Pavlov’s Podcast: The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s

dominic pet tman Pavlov’s Podcast: The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s Ears Wide Open If I had a talking picture of you, I would run it every time I felt blue. I would sit there in the gloom of my lonely little room And applaud each time you whispered, “I love you; love you.” —Sunnyside Up S ometimes it is not enough to have a photographic likeness of one’s beloved when obliged to be apart. The comfort of the voice is often somehow more reassuring than mere visual verisimilitude. Of course, as the popular song from the 1920s quoted above suggests, a coincidence of the two can throw the lover into ecstasies. This playful little ditty goes so far as to imply that the flesh-and-blood presence of the desired person is somewhat superfluous, provided one has access to the kinds of technologies of capture that emerged from adolescence into maturity in this selfsame decade.1 But what does it really mean to hear the other breathing, and not to share the same air? What changes between intimates when the exchange takes place in a “time-shifted” manner, rather than in the here and now? Volume 22, Numbers 2 and 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-1428870 © 2011 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies d i f f e r e n c e s For a certain influential school of thought, each time we hear that special someone’s voice—whether in real time on the phone or captured via voicemail or other recording devices—we subconsciously reenact the fort-da game of Freud’s infant. That is to say, we are swaddled in phantasmatic echoes, both traumatized and emboldened by the inexplicable comings and goings of the mother. Subjectivity, in this allegorical scene, is forged not only through the initial painful epiphany that one’s body and consciousness are separate from the mother (“The milk-giver is in the next room. And yet I am here!”) but also through the first tentative babblings of speech ( fort-da—“here-there”). Weaned from the soothing sounds from the mother’s mouth—the aural substitute for the umbilical cord—the infant begins to sever the connection, only to replace it with its own nerve fiber, tied to a spool of thread, in order to have some mimetic agency over the presence or absence of the (m)other. 2 In other words, the child decides to play at having control over the schedule for comfort, nourishment, and attention. At the same time, the child sublimates the trauma that necessarily stems from the realization that the individual, once separated, does not have such omnipotent power. Shrieking for attention is no doubt the most common demand that maternal presence materialize itself immediately, but such a strategy soon discovers the law of diminishing returns. So in this famous psychoanalytic scene, the young child is cradled by a thorny nest of desires, drives, fears, resentments, confusions, sublimations, identifications, alienations, and perhaps even exhilarating liberations—many of which are expressed or experienced between larynx and ear, across the cusp of language. No matter whether we actually played a game of fort-da with a spool of thread or were raised by a father (or even a wolf) rather than a mother, the geometry of the situation holds true. There is always a psychic realization of, and capitulation to, the reality of banal monadological existence. The self is not the other, at least not in the sense of regularly and reliably satisfying the pleasure principle. (This experience of being thwarted, however, is itself the libidinal motor for much of our repetitive, drive-driven behavior, at least according to Freud.) In any case, the voice of the other—the other whose attention we desire—remains a highly charged and intangible object, replete with feathers to tickle our fancy and barbs to painfully catch in our skin, highly charged depending on how it is deployed, solicited, experienced, or remembered. As time passes, the subject gathers quite a playlist of voices capable of triggering intense feelings—emotional, physical, even spiritual—but, unlike Freud, and indeed 141 142 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s unlike Friedrich Kittler (see Ernst), I shall not be content to trace the originary influence of the mother’s voice in terms of sonic forms. Rather, in the following pages I emphasize the affective architectonics of desire and longing in the absence of the physical or visual dimension, an inevitable absence foreshadowed from the crib and rehearsed many times during a singular lifetime in the typically urban “cribs” of adulthood. The “noises off” of early childhood are the aural streams in which our pliable sensoriums are nurtured, having been wrenched from the all-encompassing heartbeat that pulsed through our first nine months or so. They shepherd us from the prenatal to the parental. Just as the parent is biologically attuned to the baby’s cry, the infant is sensitive to those noises emitted from the parents. 3 Indeed, it is this privileged link between the unclosable ear and the human habitus that sets the “love tone” (to borrow a term from Jakob von Uexküll) for the child’s subsequent experiences (61). That is to say, the mother (or father) can be heard in several extralinguistic modes before we get to the induction into language. These are the cries of the mature human: cries of laughter, cries of sorrow, cries of pain, and cries of pleasure. Cognitive and social development depends on being able to distinguish these different types of cries, before the pragmatic matter of responding appropriately. And it is here we first encounter the “acousmatic voice”—the voice with no obvious or visible source—in perhaps its purest form, acting on the “acoustic nerves” of the child (see Tolstoy 94). The original understanding of the term acousmatic voice comes from the context of Pythagorean pedagogy, in which the master provided lessons to his students from behind draped material in order to not distract from the voice and to lend it a rather divine authority. Anticipating the conclusions of this essay, Pierre Schaeffer notes, “The tape recorder has the virtue of Pythagoras’ curtain: if it creates new phenomena to observe, it creates above all new conditions of observation” (81). Within the Freudian model, the Oedipal complex could be said to emerge from the dawning awareness that the mother’s cries of pleasure are inspired not by the child but by the father. Nothing could be more traumatic, therefore, than the sound of the jouissance of the mother. It creates a negative excitation, entangled within the rather agonistic ambivalences of attraction/repulsion of the primal scene. Likewise, the climactic groan of the father is heard through complicated filters: jealousy, envy, awe, and the shock of realizing that the logos that underpins patriarchal law can dissolve into a strange, pathetic glossolalia. 4 As John Lanchester writes, addressing his fellow male reader, “[T]he grunt (or cry, or moan, or roar, 143 d i f f e r e n c e s or mew) one utters at the moment of ejaculation exactly mimics, is an unheard rhyme of, the noise made by one’s father at the moment of one’s own conception” (94–95). The fact that the child in these scenarios is gendered as male is not the only limitation of its hermeneutic model, but it is perhaps the most glaring. 5 The question of gender is crucial if we are to follow the various trajectories linking the ear to the voice, especially as the latter informs and influences the libidinal economy of different iterations of subjectivity. 