Keywords

Tracing a speculative path through the economic history of experimental music research, informed by the New Musicological trope of the discipline’s ‘lateness’ to postmodernism, this chapter explores an alternate historiography foregrounding the slowness, partiality, and ambivalence of epistemic change under the accelerating austerity and privatisation measures imposed on American and European universities since the 1980s. In this new perspective, the rapid expansion of music research in the high modernist universities of the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the production of what economists called a ‘crisis of democracy’, threatening to turn burgeoning youth publics against the violence and exploitation that made the expansion of state systems possible in the first place. Then, from the early 1980s to the middle of the 1990s, academic contemporary music research stagnated aesthetically and socially while questions of modernisation devolved into an intensifying series of intergenerational and intersubdisciplinary competitions for symbolic power. In contrast with neomodernists who profess esoteric, subject-centred, dialectical critique as the key to renewing the university as state apparatus guaranteeing a rational and just distribution of cultural and epistemic resources, this chapter suggests that the first critical step is to ask new empirical questions about the modes of subjectivation made available by uncritically ‘disruptive’ institutions that have willingly traded away their capacity for social and aesthetic critique in exchange for access to financialised markets of funding, personnel, and reputation.

1 Musicology’s Critical Lateness

Surely one of the most emblematic historiographical strategies of the self-proclaimed ‘New Musicology’ in the late twentieth century was its complaint that music scholarship was late to certain transformative currents in critical thought. Not only, chides Joseph Kerman, is the musicologist “a relative latecomer” in the history of the university, but “nearly all musical thinkers travel at a respectful distance behind the latest chariots (or bandwagons) of intellectual life in general” (Kerman 1985, 14–17). The rhetoric of lateness signals a respectful orientation towards the past as well as a desire for renewal. But why should contemporaneity elude musicologists so persistently in the first place? Reflecting, some two decades after Kerman, upon music scholarship’s specific deferral in relation to the epistemological and aesthetic innovations associated with ‘postmodernism’, Judith Lochhead observes a dialectic in which, on one hand, professional theoretical writing was still dominated by the formal and technical concerns of mid-twentieth-century modernist pioneers, and on the other, practitioners and critics held to an even more antiquated belief in the ineffability of music’s expressive power (Lochhead 2011, 169). It seemed natural at this time that intellectual and theoretical innovation was going on elsewhere while musicians and musicologists were preoccupied with practice.

This conclusion bears closer scrutiny from a contemporary perspective in which postmodernism is no longer as novel nor as simple a category as it was almost four decades ago, when New Musicology was at its newest. Lochhead’s retrospection is instructive in that it draws attention beyond the bad habits of particular musicians and audiences to highlight the unequal distributions of cultural capital that produce musicology’s theoretical inertia as a complex, dynamically differentiating assemblage. Notice, however, that her focus is exclusively on lateness as lack; there is no attention to the actual theoretical activity that did happen in universities while music theorists and composers supposedly keep the world around them at bay. Absent are the institutional conditions that produced postmodernism, before it became the innovation that musicologists were supposedly missing. Both aporias were essential to the New Musicology’s performance as heroic arbiter of musical contemporaneity at the turn of the millennium. But are we to believe that English literature and Philosophy departments discarded modernism quicker and more eagerly than Music departments? Was the postmodernism that came after the watershed of the late 1980s just a set of natural practices emerging in the wild?

