Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 32

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC AND HUMANITARIAN NARRATIVES
that would be hypothetically freed from the weight of “ideologies,” while taking the
place of the welfare state. Political projects of collective emancipation and social justice
were replaced by ironic objectives of individual salvation and personal benefit. In 1985,
Valérie Lagrange asserted on French public TV: “if out of 10 million people, 50,000 are
saved, if I was one of those 50,000, I would be very happy to be one of them.” 8 In this
dystopian worldview, politics is reduced to the number of people buying and listening to
a song, as Geldof repeated without embarrassment: “if you have everybody in Germany
listening to this song, thinking about it, everybody in the UK, and everybody in France,
you got a lot of people, and that’s political”.
Figure 3. Reflections on Music and Propaganda. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und
Kunstbau München. Photo: Simone Gaensheimer
Humanitarian musical “dispositifs” maintain the illusion that citizens can “do” something
to change the world through the simulacrum of dominant media sources: donors become
consumers of the poverty of others, transformed into benevolent bearers of charity
through the consumerist exploitation of moralistic and consensual musical works. What
kind of alternative to these narratives can we suggest? Among others, re-politicising humanitarian
action and social struggles wherever they take place, focusing on a multidimensional
concept of social justice which encompasses at least economic redistribution,
cultural recognition, and political representation (Fraser 2008:404). Additionally, supporting
and listening to political actors, musicians, and artists from countries historically
concerned by humanitarian action: polemical voices which consider vulnerable others
as excluded subjects of a political community, where “the excluded is a conflictual actor,
an actor who includes himself as a supplementary political subject, carrying a right
8 Valérie Lagrange on French TV Antenne 2 news, July 15, 1985 (http://www.ina.fr/video/
CAB86011680).
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