6 Nevertheless, the song that opened this discussion has been performed over the years by both men and women without needing to change any pronouns, as one often does in concession to heteronormative conventions. There is a certain structure at work when it comes to the sonic source of desire, as well as sonorous solutions to dealing with, or enduring, that very same desire. And it is this structure, as well as the gendered dynamics that both produce it and emerge from inside it, that will be addressed below. It is thus necessary to turn to a different kind of primal scene to account for that vexed vector between the (male) ear and (female) tongue. Mythological Voices The vocal trope through which women have been pigeonholed in mythology—in both the ancient sense and the modern mutation so well understood by Roland Barthes—is that of the Sirens. These traditional emblems of seduction, intent on leading vulnerable mortals astray, symbolize the destructive potential and capacity of the hindered gender. Mladen Dolar, in his remarkable book A Voice and Nothing More, describes the Sirens as “the depositories of the voice as authority” (198), equating such a state with a certain mercilessness. Furthermore, he notes that the Siren song emanates from a nonhuman place and executes an automated, indifferent program. Ulysses may have escaped, “but that can’t dismantle the mechanism” (173). Ulysses is thus one of those classical heroic figures who manages to escape the mortal symbolic economy. The price of the bliss of hearing the Siren song is death, and yet, unlike Icarus, he manages to avoid paying this price, thanks to what Franz Kafka calls his “stratagems.” The supreme aesthetic experience is revealed as a matter of cheating the system: a system based on, and laced with, gendered suppositions. In her book For More Than One Voice, Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero sees the Sirens differently, arguing that their complex 144 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s depiction in the Homeric source has since been simplified and neutralized in the interests of creating a female stereotype within a didactic moral universe. For in the original tale, “The monstrous singers do not simply emit from their mouths [stoma] a voice that, like that of the Muse, has a ‘sound of honey’ (which is identified with the very voice of Homer). They sing words, they vocalize stories, they narrate by singing. And they know what they are talking about. Their knowledge is, in fact, total: ‘we know all [idmen],’ they sing” (104–5). Moreover, the Sirens are rendered as frightening birdlike hybrids and not at all the languid beauties that currently circulate within the popular imagination. Within this domesticating metamorphosis, “[I]t is feminine song that is at stake” (105). Cavarero goes on to note that in the story’s iconography, “[M]ost Sirens sing, but they no longer narrate. Nor do they know all like their ancient mothers. They become sinuous, fishlike creatures—something that the Homeric monsters never were—who seduce men not only through their song, but also by their beauty. The charm of the voice, rendered even more disturbing by the absence of speech, still calls men to a pleasurable (and often explicitly erotic) death” (106). She continues: And yet the reception of the myth in the western tradition consigns this song to the depths. This change of abode is highly significant. The descent of the Sirens into the water, their metamorphosis into fishlike creatures, is in fact accompanied by their transformation into very beautiful women. This process corresponds, in a rather significant way, to one of the most stereotypical models of the female sex—namely, the stereotype according to which, in her erotic function as seductress, as an object of masculine desire, the woman appears first of all as a body and as an inarticulate voice. She must be beautiful, but she must not speak. What she can do, however, is emit pleasing sounds, asemantic vocalizations, moans of pleasure. Given that the voice comes from the internal body and comes out of the mouth to penetrate the ear of the listener, this figuration obviously works because the voice and body reinforce one another. [. . .] The division of logos into a purely feminine phone and a purely masculine semantikon, finally, accomplishes and confirms the system. (107) In short, the Sirens have become “limited to raising their melodious voices in a nonsemantic seduction” (116). They function today, therefore, 145 d i f f e r e n c e s as anachronistic witnesses to the subliminal laws of gendered voices: laws that result in complex but regulated sociopolitical taxonomies. Keen to add his own voice to the mix, Kittler, along with a team of associates from Humboldt University Berlin assisted by members of the Center for Media Arts and Technology Karlsruhe, recently embarked on a research expedition at the Galli Islands, off the Amalfi coast in central Italy, “the supposedly original historical scene [of Ulysses and the Sirens]” (Ernst 2). The guiding question of the experiment: “Can the acoustic phenomenon of the Siren songs be located media-archaeologically, traced by measurements (analytic rather than performative) and thus verified?” (1). According to the only report on this fascinating folly that I have managed to find translated into English, one participant notes: We emitted both synthetic signals (sine tones, white noise) and natural voices (vocalizations of Monk seals, voices of two female singers) via loudspeaker. The signals were then recorded along a thought line along which Odysseus could approach the Siren Island. [. . .] So the acoustic analysis of the recordings revealed strong evidence for an acoustic effect which could explain the nature of the Siren song. The specific position of the three islands yielded in a deformation of the acoustic signal in form of amplification and changes in the timbre. We can be sure that there is a trace of the real in the myth of the song of the Sirens, maybe based on natural voices transformed by specific acoustic conditions of the landscape. However it remains still under question who was the emitter of the song. (3) The findings are thus as charming and misguided as the entire enterprise, stating in the same sentence that “we can be sure” that “maybe” the myth is based on “a trace of the real.” However, the desire to verify scientifically the acoustic conditions of Homer’s story tells us nothing about historical possibilities and everything about the enduring metaseduction of the Siren song itself, not to mention the power of publicity stunts, even from within the academy. In marked contrast to the Sirens, the swan is traditionally considered good luck for sailors. Interestingly, the English word swan (or German Schwan and Dutch zwaan) is derived from the Indo-European root swen (to sound, to sing), whence Latin derives sonus (sound)—this despite the fact that the common genus is known as Cygnus olor, meaning “mute swan.” While not truly voiceless, the mute swan embodies the 146 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s idea of beauty, holiness, mystery, and strength through silence. Its ability to float on the water and its tendency to mate for life have resulted in its symbolizing grace, love, and fidelity. The phrase “swan song” refers to the legend that it is utterly silent until the last moment of its life, at which point it sings one achingly beautiful song just before dying. Studies of global archetypes tell us that the swan represents the fatal culmination of desire satisfied: a romantic rendering of sexual climax. Even closer to our topic is the gender politics inscribed in the various versions of the “Swan Maiden” tale, in which “a supernatural woman [is] forced to marry, keep house, and bear children for a mortal man who holds the key to her imprisonment. When she manages to regain this key, she escapes to the otherworld, never to return” (Leavy 39–40). In her study In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narrative on Folklore and Gender, Barbara Leavy argues that this particular figure allegorizes the ambivalence with which patriarchal culture views women, suspecting them as double agents between the natural and the civilized worlds, liable to switch from one to the other at the drop of a feather.7 Thus among the sororal signifiers of the Siren, the swan, and the swan maiden, we see just how preoccupied certain traditions have been with discursively regulating the female voice, especially in terms of when it is and is not allowed to “break free” (see Jung Chang’s best-selling memoir, Wild Swans). 8 Bad women cry out and lead men to their doom. Good women cry out only once, and only in martyred celebration of fidelity and obedience (the prerequisites for “grace”). Women not yet on the threshold of death are to be seen and not heard. But, returning to our central problematic, what about women who are heard but not seen? An Avatar of Sex-Insomnia Two decades ago Kaja Silverman pointed out, “It has somehow escaped theoretical attention that sexual difference is the effect of dominant cinema’s sound regime as well as its visual regime, and that the female voice is as relentlessly held to normative representations and functions as is the female body” (viii). For Silverman, as for Guy Rosolato, from whom she borrows the phrase, the voice is an “acoustic mirror” upon which the various distortions of narcissistic reflection take place. Hollywood has been determined to “synchronize” the female voice with the female body, she argues, for fear that it could break free and begin a liberated, more acousmatic existence, thereby challenging the disembodied 147 d i f f e r e n c e s male voice-over for “enunciative authority.” This last “can come to be invested only in a voice which refuses to be subordinated to and judged by the body—a voice that resists the norm of synchronization” (83). Or as Dolar puts it, “The voice is boundless, warrantless, and—no coincidence—on the side of woman” (50–51). Silverman is therefore interested in the “migratory potential” of the voice, along with the ongoing cultural “attempt to restrain it within established boundaries, and so to prevent its uncontrolled circulation” (83; emphasis added). There is, however, one glaring exception to the idea that the female acousmatic voice is difficult to find—namely, recordings of popular (or operatic) music. 