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MUSIC AND SOUND AT WORK Toby Bennett (2015)

The below is an edited, expanded and reshuffled version of my framing remarks for the

two panels of the stream “Music and Sound at Work”, which I convened at the London

Conference in Critical Thought, University College London, in June 2015. The two panels,

titled ‘The Audible Economy’ and ‘Form, Function, Aesthetic’, were intended to focus on

the macro (socio-economic) and the micro (psychic-affective) levels of the contemporary

organisation of music respectively. Speakers were: Dr Kaarina Kilpiö on the construction

of a listening consumer in Finland; Dr Paul Rekret on the ideal of reproductive futurism in

hip hop and Annie; Dr Robert Bentall on ‘aesthetic contracts’ in electroacoustic music;

and Prof John Mowitt on fantasy and hearing in Herzog. ‘Music at Work’ is an ongoing

project for me, which I am documenting on my personal blog:

https://themoneytrench.wordpress.com/music-at-work/

This conference stream is convened around two objects or problems: music/sound (that is: the

auditory); and work (that is: productive labour). I want us to consider the changing social forms of

these two objects; to map the changing relationship between them; and to look for new ways of

thinking and talking about this relationship. At base, we’re talking about music and sound AT work.

And I want to do so in a double sense.

Imagine two signs.

One is a nondescript sheet of laminated

A3 pinned up on the wall in an office or

factory, filled with lines of small print. At

the top of the poster, it says in large

print, ‘Health and Safety at Work’.

The second is a large, triangular piece of metal at the side of some ongoing

road construction. In the centre there is a pictogram of someone shovelling,

bounded by a bright red frame. Underneath, it might read (or, at least, imply)

‘Men at Work’.

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On the first sign, work is locational and immersive; in the second, work is dynamic and intrusive. I

want to distinguish between these two senses of ‘at work’-ness, at the same time that I want to hold

them together. Both of these signs recognise the fact that work contains risks which must be

contained. The first does so by means of an awareness notice, detailing the terms of an employment

contract, which codifies and regulates the common-sense responsibility necessary to preserve the

wellbeing of the employer-employee relationship within an agreed space of work. The second, by

contrast, is evidence of a social contract between state and citizen, acknowledging the unwelcome

and dangerous entrance of work into everyday life. Though I don’t explore this theme here, we

cannot help but further notice a gendered dynamic of care and physical force splitting this ‘at work’

dichotomy.

To explore the first of these senses would be to consider the presence of music in the spaces and

environments of labour. This would inevitably have to engage with the vast number of work songs

documented by ethnomusicologists and folk song collectors, which have soundtracked activities like

hunting, crop-cultivating, herding, sewing, caring, sailing and building; songs from the fields and

seas, the mines, prisons and factories. Ted Gioia (2006), for example, in his monumental study of

these songs, emphasises the extraordinary ability of music to enable work to be performed with

regularity, efficiency, heightened focus and enthusiasm, while at the same time transcending this

purpose: ‘who can listen to these songs borne of toil and hard labor without feeling their sweep and

power?’

Marek Korczynski, with a team of others, has explored the movement of music into industrial

settings from the perspective of organisational sociology (Pritchard, Korczynski and Elmes, 2007;

Korczynski, Pickering and Robertson, 2013). He calls this twin quality – that is, productive

concentration and aesthetic distraction from the task at hand – ‘function and fancy’. But, particularly

in the context of practices of silencing and broadcasting music in the mill or the factory, he also

emphasises two further qualities. Music acts as a performed assertion of sociality, producing

solidarity against alienating settings. And (c.f. Hirschman, 1970) it also enables such workers to voice

their grievances, to become a mechanism for micro-acts of resistance. It is not difficult to consider

these four qualities of music – function, fancy, sociality and voice – as weapons to counteract Marx’s

(1975) four modes of alienation: from the product of labour; from the craft of labour; from one’s

fellow man; and from one’s species-being. Music’s role changes as it moves from pre-industrial to

industrial contexts and is, in accounts like those of Gioia and Korczynski, cast as a powerful resource

for reasserting humanity in the face of dehumanising forces.

