‘I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself ... they      make you pay for the sessions you miss.’

Perhaps here we can understand Schoenberg’s letter to Kandinsky: ‘Art belongs to the unconscious!’[1] Admittedly, Schoenberg was subscribing to definitions and terminology that sat firmly in the zeitgeist of his writing, but the statement is worth examining nonetheless.[2] Certainly, Kandinsky is a fine artist [intended] to discuss in this context, being one who ‘is painting music. That is to say he has … isolated the pure emotion … the artistic emotion … there was no question of looking for representation; a harmony had been set up, and that was enough’.[3] What Sadler means here – disregarding the oversimplified conflation of harmony and music - is that Kandinsky’s work is wholly divorced from representative association. Kandinsky called many of his works improvisations or compositions #n. Parallels between Kandinsky and the graphic scores – as vessels or starting points for improvisations - of musicians like Braxton and Smith are blatant.[4]

The score becomes obsolete the moment the object has been rendered … I don’t mind this score evaporating for each of the music objects that it creates because it’s going to create a new music object that’s completely different[5]

Certainly, Kandinsky’s expression of ‘spirit’ is remarkably similar to our understanding of Self expression. ‘Society consists of groups who seek to approach the problem of the spirit by way of inner knowledge … inner spirit only uses the outer form of any particular period as a steppingstone to further expression’.[6] Kandinksy’s steppingstones reflect our notion of exploration of Self. And as a means of exploring expression, abstract visual ‘scores’ are preferred by many musicians since traditional musical notation ‘include[s] only a small percentage of sounds’ and thus limits expression.[7]

Tuned to its grandest level, music, like light, reminds us that everything that matters, even in this world, is reducible to spirit[8]

But we are concerned with performer’s continual Self exploration, enabled through improvisation, not just the receiver’s reflection of Self enabled through a fixed, ultimate art work. For Kandinsky’s improvisations and compositions can only be understood as being subjectivities.[9] The expenditure of time and editorial effort required in creating any painted art-work ensure that, while the Kandinsky’s Self would be shifting in the act of creation, that creation cannot truly occur in real time. It is only the viewer who can view and respond to the work instantaneously. For the creator, then, Kandinsky’s art is a mediated expression that contains its own finality even as it is enacted; the excess of meaning within it applies only to the viewer.

It is useful to consider the difference between music and the visual arts as a matter of degree, not of kind[10]

What the diversion through Kandinsky allows us to realise, however, is a further understanding of the relationship between the unconscious and Self. It would be impossible to discuss the unconscious from my position in the cultural matrix without acknowledging in some way the work of Freud, who saw the unconscious following an internal grammar and, ultimately, being rational. Freud’s motto: wo es war, soll ich warden (where it was, I shall become; or: where id was, ego shall be).[11] But we are now situated on a post-Lacanian spectrum, in which a deeper comprehension of the unconscious has shown it to be ‘not a reservoir of wild drives that has to be conquered by the ego, but the site from which a traumatic truth speaks’.[12] As such, wo es war, soll ich warden is not the attempt of the ego to transform the id, but an approach to the site of ‘truth’. What sits within the id is not something to identify and assimilate, but something with which to be reconciled. ‘The unconscious is neither the primordial nor the instinctual, and what it knows of the elemental is no more than the elements of the signifier’.[13]

But what does all this mean? It seems I slip slowly away from my subject, but an elaboration is worthwhile. We can here grasp that unconscious Reason is not a coherent, structured template, rather a complex set of pragmatic particularities and compromises. To Freud and Lacan, ideas are rejected by ego but not in totality, returning again in encrypted forms in the id, rationally accepted but isolated into symbolic significance.[14] ‘Other’ acts as mediator of the relationship between the subject and the symbolic order, an inherently symbolic res which holds unassimilable uniqueness to the subject. The result is thus an unpredictable and ever-changing improvisation of an unconscious, ‘a patchwork of improvised connections’ that does not follow univocal rules.[15] Thus, in improvised musics, expressions of Self are explorations of this messy unconscious, an intrinsic, defining part of Self that cannot be assimilated rationally. So Self exploration in Community allows for the development of Self through the articulation of this ever-changing unconscious. I do not mean to say that there is a finality to the development, but an ever-changing, never-ending sense of identity in expression.

Id is not conquered and understood by the rational, empirical ego, far from it. But it is de-fetishised and re-contextualised mutually through other Selves, which allows for Self exploration by taking subjectivity out of itself. ‘When we progress to the very core of the subject, we encounter the fantasmatic kernel of enjoyment which can no longer be subjectivised, affectively assumed by the subject’.[16] Self is thus exposed to otherness in itself and other Selves as a means of development. After all ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the Other’.[17]

And while speech is limited by its own form of phenomenal representation, as Schopenhauer elaborated, music directly expresses noumenal Will.[18] ‘Music is the substance that renders the true heart of the subject, the abyss of radical negativity’ in a state of absence/presence.[19] Such readings are inherently restricted by their narrow understanding of music, however. Žižek concerns himself with nothing later than Wagner and Schopenhauer was dead long before my subject rose to prominence. For them, emphatically music is an object. The implications for further, synchronic-infinite Self in Community through unconscious becomes obvious when taking music as a process, as we do improvised music. All involved can now mutually explore Self, not just the detached listener, as is the case with Kandinsky’s work. Receptive and creative hierarchies and direct causalities are abolished. Here we must turn to the collaborative improvisational Communities that involve both musicians and artists, wherein expression becomes synaesthetic. Celia Rossi and Ryan Maegher, Pia Imbar with Catherine Schneider or Gina Southgate and The Paint Quartet.[20]

To return to Kandinsky: ‘a work of art consists of two elements, the inner … the emotion of the artist’s soul … and the outer’.[21] Do we not here see echoes of Braxton’s encomium for Warne Marsh, in which he states a distinction between ‘the actual notes [and the] internal presence and feeling’?[22]

SEE ALSO: