Music and Politics Key Concepts and Issues Uteya, Norway, = July 2011. Anders Behring Breivik, self-styled com- ander of the Knights Templar Europe, yells ‘You're going to de toda Marxists’ as he shoots down teenagers at a summer camp organized by e wing of the Norwegian Labour Party.' Earlier that day he had car. bombed government buildings in Oslo. Justifying his killing of seventy- seven people to the police who apprehended him, Breivik claimed to be defending Norway and Europe from multiculturalism, Marxism and Isla- micization, describing his attacks as ‘an expression of love for my own people and country’.” In a manifesto released to coincide with the atroci- ties, Breivik explains the crucial role that music played in developing and reinforcing his extreme right-wing militancy. As well as listing songs which inspired him, he emphasizes the importance of music as an aid to self- indoctrination and motivational control.’ Dedicating a section of the manifesto to the theme ‘How to Sustain Your High Morale and Motivation for Years through Music’, Breivik describes how the ‘ritual’ of listening to his iPod during extended solitary walks helped to nourish his beliefs and morale.‘ In addition, he explains the functions which music would serve during the different phases of his planned terrorist operation, specifying the tracks suitable for accompanying combat situations and even his anticipated martyrdom. Perhaps surprisingly, there’s no mention of skin- head bands, Black Metal or for that matter Wagner; instead, Breivik cites film and computer game soundtracks which have little or no clear connec- tion to his ideology. Recommending a track from Lord of the Rings as aif inspiring’ and capable of generating ‘a type of passionate rage within you’, Breivik notes that during the attack, ‘I will put my iPod on max prohume's 2 tool to suppress fear if needed. T might just put Lux Aeterna by Clint Mansell on repeat as itis an incredibly powerful song: ‘While it is not clear whether Brevik stuck to his planned use of music, he had an iPod bud in his ear when police finally cornered him. Kiev, ie Z December 2013. Student Markiyan Matsekh a 2 handful of other demonstrators smuggle # piano into downiow’, "SY Setting it down next to a phalanx of riot police pee a ae the Ukrainian president. Matsekh then plays # musical selection i‘Music and Politics Figure 1.1. “The Piano Player’, Euromaidan uprising in Kiev, 2013, ‘Photograph by Oleh Matsekh, Markiyan Matsekh and Andrew Meakovski. Frédéric Chopin's Waltz in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 64 No. 2, Ukrainian folk tunes and the Queen song ‘We Are the Champions’; some of the riot officers sing along and move their heads in time to the music.® Within forty-cight hours, a photograph of the event goes viral on social media, inspiring T-shirts and numerous copycat protests (see Figure 1.1). Painted in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, and sporting the twelve-star emblem of the European Union, Matsekh’s piano gestured defiantly at President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to ally with Russia and halt Ukrainian integration within the EU. But this protest had a more immedi- Ate stimulus, countering the government's brutal suppression of eatliet demonstrations and the stigmatization of protesters as extremists. For Matsck, the ‘innocence ofthe piano’ served to convey the peaceful spirit of the: position movement and to defuse tensions between protesters and Police: ‘I painted and rolled the Piano in front of the riot police to eee of the revolution -+ that we are actually trying to forward, his protest was, Peaceful way.” If Matsekh’s aims seem straight Some commentators siainaiee in quite different ways by the media. ted it as a piece of performance art, while othersMusic and Politics: Key Concepts and Issu les ignored the sonic and performative dimen: way on the photograph it generated! hogan ot the event, focusing ° Indeed, th. Jed to the protest being forced into default media = eee of the image One tendency was to view it through a universlizing eee between freedom and repression; another was iti by reading it as a plea for peace or by drawing on ee the protest ore paling unifying force. clichéd notions of music ‘Altiplano Prison, Mexico, 11 July 2015. At around 8: seta diag lord Joagoin Guamnin’'akn El Choo’ (Shey) eee tara maximum security jail through a specially constructed mile-long tunnel. Within hours of is escape, dozens of newly written narcocortidos, or drug ballads, celebrating his feat have begun to circulate on the internet In spite of Guzmén’s extreme wealth and power, these narcocorridos stress his bumble origins and treat him as a Robin Hood figure: a larger-than-life outlaw who had beaten the federales and foiled the attempts of the United States to extradite him. In a few nonchalant sentences, for example, Lupillo Rivera, one of the best-known exponents of the genre, highlighted Guzman’ ingenuity and bravado, the power of his cartel, the impotence of Mexico's politicians and the eagerness with which his people await his return." On one level, the elevation of a drug trafficker as a bandit-hero reflects the traditions of the corrido genre, celebrating the wily underdog at the expense of the authorities. 1 But on another, it points to the role music has played in helping to entrench the cartels within Mexico's poorest regions, The portrayal of Guzmén as a folk hero in these jailbreak ballads evokes a world in which people have come to accept the power wielded by the cartels. A similar tone of acquiescence was projected a few months earlier in a carefully stage-managed protest march following his arrest - with banners reading ‘El Chapo is the defender and protector of the community’ and ‘We love Chapo and respect him more than any aw Just as these protesters were paid for by Guzmin’s cate the singers and bands who honour cartel chiefs through narcocorrids are often comnt® sioned by the traffickers themselves. While these ballads may seem to offer little more than macho bluster, they contribute significantly to what the theorist John P. Sullivan describes as social environment mediation ty disseminating and normalizing the values of the cates they help ‘weaken still farther state authority and the rule of law. stand ‘Moscow, Russia, 21 February 2012. Five members of the Punk | a Pussy Riot, dressed in brightly coloured dlothes and balaclavas, Cathedral and perform their song the sanctuary of Christ the Saviour Cath ag i fr of eid ‘Punk Prayer - Mother of God, Chas‘Music and Politics formance is released on ideo of the perfor worshippers. Later that d8Y 2 7° 1 and conviction of three of the YouTube, triggering *HE wee ad by religious hatred’. Their arrest ang band for ‘hooliganism Es widespread condemnation in the Wes, Iengthy prison sentences 8 John and Paul McCartney lining na, Elton with cee sock To cadank {in the name of freedom of expres. up to support thel nce Putin’s Russia, little f Gamoured to denou! : soa Bat oe croup’ aims or ideas While Key deal ofthe attention was "As with Matsekh’s piano protest, the protest were distorted of PS oerarrative of individual freedom versus media squeezed Pussy Riot into ®t pide-eyed liberals taking on an n, presenting the 5 ol depot ‘But the members ofthe band were in no sense naive young eerkers who stumbled into trouble with the authorities as a result of their Westernized values. Although feted by mainstream media (the London Times gave Pussy Riot the accolade International People of the Year), the group aligned itself with radical anti-capitalist and anarchist standpoints. ‘And rather than being a punk band, or having any connection to the Russian punk scene, Pussy Riot was an activist collective for whom music was just one vehicle for political promotion. Even the grainily authentic YouTube video of the live performance in the cathedral is not quite what it first seemed. The group managed to record only around twelve seconds of the song in the cathedral (the refrain ‘Shit, shit, holy shit’) before being ejected by security guards, and the video versions splice this footage together with a performance in a different venue; far from documenting a live protest event, the video itself was the protest.!® These case studies illustrate just a few of the ways in which the spheres of music and politics intersect in our contemporary world. To speak of spheres may suggest that, as in a Venn diagram, music and politics are separate fields with a thin, clearly defined area of overlap — ‘political music’ - shared ee a —_ of the examples discussed above could be made to ful categ oe ee of Political music and shoe-horned into its 2 Protest music (Pussy Riot’s ‘Punk Prayer’) and Propaganda (Guzmén’s narcocorridos), Yet i more complexly and fluid) 8). Yet in general the two fields interact soundtracks; similarly, rather than . Potential females Political message. As these cases attest, the Sand materials to function politically goes well‘Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues beyond the confines of our conventional notion of political music. The reverse is true too, since if music can temporarily acquire politicality, politics can temporarily acquire musicality: how else can we conceptualize Pussy Riot’s twelve-second engagement with punk rock? ‘The ‘and’ conjoining music and politics is thus not a fixed boundary or a narrow funnel linking two separate entities. Equally, though, it is not helpful to read the ‘and’ as a sign of identity (even if it is possible for some forms of music to seem to be political in an unmediated way). While music and politics intermingle across each other's terrain, we need to resist the urge to treat them from the start as one densely entangled whole. To move toward understanding how they interrelate, it makes sense to turn to the most prominent theorist of the ‘and’, Gilles Deleuze: ‘AND is neither one thing nor the other, it’s always in-between, between two things; it's the borderline, there's always a border, a line of flight or flow ... And yet it's along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape.”"