Ironically, not only does the trope of lateness oversell the originality of those who invented it, it now also frequently serves as evidence of a hidden alliance between postmodernism and neoliberalism, which critics like J. P. E. Harper Scott (2012), Björn Heile (2011), and James Currie (2012) portray as the main adversary of contemporary musicological rigour. These nostalgics seem to want to follow Theodor Adorno in conflating serious music’s capacity to “satisfy its own concept” with musicians’ moral right to produce social critique (Adorno 1976, 28–29). The problem, however, is that Adornian critique presumes a perspective on the social that contemporary universities no longer pretend to make possible. Working in tertiary education today in the so-called ‘European Research Area’ all but obligates arts and humanities researchers to renounce the kind of protective material detachments that were so central to the production of modernist critical theory when it was new (cf. Arendt 1961; Bourdieu e al. 1991; Birnbaum 2018). I will not be the first to note, however, that the past for which these critics pine was one that blocked participation by the increasingly feminised and racialised workforce which is now faced with the challenge of rethinking academic music instruction ‘from the inside’ (cf. Hisama 2021). The trope of lateness inadvertently gives the frustrated modernists who toil under neoliberal doxa a scapegoat for the violence they endure—it shifts responsibility for austerity away from the managers, politicians, and oligarchs who impose it and on to the anti-imperialist, feminist, socialist subaltern who voices the complaint.

Modernists are entirely justified, of course, in their opposition to four decades of ruthless managerialism, depleting resources and ever sinking labour standards in universities, but identifying postmodernism as cause of this configuration is dubious. Rejecting postmodernism offers no protection against the demise of the contemporary university’s ability to foster critical cultural production. Of course, understanding the real conjuncture of postmodernism and neoliberalism in European and American universities still requires something like a ‘critical’ framing of the events. I agree with Marianna Ritchey (2021), however, that this implies also finding new ways of understanding what grasping critically is, if not simply advancing ‘reason’.Footnote 1 If returns to or redistributions of critique are to bring order back to scholarship in any sense, then, as Stephen Muecke has recently argued, they must also avoid folding the real complexity of events and experiences back into anything like a universal subject of reason (Muecke 2021, 37). Indeed, recent historical research shows more and more that modernism itself never actually amounted to the serene and impartial instrument of sociocultural progress that its adherents imagined (e.g. Geoghegan 2020; Saint-Amour 2018).

Luckily for the New Musicology, the historiography that supports the Adornians’ accusation is spurious, and the reality of postmodernism’s intersection with neoliberalism still awaits empirical articulation. A brief look in the archive will show that musicologists did participate in the invention of postmodernism, but also that this work was frustrated and even suppressed in the very first waves of austerity. In fact, suppressions of postmodernism persisted for nearly two decades until enough power had accrued to new methods that they warranted mainstream attention in seminars, thesis defences, and conferences. Music departments were never actually late to postmodernism: it lived among them from the beginning and they actively repressed it until the gaps it had opened became too big to fill.

This chapter is too brief to offer an exhaustive account of the resistance postmodernism faced in music departments during the first neoliberal attacks on the modernist university in the 1980s and 1990s. It can, however, explore some of the reasons why postmodernism’s advent in the 1970s came as such a shock to musicological norms, taking as its case study the music department at the centre of the debates that defined postmodernity—the site of the concept’s maturation, if not exactly its birthplace—the Centre Universitaire Expérimentale de Vincennes (Paris 8), established in haste to quench the revolutionary fervour of May 68. The richness of the experimentation that took place at Vincennes, in the face of severe austerity and moral panic, illustrates how much early postmodernism depended on a modernist model of university life, even as governments increasingly sceptical about the returns on state investments in education were questioning their efforts’ fitness to purpose. The music department at Vincennes was so radical that it escaped the attention of anglophone contemporaries almost entirely and is now largely absent from histories of twentieth-century music in spite of its importance. It would be decades before New Musicologists could begin to absorb the shock, and when they did, they ignored the musicology produced at Vincennes and took to domesticating the work of philosophers and sociologists anew. But maybe the high modernist university produced a monster and then immediately disowned it. Maybe the value of its epistemological innovations spiked at exactly the moment when productivity flattened out.

