Screenshot of Brittany Howard, “Stay High” music video.
This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.
Losing and Finding Death Drive’s Beat[1]
Seth Brodsky
1
Brittany Howard’s “Stay High” was the second single off her 2019 solo album Jaime, released along with the video that summer.[2] I recall finding it cute and sweet and then forgetting it; in 2021 it won a Zoom Grammy for best rock song. By then, it had swooped back into my memory while driving regularly with my kid from the city out to the bird sanctuaries of greater Chicagoland in late March 2020. “I already feel,” I’d sing in relief and exhaustion, “like doin’ it aga-aaaaa-in, honey.” It became, not an escape exactly, but a suspension bridge between the present and a “beforetime” which was also miserable but differently so. By contrast, this bridge was built out of happiness. Or more specifically, a trove of musical grammars and signifiers of “happiness”, easy life, incipience, tender humor. “To me,” Howard told the Song Exploder podcast, “the music is sunlight.”[3]
This would include Robert Glasper’s glinting celesta, its trills oscillating between old toy and fairy dust. But also the song’s complex semiotic register, a stylistic pastiche of distinct idealized chronotopes: the early 70s sound of the Muscle Shoals Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, not too far from Athens where Howard grew up; the unflappable falsettos of Curtis Mayfield and Al Green; but also the triplets, figures, and harmonies of 50s doo-wop, even the early Sam Cooke of the gospel quartets. It is as if the song’s basic message—that “everything is, everything is, everything is … wonderful”—was so provocatively delusional in 2019 America that it lobbed the music backwards a half-century, not to the anthemic Cooke of “A Change is Gonna Come” but the guileless Cooke of “You Send Me.” Howard’s voice meanwhile snakes through deep-pocketed grooves seducing, preaching, above all enjoying itself, autoerotic, pressing melody and letter onto lungs, mouth, lips, teeth. To paraphrase Maya Kronfeld on Marvin Gaye, Howard is syncopation, syncopation as rhythmic displacement, rhythmic displacement as being itself. One could say she “weaves [her] melody through the spaces between the beats [as] the rule, not the exception”—especially when she lands on the downbeat.[4] Songs are always in part coordinated slips. They time-travel, teleport, render any particular time and place a brief everywhere-and-elsewhere. This song quite so: already sounding like “beforetime” the year of its release, in lockdown, that effect likely telescoped for millions of listeners.
The song is a work song, a song to help you get by, about grind in all its polysemy and how there’s no escape from it, but that’s OK, soon enough, you’ll “already feel like doin it again.” So: a nice chunky piece of ideology. Floating from its original position in a pre-pandemic spleen to a new locked down panic, its soul pastiche accidentally transformed what Emily Lordi calls “soul’s recuperative logic, whereby suffering is made to pay off,” into a balloon floating above terror and despair.[5] “I would play this song to and from work everyday for 17 days straight before I got a day off working 16 hour shifts as a Covid nurse at the peak of Covid,” wrote one among more than 12,000 YouTube commenters on the video. “This song was so comforting. Now every time I hear this song it reminds me of those tough days.”[6]
But let’s not do ideology critique. This is shooting fish in a barrel. One could, for instance, dive into how Terry Crews laundered his persona in the song’s video—he plays a line worker at an actual poultry feed factory, the Aviagen Feed Mill in Howard’s hometown Athens—into a TikTok ad where he stunts as an Amazon warehouse picker—“@terrycrews ##ad @Amazon has got gigs (and benefits) for days. So, check them out. Like now!”[7] Or one could analyze Howard’s status, hardly her own doing alone, as a compromise formation symptomatic of liberal establishment culture’s crisis during the first Trump era, her ascent along the Tiny-Desk-Concert-to-New-Yorker-Profile pipeline an especially ambivalent expression of elite capture.[8] But neither approach would tell us anything new about liberalism’s endless exploitation of pictures of good life to neutralize actual good future; nor would they tell us much specific about this song and how it works.
