Abreaction – Notes on the Unconscious and Music

With hindsight this speculative text attempts to discuss notions of the unconscious as a dialectical dynamic to be embraced rather than as a forbidden zone to be feared. This latter, propagated in part by Freud, leads to a self-censorship that curtails the auto-theorisation that ensues from creative and political engagement. Music eventually comes to figure as  that which frees-us-up.

Notes on the Unconscious and Music¹

“It may be asked whether and how far I am convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them” Freud

1.

When Jean Laplanche loosely defines the unconscious as “the residue of the movement of questioning”² he enables us to sidestep Freud’s idea of the unconscious as an asocial entity that seeks to present biological and innate impulses as “thoughts somehow thinking themselves.” Ridding ourselves of this Freudian reduction leads us towards coming to see the unconscious not as a static container but as a kind of dynamic metaboliser of social-experiences.

2.

The unconscious is seen as disturbing because it is always presenting us with social material that is enigmatic and resistant to rational understanding. This is the material of auto-theorisation and our very resistance to this material, the repression we exert upon it, is not a result of its solely being instinctual material that insistently seeks expression, but that it is a material that it is socially expedient to repudiate.

3.

This is to refuse to join Freud when, at one point, he saw the unconscious as a “citadel that must be guarded” in order to keep repressed impulses at bay, as harbouring the pathological, but it is to offer-up an unconscious that can function as a creative dynamic which accompanies us at all times. Indeed, it is such material that has, throughout history, either been an occasion for fear of unwanted thoughts or mistakenly identified as an expression of divinity: “it wasn’t me that spoke, scarcely me that even thought such secret, silent thoughts.”³

4.

Variously quiet and loud, the unconscious always presents us with figments and fragments of experiences both distant and recent and, that this material is related-to as enigmatic is due to the fact that we cannot know everything about ourselves or others. There is no total self-knowledge nor are there any definitive answers, hence the persistence, as with many of Kafka’s characters, of an almost childlike questioning.

5.

It is socially expedient to still this questioning because to embark upon working-through such enigmas would be to bring into question our entire lives, and, by extension, the society of which we are a part. Moral codes step into this breach and, in offering commandments and manifestos, they paralyse the possibility of auto-theorisation with “unrealizable injunctions”⁴ that work to salve the discomfort of enigma and give answers that condition us into becoming reliant on external authorities that make us distrust our own experience.

6.

Similarly, whether it be taken as a sustained exercise in self-criticism or self-analysis Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is a point in case. In this book Proust auto-theoretically interrogates the various enigmas of his own life, but in so doing, in presenting memory as historically layered composites that are neither true or false, fact or fiction, he only poses himself fresh enigmas. Questions lead to other questions, yet it is not answers and knowledge that is the outcome, but rather the creative residues of the movement of questioning, the tangents and associations, that arise from our brooding over the questions. Such residues, detected by Freud, for instance, as slips of the tongue, were revealed to be at work in the formation and content of dreams and in hypnoid states. However, in the form of involuntary memories, Proust reveals the unconscious as a social dynamic that can be prompted by smell, taste, atmosphere, sight and sound. By sensory stimuli. By affect. What was once returns again and poses its enigma afresh in a changed context. The unconscious as a putting-into-relation of the social and the psyche, residues into words that, always inaccurate and unable to be definitive, are, in being subject to misunderstanding, the source of further enigmas.

7.

In the psychoanalytical literature the unconscious is always depicted as having been formed by “repressed material.” But beyond notions of the pleasure principle, that would have it that the unconscious is the source of wishful impulses the satisfaction of which would lead to the displeasure of social opprobrium and which are hence repressed, Freud, in his work on dreams, revealingly states that the ‘essence’ of repression is the transformation of affect; an affect that, for Laplanche, would be sensed as the discomforting provocation of unanswered questions.

8.

In this light the unconscious becomes not the seat of pathology but the well-spring of auto-theorisation, the source of an intensity and an emotional charge. It is this strength of affect (as unnameable residue) that resides in the unconscious and, which, for Freud, can only be presented to consciousness by transferring its intensity onto recent and trivial material. This process, a factor of the dream-work, casts light upon the way that dreams seem so full of disproportionate absurdity and overinvests in commonplace elements; seems uncanny … familiar and strange at the same time. For Freud it is this transposition that makes palatable the coming to consciousness of troubling affects for as dream-images they remain unidentifiable and cryptic and are stripped of their potential to be distressing.

