Vinyl Theory

Front matter

JEFFREY R. DI LEO

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Copyright © 2020 by Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Contents

Member Institution Acknowledgments

1. Late Capitalism on Vinyl 2. The Curve of the Needle 3. It Might Get Loud

Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments About the Author vii

Chapter One

Music has an incredible power over life. For some, music reveals this power through its ability to move our bodies and inspire our minds. Who cannot resist moving their hips when Chubby Checker asks us to do the twist? Or does not feel intellectually uplifted when listening to the music of J. S. Bach? Or politically committed and socially engaged when listening to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” (1975), N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police” (1988), or Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” (1989)?

For others though the connection between music and life is far stronger than mere affect. For people like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Miles Davis, a case might be made that “music is life.” Not just in the sense that their lives were consumed with making music, but also in a far stronger sense, namely, that for each of them “there is no life outside of music.” Understanding what these two complementary statements might mean involves a consideration about the relations not just between life and music but also death and music. This also opens up a related question, that is, What is the capacity of music to “foster life” and to “disallow it to the point of death”?!

The composer of over six hundred works, including many of the most well-known and revered works of classical symphonic, operatic, concertante, choral, and chamber music, Mozart was a musical prodigy. Although he died at the age of thirty-five, almost all of these years involved musical composition in some form or another. For Mozart, it seems fair to say, music was his life. As a three-year-old, he watched his seven-year-old sister, Nannerl, take keyboard lessons with their father. After her brother’s death, Nannerl reflected on Wolfgang’s early interest in music: “He often spent much time at the clavier, picking out thirds, which he was

” e ever striking, and his pleasure showed that it sounded good.” “In the fourth year of his age his father, for a game as it were, began to teach him a few minuets and pieces at the clavier. ... He could play it faultlessly and with the greatest delicacy, and keeping exactly in time. ... At the age of five, he was already composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down. ”? In short, his brief life from his earliest years of age was completely consumed with music and its composition.

Although Miles Davis, like Mozart, had a parent who played violin and keyboard, Cleota Mae Henry Davis was not a composer or an experienced music teacher like Leopold Mozart.’ Davis says in his autobiography that “[t]he first time | really paid attention to music was when 1 used to listen to a radio show called ‘Harlem Rhythms.” He “was about seven or eight” at the time, and then “when | was nine or ten | started taking some private music lessons.”4 Like Mozart, Davis was consumed with music. “When l got into music 1 went all the way into music; 1 didn’t have no time after that for nothing else.”> “By the time 1 was twelve,” says Davis, “music had become the most important thing in my life.”° Regarding a five-year period from 1975 to early 1980 during which Davis didn’t pick up his horn even once, he comments, “I had been involved in music continuously since | was twelve or thirteen years old.”7

It was all 1 thought about, all 1 lived for, all 1 completely loved. 1 had been obsessed with it for thirty-six or thirty-seven straight years, and at forty-nine years of age, 1 needed a break from it, needed another perspective on everything | was doing in order to make a clean start and pull my life back together again. 1 wanted to play music, but 1 wanted to play in big halls all the time instead of little jazz clubs. For the time being, 1 was through with playing little jazz clubs because my music and its requirements had just outgrown them.®

So, in the end, even the hiatus was about his life in music and finding a fresh perspective on it. “For me,” writes Davis in summation in his autobiography, “music has been my life.”

For both Mozart and Davis, the biopower of music was something that they came to recognize and embrace from a very early age. They are examples of how music and life can be regarded as co-extensive and are illustrative of the extreme power of music over life. For most people, though, the power of music over life is far less overwhelming but many times no less significant. It can be observed in both the desire to dedicate one’s life to musical performance and composition as well as in the enjoyment of listening to music and the accumulation of musical recordings. To be sure, the ways in which music exerts power over life are many—even if we are only now beginning to develop accounts of the biopolitics of music.

The power of music over life though goes well beyond the individual feelings and emotions of the performer, composer, and listener. Affect theory today encourages us to engage philosophical inquiries into aesthetic feeling in a dialogue with complementary areas such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, and cultural studies. It also pushes us beyond “tired” oppositions such as subject/ object, mind/body, and nature/culture. Contemporary theorists explore affect as both a philosophical and a political problem, drawing material for their inquiries from philosophy, political theory, and everyday life.

