Mujic of the footure Jacques Lacan and concordant discord

Abstract

This thesis examines work by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan alongside music-theoretical texts pertaining to acousmatic art – an art of sound-images and mathematical letters, comprising musique concrète and stochastic music. The key texts examined were first published in French: namely, work by Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis and Luciano Berio, all of whom were active between 1950 and 1980. Despite the common historical context, there emerges a precise discord – particularly between Lacan and the composer-theorists – concerning the subject and its theorisation. This will only come as a surprise to those who exaggerate the mischief of segregation, overlook the fundamental antagonism between the subject and the other, and assume the existence of harmony, unity and identity. Following Franchinus Gaffurius’s sixteenth-century proclamation that musical harmony is concordant discord, the tenets of this thesis are as follows: there is no bi-univocal relation between a note’s circular and linear components, no mind-body connection, no immediate musicality, and no such thing as sonic essence or intrinsic meaning. More broadly, this thesis claims that a totalised domain of discourse is synonymous with the absolute Other, La femme, the Siren, the music of the spheres, and metalanguage, all of which do not exist yet are repeatedly invoked by composer-theorists and musicologists. Lacan termed the perfect harmony, correspondence, union, ratio, proportion, or relation between two the sexual rapport, and repeatedly asserted that there is no such thing. A relation between the subject and an other appears to exist, thanks to the intermediary law and the function of phantasy. By contrast, the subject engaged in an immediate rapport is nothing but a puppet of delusion.