ipodding toward ecstasy
Music: Godfathers of German Gothic Rock, Volume 4
Currently on the docket is a co-authored essay with Mirko on drive theory and the i-pod, or rather, the "rhetoric of the i-pod," and by that I mean, how the ipod musical experience is represented in print and image. The argument is twofold: first, that the psychoanalysis of music involves two economies, one somatic/kinetic, the other, symbolic/rhetorical, and that both inform each other. Second, understanding the kinetic in terms of the drives helps to explain the sexual/cathartic/passionate represenation of musical enjoyment in everthing from rave posters to children's lunch boxes (usually the body dancing). As a demonstration, we're going to examine the advertising campaign of the ipod, which is a gadget, and all gadgets are objects that are typically inserted directly into the drive. The ear-pods of the ipod, of course, insert directly into the ear. The analysis will lead up to variations of this image on the left, the iGod or iChrist: the passion of the Christ is represented by an insular activation of in the invocatory drive. Of course, this image is overdetermined, but it also links two of the most libindinally invested objects of our time, Jesus and the ipod. Is it any wonder the question has been asked, "is the ipod more popular than Jesus?"
Anyhoot, for the bored here's a preview:
Stick it In Your Ear: Toward a Psychoanalysis of Music
Mirko M. Hall and Joshua Gunn
Theory will cause me, unconsciously, when I do not expect it, to adopt a special listening.
A number of scholars within the fields of musicology, communication studies, and cultural studies have taken to explaining in detail how the formal elements of a musical text communicate meaning in seemingly nondiscursive ways. For example, in his classic study of music education, Christopher Small argues that the central logic of Western music is formally telic. The evolution toward functional harmony in the history of Western music created musical gravity that depends feelings of expectation and satisfaction.[2] The sonata form that resulted from these manufactured feelings (variously represented by AABA, ABA, or as a certain group of Swedes made famous, ABBA) underlies the structure of most of what we characterize as "popular music," from the Beach Boys to Gerswin to Frank Zappa.
This notion of a drive toward the tonic or the beginning key or note of musical composition is not merely an aberration or circumstantial event, but one that was overdetermined and ripe with cultural and ideological influence. Consequently, in addition to analyzing and critiquing the sensory effects of tonal music in the West, many scholars have also been tracing the persuasive or "rhetorical" dimensions of formal musical structures and their relationship to the social.3 Scholars in the field of communication studies have contributed to his effort in a number of ways. For example, Karen Rasmussen has drawn on semiotics and Kenneth Burke's theory of form in order to show how Leonard Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony encapsulates a formal struggle between tonal and atonal compositional motives that serves as a rhetorical inducement and reckoning with a Jewish struggle outside of the symphony's narrative.4 The mediation and rhetorical or suasive effects of social also figure prominently in Theodore Matula's schema for analyzing popular music. Matula focuses on the interplay of text and context at multiple levels of abstraction to better specify an individual's listening practices as a complex amalgam of personal life experiences and ideological influence.5 Dissatisfied with the focus placed on meaning "intrinsic to the musical event" and the attention given to the "internal relationships of the [musical] composition," Robert Francesconi has argued for a "rhetoric of musical style" that emphasizes social frames of interpretation.6 Although far from exhaustive, these three studies help to demonstrate how almost every attempt to specific "a rhetoric" of music forwards a strategy to help navigate the object of the "musical text" and the historical, social, political, or cultural context of its reception.
Whether one studies the critical object of a speech or music, the key theoretical difficulty of any rhetorical theory is the reconciliation of an individual's personal experience of a text and the external forces and discourses mediating and influencing her reception of that text. In this essay we advance a psychoanalytic theory of music that reconciles the internal and external meanings of a given musical text in the subjective listening practices of the music listener. Although the suasive influence of music can be partially explained in reference to the ideological and political norms encoded in formal musical structures (e.g., timbre, timing, the tonic, lyrics, and so on), the fact remains that different kinds of music appeals to different kinds of listeners, and consequently, any explanation of the suasive appeal of a given song or genre of music based solely on musical structures cannot account for the idiosyncrasies individual enjoyment. Why do some people enjoy country music when others despise it? Why does techno music cause a person to tap along to the beat, even when she hates techno? We submit the answer to these and similar questions has something to do with infantile experiences and libidinal energies that reside and emanate from the unconscious.
More specifically, in this essay we argue that the appeal of a given song or genre of music resides in the dynamics of two interwoven, psychical economies: one that is libidinal and concerns pure kinetic rhythms (the psychical); and another that is linguistic or representational and which involves the relationships between sounds and their culturally defined meanings (the rhetorical). Communication scholars have tended to focus on the latter at the expense of the former. Consequently, our goal in this essay is to supplement extant rhetorics of music keyed specifically to cultural representation and mediation with a theory of desire, or an explanation for what attracts a listener to a given musical object. To this end we first explain the psychical apparatus central to our understanding of the appeal of kinetic rhythms, the "drives," with particular attention to the instinctual drive to listen, or the "invocatory drive." Then, we detail the relationship between the libidinal and symbolic economies of meaning exchange in musical experience in terms of two crucial concepts, the "sonorous envelope" and the "threshold crossing." Finally, we illustrate our psycho-rhetorical theory of popular music with a brief examination of the discourse surrounding the popular i-pod device, a small, handheld music player that has become the must-have gadget of the early twenty-first century.
The Dis/Pleasure of Drives . . . [stay tuned for part two]
Notes:
1 Juan-David Nasio. "First Lesson: The Unconscious and Jouissance." Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, trans. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), ______. fl need exact page number
2 Christopher Small. Music, Education, Society (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 7-59.
3 For two excellent examples of this kind of work, see Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993). Some notable article-length approaches in communication studies include James R. Irvine and Walter G. Kirkpatrick, "The Musical Form in Rhetorical Exchange: Theoretical Considerations." Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 272-284; Deanna Sellnow and Timothy Sellnow, "The 'Illusion of Life' Rhetorical Perspective: An Integrated Approach to the Study of Music as Communication." Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 395-415; and Eric King Watts, "An Exploration of Spectacular Consumption: Gangsta Rap as Cultural Commodity." Communication Studies 48 (1997): 42-58.
4 Karen Rasmussen. "Transcendence in Leonard Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony." Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 150-173. Kenneth Burke's famous theory of "form" as the "creation and satisfaction" of appetites in an audience is based on his experiences as a music critic. See Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 29-44.
5 Theodore Matula, "Contextualizing Musical Rhetoric: A Critical Reading of the Pixies' 'Rock Music.'" Communication Studies 51 (Fall 2000): 218-237.
6 Robert Francesconi, "Free Jazz and Black Nationalism: A Rhetoric of Musical Style." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (1986): 39.
7 Jacques Attali. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 143.