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

The following is a guest post by blahfeme, author of the weblog, blah-feme.

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

[Amie]

My voice is above all what projects me into the world. If you will take these words with a certain levity, I would say that there is something in the voice that is irrevocably ecstatic.
- Are you thinking of song?
- How could I not think of it? But I'm not talking about lyric swooning. The one who sings - and the one who listens to singing - are the most surely, the most simply, but also the most vertiginously, outside of themselves. Listen.
(He starts up a tape recorder. We hear the colaratura from the 'Queen of the Night,' then the scene from Verdi's 'Nabucco' in which the King goes mad.)
- Someone singing, during the song, is not a subject.
(Vox Clamans in Deserto, Jean-Luc Nancy)

[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?

And, to add a bit more: I guess what I;m accusing Dolar of here is a kind of faux materialism, a playing as if without really dealing with the complexities of staging his encounter with vocal stuff in this book.

[Sinthome]

I'm a little more clear on what you're getting at now. What I find myself wondering is how we can get at this materiality at all or how we can even speak of it. It always seems to escape. I believe I referenced Hegel's account of sense-certainty over at your blog. As I'm sure you're aware-- and please forgive my obsessive spelling out of details or "tutorial style", I have a tendency to go into too much detail in responding to anything, as my blog amply demonstrates, not out of any attribution of ignorance --the opening of the Phenomenology begins with sense-certainty or the sensuous-immediacy of the things itself as the ground of knowledge (and clearly you're not talking of knowledge but the thing itself). However, the moment I attempt to *say* this sensuous-immediacy, I find it slips away in the universals of language. I say "this" thing here, but "this" can just as easily be used for something else. I try to fix it with "now", "here", "I", etc., but I find myself in the same dilemma each time. I am thus unable to say sensuous immediacy but always feel to the formal and universal. The materiality thus seems to perpetually elude our attempt to indicate it, always slipping elsewhere. Doesn't precisely the same thing happen in the case of voice? I agree that all of the features you describe (in this and your more recent post) are central to the uncanny phenomenon of voice, yet they slip away in one and the same moment I try to articulate them.

Returning to my pet example of the trauma of the paternal voice that shatters the calm and pleasant world of the young child, this same child, when an analysand years later, tries to articulate the materiality, the trauma, the uncanniness, of those ringing knocks at his bedroom door, or the muffled, stern voice behind the wood, yet encounters himself as frustrated and defeated, unable to quite explain it or convey it. The materiality perpetually eludes him yet it is also perpetually there. How do we escape this Hegelian deadlock?

Very interesting stuff and beautiful writing.

[Lars]

How, as Sinthome puts it, to write about the singular, or (from the perspective of 'Sense Certainity' for Hegel) the immediate without losing the materiality of the voice? By allowing that materiality to carry through into writing - to emphasise, in language, its musical aspects - sonority, rhythm - as it repeats (in Kierkegaard's sense) the thickness of the voice. Without this repetition, there is always the risk of an arid formalism, an endemic problem to philosophy and to philosophical discussions of the voice, of art etc.

I think Blah-Feme is right to suggest that engagement with specific voices is necessary. And I think Blah-Feme is also right to invoke the materiality of the voice in a language that thickens itself.

[Sinthome]

Lars, You take the discussion in an unexpected direction with your call to emphasize the musical aspects of writing, which evokes for me "finding voice" in writing. Playing devil's advocate, I wonder why you see "arid formalism" as distinct from materiality. Taking mathematics as the paradigm of formalism, 1) why isn't thinking according to the letter or matheme the most material way of relating to language insofar as the letter is the most material dimension of language (subracting, as it does, all pretentions of meaning and the play of the signifier)? 2) Since Galileo materiality has been thought in terms of what can be mathematized... Can a musical or lyrical form of language capture this materiality (of course, here it would be relevant to discuss the strong relation between music and mathematics).

[garmin portable friction mount]

What I find myself wondering is how we can get at this materiality at all or how we can even speak of it. I think Blah-Feme is right to suggest that engagement with specific voices is necessary.