Recently I have written a piece of orchestral music, entitled “Organs without Bodies”. The idea of Organs without Bodies, from the Žižek book of the same name, involves highlighting the impasse between the Organs and the Bodies as the site of production. Whereas a totalising ideological system smooths over the impasses of intractable difference, a dialectical approach (which exposes these impasses) allows for new spaces to be opened up.
Before thinking about Organs without Bodies in a musical context, it may help to think about it from another direction. For example, this article in yesterday’s Guardian looks at generational differences in attitudes to sex scenes in TV and movies. Younger people, of so-called generation z, are put off by gratuitous, voyeuristic, quasi-pornographic and heteronormative depictions of sex in media, preferring instead “to see individuals of all varieties on screen, of all sexualities, romantic attractions and relationship types, from different backgrounds and cultures” in sex scenes which show intimacy and character-driven relationships rather than exploitation and objectification.
The Body (or what Deleuze would call the virtual) here is something which is shared between both approaches: the total idea of the sexual relationship. The Organs may even be the same: a couple, whether heterosexual or homosexual, who engage in sexual activity with each other. What differs dramatically in each case is the path of connection between the Organs and the Body: on the one hand, we have the male gaze which turns feminine sexuality into an object for masculine enjoyment (the masculine being cast as sexually exploitative or voyeuristic), as well as the heteronormatively constituted (even if homosexual) couple who experience sex as an interruption of their relationship (and of the plot of the film or show in which the sex happens) rather than a continuation of it; and on the other hand we have the queer and/or feminine sexual experience, in which people enjoy themselves via the relationship with the other, the relationship itself therefore being of vital importance (and uninterrupted) through the sexual encounter. The production of new approaches to sexuality happens then in the transition from Organs to Bodies (here Žižek differs from Deleuze, who sees the Virtual level of the totalising image as being the site of production).
The older approach to representations of sex in media elevates the sexual encounter out of the Symbolic social structure which contains it, onto the level of the Imaginary: not sexual relationship but Sex. There is no awkwardness, no nerves, no dialogue, not much consideration for consent—this is Sex as transcendental phenomenon, removed from the mundanities of the way we normally relate to each other. It is an ideological presentation of the sexual encounter in which the impasses between the two participants are dropped in order to facilitate the performance of this act. The newer approach brings sex back down into the world of difference which must be negotiated, where the Symbolic social structure continues to hold throughout the encounter. The latter depiction of sex brings the sexual encounter into its properly dialectical space of paradox: the imaginary of Sex can only occur through the Symbolic of the sexual relationship.
That was all a long digression by which I’m able to work out my understanding of the Žižek text. However, what does this mean for compositional musical aesthetics and ideology? Self-consciousiously highlighting the impasses within one’s own music facilitates the paradoxes of music to emerge (silence and sound being the most fundamental impasse of music, the negotiation of which is the Symbolic space in which the musical composition begins to take shape). When confronted with impasse, we negotiate the movement between the opposed elements and when confronted with new impasses we cannot easily fall back on received ideological positions. The ideal and perfect form of the self-conscious composition is that the impasse is so great and so obvious that the audience can only create new negotiations of their own, rather than reverting to the ideological position. While this ideal composition is certainly an impossibility, it is perhaps the same kind of impossibility which exists between the Symbolic sexual relationship and the Imaginary Sex, ie. negotiating the impossibility will itself create a new path to our conception of Music.
In my new composition, I seek to bring these impasses to the fore. There is a regular “vertical” interplay between bars of sound and bars of silence, while there is also a “horizontal” interplay of different musical styles and instrumental groups. Variation in dynamics is usually kept within the much quieter end of the spectrum, but occasional loud intrusions also highlight the impasses between loud and quiet: loud always overwhelming quiet, quiet necessitating the absence of loud. Music is full of these kinds of impasses and in my new composition they should be overwhelming and unavoidable. I turn, then, to those who receive my piece: the conductor, the orchestra, the audience, to ask “how do we proceed through these impasses?” The space of these impasses is the space in which creativity can occur as we construct our path towards a totalising conception of the whole piece. Incidentally, this is also why new work must be constantly created in order to avoid lapsing into conservative ideologies: the space of an impasse is only new when we first travel across it; ideology will march behind us and carve these spaces up in a process of territorialisation, leaving paths and roads through the impasses which will discourage us from the freedom of unfamiliar routes.
James Waide 