Possibility, Performance, Politics: On the Voice and Transformation
Possibility, Performance, Politics: On the Voice and Transformation
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可能性、表现、政治:论声音与转型
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发表时间:
2017
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影响因子:
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通讯作者:
Mickey Vallee
中科院分区:
文献类型:
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作者:
Mickey Vallee
Based in his theory of superego internalization, which punishes the subject for failing to accomplish impossible tasks, the voice became both the medium and the idea for Sigmund Freud’s notorious ‘talking cure’. He encountered, with Joseph Breuer, a symptom of hysteria which he later regarded as its defining cue, when female patients would lose all capacity to voice, which they regarded as a representation of an impasse in their capacity for relation: a lost voice would come to represent a ‘relational impasse’ between an analaysand’s inner image of self and an external image of civilization with which this internal understanding would appear radically incompatible. Voice loss, however, was considered recoverable, should the analysand rediscover their resonance under a clinical context in which they accounted for repressed traumas to their analyst: the patient was thus ‘freed’ by the return of their voice. The result of the recovery was, however, a radical reorganization in the analysand’s understanding of their inner world. Freud, therefore, concluded that voice loss manifested a relational loss, conceptualising the voice as at once an object of analysis, the symptom, cause and cure. This psychoanalytic theme of the voice as the nexus of embodiment and estrangement (a ‘voice estrangement hypothesis’) finds its most protected position in contemporary cultural psychoanalysis, defended recently by Mladen Dolar as an alienated and ambivalent component of subject constitution. Dolar describes voice as an ‘impossible object’ which divides the interior and exterior, yet maintains a position as a mediator between this division, ultimately bridging them while cutting them from one another. The voice is, according to others who share in the psychoanalytic foundation, at once autonomous to the body that produces it while responsible ultimately for that body’s negation, exalted as a specter of subjectivity that Michel Chion has termed ‘acousmatic’: a voice in search of a subject. Thus, the kind of ‘speaking’ that is proffered by the voice, to return to Dolar, is one of a pervasive ventriloquism. Dolar hears the voice as a ‘bodily missile which separates itself from the body and spreads around’, all the while alluding to the interiority of the body, the stomach, gut, chest, throat, larynx, tongue, mouth and breath while entering into a zone of proximity with the listener which forbids knowing those details precisely.