Unconscious education

Abstract

This article outlines, by means of a critique of film criticism, the processes of self-formation and subject-formation as affected by unconscious education. The basic definition of the unconscious used is: something that happens to someone without them being consciously aware of it happening, unless their attention to it is actively drawn. This is a functional definition used to develop a critical argument specific to the filmic and theoretical texts used in the article and is not an attempt to capture other definitions of the unconscious within its scope except where explicitly mentioned. While Freud is engaged indirectly through more recently theoretical work, including my own, the deep relationship to Freud’s thought is beyond the scope of this article and is therefore – consciously – only gestured towards. Unconscious education, as defined in the context of this article, is as much about what in our experience might be out of focus, which, in aural terms might be heard without listening. As such, this article charts a theoretical and practical movement from hearing to listening and passive inattention to active attention in the context of film and film criticism, with a specific focus on film music. This specific focus, though, is principally a means of illustrating (note the visual metaphors) a theoretical position that can be considered across the full range of educational experiences and practices, including research and criticism.

Introduction

This article outlines, by means of a critique of film criticism, the processes of self-formation and subject-formation as affected by unconscious education. The basic definition of the unconscious used is: something that happens to someone without them being consciously aware of it happening, unless their attention to it is actively drawn. This is a functional definition used to develop a critical argument specific to the filmic and theoretical texts used in the article and is not an attempt to capture other definitions of the unconscious within its scope except where explicitly mentioned. While Freud is engaged indirectly through more recently theoretical work, including my own, the deep relationship to Freud’s thought is beyond the scope of this article and is therefore – consciously – only gestured towards. Unconscious education, as defined in the context of this article, is as much about what in our experience might be out of focus, which, in aural terms might be heard without listening. As such, this article charts a theoretical and practical movement from hearing to listening and passive inattention to active attention in the context of film and film criticism, with a specific focus on film music. This specific focus, though, is a principally a means of illustrating (note the visual metaphors) a theoretical position that can be considered across the full range of educational experiences and practices, including research and criticism.

The notion of the unconscious utilised here, at a conceptual level, is neutral and is as likely to be utilised and experienced as conservative and in service of existing power structures and systems as it is to be radical and disruptive. In following with this overarching definition of the unconscious, two definitions of unconscious education are utilised: (1) education experienced unconsciously by its subjects (e.g. through the hidden curriculum or through film music composed in the manner advocated by Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno in Composing for the Films [ 1994 ]) (2) an education in the unconscious (through its effects), understood as a component of Freudian psychic economy. Through a critical engagement with Leo Bersani’s readings of Bruno Dumont’s L’humanité (1999) and (with Ulysse Dutoit) Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard, attendance to music in film is established as enabling a sensitive form of literacy applied through attentive and active listening. Attentive listening is demonstrated as an example of the ability to reduce the experiential field of unconscious education through an understanding of its rhetorics and processes and to enhance our understanding of the unconscious component of psychic economies by attending to its ‘delegates, representatives, proxies’ (Derrida, 1982: 21), evidenced here through the rhetorics of music and presentations of hearing and listening in film.

Unconscious education

The first of two main tendencies of subject formation in the humanist educational legacy (Bojesen, 2018), superficially drawn, is the tendency towards the co-option of inwardness. This tendency seeks to conscript and direct a subject’s interest in a manner that is directed towards particular outcomes, such as intellectual, practical, moral and social dispositions (however these are constructed by the educator and their context). A multitude of pedagogical strategies operate in support of this trajectory, from direct instruction and book learning, to dialogue and didactic art. They are often considered to be deployed in a surreptitious manner by means of a ‘hidden curriculum’. The definitive feature of this tendency in humanist education is its aim to align the self-conception of a person with the world view and disposition necessary to acting in the world in a manner compliant with the social ambitions of the educator(s) and their institution(s). The clearest example of this form of education in Renaissance Europe was that provided by the Jesuits (see Muir, 2007). In 20^th century and contemporary Europe this function has been inherited most widely by compulsory and quasi-compulsory state education. In the context of this article, this tendency refers to the impact of unconscious experience on self-formation.