9.

Moreover, for Freud, that this occurs during the time of sleep means that the unconscious impulses that underpin the dream-images that arise cannot be acted upon, they are not fulfilled as actions nor are they immediately reflected upon as expressions of the unconscious, as the posing of still unresolved questions. In this way repression, as the boundary marker between the unconscious and the conscious, serves to reduce the displeasure of provocation by hiding the questions from us, by stilling any auto-theorisation. But it does this at the expense of maintaining self-censorship and thereby concealing elements of our psyche from us: “a potential beginning is prevented from developing.”

10.

To still this interaction between the unconscious and the conscious, to repress auto-theorisation, prevents more than a “beginning” from developing, it hinders the formation of subjects as fully conscious social beings, for, if we seize upon Lacan’s maxim that “the unconscious is the discourse of the other” that it is “to a great extent the depository of intentions, desires, investments, demands, expectations – significations to which the individual has been exposed” ⁵ then we see the unconscious as an agency that continually connects to a wider social world of mutual inherence and a projection towards the future.

11.

For Freud the unconscious is a one-way system. It comes from the depths of instinct (biology) towards the light of sense-perception. However, an unconscious that is solely made-up from repressed instincts is an unconscious that cannot be effected by the stimulus of perception and affect; an unconscious that knows no ‘other.’ This leads Freud to reduce the creative dynamism of the unconscious to a material which will one day make possible a “knowledge of man’s archaic heritage.” This implied refutation of psychical dynamism and its replacement with something untouched by current social interaction obscures the fact that the supposed ‘deep’ biology of instincts, drives and affects are themselves exchanged between people as elements of communication that provoke questioning. Andrew Fletcher in summarising the import of Laplanche’s revised theory of the unconscious says that “if the drive originates in messages… we have to conclude that there is no initial or natural opposition between the instinctual and the inter-subjective, or between the instinctual and the cultural.”⁶ The social construction of the drive is, for Laplanche, an outcome of ‘seduction’ whereby, say, a breast-feeding mother transmits enigmatic messages to the child; unconscious sexual messages that are neither fully understood by the mother nor by the child, but which are creative of enigmas that propel a movement of questioning (auto-theorisation). If we think of overprotective parents, of a sang-froid climate of censorship, or of a self-limiting dismissiveness that is resistant to any ‘seduction’, we could place repression at a juncture that is different to the one (psychic repression) that polices the conscious/unconscious boundary.

12.

It may be that another form of repression takes place whereby fresh sensory stimulus, a seduction with a potential to pose fresh or cumulative enigmas creative of desiring-energy, has attention withdrawn from it, and is rejected from consciousness. This ironically corresponds to another of Freud’s definitions of repression: “turning something away and keeping it at a distance from the conscious.” This is self-repression where perception itself comes to be recoiled from. This is a censorship that not only refuses to deal with the enigmatic questions of affect that are already seeking to be worked-through, but a censorship that is resistant to the posing of any further questions that may arise from new perceptions and new sensory material. The potential beginning is stalled again and the future is thereby cancelled.

13.

This latter censorship is a form of social repression in that it is responding to the delimitation of experience by categories and censorship that instil notions of the forbidden and of taboos. That this social repression resonates with Freud’s theory of a psychical “tendency towards stability,” works in consort with psychic repression for it is tantamount to a plugging-up of the continuing process of auto-theorisation that nonetheless finds expression in the dream-work. This form of repression encourages us to only let-pass what it already knows, or more importantly, what is sanctified as worthy of knowing and thus its resistance to the ‘other’ (be that a musical or enigmatic message) aims at the maintenance of an equilibrium where the subject “re-establishes the continuity of his own conscious discourse.”⁷ A balance is thus maintained where even desire is potentially rendered inoperative.

14.

