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Love thy Neighbour? The Political Economy of Musical Neighbours | ||
Ian
Biddle Newcastle University |
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This
is a resolutely urban story, and one unthinkable (at least with this
intensity) before the advent of recording technology: music, noise,
thumping bass, bang bang bang, through the wall, through the ceiling,
through the floor; it’s late and that noise keeps coming, keeps
pressing in, keeps on and on, a never ending thumping, banging, dum
dum dum. It’s also a familiar story: the neighbour keeps different
hours, disturbs your sleep with revelry, plays music ‘at all hours’;
and the headlines run along familiar lines – neighbours from hell,
selfish neighbours, ‘15 years of torment’, my neighbour
ate my hamster. Chuck Palahniuk’s characterisation of what might
be termed the neighbourly ‘relation in sound’ in his short
novel, Lullaby (2002), is interesting not just for its intensity,
its hyperbolic elaboration of a problem anyone living in cities will
have encountered, but also for its commitment to consistent and sustained
examination of that relation: the neighbour is noisy, the neighbour
is malign, the neighbour is always plural, a horde. The tabloid press,
of course, feeds on the scenario that torments us most; like Palahniuk,
they are attracted to the extreme cases of neighbour dispute, especially
around noise, because these stories tap into a fear at the core of the
urban imagination of developed capitalist societies, a fear both of
isolation, and of vulnerability to the malevolence of the other. And
when that other walks among us, when s/he is no longer efficiently marked
out as different to us, then we are doubly anxious, doubly nervous about
the deadly potential of the neighbour, since that potential is written
into every face, lurks round every corner. |
1 | |
When
someone enters into dispute with his or her neighbour, moreover, that
dispute can often centre on a perceived incursion or interference. This
can manifest itself in the perception that the boundaries of privacy
have been breached by the other, that the membrane of property has been
‘pierced’, as it were; the dispute can also focus on a perceived
blocking of access to the home, an impeding of the functionality of
that home, a disturbance of its serene autonomy. Neighbourly complaints
range from simple disputes over boundaries, or over unwanted littering,
to more complex disputes, which arise as symptoms of underlying hostilities,
often grounded on a generalised anxiety about sovereignty and the threat
the neighbour represents to that putative sovereignty. In this context,
what noise can do, especially in this age of phonographic disembodiment,
is intervene, make its presence felt without trespass, and it thereby
manifests itself as a kind of seeping or a surreptitious piercing
of the membrane of sovereignty, a membrane we have come, in societies
like the UK, to value so highly. Noise presents itself, therefore, as
a symptom of contagion; it pierces the membrane in ways that
are more difficult to manage, organise, police and, therefore, prevent.
The pragmatics of the situation are quite complex and the hostile encounter
with the noisy neighbour inevitably raises some key questions as to
the scope and nature of sovereignty. Until when, for example, is it
acceptable to play music, how late into the night can a party run, what
are the ethical responsibilities of the neighbourly relation?
In this article I do not want to attempt to answer these questions directly,
since, as we shall see, they are radically undecidable, but I want,
instead, to examine the means by which that undecidability is held in
place, and to get to grips with the ideological frames that nourish
it. |
2 | |
From
Freud’s irritated contemplation in Civilization and its Discontents
on just what the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’ in Leviticus
19:18 is trying to get at, to the marking of the neighbour as the
coveter of his neighbour’s wife; from the ‘neighbours from
hell’ that adorn our tabloids and television screens, and haunt
our collective imaginary, to nightly encounters with semi-anonymous
but malign noise (that ‘siege’ that Palahniuk speaks of),
the figure of the neighbour, then, is rapidly becoming (if it has not
already become) one of danger, marking the potential malevolence of
dense living, of a community too close to our sovereignty. And it is
precisely at this interface of community and sovereignty, at the imaginary
line that separates ‘them’ from ‘me’, that the
story of the noisy neighbour can be told. It is with this sense, then,
of the neighbour from/as hell (and the neighbour as border dweller),
that I will have to think in this article about property in particular
and how it shapes our attitudes to noise, and about the culturally-shared
anxieties that noise leaves in its wake, what it tells us in developed
capitalist societies about late modern constructions of sovereignty,
autonomy and the im/possibility of conjoining silence and privacy.
I will also have to hold off drawing any neat or stable distinctions
between ‘noise’ and ‘music’ since, as we shall
see, such distinctions too become (even more) radically undecidable
in the neighbourly encounter. |
3 | |
Levinas on neighbours | ||
Emmanuel
Levinas’s imagination of an ethics of the neighbour, le prochain,
and its significance for his understanding of our responsibilities to
what he terms the Other (sometimes with an initial uppercase, sometimes
lowercase) is striking in its candid commitment to a debunking of any
chronology of origins, beginnings or starting points: ‘The neighbour
as other’, he says, ‘does not allow itself to be preceded
by any precursor who would depict or announce its silhouette. It does
not appear.'[2] I am struck here also by Levinas’s commitment
to the ambivalence of the neighbour in the context of an ethics of the
Other, and its disavowal of foreclosures of any kind: the neighbour
stands as that which can never appear as such, and is always
already instrumentalised, always already put to work, even before that
first encounter. It is, to transform a term from Hegel, always ‘for-the-other’,
always already implicated in a relation. |
4 | |
In
a short meditation on philosophy, justice and love, Levinas interviews
himself on the specifics of the neighbour and asks: ‘would the
experience of the death of the other, and in a sense, the experience
of death itself, be alien to the ethical reception of one’s neighbour?’[3] The question is not a simple one, and reaches
to the core of the Levinasian project of an ethics of the other, in
that it seeks to understand the limits of the ethical relation, seeks
to question how those limits can be spoken and what death brings to
that relation as the most extreme, the most extraordinary test of that
relation. His response is built around the figure of the Face,
which Levinas identifies as a site of encounter, the place where the
ethical relation par excellence is enacted: |
5 | |
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This
‘calling out’, which disturbs the visual relation of the
Face, suggests something fundamental in the encounter with the ethical
relation that is resolutely connected to sound, to a hailing, and to
the sense of hearing – in ‘hearing’ that call one
recognises one’s responsibility to the Other. This ethical relation,
then, is connected to the neighbour, which stands as an approximate
instrumentalised figure of that relation, and to sound, that which calls
us into the relation. And, just as Lacan took up Sartre’s notion
of ‘the gaze’ as structurally intervening in the relation
with the Other and as in some sense substitutable in the invocatory
drive with the voice (as its equivalent in that drive), so Levinas takes
up the figure of the Face of the neighbour as a similarly structural
tipping point and similarly exchangeable with the sonic dimension of
calling. Is it the Face or the call that occasions our ushering into
the ethical relation? Hence, we might see in Levinas’s ethics
of the neighbour a symptom, to use Lacan’s term, of a particular
qualitative juncture in the history of neighbours and neighbourhoods:
the neighbour has come to stand, at least for Levinas, as a key problematic,
a key site of contestation where responsibility to the Other and violence
against him or her might go hand in hand. And this imagination of the
neighbour is resolutely connected also to late modernity, to a particular
moment in the longue durée of modernity at which
what Michael Wolf has termed the ‘architecture of density’
has come to dominate the ethical landscape.[5] Neighbours, far from being the site of a guarantee
of communal support or succour, have become the porous membrane between
that guarantee and the threat of violence; neighbours speak to us now,
it would seem, of a devastating ethical ambiguity. |
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The noise of the other | ||
If
we recognise in Levinas’s notion of a calling more than just a
figurative fancy, we are called thereby to recognise something profound
about the ethical relation with the neighbour that goes beyond the visual
dimension of the encounter. Alongside this Levinasian ethics of the
Face of the neighbour, then, there is a need for some engagement with
what might be termed the noise of the other since the experience
of dense living brings with it in particular the key problematic of
sound disturbance, of the incessant violent eruption of the noise of
the other into the peace of the self: ‘calling’, as Levinas
seeks to name it, is fundamentally about being turned by
sound. If we are to understand the relation of the neighbour
and its articulation of a new ethics of the late modern, we need to
get to grips precisely with this sound and this noise, and to work out
the coordinates of the ideological frame in which the noise-music relation
is played out. The face, we might say, is not silent: it speaks, shouts,
sings; the neighbour, to use a term I take from Michel Chion, is an
acousmêtre, a being in and of sound.[6] Indeed, for Kafka, one of the most eloquent witnesses
to the psychic burden of modernity, that malign acousmêtre
raises the question as to the possibility of living with the other,
since his noises and his silence mark an intent Kafka
cannot fathom: |
6 | |
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The
neighbour listens, wants something, but that desire is never knowable.
