Voice, voice, voice (grit, mud, friction)

cross-posted to long-sunday

Voicing, finding one’s own voice, passive, active, middle voices, voice leading, voice-overs, voice training, to voice as if to say… around that word, vox, voz, Stimme, голос, φωνή, λαλιά, a number of highly territorialised and powerful tropes orbit:  the voice marks an origin, a departure, a making sound out of silence, a movement, a breath of discourse–it’s life.  A becoming and an authority.  Voices do not sing–to sing is to transform the voice into the singing voice, a voice other than itself, something always already at odds with itself–to set that voice into song, to take the prosaic shortness of vowels and lengthen them, set them onto a more determinate pitch structure, order that production differently, structure stress differently, make voicing into singing, is to bring voice into an unsettling relationship with itself, and to disturb something we have tried to keep hidden for a long time:  our voices, voicing, what we say… it is all, in the end, susceptible to the capricious terminality of material.

The terms on which the singing voice might be said to do cultural work are extremely difficult to catalogue, since post-reformation European and North American cultures at least have tended to deal more readily in imageries, tropes and topoi that are available to visual shorthanding.  The voice might thus be said to pose something of a representational problem; its sonic materiality that never settles cannot be held still.  This fidgety voice, a material capriciousness, seems always somehow just out of reach, beyond those things that we are able to say, and yet saying them nonetheless.  This point is made by Chion:

The voice is elusive.  Once you have eliminated everything that is not the voice itself–the body that houses it, the words it carries, the notes it sings, the traits by which it defines a speaking person, and the timbres that colour it, what’s left?  (The Voice in Cinema, 1)

It might therefore be worth trying to grasp this problem as one that can be addressed not simply in terms of what we ‘do’ with the voice, but in terms also of what it does to us–in what ways does it intervene in the formation of our ego ideal, how does it articulate, thematise or otherwise engage gender, race, class and so on?  Mladen Dolar has recently made a striking intervention in this problematic, and settles on a conception of voice as in some sense the sinthome of the Western episteme.  In this passage, he addresses Georgio Agamben’s Homo sacer and gets to the core of that epistemic problem that haunts our speaking:

… the voice is not simply an element external to speech, but persists at its core, making it possible and constantly haunting it by the impossibility of symbolizing it.  And even more: the voice is not some remnant of a previous precultural state, or some happy primordial fusion when we were not yet plagued by language and its calamities; rather, it is the production of logos itself, sustaining and troubling at the same time.  (Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 106.)

What is a stake for Dolar here is the very ground on which the split, as recognised by Derrida, between logos or word and phone, is built.  That rupture, a symptom for Dolar of the operation of culture (‘the production of logos’) on the voice, makes access to the voice extremely difficult, as if it were in some sense always spectral, always in some sense beyond the fixing operation of symbolization.

Dolar’s extraordinary insights nonetheless leave something out (and he would no doubt, as a Lacanian, be the first to admit as such since that orientation is all about marking the abyss, the missing, the lack, the sinthome).  To slightly over-characterise Dolar, there is in his book a certain disdain for the aesthetic pleasuring in the voice, a disdain which flows from the need to sustain a critical relationship with his field (this is a point also made by Pinocchio Theory in his recent review of Dolar’s book).  I want to suggest here that, although that critical relationship is crucial to the appropriate operation of Dolar’s strategy, it can also, if left unattended to, operate as a kind of dead-end political Puritanism, at its worst a kind of disavowal of the pleasuring that forms a part of any coherent political theory of the voice, especially as we encounter it in song.  In a sense, then, the question as to how the voice does cultural work is a question about the relationship between ideology and enjoyment.

When that voice takes flight in song, the volume of that encounter between ideology and pleasure is cranked right up.  Voice in this way would thus, in this extended Dolarian sense, represent not merely an impasse or a place of traumatic breaking (as Žižek makes it clear in his Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the mother in Hitchcok’s The Birds, on seeing her neighbour’s corpse with bloody eyes, runs from the room and cannot make any sound… the horror sticks in her throat); it would also allow for a place of joy, for ecstatic derangement, for being other than instrumental to the symbolic machine.  To enjoy voice is to become a noise maker, to become, in the eyes of those that speak from their gilded place of symbolic composure, a thug. Before my ASBO is served, then, let’s wreak some havoc.

Imagine three voices in song (I am thinking here of voices in the singular, in solo, of course, although choruses, choirs, ensembles of voices, each bring their own set of dynamics that I will think about elsewhere). 

The first, a voice that does not hover very far off the ground–a voice that seeks to stage a certain imagination of authenticity:  I think here of the quiet rustle of José González or Devendra Banhart.  These are voices that perform a certain easiness, a composure that is not, in the end, about intimacy but, on the contrary, about the spectacular.  Logos gives way to the pleasure of that staging without ever finding its ground - voice here resonates with the double-bind of singing - on the obne hand it is the simple voice of unmediated song, of song as spontaneity and, on the other, it is voice that is disciplined, held in a small territory in order to project the fantasy of immediacy.

The second is a voice that refuses the dance of authenticity, refutes the organic voice and reaches fo the flattened, open-ended hydrid voice, a voice without origin, a voice without subject. It is the voice of the machine, the voice without inflection, without meat. I think here of Kraftwerk, of Bjork of 'pluto', of the end of the organic dream of voice as the speaking of labour.

The third is a voice in flight, a voice that startles with its ephemeral shimmer, its staged-ness, its artiface - here 'trained' voices predominate - opera, Lied, but also certain forms of country, rock and jazz - they are voices that embrace their constructedness, their taking flight in technics, in their agility, their lightness, their airy openness, their purity.

Here then are at least three of the voice-tropes that operate in Western song, in a song, that is, which has consistently sought since the Reformation to rehearse what Lacan has termed the 'social psychosis' of the Western episteme. Song, that supplement to speech, that double supplement of writing, a symptom of the hardness and fixity of media, of the late modern predicament, of alienation from labour; that song is also a staging, a showing, a narrating of the predicament, its dramaturgy.

Richard Middleton has recently gestured at this possibility in his new book Voicing the Popular (Routledge, 2006) in which he understands song as offering a privileged site for understanding a certain vernacular history of the family, of labour, gender and of 'subjectivity'.  I would go further – what this voice in song does is disturb the fantastical ground on which family, gender, labour, authenticity, even, can be thought – it stages whilst drawing attention to that staging, it narrates whilst radically materialising narrative forms and conventions, it speaks whilst pointing at the breath hat makes speech possible: in this sense, voice is the hardest of all materials.

Comments

[pinocchio]

I've had a fairly voice-filled weekend what with one thing and another, so I'm really excited to get back and find you too are working hard on that devious being of the voice. I love this stuff about voices not singing - so so much to be said about the moment of transition between them...how troublesome that makes sprechgesang, for instance. Can't wait for extended versions of this: keep it up!

[Sinthome]

"To slightly over-characterise Dolar, there is in his book a certain disdain for the aesthetic pleasuring in the voice, a disdain which flows from the need to sustain a critical relationship with his field (this is a point also made by Pinocchio Theory in his recent review of Dolar’s book)."

I find this characterization of Dolar's position somewhat strange. I confess I haven't finished his book yet, but isn't this precisely one of the points of voice as objet a, that it embodies a jouissance that is in excess of the law of the signifier and which functions as cause of desire? This seems to come out above all in his discussions of Plato's theory of music in _The Republic_ and elsewhere. Plato (and later Augustine) goes into extensive detail about the properties of acceptable and unacceptable forms of music and poetry, excluding the flute from the _Republic_, but also defining what sorts of meter are acceptable in poetry. It does not seem to me that Dolar is so much holding the jouissance of voice in disdain, as he's trying to account for why, historically, voice has been seen as a threat or dangerous, and how it functions as a point of attachment in identification that is irreducible to the play of the signifier.

One of the repetitive themes throughout the text is the manner in which voice can become fetish (cf. pgs. 30-31), but here wouldn't the issue be that of objet a as a product of castration (Lacan writes objet a as a/-phi in Seminar 10 and 11), and how certain relations to voice strive to disavow castration? Would this be a disdain for the jouissance of voice, or a way of trying to surmount the traumatic dimension of voice (the trauma of the superegoic voice in its sheer materiality, for instance)?

[blahfeme]

Of course, as I say, I am overcharacterising to make rhetorical effect to a certain extent. However: I suppose the crucial point here is whether one is prepared to make the leap (and it is a very wide leap, by no means clearly signposted in either Lacan, Freud, Dolar or Zizek) from objet petit a, to pleasure, consuming, encounter. All of Dolar's Lacanian moves seem to circle round pleasure, around the voice's texture, its materiality ssimply a kind of naming, but where are the voices he encounters here? Where is the vocal stuff against which he is rubbing?

[blahfeme]

Hi Pinnochio:thanks for your kind words... I'm working on somthign a bit longer, so I'll keep you posted!! I've been reading you stuff for a while now - very inspiring.

[Sinthome]

Are you using the terms "pleasure" and "enjoyment" as synonyms, as the concepts are quite distinct in Lacan. Does Dolar himself refer to voice in terms of pleasure specifically, as I can't recall coming across it (and I'm sure I could have easily missed it as I wasn't looking for it)?

At any rate, I strongly disagree with this remark: "However: I suppose the crucial point here is whether one is prepared to make the leap (and it is a very wide leap, by no means clearly signposted in either Lacan, Freud, Dolar or Zizek) from objet petit a, to pleasure, consuming, encounter."

There is actually a good deal to justify this move in Lacan. Objet a itself is the remainder of jouissance (not pleasure) that is produced as a result of the operations of alienation and separation, and is what the subject strives to obtain in the fundamental phantasy ($ <> a). As such, voice would be that senseless excess over and above the play of the signifier, that attaches one to a discourse beyond what the discourse might say (the person who speaks "just to hear themselves speak") or the terrifying jouissance of the superegoic voice that traumatizes as a sort of excess over any particular command it might make (for instance, the child who's world is put entirely out of joint simply in being addressed by their father, regardless of whether that father is yelling or punishing... There's something in excess of the command here).

In his account of drive Lacan argues that drive continuously pulsates about objet a, perpetually missing it, but gaining jouissance or satisfaction from the very repetitive nature of this process. This idiotic repetition is what Lacan refers to as "phallic jouissance", a jouissance attached to the ever elusive object, and he explicitly connects it to the logic of capitalistic consumption in Seminar 17. Consequently we can have various avatars of objet a. There can be objet a of the traumatic *encounter* (which Lacan associates with anxiety in seminar 10: L'Angoisse, where overproximity of the object produces anxiety). There can be objet a of drive-satisfaction pulsating about the object and missing it (which I take you to be referring to when you talk about "pleasure", but it's important to emphasize that where pleasure is a reduction of tension in the psychic system, jouissance is an increase that's often experienced as painful), and finally there's objet a pertaining to consumption, where since the object is always missed we perpetually have to renew our pursuit of the object. This is all standard Lacan.

I'm a little less clear as to where Dolar is going with his discussion of fetishization and music. Fetish as a form of perversion seeks to disavow castration. The signifier is the agent of castration in that it requires a sacrifice of jouissance in order to enter the symbolic order (the symbolic order instates perpetual displacement and absence into the infans). Dolar's point seems to be that in the case of the musical voice we experience ourselves as surmounting the lack introduced by the signifier and attaining completeness through our relation to the voice. I'm not sure if it's common or not, but in my own relation to music I seldom notice the words or lyrics being sung at all (which is one reason, I take it, that it's possible to enjoy songs in foregin languages). Rather, we relate to voice itself beyond meaning and seem to encounter a jouissance that is absent in speech. It is for this reason that Plato was so suspicious of music containing lyrics and certain forms of sung poetry, as it can capture the listener or hypnotize them, bring them to assent to things being articulated in the song (as in the feiry speech of a fundamentalist minister, which is so entrancing), thereby introducing something other than logos. Voice as objet a, I think, explains the efficacy of such attachments.

Am I completely missing your points?

[blahfeme]

Thanks for the tutorial on Lacan (which I don't need), all of which is fine and makes sense on its own terms, but still does not address my core point here: my critique of Dolar (and by implication, Lacan and I suppose, to a lesser extent, Zizek) is that the Lacanian economy has no place for thinking about material specificity save at the most generalised and 'empty' level - in other words, Lacanian psychoanalysis fails to escape from the deadlock it sets up: the Real is always in some sense empty, general, without specficity and it is precisely this turn in Lacan (and, perhaps also in Zizek) that makes encountering voices as they sound (not in any innocent or original sense, but in their spcificity) very difficult or always already displaced.
In short, my point, despite my throw-away use of terms like pleasure etc. here, is to call for a precise materialism of the voice: in other words where are the sounding, material voices in Dolar's text? How does our consuming of those voices intervene in their meanings? What, specifically, is at work in spoecific, contextually particular, voices.
As a Lacanian, I am dismayed at the ill-suited of terms like objet petit a to this project, although I am on the whole in agreement with Zizek's re-reading of late Lacan on this in particular. All that you say above, therefore only makes sense if you limit the account of voice to a generalised, non-specific account. If you deceide to test it out a little more thoeoughly (i.e. see how the approach might work in say an engagement with the vocal technics of Bruce Springsteen, for example), it gets MUCH more difficult. I think Dolar is right to avoid this materiality since his approach is ill-suited to thinking it. The question remains, how to think that level of specificity? Is material specificity simpply a spasming of the symbolic order? Are we to redice it all to a misfire, a short circuit?

[Sinthome]

Thanks for the clarification. I think I was thrown through a loop by your use of the term "pleasure" and suggestion that this is ignored, when objet a and drive revolve around jouissance and repetitive satisfaction. I'm much more sympathetic to the claim you're making in terms of materiality, but I wonder if this isn't a problem that extends far beyond Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the clinic, of course, we don't work with these sorts of generalities, but with the material specificity. The analysand, for instance, goes on and on about the traumatic nature of a particular voice such as the paternal voice that they perpetually experienced as invading and upsetting their world, perpetually putting them ill at ease, regardless of *what* is said. That is, these generalities come to be individuated in the analytic setting through the experience of the analysand and specific way of relating to the material world (perhaps this is a problem in thinkers such as Zizek and Dolar as they only work with psychoanalytic concepts and not a clinic?).

The Western philosophical tradition, as you no doubt no, has had a tendency to argue that materiality as such is not thinkable apart from form. This comes out in Plato's critique of appearances, Aristotle's distinction between form and matter, Kant's subordination of the matter of sensibility to the categories of understanding, Hegel's assertion that we cannot say sense-certainty but are always-already situated in the universal of the signifier, Husserl's relegation of the hyletic flux of experience to a subordinate position beneath "eidetic essences", and Saussure's submission of sound to the differential forms of the signifier (which comes out with special clarity in Hjelmslev). Yet nonetheless in the Aristotlean orientation matter serves a necessary *indviduating* function for beings, as forms alone do not individuate one being from another. What, then, is the specific individuating contribution of matter? None of the thinkers above, up to Lacan (who is deeply formalist, as you point out) and Dolar, have a satisfying response to this question.

It sounds to me that in relation to voice you are asking how it is possible for us to think the individual/individuating without reducing it to form. In some respect, Dolar seems to be alluding to this as well in his discussions of Dolar, when he argues that voice is left over when the differential form of the signifier is subtracted. Voice serves as a necessary condition for the signifier and as its material embodiment, but are we able to think this materiality of voice for itself, without reducing its individuality and singularity once again to form? Or, to be paradoxical, can the materiality of this voice here be said?

[Sinthome]

Uggh, It's too early to be writing... The second sentence in the final paragraph should read "Dolar seems to be alluding to this as well in his discussions of *Saussure*..." That is, there's something that's not captured in the apparatus of the signifier and the signifying chain alone.

[Lars]

Interesting discussion - but Sinthome, surely there are other resources in thinking materiality than in the philosophers whose work you pointed to? Schelling, Nietzsche, and Heidegger ('The Origin of the Work of Art').

Nevertheless, fascinating to think about what it means to write about the materiality of *vernacular* voices. If there are ways of attempting to repeat or retake materiality in philosophical commentary (e.g., Blanchot on literature, Heidegger on Holderlin, Nietzsche on Wagner), I wonder whether the question raised by the materiality of the vernacular voice is even more transgressive.

Curious the division of labour implied in the separation of philosophy from Theory, as encountered in other humanities departments: the philosophy/ Theorist comes up with ideas that are then applied (e.g., Dolar's account of the voice to the discussion of Springsteen's voice.) But of course this application is never straightforward, and for me at least, it is where something interesting happens: philosophy/ Theory is forced to plunge into materiality. Why do philosophers so rarely engage themselves in this kind of work?

[blahfeme]

Lars has this right, I think. Whilst the Lacanian turn in critical theory (one of many, of course) has opened up some very interesting and fruitful avenues of thinking (Ljubljana school in particular), there are blindspots in that body of work that must also be addressed, and we have other resources to call on for that. I'm currently re-reading John Mowitt's _Percussion_ which stands in a critical relationship with Zizek et al whilst maintaining a certain solidarity. Might be worth looking again at thinking how the vernacular, as Lars siggests, holds a certain kind of spcificity which is strategically available to us here...