PERSEVERE
∵ Musical harmony after Lacan’s Panthéon period
Reilly Smethurst
Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Music (Honours), Master of Music
Queensland Conservatorium
Griffith University
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
17 December 2016 SYNOPSIS
Composition, music-mathematical theory and the surnames of major European figures are not often deemed important in the so-called post-historical, post-modern or post-patriarchal era. In spite of this, I persevere with two things: a slow-paced, philological study of the doctrine of Jacques Lacan and the composition of non-octave music. As a young man, Lacan received a
Catholic education that was hostile to Enlightenment philosophies. As an elderly man, Lacan declared himself an anti-philosopher and a non-progressive. He never let go of the Trinity or philological notions of the Letter qua mystery material or severe threat to common understanding. Unlike the tragedian Sigmund Freud, Lacan considered his work comic-pathetic, hence the incessant parade of insults and mockery. This is frequently overlooked by Anglophone academics. To correct this, I place an emphasis on the comic-pathetic Father figures that Lacan composed at the Panthéon from 1972 to 1980. Of secondary interest are Lacan’s four discourse- schemas from 1969 and his schema of capitalism from 1972.
Figures and discourses are not the same. Lacan’s Father figures – his notorious knots and links – pilfered material from mathematics, but their form was poetic-sophistic. I treat
Lacan’s Father figures as variants of Greek Muses, akin to musical compositions. Lacan’s discourse-schemas, by contrast, are gifts for musicology. I use the discourse-schemas, first, to acknowledge the silence of psychoanalysts on the subject of music, then, to categorise and delineate music’s subjection to hysteria, mastery and academia. Via Lacan’s lesser-known schema of capitalism, I examine progressive philanthropy, identitarianism and the so-called end of History, and I note their broad effects on Music faculties.
Lacan insisted that, for clinical analysis, there is no progress beyond flawed Father figures and no sexual harmony. I offer a subtle yet significant variation to the theme. For proper academies of music, there is no progress beyond canonised surnames; and although there is no social or sexual harmony, it is possible to supplement disasters – in a modest, non- redemptive sense – with modern, poetic-sophistic formalisations. I demonstrate this via a folio of non-octave music.
Crucial questions
1. What exactly are the Father figures that Lacan composed during his Panthéon seminars?
Are they philosophical, anti-philosophical, theological, mathematical, poetic and/or
sophistic? Academics from Anglophone Arts and Music faculties have not sufficiently
addressed these questions.
2. From 1969 to 1972, Lacan devised schemas of hysteria, mastery, academia and capitalism
in addition to his schema of psychoanalysis. Are Lacan’s extra-clinical schemas useful for
musicologists that study music’s subjection to various ideologies?
3. Can something other than octave-identity, happy/sad tonality and free, improvisatory
experiments seize composers that work within academia, or is the future of Music faculties
limited to the ideals of progressive identitarianism, consumer satisfaction and liberal
democracy?
Chapter supplements
1.1: Lacan inherited the Trinitarian Father from his Catholic family; he inherited multiple, mythical Fathers from Freudian doctrine; and he inherited countless knot, chain and mystery figures from literature. It is thus a mistake to claim that Lacan’s Father figures – his peculiar knots and links – were purely mathematical. The reader is presumed to know that, as a subfield of geometric topology, knot theory is a cousin of geometry and music. A knot requires a minimum of three crossing points; a Brunnian link requires a minimum of three components.
Lacan used knots and Brunnian links to parody the Trinity and to simultaneously figure the three tenets of his own doctrine: the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. In French, the initialism R.S.I. is pronounced like hérésie, ‘heresy’.
1.2: Lacan’s Panthéon seminars were frequently monologues; they were not Socratic dialogues. The name Panthéon means ‘all the gods’. When Lacan addressed non-analysts outside the Panthéon, he referred to his monologues as comic amusements. With explicit accents placed on religion and comedy, is it appropriate to refer to Lacan’s post-1968 work as philosophy? I argue it is not. Lacan’s work follows Freud’s resurrection of the ancient Phallus – the mystery of
Creation. It is, therefore, poetic sophistry.
1.3: After the Second World War, liberal-democracies questioned the legitimacy of figures such as the Jewish Father, the Catholic Trinity, the Freudian Father, the Artist, the
Author, the Composer and the ordinary family patriarch. This affected Lacan’s clinical practice.
According to my reading, Lacan parodied liberal-democratic degeneration with his intricate
Father figures – seriously sad jokes. In crude terms, Lacan invented his own transubstantiation ritual: instead of turning a Redeemer-Son into bread and wine, Lacan turned the Father into a chain from which he never escaped. He began composing his Father figures in 1972. Afterwards, he never stopped. He acknowledged that he loved them.
1.4: Mathematical studies of knots can be traced back to the eighteenth-century work of Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde and the nineteenth-century work of figures such as
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, Lord Kelvin, Peter Guthrie Tait and Hermann Brunn.
Mathematical knot theory does not necessarily support Lacan’s figurative constructions, especially not work published after Lacan’s death. Lacan repeatedly acknowledged that his
Panthéon work was a bit lame (boiteux), much like the elderly Oedipus at Colonus; yet he persevered.
1.5: Lacan did not fully explain the relationship between discourse and perverse/sublime figures; he merely resurrected and rehashed the mystery. Discourse refers to a social network, institution, ideology or bond. The term is purposefully vague, as is Father, which can refer to the grandiose Name-of-the-Father, the ordinary surname, the Creator or the potential to form collectives and family units. How so? Pater means both ‘father’ and
‘sovereign’ in Latin; a surname – nom-du-père in French – indicates familial bonds; the word religion derives from religare, ‘to rebind or retie’. Although Father figures have lost some appeal in contemporary Arts and Music faculties, Lacan’s schemas of capitalism, academia and hysteria are especially relevant. This chapter traces the development of Lacan’s discourse-schemas.
2.1: After May 1968, Lacan insisted – more than once – he was not a progressive or a preacher of self-empowerment rhetoric. By contrast, so-called Lacanian musicology is progressive, identitarian and ego-centric. According to my argument, work by the current proponents of Lacanian musicology is intolerable. The field requires a new orientation.
2.2: Progressive musicologists claim that music is subjective and that it empowers identities. (Identity is a popular euphemism for ego.) In spite of this, I argue that music is routinely subjected to various discourses’ imperatives and prejudices. Lacan’s discourse-schemas help illustrate my argument.
2.3: The present era is arguably post-historical. European, eighteenth- and nineteenth- century conceptions of History as a grand narrative are frequently derided and dismissed.
Liberal-democratic ideology is evidently not the same as classical, European master-discourses.
Assisted by Lacan’s schema of capitalism, I examine music’s subjection to rampant identitarianism and consumer satisfaction.
2.4: Prometheus’s over-valuation of technology and philanthropy preceded Socratic philosophy. Techno-philanthropy thus preceded modern discourses such as Freud’s and Lacan’s.
Progressive musicians and musicologists, somewhat ironically, neglect modern discourses; they instead promote ancient techno-philanthropy. Their work betrays an excessive fondness for the human-animal. Stranger still, the sphere – an ancient image of wholeness, identity and self- sufficiency – frequently appears in their work. Both techno-philanthropy and the sphere are contra-Lacanian. Although I believe that techno-philanthropy should be discarded from the field of contemporary musicology, I acknowledge that it is a powerful ideology, and I explain why it is unlikely to disappear in the near future.
2.5: I do not believe that Arts and Music faculties can progress beyond philology and exceptional figures such as the troubadours, James Joyce and Olivier Messiaen. Techno- philanthropy’s sphere of progress is merely an illusion. Philology remains the best friend to
Composition (as an academic subject), for it does not abandon exalted surnames or mathematical texts on harmony and rhythm. The following point is assumed and not discussed further: philology functions as a noise filter and thereby permits time for both careful reading and music listening.
2.6: Some modern, music theorists examine mathematical holes, as did Lacan, instead of symbols of wholeness or putatively empowered identities. They are far from a majority. So be it. They may acquire more followers in the future.
3.1: Overture is etymologically linked to a gap, a hole or an opening. There are still openings for modern, European music that have not been plugged and reduced to clichés. Non- octave tunings constitute prime examples.
3.2: Twentieth-century European composers (and European-like composers from
America, Canada and elsewhere) fall in to three typical camps: conservatism, avant-gardism and obscurantism. Conservatives long for a return to the master-discourse’s wholeness, virtuosity and perfection; avant-gardists insist that domains of mastery must be destroyed, for they do not incorporate all identities, noises or styles; and obscurantists deny that there is any truth to the conservative/avant-garde binary. I am not interested in conservatism, avant-gardism or obscurantism; I instead promote a revised academic discourse that is dedicated to modern, non- octave tunings. The octave is the conventional identity-interval; major thirds and minor thirds are responsible for the conventional happy/sad binary. In my opinion, these things are too agreeable with the proliferating follies that I examined in previous chapters, namely progressive identitarianism and consumer satisfaction.
3.3: I encourage future students of Composition to experiment with non-octave tunings.
Non-octave music is distinct from any form of microtonal music that relies on an ostentatious number of octave-divisions. Plato’s brother Glaucon mocked the latter; Arnold Schoenberg dismissed it. Attached to my thesis is a folio of compositions that demonstrate non-octave tunings and custom-fretted string instruments. My project is ultimately positive.
STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY
This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university.
To the best of my knowledge, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An Australian Postgraduate Award and a Griffith Postgraduate Research Scholarship funded Persevere. The project took place at both Melbourne University and the Queensland
Conservatorium (Griffith University), between 2012 and 2016, under the supervision of Justin
Clemens, Kim Cunio and Gerardo Dirié.
Thanks to Monique Boudet from the École lacanienne de psychanalyse and Cormac
Gallagher for their online Lacanian libraries. Daniel Collins, Richard G. Klein, Michael Plastow and Luke Thurston kindly emailed me unofficial translations of Jacques Lacan’s texts, including work by Tony Chadwick, Dominique Hecq, Dany Nobus and Ellie Ragland. I have not cited any of these translations, but they assisted my reading of Lacan’s French texts, as did the official
English translations.
Publication history
In 2011, under the supervision of W. Dean Sutcliffe at Auckland University, I wrote a review of literature by Lacanian musicologists for my Master of Music thesis. The field has not changed much since that time. My doctoral thesis’s review of Lacanian musicology (Chapter
2.1) thus incorporates material from my Master of Music thesis, but it is significantly revised and updated. In July 2016, the Bridges Organisation published my four-page summary of
Chapter 3.3, entitled “Two Non-Octave Tunings by Heinz Bohlen: A Practical Proposal”.
Document format
This document is formatted according to conventions established in 2009 by the Modern
Language Association of America (MLA). For consistency’s sake, I have chosen to include (at least) the first word of a particular work’s title for all of the in-text references. I have also chosen to use British, not American, punctuation: commas, for instance, are placed outside quotation marks, and words after colons are not capitalised. Foreign terms, technical terms, authors’ neologisms and intentional misspellings are italicised, as per MLA convention; they are not encompassed within quotation marks, and I do not use scare quotes.
The etymologies I cite throughout the thesis are from the third edition of The Oxford
Dictionary of English. To assist people that read translations of Lacan’s seminars, I cite chapter numbers from the Seuil editions or else session numbers from the Staferla editions alongside the page numbers. Unless otherwise specified, the images in the thesis are sourced from the public domain.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prelude xiii
SECTION ONE Muser | Lacan at the Panthéon | Past
1.1 Literary inheritance: Knots, chains and mysteries 2
1.2 Le séminaire as a monologue 13
1.3 The Father figure: Lacan’s lame symptom 41
1.4 Kinks in the knot: Formalised illegitimacy 55
1.5 Lacan’s discourse-schemas 76
SECTION TWO Mousa | Music at multiple places | Present
2.1 Say no to Lacanian musicology: A review of misnomers 89
2.2 Music is subjected to discourses 107
2.3 Music, consumed at the end of History 142
2.4 All about the muzhik: Philanthropy and philodoxy 170
2.5 In awe of figures that hate you 185
2.6 Sound holes: New figures for le con 202
SECTION THREE Musum | The non-octave at the Academy | Future
3.1 Overture 206
3.2 Composers placed together 207
3.3 Resurrection: Non-octave harmonia 215
Conclusions 229
Appendix: Cuts to the cross-capped sphere 233
List of works cited 236
TABLE OF FIGURES
Fig. 1. The Borromean link is Brunnian. xxviii
Fig. 2. The Hopf link is not Brunnian. xxviii Fig. 3. The trefoil knot has three crossing points. xxix Fig. 4. Annotated academic schema. 15 Fig. 5. Annotated mastery schema. 20 Fig. 6. Annotated hysterical schema. 23 Fig. 7. Annotated analytic schema. 24
Fig. 8. The three-twist knot or nœud de Lacan. 34 Fig. 9. The valknut symbol is a Borromean link. 57
Fig. 10. Borromean rings in Christian theology. 58 Fig. 11. A three-component Brunnian link with twelve crossing points. 62 Fig. 12. Lacan’s sexuation logic. 63 Fig. 13. A tri-coloured trefoil knot. 64
Fig. 14. A trefoil knot, its mirror image and its inverse. 66 Fig. 15. A Bing link. 70 Fig. 16. The object (a) in four different discourses. 70 Fig. 17. Polygonal schemas: sphere, torus, cross-capped sphere, Klein bottle. 71 Fig. 18. Two iterations of Antoine’s necklace. 73 Fig. 19. Four points prove three circles are impossible. 76 Fig. 20. Academia, mastery, hysteria and analysis. 79 Fig. 21. Various names of the four places. 80 Fig. 22. A reduced schéma R is vaguely akin to the hysterical schema. 81 Fig. 23. An upside-down Sadean schema and the analytic schema. 81 Fig. 24. A Sadean schema flipped sideways and the mastery schema. 82 Fig. 25. A reduced version of Lacan’s capitalist schema. 84 Fig. 26. Four non-identical discourses. 92 Fig. 27. Mystery quasi-discourse. 108 Fig. 28. Annotated mastery schema. 111 Fig. 29. Annotated academic schema. 121 Fig. 30. Annotated hysterical schema. 130
Fig. 31. Annotated capitalist schema. 142
Fig. 32. Wilson’s sets predicted by Pascal’s triangle. 203 Fig. 33. A sphere with one cross-cap. 233
Quid restat amplius, quin dicamus cum Platone, θεὸν ἀεὶ γεω)ετρεῖν.1 – Ioannes Keplerus (Prodromus dissertationum cosmographicarum 24)
Des fantômes nouveaux surgissent bientôt de la poussière des dieux morts.
– Gustave Le Bon (Psychologie du socialisme xi)
Il craint qu’après que nous avons fait sortir Dieu par une porte, nous ne le fassions entrer par l’autre.
– Jacques Lacan on Claude Lévi-Strauss (Séminaire II 3.48)
1 “What is there except to say with Plato that God always geometrizes?” (Duncan trans., Mysterium Cosmographicum
96). Plutarch attributed the phrase theon aei geōmetrein to Plato in his Moralia (718c). The phrase does not appear in
Plato’s extant texts.
Prelude
Je ne suis foutre pas progressiste.
– Jacques Lacan (“Vincennes impromptu n°2” 9)
Il n’y a pas de progrès parce qu’il ne peut pas y en avoir: l’homme tourne en rond.
– Jacques Lacan (L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre 2.12)
Apologia
I owe the reader an opportunity to gauge whether my thesis’s material is of any interest. For this reason, I shall temporarily forgo precise references and risk the reduction of complex subjects to trivia. I will define unfamiliar terms and provide evidence in support of the preliminary assertions later.
What justifies a doctoral study on artistic subjects in the twenty-first century? The common options are consumer-democratic and philanthropic.2 One can quantify the amount of attention that cultural activities receive, how many opinions they attract and how much profit they make; or, alternatively, one can quantify culture’s impact on the happiness and well-being of human-animal groups that are of interest to public funding bodies or private charities. The first justification is based on consumer goods; the second is based on the human-animal Good.
Neither justification is of interest to me. There are two other justifications that are more compelling. The first is philosophical; the second is poetic-sophistic.3
A philosophical justification – affirmation is a more appropriate term – would run along the following lines. Arnold Schoenberg’s resurrection of pitches in excess of Europe’s orthodox, seven-note scales rendered happy/sad tonality impossible. This is a modern music event. Work carried out in fidelity to this event is an artistic truth-procedure. The philosopher’s duty is to affirm truth-procedures as such. The philosopher does not vie for the Ernst von Siemens Music
2 Philanthropy is the love of human-animals or proto-humans. It existed prior to Socratic philosophy (Aeschylus,
Prometheus Bound line 110).
3 Poiein means ‘to create’, typically by invoking the names of Muses or the Father; sophos means ‘wise or skilled’; sophisma means ‘clever device’.
xiii Prize. He/she is not a composer. I, however, am a composer. My project is not philosophical; it is poetic-sophistic.
A poetic-sophistic justification is equally as difficult to make as a philosophical affirmation, and it is perhaps more strange. Consumer-democratic and philanthropic justifications are less likely to suffer rejection in contemporary academic circles than poetic- sophistic justifications. I acknowledge, then, that my project risks failure. The principal figure that I chose to study is Jacques Lacan, an epigone of Sigmund Freud. Friedrich Nietzsche and a few of his notable followers are cast in secondary roles.4 Lacan and Nietzsche each proclaimed respect for philology; they are both anti-philosophers according to criteria established by Alain
Badiou; and both reserved a fundamental place for the Phallus – a term that is crucial to the history of European music.5
The Phallus is the signifier of absolute mystery. It has no sense other than itself. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Timaeus characterised the Phallus as autocratic. The god of Moses – He that proclaimed, “I AM THAT I AM” – is another well-known example. Ancient, phallic fetishes were effectively responses to the enigma of Creation. As figures of curiosity, they are appropriate to the subject of art or poetic sophistry. According to Aristotle, the Phallus was present at the origin of comedy: musical processions named phallika often involved improvised insults and grandiose fetishes that tormented participants.
Attached to my thesis is a folio that makes a show of custom instruments. This, in short, is the poetic-sophistic justification that my project relies upon; but unlike ancient phallika, my folio is not grandiose. I am not a member of a Dionysiac mystery-cult or a student of Plato’s Academy; I am enrolled at a university that is forced to promote consumer- democratic imperatives in an era commonly described as post-historical, post-modern and/or post-patriarchal. I acknowledge that poetic sophistry and the Phallus are not venerated as they
4 Nietzsche registered as a Philology student in 1865. In 1869, he became a professor of Classical Philology. Followers of
Freud and Lacan are also grounded in philology. As Jean-Claude Milner pointed out, the word Deutung from Freud’s well-known Die Traumdeutung “comes from philology” (“Interview” 10; see also Miller, “Notice” 215).
5 Nietzsche’s term Dionysus is broadly equivalent to the Phallus. I will explain the meaning of Badiou’s term anti- philosophy later.
xiv were in ancient Greece. In spite of this, I persevere with composition and the modern anti- philosophies of Lacan and Nietzsche. This is an initial meaning of the title of my thesis.
My thesis does not reveal everything in its first section. The Phallus was revealed at the end of ancient mystery-rituals, not at the beginning. The Shakespearean couplet – sometimes clarifying, sometimes surprising – is the last two lines of a sonnet; it is not the first two lines. I ask for the reader’s patience. Something positive is indeed revealed at the end of Section Three
– modern, non-octave tunings that await practical experiments by future students of
Composition. My folio consists of roughly an hour of non-octave experiments. Each piece of music is composed and recorded by me. I play nine instruments, five of which are custom- fretted string instruments, not available anywhere for sale. Poetic sophistry (or, more plainly, artistic invention) is positive. Lip service rendered to consumer-democratic or philanthropic academics is not positive; it is merely pleasant. As Shakespeare’s Apemantus stated, “he that loves to be flattered is worthy o’ the flatterer” (Timon of Athens 1.1.233-34).
The pairing of Lacan and music (via the Phallus) is too vague for a doctoral study. The couples Freud/Schoenberg (Viennese Jews) and Lacan/Messiaen (Parisian Catholics) are more precise.6 Schoenberg and Messiaen are indices of a modern art-procedure (non-diatonic harmony); Freud and Lacan are indices of a modern love-procedure (clinical analysis). What, exactly, does the latter have to do with the Phallus? Analysis resurrects the Phallus’s representatives – insufficient authority figures that attempt to regulate suffering/enjoyment.
The analysand then has a chance to give his/her singular authority figure a proper burial and achieve a renewed sense of distance from it via poetic-sophistic parodies.7 This is what Lacan staged during his seminars, particularly during his time at the aptly named place du Panthéon.8
Lacan did not abolish the Phallus during the Panthéon period; but he did not prop it up as something satisfactory, either. In short, the Jewish couple Freud/Schoenberg relaunched the question of harmony/disharmony and the Phallus; the Catholic couple Lacan/Messiaen
6 Olivier Messiaen was a former Professor of Composition at the Paris Conservatoire and a recipient of the Ernst von
Siemens Music Prize.
7 Analysand is the preferred term for ‘clinical patient’ among Lacanians.
8 The name Panthéon means ‘all the gods’.
xv inherited material from Freud and Schoenberg and used it to create formalisations that were more sophisticated. I do not explain this at length; I declare it a fundamental assumption.
Does academia traditionally reserve a place for music? Yes. Plato’s Academy not only necessitated the study of geometry; it upheld musical harmony as an educational ideal. During
Europe’s medieval period, the well-known quadrivium consisted of four academic subjects: geometry, music, arithmetic and astronomy. Why should contemporary academia make a place for non-octave music? Non-octave tunings subtly question the necessity of at least three things – octave-identity, octave-periods and the happy/sad binary created by conventional major thirds and minor thirds. Iannis Xenakis’s Komboï – the title translates as Knots – is a well-known example of non-octave music. Xenakis, incidentally, composed Komboï in Paris in 1981, the year of Lacan’s death.9
Why are Lacan’s knots and links – figures pilfered from geometric topology – of interest to academia? Lacan used knots and links to parody two things that he inherited – the Catholic
Trinity and the Freudian Father. With respect to the hobbling Oedipus at Colonus and lame, liberal-democratic patriarchs, Lacan judged knots and links appropriately insufficient as Father figures – uninspiring but nonetheless captivating, in a twisted sense. In spite of the Father’s comic-pathetic status, Father figures such as exceptional composers and musicological authors remain crucial, I believe, to the study of modern, European music. The Father, in a purposefully vague sense, is the composer, creator, artist or poet. The Father – nom-du-père in French – is the privileged surname. To conserve a place for the Father and thereby persevere with comic- pathetic figures is contrary to progressive, philanthropic ideals. This is no accident. Was there a place reserved for philanthropy in the quadrivium? No. There was not even a place for philanthropy in academia’s trivium, which consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric.
Philanthropy is thus beneath the trivial.10 Worse, its proponents tend to be humourless. It is unfortunate, I believe, that contemporary, progressive academia has created so much space for philanthropy and philodoxy.
9 Although Xenakis composed Komboï in Paris, the piece premiered in Metz.
10 Trivial derives from trivialis, ‘belonging to the trivium’.
xvi What, specifically, does my thesis offer academia in response to Lacan? I am not a clinician; my role is not to further psychoanalytic theory. I am not French; I do not address
Francophone academics, and I do not cite work by well-known figures such as Roland Barthes,
Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray or Julia Kristeva.
I am an Anglophone doctoral student that has spent roughly five years studying seminars and texts from the final decade of Lacan’s teaching plus relevant knot-theoretical texts published after Lacan’s death. Why would anyone attempt such a thing? Between 2000 and 2015,
Anglophone academics did not publish any monographs on the so-called Late Lacan that were widely read. The closest thing to an exception is a translated book from 2002, How James Joyce
Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan by Roberto Harari, an Argentinean psychoanalyst. A complete translation of Lacan’s Écrits finally arrived in 2006, but Écrits does not include any of the texts that Lacan wrote after 1966. My study of Lacan’s work from 1969 to 1980 is thus a specialist project that sheds light on significant holes in Anglophone scholarship. It would be absurd to try and cover Lacan’s well-known work from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. This is another possible meaning of the thesis’s title, Persevere.
What do I have to contribute to Composition in response to Messiaen? For concision’s sake, I reduce the name Messiaen to ‘something beyond the atonal/pantonal deadlock’.
Messiaen’s modes, I believe, are more elegant than so-called atonal or pantonal music. I encourage the reader to take these terms literally and to divorce them from their common referents. With atonal, we have negation – literally, ‘no-note’. With pantonal, we have the universal – ‘all-note’. Simplistic negation and facile universality – both logical propositions – are commonly invoked in response to the question of modern, European music. The best-known examples of no-note music are Luigi Russolo’s noise-art circa 1913 and Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète circa 1948. The best-known example of all-note music is Schoenberg’s work circa 1908 to 1923 that used all twelve notes from the industry-standard, European tuning system. Messiaen’s symmetrical modes, by contrast, are neither atonal nor pantonal. They do not abolish notes or else implement all notes; they are not based on simplistic negation or facile universality. They are, in my opinion, more sophisticated formalisations.
xvii If one alters a tuning system’s period, one can make symmetrical modes that do not rely on the octave.11 In doing so, one can follow Messiaen’s method without imitating his style. This is one way, I claim, to take up the question of modern, European music and renew its mystery.
One does not even have to use a whole number as a period; it is possible to use an irrational number as a period. To the best of my knowledge, William Brouncker first demonstrated this in an appendix to a book on music by René Descartes. I would never have discovered Brouncker’s irrational-number periods if it were not for Lacan’s strange, didactic diagrams or his curiosity regarding irrational repetition. Likewise, if I did not study the games that Lacan played with
Pascal’s triangle, I would never have discovered the musical sets Ervin M. Wilson invented in
1965 in response to a question from a friend about Pascal’s triangle. This is one reason why poetic sophistry does not abolish accidents: some are happy.
So while Lacan did not speak directly about music, he spoke constantly about the
Phallus, Father figures, harmony/disharmony and mathematical games that were sometimes
Platonic, sometimes Cartesian. These things, I repeat, are crucial to European academia and music. What Lacan offers composers and musicologists is not a hermeneutic or an opportunity to attribute hackneyed, sexual meanings to music; Lacan’s anti-philosophy offers a fecund re- orientation. My folio is a testament to this. Lacan offered no progressive solutions to patriarchy.
In a decidedly perverse manner, he treated the Father figure as a necessary flaw of Freudian doctrine and persevered via novel formalisations. Lacan’s affirmation of analysis’s effects was thus not scientific or philosophical; it was poetic-sophistic. Varying the theme, I persevere with composition and modern formalisations; and as a result, Doctor may come to prop up my surname.
The word sever, as Shakespeare scholars know, is suggested by my title. So, too, is severe.12 Severed from doomed philanthropy, there are plenty of songs left to sing. My thesis and my folio are ultimately positive. From this point on, my method is philological and precise.
According to Nietzsche’s definition, philology is “the art of reading well”, without a desire for
11 A tuning system’s period is its frame of repetition.
12 “Had I brought hither a corrupted mind, / Thy speech had alter’d it. Hold, here’s gold for thee; / Persever [sic] in that clear way thou goest, / And the gods strengthen thee!” (Shakespeare, Pericles 4.6.114-17). See also Lacan’s “Lettre de dissolution” (318).
xviii redemptive meaning or hasty understanding (Anti-Christ 51, § 52). It is “a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento” (“Preface” 5; original italics).
Disharmony is real
Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. Lacan first pronounced this at the Panthéon in 1970, and he never stopped repeating it (Séminaire XVII 7.134). I translate rapport sexuel as ‘sexual harmony’, because this is exactly what Lacan meant by the phrase (Séminaire XX 11.133; Les non-dupes errent 14.97-98, 15.104-11; R.S.I. 9.76). Human copulation, in spite of what is commonly said, does not make sweet, sweet music. According to Lacan, signifiers do not generate sexual harmony: as soon as the human-animal begins speaking, it is stuffed (Séminaire
XVII 2.36). Freud, likewise, believed that the “poor ego” fails to achieve harmony, for it is pulled in divergent directions by “three severe masters”, namely the world, the super-ego and the id (New Introductory Lectures 77). Lacan re-named this impossible Trinity the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real; he formalised it as a knot or a Brunnian link; he promised no progress.
At the conclusion of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the messenger Hermes informed the Chorus that by siding with the charitable protagonist, they would become tangled up “in the inescapable net of disaster”. Hermes repeatedly insisted that Zeus’s “merciless roar of thunder” would shatter the Chorus members’ wits and strike them senseless. True to Hermes’ word, Zeus delivered the thunder that terrorised the Chorus and made their beloved philanthropos tropos scream (lines 1058-90).13 Lacan’s knots and links are appropriate to material such as this.
Aristophanes famously treated sexual disharmony as fodder for comedy. In Lysistrata, he broke with Old Comedy convention and tore apart the Chorus, separating men and women.
“Phaedrias, are we going to let these women jabber on? Why hasn’t someone busted a log over their heads?” asked the leader of the men’s chorus. The leader of the women’s chorus taunted him in response. “OK, here’s my mouth; someone take a sock at it; I’ll stand here and take it”,
13 According to Alan H. Sommerstein’s edition, Zeus’s thunder is accompanied by wild music.
xix she said. “But then I’m the last bitch that ever grabs you by the balls” (lines 356-57, 362-63).
Even Plato hinted that men and women march to different tunes (Laws 7.802d-802e).
Disharmony thus has multiple Greek supports: tragedy, comedy and politics.
For musicians, it is not all bleak. Maurice Ravel, for instance, once told his friend
Jacques de Zogheb that the only love affair he ever had was with music (qtd. in Fisk ed.,
Composers on Music 261). This is undoubtedly better than Otto Weininger’s absurd faith in complementary sex ratios or else his “dramatic suicide in the Vienna house where Beethoven had died” (Robertson, “Historicizing Weininger” 23; Weininger, Sex and Character 14, 29-30,
35-36). Sublimation may be rare in today’s consumer democracies, but it nonetheless still exists.
To such rarity, this thesis is dedicated.
Assumed background
The thesis’s material is seemingly diverse, but it rarely deviates from sexual disharmony, mystery (both the ancient Phallus and the modern Trinity), music, and the peculiar Father figures constructed by Lacan. The assumed background knowledge is summarised below.
- Lacan’s doctrine never abandoned or ceased questioning the musical mystery-Phallus,
certainly not in deference to public opinion or in fear of facile ridicule.
- Geometry teaches us musical harmonies; Lacan parodied sexual disharmony via figures that
he stole from modern geometric topology. Via knots, links and surfaces, Lacan tried to
write off the perfect, all too perfect music of the spheres and the sphere of the Good.
- Harmonikoi were ancient musical sophists that reputedly used quasi-scientific diagrams as
teaching tools (Barker, Science 39-43). Lacan used diagrams to mirror sophistic discourses
or ideologies, particularly from 1969 to 1972.
- Greek comedy derived from the amusing, musical improvisations made by leaders of
phallika (Aristotle, Poetics 1449a10-11). During the so-called post-modern era, Lacan
placed an accent on comedy and delusion, not tragedy and neurosis. Lacan’s era was not
the same as Freud’s. His discourse is a testament to this.
xx There is arguably no great work dedicated to both Lacanian disharmony and musical harmony, but piles of texts are dedicated to the Viennese, Jewish father of psychoanalysis and the Viennese, Jewish father of musical modernism.14 In response, the thesis’s Section One leaps straight to the work of a lapsed, Parisian Catholic at the Panthéon, decades after Freud’s death;
Section Three promotes non-octave systems invented after the death of Schoenberg – a time when Europe’s best music was arguably written by another Parisian Catholic, Messiaen, and dedicated to the mystery of the Trinity (Badiou, Logics of Worlds 528). Yes. The precedents of
Persevere are sound.
Following Larson Powell, I believe Lacan’s work is more appropriate to the study of music – post-war European music, especially – than “ego-centred humanism” or faux-optimistic
“notions of ego-strengthening” (“Technological Subject” 228, 234). Lacan’s teaching strikes me as an appropriately insufficient, comic response to the eternal disharmony of sexual and social relations. It does not propose progressive cures. The same can be said for musical harmony. Not even Orpheus could overcome Hell; he, too, was barred from sexual harmony. The question, then, is how to formally account for inevitable, comic-pathetic failures and thereby persevere?
Lacan’s Father figure is one possible response. Modern, non-octave tuning theory – a descendant of Greek harmonia – is another. Both, I claim, are preferable to progressives’ repetitive, identitarian debates about social/sexual harmony.
Declaration of biases
The thesis is biased towards surnames – noms-du-père. Lacan, for one, could not envisage the possibility of Freudian discourse that did not make use of the Name-of-the-Father
(“Joyce le symptôme I” 27; Séminaire XXIII 9.136). Situated within academia, I do not believe there is a future for Composition departments without privileged surnames and canons (from the Greek kanōn, ‘rule’). The thesis, therefore, is not consonant with the aims of progressive education or liberal feminism.15 Richard Hofstadter, the American historian and winner of two
14 In Élisabeth Roudinesco’s opinion, Lacan tried to resurrect a “glorious Viennese epic” (Jacques Lacan 203). I expect that some composers, even today, are excited by this same notion.
15 See Nina Power’s critique of liberal feminism qua consumer empowerment: “Almost everything turns out to be
‘feminist’ – shopping, pole-dancing, even eating chocolate” (One-Dimensional Woman 27-28). See, too, Nicole Aschoff’s critique of Oprah-style empowerment, published in 2015 (New ch. 3).
xxi Pulitzer Prizes, described progressive education as an anti-intellectual “atmosphere of warm philanthropy and breathless idealism”, predominately characterised by “moral overstrain and a curious lack of humour”. Its cardinal virtues include “worthy home-membership”, vocation, health, leisure, “ethical character”, “the hope of making the educational world safe for democracy”, and common modes of feeling. Progressivism encourages “a search for methods and content in education that would suit the needs of the intellectually mediocre or unmotivated”.
Mathematics, art and history are reduced to the level of mechanics, agriculture and “home- making” (Anti-intellectualism 334-40, 353).
Instead of treating subjects such as music, art and theatre as “a desirable supplement to an intellectually ordered curriculum”, early twentieth-century progressives treated the arts as an
“alternative” to intellectual pursuits. Their aims for arts education included correct emotional responses and so-called positive enjoyment. In response, Hofstadter decorated his criticisms with musical figures. “The more humdrum the task the [progressive] educationists have to undertake, the nobler and more exalted their music grows”, he wrote. “When they see a chance to introduce a new course in family living or home economics, they begin to tune the fiddles of their idealism”. In Hofstadter’s view, progressive education is principally “consumer education”.
If consumerism is the dominant ideology, it follows that progressive education – despite its
“philanthropic approach” and “warm rhetoric about democracy” – is in fact “politically conservative” (Anti-intellectualism 335, 340, 354-56).
In 2008, Catherine Liu revisited Hofstadter’s argument and asserted its relevance to contemporary Anglophone academia. She maintained that progressive education celebrates “the average student” and tries to make its subjects “informed consumers”. The irony is not amusing: in the name of egalitarianism, progressive education has “perpetuated more hierarchy, more injustice”. It is, in short, “the logic of administered inequality masquerading as the management of educational opportunity”. Misguided Leftists and philanthropists, including many post-1990s musicologists, proposed “the elevation of ordinary tastes, popular culture, and a critique of all forms of cultural elitism”: their work “ended up serving conservative and reactionary purposes just as well” (American Idyll 49, 52, 57-58, 79-80, 212). According to
Badiou, progressive ideology also has a grip on contemporary France. Like Hofstadter and Liu,
Badiou asserted that progressivism’s “theme of ethics and of human rights is compatible with the self-satisfied egoism of the affluent West, with advertising, and with service rendered to the
xxii powers that be” (Ethics 7).16 I acknowledge that not every academic agrees with Badiou,
Hofstadter and Liu about progressive education; but I do. The American and French situations that they described are not significantly different with respect to anything that I have witnessed in Australia or New Zealand.
As a doctoral candidate, I do not wish for the thesis to fail. At the same time, I do not believe it is desirable to restrict the thesis’s bibliography to texts by philanthropists at the expense of perverts and psychotics, some of whom are composers, artists or literary authors. I acknowledge that the post-1990s proliferation of so-called mild or ordinary psychosis is disturbing to many academics, but post-Lacanian clinicians consider this an important topic
(Redmond, Ordinary 3-5). As early as 1963, Hofstadter noted that academics could speak of a
“paranoid style” the way that “a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style” (“Paranoid” 4). Who today could deny the global spread of identity politics, delusions of empowerment (and persecution), and fundamentalist conflicts? In 1908, Freud said that psychoanalysts were “all familiar” with the paranoiac’s delusions, “which are concerned with the greatness and the sufferings of his own self and which appear in forms that are quite typical and almost monotonous” (“Hysterical” 159). A century later, academics are familiar with these delusions, too.
My aim is not to generate cheap shocks; my thesis goes beyond well-meaning neurosis for the sake of rigour.17 I shall repeat an established point: one must not overlook the fact that, in response to clinical pathos, Lacan fixated on comedy, mockery and amusement (“Je parle aux murs” 104; Séminaire XIX 5.69; “Télévision” 509; Le moment de conclure 1.6; “Le séminaire de
Caracas” 87; Nobus, “Psychoanalysis” 55). He did not address an audience that consisted of the sentimental or the precious.
16 For a critique of progressivism relevant to music in 2016, see Alex Nichols. “Contemporary progressivism”, he wrote,
“has come to mean papering over material inequality with representational diversity” (“You” n. pag.).
17 In contrast to Lacanian clinicians, the majority of Anglophone academics that cite Lacan’s texts tend to discuss neurosis – social bonds, ethics, ideologies and historical materialism. Their approach is too neat, in my opinion.
xxiii Three equivocal sections
In Section One of the thesis, I attempt a reading of Lacan’s Panthéon seminars, which have arguably not been reviewed in sufficient detail by Anglophone academics from Arts or
Music faculties. At present, musicologists that invoke Lacan’s name tend to produce facile allegories; in response, Section One makes little effort to force a rapport between Lacan’s work and music. Instead, it asks a broader question: from the perspective of academia rather than clinical analysis, what is the status of Lacan’s teaching throughout the Panthéon years? Is
Lacan’s teaching philosophy, anti-philosophy, theology, mathematics, poetry and/or sophistry?
Anti-philosophy aside, these terms should be familiar to the reader.
What, then, is anti-philosophy? According to Justin Clemens, it is not non- philosophical; the anti-philosopher does not “evade or destroy philosophy” (Psychoanalysis 2).
Momentary intemperance aside, anti-philosophy cannot be reduced to the rage of Thrasymachus or the cynicism of Diogenes. Consider, for example, Lacan’s position with respect to Jean-Paul
Sartre. In 1966, Lacan acknowledged that he read Sartre’s work with sympathy and interest, but he did not situate his work in relation to Sartre’s philosophy (“Sartre contre Lacan” 4;
Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 333-34). Consider, too, Freud’s recommendation that psychoanalysts persevere along a separate path, “humbly accept the contempt” of philosophers and refrain from the construction of rival world-views (Inhibitions 95-96). In general, anti-philosophies aim to
“draw attention to forms of knowledge that philosophy cannot know”, via a peculiar practice – clinical analysis, for example, or Søren Kierkegaard’s religious poetry-writing – in which contingency is “irreducible” (Clemens, Psychoanalysis 1-3). As a result, anti-philosophies are intolerable to anyone that is obliged to defend the status quo’s spurious necessities.
Section Two of my thesis begins with a point of stupefaction. Predominant, progressive or liberal-democratic theories claim that music is a language or a discourse that fosters autonomous subjectivities. I am not convinced. Instead, I place my faith in the following assertion: musicians are subjected to various discourses, as is anyone that speaks or writes the word music. Section Two illustrates this via Lacan’s three schemas of extra-clinical discourses plus his capitalist schema. It concludes with an examination of perversion/sublimation – a theme familiar to both Lacanians and musicologists – via troubadours, James Joyce and
Messiaen. Perverse/sublime figures are strictly not the same as discourses. The knots and links
xxiv composed by Lacan are examples of the former. So, too, are musical compositions. Why are certain figures of interest to particular discourses or social domains? This remains something of a mystery.
Section Three is concerned with modern, mathematical texts on harmony plus rhetoric spouted by well-known, twentieth-century composers. The tuning systems described in Section
Three abolish octave-identity and thereby render each pitch-class without an intuitively identifiable fellow. In other words, the solution I propose to progressive identity rhetoric is intensified alienation, with a twist. Grounded in simple mathematics instead of harlequinesque protests or anti-art pranks, it is a form of alienation distinct from the clichéd
Verfremdungseffekt.18
Accompanying the thesis is a folio of non-octave compositions plus didactic videos.
Unlike written documents, videos can simultaneously employ images, sounds, verbal descriptions and simple mathematics: they can thus help teach students about scales and tuning systems.
Euphony
The three sections’ titles – Muser, Mousa and Musum – sound alike. The Middle French muser means ‘to stare stupidly’ (and presumably to enjoy) as well as ‘to deceive or cheat’. It is the root of amusements and the verb muse. Amusements comiques and (a)murs-sements are two phrases that Lacan used to describe his teaching when he presented it to non-analysts (“Je parle aux murs” 104; Séminaire XIX 5.69). The latter phrase mocks the narcissistic folly of love
(amour), in which a lover enjoys the sound of his/her own voice talking to walls (aux murs).
True to its name, Section One presents Lacan’s work from the Panthéon to non-analysts, namely academics. It does not expect an ecstatic reception, especially not the material on knots and links. “In general, knots evoke amused or even smug reactions”, noted one of Lacan’s main collaborators from the period, Pierre Soury (“Year” 97).
Music is not often mentioned in Section One, but the title hints at it; for in Old French, muser means ‘to play bagpipes’. Section Two’s title, Mousa, is the Greek root of the nouns
18 Verfremdungseffekt is a well-known theatrical term that means ‘alienation effect or strange-making effect’.
xxv muse, music and museum. Section Two makes use of Lacan’s discourse-schemas, but it shifts the focus from Lacan’s Panthéon seminars to musicological texts. Musum, the title of Section Three, looks like a misspelling of museum, but it is in fact the Medieval Latin word for muzzle. It is related to the Old French word muse, ‘animal’s mouth’. Section Three is thus a museum and a muzzle: assisted by the folio of compositions, it presents music constrained by non-octave tuning systems. Incidentally, the music sometimes features animals’ vocal sounds.
Anglophone scholarship
From 1969 to 1980, Lacan delivered his seminars at the Faculté de droit, located in the place du Panthéon. The only major works from this period available in English translation are
Séminaire XVII, Séminaire XX, Séminaire XXIII and “Télévision”. A reading of Lacan’s
Panthéon seminars is a modest yet significant contribution to Anglophone Lacan scholarship.
My study of Lacan’s knots and links is more detailed than chapters from well-known books such as Lacan: Topologically Speaking (edited by Dragan Milovanovic and Ellie Ragland), The Later
Lacan: An Introduction (edited by Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf) and Re-inventing the
Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan (edited by Luke Thurston).
The thesis does not include much material from Lacan’s biography. Lacan could not abide historians or authors of personal histories (“Of Structure” 199; Séminaire XX 4.45; “Joyce le symptôme II” 34). In his view, to resort to biography – conceived as a coherent narrative dedicated to an important ego – is to shrink and humiliate a potentially serious question (“Du discours psychanalytique” 39). In 1974, Lacan insulted people that scrounged about for details from his past in order to explain his seminars in a facile manner. He argued that such people lack imagination (Les non-dupes errent 10.70). I agree. Soury did, too. His workgroup’s first rule prohibited “talk about the person of Lacan” (“Year” 96).
Situated first at Melbourne University and then at the Queensland Conservatorium, I made use of the two institutions’ libraries, which mostly consist of English-language texts plus musical scores and recordings. To be clear, Section One expects to have no effect on contemporary French psychoanalysts; it instead aims to refine Anglophone Lacan studies via a reading of Lacan’s Panthéon-era texts and seminars. With respect to contemporary academia’s marriage to markets, whenever possible, I refer to Jacques-Alain Miller’s editions of Lacan’s
xxvi seminars. It is nevertheless a fact that the commercial transcripts cover fewer seminars than the bootlegged transcripts, and the bootlegs sometimes reveal peculiarities introduced by Miller’s editing. For clarity’s sake, the bootlegged transcripts published by analytic associations such as the École lacanienne de psychanalyse and Staferla are cited by name, distinct from the commercial seminars, which are cited by number. I refer to Staferla’s transcript of Séminaire
XX, Encore, for example, as Encore; whereas I refer to the commercial edition as Séminaire
XX.
Terminology
As a psychoanalyst, not a topologist, Lacan dealt with analysands’ colloquialisms and errors. He was therefore inclined to speak of links as knots (nœuds), due precisely to the prevalence of knots as metaphors for love or friendship (Les non-dupes errent 3.20). If the
Father is invoked to bind two souls in matrimony, for instance, this is referred to as tying the knot. As an analyst, Lacan was more sensitive to expressions like this than correct, mathematical terminology. At the same time, Lacan was not completely ignorant. In 1976, he acknowledged that the thing he referred to idiosyncratically as un nœud borroméen was technically une chaîne and that, in English, the mathematical term for chaîne is link (Séminaire
XXIII 4.64, 4.75, 5.87; “Réponses” 473). In 1977, he reminded his audience that his so-called knots were in fact links (L’insu que sait 4.29). Throughout the thesis, I usually refer to Lacan’s nœuds as links, for in contemporary English, the word link is more pertinent than knot to the internet and social networks.
The link that appears on the Borromeo family’s coat of arms has three components, hence Lacan used the term borroméen to emphasise his Trinity, namely the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. There is, however, a twist. Sometimes Lacan used the term borroméen in his own way, to indicate what mathematicians call the Brunnian property – a phrase invented in honour of Hermann Brunn (Rolfsen, Knots and Links 67). In 1892, Brunn discovered links in which no two components form a non-trivial sublink. This means that, if you cut one component of a Brunnian link, none of its other components hold together. The Borromean
xxvii rings constitute the best-known Brunnian link. Lacan, to be clear, never employed the term
Brunnian; but it is useful for an academic audience.19
Fig. 1. The Borromean link is Brunnian.
A non-trivial link of two components is called a Hopf link. A Brunnian link is thus a structure in which a Hopf sublink – an inextricable couple – is nowhere to be found. Since analysis is alien to both ancient Eros and contemporary consumer/commodity couples
(facilitated by online dating, prostitution and/or pornography), it figuratively deals with
Brunnian links. Analytic doctrine deems the Hopf link impossible, for there is no sexual harmony. The sphere – an ancient image of wholeness, identity and self-sufficiency (Plato,
Timaeus 32d-34b) – is likewise inappropriate.
Fig. 2. The Hopf link is not Brunnian.
In addition to Brunnian links, Lacan often used the trefoil knot as a support for his
Trinity. The trefoil knot has three crossing points and is thus the simplest knot. There is no such thing as a knot with fewer than three crossing points, just as there is no such thing as a
Brunnian link with fewer than three components. How is a knot distinct from a link? In simple, non-mathematical terms, a link consists of multiple components; a knot, by contrast, is just one component.
19 I am not introducing the term Brunnian to Lacan scholars for the first time. Roudinesco mentioned the term twice in
1986 (Jacques Lacan & Co. 564); the term appears in my 2011 Master of Music thesis; and Adrian Price discussed
Brunnian links in 2014 (“In” 7-10, 22-24).
xxviii
Fig. 3. The trefoil knot has three crossing points.
Assumed audience
Lacan addressed his Panthéon seminars to an audience that he fabricated and manipulated so as to understand him – an audience he believed to be smaller than the crowds that he in fact attracted (R.S.I. 5.41). As for me, I assume Section One’s audience is small and that it consists of Anglophone Arts and Music academics that have carefully read four major texts by Lacan, namely Séminaire XVII, Séminaire XX, Séminaire XXIII and “Télévision”.
(Each is available in English translation, as I mentioned before.) I also assume that Section
One’s audience has read two recent commentaries, Clemens’ Psychoanalysis is an
Antiphilosophy and Lorenzo Chiesa’s The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan.20
It is neither possible nor desirable to address Section One to academics that know nothing whatsoever about Lacan’s Panthéon seminars; and there is no need for more simplified,
Anglophone commentaries of Lacan’s work from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s (Chiesa,
Subjectivity and Otherness 3). Lacan’s Panthéon work requires a detailed review, if only to affirm that Lacan’s knots and links are remnants of an unfinished, poetic-sophistic project that is at odds with contemporary mathematics. There is also no point addressing academics that are prejudiced against renowned, European anti-philosophers such as Freud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Blaise Pascal, each of whom appear at some point throughout the thesis. If these names – none of which are Lilliputian – are unknown to the reader, the entire thesis is unlikely to prove of interest.21 If Section One appears too long, consider this: the first chapter from Section Two
20 Chiesa’s book, published by MIT Press in 2016, deals with Lacan’s Panthéon-era seminars and texts, but it focuses on
Lacan’s sexuation logic rather than his knots and links. The book is a sign of what is acceptable in the field, and it is perhaps more difficult to read than Section One of my thesis.
21 Universities cannot force doctoral students to address everyone within academia or else the broader public (Melzer,
Philosophy ch. 7). Noble ideas are sometimes hated by the majority (Strauss, Persecution 34).
xxix requires faith in my reading of Lacan’s doctrine and a dismissal of multiple readings by musicologists with Lacanian or Žižekian inclinations. It is not appropriate for me to demand the reader’s faith until I properly demonstrate that I have read Lacan’s work.
Section Two is addressed to musicologists that study something other than conventional music notation or progressive, liberal-democratic subjectivities. I repeat: it is only addressed to musicologists that examine the imperatives and prejudices to which music is subjected on account of various discourses.22 Musicologists are advised to read Lacan’s Séminaire XVII
(particularly the chapters dedicated to his discourse-schemas) as well as the translations of
Lacan’s texts in Culture/Clinic 1 – a recent volume edited by Maire Jaanus and Jacques-Alain
Miller, addressed to both academics and clinicians.
Section Three’s audience is strictly limited to gifted composers that are prepared to experiment with modern, non-octave scales and tuning systems. The use of the antiquated term gifted is intentional. Touched is also appropriate. By contrast, terms such as experienced and skilled are too friendly to technē-centric, progressive philanthropy. Nietzsche and Badiou each influenced my choice of audience. “New ears for new music”, the former demanded. “The rest are just humanity” (Anti-Christ 3). This should not be dismissed as archaic, anti-philosophical churlishness. Recall Badiou’s philosophical assertion from 2003: contemporary art/music “does not have to be democratic, if democracy implies conformity with the imperial idea of political liberty” (“Fifteen Theses” n. pag.; see also Badiou, Ethics 54).
Restatement
In ancient Greece, music was linked to comedy, phallika and mystery cults. At the
Panthéon, from 1969 to 1980, Lacan placed an accent on comedy and delusion instead of tragedy and neurosis, he made diagrams of academia and other sophistic discourses, and he ritually composed Father figures. Lacan’s Father figures – intentionally humiliated variants of
22 It is not fashionable among progressive musicologists to place the accent on subjected instead of subjectivity, identity, agency or relational autonomy. Regardless, music as subjected is not difficult to grasp. I recommend that musicologists consult Abolishing Freedom, a book from 2016 by Frank Ruda. It helps one determine what tone of address is appropriate at present.
xxx the Phallus – resembled the Catholic Trinity and a nasty knot, chain or snare from which Lacan never escaped.
My thesis and its partner-folio are addressed to future Anglophone Lacan scholars, musicologists that study subjection, and composers of non-octave music. I am admittedly gripped by modern mystery-figures – knots, links and non-octave music. Of secondary interest is a critique of humourless, progressive academia, which promises identitarian empowerment and attempts to obscure hatred and social/sexual disharmony. I hold no hope for the empowered
One or the erotic Two; I persevere with poetic-sophistic mysteries.
xxxi
SECTION ONE
Muser, past
§
Lacan at the Panthéon
1.1 Literary inheritance: Knots, chains and mysteries
The yoke of my transgressions is bound by his hand: they are wreathed, and come up upon my neck.
– Lamentations 1.14 (The Holy Bible: King James Version)
Is there anything more obstinate or annoying than a knot? What is more offensive to common stupidity than poetic or mathematical writing? What sort of a madman would fixate on these three things – knots, poetry and mathematics? These are not trivial questions.
No divine harmony
There is a knot in the “Ouverture” to Jacques Lacan’s Écrits – a reference to The Rape of the Lock, a mock-heroic comedy by Alexander Pope. After the “Ouverture”, Lacan placed at the head of Écrits his response to “The Purloined Letter”, a short story by Edgar Allen Poe.
François Wahl, the book’s uncredited editor, was uncertain about the decision, so he asked
Lacan to add an explanation at the end of his purloined letter text to justify its placement
(Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 325-26). As a variation on the theme, Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s sole literary executor, opened a posthumous collection of Lacan’s writings, Autres écrits, with
“Lituraterre”. It is thus appropriate to begin this section of my thesis with a short review of literature.23 The chapter adheres to a simple rule: it only discusses material by Anglophone authors that Lacan cited during his Panthéon-era seminars and texts.
From Lacan’s first seminar series through to the dissolution of his École freudienne in
1980, the figure of the knot was crucial to his teaching. Lacan inherited the knot from two parents that are best characterised as difficult: literature and mathematical knot theory.24
Because Lacan was a psychoanalyst, not a poet or a mathematician, he was faithful to neither parent. His interest in knots – and, by extension, literature and mathematics – was strictly
23 The traditional review of academic literature is placed at the beginning of Section Two. I acknowledge that this is unusual, but it is better to review Lacan’s work in detail before summarising work by contemporary Anglophone academics that happen to write about Lacan.
24 Mathematical knot theory can be traced back to the eighteenth-century work of Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde and the nineteenth-century work of figures such as Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, Lord Kelvin, Peter Guthrie Tait and
Hermann Brunn.
2 bound to his discourse on analysis (Les non-dupes errent 6.41). As an analyst, Lacan was primarily concerned with the subject of love and its inevitable pathos. Since one ties a knot in the event of marriage, hanging, bondage or masturbatory asphyxiation, to invoke knots as rhetorical props seems appropriate. Indeed, a knot implies that love is a tangled mess, not divine harmony. Knots are thus well suited to psychoanalysis’s fundamental pessimism on the subject of marriage and sexual relations – the subject referred to as “a great mystery” by Saint
Paul (Ephesians 5.32).
In 1974, after decades of clinical experience, Lacan claimed he had never encountered evidence of a happy marriage (Les non-dupes errent 15.108). He believed that nothing goes as badly as relations between men and women (Séminaire XX 3.34; “Du discours psychanalytique”
38). On a similar note, Freud held imperfect love to be the greatest cause of suffering. “We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love”, he wrote, “never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love” (Civilization 77, 82).
Joyce’s knots
In 1976, Lacan approvingly cited the term that James Joyce chose to describe sexual non-rapport: exile (Séminaire XXIII 4.70). Joyce’s play, Exiles, spoke of marriage as “restless living wounding doubt” (154). Joyce’s following work, Ulysses, was more humorous.25 During the “Circe” episode, the character named Virag – described as a bird-like “basilicogrammate”
(from basilikós grammateús, ‘king-like scribe’) – spoke to Bloom about his multivolume work entitled Fundamentals of Sexology as well as his book Love Passion. According to Virag, both works consisted of “knotty points”. Later, Bloom contemplated tying the shoelaces of a woman named Bella Cohen, described as “a massive whoremistress” with “a sprouting moustache”, whom Bloom desired “with reluctance”. “I can make a true black knot”, he said to her, followed by, “Every knot says a lot”. A swarm of people are described as a “noisy quarrelling knot, a lot not knowing a jot” (15.628-32, 15.641-43, 15.686). In sum, the knots in Ulysses connote sexology, conflicted desire, and an ignorant, discontent collective – motifs that Lacan could not avoid.
25 According to Élisabeth Roudinesco, Lacan “met André Breton and Philippe Soupault and listened spellbound, at
Shakespeare & Co., to the first readings of James Joyce’s Ulysses” (Jacques Lacan 13).
3 Joyce played with knots yet again in his final work, Finnegans Wake. “Knotknow” is an apt neologism for negated knowledge; “knots in his entrails” is a familiar metaphor for anxiety.
Joyce borrowed the image of a man “trying to undo with his teeth the knots made by his tongue” from an old Irish proverb (Finnegans Wake 2.1.224, 2.1.231, 2.2.288). Lacan never spoke of the proverb directly, but he found it amusing that, by babbling on and on, one strangles oneself with one’s own knots (Séminaire VII 10.162).
“Forstake me knot” refers to the tied-up Christ’s plea to the Father (Finnegans Wake
3.2.441). There is an extremely abstruse reference to ancient Chinese knotted strings that were reportedly used as a form of writing: “I will tie a knot in my stringamejip to letter you with my silky paper” (Finnegans Wake 3.2.458; Landuyt, “Shaun” 25). Most fascinating, however, is
Joyce’s characterisation of a speaking-being’s history as consisting partly of “the reverberration of knotcracking awes, the reconjungation of nodebinding ayes”. The ear’s enjoyment is awesome yet fragmentary and diffuse; Apollonian eyes, by contrast, see well-formed words on a page that seem as stable as the ayes of consensus. For the speaking-being, this disjunction affects “the curse of his persistence” (Finnegans Wake 1.6.143). Lacan was captivated by material such as this.
Blake’s chains
Surprisingly, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” by William Blake – cited by Lacan in
Les non-dupes errent (12.83-84) – contains no instance of knot, link, bond or tie. It does, however, involve chains. According to Blake’s proverbial logic, “the weak in courage is strong in cunning”. Cunning minds generate chains that limit and “resist energy”. Blake split the strong and the weak into two classes of being: the Prolific (a feminine series-in-development) and the
Devouring (the masculine, truncated universe). To the Devourer, it seems as if the Prolific is entirely in his chains; but the Prolific is not all his. The Devourer is mistaken, for “he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole” (plate 16).
The Prolific’s role with respect to the Devourer is to object and thereby constitute a kind of excess or remainder. According to Blake, the Prolific’s position would cease to be if the
Devourer were to assimilate “the excess of his delights”. The Prolific demonstrates the speciousness of the Devourer’s totalisation; yet, to be clear, it is not a demonstration that can
4 be divorced or totally emancipated from the Devourer’s speciousness. The Prolific does not have the power of a mathematician’s metalanguage. The Prolific’s mistake consists in the belief that it is not subjected to the Devourer’s chains, that it is an independent or transcendent god. It is not. Both classes, the Devourer and the Prolific, are subjected to a necessary principle of irreconcilable difference. “These two classes of men are always upon the earth, & they should be enemies”, Blake asserted. If the Prolific were to cease its war with the Devourer in pursuit of a specious self-harmony (or vice versa), such a feat would “destroy existence”. Blake thus appealed for the principle of non-reconciliation to continue indefinitely. He cited Christ approvingly: “I came not to send Peace but a Sword” (plates 16-17).
Blake’s poetic rhetoric does not explain the origin of the necessity in question; it remains a mystery. Note the tense of the following proposition: “These two classes of men are always upon earth”. Blake does not, for example, say, “These two classes of men are, were, and always will be upon earth”. The phrase “are always” is ambiguous. It permits two conflicting suppositions: one, the classes are genetic and absolute, they always were, and they always will be; two, the classes emerged contingently and, from that point, were raised to the position of necessity. Although Blake did not divulge everything regarding the necessity of the two classes in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, his poem was explicitly against the classes’ unification or reduction to the Same. For Blake, unification is bestial. Note how his image of animal chains
(intercourse) differed from his depiction of the Devourer’s chains (discourse).
[…] we saw seven houses of brick, one we enterd; in it were a number of monkeys,
baboons, & all of that species chaind by the middle, grinning and snatching at one
another, but witheld by the shortness of their chains: however I saw that they
sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong and with
a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then devourd, by plucking off first one
limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk. this after grinning &
kissing it with seeming fondness they devourd too; and here & there I saw one
savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail. (Plates 19-20)26
26 I have not corrected Blake’s spelling, capitalisation errors or the inconsistent usage of &/and.
5 Lacan, I believe, developed his well-known sexuation logic from poetic material such as this more so than progressive psychology or sexology.27
Shakespeare’s knots
Lacan did not discuss the work of William Shakespeare at length during the Panthéon years (“Radiophonie” 415; “L’étourdit” 453 [note 1]; Séminaire XXIII 4.69); but his earlier seminars at Hôpital Sainte-Anne showed that he paid close attention to Shakespeare’s texts.
There are approximately fifty references to knots in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare deployed one of my favourites during the furious mock-banquet scene from Timon of Athens. Timon shouted at flatterers and disloyal guests, “You knot of mouth-friends! smoke and lukewarm water / Is your perfection” (3.6.100-01). Indeed! According to Lacan, discourse’s only perfection is le semblant (Séminaire XVIII 9.146) – something deceptive and make-believe. If one is in a social situation, then le semblant, for better or worse, leads the game (“La troisième” 183).
Lacan insisted on this point.
The most bizarre knot example is a herb named knot-grass, cited in A Midsummer-
Night’s Dream (3.2.328-30). Certain seventeenth-century Europeans (particularly Italians and
Spaniards) prized dwarfs for their entertainment value and believed that “dwarfs could be created by anointing babies’ spines with the grease of bats, moles, and dormice, while more palatable prescriptions used drugs such as the aptly named dwarf elder, knot-grass, and daisy juice and roots mixed with milk to stunt growth” (B. Otto, Fools are Everywhere 29). Knot- grass, in short, was associated with a highly prized symptom.
Shakespeare often used the knot as a figure of despair. Lacan was no doubt sensitive to this. In the first act of The Tempest, Ferdinand became shipwrecked and found himself isolated on an island. He sat, sighed and formed a “sad knot” by crossing his arms (1.2.221-24), much like the “sorrow-wreathen knot” from Titus Andronicus (3.2.4). Later, Prospero warned
Ferdinand not to break his daughter’s “virgin knot” (the knot that bound Miranda to the
Father of morality) prior to the formation of nuptial ties. According to Prospero, the only
27 Cf. progressive works such as Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why by Simon LeVay and The Science of Desire by
Peter Copeland and Dean Hamer. They are nothing like Blake’s poetry or Lacan’s Panthéon-era seminars and texts.
6 sensible bond between his daughter and Ferdinand was one formed by “sanctimonious ceremonies” administered with “full and holy rite” (Tempest 4.1.15-17). If one does not establish ties via a symbolic intermediary, one suffers/enjoys guaranteed sexual misery.
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey’d disdain and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both. (Tempest 4.1.18-22)
When Othello believed that his wife Desdemona had betrayed him, he cursed the
“fountain” of his life and claimed it could be reduced to “a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in” (Othello 4.2.60-61). Shakespeare’s Cleopatra – the woman who famously “made a gap in nature” by stealing its gaze – also identified her life with a tangled mess. In the play’s final act, Cleopatra placed an asp upon her breast and instructed it as follows: “With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate / Of life at once untie; poor venomous fool” (Antony and Cleopatra
2.2.226, 5.2.306-07). She then died.
In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ford complained of “a knot, a ging, a pack, a conspiracy against me” (4.2.126-27) – a paranoiac’s knot. Given that Ford suspected his wife and his house-servants of infidelity, knot can be attributed at least three senses: a troubled marital bond, a group subjected to a master, and a constricting twist of Fate. Shakespeare’s
Julius Cæsar also involves a knot-collective – a group of conspirators that murdered the sovereign and attempted to create a new form of rule, which Cassius euphemistically termed liberty (3.1.117-18). In The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, the word knot referred to a group of parasites – “A knot you are of damned bloodsuckers” (3.3.5) – and to a character’s history of “dangerous adversaries” (3.1.181-83). The knot somehow keeps track of the suffering/enjoyment inflicted by others (Lacan, La logique du fantasme 21.183).
Monsieur Parolles – a name that plays on parole, ‘speech’ – was a braggart and a self- described gallant militarist. In All’s Well that Ends Well, Parolles had a knot in his scarf that signified his all-encompassing theory of war (4.3.162-64) – an ostentatious figure of mastery.
Eventually, Parolles revealed his cowardice. Everything about him came undone aside from the
7 knot of his scarf. This is an amusing irony. “Who cannot be crushed with a plot?” Parolles asked (4.3.362-64).
Shakespeare also used the knot as a familiar figure of marriage. In Twelfth-Night, Viola found herself in a romantic bind. “It is too hard a knot for me to untie”, she admitted (2.2.42).
Viola’s master, Orsino, loved Olivia; but Olivia did not love Orsino. Olivia loved Viola, who was disguised as a man in order to find work. Viola did not love Olivia; Viola remained faithful to her master, whom she loved; but he, too, believed her to be a man and hence did not love her.
The tension resolved to comic effect when Viola was revealed as a woman and Orsino decided that he wanted to marry her instead of Olivia (5.1.397-400). In The Life and Death of King
John, the king’s mother, Queen Eleanor, urged John to bind a foreign, risky element to the
English crown by offering his niece in marriage to the Dauphin of France (2.1.423-73). Similarly, in The First Part of King Henry the Sixth, Gloucester urged Henry to marry The Earl of
Armagnac’s daughter and to thereby form a “knot of amity” with France (5.1.16-20). The knot as a metaphor for marriage or knitted souls also appears in The Third Part of King Henry the
Sixth (3.3.55), Romeo and Juliet (4.2.25) and Cymbeline (2.3.122-24). Elsewhere, the knot represents familial bonds (Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.131-34; Macbeth 4.3.27; Carroll,
“Language” 23).
A peculiar expression from All’s Well that Ends Well played on both the marriage knot
(specifically, the Father’s eternal binding-function) and the virgin knot (homophonous with
“Thou shalt not”). Bertram refused to consummate his marriage to Helena and thereby preserved her virgin knot. “I have wedded her, not bedded her”, he declared, “and sworn to make the ‘not’ eternal” (3.2.23-24). The virgin knot also appears in Pericles (4.2.163; Carroll,
“Language” 24). Troilus and Cressida contains an even stranger and uglier knot: it formed at the same time as the dissolution of divine bonds, when Troilus lost his wife to his rival
Diomedes. The knot is both fascinating and perverse. It is described by Troilus in the passage below.
The bonds of heaven are slipp’d, dissolv’d, and loos’d;
And with another knot, five-finger-tied,
The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,
The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy reliques
8 Of her o’er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed. (5.2.153-57)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona features another knot-related equivoque. Julia planned to prevent “loose encounters of lascivious men” by dressing as a page and tying her hair in
“true-love knots” (2.7.40-46). What does this mean? According to John Brand, the phrase true- love knot, spoken throughout Northern England and Scotland, did not derive from the words true and love but from the Danish verb trulofa, ‘I plight my faith’. True-love knots symbolised
“the indissoluble tie of affection and duty”. Like ancient runic inscriptions, they were considered a form of writing. Trulofad, a closely related noun, refers to a virgin that is pledged to a man, under God – another religious pact (Brand, Observations 67). Lacan was evidently attentive to knots’ associations with religious ties, Father figures and peculiar forms of writing.
Poe’s mystery letter
Since Lacan’s Écrits began with a seminar on Poe’s third and final Dupin mystery, it is on “The Purloined Letter” that this review shall conclude.28 Why did Lacan speak of the
Phallus via Poe’s mystery story? Ancient mystery cults revealed the Phallus; modern mysteries typically reveal a murderer, an alien invasion or a government conspiracy. The Phallus, the murderer, the alien and the conspiring Other are effectively the same thing: each is a penetrating force and a mysterious tormentor. In one of Freud’s well-known cases, the Phallus was supposedly a horse that threatened to bite a boy named Little Hans if Hans ventured outdoors. Freud described the horse-Phallus as Hans’s “replacement of his father” – the “big animal” that Hans envied but who may at any point “become dangerous”. Freud also spoke of a
Russian analysand that feared “being devoured by a wolf” – another version of the Phallus,
“anxiety-animal” or mysterious “father-substitute” (Inhibitions 101-04). In the case of “The
Purloined Letter”, the letter’s revelation threatens to destroy established social bonds. It is not a trivial matter.