It may happen that the enigmatic material of the unconscious – an affect seeking verbal expression, a drive seeking its shared socialisation – may activate pressures on the conscious that are not presented to us as dreams or symptoms. Unconscious material does not always take the form of visual hallucinations or revivified perceptions, but may exercise a pressure upon us that is felt as an atmosphere or a sensation and not as a well-defined image or potential symbolism. Such unconscious material as this is wordless and without an “ideational representative,” and it is its intensity alone that has attracted consciousness to it. Thus, we have “unconscious emotion” and can marry this to yet another of Freud’s definitions of repression: “to suppress the development of affect is the true aim of repression.” So, repression not only functions to withhold things from consciousness, but, for Freud at this time, it also appears to inhibit the growth of feeling and desire (and, by extension, auto-theorisation.)

15.

The aim of maintaining a psychical equilibrium (which is the charge levelled against analysis as a therapy of adaption to the status quo but which also concerns a widespread cultural conservatism) is thus also concerned with resistance to desiring-energy. Yet, rather than adopt Freud’s disengagement of feeling from thought and deal with them as separate entities as he often does, we can conjoin the two and offer that our resistance (in part socially-instilled by socially repressive moral codes etc.) to auto-theorisation, to probing those unanswered questions that are ever-present in the unconscious, is just as much about our fear of the unconscious emotions that may be abreacted, in the process. Indeed, questions to which we have not got instantaneous or rehearsed answers are felt primarily, and we should say, socially constructed, as distressing. We are not only reluctant to face the wilfully forgotten past we are reluctant to deal with the presages of the present.

16.

Such reluctance to “pay attention to our own psychical perceptions” (and desires), such introspective blindness, leads to our being ripe for the effects of social-repression simply because we have abandoned any attempt at autonomously working-through enigmas and wielding the residues: not being engaged with ourselves and our socio-historical situatedness, we cannot see how we have been formed by capitalist institutions and their repressing agencies, and, accepting their answers too readily, identifying with their exclusionary structures and individualistic significations, we are strengthening the overriding effect of repression as that which does all it can to encourage a disengagement from the social and to mould the desires that are provoked there. So, to some degree, this fear of unconscious emotion (a key factor in pathologising those deemed ‘mad’) is a strong contributing factor to the voluntary servitude that ensues from this Freudian recommendation of psychical equilibrium.

17.

Against this it would be impossible to present the unconscious as some sort of saviour, a means of re-articulating revolutionary theory, but, when Feminist artist Jo Spence talks of “unconsciousness raising” and ex-Situationist Raoul Vaneigem offers that “the reconstruction of the individual presupposes the reconstruction of the unconscious,” we are alerted to the role creative dynamism and auto-theorisation plays in breaking down conditioning (psychical equilibrium.) For if the unconscious contains a wealth of repressed material then this material is useful in the struggle against social and psychic repression. Not only does it pose ourselves as other than who we think we are or who have been ‘made’ to be – thus instaurating liberating discontinuities of self-representation – it can, through the process of shared auto-theorisation, bring to light what it is that society is so quick to demote into the darkness.

18.

However, pursuing Freud, we see that not only is there interaction between unconscious and conscious (the dream-work, involuntary memory etc.), but that this interaction is founded upon the speculation that the unconscious is itself “a process of excitation or mode of discharge” of psychical energy. The unconscious is a creative dynamic where there is a “strengthening and weakening of various components in the interplay of forces.” Freud demonstrates that psychical energy undergoes different transformations and travels along different pathways through which it is subject to the ‘primary process’ or to the ‘secondary process.’ The primary process, the unconscious, being “freed from inhibition,” is one whose “whole stress is laid upon making the cathecting energy mobile and capable of discharge.” That Freud elsewhere calls this “attention” is indicative, not of the fact that the unconscious is buried away from sensory stimulus and potential seductions, but that it is continually registering social stimulus that can later, as enigmatic material, prompt auto-theorisation and desire.

19.