For one such theorist, Brain Massumi, in a line of thought that can be traced back through Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and ultimately Benedict de Spinoza, we are immersed in affects. “Affect theory,” writes Massumi, “does not reduce the mind to the body in the narrow, physical sense. It asserts that bodies think as they feel, on a level with their movements. This takes thinking out of the interiority of a psychological subject and puts it directly in the world: in the co-motion of relational encounter.” Massumi is concerned with intensities of experience related to an immediate participation in events of the world—a line of thought that “requires a far-reaching re-evaluation of what the body can do.”" This re-evaluation has as its goal arriving “at a transformational matrix of concepts apt to continue the open-ended voyage of thinking-feeling life’s processional qualities, foregrounding their proto-political dimension and the paths by which it comes to full expression in politics (taking the word in the plural).”” Affect moves through the “encounter” to “politics.” Thus, his examination of the political dimensions of relational encounter is one of experience in-the-making and, as such, of a politics that is emergent.

In this chapter, 1 would like to acknowledge the importance of the work of Massumi and others on affect theory and note its potential for interesting and innovative work on a politics of music. Still, I am less interested here in a “proto-political” or an emergent politics of music than understanding the dominant political economy of music, which might alternately be labeled either neoliberal or late capitalist. Specifically, 1 ask how that politics engages the proposition that music has power over life. This particular politics is more attuned to the biopolitics of the late seventies and early eighties Michel Foucault than the work in the same period by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The irony here is that whereas the latter wrote explicitly and eloquently about music during this period, the former did not.

In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ([1980] 1987), although Deleuze and Guattari explain why music is so often concerned with death, their analysis is more about the problem of content and expression in music than the biopolitical economy of music or even its necropolitics, that is, the relationship between sovereignty and power over life and death. Still, the role of death as related to the content and expression of music is clearly stated:

What does music deal with, what is the content indissociable from sound expression? It is hard to say, but it is something: a child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off. We wish to say that these are not accidental themes in music (even if it is possible to multiply examples), much less imitative exercises; they are something essential. Why a child, a woman, a bird? It is because musical expression is inseparable from a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, a becoming-animal that constitutes its content.”

Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari music is often concerned with death “[b]ecause of the ‘danger’ inherent in any line that escapes, in any line of flight or creative deterritorialization: the danger of veering toward destruction, toward abolition.” Music confronts death “[nJot as a function of the death instinct it allegedly awakens in us, but of a dimension proper to its sound assemblage, to its sound machine, the moment that must be confronted, the moment the transversal turns into a line of abolition.”

Music, for Deleuze and Guattari, “gives us a taste for death.” But this is very different from the idea that music can “disallow [life] to the point of death.” It is this latter notion, following the biopower of Foucault, that 1 am most interested in pursuing. For Deleuze and Guattari, “music-making is expressive inasmuch as it serves to construct a territory.”” And “[t]hat territory defends against the anxieties, fears, pressures we feel; it doesn’t do away with them, of course, but gives them different form.” Although there is in the work of Deleuze and Guattari a direct and interesting response regarding the power of music over life and death, in this chapter, 1 would like to look at the more Foucauldian question of the power of music to both “foster life” and to “disallow it to the point of death” and its attendant or resulting political economy.

To engage music in a dialogue with power, life, and death is to engage it at a level where it becomes both a facet of biopower and a feature of biopolitics. But to do so is to go forward without the direct assistance of Foucault, who has very little to say about music in his work on biopower and biopolitics. Fortunately, however, his somewhat younger French contemporary, Jacques Attali, wrote at length about the biopolitics of music at the same time that Foucault was lecturing, with increasing depth, on biopolitics at the University of Paris in the mid- to late seventies. However, before examining Attali’s contributions to a neoliberal biopolitics of music, I’'d like to go back and reflect a bit on the work of a nineteenth-century philosopher who not only arguably made significant contributions to the biopolitics of music, particularly late in his career, but who is now becoming increasingly recognized as a thinker whose work on man as homo economicus is a prequel to our own neoliberal man. This thinker is of course the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

My aim in examining the work of Nietzsche and Attali on music through the lens of Foucault’s biopolitics is to lay the groundwork for a twenty-first-century biopolitics of music. It will be a journey that begins in the late nineteenth century with Nietzsche and is extended through the work of Attali into the late seventies. I'll conclude by making some observations as to how Attali’s work understood as a pioneering work on biopolitics and the political economy of music contributes to our present concerns.

MUSIC CONTRA LIFE

Friedrich Nietzsche spent the fall of 1888 in Turin, Italy. During his stay, he went through his older writing going back as far as 1877 and selected pieces that reflected his position on the composer

Richard Wagner. The pieces, often shortened and clarified, were to become his final book, Nietzsche contra Wagner—a book that would not be published until many years later, that is, in 1895 in volume eight of his collected works.