® Here, the ‘and’ ~ the myriad kinds of interaction linking the one and the other ~ is a transformative force of becoming, continually triggering change within the fields it conjoins. Rather than being stable objects, the fields of ‘music’ and ‘politics’ are mutating and ‘expanding constantly as a result of their evolving exchanges. And rather than being locked into fixed modes of interaction, music and politics can come together in contingent, temporary alliances.” As well as seeking to understand the multiple forms of mediation linking these fields, we need to recognize how new technologies and media have redefined the ways in which they interact (making it possible for a lone extremist to radicalize himself through his iPod and for narcocorridos to be disseminated within minutes of the event that inspired them). ‘This chapter provides a preliminary map of the ways in which the fields of music and politics relate to one another, introducing and analyzing some of the key concepts and issues that can help us understand how they interact. But before going any further, we need to pin down what we mean by ‘politics’, not to impose a particular view or eliminate areas from discussion, but rather to make sure that we do justice to all sides of the concept. 1.1 Politics and the Political Definitions of politics - what it encompasses and what is excluded from it - invariably reflect the context and political standpoint of the definer. Indeed, as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek notes, ‘every neutralization of somepolities ” asic ad p jg a political eect 1 Celene yy t'YIM8 Politics with diseent and locatin8* The British anarchist philosopher Sit®*Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues Critchley, for example, maintains that authentic politics must be conducted at a distance from government, elevating protest activism as ethically and democratically superior to parliamentary politics under liberal democracy: ‘Politics, I argue, cannot be confined to the activity of government that maintains order, pacification and security while constantly aiming at con- sensus. On the contrary, politics is the manifestation of dissensus, the cultivation of anarchic multiplicity that calls into question the authority and legitimacy of the state.’ Another contemporary proponent of this kind of revisionist definition of politics is the French philosopher Jacques Ranciére, who characterizes the political field as the struggle between what he terms ‘politics’ and the ‘police order’. Under police, Ranciére provoca- tively includes all the forces which maintain a given order of domination ~ government, justice system, social security and so on ~ reserving politics for the elements antagonistic to and excluded by that order. Politics thus challenges an existing ‘distribution of the sensible’ (partage du sensible) ~ Ranciére’s term for the order governing participation in the public realm — by giving voice to those hitherto denied a place in it: The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise ... Political activity is whatever shifts ‘a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination, It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise.” Ranciére’s distinction reflects a long-standing tradition of defining politics in opposition to the political (a pairing even more confusing in French political theory, which opposes la politique and le politique). This antithesis is more than just a theoretical conceit, since commentators have used it as a means to challenge exclusionary conceptions of politics and intervene directly in political life. The originator of this opposition was the German tight-wing theorist Carl Schmitt, who employed it - shortly before Adolf Hitler's ascent to power ~ to critique liberal democracy by driving a wedge between the political and the official sphere of politics. Rejecting narrow conceptions of the political, Schmitt argues that it is an all-pervading dimension of human existence; this dimension is characterized by ‘the most intense and extreme antagonism’, which he refers to as the ‘friend-enemy’ antithesis.°? Schmitt’s opposition of politics and the political resurfaced following the end of these and politics Music an thinkers it Provided & me, democratic consensus. Thys ,.° urope " gchmitt’s antithesis offers gy 7 ing Bur for left-wind cold War a beyond the liberal: cnt pet — ae in order to facilitate disseny t 0 re nfguing cone the dimension of antagonism that inherent jy pythe politcal i can take many forms and are in different : relations, antagonism 1 on the other side, indicates the ensemble of pr socal selations. Po ® which seek to establish @ certain order and op" discourses and Le ealthal that are always potentially conflictual beau a ee the dimension of the political. they are ’5 view of the political as inherent in aj) he massively expanded conception of polite, currently operative in arts and humanities ace (melding music. ology). Over the last half-century, the concept of the politica hay extended well beyond the state to encompass all aspects of life, a devs ‘opment evident in the various conceptions of biopolitics and ‘everyday politics’ championed by theorists from Michel Foucault onward This expansion is also clear from the ever-growing lexicon of concepts which theorists use to locate and characterize the various different modes of politicality and interfaces between culture and politics.°° All this raise the question of whether everything is political, making it illusory to distinguish between political and non-political cultural products and Practices, including music (this issue is addressed at the end of ths chapter). Two cautions from the Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson at cape — at this point. While it may seem common ses ae ne the political into something easily manageibl are, afer al, fragment aie constraining subsequent analyses ¥® compartments steno ma living in a host of separate Liat Politics is possible 37 tie each one of those a certain Kind ¢ ove invaluable in helping vg eye cntPle coexisting es ‘music and politics. No leer gan aetstand the conjunctions be sectraly the expansion ee is another caveat from Jam™ i eral uncoveting potinese’® Political field: that recent scholashiP this interpreting nu" @cTOSS culture, has tended ‘in the vel ‘Schmitt's and Mouffe’ relations chimes with TPretive di oe over oe cine assign to overtly political pu o In ord ic does ™ necte ler to be political, music con, iti ected to, fred ue this acknowle, a SPheres of life customarily fenced Ma EEO of politica ROU not lead us to neglect th ™ Music,e ‘Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues Although the discussion so far has focused on the scope of politics and the political, it has also touched on some of the concepts and categories crucial to understanding the field. Power looms large here, as in Mouffe’s view of the political as a conflictual terrain of power and resistance. In addition, we have encountered the idea of politics as the safeguarding of an ordered society, and the alternative view that politics is all about dissent. Another central theme is that of identity and difference, encapsulated in Schmitt's and Moutfe’s eleva- tion of antagonism as the crux of the political. Aristotle's conception of politics as the collective pursuit of the good life hints at a host of other concepts witich we need to take into account: politics and freedom, community, democracy, equality, social justice and so on, In addition to acknowledging these multiple dimensions, we need to bear in mind the dynamic character which they lend to politics (the ideals of freedom, community, democracy, equality and social justice are what political theorists refer to as ‘momentum concepts’, impelling us onward and upward yet remaining forever out of reach). As Aristotle's idea of collective self-perfection suggests, politics - where it rises above mere ‘management ~ is a forward-moving process envisaging change and a better future; for the French political philosopher Alain Badiou, ‘the essence of politics is not the plurality of opinions. It is the prescription of a possibility in rupture with what exists.“° This combination of prescription, change and. hope for the future surely takes us to the heart of politics and can also serve as. 4 preliminary definition of a concept fundamental to understanding the field: political ideology. An ideology is not simply a set of political ideas and principles but a vision of a social order, a lens which simultaneously brings contemporary reality into focus and corrects its defects (the wider connota- tions and uses of ideology are explored in Chapter 3). 1.2 Musical Messages, Noises and Affects ‘Music too has always been a conceptually contested terrain, and probing its limits can help us to understand what it has to offer politics. At its extremes, music as political expression morphs into speech or into brute, disruptive noise. While talking and singing have become increasingly compartmentalized within the West in modernity, the middle ground of rhetorically heightened, ritualized speech retains its potency." This zone is occupied not only by preachers and orators - think of the emotive energy, vocal range and rhythmic control of Martin Luther King Jr's ‘{ Have a Dream’ speech ~ but also by chanting crowds. Even the most banal unpitched rhythmic chant (‘Yes we can!” or ‘No ifs, no buts, no ulasi an PS imply transmit + oes more than SDP Y it @ Message, education os!) soe eve significance through its musical tie shetorical aoe ‘to generate solidarity but to choreg, soch hatin ne Egyptian sevolution of 2011, ee ape apie SHA > in particular of the word « ig chanting * erved 10 control the speed of | sheppotestest marchin, Nya sng lent consontations Similarly, the Ocas® rnd other forms of rhythmic pq! presence, mark out territory and inten in authorities.