Evidently, avoiding the modernists’ errors is not a simple matter of placing our bets on the opposite side. Rather, we need to re-stage critique in something like a ‘non-modern’ perspective (cf. Latour 1993; Pickering 1995), de-naturalising the relation between music research and the university, and moving beyond naïve assumptions about the historical ‘progress’ of technological and aesthetic commodities. It is not a simple question of multiplication, however, solvable by mapping out larger and larger webs of musical action, in the manner of actor-network theorists (cf. Piekut 2014). Instead, we need to use myth and metaphor to speculate about new explanations for empirical data that has previously been forgotten and thus cannot be folded into existing ontologies. What musical institutions are in fact is a question of complex, pluripotent machines producing continuous and discontinuous events of material, mental, and social individuation at the critical edges of the dynamic milieux they inhabit (Stiegler and Donin 2004).

Thinking with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s later work on analysis, I propose to treat actor-networks not as a neutral descriptions of social ecology, but rather as specific machines for producing and studying specific social ontologies at specific times (Deleuze and Guattari 1994; Deleuze 1993). In this account, objects do not have relations as properties: ‘strokes’ of relation need to be ‘drawn’ between objects from particular, situated points of observation, which in turn have their own horizons, vanishing points, and ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze 1993, 20; cf. Strathern 2020). Since the energies needed to produce relations are always finite, no network can simultaneously present the same features to all of the different agents moving across its edges and folds. Paths across an actor-network have an inherently contingent and speculative quality, which neither modernism nor postmodernism can explain away.

Although my approach may seem negative, the point of the alternate history I set out below is not to dismiss the range of new ideas that did survive the 1980s and 1990s in spite of austerity and conservative retrenchment. I present a positive, empirical account of a site of theoretical innovation that tests theories of progress in the face of newly excavated evidence. I want to find a new metaphor to explain how the neoliberalisation of European universities helped to manage specific epistemic ruptures and prevent them from overflowing into revolutionary social change. In doing so I propose to, both experimentally and with the support of new empirical findings, bring the European university into the foreground of the story of the progress of generic ‘contemporary music’ in the late twentieth century.

My motivation, like those of countless far more famous and astute critics before me, arises from a real breakdown in my own relations with the university (cf. Birnbaum 2018, 158; Harney and Moten 2013): for most of my short ‘career’, I have remained a relative outsider to academic life, surviving as an unpaid or low-paid researcher on short-term contracts or charity, indentured to my profession by student loans, fragile collegial bonds, and a steady stream of unfinished writing. In my conclusion I explore how this position relates to constraints on the production of institutional critique in academic music research today.

2 The Crisis of Democracy

By the middle of the 1970s, as new forecasting techniques reconfigured the future as a site of heated commercial and political speculation (Connolly 2011), a worry grew among education and research policy-makers that the continued expansion of institutional access could lead to a literal ‘crisis of democracy’. What if political participation and social experimentation could only be intensified for so long before they risked causing rational, modern order to tip over into utter chaos? According to a report by the ominous Trilateral Commission in 1975, the rapid increase in tertiary education provision that had helped fuel industrial and military expansion after the Second World War would soon be unsustainable (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki 1975; Andersson 2021). In simple terms, a rising number of knowers seemed to portend related rises in both the amount of actual knowledge and in the number of possible ways to know it. This trajectory threatened to bring about unprecedented transformations in the distribution and scope of democratic sovereignty. Without acceptable mitigating action, the Commission found, these transformations could one day begin to upset the delicate balance between public and private interests that distinguished the ‘West’ from the great socialist and subaltern others gathering at its borders. Thus, the modernising new universities of the 1960s and 1970s were enlisted in a race for imperial power that required a vast administrative, architectural and legislative infrastructure. Ultimately, any conventional musical apparatus in terms of works, instruments, or musicians that made it into these institutions had to compete for attention, funding, space, and time with a recalcitrant administrative instrumentarium of assessments, committees, conferences, critiques, forms, hearings, offices, plans, posters, projects, surveys, meetings, tests, workshops, etc. It is instructive to remember that the very articulation of ‘contemporary music’ as a university research practice does not predate this Cold War administrative explosion, and indeed could probably be fruitfully viewed, provocatively or not depending on one’s moral and aesthetic convictions, as one of its key managerial and commercial innovations.