Nietzsche wrote the preface for Nietzsche contra Wagner on Christmas of 1888, and then early the next month he became insane, after which his friend and former colleague, Overbeck, transported him back to Basel, Switzerland, from Turin. He was then committed to the asylum in Jena, Germany, but shortly thereafter released to the care of his mother in Naumburg, Germany. When his mother died in 1897, his sister moved him to Weimar, Germany, where he died on August 25, 1900.

Nietzsche contra Wagner leaves little doubt about his position on Wagner. “We are antipodes,” writes Nietzsche in the preface, a position that he contends will not be a popular one with German readers. “I have readers everywhere,” says Nietzsche, “in Vienna, in St. Petersburg, in Copenhagen and Stockholm, in Paris, in New York—I do not have them in Europe’s shallows, Germany.”

His critique of the music of Wagner in this work and others is interesting both for what it is (a “physiological” one) and for what it is not (an “aesthetic” one). In fact, in the preface he alludes to this by saying that the book is “an essay for psychologists, but not for Germans.” Although Nietzsche “admire[s] Wagner wherever

” e he puts himself into music,” “[t]his does not mean that | consider this music healthy.”” In brief, Nietzsche contends that the music of Wagner is not only unhealthy but also that the composer himself is a “sickness.”

In The Case of Wagner [Der Fall Wagner], published in September of 1888 and the last book that Nietzsche would see to publication before his breakdown,” he is direct and clear about the effect of Wagner and his music on our health: “1 am far from looking on guilelessly while this decadent corrupts our health—and music as well. Is Wagner a human being at all? Isn't he rather a sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches—he has made music sick—.”¥

Later, in the same section of The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche reflects further on the relationship between sickness, health, and life: “To sense that what is harmful is harmful, to be able to forbid oneself something harmful, is a sign of youth and vitality. The exhausted are attracted by what is harmful: the vegetarian by vegetables. Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: one only has to be healthy enough for the stimulant.”4

Health for Nietzsche involves a certain type of resilience, one that allows some people to “instinctively cho[ose] the right means against wretched states.”* The resiliency of the healthy person enables that person to use sickness as a “stimulant to life.” A variant of this line written in the same year (1888) from Ecce Homo links this all back to the development of a philosophy: “A typically healthy person, conversely, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more. This, in fact, is how that long period of sickness appears to me now: as it were, 1 discovered life anew, including myself; 1 tasted all good and even little things, as others cannot easily taste them—I turned my will to health, to life, into a philosophy.” The significance of these passages stems less with the German philosopher’s specific problems with the music of Wagner or, for that matter, with vegetarianism (Wagner was a vegetarian, and Hitler is claimed to have followed the composer’s dietary practice”) but rather with the way in which what we now call biopolitics enters into a dialogue with music through the late writing of Nietzsche.

Foucault first introduced the problematic of biopower in his lectures at the Collége de France in the spring of 1976 and then devoted his next two years of lectures at the Collége (the 1977/1978 and 1978/1979 academic years)** to developing his thoughts on biopolitics. In his final lecture in 1976 under the course title “Society Must Be Defended,” he notes that in the second half of the eighteenth century “a new technology of power” emerges. He terms it here biopower and biopolitics.”®

Foucault explains that while biopower “does not exclude disciplinary technology . . . it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques.” “Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies,” biopower “is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species.”* Biopower addresses “man-as-species” as “a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on.” It is a “seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species. "3

The first object of biopolitics are processes “such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of the population, and so on.”* In the second half of the eighteenth century, biopolitics seeks to control these processes. It is here that “the first demographers begin to measure these phenomena in statistical terms.” During this period, death is “no longer something that suddenly swooped down on life—as in an epidemic.” Death becomes “permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it.”3”

While Foucault enumerates many different elements that enter into the domain of biopolitics both in its early stages and its later stages, he says “biopolitics will derive its knowledge from, and define its power’s field of intervention in terms of, the birth rate, the morality rate, various biological disabilities, and the effects of the environment.” Also, in addition, it “deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem.” Biopolitics is as well credited by Foucault with introducing “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures.”4°

The topic of biopolitics is also discussed by Foucault around the same time in The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, the 1978 English translation of his 1976 book La volonté de savoir. In part five of this book, entitled “Right of Death and Power over