“ The most notable example used in New York ang Fey broader Occupy movement Was the ‘human microphone’, the am, Y the aroma speaker’ words through crowd repetition, which served "pli, tn ote to evade a ban on electronic sound equipment Ris sociologist Rossana Reguillo, participating tn itheshumén ae ee promoted a heightened form of listening in which the pate vee satel ty pir alized end dlstiled Sato'idean*6. set James Deaville demonstrates, the mainstr i vivid and varied soundscape of the Occuy ae a ee varied soni ipy Protest in order to 4 ‘a shambolic circus.” This media standpoint i Portray its view of the dominant order as determini neatly Hlustrates Rance rete dbcoaat ait aid deel i those forms of expressna isms i gecnlsine x s}permeneal insets Sous. JE polttical Sa scour, some forms of popula pro ion in what is recognized a a noisy shock to the s protest are more fleeting, offerit ines Ustibos ystem: a howl of rage or scorn di fering only pre poliea phase oe nine metaphor, Badiou ch pai eae, of icitbn’ az fan candscrareganah ABER the init order which gras deafness to all the lates ae of ‘ordinary acid De Rh eT oimpossbize’ poi and logics of the establisel haifa a ip - of such activist me 2 : globe. The ay in vario Wid, but typical Protest ~ e Produced ing ‘order to maintain a sonic m, the re ae or eae f Practices which en pe Sot history and acrossthe Tough masie ie O® YOKEd under this term is 7 whatever musia 2 oe Taucous, cacophonous form of suet OF those wie instrumer Pots and pans, whistlin; Steins ‘tho have offernen® a¥allable ~ di ig and screeching * ine 28td, sy led against social m irected at authority figu® ” of normal social ra involving a aes medi ere sat i onal deus for Sa a ae ean and in edie a Noman ™ Latin Am, "Y while parallels can still be! erica. (fo io r example the cacerolte‘Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues ‘or stew-pot, protests in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s). Perhaps the most interesting modern-day examples are from Haiti, where the practice of bat teneb (beating back the darkness) serves momentarily to amplify the voices of slum women, internally displaced people and other groups pushing at the margins of power."' Describing a tendb outside the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, Gage Averill explains how it provides an anonymous and relatively risk-free vehicle for protest: Car horns were joined by pedestrians clattering sticks along metal fences, by people blowing into conch shells and over bottles, by young boys banging on hub caps, and by the sound of kola merchants drumming on their bottles with spoons Because so many people were involved over such a distance and because no laws were being broken, the authorities could do nothing ... Tenébs are not music per se, although musical instruments are often used. Rather they constitute a collective performance of sound-as-power and a demonstration of the ability of popular forces to coordinate large numbers of people successfully.” ‘These examples from music's borderlands with speech and noise give us two important steers for understanding its political uses and functions. First, they encourage a focus on music's materiality, its affective dimension and its capacity to organize time and space: here we encounter music as a physical force, choreographing protest and annexing territory, translating political ideals into vividly felt experience, and generating emotional soli- darity through collective participation. Second, they usefully direct us away from an exclusive or overstated emphasis on language and verbal content. This is crucial since many of the default assumptions about the functions, workings and effects of political art are oriented around literary models and verbal communication; as a result, they offer a narrow and misleading view of what music can do for politics. Language and Verbal Content ‘A preoccupation with verbal content not only erects a wall between it and music’s other properties but can lead to the political efficacy of music being ‘exaggerated. This tends to occur when music with words is approached from the standpoint of what Ranciére terms the mimetic or pedagogical model of political art: the view not only that it communicates a transparent message but that this message exercises a direct effect on the listener's behaviour. For Ranciere, the linear logic of ‘cause and effect, intention and consequence’ underpinning this perspective is not only implausible but centuries out of date, having been refuted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the mid-eighteenthis straw horse, be attacking @ s! OSE; Consig, ve and flowed in the media ove vial nf deny the possiyi tt it would be rash to deny the possi, sic Wa pres and the attitudes and beh mi WP aship bet so ations jediated Fe! them, a "I a a uence through cognitive trangmig. iistenets if : s one bave « em soarch and medi Studies have long ran emision model of the effects of langue ine eee it tackles social problems backward, », oj media, not i a causes.°° Similarly, sociologists have count them onto their supposed this model on the grou .ds that it isolates textual messages from theta contexts conditioning their prov critics of gangsta rap have gone duction and reception; as Peter J, yy, ” 10 imply . . . that both the active “seng.» pote he dul payors: any actual soci, - a Primi we, and to assume that the “message” is both ‘unambiguoy and effective in producing an appropriate reaction ta the receiver” * Yq, this kind of logic continues to be found not only in relation to rap lyrics but in discussions of the dangers posed by other forms of music. Consider, fy example, the assumption of German government agencies and media th so-called Rechtsrock serves as a ‘gateway drug’ into right-wing extremism.” Awarning leaflet issued by the state government of ‘Saxony is typical, stating that ‘the danger is that the song texts will manipulate the political wor views of young listeners in particular and that over time they will embrae the extreme right-wing stances conveyed by them.** From the standpoint of this language-oriented effects model, the musicd firweaiee : ee is more or less incidental, serving merely to ‘sugartte ton of maa aes broadly and pervasively, this marginaliz verbal communication Aon eP'ONS of political art conceived ard thers have treated ane ey large number of political lee peg bes 0 ransareny eeOme distraction eerie Pethaps the classic ‘exatiy ‘ing communication and rational é as attempted in 1794 tg ise © in modernity is Georges Danton, ' 5 vention ofrevoluto, ee singing banned from the Natio» The halls and th bar Aone Cl aes ty Oo ie the zea from which visiting °° wah SPSiOn of he Cat'®™*NIaans) ace means to hear the solemn 2! MS With Sideshow ging eS Mithes; none a hi mela ee Sustain sing may allow him 3 me the great interests he ggtitt Me must coolly, calmly, and with ag * Ponto nd gene than, dace me sound the caret tors, and raise the alarm against impo"‘Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues 1 acknowledge the civic-mindedness of the petitioners; but I request that hence- forth we hear nothing at the bar but reason in prose.”? If today Danton’s view that music has no place in a parliamentary session seems like common sense, this reflects a more deep-seated assumption that politics is a verbal matter: a world oriented around speeches, debating points, laws and manifestos. But as seen earlier, this narrow understanding of the political field is itself grounded in the politics of exclusion, aiming to detach rational governance by the elite from the irrational passions of the mob (Danton’s attempts to sever the politics of the head from that of the body soon resulted in him experiencing a similar fate). ‘On occasion, music has contributed directly to the densely verbal world of parliamentary debates and disquisitions. One of the odder genres born during the French Revolution (cradle for so much that characterizes political music in modernity) was the constitution en vaudeville, which made use of well-known melodies to disseminate, critique and present alternatives to the articles of the revolutionary constitutions of 1791-3; one of these sung constitutions, produced by the ultra-royalist Francois March- ant, runs to 160 pages.°° This genre is an interesting by-product of the birth of mass politics, aiming to communicate and engage with sections of the population whose previous involvement in state affairs would have been negligible. But as even the leading modern expert on the genre concedes, ‘to sing the articles of a constitution seems to us today an absurd undertaking’; there are some things that music does very well, and conveying complex verbal information is not one of them.