Music can be a political force in the present. With respect to a number of musical instruments, Pynchon stages this as a force of bottom-up politics that resides and operates outside of capi-talism’s and its institutions’ necessities and constraints. It is a political force that finds its aim and expression within itself and refuses the hierarchies, compartmentalizations, and scope of action offered or imposed by institutions and their legal frame-works. In other words, it acts outside—or at the very least on the margins—of Realpolitik and the markets while maintaining the emancipatory momentum and hope that democracy in a non-insti-tutionalized, non-capitalist sense—a democracy that is closer to the utopias of socialism, communism, or anarchism—promises.
Such a conception of democracy is founded on “the equality of cit-izens” and “extends equality to the level of the economy and then into other social relations, such as sexual, racial, generational, and regional” (Mouffe 52). Chantal Mouffe may be right when she claims that, “Democracy is our most subversive idea because it interrupts all existing discourses and practices of subordination”
(52). This ideal of equality continues to haunt contemporary polit-ical thinkers—sometimes under the label of communism, social-ism, or democracy (and for Pynchon’s characters more than once under the label of anarchism)—who attempt to strip these notions of their real-political histories, oftentimes corrupted by individ-ual greed and lust for power, and to restore their idealistic and ideological foundations.1
However, music on the margins in the present time, much as it may be unnerving for listeners like Nixon/Zhlubb or the Krupp employees at the industrial magnates’ dinner party, would not elicit fear and anxiety in the ruling classes if it were not believed to be a harbinger of political change. Since as early as Plato, there has been a persistent belief in the West that “the modes of music
1 See, for instance, Democracy in What State? with contributions by Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy et al., The Truth of Democracy by Nancy, The Meaning of Sarkozy by Badiou, or Hatred of Democracy and Chronicles of Consensual Times by Jacques Rancière.
are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions” (Plato 1930, 333).2 Plato—evinc-ing a conservative view that has survived into present times—
appears to believe that such innovation (“not new songs but a new way of song”) is undesirable and that changes in music are not just early warning signs but the cause of changes in political and social conventions: “For a change to a new type of music is some-thing to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes” (Plato 1930, 333), which is why the guardians must “be watchful against inno-vations in music […] counter to the established order” (331). This trope is already familiar from Gravity’s Rainbow: John Joseph Hess observes that “Socrates is essentially the classical precur-sor to […] Richard M. Zhlubb” (14) and that “For Socrates and for Richard M. Zhlubb, music can inspire the potentially trans-formative passions outlawed in The Republic” (15). In a more lib-eral view of artistic innovation and the social order, the passage from Book IV of The Republic has been taken up both by Pynchon and by the French economist Jacques Attali who in his influen-tial 1977 Noise: The Political Economy of Music claims that the development of music prefigures the political and economic order of society. This is also in line with one of the functions Kathryn Hume and Thomas J. Knight attribute to music in Pynchon’s work: “projecting diachronically into the future, and thus serving as a vehicle of prophecy” (“Orchestration” 367).
Before outlining Attali’s argument, it is worth looking at the wordings that Attali and Pynchon chose from a plenitude of avail-able translations. The translation from Greek by Robert Bac-cou, which Attali chose for the original edition of his book, reads:
“Nulle part, on ne modifie les lois de la musique sans modifier en même temps les dispositions civiles les plus importantes,” which I translate as “Nowhere are the laws of music changed without simultaneously changing the most important civil dispositions”
(Bruits 68; this is the only time I refer to the French original). In his English translation of Noise, Brian Massumi chose the 1930 Plato translation by Paul Shorey quoted above. Other translations of The Republic read “For the forms of music are nowhere altered without affecting the greatest political laws (Trans. Chris
Emlyn-2 This belief has made it into popular culture with songs such as The Fugs’
1968 “When the Mode of the Music Changes” that continues with “the walls
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Jones and William Preddy, 359) and “For one can never change the ways of training people in music without affecting the great-est political laws” (Trans. C. D. C. Reeve, 108). Finally, in Alain Badiou’s contemporary rewrite of The Republic, Socrates says,
“any huge change in the styles of music that are in fashion sig-nals a change in the most fundamental laws of the state” (118).