I want to do something both less and more ambitious here: a formalist reconstruction of aspects of this song that seem so generic as to go unnoticed as anything other than “music,” and at the same time a little pocket general-theory-of-music as an art and activity of making repetition—and with it, rhythm, period, time itself—possible. As such, I want to focus on what insists more than expresses here, does more than says, what is so musically generic as to almost pass by. The opening guitar chords, for instance: they are the song’s motor, steadfast throughout the track, strummed gently with the flesh of the fingertip, just two chords, a tonic A and then subdominant D, triplets with no accents. Bassist Zac Cockrell adds the hook, Glasper responds on celesta. Producer Shawn Everett outfits a heavily reduced drum kit with small pressure mics stuck on with putty to help drummer Nate Smith get a bathtub-sized back-of-guitar sound, tacky and fibrous and super DIY.
These little components are already more complex than what I mean; I mean more the conceptual-sensual sound-knots one might do worse than to call “impulses” or, taking a page from Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding’s recent book Alien Listening, “pieces”— “piece[s] of time,” woven by repetition into a Penelopean fabric, a warp-and-weft one generalizes as “musical” but also experiences only as “a particular configuration, making time uniquely present.”[9]
Braided together by Howard’s voice, these little modules each induce and then enfold a gap. This gap-induction and gap-enfolding then produce a circuit which aims at—and gets—something which, in its getting, retrospectively reveals itself as not the aim. Repetition itself, this aiming and missing and aiming again, and the turning of that into a temporal circuit, a “time-piece,” becomes the thing. Each “piece” is hence the result of a kind of delayed activation, folding a gap into something which, because of that gap, retroactively becomes that something, helping weave a temporal fabric that expands in an almost fractal way. This process is most schematically laid out in Nate Smith’s drum track; note how its circuit, its “piece,” feels split between long-and-short—DAH de DAH de—and a solid triplet feel, marked by these sticky, gum-on-shoe ghost notes: DAH-ke-de-DAH-ke-de. The drums are an aural duck-rabbit, a thatchwork of two incompatible ways of hearing. But unlike the eye, the ear can hear both, if not exactly at the same time, then as a toggle for which the drums are themselves the rhythmic circuit. Music gives the duck-rabbit conundrum, not a solution, but something better: a tempo, a meter, an extracurricular enjoyment that laughs or dances at a cognitive problem. In this process, music installs a gap where there might otherwise be simply a tension, a confusion or impasse. It dilates that impasse, inflates it into something spaced rather then just smushed or stuck. But then music also fabricates, sutures even: it knits that gap into a larger sequence or cycle whose momentum and sustain suggest something other than circularity—a spiral, perhaps, aiming at and getting a kind of missing, on and on.
This fabricating expansion becomes literal in the video for “Stay High,” a process of medium-inversion: it is arguably not video that visualizes sound cues, but sound—these circuits of gap induction and enfolding—that musicalizes images. Everything the camera captures becomes music, which is to say, a Penelopean folding of gaps into time; time into repetition; repetition into pieces; and these pieces into an expanding social, cultural, historical, geographic tapestry. Factory machines become music. Poultry feed sloshing into bags become music. Push brooms, dust, punch clock and punched card. The way Terry Crews walks, his head and mouth, his need to sing even before he opens his mouth, becomes music. His old battered pickup truck becomes music, the door-seatbelt-gearshift montage its own little time-piece. And of course, driving is music: chugging cylinders, spinning wheels, snap conversions of a million years of liquified death into enough carbon to get you around. Parking lots, flatbed rims, loitering, supermarket aisles with wild kids and distracted parents: music. Cemetery tombstones and flowers are music; eager lines at Kreme Delite are music and so is their connecting network of streets and traffic lights. Wishful rapport between Black folks and white folks, citizens and police, strip and home, town and family. Music’s gaps enfold the living, the dead, and their infrastructure, issuing an elegant retort to Susanne K. Langer’s mantra that “music is our myth of the inner life.”[10] Here music does not “play” or “run” so much as stick promiscuously to everything it touches, and make what it touches begin to stick together; it is arguably less expression here than adhesive, driving assembly, convening, spacing, building. Contrary to a Wagnerian-Nietzschean lineage that ascribes to music some originary force as the most immediate art, the only art that doesn’t dupe, a Faustian means of “binding the world’s innermost core,” music here is a portal or bridge between inside and outside. It affords an erotic weave of reality itself, and calls the bluff on a longstanding musical pseudo-formalism whose avatars—“tonally moving forms” and “purely structural relationships”—mask a fantasy of material immersion.[11] “Stay High” proposes the inverse: a town, with all its residents and roads and parts, can be a tonally moving form.