9 If the female voice, serenading and seducing the ear, has been around as long as wax cylinders, why does Silverman insist on a challenge or threat to the patriarchal order in this type of acoustic mirror? The answer begins with our acknowledging the narrow protocols within which women have been permitted to “express” themselves, phonologically speaking. As Dolar insists, “[S]inging, by focusing on the voice, actually runs the risk of losing the very thing it tries to worship and revere: it turns it into a fetish object—we could say the highest rampart, the most formidable wall against the voice” (30). Female singers are affective lightning rods and have historically run the gauntlet of social strictures to remain “ladylike” even while representing civilization’s darker, more primal half. On one end of the spectrum we have the turn-of-the-century Swedish superstar Jenny Lind, who was so angelic that she represented the purity of nature and was thus dubbed “the nightingale.”10 On the other end, we have Eva Tanguay. According to Jody Rosen’s “Vanishing Act: In Search of Eva Tanguay, the First Rock Star”: “For roughly two decades, from 1904 until the early 1920s, [Eva Tanguay] was the biggest rock star in the United States [. . .] out-earning the likes of Al Jolson, Harry Houdini, and Enrico Caruso.” Tanguay’s fame—or infamy, rather—stemmed from her grotesque vocal parodies of femininity and her flouting of the same. She would growl and squawk and warble without shame, delighting and appalling the crowd in equal measure. It is perhaps fitting that two agents of Satan would thus be the ones to recognize this particular fallen angel: Edward Bernays and Aleister Crowley. The former called Tanguay “our first symbol of emergence from the Victorian age” (qtd. in Rosen); the latter wrote in 1912: [She] is like the hashish dream of a hermit who is possessed of the devil. She cannot sing, as others sing; or dance, as others dance. 148 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s She simply keeps on vibrating, both limbs and vocal chords without rhythm, tone, melody, or purpose. [. . .] I feel as if I were poisoned by strychnine, so far as my body goes; I jerk, I writhe, I twist, I find no ease. [. . .] She is perpetual irritation without possibility of satisfaction, an Avatar of sex-insomnia. Solitude of the Soul, the Worm that dieth not; ah, me! She is the Vulture of Prometheus, and she is the Music of Mitylene. [. . .] I could kill myself at this moment for the wild love of her. (qtd. in Rosen) Strong words indeed, which crystallize the stakes involved when the female voice slips the sonic corset of propriety. In Crowley’s description she is not really singing, but vocalizing possessed. It is a form of speaking in tongues. She “simply keeps on vibrating [. . .] without possibility of satisfaction.” (Of course he is talking of his satisfaction, not hers.) Tanguay obviously relished her effect on such sensitive listeners, and she had only scorn for her critics. Indeed, her biggest hit was called “I Don’t Care.” She was a modern siren, not the classical kind who presumably could stay on key. In fact, female singers are ambassadors for all three Lacanian registers, ranging among them, as if—in the liminal space of performance, at least—these isolated tuning systems form a continuum, like a piano keyboard. They are symbolic in the sense that they almost always sing lyrics that convey linguistic meaning (Meredith Monk or Elizabeth Fraser notwithstanding).11 They are imaginary in the sense that they embody what the symbolic cannot completely encode: suggestive gendered alterity. And they are real, in the animalistic grain of the voice that gives sonorous body to the abject.12 Cavarero singles out the female singer as a particularly burdened figure within logocentric history and androcentric culture. Woman is consistently cast as a timeless, universal songbird, befitting her posited role as emissary of the body. So while she may not be able to speak for herself, she can sing for her supper, by virtue of the persistent romanticized mythology of her “outsider” status: half angel, half animal. Hence women will always be associated with “the seductive, carnal, primitive, feminine voice” (4). “To put it formulaically,” writes Cavarero, “woman sings, man thinks” (6). What is more, this symbolic division of labor obfuscates the profound metaphysical bias against recognizing the voice as tethered to a unique human being and to the unrepeatable particularity of a given situation of vocal exchanges. For Cavarero, all concepts based on “the dialogic” or “communicability,” across the board, ignore the most d i f f e r e n c e s essential constitutive element: “A voice means this: there is a living person, throat, chest, feelings, who sends into the air this voice, different from all other voices” (Calvino, qtd. in Cavarero 1).13 The voice is always the voice of someone (207). Her book goes to great lengths to remind us that the intimacy of aural texture precedes the abstract nature of meaning. It thus represents a salvage operation for “sonorous materiality” or “phonic substance” before and above “semantic valence” (1). Why exactly? In order to ultimately rescue the unique individual from its unbroken history of being metaphysically effaced into formalized and universal systems (such as “speech” or “language”). Cavarero does not mince words about her Arendtian belief in unprecedented selves. “The uniqueness of the voice is an incontrovertible given of experience, technologically proven by digital machines that can trace it; this is not a problem” (8). And yet this is a problem, and not only because such appeals to—or lapses into—scientific positivism reverberate with bad faith, especially when embedded into sustained critiques of abstract reasoning.14 Acoustic or organic signatures certainly exist, but biology should not be so smoothly translated into the symbolic realm of culture, which is, after all, Cavarero’s target. No uniqueness is irreducible, at least not without venturing into the treacherous waters of essentialism. The embodied self may be, from a certain angle, unique. However, the subject, a necessarily crystallized anagram of everyone else, is not. My voice may be mapped by machines to provide a completely distinctive sound wave, but this does not register the plurality of my biological inheritance or the dialectical, inherently mimetic character of my soul. No doubt Cavarero is aware of the risk involved in her polemical insistence that the systematic repression of, or deafness to, the unique embodied voice is threatened by acknowledging it. Uniqueness “is not an unreachable treasure, or an ineffable essence,” she writes, “or still less, a sort of secret nucleus of the self; rather, it is a deep vitality of the unique being who takes pleasure in revealing herself through the emission of the voice” (4). And yet what could be less unique—not on the level of dna but on the level of a shared, distributed species-anonymity—than one’s entrails witnessed in endoscopic footage as stains on the streets of a war zone? Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin and their followers share the impulse to rescue the unique being from such anonymity, and no doubt there is an ethical pressure, even obligation, to perform such acts of redemption. But if insisted upon in a certain tone, it is also an impulse to succumb to the romantic neoliberal mantra of individualism and ignore 149 150 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s the politically liberating secret that emphasizes the shared pulse beyond identity, rather than the potentially narcissistic logic of reified, stabilized identification.15 For Cavarero “the voice” is a discursive fiction; there are only voices. And indeed, this is an important reminder to the rather tineared history of philosophy. But so long as we are aware that “the voice” always pertains to this or that voice, his or her voice, or even its voice, we are still in the position to make important observations across space and time. The general is only a problem when it loses sight of the particular. Indeed, it allows a greater understanding of the particular when used in the right way, for it builds bridges between people rather than stranding them on their own monadic islands. In any case, Cavarero neglects the existence of digital machines as she insists, “When the human voice vibrates, there is someone in flesh and bone who emits it” (4). The voice for her is always embodied, never acousmatic, as if she were writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, before human voices migrated into their devices. This amnesia is symptomatic of the humanism driving her project, for while she notes that “the Greek word phone is applied to both human and animal voice, as well as to any other audible sound” (19), she does not follow this suggestive inclusivity into the modern world, in which it is often undecidable whether any given sound embedded within a popular musical hit was in fact produced by human, animal, or machine.16 Cavarero’s desire to illustrate the crucial vocal aspect of what her translator calls “the politics of the scene” is all very well when applied to something like the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, but it does not prepare us for the possibility of Juliet listening to Romeo’s playlist on her iPod, or—even more likely—hearing the ding of her iPhone as his sext message arrives in her inbox. The acousmatic voice is now everywhere except in the kinds of interlocution that Cavarero finds so crucial and empowering. Perhaps it is only when the authority of the human voice is disappearing into an electronic Babel that the stakes of its power enter into the field of the audible. What we might call the splintering of solicitation into the commercial, the governmental, the civic, the familial, and the erotic means that the acousmatic voice is ubiquitous to the same extent that the individual voice is drowned out in the cacophony. After all, in Tokyo a Coke machine is as likely to talk to you as a human being is, a fact that only makes Althusser’s notion of interpellation more relevant, albeit more complex.17 So to speak, Cavarero’s vocalic topography is complicated by the invention of the gramophone and all the subsequent refinements (and d i f f e r e n c e s regressions) of audio recording and engineering, of which Auto-Tune is the most recent instance. This technology, which evolved from a software program designed to help locate deep-sea oil deposits, is now used ubiquitously in the studio to ensure that mediocre performances stay precisely on pitch as well as to digitally distort the voice for a post-human melodic effect (Tyrangiel). Auto-Tune is a heavy, somewhat intrusive form of hypermediation.18 Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to argue that there is any kind of subjective “trace” of the actual Cher—as a signified source of singularity—in her pioneering 1998 hit “Do You Believe in Life after Love?” The echography at work in the vocals here is not only a long way from the indexical, it seems to relish being detached and deployed from the body, the site of a subjective “aura,” in Benjamin’s language. To highlight the stakes in the terms we have been discussing thus far, it is unlikely that Cher’s beloved, whoever that may be, would choose this track over other, more “human” recordings in order to restage or simulate phonic presence. There is simply no “there” there, in the sense of ontological traction for the ear-heart-hippocampus-viscera assemblage (see Storrs). Auto-Tune aurally airbrushes any vestige of singularity out of the voice of the performer so that the sonic performance becomes, to wax Agambenian, a whatever-vox: a voice without qualities (or rather, a voice displaying the homogenized quality shared by all other artists who utilize the same software). Even the culturally gendered binary of the larynx is revealed to be a rather ambiguous modulation of the sonorous spectrum: a woman can sound like a metallic man, while a man can sound like a fiber-optic woman. Specific identity, the vocal signature, is swallowed up in this process at an unprecedented speed and in a virtually unprecedented fashion.19 As we shall soon see, Dolar emphasizes what he sees as the always already “object status” of the voice, even before it is captured and replayed with modern technology. That is to say, there is something profoundly impersonal about the voice, something alien, even as it emerges from the intimate depths of the self. For its part, Auto-Tune amplifies and caricatures this usually unacknowledged aspect through modulation and manipulation. It externalizes it and paints it with neon-colored aural pixels. The public, popular, digital voice increasingly asserts itself as distinct from the private, organic voice. 20 One’s mother does not yet sound like millennial Cher, and one hopes she never will. But the Auto-Tune of the acousmatic voice complicates the notion of the acoustic mirror, as the voice becomes too unstable to function as a site for Lacanian identity formation by virtue of 151 152 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s its interchangeability, its electronic equalization. The more generic the vocalsphere becomes, the more opaque a signifier of (human?) expression it is. In other words, due to such digital techniques and technologies, the subject is increasingly vulnerable to being lost in an aural version of Fredric Jameson’s Bonaventure Hotel. The cues for recognizing individuality via the ear become something other than the timbre of the voice: the melody, the beat, or a catch phrase, for instance. Traditional environmental cues blend into each other, so navigation of the self in relation to the other is compromised. On the one hand, new media tools for making music are becoming more and more sophisticated in terms of sonic options and configurations. On the other, the most popular audio format for listening to music today, the MP3, notoriously degrades music more than its analog ancestors did. The acousmatic voice therefore mutates in the digital age in at least two distinct ways. The first is the umbilical break from the image. Michel Chion’s original definition related to cinema, so that the soundtrack was still “framed” as it were by the mise-en-scène. The “noises off” were precisely that, off, measured in terms of their distance from the screen, novel in not being matched with glossy celluloid lips. In our era, as the iPod waxes and the music video wanes, the acousmatic voice comes to the fore in the very same motion through which it loses its lingering fidelity to the source. The voice dematerializes to a second degree: even its medium of capture is no longer graspable. It becomes more ambient, spectral, and ubiquitous: “everyware.”21 Subjectivity is sculpted by this disorienting echo chamber as much as by the visual spectacle. For every identifiable voice, there are a hundred anonymous solicitations. For every James Earl Jones, there is an invisible choir of whoevers and wherevers. What’s more, this is not necessarily a linear progression. As a culture we are constantly playing with the levels between signal and noise. Early vinyl 78s were all hiss, scratch, and fizzle; today’s MP3s are all glitch, fuzz, and crackle, whether by design for sonic effect or simply by the compromise of fivemegabyte-file convenience. The perfect “warm” reproduction so cherished by audiophiles from the 1960s to the 1980s is today merely a Platonic ideal or, at best, an expensive type of nostalgia. To force the issue into a nutshell, there are certain continuities and discontinuities concerning the acousmatic voice this century when compared with that of the previous one. The continuity is its endless repetition, its eternal return, of the fort-da that underwrites the human unconscious. Since Victorian times, the acousmatic voice has 153 d i f f e r e n c e s been simultaneously uncanny, unsettling, banal, and omnipresent. The discontinuities, however, appear in terms of its portability, its mutability, its absolute liberation from the image, and its saturating ubiquity. Dematerialization encourages dehumanization and rehumanization. The Sony Walkman, in the 1980s, inaugurated the paradigm-changing moment when people could provide an internal soundtrack to their mobile lives. With the almost magical compression allowed by mp3 technology, we can now carry tens of thousands of voices in our pockets at any given moment. The average twenty-something-year-old person of means listens to a greater variety of voices in a day than the average person listened to in a lifetime a few generations ago. We need not be media scholars like Marshall McLuhan to understand that this entails a nuanced combination of sensory extension and amputation. All of the above notwithstanding, twentieth-century technologies make two or three cameo appearances in Cavarero’s book, such as when she asks the reader to “[c]onsider the rather banal, everyday occurrence of the telephone or intercom, where one asks me ‘who is it?’—and I respond without hesitation ‘it’s me,’ or ‘it is “I.” ’ The depersonalized function of the pronouns ‘I’ or ‘me’—highlighted here by the fact that the speaker does not show her face—gets immediately annulled by the unmistakable uniqueness of the voice” (175). And elsewhere, “The intercom and the telephone—where communication ‘invites the other to make his whole body converge in the voice and which lets me gather everything in my ear’—annul this distance, but they do not negate the material relationality of the vocalic” (208). Relying exclusively on such examples, Cavarero fails to consider the voice apart from real-time exchanges. She assumes technology to be about bridging distance only; she altogether ignores technologies that shift time, like the tape recorder. Even when she refers to electrified music, the scenario painted is of a live concert and not a recording of the event: For there is a subversive potential in the voice, which is redoubled when the voice itself vibrates with the universe of sounds instead of merely clothing the concept in acoustic vesting. Of course, Plato could not even imagine the impact of jazz, r &b , rock and roll, and similar rhythms on the western ear. He could not imagine how, in modern times, the unsettling effects of the melodramatic theater could be passed on to an audience at a rock concert, where the ritual of a “loss of self-control, collective 154 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s delirium, tears, fainting, fanaticisms of all sorts” is once again renewed. (60) One wonders, then, about the relevance or applicability of an analysis of communication that effectively ignores the ubiquitous existence of communication technologies. 22 There is a willful nostalgia at work common to a certain stripe of Continental philosophy; it is not so much a provocative untimeliness but a straightforward anachronism. Which is not to say that Cavarero’s exploration of the “eroticized apparatus of phonation” (138) is entirely without merit but that such an exploration must acknowledge actual existing technics that shape and inform “the libidinal register” (131) of “vocalic pleasure” (199). To be clear, the theoretical value in Barthes’s notion of “the grain of the voice” is lost when Cavarero ties this phenomenon to the unmediated human. Missy Elliot and Karin Dreijer Andersson can be just as affecting and relevant as Aretha Franklin, Chan Marshall, Rokia Traoré, or the Bulgarian State Television Female Choir. 23 It is therefore necessary to argue for a position somewhere between Cavarero, who fetishizes the singular human element to an almost infinite degree, and Dolar, who dismisses it as inadmissible. This middle way, as we shall soon see, is indeed proposed, or at the very least obliquely suggested, by Barthes. One thing is certain: there is an externalized essence of expression called “the voice,” which has realized the expedience of attaching itself to the vector of music. But which came first?24 Is the voice a parasite, or is music?25 However we decide to approach such questions, it must be acknowledged that mobile telephones and MP3 players can potentially create connections and encounters—“events,” even—on the plane of intersubjectivity, even if one of those subjects is no longer alive. As our existence is increasingly experienced within digitized networks, the challenge is not only to rescue the grain of the voice but also to be attuned to the voice of the grain, to listen attentively to the environment, an environment that includes both paradises and parking lots. The Aural Punctum At the beginning of this discussion we referred to a generic mother figure. But what happens when we look at a very specific mother? Barthes’s mother figures prominently in his meditations on technologies of capture. What if we superimpose her key role as witness to, or embodiment d i f f e r e n c e s of, the punctum, on her son’s notion of “the grain of the voice”?26 What “dialectic of meaning and materiality” emerges from the interplay between them (Dunn 53)? Might they supplement each other in a way that does justice to the shadings of mortality, melancholy, and (prerecorded) indivisible remainders? Barthes defines the “grain” as “the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue” (“Grain” 182). Dolar is not sympathetic to this concept or to the way it is anchored in the organic. He states that this formula simply “will never do,” since the uncanny alterity of the object voice is the real issue. “The problem is that the voice cannot be pinned to a body, or be seen as an emanation of the body, without a paradox” (197). And yet paradoxes exist, and should be respected, if not absolutely accounted for. For while appeals to the individual are almost always dubious, there are times when it is appropriate to salvage the identity of the mother, of this mother—not to throw her out with the bathwater, as it were. The enigma of the voice stems from the inscrutable way in which it exists in the “singular plural,” to gesture to Jean-Luc Nancy. 27 Indeed, Dolar himself notes that the voice “is like a fingerprint, instantly recognizable and identifiable” (22). And yet it is not necessarily “proper” to the person from whom it resounds. Perhaps Dolar’s most provocative insight is that “[t]he voice is the element which ties the subject and the Other together, without belonging to either” (103). But that does not mean we need block our ears to the singular aspect of this pluralized phenomenon (while at the same time resisting the relatively narrow ontological focus of Cavarero). The recognizable vocal shadow of the beloved Other, whether in person or recorded, is an event or intensity on the intersubjective level, and something vital is lost when we diagram this into the bracing, crystalline string theory of the Lacanian universe and leave it at that. Thus Barthes’s notion of the punctum—usually reserved for the visual sphere—may be applied and adapted to the acoustic realm, in order to “hear” or “understand” better what is at stake on the surface of our eardrums 28—specifically, “the impossible science of the unique being” (Camera 71). Variously described as “marks,” “wounds,” “so many points,” a “sting, speck, cut, little hole,” “a cast of the dice,” as well as “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (27), Barthes classifies the punctum within “the order of the loving.” It emerges from an unexpected detail that catches the eye in an unexpected mode of address, shifting the impersonal gaze to something altogether more affecting and intimate. His examples include two nuns walking behind some Nicaraguan 155 156 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s soldiers with bad teeth and dirty fingernails, and the way a kilted groom holds the bridle of Queen Victoria’s horse. Barthes goes on to describe this interruption of smooth perception as a form of “infra-knowledge” (30), as well as a “partial object” that elicits “great sympathy [. . .] almost a kind of tenderness” (43). Such an interesting detail “is not, or at least not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so [. . .] like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful” (47). The visual punctum pricks the viewer through the eyes, whereas the aural equivalent is a kind of “prick up the ears” (to gesture to the innuendo often only half-buried in the phrase). It can be anything from the way a voice cracks unintentionally, 29 to an idiosyncratic accent, to a type of unself-conscious emphasis, which betrays the “audible unconscious” of the individual qua the collective (to poach and twist yet another canonical concept). The punctum—whether via the eye or the ear—is thus very difficult, if not impossible, to pin down. “What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance” (51). So while a familiar voice can soothe on one level, it can disturb on another, especially when the body we associate it with is no longer visible or present. The “grain” of the voice for Barthes is located in the materiality of the body, yet this should not preclude its being captured within analog or digital traces. (What is remarkable about the latter is how the grain or punctum can survive even the slicing and dicing into variable bit rates, at least to a certain point, so that one need not revert to “lossless” formats to carry the contingent singularity of the other in one’s pocket.) In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes states: Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is “I desire you,” and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion [. . .]; on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure. (73) This lover is coy, however, about whether his language is written or spoken. Either way, the voice pulses through Barthes’s thoughts addressed to the other, tracing his or her outline, spoken on paper or held under the d i f f e r e n c e s tongue. To “talk up this contact” is to participate in the intense feedback loop of mutual (mis)recognition that forever catches in the throat (since there is never any “last word” or guarantee in such matters, especially in the age of a mute God). 30 But what happens to the punctum when it is translated from the visual register to the sonic? What is retained and what is jettisoned? Moreover, how is Barthes’s key concept—seemingly the very essence of particularity—capable of avoiding the polarized extremism of both Cavarero and Dolar? No question, Barthes initially seems closer to Cavarero’s perspective or sensibility, and both could be accused of warming certain romantic, neohumanist chestnuts. Yet Barthes acknowledges that the science of the unique being is impossible, something Cavarero would never do. And yet it is still worth pursuing, if only with pataphysical tools. Barthes’s oeuvre, taken holistically, dwells in that fascinating no-man’sland where structuralism blends into poststructuralism—that is to say, where the metasystemic acknowledges the anomalous, the idiosyncratic, the unaccountably catalytic. His sentimental confessions, or even indulgences, are particularly poignant because he understands—sometimes explicitly, other times only implicitly—their impersonal significance. At least to my mind, he therefore earns the right to forge his own license to drive through the stereoscopic valley of the Both/And. And he, like many of his location and generation, does so by suggesting that, yes, this captured moment is equally significant and insignificant, equally moving and insipid. One needs the studium for the punctum to signal its special messageless message (and the only difference between Barthes and someone like Niklas Luhmann is that the latter would place no particular value on the dynamic, while acknowledging that this is the mechanism by which value is created for those within the code). By borrowing and repurposing the punctum for the aural sphere, I loosen the grip of the Oedipal, melancholy subject who first proposed it, and use it to counterbalance two temptations: the first to focus on singularity at the expense of plurality (Cavarero), the second to render the affect of the subject as inadmissible or irrelevant (Dolar). The very fact that the aural punctum is indeed aural dissolves the possibility of fetishizing particularity, or at least renders it more ambiguous. For a scopophilic culture, in which seeing is believing, being unexpectedly pierced by sound does not leave the same kind of wound or trace as seeing an image. It cannot be verified or fixed, as Walter Ong notes; a sound leaves the same moment it arrives. One cannot point to an image and say, “Here—look—that’s what 157 158 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s really gets me!” One can only do that awkward staccato anticipation in which we say to the other person in the room, “It’s coming up . . . here . . . no wait . . . sorry . . . after the chorus . . . wait . . . wait . . . here!” There is a different temporality involved, one that changes the stakes, especially in terms of how one is supposed to respond—aesthetically and ethically. The aural punctum invites us to listen on two registers at once, those so well articulated by Cavarero and Dolar. It conveys the improper within the proper, the plural within the singular, the contingent within the essential, the alien within the human—and vice versa. The challenge of Auto-Tune, for instance, is that it is sandpaper for the aural punctum. It eschews the timberlike timbre of the grain of the voice, replacing it with a reflective pastel-tinted chrome vector. This is what is so seductive about it, and also so vexing for those who seek ontological traction—that is, those who are accustomed to the audible textures “of” an other. As my use of quotation marks suggests, however, a lot of work is being done by that preposition. Does one’s voice belong to oneself at all, and if so, in what sense? This is the crux of the debate between the Italian feminist philosopher and the Slovenian Lacanian theorist. As Dolar observes: [V]oice is not a primary given which would then be squeezed into the mold of the signifier, it is the product of the signifier itself, its own other, its own echo, the resonance of its intervention. If voice implies reflexivity, insofar as its resonance returns from the Other, then it is a reflexivity without a self—not a bad name for the subject. For it is the same subject which sends his or her message and gets the voice bounced back—rather, the subject is what emerges in this loop, the result of this course. (161) But this need not oblige us to cast the other as Echo to our Narcissus, or vice versa. For while it may be true that “the acousmatic voice” is a redundant phrase, it bears witness to a certain, vital mode of sharing. It sings an antiphonal allegory of the mutual understanding of—or at least struggle with—the fact that presence eludes us and that we slip through each other’s fingers just as we elude our own selves. 159 d i f f e r e n c e s A Dying Echo: Toward a Conclusion Nothing more lacerating than a voice at once beloved and exhausted: a broken, rarefied, bloodless voice, one might say, a voice from the end of the world, which will be swallowed up far away by cold depths: such a voice is about to vanish, as the exhausted being is about to die: fatigue is infinity: what never manages to end. That brief, momentary voice, almost ungracious in its rarity, that almost nothing of the loved and distant voice, becomes in me a sort of monstrous cork, as if a surgeon were thrusting a huge plug of wadding into my head. —Barthes “You are lissssstening to Los Angeles.” —Soul Coughing My intention has not been to romanticize a hauntology of human traces within the smooth magnetic surfaces of our new media (or at least, not only that). We can hear the aural punctum or the grain of the voice in the impatient meowing of our cat, in the recorded call of a humpback whale, or even in the imploring squeal of a garden gate crying out for oil. The issue is a question of response, in real time—or the solicitation of a response, in time-shifted contexts. A recorded track, synthesized or not, is notable to the extent that it asks an/other to listen, rather than merely purchase and hear. 31 It initiates, or at least partakes in, the discordant chorus of voices increasingly outsourced to the wider technological environment. The essential aspect is the yet to be coded potential coiled within the response mechanism itself, whether made of human cartilage, catgut, or nylon. Indeed, we miss something (perhaps most things) when we assume that “the voice” is a human one. There is an anthropocentrism at work in this concept, assuming that what counts as a voice must be attached to human biology (as Keats could surely attest). One need only listen to Eddie Hazel’s guitar solo in Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” to realize that the sound of the secular soul need no longer be tethered to the tongue and the breath but has other avenues of expression. “The voice is far ahead of the face,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “very far ahead” (333). The challenge is thus to recalibrate our relationship with our own ears, to listen to something as it is disappearing (since everything is disappearing), as it is becoming an object of loss, like the omnimaternal, amniotic envelope we have escaped or been exiled from. 32 Listening to Mother Earth or “nature” or the city, in Schaeffer’s sense of the acousmatic, is a way of attuning ourselves to a more radical alterity than the gender distinction within our own species. 