Neoliberal Kosmos and the Cunning of Aesthetic Revolt

Writing in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988) late in his career, the neoliberal theorist F. A. Hayek lamented that writers and artists of his time had remained under the spell of “constructivist rationalism.” The truth, however, is more interesting. Sharing Theodor W. Adorno's fear that the “administered world” that arose in the twentieth century might “strangle all spontaneity,” artists embraced chance, open-endedness, and indeterminacy. In the process, experimental artists went beyond negating the rationalized postwar social order; their work also positively modeled the dispersed, unwilled—in a word, spontaneous—conception of social order that simultaneously came to theoretical expression in the work of neoliberal intellectuals. This essay offers new insight into the formal unity between spontaneous aesthetics and the neoliberal account of the order produced by markets. After broadly retracing the shared commitment among experimental artists and neoliberal intellectuals to spontaneous order—that is, to order as an emergent effect of dispersed activity rather than the rational outcome of conscious construction and coordination—this essay reads Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977) as a text in which the spirit of aesthetic revolt formally and materially converges with the neoliberal intellectual and political project.