The Silence of the Drives? One often hears that the drive—the drives, the death drive, all drives as death drives—are silent: mute, noiseless, soundless, stumm. They “operate silently,” “do their work unobtrusively,” “are in essence mute” (Freud); Jacques Lacan writes of a “silence of the drives,” Erich Fromm of their “silent work,” Rodolphe Gasché of their “silent and imperceptible work,” Deleuze and Guattari of the death drive’s “pure silence in its transcendent distinction from life”; for Eve Watson, “the drives, silent and constant, quietly pursue their aim of mute enjoyment.”
This network of assertions oscillates between mantra and shibboleth. At its weakest it is little more than a poetic flourish, empirically contradicted by drives’ noise and static, the “too much trouble” (Lacan) they introduce into human life through their constitutional unruliness. At its strongest, this mantra distinguishes drive from other unconscious activity, indeed from the unconscious tout court: if the unconscious “speaks,” drives do not. More exactly, if drive is silent, it is not because it “holds back” or has no voice, but rather because it is the “other side” of the voice. Drive’s silence, its “unsound,” is tethered less to sound than to voice as its proper negative or antipode.
I will argue that this paradigm (or platitude) has long constrained our theorization of the drives, and that we find a promising new path of investigation once we relinquish “voice” as drive’s other, and allow music to take its place. It is through the signifier “music”—encompassing all manner of sound and silence, voice and muteness, speech and action—that drive receives, even in its unsound, a more proper hearing: a registration of its constitutional unruliness as not just a vocal or expressive problem, a problem for speech and utterance, but a problem of and for rhythm, frequency, periodicity, tone, temporality, form. Indeed, it is in “the silence of the drives” that we may find a properly psychoanalytic account of music’s raison d’être, a new theory of music which simultaneously provides a new path for theorizing the drive.
Seth Brodsky is Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious, and writes on such topics as psychoanalysis, repetition, voice, influence, and contemporary music. Since 2019, Brodsky has served as Director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, which fosters experimental collaborations between artists and scholars at the University of Chicago and around the world. He also serves as executive editor of the biannual journal/magazine Portable Gray, and runs the music-sound-performance initiatives Gray Sound and Gray Sound Sessions.