Identity, Aesthetics, and Sound in the Fin de Siècle

Redesigning Perception

Dariusz Gafijczuk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134492404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This book is an analytic and historical portrait of the volatile decades at the beginning of the 20th century. Engaging with avant-garde art and thought, and concentrating on two of the most controversial and still culturally relevant personalities of Viennese modernism - Sigmund Freud and Arnold Schoenberg - it tells the story of a cultural experiment of unprecedented proportions, an experiment that attempted to redesign the senses and the concept of individual identity. The book describes the shape of this identity through its mutually overlapping artistic and intellectual dimensions, as it explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and music.

1 The Acoustic Symptom

The acoustic symptom has a history. In the version we know well it reaches back to around 1850 and, not unlike its mythological origins, it first deals with repression and then the recovery of echoes.

For what are symptoms if not echoes—acoustic fragments of ailments’ invisible origins? In their physical and plastic amplitudes, they are transcripts of a mute totality—pieces of the whole, whose identity is constructed through a series of performances. In other words, symptoms are contractions reworking the overall context of an illness, tapering it down to a certain shape with a unique surface and texture. The important thing to note about such reconstructive logic is that it “does not describe a state of things, but immediately produces a real fact.”¹

Performance and the production of facts in symptomatic arrangements played a major role in the activities of Schoenberg and Freud. Their range extended from the more official and public instances of theoretical/practical elaborations (Freud’s publication of case studies, Schoenberg’s concerts), the semiprivate occurrences (relationships with students, patients, followers), to finally the very private and biographical. One such symptom that framed Freud’s biography is his strained relationship to music proper—its early dismissal and misrecognition. This appears to be the case at least on the surface, because eventually the lining of sound will envelop the psychoanalytical habitat in its entirety.

The acoustic censorship began early. In his student days, Freud occupied the cramped family flat in Leopoldstadt, the traditional Jewish quarter of Vienna:

This apartment, to which they [the Freuds] moved in 1875 … was scarcely lavish for the sizable family. Alexander, the youngest, Freud’s five sisters, and their parents crowded into three bedrooms. Freud alone had his “cabinet” for his private domain, a room “long and narrow, with a window looking on the street,” more and more crammed with books … If Freud’s needs clashed with those of Anna or the others, his prevailed without question. When, intent on his school books, he complained about the noise that Anna’s piano lessons were making, the piano vanished never to return. The Freuds must have been among the very few middle-class Central European families without a piano.²

Among these, there was another family that lived in the second district of Vienna at the time and shared a similar experience of silence: “It seems that there was no music-making in Schoenberg’s parents’ house. Even after the father had opened a collection agency the family remained in modest conditions and did not own a piano.”³ Of course, we should not overestimate such anecdotal evidence. Yet, taken at the level of the symptomatic, these circumstances speak to a certain collusion of circumstances that inform the auditory attitudes underpinning Freud’s and Schoenberg’s mature relationship to sound.

They start from two opposite ends. Freud progressively fills the silence that was so precious to him during his study years with his own instrument for sound making. This process begins in 1886 with the publication of a medical paper on the development of the acoustic nerve.⁴ Schoenberg, who, given his early childhood experience, never acquired full instrumental proficiency, progressively extends this logic of detachment to his entire creative output, eventually dispensing with the standard acoustic identity, in a way silencing music to liberate sound. Both men will eventually meet in the middle, constructing systems of thought and practice that not only speak to each other but also contribute immeasurably to the character profile of the fin de siècle.

From the vantage point of our argument, the interesting aspect of these two parallel episodes is the early breach of standards in Freud’s and Schoenberg’s immediate environments. Its presence is felt through a range of symptoms. Of special importance is the acoustic interruption or the blockage of sonority, because sound in this case has been accused of luxury or noise, and declined. To a certain extent, this creates the side-effect condition of arrested development and censored performance of the bourgeois identity. Freud, through his objection, not only denies the pleasure of music to his sister (a pleasure that, as he will say some years later, he is unable to take part in)⁵ but also inadvertently blocks the consumption and the expression of such a conventional identity to Anna and the family. This pattern will be repeated again and again by Freud himself, especially in his practice and the nexus of ties that bind the patient to a series of stammers and interruptions, returning him or her to a zone of subjective morphology that instigates a divergence from the previously accepted norm.

