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Abstract
Through a sustained critique of the iPod and discourse about it, this essay advances a psychoanalytic rhetoric of music that characterizes listening experiences in terms of two psychical economies: the psycho-somatic or experiential and the symbolic. We argue that these economies work together to produce the fantasy of a “sonorous envelope,” a re/presentation of losing one's self in music. Because the dis/pleasurable experience of the sonorous envelope is a retroactively imposed understanding of an otherwise ineffable musical encounter, we argue for analyzing representations of the sonorous envelope in popular culture.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Richard Leppert, Omri Ceren, Ken Rufo, and the blind reviewers for their suggestions and advice, Tim Hall for his generosity, and Sue Carroll of Apple, Inc., for assisting us with rights and permissions.
Notes
1. Theodor W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Cook (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73.
2. “Apple Reports Record Profits,” USA Today (18 January 2007): [Money] 1B.
3. Andre Orlowski, “For Apple, Halo effect eclipses Osborne effect,” The Register (11 October 2005), http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/11/apple_q4_2005/ (accessed 31 July 2006).
4. Michael Bull, “No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening,” Leisure Studies 24 (2005): 343–55.
5. Armstrong Williams, “Technology Overload,” The New York Amsterdam News (25–31 May 2006): 13.
6. Bull, “No Dead Air!,” 345.
7. The argument was first made by conservative cultural critic Allan Bloom about the Sony Walkman device, to which we will return in the conclusion.
8. “iPod's Popular Earbuds: Hip or Harmful?,” ScienceDaily.com (16 December 2005), http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051216191834.htm (accessed 5 February 2007).
9. Gregory Mott, “The iPod and the Fury,” Washington Post (17 January 2006): HE01.
10. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “gadget.”
11. Juan-David Nasio, Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, trans. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 116.
12. Christopher Small, Music, Education, Society (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 7–59.
13. By “rhetoric,” we mean two things depending on the context. First, we mean to refer to the representational dimensions of a given cultural event or object that have persuasive or appealing effects on people. Rhetoric in this sense refers to a dimension, feature, or object that attracts or compels. Second, rhetoric can refer to “the study of,” or a theory of persuasion, especially when “of” is used. So, for example, a “rhetoric of music” would be a theory of how music as an object persuades people, while “music as rhetoric” refers to music as a persuasive object. For two excellent examples that exemplify both meanings of rhetoric vis-à-vis music, see Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993). Some notable article-length approaches to music in rhetorical and communication studies include James R. Irvine and Walter G. Kirkpatrick, “The Musical Form in Rhetorical Exchange: Theoretical Considerations,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 272–84; Deanna Sellnow and Timothy Sellnow, “The ‘Illusion of Life’ Rhetorical Perspective: An Integrated Approach to the Study of Music as Communication,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 395–415; and Eric King Watts, “An Exploration of Spectacular Consumption: Gangsta Rap as Cultural Commodity,” Communication Studies 48 (1997): 42–58.
14. Karen Rasmussen, “Transcendence in Leonard Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 150–73. Kenneth Burke's famous theory of “form” as the “creation and satisfaction” of appetites in an audience is based on his experiences as a music critic. See Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 29–44.
15. Theodore Matula, “Contextualizing Musical Rhetoric: A Critical Reading of the Pixies’ ‘Rock Music’,” Communication Studies 51 (Fall 2000): 218–37.
16. Robert Francesconi, “Free Jazz and Black Nationalism: A Rhetoric of Musical Style,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (1986): 39.
17. For a historical trajectory of music and psychoanalysis, see John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1997), 56–72.
18. Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 7.
19. Catherine Liu, “A Brief Genealogy of Privacy: CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother,” Grey Room 15 (2004): 113.
20. Liu, “A Brief,” 113.
21. Adorno, Stars Down, 74.
22. See Laurence A. Rickels, The Case of California (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 256–66; and Laurence A. Rickels, The Vampire Lectures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 26–35.
23. Laurence A. Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, Volume III: Psy Fi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 129–207.