The notion of the neighbour as instrumentalised or implicated in this
manner, as always already placed in the position of an unfathomable
desire, will form the starting point for our exploration of the musical
neighbour. |
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I
begin, in confessional mode, with an admission, which is connected to
the key thematic of this article, and not too distant from the Kafkaesque
imagination of the neighbourly relation. I don’t like my neighbour,
or his music. This dislike is always complicated for me by a certain
unease or guilt, not least because I was raised, like many British suburban
children of the 1960s, with a sense that one ought at least to try
to like one’s neighbour(s) and that, in a very real sense, failure
to like or connect with one’s neighbours inevitably constitutes
a failure borne not by the neighbour, but by me. Following Lacan,
we might articulate this logic (encapsulated in the ought of
the moral order of the master signifier) as a logic of neurosis, a logic
in which the subject constructs for her- or himself a foundational fantasy
of the whole, integrated self (the ‘imago’) against which
s/he can never quite measure up, thereby operating under a highly sensitised
questioning of the nature of being. Neurosis, a generalised condition,
was resolutely connected by Freud to modernity, to the malady, in particular,
of urban existence – alienation and social decay. The dislike
for my neighbour, then, would be figured within this logic of neurosis
as a symptom of a failure, but one, after Freud, which is nonetheless
located, historically limited and held at the level of community consciousness:
the guilt of that ‘failure’ is shared, and has become generalised,
normative. For Lacan, the question as to whether or not I should recognise
in my neighbour one who shares and guards with me the resources of my
community – one who contributes to its character, one who rubs
shoulders with me every day on the bus, who wanders along the same road
as I do, who shops in the same shops, who I must learn to live with
– would constitute an elaborated form of the neurotic question,
the ‘question that being poses for the subject’.[8] The duty to love the neighbour, encapsulated
most notably in the late modern reading of Leviticus’s
‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, is a duty born out of the
neurotic question of the relation to the Other (a condition shared by
the obsessive, the hysteric and the phobic, all categories of neurosis),
and the neighbour comes to stand in for precisely that question. |
7 | |
This
feeling of the ‘duty’ or imperative to co-exist happily
and in peace with my neighbour(s), constituted around the neurotic question
(of being), is complicated in the particular instance of the neighbour
whom I do not like by my own extraordinary sensitivity to noise (not
uncommon, of course, amongst musicologists): if, under the neurotic
imperative, I am to try to embrace the condition of possibilities represented
by the neighbour whilst nonetheless always failing, then what am I to
make of his noise, his music, his incessant and obsessive replaying
of a small and intensely circumscribed field of musical objects? It
is as if he were performing back at me the potentiality of my own neurosis
(and of course this appearing as if performing neurosis back is itself
a symptom of neurotic projection): repetitive behaviour, commitment
to the performance of his gender, fear of silence (obsessive, hysteric,
phobic). It is his noise that for me has come to define him, his interference,
his persistence, his unwelcome insistence not just on being, but on
being heard.[9] For me, he has become, to put it again in terms
that Lacan would have used, a symptom, or, to figure it in terms Levinas
would no doubt use, his noise is the point at which the neighbour’s
face also speaks, in the manner outlined above, of a danger, the potential
violence of/against the other brought by a malign acousmêtre. |
8 | |
This
micro-communal drama is more elaborate than it might first seem since
my noisy neighbour is not my only neighbour: I have, indeed, other neighbours,
and three of them live above me; they are all students and I must confess
(since we are still in confessional mode) to having been a very bad
neighbour to them. Impatient, bad-tempered, ever neurotic in my need
for silence, I have regularly banged on the ceiling with a broom handle
at the slightest hint of their playing music. At times I confess to
having been so unreasonable in my demands for silence that we have fallen
out: about that I have felt guilty and indignant in equal measure; despite
the fact that they always try to meet my demands, I never know what
it is that they want of me. As Lacan would put it, che vuoi?
What is it the Other wants? And, as with all common-or-garden neurotics,
the unknown (and unknowable) desire of the Other is a constant source
of anxiety that occasions the neurotic question of being at its most
intense. |
9 | |
In
addition to these neighbours, there is also another other group, the
third group, the silent family at number 85. They are my neighbours
at a distance, quiet, unmoved, radically dislocated from the rest of
us. They ignore me, but they talk about me; I know they do; I can see
them doing it though my window: they point and look in at my window
and then look away again. What are they plotting? I call them the
others (lower case o). They feed my requisite paranoia, surreptitiously
linked by Freud to agoraphobia and claustrophobia [Platzangst],
neurosis and other forms of what he terms ‘nervous disorder’.
The feeling of being watched, not uncommon to the modern imaginary,
is also to be connected, it seems to me, to the feeling of being under
aural surveillance, of feeling that one’s own noise might be cause
of the flawed ethical relation that frames the dysfunction of my relation
with my other neighbours: is the silence of these neighbours not a sign
of their potential to abandon me, as Levinas would put it, to the most
awful bareness, a violence by neglect? Here, it is their silence that
speaks (or, rather, does not speak) of my vulnerability to hurt. The
ethical relation of the Face falls down also precisely when the Face
does not speak, when it is silent. |
10 | |
In
all cases the political economy of my micro community is written around
sound and I raise my experience here not simply to unburden myself,
but also to try to address that ubiquitous complaint of late modernity
at the incursion of the other’s noise: the other is noisy, s/he
speaks too much and s/he imposes her- or himself without leave, without
need and with malice; or worse, sometimes s/he does not speak enough,
s/he is too quiet, sinister, too sovereign. The neighbour
seems to speak to us of our own intolerance and of the impossibility
of living with the other, of living with the noise or silence of the
other. The neighbour is often,
it seems, a certain kind of failure, a testament to the unbearable empirical
complexity of social interaction at its most complex and a symptom of
the impossibility of the sonic relation in particular. |
11 | |
Noise out into the community and back again |
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The
characteristics of the various complaints about the noise of the other
are dependent on the specifics of community: on the localised social
and economic dynamics that give a community its character and determine
its perceived susceptibility to the pressure of the other; on the localisation
of this other (inside or out); and on the extent to which the community
has been able to construct what might be termed a ‘community norm’.
In the UK, for example, in so-called ‘middle-class’ communities
(a term which, in the UK, tends to mean the more affluent communities
that adhere to a set of values more explicitly focussed on privacy,
property and sovereignty), complaints about noise are reasonably common
and are often followed up either by local council units or the police;
in other kinds of communities, where levels of complaint are low, random
complaints tend not to be followed up since the community norm would
seem to suggest that such noise levels are acceptable to that community;
there are, of course, other communities where both noise levels and
noise complaints are extremely high but where, for a number of complex
reasons (likelihood that following up a complaint will make any difference
to the neighbourhood, a sense that the neighbourhood is not worth investing
enforcement time in and so on), complaints are rarely if ever addressed.