In 1971, Lacan admired his reading of the mysterious letter qua Phallus. He claimed that no one in modern times had spoken about the Phallus better than him. According to
28 Incidentally, knots are mysterious figures in the first two stories from Poe’s Dupin trilogy, “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue” (145) and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (158).
9 Lacan, the essential point of Poe’s story is that one never discovers the contents of the letter.
The letter thus remains a mystery; more specifically, it constitutes a hole in the reader’s knowledge and points to something interdicted. The Queen, who initially received the letter, knows its contents, but she is prohibited from revealing anything. The letter’s contents would presumably harm her and perhaps lead her to the scaffold (Séminaire XVIII 5.93-94;
“Conférences et entretiens” 60). In 1975, Lacan implied that his own articles were closer to the figure of the mystery-letter than science or literary narratives. He said he was interested in
Joyce, because Joyce tried to ensnare academics in a modern mystery and thereby give them something to talk about for three hundred years (“Conférences et entretiens” 33, 36). In Poe’s case, the purloined letter affirmed the existence of a group ensnared in a mystery: the Queen, the King, the Minister, the Prefect and Dupin.
If, for Lacan, the mystery letter is synonymous with the Phallus, what does it have to do with the knot, the Father figure or the Trinity? Broadly speaking, from 1956 onwards, Lacan conceived the Phallus as bound up in a Trinity – real, symbolic and imaginary (Séminaire IV
2.29, 3.57, 16.269; Séminaire VIII 17.282, 17.294). In 1958, Lacan implied that, since analysands cannot satisfactorily have or else be the Phallus, they become caught in a knot of compromise- symptoms (“La signification du phallus” 685). Throughout the 1970s, Lacan repeatedly asserted that the Phallus is responsible for a knot-Trinity’s formation (“L’étourdit” 468; Séminaire
XXIII 7.118). In 1975, he defined the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary as the three Names- of-the-Father (R.S.I. 7.53).29 Towards the end of 1976, he acknowledged that the Real, the
Symbolic and the Imaginary were indices of his own surname, that is, his authorship and status as a Father figure (L’insu que sait 1.5). These moments effectively reiterate Lacan’s prior definition of the Phallus as a Trinity – real, symbolic and imaginary.
This is a controversial point among Lacan scholars, so I shall provide further evidence.
In 1971, Lacan defined the Father as something that takes the Phallus as its referent. The
Father attributes sense to the Phallus; the Phallus is otherwise mute (Séminaire XVIII 2.34,
29 Lacanians often posit the Father as a fourth term, in excess of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Sometimes,
Lacan himself did this (Séminaire IV 5.84-85); but sometimes he did not. In 1975, for example, Lacan distinguished between his own notion of the Father as a Trinity and Freud’s notion of the Father as a stand-alone, fourth term.
Lacan considered the latter superflue and inutile (R.S.I. 7.53, 7.57, 7.61). Recall that Lacan inherited the Catholic
Trinity (three), whereas Freud inherited the Tetragrammaton (four).
10 10.172-73). The Father, then, is a manifest Trinity that refers ultimately to mystery: this is well established in Catholic doctrine, which Lacan himself was caught up in as a child. It is also worth noting that Muto was a popular cognomen in ancient Rome (J. N. Adams, Latin Sexual
Vocabulary 62-63). The name Muto refers to the phallic deity, Mutunus Tutunus; a cognomen was the third of a Roman citizen’s three names. Lacan perhaps played on this when he made the Phallus into a Trinity.
Knot, Father, Mystery, Phallus, Trinity
I believe that Lacan constructed his figure of the knot as a testament to the speaking- being’s shame and incompetence in the face of a sublime mystery. An ancient synonym for mystery is, I repeat, the Phallus.30 The peculiar mystery that Lacan found himself caught in had three snares: the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Throughout Le séminaire, Lacan never stopped speaking about these three things. The Real is the place of writing; the Symbolic is the place of speech or the signifier; the Imaginary is responsible for the illusory wholeness of the world and the body (Séminaire XVIII 7.122; “La troisième” 184).
The Father is Lacan’s term for religion. The latter etymologically refers to a binding or retying function (R.S.I. 5.43), hence Lacan figured the Father as a knot or a link. Many knot- figures from literature (although certainly not all) illustrate the Father’s binding function or else a lover’s embrace (Les non-dupes errent 3.20, 14.102). Poe’s purloined letter equates to a mysterious power that binds together a network of questionable subjects without wholly revealing itself. Lacan referred to such networks as discourses. Ideologies, social links and group ties are appropriate synonyms (Séminaire XIX 11.152; Séminaire XX 2.21; S. Freud, Group
Psychology 94-99, 140-41).
Poetic-sophistic figures such as Lacan’s Father-knot or Poe’s mystery-letter are dissatisfying to academics that demand complete explanations.31 There is something obstinate
30 Before Lacan, Freud wrote about the Phallus with reference to the mystery of Creation, shame, “plaiting and weaving” and sexual difference (Three 194-96; New Introductory Lectures 132).
31 Between 1932 and 1938, Lacan’s training analyst, Rudolph Loewenstein, held that Lacan was unanalysable
(Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 74). Lacan’s opaque Father figures – the knots and links – are evidence of this.
11 and non-interpretable about them. Regardless, the Father figure is what it is – Lacan’s favourite response to the mystery of desire, encountered again and again in clinical analysis. He did not choose a symbol of freedom or empowerment; his staged his attachment to Freudian doctrine.
According to Roberto Harari, Lacan constructed the Father figure as a ritual or theatrical enactment. “Lacan does not make this explicit”, Harari argued; “he simply does it, because ‘it must be done’. If he stated it – through explanation, allusion, or whatever – this would in no way be equivalent to the act of doing it” (How 327; original italics). I agree. Lacan’s Father figure is, in my opinion, the most amusing example of comic, post-Freudian despair (Le moment de conclure 1.6; Nobus, “Psychoanalysis” 49-53). Lacan used his Father figure to parade the insufficiency of modern science, and he did so without posing progressive historicism as an alternative.32 More specifically, Lacan’s Father mocked rationalism’s inability to eradicate atavistic fundamentalism: it parodied the grip that faith and aesthetic revelation have on analysands subjected to sexual disharmony.33 One could say, Lacan figured out a joke.
As is the case with any comic invention, the surest way to destroy the appeal of Lacan’s
Father figure is to try and explain it. For better or worse, this is what happens throughout the majority of Section One.
32 For a detailed review of twentieth-century despair, following the failures of Enlightenment rationalism and progressive historicism, see Arthur M. Melzer (Philosophy ch. 10).
33 Atavistic derives from atavus, ‘forefather’.
12 1.2 Le séminaire as a monologue
Je vais revenir parce que ma pratique est ici – et ce séminaire, qui n’est pas de ma pratique, mais qui la
complémente. Ce séminaire, je le tiens moins qu’il ne me tient. […] Je suis un traumatisé du malentendu. Comme
je ne m’y fais pas, je me fatigue à le dissoudre. Et du coup, je le nourris. C’est ce qui s’appelle le séminaire
perpétuel.
– Jacques Lacan (“La malentendu” 11-12)
Lacan delivered a conference paper, “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse”, at the University of Rome on 26 September 1953. The Rome paper preceded the first transcribed session from Séminaire I; hence it is commonly deemed the start of Lacan’s teaching.34 In the paper, Lacan described the Nom-du-Père as the Law or Authority that establishes marriage ties and interdicts incest. More specifically, he treated the Father as a naming-function that indicates kinship and makes a knot from the thread of lineage. The job of an analyst, according to Lacan, is to keep to the letter of the analysand’s figurative text, even if the analysand spouts obvious untruths. Lacan defined the analysand’s text as a rebus – something made of ideographs, hieroglyphs or heterodox rhetoric (“Fonction et champ” 267-68,
277-78).35
When Lacan drafted the Rome paper, he simultaneously tried (and failed) to arrange a private meeting with Pope Pius XII (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 205). What changed decades later when Lacan delivered his seminars at a place named in honour of the gods and France’s greatest patriarchs? From a so-called substantive, progressive standpoint, nothing changed at all; but with respect to form, Lacan’s Panthéon period was arguably his most inventive. Did the extreme strangeness of the Panthéon seminars drive analysts and analysands away? Not necessarily. Lacan typically spoke in a huge lecture hall, two Wednesdays per month, from midday to two o’clock. Audience members reputedly had to arrive “well in advance to get a seat”. In 1971, Lacan’s École freudienne had 267 members; by 1975, the number had grown to
401. In 1977, there were 544 members; and by the end of 1979, the École freudienne reached a
34 Lacan’s first talk dedicated to his Trinity, “Le symbolique, l’imaginaire et le réel”, is dated 8 July 1953. Since it preceded Lacan’s Rome paper, Jacques-Alain Miller named it the beginning of Lacan’s teaching (“Notice” 205).
35 Although musical notation is ideographic, a comparison is unwarranted. Notation is conventional: it is supposed to be read by large groups. Dream-figures, by contrast, are a mystery even to one’s self. This is a premise of analysis.
13 grand total of 609 members. Its congregation-effect was unmatched by any other Freudian society (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 317, 344).
Élisabeth Roudinesco held that it is possible to study Lacan’s mathèmes without reducing them to academic discourse (Jacques Lacan & Co. 563). I agree. Texts issued publicly by the Vatican are well-known precedents: they are irreducible to academia, but they can still be studied by academics. In this chapter, I argue that Le séminaire cannot in fact be reduced to any of the four discourses that Lacan schematised during his first year at the Panthéon.36 The figure proper to Lacan’s Panthéon seminars is instead the Brunnian Father – a comic-pathetic prop.
Lacan addressed to non-analysts
Lacan’s Panthéon seminars do not qualify as pure analytic discourse (“Acte de fondation” 230). They did not take place in a clinical setting; they did not stage an analyst’s response to an analysand’s demand for interpretation. On more than one occasion, Lacan distinguished between analytic discourse proper and le séminaire perpétuel (“De l’incompréhension” 45; “Le malentendu” 11-12). The latter was bastardised.
Lacan’s audience at the Panthéon did not consist solely of analysts; and outside the
Panthéon, from 1969 to 1980, Lacan sometimes addressed contemporary quasi-masters
(politicians, for example, or so-called empowered consumers), academics and hysterics in order to declare psychoanalysis a new and different discourse (“Avis au lecteur japonais” 498). It is possible, I believe, to follow the precedent set by Lacan and to speak of his work to academics, outside analytic institutions. Without such efforts, Lacan’s work from the Panthéon period will remain absolutely senseless to academics; for, as Lacan put it, a discourse only achieves sense via translation from a different discourse (“Discours de Tokyo” 10-11; “L’étourdit” 480).
36 Lacan’s discourse-schemas are reviewed in detail in the final chapter of Section One.
14 Le séminaire and academia
Knowledge on display (S2) Speculation, work for credit points (a)
Education policy, surname references (S1) → New believers and discontents ($)
Fig. 4. Annotated ⤺academic schema.
Lacan did not use his Panthéon seminars to boast about successful treatments or to present recent case studies. His seminars typically questioned and supplemented established texts by Freud. This is akin to philological, academic practice; hence in 1972, Lacan implied that his audience merely imagined that they were being nourished by something other than academia (Séminaire XX 2.19). This is further evidence that Le séminaire was impure: its author fused the academic’s literature review and the analyst’s equivocal interpretation.
Stylistically, Lacan’s Panthéon seminars were not the same as academic seminars; they were usually monologues (“Du discours psychanalytique” 33; Séminaire XIX 15.219).
Roudinesco considered them “worthy of a character out of Samuel Beckett” (Jacques Lacan
359). An exception proves the rule. During Lacan’s final seminar at the École normale supérieure, dated 25 June 1969, a diploma certificate marked the audience as Lacan’s students and thereby established a conventional academic bond. This was a one-off event in the history of Le séminaire. It occurred just after Lacan announced his forced departure from the university. The university’s director, Robert Flacelière, wrote Lacan a letter in March 1969 and asserted that the main conference room (Salle Dussane) would not be available to him the following year (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 341-42). According to the seminar’s transcript,
Lacan’s audience laughed and applauded as the diplomas were handed out (Séminaire XVI
25.399-406). The diploma, simply put, was more likely a sign of comic-pathetic irony than academic authenticity.
In 1970, Lacan derided the progressive university system for granting credits to anything and everything, for dishing out prizes as if academia were an animal or agricultural show (Séminaire XVII 13.212). He encouraged students at Paris VIII University to refrain from feeding academia the usual, anodyne culture or agreeable opinions (“Vincennes impromptu n°2”
8-9). A year later, during a visit to the Tokyo publishing house that sold Lacan’s Écrits in translation, Lacan welcomed the interest of the progressive human sciences, in the hope that his
15 discourse would quicken their disappearance (“Discours de Tokyo” 21).37 Lacan issued at least two variations on the theme of disappearance or abolition. In 1974, he said that whenever he read academic studies of public opinion or mass phenomena, he would think of the many patients he had listened to for forty years. In his view, the peculiarity of each patient marked the Average Man a statistical fiction; therefore, we need to obliterate academia’s Average Man
(“Freud per sempre” 6). I agree with this.38 Later, when Lacan turned his attention to James
Joyce, he admired Joyce’s wish to keep academics busy with his singular body of work until the university system reached extinction (“Joyce le symptôme I” 23). This is where Lacan believed it was headed (“Vincennes impromptu n°2” 8). Future generations can judge whether or not
Lacan was correct. For now, the point is clear: Lacan did not proselytise for progressive academia.
Although Lacan initially avoided academic-analytic experiments, on 26 November 1974, he officially became the scientific director at Paris VIII University’s Department of
Psychoanalysis, located at Vincennes. Jacques-Alain Miller was appointed chief administrator.
At the time, Miller was not yet a practising analyst; he was an academic with a philosophy background. Academic-analytic experimentation continued in 1979, when Lacan created the
Fondation du champ freudien – a non-profit organisation in charge of disseminating Lacan’s teaching. He appointed to the position of director an academic that happened to have no experience as an analyst or as an analysand – namely, his daughter Judith (Roudinesco, Jacques
Lacan & Co. 575-76; Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics 180-81, 266, 286).
The success of academic-analytic experiments was anything but guaranteed. Between
1973 and 1974, students and academics from Paris VIII’s Department of Psychoanalysis often referred to its teaching as the praxis of garbage (Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics 180). In 1978,
Lacan declared that the department could not surmount the antipathy between academic discourse and analytic discourse (“Lacan pour Vincennes!” 278). In plain terms, the work of private clinics is not happily matched to academia’s public moralising or its propagation of
37 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the progressive human sciences often lapsed back upon “a humanism of the complete subject”. They thereby neglected the paranoid subject to which Lacan, by contrast, was determined to remain faithful (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 326-37).
38 For detailed critiques of the Average Man, see Catherine Liu (American Idyll ch. 2), David W. Moore (Opinion
Makers xiii, 18-19, 26, 117-18) and Lindsay Rogers (Pollsters 17).
16 commercial techniques. Lacan once referred to analysis as an ethically untenable profession that made him sick (“Propos sur l’hystérie” 8).
Lacan generally held that, with respect to academia, analytic publications were incompatible, inappropriate and antithetical (“Préface à une thèse” 393; “Postface au Séminaire
XI” 504). Freud, likewise, considered academia and analysis separate discourses. “We need not feel bound by the narrow-mindedness of academic philosophy”, he wrote; “we are ready to believe what is shown to us to deserve belief” (New Introductory Lectures 31). In 1978, Lacan suggested that analysis was a form of magic (Le moment de conclure 10.53) – a reference to faith, Creation, the Phallus or poetic sophistry. Contemporary academics are unlikely to tolerate such statements. The main distinction between the two discourses is clear. Academia’s ideal is universal transmission: every student enrolled in a given course can learn the course’s contents.
In analysis, by contrast, there is no such ideal. Universal transmission does not take place.
Lacan insisted on this point (“Analyticon” 228; “Allocution sur l’enseignement” 297;
“Intervention sur l’exposé de Ph. Rappart” 10; “Conclusions” 219-220; “Lacan pour Vincennes!”
278). He considered himself not a professor of knowledge but rather an honest imbecile like
Freud (“Conférence à Genève” 13).39
If academia is friendly to science and to science alone, then it cannot be friendly to analytic discourse; for analysis is not a science (“Avis au lecteur japonais” 499; “Conférences et entretiens” 53; “Ouverture de la section clinique” 14; L’insu que sait 4.30; Le moment de conclure 1.4). Science was not Lacan’s field (“Note italienne” 308; Les non-dupes errent 12.85).
In 1977, Lacan designated analysis the exact contrary of science (“Propos sur l’hystérie” 6). If academia’s ethics privilege the Real of science (or else the Real of market statistics) over the
Imaginary, it is, once again, no friend to Lacan’s discourse. A crucial aim of Lacan’s Panthéon seminars was not to denigrate the Imaginary but rather to break into a new Imaginary (Les non-dupes errent 10.69; Séminaire XXIII 8.121; “Conférence chez le Professeur Deniker” 3); hence the ritual formalisation of Father figures.
Will future academics be interested in Lacan’s seminars or Freudian analysis? Lacan, for one, was not sure that analysis would survive after he died (“Discours de Tokyo” 21). In
39 Cf. Les non-dupes errent (9.65): Lacan said Freud was a genius that delivered termes sauvages.
17 1977, he predicted that soon, no one would give a damn about it (“Propos sur l’hystérie” 9).
Around the same time, however, Lacan insisted that psychoanalysis should be taken seriously, even though it is comic (Le moment de conclure 1.4-6). In 1974, he referred to himself as a clown animated by seriousness (“La troisième” 183). Other paradoxes beloved of Lacan included sad comedy, folisophie (‘mad or foolish philosophy’) and scientific delusion (R.S.I. 7.54;
Séminaire XXIII 8.128; L’insu que sait 4.30). Academics do not necessarily share Lacan’s sense of humour.
As for Lacanian texts and lectures by academics, unfortunately, they are more often humiliating than captivating; but the exceptions are excellent. On rare occasions, Lacan invited academics to contribute to Le séminaire, and they did so as proper academics, not as mock- analysts. Superb examples from the Panthéon period include the Joycean scholar Jacques
Albert, the linguist Jean-Claude Milner, the knot theorist Pierre Soury, and the philosophers
François Récanati and Michel Thomé.40 It is not true, then, to suggest that Lacan was consistently opposed to academics and in favour of analysts. In 1971, Lacan proclaimed respect for les savants, particularly their ability to unearth things outside the narrow confines of the analyst’s cabinet (Séminaire XVIII 5.90). The following year, Lacan admitted that, although he had said many bad things about academia, he agreed with Freud: in order for one to become an analyst, one must first have received a good university formation (Séminaire XIX 5.71).
Throughout his final seminars at the École normale supérieure, Lacan insinuated that the analysts that attended his 1953 Rome paper were stupid, and he mocked l’imbécillité frémissante that reigned in analytic circles (Séminaire XVI 1.20, 8.134). In 1974, he complained that analysts were mostly deaf to him and that they did not understand his crucial remarks about the late eighteenth-century figures, Immanuel Kant and the Marquis de Sade (Les non- dupes errent 10.72-73). In 1978, Lacan acknowledged that analysis was an excellent method of cretinisation.41 Practising it made him limited (Le moment de conclure 10.53). To the best of my knowledge, Lacan never argued that analysis was masterful or superior with respect to academia. (True to its name, the master’s discourse is masterful, not analysis.) Analysis is
40 Miller’s edition of Séminaire XX only includes Lacan’s remarks about Récanati. Complete transcripts of Récanati’s interventions can be found in Staferla’s Encore.
41 The word crétin derives from the Swiss French crestin, ‘Christian’ – another religious reference.
18 limited to a savoir-faire with respect to one’s symptom. It only goes so far (Lacan, L’insu que sait 1.5).
A question from a different angle: did academics demand Lacan’s involvement within university discourse? After Lacan broke away from Hôpital Sainte-Anne and the International
Psychoanalytic Association in 1963, an academic, Louis Althusser, invited him to conduct Le séminaire at the École normale supérieure. Le séminaire remained there until Flacelière ejected
Lacan from the École normale supérieure in 1969. This should not be overlooked: Le séminaire involved a forced ejection from analytic discourse (I.P.A.) as well as a forced ejection from academic discourse (E.N.S.). In the third and final period of Le séminaire, at a place of Law named in honour of every god, Lacan seemed most at home. In 1969, he immediately expressed curiosity as to what effects the Panthéon would have on Le séminaire, and he suggested that the third stage of Le séminaire would be the most important (Séminaire XVII 1.16-17).42 The only thing that forcibly ejected Lacan from the Panthéon was his death in 1981.
Alain Badiou, a professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and a former professor at the École normale supérieure, is a well-known academic from the period following
Lacan’s death. Badiou entertains a relationship with Lacan that is both twisted and admirable.
In Badiou’s opinion, Lacan was the greatest anti-philosopher of the twentieth century, alongside
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Logics of Worlds 523, 540). In 2006, Badiou warned that it is “always perilous to approach Lacan from a philosophical point of view. For he is an anti-philosopher, and no one is entitled to take this designation lightly” (“Lacan” 7). In spite of this, Badiou insisted that contemporary philosophers must not shy away from Lacan’s texts. “A contemporary philosopher, for me, is indeed someone who has the unfaltering courage to work through Lacan’s anti-philosophy”, he declared in 1991. “There are not many of them” (“Truth”
129). Badiou repeated this point in 2012. “No contemporary philosophy can be considered important”, he said, “if it has not measured itself, at one point or other on its path, against the
Lacanian interpretation of philosophy” (Badiou and Roudinesco, Jacques 45-46).
42 The word Panthéon should be grasped principally as a signifier of Law and Father figures. Lacan was not a historian.
He did not recount narratives that happened to involve the place du Panthéon. That was not his style.
19 Lacan’s anti-philosophy, in short, does not preclude Badiou’s philosophy (Badiou, Le
Séminaire 12). In 1988, Badiou named Lacanian psychoanalysis – synonymous with love – one of the four conditions of his philosophy (Being and Event 3-4). Badiou’s treatment of Lacan is instructive. Note that he did not align Lacan with the other three conditions of his philosophy: revolutionary politics (Karl Marx), science (mathematics after Georg Cantor), and art (Samuel
Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé, Kazimir Malevich, Anton Webern and others). On the subject of politics, for instance, analytic discourse does not have much to offer Badiouian philosophy.
Freud established this in 1933. Psychoanalysis, he insisted, is “unfit to construct” a speculative or revolutionary world-view (Inhibitions 95-96; New Introductory Lectures 158, 175-77).
Given that transference-love’s attachment to the Father is a fundamental problem for both Freud and Lacan, Badiou’s handling of psychoanalysis is appropriate. Love and anti- philosophy are well-chosen terms.43 In a Francophone milieu, anti-philosophie is inextricable from the Father: the original anti-philosophers were religious reactionaries that opposed French
Enlightenment philosophers (Bosteels, “Translator’s Introduction” 7 [note 6]). Anti-philosophy significantly influenced the education that Lacan received at the Collége Stanislas – a Catholic school that tended to avoid eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers. As Roudinesco put it, “the young Lacan was exposed to a classical culture almost untouched by Enlightenment values” (Jacques Lacan 8-10, 254).44 In 1975, Lacan acknowledged his time at the Collége
Stanislas and described himself as an enfant de curé like James Joyce – a Catholic ‘priest-child’
(“Joyce le symptôme I” 22).
Le séminaire and political discourse
Political imperatives (S1) Slaves’ knowledge put to work (S2) The Sublime, true justice ($) → Waste production, irrational surplus (a)
Fig. 5. Annotated ⤺ mastery schema.
43 Adrian Johnston listed multiple authors that have associated Lacan’s name with anti-philosophy, including Milner,
François Régnault and Colette Soler (“This” 137).
44 Jean Baruzi taught Lacan philosophy at the Collége Stanislas. Like Etienne Gilson, Baruzi believed “sacred texts could supply material for genuine philosophical thought” (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 11-12, 90).
20 An unconditioned element of Freudian discourse, to which Lacan remained faithful until death, is a signifier of Authority, le Nom-du-Père (“Joyce le symptôme I” 27). Adrian Johnston highlighted the anti-utopian predictions made by Lacan in his seminars from 1971 to 1972
(“Blast” 70). Lacan prohibited his audience from looking at the future through rose-tinted glasses and warned that they were yet to hear the last word on racism (Séminaire XIX 16.236; see also S. Freud, Group Psychology 101). Just two years after the events of May 1968 in Paris,
Lacan declared that he was not a man of the Left and that he was certainly not a progressive, for he believed that social links are founded upon segregation (Séminaire XVII 7.132;
“Vincennes impromptu n°2” 9). On this point, Leo Strauss wrote to Carl Schmitt, “dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified, only in a unity against – against other men.
Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men” (“Letter Two” 125; original italics).45
In 1973, Lacan derided Freudo-Marxism as l’embrouille sans issue, ‘the hopeless muddle’
(“Introduction à l’édition allemande” 555). In Lacan’s opinion, psychoanalysis cannot share
Marx’s faith in proletarian Man qua future Messiah (Séminaire XVIII 10.165; R.S.I. 6.51).
Freud, likewise, mocked Marxists at a crucial point of European political history. In 1933, he flatly stated that “revolutionary children are not desirable from any point of view” (New
Introductory Lectures 151). A few years earlier, he dismissed the Communists’ notion that, free from the corruption of private property, “man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour”. Freud referred to this as “an untenable illusion”, for aggression or rivalry is already present in a child’s nursery. Freud admitted he could not “easily foresee” what would happen if a society abolished the family unit and permitted “complete freedom of sexual life” (including incest); regardless, he remained confident that sexual disharmony was “indestructible”
(Civilization 112-14). Was Freud a progressive, unlike Lacan, that promised freedom from repression? No. According to Freud, analysis does not “undo” repression. It does not free one to indulge in a hostile relationship with one’s father, for example, or a sadistic relationship with one’s mother. Analysis, instead, buries erotic idiocies; or, as Freud put it, “analysis replaces repression by condemnation” (“Analysis of a Phobia” 140-45; Clemens, Psychoanalysis 47, 62).
45 Lacan cited Leo Strauss in “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud” (508-09), albeit on the subject of persecution and esoteric writing, not segregation.
21 Lacan encountered Freud’s work around 1923 – the same time he became interested in the radical elitism of Charles Maurras and the Action français. According to Roudinesco, Lacan
“met Maurras several times and went to some meetings of the Action français”. Lacan’s first presentation about a neurological patient occurred on 4 November 1926, under the guidance of
Théophile Alajouanine, a member of the Action français. (This was before Lacan became a psychiatrist and well before he practised analysis.) Incidentally, France’s first Freudian association, the Société psychanalytique de Paris, was created the same day. When the Société psychanalytique eventually certified Lacan as a training analyst on 20 December 1938, this was partly due to the forceful intervention of Edouard Pichon – another member of the Action français (Jacques Lacan 13, 16-17, 86).
As for ethics, the discourse of master-sophists, Lacan denied that his Borromean link had any involvement with it (Les non-dupes errent 10.69). A Borromean link is not the same as the stable, celestial spheres that supported both Aristotle’s ethics and Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian politics (Séminaire II 19.275; Séminaire XX 7.76-77). In Mein Kampf, for example, Hitler praised the celestial spheres for their “eternal principles” and “ultimate wisdom”. He proclaimed, “in a world in which the planets circle around the sun, where moons ride around planets, where power alone is always the master of weakness and forces it into obedient service or else breaks it, there can be no special laws valid for man” (334). Kant, too, identified celestial spheres with the Good. “Two things”, he asserted, “fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more frequently and persistently one’s meditation deals with them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me” (Critique 161; original italics).
The sphere of the Good is strictly non-Lacanian. The only ethic recognised by Lacan’s discourse was a highly refined père-version/sublimation, alternately referred to as Bien-dire
(‘art of eloquence’) or art-dire (“Télévision” 541; Séminaire XXIII 7.118). Art-dire is a pun on ardeur, ‘love’, which, according to Lacan’s doctrine, is something addressed to the Father
(Séminaire XX 6.68; Séminaire XXIII 10.150-53). Art-dire is thus the name of a père- verse/sublime rhetorical style that should not be confused with the sphere of the Good, the ethics of Aristotle or Kant, or the politics of Hitler.
22 Le séminaire and Socratic hysteria
Protests, critical displays ($) Mastery interrogated (S1)
Historical trauma as truth (a) → New knowledge of failure (S2)
Fig. 6. Annotated ⤺ hysterical schema.
From the 1960s onwards, historical/hysterical materialists, anti-establishment critics and post-structuralists frequently invoked Lacan’s name. Lacan’s name is thus inextricable from le discours hystérico-diabolique; but this does not mean that Le séminaire is identical to hysterical discourse.46 The perfect example of historia/hysteria, according to Lacan, was
Socrates.47 Lacan considered Socrates a genius and suggested that, if Socrates had charged his admirers money, he would have been the first to make the switch from hysterical discourse to analytic discourse (“Joyce le symptôme II” 35).48
With regard to modern, historical/hysterical materialism, can one overlook the insults that both Freud and Lacan directed at Marxists and situate Le séminaire comfortably among the work of Althusser’s followers? I do not believe so. Je m’en fous du matérialisme, Lacan said on 9 April 1974, after exclaiming how much he resented having to explain his discourse via the terms of philosophy – l’être, l’étant, ousia and so on. Historical materialism, in Lacan’s view, was nothing more than a cursed resurgence of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet’s Providence – a seventeenth-century belief in a moral Law that supposedly governs history.49 The ideology denigrates form and erroneously asserts that matter – namely, historical/hysterical trauma – is more real (Les non-dupes errent 11.78).
46 Lacan equated historical materialism with hysteria in Le moment de conclure (3.15). Le discours hystérico-diabolique is a phrase from R.S.I. (9.71).
47 Historia was an ancient Greek science. The English word history derives from historia.
48 On 25 November 1975, Lacan offered a more nuanced description of Socrates. He said that Socrates inaugurated the hysteric’s discourse but that Socrates was himself a subtle master (“Conférences et entretiens” 38). This was perhaps a reference to the $ that sits beneath the S1 in the master’s discourse. On 21 December 1960, Lacan referred to Socrates as le supersophiste, ‘the super-sophist’ (Séminaire VIII 6.102).
49 Freud, too, questioned Marxists’ belief in societal development as “a process of natural history”. The positive telos struck him as “strange” (New Introductory Lectures 177).
23 On 3 December 1969, student activists from Vincennes interrupted an impromptu talk by Lacan and demanded to know the difference between certified analysts and university graduates (Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics 178-79). One of the students implored Lacan to stop making fun of his audience and to cease speaking in a high-pitched voice. The student then took off his shirt and suggested that everyone have an orgy. In response, Lacan pointed out that, despite their pretence to radicalism, the students were merely putting on a hysterical display enjoyed by the university administration (“Analyticon” 233, 240). The students were not empowered; they were “fools, impotent court jesters, the regime’s harmless isolates” (Turkle,
Psychoanalytic Politics 179). Lacan famously said that, as hysterics, the students wanted another master, which they were certain to receive (“Analyticon” 239). He thereby echoed
Shakespeare’s Timon: “many so arrive at second masters / Upon their first lord’s neck” (Timon of Athens 4.3.514-15).
Le séminaire and clinical analysis
Hole or loss on display (a) Analysand put to work ($)
Mythematics as Freudian truth (S2) → Desecrated identitarianism (S1)
Fig. 7. Annotated analytic ⤺ schema.
In 1980, Lacan said he did not lead Le séminaire like a master; Le séminaire in fact subjected him (“Le malentendu” 11). If Lacan was literally a subject ($), what sort of subject was he? In 1972, Lacan said he delivered his seminars from the position of an analysand.
Although this is a hysterical subject-position ($ in the top-right corner of the analytic schema), it is strictly not the same as the agent of hysterical discourse ($ in the top-left of the hysterical schema). He also said that the position from which he delivered Le séminaire was solitary and that it produced identitarian stupidities (S1) – a description that conforms to the analytic schema, not the hysterical schema. He then hinted that Le séminaire was a sublimation – an attempt at the least possible stupidity (Séminaire XX 1.9, 1.17-18).
In 1976, Lacan named himself a perfect hysteric without symptoms (L’insu que sait
2.12). The perfect hysteric is presumably one that practices la passe – a procedure introduced by Lacan in his “Proposition du 9 octobre 1967” (255). Following a successful analysis, the passant maintains an appropriate distance from senseless suffering/enjoyment – namely, his/her
24 partner-symptom – via a peculiar style of rhetoric. This works as a preliminary definition of Le séminaire.
According to my reading, Lacan constructed his Father figures as a testament to analytic discourse. Freud often spoke of the hysterical symptom as a Bilderschrift (‘picture- writing’), bound to the Father (“Katharina” 129; “Psychotherapy of Hysteria” 296-97;
Interpretation of Dreams 277). In response, Lacan constructed his Borromean Trinity (L’insu que sait 2.13, 8.58); yet he also dedicated his Trinity to père-version and paranoia. On one occasion in 1975, he said he fashioned his Infernal Trinity in response to neurotics’ dreams, which consisted of perverse satisfactions (R.S.I. 6.49). On another occasion, he said that the mystery of the Divine Trinity reflected the limits and the certain failure of paranoiac self- consciousness (“Conférences et entretiens” 58). In spite of this, Lacan’s Borromean Trinity cannot be confused with babbling analysands. As a mute figure or form of writing, the
Borromean Trinity is strictly not discourse. Does that make it closer to science?
Le séminaire and science
According to Isaac Newton’s philological studies, the Scriptures were corrupted throughout the fourth and fifth centuries in order to prop up the Trinitarian Church, which he considered “guilty of spiritual whoredom” and a “Synagogue of Satan” (“Irenicum” 14; Westfall,
Never at Rest 311-15). This, I believe, is an appropriate position for scientists to adopt with respect to Lacan’s Trinitarianism, constructed as it was from a heretical reading of Freudian
Scripture (Lacan, “Ouverture de la section clinique” 10-11). As for Lacan’s approach to science,
Milner referred to it as “doctrinal”. Following Alexandre Kojève, Milner believed that modern science’s break with ancient science was “tied to Christianity”. What makes science properly modern is clear: like Renaissance philology, it is based on mathematical letters, not ancient epistemes or empirical observations (“Doctrine of Science” 267-71; “Interview” 4-10). The modern, mathematical/philological subject is the only subject that Lacan’s discourse takes seriously; but at the same time, it is contrary to it, for analysis cannot proceed via writing alone. It involves deceptive, transient phenomena such as feelings, handshakes and vocal timbre.
In 1972, Lacan invoked the wall – a metaphor for discourse’s limits – to distinguish between pure science and psychoanalysis. Using formalised writing that has no colloquial sense,
25 science manages to construct something beyond the wall. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, is situated in front of the wall: in a comic-pathetic sense, it cannot avoid the limits of speech and meaning (Séminaire XIX 5.76). The following year, Lacan explained that analysis is a game that involves speech-based encounters with Lady Luck (Séminaire XX 9.105). Science, by contrast, must be written down, not merely spoken, and its experimental findings must be repeatable. Unlike analysis, then, science does not abandon itself to the mercy of Lady Luck.
Lacan reiterated these points in 1980. Science is not dialogue, he acknowledged, and thanks to the formalism of figures such as David Hilbert, science is not necessarily meaningful. Lacan considered this one of science’s advantages with respect to social discourse (“Le malentendu”
13).
In 1971, Lacan proclaimed mathematics the only proper, integrally transmissible teaching. He conceded that his mathèmes, by contrast, are inevitably close to connerie
(‘bullshit’ or perhaps ‘cunt-logic’); for there are no sexual harmonies within discourses for which the mathèmes could serve as absolute indices (Séminaire XIX 2.27). Instead, there are only absences or holes. Lacan’s reference to connerie should not be dismissed as an angry obscenity.
He repeatedly aligned his mathèmes or his topology with the hole (con or trou).50 In 1974, Lacan implied that science deals with le monde, which is supposedly functional; analysis, by contrast, is concerned with things that are dysfunctional and immonde, which means ‘unclean or improper’. It is these things – symptoms of dysfunction – that analysis deems réel (“Le triomphe de la religion” 76; R.S.I. 7.56).
Unlike Lacan, Freud often proclaimed hope that psychoanalysis would one day be accepted as a science; but he, too, acknowledged his alienation from science proper. On 1
February 1900, Freud wrote to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess.
Perhaps there are hard times ahead, both for me and my practice. […] I am actually not at
all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by
temperament nothing but a conquistador – an adventurer, if you want it translated – with
50 See, for example, “L’étourdit” (485), Les non-dupes errent (8.57), R.S.I. (2.17-18, 3.24, 7.56, 7.61, 8.67, 9.73, 10.84-87,
11.89-90), “Séance de clôture” (267), Séminaire XXIII (1.24-25, 5.82-83, 7.117-18, 9.134), “Réponses” (473) and L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre (1.7-9, 2.11-17).
26 all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort. Such people are
customarily esteemed only if they have been successful, have really discovered something;
otherwise they are dropped by the wayside. And that is not altogether unjust. (Complete
Letters 398)
Today, Freud and Lacan continue to provoke hostility from mathematicians. A French topologist, Michel Coornaert, gave Lacan a copy of Dale Rolfsen’s Knots and Links during the first session of Le moment de conclure. This does not mean, however, that the two were friends.
According to Coornaert, he only met Lacan twice. (The second time was when Lacan returned the book to Coornaert.) In 2012, Coornaert said that, from a mathematical viewpoint, Lacan’s work is meaningless. He referred to it as “poetry” (personal communication, 4 September and 6
September 2012). In short, Coornaert affirmed that Lacan’s doctrine involves elements of poetic- sophistic senselessness that interrupt any claim to pure science. This is correct. A year later, an
Australian topologist named Daniel Mathews argued that science serves the Good by promoting
“non-reading of bullshit, and ignorance of bullshit” (personal communication, 11 August 2013).
For Mathews, Lacan’s work is effectively lumped in with the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas: it is sicut palea, ‘like dross’. This, too, is correct.
In an unpublished report from 1982, the psychoanalyst Denis Lécuru and the mathematician Dominique Barataud argued that Lacan’s Borromean Trinity is not scientific and therefore cannot be deemed necessary. According to them, Lacan’s insistence that the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary are linked in a Borromean manner does not have the status of an axiom; it is a postulate – a term used often in philosophical reasoning. This is perhaps why
Lacan conceded the following in 1977: Mais la philosophie, c’est tout ce que nous savons faire.
Mes nœuds borroméens, c’est de la philosophie aussi (Le moment de conclure 3.15). Lécuru and
Barataud granted that a metaphorical usage of topological constructions is valid, but one must be careful when interpreting Lacan’s term mathème. If the Borromean Trinity, as one of Lacan’s mathèmes, is interpreted as a mathematical construction, then it is invalid. If it is interpreted as mythematical, which I believe is correct, then it receives a pass (qtd. in Roustang, Lacanian
Delusion 98-99).
Since Lacan was a Freudian, his mathèmes have a similar status to Freud’s myth of the primal father. Freud referred to the latter as “only a hypothesis” made from “the darkness of
27 prehistoric times”, a “Just-So Story” (like the one famously told by Plato’s Timaeus) or a
“scientific myth”. Who assumes the position of the dead Father-Creator and speaks on his behalf? The scientist or the poet? “The first epic poet”, Freud asserted; he who “disguised the truth with lies according to his longing”; he who “invented the heroic myth” (Group Psychology
122, 135-36). On this subject, John Farrell wrote, “As with all myths of origin, the early parts of the story remain fragmentary and obscure, while the later have the clarity of dogma”
(Freud’s Paranoid Quest 14). How did Lacan respond to this? In 1970, Lacan named Freud’s
Oedipus myth sensational, outrageous and a dream (Séminaire XVII 6.114, 7.135); but in 1978, he acknowledged that his mathèmes derived from the same myths that fascinated Freud – myths about sexual disharmony that are assumed to be true whenever an analyst takes up his/her position in the clinic (Le moment de conclure 5.21, 10.53). Lacan, simply put, was
Freud’s epigone, and the mathèmes were part of his commentary on Freudian doctrine
(“Réponses” 473).
Returning to Lécuru and Barataud, they argued that Lacan’s Borromean Trinity is acceptable as a postulate if it can demonstrate the validity of its foundation via an extension of its rational field. If such a feat is impossible, then the Borromean Trinity is a dogma, not a postulate. The Borromean Trinity is sustained only through the faith invested in it by Lacan’s disciples (qtd. in Roustang, Lacanian Delusion 98-99). Roudinesco, likewise, believed that
Lacan’s mathèmes comprised “a new instrument of dogma” (Jacques Lacan 362-63). These arguments strike me as plausible, given that, no matter how hard Freud tried to avoid the mess of patriarchal inheritance, his inventions nevertheless preserved a religious binding function and sanctified the surname. Lacan never freed analytic discourse from this mess, nor did he pretend to do so.
In 1987, Miller said that analytic praxis constitutes a sign of love but not a proof: “God, when he existed, demanded that we love him, not that we prove him”. Analysis is not something “in conformity with the scientific hypothesis”, for it cannot establish a direct link between the Symbolic and the Real; it falls back on “an imaginary mediation”. According to
Miller, to take up the analyst’s position entails an act or a pragmatic resolution, not a theory
(“Σ(x)” n. pag.). So while the Borromean Trinity or the Brunnian Father is not a scientific, testable hypothesis, it is perhaps a conjecture. As a mathème, it fixes a new, so-called true
28 opinion (“L’étourdit” 483-85; “Télévision” 538-39); and it is based on sketchy clinical evidence that cannot be rendered complete.
Regardless of whether the Brunnian Father is defined as a conjecture, a postulate or a dogma, it is not for mathematicians. In 1974, Lacan described his Brunnian link-making as a jeu de l’amour, ‘game of love’ (Les non-dupes errent 9.68). It was a detailed game that Lacan played for many years, thanks to psychotic rigour or obstinacy (“Conférences et entretiens” 9); but it was not a science. The year prior, Lacan admitted that his Borromean rings were mythical, because no one in reality manufactures perfectly closed rings of string linked in a
Borromean manner (Séminaire XX 10.115). What a dry statement!
The following is inexcusable from science’s perspective: Lacan’s use of the Borromean rings was grounded partly on stupidity and dupery (R.S.I. 2.15), synonymous with faith in social links. For analytic discourse, there is no progress beyond this belief, no accession to meta- language (Séminaire XVIII 7.124). In 1973, Lacan dismissed pre-discursive reality as an epistemologist’s dream. One’s grip on reality, for better or worse, is determined by discourses.
Reality is whatever can be recognised within a given discursive domain and agreed upon as evidence – a collective fantasy (Séminaire XX 3.33; “Séance de clôture” 269). This assertion may initially appear offensive to science, but mathematicians after Giuseppe Peano, Gottlob
Frege, Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel know exactly how difficult it is to establish a domain and determine its consistency. For modern science, a set of axioms is primary; pre-discursive reality or meaning absolutely is not. For analysis, the Father qua set of postulates, {R, S, I}, is fundamental; empiricism is not. Science’s axioms and analysis’s postulates are far from the same, but they are both symptoms of a fundamental forcing.
Ultimately, Lacan did not believe that analytic discourse could become a science that replaced religion. He regularly referred to the International Psychoanalytic Association not as a group of scientists but as l’Église, ‘the Church’. See, for example, Lacan’s “Proposition du 9 octobre 1967” (257) and “Lettre de dissolution” (318). In the latter text, Lacan attributed the stability of religion to the fact that it provides meaning, not to mention aesthetic splendour. In response to a question by Hugh Moorhead on “the meaning of life”, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell wrote, “Unless you assume a God, the question (of life’s meaning) is meaningless” (qtd. in Moorhead, Meaning of Life 165). This should not be mistaken
29 as an endorsement of religion; Russell’s response merely assigns religion its proper place, which is that of meaning. In Lacan’s view, mathematicians are the only people that can endure an austere (and perhaps non-religious) domain of letters (Les non-dupes errent 9.68). Analytic discourse, by contrast, is stuck with Father figures and thus with meaning.
Analytic discourse’s tendency to combine science and meaning, logic and theatre, geometry and poetry is arguably what makes it so odious to non-analysts (Lacan, Séminaire
XVI 22.353; Lacan, Séminaire XVIII 9.157). Consider, for example, the controversy generated by Lacan’s 1966 Baltimore talk, in which he explicitly declared that, for his topology, “a formalism of the metaphor is primary” (“Of Structure” 198; Bricmont and Sokal, Fashionable
Nonsense 5, 19-20; Stolzenberg, “Physicist” 3).51 The English word metaphor and the French word métaphore both derive from the Greek verb metapherein, ‘to transfer’. For Lacan, then, “a formalism of the metaphor” pertains to transference-love and the Father more so than the topology of professional mathematicians. Recall, for instance, the thirteenth-century ḥokhmat ha-tzeruf of Abraham Abulafia – a ‘logic of letter-combination’ that composed divine Names for ecstatic recitation rituals (Wolfson, “Jewish Mysticism” 481). Lacan’s topological metaphors are made from the same philological material.
The remarks made by Lacan on Cantor at the Panthéon are not as well known as the
Baltimore talk, but they are just as likely to provoke ridicule from mathematicians. In 1974,
Lacan said that the distinction between cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers – a distinction he attributed to Cantor and other mathematicians from the late nineteenth century – was relevant to the invention of analytic discourse (Les non-dupes errent 5.34, 5.38). In this particular instance, Lacan’s allusion was historical rather than poetic: he simply acknowledged the fact that Freud’s creation of analytic discourse is coterminous with Cantor’s creation of set theory. He hinted at this in his “Proposition du 9 octobre 1967” (249) and in “L’étourdit” (477-
78, 486, 492).
For those that follow Cantor, the sets {1, 2, 3} and {4, 5, 6} are not identical, but they have the same cardinality, which means that each set has three elements. Lacan played on this via the title of Séminaire XXII, R.S.I., plus the working title of Séminaire XXIII, which was 4,
51 Lacan’s 1966 Baltimore talk was originally published in English.
30 5, 6.52 The set {R, S, I} has three elements; so does the set {4, 5, 6}. The set’s number of elements is more important for Lacan’s doctrine than any possible meaning that can be attributed to the elements. Lacan did not intend R.S.I. to be read as first, second, third, for the
Real is not primary with respect to the Symbolic and the Imaginary. It is not, I repeat, pre- discursive reality, concrete flaccidity, or anything along those lines. For Lacan’s doctrine, there is only a Real if there is a Trinity-set, {R, S, I}. Lacan’s discourse literally cannot exist without the Trinity (R.S.I. 11.89).53 The Real of Lacan’s Trinity is thus distinct from mathematicians’ real numbers. Lacan’s Real is not pure; it is inextricably linked to the Imaginary and thus to the ruins of opinion and human perception. Lacan referred to this problem as la débilité mentale and l’imbécillité (R.S.I. 1.7).
Academics should not dismiss this material too hastily. Although Le séminaire was not strictly scientific, Lacan often cited work that academics can further investigate. Relationships between Brunnian links and prime numbers, for example, have attracted plenty of attention from mathematicians since Lacan first began his jeu de l’amour. Even though a Borromean link has a trivial linking number (as do all Brunnian links), one can use Milnor invariants to prove that the Borromean link is in fact non-trivial. In 1976, Vladimir Turaev made an analogy between Milnor invariants and Massey products. In the early 2000s, Masanori Morishita introduced “arithmetic analogues of the Milnor invariants and Massey products for prime numbers” (“Analogies” 12). Morishita noted that the triple of primes, {13, 61, 937}, involves the same relations as the Borromean link. Morishita thus named these three numbers mod 2
Borromean primes (“Analogies” 17). How is this a coincidence with respect to Lacan? If Lacan’s set {R, S, I} is indeed Borromean, then {R, S, I} is literally {13, 61, 937}. The coincidence is somewhat amusing.
In the mid-1960s, Barry Mazur and David Mumford made an analogy between knots, links and primes after Michael Artin, John Tate and Jean-Louis Verdier established a three- dimensional view of a number ring (Mazur, “Remarks” 1; Morishita, “Analogies” 2). Later,
52 Lacan later decided upon Le sinthome as the title for Séminaire XXIII.
53 Academics frequently misunderstand this. Many identify Lacan’s Real with the Kantian Sublime or the transcendent; but as Jeanne Lafont pointed out, Lacan’s Real is indebted to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s studies of set membership
(“Topology and Efficiency” 3). Lacan acknowledged that he owed a lot to Lévi-Strauss (“Conférences et entretiens” 53).
31 Mikhail Kapranov and Alexander Smirnov established an analogy between the Legendre symbol of primes and linking numbers (“Cohomology” 9-10). Between 1995 and 2000, Kapranov and
Alexander Reznikov developed further analogies between number fields and three-dimensional manifolds and christened the new field of study arithmetic topology (Morishita, “Analogies” 2).
To reiterate, interest in the material that Lacan treated as a jeu de l’amour has in fact intensified since the time of Lacan’s death. It cannot all be written off as stupid. For some, this is a bitter joke.
In spite of the multiple controversies generated by Lacan’s mathèmes, not all academics reject mathematical metaphors. In 1990, the mathematician Yuri Ivanovich Manin offered a notable defence. Manin’s text reads as an unwitting defence of Le séminaire. He believed that spoken language is sometimes desirable in excess of pure writing: “appealing to the spatial and qualitative imagination, it helps to understand ‘structurally stable’ properties like the number of free parameters (dimension), existence of extrema, symmetries. To put it bluntly, it makes possible the metaphorical use of science”. After clarifying that his “argumentation by no means undermines the ideal of a rigorous mathematical reasoning”, Manin concluded with a theological affirmation. “Metaphor”, he wrote, “helps a human being to breathe in this rarefied atmosphere of Gods” (“Mathematics as Metaphor” 1670-71).
In 1995, Louis H. Kauffman – a mathematician with no attachment to Lacanians – published “Knot Logic”. He discussed the trefoil knot in relation to “knot set theory” and briefly mentioned the Borromean rings.54 Knot set theory, according to Kauffman’s definition,
“accommodates sets that are members of themselves and sets whose members are defined mutually. The diagrammatic representation of knot sets is so constructed that topologically equivalent diagrams represent the same set”. By accident, Kauffman went on to produce the most amusing metaphor for narcissistic coupling that I have encountered. Knot sets, he noted, use the fermionic convention “for the treatment of lists and identicals”, unlike ordinary set theory, which uses the bosonic convention. According to the fermionic convention, “the set {a, a} is equivalent to the empty set” (which, for Lacanians, is the set of subjects that enjoy sexual harmony); whereas, for the bosonic convention, “identicals condense in pairs”, which means that
54 Kauffman also referenced the trinity-obsessed logician, Charles Sanders Peirce (“Knot Logic” 45). Kauffman’s work is thus not far from Lacanians’ pre-occupations (Lacan, L’insu que sait 4.29).
32 “{a, a} = {a} in standard sets” (“Knot Logic” 2, 46-50). The former is more appropriate for
Ovid’s Narcissus, for whom {a, a} equated to suicide: “even when he had been received into the infernal abodes, he kept on gazing on his image in the Stygian pool” (Metamorphoses 3.504-05).
In excess of this, Kauffman pointed to the crucial significance of holes. “The fundamentals of set theory are intimately connected, through combinatorial structures and the theme of boundaries, with logic, topology and mathematical physics”, he wrote. “All this from framing nothing!” (“Knot Logic” 32). Kauffman, in short, has plenty to teach contemporary
Lacanians. His texts, incidentally, are cited by Robert Groome (“Generalized Placement” 54),
Raul Moncayo and Magdalena Romanowicz (Real 51, 56-60), and Jean-Michel Vappereau
(“Chapitre II” n. pag.; “Making Rings” 334).
Specific examples of academics within Science faculties that do not dismiss the entirety of Lacan’s work include René Guitart and Alessio Moretti (the co-founder of oppositional geometry). Guitart works with Borromean objects, represented by Borromean diagrams.
Guitart’s following definition should strike the reader as familiar: “a Borromean diagram for an object B is a presentation of this object B as a glueing of three components R, S, I such that if one of the three is eliminated, then the resulting situation is just a trivial composition of the other two objects” (“Klein’s Group” 144; original italics). In 2011, Guitart demonstrated a
Borromean extension of the Sesmat-Blanché logical hexagon, which is itself an extension of the
Aristotelian logical square. The point of Borromean logic, according to Guitart, is that it
“allows an analysis of meanings of paradoxical sentences” (“Hexagonal” 128, 145). Guitart’s article is faithful to Le séminaire, and it was published in Logica Universalis. Examples like this are extremely rare, but they nonetheless exist.
Academics from Anglophone Arts or Humanities faculties occasionally come to the defence of Lacan’s mathèmes. According to Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Lacan cannot be said to have invented a fully-fledged, clearly delimited branch of Lacanian mathematics”, yet there is a chance, they believe, that fruitful psychoanalytic research will be conducted by mathematicians. Glynos and Stavrakakis acknowledged how easy it is to designate
Lacan “a bad pedagogue” (“Postures and Impostures” 212, 221). Since Lacan tried to separate
Le séminaire from academic discourse and its notions of Good, he was indeed a bad pedagogue.
In Jon Mills’ opinion, Lacan successfully achieved this desired alienation. “If you were to
33 randomly open any text of Lacan’s and begin to read”, Mills suggested, “you might immediately think that the man is mad”. At the same time, however, Mills believed that Lacan’s remarks on paranoia possessed “genuine theoretical and clinical value”, even for psychological scientists
(“Lacan” 30-31).
Anglophone scientists usually read Lacan in translation, which exacerbates problems.
So, too, does the editing work conducted by Miller on most of the commercial texts published in
Lacan’s name. The version of “L’étourdit” from Autres écrits is an egregious example. In it,
Lacan’s sexuation formulae are not even spelt properly (Le Gaufey, “Towards” 66-69).55 Gérard
Crovisier detected further mistakes that Miller made in his edition of Lacan’s Séminaire XXIII,
Le sinthome. On page 11, for example, the first drawing of the three-twist knot has incorrect crossing points (“Corrigé” n. pag.).56
Fig. 8. The three-twist knot or nœud de Lacan.
On 17 February 1976, Lacan nicknamed the three-twist knot le nœud de Lacan
(Séminaire XXIII 6.93). This was not a vain ostentation; it was a joke that highlighted the many mistakes Lacan made when drawing knots and links. If you mistakenly draw a positive crossing as a negative crossing (or vice versa) at the point that Lacan labelled 4 or 5, the knot unravels and thereby becomes an unknot. If, however, you make the same mistake at the point labelled 1, 2 or 3, the knot remains a knot, albeit a knot with just three crossing points instead of five.57 (Recall that the knot with three crossing points is the trefoil knot.) The meaning of
55 Autres écrits is a collection of Lacan’s articles that Miller compiled and edited in 2001.
56 Caveat: not all errors are egregious. Thanks to a mistake in Miller’s edition of Séminaire XX (10.113), for example,
Lacan discovered the difference between a link’s mininum cutting number and its maximum cutting number (R.S.I.
7.58, 8.63). This subject is still taken seriously by mathematicians. See, for example, “On Borromean Links” by
Chengzhi Liang and Kurt Mislow.
57 Groome made a detailed diagram of le nœud de Lacan (“The Sinthome Constructed” 5).
34 Lacan’s joke is something like this: as long as Lacan blundered along a path marked by a specific Trinity of points, his discourse managed to hold together. If he erred outside his Trinity, his discourse risked falling apart. The points of the knot labelled 1, 2, 3 thus allude to Lacan’s
R, S, I – the three points required for Le séminaire to hold together.
Discourse’s pollution
In spite of commendable efforts at insulation, pure science is inevitably antagonised by discourse. In 1904, the French topologist Henri Poincaré complained about the proliferation of hysterical, pathological functions. In Poincaré’s opinion, modern logicians too often engendered monsters that disrupted the field of so-called honest, purposeful functions. In a former epoch, mathematicians invented functions for practical purposes; whereas, to his dismay, Poincaré’s contemporaries invented functions to show up faults in le raisonnements de nos pères, ‘the reasoning of our fathers’ (“Les définitions générales” 263-64). Poincaré’s situation conforms to
Lacan’s hysterical schema.58 The knowledge that Master Poincaré abhorred was knowledge of the Father’s failures, revealed by monstrous, sphinx-like logic.
In an auto-biography from 2013, Edward Frenkel provided multiple, hysterical examples of discourse interfering with his scientific work. Consider the following conversation that allegedly took place at Moscow University (MGU) in 1984.
“What’s your name?” she said by way of greeting.
“Eduard Frenkel.” (I used the Russian version of Eduard in those days.)
“And you want to apply to MGU?”
“Yes.”
“Which department?”
“Mekh-Mat.” [Mekh-Mat was MGU’s department of mechanics and mathematics.]
“I see.” She lowered her eyes and asked:
“And what’s your nationality?”
I said, “Russian.”
58 Lacan noted the relationship between science and hysteria in “Note italienne” (309) and “Télévision” (523). Greek historia, I repeat, was a precursor to modern science; science and hysterical discourse each produce knowledge (S2).
35 “Really? And what are your parents’ nationalities?”
“Well… My mother is Russian.”
“And your father?”
“My father is Jewish.”
She nodded. (Love and Math 28-30)
Decades later, Frenkel remained caught up in hysterical discourse. At the end of 2008, he decided he wanted to work on a screenplay with an author named Thomas Farber. Frenkel acknowledged that mathematicians cannot write a formula for sexual harmony, for the latter cannot be expressed as a force of attraction. With reference to two celestial spheres (a star and a planet), Frenkel wrote, “There is a simple mathematical formula that accurately predicts their trajectories all the way into the future once we know the force of attraction between them. How different […] from the interaction of two human bodies – two lovers, or two friends” (Love and
Math 230). Frenkel, like Lacan, did not consider the sphere an appropriate image for desire.
The title of Farber and Frenkel’s screenplay, The Two-Body Problem, was inspired by this very impasse of formalisation. According to Frenkel’s own summary, the screenplay depicts a collision between “the world of literature and art” (represented by a character named
Richard) and “the world of science and mathematics” (represented by a character named
Phillip). Phillip is an expert of “mathematical truth” but not so-called “human truth”. He comes to learn that “approaching life’s problems in the same way as mathematical problems does not always help” (Love and Math 230). Lacan would no doubt agree with this. He believed that in love, wisdom is useless (Les non-dupes errent 5.35). Henry De Man would probably agree, too. In 1927, De Man refuted historical/hysterical materialism and said that the notion of a “scientific socialism” is just as absurd as “scientific love” (Psychology 442).
In 2009, Frenkel met a French film director named Reine Graves. He pitched her an idea for a short film. The focus, once again, was the problem of writing sexual harmony. “A mathematician creates a formula of love”, explained Frenkel, “but then discovers the flip side of the formula: it can be used for Evil as well as for Good. He realises he has to hide the formula to protect it from falling into the wrong hands. And he decides to tattoo it on the body of the woman he loves” (“Mathematics” 3). Frenkel and Graves titled the film Rites of Love and
Math. Although the film received enthusiastic reviews from Le Monde, Tangente Sup and New
36 Scientist, Frenkel was forced to acknowledge that the idea of a formula for love strikes many people as profoundly stupid. In response, Frenkel refined his notion of love. “A mathematical formula does not explain love”, he wrote in 2013, “but it can carry a charge of love” (Love and
Math 239-49).
This modest “charge”, derived from a commitment to formalisation, is perhaps the best that is available from love. It is certainly preferable to the following situation. Back in 1990,
Frenkel attended a guest lecture by the Rector of Moscow University, Anatoly Logunov, delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The lecture hall was packed”, Frenkel wrote. “People did not come to learn anything from his talk. Everybody knew that Logunov was a weak physicist who made his career trying to disprove Einstein’s relativity theory (I wonder why). As expected, the talk – on his ‘new’ theory of gravity – had very little substance”. Since this is an example of discourse, not pure science, it principally concerns a make-believe show.
“Before the talk”, Frenkel recalled, “one of Logunov’s MIT hosts introduced him in a very peculiar fashion. He projected a slide of the first page of a paper in English, co-authored by
Logunov and a few other people and published a decade earlier. I guess the point was to show that Logunov was not a total idiot, but actually he had to his credit some publications in refereed journals” (Love and Math 163).
What is more hysterical than an anti-Jewish theory of gravity? Logunov’s spectacle was comic-pathetic, but it was also diabolical; hence the phrase coined by Lacan, le discours hystérico-diabolique (R.S.I. 9.71). The point is clear: so long as there is discourse, there is controversy. In this sense, Le séminaire is not alone. Pure science, too, is antagonised and manipulated by discourse.
Monologues about discourse
Recall that Freud derived the Father figure from Sophoclean tragedy plus evidence of neurotic repression. The Father, for Lacan, pertained more to Priapeian comedy and delusion, especially post-1968. In honour of the Greeks, then, Le séminaire could be characterised as
Lacan’s parabasis – an Old Comedy digression in which the Chorus typically addressed the audience on behalf of the Author. In Lacan’s case, he delivered monologues on behalf of his
Father figure. Lacan’s preferred figures from 1972 onwards were Brunnian links. Lacan believed
37 that it is better for an analyst to identify his/her self to a Brunnian link than to the narcissistic mirror image (“Joyce le symptôme II” 32). He clarified this in 1976: analysts must be broken in to a new Imaginary, which means a new form of identification (Séminaire XXIII 8.121, 10.146).
The Brunnian link, to reiterate, is the figure proper to the analyst.
During Le séminaire, Lacan spoke about analysts, if only to disturb them; he did not speak to analysts in the hope of receiving understanding (“Télévision” 509-10). In 1972, Lacan broadened the definition of analytic discourse to include speech about the analyst as well as speech issued by the analyst (Séminaire XIX 5.72). In my opinion, this definition is too vulnerable to abuse. Any academic, for example, that speaks about Lacan yet has no analytic experience could, according to the 1972 definition, claim to be involved in analytic discourse.
Hence I prefer the following, strict classification. Le séminaire is a series of monologues delivered by Lacan about the analyst’s position. This is the only relationship between Le séminaire and analytic discourse. The latter is defined as a clinical practice (Séminaire XI 1.8-
13) – a social bond between an analyst and an analysand.
Lacan acknowledged that, during Le séminaire, he spoke to walls rather than interlocutors, and from this, he attempted to formalise a logic of réson – a play on reason and the walls’ resonances (“Je parle aux murs” 93). He later spoke of paranoïa raisonnée, ‘reasoned paranoia’ (“Conférences et entretiens” 58). Suffice to say, talking to walls or trying to deduce a logic from one’s own monologues is not how one forms social bonds. Le séminaire, I repeat, is almost impossible to confuse with discourse.
Lacan marked a place for voluntary monologues at the end of analysis. This is the principal meaning of la passe (“Proposition du 9 octobre 1967” 255).59 Le séminaire was arguably Lacan’s interminable passe. Is the place of la passe included in analytic discourse, or does la passe, as the name suggests, denote a passage from the end of analysis to something different? A recent proposal by Miller complicates the issue. According to him, la passe is a monologue; and, if successful, it is attributed aesthetic value by others. Miller invented public showings of la passe, for he believed la passe aims to show a symptom’s transformation from a
59 Note the feminine article, la. For Lacanians, la denotes something that is impossible to finish or cannot be counted as complete.
38 complaint to an aesthetic object – an escabeau (‘little stool’) that involves le beau (‘the beautiful’) and thus implies elevation or dignity. (Imagine a librarian reaching for a highly prized, top-shelf book.) For Miller, passes are not proofs of the Real; escabeaus exist, rather, “to produce beauty, because beauty is the last defence against the Real”. Miller’s version of la passe is not a monologue delivered to the walls of an asylum; it aims for “the benefit of anybody who happens to come along to a congress [for] whom it’s a matter of seducing and filling with enthusiasm”. La passe is thus an analysis “put to the test” (“L’inconscient” n. pag.).
Is Miller’s sensitivity to beauty a reactionary, academic response that is not faithful to analytic discourse proper? This is possible (Fierens, Lecture de L’étourdit 266; Lacan,
“L’étourdit” 488). What is the difference between Miller’s conception of la passe and the postgraduate student that addresses an established field of academics (S2) and effectively incarnates something brilliant/beautiful that is absent (a) from their libraries? If there is indeed a difference between Miller’s passe and routine academic work, it is perhaps this: in the case of the latter, the object (a) is the work of an undergraduate student that conforms to academic orthodoxy; for Miller’s passe, the object (a), by contrast, is a singular père-version/sublimation, such as the work of Joyce. Lacan, incidentally, introduced the concept of the escabeau during his talk at the 1975 International James Joyce Symposium. He later spelt it l’S.K.beau to emphasise the letter-based beauty of Joyce’s work (“Joyce le symptôme I” 26; “Joyce le symptôme II” 31-32). Joyce, simply put, did not keep academics busy for centuries by writing undergraduate Literature essays; he wrote Ulysses. The difference is not subtle.60
The recognition, appreciation and success of a passe cannot be guaranteed. As aesthetic objects, escabeaus risk being discarded and forgotten, like many of academia’s so-called “artistic practice as research” outputs or projects funded by the Australia Council for the Arts. For every prized surname such as Joyce and Schoenberg (artists invoked by Miller), there are countless epigones writing something incoherent or bashing away at the same twelve notes of a piano or guitar. When Lacan presided over la passe at the École freudienne de Paris, passants were, as Roudinesco put it, “massively rejected”. After “almost two hundred passes” from 1967
60 Miller’s conception of la passe is certainly different to that of Lacan’s peers at the École freudienne in 1970, who conceived la passe as a “fall into anonymity”. They were forced to acknowledge, however, that a successful passe relied upon a decision made by the school’s founding father – a privileged surname (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co. 463).
39 to 1980, only seventeen passants were deemed successful and thereby permitted to ascend to the rank of training analyst. Lacan’s École freudienne was thus “the most selective” analytic association in France (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co. 462-63).
As Lacan’s own passe, Le séminaire constituted a series of peculiar, mock-theological testaments that aimed for aesthetic renewal. See the seminar of 19 April 1977, for example, in which Lacan said that the first thing analysis needs to do is extinguish conventional notions of the Beautiful (L’insu que sait 10.71). Consider, too, the demand that Lacan issued on 14 July
1972 for an alternative to la bonne forme and Kantian aesthetics (“L’étourdit” 472, 476). The success of Le séminaire, like the success of any passe, is contingent upon the interest of others within analytic institutions as well as attempts by academics to attribute it sense. This is an admittedly limp conclusion, but a passe is not supposed to titillate belief in spheres of knowledge, perfection and omnipotence. A touch of shame is inevitable (Lacan, Séminaire XVII
13.223).
If Le séminaire sucks people in and produces little effects of amazement, it will continue to be taken up within academia.61 There is no guarantee, however, that this will go on for eternity. Recall the signifier that emerged at the very end of Le séminaire to proclaim the fate of Lacan’s École: dissolution (“Lettre de dissolution” 317; “Le malentendu” 13). Perhaps a similar fate awaits the field of Lacanian scholarship.
61 See Séminaire XIX (14.208): Lacan played on épater (‘to amaze’) and pater (‘father’).
40 1.3 The Father figure: Lacan’s lame symptom
Vous êtes tous, et tout un chacun, aussi inconsistants que vos pères.
– Jacques Lacan (R.S.I. 5.44)
J’hérite de Freud, bien malgré moi.
