me to time as charismatic, is not permanently self-justifying but inevitably becomes transformed into either rational or traditional authority, and "the purely personal character of leadership is eliminated" (Weber, 1978, p. 55). The issue of transformation of the structure of society is central to Weber's thought and social analysis. Where a rational attitude is at work, so is movement toward an organized and orderly, or at least "thinkable" society. According to Attali, music is consistent with the rational attitude of which Weber speaks in its application of logic, organization, and order to the issue of noise.
Music as the rationalization of representation can reinforce the legitimacy of found social conditions, and not always to the good of the whole or of the majority. Attali cites the evolution of music from its status as the locus of public, ritual expression of a society's character, into a commodity of a political economy marked by dependence of musicians and composers on elite (often royal) patronage, accompanied by musical representation of dominant social and cultural values and the relatively high perceived value of musical artifacts owing to their symbolic function and limited accessibility. The decline of patronage was marked by a further evolution and diffusion of music into the popular culture, i.e., the marketplace, accompanied by a transformation of the artist (composer or performer or both) and his artifact into a market-oriented commodity with a perceived use value equivalent to its ability to entertain the public rather than (say) glorify the republic or its leadership.
Attali does not insist that representation and replication are mutually exclusive or that the appearance of replication as the dominant social form that the milieu of musical production takes somehow heralds the decline of representational praxis as a mode of social organization. Indeed, the organization of discrete contemporary political ec...