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A less optimistic thread running through this account, however, delineates the sense in which the

use of music in the workplace has a legitimating function: as a managerial tool for balancing these

extremes; to enable workers to continue to feel just human enough to continue to persevere in the

face of exploitative conditions. In this narrative, the disciplinary use of music is tied to technology as

a tool of rationalisation and control, particularly the broadcast of recorded music in factories which

is thought to homogenise difference and minimise opportunities for the transgressive voice.

Korczynski and colleagues recognise this squeezing of resistant potential and go so far as to suggest

that it recedes entirely in post-industrial contexts.

And so also at this point, thematic focus shifts from the first sense of ‘at work’ (that is, the

structuring presence of music in the productive spaces of capital) towards the second sense – of

music itself working: intruding into new spaces and acting upon a subject who may not be a

contractual ‘worker’ but is nonetheless enrolled in the production and organisation of value

extraction. Implicit in this thematic shift is an adjustment in methodological perspective: from

structure to agency in sociological terms; or from what ethnomusicologists sometimes call a

‘homology’ model (musical variation as an expression of wider social transformation) to a ‘process’

model (music as itself enacting change). If, ‘under the sunny terms of postmodern cultural theory’,

as Born and Hesmondhalgh (2000: 32) put it, the latter approach has tended to be adopted in order

to articulate a myriad of agentic opportunities, then these two authors are at pains to note music’s

‘leading role in the disciplinary socialization and ideological conditioning fostered by extremely

repressive regimes’. The challenge then is to hold together two visions of music (immersive and

active) and two methods (structural and agentic).

Another configuration of this dual (structural-immersive and active-agentic) relationship is found in

attempts to consider music at work in terms that are less spatial than temporal. In terms of the

former, Critical Management scholar Martin Corbett (2003) criticises the ocularcentrism of the

‘strangely silent world’ of mainstream organisational theory and calls for researchers to ‘give an ear

to the sound of organisational practice, to enter the realm of the psychosonic’. Taken as a whole,

this conference stream is a response to such a call. Corbett’s initial sketch takes in a history of sound

as a timekeeping technology of organisation – from the ringing of bells and clocks through to the

midcentury broadcast of radio shows such as ‘Workers’ Playtime’ on the BBC Light Programme to

boost morale amongst factory workers. The residue of the latter practice can be found today in the

sharp distinction between daytime commercial radio – with its strict, quantitatively defined

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repetitions of A, B and C lists – and the more curatorial approach of evening programming which

presumes a more engaged and leisurely listen, the two mimicking the structure of the industrial

working day. There are resonances, of course, here with Adorno’s (1991b: 187-197) critique of the

concept of ‘free time’, which is by no means ‘free’ at all but is ‘shackled to its opposite’. It exists

within the time of capital, structuring it, replenishing it, and offering the illusion of escape from it. ‘In

a system where full employment itself has become the ideal’, he writes, ‘free time is nothing more

than a shadowy continuation of labour’. In what he calls this ‘rigorous bifurcation of life’, production

regulates consumption, which legitimates production.

In this light, listening to – or even producing1 – music in the workplace simply runs these two

temporalities together, bringing (the illusion of) freedom associated with work’s outside into the

space of work itself, rather than as its structuring other. In reality, labour continues into that

personalised world of non-work at work. It is a gateway for the temporality of work to penetrate

more deeply into the psyche. Running at a diagonal through the work/leisure dialectic is a dividing

schism between power and obedience which, Adorno and Horkheimer (1979:115-116) note,

becomes relentlessly naturalised by being ‘drummed into the subjects, either by other tribes or by

their own cliques, as the rhythm of work, to the beat of the club and the rod, which reechoed in

every barbaric drum, in each monotonous ritual’; in this light, radio in the workplace is a force of

rhythmic repetition that incessantly reinstates the division of labour through ‘hierarchy and

compulsion’. Simultaneously, recorded music dampens or removes the worker’s agentic voice: by

performing on their behalf, it affords and enables ‘the reduction of people to silence, the dying out

of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all’; it contributes to a workforce ‘moulded

by anxiety, work and undemanding docility’ (Adorno, 1991a: 30).