On the one hand, song and video are pure pop: frictionless, easy, happy—again, “the music is sunlight.” And the video is an unreal picture of reconciliation, not just of people and peoples, but nothing less than family, civil society, and state. On the other hand, we end up in properly cosmological territory, Rumi’s place where “everything is music.” A speculative utopian mythology of music more proper to the Black radical tradition ends up underwriting the song’s otherwise pop-historical being. Underneath its easy sway, Anthony Braxton’s conviction that “everything is music in various densities and intensities”; or Cecil Taylor’s insistence that “music is everything that you do.”[12] Behind the chuckling conundrum of Smith’s DAH-ke-de DAH-ke-de, Fred Moten’s constant citation of Cedric Robinson: “the preservation of the ontological totality” in the conceptual dissonance of the groove.[13]
2
Drive is hard. It’s hard because sexuality, from which it is inextricable, is hard.[14] Still, roughly a century after Freud’s now-canonical tanglings with drive—Trieb, infamously mistranslated as “instinct,” from which it signified a divergence—some things can be rehearsed more easily.[15] Drive is not organic instinct; it doesn’t serve survival, of the individual or the species. It serves enjoyment. One could say that drive emancipates instinct, or better, perverts it. So the instinct to eat is not the drive to eat. The instinct to eat satisfies itself—which is to say, completes itself, brings itself to completion—by eating. The drive to eat originates at the intersection of instinct and speech, bodily demand and language. It is at this point that instinctual completion becomes impossible—as impossible as the final word, the final metaphor, the final meaning. It is at this point too that the instinctual object—in this case, food—recedes: it recedes into the infinity of language, metaphor, meaning. The instinct to eat satisfies itself with food, but the drive enjoys itself with unending objects: not just by eating, but by perverting the act of eating through language, enjoying the mouth but also enjoying using the mouth to order food off a menu; enjoying sucking, but also sucking all the air out of a room; devouring, but also devouring the competition, or digesting entire fields of knowledge, or drinking up every drop of praise.[16]
Drives are sticky, promiscuous, matters of not of completion but compulsion—to go “beyond the pleasure principle,” to repeat and to seek satisfaction in repetition itself. Located, as Freud put it, “at the borderline of the psychic and the somatic,” drives seem to repeat (compulsively) that very borderline.[17] Grasping for terminology and often coining it, Freud stumbles on the portmanteau Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, “ideational delegate,” to describe drives: they are nothing more or less than this savoring of the breach opened up between psyche and soma, symbolic and material, through the intervention of the signifier, which drives seize upon as a surface, rim, or limit to enjoy.[18] Drives are hence neither mere flesh nor mere symbolic, signifiers taken for flesh or hardened into commodity or fetish. Unconscious, they nonetheless have no object of excavation. They are, as Tracy McNulty puts it, a matter of “ungivenness” and “the corresponding need to substantiate or construct it”[19]—“mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness,” Freud wrote: “our mythology.”[20] So drives are, strictly speaking, neither historical nor material. And yet a material history of capitalism is also a history of driven being. Not least as the historical interaction, dialectic, or even polyphony between two forms of compulsive labor or “endless work”—one coercively beating down collective human life from above, the other welling up endogenously from inside individual life.[21]
And yet it does seem like the present long moment is in an exceptional place with the drives. One figure in particular, “death drive,” is in great circulation these days, legion not just in theory but in journalism and social media, often in response to US political parties—the “Republican Party Death Drive,” the “Democrats’ Climate Death Drive,” “Trump’s death drive”—but also more generally: the “US death drive,” “Death drive nation,” “death drive capitalism.”[22] Just before the 2024 US general election, Eric Reinhart warned of how the death drive, as a “compulsion toward destructive repetition,” remains “a basic force in not just psychic life but also politics.”[23] Common to virtually all these accounts is a strange knot of conviction and despair: conviction that a primordial psychic force predestines humanity toward aggression and self-destruction, and despair at precisely this conviction. Simultaneously, the historical-material quandary of the drive is aggressively resolved: conviction, shaking hands with despair, receives as its consolation prize the consistency of a mass judgement whose satisfaction is incompatible with drive itself. We are here in the domain not of drive but of fantasy—that is, of drive’s emergent superstructure.
