drott - reading attali's bruits

Rereading Jacques Attali’s Bruits

Eric Drott

It has been nearly thirty years since Jacques Attali’s Bruits first appearedin English translation.1 In the decades since its publication the book hascome to occupy a vital place in music and sound studies. The broad appealof Bruits is due in part to the comparably broad sweep of Attali’s intellec-tual ambitions. Over the course of 150-odd pages, the slim volume rangesacross centuries of music history, spans vernacular and literate musicgenres, traverses the disciplinary boundaries that separate economics fromthe study of cultural forms, and resituates music alongside noise within awider, socially-constructed continuum of sound. Small wonder the texthas proven so influential. There is something in Bruits for nearly everyone.For writers on cultural production, the four musical economies sketchedby Attali (sacrifice, representation, repetition, composition) furnish a sug-gestive if somewhat crude point of departure for analyses of the socialorganization of creative activity.2 For sound students, Bruits offers a tem-

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the conference “New Directions in MusicalAesthetics” (University of Texas at Austin, 26 February 2011), the 2011 meeting of the AmericanMusicological Society, and Manchester University (27 May 2013). I would like to thank JimBuhler, Chris Arneaud Clarke, Sumanth Gopinath, Benjamin Piekut, Holly Watkins, andMarianne Wheeldon for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article. Unless otherwise notedall translations are my own.

1. See Jacques Attali, Bruits: Essai sur l’economie politique de la musique (Paris, 1977);hereafter abbreviated B. And see the second edition published in 2001; hereafter abbreviated B2.See also the translation Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi(Minneapolis, 1985); hereafter abbreviated N. I refer to the text as Bruits in this article to avoidconfusion between Attali’s book and the phenomenon he describes.

2. See John Mowitt, “The Sound of Music in the Era of Its Electronic Reproducibility,” inMusic and Society, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (New York, 1987), pp. 173–97;Robert Burnett, The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry (London, 1996), pp. 41–

Critical Inquiry 41 (Summer 2015)

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plate for how scholars might move beyond a long dominant ocularcen-trism to apprehend society not through the eye but through the ear.3 Formedia theorists and historians of music technology, Attali’s attentivenessto questions of mediation underlines the degree to which music’s produc-tion, distribution, and reception is inflected by the material supports uponwhich it relies and without which it could not exist.4 And for theorists ofimprovisation, the privilege the text accords to open-ended, free-formapproaches to music making transforms this particular form of artisticexperimentalism into a model for humane social interaction.5

Few disciplines have drawn as much inspiration from Bruits as havemusic studies. For historical musicologists in particular, Attali’s insistencethat music be situated at the center of social history represented a clarioncall upon the book’s publication in 1985, made all the more resonant by

42; Andrew Leyshon, “Time-Space (and Digital) Compression: Software Formats, MusicalNetworks, and the Reorganisation of the Music Industry,” Environment and Planning A 33, no. 1(2001), pp. 49–77; and Tim J. Anderson, Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and PostwarAmerican Recording (Minneapolis, 2006); Andrew Blake, Popular Music: The Age of Multimedia(London, 2007).

3. See Michael Bull and Les Back, “Into Sound,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Bulland Back (Oxford, 2003), pp. 1–18; Mark M. Smith, “Introduction,” in Hearing History: AReader, ed. Smith (Athens, Ga., 2004); Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and theTechnology of Fear (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Vincent Meelberg and Marcel Cobussen,“Reflections on Sonic Environments,” Journal of Sonic Studies 1 (Oct. 2011), http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol01/nr01/a10; and The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York,2012). Noise studies have also drawn significantly from Bruits. See for instance Paul HegartyNoise/Music: A History (New York, 2007); Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politicsof Noise, Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, and Hegarty (London, 2012); and Greg Hainge,Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (London, 2013).

4. See Steve Jones, Rock Formation: Music, Technology and Mass Communication (London,1992); Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London, 1999); SteveWaksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience(Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Sterne, “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,” New Media and Society 8(Oct. 2006): 825–42; Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge, Mass.,2009); and Arved Ashby, Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (Berkeley, 2010).

5. See Alan Durant, “Improvisation in the Political Economy of Music,” in Music and thePolitics of Culture, ed. Christopher Norris (New York, 1989), pp. 252–82; John Corbett,“Ephemera Underscored: Writing Around Free Improvisation,” in Jazz Among the Discourses,ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, N.C., 1995), pp. 217–42; Ajay Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note:Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice (New York, 2000), pp. 200–05; and David Borgo, Sync orSwarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (New York, 2007), pp. 87–88.

E R I C D R O T T is associate professor of music theory at the University of Texasat Austin. He is author of Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics andPolitical Culture in France, 1968 –1981 (2011). He is currently working on a bookexamining the ontologies of musical genre.

2 Eric Drott / Rereading Jacques Attali’s Bruits

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musicology’s stubborn attachment to ideals of aesthetic autonomy thatother disciplines had long since discarded. Yet it is not just the conjugationof music history with social history that explains the fascination Bruitsholds for music scholars. It is also the manner in which these two spheresare conjoined. In Bruits the relationship conventionally held to exist be-tween musical and socioeconomic spheres is inverted. Music no longerfunctions as a medium that passively registers the influence of extrinsicforces but as an augur, its sonic patterns providing a presentiment of somefuture socioeconomic order. “Music is prophecy” he declares at the open-ing of the book (N, p. 11).6 And in the chapters that follow he endeavors tomake good on this claim, most notably in his attempt to limn the contoursof an emerging society of composition toward the end of the book.7 Yet thisis only the most striking instance of a provocative gesture that Attali per-forms repeatedly in the pages of Bruits, as he turns the traditional Marxianunderstanding of the relation between base and superstructure on its head.Music, long seen as standing at a remove from political economy, is insteadplaced squarely at its center.

For scholars persuaded of music’s social efficacy, of its ability to actupon and perhaps even change the world, Attali’s Bruits has proven in-valuable. This is most evident in connection to the new musicology. In theyears since its emergence in the late 1980s, this current in North Americanmusic studies has frequently availed itself of Attali’s text, from Susan Mc-Clary’s postface to the English translation of Bruits to the present day.8

Consider, for instance, Lawrence Kramer’s introduction to the 2009 vol-

6. “La musique est prophetie” (B, p. 23).7. Attali’s identification of a utopian dimension in music calls to mind the work of

Theodor Adorno, another touchstone in music studies’ return to the social in recent decades.For Adorno, however, it was necessary for the promesse de bonheur that music holds forth toremain exactly that—a promise—if it was to avoid degenerating into self-deceptive consolation,a means of reconciliation with the benighted social reality whose negation was the propervocation of music. See, for instance, Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. RobertHullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 32–33. In contrast to Adorno’s characteristic pessimismAttali evinces what may seem a refreshing—or perhaps naive—confidence in the realizability ofmusic’s utopian moment. But, as I argue below, this confidence may also be seen as a rhetoricaldevice whose purpose was to garner support for the ideological program Attali advanced inleague with the Parti socialiste.

8. McClary, “Afterword: The Politics of Silence and Sound,” in Attali, Noise, pp. 149–58. Seealso McClary, “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year,” in Music and Society, pp.13–62 and Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991); Robert Walser,“Rhythm, Rhyme and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy, Ethnomusicology 39 (Spring–Summer 1995): 193–217; Robert Fink, “Beethoven Antihero: Sex, Violence, and the Aesthetics ofFailure, or Listening to the Ninth Symphony as Postmodern Sublime,” in Beyond StructuralListening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio (Berkeley, 2004), pp. 109–53;and Richard Leppert, “Music ‘Pushed to the Edge of Existence’ (Adorno, Listening, and theQuestion of Hope),” Cultural Critique 60 (Spring 2005): 92–133.

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ume Musical Meaning and Human Values. To buttress his hypothesis thatmusic can serve as a force for what he terms “transformative reflection,”Kramer refers readers to Bruits, promising that they will find there anaccount of music’s capacity “to anticipate cultural and social change.”9 It isnot hard to come by similar occasions where Attali’s work has been calledupon to demonstrate music’s precedence relative to socioeconomic pro-cesses. Writing in the late 1990s, Robert Fink questioned the utility ofcrypto-Marxist analyses in elucidating classical music’s declining stature,maintaining that “we are much more cautious now about questions ofpriority in the base-superstructure relationship.” Such skepticism waswarranted because “postmodern analyses of cultural production”—namely those presented in Bruits—revealed that “changes in the culturalsphere often precede and presage transformations in the materialsphere.”10 Nor is recourse to Attali’s text restricted to self-identified newmusicologists. Lydia Goehr, writing from a very different disciplinarystandpoint, invokes Attali’s text in defending the political value of musicalautonomy. Music’s ability to “bring about a better world,” she contends,derives from its ability to juxtapose an image of “the world as it is” with “analternative vision of the world.”11 How, exactly, does music accomplish thisfeat? Goehr, like so many others, quotes Attali—namely his remark thatmusic “is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the every-day, the herald of the future.”12

What the foregoing indicates is the degree to which Attali’s assertionshave become a commonplace within contemporary music studies, to thepoint that they are regarded as self-evident. It is as if the citation of Bruitssuffices to prove the veracity of the proposition that music—and culturemore generally—has some purchase on social relations.13 But what does

9. Lawrence Kramer, “Introduction,” in Musical Meaning and Human Values, ed. KeithChapin and Kramer (Bronx, 2009), pp. 2, 185 n. 2.

10. Fink, “Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of theCanon,” American Music 16 (Summer 1998): 143.

11. Lydia Goehr, “Political Music and the Politics of Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism 52 (Winter 1994): 106.

12. Ibid.13. This is not to say that the Anglo-American reception of Bruits has been universally

positive. Critical assessments of the book may be found in Douglas Collins, “Ritual Sacrificeand the Political Economy of Music,” Perspectives of New Music 24 (Autumn–Winter 1985): 14–23; Georgina Born, “Modern Music Culture: On Shock, Pop, and Synthesis,” New Formations,no. 2 (Summer 1987): 51–78; Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and HollywoodFilm Music (Princeton, N.J., 1992), esp. p. 175 n. 17; Goodman, Sonic Warfare, pp. 49–53; andRobin James, “Neoliberal Noise: Attali, Foucault & the Biopolitics of Uncool,” Culture, Theoryand Critique 55 (April 2014): 138–58. Of particular interest are critiques addressing the book’skey theses (the reversal of base/superstructure relations, repetition, the politics of noise). Theseinclude the reservations Frederic Jameson voices vis-a-vis the “‘reciprocal interaction’” model


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one find when one, as so many authors instruct, consults Bruits for thepromised explanation of music’s alleged ability “to anticipate social andcultural change”? Surprisingly little. For all its suasive power, for all theanecdotal evidence that Attali accumulates in its pages, the book neverfully spells out the mechanisms by which music performs this propheticfunction. To be sure, Bruits presents a compelling model of style change inmusic, as the very elements that disturb a prevailing musical code (that is,noise) come to serve as the basis for a new code. Analogous processes mayalso be identified in the transition from one social order to another, as thedemands made by hitherto marginalized groups introduce noise that dis-rupts the monologic discourse of power. What remains unclear is how,exactly, these two processes connect to one another. Equally unclear is whytransformations specific to music should prevail over transformations un-folding elsewhere in society. The closest Attali comes to providing supportfor this claim is when he writes that music “is ahead of the rest of societybecause it explores in a given code the entire field of possibilities muchfaster than material reality can.”14 This is a tenuous thread on which tohang such a far-reaching thesis. If music’s priority results from the easewith which it can combine and recombine itself, then by the same logic onecould claim an equally privileged role for mathematics, the visual arts, orany other form of imaginative activity. Even if we were to concede thatmusic’s fluidity and seeming immateriality make its combinatorial poten-tial special in some way, this still leaves unanswered how we are to deter-mine which configuration, out of the innumerable variety a musical codeis capable of generating, is the one that heralds the social order to come.