This cathecting of energy, or its attachment onto ideas, memories, thoughts, words, is what partially goes into establishing those condensations and displacements that Freud maintains are instrumental in forming dream-images. There is, then, a charge of psychical energy in the unconscious, a desiring-energy, emanating from a combination of libidinal drive, enigmatic communications and sensory stimulus, that, because it can be ‘discharged’ anywhere, needs to be subjected to a repression (or anti-cathexis) that disables it from becoming a willed action that upsets the ‘reality principle.’ This unbound energy, desire, with its potential for disruption and intense contagion, when taken together with other characteristics of the ‘primary process’ such as its “disregard for contradiction” and its “having no reference to time” is, for Freud, illustrative not of its creative dynamism, but of its relation to irrationality. Once more we have ‘madness’ – that which punctures the ‘reality principle’ – as the limit-point to be feared.

20.

The ‘secondary process,’ that of the conscious, is far more concerned with rationality where, in conformity to the ‘reality principle,’ the mobile cathexis is slowed-down, discharged in specific socially useful directions and, once expended, it enables a return of the psychical apparatus to a state of inertia, a minimised state of excitation. It is, for Freud, psychical energy’s passage through the secondary process that enables its expression as language and this relates, for Freud, to the elaboration of “purposive ideas” which are in-part achieved by “restricting the development of affect in thought-activity to the minimum.” The secondary process, then, is concerned with avoiding such “inefficiencies” of the unconscious (such as the ‘useless’ residues left by the movement of questioning) and, in this, Freud establishes a further cause for the repression of that unconscious dynamism that consists of more than just “unconscious wishful impulses” in that he is implying that affect itself is ‘inefficient.’

21.

This is a form of repression that appears to condemn both affect and the unconscious to a situation of uselessness and, through his estimation of the secondary process as being a “higher stage” of psychical development, Freud fails to pursue a study of the unconscious as a kind of reservoir of creative material where there is an imbrication of desire, the other and the social. As with dreams which present us with material that is both familiar and unintelligible, the unconscious reveals itself as that which is always posing material that can fuel auto-theorisation. It presents ourselves to ourselves as ‘other’, as social, as possessing all the craft and ingenuity of a polyphonic novel; it reveals affect as intimately entwined with thought, and in this way, leaving aside the efficient functioning of language and descending from the higher level, it makes us responsive to music as that which provides a frame for unconscious emotion.

22.

One of the more noticeable aporias in Freud’s paper on the unconscious – a fruitful blind spot that shows his theoretical musings to be one of creative-experiment – is that which concerns the interaction between the unconscious and the conscious. Such a “communication between the two systems” is both admitted and denied in the space of a few pages. Thus “clear-cut relations between the two” are proffered to the extent that “a total severance of the two systems…is what… above all characterises a condition of illness” and yet denied paragraphs later when he offers up a “a sharp and final division” between the two as occurring at puberty. This is possibly to be accounted for by Freud’s divergence from his own meta-psychological postulates which has it that the psychical apparatus functions as an admixture of the topographical, the dynamical and the economical. The first has it that an unconscious idea can be registered also in the conscious and “exists simultaneously in two places.” The second relates to the way that there can be “a change of state of the psychical energy cathected to an idea” and the economical relates to the quantities of energy and the vicissitudes they undergo: whether the energy is bound (held in reserve) or discharged (expended).

23.

All three modes of functioning depend on repression and it is this repression that changes the state of psychical energy and the intensity and flow of its cathexis. If we take seriously Freud’s ambiguous contention that there is a clear-cut relation between the conscious and the unconscious then this is effectively a means of installing repression as an actual boundary that is insurmountable. In fact this is a direction that Freud does pursue by means of his reduction of the human to the innately biological: if there is a primeval core, an “aboriginal population in the mind,” then repression is always acting to ‘keep-out’ uncivilizable instincts which can never be ‘tamed’ or overcome. There is no process, no auto-theorisation and no future. Rather there is psychical ‘splitting’ (schizophrenisation) as an ontological law.

24.

However, Freud, perhaps self-critically, offers up countless arguments in defiance of this “calling of a truce” between the human and the animal and these are arguments that paint a picture of the unconscious as an indispensable factor in creative activity of all kinds (creative, meant here in its widest sense as a continual process of engagement, as auto-theorisation.) Psychoanalysis is not free of contradiction and it is undeniable that it has as one of its aims not so much the maintenance of an equilibrium (which can be approached as ‘stuckness’) but the breaching of repression, the “circumvention of … censorship.” As such it facilitates the presentation of psychic materials (memory traces, affects) that are not simply innate (incestuous, aggressive etc.) but are socially derivative and repressed because they have not been subject to auto-theorisation.