But there is a curious relation here. Drive, as a breach that gives way to fantasy as both its defense and employment, here becomes fantasy’s idealized device: drive as a paradoxical “object of desire,” of the kind mapped out in Anna Kornbluh’s recent critique of immediacy as a cultural style.[24] As with many fantasms of immediacy, a neutralization of agency is rendered enjoyable, if not pleasurable, but at a significant cost; collective power denied us at every turn is redeemed as panoramic doomer-vision—gothy vitalism in the sheets, political paralysis in the streets. Reinhart’s essay, admirable in its commitments and exhortations, nonetheless continues this preemptive knee-capping logic: politics yes, but only after we sustain the fatalizing wound of humanity’s innately suicidal program. In this and countless other cases, it becomes the grim legacy of psychoanalysis to throw us into existential debt. We get caught in a bad bootstrap paradox, where any attempt to save our species first pays an impossible tab: we don’t want saving and are wired for losing.
This fatalism’s lure is understandable. It provides a pit orchestra for the present’s operatic disastrousness, characterized by so many drive-like logics now raised to highest values or greatest vices. It compels the larger construction that we live in an “age of the drive” defined by narcissism and autoeroticism; vibe, energy, compression; a corresponding hatred of fiction, mediation, infrastructure; intensity and pressure without break; inescapability; entropy; headlessness; and above all repetition, which seems to bind all the above into its juggernaut. This repetition already marks countless bodies as the cortisol shot after another instance of suicidal gun terror or extrajudicial murder by police; another political obscenity, sham ruling, ban, or broken promise; another round of neo-imperial saber-rattling and nuclear brinksmanship; another a Boschian vision of genocidal or ecocidal hell; another reminder that history repeats. After October 7th, 2023, death drive all too predictably becomes a conceptual concession for the Israeli genocide in Gaza: Zionism, ethnostate, Netanyahu, all death drive incarnate, all repeating themselves into preordained oblivion.[25] Humans are just that way.
It is true that what makes all these forms and modes of repetition difficult, or more properly, impossible, is their disruptive intensity, how each iteration paradoxically feels like the end of the world. One could, after Anahid Nersessian, think of the mediations such repetition takes today as “calamity forms,” the present’s rehearsal of what early 19th-century lyric poetry registered, without being able to yet articulate, as an “‘apocalyptic rate of change and nature-loss’.”[26] Alenka Zupančič gets at this end-looping with her sharp warning: “The world will surely end, but that won’t necessarily be the end of our troubles.”[27] But these repetitions are also impossible in how they undo the very work of repetition, its binding of the otherwise sundry into greater consistencies, what Freud might call repetition’s erotic energy. Repetition today appears as an unbound energy in service to disunity, degeneration, contraction. There is a stultifying arrhythmia, a cadential havoc to repetition now, a hole in its pocket. One could formalize this as a double paradox: each repetition dooms like the last and shocks like the first.
Current drive discourse repeats, not so much Freud, but the same defense by which late Freud and some of his followers resorted to biologism: the dream of an unriven, selfsame material consistency operating with absolute exigency—all Sade, no Kant.[28] This is a perfect inversion of how Jacques Lacan theorized drive in his “return to Freud.” There is, he maintained, only one drive, all drives are death drives.[29] But this one drive is itself constitutionally partial: incomplete, self-split, nothing more than this self-splitting. This is why Lacan stressed Freud’s use of the phrase Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, “ideational delegate.” In this model, drives are not propulsive bodies that break into immaterial psychic life like headless beasts. They are rather the delegates themselves, which is to say missives mistaken for body; in a brilliant phrase, Joan Copjec called drives “traitorous delegates,” delegates who “betray [their] mandator.”[30] In other words, “faithless electors” who, instead of sealing the deal of proper signification, get lost along the way, play hooky, get hooked on hooky. In this simple point Freud recognized language and letter—human fabrication, the nature-culture split, the metabolic rift—at the core of drive creation.
