as “the bulk of commodity production then
shifts to the production of tools allowing
people to create the conditions for taking pleasure in the act of
composing” (Noise 145; emphasis mine), the bulk of musical production shifts to
the production of musical processes and instruments (instead of ‘works’). “Composition,
nourished on the death of codes” (Noise 36), does not subvert neoliberal deregulation—it
is a model for optimally deregulated subjectivity and musical-political
economy.
But repetition doesn’t generate surplus value
by extracting it from alienated labor. Rather, it outsources the production of
surplus value to individual subjects, who then generate surplus value by
cultivating and curating their own human capital. Neoliberalism wants
and incites privileged subjects to intensify their erotic investments—to
“work hard/play hard,” as pop musicians like Ne-Yo and Wiz Kalifa say. Attalian
composition is a practice of erotic intensification and human capitalization.
It is not opposed to neoliberal governmentality, but consistent with it.
[i] As Attali argues, “repetition
entails the development of service activities
whose function it is to produce the consumer” (Noise 103; emphasis mine).
[ii] It is possible to read Attali as anticipating Facebook’s business
model. He argues that “in order to accumulate a profit, it becomes necessary to
sell stockpileable sign production, not simply its spectacle” (88). Social
media stockpileable sign production: users’ status updates, photos, tweets,
pins, are all stockpiled “signs” or “data,” which Facebook then turns around
and sells to, say, marketing firms.
[iii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
[iv] http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/draft/ben/feld/mod1/readings/reich.html
No comments:
Post a Comment