The differences among the translations—every one by a scholar of Greek or Plato—are striking. Baccou speaks of the laws of music and the civil dispositions, Shorey of the modes of music and the civil and political conventions, Emlyn-Jones and Preddy of the forms of music and the political laws, Reeve of the training of musicians and the political laws, and Badiou of the styles of music in fashion and the laws of the state. Most noticeable, however, is that Badiou’s Plato is the only one who unambiguously states that changes in music signal—not cause—changes in society. Society is changing—and music reflects this more quickly than other indi-cators of change.3 Another noticeable difference among the trans-lations is that Shorey’s “musical modes” could designate the musi-cal modes as the term is used today, that is, smusi-cales such as Dorian, Lydian, and Mixolydian, which each have their own characteris-tics and may elicit a certain mood in the listener. An early theory of those scales and how they are suited or unsuited to underline and convey certain content and moods is found in Book III of The Republic. However, since other translations distinguish between
“musical scales” (in the case of Plato’s moral theory of scales) and
“musical modes” (in the case of Plato’s warning against innova-tion), “modes” can also be read as the forms of music in general, that is, harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic conventions. The value of working with Baccou’s and Shorey’s translations (as do Attali and Massumi) is that they avoid the notion of political laws that could be misconstrued to mean the legal framework and instead choose the broader notions of political and civil/social disposi-tions/conventions. It is changes in the established order of soci-ety, and not so much in the legal framework, that elicits the fears of the ruling classes. In the end, the ruling classes’ reaction to musical changes—for instance with censorship, reappropriation,
3 Of course, other indicators could possibly serve Attali’s claims too, but would need to be developed elsewhere in a different context: fashion, design, environmental change, stock market, etc.
or disregard—depends on their reading of Plato or Attali, that is, on whether they see music as an early sign or a driver of change.
In Mason & Dixon, Ethelmer paraphrases Plato, provoking his relatives by changing the notion of a threat to that of a promise:
“When the Forms of Musick change, ’tis a Promise of civil Disor-der” (261). In this more rebellious reading of Plato, there is, at first sight, a clash between the words “Promise,” generally assumed to be something positive, and “Disorder,” generally assumed to be something negative—unless the speaker has antipathies to the current order of society and desires revolt, revolution, anarchy, or just some excitement, as the youthful Ethelmer seems to dis-play when he later says: “These late ten American Years were but Slaughter of this sort and that. Now begins the true Inver-sion of the World” (264). But even without Ethelmer’s predispo-sitions—likely insouciantly boyish rather than based on political convictions—the perceived positivity of promise and negativity of disorder may not necessarily clash if we follow Jacques Derrida:
“Serious theorists of speech acts maintain that a promise must always promise something good. […] [A] promise is not a threat.
But I’d venture to claim that a promise must always be haunted by the threat, by its becoming-threat, without which it is not a promise” (458–59). I would add to this that a threat, a performa-tive speech act as well, must also be haunted by the promise in the common sense, that is, by the possibility that something bad may turn out to be something good. Thus, in the undecidable valu-ation of the promise or threat of civil disorder, which may or may not materialize, fear and hope intersect, and only context can tell the listener/reader what moves the speaker. Whereas Plato—or Socrates—is moved by fear,4 Ethelmer is not, although it is not quite clear whether he is moved by hope or just by adolescent dis-agreement with the elders.
Attali employs both the conservative, fearful futurologist Plato and the progressive, hopeful futurologist Marx to design a tem-plate that allows, firstly, for historical inspection of changes in musical forms and what they mean for changes in the social order and the distribution of power, and then, secondly, for a prediction or a forecast. Attali thus reads music as the medial apriori of the
4 Badiou’s reworking of The Republic takes the liberty of changing the way Plato is usually read when Socrates says, “The emergence of new styles in
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organization of society. The starting point of his analysis is Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s 1559 painting Carnival’s Quarrel with Lent.