Freud’s disavowal of sound acquires further symptomatic significance that goes to the heart of the psychoanalytic technique itself, for psychoanalysis is the performance of complaint and voicing of grievances through the production of sound. Given this, Freud is unable to escape sonority, leaving him with no choice but to develop an entire philosophy of ‘soundings’ and the ‘technology’ for their recording and interpretation. Psychoanalysis is indeed the treatment with and through sound, and its productive output is central to the technique that from the start is known as the ‘talking cure’, even if at first there seems to be a large gulf separating musical sound and speech, given how the latter is overburdened by meaning. However, a parallel version of grammatical oversignification is also endemic to music in the form of tonality and harmony as the syntax of composition, against which Schoenberg will stake a claim initially through a complaint, then an accusation, and finally an all-out attack. Therefore, on the most basic level and in various proportions, both Freud and Schoenberg manipulate what we may refer to as the material-acoustic phenomenon:

The material element, which in all aesthetic enjoyment is at the root of the intellectual one, is greater in music than in any other art. Music, through its immateriality the most ethereal art, and yet the most sensuous one through its play of forms without any extraneous subject, exhibits in this mysterious fusion of two antagonistic principles a strong affinity for the nerves, those equally mysterious links in the invisible telegraphic connection between mind and body.⁶

Freud becomes the master of such telegraphy, at one point even comparing the role of the analyst to a telephone receiver—triggering the process of circular interpretations based on sequences of looping, interminable transmissions from the deepest, sonic frontiers of the psyche. Hermann von Helmholtz, who in his 1863 work On the Sensations of Tone as the Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music established the famous modeling of sound based on acoustic overtones—the internal echo of a note through which other, more distant tones are heard, leading to ‘natural’ harmonic affinities between them—also thought of the entire nervous system as networks of communication at a distance. “The nerve fibers have been often compared with telegraphic wires traversing a country”⁷—he wrote. New technologies have been frequently mapped onto the human body, unlocking its physical dimensions and transposing them onto new plateaus of perception. Something very similar took place between the psychology of the unconscious and resonance as the only tool that can penetrate deep enough to come into contact with its surface.

The unconscious can be delivered for interpretation only in packets of aural information. Such a setup operates on the basis of releasing the acoustic element from behind a soundproof partition—a mechanism surprisingly similar to the distinction between musical and pathological hearing introduced in the 1850s by Eduard Hanslick.

Perhaps the best-known music critic in Vienna from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Hanslick made his name writing on the aesthetics of music. Careful reflection on the nature of sound led him to espouse an especially unusual position at the time: early and persistent criticism of Richard Wagner. In his best known work, The Beautiful in Music (first published in 1854, and reprinted nine times in its German edition) Hanslick argued against the still prevalent appraisal of music as an art, whose most basic and valuable merit is found in the affective arousal: “I firmly adhere to the conviction that all the customary appeals to our emotional faculty can never show the way to a single musical law” (Beautiful in Music, 4). It follows then that the inquiry into musical aesthetics is “mainly and primarily directed against the widely accepted doctrine that the office of music is to represent feelings” (Ibid., 4). Feelings are extraneous notions that are motivated by the psychic/nervous state of the body, but strictly speaking they are not musical phenomena, because the latter are enclosed in their own form as sound: “The beauty of a composition is specifically musical, i.e., it inheres in the combinations of musical sounds and is independent of all alien, extramusical notions” (Ibid., 5).

Emotion, presenting us with false assumptions about the ‘nature’ of sound, perpetuates the condition of pathological hearing, because it misidentifies sound in its most basic character that is always equal to itself. True hearing, on the other hand, is an intellectual and contemplative activity, a process of attentive listening to the sequences and combination of tones. The consequence of this state of affairs is that

The word Anschauung (viewing, contemplating) is no longer applied to the visual processes only but also to the functions of the other senses. It is, in fact, eminently suited to describe the act of attentive hearing, which is nothing but a mental inspection of a succession of musical images.⁸ (Ibid., 11)

When, at one point,, Freud concludes that he cannot take pleasure in the art of music because one is not able to engage it through contemplation, he will practice his own brand of pathological hearing.

