On Answering Machines and the A/Object Voice

Music: Peter Murphy: Holy Smoke Thursday’s seminar was strange: defamiliarized by two weeks, the seminar felt like “getting to know you” again. We will repeat this in almost two weeks. Slowly, we’re becoming estranged.

The conference still lingers in my thoughts, and perhaps that is what feels so distant about coming home. NCA is traumatic (apparently at times “repulsive,” according to some first timers), but somehow over the course of a year that initial shock gets repressed. I’m thinking that I am going to start reading about group psychology again, but that’s getting ahead of myself. On Thursday, we’re still stuck in the self-Ich.

Anyhow, I tried out an idea I’ve been working and thinking about since last year that reading Ronell helped to jump-start, and thought I’d share it in this forum as well. I begin by yoking dissimilar things to underscore their structural similarity in the popular imaginary (a kind of mental wallpaper that we are socialized into as members of a screened community); in particular, I begin by tying together dissimilar manifestations of speech as an object in the popular imaginary.

Speech is an object that haunts. Voice is something that lurks. At least until we erase it.

Many days ago one of my dearest friends discovered a series of unpleasant messages on her office answering machine. Apparently while we were at the National Communication Convention in Chicago last week, sometime between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, an anonymous man phoned in to scream, “FUCK YOU JANE DOE, FUCK YOU.” Talking with her on the phone, she revealed that although, intellectually, she knew she should save these messages, it simply felt better to erase them. Acts of repetition, doing unto others, mimetic response.

Erasure is both an responsible and irresponsible act; it is one way to contend with the Other. The decision rule for this is obvious in the everyday, less so in reflection on the everyday (and a platitude is also excusable every now and again; we don’t have to be brilliant all the time, now do we? [or, isn’t that part of the problem at home?] ).

So why do we erase the threatening voice? As Steven Conner shows us, anonymous, disembodied voices need us to fashion them plausible bodies, fleshy origins in which to seat them. Us humans cannot stand to have bodiless voices: as we do with radio announcers and those cinematic voices off the screen, we imaginatively fashion bodies for wandering speech. If speech wanders, it is still a floating head, never absent a face.

Here’s the trouble: the bodies we fashion come from a preexisting cultural repertoire. As Aristotle might say, “you fill in the blank.” I mean that as a command and an explanation since I recognize, at some level, public nomenclature entails the consequence of recognition. For the innocent bystander, though, this will suffice: the trouble with snarling prank callers is that the bodies we imagine for them are monstrous. Or put alternately, given this contextual background, one can begin to understand how a prank answering machine message, a snarling male voice on tape, inhabits a cultural body: the caller’s body is very real and very material although the flesh and blood apparatus that produced it is not necessarily its author.

But these assignments--imagining bodies for the disembodied--are experienced as interior events, even though the assignment is largely determined by the exterior--the wallpaper of experience. There are countless stories of similar vocal violence on the answering machine, but these are relegated to the privacy of one’s bedroom. The bedroom is the locality of both pillow talk and the answering machine (at least it was in my family), but is also the place where most people die. Only in our contemporary imaginary has the bedroom been so exclusively coded as an erotic zone (at least for the generation of MTV, where the show The Real World charts the colonization of the bedroom in multiple senses, but none so curious as the bedroom’s blob-like colonization of the pool hall, dance-floor, and taxi cab). When I was a kid, before the bedroom became the locality of the primal scene, hidden pornography, and cheap vodka carefully replaced with water, the bedroom was the locus of the home state-of-emergency. Therein rested the answering machine (which I was forbidden to touch), and a telephone by the bedside. The answering machine was there to record the voice for later, private scrutiny. The telephone was there for a more curious reason. It was not there for conversation, but rather, the declaration of death at 2:00 a.m.

My point here about the disembodied speech of the bedroom is that the privatization of the disembodied voice holds a privileged status for us in everyday life. Even listening to the voice of the threatening other in the public space of the office is experienced, in some way, as a private event. The telephone and the answering machine harbor the disembodied voice, but the “live” feeling of the former is also felt with the latter. The disembodiedness of it is the rub.

All that rambling above is just that, rambling about a point I don’t know how to make, exactly, without inviting the publicity of something quite intimate (rambling to speak to three audiences at once, even, trying to keep them from becoming promiscuous): To what extent are we, as subjects, answering machines for the Other? Or perhaps, to what extent are we, as subjects, answering machines for the object of voice, the movement of speech. Further, when we snarl, who is snarling? When we cry, who is crying? Certainly there is a sense of ownership for snarling and crying. But what of the wail or glossolalia: who speaks grief? who bleats joy? Who makes the unmistakable call as a cry?

Well, this is all very pretentious I know. “Oh, what is the sound of one hand clapping?” But I also am thinking here with a pretentious metaphor to get at, roundabout (I’m fond of YES), the very real problem of responsibility. The facile and misguided--if not caricatured--way to understand performativity, for example, is to see overdetermined behavior as a “devil made me do it.” But I want to think about metaphors for self with an built in ambivalence with an ethical demand: that I am often moved or influenced by forces beyond my conscious awareness is all the more reason for my responsibility to the Other. This is Derridian territory, I realize; more about that one day soon.

But from my ignorance: everyone knows that we are not trained to listen very well. From our youth we are taught, instead, to make the call: “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret?” Of course, Judy Blume’s blessing is apt here, for as the academic cliché goes, there are no answers to these kinds of questions, only different ways to ask them.

Let me move, then, to Regan’s Answering Machine, if I can constellate a series of doubles. There is Ronald Reagan, the movie (his presidency but a series of quotations from bad B-movies), and there is Regan MacNeil, the troubled and possessed little girl in Friedkin and Blatty’s filmic masterpiece, The Exorcist. If you think the names are merely coincidental, they are, but this is irrelevant to the form of the double--Reagan the President is but a copy of the Hollywood film; the FUCK YOU and it’s many iterations on multiple machines and voicemail boxes across the nation; the Doppleganger, as is assumed of twins, is a seemingly passive copy, a mimetic device, an answering machine or dictaphone that reproduces what it is told even if we’re not the one’s telling it to reproduce. Consider the body of the female Regan, besieged by the African DUNG GOD Pazuzu, in the first dialogic scene between Father Karras and the possessed girl. In this scene (“Holy Water”), the priest dialogues with the demon in accord with The Roman Ritual, which requires that the exorcist thoroughly examine the presumed possessed to make sure he or she is truly possessed by something supernatural and not simply mentally ill. During this conversation he records, on a reel-to-reel tape machine, the conversation. During the end of the dialogue, the priest throws “holy water” on the possessed girl and she writhes and screams strange and unrecognizable speech. What is curious about the scene is the priest’s not-so-secret use of a recording device, which is actually Regan’s double. The homology here is between Regan, as an answering machine for Pazuzu, and the tape recorder, as a hearing device for father Karras. What this scene demonstrates very quickly is a critique of LIVENESS: everything is, as it were, memorex.

Even if everything is always already mediated, always already a recording, however, there is something about the human voice that goes beyond the human voice, something that escapes the illusion of presence or “liveness” that is threatening. This something more, which Lacan would say gives the voice object the status of objet a, is most discernible in moments of trauma or the uncanny. It is certainly there with the obscene message; but it is also there when language means nothing, when we reduce utterance to its phonetic excess: babble, speaking in tongues, the cooing or screaming of a newborn child. Utterance as such communicates. Speech as such causes a response. And our tendency to assign it a body, to place it as a voice, is unavoidable.

Not so incidentally, the first telephone recording device was invented by the Dane Valdemar Poulsen in the late 19th century (he patented it in 1898). Called the Telegraphone, this device was used to record telephone conversations for later scrutiny. The trajectory of later innovations for recording devices, we should underscore, was funded by a desire to study the voice. This is a very different history than that of the Compact Disk--which is traced back to Edison and the reproduction of music on Wax Cylinders. As Jacques-Alain Miller has suggested, music works to make that something more of the human voice less threatening, more comfortable. The telegraphone and its cousin, the answering machine, exists to preserve voice be it threatening or comforting: recorded voices are much more ambivalent.

