Can electronic music consummate grief?
In Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, mourning is the normal response to loss—a process where the subject’s libidinal investment in the lost love-object is consciously registered. But in melancholia, the subject has a pathological obsession that never goes away, since the identity of the loss is forever buried in the unconscious and can never be identified. Without an identifiable object of grief, melancholia is subsumed into the subject’s self-identity—causing a never-ending process of grief. So one forever wonders what was lost.
In Melancholy Gender, Judith Butler sees a different context for melancholia—one that is more culturally significant than pathological: the existence of melancholia is indicative of possible self-identities that have never emerged due to oppressive cultural discourses. Therefore, the persistence of grief in turn suggests an empty space in one’s cultural identity and can be informative.
In Bolis Pupul’s album, Letter to Yu, we saw the link between melancholia and the construction of a cultural identity. Born in Belgium to a Belgian father and a Hongkongese mother, he was never exposed to his mother’s cultural legacy until she died in a road accident. This album is an attempt to imagine what was lost—the epitome of the freudian melancholia. Even knowing the object of loss (his mother), he nonetheless could not identify precisely what is lost together with her death—the culture he was never exposed to.
This also relates to the foreclosed possible self-identities Butler talks about: the hegemonic whiteness in Europe leads to the lost “other culture,” a possible cultural identity that could never exist under the European educational systems and the systemic preferences for whiteness. This album is an attempt to fill the void in that identity.
In Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, mourning is the normal response to loss—a process where the subject’s libidinal investment in the lost love-object is consciously registered. But in melancholia, the subject has a pathological obsession that never goes away, since the identity of the loss is forever buried in the unconscious and can never be identified. Without an identifiable object of grief, melancholia is subsumed into the subject’s self-identity—causing a never-ending process of grief. So one forever wonders what was lost.
In Melancholy Gender, Judith Butler sees a different context for melancholia—one that is more culturally significant than pathological: the existence of melancholia is indicative of possible self-identities that have never emerged due to oppressive cultural discourses. Therefore, the persistence of grief in turn suggests an empty space in one’s cultural identity and can be informative.
In Bolis Pupul’s album, Letter to Yu, we saw the link between melancholia and the construction of a cultural identity. Born in Belgium to a Belgian father and a Hongkongese mother, he was never exposed to his mother’s cultural legacy until she died in a road accident. This album is an attempt to imagine what was lost—the epitome of the freudian melancholia. Even knowing the object of loss (his mother), he nonetheless could not identify precisely what is lost together with her death—the culture he was never exposed to.
This also relates to the foreclosed possible self-identities Butler talks about: the hegemonic whiteness in Europe leads to the lost “other culture,” a possible cultural identity that could never exist under the European educational systems and the systemic preferences for whiteness. This album is an attempt to fill the void in that identity.