Even if the reality of feeling something while experiencing sound cannot be denied, there is no direct connection between music and emotions, because the latter do not originate in the acoustic structure but are imported into it by misdirected perception:

For, in reality, there is no causal nexus between a musical composition and the feelings it may excite, as the latter vary with our experience and impressibility [sic]. (Ibid., 14)

This is how, in the most intriguing manner, Hanslick discovers the blueprint for acoustics as a form of therapy that only a few years later will work itself into Freud’s modeling of the psyche. The psychoanalytic patient is a case study in deformed perception caused by the pathology of hearing that is unable to receive the unconscious—a condition that Freud attempts to corner in its own distortion by instituting attentive listening as the proper approach towards the subject. He does so under the technical name of ‘evenly suspended attention’ (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit). Even suspension of attention aims to eliminate the emotive factor by not unduly elevating certain kinds of content over others. This is why the acoustic-material phenomenon will replay itself and find shelter in Freud’s psychological matrix, operating according to the free association of forms, not meanings as in language. If “the essence of music is sound in motion” (Ibid., 48), then sound is the seat of unadulterated elastic materiality that works by always recombining and renewing the sequential elaboration of tones:

The musical material in the hands of creative genius is as plastic and pliable as it is profuse … The union of sounds (from the interdependence of which the beautiful in music flows) is not effected by mechanically stringing them together but by acts of a free imagination. (Ibid., 52)

The fundamental mechanics of plastic manipulation and elaboration can be characterized as a directed interpretation of sonority, a kind of sound-work (Klangarbeit). This is not only a pattern whose bravado will be explored by Schoenberg to its limit but also a similar type of procedure that will underpin Freud’s analysis of dreams as dream-work (Traumarbeit). Dream-work and the technique of interpretation at its core depend on the pliability of forms—a principle that becomes the backbone of psychoanalysis.

Hanslick’s model of musical aesthetics is a dynamic one. Sound is a phenomenon that moves and paces. And it may even suggest feelings, but it is not the source of these as such. Thus, it operates in a similar way to the Freudian psyche, collecting impulses into arrangements through condensation, displacement, and imaginary representations that step into the shoes of reality. Only these forms allow for an amplification of the deeper, independent psychological elements, but they never constitute their total replacement. Hence, Freud will never fully dispense with the dual model of the mind, even though he will come quite close to doing so. This is because the amplitude of psychological processes always remains suspended between their deeper composition and their rewiring for sound. Hanslick again anticipates the psychoanalytic session some fifty years prior to its invention, when he writes,

A state of mind manifests itself most directly in music when origination and execution coincide. This occurs in the freest form of extempore playing, and if the player proceeds not so much according to the strict methods of art as with a predominantly subjective tendency (a pathological one, in a wider sense), the expression which he elicits from the keys may assume almost the vividness of speech. (Ibid., 76, my emphasis)

In Freud’s hands, the simultaneous presence of origination and execution will become known as the psychoanalytic session—the set for the directed performance of the analyst and the patient. It is a type of play that elicits forms channeled through the medium of sound out of the raw, ‘unconscious’, and chaotic material. Freud will later describe this type of engagement as Deutung, or ‘interpretation’, even though the German word is much more resonant than the abstractness of ‘interpretation’ has the ability to convey. In this sense, interpretation is more like sculpting in sound derived from subtle, textural contrasts, allowing Freud at one point to say that it is actually more appropriate to speak of psychoanalytic constructions, rather than interpretations.

If music is this ineffable, nondiscursive potency that pushes us along a trajectory of approaching the element that “directly, in itself … signifies nothing”,⁹ as Vladimir Jankélévitch says, how can we still cling to the idea of communicating with anything at all? This is indeed the core of the problem facing Freud. Jankélévitch, having the benefit of time as an ally, writing in the intellectual climate of postwar France, resolves this tension much in the same way Freud is inadvertently forced to do—by distinguishing between discursive and immediate, or situated communication, that in the manner of a performance produces immediate facts. This situates us in the “penumbra of melancholia” that can take place only in one direction, like “from hypnotist to hypnotized” (Music and the Ineffable, 9). This is where the psychological tension is harnessed to sound and released through the malleability of its form in the moment of reproduction, because music, like the psyche, “has broad shoulders. In the hermeneutics of music, everything is possible, the most fabulous ideologies and unfathomable imputed meanings” (Ibid., 11).

Such transposition into a different register attempts to counteract the process of paralyzing overidentification with one, singular meaning. Psychoanalysis rebuffs it, replacing it with an entirely different circuitry of communication that organizes events acoustically, through segmental information presented concurrently along several planes. Unlike Narcissus, these are familiar with their echo:

The melody’s mirror-reflection of itself, and with canonic imitation … In polyphony, the voices speak together, harmoniously, but they are not speaking among themselves, to one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Acoustic Symptom
• 2. Psychology of Expectation
• 3. Play of the Senses
• 4. Acoustic Perspectives
• 5. Echoes
• 6. Psychology of Distances
• 7. The Anatomy of Namelessness
• 8. Schoenberg’s Oedipus
• 9. Interpretation of Dreams: Theory of Harmony
• Conclusion: The Passion for the Real
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index