In so much death drive discourse, this difficult knotting of letter and body is conveniently covered over by biological fantasy. That fantasy is now writ large as grand-guignol destiny and given a material consistency perfectly at odds with the unnatural montage of the drive, its inorganic, undead self-inconsistency. Its surreality too: Lacan compared the drive to a “surrealist collage”; when you think of the drive, don’t think of pitiless, heaving throb, think instead of a mad contraption, like “a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap” in which “a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful.”[31] Copjec similarly recalls the director David Cronenberg marveling: “What if you were born with lysergic acid as part of your metabolism?” It is, she insists, “no weirder than our actual circumstances” vis-à-vis the drives: “as humans, we are all born with the signifier as part of our metabolism.”[32]
It is this bug of original absurdity that renders drive so resistant to theory. Drive is not a theory. It is instead a terrain, a topic, upon whose surface one traces the traitorous delegations of the signifier as it gets hooked on something else, some other satisfaction. This applies to conceptualization too: what after all is satisfaction without completion, energy without entropy, demand without end, mechanism without function, repetition without rhythm— “no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall” as Lacan put it; for Freud, an anti-biological konstante Kraft, “constant force.”[33] Leon Brenner points out that instinct can be modeled by frequency, the rise and fall of the sine wave; drive, by contrast, is a straight line—a novel way of understanding Freud’s assertion that “the death drives are essentially mute.”[34] Nowhere is drive theory more koan-like then when it comes to rhythm and time: the double conundrum of constancy without frequency and punctuation without period. What conceptual vandalism! And yet: what an elegant articulation of the fact that drive does not “add up”—that drive is not a concept but a kind of theoretical frottage, enjoying rubbing up against the rim of any concept that tries to clinch it. No wonder then that a culture already thick in ecocide might not want to struggle with these abysmal riddles, instead turning the clock back to Nietzsche (with the help of Foucault) and insisting that “there is only one kind of force”: power.[35]
The Freudian-Lacanian legacy of drive is opposed to precisely this. Drive, as a self-splitting force, generates tension, teeming, life. Drive tries to close; it tries, paradoxically, to obey the pleasure principle: tension extinction. But its mechanism is the signifier, the ideational delegate, and signifiers don’t die, don’t know how to die, indeed, only know how, not to live, but to persist, insist, repeat. One could put it this way: the death drive doesn’t have it in itself to die, doesn’t have the guts. This weird alloy of strength and weakness, durability and incapacity, ultimately means that death drive persists because it fails, and it fails because the being through which it persists lives. Death drive is not suicide, it is failed suicide. It is, as Kornbluh memorably puts it, “the accumulation of the failure to die”; or as Aaron Schuster writes, it is the record of the human organism’s “failure not to be born.”[36]
What this entails is not fate, program, agency, struggle, decision, but rather something small, partial, radically local and mobile, not building, not destroying, but repeating. And not repeating in service to others big and small but to no one. It is thus a kind of first, asocial sublimation, a sublimation for this no-one, the template of sublimation itself—“not something that happens to the drive under special circumstances,” as Copjec puts it, but “the proper destiny of the drive.”[37] That’s a very drive-y way of putting it: drive’s destiny is its exile from fate. From nature and culture too, as Todd McGowan writes, which is our subjectivity “rather than an unfortunate condition we must overcome”; only through the drives are we “alienated into equality.”[38] Or at least the “ungivenness” of equality, and “the corresponding need to substantiate or construct it.” Drive is, as such, the negative condition of possibility for fantasy and fantasmatic life generally, for the fabricating work it does, helpful and harmful. This is partly what it means to say the drives are “our mythologies.” And this is why drive harbors promise for a theory of rhythm and music more generally: as a form of impossible repetition, it is also a kind of un-time, a temporal ungivenness that, like a vacuum or undertow, gives way to time as its influx. Musically, one could call drive the unending anoriginal rim shot that trips us into a rhythmic being for which even the downbeat itself is already syncopation. “In the absence of time,” Fred Moten tells Harmony Holiday, “we made rhythm.”[39]
3
The song did not return to my mind in March 2020 just as a simple sunlit “promise of happiness” during a difficult time. It also returned, of course, as something symptomatic, a way of preserving that difficulty in a more bearable, admissible way. Song and video aren’t just an escape into wish-fulfillment: say, the wish to be able to “work hard and grind all day” and, “at night,” still feel like “doin’ it again.” “Stay High” is also a quite self-conscious attempt to replace torpor with grind—to sublimate an unbearable repetition, a repetition of the impossible, with a repetition that at least makes sense, that makes possibility possible. In this sense, its sublimation is economic in nature: to substitute one economy—of desire, the pursuit of the unobtainable—for another: the economy of drive, the pressure of the inescapable.[40] “Stay High” really is a “work song,” but a utopian one: its utopia is that good work is still possible, that work can still be and feel good, that grind is good.