In the |
12 | |
There
is clearly a story to be told about the relations that are cast
by the various new forms of urbanity: the local concerns of community
members about crowding, the ‘siege’ of noise and anxiety
about new incomers can be seen as symptomatic of a wider change in the
meanings of community and sovereignty which, according to this story
at least, has been under way for some time but which has recently come
into particularly intense focus, especially in those communities where
silence and privacy are held in high regard or, conversely where privacy
and safety seem to be under some kind of malign pressure. The roots
of this change, we tell ourselves, reside in the longue durée
of modernity itself, which we take to be both resolutely connected to,
and relatively autonomous from, the material conditions that seem to
have generated it: a radical reworking of the social contract and a
thorough-going recasting of the ensemble of social relations seems to
be under way, where the great achievement of the Enlightenment project,
the abstraction and universalisation of social relations to notions
such as ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’, has begun to
lose ground to more fragmented and less clearly articulable notions
of post-humanity, post-citizenship and distributedness. This situation,
although it has been somewhat overcharacterised, is grounded on a fantasy
(one that I will analyse shortly) which is no less powerful for being
‘merely’ a story: the stories we tell ourselves are fantastical
to be sure, but it is precisely the kind of fantasy work that these
stories do that will form the basis of my analysis here. |
13 | |
The
danger in any such social characterisation that lifts its head above
the parapet of the local is that it will always in some sense reduce
the local to anecdote and seek to over-symptomise the subtle texture
of micro-social encounters. To avoid the worse excesses of this tendency,
I want to turn my attention, first of all, to the roots of the modern
understanding of what I have thus far been calling the sonic relation
and to analyse the key elements of the foundational fantasy of the modern
imagination of that relation. To name the ground of that relation a
fantasy is not to seek to undermine the validity or strength of that
imagination: as anyone familiar with theories of ideology will know,
fantasies are powerful agents in the formation of collectively-held
beliefs and there are some key elements of the late modern fantasy of
the sonic relation that can be shown to work powerfully in favour of
a strong cultural critique of the political economy of sound. |
14 | |
By
drawing attention to its roots in the emergence of a certain kind of
urban space in the face of industrialisation, the late modern imagination
of the sonic relation can be seen to throw the role of contemporary
urban spaces into question. Such spaces, characterised as we know by
the highly ‘zoned’ dispersal of subjects according to class,
race and function across a range of housing types and around a number
of zoned public spaces, have become texts, resources in the feeding
of the late modern imagination by the hopeless distributedness and undecidability
of the ethical relation. The characteristic zoning that attends the
industrialised city also carefully manages the imagination of the sonic
relation: a Marxist would note that cheap housing for tenant workers
is invariably more densely built than the higher-specification housing
for the property-owners and, for that Marxist, this differentiation
would suggest that the relation among class, gender and wealth are all
carefully articulated in the late modern urban text. Even the most short-handed
social history of noise would point to the poorest communities as bearing
the highest costs of dense living. |
15 | |
As
industrialisation accelerated in the late nineteenth century, anxieties
about noise spread from the poorest neighbourhoods to more affluent
areas, and it was here, inevitably, that the urban bourgeoisie began
to develop a keen interest in the problem of noise and the relation
with the neighbour. It was here, furthermore, that the modern imagination
of the social relation of noise to property comes into particular focus.
For Theodor Lessing, founder of the Deutscher Lärmschutzverband
or German Noise Abatement Society, urban noise constituted a symptom
of the process of modernisation itself and his rage against noise, contrary
to Max Nordau who deemed those who could not stand such stimuli ‘degenerate’,
was also a rage against industrial modernity: |
16 | |
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Lessing
draws attention in particular to the enjoyment that noise constitutes
for the multitude of others that press in on him: their public performance
of their pleasures points to their falling short, as compensating for
a lack in their ‘sphere of power’. The riffraff, bestial
creatures that know no better than to fill their emptiness with the
noise of their being, are hopelessly attached to their empty bellowing
and drumbeating. Anxieties about urban noise, as Peter Rayer has shown,[11] were not limited at the last fin-de-siècle
to conservative thinkers like Lessing, but emerged with rapid urbanisation
as a shared concern (although, of course, it was the educated middle
classes that wielded much of the discourse on the matter). Noise,, especially
when understood as a marker of the new density of living, was thus linked
to a certain pressure on community resources, and to a threat, posed
by the potential of being ‘overrun’ by neighbours, to the
conjoining of privacy and silence: in the plural, neighbours come to
represent in this period of intensified industrialisation the proximity
to the horde. |
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In
this context, the neighbour, the bearer of noise, becomes the symptom
of the new sonic disposition and it falls to the neighbour therefore
to bear all the anxiety of his or her Other as one with whom we fight
for limited resources. In this, at least, late modernity is not so different
from the modernities of the last fin de siècle: indeed,
it might be possible to think of the neighbour as a, to a certain extent,
generalisable symptom of modernity itself. We might even go further
and observe that the neighbour has come to represent the limits of that
modernity; indeed, since the notion of neighbour entered modern consciousness,[12] the term ‘neighbour’ has always
been twofold – from Old High German [OHG] nāhgibūr,
nāhgibūro, it combines two parts, the first from OHG
nāh or nā (see also Gothic nehw, nehwa)
and the second, būr, a shortened form of Old English gebūr,
from the OHG gibūr, gibūro, meaning ‘dweller’,
‘farmer’, ‘landtiller’; hence neighbour is one
who dwells near by and who shares local resources (in Middle High German
[MHG] gibūr, gibūro came to mean ‘fellow-occupier
of a dwelling, farm, or village’ and thus the addition of the
prefix was an intensification of the neighbour’s ‘nigh-ness’).[13] Its original connection (even, it is thought,
in Gothic) to proximity and territory survives into the modern usage;
but what modernity (especially late modernity) has done to the term
is to imbue it with a particular kind of ambiguity that blurs the boundary
between what might be termed autonomy or sovereignty (and territory,
privacy) on the one hand and the communal/public on the other. |
17 | |
If
the neighbour has come to mark the point at which those two spheres
intersect, it also points up in particular the specific characteristics
of modernity’s inflection of (or intervention in) those spheres.
So, if ever there were a figure that could be said to have a longue
durée – to have, that is, a long and continuous presence
in the post-Reformation ‘Western’ (European, North American)
cultural imaginary – it is the figure of the neighbour. As I have
intimated already, this is a figure that has proven itself able to operate
variously as a cipher (holding together in a singular instance both
the devastating ambiguity of community and its fullest and most enticing
promise (of succour, mutuality, reciprocity)), and as a representation
both of the possibility of ethical friendship and of the probability
of hostility in equal measure. This is a figure, moreover, that has
been put to an extraordinary amount of cultural work: as marker of organic
community, as agent of early modern citizenship, avatar of emergent
democracy, as one of the coordinates of the emergence of a newly confident
bourgeoisie, marker of the putative decline of social cohesion, as a
symptom, even, of the very sickness of modernity, as ambiguity itself
– in all these articulations of the neighbour, s/he remains a
harbinger of disquiet, as, literally, the bringer of noise (the
all-too clear presence of the Other, too close) or of an unsettling
quiet (the blank emptied-out face of the other, too distant, illegible).
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18 | |
What
is striking in this longue durée, then, is not just the
extent to which the neighbour has been able to present itself as consistently
ambiguous, but also the manner in which it has been able to sustain
itself precisely at the line between friend and enemy and, in the specific
terms of this article, silence and noise. The radical undecidability
in the neighbour, its resilient ambiguity, resonates strongly with Carl
Schmidt’s articulation of the political as an arena in which: |
19 | |
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In
other words, from ‘outside’ of the ‘local’ situation
in which the subject and the neighbour are construed, the ethical differentiation
of the one from the other is radically problematised. We can demonstrate
this in the following question: in a dispute between neighbours over
noise levels, how is one to differentiate unreasonable hypersensitivity
from honourable indignation or harmful exuberance from antisocial behaviour?
In other words, who bears the position of ‘authority’ (in
the sense of a truth-bearer) in any such dispute and where is the line
between the one who listens and the one listened to? |
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Good neighbours | ||
In
this situation, of course, it should come as no surprise that the neighbour
is also a site of a particular kind of nostalgia, the other side
of the fantasy we have been sketching. Common wisdom holds that there
used to be some good neighbours and that they were always better than
now; in developed capitalist societies we are hopelessly addicted to
the nostalgic image of the good neighbour and contemporary vernacular
culture is rife with its representation: they popped in for a cuppa
and a chat, brought stews when you or your family were ill, looked after
your cat when you were away, and they were there for your children if
something bad should have befallen them when you were not there. Beyond
these everyday and comforting imaginations of the neighbour, we encounter
an underlying counter-fantasy about the Face of the other as promise
of what we might term, following Levinas again, a generalised love,
a love that embraces all without eros. And, like all fantasies, it is
put to work in order to cover over an impasse or shortfall in the texture
of reality precisely around the ethical relation. Pedro Almodóvar’s
film Volver ( |
20 | |
It
is crucial that this moment be, in some sense, believed, grasped, di |
21 | |
In
a very important sense, this ritualised moment (and the melodramatic
logic that drives the rest of the film) is faithful in turn to the logic
of neurosis outlined above in describing my encounter with my neighbours.