33 This is not to advocate recovering the organic in a romantic salvage operation. The 160 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s lyre bird—mimicking perfectly the sound of chainsaws, camera shutters, or car alarms—need not be quite as depressing as it initially seems, for this creature bespeaks a kind of mimesis perched on the edge of an uncanny and unexpected sharing of refrains. Such sounds offer an acousmatic mirror in which it is possible to see a very different reflection than we are used to, one that should disturb us beyond automatic hand-wringing about human impact on the surroundings. Were we capable of reciprocating, then the whole notion of “environment” could be reconceived for the benefit of all terrestrial creatures. (But this is a whole other topic, to be explored elsewhere.) Such closing remarks ratifying the object status of the voice may sound closer to Dolar than to Cavarero. Certainly a global increase of technoacousmatic voices in everyday spaces encourages this view. But it is still the subject that scans the existential radio dial for a recognizable signal to which he, she, or it can respond. Cavarero’s error was to insist that this subject is exclusively human. This is not so much psychology as a blend of affect, physiology, and physics: resonance theory. Whether it is a mother listening to her daughter’s voice on the telephone, a dog listening to his master’s voice on a gramophone, a lamp listening for the clap of a hand, or a microphone listening for specific patterns determined by an algorithm, there is a subjectively inflected object “paying heed” to its environment. This listening thing is Möbius-minded. And to emphasize its subjective or objective nature is to play the duck-rabbit game for rhetorically strategic reasons. Whereas Martin Heidegger would tell us that an animal is poor in hearing, Uexküll would insist that each mode of attunement to the world creates its own Umwelt (environment), which is largely incommensurable with any other Umwelt. The aural punctum, I would argue, has the potential to pop or connect these ontological bubbles. Human eardrums of the twenty-first century have become both stimulated and benumbed by the digital acousmatic voice, which has confused distinctions not only of gender but of species as well. Pavlov’s dogs were trained to respond to the sound of a bell whether food was served or not. Steve Jobs’s pod-people have been trained to respond to the sound of the ironically named Lady Gaga—today’s more cynical incarnation of Eva Tanguay. The question of nourishment is an ongoing one. Suffice to say in closing that in all these years, parrots may not have been merely parroting but prompting and provoking. And I hope we will—sooner rather than later—conceptualize and conjure technologies that are harbingers not of the soundscape of colonization, deracination, 161 d i f f e r e n c e s and displacement but of a planetary cohabitation, hospitality, and solidarity. Perhaps (and admittedly it is a very big perhaps) we will finally hear Echo without casting ourselves in the self-blinding role of Narcissus. For Lhasa de Sela, 1972–2010. I would like to thank Rey Chow and James Steintrager for their rigorous, helpful, and insightful feedback. Any lingering incoherence, contradiction, or underdevelopment in this piece remains as a stubborn, unintentional rebuke to their best editorial efforts. dominic pet tman is Chair of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College, as well as Associate Professor of Liberal Studies, New School for Social Research. He has held previous positions at the University of Melbourne, the University of Geneva, and the University of Amsterdam. He is the coauthor of Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture, and the Object (Amsterdam University Press, 2004) and the author of After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (State University of New York Press, 2002), Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age (Fordham University Press, 2006), Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and The Technopoetics of Capture (Fordham University Press, forthcoming). Notes 1 Despite the convenience of biographical metaphors for any given medium—that it develops from embryo to child to adult—we should of course be wary of the fixed teleology these assume. See Rudolf Arnheim’s book Film as Art, for instance, as an influential example of the argument that the introduction of sound to cinema was in fact an aesthetic step backward. 2 Silverman reminds us that Michel Chion gives “a much more sinister inflection” of the mother’s voice, which “not only envelops but entraps the newborn infant” in the terror of a “uterine night” or “umbilical net” (72–75). 3 Dolar quotes Freud’s discussion of “the sounds which betray parental intercourse” (133), in which the father of psychoanalysis notes, “Children, in such circumstances, divine something sexual in the uncanny sounds that reach their ears. Indeed, the movements expressive of sexual excitement lie within them ready to hand, as innate pieces of mechanism” (134). While admitting some reservations concerning Freud’s assumptions about the child’s psychic technology, Dolar agrees that “a fantasy is a confabulation built around the sonorous kernel” (136). 4 Silverman is, rightly, careful to stress the retrospective aspect of these phantasmatic scenes (75– 76). See also Lawrence. 5 An interesting, if sordid, twist on this familiar theme is found in Joseph Cates’s exploitation movie, Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965), in which a ten-year-old girl is obliged to overhear her detective father’s obsessional thoughts on perverse predators as he speaks them every evening into a Dictaphone. Here, the absent (murdered) mother is replaced by the machine that will hopefully one day facilitate the revenge of her death. In the meantime, the poor girl’s soul, via her ears, is constantly assaulted by homeopathically traumatic words, smuggled within the grain of the father’s voice. 162 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s 6 As Cavarero observes, “The libidinal economy [. . .] makes language into music” and thus “has an ear cocked to the rhythmic enchantment of the first voice. The first song announces, in the song itself, the sonorous relation that inimitably forms its soundtrack” (145). 7 See also Sax. 8 See Engh. Lest we forget, the Sirens were also obliged to forsake their dangerous voices in order to marry among mortal men. One wonders, as with Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, what on earth would motivate them to surrender such powers. 9 Strangely, Silverman does not mention female recording artists as an unsynchronized sonic phenomenon. Another major exception to Silverman’s rule is female announcers and voice-overs in radio and television, suggesting that the gender politics she finds at issue in the acoustic mirror is specific to cinema. I have broadened the scope significantly, given the prevalence of intermediality and digital convergence today, as well as acknowledging Silverman’s own concern with “migration” and “circulation.” 10 Were they around today, one wonders what Jenny Lind, or indeed Keats, would make of Hatebeak, a death-metal band fronted by a Congolese African Grey Parrot. 11 See, or rather hear, Luciano Berio’s pioneering work for the female voice, Sequenza III (1966). 12 Dolar would take issue with this last point, since he believes that “it is only through language, via language, by the symbolic, that there is voice, and music exists only for the speaking being” (31). Nevertheless, he is wont to admit: “There is a too-much of the voice [. . .]. One is too exposed to the voice and the voice exposes too much” (81). Which is to concede that “[t]he voice is the excess of the signifier” (81). 13 Cavarero uses this quotation from Italo Calvino’s short story “A King Listens” as the epigraph for her book. 14 The fact that Cavarero neglects to cite such digital proof of organic uniqueness does not help clarify the issue. 