This article seeks to make sense of the logical gap that lies at the centerof Bruits by reading it against the backdrop of political debates taking placein France at the time of its publication in 1977. Attali’s position as one of theleading intellectuals of the Parti socialiste, and his involvement in disputespitting the party against various rivals—above all, the Parti communiste—

of base/superstructure relations advanced by Attali (Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” in Attali,Noise, p. xi). See also Robert Fink’s critique of the treatment of repetition in Bruits, namely theway in which Attali equates this phenomenon with obsession and, ultimately, the death drive;Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley, 2005). Andsee Jonathan Sterne’s claim that noise in contemporary capitalism no longer performs theresistant functions that Attali ascribes to it, having been neutralized by technologies seeking lessits “total eradication” than its effective management (Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format[Durham, N.C., 2012], p. 124). I will return to Sterne’s critique at the end of this article.

14. “Elle est en avance sur le reste de la societe, parce qu’elle explore, dans un code donne,tout le champ du possible, plus vite que la realite materielle ne peut le faire” (B, p. 23); and seeN, p. 11. A similar claim is found in B, p. 12; and see N, p. 5.


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find expression in a number of arguments Attali advances in Bruits and inkey presuppositions that underlie his conception of music’s relation tosociety. Although consideration of such interparty quarrels may appearto be of only narrow, historic interest, having little bearing on the uses towhich his work has been put within the Anglo-American academy, closerscrutiny of the ideological prise de position enacted by the text would sug-gest otherwise, particularly considering how readily so many North Amer-ican music scholars have subscribed to its core antimaterialist claims.Conversely, resituating Bruits in relation to the ideological struggles out ofwhich it was born throws into relief what was at stake in these struggles andwhat consequences have followed from the Socialists’ triumph over theirCommunist adversaries in their dispute over leadership of the French left.To disclose the latent political agenda hidden behind the book’s manifestone, the first half of this article locates Bruits within the context of Attali’scontemporaneous writings on political economy, above all his 1976 text LaParole et l’outil, whose theses shed light on Attali’s specific contribution tothe ideological reconstruction of the Parti socialiste during the 1970s. Thesecond half of the article turns to the model of socioeconomic changesketched in Bruits, a model that has remained a mainstay of Attali’sthought to the present day—a fact borne out by the heavily revised andupdated version of the book published in 2001, discussed toward the end ofthis article. Taking heed of the particular context out of which Bruits wasborn has profound implications for how we construe Attali’s arguments.What this context throws into relief, in other words, is a subtext that runsjust below the surface of Attali’s book, a subtext that colors not only hisassertion that music possesses special prognostic capacities but also—andmore importantly—the vision of the perfected world he prophesies by wayof its sonorous flux.

Energy/Information/Noise/MusicBy the time Bruits was published in 1977 Jacques Attali was already a

prominent public figure in France, having served for the preceding threeyears as one of Francois Mitterrand’s main economic advisors.15 Initiallyrecruited to help draft the socialist candidate’s platform during his secondbid for the presidency, Attali remained part of Mitterrand’s inner circle

15. See Cyril Auffret, Le Conseiller (Paris, 2009), pp. 45–49. In addition to his associationwith Mitterrand, Attali had gained visibility through the columns he penned for majornewspapers like Le Figaro and Le Monde, and his frequent appearances on such radio andtelevision interview programs as Jacques Chancel’s “Radioscopie” and Bernard Pivot’sApostrophes; see “L’Argent, le fric,” 30 Jan. 1976, Apostrophes, www.ina.fr/video/CPB750, and“Ruses et pouvoir de l’Argent,” 11 Feb. 1977, Apostrophes, www.ina.fr/video/CPB77059749


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even after the latter’s loss to Valery Giscard d’Estaing in the 1974 election.This engagement with the Parti socialiste (PS) came at a time when theparty was undergoing a profound transformation, both ideologically andinstitutionally. The modern Parti socialiste had been ushered into existencein June 1971, when a number of political clubs and small parties of thenon-Communist left amalgamated with what remained of the old socialistparty, the Section Francaise de l’International Ouvrier (SFIO). The fusion ofthese splintered elements to form a new party was born of necessity. By theend of the 1960s the SFIO, the party of Jean Jaures and Leon Blum, had allbut disqualified itself as a credible political force in France. The party’sdeclining support was due in part to its identification with the institutionaldysfunctions of the Fourth Republic, in part to the opportunism of partyleaders, but most of all to its role in conducting France’s colonial war inAlgeria under Prime Minister Guy Mollet in the mid-1950s.16 The newinstitutions and electoral mechanisms put into place with the establish-ment of the Fifth Republic in 1958 further weakened the SFIO. By strength-ening the office of the president relative to parliament, the newconstitution encouraged a polarization of the political field that renderedincreasingly untenable the SFIO’s longstanding strategy of allying withcentrist groups to form “third force” parliamentary majorities eschewingboth the Gaullist Right and the Communist Left.17 In addition, the shiftingbalance of power between president and parliament ill-suited the SFIO,whose power base was rooted not in a centralized party apparatus, but wasspread across a number of fiefdoms controlled by local notables and mu-nicipal party machines.18 Taken together, these factors made the SFIO in-creasingly uncompetitive at a national level. By the end of the 1960s it wasclear that the only way for the Socialists to win power given the FifthRepublic’s institutional constraints was through an alliance with the Particommuniste francais (PCF), their historic freres-enemis.

So it was that one of Mitterrand’s first acts upon assuming leadership ofthe renovated Parti socialiste was to establish an electoral pact with thePCF. The fruit of these efforts was the creation of the Union de la gauche inJune 1972, a tactical alliance ratified by an accord on policies, the Pro-gramme commun de gouvernement, which the unified Left would pursue

16. See Jacques Moreau, “Le Congres d’Epinay-sur-Seine du parti socialiste,” VingtiemeSiecle 65 (Jan.–Mar. 2000): 82, and R. W. Johnson, The Long March of the French Left (NewYork, 1981), p. 155.

17. Alistair M. Cole, “Factionalism, the French Socialist Party, and the Fifth Republic: AnExplanation of Intra-Party Divisions,” European Journal of Political Research 17 (Jan. 1989): 79.

18. David S. Bell and Byron Criddle, The French Socialist Party: Resurgence and Victory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 24-32.


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should it come into power. The Union de la gauche improved the electoralchances of both parties, though it also presented them with hazards. Forthe PCF, the union had the effect of bolstering the party’s main rival,jeopardizing the primacy the Communists had enjoyed within the FrenchLeft since the end of the Second World War. For the PS, the alliance riskedalienating potential supporters, particularly given the suspicion if not out-right hostility the PCF elicited across the entire ideological spectrum, fromGaullists on the right to Maoists, Trotskyists, and Situationists on the left.Underlying this mistrust was a belief that compromise with the PCF wastantamount to capitulation.19 Any concessions on the part of the PS couldbe and were taken as signs that the new party had succumbed to the ideo-logical hegemony of the Parti communiste. Hence the PS was compelled tofind some point(s) of policy or ideology where it visibly departed from itsally, if it was to inoculate itself against charges that partnership with theParti communiste spelled its ineluctable ideological subordination.20

The most prominent marker the PS used to declare its ideological in-dependence from the PCF was autogestion (self-management), an idea thathad first gained a foothold in French intellectual circles via the Socialismeou barbarie? group in the 1950s, but which gained wider currency after theuprising of May–June 1968.21 Identified with the so-called new or secondLeft, the core concern of self-management revolved around the democra-tization of economic decision making, a necessary condition for and cor-ollary to any fundamental transformation in economic relations. No smallpart of the idea’s appeal stemmed from its semiotic indeterminacy.22 In thehands of different activists and intellectuals autogestion took on a range ofdivergent meanings. For some it represented the relatively modest idea ofworker control within enterprises or production units; for others it repre-sented a model of economic governance that offered a direct, democraticalternative to the central planning of state socialism; for still others it rep-resented a new form of sociality whose effects would extend beyond theeconomic realm, transforming every dimension of human existence (includ-ing cultural production). Yet it was precisely because of its availability to so

19. See Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Anti-Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (Oxford, 2004), pp. 125–6.

20. The Parti communiste broke from the SFIO during the 1920 Tours Congress, the resultof a schism between supporters of the Third International and militants who balked at theconditions Comintern leaders demanded of member parties; see Alain Bergounioux and GerardGrunberg, Les Socialistes francais et le pouvoir: l’ambition et le remords (Paris, 2005), pp. 79–85.

21. See Helene Hatzfeld, “L’Autogestion dans la recomposition d’un champ politique degauche,” in Autogestion: le dernier utopie? ed. Frank Georgi (Paris, 2003), pp. 173–74.

22. See ibid., p. 173, and Serge Berstein, “Les Usages Politiques de l’autogestion,” inAutogestion, pp. 159–60.


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many competing interpretations that autogestion itself became the stake invarious intra-party rivalries that roiled the PS during the 1970s, as differentfactions struggled over the young party’s ideological orientation.23

Like the discourse on autogestion, Attali’s work in the mid- to late 1970sparticipated in the Socialists’ efforts to carve out a distinctive ideologicalniche. His economic writings in particular reflected a clear desire to gobeyond the Marxist vulgate promulgated by the PCF, even as Attali en-deavored to maintain his anticapitalist bona fides. The founding docu-ment in this project of ideological self-positioning was the text Attali wroteimmediately before Bruits, his 1976 book La Parole et l’outil (The Word andthe Tool).24 In many respects, La Parole et l’outil was even more ambitiousthan Bruits, proposing nothing less than a revisionist account of moderneconomic theory. The key move Attali makes in this earlier text is to rein-scribe established economic models within a framework structuredaround two principal axes, those of energy and information. While Attalitreats the two determinants as intertwined—energy must be structured tobe useful for productive activity, while information requires energy for itstransmission and circulation—he nonetheless assigns them circumscribedroles within his economic model. Attali defines energy as “a potential thatallows the displacement and/or modification of material.”25 As such it pro-vides the motive force for economic production, be it manifest in the livinglabor of workers, fixed in the dead labor of capital, or held in reserve in theform of natural resources. Information, by contrast, is cast as “the form ororder that is discernible in all matter or energy.”26 It is what gives energy itsdirection and confers value and meaning upon the dumb quiddity of ma-terial objects. Much space is devoted in La Parole et l’outil to showing howthese fundamental terms underlie traditional economic categories. Price,for instance, is cast as a specific form of information, one that “organizesthe allocation of available goods, savings, or labor, which is to say that itallocates ordered energy and determines the behavior of economic ac-tors.”27 Commodity production, to take another example, is characterizedas the mobilization of energy for the purpose of transforming an object or

23. See Hatzfeld, “L’Autogestion dans la recomposition d’un champ politique de gauche,”pp. 179–80, and David Hanley, Keeping Left? Ceres and the French Socialist Party (Manchester,1986), pp. 106–7.