The Exorcist is a film about the voice object, the voice as something that exceeds what it says. As a film, it is overwhelmingly chatty, full of dialogue that is not typical of Friedkin, who was known for his action films. While the special effects have held up well, Linda Blair looks like a pasty raisin, and the aesthetic of the demonic appears quite dated. The staying power of the film can be traced to Mercedes McCambridge, the raspy, damaged voice of Pazuzu. McCambridge, an actress who died last March at the age of 85, was most known for playing the voice of the demon in The Exorcist, which she described the most difficult acting job she ever had. She won an Oscar for her role in All the Kings Men--which brings her closer to home, you see--but, again, her voice was so unpleasant in The Exorcist that she was never able to upstage it. Her voice, perhaps more than others, reminds us of what Kristeva has termed the abject. This would explain her typecasting and the strange alignment of her voice with her appearance in real life. Consider this rather unflattering paragraph from her obituary in The Daily Telegraph:

Mercedes McCambridge's harsh, rasping voice and severe looks somewhat restricted her repertoire, and she specialized in character roles ranging from neurotic harridans and butch lesbians to homicidal maniacs.” Let us not forget a Dung God.

So I am suggesting that there is something more in McCambridge’s voice than her voice, something that eludes language, something that escapes the symbolic, which troubles us.

Insofar as it is our tendency to find in meaningless speech a voice, an agency, the climatic scene in The Exorcist makes much more sense. In search of this agency, Karras takes his recording of the incomprehensible moans, screams, and snarls of the demon to an audio expert. Once the expert identifies the screams of the demon as “backward English,” the audience is primed to the priest’s conviction that this is a supernatural event. The priest discovers that there are multiple voices responding to his queries in backwards speech (they say, among other nasty things, that Merrin--the elder priest--is coming to exorcize them). This scene is the turning point of the film, in one moment connecting the object of voice, technology, and the supernatural in ways that many media scholars have already brought to our attention. Significantly, we should note that the only time father Karras is startled in the film is here; while he is rewinding and playing and rewinding the tape of the demons, a phone rings and he is, for the first time, visibly unnerved. When confronted with The Demon spewing green vomit he doesn’t flinch, but here, in the presence of McCambridge’s looped and altered voices, he is caught off-guard, frightened, by the call of the Other, reminded as he is of his vow to complete and utter hospitality as a man of the cloth. In a sense, The Exorcist teaches us the ethics of “hospitality.”

In any event, these two scenes mark an extremely important moment in horror cinema, for they deploy a fantasy of the abject voice that helps to cover-over and frame an encounter with the object voice. That is to say, the fantasy of the abject voice--as demonic, as monstrous, as threatening and horrible, even divine and burning-bushy--keeps us from thinking about this something more in voice at the very same time as that something more creates enjoyment.

I’m thinking now of the many ways in which this abject voice has been replicated: in the year following The Exorcist, the “moaner” or “super-tongue” would issue threats to the sorority sisters in Black Christmas. When John Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra caught wind of the backward voice, he would feature it prominently in his 1975 masterpiece, Face the Music (if you check out the album online, click on track one for the strangeness). Indeed, the fear of backwards messages, rooted as it is in the uncanny something more in human speech, would fuel a rumor panic over suicidal prompts in heavy metal albums well into the 80s: white teenage kids, under the influence of marijuana and other mind-altering substances, would become answering machines, slitting their wrists because Judas Priest told them to in backwards speech. Indeed, so compelling is the idea that speech must have a voice or agency that a form of psychotherapy was developed called Reverse Speech Therapy. According to Australian therapist David John Oates, one can get access to the subject of the unconscious by playing recorded therapy sessions backwards.

So, The Exorcist registers the fear of the subject as an answering machine, the uncanny way in which a recorded voice can startle and trouble just as much as an obscene phone call; it registers ways in which we fear being the mere conduits of larger, oppressive ideologies too. But it also registers the fear of responsibility: in answering the call of the Other, we are forced to make a choice, a judgment. So, to bring this back home (since we are speaking of the uncanny), the subject-as-answering machine underscores the ethical act as the only answer. Hospitality is a beholdenness to the Other, an open posture and positioning that is not determined by a selfsame or selfish centering. The obscene answering machine message, like The Exorcist, reminds me that I must make a judgment in a morass of uncertainty. There’s something in that “something more” in voice that voice that forces me to recognize, even if I cannot name it. Perhaps I’m just talking “pot philosophy,” or perhaps I simply cannot find the language for this, but there’s something in the experience of human voice that I can ground an ethical orientation in. I realize Derrida has spent a career arguing against this assumption. The problem is that I agree with him too, but that, in daily life, I respond most ethically to human speech, live, recorded, or simply imagined.