DesireDesire is sounded in music, like a ship sounding the sea for submarines, like the vibration of a guitar's sound-box after the chord has faded.
How does music do this? I do not know. Maybe through rhythm: the resounding, pounding throb of drum and bass, breaking through the floorboards in the house of being finding out where the nasty smell is coming from and where the bodies are buried. Had Nietzsche had the good fortune to live to hear James Brown and the JB's invention of funk in the 1969 classic 'Cold Sweat', rather than the 19th Century heavy metal of Wagner or the empty sub-Latinate prick-teasing of Bizet's Carmen, I think he might have been forced to agree. I dream of seeing Nietzsche getting down in the Apollo Theatre in Harlem on one of those enormous nights in the 1960's when James Brown was screaming his divine heresies over the sliding, percolating bass of Bootsy Collins.
Music makes sense of our selfhood, a self that is always at the point of being unmade through senseless desire, the desire that is sounded in music. Divided against ourselves we move against the present through which we pass.
Without music we are diminished, we become mere castratos of moon-mash. Music is like the light which illuminates objects in the world. Like light, it adds nothing but itself. Close to the heat of that light, we live more intensely.
Intensely be.
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Music places youMusic places you. It dates you in relation to a specific place. I can remember literally hundreds of dated and placed musical experiences: listening to Bowie's 'Suffragette City' in 1972 on my mother's stereo and not understanding my excitement; listening to the Ramones first album in someone's bedroom in Letchworth Garden City in 1976 with a sense of joyful disbelief and relief; hearing Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet on a walkman at 6.00 a.m. travelling on a train in Tuscany in 1989; hearing the first Tricky single on a portable CD-player in a hotel on the Leidseplein in Amsterdam 1995; listening to R. Kelly's 'When a Woman's Fed Up' driving north through Louisiana 1999; listening to a live version of 'Allaïl Ya Laïla' in a club in Tunis in 2000; listening to Iggy Pop's 'I wanna be your dog' after a few too many drinks with a friend last week, etc. etc. etc. And it is the etcaetera that is the point. Cultural and even personal identity can be literally assembled, or composed, from a bundle of tunes. Memory is a record collection and you can learn who you are from sleeve notes. For most of us, the story of who we are, what philosophers call our narrative identity, is in a record collection. The unanswerable question is: what is it about song, about words and rhythm that is able to do this? How can music connect together and make sense of the pieces of a life?
I think this question can only be responded to musically. The music that we have made is a tentative response to the question. What is yours?
Music places us, it locates us, within a time and within a culture. But - and this is the pleasure and the paradox of the experience - it does this by momentarily displacing us, dislocating us, dislocating our experience of who we are. Music roots us by uprooting us.
Music gives us alternative imaginative geographies for the places we inhabit.
Human consciousness, that strange awareness taking place between our ears, is the effect, the aftershock, the deferred resonance of unconscious desire. This desire is fundamentally sexual, and it is coded culturally as what we call gender and the gender differences between boy, girl and the whole plethora of intersexes. This desire is undoubtedly social, but it keeps bumping its head against something that resists the social, something obscure that we might call the real or the natural or the wild or the savage or whatever. It is this obscure limit between the social and a real that seems to resist it that Freud names with his limit-concept of the drive. Desire is experienced as the effect of a drive in consciousness. But what that drive is aiming at is death, understood as a complete reduction to nil of the energy in the organism. Paradoxically, the aim of desire is its extinction: cessation, stasis, nirvana. Even more paradoxically, it is just this extinction of desire that we cannot will. We are endlessly caught in the movement of our desire.
What is desire? A joy proposed, a dream remembered.
I think that music best traces the obscure limit between our conscious lives and the workings of unconscious desire. Music traces that limit and allows us to transgress it, just for a moment, an epiphany, a moment of grace, in the sheer elongation of an instant. From time to time, here and there, in depressed boredom and in manic joy, we listen to music and turn ourselves around to face that which flickers and burns at the heart of unconscious desire.
Music permits us to glimpse the springs of desire in a moment and movement of excess that Nietzsche calls the Dionysian. But direct contact with the Dionysian springs of desire would destroy us, suffocate us and consciousness would evaporate like a puddle of water in the midday desert sun. The Dionysian is deathly. Music therefore both opens consciousness to the movement of unconscious desire and saves us from direct contact with the flames of that desire. Music warms us, it heats us with its intensity, but it should not burn.
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Critchley & Simmons - PhilosophyFor Critchley, philosophy is for everyone. ?I?m passionately committed to the idea that philosophy should be an approachable subject,? he says.
?It can be taught to kids, and one definition I like is
that philosophy is the education of grown-ups. It takes
a certain effort to do that, to make it approachable
and I think it?s far harder than technical writing.?
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