Lacan’s formulation of neurosis is constituted in particular in
a deliberate refusal to name as normative any notion of mental health,
and leads to a radically re-formulated conception of what is general
and what is particular in mental health and in the analytic situation;
in the neurotic logic we have identified as that grounded in the neighbourly
encounter, the undecidability is what is crucial here, and, in
particular, how one deals with this. In Raimunda’s disavowal or
refusal of such undecidability, in her ritualised displacement of it
in favour of a kind of imago-in-process (as if to say, ‘as I sing
I refuse the ambiguity of modernity’), we encounter a particular
formation of neurotic disavowal (repression) in what Lacan terms the
discourse of the hysteric: |
22 | |
Fig. 1: Lacan’s discourse of the hysteric [15] | ||
The symbols, oft-used Lacanian ‘mathemes’ in this ‘algebra’, represent the following actors: the barred subject ($); the master signifier (S1); knowledge (S2); and the objet petit a or ‘thing’ as cause of desire or as symptom (a). The four elements $, S1, S2 and a are ranged across the four positions (‘functions’) thus: | ||
Fig. 2: Lacan’s/Wajcman’s Schema for the Functions of Discourse | ||
It
is worth noting that Lacan’s diagram does not use the vertical
arrows or the caesura that I include here (following Gérard Wajcman),
but Lacan nonetheless does clearly insist on the function of the four
positions and the gap between effect (or, as Wajcman puts it,
‘production’) and truth by always beginning his description
of the four orders of discourse with the term on the lower left-hand
side of the equation. Wajcman’s additions, therefore, are useful
in that they make clear what is latent in Lacan’s formulation.
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For
Lacan, the hysteric positions itself in relation to the discourse of
the master as one who disavows it, refutes it and yet fundamentally
relies on the master signifier for its subjectification through the
question: ‘what/who am I?’[16] Hence the statement $ → S1 (the question
posed by the hysteric of the master signifier) is wrought thus: |
23 | |
Tell
me who I am? → You are what
I say.[17] |
||
And
yet this apparent subordination of the hysteric to the order of the
master signifier is itself an incitement, an acting out, a radicalisation.[18] And the key observation for Lacan is that the
discourse of the hysteric is a structural (and thus social) relation,
as a question posed to the Other; that question is specifically about
knowledge, about requiring that the (hidden) master respond with/as
knowledge to the hysteric’s demand: |
||
|
||
We
might formulate the specific instance of Raimunda’s performance
along Lacanian lines in the following manner: you (the absent master)
may say (that is, I impute this to you) that community is a construction,
a ritual, and that my friends and neighbours are not really operating
with my best interests in mind, that the memories of my past are fragmented
and unreliable, and that the condition of modernity is such that I am
doomed to mourn the loss of the ideal organic community and the ideal
family; but how am I to live like that, who am I in all
this? So, to elicit your (S1’s) response to my question, I continue
to operate (as a ritualised disavowal) a recuperative authenticity,
a musicking, an acting out. For Lacan, moreover, this performative
authenticity would be understood precisely as inconsistent since
the hysteric always knows that attempts at suspending the Real (in the
ritual of remembering) are just rituals – sutures – and
that the hysterical eliciting of the hidden master is doomed to get
stuck in that ritual whilst always already cognisant of ritual’s
emptiness: is this all there is? Is this all that I am? |
||
It
is interesting to note also that the song from Morente’s album
was edited for the film: indeed, had the whole track from Morente’s
album been performed in the film, we might have been able to suggest
that Raimunda is trying to address the implied hysteric question of
the song (of the film, even: ‘¿Te acuerdas quien soy?’,
‘do you remember who I am?’) to someone, but the
full pronomial naming of the Other (the master signifier, ‘tu’,
S1) in the performance of the song in the film is never quite fully
delivered. In the full song, a potential unveiling is achieved in the
first verse (and then only obliquely) with ‘tuya’, ‘tuyo’
(‘yours’): ‘En la quieta calle donde el eco dijo/
“tuya es su vida, tuyo es su querer”’; but since only
the second verse is sung , even that oblique reference is not
available to us.[20] Nonetheless, at one point in the chorus (which
is sung in the film, towards the end of the scene), the pronoun
‘te’ (accusative second person singular, but here used,
I suggest, as the colloquial impersonal pronoun, not unlike English
‘you’ when referring to ‘one’ or an unspecified
addressee) is used: ‘que febril la mirada / errante en las sombras
/ te busca y te nombra’ [‘the feverish gaze wandering in
the shadows searches for you and names you’]. The ‘te’
which is searched for and named can thus be attached to any number of
agents (the singer herself, Raimunda’s secondary performance,
the listener, identifying with the singer/performer or some other person
or agent [the Other (S1) as master signifier in the discourse of the
hysteric]). This undecidability in the song’s address operates
as a kind of remnant of the hysteric’s self-knowledge, the marker
or symptom of the hysteric’s (repressed) knowledge of the impossibility
of the question, ‘who am I for you, a man or a woman?’.
|
24 | |
In
the context of the trauma which is delivered at the end of the film
(we learn eventually that Raimunda had herself been abused by her own
father), the question of gender is raised with an extraordinary
intensity. The song is what might be termed a canción aflamencado
(or ‘song adapted to the style of flamenco’) and is
a reworking of Carlos Gardel’s tango original of 1935. From Estrella
Morente’s 2006 album Mujeres (‘Women’), the
song is one of a number of tributes to women on the album. ‘Volver’
is named as a tribute to Penelope Cruz herself (and is the only song
not dedicated to a singer), and the intense identification that Cruz’s
spectacular lip-synching seems to perform (down to the tiniest details
of mimicking vibrato, phrasing, gestures etc.) is returned by
Morente in the dedication to Cruz: this is, then, a mutual homage,
wresting the song from its masculine authorship and placing it firmly
within the feminine domain of mutuality and friendship. This also intensifies
our hermeneutic grip on Almodóvar’s figuration of the feminine
space as a site of self-avowedly idealised ethics, of mourning and a
place where the hysteric’s discourse operates as a structural
frame: what is it to be woman? |
25 | |
One
striking difference in this version from the Gardel original is its
use of the flamenco palo [genre] rhythm or compás
of the bulerías al golpe with its characteristic ‘emphasis’
on the first beat of each 6-beat cycle (the golpe), given here
as the palmas (clapped rhythm) that start the song: |
26 | |
This
shift into 6, from the tango original in 4, makes the song seem airier,
leaving longer gaps between each line of the verses and ensuring that
the emotional structure of this scene is elongated. Hence, a characteristic
of this version is its slower, more meditative delivery, and, as a result,
the arrival of the chorus, ‘Volver / Con la frente marchita /
Las nieves del tiempo / platearon mi sien’ (literally ‘Returning,
with a wrinkled forehead / the snows of time / have silvered my temple’),
with its move to the tonic major, does not have the sense of a ‘gear
change’ or sudden quickening of the harmonic rhythm we experience
in the Gardel original: here the move to the tonic major feels like
a broadening or brightening of the harmonic landscape and the chorus
thus functions in this version more as a meditative centrepiece than
as the ‘hook’ of the original. |
||
I
have already suggested that mourning is the key here and, according
to Freud, the work of mourning must be differentiated from melancholy,
which for him always marks a failure, a ‘getting stuck’
as it were, in which an open wound is held open: ‘The complex
of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic
energies [...] from all directions and emptying the ego until it is
totally impoverished.’[21] And cathexis is precisely this getting stuck,
attaching oneself to an object, and to the oral or anal stages. In avoiding
this getting stuck and emptying out, then (the open wound is a breaking
of the surface, but is not a depth, and is thus an intensification of
surface), the mourner must operate according to a logic of slow and
careful detachment from the lost object. In that ‘work’,
Freud (especially in ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923)), also
recognises an importing of melancholy itself, and an elegiac recasting
of the ego as constituted fundamentally in endless mourning. Hence,
as a symptom of Freud’s imagination of modernity, the elegiac
ego attaches itself to rituals of remembering, never fully detaching
itself from the lost object. Such an ego, for Lacan, places itself in
a relation with the master signifier that refuses both its own instrumentalisation
and that of the other; it refuses, as it were, the exacerbation of the
surface (the wound) and engages mourning work – the hysteric
works through the trauma of modernity despite knowing at some level
that that trauma is without end or cause and that the lost object will
forever work its magic. |
27 | |
Raimunda
poses the question in her performance with a calling to remember: she
cannot bear the thought of the violence of neglect; her song is a calling,
a hailing, a drawing of the listener into the ideal relation of the
lost community and the lost family – let us remember together.
