Text for Seminar on the Purloined letter, a music
by Yasuano Tone
You may think music has nothing to do with Lacanian theory. Not quite.
According to Friedrich Kittler, in his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Edison's precursor in inventing phonograph, Charles Cros wrote an essay on the Procedure for the recording and reproduction of phenomena of acoustic perception in which he formulated all the principles of the phonograph, "to reproduce" the traces of "the sound and noises". However, when Cros erected a monument on which he had an inscription to honor his own inventions "he forgets the noises mentioned in his precise prose text". Kittler reasons that "an invention which subverts both literature and music (because it reproduces the unimaginable real they are both based on), must have struck even its inventor as something unheard of." Yes, apparently he thinks noise as the real.
He observes that the grooves of Edison's phonograph recorded nothing but vibrations meanwhile intervals and chords on the other hand, were ratios, so that, the nineteenth century's concept of frequency breaks with Pythagorean logoi, resulted in octaves, quints fourths, etc., upon which everything founded by the name of music in Old Europe. "The measure of length is replaced by time as an independent variable. ...It quantifies movements that too fast for the human eye, ranging from 20 to 16,000 vibrations per second. The real takes the place of the symbolic."
Thus, the notations, the western tonal system are all but the symbolic and noises are the real ...
[ Note: The Real is, a shock of a contingent encounter which disrupts the automatic circulation of the symbolic mechanism; a grain of sand preventing its smooth functioning; a traumatic encounter which ruins the balance of the symbolic universe of the subject.]
Let us listen to Kittler little more.
"What was new about the storage capability, the phonograph and cinematograph- and both names refer, not accidentally, to writing - was their ability to store time: as a mixture of audio frequencies in the acoustic realm, as a movement of single picture sequences in the optic realm. Time, however, is what determines the limits of all art. The quotidian data flow must be arrested before it can become image or sign. "..... In order to store the sound sequences of speech, literature has to arrest them in the system of twenty-six letters and thereby exclude noise sequences from the beginning. It is no coincidence that this system includes, as a subsystem, the seven tones, the diatonic system from a to h (*ah to hah, in German) that forms the foundation of Occidental music. In order to fix an acoustic chaos assaulting European ears as exotic music - according to the suggestion of the musicologist von Hornbostel - one first of all interpolates a phonograph, which can record the chaos in real time and reproduce it in slow motion. When the rhythms then become paralyzed and the `individual measures, even individual sounds resound,' Occidental alphabetism, with its staves, can proceed to an `exact notation'.
"Texts and scores were Europe's only means to store time. Both are based on writing; the time of this writing is symbolic(in Lacan's terms). This time memorizes itself in terms of projections and retrievals - like a chain of chains. Nevertheless, whatever runs as time on a physical or (again in Lacan's terms) real level, blindly and unpredictably, could by no means be encoded. Therefore all data flows if they were real streams of data, had to pass through the defile of the signifier."
(Friedrich Kittler: from GRAMOPHONE , FILM, TYPEWRITER: chapter I)
Now enters Lacan's Ecrits.
"As you know, we are talking about the tale which Baudelaire translated under the title: La lettre volŽe. At first reading, we may distinguish a drama, its narration, and the conditions of that narration.
We see quickly enough, moreover, that these components are necessary and that they could not have escaped the intentions of whoever composed them.
The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scŹne would be possible. Let us say that the action would remain, properly speaking, invisible from the pit - aside from the fact that the dialogue would be expressly and by dramatic necessity devoid of whatever meaning it might have for an audience: - in other words, nothing of the drama could be grasped, neither seen nor heard, without, dare we say, the twilighting which the narration, in each scene, casts on the point of view that one of the actors had while performing it.
There are two scenes, the first of which we shall straightway designate the primal scene, and by no means inadvertently, since the second may be considered its repetition in the very sense we are considering today.
...Need we emphasize the similarity of these two sequence? Yes, for the resemblance we have in mind is not a simple collection of traits chosen only in order to delete their difference. And it would not be enough to retain those common traits at the expense of the others for the slightest truth to result. It is rather the intersubjectivity in which the two actions are motivated that we wish to bring into relief, as well as the three terms through which it structures them.