One thing the song is not is—drive. No music is the drive, or rather: all music, any music, is precisely not the drive. A song, with its little teleporting circuits of extracurricular self-satisfaction, is still not a drive. The dictate that a drive toward self-destruction lies at the root of our civilization, or that we now inhabit an “age of the drive”: these are also not drives. What song and story each are, psychoanalytically speaking, is a fantasy. They each manifest a distinct register on which the psychic capacity for fantasy—for fabricating fields which transform drive’s inescapable pressure into desire’s pursuit of the unobtainable—can do its dilating and transpositional work. But a song and a conceptually derelict story of civilizational suicide are two very different kinds of fantasy. And their difference reflects back on the drive in an illuminating way. It points us toward something general—a theory of music as a foundational practice of driven beings—and something particular: a critique of the contemporary deployment of psychoanalysis in service to fatalism, and an argument for its alternate tradition, as a discourse and practice of human freedom.
If drive, in its aim-inhibition, is a first asocial sublimation, music might be considered a second, inherently social sublimation, worldly even in its cosmic departures and flights of abstraction. But it is a strange sublimation, as incomplete as the drive itself, a sublimation that remains aimed at, even fixated on, the drive it leaves behind—music as the drive’s angel of history, or Orpheus turning back to Eurydice; in any case happier and certainly more flush with enjoyment. This leaving behind one could imagine as music’s leap from drive into desire, from drive’s ineliminable intensities into the fugitive domains of representation and language. But music gets caught up in this leap, goes only halfway, stays suspended in air, its vibratory forms hovering between what cannot be avoided and what cannot be grasped.
At its most basic, music could be considered an inevitable consequence of being driven, a dialectical response to living with drives: the ongoing “work song” mediating the drive’s endless labors and the world’s unending coercions. More specifically, music becomes a mediation of the drive’s temporal ungivenness which preserves that ungivenness. A mediation, and a corresponding act of substantiation and construction—which nonetheless insists on gap and repetition. Music substantiates and constructs the drive’s own arrhythmias as rhythm; its impossible repetitions as possible; its flatline as frequency; its constant pressure as punctuation, perforation, ebb and flow. This isn’t just dreamwork, condensation and displacement, but something stranger: a Penelopean erotics whose weave neither escapes nor disavows the silence of the drive but rather induces it through frequency, putting that silence to work as gap, not a missing link but a linking through missing. Paraphrasing Freud on dreams as “the royal road” to the unconscious, Mladen Dolar has proposed the voice as “the royal road to the drive.” One should widen this infrastructure and imagine music tout court as such a royal road: not the drive itself, but a less impeded conceptual pathway, diminishing what keeps drive otherwise so unconscious, unimaginable, disavowed, “at bay.”[41] At the least, music is Eros-work that refuses to antagonize Thanatos-work. It rejects the Manichaean contest of life and death, abstains from making drive’s immortal movement its mortal enemy. It makes a partner of drive, folds death into its vitality, makes nihil the spectral support of its peculiar brand of presence. “I just want to stay high … with you …”
Nothing is farther from our “age of the drive,” whose entire project could be better understood as an aggressive deployment of fantasy in order to plug up and smooth out the drive’s ineliminable negativity and disruptive tension—a cultural style. Fantasies are ambivalent, ambidextrous constructions, always aimed at transposing the drive from which they originate into some unreachable horizon. But in this case, fantasy wages a full counterinsurgency against the drive: the fantasy is a wishful dream of having eliminated the drive that induced it, not least by a kind of theoretical gaslighting that defines the drive as the very opposite of what it is.