Life,” Foucault discusses “the ancient right to take life or let live” that comes to be replaced beginning in the eighteenth century by “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”4* The context here is the changes in the right of the sovereign to take life through the death penalty. Focus in the application of capital punishment shifts from the emphasizing the “enormity of the crime” to “the safeguard of society” and “the monstrosity of the criminal.”# “Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding,” comments Foucault, “that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private.”*

Under the aegis of an emerging biopolitics, “life more than the law ... became the issue of political struggles”** to the point where even Aristotle’s observations on the nature of man as a political animal were no longer valid. Whereas “[flor millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”

It is against the relief of the emerging and developing biopolitics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Nietzsche’s comments on the life-giving and life-taking powers of music begin to make more sense. While some might be inclined merely to dismiss Nietzsche’s comments regarding Wagner’s music as the aesthetic rantings of a philosopher whose well-known falling out with his former friend have tainted his appreciation of the composer, the emerging biopolitics indicated by Foucault provide an important and different context in which to understand his comments.

If Foucault is accurate in his assessment that the issue of measuring and calculating what fosters life and disallows it to the point of death is a major social and political preoccupation of the period, then Nietzsche’s observations on the music of Wagner are prime fodder to begin a discussion of a biopolitics of music. For example, Nietzsche’s comments that the music of Wagner is harmful to one’s health and makes people sick might be understood through the context of the emerging social and political concerns and controls over the health of society. What might have seemed without biopolitics as a passing aesthetic jab at Wagner by Nietzsche becomes through the context of a biopolitics a commentary on the health of society. It also suggests that the philosopher’s comment that Nietzsche contra Wagner is not a book for Germans and that he does not have readers in Germany entails that because the music of Wagner is championed in this country, its people, like the composer and his music, are sick and unhealthy.

Nietzsche explains in some detail in Nietzsche contra Wagner the difference between healthy and unhealthy music. It is a difference that is not grounded in aesthetics but rather in physiology. “My objections to the music of Wagner are physiological objections: why should | trouble to dress them up in aesthetic formulas? After all, aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.”4° This notion of aesthetics as a “kind of applied physiology” turns up later in the twentieth century in efforts to measure the effects of music on people and to use these effects as a form of control over them.* For Nietzsche, however, the physiological “fact” of Wagner’s music is quite clear: “My ‘fact; my petit fait vrai, is that 1 no longer breathe easily when this music begins to affect me; that my foot soon resents it and rebels: my foot feels the need for rhythm, dance, march—to Wagner's ‘Kaiser-marsch’ not even the young German Kaiser could march—it demands of music first of all those delights which are found in good walking, striding, dancing. But does not my stomach protest too? my heart? my circulation? Are not my entrails saddened? Do | not suddenly become hoarse? To listen to Wagner I need pastilles Gérandel [sic].”** It is important to note that Nietzsche’s comments here are not about his emotional response to the music of Wagner but rather about its “affect.”

Massumi clearly describes the difference—a difference that might be used to explicate Nietzsche’s comment:

you have to understand affect as something other than simply a personal feeling. By “affect” 1 don’t mean emotion in the everyday sense. The way | use it comes primarily from Spinoza. He talks of the body in terms of its capacity for affecting and being affected. These are not two different capacities—they always go together. When you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment before. You have made a transition, however slight. You have stepped over a threshold. Affect is this passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of the change in capacity. It’s crucial to remember that Spinoza uses this to talk about the body. What a body is, he says, is what it can do as it goes along.*®

Thus, the problem with the music of Wagner according to Nietzsche is its affect on his body: it makes him breathe uneasily, upsets his stomach, pains his heart, changes the circulation of his blood, makes him so hoarse that he requires a throat lozenge (Pastilles Géraudel) to ease his physical discomfort.

The trouble here is that these are not the bodily affects Nietzsche “expects of music”: “And so | ask myself: What is it that my whole body really expects of music? For there is no soul. | believe, its own ease: as if all animal functions should be quickened by easy, bold, exuberant, self-assured rhythms; as if iron, leaden life should lose its gravity through golden, tender, oil-smooth melodies. My melancholy wants to rest in hiding-places and abysses of perfection: that is why | need music. But Wagner makes sick.” The implications of Nietzsche’s comments on the music of Wagner regarding a politics of life are manifest: music has power over life. Some music eases our body, whereas other music does the opposite, that is, dis-eases our body. This power of music over life extends to populations as well. It is, in the words of Foucault, “massifying.” The fact that the people of Germany adore the music of Wagner is for Nietzsche a statement in itself on their overall health.

