Transference

How is it that blogs become sites of overinvestment? Rather than fora for discussion and disagreement, they all too quickly become stand ins for horrors, hopes, and disappointments of a sort clearly beyond their import. How easily we lapse into malign misreadings, or readings of another clearly in bad faith. How quickly we speed from disagreement to total disparagement.What sense can it possibly make to condense into specific exchanges on specific blogs the entirety of American first amendment jurisprudence, to speak of rights to own and to express and to own what one expresses? What is achieved by attacks masked as requests for clarification, attacks on others who offer themselves and their ideas, for nothing? Why do small exchanges come to stand for the entirety of the political situation of the world? For all of the history of philosophy? How is it that failure to agree comes to stand for the ultimate in complicity with evil? Surely we do not leap to such conclusions when we interact with others face to face, when we hear their voices.

Do blogs take on these roles because each of us, alone before our own screens, can all too easily transfer earlier relations, earlier hopes and disappointments onto others, others known primariliy through their words? Do we fill in the gaps between those words, those comments and posts, perhaps fantasmatically, turning the other person, or our encounter with them, into encounters from our pasts, encounters that we are forever doomed to repeat, to revisit? And is it thus that these sites for multiple transference become cauldrons of accusations and dismissals, accusations that may hide behind or travel masked as jokes and irony, but remain sharp and dangerous nonetheless?

Desire is often present as distortion. Is it possible that the distortions in reading are political distortions, distortions wrought by the trapped,. stalled, unbearble political moment? Or are they more particular, the distortions inextricable from fantasy and desire? And, I wonder, reading Mladen Dolar's, A Voice and nothing more, what role is played by the absence of our voices here? (And, yes Dolar engages the metaphysics of presence, introducing another metaphysical history of the voice, one where the voice is a menace to consistency and disruptive of sense).

Dolar considers the ambivalence of the voice, the voice as an object of authority and of shame:

...the sender of the voice, the bearer of vocal emission, is someone who exposes himself, and thus becomes exposed to the effects of power which not only lie in the privilege of emitting the voice, but pertain to the listener. The subject is exposed to the power of the other by giving his or her own voice, so that the power, domination, can take not only the form of the commanding voice, but that of the ear. The voice comes from some unfathomable invisible interior and brings it out, lays it bare, discloses, uncovers, reveals that interior. ... One could indeed say that there is an effect--or rather, an affect--of shame that accompanies voice: one is ashamed of using one's voice because it exposes some hidden intimacy to the Other, there is shame which pertains not to psychology, but to its structure. ... The trembling voice is a plea for mercy, for sympathy, for understanding, and it is in the power of the listener to grant it or not.

Is it possible that in the absence of the voice, one is more likely to be cruel? That the absent voice is the inextricable nugget that makes the other a human other, one whose vulnerability we cannot ignore? That absent the voice, we can only and at best struggle to detect the revealed interior (not an inner life but the remainder induced by the signifying cut)? And, is it possible, that we experience or seek to distance ourselves from only our own shame; that, in a way, when we involve ourselves in blog conversations, we only "hear" our own voices. So, we confront our own shame, and our own otherness or foreigness to ourselves. Because we don't really, can't really, hear the others, because there is no voice tieing us to the other, we are caught in an echo chamber of our voice, which becomes all the stranger.

Dolar writes:

The voice is the element which ties the subject and the Other together, without belonging to either, just as it formed the tie between body and language without being part of them.

My suggestion above that we only hear our own voices is absurd: when we speak, we rarely hear ourselves. I am generally appalled when I hear my voice on an answering machine or on some kind of taped interview. But the revulsion is not before the uncanny effect of my voice disconnected from me. Rather, it is the fact that this is what I sound like, that this strange effect, this noise, accompanies the words that come from my mouth. When I speak, I can only speak if I ignore the sound of my own voice. Yet, in ignoring it, it can get out of hand, seeming too terse, rude, or impatient. It interacts with others in ways that mock my will, my intentions, what I think that I want to display. So, in blogging, can we, do we confront the familiar strangeness of our own voices? Is this strangeness, and its connection with shame, part of what we try to attack, to dismiss, to avoid? Or, are their other voices, the voices of others, those caught inside us, that we hear when we don't hear the voices of those whose typed words we read?

It may be that in the silence of blogs, in the absence of the voice, we are left with subjects and others that have no tie at all. That only clash.

Comments

[josef k.]

Except that on the internet, there is a certain flatness of sonority - or rather, on the internet sonority is virtual, rather than actual: we cannot really whisper to one another here, we can only "whisper" - our tonal modulations here are really more like representations of tonal modulation.

Such that although on level you may whisper to me, there is nothing private about this - as there would be if you were doing this in a physical space. You whisper to me, but really you just are citing the form of whisper - the form of whispering as a representing a certain kind, or type, of call.

[Jodi]

Josef K--precisely! which is why voice matters and the absence of voice is an issue, an issue that overlaps with those of face and space but is not identical with them and cannot be reduced to them.

[flotsam]

Getting back to Joseph K.'s excellent point:

"One cannot just simply blame the ignorant, surely."

... makes me realize how right he is. The other half of the equation is the writer. Communication is a two way street. Sure, many readers don't read well, thereby misinterpreting the voice of the writer (and becoming offended, for whatever reason). But many writers are not really so clever as they think they are. Who amongst us has not become infatuated with the "sound" of his own written voice? The tendency - especially for young, male writers - is to post what they perceive to be clever stuff - stuff which really isn't that clever at all, but certainly can seem rather silly and even offensive.

I think the reason badly written "clever" writing can so easily seem offensive to some is that this type of writing is an usually egotistical exercise. Those who already know and love us can interpret the words on the page, precisely because they already know and love us. But that’s a very small subset of people, and it takes a very good writer to be able to reach out and make the masses actually hear his voice.

I have on my wall the following quote by Borges, which I refer to every time I am tempted to present myself as the new Oscar Wilde:

"The fate of a writer is strange. He begins his career by being a baroque writer, pompously baroque, and after many years, he might attain, if the stars are favorable, not simplicity, which is nothing, but rather a modest and secret complexity."

OT, but interesting..