The special status of these terms results from their corresponding simultaneously to the three logical moments through which the decision is precipitated and the three places it assigns to the subjects among whom it constitutes a choice.
That decision is reached in a glance's time. For, the maneuvers which follow, however stealthily they prolong it, add nothing to that glance, nor does the deferring of the deed in the second scene break the unity of that moment.
This glance presupposes two others, which it embraces in its vision of the breach left in their fallacious complementarity, anticipating in it the occasion for larceny afforded by that exposure. Thus three moments, structuring three glances, borne by three subjects, incarnated each time by different characters.
The first is a glance that sees nothing: the King and the police.
The second, a glance which sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides: the Queen, then the Minister.
The third see that the first two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whomever would seize it: the Minister, and finally Dupin.
In order to grasp in its unity the intersubjective complex thus described, we would willingly seek a model in the technique legendarily attributed to the ostrich attempting to shield itself from danger: for that technique might ultimately be qualified as political, divided as it here is among three partners: the second believing itself invisible because the first has its head stuck in the ground, and all the while letting the third calmly pluck its rear: we need only enrich its proverbial denomination by a letter, producing la politique de l'autruiche, for the ostrich itself to take on forever a new meaning. [Note: La politique de l'autruiche, a pun condenses ostrich(autruche), other people(autrui), and (the politics of ) Austria (Autriche). ]
[One more Note: Please don't get a totally wrong idea that the three performers are playing three ostriches. That is not so but my scores are. The notations of this piece, that is, those three dumb ostriches are smooth automatons of the symbolic waiting for being disrupted and fractured by three performers. What these dumb austriches are imposing on the performers is dialectic of intersubjectivity.]
Given the intersubjective modulus of the repetitive action, it interests us in Freud's text.
The plurality of subjects, of course, can be no objection for those who are long accustomed to the perspectives summarized by our formula: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
What interests today is the manner in which the subjects relay each other in their displacement during the intersubjective repetition.
We shall see that their displacement is determined by the place which a pure signifier - the purloined letter - comes to occupy in their trio.
......... Now that register of truth, we dare think we needn't come back to this, is situated entirely elsewhere, strictly speaking at the very foundation of intersubjectivity. It is located there where the subject can grasp nothing but the very subjectivity, which constitutes an Other as absolute. We shall be satisfied here to indicate its place by evoking the dialogue which seems to us to merit its attribution as a Jewish joke by that state of privation through which the relation of signifier to speech appears in the entreaty which brings the dialogue to a close: "Why are you lying to me?" one character shouts breathlessly. " Yes, why do you lie to me saying you're going to Cracow so I should believe you're going to Lemberg, when in reality you are going to Cracow?"
....we are quite simply dealing with a letter which has been diverted from its path: one whose course has been prolonged, or to revert to the language of the post office, a letter in sufferance(French lettre en souffrance). Here then, simple and odd, is the singularity of the letter, which is the true subject of the tale: since it can be diverted, it must have a course which is proper to it: the trait by which its incidence as signifier is affirmed. For we have learned to conceive of the signifier as sustaining itself only in a displacement comparable to that found in electric news strips or in the rotating memories of our machine - that - think - like - men, this because of the alternating operation which is its principle, requiring it to leave its place, even though it returns to it by a circular path.
This is indeed what happens in the repetition automatism. What Freud teaches us in the text we are commenting on is that the subject must pass through the channels of the symbolic but what is illustrated here is more gripping still : it is not only the subject but the subjects, grasped in their intersubjectivity, who line up, in other words our ostriches, to whom we here return and who, more docile than sheep model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain which traverses them.
....if it is now as before a question of protecting the letter from inquisitive eyes, he can do nothing but employ the same technique he himself has already foiled: leave it in the open? When we see him immediately captivated by a dual relationship in which we find all the traits of a mimetic lure or of an animal feigning death and trapped in the typically imaginary situation of seeing that he is not seen, misconstrue the real situation in which he is seen not seeing
....the sender, we tell you, receives form the receiver his own message in reverse form.
[From Jacque Lacan: Seminaire sur le Purloined letter
Translation by Jeffrey Mehlman]
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