The second main tendency of humanist education is towards the inculcation of a responsibility or orientation towards self-formation (distinct from a more broadly defined subject-formation), understood as a self-reflexive mode of being that discovers itself through experience and where neither truth nor self are fixed. Self-formation is not attempted with the ambition of revealing a core inner self but as an ongoing and non-linear developmental process that adapts in relation. The self that is formed is always a self-in/as-relation. Conversation and other non-didactic modes of pedagogy, such as non-prescriptive literary texts and other works of art, provide means of practicing and communicating this self-reflexive mode of being. Renaissance examples of this tendency include Montaigne’s Essays, Cesare Cremonini’s pedagogy, and Claudio Monteverdi’s opera, the Coronation of Poppea (see Muir, 2007). 20^th century and contemporary philosophical and creative practices that draw on this tendency include the writing of Maurice Blanchot, the teaching of Jean-Francois Lyotard and the music and teaching of Pierre Boulez. In the context of this article, this tendency refers to the impact of a subject’s psychic economy – which includes the unconscious – on self-formation.

These humanistically informed tendencies in educational formation are not as easily separated in experience as they might be in theory. In fact, while at their extremes they do identify two distinct strands of trajectory, they are nonetheless commonly combined in theory and practice of formal education and constitute ‘the basic ritual of our pedagogy’ (Hunter, 1994: 168). An extreme filmic example of where they do not synthesise but rather collide, is Lindsay Anderson’ s satire, If.. (1968), where public school education is rejected and attacked (with machine guns) from within by its students. A less radical but potentially more problematic example is Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) (see Author 3), supported by directly emotive music by Maurice Jarre.

Supplementing and destabilising both of these tendencies, either separately or in combination, is what I have described elsewhere as a passive education (Bojesen, 2018, 2020), which occurs whether we attempt it or not. This incorporates educational experiences which evade, decentre, deflate, or overwhelm the ‘self’. The means of passive educational experience, which is exists regardless of intervention, can be co-opted for explicit and clearly defined educational ends. While the fundamental possibility of experience of this form of education exists neutrally, as possibility for experiences where meaning is not overdetermined or is radically insufficient, it can also be used a means of conveying information unconsciously or education being provoked by the unconscious (two very different processes). Not all passive education is unconscious; we are often fully aware of making space for (as teachers) and experiencing (as subjects) passive education. However, all unconscious education is passive for the subject to be educated, including when it is experienced as part of an activity. Passive education is where the self is effaced in the relation of a broader subjection to educational experience, where it is not the self-conscious ‘I’ that learns but rather the general disposition of subjectivity qua psychic economy that is educated. Passive education can, nonetheless, be practiced consciously, even as it opens towards an inattentive unconscious education. It can, though, also be experienced unconsciously; all unconscious education being necessarily the result of passive inattention.

The tendency for co-option of art which might lend itself to unconscious education is strong. Critics, religious figures, mystics, historians, other academics, teachers, public intellectuals, and politicians are some of those who actively pursue this tendency towards religious, political, philosophical, and/or moral ends. Contexts and the intentions of artists can themselves overdetermine the ‘meaning’ of works of art in a manner that can extend or obstruct their broader communication. Film music outlined in this article is utilised as an example of and as a way in to thinking of intentionally deployed unconscious educational experience. In many ways, descriptions of the effects of film music reflect the use of sound in film generally but the distinctive nuances of sound use outside of music in film would require further discussion (see Chion, 1994).

This article will explore the means and methods utilised to attempt unconscious education in this context and approaches to the production and experience of this will be built on to suggest how similar means and methods might be purposefully or inadvertently present in other forms of communication. The clear correlate to this form of unconscious education is referred to, usually critically, as the ‘hidden curriculum’, which is implemented, often purposefully but sometimes inadvertently in social contexts of acculturation, including schooling, training, new employment, or advertising. However, rather than reading unconscious education as a manifestation of the hidden curriculum, I suggest that the hidden curriculum (in either its supportive or surreptitious guise) is more helpfully framed as one of many examples of attentiveness to what could more broadly be described as unconscious education and therefore also even more broadly captured under passive education.

Kathryn Kalinak (2023) provides a helpful and clear outline of the basic contributions of film music:

Film music, whether it is a pop song, an improvised accompaniment, or an originally composed cue, can do a variety of things. It can establish setting, specifying a particular time and place; it can fashion a mood and create atmosphere, it can reinforce or foreshadow narrative developments and contribute to the way we respond to them; it can resonate and even create emotion, sometimes only dimly realized in the images, for us to experience; it can elucidate character, fleshing out screen images with personality, background, and motivation; it can help us to know what characters are thinking and feeling; it can encapsulate a film’s theme. Film music can unify a series of images that might seem disconnected on their own and impart a rhythm to their unfolding. (1)

To this might be added that it can provide references to external cultural objects and contexts, such as the artificially intelligent android David’s performance of an ‘anaemic’ (so described by his creator) piano version of Richard Wagner’s ‘Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla’ from Das Rheingold at the beginning of Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant (2017), followed by his command, at the end of the film, to the computer to play this, in its full orchestral version, after he has accomplished his plan. The allusions are reasonably clear, as is the significance of the different versions of the music; the first performed at the command of his creator, the second at his own command after defeating the humans. Equally, there is a broader allusion to the association between the narrative of the film, which is a prequel to Scott’s original film, Alien (1979) and that of Wagner’s multipart Der Ring des Nibelungen, of which Das Rheingold is the first part. Which is to say, film music can also allude to that which is not immediately available within the context of a specific film. While in the case of Alien: Covenant, the characters effectively tell the audience what this reference is, there also many allusions possible through the narratively unstated use of specific pieces of music in a film, either in the specific use of a particular piece of music, or something implied by the style of the music. Existing knowledge can help to inform an assessment of the meaning of these references, while the absence of contextualising knowledge removes this ability for the music to defer to something elsewhere and makes it more likely that the music will contribute to the overall unconscious effect of a scene. The possibilities of unconscious education can, then, be reduced and/or reconstituted by means of attention and literacy, generally defined.

For education to be unconscious, it only has to be unconscious within the context of the individual educational experience. The conscious production of education designed to be effective unconsciously is well established, even if it is not principally defined in those terms. This article understands ‘unconscious experience’ to refer to elements of experience of which individuals are not conscious because they are not attentive to or literate in their means and content, while ‘the unconscious’ is understood separately as a constitutive feature of the Freudian psychic economy. In ‘Différance’, Derrida (1982) describes the Freudian unconscious as:

A certain alterity – to which Freud gives the metaphysical name of the unconscious – is definitively exempt from every process of presentation by means of which we would call upon it to show itself in person. In this context, and beneath this guise, this unconscious is not, as we know, a hidden, virtual, or potential self-presence. It differs from, and defers itself; which doubtless means that it is woven of differences, and also that it sends out delegates, representatives, proxies; but without any chance that the giver of proxies might “exist,” might be present, be “itself” somewhere, and with even less chance that it might become conscious. (20-21)

The Freudian psychic economy can therefore be understood to underpin the definition of self-formation informed by unconscious education, which, unlike unconscious education, is not something that can, with enhanced attention and literacy, become knowable, even if we become literate in its ‘delegates, representatives, proxies’. Music in film, can, though, provide a mode of presenting the ‘delegates, representatives, proxies’ of the unconscious in their characters, and, as will be demonstrated in a reading of the contribution of music in Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, provoke the work of the unconscious in its audience through the ear’s ability to stimulate a destabilising proximity. In addition, the conclusion will suggest that there may be some similarity – although also a fundamental difference – in how unconscious education and the psychoanalytic unconscious can be approached.

Before moving onto film music and its capacity for unconscious education, this article first outlines how ‘self-formation’ and ‘subject-formation’ (which are distinct from one another – the latter being the formation of an individual’s psychic economy) might be approached from a Freudian rhetorical perspective, and their relationship to the unconscious component of the psychic economy. By first determining ‘who’ is educated, it is then clearer how various forms of experience inform that education.

Formation

In a philosophical context where the subject operates ‘indispensably’ as ‘function’ (Derrida 1970: 272), a notion of ‘self-formation’ is necessarily heteronomous and (de)formative. Self, as instantiated sovereignty, becomes disentangled from a destabilising subjectivity. As Nick Mansfield (2010) explains:

For Derrida, sovereignty, while allowing identity by guaranteeing the stable return to self that makes its endurance possible, also threatens it as well, by linking it to what is ever enlarging and overcoming itself. Sovereignty thus makes the self-identity of subjectivity possible and ruins it in one and the same unfolding. (134)

While Mansfield’s argument builds on Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida’s engagements with Sigmund Freud, it is in Freud that this unsettling relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity is most thoroughly and helpfully defined (see Bojesen, 2018 for a detailed textual engagement with this thought). Freud’s (1991) psychic economy, whose structural elements include ego, ego ideal (or super ego), and id, helps to demonstrate the depths, complexities, and instability of the relationship between subject and subjectivity. The ego component is most straightforwardly aligned with conscious subject function (‘self’) and its unstable performative sovereignty. The ego, though, cannot be conceived outside of its relation to the ego-ideal, which is the structurally sovereign component of the psychic economy, and the id.