In it, he sees two antagonistic forces at work: festival, “whose aim is to make everyone’s misfortune tolerable,” and austerity, “whose aim is to make the alienation of everyday life bearable through the promise of eternity” (Attali 21–22). Antagonistic as these forces of noise and silence, as he calls them, may be, both serve to keep the lower classes docile. “Brueghel,” according to Attali, “cries out that music and all noises in general, are stakes in games of power” (24).
Attali draws up three consecutive yet overlapping periods of musical development in the West which he sees reflected in the social order a hundred or two hundred years later. The first era is that of Sacrifice. Music is seen as a channeler of violence. It
“is used and produced in the ritual in an attempt to make people forget the general violence” (19). Its purpose is to “unify a people through the ritualization of the sacrificial violence that grounds the social order” (Price, Resonance 116). This era roughly corre-sponds to the time before 1750 AD, a time whose music is some-what underrepresented in Pynchon’s work.5
The second era, that of Representation, is characterized by the emergence of the musical spectacle and the consumption of music in enclosed spaces. Music tries to “make people believe in the harmony of the world” (Attali 19) under the current distribution of power. Nobles employ composers and musicians to sing their praises and that of the existing order. The orchestra becomes a status symbol, the musician a salaried employee, and the spec-tacle in the enclosed space makes it possible to charge entrance fees. Music starts being commodified (51). “The theory of politi-cal economy of the nineteenth century,” Attali writes, “was pres-ent in its pres-entirety in the concert hall of the eightepres-enth cpres-entury, and foreshadowed the politics of the twentieth” (57).
Technological innovations at the end of the nineteenth century, most notably the phonograph and the gramophone, as well as Fordism, then give rise to the third era, the era of Repetition. In this period, “each spectator has a solitary relation with a mate-rial object; the consumption of music is individualized” (32). The stockpiling of essentially intangible information paves the way for
5 Only 29 of the 935 identified references to works of music date from 1751 or earlier and there is only a small number of musicians from that time. See Chapter 4.
a new organization of capitalism, “that of the repetitive mass pro-duction of all social relations” (32), which is an apolitical (110) or anti-political one. From today’s vantage point, the “repetitive mass production of all social relations” brings to mind the so-called Social Media, that is, our lives mediated by capital.
The three eras of Sacrifice, Representation, and Repetition are not discrete but overlap to some degree. Attali also names a fourth era, the era of Composition, which he situates in the future. This period is marked by the consumer turning into a producer who
“will derive at least as much of his satisfaction from the manu-facturing process itself as from the object he produces” (144).
Although Attali remains by necessity vague on this era, we can-not fail to hear in his call echoes of the enthusiasm present today not only in amateur, DIY, and DJ culture but also in the political realm, where interactive technology and the widespread means of media production such as cameras, sound-recording devices, and software are thought to promise democracy, participation, and creativity, but, as is my conviction as well as Attali’s, also carry the danger of a falling back into the networks of representa-tion and repetirepresenta-tion. The heavy reliance on technology of this type of enthusiasm does not take into account technology’s flipside as theorized by Heidegger. For one thing, it may just as well serve top-down surveillance and exploitation of the producer/con-sumer. Moreover, current software—even the promising forms—
is always programmed as a set of rules and limitations which may allow for creative misappropriation or reinterpretation of its pos-sibilities but never for transcending the mindset of the software’s creator, generally that of a Western paradigm.6,7
6 For example, Peter Price told me that most commercially available music software is so wedded to Western musical paradigms that it is, for instance, not able to parse a tabla rhythm where odd numbers of beats, syncopations, and accents are played against each other. One would have to turn to a programming environment such as MaxMSP or Pd (Pure Data) to make it work. Perhaps, philosophically, the reason for the domination of Western paradigms in programming is the fact that computers are based on mutually exclusive binaries (0 and 1, off and on) and it remains to be seen whether the underlying paradigms will change with the advent of quantum computing.