However, precisely because they were orientated in this way towards the production of public authority, these institutions also took on an affordance that followers of Ivan Illich called ‘conviviality’, a feeling of embodied, intimate, and interdependent ‘effectiveness’ that arises when local collections of people find themselves forced to oppose the compulsive, industrialised order of ‘productivity’ governing their work (Illich 1973, 183). As soon as pockets of contemporary music researchers existed in the modern university, that is, they could conceive themselves as ‘critical’ of their institutions only insofar as they performed bounded acts of exception to the rational, modernising programme that structured their activities there. This structure of feeling will be familiar to anyone familiar with the work of experimental music educator Christopher Small’, who uses it to motivate questions of embodied, emancipatory agency, and social democracy that would later become central ‘postmodernist’ concerns as well.Footnote 2

New, suburban, concrete, and plate-glass campuses rose across Europe from the mid-1960s onward. Carried upon an unprecedented wave of new science and technology training initiatives, negotiated through international treaty organisations like the OECD and UNESCO as well as by private philanthropists, these universities translated the universalising language of educational modernism into the language of common sense and current affairs, articulating local needs such as absorbing the shocks of demographic changes at home and a shrinking empire abroad, responding to environmental and economic crisis, and realigning workforces towards production for the nascent weapons and space races.Footnote 3 In 1963, Charles De Gaulle’s neoconservative government in France initiated planning for massive education reforms to be carried out as part of a 5-year economic plan ending in 1970. The disaster of decolonisation brought generational and racial strife immediately into the foreground of these new institutions. The events of May 1968 at the new ‘red’ campus at Nanterre, opened in 1964, garnered concessions to the student Left in the orientation of some high-profile reforms. Notably, two new ‘Experimental University Centres’ would be provided on surplus military land in the outskirts of Paris to serve the working class, adult and immigrant students who would now be accessing university education for the first time: a spacious complex at Porte Dauphine in the northeast would be devoted to management and commercial research, and a state-of-the-art pre-fabricated structure at the Bois de Vincennes in the southwest for the humanities and social sciences (Merlin 1980; Musselin 2001).

The music department at Vincennes opened in January 1969. Its founding head, Daniel Charles, had recently headed the government commission to implement the post-May reform for music, and set new standards for professorial music chairs across the country. Charles came to music as an ambitious but frustrated composer. Trained by Messiaen at the Conservatoire, by Schaeffer at the GRM, and by John Cage at Darmstadt, he bowed out of composing, took an additional teaching qualification in philosophy, and was posted to lecture in aesthetics at Nanterre in 1966. His philosophical project revolved around examining the ontological and ethical questions opened up by the work of his favourite teacher, Cage, a project that culminated in the publication of a book of interviews in 1976, Pour les oiseaux, and a book of critical exegesis in 1977, Gloses sur John Cage. Although hampered by poor experiences with translators and never gaining a strong following in the anglophone avant-garde, Charles did travel extensively to the US and Canada to give seminars and conferences alongside Cage, including at the November 1976 International Symposium on Post-Modern Performance at the University of Milwaukee Center for 20th Century Studies, where speakers included Dick Higgins, Carolee Schneemann, Alan Kaprow, Umberto Eco, Ihab Hassan, and Jean-François Lyotard, a close colleague from the Vincennes philosophy department.

