the voice abject returns

Music: The Sisters of Mercy: Floodland (1987)

Yesterday New York City released even more Nine-eleven emergency phone calls. This third wave of releases (the last was on March 24) is in response to pressure from "families of the victims." The families believe, although it is often poorly articulated, that there is more "information" packed into the grain of the voice of the dying than investigators could possibly provide. This much is true. This information, this data, is not knowledge but the wonderful, horrible, irrepressible will to live. Without any maudlin intention (or desire), one is hard pressed not to call this love. The something-more-in-voice-than-voice quality of the voice of the dying person, this abjection, is a reckoning with the impossible, the constitutive limit of representation.

The New York Times has hand selected, edited, and produced a number of these audio clips, which you can hear on line. The most chilling of the tapes is from Melissa Doi, who died on the phone while talking to a dispatcher: "Can you stay on the line with me please. I feel like I'm dying." No matter what the newspaper does, there is no way to properly frame this call. Listening to the tape--which is almost unbearable at times--the only and overdetermined response is to cry (don't listen to it if you don't want to cry).

I'm very ambivalent about the release of these tapes and their presentation by the Times and other news organizations. On the one hand, they help to demonstrate--better than any symbolic resource at our disposal--what makes us human, why we are neither robots nor mere animals. On the other hand, it is on the basis of an illusory identification with such voices (here, identification with the dispatcher's voice is forced, though the horror is truly reckoning with our own deaths) that wars are supported and fascists come to power. This voice abject, this thing in voice more than voice, is what I'm writing the new book about (Haunting Voices: Speech and Transcendence in Postmodernity is the working title). When I listen to these tapes, I am convinced that what I'm writing about is important, and that when my eyes well up without a soundtrack or some Spielberg-produced pabulum, my emotional response can guide scholarship. That's one thing I have learned (among many) from my colleagues in performance studies: humane scholarship requires you to feel it. Another thing I have learned is that feeling too much--especially in autobiographical performance--can be abusive to your audience, sacrificing community for self.

Cognizant of my own distaste for the mediatized maudlin machines, I will have to think hard about how much of my feeling to put in this/my writing.