– Jacques Lacan (Séminaire XXIII 1.12)
J’ai véhiculé beaucoup de ces choses que l’on appelle freudiennes. […] Mais dans ce que j’appelle le réel, j’ai
inventé, parce que cela s’est imposé à moi. […] C’est là quelque chose dont je peux dire que je le considère comme
n’étant rien de plus que mon symptôme.
– Jacques Lacan (Séminaire XXIII 9.132)
In the previous chapter, I examined Lacan’s Panthéon seminars using Lacan’s own discourse-schemas. Le séminaire, according to my reading, was not a discourse; it was a series of monologues. I also suggested that Lacan’s Father figures were père-verse/sublime. They, likewise, do not conform to Lacan’s definition of discourses qua social situations. In this chapter,
I examine Lacan’s work from the Panthéon period via three major sublimations: theology (and religious anti-philosophy), philosophy and poetic sophistry. Philosophy, I argue, is the least appropriate descriptor for Lacan’s work.
Mock-theology
During his time at the Panthéon, Lacan did not spew bile on the subject of his Catholic upbringing; he instead designated the Trinity sublime (“L’étourdit” 468; Les non-dupes errent
4.30). The Sublime, defined by Lacan as the point of least identitarian stupidity, is the aim of every discourse (Séminaire XX 1.18). What does this have to do with knots and links? In 1976,
Lacan gave a particular knot his own name (le nœud de Lacan) and described it as absolument sublime, and he referred to the Borromean link as his sinthome, his invention and his infatuation (Séminaire XXIII 6.93, 9.129-32, 10.145). Sinthome is the Old French spelling of symptôme, a pun on saint homme and an allusion to religious sublimation. How, exactly, is a mock-theological knot or link the least stupid point of analytic discourse? Lacan thought that knots and Brunnian links – figures that necessitate a minimum of three crossing points or else three components – were close to the structure of analytic interpretation, beyond trivial couples
41 such as Good/Evil, Left/Right (“Propos sur l’hystérie” 10; “Le séminaire de Caracas” 82). On 20
December 1977, he conceded that he had not found anything better than his Brunnian links, deemed metaphorical images of Sigmund Freud’s doctrine (Le moment de conclure 3.16; see also
“Séminaire du 9 janvier 1979” 1-2).
In 1893, Freud defined psychical material as a “logical chain” that “contains nodal points” and determines a symptom (“Psychotherapy of Hysteria” 289-90, 295, 299).62 Lacan’s
Panthéon work adhered so strictly to this definition, many academics consider it mad. In 1975,
Lacan acknowledged that he inherited from Freud, in spite of himself (Séminaire XXIII 1.12).
What Lacan inherited, first and foremost, was the Father – something he believed was stuck running through Freud’s head (Séminaire VIII 24.416).63 In a study of monotheistic religion,
Freud described a collective’s love for the Father as a “chain” or a “network” that reserves a place for exceptional figures such as Moses. These figures, like the Father that they are supposed to model, are somewhat mysterious or impossible to justify. Beauty, athleticism, intellect, extraordinary proficiency, virtuosity, effective action, force of influence, success achieved within one’s lifetime – none of these things constitute sufficient proof of Father figures or “great men” (Moses and Monotheism 89-90, 108-10).
In spite of such difficulties, Lacan insisted that, if the Father is not established as a default, Freudian discourse falls apart (R.S.I. 3.26-27). The Father is both a flaw of Freudian doctrine and an unconditioned element (Séminaire XVI 4.70; “Joyce le symptôme I” 27) – a sign of no progress. Lacan admitted that Freudian theory was lame (boiteux) and that clinical interpretation was delusional, but in his opinion, analysis marched on nonetheless. It remained the best way to deal with cette situation incommode d’être homme, ‘this awkward situation of being Man’ (“Ouverture de la section clinique” 9, 13). On 18 March 1975, Lacan proclaimed faith in his Borromean Trinity – the thing that humiliated him in public and caused him to suffer/enjoy like a symptom. He tried to give the statement, “I believe”, a different form of
62 Nodus is the Latin word for ‘knot’. Nodal points are thus synonymous with knot-points.
63 Alongside Freud, Alexandre Kojève was an important figure for Lacan. Kojève defined the Father-Authority as
“anything that can act on me without my having the possibility of reacting on it” – something averse to conscious mastery or manipulation. Reaction against the Father would be “a reaction against oneself, a kind of suicide” (Notion of
Authority 12, 28).
42 credibility – a written form, a symbolic form and an imaginary form. He was certain that he would fail (R.S.I. 8.66); yet he persevered, without requesting pardon.
Lacan’s Panthéon seminars were thus explicitly precarious. Lacan repeatedly acknowledged analytic discourse’s proximity to religion and dupery (Les non-dupes errent 1.6).
The Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary were, for Lacan, the three Names-of-the-Father
(R.S.I. 7.53). On 13 April 1975, he clarified that his Borromean Trinity was not simply mock-
Christian; it broadly parodied multiple religious trinities (“Séance de clôture” 265). On 11 May
1976, he referred to a Brunnian link’s formation as la père-version or la fonction du père
(Séminaire XXIII 10.150, 10.154) – more variations on the theme of religare.64 Seven months later, he named psychoanalysis the modern form of religious faith (L’insu que sait 2.12). Peter
Sloterdijk presumably agrees with this. In 2009, he characterised psychoanalysis as faith in
“crippledom”. “Freud”, he wrote, “describes man as a ‘prosthetic God’ who could not survive without the support of civilisatory provisions for existence” (You 57).
Although religion disgruntled Freud, he approved of the comical definition offered by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: he who possesses science and art also has religion, whereas he who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion (qtd. in Civilization 74). Lacan took the first part of Goethe’s joke literally: Le séminaire involved both science and art, from which he formalised a religious link-function. Regarding his own, admittedly preposterous myth of the
Father, Freud emphasised the forcing of meaning or coherence: “I think it is creditable to such a hypothesis if it proves able to bring coherence and understanding into more and more new regions” (Group Psychology 122). Lacan, likewise, spoke of meaning and coherence as forçage imaginaire, ‘imaginary forcing’ (Séminaire XXIII 1.19). Without imaginary forcing, Lacan’s links – and, by extension, his doctrine – cannot hold together.
Lacan’s Panthéon period was just as père-verse as Catholic or Protestant theology.
Recall Saint Thomas Aquinas’s famous description of his writings as palea (‘dross or chaff’) or
Martin Luther’s identification with a ripe turd, waiting to be dropped from the gigantic anus of the world (D. Martin Luthers Werke 222; Lacan, Séminaire VII 7.111). Lacan believed the analyst occupied a place formerly held by the saint (“Télévision” 519) – a place among the
64 Recall that religare means ‘to retie or rebind’.
43 unwashed and the unwanted. Unlike the saint, however, the analyst is not worshipped as a social ideal or upheld as a model citizen (Séminaire VIII 7.130, 24.421-22).65 In spite of Lacan’s proximity to the Trinity, his figure of the analyst is strictly not the Son through which society achieves redemption.
To the best of my knowledge, Lacan never promised to abolish faith during the
Panthéon period. How could he? One only enters an analyst’s clinic if one believes in something that can attribute meaning to one’s symptom or potentially reveal the origin of suffering/enjoyment. This is the neurotic position, which is tantamount to believing in God.
The other two clinical structures – psychosis and perversion – also begin with belief. Lacan characterised psychosis as radical belief in the symptom and the pervert as a defender of the faith (Séminaire XVI 16.253; Séminaire XX 4.44; R.S.I. 4.34-35, 9.76). In 1973, Lacan commended Freud for pursuing the structure of an analysand’s faith, no matter how imbecilic, after criticising him for erring on the side of science. This is a delicate point. Lacan praised
Freud for examining others’ belief in the occult (which reportedly led to figures of the dead
Beloved, much like the Father), even though Freud himself did not believe in the occult (Les non-dupes errent 2.10, 2.16, 3.25). Freud thereby acknowledged the existence of Beloved- symptoms without necessarily attributing the Beloveds any meaning or else attaching himself to them (New Introductory Lectures 31-36). Freud believed that the symptom existed (for an other); yet he himself did not believe in it. That is the subtle point of distinction.
On other occasions, Lacan doubted this line of argumentation. In 1970, he noted how bizarre it was that Freud presumed his myth of the Father could make religion evaporate, for the Father preserves the very substance of religion (Séminaire XVII 6.114). Towards the end of
1974, Lacan said that, via the Father of castration, Freudian doctrine perpetuates religion and consecrates it as an ideal neurosis (R.S.I. 2.18). In 1978, Lacan wondered aloud if Freud, in spite of his well-known protestations, was in fact religious (Le moment de conclure 10.53).
65 The Lacanian analyst deals with just one analysand at a time and responds in a singular manner; therefore the analyst’s function cannot be applied to social groups. Interpreting social symptoms (à la Karl Marx) and adopting a universal address is something very different (Lacan, R.S.I. 6.51-52). Group therapies are not Lacanian.
44 No progress beyond philology
In 1970, Lacan asserted that analytic discourse could not have been born outside the
Talmudic, philological tradition (Séminaire XVII 9.158) – a reference to Freud’s upbringing.
Lacan later made fun of his own religious upbringing and characterised his Écrits as mystical emissions (Séminaire XX 6.71). In 1972, he declared that his mathèmes owed their existence to religious orthodoxy. The Church, he predicted, will last till the end of time; analysis will not prevail against it (“L’étourdit” 484-85). When in Rome in 1974, Lacan entertained the possibility that psychoanalysis would one day become a proper religion (like Scientology).
Although he hoped it would not, he did not predict a successful resistance. According to Lacan, humanity is likely to rid itself of analysis by smothering symptoms with conventional religious meaning. He considered Freudian analysis a little flash of truth that would not necessarily last; religion, by contrast, is a fiesta to be suffered/enjoyed for centuries to come (“Freud per sempre” 6; “Le triomphe de la religion” 78-83). Lacan is perhaps correct. According to a 2015 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, if present trends continue, in the year 2050, so- called non-believers “will make up a declining share of the world’s total population”, which is
“expected to rise to 9.3 billion”.66 The two largest groups, Muslims and Christians, will together comprise sixty-one per cent of the population (“Future” 5, 7; original italics).
During his one major appearance on French television, Lacan touched on multiple religious themes: the soul, the saint, the god that satisfied Dante’s Beatrice and the god of Isaac
Newton. He mocked the emptiness of contemporary humanitairerie (‘hysterical humanitarianism’) and predicted a resurgence of fundamentalist racism (“Télévision” 512, 519-
20, 527, 534-36). Today, this seems prescient (Sloterdijk, You 1-5; Žižek, Trouble in Paradise ch. 2). From 1975 onwards, Lacan treated the paranoiac God-subject as the default subject- structure instead of the neurotic (Séminaire XXIII 3.53). Why? Instead of believing in God like a 1930s neurotic, the 1970s liberal capitalist thought that he/she was God (L’insu que sait
12.76).67 Saint Augustine’s description of a subject that takes himself to be God is especially
66 Pew Research Center is a proper name, therefore I have not changed the spelling of Center.
67 In 1961, Julius Evola discussed the problem of “the Self” assuming the place of God “when all superstructure has fragmented” (Ride the Tiger 41-46, 61-63). The problem became increasingly common in the 1970s and 1980s.
45 relevant – “a prisoner, trying to simulate a crippled sort of freedom, attempting a shady parody of omnipotence” (Confessions 2.6.14).
For Lacan, God is synonymous with divine, sexual harmony; hence it is both amusing and sad that so many Europeans, Americans and Australians took themselves to be God after the so-called Sexual Revolution. More recently, an aspiring French-Turkish terrorist, Abu
Oussama, imaginarily fused individuals that satisfy divine imperatives with houris, ‘splendid companions’. “Our women are waiting for us there [in Paradise], with angels as servants”,
Oussama said, excitedly. “You will have a palace, a winged horse of gold and rubies” (qtd. in
Dearden, “Journalist” n. pag.). Did Lacan encourage such belief in sexual ecstasy or explosive, individual empowerment? No. He instead fashioned his Trinity as a shoddy, humiliating parody of l’ex-sistence – a term derived from the mystical, philosophico-religieux field. In spite of the intensifying rhetoric of consumer satisfaction, Lacan designated divine harmony impossible and held on to this as a fundamental truth (R.S.I. 2.18, 3.25). When he drafted his analytic schema, he placed the Borromean Father – a figure of castration, not sexual harmony – in the place of truth (Séminaire XVII 7.125, 13.216). This is a mock-theological truth more so than a philosophical truth (Les non-dupes errent 3.23).
Religious anti-philosophy
In 1975, Lacan spoke of his Borromean Trinity with reference to the philosophico- religieux field. He admitted he was unsure whether he could be freed of the charge of flagrant deism (R.S.I. 3.25; “Séance de clôture” 265). A year later, he invoked the term théologie- philosophie and implied that he could not easily get out of it (“Réponses” 473). Søren
Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century anti-philosopher, embraced this difficulty and perhaps did not seek to get out of it at all. In his journals, he referred to himself as “a Christian poet and thinker” and “a poet of the religious” (Søren 149, 234; entry numbers 6391 and 6511). Truth, for Kierkegaard, is linked to poetic invention, not science or description: “I am not a witness to the truth”, he wrote. “My admitting this is the truth in me. But the fact that it is true in me produces a pain which is precisely the condition for the poet’s and the philosopher’s creativity”
(Søren 149; entry number 6391).
46 Kierkegaard’s anti-philosophical ideal was “the Poet in the Sphere of Religion” (Søren
241; entry number 6521).68 Le séminaire, by contrast, exhibited a poet (or a poetic sophist) in the Borromean rings of religion. Lacan repeatedly derided the sphere and wanted to deprive others of it (Séminaire XVII 2.36; Séminaire XX 7.81; R.S.I. 8.66-67; Séminaire XXIII 7.109;
“Joyce le symptôme II” 31-32). For Lacan, the sphere was an image of the worst – a disastrous foreclosure of castration or imperfection (Séminaire VIII 6.117, 17.282). This point cannot be over-stated. In 1972, Lacan implied that religious orthodoxy turns around the sphere. Clinical analysis, by contrast, severs the subject from the sphere and produces something heterodox
(“L’étourdit” 485). Lacanian analysis does not aim to produce non-dupes or non-pudes – subjects as putatively free as atheists or empowered, post-1970 consumers. To the contrary,
Lacan envisaged the creation of non-non-dupes (Les non-dupes errent 9.66, 13.90). The Biblical
Fall is negated not once but twice. One, delusional freedom is negated for the sake of precise limits; two, unconscious appeals for forgiveness or Grace are negated so that one can better persevere. So while religious anti-philosophy appropriately describes Lacan’s Panthéon period,
Lacan’s anti-philosophy was not the same as Kierkegaard’s, owing specifically to Lacan’s contempt for the sphere.
On 16 March 1976, Lacan spoke about love and philosophy; but emphasis remained on religion. He designated his Borromean Trinity a folisophie – a neologism derived from folie
(‘folly or madness’) and philosophie – and he compared it to the Book of Wisdom from The
Catholic Bible. Why? The Book of Wisdom treats God as a hole in transmissible knowledge, and this is exactly how Lacan’s link treats sexual harmony (Séminaire XXIII 8.128). As an aside,
Lacan made a similar allusion to folly and religion at the end of 1973. He promised to generate interpretations of his Borromean Trinity that would make his audience vomit, but he predicted that, like the dog from Proverbs 26.11, they would lap some of Lacan’s meanings back up afterwards (Les non-dupes errent 4.29-30).69
Lacan’s Borromean folisophie tried to demonstrate the hole-truth. A Borromean link, like all Brunnian links, verifies the absence of a non-trivial couple and thereby creates what
68 See also Nicolai de Cusa, who believed that the Trinity was identical to a sphere (De docta ignorantia ch. 15, ch. 23).
Although Lacan parodied Catholic theology, his Trinity was not a sphere (Séminaire XXIII 2.35-36, 7.109).
69 “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26.11).
47 Lacan called un vrai trou, ‘a true hole’. This is how Lacan figured the inexistence of sexual harmony. Lacan admitted that he was infatuated with his Borromean link (Séminaire XXIII
1.24-25, 5.82-83, 8.128). He loved it. In falling for the Borromean link, Lacan conformed to his own formula of love: he shifted from a contingency to a necessity (Séminaire XX 11.132). What do I mean by this? Following a contingent encounter in 1972 (when Lacan first met his beloved object), Lacan stopped non-geometrizing; afterwards, he did not stop geometrizing until death, which made geometrizing seem necessary. This is perhaps foolish or mad, but such is love; and in the case of Lacan and the Borromean Trinity, this is exactly what happened.
Truth and love (philia) permitted Lacan to momentarily flirt with philosophy, but the
God-hole and the proverbial dog’s folly each point to religious anti-philosophy. Folisophie, then, is closer to the latter than it is to philosophy. Lacan only mentioned the word philosophie in relation to the Borromean link a handful of times. He once, for example, compared his Trinity to Aristotle’s Trinity (noùs, psuchè, sôma); but this was during the seminar series Le sinthome, when Lacan was arguably parodying le saint homme – Saint Thomas Aquinas, the theologian that famously injected Aristotle’s Trinity into Catholic doctrine (Séminaire XXIII 10.146).
Socrates, like Lacan, conceived a tripartite soul (as well as a quadripartite soul), and he sometimes relied on rhetorical figures; but these are only vague similarities (Plato, Republic
4.443d, 6.487e, 7.533d-534a; Brann, Music 166). In sum, I do not believe the borroméen plus philosophie association can be taken as seriously as the association between borroméen and les
Noms-du-Père or folisophie.
On 20 December 1977, Lacan accepted the charge of philosophie, which he considered a fate of pretence (Le moment de conclure 3.15); but more often, he refused the term. On 29
October 1974, he said he was not at all a philosopher and that he trusted philosophy as much as a plague (“Le triomphe de la religion” 96, 101). In an interview published on 21 November 1974,
Lacan said he abhorred contemporary philosophy (“Freud per sempre” 2). When he visited an
American university on 2 December 1975, Lacan said he did not practise philosophy, for an analyst, unlike a self-help expert, does not respond to an analysand with wisdom (“Conférences et entretiens” 53). On 18 March 1980, he proclaimed himself an anti-philosopher and said he expected nothing from contemporary, finitude-obsessed philosophies other than bizarre offshoots
(“Monsieur A.” 17).
48 I do not believe that Freud’s doctrine should be considered a philosophy, either. As
Lacan pointed out in 1978, Freud’s so-called philosophy only has one truth: sexual disharmony
(Le moment de conclure 5.21). There are two problems here. First, Freudian truth refers to the
Father’s inevitable fall, which again places the accent on theology rather than philosophy.
Second, for Badiouian philosophers, a doctrine that consists of just one truth-procedure cannot be considered a philosophy, for philosophy has four truth-procedures. Sexual disharmony (or transference-love) can be treated as a specialist subject by sophists and clinicians, but philosophy must be able to think and affirm love together with art, science and politics. This was not Freud’s aim (Inhibitions 95-96; New Introductory Lectures 31, 158, 175-77).
Poetic sophistry
According to Justin Clemens, psychoanalytic doctrine interrupts Platonic geometry
(and, to this I add, Aristotelian logic) with elements of poetic senselessness (Psychoanalysis 12-
13); or, as Lacan put it in 1974, analysis follows science fiction more closely than it follows science (“Freud per sempre” 5). Poetic sophistry, like anti-philosophy, is arguably more relevant to Lacan’s peculiar formalisations than science or philosophy. There is plenty of evidence in support of this point, including a few notable remarks from before the Panthéon period. At
Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Lacan confessed that he had a perverse penchant for making things beautiful. He referred to this as his sophistry (Séminaire VIII 1.20). In 1965, while at the École normale supérieure, Lacan discussed Plato’s Sophist and said that the analyst is a contemporary sophist; but, unlike the ancient sophist, the analyst does not take up a position in a dyadic rivalry (Problèmes 18.212). He later clarified this remark and said that psychoanalytic sophistry takes on the master-discourse (and demonstrates that the master-discourse does not possess knowledge of truth); it does not take on masters qua individuals (Séminaire XIX 3.41-42).70 In
1969, Lacan referred to Le séminaire as his weekly sublimation (Séminaire XVI 24.375).
Throughout the course of Le séminaire, Lacan amassed a plague of isolated, opaque and occasionally amusing signifiers that cannot necessarily be understood within any particular
70 According to Lorenzo Chiesa, Lacanian analysis is “a modern form of sophistry” – “a sophistry directed against discourse tout court”. A Lacanian sophist “is in good company with the contemporary mathematician”, insofar as he/she rebuts the ideal of “logical positivism” and designates limits (the impossible) as the Real (Not-Two 153-54).
49 discourse. This perverse tendency arguably reached its extreme during the Panthéon period: consider texts such as “Lituraterre”, “L’étourdit” and “Joyce le symptôme II”. Marcel Bénabou et al. compiled no less than 789 of Lacan’s neologisms – an astonishing testament to Lacan’s poetic sophistry. Notable precursors to Lacan include Nicole Oresme and les grands rhétoriqueurs. Oresme was a fourteenth-century French intellectual with a gift for neologisms.
He also proved that the harmonic series is divergent. Les grands rhétoriqueurs were a group of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poets that experimented with equivocations, riddles and mathematical meters. Each is poetic-sophistic; each is mathematical.
During one of his monologues from 1975, Lacan said there is ultimately nothing but rhetoric (R.S.I. 4.32). In 1977, he defined himself as a rhéteur (‘rhetor’) who rhétifie – a play on the verb rectifie (‘rectifies’) as well as the rectus of orthodoxy (Le moment de conclure 1.4).
According to Socrates, a rhetorician is someone that knows how many different discourses exist and the ways in which the soul is partitioned or divided. Just as an analyst is supposed to know why some subjects are neurotic and others are perverse or psychotic, the rhetorician knows why
“some people have such-and-such a character and others have such-and-such” (Plato, Phaedrus
271d; Brann, Music 166). Between 1977 and 1978, Lacan also spoke of une géométrie du tissu
(‘a geometry of fabric’), stitching and weaving (Le moment de conclure 1.4, 10.52, 12.61-63) – imagery borrowed from Plato’s Sophist (226b-226c, 241c-242e, 259e, 262c-262d, 268c; Brann et al., “Introduction” 288-89).
In 1972, Lacan identified his Trinity with la rentrée du phallus sublime (“L’étourdit”
468) – another reference to poetic sophistry and comic-pathetic aesthetics. What does the
Phallus have to do with comic aesthetics? Greek comedy, as I mentioned in the Prelude, originated from improvisations made by the leaders of phallika, ‘phallic processions or song- rituals’ (Aristotle, Poetics 1449a10-11); or, as Lacan put it, the Phallus is the essence of torturous comedy (Séminaire VIII 6.118; R.S.I. 7.53-54). The Phallus was frequently depicted as a tormentor in Greek poetry. In the famous Garden of Priapus, little poems were tacked on to Priapus’s statue as offerings, yet they also pretended to be Priapus’s own words. To read any of the poems, one had to stand in front of the statue, in the position of a worshipper or a potential thief; hence Priapus’s paranoiac invective. He warned women that loved him too much and wanted to steal him away that they would be raped; adult men were threatened with irrumatio, ‘face-fucking’; little boys risked anal rape. The name Priapus thus entailed “three
50 sorts of punishments” – a Trinity of abuses (Richlin, Garden of Priapus 121). Fear the Other, indeed!
Gifted by the Muses?
“The Muses and their Arts”, an article by Penelope Murray, highlighted subtle distinctions between poetry and sophistry – the two things most relevant to the Father- symptom that accompanied Lacan and inspired/humiliated him throughout his seminars.
During a visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975, Lacan taunted cognitive scientists and said that man thinks with his soul-symptom – another synonym for the Father or the Trinity (“Conférences et entretiens” 60). Lacan’s taunt invoked the ancient figure of the
Muse or the genius (a guardian spirit, attendant from birth), yet it lacked any assumption of harmony (“Télévision” 512). The Lacanian partner-symptom is closer to a succubus – a parasitic demon that copulates with a man when he is unconscious, causing a loss of spirit or jouissance. This sense of loss is as appropriate to the symptom as the mutilated, lame Oedipus.
So, too, is the stereotypical sacrifice of an artist or a poet; hence Lacan described James Joyce’s symptom – his literary corpus – as a parasite (Séminaire XXIII 1.15-16).
Lacan repeatedly reduced the Father-symptom to a string of names, a creator of names or else a mysterious, fecund orifice (R.S.I. 7.60-61, 10.85-86; Séminaire XXIII 8.128). This is no doubt confusing; but Hesiod, likewise, reduced the Muses to names. As Peter Walcot explained,
Hesiod’s Muses have “no real existence” without their names: “the grant of a name is virtually a re-enactment of their birth” (“Problem” 44-45). This may seem strange to contemporary academics, but it was not to the poet Paul Celan. In his poem of 1958, “Engführung”, Celan fused naming with existence (and non-naming with non-existence).
Der Ort, wo sie lagen, er hat
einen Namen – er hat
keinen. Sie lagen nicht dort. (Lines 18-20)
51 The Muses inspired Hesiod to create strings of names that interrupted his narrative and forced a change of subject (Murray, “Muses” 366-67).71 To illustrate this, Walcot made a schema of Hesiod’s prooemium from the Theogony (“Problem” 45-46). Below is a revised version of Walcot’s schema.
a Description and catalogue of names (lines 1-21)
b Muses’ effects on humans (lines 22-35)
a’ Description and catalogue of names (lines 36-52)
c Birth of the Muses (lines 53-67)
a’’ Description and catalogue of names (lines 68-79)
b’ Muses’ effects on humans (lines 80-103)
a’’’ Description and catalogue of names (lines 104-15)
Hesiod’s Muses have nine names; Lacan’s Father has three names. In each case, to count names as unique, individual or whole is to thoroughly miss the point. As Murray noted,
“despite the individuality of their names, we cannot speak at this stage of single Muses having individual spheres of competence; rather they exist as a plurality” (“Muses” 367).
Via the Muses, Homer was able to distinguish sharply between sophistic masters and poets. Homer’s Muses never inspired political speeches. With Hesiod, the distinction is more subtle. Hesiod’s Muses sometimes inspired the princes of political persuasion, but, as Murray noted, their patron was ultimately Zeus, not the Muses. The Muses blessed princes with epea,
‘words’, whereas they blessed poets with the audē, ‘voice’ (“Muses” 370). What is the difference? According to Andrew Ford, the audē that the Muses gave to poets was “a special kind of voice”; it was not a narcissistic “voice of one’s own”. The poet’s audē was non- identitarian, non-unique, “not an individual’s recognisable voice”, not “the expression of a personality”, not an animal’s phōnē, and not reducible to sophistic artisanship or technique
(Homer 173-74, 177, 195). Hesiod referred to the voice given to him by the Muses on Mount
Helicon as divine. Since a divine audē appears to emerge from a poet’s banal body, it
71 See, for example, lines 76-79 of Hesiod’s Theogony: “the nine daughters born of great Zeus, Clio (Glorifying) and
Euterpe (Well Delighting) and Thalia (Blooming) and Melpomene (Singing) and Terpsichore (Delighting in Dance) and
Erato (Lovely) and Polymnia (Many Hymning) and Ourania (Heavenly), and Calliope (Beautiful Voiced)”.
52 “approaches oxymoron”; nonetheless, the accent should not be placed on the human-animal body.
The audē is essentially disruptive and incoherent (pas-tout), just like the Muses’ aforementioned strings of names. It should not be confused, however, with hysterical inconsistency or pure flux. The audē is fixed precisely upon holes; hence Greek poets left little holes or gaps in their texts and thereby left room for elaboration during oral performances
(Ford, Homer 173-74). Poets had a touch of the infinite and a glimpse of the unseen; sophists, by contrast, were concerned with finitude, the established order and “the practicalities of human life” (Murray, “Muses” 371). They were effectively precursors to progressive education’s “life- adjustment movement” (Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism 341-58).
Did Lacan have the soul of a poet or the soul of a sophist? In 1974, he admitted that he was too much of a sophist (“La troisième” 180). In 1977, he confessed that his interpretative technique – note the reference to sophistic technē – sometimes failed because he was not enough of a poet (L’insu que sait 12.76). The following year, he doubted whether Freud’s poésie – his creation of analytic discourse from myths – could be considered successful (Le moment de conclure 3.15). Like Hesiod’s sophists, analysts are perhaps limited to the Muses’ epea, barred from the audē. On the other hand, analytic discourse cannot be reduced to a pure technē, nor is it an initiation into a finite, established order. The end of analysis that Lacan proposed in 1976
– identification with the partner-symptom – is close to the poet’s identification with the audē
(L’insu que sait 1.5).72 According to Lacan, the symptom is both fixed and variable (varité), like the ancient audē or a modern, algebraic letter (“L’étourdit” 483; R.S.I. 4.33; L’insu que sait
10.69-70). The hole that the symptom fixes upon is, I repeat, the absence of sexual harmony.
If an analysis is successful, does it thereby mark a turn towards poetry and the audē, away from sophistic epea and persuasion? Why, recall, did James Joyce refuse analysis? Because
Joyce was already identified to an audē-symptom. It upset conventional narratives, and it produced epiphanies, senseless names and neologisms. (Quarks is perhaps the most famous.)
Lacan’s argument, in short, was that Joyce did not need analysis, for he had already reached
72 Freud’s example of “identification by means of the symptom” incidentally revolved around a prized letter and “a secret love affair” that aroused desire and jealousy in a group of young women (Group Psychology 107).
53 the point upon which analysis ends (“Lituraterre” 11; Séminaire XXIII 10.154; “Joyce le symptôme II” 36). Ulysses and Finnegans Wake constituted the extreme of Joyce’s symptom, and they are both considered successful within countless Anglophone Arts faculties. They continue to provoke interest in others, long after the death of Joyce’s human-animal body. One cannot say the same for the work of many analysands.
As noted, Lacan often interrupted his Panthéon seminars with neologisms and diagrams. Doubtless, these were moments of comic relief and poetic inspiration – the intrusion of the audē. The majority of Le séminaire, however, is indebted to the Muses’ gift of epea. It is merely sophisticated prose – the work of a skilled and well-educated rhetorician. This is why the success of Le séminaire remains in doubt. Perhaps Lacan, as he himself acknowledged, was not poetic enough. If Le séminaire fails as poetry, then conventional religion and/or liberal- capitalist scientism will eventually wipe out analysis, exactly as Lacan predicted (“Freud per sempre” 5).73 Anglophone academics will likely reject Le séminaire in favour of progressive life- adjustment and other pragmatic sophistries, thoroughly devoid of poetry. Religious subjects, in short, do not need another Trinitarian doctrine, and those that do nothing but manipulate finite situations for monetary gain do not need another individualistic sophistry. The poet’s audē, no matter how crazy it seems, is crucial to the success of Le séminaire. Epea will not suffice.
Appropriate description
Lacan’s Father figure was a sublimation – a fusion of geometry and poetry that was somewhat lame. Lacan acknowledged this on multiple occasions. As for the Panthéon seminars,
I shall recount the terms that I consider appropriate: anti-philosophy, folisophie, monologue, père-verse/poetic sophistry, rhetoric and théologie-philosophie. The following is my favourite: jaspinage séminariste, ‘seminarian blabbering’ (Lacan, “Propos sur l’hystérie” 8).
73 In a fictional future by Michel Houellebecq, humanity is succeeded by a race of technē-masters that reproduce asexually. Members of the new race are thus not subjected to sexual disharmony. According to Houellebecq’s narrator, humans abandoned Lacan after decades of surestimation insensée (‘senseless overestimation’) and turned to scientism.
They then created the new master race (Les particules élémentaires 391).
54 1.4 Kinks in the knot: Formalised illegitimacy
Streng genommen brauchen wir die Annahme einer wirklich räumlichen Anordnung der psychischen Systeme nicht
zu machen.
– Sigmund Freud (Die Traumdeutung 315)74
Freud n’était pas lacanien. […] Qu’est-ce qu’il a fait Freud? Ah! Je vais vous le dire. Il a fait le nœud à quatre
avec ces trois.
– Jacques Lacan (R.S.I. 3.26)
Voilà: mes trois ne sont pas les siens. Mes trois sont le réel, le symbolique et l’imaginaire. J’en suis venu à les
situer d’une topologie, celle du nœud, dit borroméen. Le nœud borroméen met en évidence la fonction de l’au-
moins-trois. C’est celui qui nôue les deux autres dénoués. J’ai donné ça aux miens. Je leur ai donné ça pour
qu’ils se retrouvent dans la pratique. Mais s’y retrouvent-ils mieux que de la topique léguée par Freud aux siens?
– Jacques Lacan (“Le séminaire de Caracas” 82-83)
Why, from 1972 to 1980, did Lacan never let go of the symbol associated with the
Borromeo family dynasty?75 Élisabeth Roudinesco argued the following. Through the Borromean link, “Lacan rediscovered the principal signifiers of his intellectual itinerary: the Roman
Catholic Church, the Reconquest, the struggle against a ‘bastardised’ psychoanalysis, itself assimilated to a reformism and a ‘Protestant’ sphere of influence, and finally the plague”
(Jacques Lacan & Co. 563). The historian makes a tidy narrative. By contrast, I claim that
Lacan’s interminable struggle – his ritual construction of knots and links – is closer to the truth.
Roudinesco herself acknowledged this. “Lacan”, she wrote, “was not satisfied with empty talk or mere reflections on the history of mathematics”. Assisted by his friend Georges-
Théodule Guilbaud, a Catholic mathematician, Lacan played mathematical games over a thirty- year period. During his seminars at Hôpital Sainte-Anne and the École normale supérieure,
Lacan sometimes presented diagrams. At the Panthéon, by contrast, he frequently relied on making and showing in addition to speechifying. As Roudinesco put it, both Lacan and his
74 Standard English edition: “Strictly speaking, there is no need for the hypothesis that the psychical systems are actually arranged in a spatial order” (S. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams 537).
75 The Borromean rings are located in the blue section, towards the bottom of the House of Borromeo’s coat of arms.
The link with three components and six crossing points was not named Borromean in mathematical literature until 1962
(Cromwell, “Borromean Rings in Mathematics” n. pag.).
55 audience were incited “to perform exercises that were no longer in the order of discourse but of demonstration” (Jacques Lacan & Co. 560-61). This mythematical incitement is not without precedent.
Bizarre origins
Knot theory is a branch of topology, a subset of pure mathematics. It became a serious field of research in the 1880s, thanks in part to an erroneous supposition. Lord Kelvin (William
Thomson) speculated that each atomic element was a distinct knot. Knot-atoms, he believed, composed the fabric of ether. Inspired by Kelvin’s strange lucubration, the Scottish physicist
Peter Guthrie Tait endeavoured to construct a table of atomic elements by listing all possible knots (C. Adams, Knot Book 5). Kelvin’s theory was later shattered; so, too, was the atom upon confirmation of the existence of subatomic particles.76 Science named the atom’s ironic particles quarks – a word borrowed from James Joyce (Finnegans Wake 2.4.383). There is, however, a twist. In the 1980s, biochemists revealed that Kelvin’s century-old delusion contained a degree of truth, thanks to the existence of knotted DNA molecules. There may even exist a correspondence between the type of knot and the properties of the molecule (C. Adams, Knot
Book 5; Kauffman, Knots and Physics 488-500). Not all errors, then, are despairing.
Nadrian C. Seeman runs a chemistry laboratory at New York University that demonstrated “a general way to design any knot from DNA, by equating a node in a projection of a knot with a half-turn of DNA” (“Single-Stranded” n. pag.). In 1997, Seeman’s lab worked out how to construct Borromean rings from DNA (Mao et al., “Construction” 137-38).
Academia, presumably, will hear more about Borromean DNA in future.
Borromean irrationality
There are infinite kinks in contemporary knot theory. One cannot, for instance, make a
Brunnian link with perfect, unbent circles. Michael H. Freedman and Richard Skora proved this in 1987 (“Strange” 88-89). Unaware of Freedman and Skora’s proof, in 1991, Bernt Lindström
76 The word atom derives from the Greek atomos, ‘thing not cut or divided’. If an atom can be cut or divided, if an atom consists of multiple quarks, then an atom is not truly an atom. Atom is technically a misnomer.
56 and Hans-Olov Zetterstrom published a special case, entitled “Borromean Circles are
Impossible”. One can, however, make a Borromean link with assistance from the irrational, namely golden rectangles. “Golden rectangles”, wrote Arul Lakshminarayan, “are those whose sides are of the golden ratio; three such orthogonal rectangles can be inscribed in a regular icosahedron”. An icosahedron is a “polyhedra with twenty faces, each an equilateral triangle”
(“Borromean Triangles” 43; Montesinos-Amilibia, “Around” 75-76).77 Lacan drew Borromean links with rectangular components on multiple occasions (Les non-dupes errent 5.37, 13.92;
R.S.I. 5.40, 7.57; Séminaire XXIII 7.107).
In 1993, the sculptor John Robinson realised it is also possible to make a Borromean link with equilateral triangles as components. He named the sculpture “Intuition”. Afterwards,
Peter Cromwell sent Robinson a photograph of a ninth-century Scandinavian symbol named the
Star of Wotan, which was a Borromean link made from triangles (Robinson, “Intuition” n. pag.). Borromean triangles also appear on seventh-century Scandinavian rune stones called valknuts, which means ‘slain warriors’ knots’ (Lakshminarayan, “Borromean Triangles” 43).
Fig. 9. The valknut symbol is a Borromean link.
H. S. M. Coxeter studied Robinson’s “Intuition” and determined that, “if the inner equilateral triangle has side 1, the side of the outer triangle is not 2 but
” (“Symmetrical” 29). It, too, is touched by the irrational. In 1996, H.
Burgiel et al. published another study of Robinson’s “Intuition”, aptly named “The Mystery of (2 6+1)/3 ≈ 1.9663265 the Linked Triangles”. They further explained why it is “impossible to construct the sculpture unless the ratio of the sides’ lengths is strictly smaller than two-to-one” (94; McCartin,
77 A Borromean link with golden rectangles is incidentally the logo of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences at Chennai.
The International Mathematical Union also has a Borromean link for a logo (Lakshminarayan, “Borromean Triangles”
43-44).
57 Mysteries 26). Mathematicians’ efforts to disqualify the number 2 would no doubt amuse
Lacan’s followers (for whom the Two signifies Eros).
Religious Trinity
At a sixth-century temple in Thiruvanmayur, South Chennai, there are multiple knots and links. Inside the temple, there is a sanctum for the goddess Tripurasundari, whose name means ‘beautiful lady of the three cities’. According to Lakshminarayan, “the irreducible tripartite nature of the divinity is emphasised through the topology of links and knots”; hence the sanctum’s artistic figures, one of which is a Borromean link with triangular components
(“Borromean Triangles” 41-42). The Trinity is a Hindu motif as well as a Christian motif. The mantra Aum typically has three parts. The yogi is a tantric triad composed of the ida, the pingala and the sushumna. Three sakthis (‘powers’) derive from the goddess Tripurasundari: the iccha (‘desire’), the gnana (‘knowledge’) and the kriya (‘action’). The sanctum’s Borromean triangles suggest, if any of the sakthis are lost, “the other two are useless”. As for the human body, it is believed to reflect divine composition, for it is constituted by three granthis (‘knots’): the brahma granthi, the vishnu granthi and the rudra granthi (Lakshminarayan, “Borromean
Triangles” 46).
According to Jacob Asbury Regester, the Borromean link is also an important figure for thirteenth-century Christian theology. It was used as a symbol of trinitas unitas. The three equal rings represent “the equality of the three Persons in the Trinity”; the linking of components represents “the essential unity”; and the circular form of each component “signifies a never-beginning, never-ending eternity”. In Christian diagrams, the word trinitas was often split among the link’s three components, for it comprises three syllables, none of which make sense when divorced from the other two (Worship 64-65).
Fig. 10. Borromean rings in Christian theology.
58 Since the trefoil knot (referred to by Regester as the triquetra) has three crossing points, it was also used as a symbol for the Holy Trinity. The trefoil knot was “found with frequency upon the stone crosses erected in the early days of Christianity in Great Britain”. The common figure of the Irish shamrock, which vaguely resembles the trefoil knot, was another Christian emblem. “The legend of the conversion of Ireland says that St. Patrick was preaching on the hillside”, explained Regester, “and wishing to illustrate from nature the sublime doctrine of the
Trinity to his pagan hearers, he bent down and plucked a piece of shamrock at his feet, and held it up to show how what was three, in one sense, might be one in another” (Worship 63-64).
In the early twelfth century, Petrus Alfonsi split God’s name in three parts (IE, EV and
VE) and arranged them in a diagram that featured three rings and a triangle. Following Alfonsi,
Joachim of Fiore produced a diagram of three interlaced rings. Later, in the fourteenth century, the poet Dante Alighieri revealed three rings at the conclusion of his Divina Commedia,
Paradiso (Cromwell, “Borromean Rings in Christian Iconography” n. pag.).
Nella profonda e chiara sussistenza
dell’ Alto Lume parvemi tre Giri
di tre colori e d’ una continenza;
e l’ un dall’ altro, come Iri da Iri,
parea riflesso, e il terzo parea foco
che quinci e quindi egualmente si spiri. (Canto 33, lines 115-20)
Within the Lofty Light’s profound and clear
subsistence there appeared to me three Rings,
of threefold colour and of one content;
and one, as Rainbow is by Rainbow, seemed
reflected by the other, while the third
seemed like a Fire breathed equally from both. (Langdon trans., Divina Commedia 393)
Attempting to discern how one ring – Christ’s “Human Form” – related to the other two Rings, Dante compared himself to a geometer; but he admitted that his “wings” were not able to make the flight. Having failed, he identified with divine Love rather than knowledge
(Canto 33, lines 127-45). Lacan perhaps played on Dante’s text via the title of his twenty-fourth
59 seminar series. L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre is pronounced almost the same as the phrase, l’insuccès de l’une-bévue, c’est l’amour. (L’insuccès means ‘failure’, s’aile ‘takes wing’, l’amour ‘love’.) The joy is in the deciphering, not the conventional explication.
Freud’s broken faith
I will return, now, to psychoanalytic topology/topography. The first person to highlight the extreme precariousness of analytic topology/topography was none other than Sigmund
Freud. Around 1900, he asserted, “there is no need for the hypothesis that the psychical systems are actually arranged in a spatial order”. Freud’s notion of “psychical locality” – locus in Latin equals topos in Greek – was not grounded in anatomy. Like Gustav Fechner, Freud believed that “the scene of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life”. He rejected the possibility of giving this peculiar scene or topos “an anatomical interpretation and supposing it to refer to physiological cerebral localisation or even to the histological layers of the cerebral cortex” (Interpretation of Dreams 48-49, 537).
Pre-empting misunderstanding (or perhaps in fear of being ignored), Freud repeated this point. “I shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine psychical locality in any anatomical fashion”, he wrote. “I shall remain upon psychological ground”. On psychical
“imagery” or “analogies”, Freud contended that analysts are justified in “giving free rein” to speculation on condition that they retain the “coolness” of judgement. He acknowledged that his analytic work approached something unknown, before which, he merely offered “the assistance of provisional ideas” and “hypotheses of the crudest and most concrete description”
(Interpretation of Dreams 536-37).
In 1933, Freud explained that his second topography – the tripartite diagram of das Es, das Ich and das Über-Ich – was not supposed to convey “sharp frontiers like the artificial ones drawn in political geography”. He suggested that “areas of colour melting into one another”, like the work of modern artists, would be more just with respect to truth (New Introductory
Lectures 79). In 1977, Lacan played on this notion of justice and admitted that le réel of his own topology was reus, ‘guilty’. The same year, he referred to Freud’s work as ce mélange de dessins grossiers et de métaphysique, ‘this mixture of crude drawings and metaphysics’ (L’insu
60 que sait 9.65, 10.70). Two years prior, Lacan hinted that children are unable to master or overcome the flaws that they inherit from their fathers (R.S.I. 5.44). He was no exception.
The best followers of Freud’s and Lacan’s diagrammatic enterprises acknowledge peculiarities and tend to problems. According to Jean-Michel Vappereau, psychoanalytic topology goes against mathematical theories of knots. He situated it between the Delphic oracle and Jean-François Champollion (“Chapitre II” n. pag.). On a related note, Robert Groome acknowledged that psychoanalytic topology does not include its diagrammatic constructions
“within the theory of relativistic physics” (“Generalized Placement” 48-49). Pierre Soury described psychoanalytic topology as a reversal of algebraic topology – a bizarre attempt to found dimensions from knots instead of founding knots from dimensions. The mathematical literature on knots and links “is not nothing”, Soury said, “but it’s not fundamental” (“Year”
97). This is true; for it is the flaws of analytic doctrine that are in fact fundamental to it.
Like Freud’s Oedipus, Lacan’s Borromean Father did not reach a happy end. In 1983,
Hugh M. Hilden et al. proved that the Borromean link is universal (“Whitehead Link” 24).78
Their discovery undermined Lacan’s use of the Borromean rings as a metaphor for le pas-tout,
‘the non-universal or non-all’ (“Propos sur l’hystérie” 6).79 Having said that, Lacan undermined his own Borromean link, sometimes via ineptitude, sometimes for theatrical effect and sometimes for reasons I cannot explain. In 1975, for example, Lacan acknowledged that the unconscious did not lend itself to representation via Borromean links (“Conférences et entretiens” 35). In 1979, he termed his Borromean link impropre and un abus de métaphore. He held it in contrast with a different, three-component Brunnian link that had twelve crossing points instead of six crossing points (“Séminaire du 9 janvier 1979” 1-2). Lacan’s criticism of the
Borromean link somehow pertained to its crossing points, but based on the succinct seminar transcript, I am unable to explain this further.
78 The authors’ definition: “A link L in S3 [three-dimensional space] is universal if every closed, orientable 3-manifold is a covering of S3 branched over L” (“Whitehead Link” 19; original italics).
79 Le pas-tout is feminine, in spite of its definite article. With respect to “Upon Some Women” by Robert Herrick,
Lacan’s metaphors are appropriate. Herrick’s women, like Lacan’s links, are “made of thread and thrum”. “Pieces, patches, ropes of hair” describes their consistency; “shreds and stuff” is their truth-value (lines 3, 5 and 12). On a related note, Freud considered “plaiting and weaving” a technique that women “may have invented”, relevant to shame and concealment (New Introductory Lectures 132).
61
Fig. 11. A three-component Brunnian link with twelve crossing points.
According to my reading, Lacan was drawn to knots and links because of what they were not, namely spheres or images of wholeness and perfection. Contemporary, liberal- capitalist subjects often mistake themselves as individuals within a spherical world. Lacan, by contrast, held that the subject belongs to three orders – the Real, the Symbolic and the
Imaginary – that have no relation to the sphere (“Joyce le symptôme II” 31). The rest is precarious. I will nonetheless examine it in detail.
Lacan’s topology
The analytic situation constructed by Freud and Lacan literally toys with the analysis situs of Henri Poincaré and Oswald Veblen. Synonymous with topology, analysis situs is the mathematical logic of place. It follows that analysis’s subject is synonymous with topic (from topos, ‘place’); Freud’s theoretical constructions were named topics or topographies (New
Introductory Lectures 71); and Lacan often referred to his work as topological or geometric.
While subject/topic is a familiar equivoque among English speakers, subject/topic is rarely associated with topography/topology. Freud and Lacan pushed the equivoque a little further and, in doing so, caused a major fuss.
In 1958, Lacan asserted that the unconscious is a knot conditioned by the Phallus (“La signification du phallus” 685). From 1961 till the publication of “L’étourdit” in 1972, he turned his attention to topological surfaces. In Séminaire XVII, Lacan spoke of discourses as social situations, networks, links or neighbourhoods. In Séminaire XIX and Séminaire XX, he formulated four places for a significant saying (dire): a necessary saying (the Law that does not stop being written), a possible saying (that which can stop being written), a contingent saying
(that which sometimes stops not being written), and an impossible saying (that which never stops not being written).
62 x Φx x Φx
Necessary:⋅ Father Impossible: La femme⋅ ∃ ∃
x Φx x Φx
Possible:⋅ Men Contingent: Women⋅ ∀ ∀ Fig. 12. Lacan’s sexuation logic.80
The four places were sectioned in two – the masculine on the left-hand side, the feminine on the right-hand side. The two sides are not symmetrical or complementary. Lacan’s sexuation logic parodied Aristotle’s logical square, but the resemblance is deceptive. As Alessio
Moretti put it, with respect to the logical squares of Aristotle or Gottlob Frege or Charles
Sanders Peirce, Lacan’s sexuation logic is “strange” and destructive, which makes it “hard to build real comparisons” (“Geometry” 120). In brief, Lacan’s sexuation formulae turn around the fact that a subject’s identity is troubled by sex. An identity cannot be guaranteed by the body’s genetic destiny or else liberated by progressive whimsies and social constructivists (Chiesa, Not-
Two 29-31; Gueguen, “Presumed Third Sex” n. pag.). Sex, synonymous with gender persuasion, is easy prey for sophistry. According to Freud, anatomy, psychology and psychoanalysis cannot satisfactorily define or describe sex; hence the subject of sex frequently falls back on “social customs” and conventional opinions (New Introductory Lectures 114-16).
On 9 February 1972, Lacan first used the Borromean link to represent the so-called signifying chain (Séminaire XIX 6.91). The signifying chain is whatever determines one’s significant Other – that to which the subject is, by definition, subjected and attempts to respond, including one’s own, narcissistic mirror image. On 15 May 1973, Lacan introduced the trefoil knot (Séminaire XX 10.111). From that point onwards, he was severely caught in a bind, avec ses propres nœuds, as he prophesied back in 1960 (Séminaire VII 10.162). Recall that there is no such thing as a knot with less than three crossing points. Likewise, there is no such thing as a Brunnian link with fewer than three components. What is the Real of analytic discourse? It is, I repeat, the minimum requirement of three elements (Les non-dupes errent 3.24) – a
Trinity. As early as 1956, Lacan insisted that the figure of the knot compels the analyst to not forget that clinical structure involves more than two terms (“Situation” 464).
80 This figure is based on Lacan’s diagram from Séminaire XIX (14.207).
63
Fig. 13. A tri-coloured trefoil knot.
Why did Lacan insist on this point? As I have explained, Lacan wanted a clinic based on something other than dyadic, sophistic rivalry, and he deemed the absence of sexual harmony or erotic perfection the one and only truth bequeathed by Freud (Séminaire XX 1.17;
Le moment de conclure 5.21). The premise of clinical analysis is simple: sexual couples fail and, as a consequence, symptoms form that, for some, become unbearable. If couples were to cease failing, there would no longer be any demands for analysis. Analytic discourse would thus cease to exist. The familiar Hopf link, which consists of two components, is thus not proper to
Lacanian doctrine (Séminaire XIX 6.91).81 Lacan characterised the Two as non-dupes of
Trinitarian Law – subjects that err via a belief in erotic possibility (Les non-dupes errent 3.23-
24). Such is the position of the psychotic – the mad lover.
Psychotics err
As of 16 December 1975, Lacan considered paranoid psychosis the default structure of the subject (Séminaire XXIII 3.53).82 Psychosis is often treated as a blunt, pejorative term; but on multiple occasions, Freud associated psychosis with an intense love of wisdom. In 1914, he noted the similarity between paranoid psychotics’ mental activity – marked by “internal research”, “self-observation” and extreme “self-criticism” – and that which “furnishes philosophy with the material for its intellectual operations”. He suggested that this, in turn, may be relevant to “the characteristic tendency of paranoics to construct speculative systems” (“On
81 To the best of my knowledge, Lacan only presented one Hopf link in Les non-dupes errent (3.25) plus one link that featured a Hopf sublink: the Joyce link from Séminaire XXIII (10.151-52). Given that Joyce was not a clinical subject, perhaps Lacan snuck in the Hopf sublink to indicate Joyce’s exceptional status with respect to analysis.
82 If psychosis is the default, this means that neurotic and perverse symptoms are engendered via artifice (Lacan, Les non-dupes errent 3.23; Grigg, Lacan 18-20). Timaeus believed that diseases of the soul were constructed and that, like riddles, they could be analysed by “interpreters of things divined” (Plato, Timaeus 71a-72d).
64 Narcissism” 96-97).83 A few years later, Freud maintained that paranoid delusions possess an
“external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers”. Philosophy, Freud explained, is “carried out in a fashion that is acceptable to the majority”; paranoid delusions, by contrast, are deemed “unpalatable” and not taken up within any discourse (“Preface” 261; see also Totem and Taboo 73).84
Following Freud, Lacan used knots and links to associate psychosis with mad love
(folie) and philosophy. The psychotic, according to Lacan, is not properly oriented (Séminaire
XXIII 3.53, 8.128). Taking another cue from Freud, Lacan spent years playing with the orientation of knots and links. In 1900, Freud explained that his topological diagrams derived from his impression that the psychical apparatus involves multiple senses or directions, including a temporal dimension (Interpretation of Dreams 536-37). Lacan took Freud’s notion of direction or orientation literally. On 13 November 1973, he supposedly oriented the Borromean link and asserted that there is a levorotatory version, distinct from a dextrorotary version (Les non-dupes errent 1.5-6). This, however, is not correct. In 1963, Stephen J. Tauber proved that the Borromean link is identical to its mirror image, and it is invertible (“Absolute” 597-99).
This means that, if one orients the Borromean link’s components, it introduces no difference.85
Lacan eventually acknowledged this fact during the seminar of 8 March 1975, after receiving help from Soury. Tri-colouring was thus the only mathematical support of difference for Lacan’s
Borromean rings (R.S.I. 8.64-65; Séminaire XXIII 3.52, 7.75).
Unlike the Borromean link, the trefoil knot is orientable (Lacan, Séminaire XXIII 3.53).
Since the trefoil knot is not identical to its mirror image, this means that it is chiral (a term derived from kheir, ‘hand’). The trefoil knot is, however, identical to its inverse.
83 Paranoic is an antiquated term; it is not a spelling mistake.
84 A contemporary example: Alain Badiou’s set-theoretical ontology plus the Cantorian philosophy of Geoff Leonard, a notorious Australian paedophile. Leonard is “interested in the theory of being or ontology”. In a self-published memoir, he wrote, “I was particularly struck by Cantor’s proposition that infinity can be defined as that number which cannot be altered by either additions or subtractions” (My Spiritual Journey 27).
85 Boju Jiang et al. later showed that the Borromean link is the only achiral, non-trivial link with nine or less crossing points (“Achirality” 185).
65
Fig. 14. A trefoil knot, its mirror image and its inverse (Cornish, “Two-Component” 6).
According to Lacan, the Borromean link’s truth is paranoiac, for the link is verified only when it is penetrated by the tormentor Phallus. I will attempt to explain. Lacan termed the trivial sublink constituted by the sexual couple le faux-trou, ‘the false hole’. Once the Phallus pierces the so-called false hole, it makes a three-component link that holds together. Only then does the hole qualify as un vrai trou, ‘a true hole’ (Séminaire XXIII 5.82-83, 7.117-18). The well-known stigmata, in other words, is the site of truth: the hole proves that the subject is had by the Other (in the double-sense of possessed/deceived). Why is it the Phallus that verifies the truth? Because the Phallus is synonymous with the sexual couple’s crushing disappointment. It is the proof that, even in a conventional relationship, one remains somewhat alienated and alone
(Lacan, Séminaire XIX 14.203).
When Lacan described the Phallus’s penetration of the trivial couple, he drew the former as an infinite straight line (Séminaire XXIII 7.118). The infinite straight line is topologically equivalent to the sphere. The point is the 0-sphere, the line is the 1-sphere, the circle is the 2-sphere, and the common sphere is the 3-sphere. For decades, Lacan criticised common, Aristotelian/Kantian philosophy for its reliance on the sphere; so why did he toy with the sphere’s equivalent, the infinite straight line? In 1977, he acknowledged that the infinite straight line was manifestement un fantasme (Le moment de conclure 1.4). For Lacan, this is a serious problem. I will return to it at the end of the chapter.
For now, this subject matter is undoubtedly mad. In 1972, Lacan remarked that his work was akin to the famous paranoiac, Daniel Paul Schreber (“L’étourdit” 461, 494). In 1975,
Lacan claimed to share a form of psychosis with logicians and geometers (“Conférences et entretiens” 9). In 1978, he acknowledged that analytic discourse involves delusional meaning
(“Lacan pour Vincennes!” 278). In less sensational terms, Lacan attempted to produce a formal account of analogical reasoning – a somewhat delusional project that can be traced back to
Plato’s Meno (86d-87c; Jetli, “Abduction” 244).
66 Père-version
Although Lacan remained faithful to Freud by associating psychosis and philosophy, on the subject of religion, Lacan was a heretic. Freud usually aligned religion with neurosis
(“Preface” 261; Totem and Taboo 73; Moses and Monotheism 80). Lacan, by contrast, placed the accent on père-version/sublimation.86 Recall Lacan’s characterisation of the pervert as a defender of the faith – one who is in favour of the Other existing (Séminaire XVI 16.253). The notion of a perverse God-symptom (Dieu-symptôme) can be traced back to 1960 (Séminaire VII
14.213). Perversion, true to its name, is oriented père-versely, towards the Father that interdicts a singular object (a) – an object of incestuous union, for example. The act of naming and prohibiting is itself – perversely – a form of enjoyment/suffering. According to François Terré, the pleasure that certain subjects experience when “pronouncing judgements” is “as particular as aesthetic or sexual pleasure” (“Introduction” xiii). Lacan often aligned père- version/sublimation with the letter/litter of the Law. James Joyce, André Gide, Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade are all père-verse men of letters discussed by Lacan.
As authors, they each propped up the nom-du-père – their surname – and dealt with material that is conventionally deemed filthy.
In 1975, Lacan said that père-version – compensatory, Father-oriented love – reflects the fact that the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary do not make a harmony by default.87
The three registers are not necessarily linked (Séminaire XXIII 1.19; S. Freud, Three 231). This is one of Lacan’s strangest proposals. As an academic, it is difficult to offer anything cogent in response. The Father, according to my reading, is something that names what the sexual couple lacks: the real phallus, the symbolic phallus and the imaginary phallus.88 Once this peculiar, three-part absence is verified, a religious subject is formed. Lacan pledged fidelity to Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, based on this same figure of a three-part absence or hole. He did not form a bond with Freud based on a so-called relation of understanding; rather, he credited
86 Caveat: Freud aligned religion with both neurosis and psychosis in Moses and Monotheism. Religious dogmas “bear the character of psychotic symptoms”; but as “group phenomena”, they escape the psychotic’s “curse of isolation” (84).
87 Lacan’s definition of père-version as la loi de l’amour from Séminaire XXIII (10.150) follows Alexandre Kojève’s notion of Authority as conflated or confused with love (Notion of Authority 10-11, 25-27).
88 Recall Lacan’s article from 1958 on the perverse author André Gide, in which he noted that love is to give what one does not have (“Jeunesse de Gide” 755).
67 Freud with founding a mysterious hole that sucked him in (“Intervention suite” 241; Harari,
“The Sinthome” 46). Without a hole composed of at least three terms, Lacan asserted that there can be no Father figure and, by extension, no analytic discourse (“Séance de clôture” 265).
Analytic doctrine is thus not substantive; it is instead based on a mystery-Trinity that sucks and ensnares.
From 14 January 1975 to 11 May 1976, Lacan flirted with a mock-theological method of distinguishing link components (R.S.I. 3.26-27, 5.43-44, 8.67, 10.87-88, 11.96-97; Séminaire
XXIII 1.19-22, 3.52-54, 10.151-55). He devised a four-component Brunnian link in which a privileged component named le sinthome or l’ego names the other three components R, S and I, and thereby distinguishes them. Roberto Harari based an entire book, How James Joyce Made
His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan, on this particular strategy. The book’s subtitle is misleading, for the four-component link and the term sinthome each rarely appear in Lacan’s seminars from 1977 to 1980. According to Staferla’s transcript of L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre, for example, a four-component link only appears during two sessions: 18
January 1977 and 15 February 1977.
Harari, in my opinion, exaggerated the significance of Lacan’s four-component link and treated it as a Final Solution.89 He claimed that it “corresponds exactly to the end of analysis” and that it “goes beyond the transference” (How 61, 357). I am not convinced by this notion.
Incidentally, neither is Alain Badiou (Logics of Worlds 481). Lacan did, however, resurrect the four-component link in a text from 1978, dedicated to the artist François Rouan (“Texte” 2-4).
It is fair to say, then, that Lacan drew on the four-component link when discussing artists, namely Joyce and Rouan. This supports the notion of the fourth component as the artist’s sinthome (Séminaire XXIII 2.38, 4.64, 4.69-73; Joyce, Portrait 225) – an index of Creation, artifice or saintly pretence that, with respect to a neurotic structure, is perhaps not necessary.90
89 This is the opening sentence from Harari’s first chapter: “Seminar 23, Le sinthome (1975-1976), is probably the last moment in the whole of Lacan’s teaching where a rigorous internal unity is emphasised” (How 1). Internal unity? This is already suspicious.
90 This cannot be made into a consistent argument, for on 16 December 1975, Lacan presented a four-component link in which the symptom was specified as neurotic, not père-verse (Séminaire XXIII 3.53-54). The link was Brunnian, yet it was unlike any of Lacan’s other four-component links: each of its components was a trefoil knot, not an unknot.
68 For neurotics are not driven – in an absolute sense – to make sacrifices for art or to sanctify the
Name.
On 11 February 1975, Lacan said he was surprised that he could not find artistic examples of the three-component link (R.S.I. 5.39). The same year, incidentally, the Paris-based artist Albert Flocon published an engraving that featured Borromean rings (Entrelacs 51).
There is a second, notable example from Paris. Between 1960 and 1961, the Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis worked on a solo piano project, entitled Herma. Xenakis referred to the project as “a knot of interest”. During the piece’s pre-composition stage, he constructed
Venn diagrams that resembled Borromean rings. Given that Xenakis’s diagrams were first published in Paris (in the 1963 book, Musiques formelles), it is odd that no one brought them to
Lacan’s attention. Having said that, it is unlikely that they would have interested Lacan. The three rings from Xenakis’s diagram denoted subsets of a finite “referential or universal set” – the total set of notes that are playable on a piano (“Symbolic Music” 170-73; Wannamaker,
“Structure” n. pag.). As I have explained, Lacan did not make his Borromean links in order to represent or symbolise a universal totality.
On 15 April 1975, Lacan made a clear distinction between his four-component link and his three-component link. The former is produced via identification with the Father, the latter via identification with hysterical desire (R.S.I. 10.88). As noted, this distinction did not hold up in later seminars, but the following point is clear. Lacan, following Freud, did not consider père- version and hysteria/neurosis the same.91 They are separate clinical structures.
Neurosis
For Lacan, the torus (which is effectively a sphincter) is the figure proper to the obsessional neurotic; hence the familiar jokes about anal obsessionals. To the best of my knowledge, Lacan first defined neurosis as a torus in 1962 (L’identification 12.87-90); he later
91 Père-version entails a reversion from the lost absolute (the Other of supposed harmony, barred by the Father’s Law) to the absolute of loss (the letter of the Law conceived as litter-ature, suitable for play). At Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Lacan denoted the neurotic’s fantasy $ a. His formula for the pervert’s fantasy was literally the reverse: a $ (Séminaire X
4.62, 8.123). ◊ ◊
69 acknowledged that the components of his Brunnian links were toruses (Le moment de conclure
8.35). A Brunnian link in which two components are embedded within a torus is called a Bing link (Garity et al., “Distinguishing” 1008-09). Lacan first embedded link-components within a torus during the seminar of 18 March 1975 (R.S.I. 8.67). See, in particular, the seminar of 10
February 1976 (Séminaire XXIII 5.82).
Fig. 15. A Bing link.92
Lacan never referred to the Bing link by its proper name, just as he never used the term
Brunnian. The Bing link’s symmetry is different from that of the Borromean link. If you reverse the orientation of exactly one component embedded in the torus, the Bing link becomes symmetrical (Cornish, “Two-Component” 42); otherwise, the Bing link is asymmetrical. This means that the Bing link is not achiral or absolutely chiral. Jiang et al. discovered this peculiarity in 2000, long after Lacan’s death (“Achirality” 191).
The neurotic’s body-image and its desire each depend on its position within social networks. The neurotic is formed (and shamed) by the so-called roundabout of discourses: hysteria, mastery, academia and analysis. In 1969, Lacan specified four forms of the object (a): the breast-sphere for the oral object (hysteria), the torus for the anal object (mastery), the cross-cap for the speculative object (academia), and the Klein bottle for the invocatory object
(analysis) (Séminaire XVI 16.249; Fierens, Lecture de L’étourdit 96).
$ S1 S1 S2
Oral sphere (a) → S2 $ → Anal torus (a) ⤺ ⤺
S2 Speculative cross-cap (a) Invocatory Klein bottle (a) $
S1 → $ S2 → S1 ⤺ Fig. 16. The object (a) in four different discourses.93 ⤺
92 This figure is a simplified version of a diagram by Dennis Garity et al. (“Distinguishing” 1009).
93 This figure is based on Lacan’s four discourse-schemas from 1969 (Séminaire XVII 2.29).
70 Each object can be represented by a polygonal schema (Edelsbrunner, “Two-
Dimensional Manifolds” 28). Lacan imitated polygonal schemas when he devised his discourse- schemas (“D’une question” 553 [note 1]).
Fig. 17. Polygonal schemas: sphere, torus, cross-capped sphere, Klein bottle.
In 1966, Lacan defined the oral object as the demand for the Other, the anal object as the demand of the Other, the scopic object as the desire for the Other, and the invocatory object as the desire of the Other (L’objet de la psychanalyse 15.189). Why is the torus identified with the anal object and the demand of the Other? Schreber, for example, believed that his bowel movements were divinely ordained (Memoirs 225). As a psychotic, he unfortunately could not shake off this belief. A neurotic’s toilet training is a less sensational example. Toilet training is, in effect, the child’s subjection to parents’ demands for faeces, followed by celebration or punishment: “Good boy/girl!” “Bad boy/girl!” How does the Other’s desire enter the scene?
This is a question for the analyst’s discourse, which tries to relieve the subject of the spurious wholeness of the Other’s demands. It is also a question for academic discourse: what brilliant or beautiful new truth does the university want to speculate upon and deposit in its library?
According to Lacan, the hysterical symptom is a convolution-function that affects the body (Séminaire XVII 6.107-08; R.S.I. 4.33; “Joyce le symptôme II” 35). Speculating on the mysteries of the clinic is tiresome, so I will instead present musical examples. Convolution, as computer-musicians know, makes a body of sound. An input signal is split into discrete samples, each of which copulate with an impulse response in order to produce a novel output. If the effect is successful, the output resembles a cohesive whole – an impression of a church’s walls, for example, responding to a voice or an instrument. As in poetry, the image is generated by writing: the sonic impression is generated by mathematical code. Langhoff et al. described a violin’s body as a function that transforms input forces applied to the bridge by the strings into acoustic pressure waves (“Comparisons” 274). The bridge’s impedance and the body’s effect over time on the various frequencies contained in a flat, broadband signal can be measured. One can then produce an impulse response that effectively knows what will happen to an input
71 signal’s amplitude and component frequencies over time. One can convolve the impulse response with any input signal whatsoever in order to produce an output that closely resembles the input signal albeit with the added resonances of a violin’s body.