%" In some other ways, too, music proves a defective medium for political work. As David Hesmondhalgh stresses, music is not much help in verifying facts or assessing the truth of one position over another; neither is it capable of elucidating particular views or belief systems.” All of which need not lead us to concede ‘the unpalatable truth’, as Mark Carroll puts it, that for music, ‘any ideological engagement (actual or perceived) depends primarily on the use of texts, whether in the form of ibretti, lyrics, titles, manifestos or explanatory commentaries." Carroll's perspective assumes that ideology is something outside music (in Marcello Sorce Keller’s words, a ‘garb’ which it puts on) and that ideologies are verbal constructs, making words more or less essential to political communication. This view of the primacy of language in politics has recently been challenged by the American philosopher Crispin Sartwell, who argues instead that ideologies are multimedia systems: Political ideologies and constitutions are aesthetic systems of which texts form a portion, in the precise sense that political systems appear in different media, none 15asic and aU Ms all of which are related ... A politics ig an samen) and aH OMe Political systems are ng my Ye, cot which 8 - patever el . of imagery, architecture, m aa) 2 ; farnishi ls they are SOP, clothing and fibers, furnishings and grap aye bodiment js particularly provocative, he is just op, ba ’s phrasing is Pane Fev while sarells PRTE se seemingly self-evident notion thay idea theorists to cial essay from the late 1960s — ‘deg sine of actu Ae logy es towards an Investigation) — ty ay usser stressed the Sate etsy of de® i NS, Practices ifest themselves in human actioy % Practices, toy Much subsequent ideological analysis hag facet and institutions: on describes as a ‘hermeneutic of practice rage developing what Jom 4 behaviours produce and reproduce ity how slic eas attention away from a narrow focus on epi an ere piting that ‘all forms of social practice and cultural pa ee therefore be considered ideological in some larger genge ‘cit there are dangers in treating ideology as all-encompassing jg ection 34), the expansion of ideological analysis to encompass symbai, practices is indispensable for work on music and politics. This does my simply entail reading the signifying practices within musical texts or ay. ities as if they were verbal artefacts, or translating musical gestures ai processes into conceptual content. It also involves, as Sartwell argues, ving due attention to the aesthetic and affective dimensions of ideology, ame which places music’s particular strengths front and centre. inal, Box 1.2 Marxism, Socialism and Communism A saa ae ae itis not helpful to think of Marxism as a single, cobait itserves as an umbrella term for a range of discourse take the i 7 and ch and economic methods and theories develope by Ka Mit Although theorine © Which all these discourses can be bailed &™ embrace dik and activists who identify themselves as Marxists 10m nd approaches drawn from the categories presented bdb™ Mere and Bey nisi is the critique of capitalism and Talks a the domivans {et the socioeconomic structure of and all the spher Sominant infuence within a society, shaping soc ™™, ‘Pitalist mode ‘py tie (See Boxes 3.1 and 3.2), For Marx and | “ton exploits workers, rating them and thMusic and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues Box 1.2 (cont.) ‘as commodities in the process of generating surplus value for the owners of the ‘means of production. It also alienates and dchumanizes them, estranging workers from the products of their labour and blocking their capacity to realize fally ther abilities and powers. 2. Marxism's vitality derives from its positive ideas and values as well as its negative critique Although Marx and Engels were reluctant to draw up blueprints for the future (fearing comparisons with ‘utopian socialists’ such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier), describing how life would be better under communism was essential to their project Marxism presents an ideal of ‘emancipation in which society is reorganized in order to enable individuals to realize their essential human capacities and powers, Crucial to fostering this holistic development is eliminating the division of labour and actualizing each individual's social essence. Marx envisages labour under communism as a self activity in which the worker, like a musician in an orchestra (Uhe analogy is ‘Marx’s) gains satisfaction from fulfilling abour and shared ownership over the product. 3, Getting from ‘I’ to ‘2 is the driving force behind Marx and Engels’s historical ‘materialism and theory of historical change. Material development drives history by generating contradictions between the productive forces and the existing social structure (see Box 3.1); for Marx and Engels, as G. A. Cohen puts it, “history is, fundamentally the growth of human productive power, and forms of society rise and fall according as they enable and promote, or prevent and discourage, that growth.” This perspective has often been equated with historical determinism — that i, the idea that history's course is predetermined and controlled by forces beyond human agency ~ and there are plenty of passages in their writings which suggest this viewpoint (eg, paragraph two of fox 21, page 68). Marx and Engels, however, stressed the role of human agency srthin these structures: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it Just as they pleas; they do not make it under crcumstnces chosen by ‘themselves.”" Marx and Engels’s sequence of modes of production includes two future phases: a transitional socialist mode of production and the subsequent attain- avent of eommunism proper or ‘full communism. They presenta ten-point plan for the socialist reconstruction of society inthe Communist Manifest, including seagures that became programmatic for socialist governments in reality (includ ing progressive taxation, public ‘ownership and free education for all)? Pull communism — common ownership of property ~ would emerge gradually alongside the elimination of divisions of labour, class race and religion, while inalvidvals capacity for sel- governance would enable the apparatus ofthe sate to ‘wither away. As the latter aspiration implies, the attainment of fall commun- jam requires a transformation not merely within society but within individuals: ‘an Idea.” the willingness, in Badiou’s phrase, to live for 7) ame = gs eqpaity to stimulate Body sensing, s Fpotivation ~ has dominated dsasig. jing of Pato. The politics of mas yn ly contrasting ways. One id eorized in wICeY i oa recently reinvigorated, conceives affects as, 4 ier the radar of conscious Perception, sin ng bebavioot through their direct impact on, lating ation ews of affect can. be found throughout Western my. boy. Sia it two very different constructs, both of which hay history, associat "atures: on the one hand, music’s elemental pop, = cabal a on the other, the idea of it as an intoxi to irrational force undermining the equilibrium of the individual and soci (ete to constructions are combined in a passage from Plato's Lox, which describes how in the healing rituals of the Corybantes, ‘the musica, the pipes bewitches the frenzied Bacchic reveller’, inducing ‘a felig of calm and peace’).’° Both these constructions treat music as a kind of ‘magical power or mood-altering drug, capable of exercising transformatie effects through its impact on the body.”° As well as functioning below the threshold of consciousness and cognition, music’s Dionysiac powers o intoxication work at a sub-personal level, serving temporarily, as Fried:it Nietasche put it, to ‘cause subjectivity to vanish to the point of complée self-forgetting.”” From the standpoint of this has been _ model of affect, music’s capacity to wok Stbrontiousy and to strip away individual autonomy gives ita dang Snes fotench fuelling abhorrent forms of collective. behav (on, for tha eth horrors of the French Revolution or the Thitd Rad have repeatedly peace ue OF faz oF rock and roll) commenti iaing force, Presented such bodily musical experience as a dehum® dragging rati i description of musi nel beings down to the level of animals 18* Revolution, for exam cet on the mob from the period of the Fe Glamed that" '€ Playwright and philosopher Friedrich onal faces ther brutish, and inn 'Y appears shot eigen eyes sin Peon Of Sensuality, verging on SO™N s srmptoms cee eize body prove OPE MOU is all desire, VU Iebratn appear” Ssting is quick and fant, in sho 3 a a ing, bt SR8H0US impres e NP Of human 41 Pt? that the senses are feastin® ee ” ion is falling prey to the violenMusic and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues ‘Commentators more sympathetic toward music’s affective dimension have viewed its political effectiveness in different terms, For the young Nietzsche ~ reflecting on the power of Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy’ by reima- gining it as a kind of psychedelic trance music ~ its suspension of individ- ual freedom functions as a shock community effect, renewing ‘the bond between human beings’ and breaking down social boundaries and hier- archies.” Similarly, ethnomusicologists working on trance states have emphasized music’s role in dissolving the boundaries between self and other; the latter is central to Judith O. Becker's definition of trancing as ‘a bodily event, characterized by strong emotion, intense focus, [and] the loss. of the strong sense of self.®” A parallel emphasis on the positive political dimensions of purely affective experience can be found in recent discus- sions of rave culture. For Sarah Thornton, the experience of rave music and dance serves to suspend rationality and create a collective state of consciousness: “The constant pulse of the bass blocks thoughts, affects emotions and enters the body. Like a drug, rhythms can lull one into another state." A more explicitly political take on rave is given by Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, who evoke the dance floor as a liberatory ‘communitarian space in which individual egos and identities are dissolved into ‘ecstatic collectivity’. The view of affect outlined above - conceiving bodily response as working independently and ahead of conscious perception and language — has gained a strong traction across the humanities in recent years, serving as a corrective to the perceived ‘linguistic imperialism’ of semiotics and discourse theory. But by polarizing affect and discourse, and treating affect as pre-discursive, this model may seem to limit its application to visceral shocks and moments of sensory overload like those described above. Such jolts to the system, as the leading theorist of this model, Brian Massumi, acknowledges, do not stray beyond the proto-political, offering only ‘the first stirrings of the political, flush with the felt intensities of life’®> Even in relation to the experience of music, where the idea of a primary physiological response is more plausible than for verbal media, affect only rarely works in isolation: our responses to sonic stimuli are mediated, shaped and framed by discourses, considered in the broadest sense as assemblages of meaning which organize and make intelligible the world around us. ‘A second model of affect, therefore, stresses the fluid boundary and constant interchange between it and discourse, Rather than casting affect and cognition as separate systems, and treating political discourses as ‘sen- sually inert, this model acknowledges what Jeremy Gilbert describes as 19afecive and sensuous dimensions - agistice jth current research in Rey n-inguis?™ re accords Wil : Neto | sing Eis pes? ee cognitive-emotional behaviours a ‘ ‘come works of Braif AFe8s, None of whic ae coalitions o! ive or cognitive’”” While the. jynari sficaly affectiv . © 80 basis in CY” ed as spec wher Baruch Spinoza considered that is be concept? ne phil of rect in the mind, more recent theo eer pbich cognitive and bodily informa el a 4 stressed tta Timm Knudsen aid Conten SAO bat a convey. FOr ct ways depending °° ana seearilhiin Y fected in comPl er ined with discourses: sometimes affects Sin then discourses, sometimes they open Possibilities streng! they motivate discursive crisis. fugue changes and sometimes n of Political Songs Box 13 The Affective Dimensio reader of an abortive republican revolution in Baden, Gq.) Yankee colonel inthe American Cl Was | Friedrich Hecker, ‘many in 1848, and later a : ‘on the power of politcal song to recruit; Not every man is capable of being enthused through intellectual argu- ‘ments, since for most itis the sensual dimension ~ in the noblest sense of the word - which is dominant. Feeling, emotion and the imagination a the guides which lead him to that hallowed place from which hunan rights, the dignity of man and liberty can be seen clearly. On learning a political song for the first time, he sings it with irrepress ‘ble oy in the rapture or fervour of the moment, but in those quiet timesin_ | which a man contemplates himself or is absorbed in dreams, and vii a here and there, the song re-echoes in his soul. The ideas whist ® ee eet vivid, both appealing in themselves and serving ong ony Sous That which was acquired unconsciously semce thea ee hen gains a nucleus, a form and an — ‘hevigh the a omes his lodestar and he becomes politicized : pasion de ne fons through tere chords te “a ontheheart. The great Surge up and down and are inscribed on the braprcesofdenienn tthe deepest ideas of politcal thou 804 of the human heat titan alloyed clarity, becoming, ee CPredich Hecker, pac vd the inalienable property of thei a ree Ka civic, a Lied’ [The Political Sone] {!' lden, 1849) mnauffer, Neue Lieder fiir das Teulst#‘Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues Affect, Manipulation and Political Advertising ‘One of the reasons why affect theory came to prominence in the human- ities was to explain what might be termed the politics of affective manipulation.” In the contemporary world of ‘post-truth’ politics, rous- ing rhetoric and emotional persuasion have increasingly trumped rational arguments; in this climate, music’s capacity to provoke visceral reactions and trigger affective resonances makes it an indispensable if volatile tool. Political activists have long been aware of the importance of positive emotions for political mobilization and the role that music can play in instilling them. The nineteenth-century German radical Friedrich Hecker, for example, stressed the importance of ‘the sensual dimension’ in recruiting for political causes, highlighting how the “irrepressible joy’ generated through political song served as the basis for the process of politicizing individuals (see Box 1.3). It is not hard to find examples of modern political advertising in which music performs a similar function. Consider the campaign ad ‘America’ from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, in which a succession of folksy images of everyday American life is combined with the 1968 Simon and Garfunkel song of the same name.” Although it presents an artless demeanour, the ad is carefully calculated to press the right affective buttons; the visuals are cut to fit the beat of the song, crescendoing into the climactic refrain ‘They've all come to look for America’, which is reinforced by surging waves of cheering and applause. Numerous media commentaries have stressed the ad’s capacity to generate not only posi- tive emotions but also bodily responses, describing how it produces ‘goose bumps’, ‘chills’ and ‘a sense of euphoria and ecstasy’.”* Its success therefore stems not only from cognitive association (the link it constructs between Sanders and the innocent optimism of 1968) but from affect (prompting viewers to experience pleasure and a hopeful sensibility themselves). As a result, viewers of all political persuasions reported responding positively to the ad.”* Crucial to the impact of this and other political ads communicating ‘positive messages (the classic example is ‘I like Ike’ from 1952) is making the viewer share the feeling of elation and belonging that goes with being part of a winning team.” Negative campaign ads aim at precisely the opposite, using music to make the viewer feel anxious, alienated and disaffected. In the United States, attack ads are so embedded in the political landscape that commercial music agencies offer package deals on scary soundtracks. The firm Music Cult, for example, sells a package of aa‘Music and Politics ‘18 ominous and dark instrumental underscores Perfect for thay 7 Negative Attack Ad’, identifying its subgenre as ‘dark, Sinister, 4 ‘omnis srineiet 22 stenilac: Product is available from Finteon with tracks entitled ‘Can You Trust? “Unfit to Win’ ang ‘Hes gts One’ On one level, such music relies on negative Cognitive a for its effect, using stock devices and colours (grim, ostinato, cing and tolling bells) familiar from thrillers and horror Movies. But on ao it makes use of low frequencies and thudding repeateg Notes tg Physically on the viewer, working below the level of consign to generate sensations of agitation and anxiety (one example techniques in practice is Mitt Romney's 2012 America’). If these examples suggest it is st responses for political ends, there Opposite, Some fail by ig the extent to whi shape viewers’ cogniti nal Tesponses. One the too-clever-by-half ‘Morning Again’ AMPAIEN ad “Belge t “tts. A striking example is the commercd can oor duced by the Republican campaign organization Amet- eet Set out to dissuade Young voters from backing Ny?” The a “ation by Portraying him as an ineffectual ot is is simple, presenting a montage fore abruptly caro 8 Und on chat aes sean oS ENCE of doy nN SWitching to black and white, ie ce Young peg neat images and stats to illustrate ie ‘middle-aged ieee Pes Problems during his frst erm. WA favourably to the ad, it fled 7s audience ang arguably strengthened Obs™‘Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues reputation; as one YouTube viewer noted, ‘Seriously, I cannot be the only ‘one who thinks Obama is one cool guy after this ad." The problem is partly visual (the colourful neon slogans such as ‘biggest celebrity in the world’ and ‘one cool president’ catch the attention more than the mono- chrome, wordy economic factoids that follow them). But music and sound are largely responsible for undermining the ad's aims. Not only does the easy-going R&B soundtrack define and dominate the mood (throwing into parentheses the ad's preachy middle section), but the abrupt interruption of its beat serves to irritate the viewer rather than capture attention or sympathy. The mixed messages the ad sends out are further confused by the samples superimposed on the main soundtrack: chants of ‘four more years’ and deep moans of ‘oh yeah’ from Yello’s eponymous 1985 single." Small wonder that Donald Trump dismissed it as ‘a terrible ad by the Republicans ... when I first saw it, I thought the Democrats put it out. ‘As ‘Cool’ and ‘Morning Again’ illustrate, music is far from being a simple tool for transmitting and implanting messages and affects. Rather, its signifying and affective power, like all forms of power, can have conse- quences wholly unintended by those wielding it. 1.3. Agency and Causation Exploring music’s political power requires that we probe the difficult issues of agency and causation. In general, political agency is the idea that individuals and groups have the power to ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ (a T-shirt slogan often misattributed to Gandhi). As this phrase neatly illustrates, political agency is both the capacity to act politc- ally and the process of exercising that capacity; the freedom to effect change and the activity of interacting with others to bring it about.’ When defined like this, the centrality of agency for probing music’s relationship to politics is immediately obvious. Understanding agency is crucial to grasping not only music’s capacity to intervene in politics but its power to construct identities and model collectivities; as Barry Shank argues in a recent discussion, ‘music is one of the central cultural processes through which the abstract concept of the polis comes into bodily experi- ence’, enabling it ‘to consolidate an entirely new sense of the self and its relation to others’ and to prefigure ‘the emergence of a political community yet to come’.'™ The idea that music can function as a political actor, just like a human agent, is at the root of many key assumptions about its political efficacy, yet this notion is as problematic as it is useful. 23) asic and Polis isely who or what i ing down precisely oF what nv int sp the nature of j The dic nd i a of canton ti, ial agency 32 istic sation, with politica eto crudely to approach the question without resort ee centring on (1) intentions Hee ence. The first and most fami materiality and (3) @ ractices and texts convey the political ideologi, a assumes that musical e rerformers; as with agentic conceptions of, aims of th . a elded to produce political effects, or asa yyy" it treats music as a too! nen icular individuals and institutions, This ve, for rain the goals Po ne pedagogic model of political ar an, of political agency deat music can be invested with a trang, senior a eon the recipient's attitudes or behaviour, . ball wid siupty equating the intentional model of political age with didactic modes of presentation or with narrowly functional fom politcal music. The idea that art conveys the intentions of its creators ate, all, is also at work in attempts to decode the concealed politics lurking beneath the surface of Western classical works: think of the cottage indi: try of commentators dedicated to revealing the secret dissidence sup. posedly animating Shostakovich’s symphonies (see Section 62). We should also avoid assuming that the category of intentionality applies a ‘othe initial instigators of a musical work or practice; the act of appro: ation, too, can imbue works or practices with political agency. Consiter, for example, the EU’s cooption of Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy’ as the emblen of pan-European nationalism, othe use of this music by Ian Smiths whit rae ae ty dei to Tepresent itself as the last outpost Passive to encompass such ~ concept of ‘reception’ may well seem t nev politcal end 'Gentic efforts to harness pre-existing musc!? ‘The second ‘| sounds and ieee wat of material agency ~ contends that mil Gan be poured, but rather Just Vessels into which political intention? human agencies involved (oye Tue their own agency, distinct fom that agency ieaagS Production. At frst glance the mo? lives ig je nt Pressingly real objects can exercise an impact O° ABENCY, the politieas ONS OF the sreise Pe mate mater sla thon Ost Provocative advocates of mat” vist 2% passive gt Bennet argues that rather than 2h and ine, ‘vitality *b We should recognize theit “7!NUsig how »Q) and lide view un. rent mey: ‘sof fter hite too cto ‘Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues and ‘thing-power’ ‘the capacity of things ... not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’! Bennett goes on to argue that man-made objects such as artworks can also ‘manifest traces of independence or aliveness’ irreducible to the intentions of their creators or the responses they provoke." These ideas seem Particularly relevant to music, since they help us to grasp the sheer unpredictability that attends attempts to harness it to political ends: the excess or gremlin in the ‘machine that lies beyond the control of human actors. The idea that material objects can have their own autonomous political agency necessitates a series of manoeuvres, not least detaching agency from intentionality. Rather than viewing agency in terms of aims that generate actions, champions of material agency have shifted the emphasis to efficacy: the capacity of objects to trigger effects and generate change. But given that efficacy is normally conceived in relation to a desired result, or as movement toward an intended goal ~ reinserting intentionality into the equation — this refocusing in turn requires a further manoeuvre. Bennett’s solution is to remove goal-directedness from agency while retaining a sense of motion: movement away from the present and toward an undefined future. In fleshing out this approach, she draws on Jacques Derrida’s concept of messianicity as an alternative to goal-directedness governed by intention, that is, the idea that material objects possess an ‘open-ended promissory quality’, an unspecified and insatiable straining toward a future plenitude,'°* ‘This conception of movement toward an unreachable future perfect reson- ates not only with the definition of politics I presented earlier in this chapter but with the political significance imputed to autonomous art within both romanticism and modernism; for the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno ~ in a maxim misremembered from Stendhal - art offers a promesse du bonheur, an endless striving toward a future world of happiness.’ If this second model finds political agency within art’s materiality, a third model locates it in the experience of art. In this model, music’s sonic configurations and affective power enable it to be heard and felt by listeners in ways that confer political agency on it. This conception smartly sidesteps the issues of intentionality and nonhuman agency, making agency something projected into the music (yet ascribed to its force) ‘The most fully developed example of this third model is Shank’s theorization of what he describes as the ‘political agency of musical beauty’. As his use of the word ‘beauty’ suggests, the agency experienced by the listener is stimulated by music's sonic structures rather than just its visceral and affective power: 2526 ts from an attentive (€¥en When yg ty, it result ye find musa Md — the flow of rhythms, the senate Where vengagerent wit a ced tensions, the surprising splashes of conscious) esto Of i of chaos, dissonance, and silence, harman een the disturbing CSIC machronization of sound” tone, timbre, shaped by the l inated violence ‘eandy ioe the coordin and agency are somethiN ‘found’ by the listener, sf music’s beauty operties within music itself, describing. i tie ° ; : ponte aes Gaius ‘i ality of musical sound’ as the bass org ‘luring, d of the telescope, Berney imilarly, from the other en Bennet pola agency Simian ile challenging us to rethink the naa, conception of material agency ~ and people ~ also ultimately, ihe interaction between objects ultimately tray of the interac roperty shared by both. In a discussion appeci, agency as a distributed prop 1 of the word ‘enchantmeny ic, Bennett describes the double sense tment, sasareoa human fascination in material objects as well as their cap ay to place humans in their thrall: ‘the figure of enchantment points in two directions: the first toward the humans who feel enchanted and whose agentic capacities may be thereby strengthened, and the second toward te agency of the things that produce (helpful, harmful) effects in human and other bodies.”"? Considered together, these models can help us understand how muxicis able to exercise agency productively in the political field. At this point, ne need to recognize that some ~ perhaps most ~ of the music normaly labelled ‘political music’ does not involve this combination of agency and efficacy, thematizing Politics rather than aiming at political effects. Mud Yalta ‘music, in short, is fundamentally unpolitical, being music about shea ysl around polities. f that seems like an oxymoron, con ich uses politics as a backdi rae i dr panens simply tobe topical or fit in with « nets ey Oe for example, the output of the yin tt & Patticular genre. Conside, the revolutionary yeor agar Bese Composer Johann Straus] dit tionary ideas (the Frog, in Which a composition celebrating revo" honouring the vee tt Marsch, Op. 226) was swiftly followed by 0 of the counter-revolitionary forces (the Radel? Simply poing a” SU88esting cynicism or a change ofa Tsponding to cument greg O™ SUCH genres cultivated popu ere is a form of politi ‘ents. In addition to music aiming at topicality rather than Intervent that might be Chace aaa ate tans culture. Think of ee Politics that works if me $0ng "Revolution? (TOPE OF Tock in rather tha ‘ lon’ (the 6 Tebellion, epitomized by the Batl® rigi: 4 Sh version, included in the white Alu)Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues which John Lennon responded to the upheavals of 1968 with a noncom- mittal ‘you can count me out ~ in’; this is music that takes up a studiedly ambivalent relationship to contemporary radicalism, exploiting the frisson of the political for cultural ends.''* While the music in these examples may later have acquired political agency, its creators and initial recipients did not invest it with agency in the senses described above. In contrast, itis not hard to find examples of music which have no political connotations yet nonetheless come to exercise political agency. Earlier, we saw how Breivik’s self-radicalization was sustained by testosterone-packed but politically neutral film and game soundtracks. Similarly, in discussing the functions of music in the UK riots and protests of 2010-11, Marie Thompson and Tan Biddle draw attention to the absence of songs with explicitly political content; the mobilizing capacity of the music lay not in its message or symbolic content but in its affective construction of collectivity." Claims about music’s agency and efficacy need to be paired with a plausible conception of causation if they are to be convincing. What kinds of explanations might be used to justify the idea that music can influence the political views or behaviour of individuals, let alone mobilize groups, construct communities or help constitute a new politics? During the Second World War, the American folk singer Woody Guthrie famously placed the hyperbolic message ‘this machine kills fascists’ on his guitar; political music has always thrived on the notion that a well-chosen chord can set boots quaking in the corridors of power. In reality, strong causation ~ aptly characterized by Timothy Morton as ‘clunk causality’ - is seldom at issue in music’s relationship with politics, even in cases where cause and effect might initially seem relatively clear-cut." Recall, for example, the use of music in the Bernie Sanders campaign ad ‘America’, ‘Music’s