"Obedience" is an essay by French post-modernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, on the theory of music. It was written for a conference given at The Sorbonne in 1986. It was published as chapter 14 of his book "The Inhuman".
Do you remember 1986 in music? In popular music, "classic rock" had already been codified and become stale. Pop music styles like new wave that used synthesizers, while initially exciting, were becoming vapid. Rap music, once thought to be a fad, was transforming into something serious, and KRS-One and Public Enemy had been recording their first albums. And two high school friends had formed a Credence Clearwater Revival tribute band in Aberdeen, Washington. We all have different memories of music, and popular music isn't everything, but...
I have a mixed relationship with Jean-Francois Lyotard, who could say amazingly insightful things but could also go on for pages in the most incomprehensible way. Usually what I do is find one quote that doesn't make sense to explain what the writing is like:
"But above all, the opposition between the two currents is illusory. If it is true that that in both cases the aim is to return the ear to listening, it is naive to believe that it is enough to make a sound with anything at any moment to obtain the sound-feeling; and it is dangerous and frivolous to privilege technology, whose end is to test cognitive hypothesis bearing on sound and its hearing, the danger consisting in the temptation of a pure experimentation of acoustic possibilities in which the anamnesis of sound-feeling is forgotten on principle (not a rhetorical principle this time, but a scientific one)."
I have been reading the works of Lyotard for almost 25 years at this point, I am conversant with his special terminology, but
boy howdy, I can not make heads or tails of any of that. The essay's title seems to take its meaning from a pun between the French and German words for "to listen" and "to obey". Listening is following dictates. Or something. But while I was reading it, what was more clear was what it was missing. I knew the names of three musicians he mentioned:
John Cage,
Claude DeBussy, and
Ravi Shankar. And he describes the current division in music between:
For example, it would be useless to place Minimalism, arte povera, happening, performance, Cage, Morton Feldman, or John-Charles Francois on the 'poor' side, and on the 'rich' side abstraction, conceptualism, Nono, Boulez, Xenakis, Stockhausen or Grisey.
Okay, maybe that would be a useless thing.
I don't expect, in an essay prepared for the Sorbonne, for Jean-Francois Lyotard to mention his collection of Pixies Bootlegs. But it is surprising that in 1987, he can write a paper on musical trends while managing to ignore over thirty years of popular music. Even if he just wants to confine himself to experimental music, this was written 20 to 30 years after Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Jazz had transitioned from being "entertainment" to "art" when Lyotard was still a young man, but jazz innovations, let alone folk or rock and roll are not mentioned here.
And it might be argued that Lyotard was working in a different tradition. One of France's foremost philosophers wasn't trying to write for Rolling Stone. But the problem with that is that Lyotard's entire philosophy was based around reappraising Western culture. We can call that post-modernism, or we can call it something else, but in general, his philosophy was based around questioning or even dismissing the "grand narratives" of Western culture. And yet while he is busy dismissing or subverting or inverting them---he also doesn't seem to consider non-Western traditions to be worthy of much notice. Especially since many of the musical developments of jazz and related forms were developed by people of African descent, as well as by Latinos, it seems somewhere between ignorant and prejudiced to not include reference to their innovations.
It might seem like a bit of hyperfocus to criticize a single essay, by a single writer, from 1987. But the problems here are also a problem of other post-modernistic or deconstructionist philosophers: while taking stances in "opposition" to mainstream "Western culture", they also seem to be almost purposely unaware that other traditions or viewpoints exist. Ironically enough, much of post-modernism fails to take into account anything that happened after 1950.