25.

Such material may present itself variously as a ‘nagging doubt’ or as a vague feeling of disquiet, of something unfinished or of something left unsaid. But it is social material: each day in the street we can hear that slightly raised, incredulous tone wherein someone is expressing disbelief at someone else’s behaviour; seeking to ascribe motives to a word, phrase or expression that has presented itself as enigmatic. Even Freud, renowned for burrowing into the ‘monad’ for his answers, has stated that the unconscious is “accessible to the impressions of life.” It is not just socially connected but is made up from a social material that is continually being interjected: “all our psychical activity starts from stimuli (whether internal or external.)” The unconscious exists between people and it is elliptical and obtuse to the degree that we are not tuned-in to social-noise, to the so-called residual inefficiencies.

26.

Being material that is unconscious means that it is material that often comes to consciousness through a different guise, though what Freud calls “derivatives.” It is the guises in which it comes that also serve to reinforce the contention that the unconscious (the primary process) is a main factor in what Cornelius Castoriadis calls, across all his later works, “radical imagination.” Freud’s massive tome on dreams may, at times, seek refuge in symbolism and oedipal reductionism, but, if we sidestep his scientific push to interpret and ascribe ‘hard-and-fast’ meanings to dreams what is inescapable is the rich litany of psychical processes that it brings to light; processes that later came to form the basis of Freud’s depiction of the characteristics of the primary process. Dreams, in short, almost function as ‘novelistic’ passages and as episodes of ‘cinematic’ clarity. Related to hallucinations, they “introduce elements which could never have been objects of actual perception,” they create “composite structures” where, as Proust shows, our memory-traces of people and scenes segue into the memory traces of other people and scenes as well as compressing disparate chronological events into new flash-frames of simultaneity.

27.

Dreams are for Freud a “particular form of thinking” that establish connections between thoughts, ideas, memories and anxieties. In short dreams are indicative of “modes of activity freed from inhibition” and present us with enigmatic material that can be worked-over, that presents us with ourselves in the ‘third-person.’ Moreover, we can see from dreams that it is the very interaction between the unconscious and the conscious, the fluidity of our passage between them, that comes to be a marker of our (often overlooked and denied) creativity. But for this to occur repression needs to be overcome: “derivatives of the unconscious can circumvent… censorship… reach a certain intensity of cathexis.” This is Freud at his most radical. However, just as these derivatives can come to consciousness as the audio-visual stimulus of dreams they are similarly, and perhaps censoriously, presented by psychopathology as symptoms of mental illness. Thus, we dare not recognise these creative powers as our own.

28.

This coming into consciousness, this creative capacity, is what is sought to be prevented by repression. It is repression that seeks to subdue psychical energy and the social repression between consciousness and perception is similarly aiming at censoring the stimulus that enters the psychical apparatus and activates the psychical energy. Such resistance is that which analysis, and in a wider remit, cultural-engagement, seeks to overcome. This is a resistance that, stemming from the need to avoid displeasure, tends to ward-off all intensity of ideas and emotions and remains in an unaroused state. The status afforded to such ‘displeasure’ by Freud is still a factor in a society that seeks to ward-off all ‘trauma’. This is manifested publicly as cultural censorship where the delimiting of a possible cultural-engagement means that an auto-theorisation, that would come to encounter the blockage of those social-repression mechanisms (from poverty to language to mediated archetypes to cultural injunctions such as ‘completion’ and ‘resolution,’) is almost always instituted as affording no pleasure. In many circumstances it is even branded as individualistic and solipsistic.

29.

