Jacques Attali Quotes

Jacques Attali critiques how music can mask power, urging listeners to hear beyond the surface.

13 quotes

1. 'What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector.' Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.

2. In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men. Clamour, Melody, Dissonance, Harmony; when it is fashioned by man with specific tools, when it invades man’s time, when it becomes sound, noise is the source of the purpose and power, of the dream – Music.

3. Now we must learn to judge a society by its sounds...

4. Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

5. Global governance is just a euphemism for global government.

6. The first path a human being ever travels is the path that leads out of the maternal womb. Every human being's first labyrinth is that of a woman.

7. For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.

8. Change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society.

9. What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new.

10. Fetishized as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: deritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalize its consumption, then see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses its meaning. Today, music heraldsregardless of what the property mode of capital will bethe establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore. But at the same time, it heralds the emergence of a formidable subversion, one leading to a radically new organization never yet theorized, of which self-management is but a distant echo.

11. For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.

12. “In the future, a part of this class - individuals particularly sensitive to this question of the future - will realize that their happiness depends on that of others, that the human species can only survive united and pacific. They will cease to belong to the mercantile innovative class, and refuse to put themselves at the service of pirates. They will become what I call transhumans (who will give birth to a new order of abundance). ”

13. Man's tragedy is that when he can do something, in the end he will always do it