turning: the voice that tickles

[A guest post by blah-feme.]

What do you want of me, siren?  Why do you turn me so, why do I stop and listen?  How am I to remain after your song?  What am I after you fall silent again?  Where will I have moved to?  The siting (and citing) of the voice in song with the feminine has a long and continuous history, and it marks a certain texture of the Western episteme, a certain materiality that is formidable.  To turn to that voice is not to be hailed in the Althusserian moment of becoming-again, but to wonder.  It is to raise a question, to pose the nature of agency, of self, of the ground of the resources of subjectivity as we think it has arrived to us.

If there is one thing that makes thinking about voices, especially the voice in song, infuriatingly complex, it is its parallax function:  the singing voice shortcircuits the mythological composure of he-who-speaks and invokes the troublesome knave-who-feigns.  This Narrenschiff, this ship of singing jesters, has long since set its course for the heart of Arcadia, and threatens to bring the most impudent thuggery to its heart.  Sing and you shall lose who you are and, what is worse, listen to that song and you are forever lost.   Proust was one who saw this with extraordinary clarity, in this much-quoted passage from The Fugitive:

My mind ...was entirely occupied with following the successive phrases of O sole mio, singing them to myself with the singer, anticipating each surge of melody, soaring aloft with it, sinking down with it once more... Each note that the singer's voice uttered with a force and ostentation that were almost muscular stabbed me to the heart ... This I remained motionless, my will dissolved.

This sirencic trope of song as seduction is very old and always remarkable for its fidelity to the structure of the parallax: 

song is a kind of turning, a 'hard' material that stages a kind of emptied-out interpellation; the 'subject' of ideology turns here not as in that moment of self-recognition, but as an animal froths at the mouth at the ringing of the bell.  And the feminine stands as the creature that enacts this infantilisation.

This observation represents, nonetheless, a kind of dead-end (this is the deadlock of the Lacanian feminine as always already locked out, always a figure of the outside, and yet internal, sympomatic, disturbing).  It rests on the Lacanian fantasy of feminine sexuality as mysterious and voice-in-song is attached to it as a shorthand of its marginalisation.

To try to break out of this gridlock, I suggest, we must return to the voice-in-song as a kind of 'staging'.  This is where my critique of Dolar is sited: that, in his magisterial book, he tiptoes around voices' materiality, their susceptibility to reworking, their texture, their materiality. Without some sense of voices' specificity, without some notion of their particularity, we are always in danger of falling back into hat ol narative, that old and heavy trauma of the castrating mother that steals our voice.

I have tried elsewhere to look at voices as having a certain specific materiality, but, I confess, to always havin failed in a very particular kind of way.  Here is something I said several years ago about a certain kind of voice in Kraftwerk:

The voice used as the exciter signal for the vocoder resides clearly in the throat, but, unlike the hegemonic male rock voice, it does not resonate in the chest and is almost pitchless, emphasizing its ‘breathy’ tone.  This emphasis on breath, on sibilants and fricatives, the 'hard' 'electronic' quality of the track’s soundscape, the over-recorded quality of the voice, sustains an emphasis on the ‘overtones’ of the voice and the non-verbal glitches and wheezes.  It is almost as if the voice were produced by drawing the breath in across the larynx rather than expelling it, suggesting a pathological voice.  The ‘surface noise’ on the voice works like a kind of grit in the voice that obliterates any possibility of an (Oedipal) identification with the voice of the father, but creates, in this uncanny monstrous hybrid of the organic and the electronic, the possibility of a new kind of identification, the kind of ‘coupling’ identified by Deleuze and Guattari in their devastating critique of Freudian psychoanalysis, Anti Oedipus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  This coupling is an expression of what might be termed the ‘stickiness’ of this voice, its alluring materiality (and mediality).

All the technics of this analysis, all he technological observation and the musicological composure of the passage cannot hide a fundamental trauma at the heart of it all - that, in the end, the analysis fails to make a case for itself because it cannot trace the trajectory from material specifics to this other mode of analysis.  In short, if fails because voice's materiality, especially that capricious materiality of voice-in-song, will not submit to second nature.  This is not to hold voice in the place of a kind of universal balm, or a romantic place of higher knowledge, but to recognise something specific about the way in which voice has been marked out as marginal: this is a work of ideology.

The critical analysis of voice, therefore, must stage the inhospitability of the symbolic order for voice, dramatise it in such a way as to bring the parallax into view, and hold it there: what a critical turn in the analysis of voice would do, it seems to me, is encounter voices' materiality as a question, as an indictment, a reproach.