Such counterinsurgent logic against the drive ultimately spans from the annihilation of the conceptual gap to the annihilation of surplus populations. This annihilation of the gap occupies the entire political spectrum, and can be achieved as much through anesthetic disavowal or sweaty repression as through blatant aggression and sadistic arrest. Its primary mode is imaginary: an alternately rageful and tearful patching, stuffing, and collapsing of time and space into consolations and cruelties that brook no “absence at the heart of the address,” as Willi Apollon put it.[42] A desperate, ultimately despairing exercise in fabrication, it is deeply related to music’s Penelopean erotics. But it is done as a hatred of music, a refusal of address, a rejection of the fragile act of listening itself. Repetition’s hegemonic forms today—shooting, streaming, scrolling, vibing, driving, capitalizing—could in this sense be understood as forms of music-hatred, or at least as fulcra where a mutual hatred of drive and of music meet. These forms practice repetition not to affirm it, but, repeatedly, to make it stop.
What we instead have in the Freudian-Lacanian legacy of drive is a singular account of freedom: a mythology of human destiny as exile from fate, the saving incapacity to not-sublimate, the comic failure to not be born, the inability to not-queer the libidinal aim. Such a mythology need not deny human history as a seemingly transhistorical struggle to overcome precisely this constitutional openness through the ambivalent, often reactionary power of fantasy. Drive is, again, radically promiscuous; drive drifts. It attaches itself even to dreams of its liquidation because the drive can enjoy anything. But precisely this is the best evidence of its freedom. And this freedom, this promiscuous incompleteness, must not be coopted for a tragic account of human fate. We cannot do our enemies’ work for them. Music provides one dialectical model, one royal road, toward reaffirming the freedom of the drive in an era that finds that freedom unbearable.
[1] Deep thanks to the wonderful participants in the exploratory ACLA seminar that led to this essay, and especially to Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal for their generous work and guidance making it happen; thanks also to Tracy McNulty, Farah Bakaari, Nathan Gorelick, Mladen Dolar, and my Drive/Music seminar students Hiro Cho, Nathan Friedman, Juan Rivera, Yesha Shukla, and Alex Tripp for invaluable responses to previous versions; thanks finally to Anna Kornbluh, steadfast interlocutor in all things drive.
[2] Brittany HowardVEVO, “Stay High,” YouTube, published July 16, 2019, accessed November 3, 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfizQsGWOxI.
[3] Thao Nguyen and Brittany Howard, “Episode 168: Brittany Howard, ‘Stay High,” produced by Hrishikesh Hirway, in Song Exploder, Sept. 18, 2019, podcast, MP3 audio, 18:33, https://songexploder.net/brittany-howard.
[4] Maya Kronfeld, “The Philosopher’s Bass Drum: Adorno’s Jazz and the Politics of Rhythm,” Radical Philosophy 2/5 (2019), 43.
[5] Emily J. Lordi, The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Durham: Duke, 2020), 8.
[6] See comment from @143Chriztophur, accessed Nov. 3, 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfizQsGWOxI&lc=UgyFJE44B78RnbLY7-V4AaABAg.
[7] See the ad at https://www.businessinsider.com/terry-crews-amazon-ad-video-2021-11. See also a fine analysis of the song and video’s contradictions from David Yearsley at https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/13/joie-de-job-staying-high-at-work/.
[8] See “Brittany Howard: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert,” filmed on Oct. 15, 2019, and posted on YouTube on October 23, 2019, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyW5Zz0w1zg&ab_channel=NPRMusic. See also Amanda Petrusich, “Brittany Howard’s Transformation,” The New Yorker, April 20, 2020, at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/27/brittany-howards-transformation.
[9] Daniel K.L. Chua and Alexander Rehding, Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2021), 191.
[10] Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1957), 245.
[11] See Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Lee Rothfarb and Christoph Landerer (Oxford: Oxford, 2018), 41ff.
[12] See “Anthony Braxton on the Radiance of Standards, his Search for Charlie Parker & the Forces that Divide America,” at https://www.grammy.com/news/2021-anthony-braxton-interview-12-comp-zim-quartet-standards; see also “Cecil Taylor on Music as Life/Life as Music,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvFyvPAWuug; both links last accessed Nov. 3, 2024.
