Bjork archives and lacan
For Christmas, my boyfriend got me the "Bjork archives," a collection of writings on Bjork published for the MoMA Bjork exhibition. Included is the essay “Bjork Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation” by Nicola Dibben. It argues that Bjork conceives her creativity as that of maternal procreation as opposed to the patriarchal creation divinely inspired by the father or God. I like that Dibben derives this from her reference to her collaborators as her "midwives," and it’s kind of everything that her album Medulla stands for.
She also elaborates on Bjork’s subversion of the binary between the natural and industrial (most obviously in the song "All the Modern Things"). This becomes an argument for her subversion of the gender binary, which is well supported by the associations of nature-mother earth-woman and machine-reason-man, cycling back to the point of maternal and paternal creation.
My favourite point is about the mutual dissolution of the technology-nature / feminine-masculine binaries in the songs "All is Full of Love" and "Mutual Core." The one with the robot sex music video is more obvious but I was especially satisfied by the idea that Mutual Core inverts the contrast of sex-as-nature against technology-as-reason-as-human (sex is like technology) into sex-as-human against earth-as-nature (sex is like the earth), mixing everything up. Bjork was also reading Bataille, apparently, so that’s something to consider for another day …
What I thought deserved more elaboration is when Dibben observes that while "'All is Full of Love' emphasizes peace, love and sex, 'Mutual Core' represents a more violent unification." I thought immediately of another dichotomy, Lacan’s imaginary and symbolic order. The psychoanalyst often conceptualizes this through Hegel’s master-slave dialectic; the aggression of the two consciousnesses who want to kill one another is that of the imaginary mirror-stage that forms the ego, and the peace of the master-slave relationship -- resulting from the necessity of domination to be recognized, an impossibility when the dominated is dead -- is that of the symbolic order.
"This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history: the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation …" (The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, Lacan)
"Can you hear the effort / Of the magnetic strife / Shuffling of columns / To form a mutual core" (Mutual Core, Bjork)
Another song of Bjork’s I’ve associated to Lacan’s imaginary is "Pluto." I write more about the aggressivity in “Pluto” in this corny piece here.
loosely related to the discussion of herzog in the article above, I want to share an extract from an e-mail exchange between Bjork and the author Timothy Morton, also included in the Bjork Archives.
"i feel in many ways we icelandic people are a bit different from usa and england . somehow we missed out on the industrial revolution and modernism and postmodernism and are now coming straight from colonialism , getting our independence 1944 and going straight into 21st century ! we have a chance to enjoy our still almost untouched nature and combine it and heabutt our way into green techno internet age . so somehow there is way less apocalyptic feeling over here … we dont have an army , havent been burned by wars or by the guilt that comes with it … somehow we are still continuing the romantic age of the 19th century but it is not back to nature , it is forwards !! i feel this has been misunderstood so far as naive and cute (a la grizzly man werner herzog or even worse dolphins and shit !! )"