In other words, any input signal can take the place of the violin’s strings and become convolved with the violin’s body. The body is thus an effect, not an origin. On a related note,
Lacan referred to discourse – not the body – as the speaking-being’s stabitat, ‘stable habitat’; for it is discourse that organises and generates functions. According to Lacan, without discourse, there is nothing to organise the body. This is evidenced by the schizophrenic, who is dysfunctional and without a place in any established discourse (“L’étourdit” 474; Séminaire
XXIII 10.150; “Joyce le symptôme II” 31-34). Lacan explained that his recourse to topology, which broke him away from pre-Freudian ontologies, was premised on the fact that there is no genesis other than discourse itself (Séminaire XX 1.16).
Established discourses – social networks, institutions, bodies of law, histories of conflict and trauma, and so on – exist prior to a subject’s so-called birth from the womb. True to its name, a subject is subjected to others’ discourses, even as an infant. As Lorenzo Chiesa explained, “from the moment of his birth”, the infant “hears other human beings speaking”, some of whom “may be speaking about him” (Subjectivity and Otherness 61). There is no escape; he/she is already ensnared. Such is the neurotic’s position.
Hitting a wall, post-Lacan
It is not appropriate for academics to invent metaphors about clinical experience; or, otherwise stated, it is impossible for an academic to go beyond Lacan’s mythematical constructions without seeming absurd. See, for example, “Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse” by
Levi R. Bryant. There are, however, a few mathematical novelties that were overlooked by
Lacan or else emerged after Lacan’s death in 1981 that are worth examining further.
Mathematicians define Antoine’s necklace as a pathological phenomenon and a wild embedding of the Cantor set. The necklace, incidentally, bears the name of an Oedipal hero.
During the First World War, when Louis Antoine was aged 29, his eyes were ripped from their sockets (Pickover, Math Book 340). To construct Antoine’s necklace, take a single solid torus
72 and replace it with a closed chain of four or more toruses. Each toric component from the chain is then replaced by a closed chain consisting of four or more toruses. This process is repeated a countable number of times. Theoretically, after infinitely many steps, one arrives at Antoine’s necklace, which has “uncountably many points” – chains within chains within chains (Bing,
“Examples and Counterexamples” 312).
Fig. 18. Two iterations of Antoine’s necklace.
As noted, the construction of Antoine’s necklace is akin to the construction of a Cantor set. To make the latter, one takes a straight line interval and deletes its middle third. The middle third from each of the two remaining pieces is then removed. This process is repeated a countable number of times, yet it results in the construction of a set with uncountably many points. To reiterate, the Cantor set is “the set of points remaining after deleting the open middle thirds, ad infinitum” (Brechner and Mayer, “Antoine’s Necklace” 307). Lacan cited
Cantor somewhat often after 1967 (“Proposition du 9 octobre 1967” 249). The Seuil edition of
Lacan’s Séminaire XVI, for example, features an artistic rendering of a Cantor set by Salvador
Dali on its front cover (Kocić, “Fractals” n. pag.).
Technically, Antoine’s necklace is a non-empty compact subset of three-dimensional real co-ordinate space, homeomorphic with a Cantor set (Rolfsen, Knots and Links 73-74).
Discovered in 1921, it was the first topological Cantor set. Inspired by Antoine, James W.
Alexander II invented a pathological phenomenon of his own in 1923, named the Alexander horned sphere. The horned sphere is a wild embedding of the 2-sphere (the familiar circle) in three-dimensional real co-ordinate space. According to Dale Rolfsen, the set of bad (non-locally- flat) points of the horned sphere is a Cantor set (Knots and Links 81).
In 1951, R. H. Bing proved that the union of two Alexander horned spheres “attached by the identity map along the 2-sphere boundaries yields a 3-sphere”. (As an aside, Bing’s initials do not stand for anything. His name was R. H. – a proper man of letters.) At the same time, Bing showed that “a Cantor set in 3-space could be constructed as the intersection of
73 manifolds Mi i = 0, 1, 2, …, where the manifold M0 is an unknotted solid torus and each component of Mi is a solid torus which contains two components of Mi+1”. According to David
G. Wright, the intersection of the Mi+1 is called “a Bing Cantor set” (“Bing-Whitehead Cantor
Sets” 105-06).
After Bing, a link made from two toric components embedded within a solid torus became known as the Bing link (Garity et al., “Distinguishing” 1008). Why is this of interest to
Lacan’s followers? Unlike Antoine’s necklace, the Bing link has no non-trivial sublinks; unlike the Alexander horned sphere, it has three components; and unlike the Borromean rings, it can be treated as a starting point in the construction of a Bing Cantor set, which is an uncountable infinity. In his final public talk before death, Lacan said he tried to indicate the infinite via his diagrams, but he could only do this vaguely, by metaphorically transforming one of the
Borromean link’s components into an infinite straight line (“Le séminaire de Caracas” 85; see also Séminaire XX 8.94).94 This is too easily derided. Prior to this, Lacan hinted that he wanted to demonstrate Cantor’s intersection theorem, which can be used to show that the Cantor set is compact and non-empty (Séminaire XX 1.14). With respect to the Cantor set, the Borromean link falls short as a metaphor; the Bing link is perhaps less absurd.
Rolfsen’s Knots and Links – the only topology textbook cited by Lacan during his
Panthéon seminars (Le moment du conclure 1.4) – did not mention the Bing link. Rolfsen’s book referenced articles by Bing from 1958 and 1959 plus an article from 1971 that Bing co- wrote (Knots and Links 430-31); but the Bing link is nowhere to be found in it. There is a chance, then, that Lacan never read about the Bing link in detail. As I mentioned, however,
Lacan occasionally hinted that the Borromean link could be transformed into a Bing link and vice versa (Séminaire XXIII 5.82; L’insu que sait 2.17-18, 8.59-60; Le moment de conclure 2.8-
10, 3.13-14); but he never explained this at length. I am confident, then, that Lacan’s poetic- sophistic project was incomplete. If Lacan had not died in 1981, I believe he would have continued playing his jeu de l’amour with Bing links, and he would have continued to cite
Cantor alongside Freud.
94 Infinity was also a problem for Soury. The relationship between the boundary problems of general topology and
“double infinity” (comprised of infinitesimal and actual infinity) remained unclear to him (“Topological” 91).
74 Restatement
Knot theory was not Lacan’s field, and neither was Joycean literature. Lacan’s field was doubly dismal: it failed to transmit its findings like a proper science, and it did not produce the same effects of amazement among academics as Joyce’s writing. In spite of both these things,
Lacan persevered. From 1972 to 1980, he never let go of the knots and links that he professed to love. Why? In love, one is inevitably a fool; one, I repeat, is not a scientist. At the end of 1972,
Lacan asked how analytic discourse could render sublime its inevitable stupidity (Séminaire XX
1.18)? He did not provide an answer via speech; I believe he answered this question by composing figures. For academics, artists and musicians that are willing to accept poetic- sophistic justifications, Lacan’s sublime stupidity is perhaps admirable. For mathematicians,
Lacan’s knots and links are somewhat curious or else repulsively superficial. In this sense,
Lacan’s knots and links are proper cousins of music. Their material is mathematical; their form is poetic-sophistic.
Lacan’s knots and links were highly refined, poetic-sophistic or mock-theological testaments to the discourse he inherited from Freud. In spite of academic explication, Lacan’s comic-pathetic Father figure – the thing he named his symptom – remains something of a mystery. It was perhaps akin to an ancient fascinum – a phallic prop designed to ward off the
Other’s Evil Eye and thereby protect one from curses. Suffice to say, knots and links fascinated
Lacan for many years and presumably granted him a measure of relief from the Other’s discourse, composed as it is of senseless anguish and banal opinions.
75 1.5 Lacan’s discourse-schemas
Les dits Écrits ne sauraient être lus en diagonale: disons plutôt que l’effet de formation que sait tirer d’une telle
prise l’invention mathématique, ne peut y être qu’indistinct, faute encore d’une suffisante formalisation.
– Jacques Lacan (“D’une réforme dans son trou” 7)
In 1991, Bernt Lindström and Hans-Olov Zetterström unwittingly fed Lacanians material on the three and the four – the Trinity and the quaternary discourse-schemas. As noted in the previous chapter, a Borromean link made of three unkinked circles is impossible.
Lindström and Zetterström showed that, if the circles C1 and C2 do not lie in the same plane, then they belong to the same sphere, in which case, the circle C3 cannot belong to the same sphere. C3 meets the sphere that C1 and C2 belong to “at least four times”. This is a contradiction, for “a circle and a sphere have at most two points in common when the circle does not belong to the sphere”. C1, C2 and C3 thus cannot be circles: “Borromean circles are impossible” (“Borromean” 340-41; original italics).
Fig. 19. Four points prove three circles are impossible (Lindström and Zetterström, “Borromean” 340-41).
The four, in this case, proves something impossible about the three. Lacan was not able to demonstrate this himself. His attempts to associate the three and the four were particularly vague. On 14 May 1974, for example, Lacan mapped his four sexuation formulae to the four vertices of a tetrahedron; then he attempted to illustrate an association between the tetrahedron and his Borromean Trinity. Lacan claimed that the Borromean link is orientable, which, as noted in the previous chapter, is not correct. Using this false orientability, he then tried to establish a relationship between a Borromean link and the tetrahedron (Les non-dupes errent
13.94-96; Soury, “Year” 96-97). I am unable to explain this properly. It seems as if, on this occasion, Lacan were simply mistaken. Lacan returned to the tetrahedron and the Borromean
Trinity during the seminar of 18 January 1977. This time, he noted that the Borromean rings have six crossing points and the tetrahedron has six edges (L’insu que sait 5.33-35). This is
76 correct, but I fail to grasp the significance. Even if one treats this statement as a parody of
Pythagorean numerology, Thomistic rationalism or Abulafian letter-combination, it seems simplistic.
Given that the three and the four are Lacan’s poetic-sophistic inventions, outside analytic discourse, there is not much material that is of any relevance.95 I only know of one significant, mathematical association between the tetrahedron and the Borromean link. The boundary of the Borromean link forms an icosahedron. In The Harmony of the World, Johannes
Kepler noted that the icosahedron is “like a snub tetrahedron” (120). A tri-coloured (red, green and blue) icosahedron is exactly equivalent to a snub tetrahedron, “since four of its principal faces lie on the framing tetrahedron while four others lie on the dual tetrahedron” (Kappraff,
Connections 475). As George Hart explained, “red represents the tetrahedral faces, green the tetrahedral vertices, and blue the pairs of faces which replace the tetrahedron’s edges”. As “a chiral object with tetrahedral symmetry”, the tri-coloured icosahedron “has no planes of symmetry” (“Symmetry Planes” n. pag.). In excess of this, I can only find two obscure, scientific studies that involve both the Borromean link and the tetrahedron. In 2010, Ken
Brakke generated an image of a “soap film spanning the [Borromean] rings with a tetrahedral point centre” (“Soap Films” n. pag.). Since analytic discourse is famous for filth, the reference to soap is somewhat amusing; but I doubt this is of use to Lacan’s followers. In 2013, Konrad
Polthier and Faniry Razafindrazaka studied surfaces of genus 13, including one constructed from two Borromean links and one “obtained from a tetrahedron”. The authors named the former a 6-ring, the latter Tub(R3.4’) (“6-Ring” 1, 4). I doubt this is of use, either. I am thus forced to move on.
On 9 April 1974, Lacan explained that his object a occupies a place in each of the four discourse-schemas. He then suggested the object a could also occupy the place of the variable x in the four sexuation formulae (Les non-dupes errent 11.75). The four discourse-schemas, like the sexuation formulae, revolve around the failure of erotic coupling. As Colette Soler explained, each discourse “constructs a type of social bond” – a compromise or “recourse against the programmed misfortunes of the sexual couple” (Lacan 191). In plain terms, there is no perfect
95 For a detailed review of the three and the four, see “Chapitre VII” from Jean-Michel Vappereau’s Nœud. Nœud is less fanciful than How James Joyce Made His Name by Roberto Harari.
77 intercourse, but there is nonetheless discourse (for non-psychotics). The hysterical rapport between $ and S1 is inconsistent; the masterful rapport between S1 and S2 is actually incomplete; the academic rapport between S2 and a is indemonstrable; and the analytic rapport between a and $ is undecidable (Fierens, Lecture de L’étourdit 71-72). Intolerance of inconsistency forces a passage from hysteria to mastery; intolerance of authority’s incomplete knowledge forces a passage from mastery to academia; and sometimes, intolerance of academic speculations forces a passage to analysis. The progressive imperative, “Tolerate everything”, is guaranteed to fail.
This is a basic, Freudian wager.
The relationship between Lacan’s Father figures and his discourse-schemas is even more mysterious than the relationship between the discourse-schemas and the sexuation formulae.
Libraries are littered with academics’ attempts to discern the role that society or ideology plays with regard to artistic, poetic-sophistic or père-verse/sublime figures. Lacan, in short, did not solve the figure/discourse mystery during his Panthéon period; he resurrected and rehashed it.
Having discussed Lacan’s Father figures at length, I dedicate this chapter solely to Lacan’s discourse-schemas. The latter assist my musicological analyses in Section Two.
Introduction to the four
Séminaire XVII, L’envers de la psychanalyse, 1969-1970 was Lacan’s first seminar series held in the Faculté de droit at the place du Panthéon, and it was the first in which Lacan deployed his four discourse-schemas. Lacan’s discourse-schemas are vaguely akin to Freud’s
“impossible” professions and Alexandre Kojève’s “four irreducible types” of Authority. Lacan’s analytic discourse follows Freud’s assertion that a perfect psychoanalysis as impossible; the impossibility of governing is the master’s discourse; the impossibility of educating is the academic’s discourse (S. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” 248). Kojève’s
“Father” qua mysterious cause is Lacan’s analyst qua cause of desire; Kojève’s “Master” that risks death to preside over slaves is close to Lacan’s master; Kojève’s “Leader” that desires accurate foresight and makes predictions is Lacan’s academic; and finally, Kojève’s “Judge” is somewhat like Lacan’s hysteric, for the sad Judge, torn between parties, wants justice (Kojève,
Notion of Authority 28-29).
78 S2 a S1 S2 $ S1 a $
S1 → $ $ → a a → S2 S2 → S1 Fig. 20. Academia ⤺, mastery, hysteria ⤺ and analysis (Séminaire ⤺ XVII 2.31; “Radiophonie” ⤺ 447).
The bottom line ( ) designates a relation of comic-pathetic impotence or inability; the ⤺ top line ( ) designates a relation of impossibility (Séminaire XVII 11.190, 12.202-03). What is → the difference between impotence and impossibility? The former effectively masks or distracts from the latter and thereby serves as a scapegoat or else an illusory incentive. “Never let go of your dreams!” says Impotence personified, overlooking certain impossibilities.
In Chapter Six of Séminaire XVII, Lacan named the four terms as follows: the master- signifier (S1), the slave’s savoir (S2), the subject ($) and jouissance (a). There are notable inconsistencies. In Chapter One, for example, savoir (S2) was defined as the Other’s jouissance, not the object a. In Chapter Three, savoir was likewise designated a means of jouissance
(Séminaire XVII 1.14, 3.57, 6.105). Lacan’s article from October 1970, “Radiophonie”, helps clear the confusion. In it, he specified that the object a is the plus-de-jouir – a jouissance in excess of both the master’s jouissance and the jouissance of the slave’s savoir (“Radiophonie”
447). The master’s jouissance (S1) was later clarified as masturbatory, private and identitarian
(Séminaire XX 7.75). Plus-de-jouir, by contrast, denotes the master’s castration – the exhaustion or sense of loss (a) experienced when barking orders that inevitably fail to cover everything. Master-signifiers not only determine castration (for the slave), they induce it as well
(for the master); for, as noted, both S1 and S2 are castrated with respect to the little a. Lacan deemed this a new development in his theory (Séminaire XVII 6.101, 12.203).
Another key development from the period was the nomination of the master’s discourse as the condition or l’envers (‘inverse’) of psychoanalysis, hence the title of Séminaire XVII
(6.99; “Radiophonie” 411). Why is the master’s discourse the condition of analysis? The latter cannot operate without its agent, namely, the object a produced by the master-discourse in the sense of a litter, birth, excretion, miscarriage or misunderstanding. Note the preservation of the
Freudian, parental theme.
Just as Lacan varied the names of his schemas’ four terms, over time, he also changed the names of the four places.
79 desire Other agent work
truth loss truth production
agent other semblance jouissance
truth production truth plus-de-jouir
Fig. 21. Various names of the four places .96
How can Lacan’s four discourse-schemas – referred to as le mathème tétraédrique – account for contemporary, progressive diversity or infinitely complex cultural/historical contexts? They cannot, and they do not pretend that they can. Lacan translated the crucial terms of Freudian doctrine and used them to formally clarify and arrange a limited number of discourses in which change does not occur (“De l’incompréhension” 66, 70; Séminaire XIX 5.66,
5.76; Séminaire XX 2.20). Change, as Oliver Feltham explained, occurs outside or between discourses. Change itself is “asystematic or astructural”; hence, for each of the four discourses that Lacan schematised, there is strictly no such thing as “structural change” or progress
(“Enjoy Your Stay” 190). Like the poet Arthur Rimbaud, Lacan believed that when one switches from one discourse to another (after finding a new reason or a new passion), one has fallen in love (Séminaire XX 2.20-21).97
Pre-Panthéon schemas
Although the four discourse-schemas were presented for the first time in Séminaire
XVII, one should not rush to call them new. To the best of my knowledge, Lacan first expressed his belief that quadripartite structures are required to demonstrate the unconscious in 1962
(“Kant avec Sade” 774; Séminaire XVII 1.13). The hysterical schema and the academic schema each have something in common with Lacan’s schéma R of 1958, which, in turn, was based on the schéma L, dated 2 February 1955 (Séminaire II 9.134). Both the schéma R and the academic schema position the object a in the top-right corner; the hysterical schema, like the schéma R, places the subject in the top-left and the Other’s savoir in the bottom-right. So while the schéma R, the hysterical schema and the academic schema are not identical, they are not radically different.
96 The names derive from Lacan’s schemas (Séminaire XVII 6.106, 12.196; “Radiophonie” 447; Séminaire XIX 5.67).
97 See Rimbaud’s poem, “À une raison” (320): Ta tête se détourne: le nouvel amour! Ta tête se retourne, – le nouvel amour!
80 S a $ S1
a’ A a → S2 Fig. 22. A reduced schéma R is vaguely akin⤺ to the hysterical schema. ≈
In 1966, Lacan added a footnote to an article from 1958, “D’une question préliminaire à tout traitement possible de la psychose” (553), in which he described schéma R as a cross- capped sphere. How can a square-shaped diagram be a cross-capped sphere? Recall from the previous chapter that Lacan used the cross-capped sphere as a figure for the academic discourse.
Recall, too, that mathematicians sometimes represent the cross-capped sphere via a polygonal schema that resembles a common square (Edelsbrunner, “Two-Dimensional Manifolds” 28).
Finally, note that Lacan included the letters of his Trinity – R, S and I – in the schéma R. This constitutes an early attempt by Lacan to associate the three and the four. I cannot provide further details; I remain confident that Lacan’s theory was incomplete.
Lacan’s 1962 schema of the Sadean fantasy is vaguely akin to the analytic schema
(“Kant avec Sade” 774). In the Sadean schema, the object a serves as the ideal agent of valour
(V): it works its way through a utopia of desire ($), hoping to eventually become the subject of a brutal, non-interdicted pleasure (S, to be read as $ without a bar). If one inverts the Sadean schema, it resembles the analytic schema; but appearances are deceiving.
a $ a $
V S S2 → S1 Fig. 23. An upside-down ◊ Sadean schema⤺ and the analytic schema. ≠
Sadean valour and the analyst’s vérité – located in the bottom-left corner of each schema – are not the same. Absolute, unimpeded enjoyment of the Other’s body – the universal principle of the Sadean fantasy – has no place in a discourse that treats knowledge of castration as truth and desecrates supposed, identitarian omnipotence. According to Lacan, the Sadean ideal is a unique, self-affirming being that proclaims, “I am what I am”, like the god of Moses
(Séminaire XVII 4.75; Exodus 3.14). In the analyst’s discourse, by contrast, nothing is designated whole, in-dividual or perfectly coherent (“Radiophonie” 440).98
98 Lacan criticised Freud on this point. Freud’s theory of the unconscious (das Unbewusste) was a blundered attempt at coherence (l’une-bévue). Making One inevitably fails (“Clôture” 508; “Ouverture de la section clinique” 8-9).
81 If one examines the inverted Sadean schema and the analytic schema more closely, the lozenge ( ) gives the game away. The lozenge should be on the bottom line, not the top line, for
Lacan used it to denote the same relation of impotence (or, alternatively, power via fantasy) as ◊ the symbols and (Séminaire XVII 7.124). The analytic schema is thus not the same as the ⤺ ▲ inverted Sadean schema. Given that the Sadean fantasy is a perversion with respect to the master’s discourse, what happens if one reverses the Sadean schema instead of inverting it? See the image below.
S V S1 S2
$ a $ → a ⤺ Fig. 24. A Sadean schema flipped ≈ sideways and the mastery schema. ◊
The relation of impotence is now correctly positioned along the bottom line. More importantly, the flipped Sadean schema shows that the Sadean fantasy is literally the master’s discourse in reverse; it is not the inverse of the analyst’s discourse. Sadean perversion, in short, is the reversion of mastery; and mastery is the inversion (l’envers) of analysis or vice versa.99
Analysis and Sadean perversion, I repeat, are vaguely akin; but they are not the same
(“Télévision” 510).
Writing is the object
By 1969, it was certainly not new for Lacan to scribble on the blackboard during his seminars. Séminaire XVII nonetheless marked an intensified interest in written formalisation. In
Chapter Eleven, Lacan mentioned a student from Vincennes who argued that the Real cannot be reached via the silly blackboard. Lacan’s response was clear: if there is a chance that the
Real can be grasped, the chance lies nowhere other than on the blackboard (Séminaire XVII
11.176). A series of affirmations ensued: the letter is in the Real (Séminaire XVIII 7.122); l’écrit, c’est la jouissance (Séminaire XVIII 8.129); the Real is mathematical and is affirmed precisely by the impasses of logic (Séminaire XIX 3.41, 13.184); formalisation is the goal of psychoanalysis, for the mathème alone is capable of being integrally transmitted (Séminaire XX
99 Freud defined neuroses as perversions’ negatives (Three 165). This is effectively the same as saying that perversion is the neurotic’s master-discourse in reverse. Freud believed that neurotics’ unconscious fantasies correspond to “the situations in which satisfaction is consciously obtained by perverts” (“Hysterical” 162).
82 10.108); and, finally, analytic discourse must revolve around its écrits (“Note italienne” 311). It was during this period that Lacan first allowed his oral teaching to be published in a written form. Séminaire XI – the first text established by Jacques-Alain Miller – was published by Seuil in 1973. Séminaire I, Séminaire II and Séminaire XX followed within five years and were thus published during Lacan’s lifetime.100
On account of his comic equivocation, “The letter! The litter!” (Finnegans Wake
1.4.93), Lacan deemed James Joyce a success by analysis’s standards, even though Joyce famously refused analysis with Carl Jung (“Lituraterre” 11; “Joyce le symptôme II” 36). Lacan presumably derived a perverse satisfaction from Joyce’s refusal. During the inauguration of the clinical section at Paris VIII University’s Department of Psychoanalysis in 1977, Lacan said something even more shocking. He said that Freud’s best work was his text on Daniel Paul
Schreber – a psychotic subject that, like Joyce, never took part in clinical analysis (“Ouverture de la section clinique” 13). This counts as praise, I believe, for Freud’s philology.
In Chapter Eleven of Séminaire XVII, however, Lacan warned his audience not to use mathematical writing to try and determine the origin of analysis’s object a (Séminaire XVII
11.181). The object a will never offer itself up as a Revelation for the sake of universal comprehension or affirm that it is what it is (“Le malentendu” 12). The object a certainly cannot be demonstrated as rational or proportionate. On multiple occasions, Lacan figured the object a as the reciprocal of the golden number, which is an irrational number (La logique du fantasme 13.113; Séminaire XVI 9.138-39; Séminaire XVII 11.182-84; Séminaire XX 4.47). If you divide 1 by the golden number’s reciprocal, it produces a result that is equal to the sum of the latter plus 1, which is also equal to the golden number itself.101
1 a = 1 + a ≈ 1 0.61803 ≈ 1 + 0.61803
100 A caveat: Lacan’s experimental journal, Scilicet, ceased during the Panthéon period. According to Roudinesco, it became “the symbol of that ‘unreadable’ Lacanianism that would be the mockery of an entire intelligentsia”. The experiment with anonymous authorship was a “resounding failure” (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co. 464-69).
101 A common symbol for the golden number’s reciprocal is the Greek letter Incidentally, Lacan used in his schéma
R to denote the imaginary phallus. φ. φ
83 . In 1987,
Louis H. Kauffman handed Lacanians a precise link between the golden number and the Trinity The golden number’s relationship with the Fibonacci sequence is well known via the Fibonacci tree and the trefoil knot. (Recall that the trefoil knot sometimes symbolised the Christian Trinity.) Kauffman coded the trefoil knot’s three crossing points and showed that the knot could be reformulated as a labelling pattern on the Fibonacci tree. The same can be done for other knots. “Each knot”, he wrote, “contrives its own way of labelling the tree” (On
Knots 116-18).
The golden number is commonly denoted by the Greek letter Φ. Lacan frequently used the same letter to denote the Phallus. The Phallus, according to Lacan’s comic-pathetic definition, is the only thing that is infinitely happy (Séminaire XVII 5.84). It is a mythical absolute that one can only approximate via comic-pathetic chit-chat – the Passion of the signifier, as Lacan put it (“Radiophonie” 412).
Something more easily understood
The above material is mostly nonsense from an academic’s perspective. Lacan’s schema of capitalism, by contrast, is especially relevant, given that contemporary academia treats economic reality as its master-signifier (“D’une réforme” 9). Lacan presented the capitalist schema on 12 May 1972 to an Italian audience that did not belong to his École freudienne or attend Le séminaire (“Du discours psychanalytique” 32-33, 40). He, too, believed it could be of use to non-Lacanians.
$ S2
S1 a Fig. 25. A reduced version of Lacan’s capitalist schema.102
Lacan only spoke about his capitalist schema on this one, particular occasion, and he did not say much.103 Capitalism substituted for the master’s discourse, he argued. It is quelque
102 Lacan’s original schema, which is copyrighted and therefore cannot be reproduced here, has arrows pointing from $ to S1, S1 to S2, S2 to a, then a to $ (“Du discours psychanalytique” 40).
103 Lacan claimed that, in 1970, he wanted to show off his capitalist schema, but since none of his audience members intervened and asked how it differed from the four discourse-schemas, he waited till later (Séminaire XVIII 3.49).
84 chose de follement astucieux (‘something insanely clever’ – note the reference to psychosis), yet it is also self-consuming, untenable as a discourse and therefore doomed to la crevaison. The term crevaison suggests a blow-out or a punctured tire. Lacan also said that, via capitalism, everything is unveiled à la pornography or the Apocalypse (from apokaluptein, ‘unveil, reveal’); hence le public inevitably seems like la poubelle, ‘the trash can’ (“Du discours psychanalytique”
34, 48).
Lacan predicted that, in future, psychoanalysis would not be Freudian or Lacanian but rather vraiment pesteux, ‘truly pestilent’, Americanised and devoted to the ideology of consumer satisfaction (“Du discours psychanalytique” 49). On a previous occasion, Lacan insisted that
America brought a plague upon Freudian practice, for it reduced analysis to individualistic ethics and the pursuit of “success” and “happiness” (“La chose freudienne” 403, 416;
Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 265). Lacan was not wrong. Since his death in 1981, quasi-analytic self-help and self-empowerment rhetoric has become ubiquitous. In March 1988, for example, L.
Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health topped “virtually every best- seller list” in the United States (Sappell and Welkos, “Costly” 1).104
Today’s mainstream and religious media outlets in the United States, the United
Kingdom and the British colonies are influenced more by Edward L. Bernays than either Freud or Lacan. Bernays was Freud’s nephew. He effectively fused Freud’s Group Psychology with
Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules and thereby created a liberal-capitalist machine named public relations. “Today the privilege of attempting to sway public opinion is everyone’s”, wrote
Bernays, decades before the emergence of sad, social media activism. Bernays boasted about the infiltration of public relations rhetoric into established discourses: “People attempt to sway other people for social motives – ethical, philanthropic, educational – for political, for international, for economic, and for motives of personal ambition” (“Manipulating Public
Opinion” 959-60). Academics and members of the public can all understand Bernays’ writing style. In spite of what is commonly said, this is not a blessing. In 1929, Bernays created the infamous Torches of Liberty Contingent – a marketing campaign that equated consumerism
104 Richard Hofstadter characterised “modern inspirational literature”, based on “self-manipulation”, as “a kind of faith in magic” in which “the realms of the world and the spirit” become “vaguely fused”. Self-manipulation is “believed to be the key to health, wealth, popularity, or peace of mind” (Anti-intellectualism 266-67).
85 with female empowerment in the hope that women would become addicted to a particular product and thereby grow an industry’s profits (Gabay, Brand Psychology 165). The example consists of four main things: a corporation (from corps, ‘body’), a parade of quasi-satisfied bodies (that are both consuming and part of a consumable spectacle), Bernays’ saucy know- how, and public opinion in favour of self-empowerment. These four things can be mapped to
Lacan’s terms, in this order: S1, $, S2 and a.
The following passage from Bernays’ “Manipulating Public Opinion”, published in 1928, will seem more familiar to Anglophone academics than anything spouted by Lacan.
If the general principles of swaying public opinion are understood, a technique can be
developed which, with the correct appraisal of the specific problem and the specific
audience, can and has been used effectively in such widely different situations as changing
the attitude of whites towards Negroes in America, changing the buying habits of
American women from felt hats to velvet, silk, and straw hats, changing the impression
which the American electorate has of its President, introducing new musical instruments,
and a variety of others. (958)
Bernays, not Lacan, was a man of the public; Bernays, not Lacan, demonstrated the effects of being easily understood. Bernays lacks the surname of a Freud or a Lacan; he merely facilitated the opinions of others (from facilis, ‘easy’), which is precisely why the facile present is his. Alternatively, one could argue that the present belongs to the Gallup Organization or even to Anna Freud. The former is a group of pollsters that initially rivalled Bernays and later, from
1997 onwards, promoted Positive Psychology research (Moore, Opinion Makers v-vi, 20); the latter established a profoundly non-Lacanian, pro-identitarian version of analytic practice, which aimed to restore “the ego to its integrity” via the correction of “abnormalities” (A. Freud, Ego
4). Élisabeth Roudinesco described Anna Freud’s empire as a slavish machine that reproduced
“the adaptive ideas of ‘the American way of life’: an Uncle Sam bloated with Coca-Cola”
(Jacques Lacan 259; see also Lacan, “Subversion du sujet” 808-09).105
105 In 1973, the International Psychoanalytic Association named Anna Freud its Honorary President. In 1974, Lacan, by contrast, said that nothing resembled a fly’s excrement – that is, waste produced by a degenerate master-discourse – more than Anna Freud (“La troisième” 185).
86 Their opinions may not be consistent, but Bernays, Anna Freud and Gallup are all indices of capitalism. Theirs is the ideology that gifted us “emotional capital”, the “cash value” of ideas, Amy Cuddy’s Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, Nancy
Etcoff’s Survival of the Prettiest, and On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself through
Mindful Creativity by Ellen Langer (Ajayi et al., “Positive Relationship Science” 281; Lambert,
“Science of Happiness” 27-28, 94). With rhetoric such as this, is it any surprise that Lacanian analysts find themselves on the margins of consumer democracies? Given that Lacan’s diagrammatic enterprise took place “when technological rationalism was in the ascendant” (that is, when Bernays triumphed over his uncle Sigmund), Roudinesco appropriately designated it
“one of the strangest phenomena in the history of modern thought” (Jacques Lacan 259, 359-
60).106
Clinical analysis may have nothing to do with music, and it is certainly at odds with academia’s hegemonic, progressive ideology. In spite of this, Lacan’s schemas of capitalism, academia, mastery and hysteria can be used by musicologists to examine the rhetoric to which music, musicians and music-lovers are subjected. Lacan’s schemas illustrate the social structures
(and the quasi-social capitalist structure) through which music, musicians and music-lovers are invoked and neglected, privileged and denigrated, attributed sense or written off as absurd. If
Lacan’s Father figures embodied his attempts at composition or mock-harmonia, then the discourse-schemas are Lacan’s best contributions to musicology. Section Two demonstrates this.
106 In 1933, Sigmund Freud pre-empted the difficulties experienced by Lacanians. “You can believe me when I tell you”,
Freud insisted, “that we do not enjoy giving an impression of being members of a secret society and of practising a mystical science” (New Introductory Lectures 69).
87
SECTION TWO
Mousa, present
§
Music at multiple places
2.1 Say no to Lacanian musicology: A review of misnomers
L’analyse ne se fait pas en musique.
– Jacques Lacan (“Discours de Rome” 164)
[…] la topologie inepte à quoi Kant a donné corps de son propre établissement, celui du bourgeois qui ne peut
imaginer que de la transcendance, l’esthétique comme la dialectique.
– Jacques Lacan (“L’étourdit” 479-80)
Mais ce n’est pas du tout kantien. C’est même ce sur quoi j’insiste. S’il y a notion du réel, elle est extrêmement
complexe.
– Jacques Lacan (“Le triomphe de la religion” 96-97)
Lacanian musicology is a vague and diffuse sub-field of cultural studies. Although
Lacanian musicology is named after the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, its Anglophone proponents read the cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek more than they read Lacan; and they are more concerned with Žižekian academia than they are with Lacan’s analytic practice. Two major problems emerge: Lacan is conflated with Žižek, and Lacan is conflated with Kant. As a result, analytic discourse is confused with post-modern academia, and it is confused with an eighteenth-century master-discourse on the Sublime. I shall demonstrate.
Another praxis of garbage?
Throughout the twentieth century, psychoanalytic approaches to music were not popular within Anglophone conservatories; yet academics that write about sound and participatory art, such as Claire Bishop, look back on “the use of Marxism, psychoanalysis and linguistics in the 1970s” as something especially familiar (Artificial Hells 7). Lacanian musicology’s status within academia is therefore uncertain. Is it novel, or is it clichéd and exhausted?
In 2007, Lorenzo Chiesa held that “the risk of a belated fashion for ‘Lacanian soirées’ and the hegemonic imposition of a ‘soft’ – or simply mistaken – approach to [Lacan’s] oeuvre is presently higher than ever in Anglophone university circles” (Subjectivity and Otherness 3).
Chiesa’s broad caution applies to the burgeoning field of Lacanian musicology: a swarm of
89 interest could merely entail further Anglophone conferences, lectures and publications that are unsatisfactory. This is unlikely to shock anyone aside from academics that make money talking about Lacan.
Lacan believed that his texts were incompatible, inappropriate and antithetical with respect to academia (“Préface à une thèse” 393; “Postface au Séminaire XI” 504; “Lacan pour
Vincennes!” 278). Even when he appeared on French television, Lacan spoke specifically about analysis; he did not address academics using the terms of their discourse or else members of the public with no analytic experience (Séminaire XIX 14.194; “Télévision” 509-10). He did not consider open seminars very serious, and he referred to public texts as poubellications – a play on publication, poubelle (‘trash can’) and the trashy public domain (Séminaire XVI 15.244;
“Introduction de Scilicet” 285; Séminaire XIX 5.65). This partly explains how France’s first department of psychoanalysis (within academia) acquired its reputation as the praxis of garbage
(Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics 180): it took psychoanalytic babbling and made it public.
Lacan mocked so-called Lacanian academics within Humanities faculties on account of their frotti-frotta littéraire and tourbillon de sémantophilie (“Lituraterre” 12; “L’étourdit” 494).
More broadly, he made fun of academic pédants and partnered them with pédés (“L’étourdit”
462) – an allusion to boarding school fagging, perhaps, or members of Socratic societies that enjoy fondling boys. During a visit to Yale University in 1975, Lacan teased academics yet again: he noted that, while literature pricks academics in the behind, it does not produce the same titillating effects for others (“Conférences et entretiens” 36). This is the sort of material that warrants the adjective Lacanian. It is not academic; it does not pretend that it is academic. In Lacan’s view, academics that cite his work (such as myself) are like a tree’s amber: the amber traps the fly yet knows nothing of its flight (“Préface à une thèse” 402). This is true.
Many academics that cite Lacan have absolutely no analytic experience.
In 1968, after nearly three decades spent in three different psychoanalytic societies,
Lacan admitted he had plenty of experience with household garbage (Séminaire XVI 1.11) – a reference to analytic case studies. By contrast, he never claimed to know much about musical practice. Who, then, can expect a happy marriage between analytic discourse and musicology?
90 Lacan said almost nothing
In “Art after Lacan”, François Régnault wrote, “We must admit that the subject
‘psychoanalysis and music’ never inspired any great writing, in spite of Theodor Reik’s treatment of Gustav Mahler”. Although Lacan regularly attended concerts throughout the 1950s and 1960s at Paris’s Domaine musical (which featured the music of Luciano Berio, Pierre
Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen), he never discussed events such as these in his seminars or articles. In response to Lacan’s silence, Régnault was forced to infer, “Maybe music is of no use in psychoanalysis” (n. pag.). Lacan issued a complementary statement back in 1953. Analysis, he pointed out, is not something that happens in music (“Discours de Rome” 164). This is undoubtedly correct.
At least two guests invited to speak during Lacan’s seminars mentioned music, but each mention failed to attract a response from Lacan. Michèle Montrelay was responsible for the first.
Montrelay became a member of Lacan’s École freudienne de Paris in 1965. During a session of
Lacan’s Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, Montrelay discussed Marguerite Duras’ novel
Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein and made a brief allusion to contemporary music by
Stockhausen (“Séminaire du 23 juin 1965” 276). The second moment concerns Alain Didier-
Weill, whom Lacan called upon during L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre. Didier-
Weill’s impromptu is somewhat amusing, thanks to the spontaneous coinage sujet musicant,
‘musicking subject’ (“Séminaire du 21 décembre 1976” 22) – a notion that became popular among Anglophone musicologists in the late 1990s, following the publication of Christopher
Small’s Musicking. I repeat: Lacan did not take up Montrelay’s Stockhausen example, and he did not make anything of Didier-Weill’s sujet musicant. He certainly did not write a big book about it like Small. Likewise, dedicated Lacanian scholars and analysts tend to overlook these moments. They are not considered significant events in the history of Le séminaire.
In “Psychoanalysis and Music”, Régnault reiterated his general argument. “I have always been struck by the silence of psychoanalysis with regard to music”, he wrote: “nothing in
Freud, almost nothing in Lacan”. Although I endorse Régnault’s argument, the following point is not correct: “Lacan stated only that music and architecture are the supreme arts” (n. pag.).
Since the subject of Lacan and music has not been adequately researched, it is worth sifting through the details, even if they prove tedious.
91 Lacan twice mentioned music during his final seminar series at the École normale supérieure, held from 1968 to 1969. He flattered music and architecture on account of their shared debt to mathematics and later spoke briefly about harmonics and musical intervals
(Séminaire XVI 1.14, 19.296). When Lacan drafted his four discourse-schemas at the Panthéon, he referred to a discourse’s agent as la dominante (Séminaire XVII 2.34, 3.47). In conventional
Western music theory, the dominant is a note that implies or points to the tonic while remaining separate from it. Likewise, the dominant spokesperson of a social institution can imply the truth (in a typically sleazy, sophistic manner) and can rely on others’ belief in truth, but the spokesperson cannot wholly reveal it.
S2 a S1 S2 $ S1 a $
S1 → $ $ → a a → S2 S2 → S1 ⤺ Fig. 26 .⤺ Four non-identical ⤺ discourses. ⤺
In 1971, Lacan reminded his audience that thunder – a mysterious and imposing semblance – is a crucial support of divine authority; he noted that birdsong is often believed to incarnate divine praise; and he observed that singing is like the Phallus (a tormentor such as
Priapus, Dionysus or Mutunus Tutunus) insofar as it ruptures a body’s synergy and forces a division between phonation and breathing (Séminaire XVIII 1.15-16, 4.70). Playing on seriner
(a verb meaning ‘to drum in’) and sirène (the mythical, disastrous Siren), Lacan said that analytic experience repeatedly drums in the fact that there is no sexual harmony (Séminaire
XIX 1.18). These disparate comments do not add up to an academic theory of music; they simply invoke ancient musical topics such as sound, mathematics and myth.
In 1972, during the well-known Séminaire XX, Encore, Lacan played on the musical title and argued that an analyst must have a good ear. This, however, does not infer that an analyst’s ear is the same as a musician’s. An analyst must be able to discern equivocations that undermine potency. In the word maître, for example, an analyst should hear m’être – an equivocation that mocks the ego’s confused apprehension of itself as a master (Séminaire XX
5.53). A musician’s ear, by contrast, develops in the direction of potency and sophistication.
Music’s notions of Good typically derive from the master’s discourse: displays of virtuosity
(from vir, ‘man’), precise intonation, control of coloratura, esoteric microtonal or spectro- morphological powers, sophisticated timbre manipulation, computer-generated rhythms that
92 eschew the limits of human bodies, and so on. The aristocratic imperative is clear: “More!
More!”
The musician’s Good is whatever il maestro deems sound; whereas analysis is oriented towards a singular impasse. The two discourses – mastery and analysis – are separate. So-called post-modern, anti-mastery critics are separate yet again: they are either gripped by neoliberal empowerment rhetoric or le discours hystérico-diabolique.
During the aforementioned session of Séminaire XX, Encore, Lacan argued that familiar pleasantries such as musical epithalamia and love letters do not constitute sexual harmony; they skirt around the fact that sexual harmony does not exist. In a later session, dedicated to the Baroque period, Lacan contemplated talking about music, yet he doubted he would ever have the time (Séminaire XX 5.53, 9.105). This is not an auspicious beginning for
Lacanian musicology. Further comments on music and notation can be found in Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse (1.7, 2.13, 12.129, 24.285) and in Écrits (35, 215 [note 1], 253,
335, 372, 423, 479, 503, 533, 539, 670, 729, 764, 890). On page 890 of Écrits, for example, Lacan slyly referenced “La cathédrale engloutie”, a piano prelude by Claude Debussy that tries to evoke underwater cathedral bells. I hope that these references are of use to future scholars; but in sum, they do not amount to much. Régnault’s argument therefore stands: Lacan said almost nothing about music.
Academia ≠ analysis ≠ mastery
During his seminars, Lacan regularly spouted material from academics (other than musicologists), just as analysands regurgitate stuff from the various discourses to which they are subjected. Academia, by contrast, applies strict regulations upon speech and publications issued within its domain. One cannot, therefore, claim that anything and everything from analytic discourse is welcome within academia. In 1963, Lacan employed an Anglophone phrase in order to denigrate a metaphorical pile of books and articles written by analysts: “psycho-analytical dunghill” (Séminaire X 22.350). The following year, Lacan criticised analytic literature’s extraordinary capacity for inconsequence and confusion. He was confident that analytic texts would one day be considered among the works of les fous littéraires – a reference to the
93 Surrealists’ follies (Séminaire XI 20.240).107 From academia’s perspective, this is not a commendation. Having said that, academics frequently betray the standards of their own discourse: they are not saints (Ioannidis, “Why” 40, 44; Verhaeghe, What About Me? 126-30).
From a different angle, Lacan maintained that a clinical setting was proper to his work rather than an academic setting. In “Jeunesse de Gide” (747), he stated that psychoanalysis is applied only as a treatment to a subject that speaks and listens. If a prospective analysand knocks on an analyst’s door, psychoanalysis may indeed have a purpose. If, by contrast, the
Beatles abruptly truncate the end of a studio recording and their record label consents to promote the song (and thus include it on an album that millions of people purchase), this is not a demand for analytic interpretation.108 The final stage of a commercial album’s production is named mastering for a reason: it does not entail analysis or dissolution, unless the record company in charge of the album suddenly files for bankruptcy.
Freud occasionally indulged in the gratuitous analysis of art, notably in Leonardo da
Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood; and since the late 1980s, Žižek has frequently practised non-clinical analysis within multiple branches of cultural studies. Compared to Freud and Žižek,
Lacan was arguably more careful to avoid non-clinical analysis (Les non-dupes errent 11.77;
“Conférences et entretiens” 36). In 1975, he made a few psycho-biographical lapses concerning
James Joyce, but he later admitted that he was embarrassed to speak on the subject of Joyce’s art (Séminaire XXIII 4.74, 5.77; “Préface à l’édition anglaise” 573). Lacan reminded his audience that Joyce was not his analysand. Instead of practising analysis on Joyce, Lacan speculated about Joyce’s psychologie and l’ego (Séminaire XXIII 5.79-80, 10.149-52).109 In David
Macey’s opinion, Lacan’s well-known references to literature and visual art were subordinate to his main concern, which was the teaching of clinical analysis (“Jacques Lacan” 151). I agree.
The difference between clinical analysis and non-clinical analysis is not subtle. The former is requested by a prospective analysand and must be agreed upon by an analyst; the
107 Lacan considered the Surrealists a group of imbéciles (R.S.I. 7.61).
108 See the second chapter of David Schwarz’s Listening Subjects, entitled “Scatting, the Acoustic Mirror, and the Real in the Beatles’ ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’”.
109 Joyce scholars and Anglophone Lacan scholars frequently overlook this point.
94 latter is gratuitous. Régnault mocked the psychoanalysis of music and implicitly encouraged his readers to “avoid facile allegory which would run aground if one were looking for the sexual function of the dominant seventh, or castration in syncopation, for example” (“Art after Lacan” n. pag. [note 24]). An article from 2011 by Kenneth M. Smith, “The Tonic Chord and Lacan’s
Object a in Selected Songs by Charles Ives”, fell straight into Régnault’s trap. According to
Smith, during Ives’ “Premonitions”, “dominant-seventh chords, as free-floating signifiers, now divorced from a syntactically prepared tonal centre, simultaneously lacking and excessive, set the signification process in motion along the path of ‘desire’. These seventh chords then become
Lacan’s anamorphotic spots (phallic signifiers) that fuel our interpretative mechanisms
(desires)” (389). Smith’s passage – an epitome of facile allegory – was somehow published in the
Journal of the Royal Musical Association. It does not read well out of context; but do all passages necessarily improve when read in context? I shall leave the reader to check.
In a footnote to “Psychoanalysis and Music”, Régnault downplayed pretentious discussions of silence. This is unfortunately relevant to multiple Lacanian musicologists
(Jagodzinski, Music 36-39, 58, 205; Reichardt, Composing 94-96; Schwarz, Listening Subjects
123, 142; Schwarz, Listening Awry 72-76, 157; Willet, “Music as Sinthome” 119). Although music does indeed involve silences as well as sounds, the proliferation of “banalities”, as
Régnault put it, “about the silence following Mozart’s music being also Mozart, etc.” is unnecessary (n. pag. [note 4]). I lack the will to pursue this subject further. Anyone interested in hyperbole regarding silences can consult the multiple references I just provided.
Lacanian musicology is a misnomer
Music research referred to as Lacanian and/or post-Lacanian generally falls within opera studies or cinema studies. Examples include The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure
Principle in Opera by the psychoanalyst Michel Poizat, Opera’s Second Death by the cultural theorists Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek, and “Music as Sinthome: Joy Riding with Lacan,
Lynch, and Beethoven Beyond Postmodernism” by the musicologist Eugene Kenneth Willet.
Even so, works like these remain abstruse. They do not belong to a predominant field of
Anglophone Humanities research. The Angel’s Cry, for instance, is Poizat’s only work available in English translation; Opera’s Second Death is the only book by Dolar or Žižek dedicated to
95 music;110 “Music as Sinthome” is a doctoral thesis that has not been treated to a commercial publication.
Lacanian clinicians that write about music are few in number. Along with Poizat, examples include Sebastian Leikert, Eduardo Said and Didier-Weill. Leikert is the Chairman of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse und Musik. “The Object of Jouissance in Music” is
Leikert’s only work available in English translation. Musicological texts by Said and Didier-
Weill (such as the well-known Les trois temps de la loi) are currently limited to readers of
Spanish and French, respectively.
Lacan’s name is rarely invoked in the swelling mass of popular music texts. Jan
Jagodzinski’s Music in Youth Culture: A Lacanian Approach constitutes an exception, as does the work of David Schwarz. Jagodzinski’s methodology is similar to that of many Lacanian musicologists. He serves up Lacan via Žižek plus a cocktail of French philosophy and tries to say something about music, as evidenced by the following passage.
To what extent can this array of music youth cultures be theorized as examples of
“becoming-woman” in Deleuzean terms? […] Becoming-woman, a Deleuzean term, seems to
sit uncomfortably within a book that utilizes Lacanian psychoanalysis, who is often accused
of transcendental phallogocentrism against the author(s) of empirical transcendent
immanence. To what extent, then, do I find myself “Oedipally” still loyal to Lacan, or to
his most eminent practioner [sic] in the English-speaking context such as Žižek? Gratefully
perhaps, an exploration of pop music can result in a productive misreading so, at the very
least, some form of “betrayal” can take place that furthers an understanding of youth
today? (2; original italics)
Jagodzinski’s description of his own methodology contains a spelling mistake as well as a question mark at the end of a sentence that is not a question; and these are the least of its problems. When one compares an Anglophone commentary with translations of French primary
110 Dolar’s book, A Voice and Nothing More, is more broadly concerned with psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy and literature.
96 texts, one expects the commentary’s prose to be less awkward. This, unfortunately, is not the case for Music in Youth Culture: A Lacanian Approach.
Schwarz’s rationale for dragging analytic discourse into musicology is, in my view, vain and unconvincing. In 1997, Schwarz wrote, “Why psychoanalysis? In part, I am drawn to psychoanalysis temperamentally; much of it just seems right, particularly with daily confirmation from the experiences of raising a small child” (Listening Subjects 2). By 2014, little had changed: “My approach is Lacanian because I have a history of inquiring into art from a
Lacanian point of view” (Bard-Schwarz, Strangest Thing 2).111 Schwarz’s rhetoric is too limp to be labelled authoritarian, yet his methodology can effectively be reduced to the following:
“Lacan is great for musicology because I say so, and I have said this for quite some time now!”
On a more serious note, anyone that has read Lacan knows that he was critical of intuitive formalisations and sentimental excesses (“D’une question” 571; Séminaire XXIII 10.150).
Sarah Reichardt’s justification for invoking Lacan is similarly troubling. In Composing the Modern Subject: Four String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich, Reichardt wrote, “Jacques
Lacan’s concept of the real, thoroughly discussed in Chapter One, provides the foundation for the critical-theory approach” (1). At a time when at least six seminar series by Lacan were available in English translation as well as selected articles from Écrits, Reichardt founded her
“critical-theory approach” upon just one article by Lacan and one seminar series. Like Schwarz,
Reichardt principally engaged with the work of post-Lacanian academics, hence the following footnoted admission: “My account of the real is taken, for the most part, from Slavoj Žižek,
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture […] and The Sublime
Object of Ideology” (8 [note 13]).
Žižek’s work, not Lacan’s, is the foundation of Reichardt’s project. Why, then, is
Lacan’s name invoked on the first page of Reichardt’s book instead of Žižek’s? This is very peculiar. In Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (published in 1997) and
Listening Awry: Music and Alterity in German Culture (published in 2006), Schwarz, likewise, gave Lacan excessive credit and Žižek too little. It took till 2014 before Schwarz – writing under the new name of Bard-Schwarz – offered the following clarification.
111 Between the publication of Listening Awry and Strangest Thing, Schwarz changed his surname to Bard-Schwarz.
97 For the past few decades I have approached Lacan through his interpreter, Slavoj Žižek.
The advantage of such an approach is that one reaches the thought of the difficult master
through a writer who makes Lacan accessible and very clear; the disadvantage of such an
approach (as it occurs to me now) is that one misses the precision of the language of the
master himself. (Strangest Thing 2)
If Lacanian musicologists instead referred to themselves as Žižekian musicologists, this would solve three problems. Their academic field would be named after an academic; appropriate credit would be given to the author whose texts they regularly cite; and focus would be placed on an author who sometimes writes about music instead of a psychoanalyst who never once issued a seminar or article specifically about music. Yes.
Although Lacan’s name featured in the title of Willet’s doctoral thesis, Willet’s review of Lacan’s work was even weaker than Reichardt’s or Schwarz’s. He only mentioned a single text by Lacan: Séminaire XXIII, Le sinthome. But he cited it incorrectly. See page 99: “Le
Seminaire [sic] XXIII: Le sinthome (1971-1972), unpublished, lesson of 2/9/72; sited [sic] in
Hoens and Pluth, ‘The sinthome,’ 1”.112 What a mess! Check Willet’s bibliography: the erroneous entry appears a second time.
What is worse, Willet’s carelessness or his shameless pretence? He purposefully named
“Music as Sinthome” after a text by a well-known figure, which he then referred to no more than once over the course of 153 pages (see page 130). How could Willet’s sizeable Dissertation
Committee – James M. Buhler, David P. Neumeyer, Byron P. Almen, Andrew F. Dell’Antonio and Richard A. Shiff – approve of this? If Lacanian musicology is in fact Žižekian musicology, as I believe it is, that makes Lacanian musicology a misnomer. What if Doctor Eugene Willet is also a misnomer?113
112 Lacan’s Séminaire XXIII, Le sinthome was delivered in 1975-1976. Lacan’s seminar series of 1971-1972 was in fact
Séminaire XIX, … ou pire. It includes the seminar dated 9 February 1972. Willet is confused.
113 The question is not intended as a joke. As a PhD candidate, I wish to become named Doctor. Poor scholarship like
Willet’s demeans the nomination process.
98 Repetition
Robert Fink’s Repeating Ourselves could serve as a motto for self-described Lacanian and post-Lacanian musicologists: it contains no specific references to any of Lacan’s texts.
Repeating Ourselves is ostensibly a book about jouissance, American minimalism and disco music. Throughout his book, Fink conflated discussions of jouissance by multiple authors –
Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Roland Barthes and Jean-François Lyotard – that are far from similar. Worse, Fink’s concept of “disco-as-jouissance” is explicitly vain, as evidenced by the passage below.
The Lacanian route can be a dangerous temptation: disco-as-jouissance provides both a
satisfyingly radical take on the music, and a hermeneutic window that opens onto one of
the most high-status theoretical discourses in postmodern academia. But try to use the
trope seriously, and you will soon find out that jouissance is a rather blunt hermeneutic
instrument. […] It is spectacularly destructive of analytical method; it has little to do with
the way dance music is produced and consumed; and it ignores huge swaths of popular
reception. (39)
Fink’s arrogance is just as prone to ridicule as Schwarz’s opinion, “much of it just seems right”. The “satisfyingly radical”, “high-status” notion is especially peculiar: it re-emphasises the lack of attention paid by post-Lacanian academics to Lacan’s discourse proper. According to
Lacan, analysts are not satisfied; they are horrified by their practice. More importantly, Lacan claimed that no one could aggrandise one’s self on account of anything learned from analytic discourse (“Lettre” 13). He considered Freud un débile mental (‘a mental defective’), and he applied the same label to himself (L’insu que sait 10.70). For an analyst is not in a position to produce masterful, sophistic solutions. Fink does have a point, however, on the subject of hermeneutic interpretation. Psychoanalysis is not a hermeneutic instrument (Lacan, Séminaire
XI 1.12-13); it cannot reveal “the true, hidden meaning of a text” (Nobus, “Illiterature” 25).114
In excess of this, the jouissance from which an analysand suffers is not something that conforms
114 Michael L. Klein, another Lacanian musicologist, defied this point and chose to follow Reichardt and Schwarz. “The
Lacan I read about in [Anglophone] musicology and theory is not always the Lacan I recognise from my own poor attempts to interpret his work”, he confessed (Music 2-3).
99 to academic discussions of musical enjoyment. This is a black omen for Schwarz’s treatment of the Lacanian Real.
The Real is admittedly a point of controversy among Lacanian analysts, due to the fact that Lacan’s discussion of the Real was not consistent throughout the twenty-seven years that he delivered Le séminaire. This should not surprise anyone. Having said that, few analysts – and perhaps few academics – would recognise Schwarz’s version of the Real as Lacanian
(Scherzinger, “When” 99-101). Why? Because Schwarz’s Real is just another avatar for the
Kantian Sublime – a topic guaranteed to satisfy any academic hankering for familiarity. “The
Lacanian Real is rather like the Kantian sublime”, he proclaimed in 2014; “a glimpse of the
Lacanian Real is perhaps not unlike the Kantian sublime” (Bard-Schwarz, Strangest Thing 12,
71). Lacan, by contrast, explicitly stated that the Real is not at all Kantian (“Le triomphe de la religion” 96-97).
In an unpublished review of my work, Marc De Kesel failed to grasp this point; so I am obliged to provide further evidence. See “L’étourdit”, in which Lacan distinguished his teaching from Kant’s aesthetics as well as la topologie inepte that allowed the little gentleman to dream of transcendence. (What a terrific allusion to middle-class musicologists and their obsession with the Sublime! Perhaps others can pursue this subject further.) In the same text, Lacan defined the Thing not as the Real but as le dit de la vérité (“L’étourdit” 452, 472, 479-80). This should not be a point of confusion. See also the seminar of 19 March 1974, in which Lacan clarified that the three tenets of his doctrine – the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary – do not constitute a Kantian or Aristotelian ethics. Lacan then insulted people who misunderstood his remarks about Kant and said that they were deaf (Les non-dupes errent 10.69-73). More broadly, one should not ignore the fact that Lacan spoke of sublimation together with the clinical category of perversion more so than the Sublime of eighteenth-century German idealism
(Séminaire VII 8.131; La logique du fantasme 23.200-01; Natahi, “Un haut degré” 149-54).115 As
Tim Dean pointed out, for example, “Joycean sublimation is fundamentally perverse” (“Paring
His Fingernails” 259). Even in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (156-57, 238-
115 According to Jacques-Alain Miller, “sublimation is often the salvation for perversion” (“On Perversion” 318). Cf.
Marc De Kesel’s Eros and Ethics. De Kesel disagrees with the coupling of sublimation and perversion, and like Alenka
Zupančič, he writes about Kant, Lacan and ethics.
100 39), one finds sublimation discussed together with perversion. It is simply not necessary to invoke the Kantian Sublime.
Kenneth Smith made no note of subtleties such as these. Like Alenka Zupančič (the author of Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan), Smith conflated the work of Kant and Lacan.116
(Perhaps the signifiers Kant/cunt and Lacan/le con are the cause. This should not be ruled out for the sake of academic piety.) Again, I shall leave the details of Smith’s argument aside and simply provide the following passage as evidence: “Perhaps this is what Žižek refers to as the
Kantian ‘mathematical sublime’ found in the drives of the Lacanian real”, Smith wrote –
“compounded forces that are too much for us to process”. Smith also conflated the analysand’s fantasy object (discussed frequently by Lacan) with the Kantian Thing: “Although as ungraspable as the Kantian Ding an sich (with which, in a sense, it is identical), this imaginary goal structures encounters with everyday reality” (“Tonic” 356, 368). The problem here is obvious: compounded surnames are too much to process. If a musicologist discussed Ives with reference to the Kantian Sublime and/or the Thing, that would produce a total of just two surnames: Kant with Ives. Are two surnames somehow insufficient? Why invoke Žižek and, soon afterwards, make equivalences between the work of Lacan (which has not been thoroughly consulted) and the work of Kant?117
Hypothetically, it is appropriate to write about a performer’s spectacle of mastery with reference to the Kantian Sublime but not the Lacanian Real. If a so-called empowered individual could master the Real that torments him/her, this would amount to a self-cure or an ideal self-realisation. There would be no need, then, for clinical analysis, in which case, the
Lacanian Real would not exist (Lacan, “Télévision” 518). With this in mind, consider three passages from Schwarz’s review of a performance by Lesley Flanigan. This is the first passage:
“I like noise and find it strangely soothing”, Schwarz wrote. “In order for this to happen, it has to resonate with some psychic formation and for me this psychic formation is the Lacanian
Real” (“Performance at STEIM” n. pag.). Again, Schwarz flaunts his liberal methodology and
116 Zupančič’s book, published by Verso, is widely consumed and easily digested. This is unfortunate.
117 Kant scholars could ask David Schwarz and Kenneth Smith, where are the precise references to Kant’s work? There are none.
101 says whatever he pleases in Lacan’s name. I remain unconvinced by this. Schwarz’s second passage, copied below, does not dispel doubts.
The Real is the thingness which can seem to appear when some recognizable object is
pulled apart, cracks, or reveals what lies beneath. The glimpse of the Real […] is auditory
and occurs when normal functioning of electronic equipment produces the feedback that
she harnesses. As she masters that feedback, the resultant noise becomes tamed, named,
Symbolic. (“Performance at STEIM” n. pag.)
Why involve an analyst’s terminology in this situation? The musician under review is regarded as a master: Flanigan has a Master’s degree from New York University. Her performance was staged at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam as an example of mastery. A display of mastery is the very opposite of a demand for analysis. Why did Schwarz not instead cite a liberal-capitalist theorist of progress and technological innovation? The twenty-first century is littered with them.
The third and final passage from Schwarz’s review proves just how foreign his musical case study is from Lacanian case studies: “it is enjoyable to feel the fabric of subjectivity pull apart so that one can master it” (“Performance at STEIM” n. pag.). Is it enjoyable, really?
Consider the case of Daniel Paul Schreber (discussed by Lacan throughout Séminaire III, Les psychoses). In Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Schreber wrote, “every human action however small which is combined with some noise, […] is accompanied by a sensation of a painful blow directed at my head; the sensation of pain is like a sudden pulling inside my head […] and may be combined with the tearing off of part of the bony substance of my skull” (204). Schreber is an exemplary Lacanian subject, for he is subjected to others’ torments. He is not a master; he is helpless with respect to the Real. Is there a single Lacanian case study that could condone
Schwarz’s journalistic hyperbole or Robert Fink’s “high-status” smugness? I am not aware of one. For the Real is nothing short of horrible. It is not something that the ego can master or overcome (S. Freud, “Difficulty” 143).
J. P. E. Harper-Scott is another musicologist whose enthusiasm for the Real is excessive. Consider the following passage from The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: “Her ability to escape the focus on the phallic Φ, her refusal in all cases to make this ‘all’, is what
102 makes woman, for Lacan, the superior subjective position, the one that can reveal the truth of the Real” (53). Harper-Scott made an obvious technical error. If women satisfied a refusal- function “in all cases”, then logically, they would form a universe. The category in which Lacan placed women, le pas-tout, is named as such because it is strictly not a universe. Le pas-tout is literally ‘the non-all’. Consistent refusal is in fact denoted by Lacan’s formula for the mythical patriarch: x Φx (“L’étourdit” 458; Séminaire XX 7.74). Women, by contrast, are indeterminate ⋅ (Séminaire XIX 3.47; Séminaire XX 8.94). In banal terms, they cannot find ∃ themselves in screams of either “No” or “Yes”.118 What does this have to do with musicology?
That is for Harper-Scott to establish. I am not convinced he succeeds.
Given that academics are encouraged to be clear and comprehensible whereas analysands are permitted to babble incoherently, it is somewhat ironic when the former struggle to make sense. In Listening Awry, Schwarz attempted to establish a semantic link between
Webern’s “Marcia funebre” (from Sechs Orchesterstücke, Op. 6) and the death of Webern’s mother. In my view, Schwarz did not succeed. According to him, Webern’s work is “neither a traumatic experience nor a subsequent experience that reminds a patient of a traumatic wound”; the work is, rather, “one among presumably other ways of self-representation and embodiment of that trauma” (Listening Awry 79). I shall attempt to rephrase. Webern’s work is not a traumatic event or a representation of trauma; it is a representation of Webern’s self and an embodiment of trauma that somehow does not remind him of his traumatic wound. I admit:
I am confused.
Music and Cultural Theory by John Shepherd and Peter Wicke belongs in the same field as Schwarz’s work. It, too, struggles to make sense. According to Shepherd and Wicke,
Lacan’s work is “insufficient to sustain a line of argument which seeks to ground the relative autonomy of music in the specific character of its material grounds and to posit the connectedness of music as a signifying process to processes of subjectivity as one constituted through the impact of sound as a material phenomenon on the materiality of the body” (74).
This is poor writing.
118 “Woman is such in the phallic function only inasmuch as she says ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to it (where the ‘and’ is additional, not disjunctive)” (Chiesa, Not-Two 118; original italics).
103 Intent upon the circular – and arguably nonsensical – connectedness of a signifying process to processes of subjectivity and the impact of a material phenomenon on materiality,
Shepherd and Wicke abruptly abandoned Lacan. “Without losing the benefit of Lacan’s insight that processes of signification constitute subjectivities”, the two wrote, “it is necessary to reclaim the body from Lacan and weaken the stranglehold of language in his theoretical scheme”
(74). Shepherd and Wicke’s proposal appeals to academics that love to envisage their bodies as empowered, free and unique; but not everyone is convinced. Eduardo Said, for example, argued that bodies possessed by music do not break the established order of logos; their enjoyment merely supplements it (“La música” 3). I agree. Thanks to contemporary music videos, we know that jiggling bodies are anything but radical. They conform to consumerist enjoyment-rituals.
I am not smitten with Shepherd and Wicke’s ideal, liberated body. Instead, I place my faith in the body’s subjection, described by Schreber with psychotic rigour. The following epitomises Schreber’s position: “Like everything else in my body, the need to empty myself is also called forth by miracles” (Memoirs 150-54, 225). Evidently, Schreber could not free his body from language, which consists of demands, imperatives, summons, judgements, expectations, laws, mores, punishments, values, criteria, rules, conventions, customs, games, instructions, choreography and more. Musicians cannot free themselves from the stranglehold of language, either. The Schreber case also demonstrates that, in spite of Shepherd and Wicke’s criticisms, there is plenty of material in Lacan’s articles and seminars that concerns the body, just not the faux-empowered, liberal-humanist body. See, for example, “Télévision” (521-25).
In 1962, Lacan refuted the notion that his discourse – one that necessarily involves an analysand’s suffering – neglects affect and the body. At the same time, in an effort to clarify and delimit his discourse, Lacan listed topics familiar to academics that he did in fact intend to exclude, such as ego-psychology’s catalogue of emotions, Being conceived as immediate, and the subject in a crude or animal form (Séminaire X 1.23-24). These things remain motifs within musicology and other branches of cultural studies, as do variants of the Kantian Sublime and the Thing. These things are not Lacanian motifs. The distinction, once again, is not subtle.
104 Appeal for a cut
Noise, static, dissonance, distortion, unexpected formal ruptures, extreme dynamics: these things are not traumatic encounters with the Lacanian Real. Unless one is subjected to torture, one can easily switch off a recording or walk out of an annoying concert. So, when musicologists speak of representations, embodiments or encounters with the Lacanian Real, they are exaggerating (Lacan, “La troisième” 184). For most academics, listening to music is not as exciting as the encounters detailed in Schreber’s memoirs. This is perhaps fortunate.
Robert Fink, Jan Jagodzinski, Sarah Reichardt, David Schwarz, John Shepherd and
Peter Wicke, Kenneth Smith and Eugene Willet collectively represent the lack of precise consideration and scrutiny that Lacan’s work has received within the field of post-1990s
Anglophone musicology. These names also represent academics’ tendency to conflate Lacan’s work with the work of Žižek, Kant and the usual suspects from Francophone cultural studies. In future, if musicologists write about Lacan, they should first read his work. In an Italian interview from 1974, Lacan said that it is an abuse to speak of psychoanalysis without reading analytic texts, namely Freud’s (“Freud per sempre” 3). Addressed to prospective analysts,
Bruce Fink wrote, “I think it [is] important to emphasise that there is no substitute for reading the original texts by important analysts” (Fundamentals 273).119 This prescription is even more appropriate for academia; hence I issue two variations.