24. See Attali, La Parole et l’outil (Paris, 1975); hereafter abbreviated PO.25. “On peut definir l’energie comme un potentiel qui permet le deplacement et (ou) la

modification de la matiere” (PO, p. 53).26. “L’Information est la forme ou l’ordre qui est detecte dans toute matiere ou energie” (PO, p. 51).27. “Les prix sont des informations qui organisent la repartition des biens disponibles, de

l’epargne ou du travail, c’est-a-dire qui repartissent de l’energi�informee et determinent lescomportements des agents economiques.” (PO, p. 77).


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group of objects into some other entity, the entire process guided by anexternal source of information (see PO, p. 97). Here as elsewhere the sur-face phenomena of economic life give way at a deeper level to some con-figuration of these two basic determinants.

Subtending the energy/information dialectic sketched in La Parole etl’outil is a structural isomorphism between the two phenomena. Both en-ergy and information, Attali observes, are inextricably bound up with thelevel of entropy present within a given socioeconomic system. The relationof entropy to energy is straightforward. When exploited, the energy storedin a structure disperses, some of it being used for productive work, some ofit being lost as heat. If this process takes place within a closed system, thenthis dispersal will increase the amount of entropy within the system, as thesecond law of thermodynamics stipulates. In the case of information, therelation to entropy is more roundabout, inspired by Claude Shannon’spioneering work in information theory. Shannon famously borrowed thenotion of entropy from thermodynamics in an effort to measure theamount of information contained in messages, an undertaking motivatedby the interest that AT&T, his employer at Bell Laboratories, had in max-imizing the efficient use of its existing network of telephone cables. Shan-non’s solution to this problem was to conceive of informationprobabilistically, in terms of the likelihood that any single message will betransmitted out of the entire range of possible messages a code can gener-ate. The more probable a message, the less information it conveys; the lessprobable, the more information. Entropy is thus linked with informationinsofar as the amount of information a message carries is proportional toits improbability—that is, to its degree of randomness or unpredictabilitywith respect to some governing code.28

Attali’s identification of entropy as the linchpin of the information/energy dialectic is notable, not least because it provides the motor foreconomic change within his historical model. The irreversible accumula-tion of entropy that results from the expenditure of energy for work im-poses a certain direction on economic development as well as certainconstraints upon it; beyond the costs incurred as a result of environmentaldegradation, the depletion of energy reserves places a fixed upper limit ongrowth. To use Attali’s information-theoretical language, the destructur-ing of chemical bonds that takes place when one burns coal, oil, or otherfossil fuels involves a transformation of in-formed energy (energie infor-mee) into unformed energy; as its hitherto ordered elements become dis-

28. See Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication(Urbana, Ill., 1949).


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ordered, an energy source is deprived of its capacity to carry outproductive work. Nonetheless, there exists the possibility of counteractingthis apparently irreversible tendency toward entropy. If energy consump-tion inevitably leads to an increase in the disorder of a system, informationcan reverse this secular trend by making the adjustments necessary tomaintain a certain level of order. Unlike the consumption of energy, theconsumption of information has the effect of reducing entropy, a fact thatled certain researchers to describe it as a form of negative entropy (or“negentropy”).29 Energy and information thus represent countervailingforces: energy pushing inexorably toward greater disorder and informa-tion pulling in the opposite direction, toward greater order. It is the bal-ance of these forces within a historic conjuncture that determines thenature and direction of socioeconomic change.

Facilitating Attali’s integration of information theory into his economicthought were the inroads this new science had already made in Frenchintellectual circles by the mid-1970s. As Bernard Geoghegan has docu-mented, a number of concepts, models, and techniques associated withcybernetics and information theory first infiltrated French Theorythrough the support that figures like Claude Levi-Strauss and Roman Ja-kobson had received from the Rockefeller Foundation during their war-time exile in the United States. As one of the main backers of the newsciences of communication and control, the Rockefeller Foundation pro-moted work in this area because of its promise as a means whereby a morerational and less conflictual postwar order might be established. Enlisted aspart of a Cold War strategy that sought to supplant Marxism as the linguafranca of Western European intellectual life, cybernetics and informationtheory took on a very different guise once assimilated into the structuralistproject spearheaded by Levi-Strauss and Jakobson.30 Cybernetic modelsthat imagined humans to be just another component of a complex controlsystem, indistinguishable from machines and other nonhuman actors,found a distorted echo in the work of thinkers who bracketed off as irrel-evant questions of individual agency and subjectivity.31 But if cybernetics

29. This idea was first advanced in Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings:Cybernetics and Society (Boston, 1950), p. 21. It was developed further in the work of MichelSerres, whose thought was key in shaping Attali’s metaphoric extensions of information theoryto explain economic and musical processes; see for instance Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature,Science, Philosophy ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore, 1982), pp. 73–75, 81–82.

30. See Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French Theory:Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus,” Critical Inquiry 38 (Autumn 2011): 96–126.

31. See Celine Lafontaine, “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory’” Theory CultureSociety 24 (Sept. 2007): 32.


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and information theory were so thoroughly absorbed into structuralism asto be rendered virtually unrecognizable, they exercised a more overt influ-ence on the human and natural sciences during a second phase of theirFrench reception. The key catalyst in this later popularization of cyberneticthought in France was a small circle known as the Groupe de dix, whichcounted among its members sociologists (Edgar Morin), biologists (HenriAtlan), and political figures (Michel Rocard), as well as the young JacquesAttali. Active during the first half of the 1970s, the Groupe de dix was in-spired by Heinrich von Foerster’s work in “second cybernetics,” particu-larly his theories concerning self-organizing systems.32 The self-production and reproduction of various organisms—whether biological,social, or economic—became a recurrent theme in the writings of variousmembers of the group. Attali was no exception, as his concern for thenegentropic properties of information makes clear. Moreover, the intel-lectual heritage that linked poststructural thinkers to American cybernetictheory via their structuralist forebears facilitated Attali’s subsequent ap-propriation of the work of Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard andothers into La Parole et l’outil and later publications. This shared par-entage ensured that the framework elaborated in La Parole et l’outilwould prove receptive to the various poststructural grafts it received inBruits and beyond.

The ink on the manuscript of La Parole et l’outil had barely dried whenAttali began laying the groundwork for his next book. In 1976 Louis Dan-drel, then director of France-Musique, invited Attali to produce a series ofradio programs exploring the relation between music and power (see B2, p.9).33 Out of the hastily sketched notes Attali composed for these broadcastswas born Bruits.34 That Attali’s reflections on music should bear the im-

32. See Brigitte Chamak, Le Groupe des dix, ou les avatars des rapports entre science etpolitique (Monaco, 1997), esp. pp. 205–8. See also Frederique Jourdaa, La Planete Attali (Paris,2010), pp. 146–54.

33. See also Jourdaa, La Planete Attali p. 162.34. An extensive publicity campaign accompanied the publication of Bruits. Apart from the

broadcasts on France-Musique, which functioned as an advance promotion for the book, Attaliwas featured in a series of profiles and interviews in the press in the months following itspublication. See for instance Attali, “Musique et societe: entretien avec Jacques Attali,”interview by Agathe Malet-Buisson, Magazine Litteraire 121 (Feb. 1977): 60–63; “A Propos deBruits : entretien avec Jacques Attali,” interview by the editorial board, Presences de la Musique13 (July 1977): 14–15; and “La Musique apres Mai 68,” Panorama de la musique et des instruments23 (May–June 1978): 10-12. Attali was also invited to edit a special dossier on music in themagazine Nouvelles litteraires, which appeared in print at roughly the same time as Bruits; seeAttali, “Musique, argent, pouvoir,” Nouvelles litteraires, no. 2571 (Feb. 1977): 17–22. His workwas also the subject of a televised round-table discussion featuring Andre Glucksmann, GuyLardreau, Ivo Malec, and Michel Serres, in addition to the author himself; see L’Homme enquestion, 24 Apr. 1977, FR3, www.ina.fr/video/CPC77058857/jacques-attali-video.html


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print of La Parole et l’outil is therefore not at all striking, given how closelythe former followed on the heels of the latter. What is striking is the preciseway in which this influence manifested itself in Bruits. Recall that Attali’sefforts at locating a homology linking energy and information hinged onhis adoption of information theory and on the terminological slippage thatthis theory afforded, between informational entropy on the one hand andthermodynamic entropy on the other. Yet the adoption of this theoryafforded a second, no less important point of terminological slippage, onethat subtends the extended musical metaphor elaborated in Bruits. A coreconcern of information theory, after all, revolves around the problem ofnoise; the effect that external disturbances have upon the transmission ofinformation and how different communication systems can minimize theeffect of such interference. By conflating this specific conception of noisewith the more commonplace understanding of the term, Attali effects asmooth if not entirely seamless transition from the economic concerns ofLa Parole et l’outil to the musical ones of Bruits. Indeed, it is hardly anexaggeration to describe the later book as a rewriting of the earlier one,with the figure of music taking over the role previously assigned to theinformation/energy pair. Numerous parallels support this reading. Just asinformation is capable of imposing order and thus forestalling the increaseof entropy, so too is music. “In every network, as in every message,” Attaliwrites, “music can create order.”35 And just as the noise external to a systemis able to give rise to new forms of social organization via the principle of“order by noise” (discussed below), so too is the noise external to a musicalcode able to give rise to novel forms of sonic organization. Music, in short,assumes an allegorical function in Bruits. Which means that Attali’s state-ment that Bruits represents an attempt to theorize society “through music”is not entirely accurate because music already stands in for somethingother than itself in the text. And that something is the information/energydialectic outlined in La Parole et l’outil.

That information theory proved crucial to Attali’s conception of musicwill come as little surprise to readers familiar with Bruits, considering thatAttali explicitly cites Shannon’s language of signal, noise, and code in de-scribing music as a form of communication (see B, p. 66 and N, p. 33). Evenso, the broader significance that this theory holds for his reading of music’srelation to society only emerges when the historicity of Attali’s model ofmusical and social change is taken into account. Notable in this regard isthe asymmetry established between information and energy in La Parole et

35. “Dans tout reseau, comme tout message la musique peut etre creatrice d’ordre” (B, p.66); and see N, p. 33.