But we are no longer in the time of Adorno, and the Fordist paradigm is no longer the hegemonic

settlement. And so, at this juncture, we need to observe the changes in working forms, spaces and

subjectivities that have come to characterise contemporary, post-industrial, post-Fordist,

postmodern, knowledge-intensive (etc. etc.) economies. New and informal figurations of labour

(audience, aesthetic, affective, immaterial, emotional, promotional, service...) have grown in

prominence – in practices of co-production, for instance, or simply in the participation in online

communities and technologies. So too have new agents appeared. Listening becomes, as Anahid

1 Classically, producing music in the workplace would have included sung and rhythmic accompaniments to

manual labour. In the flexible workplace of today the scope has broadened – as in the offices of Spotify, which include an in-house studio and performance spaces. http://www.fastcompany.com/3034617/how-spotifys-music-obsessed-culture-makes-the-company-rock

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Kassabian (2013) notes, ‘ubiquitous’, ‘distracted’, and ‘distributed’ across multiple fragmented sites

and subjectivities. A view of music (such as Adorno’s) that privileges focused attention and

engagement can only shrink with disgust from such a conjuncture. We lack adequate critical tools.

There has, as a consequence, been a dearth of writing about music in the working contexts of our

time and emerging opinion is polarised. On the one hand, with the prevalence of headphones and

individualised listening practices, technologised subsumption is often presumed to have become

solipsistically total. Consider Michael Bull’s (2010) mapping of the iPod as a ‘sensory gating’

apparatus that promises unmediated access to the inner self and a wallowing in ‘toxic pleasure’;

alongside Mark Fisher’s (2009: 24) complaint that this ‘retreat into private OedIpod consumer bliss

[constitutes] a walling up against the social’: the intimacy of the headphone offers a final safe space

from a neoliberalised socius of No Alternative. On the other hand, music eases and softens the

inevitable convergence between life and market. Organisational psychology and marketing research

often celebrates the power of music as a technology of the self that can boost worker performance

and productivity, have positive effects on consumer spending, reduce frustration in queuing and

waiting, generally enhance mood, and so on (Cameron et al., 2003; Eroglu et al., 2005; Haake,

2010).2 On both sides of this picture, music is selected for an immersive quality that can be flexibly

deployed by an always-productive subject to fend off new modes of alienation: by either reinstating

or overcoming the rigorous bifurcation between the space-time of affective fantasy on one hand and

that of a life-become-work on the other. In this gesture, the only tools music is able to offer

reproduce an impoverished binary politics of escape or submission to the No Alternative. Following

Bernard Stiegler (himself following Gilles Deleuze (1995)), the search for new tools, or new weapons,

should be placed at the forefront of this music-work assemblage – in which vein, more in a moment.

First and foremost the assemblage must be mapped and historicised. If the ‘audible economy’ of

subjects and technics of sound has yet to be fully articulated, we can nonetheless find provocations

in its direction. In Simon Reynolds’ Retromania (2011), for example, we find tenuous but

nonetheless stimulating historical parallels between economic formations and musical aesthetics,

drawing on Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of postproduction. In contradistinction to the manual

physicality and work aesthetic of studio production (and here he references Detroit’s twin history of

Ford and Motown), today’s ‘postproduction pop’, he argues , is more ‘white collar’, requiring a

different ‘skill-set’, involving the ‘scroll-and-click work’ of ‘information processing, editing, framing,

2 There exist a number of websites offering to match your type of work to an appropriate genre while, in a

well-known example, classical music helps shift more expensive bottles of wine (cited in DeNora, 2004:141-142).