1. Students interested in Lacan should consult the growing list of texts published in Lacan’s
name by his literary executor, Jacques-Alain Miller, as well as the unedited seminar
transcripts used by analytic institutions.
2. Students interested in European music from Lacan’s lifetime should consult the mass of
primary texts cited by Richard Taruskin in Volume Four and Volume Five of The Oxford
History of Western Music – a paragon of academic knowledge (S2), split between mastery
(S1) and critical objections (a).
Lacan’s discourse-schemas could perhaps be supplemented by readings of musicians’ primary texts. The latter inevitably detail music’s subjection to hysterical, political and
119 Please note that Bruce Fink and Robert Fink are separate authors.
105 academic discourses; but let us not succumb to the Humanities’ deranged optimism and thereby overlook the crucial point. If, in future, serious musicological ventures involve Lacan’s texts, they will necessarily be grounded upon academics saying “No” to the present incarnation of
Lacanian musicology. For now, Lacanian musicologists demonstrate that the most limited academics – in the pejorative sense – are ironically the most liberal.
Reduced argument
Lacanian musicology in fact refers to Žižekian musicology, and what musicologists call the Lacanian Real is not really Lacanian. The re-branding of the Kantian Sublime and/or the
Thing as the Lacanian Real is not necessary; it is a symptom of confusion. Worse, it is common.
If nothing else, I have proven that there is a significant distance between Lacan and an adjective too often employed by academics: Lacanian.
106 2.2 Music is subjected to discourses
I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being.
– Arnold Schoenberg (Letters 88)
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
– Dylan Thomas (“Fern Hill” lines 53-54)
What can Lacan’s Panthéon seminars teach us about music? On one hand, this is an absurd question, for Lacan almost never spoke about music. On the other hand, the Panthéon is home to the remains of the author who wrote the Diderot Encyclopaedia’s articles on music –
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In addition, Lacan often spoke about his Trinity, the Father and the symptom – terms that are difficult to distinguish from the Muses, the soul or the genius qua partner-spirit. So while music did not occupy a place in Le séminaire or Lacan’s clinic, Lacan’s poetic-sophistic and theosophic motifs are indeed relevant to an art form littered with psalms, hymns and epithalamia.
In 1973, Lacan wondered why artists bothered to attend his seminars. He apologised and said that the only thing he had to talk to artists about was religion. Following Freud,
Lacan believed that religion was synonymous with artistic creation. He concluded that artists attended his seminars because they demanded a way out of religious rhetoric, which they deemed stupid. In response, Lacan denigrated their demand for freedom and claimed that it perpetuated ignorance (Les non-dupes errent 3.19). For demands override or else ignore the question as to why one is caught up in the Father – a question that is crucial to the work of analysis. In 1978, Lacan specified that analysis does not free an analysand from pathetic symptoms; analysis merely results in knowing why one is caught up in them (Le moment de conclure 4.17).
This chapter is an extension of Lacan’s apology. It is intended in the Greek sense of apologia, as a defence, not as a plea for pardon. The argument is simple. Contra progressive and liberal-democratic rhetoric, music does not empower so-called subjectivities; music is
107 subjected.120 Music is not a discourse; music is a term that various discourses deploy, manipulate, privilege or denigrate. Simply put, music can come to occupy a place in various discourses: political discourse, academic discourse or hysterical-diabolical discourse. I provide examples of texts and transcribed speeches from each of these three discourses. Why are so many of the examples similar and monotonous? As explained in Section One, change does not occur within a discourse; change occurs in the passage from one discourse to another. That is how one arrives at a different structure.
Before I discuss any examples from discourses, however, I propose a detour – an examination of music’s place in ancient, mystery quasi-discourse.
Music in ancient mystery cults
Disciplined enjoyment/suffering (a) Initiation subjects ($)
Knowledge of harmony (S2) Phallic revelation (S1)
Fig. 27. Mystery quasi-discourse.
In a former epoch, music also had a place in mystery initiations – a père-verse prototype of analytic discourse. Mystery cults, with the help of music, engendered belief in phallic perfection, which was supposedly revealed to each initiate. According to Lacan, psychoanalysis, by contrast, is an anti-initiation (“Séminaire du 16 janvier 1979” 1;
“Radiophonie” 439). A successful analysis does not grant the analysand access to a sphere of phallic omnipotence or happiness. As noted, both analytic praxis and analytic theory are devoid of music and belief in perfect harmonia. Psychoanalysis takes two terms – the blabbering subject ($) and his/her cause of desire (a) – and marks any satisfying relationship between them impossible. Mystery cults’ initiation rites, by contrast, created an illusion of a satisfactory relationship – a fusion of omniscience (S2) and omnipotence (S1). It is impossible to say for certain based on extant texts, but this is likely a père-verse/sublime fantasy.
120 Examples of progressive and liberal-democratic rhetoric include Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in
Romantic Music by Kofi Agawu, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification by Naomi Cumming, The
Language of Electroacoustic Music (edited by Simon Emmerson), and Sheila Whiteley’s Women and Popular Music:
Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity.
108 In Lacan’s reading of the Pompeii Mysteries, initiations revealed a demon of shame at the same time as a phallic copula (“La signification du phallus” 692). An analyst, by contrast, unveils little other than silence and equivocations (a) and attempts to dissolve the part of an analysand’s symptom that is clogged up with desperate meaning. Mystery quasi-discourse is too absolute, too meaningful to count as a social bond (which is inevitably limp); hence its secret, supplementary status in Greek and Roman civilisations. The Romans chose to translate the
Greek mystēria as initia, hence mystery cults and initiation rites are effectively synonymous.
There is possibly a link between the singular Greek mystērion and the Hittite verb munnae, ‘to conceal or hide’. The Mysteries’ potency depended upon selective revelation as well as concealment from dominant, socio-political discourse. In Eleusinian initiations, for example, this presumed policy of concealment was followed by a stage named Epopteia, ‘Viewing’ (Bremmer,
Initiation vii-viii).
It is not an abuse of history to associate mystery quasi-discourse with Sadean,
Enlightenment-era père-version. The Enlightenment produced secret societies such as the
Freemasons and the Rosicrucians that were fascinated with ancient mystery cults. According to
Jan Bremmer, “the Mysteries became a popular subject and could be seen as the place where the enlightened elite was educated. […] This growing interest in the Mysteries was also reflected at the verbal level by the emergence, from the 1780s, of the German term Mysterienreligion”
(Initiation ix).
The initiation procession named the myēsis included “the singing of hymns accompanied by pipes” as well as a rhythmic and repetitive invocation of Iakchos. (Iakchos was a relative or avatar of Dionysus.) The masses of initiates were headed by costumed Eleusinian dignitaries and “priestesses carrying sacred objects on their heads in special baskets” (Bremmer,
Initiation 5-6). As one would expect from père-version, as long as the Beautiful maintained a position of reverence, imperatives inherited from socio-political discourse could be upended. The myēsis procession was thus distinct from the modern, hyper-moralistic skimmington, which I will discuss later in this chapter. During the myēsis procession, the young mocked the old, prostitutes hurled insults at passers-by, and couples were treated to a familiarity with each other’s bodies that was elsewhere denied. Aristophanes made fun of this in his depiction of an initiate who came to know a slave-girl’s nipple (Bremmer, Initiation 7) – a farcical form of knowledge.
109 On a less comical note, Plato complained that Dion’s fellow mystagogues assisted in his murder.
Dion came home bringing with him two brothers from Athens, friends whom he had
acquired not through philosophy, but by way of that facile comradeship which is the basis
of most friendship, and which is cultivated by hospitality and mystic rites and initiation
into secrets; because of these associations and the service they had rendered Dion in
returning to Syracuse, these two men who came with him had become his comrades. But
when they arrived in Sicily and saw how Dion was being slandered among the people of
Syracuse whom he had liberated, and was being accused of plotting to become a tyrant,
not only did they betray their comrade and host, but they became as it were his murderers,
since they stood by with arms in their hands to assist his assassins. (Letters 7.333d-334a;
Bremmer, Initiation 3).
Plato’s complaint hints at the instability of mystery quasi-discourse, which is perhaps why initiation festivals were short-termed. Eleusinian festivals, for instance, most likely divided their events over just two nights (Bremmer, Initiation 9). The bonds of ecstasy are not sustainable.
The first night of an Eleusinian festival was dedicated to a re-enactment of
Persephone’s mythical abduction. The name Persephone contains a brilliant equivoque: the – phone is derived from phos (‘to bring’), but it is close to both phōnē (‘sound, voice’) and phonos
(‘murder’).121 Only the three highest Eleusinian officials – a trinity of masters – were permitted to take part in the first night’s drama; but all initiates were sent out with torches to look for
Persephone, who was not recovered until the High Priestess struck a gong (Bremmer, Initiation
10). The gong is not far from the collective-function of the Jewish shofar or the faith-inspiring thunder that Lacan spoke of in Séminaire XVIII (1.15).122
121 One could make from the equivoque a Lacanian Trinity: the Imaginary brings light; murder indicates the severe
Father-symptom; phōnē is the babbling of the Symbolic.
122 For thunder as the voice of God, see Job (37.2-5), Psalms (18.13, 29.3, 77.18, 81.7, 104.7), 1 Samuel (7.10) and 2
Samuel (22.14).
110 The second night of the festival was the time of the epopteia. The ritual was ordered so that it gradually approached a climax. According to Bremmer, “a phallus was part of several festivals and does not seem to be out of place in a ritual for Demeter”, Persephone’s mother. In this instance, what form did the Phallus assume? The answer is perhaps surprising: a feminine monster, namely a Gorgon (Bremmer, Initiation 11, 13). Lacan spoke of this in Séminaire
XVIII (4.67) and “La signification du phallus” (694): to be the Phallus is both feminine and horrific. The Phallus is something alien – something that does not entirely belong to neurotic men. This terrifies them. Little Hans (from Freud’s “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old
Boy”) is a well-known example.
According to Plutarch, the Eleusinians exploited the anguish indicated by the Phallus.
How so? They allegedly produced a litany of terrors just prior to the climax of the ceremony: shuddering, shivering, sweating and amazement (qtd. in Bremmer, Initiation 13). They then erected a statue of Demeter. At the climax of the night, the hierophant called out at the top of his voice, and the goddess gave birth to a sacred baby boy. The Phallus was thus linked to three things: a fetish (the statue), an overwhelming series of terrors (that culminated in the delivery of an imperative), and a principle of fecundity.
It is not difficult to guess why music occupied a place in mystery quasi-discourse. Its instruments are aesthetic objects; its ensembles typically necessitate the emergence of imperatives (delivered by band-leaders, conductors or composers); and it effectively veils the horrors of mundane fecundity. As E. M. Cioran joked, “Without Bach, Theology would be devoid of an object, Creation would be fictive, and Nothingness peremptory. If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God” (All 116). Mystery quasi-discourse was arguably an obscene supplement to the polis religion – the reigning political discourse
(Bremmer, Initiation viii). It was truly l’envers of the master-discourse – a sublime silver lining or perverse underbelly.
Music subjected to mastery
Master-signifiers, imperatives (S1) Slaves’ know-how (S2)
The soul, Socratic irony ($) → Garbage, opinions (a)
Fig. 28. Annotated mastery ⤺ schema.
111 Master-composers, according to Arnold Schoenberg, are “the only ones” who are not allowed to write “just anything”. Masters “do what is necessary” (Theory of Harmony 414,
433). The link between mastery and necessity is ancient. According to the Myth of Er, recounted by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, Necessity’s three daughters were singers, accompanied by eight Sirens. The Sirens composed a harmony while standing upon revolving circles (10.617a-617c) – symbols of perfection and completion.
The master’s politico-sophistic discourse takes Lycurgus as its Father figure (Lacan,
“Allocution sur l’enseignement” 300). Lycurgus is the symbolic founder of the Spartan state.
Incidentally, Lycurgus is also the name of a character in Homer who turned against the god of music, Dionysus, and raped the women attached to Dionysus’s servants (Lacan, Séminaire VII
21.327). The equivoque is both disturbing and instructive. If Master Pericles, for example, took up the advice of Damon, then music would be considered a show of the Good within his domain.
If, by contrast, Pericles rejected Damon, music risked falling to the level of the maligned aulos players from Plato’s Symposium (176e, 212c; see also Plato’s Protagoras 347c-347d and Republic
8.561c). Its value depends on the master-discourse’s attributions. Music is thus subjected.
Plato’s Cratylus aligned music with desire and curiosity. What does this mean? Is
Cratylus an ode to divergent, individual predilections, or does it affirm subjection to Socratic truth-seeking? I opt for the latter. As Socrates explained, the name Muse derived from mōsthai
(‘desire’), due to the Muses’ will “to investigate and do philosophy” (406a). The Muses’ desires, simply put, are limited and highly refined; they are not free or crude. Plato’s Phaedo staged a similar question: is music subjective and autonomous, or is music subjected to divinity? Socrates argued that the soul is not a banal harmony, “directed by the affections of the body”, like a liberal-democratic subjectivity. Following Homer, he proposed that the soul rules over the body and audible harmonies; it masters them; it is “a much more divine thing” (94e-95a). This fleshes out Lacan’s schema of mastery: on the left, there is a supposed soul ($) and an assertion of divine authority (S1); on the right, there is a slave-body (S2) and a production of suffering/enjoyment (a) that is only consonant with the soul via fantasy.
If music were autonomous, the soul would be subjected to it. Music would direct the soul; the soul would follow. Contrary to this, Socrates proposed that the soul is attached to a master-signifier – insofar as it entails a bond, the soul is discourse – and that music is instead
112 subjected to it. The soul’s master-signifier is something that forces sense and direction.
According to Socrates, it is something “ruling over all the elements of which one says it is composed, opposing nearly all of them throughout life, directing all their ways, inflicting harsh and painful punishment on them, at times in physical culture and medicine, at other times more gently by threats and exhortations, holding converse with desires and passions and fears as if it were one thing talking to a different one” (Plato, Phaedo 94c-94d). The master-signifier, in other words, is an alien antagonist that attempts to whip music into shape.
In Book Four of Plato’s Republic, Socrates conceived the just man as a masterful trinity. Note Socrates’ emphasis on regulation and filtering in the passage below.
He regulates well what is really his own and rules himself. He puts himself in order, is his
own friend, and harmonises the three parts of himself like three limiting notes in a musical
scale – high, low, and middle. He binds together those parts and any others there may be
in between, and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate and
harmonious. Only then does he act. (443d-443e)
Justin Clemens characterised the politics of Plato’s Republic as a noise-filtering project: from “the noise of ordinary existence”, the “proper political architecture” works to construct “as noise-free a zone as possible” (“Cum” 296; original italics). Theophrastus (one of Plato’s students) later elevated music to the dignity of a moral purgative. Because music was rational
(that is, made of interval-ratios), Theophrastus believed it had the power to purge the soul of irrational evils caused by emotions (“Theophrastus” 118).
In the modern era, Adolf Hitler elevated music and architecture to the status of
“queens”, because they supposedly owed “nothing original to Jewry” and thereby conformed to his definition of the Good (Mein Kampf 417). The best-known master-signifier to emerge in the twentieth century in relation to German music was undoubtedly the Nazi’s patriarchal trinity:
Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner. These three names constituted a class of the Beautiful so effectively, composers such as Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg were temporarily reduced to garbage. In a letter to his former friend Wassily Kandinsky, dated 20
April 1923, Schoenberg wrote, “I have at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European,
113 indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew” (Letters 88).
Like the Lacan of 1970, the Schoenberg of 1923 believed in segregation; and he suffered its effects. “I have heard that even a Kandinsky sees only evil in the actions of Jews and in their evil actions only the Jewishness”, Schoenberg wrote, “and at this point I give up the hope of reaching any understanding. It was a dream. We are two kinds of people. Definitively!” (Letters
88). According to Peter Biskup, the New South Wales Conservatorium refused Schoenberg employment in 1934. Schoenberg’s job application contained two notes. The first was anonymous. It simply read: “Jewish”. The second note was initialled “E.B.” (Edgar Bainton, the conservatorium’s director). It read: “Modernist ideas and dangerous tendencies” (qtd. in Biskup,
“Popper in Australasia” 20). Musicians, I repeat, are ensnared and rejected, sucked in and spat out by discourses.
Because Beethoven, Wagner and Bruckner are surnames that emerged prior to the twentieth century, one may be tempted to argue that the Nazi discourse was unproductive with respect to music. This is not so. According to Lacan’s schema, the master’s discourse produces a waste product or an excremental reject – something inassimilable with respect to the domain of spurious harmony. Nazi discourse literally produced an inventory of so-called degenerate musicians due for expulsion. In 1933, for example, the Nazi discourse actively caused
Schoenberg’s exile to America. This is not a production likely to satisfy pious musicologists; but it is indeed a production. Incidentally, so is the absence of women musicians in the Talmud.
The absence (a) is a product of Jewish Law (Harrán, Three 11).
Is twentieth-century German music a discourse? No. Is twentieth-century German music caught up in the discourse of the Aryan and the Jew? Absolutely. The Jewish musicians written off by Nazi discourse were closer to waste products (a) than proud, liberal-democratic subjectivities. But today, musicians have progressed beyond subjection, have they not? Nazi discourse is a relic of the past? No. On 18 September 2013, The Guardian reported a familiar story: “The alleged murder of a prominent left-wing hip-hop artist by a self-confessed member of the far-right Golden Dawn party has sent political tensions soaring in Greece”. The law still enjoys force: “Greek law enforcement officers have been increasingly accused of colluding with
114 Golden Dawn, whose calling card appears to be open-ended violence” (H. Smith, “Greek” n. pag.).
The composer of popular musicals, Baron Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton, is another musician tied to recent effects of subjection.123 On 26 October 2015, Andrew Lloyd Webber flew first-class from New York to London, took up the place inscribed for him in the British House of
Lords, and voted in favour of Chancellor George Osborne’s plan to reduce tax credits for employed citizens with the lowest salaries (Buchanan, “‘Desperate’ Tories” n. pag.).
There are many more examples. Lyndon LaRouche’s adherents – deemed fascists by
Helen Gilbert and Dennis King – continue to fiddle with music. From the 1970s onwards,
LaRouche endorsed l’envers of Freud’s discourse. According to Warren J. Hamerman, LaRouche created a program named “Beyond Psychoanalysis”, which led to “the Beethoven principle”.
The latter “focused intensely” on creating a class in the image of past masters such as
Beethoven, Dante Alighieri and Leonardo da Vinci. The Beethoven principle was a reaction to the brutal post-war period that allegedly threatened “an even more hideous dark age” in future.
It aimed to create “a totally new civilisation” based on “the essence of Christian culture, God’s living image in man, a divine spark of creative reason inherent in each individual”. Hamerman held the Beethoven principle “in contradistinction to the oligarchy’s promotion of pagan culture as a means of enforcing slavery, genocide, and menticide [brain-murder]” (“Beethoven” 22, 27).
LaRouche’s anti-analysis, pro-mastery rhetoric successfully sucked in a group of loyal adherents. After attending a LaRouche conference in 2002, Gilbert noted, “what comes through is that LaRouche provides the young people with a sense of importance and purpose and a world view that provides unconventional and intellectually challenging (because they don’t make sense) answers to absolutely everything”. In Gilbert’s view, many are inspired by the placement of music within a master-discourse, that is, “by LaRouche’s emphasis on classical music and art and Greek philosophy” (Lyndon LaRouche 34).
In May 1984, LaRouche’s wife, Helga Zepp LaRouche, founded the Schiller Institute.
The Schiller Institute is an international, non-profit corporation, headquartered in the
123 The title Baron Lloyd-Webber involves a hyphen, even though the surname Lloyd Webber ordinarily does not.
115 Washington District of Columbia and named in honour of the eighteenth-century German master, Friedrich Schiller. In 1988, a legislative proposal by the Schiller Institute infiltrated the
Italian Senate. The Schiller Institute demanded that the A440 hertz reference pitch be reduced to 432 hertz. According to Liliana Celani, the proposal was “officially introduced in the Italian
Senate” in July 1988, “thanks to two Christian Democratic senators, Sen. Carlo Boggio and Sen.
Pietro Mezzapesa”. Further discussion by the Italian Senate Education Committee was scheduled for October 1988. The proposed change was motivated (at least in part) by the
Schiller Institute’s contempt for Herbert Karajan, Great Britain, Josef Goebbels and jazz musicians. The institute blamed Karajan for “absurd” reference pitches such as 448 hertz and
450 hertz. They opposed 440 hertz because it was designated “the London Standard Pitch of
1939”, it was embraced by Radio Berlin’s “Standard Pitch conference” during the Third Reich, and it allegedly pleased “jazz players who wanted a brilliant sound from their wind instruments” (“Italian” 46-47).
To help write off 440 hertz as garbage (a), the institute obscured their aim with precious, considerate terms. Celani claimed that, unless 432 hertz was adopted as a reference pitch, “singers’ voices and precious instruments such as the Stradivari, Guarneri, and Amati violins will not be saved from the destruction wreaked by today’s higher and higher pitches”.
The Schiller Institute’s proposal never passed into Italian law, but it nevertheless produced effects. In response to a draft proposal disseminated throughout Europe in April 1988, over one hundred French singers pledged their support, “many belonging to the Paris Opera” (“Italian”
46-47).
At the end of 1997, Lyndon LaRouche delivered the keynote speech at a conference organised by the Schiller Institute in Germany. When LaRouche spoke about music, expulsion remained an important theme. “Classical composition is important to us”, he asserted, “whereas
Romantic is not. Modern music is not necessary; put it out in the trash, where it would be happy, by itself. Popular music, as it has developed recently: put it in the trash, it doesn’t belong, it doesn’t do anybody any good”. Artists who can “relive the act of composition” are permitted in LaRouche’s domain, whereas a mere “note-player” is not. Wagner must be prohibited, because he “gave up on music in order to make bombs on stage”. “Liebestod”, in
LaRouche’s view, is “nothing but one chromatic experience after another. A chromatic orgasm of protracted length! It’s not music”, LaRouche asserted. “It’s erotic effects” (“Comet of Doom”
116 37). Wagner’s music, in short, was not supported by LaRouche’s master-discourse. It was not deemed “beautiful” or “an idea” (S1); it was written off as Babylonian pollution (a).
In 1980, LaRouche’s journal, The Campaigner, published an article by Peter Wyer, a founding member of the Musicians for LaRouche group. Wyer began the article on a note of repulsion. He criticised a concert held in New York’s Aeolian Hall way back in November 1923 that mixed songs by George Gershwin, Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud and
Schoenberg. Wyer implied that the 1923 concert ultimately led to the “rock-jazz-modern composer and trolley car conductor Leonard Bernstein, a figure rivalled only by Gershwin himself for lack of artistic scruples (and sheer moral depravity)”. Wyer did not believe that the levelling of “the masters of our musical tradition” (such as Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms) via popular music was noble. To the contrary, he derided twentieth-century consumerism and alleged that it “built a multimillion dollar entertainment industry” upon racist ostentations, “for the purpose of disseminating an infantile and regressive moral outlook throughout the population as a whole”. Wyer’s critique designated popular music an effect of consumerism, which he viewed as corrupt with respect to the Classical master-discourse. The principal agent of corruption, according to Wyer, was a “tightly-knit oligarchy centred in England” that aimed to subject Americans to idiotic culture so that they would become easier to dominate and control (“Racist” 10-12).
What class of enemies and rejects did Wyer’s master-discourse attempt to consolidate?
Looking back on the nineteenth century, Wyer named “Lord John Palmerston, John Ruskin and others among British ruling circles” enemies, because they “sponsored the Paris-centred
‘romantic-futurist’ movement of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner as a means of subverting the musical tradition of J. S. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Funding was generously provided for this cultural operation by the British-allied Rothschild banking family”. Wyer seemed pleased that “the irrationalist antics” (a) of Liszt and Wagner were “lawfully” (S1) discouraged, so that they “gained little support in America during the nineteenth century”. After 1923, however,
Wyer believed that “the proponents of a New Dark Age” succeeded in America. For them,
“Gershwin’s synthesis of jazz and the music of the Paris moderns was viewed as a strategic victory” (“Racist” 13, 21).
117 Consumerism’s success entailed a passage out of the Classical master-discourse, which, in Wyer’s view, resulted in “racialist self-identification” and competition between “white trash” and “black trash”. According to him, “poor black pimps and prostitutes such as Bessie Smith sweated it out for a pittance”, whereas Gershwin, Jolson and Fred Astaire “made a mint with their respectable and sophisticated stylisations of the supposed black folks’ music”. Despite the switch from the Classical master-discourse to consumerism, Wyer never altered his emphasis on music as an effect of discourse. He believed that the blues, for example, was created when
“black prostitutes and homosexuals were screened, profiled and selected” – a familiar discourse- function – “according to who could convey the most thoroughly obscene image” for commercial gain (“Racist” 43, 56).124
Are fascist and conservative discourses the only ones to generate discontents? No. Let us turn to an ostensibly Leftist discourse. In 1970, the French President Georges Pompidou invited Pierre Boulez to found a public music institution. The resultant Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM) opened in 1977. Georgina Born described the
IRCAM of 1984 in the following terms.
IRCAM had a classic sexual and racial division of labour. All of the low-paid, low-status
clerical staff were women, while women were barely represented in the higher sphere of
research and production, whether technological or musical. There were few nonwhites at
IRCAM. The most numerous were the North African men and women cleaners seen for
brief periods in the early mornings and evenings. They came from a private contractor via
the CGP [Centre Georges Pompidou] and were the only unionised workers to enter IRCAM
(belonging to the Communist CGT).125 The IRCAM accountant was also of African
American descent, the only such permanent member of staff. There was one black
American composer on temporary commission in 1984. He saw himself as a “token black
man” among IRCAM intellectuals, and was self-conscious and uncomfortable in this role.
(Rationalizing Culture 117)
124 My aim, to be clear, is not to endorse Wyer’s arguments or else to piously label his critiques paranoid (or perverse or neurotic); I aim to illustrate master-discourses as accurately as academia permits.
125 CGT stands for Confédération générale du travail, ‘General Confederation of Labour’.
118 A Lycurgus-like master-discourse once again displayed an indifference to women. On this note, consider the recent scandal in Sweden over internal police memos regarding the music festival, We Are Stockholm, “attended by 170,000 young people”. According to The Guardian, one memo read: “These are so-called refugee youths, specifically from Afghanistan. Several of the gang were arrested for sexual molestation”. Meanwhile, the official police report, released to the public, “made no mention of sexual harassment or assaults”; hence the eventual scandal
(Crouch, “Swedish” n. pag.). On 28 December 2015, just two weeks before the We Are
Stockholm scandal, Slavoj Žižek noted, “Sexuality has emerged as one of the central ingredients of today’s ideologico-political struggles” (“Need” n. pag.). This is true. No master-discourse, I repeat, includes sexual harmony.126
Because discourses assign terms to non-equivalent, non-egalitarian places, Lacan compared their effects to the segregation of horses and dogs. Indeed, he envisaged each discourse’s constitution of classes – masters and slaves, for example, or pedants and students – as analogous to the management of domestic animals and horticultural exploits (“L’étourdit”
462-63; “Télévision” 534). Born’s description of IRCAM inferred that classes were established based on supposed skills or merits. Yes. According to Lacanian doctrine, discourses support specious suppositions and generate real discontents. Ideologico-political struggles are guaranteed.
Contra common, liberal-democratic fantasies, there is no so-called in-dividual that can avoid the crushing effects of discourse. Take Dmitri Shostakovich, for example. Vladimir
Zakharov, director of Russia’s leading folk ensemble, successfully labelled Shostakovich an enemy of the people because of his music’s formalism. On a related note, the Communist
Party’s Central Committee denounced Sergei Prokofieff’s Sixth Symphony for what it deemed a dogmatic insistence on innovation, artistic snobbery and a misguided fear of the ordinary.
According to Richard Taruskin, “Prokofieff was faulted for spurning the resources of folklore – not only an unpatriotic move, but one bound to lessen the accessibility of his music to ordinary listeners”. Afterwards, Prokofieff was forced to publically apologise for his work and to thank the Party for inflicting upon him its imperatives (Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth
Century 9-11).
126 Freud offered “the Church and the army” as fundamental examples, for in each, “there is no room for woman as a sexual object. The love relation between men and women remains outside these organisations” (Group Psychology 141).
119 In 1910, Max Weber attended German’s first Sociology conference, which, by definition, was dedicated to the master-signifier as a collective-function. Weber implied that the class of masters benefited from stupefying musical imperatives.
Someone who is accustomed on a daily basis to exude powerful inner emotions by way of
his voice-box, with no connection of any kind to his actions, in other words, without any
adequate abreaction for these powerful emotions in correspondingly powerful actions – and
this is the nature of the art of the choral society – is someone who, to be brief, very easily
becomes a “good citizen”, in the passive sense of the word. It is no wonder that monarchs
are so fond of organisations like these. (“Transactions” 94)127
Mastery makes a stable habitat. So says the cliché: “You can safely make your home where people sing” (Weber, “Transactions” 94). The ancient sophist, Damon of Oa, is vindicated.
The master’s discourse is not restricted to sophists and politicians; the Father is another common motif. Pope John XXII, for example, insisted that music must transmit the
Father’s Word. In 1324, he issued a decree to make sure that words remained intelligible when sung in churches. Likewise, in the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent demanded verbal clarity. Between 1645 and 1660, the Puritans adopted a dissimilar approach yet one that still reflected a commitment to the Father. To limit distractions, the Puritans banned music from the Anglican Church, dismantled organs and burnt scores of music (Dolar, Voice 49-51). After the Sistine Chapel produced castrati as gifts for the Father, the French Revolution prohibited castrati from singing in public. According to Mladen Dolar, castrati “became the emblematic and monstrous figureheads of the perversity and corruption of the ancien régime” (Voice 51-52).
Out with the ancient regime, in other words, and in with the new. One S1 is exchanged for another; music is forced to respond to whatever S1 assumes the place of the agent.
As one would expect, master-sophists looked kindly upon sophisticated, masterful forms of music. Thrasymachus, for example, said that the man of music is clever and the non-musical man is not (Plato, Republic 1.349e). Adeimantus suggested that children should first learn
127 I owe this reference to David Allinson (“Join the Choir” n. pag.).
120 music and poetry (Plato, Republic 2.376e). Protagoras, likewise, prescribed kitharistai lessons for children, so that children’s souls could become familiar with rational harmonies and rhythms
(Plato, Protagoras 325c-326b). Nicias praised Damon, who tutored Nicias’s son: “he is the most accomplished of men, not only in music, but in all the other pursuits in which you would think it worthwhile for boys of his age to spend their time” (Plato, Laches 180c-180d).
In the Republic, Socrates invoked Damon the master-sophist and deemed certain rhythms appropriate for the education of phylakes, the best possible citizens. The master’s
“words” (master-signifiers) determine music, not vice versa. “We should try to discover what are the rhythms of someone who leads an ordered and courageous life”, argued Socrates, “and then adapt the meter and the tune to his words, not his words to them”. Socrates reiterated music’s subjection: “rhythm and mode must conform to the words and not vice versa”, and the style and content of words “conform to the character of the speaker’s soul” (Republic 3.399e-
400e). In other words, studies of rhythm and mode (S2) must conform to master-signifiers (S1), which, in turn, are supposed to represent the soul ($).
The Platonic dialogues’ material on music education encourages a turn from the master’s discourse to academic discourse.
Music subjected to academia
Ostentatious knowledge, public servants (S2) Students’ empty gazes, opinions (a)
Authoritative surnames, policy (S1) → Consumers, faith, discontents ($)
Fig. 29. Annotated academic ⤺ schema.
Strabo, the Greek geographer and historian, believed that “all educated people – especially musicians – are servants of the Muses” (Geography 10.3.10; Murray, “Muses” 365).
Emphasis should be placed on servants. Recall the image of Socrates the educator composing music in prison (Plato, Phaedo 60c-61b).
According to the Athenian from Plato’s Laws, education is “just about the most important activity of all”. “A man”, he believed, “should spend his whole life at ‘play’ – sacrificing, singing, dancing – so that he can win the favour of the gods and protect himself from
121 his enemies and conquer them in battle” (7.803d-803e). The emphasis, I repeat, should be placed on sacrificing and subjection to the Other’s favours. On a complementary note, Socrates once referred to philosophy as “the song that dialectic sings” (Plato, Republic 7.532a). In Plato’s
Theaetetus, Socrates praised the mathematician Theodorus and implied that he was “a master of astronomy and arithmetic and music – of all that an educated man should know” (145a).
Shortly after Plato established Greece’s first Academy, Glaucon and Socrates each played the role of an academic and discussed the best possible education. Their notion of education fused ideals of the Beautiful and the Good: “fine works”, said Socrates, in his usual, questioning manner, “will strike their eyes and ears like a breeze that brings health from a good place, leading them unwittingly, from childhood on, to resemblance, friendship, and harmony with the beauty of reason?” Education, simply put, is a discourse: it allows one to form social bonds. In response, Glaucon agreed that Socrates’ example “would be by far the best education” for ideal, future citizens (Plato, Republic 3.401c-401d).
For Socrates, music and poetry are most important in education: rational rhythm and harmony permeates the soul, “so that if someone is properly educated in music and poetry, it makes him graceful, but if not, then the opposite” (Plato, Republic 3.401d-401e). This last remark is seemingly at odds with Socrates’ position in the Phaedo. It makes sense, however, if one accepts that Socrates adopted different positions and spoke about distinct discourses. So, when Socrates spoke about the soul as a master-discourse, he denied that the soul was a slave to music. By contrast, when Socrates spoke about the soul as academic discourse, he noted that the semblance of “fine works” (S2) produces a man of grace ($).
If music effectively produces men, does this not make music an autonomous agency, as so many contemporary academics claim? No. Music may sometimes occupy the position of the semblance within academic discourse, but it is forced to serve the master’s Good – in Socrates’ case, the beauty of reason. Music does not cause or determine the Good, not even in academic discourse. What about Socrates’ famous remark from Plato’s Republic, “the musical modes are never changed without change in the most important of a city’s laws” (4.424c)? This is properly hysterical, for the semblance – in this case, a particular musical mode – that demands a new master-signifier is the hysteric’s semblance. In sum, then, Socrates spoke about music’s involvement in three distinct discourses: the master’s discourse (Phaedo 94e-95a and Republic
122 4.443d), the academic’s discourse (Republic 3.401c-401e), and the hysteric’s discourse (Republic
4.424c).
The distinction between the master’s discourse and the academic’s discourse is clearer in Plato’s Gorgias. Banal, audible music that is of no interest to the nobility was labelled a species of kolakeia, ‘flattery’, which, like rhetoric, aims solely “to gratify the whims of the masses” (Murray, “Muses” 376). Socrates implied that activities such as aulos-playing, competitive lyre-playing, chorus-training and the composition of dithyrambs merely aim to gratify crowds and give pleasure; they do not consider what is best or aim for ideal improvement. Music void of rational melody and rhythm was rejected by the master-discourse: it was equivalent to “speeches given to a large gathering of people”, argued Socrates, “a popular oratory of a kind that’s addressed to men, women, and children, slave and free alike”. “We don’t much like it”, he said; “we say that it’s a flattering sort” (Plato, Gorgias 501d-502d).
The twelfth-century rabbi, Maimonides, believed that the masses’ enjoyment of music should be prohibited; exceptional subjects, by contrast, were permitted to appreciate rational music, for it supposedly conformed to godly things (Harrán, Three 140). Saint Thomas Aquinas
– the Catholic scholar par excellence – was also against kolakeia and vulgar music. He believed it was pointless to sing praises to God, for God is above all praise and flattery. (See Sirach 43.33 in The Catholic Bible.) Praise, then, is “not indeed for His sake, but for our own sake; since by praising Him our devotion is aroused towards Him, according to Psalm 49.23”, as is the devotion of others. One can issue praise via song, but Thomas held that it was preferable “to incite men’s minds towards God by means of teaching and preaching”, so that they do not become distracted. Music, in Thomas’s view, was not strictly necessary; “the use of music in the divine praises is a salutary institution” if it can incite “the souls of the faint-hearted”, the
“coarse and carnal” to devotion (Summa Theologica Part 2.2, Question 91). Although Psalm
32.2-3 encourages God’s subjects to praise Him with harps and psalteries, Thomas noted that the Church of his day did not make use of such instruments “for fear of seeming to imitate the
Jews”. Thomas also believed that the harp and the flute orient the soul towards pleasure
“rather than create a good disposition within it”, one that is attuned to God (Summa
Theologica Part 2.2, Question 91; Bruhn, Messiaen’s Interpretations 16).
123 As an aside, The Holy Qur’ān contains a variation on the term kolakeia, namely lahw al-hadīth, ‘idle speech’, ‘useless statement’ or ‘diverting, distracting utterances’. The prophet
Muhammad’s companion, Abdullah bin Mas’ud, explicitly aligned lahw al-hadīth with singing and instrumental music (Sunarwoto, “Dakwah” 207). Socrates endorsed music oriented towards mathematical knowledge; the Qur’ān privileged divine knowledge, “firm faith in the Hereafter”, and “they who follow guidance from their Lord”. Socrates denigrated kolakeia; the Qur’ān proclaimed “humiliating punishment” for any man of the public who pays for lahw al-hadīth
(deemed void of knowledge) and uses it to distract from remembrance of Allāh (Luqmān 31.5-
7). It is clear: both Socrates and The Holy Qur’ān offer master-signifiers for academics to serve, interpret and reinterpret. The same can be said for the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.
Consider, for example, the work of Leon Modena, an Early Modern Jewish scholar. Modena cited interpretations by previous scholars such as Hai ben Sherira and Maimonides in order to rehash a basic prohibition on vocal music (Harrán, Three 142). Progressivism aside, this is standard academic practice.
Plato’s final dialogue, Laws, repeated his prior dialogues’ distinction between denigrated mass-music and music deemed philosophically sound. “Pleasure is indeed a proper criterion in the arts, but not the pleasure experienced by anybody and everybody. The productions of the
Muse are at their finest when they delight men of high calibre and adequate education – but particularly if they succeed in pleasing the single individual whose education and moral standards reach heights attained by no one else” (2.658e-659a). The master says to the
Academy, “You shall serve no one but me!”
Socrates’ statement from the Gorgias reflects the academic’s willingness to serve and to thereby privilege harmony and rhythm that is rational and ideal. The academic’s position, according to the Republic, states that someone “truly trained in music and poetry” (S2) tries to expel the body’s irrational suffering/enjoyment (a) in order to produce a concord with the soul
($). The ideal citizen, said Socrates, “won’t entrust the condition and nurture of his body to the irrational pleasure of the beast within or turn his life in that direction”. He instead puts “the state of the soul” (that is, the soul’s rapport with the master-signifier, reason) in the place of production ($): “he’ll value the studies that produce it and despise the others” (Republic 9.591b-
591d). Murray noted the master’s rejection of flattery-music and the academic’s affirmation of rational music: “The Gorgias’ implied contrast between the specious music of popular culture
124 and the true music of philosophy is made explicit in the extended discussion of the philosophical life in the central books of the Republic” (“Muses” 376).
Modern academia remains a tangle of knowledge and political imperatives. Its knowledge still serves whatever the master-discourse deems Good. Take Gustave Le Bon, for example: his surname means ‘The Good’.128 Le Bon was a French academic famous for his theories about national traits, white supremacy and the superiority of men. To invoke Lacan’s terms, S2 sits pretty atop S1, like a bauble. Incidentally, my supervisor, Justin Clemens, often sits at his desk in a building at Melbourne University that is named in honour of a eugenicist,
Sir John Medley. The university’s Maths and Statistics building is also named after a eugenicist,
Richard Berry. More broadly, the Australian Council for Educational Research was founded by
Kenneth Cunningham – a president of the Eugenics Society of Victoria, which ran from 1936 to
1961 (Wimborne, “From” n. pag.). Credo quia absurdum.
Lacan cited Charlemagne as a father of academic discourse (“Allocution sur l’enseignement” 300). Charlemagne told cathedrals and monasteries to establish schools, which in turn functioned as knowledge-props for both the Holy Father and the Father of Europe. S2 is indeed bound to serve the moralist’s S1. In excess of this, the schools compensated for the fact that priests are not allowed to reproduce and thereby produced priest-children – the new faithful. “BELIEVE”, incidentally, was the University of Melbourne’s motto in 2013. (The letter
I in the centre of the word was highlighted.) “BELIEVE” also served as the title of a private fund-raising campaign – the largest in the university’s 160-year history – dedicated to making the world Good (Melbourne Newsroom, “Melbourne” n. pag.). This is dubious, but at present, elite university administrators’ salaries are most certainly Good. According to the National
Tertiary Education Union, in 2013, Melbourne University paid its Vice Chancellor over one million dollars, as did the Queensland University of Technology, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney and the Australian Catholic University (“How” 2). Note the name of the latter. One is not as far from Charlemagne as one perhaps assumes. As Élisabeth
Roudinesco put it, for putatively secular societies post-1970, “school tends to replace the church” (Jacques Lacan & Co. 561).
128 Freud discussed Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules in Group Psychology (72-88, 117-18, 127-29). In 1972, Lacan acknowledged this and referred to Le Bon as an imbécile (Séminaire XIX 12.167).
125 Needless to say, academia’s place of production ($) is not as perfectly aligned with the
Good (S1) as Charlemagne’s servants or Melbourne’s marketing campaigns make it out to be.
There are plenty of discontents. In 2015, for example, the Australian Government Attorney-
General’s Department tried to “help” teachers minimise the production of disturbed children.
The Department published a booklet via the Living Safe Together website, entitled “Preventing
Violent Extremism and Radicalisation in Australia” (Holm, “Radicalisation Awareness Kit” n. pag.). The booklet contained a “case study” about a girl named Karen who was allegedly led astray by “the alternative music scene” and eventually became a terroristic “soldier for the environment”. The Government implicitly sided with Karen’s “loving family who never participated in activism of any sort” (“Preventing” 11). Moral imperatives delivered via Living
Safe Together provide a model for contemporary education institutions – safe spaces.129
Schoenberg believed that what one learns at school is transmitted, coloured and arranged in order to not interfere with the master’s political, philosophical or moral beliefs.
When it comes to the history of music, the student inevitably has to take it as the master’s representatives give it (Style and Idea 137). On a related note, the music theorist Heinrich
Schenker predicted the emergence of cretinous knowledge (S2) in the service of a market-master
(S1) – neoliberal academia. According to him, “an economy that does not enable art and science to come to the forefront of society must, despite all the glittering strategies and successes, be dubbed a ‘failed economy’” (Masterwork in Music 121). Via Schenker’s rhetoric, one can annotate the right side of Lacan’s academic schema, which represents the class of students. In the place of the senseless object (a), Schenker put “the chaos of opinions”, deemed incorrigible.
He described the place of the subject ($) as a church where one worships nothing but one’s own sensibility and naiveté (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony 22).
In Australia, throughout the 1990s, music education was subjected to the Dawkins
Review – a federal Labor government initiative.130 Conservatoria were assimilated within universities. In 2011, a self-dubbed Task Force assembled by Global Access Partners studied
129 In 1969, Lacan referred to the then-recent progressive universities as garderies, ‘child care centres’ (“D’une réforme”
10). For contemporary examples of progressive education rhetoric, see “Cultivating the Art of Safe Space” by Mary Ann
Hunter and “Safe Space” by Lynn C. Holley and Sue Steiner.
130 The party’s name is indeed spelt Labor in Australia, not Labour.
126 effects of the Dawkins Review. (Is there anything the master loves more than tasks and force?)
The Task Force determined that “Music faculties around Australia are at breaking point”
(“Tertiary” 5). In response, the Task Force proposed an expansion and diversification of knowledge for the sake of increased economic benefits: S2, in other words, must grow and grow in order to satisfy the voracious S1.
“A failure to value artistic output as equivalent to the academic research which attracts funding exacerbates the situation”, they wrote. “This demands a drastic revision of the national funding model and a greater recognition of the social and economic benefits of tertiary music to the Australian people. The [Task Force’s] report sets out how Australian tertiary music education can be revitalised at relatively little cost to the benefit of the cultural and economic health of the nation”. The structure of academic discourse is such that its justifications, I repeat, stem from the master-signifier. For the Task Force, the market is just; the market is ethical; the market determines benefits (from benefactum, ‘good deed’); the market distributes goods; the market-master is unequivocally Good. Page 11 of the Task Force’s report is headed by a series of capital letters: “WHY IT MATTERS – ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL VALUE
OF MUSIC”. Spend money to make money: this is the Task Force’s predictably optimistic sales pitch. “The production, performance and sale of music make a huge contribution to the national economy. The economist Hans Hoegh-Guldberg estimated the gross value-added of the
Australian music sector at $6.8 billion, or 0.7 of gross domestic product (GDP), in 2005-06”
(“Tertiary” 5, 11).
Certain musical works – Benjamin Britten’s Cantata Academica, for example – only make sense via academic discourse. Paul Sacher commissioned Britten’s piece in 1958 to honour the University of Basle’s five hundredth anniversary. Britten was not a graduate of a British university, nor was he regarded as a composer of serial music. At the time, however, the names
Schoenberg, Berg and Webern functioned as master-signifiers in European universities such as
Basle. (Note how these names functioned in this particular discourse compared to the Nazi discourse.) Hence Britten decided to write an academic cantata in an academic style to suit an academic occasion. According to Mervyn Cooke, “Britten felt rather at home in this school- oriented environment” (“Reflections” 6-7).
127 Music, I repeat, is not a discourse. It is “at home” within a discourse, both supported and interfered with. The discourse is music’s habitat. A broader and more significant example is the Darmstadt institute, established in 1946 by Wolfgang Steinecke and Wolfgang Fortner for the sake of annual international Summer courses for New Music. The institute was located in the American zone of occupation and later received funding from the United States military government. The left side of Lacan’s schema could not be spelt more clearly: S1 is the support of
S2 insofar as S2 agrees to promote it.
Taruskin’s description of Darmstadt touched on the discourse’s structure.
The courses had two main goals: first, to propagate American political and cultural values
as part of the general Allied effort to re-educate the German population in preparation for
the establishment of democratic institutions; and second, to provide a meeting place where
musicians from the former fascist or fascist-occupied areas of Europe – chiefly
Germany/Austria, France, and Italy – might further their musical re-education through
exposure to (and instruction in) styles and techniques that had been prohibited or
otherwise silenced during the fascist years. (Music in the Late Twentieth Century 20-21)
The discourse changed in 1949 when a new S1 – the West German government – assumed the place of the American military government. It likely changed for the worse, for it headed in the direction of non-discourse. Taruskin wrote of widespread delusions such as
“creative freedom” and “a protected space free from all social or political pressures”. The new
Darmstadt school instituted a predictably stupid, dyadic rivalry with Soviet mastery: “it became imperative” for Darmstadt to promote precisely “that which was subject to repression in the Soviet bloc” (Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century 21-22). In short, whatever the
Soviets rejected, Darmstadt wanted: the object a shifted from mastery’s place of waste production to academia’s place of desire.
Since a contrary is not a negation, Darmstadt’s ostentations did nothing to dissolve
Soviet power. It became just another form of academic discourse that resembled Soviet bureaucracy. According to Hans Werner Henze, Darmstadt “bureaucratically determined” the criteria to which students’ compositions were subjected. He described it as “a winter’s tale” – a
128 phrase that implies both misery and misguided folly (“German” 44; Taruskin, Music in the Late
Twentieth Century 22).
The push to folly did not end there. Ernst Krenek exemplified an extreme demand for
Automaten, technē and machinery at the cost of social bonds – non-discourse over discourse. In a text first published in 1960, Krenek wrote, “the composer has come to distrust his inspiration because it is not really as innocent as it was supposed to be, but rather conditioned by a tremendous body of recollection, tradition, training, and experience” (“Extents” 228). The master’s secret truth is precisely his/her inconsistency: Einfall is identical to unreliable history/hystérie ($). Einfall is thus another variation on symptôme (from ptóma, ‘fall or fallen body’): it is the German word for ‘inspiration’ that literally means ‘what falls to mind’
(Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century 41).
Krenek’s solution to inconsistency – calculation, automation and mechanisation – rejected harmonia and traditional academic aesthetics.131 “The so-called harmonic aspect of the piece”, wrote Krenek, “will be entirely the result of operations performed on premises that have nothing to do with concepts of ‘harmony,’ be it on the assumption of tonality or atonality or anything else. Whatever happens at any given point is a product of the pre-conceived serial organisation” (“Extents” 228).132 Stanley Cavell, a professor of aesthetics from Harvard
University, was not impressed. “In denying tradition”, he wrote, “Krenek is a Romantic, but with no respect or hope for the individual’s resources; and in the reliance on rules, he is a
Classicist, but with no respect or hope for his culture’s inventory of conventions” (“Music
Discomposed” 196).
To reiterate, Krenek’s project does not fit in the master’s discourse or the academic’s discourse. It is an example of scientism – an insane fusion of art and science. As Krenek himself put it, “The propensity of present musical theory for terminology originally belonging to
131 According to J. Peter Burkholder, experimental music like Edgard Varèse’s (and Krenek’s, I add) “is very characteristic of our science-centred culture” (“Museum Pieces” 131). As Krenek himself put it, “The propensity of present musical theory for terminology originally belonging to mathematics and physics is characteristic of a style of thinking essentially different from earlier ways of viewing the subject matter” (“Extents” 210).
132 Incidentally, Krenek’s pro-calculation rhetoric conforms to Lacan’s schema of capitalism – the topic of my next chapter.
129 mathematics and physics is characteristic of a style of thinking essentially different from earlier ways of viewing the subject matter” (“Extents” 210).133 Such difference or novelty is not necessarily attributed value; hence some academics wrote it off as nihilistic and absurd (Cavell,
“Music Discomposed” 202; Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century 41).
Music subjected to hysteria
Historical materialists, protests ($) Hegemony (S1)
Precious suffering/enjoyment (a) → Knowledge of flaws (S2) ⤺ Fig. 30. Annotated hysterical schema.
The Athenian from Plato’s Laws rejected the hysterical demand of novelty for novelty’s sake. Making music, in his view, “is the task of a god, or a man of god-like stature”: it is a task for the agent of the master-discourse. “One ought to have no qualms”, he argued, “about giving the whole subject systematic expression in the form of a law”. He then turned his attention to the hysteric’s anti-canonisation discourse. “It is true”, he argued, “that the craving for pleasure and the desire to avoid tedium lead us to a constant search for novelty in music, and choral performances that have been thus consecrated may be stigmatised as out-of-date”. Despite this, the Athenian maintained faith in music awaiting canonisation. He did not believe that hysterical demands had the power to corrupt ideas of mastery (Laws 2.657b).
The Athenian reiterated his aversion to hysterical discourse. “The soul of the child”, he said, “has to be prevented from getting into the habit of feeling pleasure and pain in ways not sanctioned by the law and those who have been persuaded to obey it; he should follow in their footsteps and find pleasure and pain in the same things as the old” (Laws 2.659d). The hysteric’s truth inevitably runs along the following lines: suffering/enjoyment (a) is not wholly regulated by an established master-signifier (S1), hence the hysteric’s hatred of the old master and demand for the new. As Paul Verhaeghe pointed out, however, “the hysteric is not so much a revolutionary as the essential supporter of authority, albeit from time to time a so-called
‘alternative’ authority”. In short, “her revolutionary impact is rather small” (Does 202;
133 Freud thought that the demand for meaningful ideals was responsible for art, which is “almost always harmless and beneficent”. If, however, science were forced to satisfy the same demands, then this would lead to “individual or group psychosis” (New Introductory Lectures 159-60). This effectively describes scientism.
130 “Tactics” 1; see also Grigg, Lacan 129-31). Verhaeghe’s argument is consistent with Lacan’s schema of hysterical discourse. What occupies the place of hysterical desire? A master-signifier
(S1). The hysteric wants a master to torment (Séminaire XVII 8.150) – a master that is not sufficient to govern, a flawed master that accidentally perpetuates the hysteric’s desire for an ideal that is presumed to exist elsewhere.
On the very first page of Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music,
Sally Macarthur wrote, “research that is dedicated to making improvements in the future will invariably and unavoidably replicate the past”. Revolution is a popular term within hysterical discourse: one progresses three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, all the way back to the Same. Claire
Bishop, an art historian and critic, also studied music’s involvement in hysterical, revolutionary discourse. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, “the triad of author, work of art and audience underwent an ideological reprogramming that spanned art, theatre and music. In general terms, the aim was to bring cultural practice into line with the Bolshevik Revolution” (Artificial Hells
49). The revolution, in other words, demanded a new master-signifier.
The hysterical agent ($) is best characterised as an inquiry (historia) or else a point of conflict and indecision. Take, for example, Bishop’s description of the Russian Revolution: “The question of whether or not the Revolution should occasion an entirely new form of culture produced by and for the proletariat, or should retain its ties to cultural heritage despite its ideological flaws was a key point of conflict between theorists immediately following 1917”
(Artificial Hells 50). Notable agents of the Russian Revolution discourse include Aleksandr
Bogdanov and Arsenii Avraamov. Bogdanov was “the most outspoken advocate of suppressing bourgeois culture of the past in favour of a new proletarian culture that made no reference to cultural heritage”. Bogdanov’s hystérie, in other words, demanded something other than the past masters. He wanted a new collective-function (S1). Under Bogdanov’s discourse, music and the arts were subjected to “a reorganisation that aimed to bring cultural production in line with collectivist ideals” (Bishop, Artificial Hells 50).
Avraamov was a clichéd hysteric. He wanted to destroy the bourgeois masters’ music and twelve-tone equal temperament, so, in 1920, he asked Russia’s Commissariat of
Enlightenment to demolish all pianos. Avraamov’s name is also attached to the Hooter
Symphonies, which Bishop described as “one of the most mind-boggling cultural gestures of the
131 post-revolutionary period”. The Hooter Symphonies demanded a new and superior master- signifier, inclusive of all noises and “mass participation”. “Conceived as a new and truly proletarian music, the Hooter Symphonies aimed to turn the whole city into an auditorium for an orchestra of new industrial noise” (Bishop, Artificial Hells 65).
Macarthur offered another variation on the hysterical theme, that is, desire for a master that one can partially manipulate. “Feminist work”, she wrote, “like any work inspired by a political agenda, is mostly caught in this double blind: it has an idea of what it thinks will be a utopian future” – a superior collective-function (S1) – “but it wants to control how this future will look” (Towards 1). To Macarthur’s credit, she affirmed the hysteric’s bind. According to her, twentieth-century feminist work stemmed from “a pre-existent reality and a set of pre- determined goals” (a), hence its outcomes were destined “to conform to the prevailing conditions of the present reality” (Towards 2).
In Macarthur’s view, what is the achievement of feminist musicologists post-1970? “A tiny amount of women’s music is heard today on the concert platform, and very little of it is taught in tertiary music programmes. We could say that the impact of this research has been negligible: a comparison between its earlier aims with what it actually achieved in the first decade of the twenty-first century demonstrates this point” (Towards 2). Avraamov, likewise, did not succeed in abolishing pianos and twelve-tone equal temperament. Hence, I repeat, the hysterical agent is best characterised as an ostentatious protest, a question or a provocation.
If the agent were a new master-signifier, that would constitute a new master-discourse.
For hysteria, however, the master-signifier remains in the place of desire and infinite dissatisfaction. Bishop implicitly acknowledged this when she wrote about “collaboration and its discontents”. In her view, “contemporary art’s ‘social turn’” – another banal desire for a new collective-function – “not only designates an orientation towards concrete goals in art, but also the critical perception that these are more substantial, ‘real’ and important than artistic experiences”. The agent, however, never grasps the substance. Hysterical discourse’s “perceived social achievements” remain distinct from “actual (and innovative) social projects” (Artificial
Hells 1, 19).
132 According to Bishop, the demands issued via social or participatory art “derive their critical value in opposition to more traditional, expressive and object-based modes of artistic practice”. Hysterical discourse, otherwise put, is destined to critical opposition and perhaps to critical opposition only. Worse, the hysterical agent is stuck lashing out at a master-signifier that it nonetheless desires. As Bishop stated, “the point of comparison and reference for participatory projects” remains art (which, in turn, remains attached to signifiers of mastery),
“despite the fact that they are perceived to be worthwhile precisely because they are non- artistic” (Artificial Hells 19). What a bind!
Hysterics sometimes form groups to see who can lash master-signifiers the hardest.
(Recall that, by definition, hysterical discourse is a social bond.) Bishop’s descriptions of competition in the field of participatory art are superb. I have cited an example below.
The tendency is always to compare artists’ projects with other artists on the basis of
ethical one-upmanship – the degree to which artists supply a good or bad model of
collaboration – and to criticise them for any hint of potential exploitation that fails to
‘fully’ represent their subjects (as if such a thing were possible). This emphasis on process
over product – or, perhaps more accurately, on process as product – is justified on the
straightforward basis of inverting capitalism’s predilection for the contrary. Consensual
collaboration is valued over artistic mastery and individualism, regardless of what the
project sets out to do or actually achieves. (Artificial Hells 19; original italics)
There is some truth to the following hysterical caricature: “My anti-mastery is better than your anti-mastery! I torment the master-signifier even more than you do!” Opportunities for mockery are not rare. In 1970, the American journalist Tom Wolfe mercilessly made fun of
Leonard and Felicia Bernstein. The Bernsteins hosted a charity party to raise money for the
Black Panthers. They held the event in their Park Avenue penthouse apartment. Wolfe mocked the Bernsteins for choreographing the race of their servants.
Lenny and Felicia are geniuses. After a while, it all comes down to servants. They are the
cutting edge in Radical Chic. Obviously, if you are giving a party for the Black Panthers,
as Lenny and Felicia are this evening, or as Sidney and Gail Lumet did last week, or as
John Simon of Random House and Richard Baron, the publisher, did before that; or for the
133 Chicago Eight, such as the party Jean vanden Heuvel gave; or for the grape workers or
Bernadette Devlin, such as the parties Andrew Stein gave; or for the Young Lords, such as
the party Ellie Guggenheimer is giving next week in her Park Avenue duplex; or for the
Indians or the SDS or the G.I. Coffee Shops or even for the Friends of the Earth – well,
then, obviously you can’t have a Negro butler and maid, Claude and Maude, in uniform,
circulating through the living room, the library and the main hall serving drinks and
canapés. Plenty of people have tried to think it out. They try to picture the Panthers or
whoever walking in bristling with electric hair and Cuban shades and leather pieces and
the rest of it, and they try to picture Claude and Maude with the black uniforms coming
up and saying, “Would you care for a drink, sir?” They close their eyes and try to picture
it some way, but there is no way. One simply cannot see that moment. So the current wave
of Radical Chic has touched off the most desperate search for white servants. Carter and
Amanda Burden have white servants. Sidney Lumet and his wife Gail, who is Lena Horne’s
daughter, have three white servants, including a Scottish nurse. Everybody has white
servants. (“Radical Chic” 28-30)
Like Bishop, Wolfe acknowledged that, as hysterical discourse, Radical Chic produced group-effects that were sometimes imitative and farcically competitive. Consider the following passage.
The only other thing to do is what Ellie Guggenheimer is doing next week with her party
for the Young Lords in her duplex on Park Avenue at 89th Street, just ten blocks up from
Lenny and Felicia. She is giving her party on a Sunday, which is the day off for the maid
and the cleaning woman. “Two friends of mine” – she confides on the telephone – “two
friends of mine who happen to be… not white – that’s what I hate about the times we live
in, the terms – well, they’ve agreed to be butler and maid… and I’m going to be a maid
myself!” (“Radical Chic” 30)
Wolfe also made fun of the discourse’s manifest inconsistency. He described how the manipulation of inconsistency became a principal rule of the game.
What does one wear to these parties for the Panthers or the Young Lords or the grape
workers? What does a woman wear? Obviously one does not want to wear something
134 frivolously and pompously expensive, such as a Gerard Pipart party dress. On the other
hand one does not want to arrive “poor-mouthing it” in some outrageous turtleneck and
West Eighth Street bell-jean combination, as if one is “funky” and of “the people.”
Frankly, Jean vanden Heuvel – that’s Jean there in the hallway giving everyone her famous
smile, in which her eyes narrow down to f/16 – frankly, Jean tends too much toward the
funky fallacy. Jean, who is the daughter of Jules Stein, one of the wealthiest men in the
country, is wearing some sort of rust-red snap-around suede skirt, the sort that English
working girls pick up on Saturday afternoons in those absolutely berserk London boutiques
like Bus Stop or Biba, where everything looks chic and yet skimpy and raw and vital.
Felicia Bernstein seems to understand the whole thing better. Look at Felicia. She is
wearing the simplest little black frock imaginable, with absolutely no ornamentation save
for a plain gold necklace. It is perfect. It has dignity without any overt class symbolism.
(“Radical Chic” 31)
In Taruskin’s view, the climax of Wolfe’s critique was “of both outrage and hilarity”.
Leonard Bernstein identified with the Black Panthers in a hysterical manner: he claimed that, as an artist in America, he was unwanted by the master-discourse. The charity event thus placed Bernstein’s self-pity “front and centre” (Music in the Late Twentieth Century 348).
Bernstein’s charity, his identification with the afflicted, his so-called social conscience – these things remained narcissistic. Such is the agent of hysterical discourse – a vain ostentation ($).
The details are intense. Don Cox, described as “the Panthers’ Field Marshal from
Oakland”, told Bernstein that, in society’s view, he was “just another nigger… see… just another nigger” and that an “off-duty pig” in Queens recently gave him the finger. “God”, Bernstein allegedly responded. Looking around the room, addressing both his wealthy guests and the
Black Panthers, Bernstein then exclaimed, “most of the people in this room have had a problem about being unwanted!” Wolfe could not stifle his amusement. “Lenny is unbeatable”, he sneered (“Radical Chic” 28, 50; original italics).
Wolfe justifiably compared Bernstein’s response to clichéd, neo-Freudian rhetoric from
1950s New York.
135 Rejection, Security, Anxiety, Oedipus, Electra, Neurosis, Transference, Id, Superego,
Archetype and Field of Perception, that wonderful 1950s game, beloved by all educated
young men and women in the East who grew up in the era of the great cresting tide of
Freud, Jung, Adler, Reik & Reich, when everyone either had an analyst or quoted Ernest
Dichter telling Maytag that dishwashing machines were bought by women with anal
compulsions. And in the gathering insulin coma Lenny has the Panthers and 75 assorted
celebrities and culturati heading off on the long march into the neural jungle, 1955 Forever.
One way or another we all feel insecure – right? (“Radical Chic” 50; original italics)134
New York resurrected Wolfe’s “devastating and hilarious” article in 2007 and described it as a “classic indictment of do-gooding but oblivious limousine liberals” (“Radical Chic and
Mau-Mauing” n. pag.). If one is content, like Democritus, to play the laughing philosopher, one could speak ad nauseam about hysterical discourse. Alternatively, one can affirm in a more sober manner that hysterical discourse is not responsible for significant changes. It is a discourse of ostentatious protests and putative radicalism.
Socrates’ dialogue with Timaeus is a less inane example of hysterical discourse. At the very beginning, Socrates turned against his own attempt at mastery from the previous day, in which he described an ideal State. He compared yesterday’s ideal to beautiful creatures standing still or in repose and then uttered a hysterical wish to see the ideal “in motion or engaged in some struggle or conflict”, as if he desired entertainment (Plato, Timaeus 19b). From the hysteric’s position, Socrates witnessed Master Timaeus generate a flawed harmonia (S2). Note how Socrates flattered Timaeus and then remained silent, withdrawing from his usual position of irony and rebuttal. He described Timaeus as someone who had “mastered the entire field of philosophy”. Peter Kalkavage suggested that Socrates may have feigned or exaggerated his respect for Timaeus in order to trick him, so that Timaeus’s poetic sophistry would become exhausted and eventually reveal points of failure. According to Kalkavage, Socrates is instructed, entertained and gratified by Timaeus’s “ultimate failure” (“Plato’s Timaeus” n. pag.).
134 Neo-Freudian rhetoric is technically consumerist (Edward Bernays’ cigarettes as phallic symbols, for example) or hysterical, not analytic. “The hysterical patient is said to sexualise or eroticise ‘everything’. This is a direct consequence of the imperative to deal with the traumatic Real in the Imaginary” (Verhaeghe, Does 43).
136 As for Timaeus, his monologue was probably not intended to provoke a response from a hysterical partner; it was addressed to the gods of ratio and proportion (Plato, Timaeus 27b-
27d). It is thus an example of père-version/sublimation or mythematics. On 18 January 1961,
Lacan cited Plato’s Timaeus as an example of a Greek myth that supplies for the hole or flaw in philosophical knowledge (Séminaire VIII 8.147; see also R.S.I. 8.67). This is another reference to the absence of harmony among the wise. The god from Timaeus’s tale mixed “Same, Other and Being to make a sort of soul-stuff”; he then took the soul-stuff and made from it “a musical strip”; and, finally, he cut and pasted the strip “to form the two circuits according to which the
All moves” – the circuit of the Same and the circuit of the Other (Kalkavage, “Appendix A”
157; Plato, Timaeus 35a-36d). Lacan, as I have explained, treated the All and the sphere as fraudulent. What about Timaeus? What, exactly, is the flaw in Timaeus’s so-called All?
Timaeus’s god generated the musical soul-strip from multiples of the prime numbers 2 and 3. Multiples of primes are incommensurable; hence the god encountered a problem. If one attempts to make a musical scale with a generator that involves multiple primes (for example, the ratio 3:2), the scale “refuses to close”.135 To avoid this problem, Timaeus’s god was forced to use the interval-ratio 256:243 in his scale. 256:243 is the difference between his scale’s major third (81:64) and its perfect fourth (4:3). Kalkavage described it as both “a mathematically necessary feature of the system” and an “unwieldy ratio” (“Appendix A” 158-60). The god’s method of constructing a musical scale can be traced back to the work of Plato’s mathematician friend, Archytas (Barker, Greek 54). According to Timaeus, the god tried to fill all the 4:3 intervals (which, I repeat, involve the primes 2 and 3) with the 9:8 interval, “leaving a small portion over every time”, namely 256:243 (Plato, Timaeus 36a-36b). Lacanian topology is fixated with such flaws. In this sense, Plato’s Timaeus is Lacanian (Lacan, Séminaire XIX
9.131; Lacan, R.S.I. 3.26).
Critias, another character from Plato’s Timaeus, was a noted dupe. He recalled himself as a ten-year-old boy, following a command from the city’s fathers, singing nomoi (laws and customs “magically transformed into sentiments” via melodic recitation) during the festival of
135 If 3:2 is the generator of a tuning system, then the latter involves the ratio 531441:524288 (Kalkavage, “Appendix A”
158). First described circa 300 B.C., 531441:524288 is the small gap between a chain of twelve perfect fifths and a chain of seven octaves.
137 Apaturia (Timaeus 21b). The festival’s name derives from pater, ‘father’, yet it also suggests apatē, ‘deception’. Kalkavage held that for subjects like Critias, “convention will be their wisdom”, not Socratic dialectic. Instead of identifying with or recognising images as empirical referents, Critias-the-dupe is bound to “the phantasia of our souls”. He is sucked in to dream- space via the chōra – a function that both gives things a place and traumatically dislodges things “like a shaking machine” (Kalkavage, “Plato’s Timaeus” n. pag.; Plato, Timaeus 52a-
53a).
Timaeus, like Lacan, employed bizarre, poetic-sophistic mathematics in order to formalise the place and time of the soul’s creation; and his discourse accentuated Becoming (le semblant) rather than Being. Timaeus named his god’s invention a kosmos, ‘cosmos or ornament’. If a subject becomes a dupe of Timaeus’s kosmos, like Critias, this hypothetically erases the distinction between model and origin, representation and presentation. Suffice to say,
Timaeus’s theosophic configuration of the Same, the Other and Being is closer to Lacan’s
Trinity than Socrates’ desire to authentically distinguish Being and Becoming. The latter is philosophical, the former anti-philosophical.