15 Cavarero attempts to counter the fetish of the individual preemptively by also emphasizing the “relationality” of local, quotidian encounters and situations. She thus refers to “the chains of individuality” (131) in addition to “uniqueness as an understanding [. . .] and a reciprocal dependence” (182). But this balancing act is decidedly unbalanced in one direction, and such a caveat is drowned out by her own demonstrative approach. Deleuze’s notion of the “dividual,” Nancy’s “being singular plural,” Agamben’s “whateverbeing,” Luhmann’s systems theory, Lacan’s formalizations of allegedly unique beings, as well as Bersani’s call for “impersonal intimacy” all, in their different ways, provide persuasive challenges—even deterrents—for any philosophy that has such emphatic recourse to the singular as its primary building block. That is to say, zooming down to the level of the unique being is no threat to the status quo. Indeed, it is the modus operandi of Google’s advertising revenue and China’s regime of political punishment alike. 16 At one point Cavarero goes so far as to claim boldly, “Because it belongs to the world of humans, 163 d i f f e r e n c e s the voice is for the ear” (178). Such anthropocentric presumption is surprising, to say the least, from someone intent on deconstructing the metaphysical edifice engineered largely by Aristotle (including his distinction between human speech and animal voice). In other words, Cavarero’s project would be better served if she listened less to Arendt and more to the later Derrida (the one whose trace became less and less recognizably human), rather than the earlier one, to whom she dedicates a long appendix. 17 One fascinating mutation of the acousmatic voice is the textto-speech technologies made famous by Stephen Hawking. More recently, the film critic Roger Ebert had his own voice “restored” after it was robbed by cancer. On this occasion the possessive makes a certain kind of miraculous sense, as his own recorded words were painstakingly assembled and fed into the program in order to create an extensive vocabulary database in his voice. Sadly, this is not an option for most people with a similar affliction, since most people have not spent their adult lives on camera or behind a microphone. 18 In 2009, hip-hop artist Jay-Z expressed his impatience with the overutilization of this technology in his single d.o.a. (Death of Auto-Tune). 19 One precursor, which remained stranded in the realm of novelty, would be the vocoder, made famous in Peter Frampton’s epic 1970s song “Do You Feel Like We Do?” 20 As I write, the mainstream media are obsessed with the (possibly) rags-to-riches tale of Ted Williams, a homeless man with a “golden radio voice.” The staggering popularity of the original YouTube clip of Mr. Williams parroting a smooth dj, while begging for money on the street, can in large part be attributed to the stimulating cognitive dissonance created by the polished, public voice emanating from a body codified as anything but. 21 I borrow this term from Adam Greenfield. 22 Describing the flute as an “acoustic prosthesis of the mouth” (Cavarero 72) does not go nearly far enough. 23 Andersson, lead singer of The Knife and of Fever Ray, is an interesting figure in the genealogy linking Eva Tanguay with other punkish or elfin singers like Lene Lovich, Souxie Soux, Kate Bush, Cindy Lauper, Björk, Joanna Newsom, and so on. By using postproduction to distort her voice downward into a rather spooky androgyny, she reminds us that gender should not be tethered too tightly to biology and that the voice is part of the performative ensemble underscored by Judith Butler. Indeed, transgender Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons does the same with only a microphone, carrying the torch lit by Nina Simone and troubling the patrolled binarism that produces certain types of desire while precluding others. 24 For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the coevolution of music and speech was most easily observed “in arid regions, where water could only be had from wells [. . .] [and where] the first meetings between the sexes took place” (qtd. in Head 6). The fable he develops from this (rather ahistorical) primal scene rests on the assumption of the libidinal genesis of vocal expression. 164 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s 25 26 27 On a different occasion, the question could be posed specifically to Michel Serres, who argues that “the parasite is the most silent of beings, and that is the paradox, since parasite also means noise” (237), at least in French. Serres’s idiosyncratic and influential extension of the concept relies on a quasi-cybernetic understanding of the parasite as an asymmetrical, linear, enabling (even tricksterish) ur-relation; it is analagous to the first term in the noise/ signal dynamic so dear to recent systems theory. Cavarero takes Barthes to task for not escaping logocentrism, stating that he “does not write of a body whose singularity is foregrounded, nor of a voice whose uniqueness is given any importance. Rather, the grain refers to a body of the voice and should be understood as ‘the way in which the voice lies in the body—or in which the body lies in the voice.’ But here both body and voice are still presented as general categories” (15). Moreover, “in Barthes’ writing, the voice and the body are categories of a depersonalized pleasure in which the embodied uniqueness of each existent (something that Barthes never thematizes) is simply dissolved along with the general categories of the subject and the individual” (14). In contrast, I would argue that Barthes demonstrates stereoscopic or stereophonic skill in being able to account for the “unique being” via (and by virtue of) that being’s essential and a priori being-with, ethically and aesthetically speaking. In other words, the punctum cannot be fully understood outside the grain of the voice, and vice versa. Each corrects the ontological emphasis—or excess—of the other. Nancy locates the emergence of the subject within the liminal space held open between and by sound and meaning: “A self is nothing other than a form or function of referral” between these two modes (8); “perhaps no subject at all, except as the place of resonance, of its infinite tension and rebound” (22). And as such, “the subject of listening is always still yet to come” (21). 28 Malcolm Gladwell tells us that when Alexander Graham Bell traveled to Brantford in 1874, “he brought with him an actual human ear, taken from a cadaver and preserved, to which he attached a pen, so that he could record the vibration of the ear’s bones when he spoke into it” (51). 29 See my piece “After the Beep: Answering Machines and Creaturely Life” for an emotive example. 30 In relation to a different God, one wonders what difference, if any, was registered on the ear of the supreme Islamic deity during the adhān, or “call to prayer,” when the muezzin began electrically amplifying his song a few decades ago. 31 Nancy asks, “What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message?” (5). 32 For a remarkable tale of this literal recalibration, see Michael Chorost’s Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, which describes the experience of undergoing a cochlear implant and the subsequent realization that hearing—or indeed any sense perception—is always already heavily “mediated.” 33 Schaeffer borrows the word acousmatic in order to attach it to a new type of relationship to 165 d i f f e r e n c e s the ear, whereby “we listen to the sonorous forms, without any aim other than that of hearing them better, in order to be able to describe them through an analysis of the content of our perceptions” (78). In short, acousmatic listening “brings the sonorous object to the fore as a perception worthy of being observed for Works Cited itself” (78). Here we could also cite the Futurist Luigi Russolo, who stated in 1913 that “our ear is not satisfied and calls for ever greater acoustical emotions” (11)—especially those created by new machines. And so “[l]et us cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes” (12). Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: u of Minnesota p, 1993. Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: u of California p, 1957. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Ref lections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. . “The Grain of the Voice.” Image/Music/Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 179–89. . A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Penguin, 1990. Berio, Luciano. Sequenza III for Woman’s Voice. 1965–66. London: Universal Edition, 1968. 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