Charles’ syllabus for the Vincennes music department’s first semester features electroacoustic composition studios led by Martin Davorin Jagodic and Jean-Claude Eloy, ethnomusicology with Claude Laloum, and free jazz workshops led by Daniel Caux, who, through his contemporaneous work curating the ground-breaking Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, was also helping to build new European audiences for Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young. Charles himself taught aesthetics, developing the interests in musical time, orality, and vocality which he would later elaborate in a series of books including his thesis for the doctorat d’état, published in (1978) as Le temps de la voix [The Time of the Voice]. True to the university’s mission, Charles’ doctoral students in the 1970s were predominantly migrants like Julia Kristeva’s younger sister, Ivanka Stoïanova, and the composers Horatio Vaggione and Costin Miereanu. Charles’ own doctoral work had been supervised by the phenomenological aesthetician Mikel Dufrenne, who had spent the occupation in the same prisoner of war camp as Paul Ricoeur, and had also supervised Jean-François Lyotard’s doctorat d’état in 1973. Lyotard, of course, soon went on to popularise the very notion of a ‘postmodern condition’ (1984a) for a government commission on the computerisation of higher education in Quebec, where Charles also had close friends. Under Charles’ watch, any theoretical production had to be embodied, politicised, and socialised in the dynamic flux of an evolving, experimental, media-saturated classroom life (not least because there was no space for individual offices). Even the harmony lecturer, Éveline Andréani, a Prix de Rome winning composer trained by Nadia Boulanger, asserted an embodied, affective view on the practice that she saw as rising to the challenge of contemporary pluralism: “integration into music, not only of all sounds, but also of all noises of the contemporary world” (Andréani 1979, 16, my translation).

Just as Charles had been chosen to select and head the staff of the music department at Vincennes, the staff of the philosophy department was to be selected and headed by similarly rising star Michel Foucault, although the latter quickly escaped to a more relaxed and prestigious post at the Collège de France (Dosse 2010, 347). Foucault too attempted to defy tradition, staffing his department with young Althusserians and Lacanians alongside emerging authorities in the new post-phenomenological orientations emerging at Nanterre, including Lyotard, Deleuze, and Michel Serres. As factions arose pitting youthful radicals like Alain Badiou and Guy Hocquenghem against these ‘stagnant’ philosophers of ‘difference’, Charles took up the challenge of mediating the gap, a feat documented across a web of mutual readings and references. Following Lyotard’s anti-Lacanian ‘figural’ metaphysics, Charles theorised the emerging ‘free’ and repetitive musics as material eruptions rising from the interval between two musical modernisms: an older, slower tradition of accumulating, universalising, mnemotechnical inscriptions, and a new, accelerating orality/vocality of embodied, micropolitical, sociotechnical becomings, spilling over the edges of the traditional concert hall (Charles 1978, 256–269). Charles’ music department presented this analysis to a diverse and often divisive student population, which included a high proportion of adult learners, a large minority of recent immigrants, especially from France’s collapsing African and Southeast Asian colonies, several patients of Guattari’s from the experimental psychiatric clinic at La Borde, and an unpredictable daily influx of addicts wandering in from a surrounding park as infamous for its drug market as for its gay cruising scene (Merlin 1980; Birnbaum 2018; Robcis 2021). In conversations with Claire Parnet for the film Abécédaire in 1988, in the section aptly entitled ‘P comme Professeur’, Deleuze fondly recalls the challenging complexity of teaching new student publics who could never before have gathered under statutory protection, and whose resistance to normal conventions of student–teacher relations made it not just interesting but necessary to use metaphors that would translate his ideas across disciplines, cultures, and socioeconomic positions.

Published musicological writing from the time contains only scattered reports of the moralising reactions that this ‘explosion of voices’ elicited among the academic authorities of the time. Charles quips that inspectors overseeing the French state music education examination had complained of a ‘satisfied amateurism’ among his students (1978, 257). Meanwhile, structuralists like Jean-Jacques Nattiez openly mocked the prospect of figuring musics as ‘open’ circuits of human and nonhuman libidinal economy, and not as closed systems of signification (1990, 85–87). Economic austerity and moral panic put a lid on the funding and the motivation for modernisation, and in 1980, after years of virulent disputes over its devolution from a ‘showcase’ to a ‘ghetto’ for the radical Left, the whole complex of buildings at Vincennes was demolished by municipal authorities.