Although the “physiological objections” to the music of Wagner cited appear quite early in the philosopher’s final book, Nietzsche contra Wagner (they are in the second section under the title “Where | Offer Objections”), they were first made in section 368 of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, first published in 1882 and then again in a revised edition in 1887, whose title has been translated as The Gay Science. The wording is very similar to that in Nietzsche contra Wagner, but the philosopher noticeably omits the final paragraph of the section, which is stylistically set as a parenthetical reply from the Wagnerian: “(l forgot to mention how my enlightened Wagnerian replied to these physiological objections: “Then you really are merely not healthy enough for our music?’).”* This final thought in section 368 of The Gay Science brings us back to the matter of affect and capacity. Like Spinoza, Nietzsche views the body in terms of its capacity for affecting and being affected. However, Nietzsche's comments on Wagner open up the added dimension of considering the body in terms of its capacity for affecting music as well as its being affected by it. Thus, the question “Then you really are merely not healthy enough for our music?” arguably concerns both the domains of affect and biopolitics.

MODES OF MUSICAL PRODUCTION

A few weeks before Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner was published, a man named Charles Cros died in poverty. Cros, the author of Kippered Herring (Hareng saur) was also an inventor. Although his invention would ultimately not be a successful one, it was one of the earliest efforts to, in the words of another French theorist, “transform sound into writing, in other words, to achieve automatic stenography.”” That theorist is Jacques Attali, and the invention was the “paleophone,” one of the precursors to Thomas Edison’s successful “automatic stenographer,” the cylinder-based phonograph. Attali’s book Bruits: Essai sur l'économie politique de la musique (1977) shows how the invention of the phonograph brought about a new form of political economy, one he calls “repetition” but which we call today neoliberal political economy.

Bruits, translated into English by Brian Massumi in 1985 as Noise: The Political Economy of Music, takes its title from Attali’s definition of music: “All music can be defined as noise given form according to a code (in other words, according to rules of arrangement and laws of succession, in a limited space of sounds) that is theoretically knowable to the listener.” His study is a primer of sorts on both biopower and biopolitics composed at the same time that Foucault was himself lecturing and publishing on the same topic. Moreover, and perhaps more important to the concerns of this chapter, Attali’s Bruits provides an interesting historical framework in which to consider neoliberalism or neoliberal biopolitics in music.

Before Bruits, Attali published a few books on economic history, political economy, and political science including La parole et l'outil (1975), Les modèles politiques (1972), and Analyse économique de la vie politique (1972). And then, two years after, he published a book on the history of medicine, L'ordre cannibale: Vie et mort de la médecine (1979). His other book from this period was La nouvelle économie francaise (1978), published a year after Bruits. After the 1970s, however, Attali’s writing production exploded, with well over sixty books to date authored by him. Although over half of these books are categorized like Bruits as “essays,” his output includes at least five volumes of memoir, ten novels, five biographies (including studies of Diderot, Gandhi, Pascal, and Marx), two plays, two books of lyrics, two dictionaries, and a book of fairy tales. Still, in spite of his prodigious output, less than ten of his titles including Bruits have been translated into English: A Man of Influence: The Extraordinary Career of S. G. Warburg (1987); Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order (1991); A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (2009); The Economic History of the Jewish People (2010, with a foreword by Alan Dershowitz); The Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to

Wisdom (1998); After the Crisis: How Did This Happen? (2010); and From Crystal to Smoke (2010), his play about Kristallnacht.

However, the focus in this chapter is not on Attali the prolific public intellectual, who Foreign Policy magazine listed in 2008 and 2010 as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world,” but rather much more narrowly on how aspects of his early study Bruits provide an intriguing historical framework in which to discuss neoliberalism, or more precisely, neoliberal biopolitics, in music. Fredric Jameson, who wrote the foreword to the University of Minnesota Press translation, recognizes the neoliberal aspects of Bruits, writing “Attali’s varied and complex reflections thus rejoin, from a unique perspective (which is, given his political role, a unity of theory and practice in its own right), the now widespread attempts to characterize the passage from older forms of capitalism (the market stage, the monopoly stage) to a new form.”*® The “unity of theory and practice” Jameson refers to is Attali’s role as both an academic and practicing political advisor. A professor of economic theory at the Ecole Polytechnique, the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, and the Université Paris-Dauphine, Attali also served as a special adviser to the president of the republic (François Mitterand) from 1981 to 1991 and was the founder and first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London from 1991 to 1993. Currently, he is CEO of A&A, an international consulting firm in strategy, based in Paris, and president of Positive Planet, an international non-profit organization assisting microfinance institutions all over the world, which as of the composition of this chapter advises and finances the development of microfinance in eighty countries.”