earfucking, or, ipodding toward ecstasy, part 2

Music: De/Vision: Subkutan (2006)

I've made some more headway (yay!) on my and Mirko's essay. Going to call it quits for today, but thought I'd post what I got done. Most of this is Mirko's writing with my cute examples. Mirko is a smart mofo homo (hence I go heavy on the hetro examples, just cause he's not really a "tit man" . . . ).

The Dis/Pleasure of Drives

Whatever I do to make it real/it's never enough
--Robert Smith/The Cure

In the psychoanalytic tradition, there are two mutually informing yet nevertheless distinct approaches to human motivation: object relations theory and drive theory. The tradition that has modified yet not abandoned Freud's understanding of motive, sometimes referred to as "classical psychoanalysis," is that of drive theory. Fundamentally reduced, the "drive" (Trieb) is the variable yet insatiable movement of psychosexual energies throughout the body, or as Freud once put it, the "psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuous flow of stimulation." In less syllabic terms, the idea of the drive is that humans are goaded to thinking and behaving in reference to energies that pulsate around certain objects. Freud argued that these objects tend to be located around or near libidinally-charged and psychically-privileged regions of the body, the " erotogenic zones," many of which are orifices. For example, the human infant's "oral drive" aims toward (or pulsates around) the breast, the anal drive the feces, the invocatory (or listening) drive speech, and so on.

Although psychoanalytic theorists have argued that the drives derive from hard-wired "instincts" (Trieb is sometimes translated as "instinct"), Jacques Lacan distinguished the drives from the instincts for reasons that afford a central role to representation and, by extension, rhetoric. First, unlike other animals, humans are born with partial and incomplete "instincts" and must resort to symbolic resources, such as crying, to satisfy their needs. This is why Lacan insists on the drive's primary construction through symbolic processes; simply put, biology is not enough because self-consciousness requires human beings to be "symbol-using [and symbol-used] animals." Although the drives are facilitated by neuronal pathways that re/trace more basic, incomplete, preservative instincts, the drive represents a culturally-mediated state of "lack." For example, the clichéd object of the oral drive for the classic, heterosexual male is the woman's breast. When making love to a woman, like a hungry infant, a "tit-man" man will ultimately end up putting the woman's breast in his salivating mouth. One knows the oral drive is in play because the man does not want to "get" or "possess" the breast as the object of his desire, but precisely the opposite. In other words, the point is not to own or have the breast, but to prolong sexual excitement by reckoning with the impossibility of ever getting the breast--of lacking the object even though may be in one's mouth.

Second, the object of the drive is determined by nurture or culture, not by "nature" (e.g., whether the hunger cries of an infant are satisfied by the breast or the bottle is of little consequence to the infant). The relatively interchangeable character of the object of the drive implicates the intervention of social codes, norms, ideology, and so on in determining what is and is not a proper love object (we say "relatively interchangeable" because, of course, sticking a cigar into an infant's mouth would not provide the nourishment it needs, although a cigar may very well--at least momentarily--stimulate the oral drive). These theoretical innovations, in turn, are built upon a number differences between Freud and Lacan that will prove important for our discussion: (a) Freud suggests that the drives emanate from "erotogenic zones," whereas Lacan stresses that a specific orifice always defines the drive, which--by permanently "cutting" or penetrating the body's surface--marks the precarious threshold between the internal, psychical world and external reality, otherwise known as the divide between subject and object; (b) Freud suggests that there are several "component drives" (oral, anal, genital) that initially function independent units until they are assimilated under the genital drive in puberty,ix whereas Lacan argues that the discrete drives can never attain any complete, harmonious organization and always remain partial; and (c) for Freud, the purpose of the drive is to gain sexual satisfaction through the expenditure of energy, operating on a kind of hydraulic model of tension and release, whereas for Lacan the purpose of the drive is to re/produce a always-open circuit of auto-eroticism that never closes such that libidinal energy endlessly circulates around the orifice.