This hysteric’s relation to her neighbours is a relation structured
around the question of being, addressed to an absent (incomprehensible,
hopelessly distributed) master who stands for knowledge-giving –
how can it be that we must suffer this indignity and how is it that
you (S1) do not answer? You are responsible and yet you do not show
yourself! As an address to modernity, the hysteric’s question
becomes the modern subject’s question par excellence, the
‘splendid child’ of psychoanalysis, as Juan-David Nasio
puts it (after Freud).[22] The desire to know in Lacan is always already
hysterical and the ritual of remembering enacted in song is a ritual
that is also a kind of productive mourning work, a way of imagining
the ideal ethical relation of neighbour to neighbour, of trying to capture
Levinas’s Face, fading, fading, a worked-on cathexis at the core
of the elegiac ego. |
28 | |
Freud and the im/possibility of neighbour-love |
||
The
desire to know the neighbour, then, as the ultimate marker of the hysteric’s
discourse, is also (or, perhaps better, leads to) the desire for knowledge
in general. In other words, this relation, as we have seen, is
a structural one. In order to examine the consequences of thinking of
song as a ritual of remembering (and thus also a kind of forgetting),
I want to take the story back now to the famous injunction to ‘Love
thy neighbour as thyself’ in Leviticus or, to be specific,
to perhaps the most elegant of modernity’s responses to that ‘ancient
knowledge’ of the neighbour, casting modernity itself in the role
of the hysteric, as it were. In a short but remarkable passage towards
the end of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud responds in
di |
29 | |
|
||
The
incomprehension, then, is symptomatic precisely of that question of
being we have come to call hysteric. Indeed, for Lacan it is precisely
this incomprehension, this splitting off of the ethical from the ideological
in exasperation at the impossibility of getting an answer from the hidden
and silent master, that drives the late Freud, that brings him into
an encounter again and again with the predicament of modernity which
he recognises in the figure of the bad neighbour: a threatening, deadly
Other, the spineless and malevolent Other. How different from the neighbours
in Almodóvar’s lament for community and yet how continuous
with that lament, how reliant upon the same longue durée
of the neighbour: in this, in both Freud’s refusal and Raimunda’s
mourning, the neighbour speaks. Certainly, Freud’s approach to
the injunction in Leviticus operates around a certain notion
of what he terms ‘truth’: |
30 | |
|
||
And
this extraordinary passage gets to the heart of the Freudian project,
and does so with remarkable efficiency and candour: the disavowal of
any cosy or settled notion of man as thoroughly civilised, as only aberrantly
or rarely violent, constitutes for Freud a devastating complacency at
the heart of the political economy of neighbours. To rest on the laurels
of modernity’s putative civilisation is to make oneself vulnerable
to slipping at any minute into the chaos of violence. What is striking
is the manner in which the neighbour is made to work, yet again, as
a symptom, as a figure that holds together in one place the incommensurability
of being of civilisation and the recognition that that civilisation
is coterminous with the most brutal and base instincts that have not
been laid to rest (despite modernity’s best efforts to abstract
the social relation as if that violence could effectively be written
out of the contract). The injunction that seemed so strange for Freud,
to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, reads in full: |
31 | |
19 Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD. |
||
The
third book of the Hebrew Torah, Leviticus, the book of the Levites
(ויקרא, Vayyiqra or Wayikra),
is resolutely connected to law and ritual, especially to priestly ritual.
Its laws are given to Moses and the Hebrew name of the book is ‘and
he called’. Moses is set into the law by this calling, this hailing,
which is put in motion at the very beginning of Leviticus (1:1–2)
: |
||
|
||
The
commandment to love thy neighbour is thus initiated, in this first hailing
of Moses, by a disembodied voice; Moses is, as it were, interpellated.
Yet it is an interpellation that for Freud is clearly distinctly problematic:
the engine that drives Civilisation and its Discontents is not
the voice of God, but the ‘truth’ that God is dead. God,
indeed, has always been dead but, as Lacan puts it, ‘he does not
know he is dead’: |
32 | |
|
||
Lacan
is referring here to Freud’s myth of the primal horde, which we
have already seen transformed by late modernity into the neighbours
that threaten to overrun us – the horde from within, as it were;
in Freud’s ‘myth’, the primal father forbids his sons
sexual access to the women of the horde. The sons come together and
murder the father because they want access to the women of the horde,
thereby learning the great power of collective agency. In that moment
of violence, the men overthrow the primal father and change the order
of things: from then they are doomed to mourn the father, burdened
by the guilt of their transgression, and thereby, in honour of him who
has been wronged, they reinstate the dead father as the father-God,
totem-God. And it is here, in the howl of this bloody transgression
that the neighbour is born: love him as thyself, for never again
shall ye wrong him. ‘Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge
against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour
as thyself’. |
||
The
neighbour, then, is precisely this symptom and s/he emerges at precisely
that moment when the horde’s men fall under the sway of the father-God,
when they fall under the sway of law, as they pass fully into the symbolic
order into which they are hurled as its subjects, subjected, in chains.
They mourn for that which is lost and yet reinstate it, put it back
in place, revere it. The father returns as a symptom, as chant, as song,
as a great humming. It’s as if, to inject a trope from Almodóvar,
he is always hiding in the car, just out of sight, presumed dead but
about to return any minute, and we sing volver, volver… |
33 | |
The relation in music |
||
Freud
connects the neighbour to hurt, to transgression and the basest instincts
which modernity (he thinks) has failed to mitigate in any meaningful
way. We have seen how song, as a site of mourning, can be taken up in
the repairing of the hurt of this bleak vision, and how it similarly
fails to heal the wound that Freud exacerbates: in the ritual of remembering
in song, communities both cohere (constructing an ‘authentic
core’ in the maternal family) and display their constructedness
(and thus their susceptibility to the malign erosion of history, time,
symbolisation). One response to that impasse is to take up the subject
position of the hysteric ($ in Lacan’s schema at the position
of the agent) as a normative position, the mot juste of the modern
subject, questing, asking, repeatedly addressing the absent master –
the position of the subject in its quest for knowledge. And, as a ritualising
of that question, song transforms it into a public repeating, a worked-on
cathexis at the core of the elegiac ego in mourning: we have seen how,
in Lacan’s notion of the hysteric’s discourse, the question
of being demands speech, but in migrating the question into song, the
demand holds off that return; the ‘you are what you are’
of the master signifier,[26] is systematically delayed and the act of demanding
begins to operate as an autonomous voicing, delivers its own kind of
jouissance. |
34 | |
I
want to consider now how the relationship of the hysteric and the neighbour
can be thought out in the sphere of musical materials specifically,
and how hysteric voicing manifests itself in a number of different musical
situations in which notions of space and proximity are worked through
musically. The musical elaboration of proximity will come under particularly
intensive scrutiny here although my move from a short theory of the
neighbour to a theory of musical proximity and territory is by no means
guaranteed. Moreover, the relation of ‘territory’ to ‘property’
as I have been using it is by no means straightforward: on the one hand,
of course, in ‘hard’ legal networks, territories are quite
complex phenomena that embrace a number of different legal qualities,
one of which is the quality of ownership, although that is a quality
that does not guarantee the territory. Property, on the other
hand, is a phenomenon in which that quality of ownership is crucial
and in which boundaries are ‘guaranteed’ by a clear legal
framework of provenance. Both concepts embrace a model of space as articulated
by human agents, although the two are not synonyms, but, rather, point
to a shared logic of legislative discourse in which the phenomenon cannot
precede the articulation. If we were concerned here only with relations
of property, then territory would seem at first to be a strange choice
of metaphor. Hence the move from property to territory
is precisely that – a move. But I do want to make this move
in order to test the extent to which the notion of a space articulated
by agents might work within specific musical instances, and then
to test those instances against the broader frame of the ethical relation
of the neighbour as outlined above; and I can only do that if we modify
the articulation of space embraced in relations of property to embrace
also other spatial relations that are not wholly reliant on property,
but which in some sense are closely related to those spatial relations
of property.[27] We can now usefully talk of territorialisation
as a process by which localisation is imposed on a social agent, or
under which a social agent accepts the operation of territory upon it,
or in which a social agent imposes itself on a specific spatial domain:
in this way we can capture both the more specific relations of property
and those of proximity more generally. |
35 | |
Territorialisation,
of course, has a complex history in continental philosophy, especially
after the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and I will reference this here
only briefly. In the terms we are working under, we can talk both of
an explicit and an implicit territorialisation, a distinction that will
become crucial for my argument below and which, in a rather limited
sense, draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptions of territorialisation,
deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Explicit
or ‘hard’ territorialisation is a largely ‘sociological’
category that emphasises the need to circumscribe, articulate or otherwise
mark out different subcultural spaces from each other: under this rubric,
the various logics of the ghettoisation, invasion, incursion and disaggregation
of communities can be analysed. Implicit territorialisation, by contrast,
is a ‘symbolic’ category and when we speak of territorialisation
in this manner, we inevitably refer to territory as metaphor, although
that is not to reduce it to a figure of speech. The work of implicit
territorialisation can be linked to a tendency to de-particularise (and,
perhaps, therefore smooth over) the material conditions of territory
on which it draws, but which it seeks nonetheless to evoke and also
invoke. In the move from the explicit to the implicit, we note the operation
of ideology: the aesthetic can come to represent a domain of secrets,
spoken only obliquely – what Marxists used to call ‘mysitification’.
