The Neoliberal Soundtrack
As we float along through the neoliberal flux there is a soundtrack playing to emphasize the collective disposition. It’s an eerie opus of foreboding doom with light overtones to suggest the possibility for resolve, but ultimately leaving the mood uncertain. The pauses in the oeuvre leave space to breathe and process but this is the most uncomfortable part. Without the emotional surrogate of the rhythm and melody we hardly know what to feel, it’s chaotic, and disjointed, with incoherent internal dialogue too nerve-racking to decipher. Anything is better. Noise. A jackhammer. The soothing calm of a raging thunderstorm. Traffic. Alarms. A bustling coffee shop. Any sound to fill the scape of an alienated being in a confusing world.
The soundtrack of turbo-capitalism is electronic, matching its transactional digital registers, liminal vibrations, transfers, exchanges, transformations, indefinite growth, and an infinitely elastic pitch to hollow out the sound of extending intergenerational debt. We hear it when we put our headphones on and walk, when strangers play music from their phones on the subway, when we enter bars and nightclubs, when we study to lo-fi, when we sit in the park next to someone’s Bluetooth speaker, when we go to the gym, when we do yoga, when we ride our bikes, sit on planes, eat food, watch videos, take drugs, and even when we have conversations so we can set the mood. Music has become the mood-setting medium for emotional coherence in our overstimulating digitized environments.
We drown out the sound of silence with extrinsic stimulation. Music is communal, and silence is solitary. Music is connectedness in an emotionally disconnected and alienated world. We play music to avoid loneliness. Just a little something in the background. Just a little something to help me catch a feeling. Just a little something to avoid the internal dialogue. Just a little something to drown out the sound of my inner voice, which has grown hoarse over the years from complaining. Just a little something to make me feel so that I don’t feel. Just a little stimulation to undo the overstimulation of being, like amphetamines to the ADHD brain. Just a little something to forego confronting my mortality. Just a little something I can lose myself in.
Silence is absolute. We don’t experience silence. We experience quiet. But it’s sexier to call our quiet–silence–because it’s a negation of sound. Silence is reflective of our inner space. A place to reflect and process. A place to think. A place to look at oneself and analyze meaning(lessness), freedom, alienation, and mortality. These are the existential constructs aimed at embracing our possibilities for becoming–with the heaviness of creating meaning in a meaningless world and taking responsibility for our freedom to confront our mortality–and then in facing our death, learning how to live. Silence is golden. So much so, that it has become a luxury. A capitalist commodity. We sell silence in sensory deprivation chambers (ironically, they can also play soothing music if you like), spiritual retreats, and quiet country getaways or off-grid camping (but we still bring our speakers, just in case). And even then, that silence is not for our inner voice to speak, but for our bodies to relax our over-tense muscles and decelerate our overstimulation so we don’t implode–transition from leisure to rest. But that’s the virtue of neoliberalism, that it’s flexible, just like our labour. Just enough so we don’t snap.
Music is consumed as a commodity to cue moods, help us feel or unfeel, drown out the loneliness, quiet our inner voice screaming for meaning, and avoid the fact that we are going to die and we have lived mostly unlived lives. Music is rarely experienced as art. The aesthetic experience of music is aestheticized in a neoliberal transformation of awe into reaction. A reaction becomes a spectator sport for an audience of followers waiting to see the “authentic” emotions emerge from the viral experience. Will it be tears? Laughter? Sorrow? Joy? The music becomes the soundtrack once more to the consumption of other people’s commodified emotions.
But we can! We can approach music with intentionality and awe. We can approach silence, our quiet, with intentionality and awe also. We just need to pause the neoliberal soundtrack, maybe even stop it.