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l’outil and that is sustained throughout Bruits. Even though these twoterms stand in a dialectical relation, information clearly remains the priv-ileged of the two, a means not just of offsetting the inefficiency, waste, anddisorder that energy consumption generates but also of fostering richer,more complex forms of human interaction. Moreover, the key to socialliberation in Attali’s model resides in the liberation of information.Whereas capitalism impedes its circulation, drawing profit from its un-even distribution in society, socialism—as conceived by Attali—insteadseeks to decentralize its flow, thereby releasing its full creative potential(see PO, p. 232). But above all, the valorization of information as a force forsocial progress—explicit in La Parole et l’outil, implicit in Bruits—clearlyresponded to transformations then taking place in the French economy.One sign of this economic restructuring was the changing composition ofthe workforce during France’s postwar boom years. Particularly signifi-cant was the expansion of the strata variously referred to as the new middleclasses or nouvelle petite bourgeoisie, a catch-all category that included en-gineers, technicians, teachers, office workers, and other occupations en-gaged in intellectual as opposed to manual labor. This heterogeneousgroup doubled in size from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, growing from9 percent to 17 percent of the working population and, as a consequence,occupied an increasingly important place within the social, economic, andcultural life of France. By contrast, the industrial working class during thesame period remained more or less stagnant.36 While blue-collar workersmaintained their numerical preeminence well into the 1970s, by the timeAttali was writing Bruits the slow but steady decline of this group as apercentage of the workforce was already underway. The different trajecto-ries traced by these two groups during the postwar period goes some waytowards explaining why Attali would accord information so privileged arole in his model of socioeconomic progress. Associated with the mostdynamic elements of French society, information seemed to hold outbetter prospects for France’s march towards socialism than did energy,the latter tainted by its association with the dumb, brute force of heavyindustry.

But there was also a strategic element at play in Attali’s valorization ofthe information sector, insofar as members of the new middle classes madeup a growing share of the Parti socialiste’s electorate during the 1970s. Evenas support for the party among blue-collar workers remained stable duringthis period, comprising roughly a third of its vote, the backing it received

36. See Henri Mendras and Cole, Social Change in Modern France: Towards a CulturalAnthropology of the Fifth Republic (Cambridge, 1991), p. 35.


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from professional, managerial, and white-collar employees increasedmarkedly, going from 28 percent in 1968 to 41 percent in 1978.37 This de-mographic remaking of the Parti socialiste points to an ulterior motive forthe prominence Attali grants information. That is, his privileging of infor-mation did not simply respond to changing economic realities but super-imposed upon these realities a certain vision of social relations, one thataccorded with Attali’s political interests as a member of the Parti socialisteand his social interests as a public intellectual. By stressing the importanceof information, Attali implicitly stressed the importance of those groupsinvolved in its production, circulation, and manipulation—in otherwords, those groups identified with the nouvelle petite bourgeoisie. His pri-oritization of the information sector may therefore be read as a thinly-veiled overture to precisely those constituencies crucial to the Socialists’future electoral chances. But the elevation of mental over manual labor inhis economic theory had the added advantage of challenging the standardMarxist narrative of sociohistorical change, a narrative that underpinnedthe policies of the Parti communiste and constituted a significant part of itselectoral appeal. Whereas the Communists cast the working class as thegroup charged with bringing the capitalist order to its inevitable end, At-tali’s narrative instead cast the new middle classes in this role. In this waythe social hierarchy that had hitherto set the proletariat both apart fromand above potential allies in the struggle against capitalist exploitation wasturned on its head. Information workers (the cornerstone of the socialistcoalition) displaced the industrial proletariat (the cornerstone of the com-munist coalition) as the presumptive subject of history.38

A similar point may be made with regard to Bruits. Just as the economicframework expounded in La Parole et l’outil was itself a stake in the ongo-ing contest between the Parti socialiste and the Parti communiste, so too didBruits participate in this internecine struggle over the leadership of theFrench left. In this regard, the inversion of the base/superstructure relationthat Attali effects within his account of music history was not an innocentor impartial gesture. Rather, his assertion that music does not reflect butanticipates social change took direct aim at the view of culture prevalent

37. See Bell and Criddle, The French Socialist Party, p. 196. The increasingly middle-classcharacter of the party was even more pronounced among its militants and leadership. SeePatrick Hardouin, “Les Caracteristiques sociologiques du parti socialiste,” Revue Francaise deScience Politique 28, no. 2 (1978): 252–3. See also Hugues Portelli, “Nouvelles Classes moyenneset nouveau parti socialiste,” in L’Univers politique des classes moyennes, ed. Georges Lavau,Gerard Grunberg, and Nonna Mayer (Paris, 1983), p. 259.

38. This reversal was not lost on Communist critics of Bruits, who were critical of (amongother things) the near total absence of the working class from Attali’s social history of music.See Richard Crevier, “Brouillages,” France Nouvelle, 17 Jan. 1977, p. 38.


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within French communism, characterized as it was by a rigid, hideboundmaterialism. At the same time, this inversion reproduced within the cul-tural sphere the same asymmetry between mental and manual labor foundin Attali’s conception of the modern capitalist economy. His assertion ofthe primacy of the superstructure over the base was tantamount to anassertion of the primacy of those groups that work within and upon thesuperstructure. All those whose work does not take place within the em-pyrean realm of ideas and information but within the grubby, terrestrialrealm of material production are demoted to a subordinate positionwithin this vision of the social world.

Echoing this asymmetry between mental and manual work is the dif-ferent status accorded to composers and performers as political agents inBruits. Discussing how music enters commodity production under capi-talism, Attali observes that this form of human activity sits uneasily withthe distinction between productive and unproductive labor. In Marxianeconomic theory labor is only productive if it increases surplus-value,which is only the case when individuals sell their labor in exchange forwages. The same holds true for music. No less than with other forms ofeconomic activity, musical labor is productive only when musicians workas wage earners employed in a profit-seeking enterprise. It is not difficult tothink of situations that might satisfy this condition: examples include full-or part-time orchestral performers, members of opera companies, studiomusicians, house bands in bars and nightclubs, Broadway musical per-formers, and so forth. In the majority of these cases, Attali remarks, it is theperformer, not the composer, who enters into the capitalist labor process:

The productive workers who create money are the performers, andthose who manufacture instruments and publish scores. By contrast,when the composer receives royalties on a work that has been soldand performed, he remains strangely detached from the wealth gener-ated, since as an independent craftsman he is outside the capitalistmode of production.39

Inasmuch as composers receive their income not from the sale of theirlabor, but from the sale of the products of their labor, they remain unpro-ductive in the sense that they do not contribute to the accumulation ofcapital. Moreover, the fact that composers retain control of the means of

39. “Les travailleurs productifs createurs d’argent sont les interpretes, et ceux qui ontproduit les instruments et les partitions. Le compositeur, lui, lorsqu’il recoit des droits d’auteursur l’œuvre vendue et representee, reste etrangement exterieur a la richesse qu’il impliquepuisque, artisan independant, il est hors du mode de production capitaliste” (B, pp. 79–80); andsee N, p. 39.


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musical production—brains, hands, pen, and manuscript paper—meansthey are able to dispose of the products of their labor freely.

Clearly, the portrait that Attali paints of the fate of the composer undercapitalism ignores many complicating factors. Not least of these is the factthat most composers subsidize their creative activities by working as wageearners (usually as teachers or performers). Nor does it take into accountpower relations within the music industry. The chokehold that publishersand other intermediaries have exerted on distribution since the dawn ofthe modern music industry has meant that most artists have never been ina position to claw back the surplus value generated in production. This hasonly ever been a privilege enjoyed by a vanishingly small number of super-star performers.40 But if one concedes these points and accepts for the sakeof argument Attali’s contention that composers stand “outside the capi-talist mode of production,” then a curious paradox emerges. On the onehand, composers are themselves unproductive. On the other hand, theworks they turn out provide the basis for productive musical labor, thescores that performers execute in exchanging their labor power for wages.Thus, even if composers are located beyond the pale of capitalism, theyremain key to its functioning, at least within the musical sphere. For thisreason Attali identifies in the figure of the composer—and in those occu-pational categories that perform analogous functions in other sectors ofthe economy—a weak link in the late capitalist system of commodity pro-duction, a point vulnerable to attack. By furnishing the prototypes repro-duced en masse by industry, workers of this sort—what Attali refers to asmatriceurs—impede capitalism’s otherwise unchecked colonization of allareas of economic and social life: “the remuneration specific to authors hasconsiderably blocked the control of music by capital, protecting creativity andpermitting even today the relations of power to be reversed.”41 For thisreason it is in the interest of those endeavoring to undermine capitalism toextend composers’ unusual status to other segments of the workforce, toother domains where the contributions made by creative workers are vital:“the study of music is essential: if the producers of matrices can in thefuture gain the same rights as musical composers, and if payment on the

40. See Matt Stahl, Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work (Durham,N.C., 2013).

41. “La remuneration specifique des auteurs a freine considerablement le controle de lamusique par le capitale, protege la creativite et permet meme aujourd’hui aux rapports depouvoirs . . . de s’inverser” (B, pp. 81–82). Massumi translates the term matriceur as “molder,”which accurately conveys the sense that the actors in question produce the original matrices ormolds used in serialized mass production (N, p. 40). What this translation fails to capture,however, is the musical connotations of the word matrice, which in French may also refer to amaster recording.


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basis of use by others is able to replace the monopolization [of research anddevelopment], then the results of the economy of music will be able tospread throughout society.”42

A number of objections may be raised against Attali’s identification ofcomposers and other cognate professions as the primary agents of politicalchange. Not only does it glorify rent-seeking behavior (hardly the mostprogressive solution to the depredations of capitalism), but it also fails toaccount for the possibility that this privileged category may simply consti-tute the latest incarnation of the labor aristocracy, a fraction more con-cerned with its material well-being than radical social change. But what iscrucial to note is that this analysis likewise elevates mental labor over man-ual labor, not only by treating intellectual production as a catalyst foreconomic development, but also by casting it as a force that has the poten-tial to disrupt and even undermine the capitalist mode of production.Composers and performers assume here the roles that intellectual andindustrial workers occupy elsewhere. Like their blue-collar counterparts,performers find themselves obliged to sell their labor power in order tosurvive, which, according to Attali, narrows their margin of political ma-neuver. By contrast, composers, like other creative and intellectual work-ers, operate from a position of relative strength. Inasmuch as they exercisesome control over their work, and inasmuch as that work fuels commodityproduction, they possess a form of leverage their blue-collar brothers andsisters lack. As was the case in Attali’s reading of economic relations, hisreading of musical relations turns on its head the hierarchy of social classesto which the Parti communiste adhered. It is no longer the industrial work-ing class (or their musical analogue, the performer) that is extolled as theforce that will one day topple capitalism; it is the new class of intellectualand creative workers, exemplified by the composer, that is accorded thisparticular honor.

Aestheticizing CrisisSo where does noise figure in all of this? Answering this question is more

challenging than might first appear, given the protean quality noise as-sumes in Bruits. It is helpful to bear in mind in this regard something thathas been lost in translation, namely that the original title of Attali’s book isBruits with an s—that is to say noises, not noise in the singular. It is there-fore to be expected that a wide range of meanings would accrue to this

42. “L’etude de la musique est essentielle: si les matriceurs . . . peuvent a l’avenir obtenir lesmemes droits que les auteurs, et si le monopole est remplace par une remuneration sur l’usagepar d’autres, alors les resultats de l’economie de la musique pourront se generaliser” (B, pp.81-82); and see N, p. 40.