Yet these “unknown pleasures” (Proust) of unconscious enigmatic material are a means of further encountering ‘pleasures’ that are themselves defined and constructed socially and enter into the culture as archetypes (repressing-representations). Repression thus prohibits the foregoing of such ‘traumatic’ stimuli in the interest of an efficient balance of psychical energies, and rather than open the sluice-gates between the unconscious and the conscious and have access to a mobile cathexis of ideas and affects we see that repression effects an anti-cathexis: “a train of thought which is ‘repudiated’ is one from which cathexis has been withdrawn.” It is dis-intensified. Eviscerated. The more an idea or emotion exhibits mobile cathectic energy the more it is in a state of agitation and flow, the more it attracts the attention of consciousness to the affect or the idea. It needs connect. This is the instance of “abreaction” which early analysis sought, but it is also an instance which culture, and particularly music, can bring into play and which, crucially, need not be mediated by specialists nor restricted to the time-limits of the session.

30.

Indeed, an overcoming of (psychic) repression, that would lay bare other (social) repressions, would need to draw upon characteristics of the primary process and there is much to suggest that music comes to directly interact with the unconscious: it is instantly pleasurable and gives little regard to the economical efficiencies of an injunctive social-reality; it is timeless in that under music’s sway we lose a sense of socially-enforced time divisions; it ward-off the fear of unconscious emotion. In short music activates desiring-energy and helps to bring it to social expression. So, not being subject to the secondary process, eluding language, means that we initially respond to music through dance, bodily movement, grimaces etc. The musical message, proffering seduction and acting as a stimulus for perception, does not thereby undergo sifting, comprehension and comparison; its ‘all-at-once’, not being able to be made readily digestible, comes to be apprehended as an atmosphere.

31.

This is one means by which music is both creative of mobile cathectic energy at the same time that the psychical energy thus created cannot come to settle on any one object or signifier. Being mobile means that the energies thus provoked cannot come to be subsumed and overdetermined by being immediately expressible in words: “This initial desire is radically irreducible not because what it aims at does not find in reality an object that embodies it, or in language words that state it, but because it cannot find in the psyche itself an image in which to depict itself.”⁸ In this way music comes to act as a derivative of unconscious emotion without necessarily having to transform itself into words or images or without being accompanied by a fear of ‘madness.’ And so, if repression comes to act as an injunction (words) or as repressing-representative (image) then music can enable abreaction: desire, with all its taboo intensities intact, in learning how to be pre-articulate, learns how to speak and enter into a process of an auto-theorisation that can challenge the ‘reality principle.’

32.

Backtracking a little it could be said that music can come to stir-up intensity in a slightly different way. Music can effect a transposition of unconscious ideas and desires into the conscious by “establishing a connection with an idea that already belongs to consciousness.” The conscious idea is normally one that seems trivial and because of this, because the idea is “indifferent and recent,” it becomes a suitable vehicle for the unconscious idea or emotion to be made sufficiently urgent enough to be registered by consciousness. Music can be seen as acting as a model of this transposition: with vocal music the lyrics, often dull and uninspiring when written out, are inflected by the music around them; in instrumental music there is a transposition between separate parts of a composition that becomes explicit when we consider improvised music. A further ramification of this musically-induced transposition, which is not a million miles away from our relation to dreams, is that the apparent triviality of our thoughts, when listening to music or when recollecting a dream, leads us to believe that there has been no intellectual activity whilst we have been listening or dreaming – we see here another instance of social repression where thinking is not granted the status of thought unless it has been suitably expressed in words that are socially deemed as logical and which concur with accepted forms.

33.

Repetition in music is perhaps a key point in case. Here the music itself is conventionally deemed as having no progression, as being simplistic and trivial, but it is a form of music that has great abreactive powers. Here another creative element of the ‘dream-work’ comes into play, for it is with repetition that we sense qualities of condensation and compression being added to those of transposition. So not only are unconscious ideas and desires able to elude repression it may be the case that repetitive music allow the conscious to probe the unconscious. Such is the deliberate overdetermination of a repeating beat or refrain or loop that, in jettisoning linear progression and thwarting the expected cathexes, it temporarily abates our being conditioned by the social measurement of time and, in fulfilling one of the characteristics of the primary process, allows others to come to the fore.

34.