Discourse, as I established in Section One, is the stuff of social formalities, not père- version/sublimation or mathematical formalisation. I will return, then, to hysterical discourse.
Take the skimmington, for example – a social activity that appeals to the hysteric’s grotesque sense of morality. It is a musical procession in which a weak master is rebuked – “a ludicrous cavalcade in ridicule of a man beaten by his wife”. According to a nineteenth-century definition, a skimmington “consists of a man riding behind a woman with his face to the horse’s tail, holding a distaff in his hand, at which he seems to work, the woman all the while beating him with a ladle”. An empty smock displayed on a staff allegedly headed the processions, intended to mock the notion of feminine superiority. “Rough music, that is, frying-pans, bull’s horns, marrow-bones and cleavers” accompanied the cavalcade (Brand, Observations 119).
A skimmington appears to criticise an authority figure, yet it only does so in the service of a greater master; it illustrates music’s involvement in discourse, which is necessarily social; and it uses domestic objects as noise-makers. Why is the word domestic so apt in this particular context? First, domestic is a slang term for a quarrel between a husband and a wife; second, it
138 implies the equivocation of domus and dominus, ‘house’ and ‘master’. A skimmington, in other words, is a discourse of the domus for the dominus – an absurd situation comedy.
Returning to Macarthur, she designated contemporary music by women “‘becoming- minoritarian’, for it is viewed as a destabilisation of the dominant music of the concert hall”
(Towards 37). Macarthur’s targets – the concert hall and the canon – are precise. For, as one recalls, canon derives from the Greek kanōn, ‘rule’. More broadly, canon refers to a method of assemblage via truncation – mastery’s principal function. It is to this that the hysteric is perennially opposed. Via the work of Theodor Adorno, hysterical opposition is especially familiar to musicologists. Alain Badiou clearly and succinctly summarised Adorno’s position:
“Adorno was forced to ascribe nothing but a purely negative meaning to form, or the imperative of form”. The accent placed on the negative is unmistakable: “any work having a conclusive resolution must be avoided. There must be no resolution, completion, closure, culmination or finality in a given work of art; the latter must be wholly suspended”. The music that Adorno promoted “has no ending that is truly essential to it nor does it have an end in the sense of a telos; it does not resolve the system of tensions it creates” (Five 52-53).
What, according to Badiou, was the cause of Adorno’s anti-mastery? “Adorno’s system is an ethical historiality” (Five 34). Exactly! The hysteric demands an ethics – something other than the telos or the kanōn prescribed by the master-discourse. Musical hystérie arguably began when Perseus beheaded the Gorgon Medusa and – more importantly – the goddess Athena identified with the cries of injustice emitted by Medusa’s sisters. Athena invented aulos-playing to imitate and transfigure the monstrous sisters’ suffering/enjoyment. She later used aulos- playing and her memory of a particular Gorgon’s lament to compose a nomos for mortals to listen to as they gathered together, engaged in contests and danced (Pindar, “Pythian 12” lines
6-27; Schafer, Tuning 6).136 Voilà.
The end of hystérie?
The term hysteria is no longer employed in public Anglophone discourse, except as an anachronism or a pejorative. The rise of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy in the 1980s and the
136 Aulos-playing is wind-playing; a nomos is typically a law or a custom, recanted in melodic form.
139 1990s displaced hysteria from the soft sciences.137 At the same time, liberal feminism expelled the term from political discourse. Likewise, terms such as desire, lack, repression and shame are out of place in the post-1980s era of consumer choice, satisfaction, addictive suffering/enjoyment, gluttony, anti-shaming, the free expression of opinions, and so on. Even mastery, signifier, signified and discourse are antiquated terms. At the time of writing, words such as leadership, brand, content and social media are much more likely to do the rounds.
More broadly, the end of hystérie – and, true to the pun, the end of teleological history
– reflects the advance of liberal capitalism, which is a bizarre fusion of mastery and hysteria.138
Between 1946 and 1962, Alexandre Kojève sardonically referred to “the type of life specific to the post-historical period” as the “American way of life” and as “Man’s return to animality”; hence the proliferation of consumer satisfaction surveys and animal-humanism. According to
Kojève’s definition, “post-historical animals of the species Homo sapiens (which will live amidst abundance and complete security) will be content”. Philosophy, he claimed, had disappeared, whereas “everything that makes Man happy” would be preserved indefinitely (Introduction 158-
62 [note 6]; original italics).139
Oswald Spengler issued a similar argument back in 1933. He resented liberal capitalism’s “serious abdication from history at the cost of dignity”, the protection of everyday comforts “against destiny”, and “the ‘happy ending’ of an empty existence”. Coincidentally,
Spengler also rejected American, improvisatory music (Hour of Decision 227). In 1961, Julius
Evola claimed that “the formula for all human happiness and wholeness” is best suited to “the lowest and dullest levels of society”, for it is “little better than bovine”. Evola believed that under liberal capitalism, “the values of Tradition” (mastery) were ineffectual, and “metaphysical or moral rebellion” (historical/hysterical materialism) had also reached a point of dissolution.
137 Patricia Gherovici traced the beginning of hysteria’s demise back to 1952. “The word was deleted from the medical vocabulary when it ceased to be listed as a separate clinical entity in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual, Mental Disorders (DSM-I) (1952) and in The Standard Classified Nomenclature of Disease (SCND)” (“Where”
47).
138 Lacan considered capitalism a transformation of the master’s discourse that occurred in response to Marx’s historical/hysterical materialism (Séminaire XVIII 3.49, 3.52, 10.165; “Je parle aux murs” 96).
139 Lacan regarded Kojève as a friend and a teacher (“Avis au lecteur japonais” 497; “L’étourdit” 435 [note 1]). Francis
Fukuyama famously revisited Kojève’s argument between 1989 and 1992 (End 312, 319).
140 Evola thus defined the contemporary ideology as “the exact antithesis of any traditional type of civilisation”. He considered himself a witness to “the nihilistic phase in the proper sense, whose chief theme is the sense of the absurdity, the pure irrationality of the human condition” (Ride the Tiger 2-3, 19, 29).140 Enter the consumer-subject – neither a classical master nor proper hysteric.
Liberal capitalism may indeed mark the end (or the putative satisfaction) of hystérie, yet it is anything but the end of inconsistency. Recall, for example, Edward Bernays’ Torches of
Liberty – smoke and mirrors par excellence. How does music fare, subjected to this absurdity?
The following chapter is dedicated to this: music’s subjection to consumer democracy.
140 Absurdus means ‘out-of-tune’ in Latin. Absurd is thus a proper musical term.
141 2.3 Music, consumed at the end of History
La plus-value, c’est la cause du désir dont une économie fait son principe: celui de la production extensive, donc
insatiable, du manque-à-jouir.
– Jacques Lacan (“Radiophonie” 435)
La liberté c’est la folie.
– Jacques Lacan (Les non-dupes errent 3.24)
In 1947, Arnold Schoenberg attributed music to “genius” and to “the Almighty”. He believed that serious music was a “necessity of the soul”, not “an attempt to conquer a market”
(Style and Idea 203). The fossilised impression made by Schoenberg’s rhetoric hints at the distinction between the master-discourse proper and the liberal capitalism in which one finds oneself situated today.
This chapter’s sole aim is to present examples of music’s subjection to liberal-capitalist media without resorting to either pious, progressive critique or desperate, faux-optimistic embraces. As Justin Clemens put it, “There’s something tiresome, not to mention patronising and false, about MIT-scholar-type declarations of the particular evils of today’s media empires”.
The same can be said for “the appalling celebrations of the allegedly emancipatory powers of new media” (“When” e17). I agree. These two things are best avoided.
Irony, cynicism, participatory culture ($) Off-shore workers, predictive algorithms (S2)
Economic reality, safe space, “Enjoy!” (S1) Waste products, charity, opinions (a)
Fig. 31. Annotated capitalist schema.
Recall that Lacan presented his schema of capitalism during a visit to Milan in 1972
(“Du discours psychanalytique” 40). Unlike the four discourses proper, a capitalist democracy contains one class, not two. This statement is broadly consistent with the analyses of European thinkers post Karl Marx such as Marcel Déat, Henry De Man, Jacques Doriot, Georges Izard,
Adrien Marquet and Drieu La Rochelle, who grappled with historical materialism’s failure to unite a proletarian class in opposition to a class of bourgeois masters (Sternhell, Neither 138,
162-72). It is especially relevant to the United States. As Richard Hofstadter noted, the
American labour movement “aimed at making the proletariat into a new bourgeoisie” (Anti-
142 intellectualism 282). The movement, in other words, made a new class of consumers with no opposition whatsoever. In Jean-Claude Milner’s view, this lack of opposition became extremely evident at the end of the twentieth century. Specifically, Milner noted that “the name worker”, which once served the great divider (throughout Europe and Asia), “has ceased to divide” and thereby constitute an opposition; therefore, he stressed, “it has also ceased to bring together”
(“Interview” 21).
Although, to invoke contemporary slang, capitalist democracies produce a ninety-nine per cent and a one per cent, or plebs and celebs, these are not distinct classes; for they all address their demands to so-called economic reality. Pleb/celeb is not the same as serf/monarch or slave/master. As Oswald Spengler put it, proletarians and parvenus are “one and the same type, the same weed of a metropolitan pavement”. According to him, both socialism and liberal capitalism derived from “the same intellectual root: thinking in money”. Sentimental details aside, they are the same ideology (Hour of Decision 89, 100, 190). In 1961, Evola denounced
“the regime of petty politicians, who, whatever their party affiliations, are often figureheads at the service of financial, industrial, or corporate interests”. In his view, both Western prosperity and Marxist ideology are “within the orbit of nihilism”. The agent of each is “the most terrible void” (Ride the Tiger 27-29, 173). More recently, Frederic Jameson argued that post-modern capitalism involves “informational institutions” and “immense constructions in cyberspace” that
“transcend the dimensions of any individual, whether master or servant” (“Aesthetics of
Singularity” 110-11).
In Lacan’s vision of capitalism, there is no master/slave or bourgeois/proletarian distinction; everyone is a proletarian consumer (“La troisième” 187). Consumer-subjects address
141 the market (S1); they do not address a significant Other or a treasure chest of knowledge (S2).
Paul Verhaeghe, a Lacanian analyst, described consumer society as “an assortment of individuals without a common tie” (What About Me? 30). “Stay true to yourself” is the consumer motto. The rapper and corporate entrepreneur, Master P, preached this to his mass of
Twitter followers on 26 August 2012. There are countless variations on this theme.
141 In Lacan’s original schema, the arrow from $ runs down to S1, not across to S2 (“Du discours psychanalytique” 40).
The capitalist schema’s arrows are different to the proper discourse-schemas’ arrows.
143 In 1974, the political economist Harry Braverman argued that “capitalism creates a society in which no one is presumed to consult anything but self-interest”. Employment contracts are made by parties that have nothing in common except “the inability to avoid each other” (Labor 46; Liu, American Idyll 61-62). In 2006, the psychoanalyst Frédéric Declercq argued that, in contrast to proper discourses, capitalism has “an anti-social nature because it does not connect subjects to other subjects”. Instead, it promises – in a supremely sophisticated, deceitful manner – to connect “subjects to objects of libidinal enjoyment” (“Lacan” 74): “Swipe right”, “Tap that”, “Click ‘Like’”, and so on. Likewise, in 2009, Colette Soler inferred that capitalism “can only constitute a single, barely social bond between the individual and products.
Indifferent as it is to ‘the business of love’, it moves towards an increasing fragmentation and instability of social bonds, and leaves individuals always more exposed to insecurity and loneliness” (Lacan 191).
Robert W. McChesney, an American media theorist, made similar points back in 1998, but he employed different terms. According to him, neoliberal democracy – an ideology that crystallised around 1978 to 1980, thanks to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Paul
Volcker – places the market (S1) über alles. The agents of neoliberal democracy are not citizens; they are consumers ($). “The net result”, McChesney argued, “is an atomised society” – an apt oxymoron (“Introduction” 7, 11; Harvey, Brief 1-9). To McChesney’s annoyance, perhaps, Evola painted 1960s Europe with a near-identical brush. He held that “what exists today is essentially the shifting mass of ‘individuals’, devoid of organic connections” – a mass moved by “unstable currents”. In Evola’s view, so-called elites are mere technical specialists that serve “material reality” and “the distractions of the human-animal” (Ride the Tiger 177). There is no doubt some truth to these arguments.
Waste production
Capitalism produces garbage, waste, opinions and mass suffering/enjoyment (a). Unlike the four discourses proper, capitalism is not based on love’s suppletions but rather the fallacy of consumer satisfaction (Badiou, In Praise of Love 5-11; Declercq, “Lacan” 75; Lacan, “Je parle
144 aux murs” 96).142 Its agent is best described as a question ($), addressed directly to the market
(S1): “What do I consume?”
From 2000 onwards, rhythmic boasting and pornography have apparently sufficed as responses to consumer desire. This satisfies Peter Sloterdijk’s definition of the post-modern consumer as one that desires nothing other than the erotic. “It is not an arbitrary fact”, he asserted, “that the instrumentalisation of nudity is the leading symptom of the culture of consumption” (Rage and Time 17).143 In 2003, Frank Majors reported, “At the AVN Adult
Expo in Las Vegas, the porn-to-rap connection was in full effect, with a cadre of top name MCs on hand to represent their cliques and flaunt their porn products. AVN.com had a chance to chat with some of these rhyme slingers about why they decided to cross over into porn” (“Porn-
To-Rap Connection” n. pag.). Although Snoop Dogg – note the animal alias – allegedly received most of the credit for uniting rap and pornography, “it was actually DJ Yella from N.W.A.
[Niggaz Wit Attitudes] that first crossed the bridge” (Majors, “Porn-To-Rap Connection” n. pag.). This is not a history that will be taken seriously. More to the point, it is not a history that wants to be taken seriously.
De Man predicted this in 1927. “We should see the culture of the proletarian masses as it really is”, he wrote, “namely a culture of substitutes for or imitations of petty-bourgeois culture”. “This does not mean”, De Man added, “that the working class is subjected to the influence of this culture”, in the manner of the ancient slave’s subjection to the master. What
De Man held to be “a far more significant fact” was that the proletariat “does not want anything else” (Psychology 268). It does not want separation from petty-bourgeois consumerism; it does not want a novel teleology. Hence there is no class separation; there is only the proletarian consumer.
142 During a 2008 interview, Badiou mocked online dating’s “safety-first concept of ‘love’”. He held that it is not very different from arranged marriage; it is merely conducted in the name of risk-free “safety for the individuals involved” instead of “family order” (In Praise of Love 6-8).
143 This point has notable precedents. In 1933, Spengler complained that liberal democracy is so meaningless, affluent youths resort to erotic sports and “the ‘problems’ of fashion or of cooking” (Hour of Decision 74, 157 [note 1]). In 1961,
Evola acknowledged the “sexual intoxication that is profusely manifested in public life, conduct, and art” (Ride the
Tiger 198).
145 It is no secret that, alongside the Bible and Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses, pornography thrived soon after the printing press introduced mass-production to Europe
(Coopersmith, “Pornography” 97; Johnson, “Pornography” 219-20). In the twentieth century, pornography profited thanks to mass-produced videocassettes and videodiscs, designed for private, domestic viewing. This notion is etymologically linked to idiocy (from the Greek idios,
‘own, private’).144 In the twenty-first century, pornography benefitted once again from online streaming video, instantly mass-disseminated. “Throughout the history of new media”, Johnson noted, “from vernacular speech to movable type, to photography, to paperback books, to videotape, to cable and pay-TV, to ‘900’ phone lines, to the French Minitel, to the Internet, to
CD-ROMs and laser discs, pornography has shown technology the way” (“Pornography” 217,
226). Johnson’s article was not intended to scandalise; it was published in the American Federal
Communications Law Journal. It consists of basic facts.
Liberal capitalism’s obsession with metrics plays right into pornographers’ hands. As of
12 November 2015, the most popular video from the Queensland Conservatorium’s YouTube channel has 2,058 views; the Melbourne Conservatorium’s top-ranked YouTube video has 13,048 views; the Sydney Conservatorium’s best effort has 18,238 views. Can American academies do any better? The most popular video from the Juilliard School’s YouTube channel has 146,860 views; meanwhile, “Brother Fucks Passed Out Sister” on XVideos has no less than 25,589,591 views.145 To express sentimental concern and question how academics and students from art- music institutions suffer/enjoy this comparison is to miss the point. The pure hit-count is synonymous with the liberal-capitalist Good – the ethic of the über-accountant (Chiesa, “What”
10). If one wants something other than this brutal Good, one must seek passage to a different discourse (Lacan, “Télévision” 520). Pious complaints are unlikely to prove effective.
In 2007, a professor from the Queensland Conservatorium, Paul Draper, acknowledged that online participatory culture is akin to toilet-wall scribbling. Despite this, Draper endorsed it. In his view, “participatory culture has transformed value systems, undermined notions of
144 Lorenzo Chiesa made the same observation (Not-Two 18).
145 I have not included any of the YouTube or XVideos examples from this paragraph in the List of Works Cited. I chose an incest-themed example from XVideos in order to preclude progressive counter-arguments that celebrate pornography.
There are plenty of incest-themed examples on XVideos with hit-counts in excess of one million. Video and audio files produced by art-music academies do not often achieve equivalent hit-counts.
146 authority and power, while simultaneously creating new pathways for autonomous creativity and innovation” (“Music Two-Point-Zero” 1, 15). This counts as one of the aforementioned celebrations of new media. Like Draper, Jonathan Coopersmith acknowledged techno- capitalism’s blurring or outright elimination of distinctions between “producers, distributors and consumers”. In his view, “instant photography, video, and computers have permitted a
‘democratisation’ of pornography” (“Pornography” 94-96). This is undoubtedly correct.
XVideos, for instance, facilitates participatory culture, it is wildly popular, and it allows masses of people to both produce and consume photographs, sounds and moving images.
In the era of XVideos, everyone is an artist. This is not something to celebrate (Liu,
American Idyll 71; Verhaeghe, What About Me? 112).
Out-of-tune with classical mastery
In 1871, Ernest Renan warned that capitalist democracy could potentially extinguish haute discipline and difficult culture and thereby lead to a form of society in which une masse dégénérée would never aspire to anything beyond the pleasures of l’homme vulgaire (“Troisième dialogue” 99-100). In 1939, Clement Greenberg explained that, after rural peasants “settled in the cities” and the distinction between the “proletariat and petty bourgeois” effectively collapsed, “a new commodity was devised”. Greenberg derided the latter as “ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide” (“Avant-Garde and
Kitsch” 39).146 Roughly a decade later, Schoenberg complained that “the present has never belonged so completely to the mediocre as it does today” (Style and Idea 11).
In 1973, Lacan claimed that the world of classical, Aristotelian mastery was in a state of decomposition (Séminaire XX 3.32-37). Musicians from the same period echoed this remark.
“Noise pollution is now a world problem”, asserted R. Murray Schafer in 1977. “It would seem that the world soundscape has reached an apex of vulgarity in our time” (Tuning 3). In 1984, the composer Milton Babbitt (whose surname, incidentally, means ‘a complacent, materialistic
146 Catherine Liu pointed out that, six decades after Greenberg’s article, “kitsch had few critics and many admirers”, especially in progressive academia (American Idyll 219).
147 businessman’) complained that “the world of music never before has been so pluralistic, so fragmented, with a fragmentation which has produced severe factionalisation” (“More” 387).
Two years later, Pierre Schaeffer (a father of musique concrète) declared, “The only hope is that our civilisation will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance” (“Interview” 42). That is not all. In 1989, Alain Badiou characterised liberal capitalism as a devilish ideology that “seeks to undo everything, and thereby to leave everything at the mercy of dispersion, competition, opinion and the despotism of the public and publicity” (“What” 32). Seventeen years later, Badiou proved consistent. He argued that capitalist democracy “pushes thought into the arms of sceptical relativism” and in turn generates a specious and fanatical pluralism that “only tolerates its own vacuity” (Logics of
Worlds 511).
In Badiou’s view, it is increasingly difficult (and increasingly necessary) for philosophy to illustrate and defend its four conditions: the arts, the mathematical sciences, collectivist politics and Freudian transference-love. Under post-modernity, “our confused and detestable present”, philosophy’s conditions have degenerated into culture, technology, management and sexuality (Second Manifesto 119-21, 130; Saint Paul 12).
To be clear, contemporary doomsayers do not provoke the same angst as those from the late nineteenth century or the early twentieth century. As Jameson noted, when “many of the modernists” repudiated essentialism and metaphysical foundations, they “tended to express such principles in accents of anguish or pathos”. They did not suffer the charge of “relativism” lightly. What distinguishes post-modern capitalism, according to Jameson, “is the disappearance of all that anguish and pathos”. He described the present era as lacking “a genuine historicity” or teleology, which results in “apathy and cynicism, paralysis and depression” (“Aesthetics of
Singularity” 104, 121, 125) – all these things but no Sturm und Drang. As Sloterdijk put it, consumer-subjects tend to respond to problems “with constant irony or with learned indifference”; they do not sing about the rage of Achilles like ancient Muses (Rage and Time 1-
4, 17).
148 Lacan remarked upon something similar in 1977. At that point, life struck him as comic, not tragic.147 Freud’s Oedipal myth thus seemed inappropriate (Le moment de conclure
1.6). The following year, Lacan implicitly dismissed the grandiosity of Oedipus’s Fall and described the symptom as something that each analysand possesses (“Conclusions” 220). A consumer-symptom, put simply, is banal: it has no exceptional power to astonish and no universal significance. Jameson’s text supports this point. “Even increasing immiseration”, he noted, “and the return of poverty and unemployment on a massive world-wide scale are scarcely matters of amazement for anyone”, precisely due to their banality (“Aesthetics of Singularity”
125).
Jameson casually invoked Sloterdijk’s well-known phrase from 1983, cynical reason
(zynischen Vernunft). Cynic is a well-chosen term, for it alludes to the prevalence of animal- humanism, the consumer-subject’s reduction to the body, and the proliferation of insignificant affect-events post-1980 (“Aesthetics of Singularity” 106, 123). A cynic, according to etymology, is kunikos – a ‘dog-like’ animal that despises civilised institutions and treats the master-signifier
Nature as truth. A master-signifier (S1) in the place of truth is exactly what one finds in Lacan’s capitalist schema; but instead of Nature, it is economic reality. In 1973, Lacan spoke of the reigning master-signifier as masturbatory suffering/enjoyment (Séminaire XX 7.75, 8.86). This,
I claim, is synonymous with economic reality. In antiquity, the cynic Diogenes of Sinope famously masturbated in the marketplace; in the post-modern era, since pornography “is virtually everywhere”, suffering/enjoying it in a masturbatory mode is common. “The essence of pornography”, wrote Jean Baudrillard, “permeates all visual and televisual techniques”
(“Conspiracy” 25) – popular music videos, for example.
Facebook-style Like-repetition is today’s version of the Freudian super-ego – the obscene imperative to suffer/enjoy, suffer/enjoy, suffer/enjoy (Lacan, Séminaire XX 1.10).
Verhaeghe is not amused. “If we look at what is expected at an individual level”, he wrote, “the answer is ‘to enjoy life to the full’. The person who best meets the norm is the one who enjoys the most, enjoyment being explicitly linked with consumption and products” (What About Me?
201). In this respect, the celebrity is the best; hence, for music, a celebrity’s duty is to curate
147 It is worth noting that Lacan equated the comic with psychosis or delusion (R.S.I. 4.35).
149 playlists that establish mass-consumption trends.148 According to Beats Music, we all trust celebrities to tell us what to consume: “The Beats Music curator program brings together a group of authoritative voices in music we all know and trust” (“Curators” n. pag.).
Enjoyment-imperatives and ego-centrism affect contemporary music education as well.
“The ultimate goal of present-day education”, according to Verhaeghe, “is ‘self-management’ and ‘entrepreneurship’. Young people must regard themselves as enterprises, and see knowledge and skills above all in economic terms – that is, as something they can use to increase their market value” (What About Me? 163).149 An increase in market value strictly does not equate to classical mastery. According to Lacan’s schema of capitalism, a banal subject occupies the place of the agent, not the master, and thereupon pretends that he/she is a global Every-Individual.150
David Brent (the farcical boss from The Office, a British television series) put it best when he flaunted his mediocre casualness as an asset: “You’ll never have another boss like me, someone who’s basically a chilled out entertainer” (Gervais and Merchant, “Merger”).
What ordains the new ordinary?
The Office and two other British television comedies, Peep Show and Nathan Barley, are arguably better at treating consumer-music delusions than progressive academic texts.
During an interview situation in 2001, Brent addressed the camera and spoke of his life as a musician – his delusion, that is – before he became an office manager in Slough.
I get all this, “Ooh, David, you know, you’re a brilliant singer-songwriter, you’re stuck in
Slough, while it’s Texas that’re off making all the money, and they’re rubbish compared to
you.”151 And I go, “Don’t slag them off.” I say, “I’ve been there, I’ve done that, you know.
That’s behind me.” […] The thing is, we’re both good in our fields. I’m sure Texas couldn’t
148 Ernest Hemingway traced the trajectory of so-called progress: “Religion is the opium of the people. He believed that, that dyspeptic little joint-keeper. Yes, and music is the opium of the people. Old mount-to-the-head hadn’t thought of that. And now economics is the opium of the people” (“Gambler” 155).
149 At present, the Queensland Conservatorium has a compulsory series of courses for its Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Music Technology students named My Life as a Musician. The rhetoric is just as Verhaeghe described.
150 “More than ever, today’s master doesn’t want to appear as a master” (Žižek, Trouble in Paradise ch. 4).
151 Texas is the name of a popular band from Glasgow. They emerged in the late 1980s.
150 run and manage a successful paper merchants, yeah? I couldn’t, you know, do what…
actually I could do what they do, and I think they knew even back then. Probably what
spurred them on. (Gervais and Merchant, “Training”)
On another occasion, Brent demonstrated – unwittingly, of course – the limpness of inspirational consumer-music. At the conclusion of a corporate motivational speaking gig, Brent played a popular song of triumph and said to his audience, “I’ve been David Brent; you’ve been the best!” Brent’s audience looked unimpressed (Gervais and Merchant, “Motivation”). The episode entitled “Party” mocked both the secular saint and rock idol motifs. Addressing the camera, once again, Brent expressed admiration for the English cricketer, Ian “Beefy” Botham, because Beefy participated in a charity event. He said he was influenced by Beefy’s “maverick” modus operandi and that, even though he wears a suit to work, people know that he is “rock ‘n’ roll through and through” (Gervais and Merchant, “Party”).
The very first episode of Peep Show, which premiered in 2003, began on a similar note.
The protagonist named Jeremy fantasised about his life as a musician. “I’m almost definitely a musical genius!” said Jeremy’s internal monologue, as Jeremy watched himself dancing in the mirror and listened to his own music (Armstrong and Bain, “Warring Factions”). (Recall the etymology of idiocy.) The comedy, in short, derives from the fact that Jeremy’s belief in himself as a musician is masturbatory and pathetic.
Nathan Barley premiered around the same time, in 2005. A decade later, both The
Guardian and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Arts website praised Nathan Barley for predicting the “nightmare” of participatory hipster culture, which of course includes music
(Harrison, “Totally Mexico!” n. pag.; Stone, “Idiots Have Risen” n. pag.). The eponymous character described himself as a “renegade” and a “self-facilitating media node”. His website was
“an online urban culture dispatch” (Brooker and Morris, “Episode One”). In the first episode’s opening scene, Nathan showed off his website’s “latest monkey animation”, which depicted a monkey masturbating while playing in a band with a keyboardist monkey and a drummer monkey. A character named Dan Ashcroft wrote an article about people like Nathan – “self- regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality” – called
“The Rise of the Idiots”. “Welcome to the age of stupidity”, he sneered. In response to the
151 article, Ashcroft’s fellow magazine staff praised his opinions and implored him to “keep it foolish”. This made Ashcroft even more bitter (Brooker and Morris, “Episode One”).
The year that Nathan Barley premiered, the progressive academic Mizuko Ito praised online anime and manga culture. “Anime otaku are media connoisseurs”, she wrote – “activist prosumers who seek out esoteric content […] and organise their social lives around viewing, interpreting, and remixing these media works”. Ito cited the production of anime music videos as a “sometimes brilliantly creative” feature of otaku culture (“Otaku Media Literacy” n. pag.).
In this, one hears the echo of Jeremy from Peep Show – “almost definitely” a genius. More seriously, one could describe Ito’s project as generic “academic populism”, which, according to
Liu, idealises “fandom, the body, unreason, subcultures, and the New Age” (American Idyll 215-
16).
Outside the field of comedy, consumerism’s effects are less amusing. Take the field of major-label pop music, for example, in which pathos and power are terribly confused.
Mainstream media branded Rihanna triumphant after Chris Brown battered her and photos of her bruised face became accessible to anyone with an internet connection; Taylor Swift’s popularity increased significantly after Kanye West bullied her in public; and, although a Los
Angeles Superior Court Commissioner forced Britney Spears under the conservatorship of her father in 2008 (and thereby prohibited Spears from making her own financial decisions), this did not prevent her from earning millions of dollars. Why have I chosen to name these three singers? Forbes heaped praise on them in 2012, simply because they earned more money that year than any other women in the music industry (Greenburg, “Top-Earning” n. pag.). The
über-accountant’s ethic is satisfied.
The Dancing Man is another well-known example. In March 2015, photographs of a morbidly obese Liverpudlian dancing in public were posted to 4chan (an online forum, originally dedicated to otaku culture). The Dancing Man suffered ridicule via 4chan but then became the subject of a celebratory Twitter campaign, #FindDancingMan. Two months later, Twitter users collectively paid the Dancing Man to attend a party in Los Angeles featuring Monica Lewinsky
(best known for performing sex acts with an American president) and popular musicians such as
Moby and Andrew WK. The party reportedly “raised money for a range of anti-bullying
152 charities” (Khomami, “Fat-Shamed” n. pag.). This vague, sentimental notion of progress conforms perfectly, I repeat, to the ethic of the über-accountant.
Democratic disturbances
In 1930, Heinrich Schenker predicted musicians’ mass departure from the master’s discourse. “The vanishing of the genius is very welcome to commonplace man”, Schenker argued, “for the spectacle of towering superiority disturbs his cosy self-complacency. The most that he can console himself with is the thought that the name of this giver of great bounty may ultimately pass into oblivion, thanks to the ravages of time and the even greater ravages of man”. Schenker did not stop there. “The genius”, he wrote, “whose name is hallowed, and the nameless commonplace man ‘as is only right and proper’ may finally both alike become nameless, may sink into equal anonymity – that is the desire and triumph of the eternally anonymous ones” (Masterwork in Music 112). Spengler issued a similar diagnosis just three years later. He referred to his democratic peers as nihilists and denigrated their “abysmal hatred” of mastery, culture, history and “higher form of every sort”. “The Age has itself become vulgar”, he wrote, “and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted”
(Hour of Decision 95).
Today, Schenker’s and Spengler’s critiques seem out of place: this is precisely my point.
Sally Macarthur, by contrast, seems comfortable with the post-modern ideology. In 2013,
Macarthur wrote, “Not everyone can be a superstar”, therefore it is imperative to explore “a different model of authorship”. Macarthur acknowledged that the composer-surname is no longer dominant and that “most people collaborate these days”, but in her view, this is not enough. “The division of labour is clearly defined”, she noted, “ultimately reflecting the contribution of each individual”. Macarthur asked post-modern musicians, “why not experiment with shifting the idea of composer into communities and collaborative spaces that aim to blur the boundaries between one composer and another?” She reserved special criticism for “the composer who does not care what the masses think”, who, in her view, “has exhausted the repertoire of possibility of the new”. Note the post-modernist’s underlying belief in finitude and the implicit support of an established domain. Macarthur continued her critique against composers dedicated to the new: “They experiment with extending the capabilities of instruments and manipulating sounds in general but end up reproducing the known and
153 familiar” (“Music” n. pag.). Macarthur’s critique is a variation on the post-modern theme: the end of History.
According to Hofstadter, progressives from the early twentieth century typically derided nineteenth-century education. “The effect of mental testing”, they believed, “was to encourage elitist views”. What was their response? “The educators-for-democracy”, Hofstadter surmised,
“might have said that God must love the slow learners because he made so many of them”
(Anti-intellectualism 339). This statement is presumably offensive to many academics in 2016; in 1964, the book it is sourced from received a Pulitzer Prize. This implies a dramatic ideological shift. Post-modern capitalism, I repeat, is not the same as the master-discourse proper.
Hofstadter’s point is clear. When education ceased to serve nineteenth-century master- signifiers, this lead to the pro-consumerism, “life-adjustment movement” of the 1940s and the
1950s. Hofstadter described the movement as a “peculiar self-defeating version of ‘democracy’” in which “immature, insecure, nervous, retarded slow learners from poor cultural environments were ‘in no sense inferior’ to more mature, secure, confident, gifted children from better cultural environments”. Nowadays, this is referred to as false democratic levelling. The life-adjustment movement actively denigrates “intellectual development” and privileges “practical training in being family members, consumers, and citizens” (Anti-intellectualism 342-44; Liu, American
Idyll 19-26). The movement was undoubtedly effective. In 1996, Baudrillard named mediocrity and banality the major elements of contemporary art ideology, alongside waste (“Conspiracy”
27).
At the time of writing, relatability (or conformity to liberal-democratic norms) is so marketable, a twenty-something Swede nicknamed PewDiePie has the most subscribers on
YouTube. PewDiePie does nothing but follow the rules of computer games. In a private, domestic setting, he offers inane, running commentaries (Karmacharged, “It’s Raping Time!” n. pag.).152 Functionally, PewDiePie is not far from the nineteenth-century consumer par excellence, Victor Ardisson. Steve Finbow described Ardisson as “a feeble-minded boy” who was
“addicted to masturbation and the consumption of his own semen” (Grave Desire ch. 1). There
152 Recall, again, the etymology of idiocy.
154 is, however, a crucial twenty-first-century twist: whereas Ardisson remained a solitary figure throughout his life, PewDiePie has attracted a global mass of scopophiles. Catherine Liu referred to this phenomenon as “a new elite of ordinariness itself”. In her view, it emerged at the end of the twentieth century, when “ordinariness became apotheosized as the space of true innovation and creativity” (American Idyll 215).
Today’s consumerism is pleasant, all too pleasant: no class distinctions, equal rights attributed to men and women qua empowered shoppers, opinions propagated everywhere via social media, and so on. In spite of this, Lacanian clinicians such as Jacques-Alain Miller and
Jonathan D. Redmond speak of a growing number of twenty-first-century subjects in terms of delusion, “ordinary psychosis”, “mild psychosis”, “dissimulated psychosis” and “veiled psychosis” (Miller, “Ordinary Psychosis Revisited” 148-49, 152; Redmond, Ordinary 3-5).153 If one’s ideology lacks a strict, philosophical friend/enemy distinction, everyone is not suddenly one’s friend; everyone is potentially a competitor, a rival or an enemy.154
Verhaeghe, to be clear, is not one of Miller’s followers; but he, too, believes that post- modern capitalism has altered clinical subjects. Verhaeghe is “convinced that the problems for which people are seeking help these days are not just increasing, but also that their nature has changed”.155 According to him, the non-existence of positive, substantial identities causes “the quest for identity that is so ubiquitous in the Western world” (What About Me? 3). Hence
Christin Hoene’s Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature from 2015,
Music and Identity Politics (edited by Ian Biddle in 2012), Identity, Performance and
Technology: Practices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity (edited by Susan
Broadhurst and Josephine Machon in 2012), Music and Identity: Transformation and
Negotiation (edited by Eric Akrofi et al. in 2007), Stan Hawkins’ Settling the Pop Score: Pop
Texts and Identity Politics from 2002, and so on. Texts like these are ubiquitous.
153 Freud offered an early example: an isolated, delusional subject is forced to replace via “his own symptom formations the great group formations from which he is excluded” (Group Psychology 142).
154 For recent, succinct notes on the friend/enemy distinction (and its disturbing absence), see Clemens (“When” e16- e19).
155 Twelve years after Lacan’s death, Roudinesco likewise argued that clinical “patients have changed, their troubles now all the more visible and their appeals for help all the louder because they are daily confronted with powerful ideals of social success, liberal consensus, fanaticism, the occult, and scientism” (Jacques Lacan 441-42).
155 According to Susan McClary, the pre-occupation with identity and autonomy emerged
“in the early nineteenth century when musicians were breaking their ties with traditional forms of patronage and beginning to grapple with the pressures of the commercial market” (Feminine
Endings x). Badiou effectively agrees; but unlike McClary, he does not embrace the identitarian trend. “Capital”, according to Badiou, “demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities”. It receives identitarian particularities (such as “black homosexuals”,
“disabled Serbs”, “moderate Muslims” and “ecologist yuppies”) not as subversive but as “a god- send”. For each new “social image authorises new products, specialised magazines, improved shopping malls, ‘free’ radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady ‘public debates’ at peak viewing times” (Saint Paul 10). As noted in the previous chapter, the agent of liberal capitalism is a modified hysteric – a subject ($) incapable of determining what it is or what it wants, in a coherent sense. Instead of producing knowledge, however, capitalism produces addictive waste (a): “Encore! Encore!” Following Hannah Arendt, Verhaeghe held that hysterical evil is not rare with respect to liberal capitalism; it is banal (What About Me? 3).
Like Verhaeghe, I believe that the banality of evil is precisely the consumer-agent ($), so long as the accent is placed on the banality.
In an article on art subjected to post-modernity, Jean-François Lyotard argued that the latter’s seemingly individualistic ethos is in fact an ethos of the market-master – another variant of the über-accountant. In Lyotard’s view, when power equates to “capital and not that of a party”, this encourages the post-modern “solution”. If the classical master’s aesthetic criteria are obliterated, it nevertheless remains possible for the market to assign profit-values to so-called art commodities. Lyotard depicted the situation of 1982 in the passage below.
Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae,
watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris
perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.
It is easy to find a public for eclectic works. By becoming kitsch, art panders to the
confusion which reigns in the “taste” of the patrons. Artists, gallery owners, critics, and
public wallow together in the “anything goes,” and the epoch is one of slackening.
(“Answering the Question” 76)
156 Lyotard then demonstrated a link between liberal tolerance and liberal capitalism: “this realism of the ‘anything goes’ is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful [for liberal capitalists] to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield” (“Answering the Question” 76).156 In short, Lyotard predicted contemporary art-rhetoric’s descent to the level of philarguria – “an anything-goes-if-it-sells ethos, in which artistic value becomes indistinguishable from market value” (Bennett,
“Checking the Post” 15). He also predicted arts scenes’ and Arts faculties’ attachments to creature comforts.
Artistic and literary research is doubly threatened, once by the “cultural policy” and once
by the art and book market. What is advised, sometimes through one channel, sometimes
through the other, is to offer works which, first, are relative to subjects which exist in the
eyes of the public they address, and second, works so made (“well made”) that the public
will recognise what they are about, […] and if possible, even to derive from such work a
certain amount of comfort. (“Answering the Question” 76)
According to Baudrillard, the art market “generously promotes” nullity as a value and thus provides nullity-art “reasons to exist”. “There is no longer any possible critical judgement”,
Baudrillard asserted in 1996; there is “only an amiable, necessarily genial sharing of nullity”
(“Conspiracy” 28).
In 1934, Ernst Jünger acknowledged liberal capitalism’s bias towards comfort and geniality, which he considered a cowardly refusal of pain, suffering and sacrifice. “Pain as a measure of man is unalterable”, he asserted, “but what can be altered is the way he confronts it.
Man’s relation to pain changes with every significant shift in fundamental belief”. Excess suffering/enjoyment (a) is indeed a term of each discourse, according to Lacan’s schemas; and each discourse’s agent adopts a different position with respect to it. “Tell me your relation to pain”, wrote Jünger, “and I will tell you who you are”. Jünger was adamant on this point.
Given that one’s relation to pain is not fixed and that one can situate one’s self in multiple
156 In September 2008, Damien Hirst made the news for breaking Picasso’s auction record. He made a total of
111,000,000 British pounds over two days. The Guardian noted that Jeff Koons’ record for a single work, set in June
2008, remained intact (Kennedy, “£111m” n. pag.).
157 discourses, Jünger held that this choice is the “best benchmark” by which to discern a class of people (“On Pain” 1-2).157
On the “widespread security” of liberal capitalism, just prior to Nazism, Jünger wrote,
“These years display a strange mix of barbarity and humanity; they resemble an archipelago where an isle of vegetarians exists right next to an island of cannibals” (“On Pain” 9-10).
Jünger is correct. Liberal capitalism often fuses barbarity and superficial pleasantries. In 2009, for example, Hollywood paid Brian Eno to soundtrack a film about a Heaven-dwelling victim of child rape, entitled The Lovely Bones. Thanks to a popular Twentieth Century Fox Television series, the signifier glee is associated not only with music, liberal tolerance and sentimentality but also transgressions such as sexual battery and child pornography (Sifferlin, “Former” n. pag.). Another familiar example: Rolf Harris, a self-described “victim”, is currently planning an album with a well-meaning title, Justice for All (Australian Associated Press, “Rolf” n. pag.).
Harris is renowned for cloying children’s songs and for molesting young girls.
The agent of liberal capitalism is oxymoronic – vacuous yet stuffed with sentiment.
McClary conceived the progressive, post-modern subject as a self-satisfied, identitarian particularity (“More” 31). An accent on sentiment and self-satisfaction was present in Adam
Smith’s well-known Wealth of Nations from 1776. See the passage below.
Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that
which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such
offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of
those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the
butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love,
and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a
beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. (13)
It is clear: the consumer-subject ($) appeals to the market’s spirit of self-love and empowerment (S1). This, unfortunately, is the basis of progressive music education.
157 Libidinal suffering/enjoyment is also crucial to Freud’s theory of group formation (Group Psychology 94-103, 139-42).
158 More progressive education
In 2009, Kevin Gerrity published a review of music education in Ohio, affected by the neoliberal No Child Left Behind policy. “Data analysis revealed that a vast majority of Ohio’s public school principals hold favourable attitudes toward music education”, he wrote. “In fact, only 7% of the respondents earned attitudinal scores that were classified as less-than- favourable” (“No” 86). The passage below contains a crucial twist.
Despite favourable attitudes, respondents consistently ranked music as the least important
subject in the general education of students. When considered among the other core
disciplines recognised by No Child Left Behind, mathematics, reading, science, social
studies and writing […], music and the other arts were assigned the lowest ranking by 71%
of the respondents. (“No” 87)
Yes. Everyone supposedly loves music; but few are willing to commit to it or become disciplined by it.
In 2010, Henry Jenkins reviewed academic literature on web-based participatory culture. He acknowledged that, even though the Do It Yourself ethos (synonymous with liberal- capitalist individuality) putatively “emerged as a critique of consumer culture and a celebration of making things ourselves”, it immediately risked “being transformed into a new form of consumer culture”, one that benefitted media companies such as Facebook and YouTube as well as profit-driven educational institutions (“Afterword” 238). Between 1999 and 2008, the mutant, participatory-consumer culture that Jenkins resented came to be known as Web 2.0 or Learning
2.0 (Adler and Brown, “Minds on Fire” 28-32; DiNucci, “Fragmented Future” 32). These terms are now ubiquitous in Anglophone academia.
Jenkins promoted creative processes over products, and he considered this a radical idea
(“Afterword” 236); but such processes and temporary art-events are also fit for mass consumption. Process, Heraclitean flux, the ephemeral, the unfinishable, or the continuum of questionable value: however you choose to name the fetish, it poses no disruption to post- modern consumerism. I prefer Jameson’s vernacular. According to him, a non-teleological series
159 of “singularity-events” is anything but contrary to capitalist logic; it totally conforms to the
“world of finance capital” (“Aesthetics of Singularity” 109-11, 122).
Jenkins tried to distinguish between “participatory cultures, which may or may not be engaged with commercial portals”, and Web 2.0, “which refers specifically to a set of commercial practices” (“Afterwards” 238). Commercial versus may or may not be commercial equates to weak difference at best. Contrary to this, I maintain that there is no structural difference between Jenkins’ participatory subject and the consumer subject; and there is nothing new about technē-wielding philanthropists (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound line 110). In an article from 2013 on education and participatory media, the philosopher A. J. Bartlett noted,
“We constantly re-encounter this structure whereby declared radicality in fact simply rehearses the most archaic aspects of what it purports to supersede” (“Innovations in Incapacity” 5).158
In 2014, Stephanie Horsley wrote about music’s subjection to neoliberal policies in both
Canada and the United Kingdom. Her study emphasised industry and economy (S1): “music education can be conceived of as job training in its own right for future workers within the music and entertainment industries or as a means of creating consumers of music that may contribute to sustaining an economy reliant upon mass consumerism” (“Comparative” 3). This, too, is consistent with Lacan’s schema: capitalism produces objects that function as vortexes
(a), sucking in consumers, more and more.159
Horsley extracted a trichotomous master-signifier from her study of British music education under Margaret Thatcher and John Major: “individualism, self-interest, and self- reliance” (“Comparative” 434; original italics). Under such terms, music can only be masturbatory, bound to the market that in turn determines the consumer’s Good. (Recall, again, Jeremy from Peep Show and the character Nathan Barley.) If consumers are unsatisfied
(which, according to Lacanian doctrine, they are and always will be), music is dropped. Hence, under neoliberalism, in both England and Ontario, “music education in the primary schools
158 For historical precursors to this problem in progressive education, see Hofstadter (Anti-intellectualism 354-56).
159 As Jameson put it, consumers “now consume the very form of communication along with its content” (“Aesthetics of
Singularity” 111). Consider the recent competition between subscription media services: Spotify versus Apple Music, for example.
160 increasingly became the responsibility of generalist teachers as specialist teachers were either laid off or reassigned to generalist roles in order to increase the system’s efficiency” (Horsley,
“Comparative” 454; original italics).
In his first book, the anti-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche complained of a similar, music-related decline in Ancient Greece, caused by majoritarian relevance.160 The problem, according to Nietzsche, emerged when Euripides broke with Aeschylus and Sophocles and placed the accent on the common man: “Euripides brought the spectator on to the stage” (Birth of
Tragedy 11.55; original italics). Nietzsche despised flattery (kolakeia), specifically the way
Euripides allowed ordinary spectators to view themselves as the protagonist, to identify with an artificially-enhanced semblable: “the spectator now heard and saw his double on the Euripidean stage, and was delighted that the latter knew how to speak so well”. Nietzsche held Euripides’ common man responsible for promoting mundane suffering/enjoyment: “everyday life could be represented on stage”, he wrote in disgust. The obverse of celebrated mundanity is explicit ignorance of the radically foreign and non-human: “Bourgeois mediocrity, on which Euripides built all his political hopes, now had its chance to speak”, noted Nietzsche, “whereas previously the character of language had been determined by the demi-god in tragedy and by the drunken satyr or half-man in comedy” (Birth of Tragedy 11.56).
Given that banality is familiar to all, everyone is capable of judging banality, therefore there is no further need for judgement. “Thus Aristophanes’ Euripides praises himself”, argued
Nietzsche, “for the way he has represented general, familiar, everyday life and activity, things which everyone is capable of judging”. Determined ignorance (regarding the radical and the non-human) combined with the near-perfect relinquishing of judgement produced the following effect: “the Hellene had given up his belief in his immortality, not only his belief in an ideal past, but also his belief in an ideal future”. Figuratively speaking, the post-Euripidean Hellene achieved post-modernity long before Macarthur or McClary. How so? The post-Euripidean
Hellene first glimpsed the end of History; he/she first came to identify with “the cheerfulness of slaves who know no graver responsibility, no higher ambition, nothing in the past or future of higher value than the present” (Birth of Tragedy 11.56).
160 On Nietzsche’s designation as an anti-philosopher, see Badiou (Saint Paul 17, 58-62, 72; Wittgenstein’s
Antiphilosophy 69-71, 75-76).
161 Nietzsche is often criticised for his hysterical inconsistency, but on the subject of the end of History, he is a dedicated obsessional. In Beyond Good and Evil, he referred to popular levelling as “the most disastrous form of arrogance so far”. He rejected people “who were not noble enough to see the abysmally different orders of rank and chasms in rank between different people”. “People like this”, wrote Nietzsche, “with their ‘equality before God’ have prevailed over the fate of Europe so far, until a stunted, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something well-meaning, sickly, and mediocre has finally been bred: the European of today” (57, § 3.62).
Nietzsche predicted the mediocre man’s success lasting well into the future: “nothing lasts as long as the day after tomorrow except one species of person, the hopelessly mediocre.
Only the mediocre have prospects for continuing on, for propagating – they are the people of the future, the only survivors: ‘Be like them! Be mediocre!’ is the only morality that still makes sense, that still finds ears” (Beyond Good and Evil 160, § 9.262; original italics). In Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s protagonist spoke of the man at the end of History as “the most contemptible person”. Again, Nietzsche emphasised the mediocre man’s ignorance of whatever is
“beyond the human”.
Beware! The time approaches when human beings no longer launch the arrow of
their longing beyond the human, and the string of their bow will have forgotten how to
whir!
[…] Beware! The time of the most contemptible human is coming, the one who can
no longer have contempt for himself.
Behold! I show you the last human being.
[…] Then the earth has become small, and on it hops the last human being, who
makes everything small. His kind is ineradicable, like the flea beetle; the last human being
lives longest.
“We invented happiness” – say the last human beings, blinking. (Thus Spoke
Zarathustra 9-10, § 1.5; original italics)
Euripides’ common man was, I repeat, a prelude to the Last Humans of liberal capitalism – the Dionysus-less domain par excellence. Nietzsche criticised “the tendency of
Euripides, which was to expel the original and all-powerful Dionysiac element from tragedy and to re-build tragedy in a new and pure form on the foundations of a non-Dionysiac art, morality,
162 and view of the world” (Birth of Tragedy 12.59).161 This situates Euripides in the hysteric’s discourse: his banality-loving subject ($) desired a master of the Good (S1).
The subtle shift from Euripides’ common man to the Last Human marks the passage from hysterical discourse proper to liberal capitalism. At the end of hystérie denoted by the common man’s narcissistic banality, the Last Human ($) became fused to the master of the
Good and consumer goods, the master of the Right and individual rights (to opinions), the master of liberal tolerance and liberal capitalism. Euripides thus provided an early glimpse of music’s fate under contemporary liberal capitalism. So, too, did nineteenth-century English liberals. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche labelled the English liberal a moralist obsessed with “comfort” and “a modest and thoroughly mediocre type of person”. Nietzsche called the
English “boring”, and he mocked their singing. “What is offensive in even the most humane
Englishman is his lack of music”, wrote Nietzsche. “There is no dance or timing in the movement of his soul and his body, not even a desire for dance or timing, for ‘music.’ Just listen to him speak; […] finally, listen to them sing!” (Beyond Good and Evil 119, 144, § 7.228, §
8.252). This is an exceptional prelude to contemporary, liberal-capitalist rhetoric from the
British colony of Australia.
The last national review of music, published by Australia’s federal government in 2005, described music as something Good, something with “holistic benefits”. “Pythagoras (6th century
B.C.)”, the report contended, “taught music to his students for moral improvement and physical health benefits”. Soon afterwards, the report endorsed the neoliberal virtue of “self- expression”. In excess of this, it alleged that music is a Redeemer of the weak: it is responsible for “significant increases in the overall self-concept of children at-risk”. There is no trace in the report of the following: “Ask not what the Muses can do for you; ask what you can do for the
Muses”. The Muses are instead subjugated to vague notions of consumer satisfaction. In the vein of post-Euripidean Greek cheerfulness, the report cast music as something that flatters the ego and the body. Music is Good because it brings “satisfaction to people’s lives”. Music’s satisfactions are multiple: “physiological, psychomotor, emotional, cognitive and behavioural”
(Church et al., National 8-9).
161 “The Dionysian way was a way of the Mysteries” (Evola, Ride the Tiger 65). Nietzsche and Lacan were both anti- philosophers subjected to mystery. Nietzsche placed an accent on Dionysus; Lacan preferred the vague term phallus.
163 What is the effect of pleasant rhetoric such as this in Australia? Is there anything that can be affirmed? From 1991 to 2004, enrolment in subjects named “performing arts/media” increased sixty-six per cent; enrolment in music increased just three per cent. In 2004, 37,542 students were enrolled in visual art subjects, 27,705 in performing arts subjects, and just 11,140 in music. Is the recent, neoliberal emphasis on Euripidean cheerfulness and the anti-Dionysiac working well for music? “At present, the music education has rotten teeth”, wrote a parent from the Northern Territory. Music is “the first item to ‘fall off the plate’ when time runs out”, wrote a teacher from New South Wales. A parent from Victoria complained that music is “neglected in favour of sport”, then asked, “How can someone write a fabulous opening music score for the
Olympics if they never learn how?” (Church et al., National 51, 56). The question is perhaps trivial, but the implication is correct: Australian educational rhetoric flatters music, to music’s detriment.
The report fortunately made note of “the large amounts of lip service paid yet low priority given to music in schools overall” (Church et al., National 57). I repeat: music’s main problem under liberal capitalism is that it is universally liked. Consider how many teenagers in
Australia claim to like music compared to mathematics. Now, consider how many teenagers are taught mathematics at High School until the minimum age of fifteen, and compare this to the number of teenagers that are taught music theory. Broadly speaking, music is liked by laypeople and is considered a comfort, to music’s detriment; mathematics is maligned and is considered a challenge, to mathematics’ benefit.
Lip service is not easily dismissed; at present, it is deemed profitable. According to
Emiliano de Cristofaro et al., Facebook and other online social networks are “one of the primary outlets for businesses and enterprises to advertise and communicate with their customers”.
Businesses can create a Facebook Page and advertise their Page in order to attract Likes.
Estimations of the revenue attached to each Like range from US $3.60, to $8.00, to $136.38, and even to $214.81 (“Paying for Likes?” 1). As a result, there is a growing industry of Like Farms – services paid to inflate a Page’s number of Likes. In layman’s terms, Like Farms generate fake profiles that “imitate real users’ behaviour”. For Pages that want to appear more popular than they otherwise would be, fake Likes are worth the service fee charged by Like Farms. Other
Pages, by contrast, wish to attract “genuine interest”, not fake Likes. The latter are “less
164 valuable to businesses in terms of potential customer engagement and revenue” (Cristofaro et al., “Paying for Likes?” 1).
Since the consumer-agent is duplicity itself (or the banality of evil), Facebook is riven with irony and cynicism.162 There are so many ironic Likes from so-called real Facebook users, it makes it very difficult for Cristofaro et al. to uphold the naïve real/fake distinction. Note the study’s emphasis on semblances or apparent reality.
(1) some farms, like SocialFormula and AuthenticLikes, seem to be operated by bots
and do not really try to hide the nature of their operations, as demonstrated by large
bursts of likes and the limited number of [Facebook] friends per profile; (2) other farms,
like BoostLikes, follow a much stealthier approach, aiming to mimic regular users’
behaviour, and rely on their large and well-connected network structure to disseminate
the target likes while keeping a small count of likes per user. For the latter, we also
observed a high number of friends per profile and a “reasonable” number of likes.
(“Paying for Likes?” 5)
Because Like Farms such as BoostLikes “exhibit patterns closely resembling real users’ behaviour”, detecting so-called fake Likes is in fact “quite difficult” (Cristofaro et al., “Paying for Likes?” 5). What we are dealing with here is not so much real versus fake but rather semblances that conform to statistical norms versus semblances that do not conform. If one can assess the median number of Friends and the median number of Likes attached to a so-called real Facebook account, algorithms can then generate believable models of Facebook accounts that conform to statistical norms. The believable and supremely sophisticated model, the semblance that passes as normal – this is proper to post-modern capitalism.
Sophisticated filters
The Belgian artist Wim Delvoye made fun of the naïve real/fake distinction with his
Cloaca – a machine that produced faecal waste. Delvoye’s Cloaca is so sophisticated, scientific
162 In 2009, David Bennett noted the ubiquity of “postmodern value-relativism and irony” (“Checking the Post” 8).
165 tests cannot discern a difference between human faeces and the machine’s faeces.163 “The machine is fed everyday”, said Delvoye, “because in the organs, there is real human stomach bacteria” (“Josefina” n. pag.). The problem detailed by Cristofaro et al. is not far from this. In a quasi-discourse like post-modern capitalism, how can one distinguish between authentic opinion-excretions and simulated opinion-excretions?164 The only certainty, as Lacan implied, is that something is excreted. Civilisation, he joked, is cloaca maxima (“Conférences et entretiens”
61) – a reference to the Roman aqueducts.
In 2015, the Computer Law and Security Review published an article by Kate Mathews
Hunt about the discord between consumer opinions (a) and market regulation (S1). “Never has there been so much noise and clutter in such a fiercely competitive market environment”, she wrote. Mathews Hunt’s paper primarily examined “fake online reviews in the Australian consumer law context” and attempts by “consumer protection laws, guidelines and industry codes” to regulate fake reviews. “Fake online reviews are false, misleading and deceptive communications in a digital environment”, she explained; they are distinct from so-called genuine opinions (“Gaming the System” 4; original italics). The implied aim is an agreement between a and S1 – the formation of a functional orthodoxy, that is, a domain of opinions one can invest in with confidence.
Consumerism’s reliance on filtering is a contemporary variation on the theme of cloaca maxima: “Clear the filth!” According to Mathews Hunt, well-known companies such as Samsung and Belkin have been prosecuted for penning fake reviews, and “Fox News has recently been accused of engaging employees and third parties to write fake reviews to promote and defend it online”. Yelp claims to filter twenty-five per cent of all submitted reviews, which its algorithms mark as fake. If you add the number of non-viewable fakes to the number of viewable fakes
(that successfully passed the algorithms), “the simple math suggests around two thirds of all reviews submitted” are fake (Mathews Hunt, “Gaming the System” 7).
163 In 1963, Lacan spoke about a child learning to paint as a sublimated satisfaction – a substitute for the joy of smearing his/her own shit (Séminaire X 22.350-51). See also Lacan’s brief note from 1964 on art-creation, faeces- creation and authenticity (Séminaire XI 9.107).
164 A marketing blurb for Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art described the consumer-subject’s placement above the master-signifier as an elevation of “the banal over the enigmatic, the scatological over the sacred” (qtd. in Bennett,
“Checking the Post” 9).
166 Trash, in short, is the Yelp majority. As a result, functions that filter and reject opinions (a) – and therefore do not celebrate all opinions as equal – are deemed useful. Filter- algorithms occupy the place of knowledge (S2) for Yelp and similar companies, not the consumer
($). What does this have to do with music? Mathews Hunt noted a United States Federal Trade
Commission case from 2010 that involved a marketing communications firm “which wrote misleading and deceptive iTunes reviews for client App developers who in many cases, paid the firm based upon a sales commission” (“Gaming the System” 14; Siegel, “Fake Reviews” n. pag.).
Consumerism is novel with respect to the classical master’s discourse in that it consumes its own excretions at an unsustainable and exceedingly fast rate (Lacan, “Du discours psychanalytique” 48; Lacan, “Radiophonie” 435). In the present case, consumerism consumes consumer-reviews: it literally profits from them. If a restaurant’s rating increases on Yelp by one star, for instance, its profits swell between five and nine per cent. Likewise, a one-star increase for a hotel on Travelocity or TripAdvisor allows room rates to go up eleven per cent. “It is little wonder”, wrote Mathews Hunt, “that businesses actively seek positive reviews and many are tempted to buy them, given the reputational and commercial advantages they entail” (“Gaming the System” 8).
Profitable opinions
Because consumer democracy appears to profit from opinions, defences of the latter are ubiquitous. The example below is taken from Colette Soler’s chapter on capitalism and psychoanalysis.
Take the practice of testimony, for example. Today it is pushed to the point of mania,
independent of all content. You have nothing to say? All the more reason for you to
express yourself. A woman was interviewed on the radio: “I am nothing, I have no
particular information, but that is no reason for me to be silent”. What a great comment.
(Lacan 193)
Lindsay Rogers, an American political scientist, acknowledged a similar phenomenon back in 1949. He mocked the implication that pollsters such as George Gallup were “on the side of the angels” and that critics of vulgar opinion belong to “the camp of the devils”. According
167 to Rogers, Gallup’s systematised philodoxy “does not make the public more articulate”.
“Instead of feeling the pulse of democracy”, he wrote, “Dr. Gallup listens to its baby talk”
(Pollsters 17).
Mathematics is somewhat protected from vulgar opinion. “Two times two is four – whether one likes it or not”, sneered Schoenberg (Style and Idea 51). Thanks to liberal capitalism, music, by contrast, is subjected to any opinion whatsoever. Hence the remark uttered ad nauseam by contemporary musicologists: “But that’s just my opinion”. This is a certain sign of inconsequence (Lacan, “Conférence du mercredi 19 juin 1968” 142). McClary exploited this: she knew that conflicting opinions were of no threat to her position. “I have no quarrel with meanings that differ from mine – indeed, I welcome them”, she wrote (“More” 35).
This, I believe, is nothing to celebrate.
Pornographic progress
As I have explained, pornography, which is trivial, proliferates when mass-consumption is possible. Art-music – a subject that requires serious institutions and adherents – does not.
Post-modern consumerism – satirised as the rise of the idiots, the Last Humans, the comfortable, the private and the masturbatory – is indeed the end of History. Although it is hegemonic, it is strictly not the same as the master’s discourse proper. Music subjected to consumer democracy is and inevitably will be kitsch – a clichéd opiate for the masses. There is a chance, however, that music will return to discourses of tradition, myth and divine authority, for better or worse. In 1970, Giorgio Agamben noted two specific limits for contemporary art: kitsch, and the threshold of myth (Man Without Content 114).165 A passage from kitsch is possible where the exit from myth is impossible. So-called progress beyond myth is possible where the exit from kitsch is impossible. It is precisely this progress that the liberal-capitalist subject suffers/enjoys.
Since 1970, no alternative has emerged for art-music. Kitsch, technē and philanthropic ostentations have become more predominate; mythical Names and canonised composers have
165 Stanford’s edition of The Man Without Content claims that Agamben’s book was first published in Italian in 1994; but this is not true. 1970 is the correct date.
168 receded further into the past.166 In excess of this, if one spews bile in the direction of consumer society, one risks provoking reforms that assist its progress. Lacan often highlighted this. Given that hysterical dissatisfaction – euphemised as consumer choice – is the agent of liberal capitalism, whatever rises up against the latter merely affirms its dominance (“D’une réforme”
9-10; Séminaire XVIII 3.52, 10.165; “Je parle aux murs” 96). Addressed to post-1990s cultural theorists (including musicologists), Liu put it best: progressive critiques fall headlong into “an unexpectedly intimate embrace with the cultural consensus of the neoliberal era” (American
Idyll 226). This is correct.
The next chapter provides further evidence that, in spite of ostentatious protests and critiques, neoliberalism is the proper home for progressive philanthropists.
166 According to a vague, pre-historical sketch by Freud, a period of matriarchy, human-animal equivalence and animal- gods came between two patriarchal periods. It succeeded the primal father’s horde; it preceded “the re-establishment of a patriarchal order” via the eventual return of a “single father-god”, namely the god of Moses (Moses and Monotheism
81-84). Today, it is difficult to predict the next period, beyond the end of hystérie.
169 2.4 All about the muzhik: Philanthropy and philodoxy
Nous vivons dans une aire de civilisation où, comme on dit, la parole est libre, c'est-à-dire que rien de ce que
vous dites ne peut avoir de conséquence.
– Jacques Lacan (“Conférence du mercredi 19 juin 1968” 142)
Il n’y a pas une doxa, si futile, si boiteuse, cahincaha, voire conne soit-elle, qui ne soit rangée quelque part dans
un enseignement universitaire. Il n’y a pas d’exemple d’une opinion, si stupide soit-elle, qui ne soit repérée, voire,
à l’occasion de ce qu’elle est repérée, qui ne soit enseignée.
– Jacques Lacan (Séminaire XIX 5.72)
Il y a une trop grande confusion en effet, de nos jours, entre ce qui fait public et ce qui fait poubelle!
– Jacques Lacan (“Du discours psychanalytique” 34)
According to Oxford University Press’s Music: A Very Short Introduction, “People think through music, decide who they are through it, express themselves through it”. The book, written by Nicholas Cook, began with “an individual, domestic response to music” – specifically, a discussion of “a television commercial, and the different associations and connotations that give it meaning”. In a chapter entitled “Music and the Academy”, Cook characterised “the generation of musicologists who went through graduate school around 1970”, particularly in
America, as scholars that were not “content to keep their professional and their personal lives apart” (ix, 100-01; original italics).
Cook’s introduction to musicology post-1990 is accurate. Musicology’s progressive sub- fields reserve a place for the personal – synonymous with the ego, selfhood and identity – as well as everyday consumerism (Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism 339-40, 354).167 I broadly characterise the progressive sub-fields as philanthropic, philodoxical and populist. In my view, they perpetuate at least four ancient errors.
167 The chapter’s title refers directly to this. Muzhik (also spelt moujik) is a Russian word for ‘human-animal, peasant or uncivilised man’. The word is listed in multiple English dictionaries, therefore it does not have to be italicised.
170 1. Philanthropos tropos – a tragic flaw that caused Prometheus to give blind hope and technē
to human-animals, merely to distract them from death (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound lines
11, 28, 110, 250; Plato, Protagoras 321c-322c; Brann, Music 156).168
2. Protagoras’s ego-centric maxim, “Man is the measure of all things”, known as the homo-
mensura.
3. The hysterical fusion of music and ethics from Book Four of Plato’s Republic (424c).
4. The mythical rapport between music and spheres (or any other symbol of wholeness).
Prometheus and Plato’s Republic are both well known and require no explanation at this point. Protagoras was a sophist – a professional teacher of rhetoric and techniques. Finally, the music of the spheres was a myth propagated by Pythagoras’s school (Aristotle, On the
Heavens 2.9, 290b12-29). The Pythagoreans believed that the heavenly spheres made music via their movements and that the music’s proportions were perfect. The Early Modern poet, John
Donne, mocked those that effectively believe in sexual harmony and the music of the spheres.
He equated their supreme vanity with alchemy.
That loving wretch that swears,
’Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
Which he in her angelic finds,
Would swear as justly, that he hears,
In that day’s rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres. (“Love’s Alchemy” lines 18-22)
The four points I listed may seem strange at first, but I shall demonstrate examples of each via a review of post-1945 musicological texts.169 A secondary aim is to show that musicology’s progressive sub-fields are responsible for messianic ostentations. As noted in
Section One, Lacan attributed such absurdities to humanitairerie, ‘hysterical humanitarianism’
(“Télévision” 534).170
168 To be precise, didaskalos technēs pasēs (‘teacher of all techniques’) is the phrase from line 110 of Prometheus Bound.
169 This chapter was not intended to comment on Lacan’s work at Hôpital Sainte-Anne; but incidentally, on 21
December 1960, Lacan discussed Protagoras’s homo-mensura plus ridiculous sphere motifs (Séminaire VIII 6.102-18).
170 Recall that absurd derives from a musical term: absurdus, ‘out-of-tune’.
171 Background and polemical assumptions
Progressive musicologists often invoke the homo-mensura. Theaetetus’s definition of knowledge is especially relevant to their field. “A man who knows something perceives what he knows”, said Theaetetus, “and the way it appears at present, at any rate, is that knowledge is simply perception”. In response, Socrates pointed out that this statement is a variation of
Protagoras’s homo-mensura. Socrates then provided another variation: “As each thing appears to me, so it is for me, and as it appears to you, so it is for you”. A rhetorical question followed.