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signifier. In addition to the familiar definitions from music and commu-nications as discussed above, Attali advances a number of less conven-tional, more imaginative interpretations of noise in the pages of Bruits. Ofthese, six stand out:

1. Noise as an index of life. This is the conception with which Attalibegins his book, in setting the noise of life against the silence of death: “Ourscience has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate thesenses, forgetting that life is noisy and that death alone is silent: noises ofwork, noises of men, and noises of animals. Noises bought, sold, or for-bidden. Nothing essential happens where noise isn’t present.”43

2. Noise as originary chaos, preceding the institution of social order.“With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With musicpower is born and its opposite: subversion.”44

3. Noise as unformed energy. To be noted is the parallelism between thetreatment of noise in Bruits and energy in La Parole et l’outil—a parallelismthat, while never explicitly drawn, is nonetheless clear. Just as commoditiesare defined in the latter as an ordering of energy by means of information,music in Bruits is described as “noise given form by a code.”45

4. Noise as violence. “Noise is in itself violence: it disturbs,” Attali re-marks. “To make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, tokill.”46 It is this recoding of noise that allows Attali to map informationtheory onto Rene Girard’s work on the social function of ritual sacrifice inBruits, one of the more striking moves he makes in the book.47 The regu-lated, institutionalized form that the sacrificial act assumes in traditionalsocieties circumscribes violence, staving off an escalating spiral of reprisaland counterreprisal by redirecting these energies toward a designatedscapegoat. Similarly music, by imparting an order to noise, is able to cir-

43. “Notre science a toujours voulu surveiller, compter, abstraire et castrer les sens, enoubliant que la vie est bruyante et que seule la mort est silencieuse : bruits du travail, bruits deshommes et bruits des betes. Bruits achetes, vendus ou interdits. Rien ne se passe d’essentiel oule bruit ne soit present” (B, p. 7); and see N, p. 3. This construction of noise is clearly inspiredby Michel Serres’s work.

44. “Avec le bruit est ne le desordre et son contraire: le monde. Avec la musique est ne lepouvoir est son contraire: la subversion” (B, p. 13); and see N, p. 6.

45. “Un bruit mis en forme selon un code” (B, p. 50); and see N, p. 25. Compare this to thedescription of the commodity in La Parole et l’outil as “energie informee” (PO, p. 97).

46. “Le bruit est en soi violence: il derange. Faire du bruit, c’est rompre une transmission,debrancher, tuer” (B, p. 53); and see N, p. 26.

47. See Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977). OnAttali’s significant debt to Girard, see Collins, “Ritual Sacrifice and the Political Economy ofMusic,” p. 19.


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cumscribe the metaphoric violence noise evokes: “music is a simulacrum ofthe channelization of noise and image of sacrifice.”48

5. Noise as catalyst. Noise, as Paul Hegarty has observed, is a relationalconcept, defined “according to presumptions” that “vary according to his-torical, geographical, and cultural location.”49 Whether or not some eventis identified as noise thus depends on the particular circumstances inwhich it occurs. Noise’s status is not fixed: it can always be recoded asmusical, as something desirable, in the same way that music can always berecoded as noise, as undesirable. The noisiness of noise is only ever con-tingent. As such, the transformation of inchoate, meaningless noise intomeaningful sound is an important force for music-historical change.“Subversion in musical production always comes back to the opposition ofa new syntax to one that is in place, from whose perspective it is a noise.”50

Indeed, the relational and contingent status of noise means that it may beconstrued as a potential source of information, one that prevailing codeshave yet to assimilate: “noise creates meaning: . . . the interruption of amessage signifies the interdiction of the meaning broadcasted, censorshipand scarcity.”51

6. Noise as catastrophe. Beyond a certain point noise may no longersimply corrupt or distort communication but prevent it from taking placeat all. Under such conditions the prevalence of noise inhibits the operationof existing codes, depriving them of their force. In a dialectical reversal, theobliteration of determinate meaning via noise clears a space for the cre-ation of radically new forms of value and significance: “the very absence ofmeaning, in pure noise or in the senseless repetition of a message . . .liberates the imagination of the listener. The absence of meaning is thus thepresence of all meanings, absolute ambiguity, construction beyond mean-ing.”52 Far from a purely destructive event, the drowning out of a code bynoise is capable of giving rise to a new code, a new form of social, eco-nomic, or musical organization. This is the principle of order from noisethat features prominently in Bruits and other works of Attali’s, a key in-

48. “La musique est simulacre de canalisation du bruit et image de sacrifice” (B, p. 53); andsee N, p. 26.

49. Hegarty, Noise/Music, p. 3.50. “La subversion dans la production musicale revient a opposer une syntaxe nouvelle a

celle en place, a etre, pour eux, un bruit” (B, p. 69); and see N, p. 34.51. “Le bruit cree un sens: . . . parce que l’interruption d’un message signifie l’interdiction

du sens diffuse, la censure et la rarete” (B, p. 67); N, p. 33.52. “L’absence meme de sens, dans le bruit pur ou dans la repetition insensee d’un message

. . . libere l’imagination de l’auditeur. L’absence de sens est alors presence de tous les sens,ambiguıte absolue, construction hors du sens.” (B, pp. 67–68); and see N, p 33. See also B, p. 243and N, p. 122.


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sight of von Foerster’s second cybernetics as mediated by the Groupe dedix.

The importance of this last way of construing noise—as the instigator ofcrises out of which newer, more complex forms of organization issueforth—cannot be emphasized enough. The idea that noise might not onlybe a disruptive but also a generative force provides Bruits with an explan-atory model for large-scale historical transformations. That is, the creationof order out of noise accounts for the cycle of destruction and reconstruc-tion that drives the passage through the four historical regimes identifiedin Bruits: from sacrifice, through representation and repetition, to the finalutopian regime of composition. This generative principle is to be distin-guished from the more gradual evolution musical styles undergo withineach of these social orders, which involves the normalization of elementsalien to a given code. Initially resistant to interpretation, a noise may withtime lose its radical alterity and become just another sign within a systemof signification. But in subsuming this noise the code that invests it withmeaning undergoes a complementary transformation, increasing in com-plexity. This evolutionary process is quite different from the revolutionarychange effected by the principle of order from noise. Whereas the formerdescribes a process of reciprocal modification, as noise and code reshapeone another, the latter describes the dissolution of a code by the over-whelming force of noise, a noise that then serves as the basis for a neworder and a new code.

More significantly, the seductive image of transfigurative disrup-tion—or rather, its idealization in the principle of order from noise—stands at the center of Attali’s economic thought. It forms the basis of hisinterpretation of the dynamic governing economic crises, including theone France and the rest of the industrialized world experienced followingthe oil shock of 1973, a period that coincided with Attali’s formative years asan economist. Adumbrated in La Parole et l’outil, his fascination with theredemptive potential of such crises was spelled out in an article that ap-peared in a special issue of Communications dedicated to the theme of crisisjust months before the publication of Bruits. Tellingly entitled “L’Ordrepar le bruit,” Attali’s article contended that it was not the breach of a stableequilibrium or a disruption in a steady process of growth that definedcrisis, as neoclassical economists maintained.53 What appeared in theirtheories as a disjunction, a break, was in fact regeneration, a phase char-acterized by the “repair of antecedent malfunctions, the resorption of dis-

53. See Attali, “L’Ordre par le bruit: le concept de crise en theorie econimique,”Communications, no. 25 (1976): 86–100.


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equilibria built up during the preceding period of growth.”54 Crisis withinthis account ceases to be something to be avoided or ameliorated, insteadbecoming a crucible through which the corrupted society of the presentmust pass if it is to be reborn along more just, equitable, and above alllibertarian lines. Delaying its onset or mitigating its effects will only keepthe crisis from discharging its appointed task of restructuring economicrelations. Countermeasures are pointless in any event, since the accumu-lated dysfunctions, disequilibria, and inefficiencies within an economicsystem make such moments of creative destruction unavoidable. The ide-ological work performed by Attali’s valorization of the cleansing power ofcalamitous economic upheaval should not be discounted. As FrancoisCusset has noted in a trenchant discussion of the enthusiasm with whichcybernetics was greeted in late 1970s France, the application of models ofself-organizing systems to social processes tended to naturalize economicdisturbances, along with the suffering they entail.55 Economic downturnswere thus transformed into something individuals had no choice but toendure in the hope that a better world would emerge once the tempest hadpassed. Nobody in particular was responsible for its onset, nor could any-body hope to bring it to a premature end. Human agency was evacuatedfrom the scene of radical social change. If there was to be a revolution, itwould not be the product of collective political action—a supposition thatflatly contradicts the role Attali assigns knowledge workers as historic sub-jects elsewhere in his writings. Rather, revolution would be a product ofthe system’s inexorable logic working itself out.

The clearest example of catastrophic noise giving birth to a new ordercomes toward the end of Bruits, in Attali’s discussion of how the contem-porary regime of repetition will eventually give way to the utopian regimeof composition. Under repetition—the musical corollary to Fordist massproduction—the driving force in the musical economy is sound recording.The ascendancy of recordings over live performance signals the advent ofa new mode of accumulation, one that overcomes the declining rate ofprofit associated with the production of unique, unrepeatable events, thecenter of economic gravity in the preceding regime of representation. Butthis increased profitability comes at the cost of robbing music of its usevalue. Attali’s thinking bears the clear imprint of Baudrillard’s roughlycontemporaneous writings on symbolic exchange, in particular the latter’scontention that postwar capitalism had undergone a “structural revolu-

54. Ibid., p. 88.55. See Francois Cusset, La Decennie: le grand cauchemar des annees 1980 (Paris, 2006), p. 45.


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tion of value” that uncoupled use value from exchange value.56 Detachedfrom the labor that is its point of origin and the social function that is itsostensible finality, music like all other commodities approaches the con-dition of the pure sign. For Attali this displacement of utility by semiosis isvividly expressed in the stockpiling of use-time that recordings encourage,as individuals purchase more albums (and nowadays compact discs andMP3s) than they have time to enjoy. Such behavior does not represent anindividual pathology or moral failing, however. It is a structural necessity,since the output of the music industry exceeds the capacity of audiences tokeep pace. “At a certain level,” Attali writes, “accumulation effectivelydemands acquiescence to the possession, the stockpiling of use.”57 Therapid gains in productivity that mass production made possible wouldhave proven unsustainable if industry “had been obliged to content itselfwith producing services at the same tempo they are consumed.”58 Thewidening gap between the time needed to produce commodities and thatneeded to use them makes the production of consumer demand vital if theeconomic system is not to collapse in on itself. Consumers need to beinduced to buy more music than they want or need. But spurs to consump-tion are effective only to a point; and once the mechanisms stimulatingconsumer demand cease being effective, then the result is what Attali refersto as a “crisis of proliferation,” a situation where inordinate growth be-comes malignant, a cancer that menaces social and economic well-being(N, p. 130; and see B, p. 91).

