Why is it that when you listen to a piece of music, you feel a deep emotional connection to that piece of music, but as soon as the next piece of music comes on, your previous emotions are all but forgotten, replaced with the feelings the new piece of music induces? This may seem like an uncontroversial point, you may argue that that this is merely the nature of our experience of mediums like music. However, how can it also be the case that in real life interactions, when we experience an emotion caused by one event or another, our feelings aren’t left behind when some new event happens?
I believe that this can be answered fairly easily by answering the question of the differences in how we relate to a piece of music, and how we relate to an event in real life; or, to be more pertinent, what these two things mean structurally to the subject.
A piece of music is pre-organised to implicitly contain all the signifiers which tell you how to feel about it, your feelings are caused by the way the piece of music is constructed so that it structurally is designed to elicit a desired response of the composer from the listener.
However, a real life situation is organic, it is not intrinsically coded to contain sets of information which prompts a designated response from the listener’s moral and emotional faculties.
Two good reasons can be outlined here- firstly, a piece of music is a finished thing, with a narrative structure with implicit values; life, however, is unfinished, and our lived life does not contain implicit structurally imposed values in the way that a piece of music does.
Secondly, we can uncontroversially assert that moments in our life are interpreted as and when they happen. Life doesn’t have a narrative arc, so an event in life can not be so soundly predicted by the previous, leading events. Not merely that, but a piece of music will contain a set of values included by the singer and/or composer which will prompt you to interpret the piece in a way germane for them veridical to the composer’s intentions. However, in a lived experience, we contend with our own memories and values as a metric and significator system. This may, at face value seem like a simple enough statement, but it’s true enough to say that our values and memories are a mixed bag, often self-contradictory, and leading to different, and often variegating interpretations.
Alfie Bown, in his book Enjoying it, Candy Crush and Capitalism, frames our enjoyments in the following way. He proposes that enjoyment should be understood in terms of their being productive and unproductive. Productive enjoyment, he says “serves our cultural and social structures” (p. 2). He further adds that “when we are enjoying, we feel we are freely being ourselves… we become invested in our enjoyment because it seems to be a symptom of ourselves” (p. 8). His point here is that when we enjoy, by connecting to something such as a piece of music, we believe we are being who we are, and our identities are produced and reinforced. When we relate to a piece of music, we are having our social identity reinforced, but if we are creating a piece of music with our organic emotions, we are creating our identity. The enjoyment of external structural forms of enjoyment, and those forms of enjoyment organic to life aren’t completely separate. In fact, they reinforce each other. In the case of organic emotions, a sense of identity is created, and in the case of the enjoyment of already created things, we reinforce the identities we have assumed through creation; one reinforces the other in a dialectical positive feedback loop.
Bown, however, rejects the idea that enjoying the things already in the world could ever be an exact reflection of the sort of people we truly are. The sort of enjoyment which reflects who we are is neither productive nor unproductive, he calls it irrational enjoyment because it doesn’t seem to serve an exact purpose. In fact, irrational enjoyment constructs us because, he asserts, we are unconsciously incomplete identities who need to transgress that which is approved enjoyment in the world so that we can construct who we truly feel we are. This is because the world is seen as oppressive (as the Freudian super ego) in that it is limiting. Whilst enjoyment of things in the world forms us as social subjects, it doesn’t form us as personal identities, as individual subjects. He says of these moments of enjoyment, that
“Jouissance (irrational enjoyment), then, would be a moment of ‘thought’, or at least of potential thought, a moment that insists that the limitations of knowledge are made visible and that new thought is produced to process them. These moments are moments of change, and they structure us as subjects and as a society” (p. 56).
We see, then, that our enjoyment of a piece of music is created to elicit an emotional response, but it’s a passing response and experience because it isn’t organic- it’s a meaning which we have not created. Beyond that, it’s meaning which, whilst we may feel on an emotional level, it’s not a feeling of who we truly are or who we truly feel or construct ourselves to be. An organic emotion, one which emerges within our life, persists because it functions as part of our construction of our selfhood. If we, to carry on with the same analogy, construct a piece of music based around, and from, our personal emotions, that moves from being unproductive enjoyment to productive enjoyment because it is a constructive mechanism rather than a reinforcing mechanism.
Whilst I have talked about this in terms of enjoyment, I should note here that I believe that this discussion of persistence of emotions pertains to our feelings beyond Bown’s discussion of enjoyment, hence my appeal to it. It also, I believe, applies to our sadness, our hopefulness, in fact the whole rich panoply of feelings and emotions. In similar analogous terms, I also believe that moments of emotion which assert that which is genuinely us CAN, but do not have to transgress conformities of feeling. Our emotions can be ours when they are in line with the assumptions of correct or moral emotional responses in the world, but if we look at the minutiae of nuances of our feeling, we will eventually find something which seems specific to us.
I believe that unproductive enjoyment reinforces our assumption of what the world is like. As Kandinsky famously asserted, “Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions” (p. 1). What he means here, of course, is that a work of art is an expression, which contains an emotion or feeling or sentiment (think of our example of music). This provides a veritable roadmap of the way that the world is, a framework on which we can build our own identities and emotions. We can see that our irrational enjoyments and genuine feelings are rarer than productive and unproductive enjoyments and feelings because we can’t perpetually brake the ontological framework of the world we believe to be the natural order around us.
Aldous Huxley, in The Doors of Perception, posited the idea that our consciousness is a reducing valve-
“the function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge”…”it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data” (pp. 10-11).
What he means here is that our perceptions contain a lot more information than we are consciously aware of. In order to avoid being overwhelmed by this vast array of nebulous data, the brain reduces this intake of information to fit a preconfigured set of beliefs about the world so that the information we remember or experience is similar in nature, creating a schematic reality. I propose that this schematic reality is conveyed from the world at large, to the individual, by our experiences of things which contain pre-configured emotional, informational prompts such as music and art. Those things which we enjoy and or feel in the world become the ‘reduced awareness’ reality of which Huxley speaks.
These moments of irrational enjoyment are where we press against the veritable societal reducing valve, the consensus of the ‘art of the age’ in Kandinsky’s terms, and assert a real sense of identity within it. Lacan created the idea of the ‘mirror-stage’. He believed that we construct our identity and consciousness when we see a reflection of ourselves in the world reflected back to us, not merely other people and things. This partly explains why we create art; so that we can see artefacts of ourselves in the world for us to identify with. Lacan says that
“I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality” (p. 331).
I would propose a further addition, here, to the reason we don’t find our prompted feelings from the enjoyment of a piece of music lasting is that whilst it produces the backdrop against which we identify ourselves, it is too impersonal for it to be where we could in fact find ourselves. It also ceases to persist emotionally precisely because its best function is merely as precondition for us to have genuine meaningful emotions. When we emotionally connect to a piece of music, we connect to the world; when we experience emotions in our lives, we experience ourselves.
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Thank you for reading.
Works cited
Bown, A. (2015). Enjoying it. Croydon: Zero Books.
Huxley, A., Ballard, J., Bradshaw, D. and Huxley, A. (2004). The doors of perception. London: Vintage.
Kandinsky, W. and Sadleir, M. (1977). Concerning the spiritual in art. New York: Dover Publications.
Lacan, J. ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ in McNeill, W. and Feldman, K. (1998). Continental philosophy. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
The Wolfe Review 
This is SO true!!
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