Rihm, Tonality, Psychosis, Modernity

Abstract

Abstract Wolfgang Rihm's is one of the more radical – which is to say ‘deep’ and ‘rooted’ – relationships towards tonality among all post-war composers. In this article, I concentrate on the role psychosis plays in this relationship, arguing that tonality for Rihm often assumes the operations of what Jacques Lacan called a symbolic order: a network of laws and codes which sustain the world of subjects and others. In Lacanian terms, it is the subject's unsuccessful installation in the symbolic which triggers psychosis – a state organized by mimetic rivalries, the body's invasion byjouissance, and the de-hierarchization and loss of control of the drives. Tonality, for Rihm, is apoorly installed symbolic order, from which music ‘breaks’ psychotically. But it would be a mistake to pathologize Rihm's music. Rather, Rihm's is one of the more cunning, problematic, ‘neurotic’ solutions to one of modernism's oldest challenges: how to function creatively in the absence of (a) language. Both the challenge and the solution are themselves as old as aesthetic modernism; they can be understood as the two sides of modernism's ‘fundamental fantasy’, in which madness becomes a practicable sanity, and psychosis a saving symbolic order.

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