24. Catherine Liu, Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 36–37.
25. Laurence A. Rickels, “Nazi Psychoanalysis: Response to Werner Bohleber,” American Imago 52 (1995): 356.
26. Rickels, The Case of California, 264–65.
27. Steven Levy, “iPod Nation,” Newsweek (26 July 2004), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5457432/site/newsweek/ (accessed 30 July 2006).
28. “Desire thus does not seek satisfaction; rather, it pursues its own continuation and furtherance—it merely seeks to go on desiring.” Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 51.
29. See Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 288–317; and Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Volume Four: 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2003), 389–400.
30. By “fantasy” and “fantasmic” we mean to refer not simply to an illusion, but rather, the defense narratives of everyday life (for Lacan, this would be a defense from the lack of the Other). See Joshua Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 1–23; and Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), esp. 3–44.
31. Perhaps “surplus-jouissance” is a powerfully relevant concept that explains the effect of the iPod; unfortunately, space limitations prevent a thorough discussion of this “something more.” See Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), esp. 52–53; 170.
32. The Cure, “Never Enough,” Never Enough, Elektra Records, CD single, 1990.
33. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 34.
34. Some object-relations theories, for example, believe infants are “hard-wired” to pursue certain objects (which obviates the “drive” of classical psychoanalysis). See W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952); and Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, trans. David Rapaport (New York: International Universities Press, 1958).
35. Both Kenneth Burke and Jacques Lacan share this fundamental view of human nature. See Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man,” Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 3–24.
36. More technically, what the man desires is “something more” beyond the breast, something that the breast betokens, but is not identical to the impossible stimulus of desire that Lacan terms the objet a.
37. See Philipe Van Haute, Against Adaptation: Lacan's “Subversion” of the Subject: A Close Reading, trans. Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk (New York: Other Press, 2002), 158–62.
38. “Let us look at what he [Freud] says,” argues Lacan. “As far as the object in the drive is concerned, let it be clear that it is, strictly speaking, of no importance. It is a matter of total indifference … If Freud makes a remark to the effect that the object in the drive is of no importance, it is probably because the breast, in its function as object, is to be revised in its entirety.” The centrality and specificity of the object in this respect is one thing that distinguishes drive theorists from object-relations theorists. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 168.
39. Freud, Three Essays, 35.
40. See Lacan's illustration of the drive's circuit in Book XI, 178.
41. “With the arrival of puberty … a new sexual aim appears, and all the component [drives] combine to attain it, while the erotogenic zones become subordinated to the primacy of the genital zone.” Freud, Three Essays, 73.
42. Lacan, Book XI, 179.
43. As translator Alan Sheridan explains, in Lacan's witty formulation of “la pulsion en fait le tour,” the drive “moves around the object … [it] tricks the object.” Lacan, Book XI, 168.
44. The drive takes the objet a as its privileged object; this object does not represent any “object” of satisfaction (though one may be mistaken in this case). Rather, whatever functions as the objet a is a metonymic substitute for something “beyond” the object that is impossible to get. The space needed to fully unpack Lacan's formulation of the objet a is book-length project beyond the scope of this essay. For a rigorous characterization of the objet a—variously objet petit a or objet (a) depending on the period in which Lacan is writing—see Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 83–97.
45. Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom (New York: Routledge, 1992), 48. Also see David Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 64–86.
46. Technically speaking, the objet a betokens the order of the real, and thus no one object is the objet a as that generic thing which causes desire; rather, it takes on its function to become, effectively, an objet a for a given person. In other words, what sets-off our desires and engages our drives may be very different from the objet a of others. Hence, the iPod is one of many objets a. See Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 140–52.
47. Eric Nagourney, “A Study Gauges the Risks for Ears with iPods,” New York Times (24 October 2006, late ed.): F6.
48. See Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice,” Sic 1: Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 7–31.
49. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 143.
50. Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1990), 253.