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packaging’. The scope expands: ‘the transition from making money through making stuff to wealth

generation achieved through information, services, ‘signification’’ and financialisation has its

aesthetic echoes. I quote Reynolds (2011:492-493) at length:

The world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt; music has been

depleted of meaning through derivativeness and indebtedness. The imbalance in

Western economies towards financial and real-estate speculation meant that too much

of the wealth generated was meta-money [...] Similarly, the profusion of hyper-

referential bands and micro-genres whose stylistic involutions are understood only by

hipsterati and bloggerati resembles the ‘complex financial instruments’ that only a

handful of people in Wall Street and the City of London comprehend.

Speculation led to a spectralisation of the economy: money that has only the most

tenuous, remote relation to the material world. [...] Culture, as the superstructure to the

economy’s base, reflects the gaseous quality of our existence. The insubstantiality of the

economy revealed itself, horribly, a few years ago. We are still waiting for the music-

about-music bubble to burst.

Despite quasi-Marxisant appeals to a base-superstructure dichotomy of reflection and resemblance,

there is no causal relation implied in this account. Postmodernisation has simply flattened out all

distinction between culture and economy into identical processes operating at different resolutions.

Reynolds complains that agency goes missing in this assemblage and there is no room for innovation

or transformation: all is reduced to navigating a course through rows in the (big) data-base. As

opposed to the ‘game-changing’ ‘future-rush’ of past musical forms, Reynolds (2011, 485) remarks

that the ‘rush’ of the present – that is, the set of ‘distinctive sensations and affects of our time’ – is

found in the libidinal intensity of being enmeshed in networks of distributed sound. Yet, his

humanist modernism founders here: the observation is sour-tinged and disdained rather than

deemed worthy of further description and investigation. Our conceptual tools – theoretical and

methodological – need to be adequate to the task of a more descriptive critique of political

aesthetics.

In the context of (whatever name we choose for) our present era, I have found the work of Bernard

Stiegler productive. Stiegler’s core thesis, that technics is historically and continually constitutive of

the human, rather than invented by and opposed to the human, finds expression in the emphasis he

places on what he calls the industrial temporal objects that are the product of contemporary cultural

industries – cinema, television, online visual media, computer games, and of course recorded music.

For Stiegler (2011:1),

an object is “temporal” when its flow coincides with the stream of consciousness of which it

is the object (example: a melody). In this new calendarity, the "stream of consciousness" of

global collectivity unfolds simultaneously with the temporal flow of the products of the

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programming industries, resulting in a disruption of the very process of eventization (of

"what happens," what takes place, what conjugates space with time, as time). This

disruption also affects the biological event, orders digital "real time," etc.

If an event is defined by its conjugation of space and time, then the ‘industrialisation of memory’ –

which is the proper activity of the cultural industries and which expands outwards in a

complementary manner to the distribution of listening described by Kassabian, for example through

the storage of metadata – makes new commodities out of space and time. It is in such a context that

new spatio-temporal enclosures emerge in the music industry: the growing primacy of ‘live’ music

(i.e. the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1999));3 the displacement of the sale of the

recording with a battle for consumer interest (i.e. the ‘attention economy’ (Davenport and Beck,

2001));4 the differentiated subscription ‘tiers’ of streaming services (i.e. the ‘control society’

(Deleuze, 1995));5 and so on. These new enclosures afford particular kinds of behaviour and

interaction with music, producing particular forms of revenue generation – while they

simultaneously creep into the workplace itself (for example, where the office radio is replaced by the

collaborative playlist).

In digital post-scarcity, the scarcity of time becomes a resource for the production of capital. But

since, for Stiegler, all technology is a pharmakon – that is, neither essentially good nor bad, always

potentially both toxin and cure – this does not necessarily mean the enslavement of subjects to

their tools (as some ‘critical’ commentators tend to conclude). Certainly, Stiegler’s argument

sometimes gives the impression of a simple isomorphism between distraction as poison and (deep)

attention (c.f. Hayles, 2007) as cure.6 But, as Stiegler (2015a) argues contra Nicholas Carr, it is not

the internet per se that is making us ‘shallow’ but our interpretive and adoptive tools that are

lacking. Rather, we need to carefully observe the coincidence of flows between so-called ‘internal’

psychic time, the collective time of the socius, and the technical time that regulates this coincidence,

to find new possibilities for individuation.