7 I see no reason to hypothesize a different fourth era for today’s situation (not repetition anymore nor composition yet) that may or may not lead to a fifth era of composition, as was suggested to me by Philipp Schweighauser.
Firstly, there is every indication that we are still firmly rooted in an era of repetition of goods, services, and social relations, and that the category of the
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Attali’s claims prove fruitful for an interpretation of a number of musical passages in Pynchon’s work. The most obvious one—
because Plato is directly quoted—is in Mason & Dixon, but the same kind of gesture can also be observed elsewhere, for instance, in the discussion of jazz and anarchism in Against the Day and in the Inherent Vice scene where Doc, Denise, and Japonica drive past Wallach’s Music City. The era of composition can be glimpsed in the scenes involving the kazoo, the ukulele, and the harmonica, as well as in Chandler Pratt’s intern Darren, the young rap artist of Bleeding Edge, or in the many songs in Pynchon’s work com-posed on the spot by amateur musicians.
The Age of Representation
At Christmastime in 1786, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke recounts, Sheherazade-like, his own version of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon’s lives and careers as astronomers and land surveyors. His tale is interrupted from time to time by oboe and clavier interludes performed by his host family, who, at one point, slip into a discussion that is possibly Pynchon’s densest and most carefully crafted musical passage. The family evaluates Plato’s views on the transformative power of music with reference to their own post-revolutionary days, their own songs and hymns, and the new music which, supposedly, is beginning to take shape in South Philadelphia. The passage that spans more than three pages (261–
64) brings us back to Plato and allows for nearly endless unrav-eling. While it would be desirable to reprint the entire passage, I will forgo the sense of continuity and reading pleasure this would afford and instead highlight the important parts and discuss them
speaking, a more important category than that of the citizen or the homo generator, no matter the promises of and occasional inroads into the era of composition. Secondly, Attali’s eras have never been entirely discrete but bleed into each other. And thirdly, such eras have a long duration and can be established only in retrospect. Nominating an era for our immediate present carries the danger of falling into a kind of hysteria about the most recent technological advances, seeing an ever-accelerating development of which the present is the apex, and, correspondingly, the current state of civiliza-tion as the natural point of convergence of history.
in depth, taking at times the liberty of musicological digressions to shed light on the density and coherence of Pynchon’s writing.8
The passage is set at the tail end of Attali’s era of sacrifice and in the first decades of the era of representation, both of which employ their specific strategies to keep the lower classes docile.
In other words, it is set at the dusk of Christianity and the dawn of the scientific era. While there has been a major shift in per-spective on the place of the human in the world, both of these eras build on dualities to subjugate the natural world. As Joseph Dewey writes, “Within the sciences—as within Christianity—the cosmos is simplified into a battlefield, hostilities inevitable as long as we are held to be separate from nature and as long as we resolve to dominate and direct” (121). A third way—for instance, that of Eastern mysticism to which the Reverend Cherrycoke feels drawn—has no place in either of these worldviews.
Musico-historically speaking, the scene takes place somewhere in the transition period between the Baroque and the Classical.
By then the suite, a succession of dances first mentioned in dance books of the sixteenth century (Der Brockhaus Musik 769)—the time of Brueghel the Elder—had found its standard form of Alle-mande–Courante–Sarabande–Gigue but allowed for variation with other dances such as the minuet, the gavotte, the scherzo, and the bourée.9 In Aunt Euphrenia’s words:
By then the suite, a succession of dances first mentioned in dance books of the sixteenth century (Der Brockhaus Musik 769)—the time of Brueghel the Elder—had found its standard form of Alle-mande–Courante–Sarabande–Gigue but allowed for variation with other dances such as the minuet, the gavotte, the scherzo, and the bourée.9 In Aunt Euphrenia’s words: