the ethics of projection

Music: Claire Voyant: [self-titled] (1995)

Last week was admittedly a rough week for reasons both public and private, and thankfully the chaos of school starting provided just enough joy to have me laughing inside at the things falling apart; there's always clown inside the visibly mournful (counterpoint to Jack Nicholson's Joker). And in the key of mourning, I've been laboring on this holiday of un-work in discovery mode as I tinker on an essay tentatively titled, "On the Uncanny Voice of Acoustic Projection."

To abide by the dictations of our new Overman---the publisher, who has come to replace the editor just like the producer has replaced the film director ---I've been asked to cut 3,000-4,000 words from the review essay on speech. The perfect candidate for cutting is my running example of EVP (ghost voices caught on tape); so I figured I would parlay that material into a new, full-blown essay that I intend to reprint as an article and, later, a book chapter. The new essay argues something like this: recording technologies have amplified fantasies of communicative transcendence by catalyzing the archival impulse. The amplification of these fantasies are discernable in what I will term "memorial listening," the practice of discerning good voices or bad voices in recorded speech. My two examples are, of course, EVP (good voices) and backwards masking (bad voices). I argue that this amplification is the effect of three elements: a hard-wired tendency to hear in binary; a cultural fantasy of the angelic and demonic voice [they are the same thing]; and a sort of death-drive that Derrida dubbed "archive fever."

Father Ong was arguing about the "new vocality" in the 1960s, which was a consequence of the increasing accessibility of magnetic tape. Implicit in this newer vocality is the well-known spirit/letter distinction (the letter is dead, whereas the spirit, that animates dead things) that Derrida is careful to critique, and what I would write vis-à-vis presence and so forth is fairly predictable. What's got me intrigued today is Archive Fever, a talk Derrida gave at a symposium on the Freud archive in London and then later turned into a book/record (archived). I'm still working through it, but, Derrida's use of the archive as a metaphor for control with the death drive as the motor is pretty damn interesting, and really yields some insights regarding EVP that go beyond the obvious, psychoanalytic riff on projective identification and so forth. The oscillation between the archive (trace) and the repertoire (doing the archive, taking the photograph, capturing the voice) bespeaks the ambivalence of projective assignment: angelic voice or demonic growl? Well, that does depend on which illusion you prefer. EVP enthusiasts are looking for angels; concerned evangelical parents are hearing Satan urging young people to get naked. Oral historians, perhaps aware at some level of the instability of projection, avoid it altogether via transcription. In the move from speech to text, the voice beyond speech is put away, safely, and re-presented by the dead letter.

This got me to thinking about a disagreement with E! I had last week on the politics of projection. At my invitation she visited my "Rhetoric and Religion" class along with some other colleagues. To demonstrate the power of projection and its centrality to religious discourse, on the first day of class I hold a séance. In dialogue with certain students, in a darkened, candle-lit auditorium I speak with the relatives and loved ones that have passed on to the other side (think about Crossing Over with John Edward; that's pretty much my model). A number of students always drop (we lost about ten students to the séance, but gained a few more after word got out). A number of students are anxious to talk to me after the séance about their experiences with ghosts and spirits. In the course, we do not return to discussing the séance for another six weeks; my goal is to get students thinking: was it real or a put-on? This ambivalent feeling of doubt and wonder, of cynicism and hope, is the same affective response we have to the uncanny voice: angel or demon? Presence or illusion? I want students to drawn on this uncertainty so that by the time we discuss faith we have a shared experience.

Anyway, E! was angered because, if I was not really talking to dead people, then I have opened the course with a deceit. I replied that even if I admitted I was deceiving my students, its possible that spirits were making me do the séance in the first place. Nevertheless, for her, if I knew I was deceiving my students, then I was breaking an implicit contract with my students because I presumably stand on the side of truth. My response was that I do not stand on the side of truth, I stand on the side of training or experience or whatever, and my job is to encourage critical thought. To me, the dynamic behind religious discourse is projection (and now, also something like "archive fever") and I want my students to think about how projection goes wrong in extremism.

What point am I coming to here? Well, my point is that I tend to believe we live a fantasmic life and this creates a kind of ethical quandary. If (social) life is a collection of fantasies, and these fantasies always involve projection, what are better and worse ways of projecting? What's the criteria of judgment for projections? Having read Wired for Speech and some of the work coming out of the MIT speech labs, I'm also inclined to believe that we cannot help ourselves: our brains must attribute, and it's hard to keep the processes away from binarism. When you add into this tendency our cultural fantasies of good and evil, or---noting Derrida's insistence that the archive is always about state power---friend and enemy, then the identitarian logic of the Same seems almost inevitable. So: what if psychics and mediums help others to grieve their loved ones? What if no physical or psychological harm results from dialoging with spirits? What if discerning my deceased wife's voice in the white noise of the television set is a comfort? Is there an ethical misstep here?

Obviously, these days (with apologies to Badiou) a retreat to truth is not an option. It would seem more ethical to adopt a posture of hospitality, as it were. So if we displace the possibility that good and bad voices are really centered as either, it would seem the responsible route is one of unsettled certitude. Whence, then, enjoyment? Judgement? The enjoyment of judgement? The Law?

Last week, the day before the séance, my therapist described me as a hopeless romantic. I recognize the Truth in that.