“Now doesn’t it sometimes happen that when the same wind is blowing, one of us feels cold and the other not? Or that one of us feels rather cold and the other very cold?” Theaetetus replied,
“That certainly does happen” (Plato, Theaetetus 151d-152b).
For the sake of clarity, Socrates summarised the rapid development: “The appearing of things, then, is the same as perception, in the case of hot and things like that. So it results, apparently, that things are for the individual such as he perceives them” (Plato, Theaetetus
152c). This notion is especially relevant to ethnomusicology and auto-ethnomusicology (Cook,
Music 100).
In his next move, Socrates pre-empted the rhetoric of post-modern anti-ontologists – those that invoke notions of the continuum or infinite, indescribable complexity. “Nothing is one or anything or any kind of thing”, he said. “What is really true, is this: the things of which we naturally say that they ‘are’, are in process of coming to be, as the result of movement and change and blending with one another. We are wrong when we say they ‘are’, since nothing ever is, but everything is coming to be”. Socrates then acknowledged that “all the wise men of the past”, including Protagoras, Heraclitus and Empedocles, held this view, except for Parmenides the poet-logician (Plato, Theaetetus 152d-152e). The point is clear: post-modern perspectivism was not even a novelty during Socrates’ era. It is properly ancient.
Socrates then parodied the flux of post-modern identities. “Do you even feel sure that anything appears to another human being like it appears to you?” he asked Theaetetus.
“Wouldn’t you be much more disposed to hold that it doesn’t appear the same even to yourself because you never remain like yourself?” Theaetetus agreed with this. A twist followed. “Have a look round”, implored Socrates, “and see that none of the uninitiated are listening to us – I
172 mean the people who think that nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands; people who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world in general have any place in reality”. Note the dramatic shift in tone. Socrates insulted the non-philosophers and described them as “very crude people” (Plato, Theaetetus 154a, 155e-156a).
The weakness of perspectivism, according to Socrates, is its inevitable capitulation to mob-oratory. The principal “meaning of the theory” is that one “must not speak of anything as in itself either being or becoming nor let anyone else use such expressions”. The supposed freedom of the homo-mensura is in fact a prohibition. Theaetetus once again agreed (Plato,
Theaetetus 160b-160c). Having dissed relativism, Socrates proceeded to mock animal-humanism, over two millennia before the publication of Peter Singer’s popular Animal Liberation or
Jacques Derrida’s L’animal que donc je suis. He said he was surprised that Protagoras did not state “Pig is the measure of all things”, or “Baboon is the measure”, or any other “creature with the power of perception”. Explicit statements such as these would affirm that Protagoras was
“no better authority than a tadpole – let alone any other man”. Why would anyone promote the homo-mensura, then? One possible answer: it makes crowds happy (Plato, Theaetetus 161c-
161e). The homo-mensura is effective as flattery: it can assist a sophist to win over an audience.
The worst effect of the homo-mensura, to reiterate, is that it renders futile any attempt to “examine and try to refute each other’s appearances and judgements”, for each individual’s opinion is always correct. “This is surely an extremely tiresome piece of nonsense”, said Socrates
(Plato, Theaetetus 161e-162a). I agree; and in response, I claim that the homo-mensura and its
Heraclitean or post-modern variants are of no use to serious, non-philanthropic musicologists.
Skipping ahead to the Early Modern period, Shakespeare’s Caius Marcius was similarly scornful of individuals and their opinions. He claimed that, by rubbing the “poor itch” of opinion, one makes oneself a scab (Coriolanus 1.1.171). He thus played on the derogatory Middle Dutch term schabbe – something contemptible that enjoys.
Evidence from musicological texts
In 1948, Sophie Drinker dedicated her project to the individual’s will to self-expression.
Drinker wondered why so many musicians sing the music of others instead of using music “to communicate their own ideas and feelings”. According to Drinker, “music gives access to the
173 subconscious that can be reached in no other way”. It can penetrate “depths where nature and spirit are in unity” and thereby generate “a greater awareness of surrounding conditions”
(Music and Women xi). Music, in other words, is a process of erotic unification (from the Latin unus, ‘whole or one’). Two form a harmonious One – conscious-subconscious, according to the passage just cited, or nature-spirit – and this One is named a sphere.
The spherical world reflects the musician’s self, which is made One via musical activity.
The subjects of Drinker’s study allegedly “feel their being as women peculiarly linked to the celestial being of the moon”. The link between ontology and the celestial sphere is grounded by the body and justified via an appeal to the master-signifier Nature. “The rhythmic drama of a woman’s bodily life, of which childbirth is the great climax, is timed to the cycle of the moon”,
Drinker asserted (Music and Women 3-4). The sphere, the body, the self and Nature are ancient philanthropic motifs. Drinker also added the cycle (which is technically a sphere in two dimensions) to her repertoire. The evidence is copied below.
Her monthly cycle is four weeks or a lunar month. She measures the time it will take her to
bring her child to birth by the waxing and waning of the moon. Ten times the thin,
gleaming crescent will appear in the sky, ten times it will grow to its full, round, lusty
prime, and ten times it will fade and shrink and so grow old and die. Ten times it will be
born again. And at the tenth moon the child will be born, and grow like the moon to full
splendour, and wane, and die to be reborn again like the moon, if a woman has faith and
makes the proper incantations or singing. (Music and Women 4)
The world, according to Drinker, is directly linked to the individual musician’s ego.
“The primitive musician”, she wrote, “believes that by directing the force of rhythm and sound upon a thing, a person, or a situation, he can make it conform to his will” (Music and Women
4).
Susan McClary’s “Reshaping a Discipline: Musicology and Feminism in the 1990s” – a well-known text – explicitly invoked the strato-sphere. According to McClary, music’s link to the body is a central, post-modern concern: “it is the actualisation of music through real bodies and real voices that brings it down from the stratosphere to participate in everyday practices”
(417).
174 In 1983, Thomas Clifton founded his musicological project on both the homo-mensura and the ego-sphere. “Music is what I am when I experience sounds that I perceive to be music”, he asserted. In Clifton’s view, there is a relationship of complementarity between meaning
(recognised and felt by the ego) and music (named as such via the subject’s assertion). “Sounds become music when they are meaningful to me”, he surmised. Clifton’s revival of the homo- mensura prefigured Christopher Small’s well-known concept of musicking. “There is no music”, asserted Clifton, “without the presence of a ‘music-ing’ self” (Music as Heard 277, 281; Warren,
Music 43-44). Did Clifton identify the self with a sphere, as did Drinker? Yes. The evidence is below.
The self enters the phenomenal world of the music by neutralising all references to its
purely physical qualities. The music enters the self, subtracting self-consciousness. But
there remains consciousness of music which now can be more accurately rendered as
consciousness in music. The self-sphere extends its perimeter to include music. If I become
tender and dignified, it is because music is tender and dignified. (Music as Heard 281-82)
Clifton attempted to define music as social, as “meaning constituted by human beings”
(Music as Heard 5). This is superficially pleasant, but one must ask, “Whose meaning does the rounds within an academic domain? Whose meaning catches on, generates interest and attracts citations?” Crowds may be flattered by philodoxers, but an individual’s utterances are only included in an academic domain and recognised as meaningful if an ethno-musicologist named
Doctor chooses to cite them. As Socrates joked, Protagoras did not consider wisdom that which comes from frogs; wisdom comes from the doctors that slice up the frogs (Plato, Theaetetus
167b). That is not all: doctors acquire money as well. The point is clear: populist academics have much to gain by flattering the masses. Do not forget: doxy may mean ‘opinion’, but it also implies prostitution and deceit.
More bodies and doxies
Musicologists that contributed to the well-known book, Queering the Pitch, chose to incorporate their egos into their work in order to bring “new insights and intuitions to the study of music”. The authors focussed on their own “pleasurable relations with music” as well as their
“accommodations to society through music” (Brett et al., “Preface” ix-xi). Philip Brett, one of
175 the book’s editors, affirmed his fidelity to the body and a sonorous sphere deemed maternal
(“Musicality” 12). Another of the book’s editors, Elizabeth Wood, invented the notion of a
Sapphonic voice, the essential feature of which is not sound but an imaginary body. Wood explained, “If this trained female voice I spoke of, an embodied and acoustic instrument, is no longer audible as material sound, it is visible and resonant as presence in historical contexts and imaginary representations”. Wood also described her concept as a “vessel of self-expression and identity” (“Sapphonics” 28). Suffice to say, Wood’s principal concern was embodiment, broadly synonymous with identity, the ego and the Imaginary.
Suzanne G. Cusick’s chapter began with a description of the shock she experienced when she realised that she had forgotten to include herself and her semblables in a book proposal. She wrote, “to my amazement, to my horror, to my shame, I realised I had not only left out lesbians from the book proposal, […] I had left out myself, or a part of my self, from my own book”. Cusick’s preoccupation was, again, identity. “This essay”, she wrote, “is an assemblage of notes that constitute the less private parts of an interior conversation among the several selves I am, the several selves I have been as I have moved among languages, continents, and the various discursive acts that constitute the identities lesbian, musician, musicologist”.
Cusick aimed “to further a conversation” and stimulate doxy-play. “When I teach”, she wrote,
“I teach my own listening posture, one that seeks to restore a primal reception of music through a listening strategy of extreme attentiveness” – an experience that occurs in an explicitly anti- analytic realm of wholeness. Indeed, Cusick wanted “to allow the music her own voice (and to allow the students theirs), her own wholeness of utterance, before analytical or cultural- historical interrogation” (“On” 68-69, 76; original italics).
Traditional musical analysis is, according to Cusick, a form of violence. “I feel a deep, deep reluctance to engage in what feels like the dismemberment of music’s body into the categories ‘form,’ ‘melody,’ ‘rhythm,’ ‘harmony.’ Because, I think, both the essentialising and the dismembering strategies feel akin to those violences [sic] as they are committed on the bodies and souls of real women” (“On” 77; original italics). I apologise for citing this poorly written passage. The phrase “as they are”, in particular, makes no sense. The point I wish to stress is simple: the human-animal body is terribly precious in the eyes of philanthropic musicologists. Cusick made it clear that, for her, the body fulfils a quasi-religious function – a
176 recuperation of primal wholeness, contra the forceful and meticulous undoing of analysis. To paraphrase Socrates, this is extremely tiresome.
For Cusick, music is itself a body – “a(nother) woman” that possesses “her own wholeness of utterance, before analytical or cultural-historical interrogation”. What is the image proper to Cusick’s whole woman? The sphere. According to Cusick, music-sex is whole – another variation on the theme of Eros or the One. On her relationship with music, Cusick wrote, “we are both on top, both on our backs, both wholly ourselves and wholly mingled with each other”. Cusick repeatedly invoked wholeness and unification. “Power circulates freely across porous boundaries”, she asserted; “the categories player and played, lover and beloved, dissolve” (“On” 76, 78; original italics).
Sphere of technē and the Good
Other spheres are more easily identifiable. Ambisonics is one such example. True to its name, ambisonics is a surround sound system, yet it is not as common as commercial technologies by Dolby or Digital Theatre Systems (DTS). Two mathematicians developed ambisonics in the 1970s – Michael Gerzon from Oxford University and Peter Fellgett from
Reading University. Ambisonic recording equipment typically involves three directional, bipolar microphones plus an omnidirectional, unipolar microphone. The directional microphones capture left-right, front-back and up-down information. The omnidirectional microphone provides a positive reference signal via which the other signals’ differences are gauged. A spherical sonic- image is thus possible.
In 2010, a composer of electroacoustic music, Natasha Barrett, spoke about the sonic sphere and “self-projection”. She argued that “the listener’s connection to the sound involves not only 3D acoustic and psychoacoustic distance cues [but also] sense of agency behind the material and social distance in relation to the arena”, which does not make much sense, even when it is read in context. “These features”, Barrett continued, “together provoke a physical projection of the ‘self’ in the two temporal-spatial streams outlined above: through immediate
(3D scene) and time-dependent (agency and social distance) spatial constructs, as part of the listener’s creative consciousness in the acousmatic ambisonics experience” (“Ambisonics” 6).
177 The sphere and the ego motifs were also present at the 2011 Electroacoustic Music
Studies Network Conference, held in New York City. One of the conferences’ three key topics was “Sonosphere”. The conference’s co-chairs explained the meaning of sonosphere as follows:
“Can we use sound to further our understanding of real-world issues? Can we use creative networks based on music technology to lead us towards world peace?” (Chadabe and Schedel,
“Introduction to EMS11” n. pag.). The definition is unclear; but it seems that sonosphere is another reference to the world, to harmony or to the One. During the conference’s keynote address, Leigh Landy teased the director of the Electronic Music Foundation (E.M.F.), Joel
Chadabe. Landy said he could no longer tell whether the E in E.M.F. stood for electronic or ecological (“Art” 4). There is plenty of truth to Landy’s joke.
In 2002, Cambridge University Press published an article by Hildegard Westerkamp, a
German-born composer based in Canada. The article was entitled “Linking Soundscape
Composition and Acoustic Ecology”.171 It implicitly endorsed pantheism (from the Greek pan,
‘all’). According to Westerkamp, soundscape composition is “an ecologically meaningful language”, sounds possess “inherent meanings”, and there is “sonic/musical essence contained within the recordings”. Westerkamp insisted, “the sound materials themselves will reveal the structure and the final content of the piece”. “Aesthetic values”, she wrote, “will emerge from the recorded soundscape” (53-54; original italics). Soon after, she revealed that the so-called aesthetic values are in fact ethical imperatives that can only be addressed by an exceptional subject. The soundscape composer, Westerkamp argued, possesses the requisite know-how to help solve “one of the most urgent issues we face in this stage of the world’s life: the ecological balance of our planet” (56). In short, Westerkamp wants an ethical composer (S1) that can restore harmony to the sphere of Mother Earth (a). As noted in previous chapters, this is consistent with hysterical discourse.
Let us turn, now, from hysterical discourse to the discourse that Lacan considered the most pretentious – academia (Séminaire XVII 12.203). As established in previous chapters, academics put on a big show (S2) in the service of ethics (S1). Take Philip Samartzis, for example – an associate professor of Sculpture, Sound and Spatial Practice at the Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology. According to his online staff profile, “Philip researches in
171 Acknowledgement: I previously wrote about Westerkamp’s article in my Master of Music thesis.
178 the areas of sound art, acoustic ecology and spatial sound practices, with a specific focus on sound, art and the environment” (RMIT University, “Staff Profile” n. pag.). Landy’s electronic/ecological joke is, once again, apt. Samartzis’s staff profile is copied in full below.
Philip Samartzis uses field recordings of natural and constructed environments as his
primary material to render densities of space and discrete zones of aural experience, which
are arranged and mixed to reflect the acoustic and spatial complexities of everyday sound
fields. He draws on a range of practices ranging from acoustic ecology and bioacoustics to
musique concrète and sound art to arrive at compositions that highlight the pervasive
nature of sound and the myriad ways in which it informs and influences our daily
experiences. To emphasise this, Philip designs his compositions for multi-channel surround
sound systems that afford immersive and tactile listening experiences to demonstrate the
transformational qualities inherent in sounds familiar and strange. (RMIT University,
“Staff Profile” n. pag.)
Samartzis’s ostentations (S2) explicitly serve government aims (S1). Consider, for example, Samartzis’s first Australian Research Council grant, “Designing Sound for Health and
Wellbeing”. The title can be interpreted as follows: “My function as an academic is to put on a show that makes it seem as if I know how to design sound that supports the government’s notion of well-being”. Recall Lacan’s pun on the governing S1: maître/m’être (Séminaire XX
3.33). My master (maître) determines my well-being (m’être); government propaganda determines what is Good.
Below is the summary of “Designing Sound for Health and Wellbeing”, published by the
Australian Research Council.
Up to five million Australian Emergency patients per annum may benefit from research to
be conducted by composers and musicians from the School of Art, RMIT University and
medical practitioners and clinical health psychologists based in the Emergency Department
at St. Vincent’s Hospital – Melbourne. Researchers will investigate whether soundtracks
and musical compositions developed for Emergency patients can lower levels of anxiety.
Outcomes from the study could lead to reductions in patients’ stress and unnecessary
nursing and medical attention – all of which could lead to less anxiety in Emergency
179 patients and potential savings in Hospital budgets. (“Summary of Successful Proposals”
33)
A liberal-capitalist ethic – the hospital’s budget as the Good (S1) – occupies the place of truth; the sound designer’s know-how (S2) is expected to put on a show; the situation’s peculiar ideal consists in an unexcited gaze (a) from each of the hospital patients; and finally, in the place of production, there is a minimal anguish ($) that does not disrupt the budget’s well- being. That is the structure of the situation.
Between 2010 and 2013, Samartzis was involved in a second Australian Research
Council Linkage Project, entitled “Spatial Dialogues: Public Art and Climate Change”. The published summary is copied below.
This project will yield both social and environmental benefits through the creative ways it
combines highly innovative public art projects with electronic social network systems to
initiate trans-national civic dialogues on the problem of adaptation to climate change. It
extends our sense of urban space to include the regional and global ecologies upon which
cities are dependent. The role of water in the city will not only be represented as a vital
resource, but as an element essential to life and, as such, replete with deep cultural values
frequently overlooked in the expedience of everyday urban life. (“Summary of Successful
Linkage Projects” 5)
Landy’s electronic/ecological joke is starting to wear thin. Likewise, the British television series, Nathan Barley, mocked so many things that are now familiar, audiences often find it bitter. “I’ve already filmed a choir of junkies!” said Claire Ashcroft, a career-obsessed philanthropist. “They’ve beaten their addiction and written songs about it” (Brooker and
Morris, “Episode One”). In 2005, the show’s creators treated this as comic fodder. “Nine years later”, The Guardian noted, “Channel 4 made Addicts’ Symphony for real” (Harrison, “Totally
Mexico!” n. pag.).
180 Charitable displays
“Music as a Tool for Social Transformation”, dedicated to “the Life and Work of Steve
Dillon (20 March 1953 – 1 April 2012)” by Barbara Adkins et al. is another example of philanthropic, techno-capitalist rhetoric. Various authors contributed to each of the article’s sections. “Steve Dillon saw community music as an inherently political and ethical enterprise”, wrote Brian Procopis and Naomi Sunderland, “one that aims to affect social change in the interests of promoting social justice”. This statement evidently touches on the Good. Ande
Foster simultaneously paid homage to consumer goods and listed technological commodities used by children in one of Dillon’s projects, entitled jam2jam (Adkins et al., “Music” 190, 192).
According to Andrew Brown, a central “feature of the community music projects that
Steve involved himself with was their reliance on technologies”. Brown invoked familiar, liberal- capitalist themes of ego-empowerment and the quest for identity. In his view, Dillon’s “projects and research were guided by a conviction about the power of music to enable people to express themselves, to build relationships and find their place in the world”. Brown claimed that Dillon was influenced by “Flow theory” – a 1990s theory of happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
“Flow theory”, Brown wrote, “focuses on optimal experience, a state of personal satisfaction and pleasure, which is particularly reliant on achieving a balance between the skills one has and the challenges one faces. This insight was a strong driver of Steve’s pursuit to design musical interactions that provided access to flow experiences, especially for those with limited musical experience” (Adkins et al., “Music” 191-92). This material conforms perfectly to Richard
Hofstadter’s definition of anti-intellectual, progressive education (Anti-intellectualism 339-40).
Brown insisted that an “ethical relational framework was always at the forefront of
Steve’s mind”. This led to “the theory of Meaningful Engagement”. Brown’s summary of the theory is grammatically incorrect: “To be able to experience personal meaning through an individual relationship with music, social meaning through the wordless connection with others through music, and cultural meaning through being recognised and valued by the community for their music-making efforts”. Another example of liberal-capitalist philanthropy is Sweet
Freedom, “a music production and promotion organizsation [sic] comprised of producers, film- makers and community development practitioners”. The organisation stated an aim to “enhance personal, social and cultural identity” (Adkins et al., “Music” 191-92). Theodor Adorno and
181 Hanns Eisler analysed similar rhetoric back in 1947. They spoke of people’s frustrations with
“social conditions” that were ingeniously – and, in their view, deleteriously – “put into the service of commercialism” (Composing 22).
Notice how closely Sweet Freedom’s putatively not-for-profit rhetoric satisfies the reigning ideology of production and development.
Collaborating with people from marginalised circumstances, Sweet Freedom crafts songs,
music videos and documentaries. It then promotes and distributes these to national and
international networks in order to educate, entertain and promote solidarity. Culminating
in a community festival, performances and a CD/Video launch, the process produces team
building, and self-esteem development. (Adkins et al., “Music” 192)
According to Procopis and Sunderland, Sweet Freedom helped elevate perceived uselessness to the dignity of neoliberal productivity. Their explanation is copied below.
A request came through from the Down Syndrome Association of Queensland for a song to
be composed for the youthful members to celebrate a special occasion. The volunteers who
had founded Sweet Freedom clarified quickly that we do not write songs for people – we
write songs with people. We subsequently had meetings with the children and young adults
with Down syndrome who would participate and their parents and siblings. We talked
about the song. They wanted it to be up-tempo and proud. Parents wanted the broader
public to see their children as they saw them – as productive members of society with their
own unique gifts to offer. (Adkins et al., “Music” 193; original italics)
The song that resulted from the meetings, “My Life My Voice”, was ego-centric. What did Dillon have to do with this? Procopis, the Founding Chair of Sweet Freedom, met Dillon and immediately “recognised a kindred spirit”. In response to Sweet Freedom’s request to help record “My Life My Voice”, Dillon offered them a recording engineer and the Queensland
University of Technology’s studio facilities (Adkins et al., “Music” 193).
In-tune with the times, Dillon later “recognised Sweet Freedom’s potential for national and international relevance and set about implementing a master plan to develop Sweet
182 Freedom into a social enterprise and social justice record label” (Adkins et al., “Music” 193-94).
Sweet Freedom is an example from Australia, yet it is consistent with Claire Bishop’s study of
“the instrumentalisation of participatory art” in European cultural policy, which developed “in tandem with the dismantling of the welfare state”. Britain’s New (neoliberal-influenced) Labour, for example, “built upon the Conservative government’s openly instrumental approach to cultural policy”. According to Bishop, New Labour’s principal interest was “soft social engineering”: the party wanted the arts to be “socially inclusive” so as to “conceal social inequality, rendering it cosmetic” (Artificial Hells 5, 13, 15; original italics).
“What can the arts do for society?” asked New Labour when it came to power in 1997.
“The answers”, wrote Bishop, “included increasing employability, minimising crime, fostering aspiration – anything but artistic experimentation and research as values in and of themselves”.
As noted, private organisations such as Sweet Freedom want to help people be viewed as
“productive members of society”. Likewise, under neoliberalism, public institutions such as New
Labour’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport are on “a mission to enable all members of society to be self-administering, fully functioning consumers who do not rely on the welfare state and who can cope with a deregulated, privatised world” (Bishop, Artificial Hells 13-14).
In 2009, Peter Sloterdijk held that one gains “insights into the structural change of human motives for improvement in recent times” if one takes into account “cripple- anthropological premises” and neoteny. He noted the proliferation of “anthropotechnic praxes” such as “religions and systems of ethics” that effectively substitute the body for the spirit (You
35-40, 57-58). In a 1963 chapter entitled “Self-Help and Spiritual Technology”, Hofstadter pointed to a related, American phenomenon – a putatively secular, middle-class culture in which
“mental self-manipulation” performed the function of religion, magic or redemption for
“defeated persons”. It offered them a cocktail of “terms taken from business, technology, and advertising” and engendered the impression that a so-called spiritual life can be achieved via
“systematic progressive means” (Anti-intellectualism 266-67).
According to Adorno and Eisler, “the greater the drabness” of liberal capitalism, “the sweeter the melody” (Composing 22). The present ideology’s grip on charity, sentimentality and mythical redemption is unlikely to relax any time soon (Verhaeghe, What About Me? 142). As
Bishop explained, “socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities,
183 dialogic art, littoral art, interventionist art, participatory art, collaborative art, contextual art and (most recently) social practice” are flourishing symptoms of post-1990s consumerism
(Artificial Hells 1). They will likely continue to flourish.172 Pad Thai by Rirkrit Tiravanija is a notable example from the field of participatory art. It first took place in 1996 at the De Appel arts centre in Amsterdam, where Tiravanija set up “a room of amplified electric guitars and a drum set” and allowed visitors to produce something deemed “their own” (Bishop,
“Antagonism” 57). This vague notion of production is linked directly to consumption. As the title of Pad Thai implies, historical precursors include participatory works that presented the consumption of food and drink as art: see, for example, works from the 1960s and the early
1970s by the Fluxus group, Tom Marioni, Allan Ruppersberg and Daniel Spoerri (Bishop,
“Antagonism” 56 [note 15]).
The American artist, Dan Graham, pre-empted the philanthropy fad back in 1994. “All artists are alike”, he preached. “They dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art” (“Label” n. pag.).173 Bishop cited Graham’s faux- saintliness on the first page of Artificial Hells. Why? It is the reigning cliché of today; and as long as liberal capitalism dictates the terms of discourse, it is certain to remain as such (Badiou,
Saint Paul 10-11; Snow, “Against Charity” n. pag.).
Guaranteed repetition
The musicologists, musicians and artists discussed in this chapter are ego-centric, or, alternatively, they entertain pre-Freudian notions of social harmony and the sphere of the Good.
There will be no radical change, I predict, under neoliberalism; there will only be assistive revisions and reforms. Radical change, as noted in Section One, only comes from a switch to a different discourse. In the next chapter, I affirm my place in a discourse that is properly separate: traditional, philological academia.
172 As I explained in the previous chapter, common, philanthropic trends are intolerable to anyone situated in the classical master’s discourse. Oswald Spengler, for example, insisted that a master is significant “as opposed to a mass of slavish souls, pacifists and world-improvers” (Hour of Decision 59).
173 According to Francis Fukuyama, America’s “utilitarian traditions make it difficult for even the fine arts to become purely formal. Artists like to convince themselves that they are being socially responsible” (End 320).
184 2.5 In awe of figures that hate you
Daß man, auf die Gefahr hin, daß es irgend jemand ‘Pein macht’, dasjenige tut, was notwendig ist; daß man
unbekümmert um Zustimmung oder Ablehnung dasjenige tut, was die Sache erfordert.
– Arnold Schoenberg (“Probleme der Harmonie” 219)174
Un saint, pour me faire comprendre, ne fait pas la charité. Plutôt se met-il à faire le déchet: il décharite.
– Jacques Lacan (“Télévision” 519)
Ancient mousikē was a gift of the Muses; it did not revolve around the vulgar anthropos. This is well established (Plato, Timaeus 47c-47e, 88c). Modern music, according to my non-progressive argument, remains père-verse/sublime. Although musick is no longer the predominant Anglophone spelling, music is still a sickness of sorts. It is a symptom of social and/or sexual disharmony – a figure of comic despair, sometimes exalted, sometimes discarded.175
The previous chapter examined clichéd examples of neoliberal charity and humanitairerie. This chapter, by contrast, is dedicated to perversions that try to avoid various discourses’ stereotypes. Recall that a perversion is not a discourse; it is, as Freud taught, a version of mastery that does not necessarily develop an obstacle to “another person’s pain” – a cruel or twisted mastery (Three 192-93). As a non-discourse, perversion inevitably involves hatred of established social groups. Why, then, do social groups sometimes admire perversions and treat them as sublimations or artistic figures? Why are certain perversions written about by academics and admired as brilliant or beautiful? There is perhaps no end to the mystery.
R. Murray Schafer helps set the scene. In 1960, Schafer sent a letter from London to the
Brunnenburg (a thirteenth-century Italian castle), addressed to the poet-musician Ezra Pound.
Schafer was “particularly curious” about an opera that Pound composed for a fifteenth-century poem by François Villon. Pound allegedly declined Schafer’s request for a meeting, because
174 English version: “One does what is necessary, though it cause somebody else pain; one does what the situation demands, unconcerned about the approval or disapproval of others” (Schoenberg, “Problems of Harmony” 167).
175 Prior to the popularisation of An American Dictionary of the English Language, first published by Noah Webster in
1828, musick was the predominate spelling of music in Anglophone countries.
185 Schafer’s proposal struck him as “unvenomed and innocuous”. Schafer travelled to the
Brunnenburg anyway (“Postscript 1942-1972” 465). Why? Hatred is not necessarily a deterrent; it is sometimes fascinating. Common pleasantries, inversely, are often dull. To dispel misguided assumptions, please note: the chapter does not involve texts on the Sublime by Edmund Burke,
Immanuel Kant or Slavoj Žižek. Recall, instead, Rudolf Otto’s 1917 definition of the père- verse/sublime as something separate from “the meaning of goodness”. The père-verse/sublime cannot be reduced to “creature-feeling” or “the self”. It is closer to ancient, phallic notions such as “aweful majesty”, bewilderment, the daemon, the esoteric, the fascinans, the figure/ideogram, humiliation, mysterium tremendum and the soul (Idea 7, 10-21, 35).
Fallen figures
The place of music par excellence is, perversely, Guillaume IX’s Niort. (Ni-ort literally means ‘no place’.) At Niort, Guillaume established “a mock monastery of prostitutes, complete with abbess and liturgical song”. Guillaume, one of the first troubadours, is famous for two things: foudatz (‘making what one wants out of words’, in defiance of convention) and his perverse rapport with Church and monarchical authorities (Kendrick, Game of Love 15-16). In
1966, Lacan cited Guillaume’s well-known poetic invention – the chosen woman or the beautiful neighbour – following a discussion of Dante Alighieri’s Beatrice. Lacan aligned both Guillaume and Dante with gai saber – a peculiar savoir-faire that withdraws sexual suffering/enjoyment from its field and installs a sublime/père-verse figure of truth. The chosen figure – whose hatred of the subject, make no mistake, is absolute – indicates that the place of sexual harmony is ni- ort. As the impossible-to-touch, the beautiful/brilliant figure sets a limit to inevitable failures, misery and conflict (L’objet de la psychanalyse 7.96).
Why is the music of Niort exemplary? By mocking the ruins of sex and politics,
Guillaume proved he could make something from whatever material he had at his disposal. In turn, he made a name for himself. According to Stephen G. Nichols, early troubadours like
Guillaume “created the first ‘modern’ European examples of the individual artist, a genius set apart from the common folk, whence the connotations of value and ‘high seriousness’ associated with the high style”, namely the grand chant courtois (“Early Troubadours” 66). In 1973, Lacan implied a contrast between gai saber (or the grand chant courtois) and the moralist’s stereotypical sadness. He described the former as a peculiar virtue that absolves no one from
186 sin. Gai saber is a method of deciphering that produces multiple senses – Guillaume’s foudatz, for example – and inevitably returns to obscenity or the Fall (“Télévision” 526). The Fall, according to John Milton, is explicitly musical. Paradise Lost begins with the following: “Of
Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree, […] / Sing Heav’nly Muse”
(Book 1, lines 1-6). According to Friedrich Nietzsche, gai saber is composed of three terms: singer, knight and spirit. The perfect example of gai saber, according to him, is an exuberant song that provokes one to “dance over morality” (Ecce Homo 123). More broadly, the Fall refers to the sym-ptóma or the poet’s Einfall.176 It is not a sign of progress or universal redemption.
Dante famously situated the troubadour Bertran de Born among Hell’s Seminatori di
Discordi (‘Sowers of Discord’). Bertran allegedly severed ties between the young Prince Henry and his father, King Henry II (Divina Commedia, Inferno Canto 28, lines 133-42). How did he accomplish this? The answer, again, is père-verse/sublime: Bertran severed bonds via lyric poetry. Pound thus depicted Bertran as a lover of music and disharmony.
The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth’s won and the swords clash
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music. (“Sestina: Altaforte”, lines 25-30)
Pound returned to Bertran in a later poem, “Near Perigord”, published in 1915. Pound wondered whether “the knot, the first knot” – Bertran’s chosen woman, Maent – was human or whether she was in fact a figure of “war and broken heaumes and politics” (lines 80, 93).177 With respect to hatred, just how perfect was Bertran’s chosen figure? This is a mystery.
In 1973, Lacan heaped praise on troubadours and the père-version/sublimation of amour courtois. He described the latter as highly refined – the most amazing (formidable) thing
176 Recall that the Greek ptóma means ‘fall’ or else ‘fallen body’.
177 Heaumes are helmets.
187 that has ever been attempted (Séminaire XX 6.65).178 Amazement is crucial to père- version/sublimation. Lacan described proper, Father-oriented saints, for example, as épate
(“Télévision” 520). Épate, like formidable, is often translated as ‘amazing’ or ‘extraordinary’. In
1972, Lacan defined the Father’s function as l’é-pater – a play on épater and pater familias.
What does this mean? If an ordinary father fails to fulfil his function and never impresses his family, he risks being ignored or dropped. Something else will inevitably épateront and thus take the father’s place (Séminaire XIX 14.208) – social media, online videos and global gaming networks are common, contemporary examples.179
Amour courtois was supremely artificial. This is not an insult. As Lacan pointed out, although amour courtois somewhat made up for the absence of sexual harmony, it could only do so by pretending that its subjects were responsible for creating an obstacle (Séminaire XX
6.65). The obstacle is synonymous with the aforementioned chosen, impossible-to-touch figure, la belle dame sans merci. La belle dame may not have a place in historical reality, but the poet of amour courtois nevertheless believed in her, for she was a figure of his making.180 The père- verse/sublime poet makes love (Séminaire XX 6.68, 10.118): he literally makes something up.
From the refuse and ruins of sex, the poet writes love letters; hence James Joyce’s well-known exclamation from Finnegans Wake (1.4.93), “The letter! The litter!”
Leonardo da Vinci’s ability to manipulate disgusting mould-stains and make use of them in his religious murals is another example of père-version/sublimation (Lacan, Séminaire
XIX 5.74). So is Pound’s motto of renewal, lifted from a gold-engraved washbasin that belonged to Tch’eng T’eng, the founder of the ancient Shang dynasty (Terrell, Companion 477, 621).
“Make it new, again and again, from filth to gold”: analytic discourse, Joycean père-version and
Saint Thomas Aquinas’s well-known palea each offer no progress beyond this. Although Joyce tried to situate the human being somewhere different with respect to anything asserted previously, he nonetheless fell back on an imperfect sinthome/saint homme – his alter-ego,
178 Amour courtois is an imprecise phrase that is not taken seriously by literature scholars (Robertson Jr., Preface to
Chaucer 391). It is of use, however, to Lacan scholars. For them, amour courtois refers to la femme as something impossible or off-limits.
179 Inevitably, there will be others that propagate apatē (‘deception’) as well.
180 Man is a human-believing more so than a human being: L’homme croit créer – il croit-croit-croit, il crée-crée-crée. Il crée-crée-crée la femme (Lacan, Séminaire XX 10.118).
188 Stephen Dedalus (Lacan, “Conférence à Genève” 23).181 Joyce’s gifted wordplay, like the troubadours’, returned him to the Fall – a highly refined père-version but nothing more. A successful analysis is not far from this: a doomed love procedure turns to a poetic-sophistic procedure in which one knows how to deal with one’s partner-symptom, genius or Muse, in a distant, non-redemptive sense.182 Lacan did not progress beyond his structure à la noix (his
‘nutty’ Trinity figure); he repetitively refashioned it. Truth, according to him, is not an ostentatious claim to knowledge; truth is invention (Les non-dupes errent 8.54-55; “Note italienne” 310-11; L’insu que sait 1.5). Lacan’s grasp of truth is, I repeat, poetic-sophistic.
Lacan repeatedly hinted at similarities between analytic discourse and amour courtois, gai saber or père-version/sublimation; but they are not identical. In 1974, Lacan acknowledged that amour courtois and analytic theory each regard the Imaginary as the place of true love.
Transference-love consists in an imaginary link between knowledge (the Symbolic) and sexual disharmony (the Real of the symptom); hence analysts appear to know how to respond to analysands’ symptoms. More specifically, transference-love is contingent upon analytic interpretation – a function of the Imaginary that generates novel semantic content. Likewise, amour courtois generates an image that implies a link between carnal knowledge and the certain prospect of death – la belle dame as the wife of a jealous murderer, for example. (If you touch her, you die.) For both analysis and amour courtois, then, the Imaginary performs a crucial function. It is not denigrated or cast aside (Les non-dupes errent 4.31-32, 10.69).
How, then, is amour courtois distinct from analysis? According to Lacan, the former retains an ancient, quasi-Greek figure of the beautiful/brilliant (la belle dame), whereas analysis does not. Lacan believed that if conventional figures of the beautiful/brilliant were cleared from one’s path, this would permit a re-flowering of love (Les non-dupes errent 4.31-32; L’insu que sait 10.71) – a chance for re-invention. Analysis allegedly has the potential to formalise truths that are purified of colloquial meaning or divorced from the sensational. There is no truth proper, Lacan asserted, except that which has no colloquial meaning. Mathematical formalism
181 Joyce’s Portrait spelled out his attempt at originality: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (225). Lacan did not believe that
Joyce succeeded in this aim.
182 Note the potential distinction between Badiouian philosophy and Lacanian anti-philosophy. The former moves from a love-procedure to politics; the latter moves from a love-procedure to an artistic procedure.
189 (post David Hilbert) is one example of a practice that generates truth via the manipulation of axioms, the meaning of which is contingent upon sophisticated interpretations (Les non-dupes errent 3.22). Modern, formalised art is another example: Lacan held it to be truer than any bla- bla (L’insu que sait 5.38). As discussed in Section One, Lacan’s père-version, for better or worse, fused these two things, mathematical formalism and poetic-sophistic formalisation. To reiterate, thanks to the ancient figure of the beautiful/brilliant, the distinction between analysis and amour courtois is clear; but it is much more difficult to make a distinction between a successful analysis or passe and modern, poetic-sophistic formalisation. According to my reading, analytic discourse ends with a novel père-version/sublimation.
On 8 January 1974, Lacan explicitly affirmed his belief in poetic-sophistic writing. He asserted that, since his Trinity was written down (and was thus distinct from pure opinion or anecdote), it could be upheld as correct. For even if a historical record’s content or meaning is designated false, the record itself remains real. It is a real record of a speech-event (during which lies may or may not have been told). Following this peculiar logic, Lacan repeatedly wrote his Trinity-figure on the blackboard for his audience to witness (Les non-dupes errent
5.35). In doing so, he publicly registered faith in his symptom; he pled guilty without asking for others’ pardon (L’insu que sait 9.65). Like the artist, the poet or the composer, Lacan persevered with the figure. On 16 March 1976, Lacan revisited the modern, poetic-sophistic theme. He said he wanted to break his audience in to a new Imaginary or le semblant le plus vraisemblable – a mock-Timaeus tale of cosmos-creation that did not involve the beautiful/brilliant, the spherical or the whole (Séminaire XXIII 8.121-22).183 Playing on the notion of Destiny as a profound or correct orientation, Lacan acknowledged that topologists could study orientation purely via mathematical writing (without necessarily involving images or meaning), whereas analysis could not. The latter, he explained, is forced to use a version of the Father (and thus a religious Imaginary) and to question how far this approach could go
(R.S.I. 5.44; Séminaire XXIII 10.150).184
183 See Lacan’s brief discussion on the cosmos and cosmetics – beauty as whole (“Ouverture de la section clinique” 7).
184 As Lorenzo Chiesa put it, “a certain relapse into the domain of totalising images appears to be inevitable”, for
“imaginary knowledge alone guarantees that human (sexual) relationships are livable” (Not-Two 41).
190 If analysis is stuck with sense and the Imaginary, as Lacan insisted, then it is not a pure, modern science. This should be clear by now. The ideal of analysis, according to my reading, is not science itself; it is, rather, the orientation that Jewish scientists such as Albert
Einstein received via the Talmud’s doctrine of exacting, letter-by-letter interpretation. The former, like analysis, remains père-versely oriented and sometimes voids or relieves the burden of unnecessary meaning. From Lacan’s perspective, it is no coincidence that Einstein made a name for himself via letters and numbers (Séminaire XVII 9.158; Les non-dupes errent 12.85).
The thirteenth-century Jewish mystic, Abraham Abulafia, promoted a similar orientation.
Abulafia was principally concerned with ḥokhmat ha-tzeruf, the ‘logic of letter-combination’ that composed divine Names. The ecstatic recitation of divine names supposedly affected one’s soul, just like musical harmonies (Harrán, Three 22). Abulafia’s ḥokhmat ha-tzeruf is not far from the games that Lacan played with the letters R, S and I, which he believed composed the Names of the Father or one’s soul-symptom. Like Lacan’s seminars, ḥokhmat ha-tzeruf consisted of three senses: “written, oral, and mental”, or real, symbolic, and imaginary (Wolfson, “Jewish
Mysticism” 481). Lacan’s R.S.I. (pronounced in French like hérésie, ‘heresy’) and his Trinity- figure proved that, like Guillaume, he was choosy and a heretic.185 Heresy, in his opinion, is not free or progressive; it remains rooted in religion (Séminaire XXIII 1.15).
Lacan characterised the bastard – a man of letters that is neither purely mathematical nor purely theological.186 Without doubt, Lacan admired the Talmud’s production of both
Einsteinian literati and Freudian litière-raté. He perhaps wanted analysands to invent new orientations along these lines, following their experience of analysis’s décantage du sens (Les non-dupes errent 5.34). To the best of my knowledge, Lacan never proposed that one fall back on conventional opinions regarding the beautiful/brilliant. He was not a stereotypical Oxbridge aesthete. If the beautiful/brilliant sufficed, there would be no reason for analysis to exist.
Subjects could remain happily within academia.
185 Heretic derives from the Greek hairesis, ‘choice’ (Miller, “Notice” 208).
186 In 2008, Jean-Claude Milner commended modern, Galilean science for its “literalisation” – the construction of a universe (or a domain) via alphabetical letters. Via literalisation, Early Modern science achieved a precision equivalent to that of Renaissance philology (“Interview” 4-10). Milner is one of Lacan’s followers within academia.
191 Art and analysis are limited
Writing on behalf of neurotics, Freud referred to the enjoyment of artistic beauty/brilliance as a “mild narcosis” and a “transient withdrawal” from suffering.
Unfortunately, however, the beautiful/brilliant is “not strong enough to make us forget real misery” (Civilization 81). Following Freud, Lacan held that beauté boite (Séminaire XVIII
10.164): beauty is a bit lame. It only goes so far.187
Even for the stereotypical suffering/enjoying artist, père-version is not entirely satisfying; it is merely a compromise or a supplement. One cannot possess la belle dame or the goddess Apate, for instance; but one can have poetry on the subject of not having her or of being had/deceived by her. According to Freudian doctrine, composers cannot have sexual harmony, but they can persevere and muck around with formalised, musical harmonies.
“Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the ethereal”, joked Joyce (Ulysses
11.359). With respect to filth and disharmony, père-version/sublimation is not a Final Solution; for the washbasin is the site of its gold, the chamber pot its music.188 Père-version, I repeat, rehashes the Fall; it does not solve it or promise redemption.
At its best, analytic discourse does not even attempt to interpret literary, musical or visual figures. “Psychoanalysis, unfortunately, has scarcely anything to say about beauty”, admitted Freud (Civilization 83). In 1974, Lacan urged his followers to rule out the so-called psychoanalysis of art (Les non-dupes errent 11.77). The following year, when speaking at Yale
University, Lacan criticised the many analysts that tried to explain art by making suppositions about a particular artist’s unconscious. To treat art as a symptom – a partner-genius, a Father figure, a fetish or an escabeau, for example – struck him as a more serious approach
(“Conférences et entretiens” 36). This does not necessarily mean, however, that an analyst knows how to respond to père-verse figures. Perhaps the analyst does not and it is this failure that should be taken seriously.
187 “Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31.30).
188 This is a reference to Joyce, not Marcel Duchamp: “Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling” (Ulysses 11.364).
192 According to Sebastian Leikert, it is “fundamentally wrongheaded” to approach music
“from the vantage point of meaning – that is, the register of neurosis”. The “most penetrating aim” of music is its production of non-sexual suffering/enjoyment – an aim that “belongs to the register of perversion”. Leikert presented the castrato as “comically concrete evidence” of music as père-verse (“Object” 9, 13). The castrato is a well-known sacrificial product of the Sistine
Chapel, dating from the late sixteenth century. The castrato was expected to put on a perfect show for the Catholic Trinity and to thereby deny that anything was absent, even though absent testicles are a condition of the castrato’s vocal range. Note the perverse irony: perfectus is the Latin word for ‘completed’.
Music, according to my argument, is a perverse postulate – a term that alludes to both ecclesiastical law and mathematics. It assumes that the Muses’ suffering/enjoyment exists (or else that it will come to exist in future); it tries to figure this out; and it proceeds from there. It is an invention that is both of and for the Other. Recall Lacan’s crucial lesson on perversion from 1969: the pervert is devoted to the unbearable hole that is the Other’s absence – the absence of harmony. According to Lacan, the pervert desperately wants the Other to exist: he is a defender or a keeper of the faith (Séminaire XVI 16.253).
In 1981, the composer Ben Johnston declared that religion and art have the same aim, namely the “greater truth” of père-version/sublimation (“Art and Religion” 151-52). Johnston is not alone. As Joscelyn Godwin pointed out, many of the major, twentieth-century composers were “religious, even mystical (Webern, Messiaen, Stockhausen, Maxwell Davies)”. Some were
“involved in esotericism (Debussy, Satie, Skryabin, Schoenberg)”; others, such as Milton
Babbitt, occasionally set mystical poetry to music (Harmonies 117-19; Schoenberg, Style and
Idea 203). In 2006, Alain Badiou acknowledged that modern art-music sometimes (but not always) retains a rapport with religious anti-philosophy. Olivier Messiaen was Badiou’s favourite musician from the second half of the twentieth century; but as a theological subject,
Messiaen cannot be incorporated properly into Badiou’s philosophy (Logics of Worlds 528).
Messiaen’s père-version consisted of “the religious sentiments exalted by the theology and the truths of our Catholic faith” (Technique 13). He attended a church named Sainte-Trinité, and he was fascinated by Saint Thomas Aquinas (Bruhn, Messiaen’s Interpretations 13-36). Like
Saint Thomas, Messiaen had “a great affinity with the eccentric or surreal” as well as “an
193 enormous longing for rationality” (Maas, Reinvention 21). Like the troubadours, Messiaen was captivated by le charme des impossibilités. Below is Messiaen’s description.
This charm, at once voluptuous and contemplative, resides particularly in certain
mathematical impossibilities of the modal and rhythmic domains. Modes which cannot be
transposed beyond a certain number of transpositions, because one always falls again into
the same notes; rhythms which cannot be used in retrograde, because in such a case one
finds the same order of values again – these are two striking impossibilities. (Technique
13)
What about Charles Sanders Peirce’s trinity? Is it of any use to musicology? In 1991,
Raymond Monelle attempted to resurrect Peirce’s sign-trinity (comprised of the index, the symbol and the icon), even though he believed Peirce’s thoughts on aesthetics were “of limited usefulness” (“Music” 100). To date, not much has come of this. “As significant and pertinent as
Peirce’s categories and theory of signs are, music semioticians” – Monelle included – “have often misinterpreted his concepts”, wrote José Luiz Martinez. “Such misinterpretations must be rectified, and the understanding of his semiotic theory, by music scholars, must be raised to the high level found in Peirce’s own writings and in the interpretations of his ideas by expert Peirce scholars” (Semiosis 32). Even among serious Peirce scholars, however, Peircean trinities are sometimes considered peculiar and difficult to justify. Umberto Eco, for example, spoke of “the sin of compulsive triadism” with reference to Peirce (Kant 395) – an apt choice of words.189
According to Danuta Mirka, Monelle’s Peircean project is unjustifiable, for Monelle confused “the distinction between topics and pictorialism” (“Introduction” 3). What if this were precisely Monelle’s intent? He often hinted at figures or aesthetic fetishes. He credited literature
– literary art, not transcriptions of banal speech – with “the idea of the topic”; he acknowledged that topics were used by rhetoricians “when a high style was sought”; and he noted that “topics in Latin literature were signs not of natural objects or events, but of style” (Musical Topic 11-
12). Regardless of Monelle’s flaws, he was nonetheless correct to treat music as a figure that is somewhat precarious and unjustifiable with respect to discourse.
189 Lacan acknowledged his debt to Peirce on multiple occasions (Séminaire XIX 14.199, 15.220, 16.231-35; Séminaire
XXIII 1.13, 8.120-21; L’insu que sait 4.29).
194 In 1971, Jean-François Lyotard distinguished between the figure and discourse. Lyotard aligned the figure with the rhetorician and the painter. Art, according to Lyotard’s definition,
“indicates a function of the figure” as well as “a refutation of the position of discourse”.190 The figure consists of a père-verse truth that is unexpected and “discordant in discourse”. Like
Lacan and Peirce, Lyotard used three terms to compose his figure: figure-image, figure-form and figure-matrix. The latter is explicitly père-verse. Lyotard conceived the figure-matrix as
“violation of the discursive order – violence against the transformations authorised by this order”. It is “the other of discourse and intelligibility”, hostile to sense (Discourse, Figure 5-7,
12, 268) – the extreme of Joyce’s symptom, for example.
As noted in Section One, Lacan considered Joyce’s symptom désabonné à l’inconscient
– unsubscribed from generic discourse and thus not concerned with catching others’ sympathies.
Joyce instead wanted his surname – le nom-du-père – to survive forever (“Joyce le symptôme I”
24-26). This notion is undoubtedly religious. It is not surprising, then, that the Lacan of 1973 denied a distinction between art and religion, as did Ben Johnston, Messiaen and Schoenberg
(Les non-dupes errent 3.19; cf. Séminaire VII 10.155). The distinction that interested Lacan from that point onwards was, I repeat, the one between stereotypical père-versions and novel père-versions. In 1975, for instance, he said he was only interested in clinical practice for the off- chance that it could invent a less stereotypical perversion; but he was not so naïve as to believe that success was guaranteed (R.S.I. 9.77). Success is rare; failure is ordinary.
Hatred of the ordinary
For his first attempted novel, Stephen Hero, Joyce created a protagonist – “a saint of literature” – named after “paganism’s greatest inventor”. Joyce wanted his alter-ego, Stephen
Dedalus, to invent “wings to soar beyond his compatriots” and to create a mysterious labyrinth
“based on great cunning” (Ellman, James Joyce 148). Joyce despised the thought of being regarded as ordinary. In a letter to his aunt Josephine, dated 4 December 1905, Joyce complained about his future wife, Nora Barnacle: “Nora does not seem to make much difference between me and the rest of the men she has known and I can hardly believe that she is justified in this”. Joyce insisted that he was an artist, not a “domestic animal” (qtd. in Ellman, James
190 Badiou, likewise, defined artistic procedures as “literally asocial” (Ethics 54).
195 Joyce 214). According to Colette Soler, Joyce wanted Nora to view him the way that he viewed himself. He wished to annul the usual disparity between what the partner wanted of him and what he wanted of himself (Lacan 139-42). In short, he wanted her to see a singular Creator, not a common human-animal.
Lacan’s snobbery was not far from Joyce’s. He did not admire or endorse any old perversion. He described masochists, for example, as pas malin (‘not smart’). He called Leopold von Sacher-Masoch un con (‘an asshole or cunt’) and insisted that better, more intelligent savoir-faires have been invented in response to sexual disharmony (Les non-dupes errent 8.57).
The same could be said for Jean-Jacques Lebel – a stereotypical shock artist. Lebel was influenced by figures such as Freud, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille and the Marquis de
Sade. “As this selection might indicate”, wrote Claire Bishop, hinting at Lebel’s predictability,
“Lebel understood the artist’s role in society to be one of moral transgressor, giving image and voice to what is conventionally repressed”. Despite his pretences to radicality, Lebel conformed to the Redeemer-Son stereotype. He identified himself as “a group mind” and “a conduit for collective hopes and desires” (Artificial Hells 97).
Bishop described one of the ersatz, Sadean happenings that Lebel facilitated on 4 April
1966 at the Théâtre de la Chimère.
Around 400 people entered the building via the stage door […], a wry reference to Sade’s
delight in the ‘back passage’; they were welcomed by nude women acting as customs
officers who took their fingerprints before allowing them to pass through a narrow corridor
hung with bloody fresh meat (‘a return to the maternal belly’). Potentially smeared in
blood, viewers entered the theatre directly onto the stage, where the action was taking
place, but could also descend into the auditorium, from which all seats had been removed.
Twelve sequences were staged, which served as the point of departure for improvisations.
These included a naked soprano, Shirley Goldfarb, descending from the rafters, singing
excerpts from Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom and urinating on the audience in the orchestra
pit. Lebel himself wore a blue wig and a priest’s chasuble smeared in shit to officiate over
Goldfarb (still naked, now on a ceremonial table), covering her in whipped cream and
inviting the audience to lick it from her body; when finished, she stood up and wore a mask
of de Gaulle. In another section, Lebel and the artist Bob Benamou ‘spanked’ a rendition of
196 ‘La Marseillaise’ on two half-naked girls, before reversing these roles to be spanked in turn.
The most notorious part of the evening featured a transsexual prostitute called Cynthia,
dressed in a nun’s habit, who stripped, washed her genitals, and then auto-sodomised
herself with carrots and leeks. (Artificial Hells 99)
I have met plenty of shock artists that march along similar, predictably perverse defiles.
Since they are common and pas malin, there are plenty of historical precedents. Consider, for example, the “gross roguery” of Eulenspiegel during an infamous competition with a fourteenth- century Polish musician, the court fool of Casimir III the Great. In order to win “a new outfit and twenty guilders”, Eulenspiegel defecated in the middle of the king’s court, divided the pile in two, ate one half with a spoon, challenged the king’s fool to eat the other half, then asked the fool to produce a second pile for dessert. The fool declined and insisted that Eulenspiegel took after the devil with his tricks (B. Otto, Fools are Everywhere 38-40). Lebel, in short, is not a radical or a sign of progress; he is a stereotype.
In contrast to his disdain for stereotypical perversions, Lacan expressed admiration for
Japan’s snobelisme – a humorous, ‘snobbish nobility’ that renders analytic discourse unnecessary. In doing so, Lacan followed Alexandre Kojève, who considered Japanese snobelisme
– “totally formalised values” – an alternative to historical/hysterical meaning as well as
American, animal satisfaction (Introduction 158-62 [note 6]; Fukuyama, End 319-20). Lacan characterised a well-formed Japanese adult as a mot d’esprit, ‘witticism or practical joke’. For this reason, he invited Japanese readers to close his Écrits straight away and to not bother reading it. In my view, this was not an act of false humility. Lacan proceeded to promote his own highly formalised style, which he did not believe could be translated into Japanese (“Avis au lecteur japonais” 497-99). The point is clear: Lacan did not believe that analysis had anything to offer in excess of Japan’s post-hysterical snobelisme.
In contrast to his time at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Lacan was less of an evangelist for clinical analysis during the Panthéon period. He complained bitterly about analysis’s infecundity, its inability to create a new père-version (Séminaire XVI 1.19; Séminaire XXIII
10.153; cf. Séminaire VII 1.24). This is perhaps why Joycean escabeaus are highly prized by
Lacan’s followers such as Jacques-Alain Miller (“L’inconscient” n. pag.). Joycean escabeaus are
197 considered less repulsive than stereotypical masochists and less banal than hysterical analysands.
Refuse and refusals
Recall that Lacan defined neurosis – the most common subject of clinical analysis – as a failed perversion (R.S.I. 6.49). According to Dany Nobus, “perverts hardly ever come to see an analyst, either because they are perfectly happy with their objects and methods of sexual gratification, or because they are afraid that therapy will force them to relinquish parts of their enjoyment” (Jacques 45). Joyce refused analysis for a simple reason: he did not want it
(Thurston, James Joyce 126, 130, 135). In response, Lacan admitted that analysis would not have offered Joyce much aside from a flat ending (“Joyce le symptôme II” 36).
How did Freud and Lacan respond to père-verse/sublime figures? Freud suggested that, with respect to “the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms”
(“Dostoevsky and Parricide” 177).191 On a related note, Lacan said that, where the père-verse saint appears to offer an absolute, the analyst declares forfeit. In comparison with the saint, the analyst is a disenchanted figure (“L’étourdit” 494). This marks another subtle distinction between analysis and religion/art. In his final public talk, Lacan implied that the artist’s muse did not visit him (“Le séminaire de Caracas” 87). The analyst, one could say, makes no attempt to rival the père-verse charm of figures such as Messiaen or Joyce (Soler, Lacan 50; Fierens,
Lecture de L’étourdit 201, 266). I extract two points from this mess. One, successful père- versions/sublimations (including gai saber, Joycean escabeaus and Japanese snobelisme) constitute a limit to analytic interpretation – a limit that the best analysts respect. Two, père- verse figures offer their bearer a peculiar satisfaction that prevents him/her from entering an analyst’s clinic.
Is père-version/sublimation a gift generously bestowed upon neurotic discourses, as philanthropists and public bodies such as the Australia Council for the Arts wish to believe?
No. According to Lacan, the saint’s caritas is specious: his/her business is to make fun of
191 Justin Clemens cited this remark as an example of Freud’s attentiveness to the limits of analytic discourse
(Psychoanalysis 9).
198 distributive justice (“Télévision” 519-20). Joyce’s saintliness – his canonical aspiration – was an effect of his fiction (“Joyce le symptôme II” 31-32). It was strictly non-philanthropic. Saint
Joyce’s principal responsibility was to ensure his own memorialisation; hence he created an ego that was singularly père-verse (Séminaire XXIII 10.147-55). Saints, in short, do not really care for others; instead, they want a Name to glorify their suffering/enjoyment (Séminaire VIII
24.421; “Joyce le symptôme II” 32). The saint only appears to give up something – Joyce’s financial sacrifices, for example – so as to possess everything. In terms of significance, the saint is filthy rich (Séminaire VIII 24.421).
Consider the absurd parodies of justice staged by Angela of Foligno – a mystic who died in 1309 and was declared a saint in 2013 by Pope Francis. Angela one day decided to look for
Christ “among the poor, the suffering, and the afflicted”. At a local hospital, Angela washed a leper’s hands, which were “withered and decomposing”. She then drank the water used to wash the leper’s hands and suffered/enjoyed the taste. “The sweetness we felt was so great”, she insisted, “that it lasted all the way home – it felt as if we had received Holy Communion”. Prior to this, when Angela first began “the way of the cross”, she asked God to kill her mother, her husband and her sons. God allegedly granted her request. “I felt a deep consolation following their deaths”, she wrote. “I knew that God had accomplished these things for me, and that my heart would always be in God’s heart and God’s heart would always be in mine” (Memorial 27,
53). On a related note, Soler argued that Joyce’s muse was not contained within the family unit. It was not his wife, Nora; it was something Other. “It was enough that Nora accompanied him, that’s all”, wrote Soler (Lacan 137, 140).
The saint’s love of God – the Name to which they dedicate their suffering/enjoyment – is monstrous (Lacan, Séminaire VIII 24.421); yet Lacan found saints profoundly amusing
(Séminaire XX 9.103; “Télévision” 520). He believed that saints furnish established domains with something alien and new, unlike an ordinary consumer that buys a hot-rod, for example, and thereby constitutes a sign of boredom or lack of wit (Séminaire VII 14.221; “Radiophonie”
414). One must not, however, be swept away by enthusiasm. As noted, saints and Joycean artists have their limits. Any saint or artist that claims to perform a cure-function is as absurd as the analyst that claims to rival the charms of figures such as Messiaen or Joyce.
199 Peter Singer’s “effective altruism” is ripe for mockery. It is another variant of stereotypical consumer-charity or Promethean techno-philanthropy. “Philanthropy is a very large industry”, wrote Singer in The Most Good You Can Do. “In the United States alone there are almost one million charities, receiving a total of approximately $200 billion a year with an additional $100 billion donated to religious congregations”. The money allegedly purchases meaning and good feelings. As Singer put it, “effective altruism is a way of giving meaning to our own lives and finding fulfilment in what we do. Many effective altruists say that in doing good, they feel good”. This is closer to the logic of consumer satisfaction than it is to père- version/sublimation. Singer readily admitted, “Most effective altruists are not saints but ordinary people like you and me” (viii).
Joyce’s work was explicitly less ordinary than Singer’s. Joyce did not identify with the
Redeemer-Son or the masochist/altruist dedicated to an established group. Joyce’s figure of the artist/saint was in fact closer to the Father-Creator.192 “The purest case of the Authority of the
Father, considered as the ‘authority’ of the ‘cause’ over the effect, is perhaps the Authority that an author (in the broadest sense of the word) has over his Work”, explained Alexandre Kojève
(Notion of Authority 28). According to Lacan, Joyce wanted a grip on as many people as possible, in the mode of the Father presiding over a new domain of familial slaves (Séminaire
XXIII 5.79-80, 5.85-88). Unlike the Redeemer-Son, the Joycean saint does not await recognition from others. In “The Holy Office” (a satirical poem from 1904), Joyce asserted, “Myself unto myself will give / This name, Katharsis-Purgative” (lines 1-2). He reserved the following line for others: “My soul shall spurn them evermore” (line 96). Discourse, to reiterate, drove Joyce to despair – comic despair. He took refuse in the figure of the literary saint and refused analytic interpretation, for he did not need it. Such was Joyce’s père-version, severed from ordinary society.
192 Joyce’s response to his Catholic upbringing was arguably Jewish (S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism 136). Although
Joyce sometimes referred to himself as Crooked Jesus or Melancholy Jesus, I agree with Lacan: Joyce identified more with the Father-Creator (Ellman, James Joyce 489).
200 Philology, not philanthropy
Lacan and Joyce both aligned the artist/saint with père-version and hatred of the ordinary. Successful figures are closer to philology than philanthropy. For composers dedicated to texts and novel formalisations, this is a relief. Lebel-like shock tactics and neoliberal philanthropists are common; a highly refined père-version is extremely rare. I cannot promise the reader progress beyond this.
201 2.6 Sound holes: New figures for le con
[…] nous inventons un truc pour combler le trou dans le réel. Là où il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel, ça fait
‘troumatisme’. On invente! On invente ce qu’on peut, bien sûr.
– Jacques Lacan (Les non-dupes errent 8.57)
In Section One, I discussed the following variations on a theme. Père- version/sublimation invents something in response to a hole, not a sphere of wisdom; père- version is oriented towards le con; art creates a figure around an absence of harmony. The theme seems peculiar when articulated in Lacan’s terms, but music’s place is a fundamental subject. It is hinted at by the word compose, which derives from ponere, ‘to place’. A conservatory is one possible place of music: con, incidentally, is a popular Australian nickname.193
Music theorists sometimes – though certainly not often – play with holes or absent centres. In 1965, for example, a musician named Paul Beaver asked Ervin M. Wilson if he
“knew of any musical use for Pascal’s triangle”. Wilson did not. A year later, Wilson produced
“an interesting set” of six notes by multiplying two numbers at a time, limited to four factors:
3, 5, 7 and 11. He named the result a combination product set. A set with six notes is called a hexany (from the Greek hex, ‘six’). Wilson considered the hexany musically resourceful, so he then made a set of twenty notes by multiplying three numbers at a time, limited to six factors:
1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. This occurred some time between 1966 and 1968. A set of twenty notes is called an eikosany (from the Greek eikosi, ‘twenty’). A set of seventy notes – generated from eight factors, taken four at a time – is called a hebdomekontany (from the Koine Greek hebdomékonta, ‘seventy’). “I noticed that these combinations had been predicted by Pascal’s triangle”, Wilson wrote (“D’alessandro” 1; Chalmers and Wilson, “Combination” 350-52).
193 A more banal example: Australia, my motherland, is sometimes referred to as a hole or a desert. If an Australian composes music, he/she perhaps does so in response to a hole.
202
Fig. 32. Wilson’s sets predicted by Pascal’s triangle (“D’alessandro” 8).194
John H. Chalmers offered an elegant explanation of Wilson’s hexany. “The notes of the hexany”, he wrote, “are the melodic expansion of the intervals of a generating tetrad or tetrachord. They are obtained by forming the six binary products of the four elements of the generator”. (An eikosany, to reiterate, consists of twenty ternary products; a hebdomekontany consists of seventy quarternary products.) When musicians treat a combination product set as a scale, no note “should be considered as the tonic”. Combination product sets are, as Chalmers stated, “harmonically symmetrical, polytonal sets with virtual or implicit tonics which are not
[notes] of the scale”. Although triads can be formed from the notes of a combination product set, “the global 1:1 for the whole set is not a note of the scale”. It is absent. A combination product set is thus a “non-centric musical structure” (Divisions 116). According to Kraig
Grady, the early “space and moon expeditions” inspired Wilson to investigate rational tunings
“without a central point of gravity or tonality” (“Introduction” n. pag.).
The members of a hexany can be “partitioned into four sets of three tones and their inversions”. If one represents a hexany visually, as a hexagram, the three-tone sets “appear as
194 Note the repetition of the monany along the edges of Pascal’s triangle. This fascinated Lacan during his experiments with Pascal’s triangle in 1972 (Séminaire XIX 4.49, 4.59-61, 10.146-47, 11.160-65, 12.176-77); but Lacan’s responses to the triangle lacked Wilson’s inventive charm.
203 triangular faces”. Chalmers described these triads as “the essential consonant chords of the hexany”, whereas “all chords containing pairs of tones separated by diagonals are considered dissonant” (Divisions 117). There is no central point marked 1:1 in Wilson’s hexany, eikosany or hebdomekontany diagrams. The centre is a hole.
More recently, Rachel Wells Hall noted that, for twelve-tone equal temperament, the set of dyads plus single notes “forms a thrice twisted Möbius strip”; the subset of single notes forms a trefoil knot on the boundary (“Geometrical Music Theory” 329; “Research” n. pag.). In
2011, Dmitri Tymoczko cited the Möbius strip multiple times in A Geometry of Music (19, 65,
69, 71 [note 3], 72-86, 93, 108, 114, 117, 198-200, 224, 361, 398-99, 415, 429-30). He also cited the torus (20, 71 [note 3], 247, 410). August Ferdinand Möbius himself constructed a musical, polyhedral torus. The polyhedron’s twelve corners correspond to the twelve notes from the conventional chromatic scale; its twenty-four triangular faces correspond to the twelve major triads and twelve minor triads; its thirty-six edges correspond to the twelve major thirds, twelve minor thirds and twelve perfect fifths (“Nachlass” 554-55; O’Neil, “Musical” 407).
The subject of rhythm must be reserved for a future study; so for now, I will cite just one relevant example. In 2016, Jonathon Kirk and Neil Nicholson discovered “a tactile process for generating Euclidean rhythms: the twisting of knots”. Their work followed the British mathematician John Conway, who devised “notation for representing rational tangles”
(“Visualizing” 4-6).
Waiting
There is little of this work in terms of quantity, but it is undoubtedly less embarrassing than Lacanian musicology, and it is less clichéd than contemporary topic theory. Perhaps there will be more to write about in future concerning non-centric musical structures, holes and knots.
The preceding generation of Anglophone academics invented Effective Altruism, Learning 2.0 and Positive Psychology. Few were gifted with the Muses’ audē, and they frequently overlooked the work of geniuses like Wilson. Section Three argues for genius’s resurrection plus renewed curiosity concerning harmonia. It does not fear progressives’ derision. As Arnold Schoenberg proclaimed, one’s contemporaries are not “final judges” (Style and Idea 103).
204
SECTION THREE
Musum of the future
§
The non-octave at the Academy
3.1 Overture
[…] like a lunatic curator of a vanished museum.
– Description of Olivier Messiaen (qtd. in Maas, The Reinvention of Religious Music 3)
Overture derives from apertura, ‘opening, hole or gap’. The term is appropriate, given that justifications for new music rely on risk and are therefore open to ridicule. This third and final section of the thesis is brief, for it is addressed to future students of Composition (who, for better or worse, are usually expected to read less than musicologists), and it respects the limits of the teachable. This is the meaning of the section’s title, Musum.
In 2006, Alain Badiou claimed that popular, post-modern pluralism is a wasteland and that serialism is “equally unpromising” (Logics of Worlds 89). What did I decide in response to the musical crisis noted by Badiou?195 I committed myself to a project that does not fall into either the pluralism category or the serialism category. Moreover, my project is not defeated by the atonal/pantonal deadlock that I described in the thesis’s Prelude. The next chapter further examines atonal, ‘no-note’ despair; the final chapter proposes something new, namely non- octave tunings.
195 The word crisis, do not forget, derives from the Greek krisis, ‘decision’.
206 3.2 Composers placed together
This chapter illustrates the meaning of componere (‘to place together’) via three categories of notable, twentieth-century composers and artists: conservative, avant-garde and obscure. At the chapter’s conclusion, I propose a revised academic discourse, dedicated to non- octave music.
When it comes to rhetoric by twentieth-century composers, there are two obvious positions: the conservative/reactionary position and the putatively radical, avant-garde position.196 I define the conservative position as centred on the One or familiar synonyms such as the All, the whole, the universe, the sphere, the total, the holistic and the in-dividual.
Consider, for example, Iannis Xenakis’s ontology: “Man is one, indivisible, and total. He thinks with his belly and feels with his mind” (“Towards a Metamusic” 181). Consider, too, the “total appreciation of the acoustic environment”, proposed by R. Murray Schafer. “Today”, Schafer asserted, “all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe” (Tuning 4-5; original italics).
Broader examples include Nature, orthodox harmony, just intonation’s whole numbers, purity, the perceptual continuum, pantheism, individual empowerment, and consumer choice or autonomy.
Conservative
The musical genres supported by conservative rhetoric are well known, so I will simply list them.
- Neoclassicism: Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith and Manuel de Falla.
- Broadway musicals: Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Stephen Sondheim.
- Minimalism: Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams.
- Holy Minimalism: Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki and John Tavener.
196 To be clear, conservative is shorthand for both the master’s discourse and consumer democracy; progressive stands for the hysteric’s discourse. How composers choose to label their own work is not taken into account. Perspectivism falls into the category that I named obscure.
207 - Octave-based rational tunings: La Monte Young, Lou Harrison and Kyle Gann.
- Soundscapes and acoustic ecology: Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp and Luc Ferrari.
- Popular empowerment anthems sung by Britney Spears, for example, while under the
conservatorship of her father.
- Conventional melodies and harmonies in support of visual and verbal content presumed to
shock or else raise so-called awareness: advertising music, film soundtracks and songs
disseminated via commercial radio, cinema chains, television, record labels, digital media
stories and online streaming services.
Avant-garde
Avant-garde is a French military term that denotes the vanguard or leading area. In music, however, avant-garde typically refers to the turn from a classical master-discourse to hysterical stunts and conflicts. Avant-garde rhetoric proclaims itself as new, yet its promotion of
Heraclitean flux is ancient. As Oliver Feltham put it, the problem with the avant-gardists’
“paradigm of permanent change is that it always presumes totality – all is flux” (“Enjoy Your
Stay” 188). Avant-gardists merely pretend to escape the One of mastery or conservatism. They repeatedly make a show of this.
Edgard Varèse’s rhetoric consisted of multiple avant-garde clichés. He dreamed of future instruments that would allow him to produce works that “flow as a river flows” – “a melodic totality”. “I have always felt the need of a kind of continuous flowing curve that instruments could not give me”, he declared. Via new technē and music conceived as an “art- science”, Varèse expected “liberation from the arbitrary, paralysing” status quo and machines that could deliver “new dynamics far beyond the present human-powered orchestra”. Finally, he proclaimed a “musical mortician” anyone that invents rules or a system of codification for electronic music (“Liberation of Sound” 11-13, 18).
Groups and institutions that propagated avant-garde rhetoric include: Varèse’s Pan
American Association of Composers, Pierre Schaeffer’s Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM), the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Studio für elektronische Musik des Westdeutschen Rundfunks, Pierre Boulez’s Institut de Recherche et
Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), and Andrew Hugill’s Music, Technology and
208 Innovation Research Centre (MTIRC). More broadly, avant-garde rhetoric manifested in movements such as pantonality (after Arnold Schoenberg), Fluxus (note the reference to
Heraclitus, again), and New Complexity (after Brian Ferneyhough).
Avant-garde rhetoricians such as George Maciunas (associated with the Fluxus group and the neo-Dada genre) maintained an intimate and conflicted rapport with master-discourses.
Maciunas complained that master-discourses failed to include the everyday and the banal. A
Maciunas-approved “concretist”, by contrast, “perceives and expresses a rotten tomato without changing its reality or form”. The sound of a metal hammer striking a piano is allegedly “more material and concrete” than conventional piano sounds, “since it indicates in a much clearer manner the hardness of hammer, hollowness of piano sound box and resonance of string”.
Banalities such as “human speech or eating sounds are likewise more concrete for the same reason of source recognisability” (“Neo-Dada” 728). This type of rhetoric provoked the ire of conservatives. Julius Evola, for example, decried “not just the acceptance but the exaltation of the absurd and the contradictory, of nonsense and pointlessness taken just as they are” (Ride the Tiger 22).197
Demanding a new and better master of the All, Maciunas publicly declared, “anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality – it is one and all” (“Neo-Dada” 729). To lash out and mark oneself in opposition to a master (who is both limited and limit-imposing) is a typical element of avant- garde rhetoric. “The aims of avant-garde art show themselves in large part destructive”, Ben
Johnston observed in 1971. According to him, avant-garde music concerts were typically “a form of anti-art” (“Art and Survival” 134). Count how many times anti- and against appear in the passage by Maciunas below.198
To approach closer affinity with concrete reality and its closer understanding, the art-
nihilist or anti-artists (they usually deny those definitions) either creates ‘anti-art’ or
exercises nothingness. The ‘anti-art’ forms are directed primarily against art as a
197 See “Josefine, die Sängerin, oder Das Volk der Mäuse” by Franz Kafka. The protagonist, Josefine, is a mouse that, like all mice, can squeak. Josefine’s squeaking is therefore ordinary; yet, for mysterious reasons, it is treated as an art.
198 Anti-philosophy is a negative term, but it is not necessarily relevant to Maciunas’s anti-art. As Section One established, Lacan’s anti-philosophy cannot be reduced to hysterical, anti-mastery discourse.
209 profession, against the artificial separation of a performer from audience [sic], or creator
and spectator, of life and art; it is against the artificial forms or patterns or methods of art
itself; it is against the purposefulness, formfulness and meaningfulness of art. (“Neo-Dada”
729)
Finally, note the crypto-capitalist conclusion to Maciunas’s speech. He said, “if man could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding him” – and presumably experience equates to consume – “in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need for art, artists and similar ‘non-productive’ elements” (“Neo-Dada” 729). This is another example of the hysteric acting as a precursor to post-modern capitalism. Adrian Searle (an art critic from The
Guardian) put the two together. In 2008, he argued, “Fluxus’s aim to eliminate music, theatre, poetry, fiction and all the rest of the fine arts combined was doomed. Only the mass entertainment industry might achieve such a thing” (“Snapshots” n. pag.; see also Badiou,
Handbook of Inaesthetics 8).
Anti-classical avant-gardism is typically harlequinesque: it involves performances, stunts, acrobatics, wannabe magicians and fictional violence. Stockhausen, for example, often played the harlequin. On 26 June 1995, he delivered an amusing stunt featuring members of a string quartet playing in four different airborne helicopters. On September 17 2001, Stockhausen described the then-recent collapse of New York’s Twin Towers as “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos”. According to The New York Times, Stockhausen believed that if art does not transport us “out of life”, it is nothing (Tommasini, “Music” n. pag.).
Stockhausen’s remarks may have caused a stir, but again, harlequinesque nihilism or irony is nothing new. Decades before the Stockhausen controversy, experimental and controversial were considered equivalent terms within avant-garde music scenes (Cage, “Experimental Music” 7).
Although avant-garde rhetoric is spouted by self-proclaimed independent voices, it is often generic. Note the repetition of unlimited flux and/or the implied destruction of the master-discourse in the following six examples. Schoenberg criticised New Music propagandists for attempting to negate all the values of the preceding period (Style and Idea 43, 46, 64). Luigi
Russolo denigrated “the meagreness of orchestral timbres” and promoted “the unbounded richness of the timbres of noises” (Art of Noises 86). In 1952, Boulez declared that, “since the
Viennese discovery, every composer outside the serial experiments has been useless”
210 (“Schoenberg is Dead” 274; original italics). In 1966, Schaeffer advocated a liberated sound object, “contained entirely in our perceptive consciousness”, without an identifiable origin.
“Such is the suggestion of acousmatics: to deny the instrument and cultural conditioning, to put in front of us the sonorous” (“Acousmatics” 79-81; original italics). Following Schaeffer, Trevor
Wishart rejected “the idea that music has to be built upon a finite lattice” (a set of pitches). He instead advocated “dealing with a continuum using the concept of transformation” (On Sonic
Art 7; original italics).
Towards the end of his life, Schaeffer proclaimed himself an “anarchist” (“Interview”
36). The well-known American avant-gardist John Cage, likewise, proclaimed himself an anarchist and embraced pantheism. “Everything has a spirit and that spirit can be released by setting whatever it is into vibration”, Cage believed (“John” 209-10). In “The Future of Music:
Credo” (a talk from 1937, first published as an article in 1958), Cage spelled out his avant- gardism in all-capitals. Note the typical charge of inadequacy or impotence: “THE PRESENT
METHODS OF WRITING MUSIC, PRINCIPALLY THOSE WHICH EMPLOY HARMONY
AND ITS REFERENCE TO PARTICULAR STEPS IN THE FIELD OF SOUND, WILL BE
INADEQUATE FOR THE COMPOSER, WHO WILL BE FACED WITH THE ENTIRE
FIELD OF SOUND”. Cage endorsed Schoenberg’s pantonal method, non-pitched percussion music, and “METHODS WHICH ARE FREE FROM THE CONCEPT OF A
FUNDAMENTAL TONE” (4-5). In other words, Cage’s hysteria attached itself to both pantonal (‘all-notes’, Whole) music as well as atonal (‘no-notes’, negative) music.199 This is a common, conflicted response to the question of musical Modernism.
Obscure
There are many cases that obscure the conservative and avant-garde positions.
Schoenberg, for instance, disregarded New Music propagandists and refused to view his twelve- tone technique as something that destroyed a previous period or marked it as obsolete. He maintained that twelve-tone musical “creation should be formed in harmony with the Divine
Model” of mastery and “ultimate perfection”; and he considered the ability to compose a “gift from the Supreme Commander” (Style and Idea 45, 102, 111). The elderly Schaeffer is another
199 Recall the definitions of pantonal and atonal from my thesis’s Prelude.
211 well-known example. In 1986, Schaeffer drastically obscured his pro-experimentalist tune. He admitted that each time he worked on sound-forms, he experienced “the disappointment of not arriving at music”. “I wasted my life”, he proclaimed.200 Schaeffer predicted that the future of musique concrète (which was initially an avant-garde genre) would be limited to “a mixture of electricity and DoReMi” (“Interview” 35, 38-39, 43). Presumably, this is a reference to the sampling techniques used in the production of post-1980 consumer-music.
Academy of non-octave music
Instead of conservatism, avant-gardism or something that obscures the two, I propose a revised academic discourse that allows students to work on non-octave music. Hans Werner
Henze issued a proposal in 1969 that is broadly relevant to mine. He wanted to pass from
“commercialisation” and the “ideology of stardom in music” to a discourse in which the composer becomes “someone who learns and teaches” (“Does” 171; Taruskin, Music in the Late
Twentieth Century 346). Unlike Henze’s proposal, however, mine does not promise to help consumers of progressive education realise their so-called creative potential. Music, according to my schema, is devoted to the Muses, not to progressive identities or students’ egos.201
Following Ben Johnston, I believe musicians within academia should dedicate themselves to “perceptible order rather than seeming disorder”, randomness or hyper-complexity
(“Rational” 62). René Descartes issued a similar prescription in 1618: musical works should avoid excessive complication and confusion (Des-Cartes, Compendium musicæ 6). Schoenberg, too, believed that “artistic value demands comprehensibility”. He was against “senseless prolixity” (Style and Idea 64, 103).
200 In 1964, Claude Lévi-Strauss asserted, “Musique concrète may be intoxicated with the illusion that it is saying something; in fact, it is floundering in non-significance” (Raw 23).
201 Recall from Section One that the academic rapport between S2 and a (in this instance, the Muses’ knowledge of harmonia plus the student’s compositions as manifest suffering/enjoyment) is indemonstrable. Otherwise put, its truth is axiomatic and cannot be proven (Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony 432). Indemonstrable truth arguably suits
Composition better than hysterical inconsistency, pretentious virtuosity or psychoanalytic undecidability.
212 Recapitulation
For the sake of a broader audience, I will restate the material from this chapter using J.
Peter Burkholder’s familiar terms. What I labelled conservative, Burkholder called the
“historicist mainstream” – a master-discourse inherited from nineteenth-century Europe. The place proper to the historicist mainstream is the twentieth-century concert hall qua museum of masterpieces. This is well established. “Popular music”, “light classics” and “movie background music” belong to a second conservative ideology, namely consumer democracy. What I called avant-garde or hysterical discourse, Burkholder described as “the radical wing of progressivism”, the “rejection of the past”, and the will to destroy the masters’ museum (“Museum Pieces” 126,
129-31).
What Burkholder calls “research music” – specifically, academia’s resurrection of
European art-music projects, post-1945 – is broadly consistent with my proposal. Research music “can be thought of as an experimental branch of music theory”; but, like Schoenberg, I do not believe that experimentation necessitates trashing the museum. As Burkholder noted, the place proper to research music is separate from the museum of canonical works: it is “the universities”, specifically “the library or laboratory” (“Museum Pieces” 132). Bob Gilmore listed
Herbert Brün, Robert Erickson, Kenneth Gaburo, Lejaren Hiller, Ben Johnston, Alvin Lucier,
Salvatore Martirano and Roger Reynolds as examples of composers that functioned within “a university milieu” (“Introduction” xii). Olivier Messiaen is perhaps the best-known example of a composer-teacher. He hoped that students would further develop his ideas, so that he could become a precursor to inspired works (Technique 7).
“Although there is much that seems dull” within academic music scenes, Burkholder concluded, “there is also research music of great excitement and intrinsic beauty” (“Museum
Pieces” 132). I agree. Today, Burkholder’s characterisation is relevant to both music academies and online quasi-academies. Consider, for example, internet forums and social media groups dedicated to experimental tuning theory. The home-made recordings and videos are often embarrassing to witness, but the members’ curiosity regarding music and mathematics is admirable (Barker, Greek 30, 235; Rameau, Treatise on Harmony xxxv). It is manifest fidelity to the Muses. Academia cannot succeed beyond this. That is my non-progressive proposal.
213 If music is once again situated in the academic’s discourse, what particular master- signifier does it serve? The market? The true self? The human-animal Good? The ethics of participatory art? The demand for virtuosity, extreme complexity, dynamics, dissonance, distortion or formal ruptures? The Names of the Father or the Muses? I unashamedly vouch for the latter. More specifically, I do not believe academies of music can make do without a kanōn – a set of composer-surnames that mark rare encounters with genius and the renewal or resurrection of harmonia. My choice is broadly consistent with the following material from
Section One and Section Two: père-version/sublimation, the Muses’ audē, the topological soul discussed by Timaeus (split in three parts), Friedrich Nietzsche’s gai saber (composed of three terms), and the mystery of the Catholic Trinity that captivated Messiaen.202
If one follows conservatives like Evola, my proposal could be dismissed as something from the “regime of residues” – another example of “academicism and the withered reproduction of models” from expired epochs, or better yet, an esoteric “phenomenon of escapism, alienation, and confused compensation that in no way impinges seriously on the reality of a soulless, mechanistic, and purely earthly civilisation” (Ride the Tiger 153, 209). So be it. As Section One established, the Muses’ effects are somewhat incoherent; and the lame, deteriorated Father is still the Father. I see no signs of progress elsewhere, especially not in the field of techno- philanthropy, which, in spite of the neoliberal gloss, is as ancient as Promethean bondage and just as miserable. The composer’s curiosity is a gift from the Muses; it does not lead him/her on an aimless search for the anthropos or a meaningful banality. The latter is the role proper to the cynic (Diogenes Laertius, Lives 6.2.43). To paraphrase the poet Paul Celan, there are songs to sing other than those of the anthropos (“Fadensonnen” lines 5-7; see also Nietzsche, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra 5, § 1.3).
Evola doubted whether Art still has a future (Ride the Tiger 157). He may be correct to entertain such a notion; but I instead wish to cast doubt on the necessity of octave-identity, integer-based periods, and the happy/sad binary constructed by major thirds and minor thirds.
Alternatives to these things do indeed exist. The next chapter reveals this, without falling back on the spurious freedom of timbre-based music or group-improvisatory music.
202 Lorenzo Chiesa explained how this position (which, following Lacan, he termed soul-love) is distinct from the work of clinical analysis (Not-Two 40).
214 3.3 Resurrection: Non-octave harmonia
After the particular number of notes of a particular division is added together, we arrive at a note exactly one
octave (frequency ratio 2:1) away from the pitch at which we started. […] This notion has been around for so long
that it almost sounds impertinent to suggest there might be a useful alternative which has been systematically
ignored.
– Wendy Carlos (“Three Asymmetric Divisions of the Octave” n. pag.)
The composition project to which I am pledged consists of three main points.
- Modern harmonia: teachable, non-octave systems and scales.
- Technē is neither privileged nor neglected.
- Non-philanthropy.
Modern harmonia, as I define it, resurrects “the avoidance of octave doubling”, first promoted by Arnold Schoenberg. In his efforts to create something truly new with respect to
Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic music, Schoenberg realised that the octave’s familiarity posed a major problem. In Schoenberg’s opinion, the octave creates a sense of emphasis, which is in turn linked to expectations of a conventional “root” or “tonic” (Style and
Idea 108, 119, 126-27, 130-31).203 Non-octave music, post-Schoenberg, offers a dramatic solution to the problem, without abolishing a mathematical theory of harmony. It thus cannot be confused with timbre-centric genres such as noise art (Luigi Russolo) or musique concrète
(Pierre Schaeffer). It is also distinct from common, microtonal music, which Plato’s brother
Glaucon ridiculed in the Republic (7.531a).
In Schoenberg’s opinion, microtones should not be confused with “a higher level of development” (Theory of Harmony 423-25). Ben Johnston, likewise, did not consider microtonality “an important musical movement”. To increase “the number of notes per octave” is not necessarily a sign of sophistication (“Regarding” 258). Non-octave music is arguably less pretentious than common, microtonal music. It simply involves a tuning system or a scale that repeats at an interval other than 2:1. Alternatively, one can make non-octave music with a set
203 “There is in Schoenberg’s atonal compositions an avoidance of octaves”, noted Ben Johnston (“Without
Improvement” 168).
215 of unconventional notes that do not repeat at any interval. Tuning theorists often refer to the interval of repetition as the period, and since the nineteenth century, they have measured systems’ and scales’ steps in cents. As the name implies, a cent is one-hundredth of a conventional, equal-tempered semitone. The latter, to be precise, is defined as 12 2, which means that a cent is 1200 2. Although non-octave music is not a well-known subject among Anglophone musicologists and composers, it was touched on multiple times in the expanded, 1992 edition of
Iannis Xenakis’s Formalized Music (xii, 132, 183, 188-89, 198, 269-70, 379 [note 24]). Ben
Johnston mentioned it as well (“Microtonal Resources” 42).
This chapter introduces composers to a few non-octave systems and scales that are of historical interest. It concludes with practical suggestions for performers of fretted string instruments. The reader is not spoon-fed justifications for particular tunings. One must not indulge in phenomenological speculations; one must experiment.
No 2:1 period
To the best of my knowledge, the “Animadversions upon the Musick-Compendium of
Renat. Des-Cartes”, published in 1653, was the first Anglophone text to establish non-octave periods. The author (referred to in the text only as “a Person of Honour”) is believed to be
William Brouncker, who, in 1662, became the first president of the Royal Society of London
(Wardhaugh, “Musical” 24). Brouncker invented two tuning systems that are vaguely similar to twelve-tone equal temperament; but because they do not treat 2:1 as their period, they are technically non-octave systems. The first system’s period is ( 5 + 3) 2 :1. This can be expressed as Φ2 or Φ + 1 in contemporary shorthand.204 Brouncker spelt the first period out as
“2.61803398875” and divided it in to seventeen equal steps.205 The second system’s period is
( 2 + 1):1 (“Animadversions” 84-94). Unfortunately, Brouncker’s two systems are described
204 Φ is short for Euclid’s Extreme and Mean Ratio, nicknamed the divine proportion in the sixteenth century and the golden section later in the nineteenth century (Tatlow, “Use” 71). The latter phrase is the most familiar today, but it is strictly not relevant to Brouncker’s seventeenth-century text. Brouncker’s text alternately invoked the “Extream and
Mean Ration” and the “Extreame and meane Ration” (“Animadversions” 84-86).
205 Lacan made a diagram that features the same period (Séminaire XVI 8.134): 1 + 1 + a = 2.6180…. As far as I am aware, no Anglophone commentators have noted the coincidence.
216 incorrectly on page 211 of Rudolf Rasch’s “Tuning and Temperament” – a widely read text published by Cambridge University Press.
The cent as a unit of measurement was not available to Brouncker, but today, for the sake of comparison, one can measure the step from Brouncker’s first system as 98.01 cents. Even though Brouncker’s use of a non-octave period was radical, his system’s step and the major/minor triads that it can generate are not far from what contemporary listeners are used to hearing. Brouncker’s major thirds, for example, are 7.96 cents closer to the ratio 5:4 than the major thirds of twelve-tone equal temperament (which means that they are just 5.73 cents sharp); but his quasi-octaves are 23.87 cents flat with respect to 2:1. This constitutes a noticeable dissonance. Brouncker’s second system has a 101.72-cent step. Its quasi-octaves are dissonant, too. They are 20.69 cents sharp with respect to 2:1. If someone in search of a pure octave were to subject Brouncker’s two systems to practical tests, he/she would certainly reject both systems. Brouncker, however, did not proceed from the supposed sanctity of the octave- period. His systems resulted from an experimental conjecture: “geometrical” proportions are better suited to “the Sense of Hearing” than “arithmetical” proportions (“Animadversions” 84).
According to Susan Wollenberg, Brouncker was the first English mathematician to use logarithms (invented circa 1614) for musical tunings (“Music and Mathematics” 3). Why is
Brouncker’s work significant? Without logarithms, one would not have a modern theory of equal temperament; and without tunings that use a period other than 2:1, there would be little to write about non-octave music.
Stockhausen and Wilson
In 1954, Karlheinz Stockhausen invented a non-octave system, which he used for a piece of electronic music, Studie II. According to the piece’s score, published in 1956, Stockhausen derived an equal step from (Nr. 3 iv). The step measures 111.45 cents. As an aside, 25 17 produces a near-identical step of 111.88 cents. 5 3
In 1966, Ervin M. Wilson devised his first combination product set – a rational, non- centric musical scale. (Examples of Wilson’s sets – the hexany, eikosany and hebdomekontany –
217 were discussed briefly in Section Two.)206 Wilson’s invention distinguished rational tuning from conservativism. In 1986, Kraig Grady referred to it as “a giant leap forward”. “For the first time”, Grady wrote, “Just Intonation” – a popular synonym for rational tuning – “could not be accused of being a reactionary endeavour” (“Combination-Product Set Patterns” n. pag.).207
Although it is not necessary, it is possible to use a combination product set that is not reduced to the octave and that does not repeat at the octave (Grady, “Re: Wilson CPS” n. pag.;
Keenan, “Re: Making Music” n. pag.). In 2005, David C. Keenan devised a new guitar fretboard and six, modified open-string frequencies. Keenan’s guitar can play each note of a particular non-octave-reduced, non-octave-repeating eikosany (“Combination-Product-Set Guitar” n. pag.).
Using standard, straight-across frets, not fretlets, the guitar’s maximum error with respect to each note of the eikosany is a mere 3.57 cents.208
Bohlen et al.
In 1972, a German engineer named Heinz Bohlen invented a system that consists of thirteen divisions of 3:1 (“First” n. pag.). There is a rational version of the system as well as a tempered version. The former consists of 1:1, 27:25, 25:21, 9:7, 7:5, 75:49, 5:3, 9:5, 49:25, 15:7,
7:3, 63:25, 25:9 and 3:1. The temperament, , produces an equal step of 146.30 cents. In 1976, 13 Bohlen submitted an article to Acustica, entitled “13 Tonstufen in der Duodezime”. The article 3 was published in 1978. An English translation, “13 Tone Steps in the Twelfth”, followed in
2001. Bohlen began with “a consonance criterion that is founded on combination tones” and demonstrated a way to derive the traditional twelve-note system from the major triad, 4:5:6.
“The same procedure, extended to consonant intervals not used in the twelve-step scale, then leads to a thirteen-step scale filling the framework of the twelfth”, that is, the ratio 3:1 instead
206 According to Daniel James Wolf, Wilson invented combination product sets after “unsatisfactory” experiments with conventional quartertones (“Alternative” 9).
207 In my opinion, rational tuning is clearer and more appropriate than the term just intonation. Why? A rational tuning consists of ratios; just, meanwhile, derives from the Latin jus, ‘law or right’. Just intonation is the more popular term among Americans and Australians. This is suspicious.
208 Anyone can remove frets from a conventional six-string guitar and experiment with Keenan’s design using tied-on viol frets. If the experiment proves a success, a luthier can install permanent frets. Do not forget, fretted string instruments that have inaccurate nuts and bridges introduce additional errors, as do performers that press down too hard on the strings.
218 of the octave’s 2:1 (“13 Tone Steps” 617; “13 Tonstufen” 76). In other words, Bohlen’s article proposed both new consonances and a new period. This is a significant achievement.
Bohlen asked what to do with “the remaining consonances” – the ones not approximated by conventional semitones (or quartertones, I add). He cited Adriaan Fokker’s organ – a Dutch instrument installed in the Teylers Museum in 1950 that can play thirty-one notes to the octave – as a then-recent attempt to explore further consonances; but he acknowledged that no such experiments achieved “lasting success”. Bohlen referred to his new system as a speculative “attempt to gain additional musical material” via “consonances selected in accordance with the combination tone properties”. He deemed 7:3 “the best consonant” interval that is not used by twelve-tone equal temperament, and he combined 7:3 with 5:3 and
1:1 to make a triad that is “very worthy to listen to”. From this triad, Bohlen inferred that the period should be an “odd-order” consonance, namely 3:1 (“13 Tone Steps” 621; “13 Tonstufen”
81-82).
The amount of error introduced by the tempered version of Bohlen’s system (with respect to the rational version) is “at most 13 cents” (“13 Tone Steps” 622; “13 Tonstufen” 83).
The worst error in twelve-tone equal temperament, by comparison, is the 17.49-cent difference between 26/12 and 7:5, the tritone (Mathews and Pierce, “Acquisition” 6). Kees van Prooijen independently proposed the temperament around the same time as Bohlen. In February 13 1978, Van Prooijen submitted an article to Interface, entitled “A Theory of Equal-Tempered 3 Scales”. He dedicated a section of his article to “equal-tempered scales with a higher harmonic than the second as the basis” (50-52) – tuning systems, that is, with a period other than 2:1.
Van Prooijen split 3:1, measured as 1901.96 cents, in to nine equal steps ( = 211.33 cents), 9 thirteen equal steps (Bohlen’s = 146.30 cents), fifteen equal steps ( = 126.80 cents), 3 13 15 twenty-eight equal steps ( = 67.93 cents), thirty-five equal steps ( = 54.34 cents) and 3 3 28 35 forty-three equal steps ( = 44.23 cents). Van Prooijen did not stop there. He divided 5:1, 3 3 43 measured as 2786.31 cents, in to nineteen equal steps ( = 146.65 cents), twenty-four equal 3 19 steps ( = 116.10 cents), forty-three equal steps ( = 64.80 cents) and sixty-seven equal 5 24 43 steps ( = 41.59 cents). He also divided 3:2, measured as 701.96 cents, in to nine equal steps 5 5 67 ( = 78.00 cents). Finally, Van Prooijen split 8:5, measured as 813.69 cents, in to five 5 9 (3 2 )
219 equal steps ( = 162.74 cents) and thirteen equal steps ( = 62.59 cents). 5 13 Composers have hardly explored any of these systems.209 (8 5 ) (8 5 )
Likewise, composers have barely touched the two non-octave systems that Bohlen included in a footnote to “13 Tonstufen in der Duodezime” (84 [note 26]; “13 Tone Steps” 623
[note 26]). The systems are summarised below.
- Twelve rational divisions of 3:1, namely 1:1, 11:10, 6:5, 30:23, 10:7, 11:7, 7:4, 21:11, 21:10,
23:10, 5:2, 11:4, 3:1.
- Eleven rational divisions of 3:1, namely 1:1, 10:9, 6:5, 4:3, 3:2, 5:3, 9:5, 2:1, 9:4, 5:2, 27:10,
3:1.
In 1984, Max V. Mathews, John R. Pierce and Linda A. Roberts discussed thirteen
“equal frequency divisions” of the 3:1 period – the same thirteen-note temperament that Bohlen and Van Prooijen wrote about. Mathews et al. believed it would prove “useful for non- traditional new music” (“Four” S10). In 1987, Mathews and Pierce submitted a proposal to the
National Science Foundation that acknowledged Bohlen’s work (“Acquisition” 5).
Unfortunately, they overlooked Van Prooijen. According to the 1987 proposal, Pierce stumbled upon the thirteen-note temperament after he heard “two non-traditional triads” that seemed consonant – 3:5:7 and 5:7:9. The two triads were deemed “interesting”, for even though they are both unfamiliar to listeners of traditional music, it is possible for listeners to gauge whether they are in-tune or out-of-tune. “Both the 3:5:7 and 5:7:9 triads exhibit intonational sensitivities similar to those of the traditional major triad which has frequency ratios 4:5:6”. Pierce then combined the two triads to make “a tetrachord with 3:5:7:9 frequency ratios” and proposed a period of 3:1, since 3:1 corresponded to “the ratio of the lowest to the highest notes in the tetrachord”. Pierce reportedly found the number (and thus thirteen equal divisions of 3:1) 13 “by trial”. He believed the thirteen-note temperament gave “an excellent approximation to the 3 tetrachord” (“Acquisition” 5-6).
209 I have not copied directly from Van Prooijen’s article. I have effectively translated Van Prooijen’s material so that his systems are easier for composers to understand.
220 Mathews and Pierce’s 1987 proposal included the first mention of the tritave – a nickname for the period 3:1 (“Acquisition” 6). I do not consider the name tritave appropriate.
The term octave only makes sense for conventional diatonic music. It derives from the Latin octavus, ‘eighth’, and thus appropriately describes the rapport between the first note and the eighth note of a diatonic scale. Octave, strictly speaking, does not even make sense for twelve- tone serial music. Hence I see no reason to pun on octavus when dealing with a thirteen-note chromatic scale. Simply put, the word tritave is confusing. Tri- refers to 3:1, which is the system’s period. That part makes sense; but the allusion to the octave (-tave) is unnecessary.
Bohlen hoped that future listeners would be able to experience music that does not
“rely on the well-known twelve tones” – music that would validate a new theory, not augment an established theory (“13 Tone Steps” 624; “13 Tonstufen” 84-85).210 After experimenting with
Bohlen’s system for more than two decades, Georg Hajdu said that, although one can make analogies between it and the traditional twelve-note system, Bohlen’s system “differs greatly”
(“Bohlen-Pierce Music Theory” 153). Likewise, William A. Sethares argued, “the Bohlen-Pierce scale really is fundamentally different, and it requires a fundamentally new music theory”
(Tuning 112). I agree.211
In the traditional twelve-note system (regardless of whether it is used for diatonic or serial music), 2:1 is both the period and the identity-interval; hence each note named C is in a
2:1 rapport with another note named C. It follows that, for Bohlen’s system, 3:1 is the period as well as the identity-interval. Does this mean that notes in a 3:1 rapport are equivalent, psycho- acoustically, in the same way that notes in a 2:1 rapport are equivalent? I do not believe this.
To engender a clearer perception of consonance between two notes at a 3:1 ratio, the American theorists prescribed the use of timbres that consist of “only odd harmonics” (Mathews et al.,
“Four” S10; Mathews and Pierce, “Acquisition” 6). This strikes me as a dead end. Ask someone
210 “An essential difficulty in confronting the new sounds is the inertia of established hearing habits, which try to force the listener again and again to perceive the novelty as a flawed reproduction of the well-known” (Bohlen, “13 Tone
Steps in the Twelfth” 624; Bohlen, “13 Tonstufen in der Duodezime” 85).
211 As an aside, see the dissonance curve that Sethares illustrated for spectra with strong odd-order harmonics. The curve has minima that align with 13-ED3’s steps 3, 4, 6, 7 and 10. 13-ED3’s period, 3:1, is “very consonant”, Sethares noted, “and all the intervals of the ‘major’ and ‘minor’ chords proposed by Mathews and Peirce (and their inversions) appear convincingly among the deepest of the minima”(Tuning 112).
221 that plays a clarinet or a pipe organ (instruments that generate strong odd harmonics and weak even harmonics) to play two notes at a 2:1 ratio followed by two notes at a 3:1 ratio, then judge which ratio seems more consonant. Even if one uses a triangle-wave synthesiser, the ratio 2:1 seems more consonant than 3:1. In my opinion, 3:1 should only be referred to as the Bohlen system’s most consonant possible interval, its period and its identity-interval – nothing more.
Comparisons or allusions to the octave are not useful.
To prevent confusion, I refer to the rational Bohlen system as 13-RD3 and the temperament as 13-ED3. RD stands for ‘rational divisions’; ED stands for ‘equal divisions’; 3 indicates ‘the third harmonic’. (The familiar, twelve-note system is 12-ED2: twelve equal divisions of the second harmonic.) Manfred Schroeder discussed 13-ED3 as a self-similarity sequence in his well-known geometry book, Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws.212 Although 13-ED3’s number theory is “nearly perfect”, Schroeder acknowledged that 13-ED3’s compositional value remains “open to debate” (102). This is not an insult; it is an incitement.
In a 1972 manuscript dedicated to 13-RD3, Bohlen named four, nine-note modes
(“First” n. pag.).
- Dur I consists of 1:1, 27:25, 9:7, 7:5, 5:3, 9:5, 49:25, 7:3, 63:25 and 3:1.
- Dur II consists of 1:1, 25:21, 9:7, 7:5, 5:3, 9:5, 15:7, 7:3, 63:25 and 3:1.
- Moll I consists of 1:1, 25:21, 9:7, 75:49, 5:3, 9:5, 15:7, 7:3, 25:9 and 3:1.
- Moll II consists of 1:1, 27:25, 9:7, 7:5, 5:3, 9:5, 15:7, 7:3, 25:9 and 3:1.
Later, Bohlen re-named Mol I the Δ scale, and he introduced the Γ scale. The Γ scale consists of the ratios 1:1, 27:25, 9:7, 7:5, 5:3, 9:5, 49:25, 7:3, 25:9 and 3:1 (“13 Tone Steps” 622-
23; “13 Tonstufen” 83-84). Mathews and Pierce’s 1987 proposal specified a nine-note mode of
13-ED3, which can be described as a tempered version of Bohlen’s Mol II (“Acquisition” 6). In
Bohlen’s opinion, Mol II features the simplest numerical relations but little potential for tension
(“First” n. pag.).
212 Acknowledgement: I discovered Bohlen’s work in 2011 via Schroeder’s geometry book. I did not hear about it from any of my music colleagues.
222 Van Prooijen invented an asymmetrical mode for 13-ED3 that consists of seven notes: steps one, four, five, seven, eight, eleven and thirteen. The mode is considered “major”. The
“minor” variant is based on steps one, three, four, seven, eight, ten and thirteen (“13 Tones” n. pag.). For further examples of 13-ED3/13-RD3 modes, see Hajdu’s “Bohlen-Pierce Music
Theory”, “Just Chromatic BP Scales and Beyond” by Todd Harrop, “The Bohlen-Pierce Scale” by Elaine Walker, and Bohlen-Pierce Scales for Guitar by Ron Sword.213 The latter includes modes for 39-ED3 as well as 13-ED3. For a review of 13-RD3/13-ED3 notation options and instruments (guitars, clarinets, an alto recorder, a pan flute, chimes and metallophones), see
“The Bohlen-Pierce Scale” and “Bohlen-Pierce Instruments” by Nora-Louise Müller.
Carlos
Between 1984 and 1985, Wendy Carlos invented a number of non-octave systems, which she termed asymmetrical tunings (“Resources” n. pag.; “Tuning” 41-43). Carlos noticed that, once you have the ratios 2:1 and 3:2 (the perfect fifth), which involve the prime numbers 2 and
3, the ratio 4:3 (the perfect fourth) “follows directly”, yet it is “not prime like the other two ratios”. The ratio 5:4 (the major third) introduces the prime number 5. The inversion of 5:4 with respect to the octave is 8:5 (the minor sixth). Like 4:3, 8:5 does not introduce a new prime number. The inversion of 6:5 (the minor third) with respect to the octave is 5:3 (the major sixth). This does not introduce a new prime number, either. Carlos referred to these ratios as
“redundant interval pairs” that are “symmetric with respect to the octave”. She then decided to
“lose all octave symmetry” and to search for equal temperaments that accurately approximate the ratios 3:2, 5:4, 6:5, 7:4 and 11:8 (“Three” n. pag.). The ratio 7:4 is sometimes referred to as the harmonic seventh. It is not approximated by 12-ED2, and neither is the ratio 11:8. Since it falls between 12-ED2’s perfect fourth and the tritone, 11:8 is sometimes called a superfourth.
Carlos imposed a limit of ten-to-forty equal steps to the octave, presumably as a pragmatic consideration. (The octave-period is otherwise not relevant to Carlos’s systems. 3:2 is the period.)214 Three systems resulted from the search. Carlos named them Alpha, Beta and
213 If one is willing to pay for custom work, luthiers can make 13-ED3 fretboards for guitars, viols, mandolins and so on.
It is just as easy to calculate thirteen equal divisions of 3:1 as it is to calculate twelve equal divisions of 2:1.
214 For an early discussion of 3:2 as a period or “quintave”, see Joseph Yasser (“Highway” 11-12).
223 Gamma. The Alpha system divides 3:2 in to nine equal steps of 78.00 cents. The closest step to the octave’s 1200.00 cents is 1169.93 cents, “which sounds awfully flat”. The next step, 1247.93 cents, “is even further away”, hence it sounds “hopelessly sharp”. This is not a problem; Carlos instead referred to it as “the trade-off we’ve requested” (“Three” n. pag.). Incidentally, Carlos’s
Alpha system, , is one of the equal temperaments that Van Prooijen discovered in 1978 9 (“Theory” 51).215 Carlos’s Beta system divides 3:2 in to eleven equal steps of 63.81 cents. (3 2 ) Melodically, it is “impossible to hear much difference” between the Beta system and 19-ED2.
From a harmonic perspective, however, since Carlos’s Beta system does not include a pure octave, it cannot function identically to 19-ED2. As for Carlos’s Gamma system, it divides 3:2 in to twenty equal steps of 35.10 cents (“Three” n. pag.). Carlos’s three non-octave systems are summarised below.
- Alpha = = steps of 78.00 cents. 9 - Beta = = steps of 63.81 cents. (3 2 ) 11 - Gamma = = steps of 35.10 cents. (3 2 ) 20
(3 2 ) “These are not just theoretical speculations we’re talking about here”, Carlos wrote.
“The territory is virgin and ripe with gorgeous possibilities” (“Three” n. pag.). A recent article from the Nature journal supports this point. Ricardo A. Godoy et al. studied Amazonian listeners that had not been subjected to decades of Western, happy/sad tonality. According to their study, the Amazonian listeners considered conventional consonances and dissonances
“equally pleasant”, for “culture has a dominant role in shaping aesthetic responses to music”
(“Indifference” 547). This affirms a père-verse tenet of ancient, musical mystery-cults: initiation affects how one suffers/enjoys. It is indeed possible to teach future listeners to suffer/enjoy unfamiliar harmonies. Although Western, consumer-democratic norms are likely to spread further across the globe, there is nonetheless a chance that some listeners will come to appreciate non-octave tunings.216
215 Nora-Louise Müller alerted me to this fact (personal communication, 24 January 2016).
216 In 2010, 13-RD3/13-ED3 music helped lure an audience to an international symposium organised by the Boston
Goethe Institute, the Boston Microtonal Society, Northeastern University, the Berklee College of Music and the New
England Conservatory (Hajdu et al., “Starting Over” 127). There is sometimes cause for optimism.
224 Φ:1 as the period
In 1999, Bohlen invented another non-octave oddity, which he named the 833 cents scale (“Phi_7b.scl” n. pag.). Bohlen did not set out to construct a scale with Φ:1 as the period, but this is exactly what resulted from his experiment (“833 Cents Scale” n. pag.). What does Φ have to do with 833 cents? The frequency-ratio Φ:1 is approximately 1.618034, which in turn equates to 833.09 cents. The exact formula: 1200 × log2 1.618034 = 833.09 cents.
Just as the steps of conventional diatonic scales are non-equal (they are either 100.00 or
200.00 cents), so too are the steps of Bohlen’s 833 cents scale. There are seven steps in total.
Each step is one of three sizes: 99.27 cents, 131.14 cents or 136.50 cents. Bohlen summarised the scale in the table copied below (“833 Cents Scale” n. pag.).
Difference from Step Decimal-fraction Interval (cents) previous step (cents)
0 1.0000 0 N/A
1 1.0590 99.27 99.27
2 1.1459 235.77 136.50
3 1.2361 366.91 131.14
4 1.3090 466.18 99.27
5 1.4120 597.32 131.14
6 1.5279 733.82 136.50
7 1.6180 (Φ) 833.09 99.27
Since the scale’s period is Φ:1, the first repetition of the scale begins at Φ:1. The second repetition begins at Φ2:1, which, incidentally, is equal to Brouncker’s first non-octave period.
( .) 2 ≈ Φ = Φ + 1 2.6180 Like “13 Tonstufen in der Duodezime”, Bohlen’s text, “An 833 Cents Scale”, involved a study of combination tones. “Not every music theorist agrees that combination tones play a major role when it comes to defining harmony”, Bohlen acknowledged; but “some do”. For the sake of his experiment, Bohlen assumed that the latter theorists are correct (“833 Cents Scale”
225 n. pag.). Ironically, the construction of this particular non-octave-repeating scale began with
Bohlen playing two sine tones at 1:1 and 2:1, via which, one perceives combination tones. The closest combination tone appears at the ratio 3:2 with respect to the higher tone, 2:1. If one plays two sine tones at 1:1 and 3:2, a summation tone appears at 5:3 with respect to the higher tone, 3:2. Bohlen continued this game and produced the table below.
Base interval New interval (ratio) New interval (cents)
2:1 3:2 701.96
3:2 5:3 884.36
5:3 8:5 813.69
8:5 13:8 840.53
13:8 21:13 830.25
21:13 34:21 834.17
34:21 55:34 832.68
55:34 89:55 833.25
89:55 144:89 833.03
144:89 233:144 833.11
Bohlen realised that the new intervals “converge to a value close to 833 cents”. At the interval 144:89, measured at 833.11 cents, the summation tone appears at a distance of 833 cents from the higher tone, and the difference tone appears at a distance of 833 cents from the lower tone. Because 833 cents appeared repeatedly in Bohlen’s experiment, he decided to make the exact value of 833.09 cents the period for a new scale featuring seven, pragmatic steps. Only later, once he had finished constructing the scale, did Bohlen realise that he “had hit upon the
Fibonacci Sequence” and Φ:1 (“833 Cents Scale” n. pag.).
Between 1960 and 1977, theorists such as John Chowning, Walter O’Connell and Lorne
Temes each devised systems and/or scales with Φ:1 as the period (Chalmers, “Notes” 1-2).217
O’Connell, like Bohlen, studied combination tones. He invented two Φ-based systems with equal
217 Chowning’s system divides Φ:1 in to nine equal steps of 92.57 cents (“Fifty” 6-7). Ján Haluška incorrectly referred to
Chowning’s system as nine equal divisions of instead of Φ:1 (Mathematical 8).
π:1 226 steps. For the first system, he divided Φ:1 in to twenty-five steps of 33.32 cents; for the second system, he divided Φ:1 in to eighteen steps of 46.28 cents (“Tonality” 6-8, 16). Bohlen’s 833 cents scale is incidentally close to seven particular notes extracted from O’Connell’s 25-EDΦ, as shown below (in cents).
- Seven steps from 25-EDΦ: 99.97, 233.27, 366.56, 466.53, 599.83, 733.12 and 833.09.
- Bohlen’s 833 cents scale: 99.27, 235.77, 366.91, 466.18, 597.32, 733.82 and 833.09.
The greatest difference measures just 2.51 cents. Bohlen himself said that, with his Φ- based scale, he “re-invented O’Connell’s wheel” (“Re” n. pag.).
Practical suggestions
It follows that 36-ED2 (with its 33.33-cent step) can be used to approximate
O’Connell’s 25-EDΦ (with its 33.32-cent step) as well as Bohlen’s 833 cents scale. With respect to O’Connell’s 25-EDΦ, 36-ED2 introduces a maximum error of 0.24 cents; with respect to
Bohlen’s 833 cents scale, 36-ED2’s maximum error is 2.68 cents. Bohlen thus deemed 36-ED2
“suitable” (“833 Cents Scale” n. pag.). Since 36-ED2 contains all twelve notes from 12-ED2, it can also satisfy conservative composers and performers. Furthermore, since thirty-six is a composite number, it is possible to invent symmetrical modes for 36-ED2, just as Olivier
Messiaen did for 12-ED2 (Technique ch. 16). In sum, if musicians use 36-ED2, they can play established 12-ED2 repertoire (diatonic, jazz and dodecaphonic music) as well as new symmetrical modes, and they can closely approximate non-octave music derived from
O’Connell’s 25-EDΦ and/or Bohlen’s 833 cents scale.218
Alternatively, musicians could follow Melle Weijters and use a 41-ED2 guitar to play conventional diatonic scales plus each note from Bohlen’s 13-ED3. 41-ED2 has a 29.26-cent step.
Five 29.26-cent steps from 41-ED2 are equal to one 146.30-cent step from 13-ED3 (Harrop,
“Just” 191). 41-ED2 can also be used to approximate a non-octave system in which the period
3:2 is divided in to eight equal steps of 87.75 cents (Keenan, “Re: The Mighty Strange” n. pag.).
218 I have not experimented with small, 33.33-cent frets, but experienced musicians such as Neil Haverstick can play 36-
ED2 guitars.
227 As Schoenberg acknowledged, it is “senseless” to compose music for non-existent instruments
(Theory of Harmony 25-26); hence the prospect of fretted string instruments that can play both conventional music and non-octave music is fortunate. Instruments with movable frets or interchangeable fretboards are especially useful.
A less predictable future
The systems and scales discussed in this chapter – attributed to Brouncker,
Stockhausen, O’Connell, Wilson, Bohlen, Van Prooijen, Carlos and others – offer non-despairing proof that not every melody or harmonic progression has been written. Non-octave tunings affirm that, although musical works are finite and styles eventually become kitsch, Music, as an academic subject, is inexhaustible.
I did not list every non-octave system or scale; but there is plenty of material here for musicians that are willing to explore the paths stumbled upon by Brouncker and Schoenberg, with no guarantees or clear ends. I encourage further practical experiments. Perhaps, then, the reader will encounter firsthand music made from something other than semitones or quartertones that is “nonetheless harmonic” (Bohlen, “13 Tone Steps” 624; Bohlen,“13
Tonstufen” 85). Like Ben Johnston, I believe that harmonic refinement should not be neglected or abandoned (“Rational” 62). Persevere!
228 Conclusions
I cannot repent.
– Doctor Faustus (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus 2.3.18)
The post-historical, post-modern or post-patriarchal era is plagued by the ideology of consumer satisfaction, identitarianism and vain progressive protests. These things are unlikely to disappear in the near future. The same can be said for their three musical correspondents – happy/sad tonality, octave-identity and progressive genres that are explicitly anti-art or anti- composer. There is no cure for progressive mass illusions. One can simply write them off – in an esoteric, Pythagorean mode – and persevere with composition work. I principally dedicated the first section of this thesis to the poetic-sophistic figures Jacques Lacan composed during his
Panthéon period; the accompanying folio demonstrates my own composition work.
Is my thesis a sufficient response to contemporary, philosophical works such as Being and Event by Alain Badiou? No. Does it instead follow Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy by
Justin Clemens? Yes. Does it thus contribute to academic studies of religious anti-philosophy?
Yes. Does it discuss music and demonstrate a love of texts? Yes. Nietzschean philology is therefore appropriate as a secondary designation. With Lacan as the protagonist and
Nietzscheans cast in secondary roles, my thesis examined anti-philosophy’s love of mysterious, quasi-geometric figures (knots, links and music), its propensity to mock post-historical consumer satisfaction, and its refusal to promise a progressive future sans myths, religious collectives and conflict. Lacan repeatedly said that, for analytic discourse, there is no progress beyond the
Father figure – ritually parodied or ceremoniously buried – and there is no sexual harmony. I vary the theme. For proper academies of music, there is no progress beyond canonised surnames; and although there is no social or sexual harmony, there is nonetheless modern, non- octave harmonia.
Does the accompanying folio of non-octave music – stereophonic recordings plus didactic scores and videos – await recognition of mastery? No. The folio, too, is submitted as academic; or, to be more precise, it is submitted as a musick-symptom that is a bit lame
(boiteux), like the symptom of Lacan, but it is nonetheless the best thing that I have to offer
Music faculties. The folio invokes the non-octave Muses – presuming that they exist – and aims
229 to lure a small group of practitioners, namely future students of Composition. It has no affiliation with progressive kolakeia or Music Industry Studies.
The folio aside, why submit the thesis to the Queensland Conservatorium’s library?
Section One supplemented insufficient Anglophone reviews of Lacan’s work from the Panthéon period. Section Two argued in favour of discourse’s limits, contra progressivism’s excessive tolerance (broadly equated with so-called Lacanian musicology, techno-philanthropy and reception/consumption studies). Section Three aimed to clear a path for practical experiments with non-octave tunings. I want to know if others can successfully resurrect the modern, non- octave project hinted at by William Brouncker and Arnold Schoenberg. Without pretending to contribute anything to analytic discourse, the thesis covered the three Freudian, clinical structures. It discussed père-version/sublimation via Lacan’s figures, James Joyce’s literature, and non-octave harmonia; it touched on neurosis/hysteria via music’s subjection to various discourses; and it encouraged readers to laugh at the comedy of ordinary psychosis, exemplified by consumer satisfaction and self-empowerment rhetoric.
What subjects are appropriate for contemporary, non-progressive academics to study while sifting through Lacan’s seminars and texts from the Panthéon period? In 1975, Lacan spelled out four possibilities: anti-philosophy, linguistics, logic and topology (“Peut-être à
Vincennes…” 314-15). Non-analysts such as Clemens, René Guitart, Jean-Claude Milner and
Alessio Moretti have since explored these paths. I chose to study anti-philosophy, for which the mystery-Phallus (or Nietzsche’s Dionysus) is an absolute. This, in turn, led me to music, comic pathos and philology. If, in future, composition is granted relief from identitarian and techno- philanthropic rhetoric, and if the unquestioned ability to pursue harmonia – new periods, modes, consonances and dissonances – is restored to it, this will constitute bonheur. Bonheur is usually translated as ‘happiness’, but it literally means ‘good luck or fortune’. Bonheur is not the desperate happiness of consumer satisfaction; it is something better.
The thesis’s most direct contribution to academia pertains to the brilliant/beautiful.
Lacan insisted that academics are stuck speculating upon the brilliant/beautiful. Clinical analysis, by contrast, allegedly entails a loss of faith in conventional notions of the brilliant/beautiful. The analysand’s loss of faith is a singular, non-teachable experience. Analytic discourse is thus distinct from academia. Beyond lecture-centric academia and babbling
230 analysis, there is pure mathematics, which can potentially bypass speech and images so as to function via writing alone. Where is it most appropriate to situate music? Is it academic, analytic or purely mathematical? Unlike analysis, music cannot do without the brilliant/beautiful (accompanied inevitably by absurd, faux-radical stunts and common shock tactics); and unlike the singular experiences of analysands, Music theory is eminently teachable.
Can music, like pure mathematics, proceed via writing alone? Is it strictly scientific? No. The place proper to music is thus the Academy, just as the ancients proposed.
A caveat is necessary. It is impossible to say that if one follows my proposal and studies non-octave harmonia, one will become receptive to Socrates’ ideal, “the song that dialectic sings” (Plato, Republic 7.531d-532a). One could, after all, go the way of Alcibiades, Timon and
Bertran de Born.219 Academics that try to impose sentimental, philanthropic ethics upon all musicians will never succeed (Badiou, Ethics 28, 60; S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures 104).
Their project remains as doomed as Prometheus, the first philanthropos tropos. Following
Lacan, I do not believe that music and love songs are redemptive or curative. Musical harmony is a modest supplement for the absence of sexual harmony (Séminaire XX 5.53). It is incorrect to promise anything in excess of this.
Via Lacan’s seminar of 15 March 1977, one can formulate an appropriately vague definition of Music as an academic subject. Music – or any other form of sonic art – does not tell us the truth about the Real, nor is it the Real of abjection, subversion or transcendence, as progressive musicologists and avant-garde rhetoricians assert. These are common lies. Music is symboliquement imaginaire if it involves geometry; it is imaginairement symbolique or la Vérité if it involves poetic holes and Muses; and musical praxes are symboliquement réel if they involve neurotics’ anguish (L’insu que sait 9.65-66). Should academia try to ameliorate the latter via
Edward Bernays’ public relations methods? I do not believe so. If one follows Freud and Lacan, the place proper to neurotic symptoms is the analyst’s clinic. Academia – in a strict, non- progressive sense – is best confined to subjects such as Geometry, Poetry and Music Theory.
219 “Follow thy drum”, shouted Shakespeare’s Timon; “With man’s blood paint the ground” (Timon of Athens 4.3.58-
59). “Let’s to music!” screamed Pound’s Bertran. “I have no life save when swords clash” (“Sestina: Altaforte” lines 2-
3).
231 Lacan composed Father figures at the Panthéon, partly to spite progressive notions of freedom and identity. This is clear. Via non-octave harmonia and a decisive indifference to philanthropic musicologists, composers can follow Lacan’s lead without copying his practice or techniques. Heinz Bohlen’s thirteen-note system abolishes octave-identity and the happy/sad binary, for it does not include or else attempt to approximate the ratios 2:1, 5:4 and 6:5. Ervin
M. Wilson’s combination product sets – the non-octave-reduced, non-octave-repeating versions – are so alien with respect to 12-ED2 or 24-ED2, established tonal and serial composition methods are made redundant. The accompanying folio offers preliminary illustrations of Bohlen’s and
Wilson’s non-octave tunings, thanks to custom-fretted string instruments, custom-tuned keyboards and a custom-tuned guzheng.
Proper, modern harmonia cannot involve the Two of Eros or the sphere of imaginary empowerment. In this sense, musical harmony is indebted to Lacanian doctrine. The implications for musical practice and contemporary academia are not easily understood; but they are not subtle, either. There are no direct links or stable, inter-disciplinary bridges between analytic discourse and Music faculties; but if composers and musicologists orient themselves towards the Viennese couple Freud/Schoenberg and the Parisian couple Lacan/Messiaen, they will remain true to modern material and novel formalisations. This is, I believe, the best possible response to the end of History.
As a composer, I produced a folio of non-octave music. As a musicologist, I annotated
Lacan’s discourse-schemas and his schema of capitalism, and I respected the separation between discourses and père-verse/sublime figures. These are my principal contributions. If fortunate, academics will judge my work brilliant/beautiful, and I will be named Doctor.
232 Appendix: Cuts to the cross-capped sphere
In a text dated 14 July 1972, Lacan said that analytic discourse operates on something peculiar: a sphere with one cross-cap. The cross-capped sphere was, according to Lacan, the figure proper to academic discourse. What this means, presumably, is that analysis operates on people that have attended university, acquired its conventional opinions and are miserable.
Lacan defined something – anything – that can possibly be said as a closed, spherical cut.
(Recall the well-known phrase, cutting speech.) What is said necessarily refers to something that exists – a signified that is assumed via conventional interpretation but not spoken. Lacan’s formula for all that is possibly said is: x Φx. The formula for the necessary signified is: x Φx.
Because the signified exists separately from⋅ the said, it implies that there is something Other⋅ ∀ ∃ than the sphere. If there is indeed something Other than the sphere, then the sphere does not include everything: it is thus not a proper sphere. The spherical cut that makes the signified exist, according to Lacan’s argument, provides evidence not of la sphère but l’asphère, ‘the non- sphere’ (“L’étourdit” 458, 471).
Fig. 33. A sphere with one cross-cap (Richeson, Euler’s Gem 172).
The image above helps explain Lacan’s so-called spherical cut. The two spheres with holes in them are technically disks. For simplicity’s sake, take the thing detached from the disk on the left to be the Möbius strip and the thing detached from the disk in the middle to be the cross-cap. The spherical cut is what separates the cross-cap from the disk. The cut itself looks like a circle. Lacan wanted analytic interpretation to go beyond the spherical cut, beyond academia’s conventional opinions, so he devised la coupure à double boucle, ‘the double-buckle cut’. If one looks at the top of the cross-cap, one can see a line that resembles a figure-eight.
This line effectively traces Lacan’s double-bucket cut (L’identification 17.123-35; “L’étourdit”
485).
233 What is the difference between the spherical cut and the double-buckle cut? The former produces the cross-cap plus a standard, 3-embeddable disk; the latter produces the Möbius strip with a discarded abstract disk. What is the difference between the Möbius strip and the cross- cap? Both are non-orientable 2-manifolds with a boundary. The cross-cap is 4-embeddable, whereas the Möbius strip is 3-embeddable. This means that, when embedded in three- dimensional space, the cross-cap has a self-intersecting line, whereas the Möbius strip does not.
Lacan’s double-buckle cut is therefore impossible to perform in three-dimensional space.220 The double-buckle cut is, in my opinion, another of Lacan’s rhetorical devices. It is poetic-sophistic.
The 3-embeddable disk made by the spherical cut is Lacan’s image of orthodoxy
(reinforced, re-circulated opinion); the abstract disk is the peculiar cause of desire (“L’étourdit”
485). The Möbius strip produced by the double-buckle cut is the analysand subjected to clinical analysis; the discarded abstract disk is the object of the phantasy (Nasio, “Objet a” 107-08).
Why did Lacan play such a strange game of cuts? He followed Freud, who tried to model analysis on “surgical intervention” (“Psychotherapy of Hysteria” 305). Echoing Freud, Lacan once remarked how great it would be to raise analysis to the dignity of surgery (Le moment de conclure 10.53).
Making light of academia, Lacan noted the resemblance between the cross-cap and the bishop’s mitre (“L’étourdit” 461) – another reference to faith. Lacan also mentioned the cross- cap and the Möbius strip in “Radiophonie” (418) – a major text from the Panthéon period – and in a footnote to “D’une question préliminaire à tout traitement possible de la psychose”
(553). In “Radiophonie” and the first chapter of Séminaire XVIII, Lacan proposed an early, primitive version of his double-buckle cut. Drawing on the Möbius strip, he attempted to re- figure the relationship between mastery and analysis. The Möbius strip is technically non- orientable. It only has one side; there is no recto or verso. For analysts, however, if one makes a cut (presumably down the middle of the strip), this puts in to question the recto and the verso, the conscious and the unconscious, the signified and the signifier, the Imaginary and the
Symbolic (Leupin, Lacan Today 20; Fierens, Lecture de L’étourdit 103). Lacan referred to this
220 For a detailed explanation, see the three chapters on the cross-cap from Tadao Ito’s Hyperbolic Non-Euclidean World and Figure-8 Knot.
234 particular cut as la double inscription or la coupure interprétative (“Radiophonie” 418;
Séminaire XVIII 1.9).
Outside analytic discourse, this material is nonsensical. A cut down the middle of a
Möbius strip does not transform it from one-sided to two-sided, nor does it change it from non- orientable to orientable. The cut merely doubles the length of the Möbius strip’s circular boundary (Chang, Paradoxes 37). This is the only mathematical meaning that can be attributed to Lacan’s coupure interprétative. Again, I am obliged to point out the obvious: Lacan’s field was not science.
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---. “Allocution sur l’enseignement.” 1970. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil,
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---. “Analyticon.” 1969. Le séminaire, Livre XVII, L’envers de la psychanalyse, 1969-1970. Ed.
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---. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2001. Print.
---. “Avis au lecteur japonais.” 1972. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2001:
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---. “Clôture des Journées de l’École freudienne de Paris, Les mathèmes de la psychanalyse.”
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---. “Conférences et entretiens dans des universités nord-américaines.” 1975. Scilicet 6/7 (1976):
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264 ---. “De l’incompréhension, et autres thèmes.” 1971. Je parle aux murs, Entretiens de la chapelle
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---. “Discours de Rome.” 1953. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2001: 133-
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---. “Discours de Tokyo, 21 avril 1971.” École lacanienne de psychanalyse, 12 Dec. 2013. Web. 1
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---. “Du discours psychanalytique.” 1972. Lacan in Italia/En Italie Lacan, 1953-1978. Ed.
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---. “D’une question préliminaire à tout traitement possible de la psychose.” 1958. Écrits. Paris:
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---. “D’une réforme dans son trou.” 1969. École lacanienne de psychanalyse, 12 Dec. 2013. Web.
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it was not published. I have cited the original typescript’s page numbers.]
---. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Print.
---. Encore, 1972-1973. Comp. Alain Lecat. Staferla, 27 Dec. 2012. Web. 5 Oct. 2015.
---. “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse.” 1953. Écrits. Paris: Seuil,
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---. “Freud per sempre.” 21 Nov. 1974. Interview by Emilia Granzotto. École lacanienne de
psychanalyse, 12 Dec. 2013. Web. 14 Oct. 2015.
---. “Intervention suite, Conclusions des groupes de travail.” 1973. Lettres de l’École 15 (1975):
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265 ---. “Intervention sur l’exposé de Ph. Rappart.” 1970. Lettres de l’École 8 (1971): 2-10. Print.
[Talk dated 17 April 1970.]
---. “Introduction à l’édition allemande d’un premier volume des Écrits.” 1973. Autres écrits.
Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2001: 553-59. Print.
---. “Introduction de Scilicet au titre de la revue de l’École freudienne de Paris.” 1968. Autres
écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2001: 283-92. Print.
---. “Je parle aux murs.” 1972. Je parle aux murs, Entretiens de la Chapelle de Sainte-Anne.
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---. “Jeunesse de Gide ou la lettre et le désir.” 1958. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966: 739-64. Print.
---. “Joyce le symptôme I.” 1975. Comp. Eric Laurent and Jacques-Alain Miller. Joyce avec
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---. “Joyce le symptôme II.” 1979. Joyce avec Lacan. Ed. Jacques Aubert. Paris: Navarin, 1987:
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---. “Kant avec Sade.” 1962. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966: 765-90. Print.
---. “Lacan pour Vincennes!” 1978. Ornicar? 17/18 (1979): 278. Print.
---. “La chose freudienne, ou Sens du retour à Freud en psychanalyse.” 1955. Écrits. Paris: Seuil,
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---. La logique du fantasme, 1966-1967. Comp. Alain Lecat. Staferla, 7 Aug. 2013. Web. 14 Oct.
2015.
---. “La signification du phallus.” 1958. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966: 685-95. Print.
266 ---. “La troisième.” 1974. Lettres de l’École 16 (1975): 178-203. Print. [Talk dated 1 November
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---. “Le malentendu.” 1980. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Ornicar? 22/23 (1981): 11-14. Print.
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---. Le moment de conclure, 1977-1978. Comp. Alain Lecat. Staferla, 23 May 2013. Web. 1 Oct.
2015.
---. “Le séminaire de Caracas.” 1980. Almanach de la dissolution. Ed. Nicolas Francion. Paris:
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---. Le séminaire, Livre I, Les écrits techniques de Freud, 1953-1954. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
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---. Le séminaire, Livre II, Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la
psychanalyse, 1954-1955. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1978. Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre III, Les psychoses, 1955-1956. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil,
1981. Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre IV, La relation d’objet, 1956-1957. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris:
Seuil, 1994. Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre VII, L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959-1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
Paris: Seuil, 1986. Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre VIII, Le transfert, 1960-1961. 2nd ed. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris:
Seuil, 2001. Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre X, L’angoisse, 1962-1963. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2004.
Print.
267 ---. Le séminaire, Livre XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 1964. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968-1969. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris:
Seuil, 2006. Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre XVII, L’envers de la psychanalyse, 1969-1970. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
Paris: Seuil, 1991. Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971. Ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2006. Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre XIX, … ou pire, 1971-1972. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2011.
Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre XX, Encore, 1972-1973. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Print.
---. Le séminaire, Livre XXIII, Le sinthome, 1975-1976. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil,
2005. Print.
---. Les non-dupes errent, 1973-1974. Comp. Alain Lecat. Staferla, 5 July 2013. Web. 22 June
2015.
---. “Le symbolique, l’imaginaire et le réel.” 1953. Des Noms-du-Père. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
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---. “L’étourdit.” 1972. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2001: 449-95. Print.
---. “Le triomphe de la religion.” 1974. Le triomphe de la religion. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
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268 ---. “Lettre au journal Le Monde.” Ornicar? 20/21 (1980): 13. Print. [Letter dated 24 January
1980.]
---. “Lettre de dissolution.” 1980. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2001:
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---. L’identification, 1961-1962. Comp. Alain Lecat. Staferla, 30 Nov. 2013. Web. 14 Oct. 2015.
---. “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud.” 1957. Écrits. Paris:
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---. L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre, 1976-1977. Comp. Alain Lecat. Staferla, 26
June 2013. Web. 7 May 2015.
---. “Lituraterre.” 1971. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2001: 11-20. Print.
---. L’objet de la psychanalyse, 1965-1966. Comp. Alain Lecat. Staferla, 16 Aug. 2013. Web. 14
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---. “Monsieur A.” Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Ornicar? 21/22 (1980): 17-20. Print. [Seminar
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---. “Note italienne.” 1973. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris, Seuil: 2001: 307-11.
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---. “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever.” The
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269 ---. “Ouverture de la section clinique.” Ornicar? 9 (1977): 7-14. Print. [Talk dated 5 January
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---. “Peut-être à Vincennes….” 1975. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2001:
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---. “Postface au Séminaire XI.” 1973. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil,
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---. “Préface à l’édition anglaise du Séminaire XI.” 1976. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain
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---. “Préface à une thèse.” 1969. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris, Seuil: 2001: 393-
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---. Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 1964-1965. Comp. Alain Lecat. Staferla, 27 Aug.
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---. “Radiophonie.” 1970. Autres écrits. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2001: 403-47.
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---. “Réponses de Jacques Lacan à des questions sur les nœuds et l’inconscient.” 1976. Lettres de
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