4-19-11 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More

Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More

Summary: Dolar refocuses the psychoanalytic discussion on the voice by tracing the ways that the voice has always been backed up by a source (either the mouth or the letter), coming to the conclusion that the voice is untracable and unmediated.

“If disacousmatization posed the problem of pinning down the voice whose source is hidden, here we have the opposite problem: a source of voice to which no voice can be assigned, but which for that very reason represents the voice all the more.” (69)

I chose this sentence because I think it encapsulates much of what is going on in this chapter, where Dolar does quite a bit of foundational work, making minor arguments before getting to what he is really trying to say.  Throughout this chapter, Dolar says things like “We could argue” (67), “We can recall”, and “We could also read” (69), which operate in similar ways to the above passage by indicating that, yes, these readings are possible, but what they’re really getting at in terms of the voice is somewhere else.  I want to look at the methods by which Dolar diverts his discussion from the gap, by which he makes the gap resonate.

Rather than an “if…then” construction, Dolar uses an “If…here” structure.  This structure isn’t quite foundational, then; the “here” argument doesn’t rely on the “if” argument in order to constitute itself as such.  Instead, there’s a kind of deflection going on.  Dolar relocates the focus of his argument from disacousmatization back to the voice.  While that might seem obvious in that Dolar has been talking about the voice this whole time, the voice over “here” is the not-voice, or just a silence.  “A source of voice” points to the mouth of the scream painting, and so this voice has nothing to do with hearing and everything to do with seeing.  Indeed, Dolar’s imbrication of voice with the gaze is apparent here.  There is no voice that we can hear, and so Dolar’s entire discussion of the voice is not so much about hearing or locating a voice; instead, it’s about the source of the voice or representations of voices.  Dolar’s “definition” of the voice is the not-voice.

What’s more “a source of voice” renames “the opposite problem” due to the colon.  In his deflection of the discussion, Dolar doesn’t simply move it to another place; he moves it to the opposite place.  This new discussion becomes contrary to and different from the one that came before, indicating that the “foundational” work that Dolar did previously is not at all what he is trying to say.  The problem before was trying to “[pin] down the voice whose source is hidden.”  We can’t see the source of the voice at all in this problem, and trying to pin down the voice to a visible source was problematic.  But in his deflection, Dolar says that we needn’t worry about this problem, because the “here” moves away from this problem to a different one.

Where is here?  For that, we need to go to the previous sentence, which talks about Munch’s The Scream.  “Here” seems to be a different kind of text—it’s visual, not auditory, unlike the film discussion that goes along with the “if.”   The “if” of disacousmatization arises from the hidden source of the voice, which exists in a gap: “…the object voice emerges in counterpoint with the visible and the visual, it cannot be disentangled from the gaze which offers its framework, so that both the gaze and the voice appear as object in the gaps as a result of which they never quite match” (67).  The “here,” then, does not concern itself with this gap; rather, it concerns itself with the not-there.  The problem in the “here”, then, seems to be that, now, the heightened representation of the voice in the silent scream.  Even in silence, its “resonance is all the greater” (69).  What is the problem of voice, then?  On the following pages, Dolar, with the help of Zizek, suggests that the voice is forever separated from vision in that seeing the source of the voice only increases its mystery.  The problem is not that we’re forever trying to fill the gap; the problem is that the gap is unfillable, unable to be mediated, yet intensely resonate all the same.  It is the “a source of voice to which no voice can be assigned, but which for that very reason represents the voice all the more.” 

Here is where I want to put pressure on the term “represents”.  In this sentence, the source of the voice is representing the voice in a heightened way.  All the more than what?  Is the source of voice more able to represent the voice than the voice itself?  Or, outside of the “here,” does something else represent voice in a different way?  Is the voice representable as such?  Also, if the source of voice is a stand-in for the voice itself, is that what renders the voice silent?

Finally, I’d like to return to a post from February 8, where I discussed resonance.  Here, Lacan’s discussion of speech was a way of mediating in the gap between the self and the other.  Dolar’s discussion of resonance, then, intervenes in this discussion about the way that resonance functions in psychoanalysis.  It no longer mediates, it represents.