god's jukebox and the iPodic mirror

Music: Various Artists: Beneath the Surface (2006)

Well, shoot. I regret I didn't get much written today . . . some days are good, some days are not-so-good. In part, I'm recovering from a fine time at Farid's last night, which I'll post about later. For the moment, here's a section of the analysis/criticism part of my and Mirko's essay, "Stick it In Your Ear: Toward a Psychoanalysis of Music."

Insofar as iPod advertising represents a pedagogy of drive stimulation, then it also necessarily encourages regression to primary states of subject development. Consequently, (as is the case with most advertising campaigns), iPod advertising is unmistakably concerned with the development and maintenance of individual identity by "mirroring" how its consumers see or would like to see themselves. In both print ads and television commercial, each silhouetted figure is dynamic, seen to be moving or "jamming out," but always with a kind of youthful confidence that reflects Apple's stated meaning's for the "i" in "iPod": individualistic and independent.[1] In Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, such identity work is set into motion by the dis/pleasure of drives (in this case, both scopic and invocatory) in terms of imaginary self-image or "imago" of the so-called "mirror-stage."

For Lacan, the mirror stage refers to both a scene (that is, a place of acting-out) and a retroactively posited, mythic moment in which a developing child first beholds his or her image in a reflective surface.2 The child is simultaneously "jubilant" and fearful as a result of identifying with its image: on the one hand, it is pleasurable to see oneself as an independent and discrete being--a unity. On the other hand, however, asserting one's independence is painful because it means one is not "one" with her mother. Nevertheless, from that moment on, suggests Lacan, an individual internalizes the imago as a kind of self concept, which over the years becomes invested will all sorts of social expectations (gender norms, sex norms, expectations from one's parents to become a lawyer, and so on). Since Lacan's development of the concept of the mirror stage, a number of theorists have argued that the visual mirror scene is actually preceded by an "acoustic" stage in which the mother's voice functions as the first "acoustic mirror," a sonorous echo, as it were, of the child's intrauterine position.3 Like the imago that develops later, the acoustic mirror positions the developing child's first external object of identification as human speech, first in the womb and later, of course, in terms if the interplay between one's own cries and the speech of the mother (although mother's face is the "first" visual mirror, the notion of independence requires an actual image of self). Together, the acoustic and visual mirrors work in concert to stage the development of a subject in life, however, because the invocatory drive is stimulated first, music is associated with primary processes of the infant, whereas imagery--including written language--is associated with secondary, higher order processes and developing adolescence. Consequently, more so that imagery and pictures, music and human speech has long been associated (e.g., in the Platonic dialogues) with feelings of "presence" and "realness," however illusory we determine such feelings to be.[4]

Reencountering iPod discourse as a series of mirror stages, understood both as (1) a place where the drama of identity is enacted and (2) an intersection of the imago and the voice of the Other, we can begin to see why it has resonated so deeply with consumers. iPod print advertisements are uncannily homologous to the development of subjectivity in the sense that the centrality of the image is an homage to the primacy of the sonorous; it is a representation of someone "losing themselves" in music yet remaining (visually at least) independent. In figure 2, for example, a thin woman with a pony tail seems to be either looking blankly to her right or closing her eyes, her iPod held up and close to her face, as it were a microphone and she is about to sing. Her left hand is held out beside her with the palm open, signifying movement. Either the woman is dancing, or, the open-palm held aloft is urging someone to leave her alone (the gesture brings to mind the currently youthful statement of leave-me-alone-ness, "talk to the hand"). Whether the woman is dancing or fending off someone who threatens to disturb her listening pleasure, her body language signifies both independence and musical enjoyment. Similarly, iPod television commercials re-stage the archaic site of mirrors, both acoustically and visually, in a kind of identitarian double-whammy that jubilantly celebrates the primal discovery of independence and a pre-subjective state of oceanic harmony and one-ness through the use of upbeat music and bright, hypnotic color schemes. Each silhouetted figure is "empty" of features because she enthymematically represents the spectator. In short, the mirror-work of iPod discourse is an attempt to represent the sonorous envelope, an advertising campaign that appeals to an unconscious desire to return to a pre-given, harmonious state of existence while, nevertheless, maintaining a presumed autonomy.

The culturally resonant, psychoanalytic power of iPod discourse as a site of double mirroring is perhaps no more obvious than in the many parodies and spoofs of the silhouettes. Shortly after the silhouette campaign debuted in the fall of 2003, Photoshop spoofs of the ad began flooding webpages across the Internet. One of the more controversial spoofs is artist and video game producer Tim Hall's CrucIpod, a stencil-art representation of the crucifixion of Jesus, iPod in hand (see figure 3). "[I]f you look at most advertising geared towards that 20 something market," says Hall, "you will see that they borrow a lot from the graffiti/screen printing [art] scene. . . . Big corporations are taking inspiration from 'indie' artists to sell their products--why not take their campaign and subvert it?"5 If the silhouette figure represents the consumer, then what is particularly subversive about Hall's piece is the way in which it calls into question the relationship between the oceanic (in this case, rendered as spirituality) and the radical brand of personal independence promised by the iPod. Here the two mirrors are reflected in two ways. First, individual autonomy is re-figured as deity, which marks a critique of the feelings of omnipotence having "1,000 songs in your pocket" inspires in some consumers. "One iPod enthusiast spoke of his device in tones one usually reserves for a powerful deity," reports Christine Rosen. "'It's with me anywhere, anytime . . . . It's there all the time. It's instant gratification for music . . . . It's God's own jukebox."[6] Second, the dis/pleasure of the drives or the curiously painful pleasure of jouissance is represented here, of course, as the passion of the Christ.[7] Yoking together two of the most fetishized objects of our time--Jesus and the iPod--Hall holds up another mirror to Western culture that reckons with the unconscious infantilism and selfish fantasies of omnipotence that new drive technologies are frequently said to promote.

Notes

[1] Steven Levy, "iPod Nation." Newsweek (26 July 2004); available http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5457432/site/newsweek/ accessed 30 July 2006.

[2] Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 3-9; and Fink, Lacanian Subject, 48-68.

[3] See Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3-43; Silverman, Acoustic Mirror; Schwarz, Listening Subjects, 7-36.

[4] We are think here in particular of Derrida's critique of logocentrism. See [author source withheld for purposes of blind review].

[5] Tim Hall, email to the authors 29 July 2006.

[6] Christine Rosen, "The Age of Egocasting." The New Atlantis (Fall 2004/Winter 2005), 65.

[7] He's God, but he's hung up. But, he's got his iPod, so he's still (a) god! The story of the suffering of the Christ itself is another classic example of jouissance.