51. McClary, Feminine Endings, 23.
52. See Guy Rosolato, “La Voix: Entre corps et langue,” Revue Française de Psychanalyse 38 (1974): 75–94; Didier Anzieu, “L'enveloppe sonore du soi,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 13 (1976): 161–70; and Claude Bailblé, “Programmation de l’écoute,” Cahiers du Cinema 293 (1978): 5–12.
53. Quoted in Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 84–5.
54. Nasio, Five Lessons, 117.
55. Lacan, Book XI, 104.
56. Nasio, Five Lessons, 120.
57. Schwarz, Listening Subjects, 8.
58. Quoted in Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 57.
59. Both Anzieu and Rosolato parallel Kristeva's (earlier) position that music is exclusively constructed on the basis of the semiotic chora. The chora is that unified space, traversed by primary energies, which links the maternal body with that of the child. Conceived of as a “receptacle,” it encloses the sounds, rhythms, colors, and pleasures of the mother/child dyad in one highly sensate environment. For Kristeva, the chora is “[n]either model [n]or copy … [it] precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.” Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 26.
60. Schwarz, Listening Subjects, 8.
61. Van Haute explains the reason the experiential or “erogenous” and the representational are inseparable in terms of “lack”: “ … the theory of the objet a and the phantasy makes it clear that we ought not understand this lack as a metaphysical magnitude; the lack does not exist. The signifiers that introduce it are not ‘signifiers in general’—rather, they are intrinsically bound up with specific erogenous zones and part objects. This means, first of all, that the lack is always and essentially experience, and acquires (phantasmic) meaning, on the level of the body.” See Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 161.
62. Mae Anderson, “‘Silhouette’ Is Grand at Kelly Awards,” Adweek (10 June 2004) http://www.adweek.com/aw/creative/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=100052961 (accessed 31 July 2006).
63. The “Wolfmother” ad is currently available at http://images.apple.com/movies/us/apple/ipod_itunes-seventy/ipod_itunes-seventy-h.ref.mov (accessed 31 July 2006).
64. Steven Levy, “iPod Nation.”
65. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 3–9; and Fink, Lacanian Subject, 48–68.
66. “The function of the mirror stage thus turns out,” says Lacan, “in my view, to be a particular case of the function of images, which is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality—or as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt” (Écrits, 6). The imago as such is always from others or of the Other; once it is internalized it becomes an ideal ego, the promise of unity and preoedipal omnipotence.
67. See Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3–43; Silverman, Acoustic Mirror; Schwarz, Listening Subjects, 7–36.
68. We are thinking here in particular of Derrida's critique of logocentrism. See Joshua Gunn, “Speech is Dead; Long Live Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): forthcoming.
69. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18.
70. Despite the full cooperation of Apple Inc., after many weeks, phone calls, and emails, Taylor & Francis could not come to an agreement about copyrights for this image. We are unable to legally reprint it for this essay. Curious readers may consult the following URL for an example of the advertisement for their personal use only: http://www.joshiejuice.com/yellow_ipod.jpg (accessed 5 March 2008).
71. Tim Hall, email to the authors, 29 July 2006.
72. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
73. Quoted in Larry Rohter, “An Unlikely Trendsetter Made Earphones a Way of Life,” New York Times (17 December 2005), http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/international/americas/17pavel.html?ex=1292475600&en=5f4f6a4c9731e289&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss (accessed 29 July 2006).
74. Meat Beat Manifesto, “It's the Music,” Original Fire, Interscope Records, CD, 1997.
75. For a related discussion of how this argument relates to gender and sexual identity, see Charles E. Morris III and John M. Sloop, “‘What These Lips Have Kissed’: Refiguring the Politics of Queer Public Kissing,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 1–26.
76. As quoted in RiShawn Biddle, “Personal Soundtracks,” reasononline (October 1999) http://reason.com/9910/fe.rb.personal.shtml (accessed 29 July 2006).
77. Biddle, “Personal Soundtracks,” par. 7.
78. Gabriel Sherman, “Boy in a Bubble,” Guardian Unlimited (24 September 2004) http://arts.guardian.co.uk/netmusic/story/0,13368,1311300,00.html (accessed 30 July 2006).