Conversely, as we shall see, there is no guarantee that this implicit
or symbolic territorialisation will constitute any such mystification:
musical territorialisation can underline or call into appearance the
very open wound of communities under malign erosion that other musics
seek to ameliorate, or cover over. |
36 | |
I
want to think through the notion of musical territory by identifying
the means by which some musics (recent musics of developed capitalist
societies) engage territory as metaphor, and the ways in which they
attempt to hide that metaphor in a kind of fort-da dance of revealing
and hiding. In this dance, music operates territory as a resource in
which the hysteric’s discourse can run rampant: who moves, who
sings? Where do they move to, where do they sing from? Who am I for
them? Where am I in this place, this territory wrought in sound? Music
is thus given the role by the listener of operating territory
as if a kind of agent in itself, as taking the place of the master signifier,
as putting in place the topography of the social and ethical relations.
The relation of the listening subject with this musical territory is
thus one in which the hysteric is both frustrated and titillated by
the attenuation of what Žižek has termed ‘symbolic efficiency’:[28] it is precisely the conundrum of musical agency
that operates as a cause of desire – in the hysteric’s discourse,
as we have seen, the cause of desire, a, stands in the place
of truth, marking an unbearable inefficiency in the symbolic circuit.
And that relation of the hysteric to that cause of desire (as ‘truth’
in Lacan’s schema) is a relation shot through with pain, suffering
but also jouissance. This relation, that is to say, operates
at the juncture of suffering and enjoyment and puts in the place of
the absent (inefficient) master signifier a fantasy of supplication
to the music. As I and |
37 | |
‘[…] [popular] song […] come[s] to constitute a site for the articulation of gender: masochism, that state of performative ‘as if’ as Žižek terms it, is resolutely connected to pleasure and the performance of pleasure, to an enacting of being taken up by another’s will […] [W]here voice enters, so a series of enactments of the subject in chains ensue – ‘Rescue Me’, ‘Prisoner of Love’, ‘I’m in Chains’, ‘It Hurts So Good’, ‘Lovin’ Chains’, ‘Chained to You’, ‘Chained (To Your Love)’.[29] |
||
Thus we note in the relation of the listener to musical
territory, to the placing and marking out of the place taken up by the
other, a distinct masochistic potential. Territorialisation, then, is a process whereby music
appears to operate as an unknowable master to which we give ourselves.
|
||
Beyond
the frisson of this abstracted masochistic relation with a generalised
master, music also plays with territories in ways that are more overt,
more symbolically efficient, so to speak. It does this, especially in
recorded Western popular song, by invoking sonic spaces, replaying different
kinds of resonances, different inter-object sonic relationships. The
means by which music does this are relatively straightforward: high
levels of resonance tend to invoke large resonant spaces and ‘drier’
mixes tend to articulate smaller more intimate (even claustrophobic)
spaces. Similarly, resonant sound objects (the bell archetype, if you
will) released into dry acoustic spaces, cause a denaturalisation of
the acoustic frame (and the same is also true when a dry sound object
is released into a resonant domain). In the interplay of these kinds
of sonic spaces, then, music can engage and disengage real and imagined
soundscapes, locate speaking, singing and other kinds of agents, and
open out a vast array of new sonic relations. But there are some quite
specific ways, I suggest, in which music is afforded the role of master
signifier, as, so to speak, saturating the spaces emptied out by symbolic
inefficiency. We might schematise the specifics of this implicit territorialisation
in the following processes: |
38 | |
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Hence
we might say that any approach along these lines to musical territory
is as much a theory of spectacle as it is a theory of symbolic
territory per se: the two are intimately bound together in an antagonistic
but co-dependent relationship in what I term the ‘spectacular
circuit’ where territory and virtuosity circle round each other
thus: |
||
Fig.
3: The spectacular circuit |
||
This
closed circuit, elaborated from the basic theory of subcultures (a theory
which from its inception drew quite explicitly on metaphors of territory)
represents the circulation of cultural practice within a subcultural
space. This endless circulation is disrupted precisely at that moment
when virtuosity attracts attention from outside the subcultural territory,
when the subcultural capital accruing to the virtuoso exceeds
the subcultural economy. What Russell Potter has termed the ‘spectacular
vernacular’[30] is precisely that which deterritorialises:
spectacularisation thus both territorializes – in that it marks
the performing body as spectacle – and deterritorialises –
in that it pierces the membrane of subcultural space by making the performing
body into a commodity, thereby abstracting the social relation out from
the subcultural space, draining it and leaving it impoverished. This
circuit, then, is broken only when a certain excess or supplement enters
the economy. |
||
I
want to trace this excess now in musical particulars, in two tracks
released in the last 3 or 4 years: the first is the track ‘Spirit
Fingers’ by Four-tet (Kieran Hebden, of Fridge), from the album
Rounds, released in 2003,[31] and the second, ‘The Rape Over’,
is by Mos Def from the album A New Danger (2004),[32] which thematises precisely the ethical foreclosure
of the spectacular circuit outlined above. In Four-tet’s extraordinary
piece of ‘laptop folk’, the musical space of the piece is
radically distributed: the sound stage is full, expansive and yet simultaneously
cramped – the samples are compressed and yet located in a wide
and resonant sonic frame. This interplay of the compressed and the resonant
is part of what makes this track so engaging. That interplay works as
a kind of problematisation of musical territory, a denaturalisation
and a deterritorialisation whereby open play, open playfulness, are
given free run: the track plays openly in its neighbourhood, displaying
its toys, openly enjoying the spectrum that runs from closed to open,
cramped to expansive, compressed to the fullest frequency range;
territory operates as an expediency, a localised but infinitely expandable
space in which agents are always on the move. The track deals in comfortable
dialectics in which real encounters are absolutely abstracted. |
39 | |
In
Mos Def’s disturbing track, territory operates differently: here
too there is a dialectic at work, but this time it is a contested dialectic
of competing strategies, one in which the enunciation operates as explicit
political message and another which refuses that instrumentalisation.