[13] See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 168; see also Fred Moten, among other writings, “Criminality and Uplift,” in Stolen Life (Durham: Duke, 2018), especially 128–38. I thank Derek Baron for connecting Moten’s thinking here to Diedrich Diederichsen’s notion of groove as preserving the dissonance polyrhythmically rather than resolving it harmonically. See Diedrichsen, Freiheit macht arm: Das Leben nach dem Rock ’n’ Roll (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993), 109.
[14] On the specifically contemporary “difficulty” of sex, see among others Gila Ashtor, Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia (New York: Fordham, 2021), Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), and Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke, 2014).
[15] See especially Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 109–140; and “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Standard Edition 18, 1–64. Standard Edition abbreviated below as SE.
[16] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 167.
[17] Freud, “Instincts,” 120–21.
[18] Freud first uses this phrase in “The Unconscious” (1915), in SE 14, 176. I take the substitute translation “delegate” (instead of the traditional “representation”) from Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT, 2002), 37. For an exploration of Freud’s struggle with language around drives, see Rolf Flor, “On the Very German-ness of Freud’s Trieb,” in Dan Collins and Eve Watson, eds., Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2024), 43–52.
[19] Tracy McNulty, “Unbound: The Speculative Mythology of the Death Drive,” differences 28/2 (2017), 88.
[20] Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” (1930), SE 22, 95.
[21] For two distinct but systematic approaches to problems of drive, labor, and the history of capitalism, see Samo Tomsiç, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (London: Verso, 1913) and Adrian Johnston, Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital (New York: Columbia, 2024).
[22] There are too many examples to list here, but for a wide selection, see: Ben Ware, “The Death Drive at the End of the World,” e-flux 134 (March 2023), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/134/525929/the-death-drive-at-the-end-of-the-world/; Patrick Blanchfield, “Death Drive Nation,” Late Lite 1 (Nov. 2022), https://late-light.com/issues/issue-1/death-drive-nation; Liza Featherstone, “The Democrats’ Climate Death Drive,” Jacobin, June 12, 2019;
https://jacobin.com/2019/06/democratic-party-climate-2020-presidential-debate; Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021). For a withering critique of this trend and a formidable list of further examples, see Anna Kornbluh, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Parapraxis 3 (Dec. 2023), https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/we-didnt-start-the-fire. All accessed Nov. 3, 2024.
[23] Eric Reinhart, “Confronting the Death Drive in Trump’s America,” Jacobin, Oct. 27, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/10/death-drive-trump-freud-liberalism.
[24] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: or, the Style of Too-Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2024).
[25] See for instance Neve Gordon, “The Myth of Israel’s ‘Most Moral Army’,” Al Jazeera, Oct. 16, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/16/the-myth-of-israels-most-moral.
[26] Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 3.
[27] Alenka Zupančič, “The End of Ideology, the Ideology of the End,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119/4 (2020): 844.
[28] For the best recent critique of Freud’s biologism, see Dan Collins, “Debunking the Drive,” in Critical Essays on the Drive, 1–39.
[29] Lacan’s most complete account of the drive comes in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 161ff.
[30] Copjec, Imagine, 37.
[31] Lacan, Seminar XI, 169.
[32] Copjec, “Editorial: Montage of the Drives,” UMBR(a): A Journal of the Unconscious 1 (1997): 11.
[33] Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 164–65; see also Freud, “Instincts,” SE 14, 118.
[34] Leon Brenner, “Autistic Rims and Their Vicissitudes,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis 9/1 (2022), https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/autistic_rims_and_their_vicissitudes/. See also Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” SE 19, 46.
[35] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968) 432.
[36] Kornbluh, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”; Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2016), 15.
[37] Copjec, Imagine, 30.
[38] Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics (New York: Columbia, 2020), 176.
[39] Harmony Holiday (@Harmony_Holiday), “In the absence of time we made rhythm. — Fred
Moten,” Twitter, August 13, 2023, 9:40pm, https://x.com/Harmony_Holiday/status/1690810634240446464. Cited with permission.
[40] I am paraphrasing Jodi Dean’s distinction between drive and desire; see Dean, “Complexity as Capture: Neoliberalism and the Loop of Drive,” new formations 80 (2013): 139.
[41] See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5, 608; see also Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (MIT Press, 2006), 157.
[42] Willi Apollon, “Psychoanalysis and the Freudian Rupture,” trans. Tracy McNulty, differences 28/2 (2017), 16.