Collectively, these Lacanian elaborations to Freud's notion of the drive suggests a model that resembles the pulsation of energy in a circle that can never be closed. Some object--a breast, a shoe, a penis, a voice, and so on--both inspires the pulsation of the drive and is the impediment to its closure: the objet a. Slavoj Zizek explains that

It is important to grasp this inherent impediment in its positive dimension: true, the objet a prevents the circle of pleasure from closing, it introduces an irreducible displeasure, but the psychic apparatus finds a sort of perverse pleasure in this displeasure itself, in the never-ending, repeated circulation around the unattainable, always missed object. The Lacanian name for this 'pleasure in pain' is of course enjoyment (jouissance), and the circular movement which finds satisfaction in failing again and again to attain the object is the . . . is the Freudian drive.

The most obvious (and therefore most boring) example of drive enjoyment is genital foreplay: the goal of foreplay is to prolong genital pleasure, not end it in orgasm (or soreness, whichever comes first). Following Lacan, however, we submit that the most ubiquitous kinds of enjoyment in daily life concern the scopic drive and the gaze (looking at things and people), and the invocatory drive and human speech, which, as one grows older, is later surrogated as song and music.xiv As we detail below, the dialectic of "dis/pleasure" forms the basis of listening subjectivity and begins to explain why different people enjoy different kinds of music.

Crossing the Threshold of the Sonorous Envelope

Music directly transected by desires and drives, has always had but one subject--the body, which it offers a complete journey through pleasure.
--Jacques Attali

Attali's remark underscores the intense physiological and affective responses that music solicits. Music has the uncanny ability to involve, construct, and energize the body in accordance with rhythms, gestures, surfaces, and desires.xvi But music also causes listeners to experience their body and its social identity in new ways and often "seemingly without mediation."xvii The sometimes oceanic feeling of being surrounded, even penetrated, by music is the signature of the invocatory drive par excellence, and more specifically, represents a the experience of what a number of scholars have termed the "sonorous envelope." In this section we explain the concept of the sonorous envelope and specify how music engages the libidinal economy of listeners by pre/discursively constructing sites for listening subjectivity.

As a privileged discourse, music allows listeners to (seemingly) circumvent external reality and directly access their unconscious drives. Since the mid-1970s, psychoanalytic research, coupled with film theory, has concentrated on the underlying connection of music to the maternal body. A number of French theorists, such as Dider Anzieu, Guy Rosolato, and Claude Baliblé, have stressed the role of sound in a child's developing subjectivity within the womb. They argue that the perception of the mother's body--her heartbeat, breathing, voice, and bodily movements--is a primal experience in which the child feels itself enclosed within an envelope of sound or a "sonorous envelope." "Music finds it roots and its nostalgia in [this] original [infantile] atmosphere," argues Rosolato, "which might be called a sonorous womb, a murmuring house, or music of the spheres."xix This intrauterine experience suggests an undifferentiated and oceanic expansiveness; it is analogous to the all-around pleasure of listening to music. From this vantage, for example, the contemporary, five-speaker stereo system in living rooms across the country represents a classically infantile attempt to recreate the sonorous envelope in "surround sound."

As a stimulus for the invocatory or listening drive, surround sound and other forms of musical playback that inspire the listener to "lose herself" work by helping to circulate psychosexual energies around the ear. Juan-David Naso's elaborations of the Lacanian concept of musical enjoyment (jouissance) helpfully explains the crucial role of dis/pleasure in this circulation. Nasio refigures Lacan's notion of jouissance as a "thrust of unconscious energies." In this newer orientation to the experience of enjoyment, music speaks to unconscious flows (or drives) of psychical energy that are never immediately experienced by the conscious subject (this is why Lacan states that the invocatory drive is "closest to the experience of the unconscious"). If these energies do emerge, they are always "condensed in a corporeal segment," meaning that [explain here Mirko].xxii These condensations would include such involuntary responses to music, such as goose bumps, which are physical reminders of archaic moments that Schwarz terms "threshold crossings." When music addresses conscious or preconscious feelings--whether they are pleasurable, displeasurable, or ambivalent--it is the direct result of music's translation or crossing into the symbolic matrix. In short, music affects listeners unconsciously through psychical energy, and consciously through this energy's culturally mediated transformation.