Thus, repetition allows for such an accumulation of psychical energy that its cathectic intensities are much more mobile. There is thus a kind of hyper-cathexis of unconscious affects and memories where the energy can become intensely libidinal. This is itself an indication of the social formation of a ‘drive’, where, in this instance, the repetition of sound, in adding ‘layers’ to the psyche, in creating pathways, is creative of a sensitivity to sound that could amount to an ‘auricular drive.’ But repetition, in withholding the expected denouement of the music, doesn’t give rise to cathectic energy being discharged as sexual pleasure, but, in increasing its ‘volume’, it recasts sensory and mental attention as pleasurable. Is it that music enables psychical repression to be breached, that the dynamical interaction of the conscious (perceptive attention) and the unconscious (affective intensity) as we listen makes the ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘reality principle’ coincide?

35.

It is in such ways as these that music always heralds the appearance of passion, but it is a passion that marks out a kind of praxis: it is emotional and rational at the same time. With some music, particularly music that is complex and unfamiliar, this praxis manifests itself as the interloping of passions and emotions that are instaurated by the music and do not correspond to passions and emotions we are familiar with. As with those dreams in which we ourselves appear as subjects it is nearly always a case of us never appearing in a form that is completely recognisable. So too with music we never quite coincide with the representation we have of ourself. When Artaud says “I am beneath myself” he hints at this condition of listening to music where unconscious desires and emotions are activated to the degree that they cannot be easily represented, but are nonetheless felt and experienced.

36.

There is always something more in the music than what we expected. It is ‘wider’ than us to the extent that our listening to it implies the presence of others. It is inter-subjective. At the same time music is suggestive of the enigmatic material of our unconscious. Not only can it activate already present unconscious residues (i.e. if the music is nostalgic it immediately cathects with memories and stimulates the revival of memory-traces), it presents us with further enigmatic messages. This latter is not only borne out by the new arrangements of passion and emotion (unknown pleasures) but can be seen in the ever-increasing prominence in music of sounds without pitch. From Varèse to Throbbing Gristle and Techno the clarity of tone and harmonies have been undermined by the rise and extended use of other attributes of sound such as timbre, attack, decay and duration: a ‘noise’ component. When this is coupled to an increased rate of change of sounds, indefinitely pitched sounds that become more percussive and are placed in moving layers, we are witness to a music that appears not only discontinuous but ambiguous in its intent.

37.

Experiments in electronic music muddy the situation even further. The experiments in cybernetic music made by Roland Kayn are productive of both new sound material and compositional techniques to the extent that his long-form pieces suspend all familiarity and elicit a disorientated response. We cannot trace a sound back to specific instruments and such a simple disorientation as this, similar to the fear-laden severance of an unconscious emotion from its means of expression, is experienced as a provocation, a seduction, a unpleasureable pressure. It is thus material that needs to be worked-over and this temporal dimension, this returning to the sounds, is itself one of the major aspects of any music for – with attention often “directed backwards in time towards the most recently accented element”⁹ – we are, when listening, presented with a sense of multi-temporality and our own changing responses. The anticipation of what is to come carried on the wave of what has receded.

38.

Desire, unable to “find in the psyche… an image in which to depict itself” thus finds, through music, a means of (re)presenting itself to us. Desire “leans-on” the open-ended, polysemic factor in music in the same way that desire, as libido, can lean on a “non-sexual, vital function.” Thus, when Laplanche has it that “the capacity to be the point of departure of sexual stimulation is by no means the privilege of the erotogenic zones” and that “every cutaneous region is capable of serving as a departure for sexual stimulation”¹⁰ the link between music and libido can be seen as another factor that adds momentum to the intuition that musical intensities are a means of breaking down and eluding repression. Openness to music is an openness to desire in all its forms. The provocations of enigma and discontinuity in electronic music are thereby experienced as sensual tensions and are attempted to be addressed. With music, the usual repressive conditions of being resistant to the questions that challenge the ‘reality principle’ are suspended. In this way music becomes a therapeutic space which foregrounds our drive towards expression and communication in that we become accustomed to the process of our own enabling auto-theorisation: we find reflected in music our own psychical struggle with contradiction, discontinuity and ambiguity.

39.

