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The sounds of silence

During the music and daily life study we visited a number of U.S. and U.K. cities and towns to record the ‘sound of shopping’. At the end of one of these field trips, we visited a traditional ‘ladies’ outfitters’, whose clientele, with the decline of transgenerational merchandising, has dwindled to (primarily) elderly women. Wending our way through racks of A-line skirts, flower-patterned frocks and good woollen cardigans, we commented on the incongruous silence, strange to us after the relentless soundtracks of ‘young people’s shops’. Our very footsteps were annulled by thick pile carpeting. In the course of the study we came to realize that, to shoppers two or three generations older than ourselves, the very idea of background music is abhorrent as the following excerpts from exit interviews make clear:

I don’t like it when it’s jumping because I’ve got a hearing aid, you see, so it’s pretty awful . . . [Besides] I’ve got other things on my mind, you know. I’m not thinking about music. I’m thinking where am I going to get this skirt I’m looking for.

I call that pollution . . . I don’t like any music in shops or in lifts or anywhere.

Reflecting on this matter in the context of the cross-generational interviews with women about music in their lives, and also on 128 exit interviews conducted outside the shops we studied during our ethnography, we concluded that, for older women, local passages in and through music (as, for example, when one encounters music in a social setting) are less significant as a resource for the constitution of self and social setting. This is not to say that music itself was less significant as a cultural medium of agency’s constitution, but that the older women with whom we spoke were more likely to conceive of music as something that one stops and listens to with intent. To be sure, the mobilization of electronic music equipment is a cultural practice associated with youth and middle age, but, as the discussion in chapter 3 began to illustrate, the older women who were interviewed for the music in daily life study were less likely to engage in the music-reflexive practices of managing mood through music programming. Music was not something they ‘used’ to get them into, or get them adjusted to, appropriate or desired emotions, nor was it something they used to structure social scenes and settings within which they acted in concert with others. Indeed, most of them were less reflexive about the production of their agency, and less self-conscious about their self-identity. While it would be misleading to speak of them as more ‘secure’, they seemed to be less preoccupied with self-monitoring, with observing themselves as feeling, being subjects. They were, perhaps,

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therefore more impervious to music’s deployment as a part of the furniture of public space. They were not so overtly objects of knowledge to themselves, less likely to speak of what they might ‘need’ to hear and less likely to be ‘influenced’ by music (apart from music with special biographical significance). They were also most likely to do nothing but listen when they put music on the stereo, whether or not they had musical training. These age-linked uses of music in private life and in the retail clothing sector therefore should be explored in relation to the history of consciousness. Are they in line with what some have suggested is an historical transformation of the relations of production and self-production of social agency? To be sure, the social world is more variegated, more complex and contradictory than at any time in the past. Given the discussion above of music’s heightened salience under conditions of uncertainty, might this suggest, pace recent thinking within social and cultural theory, that agency’s configuration has taken on, under late modernity, an increasingly ‘other directed’ dimension? In what way may the study of music in daily life address these issues?

‘Sounds’, John Cage once said, ‘when allowed to be themselves do not require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is what is meant by response ability’ (Cage 1961:10). The point here is that, increasingly, within organizational sectors sounds are not allowed to be themselves or to arise spontaneously (as, for example, when someone bursts into song). Instead they are planned and programmed with the aim of a ording organizationally specific ends. In many of the spaces inhabited by younger people – shops, clubs – music is oriented to an agency constituted in real-time and in relation to locally provided audio-aesthetic materials. This form of agency is formulated in relation to mood, ambience and image. In keeping with more recent modes of ‘flexible’ production, this agency is one that is constituted in relation to the aesthetic materials at hand, here and now; it is adaptive, receptive to being moulded by a range of sensory stimuli. It is not only an aesthetically reflexive mode of agency; it is also aesthetically responsive.

Some commentators have suggested that this new emotional flexibility and the aesthetic reflexivity to which it is linked is liberating (Lash and Urry 1994:3, 31). Others, such as Donald M. Lowe (1995), view the consuming subject in its post-commodity phase as having rescinded autonomy. Today, Lowe argues, retailers no longer cater to pre-existing ‘lifestyle’ groups but actually instigate the image of such groups by fabricating and placing on o er images of agency that are achievable in and through participation in retail scenes, in and through the purchase of significant items ( pace the present Archbishop of Canterbury’s thesis that malls are becoming sites where the sacred is constructed and wor-

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shipped). In a similar critical vein, Stjepan Mestrovic (1999) has suggested that emotional flexibility is a sign of an advanced ‘other directedness’ (cf. Riesman 1950), an increasingly characteristic tendency, in late modernity, to experience emotion vicariously and according to the parameters of feeling that are placed on o er within specific situations (the classic example here is surely the new brand of ‘talk shows’).

In a recently translated essay on the ‘sociology of music’, Adorno observes that, ‘[w]hat should be close at hand, the “consciousness of su ering”, becomes unbelievably alien. The most alien thing of all, however, the process that hammers the machinery into men’s consciousness and has ceased to contain that which is human, invades them body and soul and appears to be the nearest and dearest thing of all’ (1999:14). Like Adorno, Mestrovic is concerned with the proliferation of a particular kind of emotionality pro ered by and in the interests of administration:

What appears to be postmodern disorder or the circulation of random fictions, as depicted by Jean Baudrillard, turns out to have a hidden order of its own, and to be highly automatized, rehearsed, and planned. (1999:2)

There is little doubt that the retail organizations we studied were overtly, deliberately oriented to the deployment of symbols within the social spaces of their shops; there and in many other public social spaces – transport terminals, dentists’ chairs, clubs, pubs, restaurants, fitness studies. Indeed, film, television, video and virtual reality as representative ‘visual’ media all make ample use of music to enhance and sometimes substitute for more overt depiction.

Whether or not one agrees with Mestrovic’s neo-Orwellian diagnosis of late modernity, it is easy to see music’s role in relation to the processes of administration he describes; indeed, music’s role in relation to the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ was the subject of Adorno’s life work. As an ephemeral and subtle medium, one that can be changed in an instant, music’s role is key here in helping to instantiate scenarios of desire, styles of (momentary) agency, and in fostering a new and ‘postmodern’ form of communitas – a co-subjectivity where two or more individuals may come to exhibit similar modes of feeling and acting, constituted in relation to extra-personal parameters, such as those provided by musical materials. Such co-subjectivity di ers in important ways from the more traditional (and modern) notion of ‘inter-subjectivity’, which presumes interpersonal dialogue and the collaborative production of meaning and cognition. Inter-subjectivity – even if understood in the ethnomethodological sense where it is only apparent and ‘for all practical purposes’(Garfinkel 1967) – involves a collaborative version of reflexivity. By contrast, cosubjectivity is the result of isolated individually reflexive alignments to an

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environment and its materials. There is no doubt that in situ studies of music in relation to the constitution of subjectivity and agency are crucial to understandings of ‘post-emotional’ society, and it is all the more strange, therefore, that music has scarcely featured so far in these literatures. For surely it is easy to discern the nucleus of Disneyland in Wagner and the legacy of both in the Gesamtkunstwerk of the modern shopping mall?