A principle path to self-formation is conscious object-cathexis, wherein the libido is invested in objects, persons, ambitions, processes, and so on. Its role in self-formation is multi-directional, teaching something about (possibly ‘repeated’ or repressed’ aspects of) an individual’s psychic economy as well as further forming and deforming relations between and within components of that economy through the experience related to the object where interest is directed. It is distinct from what might more broadly be defined as ‘subject-formation’, which incorporates the entirety of the psychic economy, including the unconscious.

Another commonly understood means to self-formation is involuntary adversity, of the kind often presented in film. While ‘volunteered’ object-cathexis might be directed towards activities that contain aspects of adversity, this adversity may itself be the main libidinal attraction, or at least an accepted element of an otherwise desirable activity or relation. In cases of involuntary adversity, the deployment of object-cathexis is still possible, even if it is directed towards, for example, the imagined over-coming of the adversity. Where a situation is adverse enough to significantly limit the deployment of object-cathexis, this can nonetheless also lead to ‘self-formation’, through the more apparent engagement of the ego ideal, perhaps especially through the retention or shattering of fantasy. The shattering of fantasy, though, can arise through experiences leading from object-cathexis, revealing the disappointment in the return on those libidinal investments. A clear and well-known filmic representation of this in Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968), underpinned by its energetic an anxiety heavy soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith. The final scene, where it becomes evident that the planet is Earth, shatters any lingering fantasy related to mankind or a return home, where light and emotionally vague music leading up to Taylor’s realisation, gives way to the sound of crashing waves.

In what are we invested? Where do we deploy our libidinal energy? These are important questions through which to approach self-formation and subject-formation because they ask about the existing features of our psyche, as well as its opening to libidinally invested development. Alongside this, though, is an understanding of where our libidinal investments have faltered. Have we fallen out of love? Has a desired path been closed off to us? Have we sacrificed? Whether libido has weakened, been withdrawn, reinvested, or its associated ambitions repressed, its role in the psychic economy continues to offer opportunities for self-formation.

The rhetoric of the subject, and the rhetorics that assist in the constitution of an individual ‘self’ are a less explicitly psychoanalytic or Freudian concern. Rhetorics provide tools to ‘make the self’, and as our experiences provide us with new rhetorical lexicons, they become at once objects of cathexis and the means through which cathexis can be deployed or progressed. The multiplicity and sometimes conflicting or hypocritical nature of rhetorics effective in self-formation reveal them as much as obstacles as well as means to self-formation. The tools we use to define ourselves do not necessarily help us form who we ‘are’ in terms of our broader psychic economy. Which is to say, we cannot be clear about who we are through this broader definition, even, and perhaps especially, to ourselves. This is in significant part due to the influence of the unconscious as a component of our psychic economy, as well as the inability of learned rhetorics that inform our notion of self to keep up with our more general subject formation.

This formulation does not presuppose that there is a clearly defined ‘self’ to know but rather that there are degrees of separation from the libido and its functioning in the psychic economy, and that the rhetorics we use to define ourselves can be more or less distant from that functioning. Also, our attachment to certain rhetorics (as with any libidinal investment) can become much less cathected, even if we continue to utilise them. This can lead to significant gap in our self-understanding, precisely because we already think we know who we are. Self-formation is a not a goal with an end but rather an ongoing process, that sometimes undoes its own work as it proceeds.

The rhetorical tools Freud provides allow for an actively complicating overview of psychic structure and operations. They are, of course, general, rather than individualised but nonetheless must be treated with the same caution as other internalised rhetorics. Foucault (2010) examines the inculcation of such rhetorics as part of a para-pedagogical process he calls psychagogy:

Let us call “pedagogical”, if you like, the transmission of a truth whose function is to endow any subject whatever with aptitudes, capabilities, knowledges, and so on, that he did not possess before and that he should possess at the end of the pedagogical relationship. If, then, we call “pedagogical” this relationship consisting in endowing any subject whomsoever with a series of abilities defined in advance, we can, I think, call “psychagogical” the transmission of a truth whose function is not to endow any subject whomsoever with abilities, etcetera, but whose function is to modify the mode of being of the subject to whom we address ourselves. (Foucault 407)

While Foucault is specifically examining the changes in psychagogical processes and effects between the Greco-Roman philosophical and Christian periods, the logic holds for a Freudian self-understanding of the ‘subject’. The major difference between these classical forms of self-understanding and Freudian psychology is that Freud’s tools actively complicate and even block confident self-understanding. While classical psychagogy transmits a truth to modify a subject’s mode of being, ‘Freudian’ psychagogy might instead place the responsibility for, and receipt of, that transmission within the psychic economy. Self-formation, then, can be understood as a self-reflexive mode of being that economically determines its orientations through experience. Neither truth nor self are fixed.

The rhetorics of both self-formation and the external co-option of inwardness, imply the significance of relation in the processes of the formation of ‘self’. There is not a ‘self’ to be developed through external transmission but rather a self to be reflected through relations scaffolded by libidinal investment whether they be in, for example, school or art. Formation, through both tendencies, occurs simultaneously with forgetfulness. For Blanchot (1986):

Forgetfulness would efface that which never was inscribed: it would bar the unwritten which thus seems to have left a trace that must be obliterated. And this slippage in the significance of forgetfulness comes to construct for itself an operator: the impersonal third-person, the subject without subjectivity, slick and vein, thickens, acquiring a sort of stickiness, and becomes trapped in the doubled abyss of the evanescent, simulated I, an imitation of nothing, which congeals in the confident Self whence all order returns. (85)

This is to say that while unconscious experience informs self-formation, even conscious formation becomes unconscious within the context of the psychic economy. This broader Freudian and Blanchotian conception of subject formation helps to clarify that, yes, a Self – an ego – is formed (and reformed, perpetually), but also that educational experience acts on and is acted on by the broader psychic economy. As such, when we describe a ‘self’ in context, that context also includes their own psychic economy, much of which is unconscious but nonetheless productive of effects.

What music?

Tears, smiles, subtle gestures, screams and exclamations, as well as engagements with other characters and, of course, the general narrative structure of a film and its visual symbols, provide a substantial evidential basis for filmic analysis, even without taking music or sound into account. These textual components can also be used as means of analysis for the educational experience of the film characters, and presents them as already necessarily and specifically educated subjects. Music in film can be a means of re-entrenching or developing a perception of a subject’s sense of selfhood or having that selfhood interrupted.

Music is represented in Bruno Dumont’s L’humanité ( 1999 ), through its reliance on diegetic or narratively contained music, as opposed to the non-diegetic music of an overarching ‘soundtrack’. However, overarching soundtracks are themselves commonly utilised in film to express the subjective disposition or experience of characters or to characterise the psychological ‘tone’ of a scene; significantly evident in the romantic film scores of Golden Age Hollywood. As L’humanité shows, music can also represent inclusion within and exclusion from a community, class, taste, and the general disposition of an individual’s persona.

In Leo Bersani’s chapter, ‘Staring’, from Receptive Bodies (2018), he argues, with reference to provocations in his own writing and Dumont’s L’humanité that ‘Mobility may be suspended by the fortuitous appearances of pleasing, self-contained, inexplicable, yet non-problematic spectacles.’ (128). Of particular interest to Bersani is the ‘spectacle’ of the protagonist, police detective Pharoan de Winter’s, staring which, ‘for all its immobility, presents (has nothing to say about) non-conceptualising force.’ (128). This immobility, then, is strikingly devoid of educational context while nonetheless providing a form of educational experience. In his own writing style, Bersani has attempted to ‘defeat, from the very start, our impatient wish to move ahead towards de-problematizing conclusions’ which, like Pharoan’s staring, can be ‘models for occasional restful stops in the agitated questioning of inconclusive thinking and inconclusive being.’ (128). These restful stops, for Pharoan in L’humanité, are often accompanied by music or other sounds which may well suggest that Dumont has something is added to this presentation by means of musical content, its filmic context, and its broader extra-filmic allusions.

The use of music in the staring scenes may well be considered as a means of generating a non-conceptualising force. The music does not produce a concept but rather inform, consciously or unconsciously, reflection on the implied significance and meaning of those specific sounds in their film and extra-filmic references. The music accompanying the ‘spectacle’ may then combine with it to produce a non-conceptualising force. For Bersani, the ‘visual thinking of film is not an improvement over conceptual thinking; it is a directly presentational doing.’ (126). If Bersani were to be attentive to, or conscious of, the auditory component of (most) film, the definition of directly presentational doing might be extended, complicated, or undermined. While sound often assists in asserting directly presentational doing (e.g. sound effects for on-screen activities), non-diegetic soundtracks and diegetic music might, for example be closer to a presentational feeling than even the visual component of film.

In the introduction to his chapter, Bersani asks if staring is ‘relational’ (106), going to suggest that it ‘may be the only nonrelational relation we can visibly, corporeally have in a world in which we no longer are. The feeling inherent in this encompassing nonbeing at the heart of being can perhaps be called melancholy.’ (107). However, hearing (as opposed to listening, which may be considered more straightforwardly relational) is also visible, as well as being audible, and is potentially also describable as non-relational. This observation would not undermine Bersani’s general argument but might expand its applicability and supply it with further evidence. It might even be possible that Bersani’s evaluation of Pharoan’s melancholy could have been unconsciously informed by Bersani’s own non-relational relation through hearing. Bersani’s only reference to music in the film describes the scene following Pharoan’s discovery of the body that will precipitate his investigation:

Alone in his car, Pharoan turns on for a moment the only musical background of the film: an hysterically paced, painfully loud, fugue-like harpsichord piece by contemporary composer Pancrace Royer (it is repeated during the credits at the end of the film. (109)

This sentence raises multiple issues, including the factual error in the description of ‘Pancrace Royer’ as a contemporary composer; Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer (1703–1755) was a French baroque composer who worked in the court of Louis XV, principally known today for his harpsichord music. The piece of music played by Pharoan is William Christie’s recording of Royer’s harpsichord work, ‘Le Vertigo’. The title of the work is allusive, not least in its possible reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller, Vertigo; another film that beings with a death and where the protagonist is a detective who experiences significant psychological issues, including melancholy. ‘Joseph’ also happens to be the name of Pharoan’s friend who we eventually discover is the murderer. The possibility for this specific piece of music, then – outside of its inherently sonic presentation – to contribute to a reading of the film is therefore evident through increased attentiveness and literacy.

Bersani’s single sentence on music in the film is also problematic in its reference to this piece as ‘background music’, as Pharoan actively plays this music on his car stereo and then sits and listens to it; even if this might be better described as hearing than as listening. The music dominants this scene, not least due to its volume and the lack of any on-screen movement. In addition, Bersani neglects the multiple additional instances of music presented throughout the film, all of which are diegetic and not ‘background’ or non-diegetic soundtrack music. This includes extremely monotonous and pounding dance music in the car with Joseph and the Domino (Joseph’s girlfriend and Pharoan’s ‘love interest’); loud and mocking group singing in the restaurant the trio attend, and a little piano background music that apeears from beneath it; and, most notably, perhaps, Pharoan playing music himself. In this final example, Pharoan, seemingly despondently, plays the keyboard (with a standard and simple pre-coded backing track being played by the keyboard itself) in his apartment, while a television shows war scenes. In all of these scenes, even when playing the music himself, Pharoan seems to hear rather than to listen, perhaps in an additional example of what Bersani describes as the non-relational relation experienced in his staring.

Much in the same way that Pharoan seems to stare without seeing, he could be understood to hear without listening. However, as, for example, his screams and other eccentric behaviours suggest, there is a significant amount of psychological activity occurring outside of the audiences ability to directly perceive. The strangeness of his behaviour, including his despondent modes of seeing and hearing, makes it clearer that it is what the audience cannot perceive that is fundamental to any understanding of his character, leaving them at a loss. Pharoan is a character with a particularly loosely determined ‘self’. His superficial simplicity defers the audience to his deeper psychological state and, due to his behaviours, this further suggests psychological trauma and repression, and therefore the very significant effect of the unconscious with the context of his subject formation and self-presentation, that mostly comes across as receptive without necessarily being attentive.

The unconscious can of course not be presented by the film but is instead alluded to by the non-relational relations perceivable through his staring and his hearing without, seemingly, listening. Pharoan’s subject formation (including the economic contribution of the unconscious) seems to have paralysed his ability for self-formation. Without the self ‘in the way’, Dumont provides a less obstructed perception of the subject and a clearer allusion to the unconscious operating within its psychic economy.

Proximity

A notable feature of Bersani’s writing on cinema is a repeated fixation on the optical and verbal components of cinema, rather than its ability to also present sound, including music. There is a distinct and consistent privileging of sight over sound in Bersani’s writings on film. This relative absence of and/or fallacious reference to sound and music in Bersani’s film criticism is especially notable given his emphatic sensitivity to Freudian psychic economy throughout his work. Music and sound is either ignored or briefly analysed in support of an optically and verbally prioritised critique.

An important exception to this is Bersani and Dutoit’s (1993) reading of Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, a 1956 documentary film focused on the Holocaust, in Arts of Impoverishment, where the soundtrack by Hanns Eisler, written specifically for the film, is mentioned powerfully, albeit without reference to the composer. Eisler, a composer of Jewish decent and collaborator with Bertholt Brecht, whose music was banned by the Nazis in 1933 and had emigrated to the USA in 1938 before being expelled in 1948 following the testimony to the House Committee of Un-American Activities of his sister Elfriede Eisler (aka the prominent communist activist, Ruth Fischer) (Haas, 240). Eisler also notably co-authored with Theodor Adorno (himself a composer, albeit of less note than Eisler) the 1947 book, Composing for the Films.

Micheal Haas describes Eisler’s music in the film as employing, ‘the starkest of music-to-visual counterpoint, anticipating Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘the banality of evil’: he underscores the gas chambers with music of unapologetic banality, leaving the viewer with a deeply unsettled impression.’ (146). Bersani and Dutoit, though, go much further in evaluating its place in the film’s psychological design and more suggestively detail its impact, describing it as, ‘Light, almost engaging music accompanies (though no word could be less appropriate)’ (184) scenes from the holocaust. They ask:

What should we be focusing on? The images, the voice, and the music are frequently sending us disparate messages, pulling us in different directions. If the bouncy music doesn’t make what we see any less unbearable, it does disorient our seeing by calling attention to itself. We are in danger of becoming as conscious of the different directions in which voice and image, or image and music, are pulling us as we are of what the voice is saying or what the image is showing us. (184-185).

This economic relationship between the different components of the film might be perceived to mirror and produce the uncomfortable operations of the psychic economy when approaching this material; ‘The images, the narrative, and the music of Night and Fog have become a part of our perceptual movement, of our perceptual being, now.’ (187). They might therefore be understood to engage in a form of discreet and relational subject formation or organisation, pressuring the different components of the psychic economy in a manner that exacerbates its ability to confidently produce a ‘self’ as a distance from the atrocities.

Far from having to warn us that we may have the same impulses as the Nazis (and that this document is therefore relevant to our own societies), Resnais has made the images of Nazism an active part of our contemporaneity. We move within them easily. The Nazi past is already being repeated inside our sensory collaboration with this film, a collaboration that Resnais encourages us to feel as a kind of self-identification and, consequently, as an inescapable complicity.(187)

The ’self’ is then produced in the context of the film, as a result of the disorienting presentation of image, voice and music. The combination of elements in the film provokes attention by disturbing passivity and forming a self psychologically complicit in – by virtue of being determined by its enhanced involvement in – what is experienced. The music here, then, is an essential component of the successful operation of the film in its psychologically educational work. It is notable that the social and educational impact of Nuit et brouillard [Night and Fog], is charted by Ewout Van Der Knaap in Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of Night and Fog ( 2006 ), which he argues has had a wide and culturally educational impact, as well as being used explicitly as a teaching resource in French schools (42-44).

In Composing for the Films, Eisler and Adorno contest that, ‘acoustical perception preserves comparably more traits of long bygone, pre-individualistic collectivities than optical perception.’ (13) This description is helpfully extended by Derrida’s (1982) description of the ear as:

the distinct, differentiated, articulated organ, that produces the effect of proximity, of absolutely properness, the idealizing erasure of organic difference. It is an organ whose structure (and the suture that holds it to the throat) produces the pacifying lure of organic indifference. To forget it – and in so doing to take shelter in the most familial of dwellings – is to cry out for the end of organs, of others. (xvii)

Eisler’s music for Night and Fog utilises this effect of proximity to produce a devastatingly disorienting experience through the utilisation of banal but ‘pleasant’ music to provoke and experience of ‘everydayness’ in the context of visuals that might otherwise be perceived as exceptional to the point of irrelevance to contemporary society and, constitution it, our individual contributions. The passivity of the ear, then, might, in Eisler and Adorno’s view, as well as Derrida’s, make it more helpfully vulnerable to the expression of social critique than the eye but also vulnerable to what might be considered as culturally consonant propaganda. Eisler weaponises the default passivity of the ear, and its ability to produce a sense of proximity to draw the audience into the film and provoke thereby produce their conscious disorientation and discomfort by use of the often unconsciously educational tool of film music:

The eye is always an organ of exertion, labour and concentration; it grasps a definite object. The ear of the layman, on the other hand, as contrasted to that of a musical expert, is indefinite and passive. One does not have to open it, as one does the eye, compared to which it is indolent and dull. But this indolence is subject to the taboo that society imposes upon every form of laziness. Music as an art has always been an attempt to circumvent this taboo, to transform the indolence, dreaminess, and dullness of the ear into a matter of concentration, effort, and serious work. Today indolence is not so much overcome as it is managed and enhanced scientifically.(14).

Eisler and Resnais, as well as Dumont (and Richard Cuvillier, who wrote some of the music for L’humanité) can be perceived as making possible the overcoming or subversion of this indolence through extreme on-screen passivity (Dumont) and audience-provoking self-formation (Resnais). Eisler and Adorno take their position further, in a manner that might, nonetheless prove that both Eisler (with his music) and Bersani (in his reading of L’humanité) both achieved precisely what Eisler and Adorno suggest should be the case:

Cinema music is not carefully listened to. If this fact is more or less accepted as an inevitable premise, the best of which has to be made, the aim will be to compose music that, even though it is listened to inattentively, can as a whole be perceived correctly and adequately to its function. The composer is thus faced with a new and strange task – that of producing something sensible, which at the same time can be perceived by way of parenthesis, as it slips by the listener. (90)

This ‘completely sensuous’ (91) approach to film music is opposed by Eisler and Adorno to ‘musical transcendence and inwardness’ and is facilitated by the predominance of movement and color over the musical depth dimension, harmony’ (91). For Eisler and Adorno, ‘By displaying a tendency to vanish as soon as it appears, motion-picture music renounces its claim that it is there, which is today its cardinal sin.’ (91). Philip Rosen (1980) frames this as suggesting, ‘An ideal film music implies a humanity which finds its specificity in something other than a magic immediacy.’ (182). While for Bersani, in his reading of L’humanité the music, for the most part, simply isn’t there, which is exactly Eisler and Adorno would suggest it should be. It contributes its effects on Bersani without being consciously perceived as music and reflected upon as aligning with visual aspects of the film.

There is nonetheless still a significant distinction between Bersani’s attention to Eisler’s Night and Fog score, which is non-diegetic, and the diegetic music written into Dumont’s L’humanité. In L’humanité music is almost always presented in a startling manner, taking over the action on screen for the duration of its presentation. It is unavoidably there diegetically and yet, Bersani does not attend to it. However, the distinction between Eisler’s position in his book written with Adorno and the music he, less than 10 years later, composed for Night and Fog is striking. This distinction is significantly supported by Bersani and Dutoit’s uncharacteristic engagement with the music.

Conclusion

Film music working in the Eislerian and Adornian tradition, as defined in Composing for the Films ( 1994 ), or at least presenting the characteristics they define as necessary to its success, can be understood to provoke, par excellence, the purposeful aesthetically produced experience of unconscious education. That is to say, film music in this tradition is engaged in provoking specifically desired unconscious responses that reinforce, expand or add contrast and detail to specific visual and narrative filmic passages. This, however, does not at all seem to have been the case with Night and Fog, at least in Bersani and Dutoit’s reading, and in my own reading, is also not the case for L’humanité. These readings, including of Eisler’s own musical contribution, significantly undermine the argument presented in Composing for the Films and also demonstrate what might be added readings of film by attending as much to what is audible as to what is visible.

For Michel Chion (2016), ‘you cannot study a film’s sound separately from its image and vice versa. In fact, their combination produces something entirely specific and novel, analogous to a chord or interval in music.’ (151). Chion argues that listening ‘is the sense most under attack today – and yet the least trained and thus the least defended. We must learn to listen, for listening is acting.’ (242). While there might be, in Eisler and Adorno’s evaluation (even if this is not a trait always present in Eisler’s practice), significant aesthetic and educational benefit to be drawn from allowing music in film to operate surreptitiously, much as the hidden (and sometimes hidden hidden) curriculum operates in formal and informal intentional education, Chion addresses an issue that presses on the relationship between unconscious education and what can broadly be called literacy. Which is to say, learning to ‘read’, through attentiveness to what is happening – whether it be in formal education or in a film – what might otherwise be received unconsciously. To understand and begin to interpret that which might otherwise operate on us unconsciously expands and transforms the field of conscious perception of experiences; in the examples provided in this article, that would mean moving from hearing to listening and passive inattention to active attention in certain contexts. This ability to make known, then, is what distinguishes unconscious education as reduced awareness of information available in cathectic libidinal investments from unconscious education as an operative component of individual psychic economies. With the former, we can then more clearly understand what is or could be affecting us and why; with the latter, we can read its effects and make reasoned assumptions.

Both forms of unconscious education can be analogised with Plato’s allegory of the cave (514a–520a, Book VII), first through its message of the possibility for enhanced knowledge and awareness of available forms, second in its overall structure, notably the complex dynamics of mutual misunderstandings experienced in the return to the cave, which articulate something similar to dynamics of individual psychic economy that can be explored and somewhat addressed through psychoanalysis. There is, then, an unconscious education of which we can become conscious and education in the unconscious, which relies on becoming literate in its often highly individualised ‘delegates, representatives, proxies’ (Derrida, 1982: 21). These literacies can be deployed in and enhanced by attentiveness to the rhetorics of film through both watching and listening.