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Radio. John Mowitt
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I am not, of course, saying anything terribly fresh, so let me get to the point. What remained, as Don Ihde and others sensed, foreclosed in the critique of phonocentrism was precisely the matter of sound. For it is one thing to show how hearing and understanding collude or collide but quite another to say that the voice is nothing but the sounds heard in the event of understanding. Saussure himself struggled with the matter when, in the chapter on “linguistic value” of the Course in General Linguistics, he pondered over how the sound units of the phoneme, that is, the acoustic molecules of the signifier, were initially separated from the chaotic flux of sound without, at any point, presupposing the arbitrary conventions made possible through this very separation. Even if we grant him the principled disciplinary procedure of simply setting certain things outside the purview of linguistics, one cannot fail to recognize the sonic dross left in the wake of this procedure and his lack of theoretical interest in it. What is the relation between this remainder and phonocentrism? Can sound gain access to meaning only through the mediation of the voice, not primarily as the faculty of human speech, but as the philosopheme of the understanding that is at bottom a hearing? Is a meaningless listening possible?
These questions are but samples. One could certainly proliferate others (indeed, the whole notion of “secondary orality” might immediately come to mind). However, if such questions herald what I have called a resurgence of interest in the voice, then what this clarifies is that this resurgence takes place, not just anywhere, but specifically in the wake of the critique of phonocentrism. That is, instead of being an anxious denial of this critique, the resurgence is an immanent requestioning of the voice, by which I mean that it retrieves and reanimates questions that the critique of phonocentrism could not, on its own terms, answer. Obviously, one of those questions is the question of sound itself, precisely the sound escaping the call and response that Saussure located at the heart of the sign.
I turn now to the distinction between comeback and return teased out of Wilder and Brackett’s Sunset Blvd. My aim is to flesh out this distinction in two ways: first, I will deploy it as a rationale for pondering the implications of two figures in what I have called the resurgence of scholarly attention to the voice, Mladen Dolar and Giorgio Agamben; and second, I will import this distinction into the concept of resurgence in order to evaluate it both theoretically and politically. Is it, as I have suggested, an avatar of one residualism or another? And the residualism of what? The voice? The radio? Their theoretical superimposition?
Doubtless the most sustained recent reflection on the voice, in English, is to be found in Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (2006). This is a very rich, very compact book that seeks to change the way we think about everyone from Derrida and Lacan to Kafka—and change in a rather specific way. As Slavoj Žižek puts it in his introduction to the series in which the book appeared: “After reading a book in this series [“Short Circuits”], the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time” (viii). Because Žižek also blurbs Dolar’s book, insisting that, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, its author is “not an idiot,” one can safely assume that this book is one through which we will encounter something disturbing about ourselves that we knew all along. The obvious question is: What?
For my purposes the most immediately relevant aspect of the text is its discussion of Saussure, Derrida, and Lacan. Here Dolar seeks to tease out the radicality of the voice by clarifying its status as an object, invoking the series of objets a enumerated by Lacan in Seminar 11 from 1964: the gaze, the voice, the breast, and the turd. Structurally, these are all objects that tear a hole in our wholeness, meaning that they mark a limit of and in our identities. We cannot, as it were, leave home without them. Dolar’s discussion is as rich as it is intricate. Although it resists easy summary, this is how it concludes.
So, if for Derrida, the essence of the voice lies in its auto-affection and self-transparency, as opposed to the trace, the rest, the alterity, and so on, for Lacan this is where the problem starts. The deconstructive turn tends to deprive the voice of its ineradicable ambiguity by reducing it to the ground of (self-) presence, while the Lacanian account tries to disentangle from its core the object as an interior obstacle to (self-) presence. This object embodies the very impossibility of attaining auto-affection; it introduces a scission, a rupture in the middle of full presence, and refers it back to a void—but a void that is not simply a lack, and empty space; it is a void in which the voice comes to resonate. (Voice 42)
Stated semantically, the choice is clear: the voice as object or the voice as ground. If I may risk repeating Dolar’s own strategy of attributing to his interlocutor values the latter is known to have repudiated, less clear is the “real” difference between these voices. One senses the difficulty instantly when Dolar pulls his punch, saying, “The deconstructive turn tends to deprive the voice of its ineradicable ambiguity,” as if conceding in advance that the more blunt and theoretically decisive formulation, “The deconstructive turn deprives” (that is, as a matter of principle, that is, as a matter of credo) “the voice of its ineradicable ambiguity,” is both unfair and untrue. Despite my having raised the issue of the truth about deconstruction, the issue here is not quite as petty as all that. Instead, what calls for attention is not only that in Dolar’s hands the voice as object, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, is unambiguously set opposite the voice as ground, but also that its ineradicable ambiguity cannot easily be disambiguated from precisely what Derrida means by the trace. To say, as Dolar does, that the object is an “interior obstacle to (self-) presence” is not thereby repeating the structure of the trace, except for the careless invocation of an “interior” that neither he nor Derrida believes in. In effect, Dolar gives us a voice, even the voice, that is the trace, simply now rebaptized as “voice.” Armed with this voice, he then goes about separating himself from a position he is obliged to caricature, as if conceding that the whole exercise is, at bottom, a performative articulation of the structure of the objet a. In effect, the voice as ground tears a hole in the voice as object so that the latter can get on with the pressing business of demonstrating that the voice resonates in the void left by this tear.
One is reminded here of chapter 25 in Tristes Tropiques, “A Writing Lesson,” except that what is at stake here is not finally about the right word and how to spell it properly. The intellectual historical question of precedence is not without interest—who came up with the logic of post-dialectical difference, if it makes any sense to say this, “first”—but a responsible, that is, thorough, treatment of the prolonged confrontation between philosophy and psychoanalysis will take us out of signal range.
I will settle for a few observations. First, regardless of whether one agrees with Dolar’s reading of Derrida, what is beyond serious doubt is that the former’s approach to the voice, his reinvestment in it, is marked profoundly by the perceived impact of the critique of phonocentrism. In this sense my characterization of the resurgence of interest in the voice is at least partly justified—about which more in a moment. Second, and this is closer to the gist of the matter, Dolar’s discussion, while it certainly succeeds in disambiguating the voice and presence as the phenomenological condition of meaning, avoids wrestling with precisely the acoustic character of the void within which the voice as object is said to resonate. How are we to think the resonance of the void? Is it to be ceded to the concerns of psycho-acoustics? In short, sound again drops out. Perhaps the clearest symptom of this is in Dolar’s effortless gliding from voice to music, a gliding rendered in an arresting formulation late in the text: “What Freud and Kafka have in common … is their claim that they are both completely unmusical—which made them particularly susceptible to the dimension of the voice” (Voice 208). While on the face of it this would appear to oppose music to voice, my point is that Dolar appears here to assume that the relation between music and voice is so intimate as