The crisis of proliferation that Attali diagnoses might be mistaken forthe crisis of overproduction theorized by Karl Marx in the third volume ofDas Kapital, save for the fact that Attali supplements its basic frameworkwith additional glosses, some drawn from his earlier study of cyberneticsand information theory, others from his more recent encounter with thework of Baudrillard and Girard.59 One consequence of this accretion ofdisparate theoretical systems is to amplify the severity of the crisis Attalidescribes. The mass production of commodities on the basis of some pro-totype floods the consumer market with more or less identical objects. Inthe language of information theory the outcome of this process is an in-crease in redundancy and a corresponding decrease in the overall amount

56. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Ian Hamilton Grant (London,1993), p. 6.

57. “A un certain niveau, l’accumulation exige en effet d’accepter de posseder, de stockerde l’usage” (B, p. 248); and see N, p. 125.

58. “La repetition permet une croissance explosive . . . . Elle eut ete vite freinee s’ils devaientse contenter de produire les services au rythme ou ils sont consommes” (B, p. 248); and see N,p. 125.

59. See Karl Marx, Capital, trans. David Fernback, vol. 3 of 3 vols. (New York, 1991).


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of information circulating within a social system. Considering that forAttali information is key to the production and reproduction of socialorder, its loss deprives a system of the one resource capable of counteract-ing the accumulation of entropy that is a byproduct of productive activity.At the same time the mass replication of a small number of models effacesdistinctive social markers. While the resulting dedifferentiation of objects,musics, and messages is camouflaged to a degree by mechanisms that workto fabricate arbitrary, artificial distinctions—the hit parade being Attali’sprimary example—strategies seeking to divert attention away from thecollapse of difference into identity never prove entirely successful. ForAttali, unlike Baudrillard, the triumph of exchange over use value is nei-ther total nor absolute. What remains discernible, if only faintly, is thepersistence of “uniformity in a music so multiform, repetition in a societywhich speaks so much of change, silence in the midst of so many noises,death in the heart of life.”60 Yet it is precisely the failure of sales charts andother simulacra of difference to furnish an adequate substitute for thedistinctions lost under the regime of repetition that poses a mortal dangerto society. It threatens a return to contagious violence, hitherto held incheck by sacrifice and its latter-day surrogates, including music. Here At-tali draws on Girard’s claim that identity, not difference, is at the root ofinterpersonal conflict. Insofar as mimesis of the other’s desire provokesdiscord that always threatens to spin out of control, the steady degradationof music’s capacity to mark meaningful differences presents an existentialthreat to modern, repetitive economies: “the return to violence today isn’ttherefore due to an excessive desire for differences, but, on the contrary, tothe serial production of mimetic rivalries, and the inability to redirect thisviolence toward a sublimating activity.”61

Buttressing Marx’s theory of overproduction with concepts borrowedfrom Baudrillard, Girard, and information theory not only allowed Attalito magnify the crisis afflicting the regime of repetition, it also fixed thegeneral parameters of the postcrisis utopia of composition he envisaged.Given the dangers that the erosion of difference posed to social peace, anydurable successor to the contemporary society of repetition needed toreinstate the kind of significant distinctions that its predecessor expelled.

60. “L’uniformite dans une musique si multiforme, la repetition dans une societe qui parletant de changement, le silence au milieu de tant de bruits, la mort au cœur de la vie” (B, p. 240);and see N, p. 120.

61. “Le retour a la violence aujourd’hui n’est donc pas du a une excessive volonte dedifferences mais, au contraire, a la production en serie de rivalites mimetiques et a l’absence depolarisation de cette violence vers une activite sublimante” (B, p. 242); and see N, p. 121. See alsoB, p. 91 and N, p. 45.


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But it would have to do more than simply restore a stable principle ofdifferentiation, particularly if it were to avoid erecting new hierarchies inthe place of older ones. Any chance of moving forward past repetitioninstead of regressing to the earlier stage of representation required somemechanism by which distinctions could be perpetually renewed, andthereby kept from becoming entrenched. Autogestion presented one suchmechanism, but only on the condition that it was sufficiently radicalized.Extending this ideal beyond the domain of economic relations, expandingthe principle of autonomy it embodied to encompass more than just mat-ters of conception and decision making, Attali’s transfiguration of auto-gestion into composition imagined a society in which every individualwould be the sovereign producer of her or his music, as well as the codesgoverning it. As such, composition served as a figure for a broader andmore profound shift in social relations, characterized by the transforma-tion of productive activity from a means to an end into an end unto itself:“Composing . . . is doing without having any other finality than the act ofdoing, without trying to artificially recreate older codes in an effort toreintegrate communication into them. It is the invention of new codes, ofthe message at the same time as the language. It is to play for one’s ownpleasure, which is the only way to create the conditions for a new form ofcommunication.”62 Under such conditions noise would become at onceubiquitous and unremarkable. The displacement of a shared, normativecode by a profusion of individualized ones not only reveals the radicalcontingency of noise but also its immanent diversity. There are as manynoises as there are codes; and there are as many codes as there are individ-uals. No longer a disturbance to be suppressed, noise in this scenario be-comes a resource to be exploited, an engine for the continual productionof difference.63

Because it is erected on such fluid, volatile foundations, the regime ofcomposition that Attali imagines in Bruits can never assume a fixed orenduring form. “Composition,” Attali remarks, “involves a perpetual call-

62. “Composer, . . . c’est faire sans autre finalite que l’acte de faire, sans tenter de recreerartificeillement les codes anciens pour y reinserer la communication. C’est inventer des codesnouveaux, le message en meme temps que la langue. C’est jouer pour jouir soi-meme, ce quiseul peut crer les conditions d’une communication nouvelle” (B, p. 267); and see N, p. 134.

63. Attali acknowledges that excess noise presents its own dangers to social cohesion: “thenoise of others may be perceived as a cacophony, and each difference thereby created betweencomposition units may be felt as a nuisance” (“d’une part, le bruit des autres peut rendre unson de cacophonie, et chaque difference ainsi creee entre les unites de composition peut etreressentie comme une nuisance”) (B, p. 290); and see N, p. 145. To regulate social interactionAttali proposes an ethics grounded in “tolerance and autonomy” (N, p. 145; and see B p. 290).His recourse to ethics (as opposed to politics) becomes more pronounced in later writings,including the second edition of Bruits.


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ing into question of stability—in other words, differences. It is inscribednot in a repetitive world, but in the permanent fragility of meaning afterthe disappearance of use and exchange.”64 Such instability is the price to bepaid for the radical democratization of creative activity. If greater self-determination is to be obtained, if the diversity required to preempt anoutbreak of contagious violence is to be ensured, individuals must foregoa certain degree of security and embrace risk. Already in La Parole et l’outilthe terms of this Faustian bargain are spelled out, above all in the sketch ofthe “relational society” that ends the book, a forerunner to the regime ofcomposition later fleshed out in Bruits. “If it is obvious that there can be nofreedom without security,” Attali remarks in the earlier text, “security es-tablished as the ultimate end becomes the end of freedom. Liberty must not bethe ‘consciousness of necessity,’ but the acceptance of what is tragic aboutthe human condition. Man is mortal. To transfer this anxiety onto anabstraction that one strives to maintain in a state of equilibrium is todestroy man.”65 Composition makes similar demands: “fantastic insecu-rity opens before us once we leave the world of repetition behind.”66 As wasthe case with his valorization of information, there was a strategic dimen-sion to the trade-off Attali proposed. Relinquishing certain social protec-tions in exchange for greater self-determination offered a marked contrastwith the statism of the Parti communiste.67 Yet it was also symptomatic of abroader shift taking place in France during the second half of the 1970s, onethat involved a redefinition of which grievances among the many leveledagainst capitalism were to take precedence. In the years just after the up-rising and general strike of May–June 1968 business leaders and govern-

64. “La composition est une perpetuelle remise en cause de la stabilite, c’est-a-dire desdifferences. Elle n’inscrit pas sur un monde repetitif mais sur la fragilite permanente du sens,apres dispraition de l’usage et de l’echange” (B, p. 293); and see N, p. 147.

65. “S’il n’y a pas evidemment de liberte sans securite, la securite erıgee comme finalitesupreme devient la fin des libertes. La liberte ne doit pas etre en effet la ‘necessite devenueconsciente,’ mais l’acceptation du tragique de la condition humaine. L’homme est mortel.Transferer son angoisse sur une abstraction qu’on veut en equilibre, c’est detruire l’homme”(PO, p. 244).

66. “La sortie du monde repetitif ouvre sur une fantastique insecurite” (B, p. 292); and seeN, p. 146.

67. This valorization of freedom over security became all the more attractive as a strategy ofdistinction given criticisms of the PCF’s totalitarian proclivities leveled by the Nouveauxphilosophes during the second half of the 1970s. These charges—fueled partly by fears thatrecent victories of the Union de la Gauche in municipal elections might translate into similarresults nationally—strained relations between the PCF and the PS. The Socialists facedincreasing pressure to declare its commitment to liberal values and disavow the Communists’antidemocratic tendencies, even as the PCF, losing votes to their partner, sought to stake out adominant position with the Union de la gauche by adopting an increasingly hardline stance.These tensions ultimately led to the demise of the Union in fall 1977. See Christofferson, FrenchIntellectuals against the Left, pp. 184–5.


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ment officials attended primarily to what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapellohave called social critiques of capitalism, that is critiques that centered onthe unjust exploitation of labor by capital. By the mid- to late 1970s, how-ever, their efforts were redirected towards claims made on the basis ofartistic critiques, critiques that focused instead on the barriers to self-realization imposed by the capitalist labor process, in addition to the alien-ation and loss of meaning engendered by the unyielding expansion ofcommodity relations.68 It was capitalism’s inability to satisfy individualaspirations, not its unjust redistribution of social wealth from one class toanother, that came to be regarded as its principal failing. Yet it was pre-cisely this displacement of social by artistic critique that enabled agents ofa nascent post-Fordist regime of accumulation to redirect the liberatoryimpulses unleashed after 1968. Passed through the filter of human relationsspecialists, industrial psychologists, and sociologists of work, the ills iden-tified by artistic critiques of capitalism—the rationalization of the laborprocess, the standardization of consumer goods, the persistence of un-democratic workplace hierarchies—became fodder for reforms whosepurpose was not to move beyond capitalism so much as make it operatemore smoothly.69 The various utopian schemes Attali proposed before,during, and after Bruits (the relational society, composition, the “poly-order of nonviolence,” among others) participated in this reorientation ofpolitical priorities. What these all promised deliverance from were ills ofthe sort identified in artistic critique. Grievances stemming from the socialcritique of capitalism, while nominally addressed, were clearly subordinatefor Attali. Freedom, not social justice, was the order of the day.

But before the regime of composition might be attained, the existingregime of repetition must first come to an end. And the end that awaits thisorder is rendered all the more calamitous insofar as the crisis of prolifera-tion is, as we have seen, an amalgamation of three distinct crises, affectingthe production of commodities, meaning, and sociality respectively. Whatis to be done in the face of these mutually reinforcing crises? Attali outlinestwo possible responses. The first would marshal the resources at the state’sdisposal to close the gap between supply and demand by nationalizingcertain sectors of the culture industry, subsidizing production in others,

68. See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. GregoryElliott (New York, 2005), chap. 3. For a succinct description of the social and artistic critiques ofcapitalism, see pp. 38–39.