The first projects the voice onto community: the I is spoken as a kind
of collective, a curtailed collective admittedly, but ripe with that
potential; there is an emphasis here on displaying out, on the spectacular
as always already ‘a new danger’, in which the performing
body refuses objectification and insists on its subjectivisation, on
the requirement that the listener identify, locate and give space to
the subject that identifies with its enunciation (hence the first person
narrative); the power relations at work in the encounter of addresser
and addressee are always explicitly drawn into the phenosong, always
part of its domain, always already part of the ‘message’,
to use Barthes’s nomenclature.[33] And yet, there is also a refusal of that kind
of instrumentalisation at work here: the collectivising potential of
the first person is also resolutely attached to the performing persona,
also resolutely singular; the emphasis on display is also an emphasis
on the historically-specific traditions of hip-hop practice, on displaying
also as part of a convention, of an expressive technology; the politics
of opposition that speak through the collectivising I of the first strategy
are also problematised in this adherence to convention, to the poetics
of rap; the performing body is thus also reduced to virtuoso, to vessel
of the tradition. What is striking is that both strategies (for want
of a better word), the political and the aesthetic, operate in each
other’s space, delivering a radical undecidability in the performing
persona of Mos Def. The undecidability of the subject that speaks in
song is not limited to this kind of enunciation, however. When the musical
encounter is de-humanised and abstracted, as in the Four-tet track,
a radical undecidability still operates: the materials of the piece
are distributed in an avant-garde (or, to use my colleague |
40 | |
Conclusion: Neighbourhoods, neighbours and musical mournings | ||
The
hysteric’s discourse, as we have seen, would seem to place the
listener in a relation with the addresser that is a questioning one.
The che vuoi? (what do you want of me?) of Lacan’s question
posed by the barred subject ($) to the big Other needs to be elaborated
for the hysteric to include the che cosa vuoi che io sia? of
the hysteric listener: what do you want me to be? Imagine this question
posed in the context of Kafka’s terror at disclosure of himself
to his neighbour (‘These dreadfully thin walls, which betray the
honest, but cover the dishonest!’): between the addresser and
the addressee there is a wall, a gap, a partially porous membrane and
a radical ambiguity. Who am I for you, my neighbour? What do you want
of me? What do you want me to be for you? For Kafka, the relation of
addresser and addressee is never one of disclosure but of a fear
of that disclosure; the radical ethical undecidability is what sustains
the discourse in the two statements: |
41 | |
a
→ $ |
||
(the
objet petit a, cause of desire, is itself without cause) |
||
and |
||
S2
// a |
||
(knowledge
is barred from the cause of desire) |
||
We
have already seen something of how different musical enunciations can
play out the complex ethical territories of different subcultural subject
positions by naturalising and denaturalising sonic territories in a
fort-da dance of revealing and covering over the material territories
on which they are grounded. In the context of the hysterical listener,
that playing out of territories is precisely what seeps through
the wall: the wall (as a semi-porous boundary) in the neighbourly
relation works as both material divide (marker of sovereignty) and as
symbolic potential (its porosity points to a sovereignty in peril, haunted
by the acousmêtre of the other), through which other sonic
territories pour, territories however that no longer allow for the hysteric
listener. Certainly, between knowledge and desire, there is a gap that,
for the hysteric subject, cannot be navigated (knowledge is the end
of the quest and desire its beginning) but, crucially, in the neighbourly
relation, music and noise disturb that fixedness of the subject and
send the hysteric’s discourse in a spin with the addition of the
statement S2 → (//) → a. Hence, the discourse becomes
susceptible to endless slippage: |
42 | |
Fig.
4: the deterritorialisation of the hysteric |
||
When
the neighbour speaks, makes noise or plays music behind the wall, that
wall seems to fall, to reveal a malevolent intent, to open out and to
fail to hold safe, to fail to protect; it leaves the subject bare, vulnerable,
open to hurt, to use Levinas’s ethical frame of the Face. Here,
in this flattened discourse-surface (Figure 4), there is no key marker
of the four functions (agent, other, effect, truth), no crucial caesura
to pin down the position of truth and effect, no fixing point to hold
the subject in place. This leads to a radical deterritorialisation,
in the terms that Deleuze and Guattari have set it up: in other words,
in flowing through the (now) porous membrane between S2 and a,
through ‘the wall’ (figured both as a material and a symbolic
failed barrier), the circulation of meaning finds no rest and the ‘place’
of the subject is radically undecidable: we are always in one place,
going nowhere. On the other side of that wall, malign and hostile acousmêtres
shuffle about, scratch, shout, bang and dance while knowledge (S2) dissipates,
flows into the endless circle. The ethical structure that would seem
to sustain the late modern idealisation of the neighbourly relation
we encounter in Almodóvar is here utterly destroyed. |
43 | |
There
is one film, perhaps more than any other, in which the slippage from
the ideal neighbourly relation to the circular dance with the deadly
acousmêtre is plotted. John Schlesinger’s |
44 | |
Although
the movie is unusual in its candid exploration of the porosity of that
all-important wall that keeps neighbours at bay, similar themes abound
in Anglophone cinema: Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave (1994),
Douglas Jackson’s Deadbolt (1994), John Klausner’s
The Fourth Floor (1999), Tony Spiridakis’s Noise
(2004) and Paul Schenider’s Love Thy Neighbour (2005) all
deal with the threat posed by the malevolent neighbour. In all these
movies, a shift in the ethical coordinates of the neighbourly relation
is shown to force the semiosis of subjective agency into a circular
motion; this acts structurally in these narratives as a trauma, in the
manner that Freud would understand it – as a breakdown, a collapse,
of the order of the psyche into Zwangsneurose or obsessive neurosis
where, as with Modine’s character in Pacific Heights, the
neighbour’s noise becomes a symptom. Indeed, it is common for
neighbours suffering under the effects of a malign neighbourly acousmêtre
to become highly sensitised to noise and to engage in obsessive close
observation of the neighbour, to the point where the injured party is
placed precisely in that position in which they want to hold the neighbour,
as the malign other; they slip inevitably into the place that holds
them responsible. If this slippage is traumatic and can lead
(in the popular imagination at least) to a break, or to a psychotic
moment, then any theorisation of the musical neighbour that does not
at least attempt to deal with this moment of ethical switching does
not do justice to the complexity of the late modern sonic relation of
the neighbour. Indeed, as Freud would no doubt have insisted, traumas
will often occasion an ego-defence mechanism, perhaps the most common
of which (and which certainly runs through Freud’s case studies)
is the constant return to ritual as the beginning of a kind of mourning
work that can help the subject unstick itself from the empty repeating
of melancholy. |
45 | |
The
most profound trauma at the shift of the ethical coordinates of the
neighbourly relation, however, is experienced not at the encounter with
the violence that has been threatened, or with our finding the most
awful proof of the other’s malevolence, but in the recognition
that we always already knew it would be like this, that it was always
already destined to descend into this hostility in which injured parties
have no recourse to the privileged position of the righteous. It is
here that Schlesinger’s film operates its greatest conceit –
the film leaves no space for mourning work, foreclosing any such possibility
with an act of violent revenge, enacted onto Hayes by |
46 | |
We
began our account of mourning work with that glorious moment from Almodóvar’s
Volver where Raimunda sings her song of remembrance. One way
to read Almodóvar’s film, as we have seen, is precisely
as an act of ritualised mourning: in the hysteric’s discourse,
Raimunda seeks answers to the question of being, but that question is
an elegiac one, a questioning that mourns the absence of the master
signifier. Mourning finds expression in an almost camp manner: women
in black hum the Hail Mary like insects, packed into the small room
where the body of aunt Chus lies; the film opens with the women of the
village cleaning the graves of their relatives and the characters find
out on a TV chat show that Agustina (friend and neighbour to Aunt Chus)
is dying of cancer. Death and resurrection stalk the characters of the
film, the one chasing the tail of the other. ‘Mamá te necesito’
(‘mother, I need you’), the last line of the film, underlines
the necessity and inevitability of the return of the dead mother, and
the neighbours in the film, of course, are all women. Indeed, the mother’s
return and the commitment to the feminine space are both disavowals
of the impasse of the hysteric: if you will not answer, then we will
ask each other, turn in on ourselves, rely on our own autonomous community.