A number of post-Lacanian theorists have argued that music seeks to re/discover the sonorous envelope though its very repetitiveness, which suggests a powerful parallel structures. Music engenders a "repetition that postulates an anteriority that recreates itself . . . encountering a lost object (the mother . . . ) or one of its traits--sound, the voice," argues Rosolato. "Throughout this return, it is the movement of the drive itself that is reproduced since it works to reestablish an anterior state" (our emphasis).xxiv Although Rosolato and his followers essentialize music as re/enacting a series of lost maternal representations (wrongly so, we think), they nevertheless recognize the rhythmic and energy-laden nature of the invocatory drive. In fact, most musical structures are repetitive and thus are homologous to the circular pulsation of the drive in this pure kinetic motility. In other words, as we argued above with drives in general, invocatory energies endlessly circulates around the orifice of the ear in a manner that formally parallels the repetitive structures of music itself, thereby keeping the ear in a permanently erogenous state and unable to reach the end-goal of complete sonic satisfaction (we are minded here of children who never tire of playing or singing the same "I Love You" Barney song over and over and over). An obvious example of the homology of the invocatory drive and musical experience is the modern dance club or "discothèque": inside a comfortably warm and dark room, colorful lights bathe dancers and pulsate repetitively as a driving musical beat urges bodies to move. Each pound of the beat or melodic return to the tonic and chorus signifies a pulsation of the invocatory drive. As most individuals who have been to a dance club can attest, even if one does not like the music she will find herself, nevertheless, eventually nodding her head or tapping her foot to the beat. The dance floor pulsates to the music just as the drive pulsates to the music; when one adds de-inhibitory drugs to the experience, the oceanic feeling of the sonorous envelope is overdetermined. Dance clubs, in other words, are hyper-drive zones.

Although the appeal of music in a dance club has as much to do with its technological reproduction (usually overpoweringly loud) as the monotonous, repeative beat, musical harmony also works to remind listeners of archaic, oceanic moments of developing subjectivity. Listening to a favorite song through a telephone speaker--which sounds terrible--can still cause one to "lose oneself" in the music. Such an experience implies a powerful compensatory role for memory and, therefore, symbolic re-presentation, which underscores the fantasmic and rhetorical character of the sonorous envelope. Although Anzieu and Rosolato have argued that music can re/interpellate the listener's blissfully anterior (i.e. pre-subject, pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal) state, such a theoretical position only articulates the parameters in which listeners may have access to vestiges of pre-symbolic conditions. xxv David Schwarz, on the other hand, argues that the sonorous envelope is a fantasy concept or a psychical representation that is retroactively attributed to a powerful, sonorous experience:

On an elementary level, . . . the experience of being embraced by the all-around sound of music . . . [is] made possible by [one's] experience of the sonorous envelope in the early stages of . . . developing subjectivity. But, even though the experience . . . [is] visceral, it was a fantasy--a representation of an experience to which neither I nor anyone else can have direct access. Thus, representations of the sonorous envelope are always retrospective; they are produced by a wide variety of theoretical, historical, psychoanalytic, and personal contexts. Given its retrospective structure, the sonorous envelope can be described as a thing, an immanent experience whose features represent how we imagine the sonorous envelope might have sounded.

To put the same point alternately, although music can be understood though primary, psycho-somatic processes and experiences, it first becomes fully enunciated through the secondary processes of the symbolic order. How one reflects upon or represents a powerful sonorous experience (e.g., getting goose bumps during a favorite aria, nodding one's head or dancing unwittingly, and so on)--that is, how one imagines and describes the sonorous envelope--is consequently fundamentally rhetorical. The retroactive rendering of the sonorous envelope is the primary site of analysis for a psychoanalytically informed rhetoric of music.