ear-wigging, or, ipodding toward ecstasy, part 4

Music: She Wants Revenge: [self-titled] (2006)

The good news today is that Tim Hall, artist of the CrucIpod art I have hanging in my den, has agreed to let me and Mirko print an image of his work for our article on the iPod. Yay! Tomorrow I hope to get to writing an analysis of Hall's art, but meanwhile, I found a quote to go along with it to share. This is from a pretty interesting essay by Christine Rosen on "The Age of Egocasting":

When he introduced the iPod, Apple CEO Steve Jobs claimed that "listening to music will never be the same again." Judging by the testimonials of iPod uses, this was not merely marketing overstatement. One iPod enthusiast spoke of his device in tones one usually reserves for describing a powerful deity. 'It's with me anywhere, anytime . . . It's there all the time. It's instant gratification for music . . . . It's God's own jukebox."

Well, there it is on a stick (pun intended).

The iPod advertising aesthetic is an amalgum of the mirrors of subjection, reflecting the sonorous envelope of listening practice as well as the imago of a new generation of Podpeople. Yoking two important fetishized objects in our culture--jesus and the ipod--this image represents the libidinal pulsation of the drives better than we could: dis/pleasure, indeed! He's god, but he's hung up! But he's got his iPod, so, like, he's god! We can take this right back to Allan Bloom's remarks on the Walkman in his The Closing of the American Mind, who argued rock music was akin to a drug delivered by the Walkman in a neverending masturbatory fantasy of omnipotence. I mean, jeez, is there anything more infantile than the iPod commercials--except maybe Michellan Tire commercials?

Well, anyhoo, I'll get to this intriguing stuff tomorrow. Today I actually took a stab at the conclusion, with the idea it will shake something loose that I can then return to in the analysis section. I'm hopeful Mirko will think of something more interesting to end this all with. For the moment, though, here's a draft of the conclusion:

Concluding Remarks: Earwig of a Deeper Jouissance

I was in the woods in St. Moritz, in the mountains . . . . The snow was falling down. I pressed the button, and suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling, to realize that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation.
--Adreas Pavel, inventor of the Walkman[1]

This beat that the devil, today, has nurtured and fostered is inspired by the powers of hell. And there are young people that are in these rock groups that are pulling off their clothes in full view of thousands of young people. . . . Those young people that ripped off their clothes and acted like animals, they say it's the music. . . . "I really didn't know what I was doing," they said, "I just pulled off my clothes and had to do it!"
--Unknown preacher sampled in Meat Beat Manifesto's "It's the Music"[2]

In his widely read 1987 diagnostic for higher education in the United States titled The Closing of the American Mind, the late Alan Bloom famously inveighed against the Sony Walkman, one of the first portable music gadgets, as a self-sealing delivery device for "rock" music, which has "one appeal only, a barbaric appeal . . . to sexual desire . . . [rock music is] a non-stop commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy."[3] If one recharacterizes the "barbaric appeal to sexual desire" as the stimulus of the invocatory drive and "masturbation" as the continuous pulsation of libidinal energies around the ear, then Bloom is entirely correct. In this essay we have advanced a psychoanalytic theory of music that explicates Bloom's anxiety about music. We have described listening experience in terms of two psychical economies, the psycho-somatic and the symbolic, which work together to produce the fantasy thing of a "sonorous envelope" of listeners to losing themselves in music. The dis/pleasurable experience of the sonorous envelope is, however, a retroactively imposed understanding on an otherwise ineffable musical encounter. Consequently, instead of analyzing a given song in order to detail how its musical structures and formal qualities stimulate the invocatory drive, we focused on representations of the sonorous envelope in popular culture, and in particular, the retroactive characterization of an anonymous individual's experience of music in Apple's iPod advertisements. We also showed how spoofs inspired by Apple's silhouette ads, such as the iRaq subway posters and Tim Hall's CrucIpod, help to underscore the fundamental ambivalence to musical jouissance, the ambivalence upon which a certain cultural politics is based: there is a kind of "pleasurable pain" to sonorous envelope that pushes representation to the very limits of taste. In this respect, it is important to keep in mind that sensorial "masturbation" is not always pleasurable: sometimes it is politics.

To say that sensorial enjoyment is political entails a number of consequences: first, it is to recognize the ways in which the symbolic and cultural inevitably colonize and mediate one's experience of music, much like a parasite; second, as a culture we seem heavily invested in where and how one enjoys and engages the drives; a great deal of our cultural politics seems to involve who does and does not have the right to sensorial stimulation, as well as the appropriate places in which one can enjoy. Controversy about the ubiquity of the iPod is a good example of how the libidinal enjoyment of music inspires political rhetorics of repression. Although Bloom's remarks about the insulating effects of the portable music device have been criticized for intoning an elitist conservatism, what he and a number of contemporary critics across the political spectrum share in common is an attention to the isolating effects of new, portable media gadgets like the cell phone, the Nintendo Gameboy, and the iPod, all of which are designed to stimulate one or more of the drives. Before the arrival of the iPod, the anarchist John Zerzan argued that the portable music device is part of an "ensemble of technologies" that create "a protective sort of withdraw from social connections."4 Thomas Lipscomb has described personal listening devices as the equivalent of a sensory depression tank that "prolongs adolescence, stifles social contact, and keeps people from expanding their intellectual horizons."5 Writing for the New York Observer, Gabriel Sherman said that he had to wean himself off of his iPod because he "had grown increasingly numb" to his surroundings, "often oblivious to the world" around him, "trapped in a self-posed bubble." He compared the iPod to a drug that had "come to dominate [his] daily existence."6 While it is certainly the case that music technologies are an important part of listening practices, these commentators overlook the crucial central role of music itself. Like a cigarette, the iPod is functionally a delivery device; the real drug is the music. The general shift in discussion from the sounds produced by the iPod to the fetishism of the device is functionally a rhetoric of displacement--as is most discourse about the gadget--a way to talk about the dildo instead of what the dildo does: promote a continuous dis/pleasurable, seemingly unmediated experience of psycho-somatic stimulation.

What does one really do with an iPod? You stick it in your ear, of course. Those who worry in print and on screens about the infantile fantasies of omnipotence inspired by portable media gadgets, those who fret about the uber-individualism and self-absorption encouraged by "iPod culture" are in truth troubled by the implosion of the private and public the increasingly direct actualization of the drives betoken. As the invocatory stimulator has moved deeper into the body from the speaker, to the headphone, to the earbud, paradoxically musical enjoyment has become increasingly public and spectacular yet simultaneously radically individual.

Notes

[1] Quoted in Larry Rohter, "An Unlikely Trendsetter Made Earphones a Way of Life." New York Times 17 December 2005, New York Times Online, available http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/international/americas/17pavel.html?ex=1292475600&en=5f4f6a4c9731e289&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss accessed 29 July 2006.

[2] Jack Danger, "It's the Music." Performed by Meat Beat Manifesto. Original Fire (Interscope Records, 1997).

[3] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).

[4] As quoted in RiShawn Biddle, "Personal Soundtracks," reasononline (October 1999); available http://reason.com/9910/fe.rb.personal.shtml accessed 29 July 2006.

[5] Biddle, "Personal Soundtracks," para. 7.

[6] Gabriel Sherman, "Boy in a Bubble." Guardian Unlimited 24 September 2004; available http://arts.guardian.co.uk/netmusic/story/0,13368,1311300,00.html.