69. See ibid., pp 185–6. As the two authors observe, the first response to post-68 socialunrest by business and government officials took the form of interprofessional agreements thatoffered broad classes of workers improved working conditions, job security, and materialremuneration (see pp. 182–3). By contrast, the second phase substituted rewards based onindividual performance for guarantees based on membership in statutorily defined groups.


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and lowering barriers of access to cultural goods. Think of this as theinterventionist, Keynesian strategy for addressing the crisis of prolifera-tion. The second response is less activist in orientation, allowing the crisisto deepen and ultimately resolve itself through the providential actionwhereby order emerges from noise. Think of this as a variant of theMarxist-Leninist strategy of heightening the contradictions. But viewedfrom another angle it could justifiably be understood as a laissez-faireapproach that affirms the virtues of Schumpeterian creative destruction.70

Either way, there is little doubt which of these two options Attali prefers.Given his predilection in La Parole et l’outil, Bruits, and other writings forviewing crises as necessary, even beneficial events, it is to be expected thathe has little patience for policies that seek to offset their effects. Attali isnever more scathing in Bruits than when describing such interventionistprograms and the philosophy that underpins them. Instead of allowing theregime of repetition to self-destruct, such approaches would perpetuate it.But to the extent that they only address the material dimension of prolif-eration, not its symbolic and social dimensions, rearguard actions of thiskind are doomed to failure: “Is it for socialism to delay the destruction ofcommercial codes that capitalism is so adept at carrying out itself? Orwould it not be better to let the general obliteration of the old codes toachieve fruition, so that the conditions for a new language might be born?Even if such a reactionary socialism wanted to, it could not prevent thisextermination from continuing.”71 If Attali’s contempt for “reactionarysocialism” is scarcely in doubt, what is less clear is the precise target of hiscriticisms. Or at least this is likely the case for Anglo-American readers ofBruits. For contemporary French audiences the object of Attali’s oppro-brium would have been evident. Calls for the collective appropriation ofthe means of cultural production, for increasing outlays for cultural af-fairs, for democratizing access to the arts—all of this recalls the policiesadvocated by the Parti communiste during the 1970s. And while the anti-interventionist stance Attali adopted seems to have had little bearing onofficial socialist policy, it nonetheless represented his vision of the programthe PS should pursue.

There is no better illustration than this climatic passage of the wayAttali’s text intervened in—and was shaped in accordance with—the pe-

70. On the influence of Schumpeter on Attali, see Jourdaa, La Planete Attali p. 97.71. “Est-ce au socialisme a retarder la destruction des codes marchands que le capitalisme

sait si bien accomplir lui-meme? Ou bien ne vaut-il pas mieux laisser s’accomplir le broyagegeneral des codes anciens pour que naissent les conditions d’une langue nouvelle? Meme s’il levoulait, un tel socialisme, reactionnaire, ne pourrait empecher qu’une telle extermination sepoursuive” (B, p. 261); and see N, p. 131.


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culiar political dynamics of late 1970s France. A comparison of this passagewith the corresponding point in the substantially revised second edition ofthe book published in 2001 only reinforces this impression. Where Attalionce outlined two possible strategies for addressing the crisis of prolifera-tion stands a lacuna in the new edition. Where he once presented a starkchoice between prolonging the death throes of repetition and allowing itsultimate demise is a gap in the argument. Bruits 2.0 elides this decisivemoment, and instead skips directly from the crisis of proliferation to theutopia that lies on its far side. One reason for this pointed omission is thatthe rivalry that once subtended and lent meaning to the alternatives Attalipresented had dissipated in the intervening quarter-century. As early as1977 signs that the PCF was losing ground to the PS could be discerned.72

The subsequent collapse of the Parti communiste as an electoral force dur-ing the 1980s—its irrelevance cemented by the dissolution of the USSR in1991—removed the only meaningful left-wing counterweight to the Partisocialiste. But even if the decline of the PCF has been a significant factor inthe Socialists’ rightward drift over the past thirty years, the centrist make-over the party has pursued since the early years of the Mitterrand presi-dency has not been due to exogenous factors alone. Changes internal to thePS—in its discourses, organization, and social composition—have alsoloosened it from its traditional ideological moorings.73 Ever since the volte-face of 1983, when the reflationary policies initially pursued under Mitter-rrand were abandoned in favor of austerity measures, the party has steadilyscaled back its commitment to anything resembling an authentically so-cialist economic agenda.74 By the end of the millennium references to aneventual rupture with capitalism had all but disappeared from the dis-course of party leaders. Sanding off the rougher edges of a triumphantneoliberal order would now suffice as far as the PS was concerned. “Yes tothe market economy, no to the market society” was how Prime MinisterLionel Jospin summed up the party’s stance by the end of the 1990s.75 Yet

72. See Bergounioux and Grunberg, Les Socialistes francais et le pouvoir, p. 269, and YvesSantamaria, Histoire du parti communiste francais (Paris, 1999), p. 88.

73. See Remy Lefebvre and Frederic Sawicki, La Societe des socialistes: le ps aujourd’hui(Broissieux, 2006), chap. 6.

74. Attali was among those who counseled Mitterrand not to withdraw from the EuropeanMonetary System, thus limiting the French government’s ability to set exchange rates, anecessary condition for pursuing its expansionist policies. See David R. Cameron, “ExchangeRate Politics in France, 1981–1983: The Regime-Defining Choices of the Mitterrand Presidency,”in The Mitterrand Era: Policy Alternatives and Political Mobilization in France, ed. Anthony Daly(London, 1996), pp. 56–82, and Jean-Gabriel Bliek and Alain Parguez, “Mitterrand’s Turn toConservative Economics,” Challenge 51 (Mar.–Apr. 2008): 97–109.

75. Lionel Jospin, “Le discours de la reforme,” Les Notes de la Fondation Jean Jaures 15(Mar. 2000): 83.


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anticapitalism was not the only thing missing from the vocabulary of themodern Parti socialiste. So too was the figure of the working class. Partly afunction of the professionalization of the party’s cadres, the majority ofwhom no longer entered its ranks via grassroots activism but through theelite Ecole nationale d’administration, the PS has largely ceased to addressitself to this once-privileged social category—that is, if it recognizes theexistence of such a thing as the working class at all. As Remy Sawicki andFrederic Lefebvre have observed, society as conceived in contemporaryFrench socialism is not an arena in which the struggle between opposedclasses is waged. Rather it is conceived as an aggregation of atomized in-dividuals, a space defined not by active contention but inert coexistence.76

Considering that Attali was not some passive observer of the PS’s post-1981 reorientation but one of its main catalysts, is it any wonder he excisedfrom Bruits 2.0 the pivotal choice he laid out for readers in the original? Itis not simply that the communist alternative that was still a vital force circa1977 has been reduced to a spectral existence by 2001. Nor is the excisionwholly due to the fact that Attali, no less than his erstwhile socialist com-rades, has long since squandered whatever credibility he once possessed asa tribune of a future postcapitalist society. Above all, the omission of thisdecisive moment in the second edition of Bruits reflects the fact that thevolume appeared at a moment when the prospect of any practicable pro-gram that might lead past capitalism had become difficult to fathom. Theproblem is not that the capacity to imagine utopias has diminished underthe reign of “capitalist realism,” as Mark Fisher has argued.77 Rather, whatis lacking is a political project that might make these utopias a reality aswell as a collective political agency capable of undertaking such a project.Thus, while Attali still holds out the promise of a better world to come inthe revised version of Bruits—what he refers to in other recent writings asa coming era of “hyperdemocracy”—the concrete steps that will take usfrom here to there are far from evident.78 On the one hand, he doublesdown on his wager that a vanguard group is taking shape, a privileged classthat will lead the way to a perfected society once it emerges from out of itschrysalis. In certain respects these would-be world-historical agents arenothing more than the latest avatars of a recurring protagonist in thethought of Attali, who in La Parole et l’outil assumed the guise of theknowledge or relational worker and in the first edition of Bruits that of thecomposer. But where he once defined such historical agents in socioeco-

76. See Sawicki and Lefebvre, La Societe des socialistes pp. 225–32. See also Didier Eribon,D’Une Revolution conservatrice et de ses effets sur la gauche Francaise (Paris, 2007), pp. 70–72.

77. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, 2009).78. Attali, Une Breve Histoire de l’avenir (Paris, 2006), pp. 361–92.


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nomic terms, by virtue of the leading position they occupied within aspecific regime of accumulation, in his recent writings he defines themprimarily in ethical terms. In his 2006 book, A Brief History of the Future,for instance, he describes the ideal-typical member of this valorized cate-gory (that of the “transhuman”) as someone who is “altruistic, a citizen ofthe planet, nomadic and sedentary at the same time, equal to his neighborin rights and obligations, hospitable and respectful of the world.”79 On theother hand, new information and communication technologies—aboveall the internet and social media—are regarded as the means by which themarket economy will be brought to heel. Capable of surmounting thescarcity associated with material goods, the putatively dematerialized in-formation goods that digital technologies circulate hold out the prospectof not only supplementing but eventually supplanting the market econ-omy with one based on gift exchange. At the time Bruits 2.0 was published,the clearest portent of this shift was to be found in the practice of online filesharing (see B2, pp. 226–30). To his credit, Attali recognized the likelihoodthat some corporate entity—be it the record industry, internet serviceproviders, or an emergent sector of the information economy—might yetsucceed in enclosing the virtual commons opened up by computer tech-nologies, (re)commodifying the virtual goods that threaten to slip throughthe market’s grasp (see B2, pp. 233–4). But even if the gift economy Attalienvisages were to become a reality, it is not at all certain this would be thepanacea he imagines it to be. That gift exchange does not preclude theunequal distribution of resources in society, that it may give rise to andsustain coercive power relations—points that even a cursory reading ofMarcel Mauss should make plain—seems to trouble Attali little if at all.80

What Attali’s latest version of utopia registers is the degree to which thelibertarian socialism he once espoused has been shorn of its substantive, tothe point that little remains beyond a milder variant of the liberal-libertarian doxa that prevails in France as elsewhere. It is liberte more thanfraternite or egalite that now defines Attali’s vision of a better world: the

79. “Altruiste, citoyen de la planete, nomade et sedentaire a la fois, egal en droits et endevoirs a son voisin, hospitalier et respectueux du monde” (Attali, Une breve histoire de l’avenir,p. 367). In contrast to the valorized subjects who manifest this ethos of cosmopolitan generosityare the abject others of Attali’s model society, all those unable to realize themselves on accountof their immobility, passivity, and self-hatred: “la plupart des gens prefereront toujours resterpassifs devant le spectacle du monde, accumulateurs d’objets, trouvant plaisir a admirer et acollectionner les creations des autres. . . . Ceux-la n’auront pas su s’accepter comme mediocres,ni vaincre le pire ennemi de l’homme: La haine de soi” (B2, p. 244).