If we consider the ‘process’ music of an improvising ensemble like AMM we can see the importance of not just unleashing desire and repressed material in the manner of an instinctual tantrum. Rather than such catharsis what occurs when listening to this group is our acute awareness of a very fragile form that is constructed inter-subjectively. Desires come into interaction with the desire of others and, in this way, desire is working by means of anticipation and response. It is being worked-through by the desired choice of another group member. It is socialised desire. Being a music that makes itself in the present moment, the music of AMM is indicative of group members making spaces for pre-articulation. This would serve as an apt metaphor for our being able to address unconscious material, for, in attempting to place it in the framework of language, there would be many instances of stumbling, stuttering and inaccuracy. As with the therapeutic encounter, the music of AMM and other improvising ensembles, makes a space for these tentatives; a space that profiles the interaction between the unconscious and the conscious; an interaction between the primary and secondary processes.

40.

Perhaps this is more evident with the music of AMM than it is elsewhere because the improvisatory route that they choose is above all a retaliation against an easily recognisable articulation. Not being composed, in the sense of already being annotated and pre-prepared, give rise to ‘free association’ as method; a method that would have to draw upon unconscious desire and emotion. And so, if ‘confessional literature’ – or one that draws upon a journal or diarist form (such as that of Kafka and Bataille etc.) – is often frowned upon, it is so because it is seen as being self-indulgent and thus failing to provide the necessary aesthetic distancing. AMM’s music makes audible this subjective exploratory factor but it does so in a group setting and any indulgence is tempered by the way it makes a collective desire audible as an assemblage. It is in this way that AMM, in presenting us with a pre-articulation as a full articulation, in overcoming the charge of ‘indulgence,’ reveal the necessity of auto-theorisation: “In assessing the value of an improvisation the audience evaluates itself.”¹¹ The collective unconscious becomes audible.

41.

Maybe more than this. Maybe improvised music, as the collective working-though of unanswered questions, as sonically presenting the unfinished of auto-theorisation, is a means of turning towards the future and what is still to come. Maybe it is through such processual music that we are given concrete incitement toward constructing a social imaginary: “What desire aims at is not an ‘object’ but that ‘state’, that ‘scene’ which, when we can grasp it … implies not simply a ‘subject’ and ‘object’ but a certain relation between them – and it is in this relation that the meaning of phantasy is to be found for subjects.”¹² By chipping at repression and coming to demonstrate that the unconscious and conscious are in interaction; by showing how the emotional and the rational are in modulation; by revealing that our subjectivities can be held by other subjectivities; by presenting us with unfamiliar forms with an unintelligible content, music, like other enigmatic messages that stimulate the unconscious, can come to instaurate a space between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’ Phantasy thus moves away from its fixed role as compensation for lack and absence, and becomes a socially productive means through which that fear of unconscious emotion can be presented to the conscious and can thereby come to be expressed between us… We move from the ‘discharge’ of instinctual catharsis to the ‘plateau phase’ of uncategorisable affects, the unknown pleasures, of maximal differentiation … and we institute… as Abreaction Associations.

Howard Slater

1999

Edited 2025.

1 Freud quotes taken from The Interpretation of Dreams, Pelican, 1985 and On Metapsychology, Pelican 1984.

2 Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, Drives, ICA Documents 1992, p.17.

3 Georg Büchner: ‘Danton’s Death’ in Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, Penguin Classics 1996, p.37.

4 Cornelius Castoriadis: World in Fragments, Stanford University Press 1997, p.121.

5 Lacan cited by Cornelius Castoriadis, ibid, p.102.

6 Andrew Fletcher: Seduction, Translation, Drive, ibid, p71. Castoriadis concurs with this view when he states: “The newborn infant also has imposed upon it various forms of conduct and behaviour, feelings of attraction and repulsion, and so on.” See World in Fragments, ibid, p85.

7 Jacques Lacan: Ecrits, Tavistock 1980, p.49.

8 Cornelius Castoriadis, ibid, p.296.

9 James Tenney: Meta-Hodos, Frog Peak Music 1992, p.37.

10 Jean Laplanche: Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, John Hopkins University Press 1976, p.22.

11 Eddie Prevost: Improvisation – History, Directions, Practice, Association of Improvising Musicians 1984, p.11.

12 Cornelius Castoriadis, ibid, p292.

• Other texts by Howard Slater on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 2
• All articles from Break/Flow 2

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