3 See my further comments on live: https://themoneytrench.wordpress.com/2015/07/03/are-we-postsocial-

on-live-music-technology-and-the-immediate/ 4 And the concomitant displacement of ‘piracy’ as the key threat to recorded music by the ‘leak’, which

disrupts the carefully-staged ‘build’ of a marketing plan unless it is crisis-managed such that the leak is appropriated into the hype. http://www.factmag.com/2015/01/29/inside-album-leaks-bjork-vulnicura-madonna-rebel-heart/ 5 Different levels of payment provide access to different sets of permissions: defined by the number of plays

and skips; the length of time a user is allowed to interact; access to ‘exclusive’ content, etc. 6 Especially in Stiegler (2010b) and in his repeated invocations of TV executive Patrick Le Lay’s comment that,

through advertising, TF1 sells ‘available brain time’ (e.g. Stiegler, 2015b: 46 and passim).

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Stiegler (2013) argues that technics (such as the industrial temporal object of recorded sound) acts

like what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls a ‘transitional object’ (such as a blanket or soft

toy) that the child uses as a means to break free from the safety of its mother, while investing in the

object enough of an affective bond to remain connected to the feeling of maternal care. The

‘transitional space’ that opens up between mother and child as a result is a realm of

experimentation, play and fantasy, through which intangible qualities like intimacy and distance,

internality and externality, similarity and difference, can be grasped and toyed with, so that the child

can individuate itself as a new and singular subject. And so a film, or a piece of recorded music, can

be used literally to ‘kill time’ – and by doing so we kill both the ‘free time’ that is still as Adorno

points out ‘on the clock’, as well as the temporal space of psycho-social individuation – or, it can

make some time for us: affect and inspire us to act differently; to go on to create for ourselves; to

take away from the industrial temporal object the fantasy that occurs within and through it,

alongside many others who may do the same. We can ‘leave the film singing’ as Stiegler (2014:24)

puts it; we can ‘sense through participation’ (Stiegler, 2015b).

Fantasy is not the same as ‘escape’; media do not always take us away from reality. For Valerie

Walkerdine (1986:171), fantasy is neither ‘in’ the film (or the music), nor is it ‘in’ the viewer or

listener: watching and listening is the ‘engagement, the linking, of the fantasy space of the film and

viewer’. To be effective, this engagement ‘necessitates an already existent constitution [my italics] of

pains, of losses and desires for fulfilment and escape’; it demands ‘inhabiting already a set of fantasy

spaces inscribing us in the ‘everyday life’ of practices which produce us all’. We are not a ‘unitary

subject’ located in a determining ‘social totality’; but a ‘fragmented subjectivity in which signifying

practices produce manifest and latent contents for the inscription of fantasy’. It is itself a creative

event in which emergent possibilities for individuation can occur. Such an event is obviously equally

present in the creative act of the composer, producer, interpreter, or sound designer, just as it is in

the listener (distributed or otherwise).

As a counterpart to the diagnosis of the new conjunctures of music and work, it is this productive,

creative moment which this stream also seeks to explore – as an instance of music ‘at work’ on the

psychic and affective formation of a subject, a subject who may be either complicit or resistant, or

both, to the aspects of the social and economic modes of organisation in which it is already

embedded, and in which music increasingly plays a regulatory role. In searching for these moments,

we should certainly pay attention to technologies of distraction and affect distribution – the shuffle,

the playlist, the algorithm, the app – since this is where the boundary between the immersive and

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the active senses of music at work is surely most unsettled. What would a post-industrial work song

look like? How would we recognise it and what would we do with it?

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