affective efficacy may seem indisputable in this case; yet even here, there is no simple causal link between it and a political effect. For a start, the intense positive emotional and physical response that the ad elicits ‘owes as much to the visuals (happy, demographically diverse faces) and sound (ecstatic cheering and applause) as to the Simon and Garfunkel song; at most, music functions as one causal factor among others. Even if we take it as read that the music helps generate positive responses, this does not necessarily translate into straightforward political effects. Viewers and listeners are not simply submissive recipients, bovinely accepting whatever is thrust in their direction, but rather active political agents capable of blocking or reversing the effects intended. While even Repub- lican voters responded positively to ‘America’, a large proportion of them reported that they viewed Sanders less rather than more favourably after 728 Music and Politics watching it pollsters also stressed the limited ca Ofte supports or win ove unaligned voters ‘They can kay ag, of voters for about a week afte they view it. $0 the ehcp tn Beant eae Dt eg the effect is incredibly difficult, tng Given the difficulty of gauging music's Politica} eles, % Preferable to ditch strong forms of causation in favour of % tives. An example of this approach can be found in the monttee theorists Micke Bal and Miguel Heménder-Navarro, tk aye agency lies not in attempting to force a Political agenda ions ba Persuasive new ways of viewing the worlds » Without dictating its Politics, Visibility of situations, issues, events, and people ang Teaders to enact that visibility to answer ite call by s, ot apodictic but only propos audience disposes. Thus, 35 Propaganda would, arg F novels that straddl. vid bea and le the supposed divide et jabink of Harriet Beecher Stowe's antslavery nv in (1852) or Pablo Picasso's antifascist painting Gm Pusher, enforcer 2 ~ #4 music in its roles as street fighter, iss forms of and s0.on, We need to be able to allow for more empl! owledgin, vid : '§ the complex, indirect waysin lifest themselves, P i Model, entirely reject attempts t0 wy he Postion Of arguably gant Politics in caural oa eres me “lationship bere EY the most important contemporary the wet nee coer ea —_—Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues Earlier, we saw that for Rancitre, politics centres on disrupting and refash- ioning the ‘distribution of the sensible’, empowering those denied visibility and voice so as to create something more closely approximating a commu- nity of equals. This task of redrawing social spaces and identities, and reconfiguring what is visible and audible, gives politics its own aesthetic dimension (Ranciére is at pains to differentiate this ‘aesthetics of politics’ from the fascist aestheticization of politics, explored in Section 7.2). Ran- ciére regards art, like politics, as a form of dissent from the given ‘natural’ order, assigning artistic practices and works the capacity ‘to intervene in the distribution of the sensible and its reconfiguration’.'”° Just as politics has an aesthetic aspect, so he regards art as possessing a politics specific to it: if there is a politics of aesthetics, it lies in the practices and modes of visibility of art that re-configure the fabric of sensory experience." Although Ranciére assigns the spheres of politics and art/aesthetics ‘common concerns, he precludes them from talking directly to one another; like Schiller, whom he frequently cites and discusses, Ranciére’s conception of the politics of aesthetics is grounded in the view of art and politics as autonomous systems. Whatever political efficacy art possesses is not exercised through intervening directly in the field of politics, since there can be no direct traffic from the one to the other.’ Although Ranciére frequently draws on the language of causation in discussing the relationship between art and politics, he explicitly excludes direct cause and effect: “This politics of aesthetics ... operates under the conditions prescribed by an original disjunc- tion. It produces effects, but it does so on the basis of an original effect that implies the suspension of any direct cause-effect relationship.” Ranciére even rules out the weaker, propositional model of ar’s efficacy outlined above, arguing that ‘political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an “awareness” of the state of the world.” Rancitre devoted an essay, “The Paradoxes of Political Art’ to working through the implications of this position. From his perspective, the princi- pal paradox of political art is that it exists at all: as Gerald Raunig notes, Ranciére perpetuates the romantic-modernist opposition between ‘content- focused “political” art and formalistic “autonomous” art’, proscribing the former and investing all the dissensual energies of the aesthetic into the latter.'5 Locking art's politicality into its autonomy has the benefit, argu- ably, of making politics an inseparable part of what art is and does. But the political value of Ranciére’s autonomous art seems ‘locked in’ in another sense, unable to actualize the efficacy he claims for it without surmounting a host of obstacles, While his political theory is all about tearing down walls, these kinds of spatial metaphors work in the opposite direction in his essay 29and politics Music seave the spaces Te86rVEU fori of, ot ults in a ‘paradoy “by, art cane of aesthetics Tes Patadoxicg, 5M, cal arts a afar ing oro ane ns moet erelng sen cacy centring veal effects, however, Ranciére emp| OF Moye i ers polit lds of art and politics seem able toy ow art ae which 2 metaphor ie remaining autonomous rw wii sical or political by ‘moving beyond italy, jot become ae in the ‘real world’. There is no ‘te Worl! int nt Instead, there isa multiplicity of fg, inne ide icin which outside and inside take on « uit the topography of what is ‘in and what ‘ws placed by the aesthetics of politic ana ma Art does 1 from itself, and fancions asthe outs mon, fe oa, in wich hi , : canny cris-rosed and of ‘aesthetics. "7 lve matters, but it tive metaphor does not resol les is to her models of causation that can help us Understand jy set proce political effects. While Ranciére rules out direct Ausation jy conception he expresses metaphorically has much in common wih view of causality as mediation presented by the cultural theorist Laven Grossberg and with the idea of emergent causality formulated bye Political theorist William E, Connolly. For Grossberg, all causality isi. ated, in that the ‘trajectories of effectivity’ (for example, the ‘ands’ lnk music and politics) are always ‘interrupted, intersected, magnified or dinis ‘shed, transformed, bent, blocked, inflected, redirected, ete, by other: tices and events’.!* Movement from one fold of reality to another is tha unpredictable, non-linear process of becoming, Similarly, Connolly uses Concept of emergent causality to explain how seemingly autonome rps #200 one another. Inspired by the outlandish causal relation! . Theogony it causality stes# the my oe gony, emergent Ysterious, unknowable dimensions of a stimulus’s effects: i Emergent causaliny J clang in oa Banatl~-inthata movement in one force ld helt introduced nd ci? &Mergent in that: fist, some ofthe HH attves darkly tee ay Feld is not always knowable in detain sl Cal some dep ing tat emerge: second the new rcs ma 7 factor isn the very organisation of the emergent phenome ote oimpigegP8 fom the later fd hr rau sionsang fing fom the outside on the emerging formation! Poe within one ne may trigger novel capacities of elf" if *he two systems that had not been spurred int™‘Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues before; and fifth, a series of resonances may now roll back and forth across two partially separated and partially conjoined force-fields."2° As is apparent from Connolly's fifth category, he moves beyond the idea of causation as one-way traffic, highlighting not just how one system can stimulate motion in another but how resonances and vibrations can echo between both fields. As Connolly stresses, the use of language like ‘reson- ances’ and ‘Vibrations’ is more than simply metaphorical: it is indispens- able in seeking to get a hold on forms of causality that go beyond the direct or mechanical modes.'” While mediated and emergent causality helps us understand how art and politics can fold themselves into each other, a more straightforward idea is at work in Ranciére’s conception of how art produces political effects: art does politics simply by doing what it does as art. In arguing that art’s autonomy and capacity for subversion are two sides of the same coin, Ranciére claims that ‘the arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible."*' From this perspective, music’s contribution to furthering political projects consists simply of exercising the powers inherent to it, producing subjectivities and constructing communities through its own resources. Music and politics becomes music as politics. Hearing Freedom, Imagining Community It is not hard to think of examples of how music might exercise political effects simply by being itself, Music’s seemingly inherent politicality has led to it being idealized in many cultures as a symbol, prefiguration and catalyst of as yet unrealized forms of human freedom and social har- mony.? The ubiquity of such ideas is evident from the host of political metaphors derived from musical practices, as well as from the Western habit of listening metaphorically to genres such as the concerto.'”” The idea that the concerto embodies the tensions between individual autonomy and social cooperation may well seem trite, particularly in this vague, generic formulation. But the point of this trope, as Slavoj Zizek recognized in applying it in nuce to a range of composers from Mozart to Bartdk, is that each work negotiates the balance between these elements differently, striving yet filing to achieve the ideal relationship between the individual and the collective.'