3 ‘Relocating a Cemetery’

What if, contrary to what readers of neoliberal economist Jacques Attali’s popular assessment of the period might still assume, the music department at Vincennes was not an anticipation of a new, utopian order, but a desperate, inflationary spike, the last gasp of a dying epistemic economy? The institutional legacy of these experiments never lived up to economic forecasters’ dream of continuous epistemological revolution. In fact, what followed was a long, difficult period of slow domestication and professionalisation. As universities succumbed to increasingly perilous political and economic pressure, the glib relativism of Lyotard’s and Charles’ music criticism became more and more unfashionable.Footnote 4 Societies and conferences were quickly launched to conserve the newly applied and ‘popularised’ academic disciplines, while education ministries and university managers organised market-like infrastructures for study and scholarship, and governments began a large-scale transfer of university debt from public to private accounts in the form of student fees and loans (Musselin 2010; Raunig 2013; Brown 2015). In Britain especially, additional legal and financial restrictions had to be imposed to curb student and faculty labour power, and curricula and assessment were centralised to avoid undue influence from the Left (Anderson 2006, 163–182). Student numbers advanced rapidly during this period of epistemological and political retrenchment, especially in the engineering subdisciplines of music research, although it would take decades longer for concrete action to be taken on the glaring gender and racial inequalities (cf. Born and Devine 2015; Ewell 2020). As the historiography of New Musicology shows, the end of the century retained almost no memory of postmodern musicology: it had to be invented anew.

Today, as economic historian Melinda Cooper has shown, monetary value is no longer dependent upon alternating exchanges of equivalent commodities, because it can now occur instantaneously and ubiquitously as an index of abstract, non-dialectical ‘turbulence’ across digitalised global financial markets (Cooper 2010; cf. La Berge 2014). Academic capital now shares this economy’s technical and conceptual infrastructure, if not quite yet its ‘spirit’. Success in contemporary academic work depends not on interpretations of one’s production being inherently justifiable or verifiable in comparison to that of one’s peers, but rather on one’s ability to perform and accumulate the kind of relations to power that make research traceable across the closed topology of a particular ‘career stage’, ‘field’, or ‘network’. In turn, the success of university management is measured not in terms of the quality of research findings, but in terms of models of system-wide socioeconomic effectivity related to like those of Illich and his followers. The ideal subject of this economy is the increasingly feminised and racialised ‘early career researcher’, acritical agent of libidinal investments in entrepreneurial ambition, mobility, and disruption (Sautier 2021; Else 2014; cf. Berlant 2011).

Notice how little nostalgia academic music researchers today express about the pursuit of half-a-century-old postmodernist concerns like embodiment, ecology, and social participation. Contemporary university staff are obliged to produce and manage the effects of social and aesthetic critique in an eternally ‘turning’ present (Straw 2017). Recent Latourian calls to ‘deflate’ theory and unlearn the modern gaze are more than sufficient to justify the inexorable cycle of returns to theoretical innocence (cf. Piekut 2014). In some circles, ‘theoreticism’ still counts as the cardinal modernist sin: here, renunciations of modernism thus folding into the long-standing utilitarian preoccupation with de-intellectualising normative aesthetics (Born 1995, 42; cf. Ahmed 2019; Rekret 2018). Meanwhile, in many parts of the world, academics regardless of their politics have no right to dissent, being forced to sign hiring agreements forbidding them to disparage their employers.Footnote 5 What better way to ensure that students never learn about the technocrats, petrocapitalists, and property developers whose successes have helped to fund, to choose only the most ironic example, the enthusiastic ‘material turn’ and concomitant wave of new music technology and ‘critical organology’ research that arose during the apparent ‘art bubble’ of the debt-locked 2010s?Footnote 6