80. At one point in the second edition of Bruits Attali acknowledges the limitations of gifteconomies. But he maintains that the future regime of composition will somehow surmountthese limitations, without ever specifying how; see B2, p. 251.


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freedom of immaterial goods to multiply and circulate, the freedom em-bodied in the creative act, the (apparent) freedom that characterizes thegift relation. The only unfreedom that haunts this image of the ideal soci-ety is freedom itself, which becomes an inescapable historical necessity onpar with G. W. F. Hegel’s world spirit: “History flows in a single, stubborn,and very particular direction, which no upheaval, however long-lasting,can permanently deflect: from century to century, humankind has assertedthe primacy of individual freedom over all other values.”81 We have no choicebut to become free. And in a twist that would be ironic were it not sopredictable, the carrot of liberty’s future triumph and the stick of its his-torical inevitability become the means by which Attali justifies a programof deregulation and economic liberalization in the present day. To preparethe ground for the society to come, it is vital not only to invest resources incertain key sectors of the economy, but also to dismantle sclerotic struc-tures (read social protections) that impede economic growth. It is not thatsuch measures will necessarily hasten the coming era of compositionand/or hyperdemocracy, but that failure to enact them will retard its even-tual, ineluctable advent. The place occupied by a “petit-bourgeois vision ofatrophied communism” (N, p. 135) in his early writings has now beentaken over by a different yet homologous set of antagonists: a bloatedpublic sector, uncompetitive industries propped up by overly generousgovernment subsidies, and the statutory protections still enjoyed by cer-tain segments of the French workforce. Now as then the social modelsinvoked by Attali are little more than foils for the liberalizing policies heprescribes across the numerous media platforms at his disposal: in theregular column he writes for L’Express, in the mass market books he con-tinues to publish at an astonishing clip, or in the reports issued by thesuccession of presidential commissions he has chaired, first under NicolasSarkozy, now under Francois Hollande.82 A bargain that may have ap-peared reasonable, even desirable in the context of an interparty strugglewith the notably undemocratic institution that was the Parti communistefrancais assumes a very different ideological complexion in the context ofan ascendent neoliberal order. The trade-off between freedom and secu-rity first proposed in La Parole et l’outil and subsequently reiterated in the1977 edition of Bruits has been transformed in the interim into an apologia

81. Attali, Une Breve Histoire de l’avenir, p. xiii.82. See Attali et al., Rapport de la commission pour la liberation de la croissance francaise: une

ambition pour dix ans (Paris, 2010), www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/var/storage/rapports-publics/104000541/0000.pdf and Pour une economie positive (Paris, 2013), www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/var/storage/rapports-publics/134000625/0000.pdf


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www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/var/storage/rapports-publics/104000541/0000.pdf




for measures that would make an already precarious economic lifeworldeven more so.

Music is prophetic. Or so Attali tells us in Bruits. But like millenarianproclamations of an end time that is always imminent but never arrives,the future Attali predicts through the medium of music is forever just overthe horizon. This alone should force us to reassess his claims regardingmusic’s prophetic powers. So too should the book’s involvement in thepolitical mutations that France, the Parti socialiste, and Attali have all un-dergone since the 1970s, whose contours I have outlined in this article.What, then, are we to make of Attali’s theses in light of his participation inthe intramural struggles that set socialists against communists in late 1970sFrance? In light of the allegorical dimension music acquires in the contextof this struggle? Or the vulgar antimaterialism Attali embraced in reactionto the vulgar materialism espoused by the Parti communiste?

Acknowledging the degree to which the original edition of Bruits wasenmeshed in contemporary political debates concerning the Union de lagauche underlines the performative character of Attali’s prognostications.The predictive claims to which music gives rise are presented in Attali’stext as apodictic statements, as pronouncements whose truth will be re-vealed in the fullness of time. But what is cast as an inevitability is in fact aconditional. This is particularly evident with regard to the utopian regimeof composition that Attali describes at the end of Bruits. This image of atruly democratic culture—itself a token of a truly democratic, postcapital-ist economy—is not so much a prophecy as a promise. This, Attali declaresto his readers in Bruits, is what the future may hold should the Parti so-cialiste accede to power. Neither their adversaries in the ruling center-rightmajority nor their partners-cum-rivals on the left, the Communists, werecapable of turning this dream into a reality. Only Attali and his socialistallies were able to do so. That Bruits appeared in print just a few monthsprior to municipal elections in which the Union of the Left would enjoyconsiderable gains only reinforced the surety of the promissory note Attalitendered his readers.83

At the same time, recognizing the ideological work that Bruits per-formed in late-1970s France compels us to reflect upon the kind of ideo-logical work it has also performed—and continues to perform—in theAnglo-American academy. There are several points to be made in thisregard. One concerns the very different horizon of political possibility thathas shaped the English-language reception of Bruits, especially compared

83. See Bell and Criddle, The French Socialist Party p. 92.


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to that which Attali and his French readers inhabited at the time of itspublication in 1977. As noted above, Bruits appeared in print just as theFrench Left was on the cusp of sweeping into power for the first time sincethe Fifth Republic was instituted some twenty years beforehand. By con-trast, the English translation appeared in print in 1985, in the midst of theReagan and Thatcher counterrevolutions, when the backlash against thegains won by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s was in full swing.One ironic consequence of this has been the tendency of English-languagereaders to diminish the power that Attali ascribed to music in the originaledition of Bruits. In the hands of North American scholars in particular,Attali’s conjectures regarding music’s prophetic capacities lose much oftheir force. Music is no longer understood to presage new forms of socio-economic organization but to foreshadow changes in sensibility, ideology,and structures of feeling. It would appear that the idea of a radical trans-formation of the economy, something still conceivable in France prior toMitterrand’s election in 1981, was all but unthinkable for American aca-demics by the mid-1980s. Under these circumstances, the only thing thatchanges in music seem capable of auguring are changes in other, relativelyautonomous areas of the superstructure. As such, the coming age of com-position Attali foretells no longer represents the passage from capitalism tosocialism. Rather, in the hands of his Anglo-American readers it hastended to mark little more than the advent of a freer, more liberal culturalethos.84

But why, exactly, has Bruits proved so alluring for English-languagemusic scholars? Part of the answer to this question lies in the particulardisciplinary history of North American musicology and the fact that Bruitsarrived at the exact moment when scholars were beginning to break free ofthe positivist straitjacket that had constricted them for so long. But anequally important part of Bruit’s allure is due to the comforting image itpaints of music and its place in the contemporary social world. Clearly theclaim that music is “the herald of the future” serves the professional inter-ests of music scholars. Yet the same may also be said of the ideologicalfoundations upon which this claim rests. If the foregoing has indicatedanything, it is the degree to which Bruits was animated by the same classpolitics that drove Attali and the Parti socialiste in their efforts to loosenthe grip that the PCF’s workerism exerted over the imagination of theFrench Left. Substituting the nouvelle petite bourgeoisie for the industrial

84. A clear example of this can be seen in McClary’s afterword to Noise, where she readscontemporaneous musical developments (new wave and punk in popular music, minimalismand performance art in the classical sphere) as expressions of “not simply a change in musicaltaste but also of social climate” (McClary, “Afterword,” pp. 158).


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proletariat as the principal catalyst of social history not only allowed a cleardistinction to be drawn vis-a-vis the PCF; it also facilitated the Socialists’bid to win the support of this growing electoral bloc. And even though theintended addressees of Bruits were not the Anglophone readers of BrianMassumi’s translation, this does not mean that the latter would be deaf toits appeals. Music scholars may not have been the ones the book hailed, butthere was nothing to prevent them from responding as if they were.

This is not to say that the book’s claims are altogether lacking validity orvalue, or that the intense interest Bruits has generated in North Americaand beyond is simply a matter of ideological mystification. Rather, it is tosay that this interest is overdetermined, partly by the identifications anddisidentifications the text puts into play, partly by the uses Attali’s argu-ments have afforded scholars working in a political and intellectual con-text very different from that in which they were originally formulated. Butif the book’s more fruitful insights are to be put to continued critical work,the broader discursive framework in which they are enmeshed must beregarded with greater scrutiny than it has been given in the past, and witha greater degree of reflexivity. It is by means of such a critical rereading ofBruits that we can begin the arduous yet necessary task of rewriting certainof its key concepts, most notably that of noise itself. This process is alreadyunderway in the work of a handful of scholars. Jonathan Sterne, for in-stance, has recently observed how noise’s capacity to disturb has beenfundamentally altered by the development of what he refers to as “percep-tual technics,” procedures that take into account the peculiarities of thehuman auditory mechanism and integrate this knowledge into the designof media systems capable of exploiting its manifold gaps and crevices. Thesuppression of noise is made unnecessary to the extent that it is so readilymanaged nowadays, secreted away beyond the limits of human hearing.“Once you can use signal to hide noise, the game is up,” Sterne writes.“Noise ceases to matter as a perceptual category.”85 More emphatically still,Steve Goodman has highlighted the degree to which noise can serve thearts of domination equally well as the arts of resistance. A vivid manifes-tation of this has been the development of technologies like long-rangeacoustic devices (LRADs), whose use by police in crowd control countersthe noise of public discontent with a greater noise, disrupting the capacityof protest to disrupt.86 Nor is it just noise in its familiar acoustical form thathas been put to work on behalf of a hegemonic neoliberal order. Noise

85. Sterne, MP3, p. 124.86. See Goodman, Sonic Warfare, p. 11. See also Juliette Volcler, Le Son comme arme (Paris,

2011).


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understood in its informational sense, as an impediment to the transmis-sion of a signal, has also demonstrated its utility. How else does the drive tosubject all areas of social life to the dictates of the market operate if not bymeans of such a logic of interference? Transposed from the economicsphere into spaces that once enjoyed a degree of relative autonomy, marketsignals function as a noise whose strength threatens to drown out all otherlogics, all other ordering principles, all other codes. The political valence ofnoise, in short, cannot be assumed in advance. The same is true of thecodes against which noise is invariably opposed in Bruits. Even if for Attalithese are posed as the hegemonic other of a resistant noise, there is nothinginevitable to this distribution of political functions. Indeed, the emergencesince the 1970s of a new spirit of capitalism, one that has absorbed many ofthe claims lodged against it by artistic critique, effectively short-circuits thedialectic Attali describes. The motor driving historical change in Bruits, theprocess whereby the noise that destructures one order gives rise to another,seizes up under the conditions that prevail nowadays. Noise is no longerantagonistic to the existing regime of accumulation but instead providesthe raw material for its perpetual renewal.87 And once crisis has been sothoroughly subsumed by capital, the providential action Attali identifies inthe principle of order from noise can scarcely be expected to effect systemicchange. Henceforth any disturbance that is to do more than just pry opennew opportunities for the extraction of surplus-value needs to participatein the construction of some concrete alternative, in the composition of acode whose sense can withstand the pervasive nonsense of the market.Even if the terms of Attali’s dialectic remain the same, the relation betweenthem need not: instead of order from noise, noise from order.

87. Robin James makes a similar point, writing that “Deregulation is designed to producenoisy irregularity, not to suppress or eliminate it” (James, “Neoliberal Noise,” p.143).


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drott - reading attali's bruits

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