Men circle the narrative as mere props, corpses, guitarists, property
owners, but not as narrative agents: their territory is outside this
circle, they are intruders. And music serves to locate, to cohere and
to envelop this community of women. They are as much acousmêtres
in a shared sonic space without walls as narrative agents and this doubled
function is what marks them out in the Almodóvarean aesthetic
as idealising women: in short, they refuse the ethical uncertainty of
modernity. |
47 | |
How
different from Freud’s hostility to neighbour-love: for him there
is no collective compassion, no resurrection of the patriarch, no understanding:
the men of the horde fall upon the father and then mourn him, setting
him up as a great totem, but doomed to suffer under the unbearable
absolute equivalence of each and every one’s guilt – they
are thrown into a radically undecidable ethical relation. The crucial
difference, of course, is that Almodóvar’s film is about
women and these are women of a very high order: they are made to take
on the full moral authority of community, to carry that burden with
smiles, tears and infinite patience. For Almodóvar, indeed, women
represent an ideal and men always bring malevolent pressure to bear
on that ideal. This is the crucial difference in the order of neighbours:
for Freud (and for Schlesinger) neighbours fall under the masculine
order of violence and for Almodóvar they fall under the feminine
order of compassion. But for Almodóvar, the feminine order of
compassion is also elegiac since this work is also a lament for the
decline of communities, and it is music that does much of this mourning
work. |
48 | |
That
work, moreover, operates in the face of what I am calling the
play of communities, the always more-than-one-ness of a community, its
beholdenness to other communities that are often hostile, always malevolently
mobile, encroaching, threatening to swallow up the places and spaces
of the maternal ideal space. The postmodern predicament, as we have
now come to call it, is a predicament in which the play of communities
has for many become absolutely deadly: urban liminal spaces are under
malign erosion and rural spaces are in ever greater threat of encroachment
form the overspills of the urban. What is particularly striking , then,
is the extent to which neighbours cease to be (if they ever were) the
bearers of benign community spirit and come to represent noise,
the noise of the other, the interference of the other, pressure, the
chatter of the horde. And that danger is right next door. Right here.
Listen. Hear that? |
49 | |
[1] Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby (London: Vintage, 2003), 15. [2] Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, tr. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nifhoff, 1974), 86. [3] Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other, tr. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London: Athlone Press, 1998 [1991]), 104. [4] Ibid. 104. [5] Michael Wolf, ‘The Architecture of Density’, http://www.photomichaelwolf.com/intro/index.html (19 August 2007). [6] Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, tr. and ed. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Of course this notion of hailing is also key to Althusser’s theory of ideology: interpellation, being hailed, is the moment at which we are made subjects of ideology and we are turned by that hailing. [7] ‘Die elend dünnen Wände, die den ehrlich tätigen Mann verraten den Unehrlichen aber decken. Mein Telephon ist an der Zimmerwand angebracht, die mich von meinem Nachbar trennt. Doch hebe ich das bloß als besonders ironische Tatsache hervor. Selbst wenn es an der entgegengesetzten Wand hinge, würde man in der Nebenwohnung alles hören. Ich habe mir abgewöhnt, den Namen der Kunden beim Telephon zu nennen. Aber es gehört natürlich nicht viel Schlauheit dazu, aus charakteristischen, aber unvermeidlichen Wendungen des Gesprächs die Namen zu erraten. - Manchmal umtanze ich, die Hörmuschel am Ohr, von Unruhe gestachelt, auf den Fußspitzen den Apparat und kann es doch nicht verhüten, daß Geheimnisse preisgegeben werden.’ (Franz Kafka, ‚Der Nachbar’, Beshcreibung eines Kampfes: Novellen, Skizzen, Aphorismen aus dem Nachlaß (Frankurt am Main: Fischer, 1969), 100-1: 100. My translation.) [8] Jacques Lacan, ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud’, Écrits: A Selection, tr. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 161-197: 186. [9] Anyone who lives in a so-called Tyneside flat (a design found only in the North East of England and characterised by two-storey terraces with a flat on each floor) will be familiar with the problems with invasive noise that can arise from proximitous neighbours. See Gateshead Council’s explanation of the origins and layout of Tyneside flats: ‘Housing in Gateshead’, http://www.gateshead.gov.uk/DocumentLibrary/housing/Leaflets/display_boards.pdf (16 August 2007), 2. [10] Theodor Lessing, ‘Űber den Lärm’, Nord und Süd: Eine deutsche Monatsschrift, Vol. 97 (1901), 71–84: 77, trans. and quoted in Lawrence Baron, ‘Noise and Degeneration: Theodor Lessing’s Crusade for Quiet’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 17, No. 1, Decadence (January 1982), 165-178: 167. See also Max Nordau, Degeneration [Entartung] (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968 [1892]). [11] Peter Rayer, ‘The Age of Noise: Early Reactions in Vienna, 1870-1914’, Journal of Urban History, Vol. 33 No. 5 (July 2007), 773-793. [12] The Oxford English Dictionary has the following etymology for the word neighbour/neighbor: ‘Cognate with Middle Dutch nageboer, nagebuer, nagebuur, nagebuyer, nagebuyr, Middle Low German nāchgebūr, nāgebūr, Old High German nāhgibūr, nāhgibūro (Middle High German nāchgebūr, nāchgebūre), and further with Middle Dutch nāber, nābuer, nābūr, nābuur, Old Saxon nābūr, nāhbūr (Middle Low German nāber, nābūr, nēber, etc., German regional (Low German) Naber), Middle High German nāchbūr, nāchbūre, (German Nachbar) < the Germanic base of NIGH a. + the Germanic base of BOOR n. Cf. also Old Icelandic nábúi, Old Swedish nabōe, nabō (Swedish nabo), early modern Danish naabo, nabo (Danish nabo).’ (‘neighbour | neighbor, n1’, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press, http://dictionary.oed.com (4 Aug. 2007)) [13] ‘boor, n1’, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press, http://dictionary.oed.com (4 Aug. 2007). [14] Carl Schmidt, The Concept of the Political, tr. George Schwab (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 26. [15] Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XVII (New York: Norton, 2007), 13. For the addition of arrows and caesura, see Gérard Wajcman, ‘The Hysteric's Discourse’ from Le maître et l'hystérique (Paris: Navarin, 1982), 11-30; available in The Symptom, No. 4 (Spring 2003), http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom.htm (21 August 2007). Translation not credited. [16] As Gérard Wajcman puts it, ‘On the side of the Other the question ends with the gift of speech. But this gift has an essential flaw. By answering the subject's question: "Who am I?" the Other lets the subject come into being; but any given answer, necessarily specific, reduces the subject's quest to a finite object: "Who you are? A saint, a fool, a hospital case..." Calling the subject into being, the hysteric's "Who?" in response receives a what that objectifies her.’ (Wajcman, ‘Hysteric's Discourse’) [17] Ibid. [18] ‘The hysteric embodies the division between subject and object in a particular way. As subject she incites desire; but when this desire moves towards the object that causes it, the hysteric cannot condescend to be this object. She incites man to know what causes his desire, inciting him to acknowledge her as the inaccessible object of his desire.’ (Ibid.) [19] Lacan, Other Side, 23. [20] We could look to the full song here and note that this absent possessive pronoun in the absent first verse marks both the absent address and the absent addressee: ‘in the quiet street where the echo said / “yours is its life, yours is its love [desire/wanting]”’. Not only is the address once removed in the absence of the fully stated pronoun ‘tu’, but the address itself is tendered out to the faceless ‘echo’ fundamentally problematising the position of the interlocutor: What is it an echo of? Who asks the veiled question of being? [21] Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957 [1917]), 243-258: 253. [22] Juan-David Nasio, Hysteria: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis, tr. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 1998). [23] Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, tr. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961 [1930]), 748. [24] Ibid. 239-240. [25] Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1997), 180-1. [26] See again Wajcman: ‘This mandate to speak is a fundamental aspect of the Demand: only speech is demanded, nothing else.’ (‘Hysteric's Discourse’) [27] Indeed, territories, with their much wider conception of the relation of agents to spaces, can also constitute a kind of imposed localisation, a prison sentence if you will, especially in those communities where ownership is, on the whole, largely absent, and location is a matter of economic necessity: in order to theorise the neighbour, in other words, we cannot rely solely on a theory of property since many communities are tenant communities where ownership is external to that community. [28] Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 322. [29] Ian Biddle and [30] Russell Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany: State University of New York Press). [31] Four-tet, Rounds (CD, Domino, B000092Q6L, 2003). [32] Mos Def, A New Danger (CD, Geffen Records, B00030EEO0, 2004). [33] Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, Image, Music, Text, tr. Steven Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 179-189. |