It is instructive to recall how much of the state funding that has supported the past decade-and-a-half of contemporary music research in Europe was mediated by institutions designed to insert ‘stimulus’ (especially in the form of urbanisation and privatisation) into national economies following the Greek debt crisis. The economic rescue that ensued was one of the main motivations behind the realignment of European tertiary education as a system of creative knowledge markets over the decades that followed. In his keynote speech to the European Conference for Education Research in September 2007, founding ERC Secretary General Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker harkened his audience back to a time before modern nation states, when elite individuals and institutions had evidently been free from the bonds of bureaucratic oversight. The planned ‘single knowledge area’ would approximate this feudal utopia by setting up a ‘champion’s league’ for industrial and social innovation. Affluent young migrants from around the world would be enticed by the promise of Europe’s “three Ts […] talent, tolerance and technology” to pad the local ‘creative class’ and drive gentrification (Winnacker 2008, 127). In effect, universities had to learn to process talent without the security of the modernist public order to protect them. Reductive local traditions would be replaced with a uniform, anglophone, liberal democratic environment where business-like research teams could compete to provide solutions to the ‘complex’ and ‘emergent’ problems of the digital age. ‘Autonomy’ might even return one day, Winnacker teased his audience, with the abundance and prosperity which would be the inevitable future result of the denationalised competition for excellence. In the meantime, reform would have to take place without internal support, rather like “relocating a cemetery” (129).

The deliberate avoidance of distributive justice at the heart of the ERC funding model provokes speculation about the kinds of peripheral or oppositional work in the humanities that might have been possible without the clear concentration of funding in elite universities and rising postindustrial regions. If we take seriously the funder’s inflationary rhetoric, then it quickly becomes clear that the ERC’s main business today, in much the same way as more widely criticised neoliberal institutional networks like American private prison industry (Wacquant 2009) lies in the production of social inequality. Writing and teaching in the arts is more and more heavily imbued with anxiety about ‘excellence’, defined, again, not as a measure of inherent quality but as a quantitative function of system-level readiness to respond to the asynchronous interests of evaluators and stakeholders (Raunig 2013; Beer 2016; Morrish 2019; Osborne 2021). And since the managers of this environment know no shame, the very same anxiety can then be measured again to produce raw material for derivative products, which universities can then use as currency to sustain their accelerating ambitions as information processors without the need to increase knowledge production—just as student loan systems allowed the state to both avoid paying for education and provide opportunities for bankers and property developers to draw profits from the resulting insolvent public institutions and citizens (Brown 2015; Lazzarato 2015). In the end, Winnacker never actually has to move his cemetery. Engineers can simply redefine the hoards of dead labour as ‘content’ and sell access by subscription.

The lower European universities drive the price of knowledge production in pursuit of more and more granular forms of excellence, the more competition they seem to attract from private businesses and micro-institutions modelled as think-tanks or start-ups. Funders are attracted to these more agile competitors precisely because, although they welcome state intervention, they lack the resources necessary to ground strong critique. Just as the Vincennes music theorists in the 1970s warned it would, molecularity of this kind renders dialectical avant-gardism obsolete (cf. Lyotard 1984b; Charles 1978). Success happens in hybrid institutions like IRCAM that have the advantage of complete detachment from the ‘democratising’ activity of undergraduate teaching, allowing them to pursue high class electroacoustic music alongside electric vehicle sound design and stylish ambient electronica.Footnote 7 Increasingly, research councils are realising that they can just as easily fund projects at private maker spaces, who offer all of the dynamism and community engagement of a university with far less moral and epistemic baggage.Footnote 8 The most important critical concern in this environment is not the production or exchange of musical objects at all, but rather the processing of that activity and attention into fuel for abstract violence and extraction elsewhere. Austerity has worn contemporary academic music research down into a distracted bureaucracy, dutifully churning out nothing but justifications for the dire machine that seizes and exploits its labour.