the voice object

Music: Michael Brook: Albino Aligator (1997)

I'm still reading and writing, and can sort of see the end of the present review essay project. Alas, I still have one more book to read before I can finish, but I do think this project has helped me to think about my own book writing and how I might organize the opening chapters.

It's time to walk Jesús, get some exercize myself, bathe, and head to the chiropractor. Speaking of spines: I rarely have any time to read when I go to the chiropractor's office; I swear this is the most timely doctor I've ever had. And speaking of doctors, I'm not sure what to make of the chiropractor. I've been tight and sore from the workouts, and I'm sure the "adjustments" are doing something, I’m just not sure what. Like the lot of you who are suspicious of psychoanalysis, I'm still suspicious of these adjustments (and, yes, my shrink too). Is chiropractics just quackery? I dunno what I think about it yet. I started going as a sort of experiment, and it's cheap with my insurance, I just dunno what I think about his claims to be "resetting" my nervous systems and so forth.

Hell, lets face it: I just want massages.

Well, anyway, here's more of the review essay:

From Word to Voice: Speech as the Voice Object

Although he never mentions Ong's work directly, Dolar begins A Voice of Nothing More by banishing Ong's God. The book opens with reference to Walter Benjamin's famous parable of the automaton and the dwarf in "On the Concept of History" in order to underscore the "implicit teleology" of the voice explicit in Ong's work: the religious ambassador is really only the vocal vehicle of God's Word (logos).[1] Dolar then cites a passage from St. Augustine in which "the voice gradually loses its function as the soul progresses to Christ" in order to suggest that "there is only a small step from linguistics to theology."[2] Dolar argues that we must break with the implicit "theology of the voice as the condition of revelation" in the opposite direction, from

the height of meaning back to what appeared to be mere means; to catch the voice as a blind spot of making sense, or as a cast-off of sense. We have to establish another framework than that which spontaneously imposes itself with the link between a certain understanding of linguistics, teleology, and theology.[3]

Dolar then moves on to argue that what Ong specified as the uncanny presence of the word is really the voice, or rather, something more in voice than voice, the "voice object." Dolar compares both the word and the Word alike to the attempt of linguistics to repress the voice object in semiology and phonology. Because the voice harbors a mysterious and elusive quality, "the voice is the impeding element that [linguists] have to be rid of in order to initiate a new science of language."[4] Just as Augustine urged the eclipse of the voice of John the Baptist by God's Word, so did Saussure and Jacobson jettison the voice with the signifier and phoneme respectively. After this interesting set-up in chapter one ("The Linguistic Voice"), A Voice and Nothing More emerges as an attempt to recover the un-recoverable, something that human speech evokes yet which is beyond our ability to represent it, something that is conveyed by voice yet which is beyond meaning: the voice object.

So what is the voice object? Dolar's answer to this question is almost two-hundred pages in length and assumes a modest background in psychoanalytic theory. Although space limits any thorough discussion, to understand Dolar's argument about the "voice object" it is important to mention that in psychoanalysis an "object" usually refers to a person, either directly or indirectly, and more specifically, to an outside other that makes it possible for a subject to become self-conscious as a subject. For example, the first "object" for an infant is a parent, often the mother, and the infant only becomes conscious of itself as a discrete being when it realizes that "I am not my mommy." When the infant realizes there is more than one parent (the end of so-called primary identification), her object domain begins to expand concurrently with her sense of self. Eventually things can represent objects or others for the infant, becoming "part-objects." A classic example of a part-object is the breast, of course, which re-presents "mommy" in the form of a part of her. In this respect the voice object is a kind of part-object, a thing that represents another person in the abstract, or the Other.[5]

The voice object is experienced in one's own voice as well as that of another, but it is not a substitute. Rather, for Dolar there are substitutes for the voice object, or things that repress this disturbing and elusive element of voice. These consist of anything that disciplines voice in respect to meaning. In the history of Western music-making, for example, Dolar argues that "music, and in particular the voice, should not stray from words which endow it with sense; as soon as it departs from its textual anchorage, the voice becomes senseless and threatening-all the more so because of its seductive and intoxicating powers."[6] Musical instruments, something like a flute, for example, represent a literal, material substitution for the voice in a manner that buries the ambivalence of the voice object.