™* Of more practical resonance, pethaps, is 3132 ‘Music and Politics lifies and enacts what » cchestra exempine Oo a the idea that the sph a of all individualities into a fre ¢,, Belkker describes a8 ee has been around in one form or another sng munity, perspective f tury.13° This trope has recently been Feinvigorateg the mid-nineteenth the potent symbolism of the eee Divan partly as @ eee by its co-founder Daniel Barenboim as a ‘utopi,, Orchestra, deserve Meh this and similar ventures undoubtedly hy, sept it secial harmony, their political effects are unlikely te dialo preeet ee claims made for them. to matel thetics is the idea of the choir or orchestra as le of social aes anime basen ae soot nity: an egalitarian social union in which indivi a model comm mA find expression and fulfilment by pooling their varied strengths. One the earliest examples of this trope can be found in a paean to the democratizing force of choral singing by the Swiss composer and educa. tionalist Hans Georg Nigeli: ‘Take masses of people, take them by the hundreds, the thousands, bring them into human interaction, an interaction where each individual expresses his personaly freely and actively through emotions and words, where he receives harmonious impressions from all the others, where he becomes aware in the most intuitive and diverse ways of his human autonomy and solidarity, where he receives and shares enlightenment, where he imparts and inhales love simultaneously with evey breath: could this be possible through anything other than choral singing?™™* os one level, this trope points to a politics Particular to art/aesthetics, cating music's community effect within the fold of its autonomy. At this helping embed a ier] bjeao instantiate it concretely in the preset! The idea that every and sensibility. and efficacy (ainsi vrasieamaking can possess its own politically thetic and his aesthetics o¢ oon a2"Y Between Rancidre’s polities of lective ans Politics) raises some loci oes ait level asa politica «nical activi ‘ a eto ein, Hsien can function = ‘s as claiming that this cal must su nt ; ie , count be of very low defor Possessed by a musical pracit "ih discursive framing eS SPecificity and ideolog 8 nd other mediating factors. 1™Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues while in cultures the world over, collective singing carries the connotation of togetherness, it does not come prepackaged as an emblem of egalitarian- ism or emancipation, Indeed, one of the reasons music is so open to ideological misuse is that its politics can resemble a hazy, free-floating potentiality, easily moulded to suit any agenda. As an agent of social cohesion, music can serve not only as an emblem of egalitarian community but as a distracting smokescreen or a signal that individual freedom is being eroded. Thus the social anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss, while acknowledging music’s potential as an experimental political space, contends that its politics serves to generate ‘the comforting illusion that contradictions can be overcome and differences resolved’. Similarly, in explaining how music is susceptible to ideological exploitation, Adorno highlights the ‘use made of music by politicians and other authorities who regard it as a cohesive social force, as something capable of creating the illusion of immediate community within a reified and alienated society’.'“° 14 Is All Music Political? And so we return to the ‘and’ with which we started. Broadly speaking, aesthetic theorists, musicologists and other commentators have taken three positions on the question of whether all music is political. The first vigorously segregates political music from music as an autonomous art, treating the former as a marginal, sub-artistic phenomenon. The second similarly regards political music as antithetical to art yet claims that autonomous art offers a deeper form of political engagement as well as better art. In contrast, the third position affirms the proposition that all ‘music is political, rejecting the polarization of political and non-political art as misguided or tendentious. Needless to say, the position that particu- lar commentators take on this issue is shaped by whether they define the political in narrow or broad terms, Anyone who regards politics as limited to the sphere of public governance is unlikely to argue that all music is Political, while those adhering to the paradigms of biopolitics or everyday politics are more or less obliged to adopt this stance. ‘The first of these standpoints ~ the idea of political music as something distinct to (and distinctly inferior to) music as autonomous art ~ has its origins in the aesthetic upheavals of the late eighteenth century; until relatively recently it remained the dominant position within Western aes- thetic theory and musicology. The conception of art’s autonomy formulated by Immanuel Kant and fleshed out by Friedrich Schiller was nothing if not 33Music and Politics political, constructing a parallel eae liberal paradigm of i, ain i ifsufficiency, inner p dom and the autonomy, sel : os inna dignity of art.'*" Yet this analogy precluded direct anisic : > vention in polities Kant fenoss of political rhetoric fom fee pete, Ny Schiller argued that ar’ freedom requires it to ‘forsake reality and yp iS above the needs of the present’. Such oppositions were sw Wily taken within the discourses of art music, with figures like Nagel ie Tigidly diss, guishing between pure and applied (angewandte) art, and Consigning Pol, ical music to the latter camp; its inferior status is confirmed by Nagar, remark that ‘the absence of genius will matter least’ in applied mug at mt dismissal of political art as sub-aesthetic was cemented by the Philosophe Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose 1820s lectures on aesthetics drove) ‘wedge between ‘service’ art (dienende Kunst) and free or autonomons gy this opposition was sufficiently pervasive that even the young Kari Man, dismissed socialist engaged literature as non-art.!44 ‘The fierce aesthetic debates within an use I is Poltcal i ich happens to be political. Political at" by oalpa RE Of ts political erure” Neither art nor ‘They are domains of a where acting gency, re Re Inthe case of political ane the agency iso™ hea “ause it works politically.” exploring Rane : Point outlined shore ty aa Already encountered the second st SMtonomous artis more politically effective th”Music and Politics: Key Concepts and Issues art which cultivates closer relationships with politics. This claim becomes even more counterintuitive when applied to art that is autonomous in a further, more particular sense: abstract painting, say, or pure instrumental ‘music. One influential proponent of this standpoint is the philosopher Lydia Goehr, who contends that ‘it is by aspiring towards a purely aesthetic state that works [of music] have played their social or political role. Less success- fully, if at all, have they played this role by functioning as merely social entities with explicit or tendentious content.”"** Rejecting as crude the view of autonomous and political art as antitheses, Goehr argues that music's separation from society engenders a capacity to engage critically with it: ‘one ‘may say that music’s freedom from external constraint gives music a freedom to express itself in, with, and on its own terms, which in turn gives it a freedom to express or reflect upon society at a critical distance.” Although Goehr does not give a detailed account of music’s political capacities or how it discharges them, she describes in Adornian terms its capacity to be ‘resistantly social through its purely musical form’; elsewhere, she argues that music’ political role is to ‘help bring about a better world’ by critiquing the status quo and offering an alternative vision.” Even if we accept these claims for now (we will probe similar perspectives in detail at a later stage) they do not justify elevating autonomous music as more politically effective than other forms of political music. Goehr’s move recalls some of the logics seen earlier in exploring competing definitions of the political (such as Ranciére's restriction of politics to dissensus); choosing to concentrate on just one aspect of politics does not make the rest go away, and no single form of music can deliver the multiplicity of political func- tions and effects discussed over the course of this book. Another objection which could be levelled at both Goehr and Ranciere is that, aside from the historical association with freedom discussed above, music’s autonomy is no guarantee of politicaity; as Badiou argues in relation to contemporary activist art, the claim that autonomy is ‘by itself of a political nature’ does not provide a credible means to compensate for the ‘real weakness of the relationship between art and politics today’.'*' Perhaps most importantly, it is by no means clear that the idea of aesthetic autonomy is even necessary for assigning to music the political capacities which Goehr and Ranciére describe. Some kind of baseline conception of music’s autonomy as a social practice ~ art as a distinct fold within the fabric of common experience ~ is needed to sustain the idea that it can offer an emancipatory social space or ‘model community.!® Yet as Nageli’s invocation of the democratizing force of ‘applied music’ attests, the more emphatic idea of aesthetic autonomy can be dispensed with here. 3536 ,d above is a variation on y anes is a foundational ssn hk nities disciplines, the ubiquity it ascribes ft conte ie concept of Hs See ei pen ~] spay seem ik political, nothing is political any Morte lard, ‘whem e727

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