A Voice and Nothing More

A Voice and Nothing More summary: Dolar seeks to locate the voice as the uncanny object which neither is sublimated as it conveys meaning, nor is ossified by veneration into a fetish object, but which functions as the blind spot in the distinction between outside and inside.

Passage for close-reading: “Bringing the voice from the background to the forefront entails a reversal, or a structural illusion: the voice appears to be the locus of true expression, the place where what cannot be said can nevertheless be conveyed. It seems still to maintain the link with nature, on the one hand—the nature of a paradise lost—and on the other hand to transcend language, the cultural and symbolic barriers, in the opposite direction, as it were: it promises an ascent to divinity, an elevation above the empirical, the mediated, the limited, worldly human concerns” (31).

These sentences occur in the first chapter of Dolar's book, in which he explores the linguistics of the voice, in a section which details the linguistics of the non-voice, including hiccups, coughing, laughing, and singing. Continuing my interest in the musical metaphors serving as a sort of uncanny remainder within Deleuze and Guattari's text, I find myself drawn to the specificity of singing as a voice which pulls both ways in the very moment of seemingly fixating most purely on voice as object, to the point that the singer loses the elusive uncanniness of the object voice in the development of the perfectly controlled singing voice as object. In the sentence immediately preceding the ones in question, Dolar asserts that the fixation on the musical qualities of the singing voice serves as the invert of the attention to the object voice that he is pursing, but that even this inversion is dualistic. The gesture pulls both ways: music both “evokes the object voice and obfuscates it” (31). This passage, then, is admittedly existing on a narrow level of Dolar's text: a position that only partially approaches the object of his own examination, occurring in a specific example of a class of at least four non-verbal, and, in some cases, non-vocal sounds. Nonetheless, I'm interested in the ways this passage enacts the ambivalent gesture of obfuscation and evocation at the same time as setting up this paradigm as one of fetishization that removes attention from the elusive voice as object a. If the rhetoric of this passage pulls both ways at once, it does so at least in part through a series of visual metaphors, and specifically an optics of magnification, that exists in tension with the auditory profundity of the voice, and serves to outline the gap at the heart of Dolar's own object under the guise of a tertiary example.

The first sentence begins by “bringing the voice from the background to the forefront,” an act that can equally well apply to Dolar's own project of bringing forth the elusive qualities of the object voice from behind logocentrism, and to the opera aficionado's aim of highlighting the musical qualities of a beautiful singing voice over the comprehensibility of the words they utter. Before the colon, this first sentence is cast in the passive voice, with no clearly delineated actor who is responsible for drawing the voice forward. The void created by the lack of an agential subject places the emphasis on the action of bringing the voice forward, so that the voice itself takes on the role of both the actor prompted to step forward, and the uncanny frontrunner of a force that originates elsewhere, and which takes its force from its spatial dislocation. Furthermore, this first sentence in both its halves is organized around visual space through which this voice traverses. Before the colon, the voice is brought “from the background to the forefront,” terms which are both artistic and theatrical in their spatial specificity. If the spatial progression suggests an actor crossing the stage towards the footlights, underneath the visual image is the whisper of that actor's spoken lines brought forward from the back of the house, spreading throughout the theater in their sonority. Yet this motion entails, specifically, a view of the process as a “reversal, or a structural illusion,” a repetition which seemingly solidifies the spatial complex surrounding the concept of the voice. The word “illusion,” unlike, say, “hallucination” or “misconception,” is a specifically visual mis-recognition, while the “structural” implies both that the structure of a voice traversing a theatrical space is illusory, and that the illusion itself takes on a visual structure.

After the colon, the voice, despite its apparent ephemerality, “appears” in seemingly visual glory as the “locus” of true expression, a term which is visual in the specifically spatial register of a geometrical point, from which the disembodied voice expresses with profundity “what cannot be said [but] can nevertheless be conveyed” (31). From the vantage point of the voice's “locus of true expression,” the unsayable is dispersed outward from the very specific to the very expansive, like the first notes of an opera spreading from the vocal cords of a single singer to expand acoustically across an entire concert hall.With “conveyed”, the sentence ends as it begun, with visual terms that connote a traversal of a specifically delineated space. Both these phrases, however, surround the spatial and visual core of the sentence: “illusion.” Situated in the middle of the sentence, this is an illusion that visually pulls both ways, as if one were looking through each end of a pair of binoculars in turn, so that the object of vision was first remarkably distant, and then unusually proximate.

The final sentence of this series continues the metaphorical binocular optics, as a scale of visual binaries that pulls both ways, into the specificity of the very small as well as the profundity of the very large. The sentence begins with a gesture towards the ocular trope with the simple verb phrase “it seems,” where the voice serves as the antecedent of the pronoun. This visual resemblance serves to reiterate, rather than simply produce, the “link with nature” which forms one half of the visual paradigm, reaching back into the minutia of a mythically distant and yet literarily specific, past, a “paradise lost.” “On the other hand,” in the second half of this sentence, the dichotomy reaches in the “opposite direction, as it were,” stretching infinitely upwards in order to “transcend language” (31), so that the two directional registers are situated neatly on the radial symmetry of the body. If the beginning of this second sentence posits music's ability to initiate a return to the specificity of a natural, paradisaical past, the second half of the sentence promises a “musical ascent to divinity,” an upwards trajectory from whose “elevation” one can gain the properly immense perspective on the dimensions of “limited, worldly concerns.” This double-optics system resembles the medieval scale of arranging life in visual, hierarchical ascensions from animal to angel, with man securely ensconced in the center of the concentric series. Yet here, there is a blind spot at the heart of these visual representations, a blind spot that is occupied exactly by the uncanny voice. The optical oppositions of the very large and the very small, each situated “on the other hand” of the other, have no body between them, but only the voice which echoes with profoundly illusory transcendental meaning. The structures of bringing the voice into the foreground is itself an illusion, both from within the perspective of the fetishization of the voice that this paragraph details, and within the larger aims of this chapter and this work. Through verbs like “being,” “appears,” and “seems,” the passage sets a reader into a viewer's position relative to the voice, hence himself both evoking and obfuscating the object voice within a realm of visual metaphors in the very act of commenting on the ways in which music does the same thing. Despite its ecclesiastical specificity, the passage functions to open the “gap that cannot be filled” through a series of visual metaphors which obfuscate the voice at its very moment of fetishized prominence.