Week 2 - Lacan's Borromean Knot
So after this week’s Lacan reading (which I treated like poetry, because I found myself extremely lost) I explored the internet for more answers. I particularly liked this Zizek video in which he basically uses the Knot to recreate Marx’s Commodity Fetish (because it’s Zizek), but I really liked this video where they made Borromean Onion Rings.
So while I could definitely take the Zizek approach with my Marxist stuff I kinda wanna try something that could be totally incorrect but seems maybe interesting?
In my head I imagine a sort of sonic breakdown of Lacan’s knot to be something like:
Real: What you physically heard or experienced.
Imaginary: What you expected or fantasized to hear or experience.
Symbolic: What your enculturation shaped that fantasy and experience into.
I’m gonna use an example to illustrate this setup--because I frankly don’t think I can do much of a schematic here without a practical use-case.
One of my favorite sort of sonic confusions comes from The Avalanches’ sample-based album “Since I Left You” (2000). This project is very dear to me and I’ve spent far too much time with it. Basically, there’s an opening vocal sample to the album that sets the stage for a sort of sonic journey (to where, we don’t know). You can listen here:
Since I Left You - The Avalanches (2000) (sample at 1:09). Or see the brief snippet below.
What did you hear the vocalist saying? If you heard “since I left you” you are basically every listener ever, including myself. After all, that’s the name of the song. But let’s check out the original sample, which comes from Main Attraction’s 1968 track “Everyday” (sample at 0:38), or see snippet below.
What do you hear this time? Do you still hear “left” here? Or are you maybe hearing them say “met” instead?
While the Avalanches chose to slightly warp the audio and name the track to push the listener in a different direction, the original vocalist here is actually saying “since I met you.” It’s a small change that completely alters the direction of the project. Now, instead of this new world being opened by a new person, it’s an album about what happens after that relationship has run its course (or some variation of this).
Ok but let’s bring Lacan’s Borromean Knot into play cuz what am I even doing here…
REAL
If the “real” in this case is what’s physically being produced and vibrated out—then maybe we can check the waveform. However the way you experience it could take so many forms depending on anatomy and perception. Is it the physical feeling of speaker vibrating your chest? Is it a pair of headphones vibrating the air into you ear drums? Is it simply looking at a waveform or data to predict sound? There’s so many ways to define what the “real” is here. But waveforms certainly are one very raw form of data we can use.
I’ve isolated the two vocal performances in RX9. Here are the physical waveforms and isolated vocals.
Once you know what you’re listening for, it becomes extremely difficult to un-hear “met” and so…
IMAGINARY
Because of the track’s title “Since I Left You” you expected to hear the word “left.” The imaginary here is what happens when the fantasy of your own mind grabs hold of the sonic input. You hear what you want to hear, not what actually is being outputted. However the question I find interesting here is if The Avalanches intended for you to hear “left” then you actually did hear the “real” in this case. Maybe it’s not the literal “real” but it is most certainly a shared imaginary between you and the artist. Does that make any sense? Maybe.
SYMBOLIC
If you looked at the album art, showing what appears to be a bunch of sailors lost on a life raft—you may have equally assumed the album has a theme of being lost, or of sustaining loss (or you didn’t even think about it which is fine too). While I think this tends to blend with the Imaginary quite a bit—I’d focus on how your experience and knowledge shapes your expectations further. You may associate this imagery with other pieces of media you’ve experienced, or associate it with themes learned in texts. If we take Zizek’s reading into this, you also associate the value of the art itself within a cultural economy. If you know this album is considered to be one of the greatest sample-based works of music in the history of ever—maybe you write a whole journal post about it despite it having no relation to Lacan’s Borromean knot. Symbolically, the “met” or the “left” or whatever you’ve heard, has value because you deem it to be interesting in the context of larger structures. And so here we are I guess.
Overall, I think Sound is as important as anything in the framework of subjectivity—but it seems near impossible to single it out. “Sound” as a concept can be experienced so differently based on bodies, ears, anatomy, etc. Sound is vibration to most as a general idea, but what we actually internalize as being “sound” is based on far more than that—it can be visual, imaginary, emotional, and more. To me the knot is basically showing us this core idea—sound is not sound at all, it is an experience we have on individual levels based on our prior experiences, simply guided or influenced by “real” senses in the moment. And sometimes it can even occur without input—what does it mean to hear a song in your head without any sonic input? Is that sound? And if we removed things like “the real” it may unravel the knot but that doesn’t necessarily lead to some sort of breakdown like we hear of in the reading—it can simply lead to a different form, or a moving thread. Maybe I just enjoy the chaos concepts here, but easily the most interesting part of the knot lies in it’s unraveling—at least to me.
TLDR: the “real” is too slippery to label one thing a sound, and another something else—they’re all tied together and based on body & perception of the “listener.”
also TLDR: I still don’t understand Lacan.