Dolar's description of the voice object as both a seductive and threatening object is an indirect intervention in a psychoanalytic debate between those who advocate "the drive model" and those who advocate the "relational model" of human motivation. Dolar sides with the (presumably) more "radical" theories of Jacques Lacan, who advocated a revised version of Freud's theory of the drives.7 This debate concerns the function of objects and part-objects in respect to what energizes people to work, reproduce, live, and destroy. So-called object-relations theorists like W.R.D. Fairbairn argue that human motivation is hard-wired toward specific objects, and is, thus, not sexual in character.[8] In the school of thought that maintains a link to Freud ("classical psychoanalysis"), including Lacanians, part-objects are at the center of pleasure-seeking drives; they are things that energy pulsates around which set the psychical apparatus into motion (e.g., they are what make us "go," or as Mick Jaggar might put it, things that start us up so that we never stop). So, for example, the "oral drive" pulsates around the breast, the anal drive the feces, the invocatory drive the voice, and so on. Lacan later revised the theoretical function of the part-object in Freud's model with what he calls the objet petit a or simply the objet a, which is a formal term that refers to any object that causes desire or starts-up and maintains a drive. For Dolar, the voice object is, first and foremost, the most important objet a, something that both stimulates desire and sets drive into motion. Unlike the part-objects that can represent another as an inanimate object, sometimes even becoming fetishized (e.g., a woman's high-heel shoe: "Shoes. Oh My God!"), the voice object is neither seen nor heard. We can only know of its effects.

Dolar clarifies his understanding of the voice object as an attempt to advance a vocabulary for voice in a way that does not reduce it to "the vehicle of meaning" or "the source of aesthetic admiration":

[T]here is a third level [to voice]: an object voice which does not go up in smoke at the conveyance of meaning and does not solidify in an object of fetish reverence, but an object which functions as a blind spot in the call and as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation. One shows fidelity to the first by running to attack [when called to war]; one shows fidelity to the second by running to the opera. As for fidelity to the third, one has to turn to psychoanalysis. [9]

As with Ong's focus on the sensorium, Dolar's psychoanalytic approach to this third element is phenomenological and additive, so the way in which the voice object is described shifts from on perspective to another chapter by chapter. After Dolar demonstrates that the voice object is not reducible to the signifier with various examples (hiccups, infantile babble, screams, and laughter), he then locates its function in philosophy and musicology in chapter two ("The Metaphysics of Voice"); its relation to the body and the materiality of sound in chapter three ("The 'Physics' of Voice"); its guise as the "voice of reason" and the "voice of conscience" in chapter four ("The Ethics of Voice"); its role vis-à-vis the law and governmentality in chapter five ("The Politics of Voice"); its centrality to psychoanalytic practice in chapter six ("Freud's Voices"); and finally, as the skeleton key to Kafka's bizarre stories in chapter seven ("Kafka's Voices").

In every chapter the voice object is discerned as a paradoxical inbetweenness that upends common assumptions and facile binaries. For example, while Dolar admits that "there is no voice without a body," disembodied voices are nevertheless ever-present, especially in the wake of various technologies of speech telepresence like the cell phone. In cinema voices often seem to come from nowhere, or don't quite match up with the bodies they are associated with, like the mother's voice in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, the wizard's voice in The Wizard of Oz, or the English overdubs in some martial arts films (the "acousmatic voice" of Michel Chion).[10] In fact, Dolar even goes so far as to suggest a "basic quality of the voice" is that "it always displays something of an effect emancipated from its cause."[11] Although there is a material basis for the voice, the voice object is not reducible to the body because we cannot see the origin of any given voice,

it [the voice] stems from an undisclosed and structurally concealed interior, it cannot possibly match what we see. This conclusion may seem extraordinary, but it can be related to banal everyday experience: there is always something totally incongruous in the relation between the appearance, the aspect, of a person and his or her voice before we adapt to it. It is absurd, this voice cannot possibly stem from this body, it doesn't sound like this person at all, or this person doesn't look at all like his or her voice. Every emission of the voice is by its very essence ventriloquism.[12]

The voice consequently is both inside and outside, something that fires "like a bodily missile which separates itself from the body" at the very same time as it indexes an interiority, that "hidden bodily treasure beyond the visible envelope."[13]

The ambivalence of the voice object helps Dolar to confront directly the now widely assumed critique of the dreaded "metaphysics of presence" by Jacques Derrida.[14] Originally published as a chapter in one of the SIC collections helmed by Slavoj Zizek,15 Dolar's compelling critique of Derrida amounts to the late deconstructionist's lack of Lacanian know-how (so to speak). According to Derrida, the Western thought can be characterized as metaphysics of presence based on the Platonic assumption that speech presences the thought of the speaker. "The voice is heard (understood)-that undoubtedly is what is called conscience-closest to the Self as the absolute effacement of the signifier," argues Derrida, as a "pure auto-affection that . . . does not borrow from the outside of itself."[16] This "logocentric" conceit "offered the illusion that one could get immediate access to an unalloyed presence . . . a firm rock against the elusive interplay of signs which are anyway surrogates by their very nature, and always point to an absence."17 Dolar argues, however, that Derrida overlooks the bad and threatening voice in Western thought, the voice that upsets and troubles, from the terrible voice of God to the sexual frenzy threatened by music. "[T]he history of 'logocentrism' does not quite go hand in hand with 'phonocentrism,'" argues Dolar, for "there is a dimension of the voice which runs counter to self-transparency, sense, and presence: the voice against logos, its radical alterity." Contra Ong, Dolar agrees with Derrida that the presence of speech is an illusion, yet he refuses to equivocate the voice with logos.

An Ontology of Voice

For Dolar the voice is ultimately "an opening to radical alterity" that Heidegger suggested issues "a call eluding self-appropriation and self-reflection."[18] In a qualified sense, Dolar advances an understanding of the human voice that provides an ontological basis for ethical being toward others:

The voice is the element which ties the subject and the Other together, without belonging to either, just as it formed the tie between body and language without being part of them. We can say that the subject and the Other coincide in their common lack embodied by the voice, and that "pure enunciation" can be taken as the red thread which connects the linguistic and ethical aspects of the voice.[19]

Locating a non-appropriative relation to the Other in the "pure enunciation" of voice is Adriana Cavarero's project in For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression.

Notes

[1] See Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," translated by Harry Zohn. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, edited by Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 289.
[2] Dolar, A Voice, 16.
[3] Dolar, A Voice, 16.
[4] Dolar, A Voice, 17.
[5] This is a necessary oversimplification of the term. The Other is frequently capitalized to emphasize that it is not simply another person, but a special "not me" that is, for example, worthy of justice or hospitality (Derrida, Levinas), or the principle figure of the symbolic order (Lacan), and so on. [6] Dolar, A Voice, 43.
[7] See Dolar, A Voice, 71-74.
[8] See W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, 1976).
[9] Dolar, A Voice, 5.
[10] Dolar, A Voice, 60. Also see Chion, The Voice.
[11] Dolar, A Voice, 67.
[12] Dolar, A Voice, 70. In fact, Steven Conner would describe this uncanny awareness the product of "vocalic bodies," fantasy bodies that we mentally conjure for the voices we hear. See Connor, Dumbstruck. [13] Dolar, A Voice, 71.
[14] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
[15] Mladen Dolar, "The Object Voice." SIC 1: Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 7-31.
[16] Derrida, Of Grammatology, 20.
[17] Dolar, A Voice, 37.
[18] Dolar, A Voice, 102.
[19] Dolar, A Voice, 103.