Everyone is a Ventriloquist

An Interview with Mladen Dolar

http://metropolism.com/magazine/2009-no2/everyone-is-a-ventriloquist/

Aaron Schuster:
One of themes running through A Voice and Nothing More [see above] – perhaps the main theme – is that, from the psychoanalytic viewpoint, the voice is not a form of self-affection or self-presence, but precisely an obstacle to the subject’s identity: it is the objective correlate of what Lacan calls the split subject. Part of the difficulty of grasping the voice lies in its peculiar topology, which you describe as a precarious border between the inside and the outside: while the voice emanates from within the body, it is also a part of the world, an uncontrollable outside, a ‘missile’ with its own trajectory. My voice is never simply my own, but there is always, as you note, a ‘minimum of ventriloquism’; it is not so much I who speaks, but rather I am spoken, the voice speaks in and through me. How strongly do you see this notion linked with psychopathology? Is not the paradigmatic case of the voice in psychoanalysis that of auditory hallucination, an extreme instance in which the voice appears as a form of otherness or hetero-affection?

Mladen Dolar:
‘As far as the general argument of my book is concerned, your question states it very well, and I couldn’t put it better myself. You also point to what I see myself as a certain deficiency of my book, namely the question of the status of the voice in psychosis. This is indeed, as far as the analytic practice is concerned, one of the most frequent and spectacular tell-tale signs of psychosis, presenting probably the most compelling instance of the voice as an intruder, the alien kernel which immediately imposes itself as real. It points to the sheer impossibility of sorting out the inner and the outer, for the voice heard is experienced as more intimate than the inner and more compelling than any exterior voice. In this sense, there is something psychotic in every voice, and psychosis only amplifies, or rather distils something which is usually kept at bay – the difficulty of distinguishing the inner and the outer and the persistent ambiguity of this division.

A simple reason for this lack in my book is that, having no clinical expertise and technical knowledge, I lack the competence to elaborate it, beyond embroidering on what many illustrious clinicians have already said. But this reason is not enough, and it is not enough to confine the voice to psychopathology. This compelling voice beyond one’s power has had a long history as a divine sign, before it became a matter of psychopathology. Consider the paradigmatic figure of Socrates, a man whose ‘hearing voices’ is intimately linked to the very foundation of philosophy (I have dealt with him far too briefly in the book and have tried to remedy this since). Lacan speaks somewhere of 19th century psychography1, which took Socrates as a case of madness (as Lélut put it, roughly, “If a philosopher claimed today to be in direct communication with divinity and to hear its voice—would we appoint him a chair in the University or a cell in Charenton?” Indeed).

The history of hearing voices was intertwined, up to modern times, with the history of divine signs, the authority of wonders and the wonders of authority, which could have the shattering resonance of Joan of Arc, or of the mystic visions (and Lacan had a special predilection for the discourse of the mystics). Hegel says somewhere that the Socratic “daemon stays in the middle between the exteriority of the oracle and the pure interiority of spirit”.2 This puts the question in “ontological” and structural terms rather than in terms of psychopathology, and the point of psychoanalysis is not so much to explain psychopathology, but rather to restore its ‘ontological’ value, as it were. Modern spiritual interiority allows for no divine voices and relegates them to nut-cases, and no doubt Schreber, this great ‘hearer of voices’ [a judge who around 1900 took notes on his mental illness, later interpreted by Freud – ed.], can serve as a paramount modern nut-case, endowed with the value of a harbinger, a token of modernity, a very troubling sign of a transformation of authority, investiture, the function of the father. His “hearing voices” has an emblematic value—this is also taken up by Deleuze, and I will just point out Eric Santner’s “definitive” book on it, My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity 3 So to answer your question properly I would have to write another chapter on the history of hearing voices from Socrates to Schreber, and if Socrates presents the foundational moment of philosophy, then we must bear in mind Schreber’s proximity to the foundational moment of psychoanalysis.’

Aaron Schuster:
One of the main ideas explored in your book is this ambivalence of the voice, at once terrifying and pacifying, siren song and call of conscience, vehicle of the law and its transgression. One could conclude that the voice’s ethico-political significance is strictly ‘undecideable’. However, beyond this ambivalence there also seems to be a ‘good’ voice, which you qualify as ‘mere voice’, ‘pure enunciation’, or the silent voice of the drive. This voice compels us to assume responsibility, but – crucially – without dictating what form our engagement should take. This looks like a mixture of Heideggerian authenticity and Badiousian fidelity, though here what one must assume responsibility for is the unconscious.

Mladen Dolar:
‘The “object voice” is on the edge, at the crossing. It’s not the voice of the Other, nor the subject’s own voice, but emerges in a strange loop between the two. It is unplaceable, yet one has to ascribe it a place and assume it. Speaking schematically, there is one way which turns it into the point which sustains the Other – hence the figure of the superego, or various figures of political authority; and there is another way which turns it into the pledge of one’s own presence and authenticity, “finding one’s own voice”, as the phrase goes. The two can go together, or even structurally support each other, as Althusser’s concept of interpellation tries to show: finding one’s own “authentic” ego by submitting to the call of the Other, assuming the posture of its addressee. But the subjectivity which is at stake here is something very different from the ego and it emerges with tackling the edge and the crossing point.

So how can one show fidelity to something which is neither the subject nor the Other? Or maintain the authenticity of the experience of “inauthenticity”, so to speak, a dispossession or a dislocation? Both Heidegger and Badiou deal with this in certain ways, very different ways – let’s say with an “alien kernel” as the core of “subjectivity”, although neither would be happy with this formulation – and I am aware of the pitfalls which may lie on the way. If you say “the voice compels us to assume responsibility”, this may be understood as the response to the enigmatic call of the Other which exceeds us, in relation to which one is always responsible and also always deficient. This is the logic of Levinasian ethics, and although it maintains the alterity of the Other as an infinite and enigmatic opening, it still strangely reproduces, in a roundabout way, the logic of what psychoanalysis has called the superego. The Other is an enigma and poses a demand – demand as such, not some positive injunction – and one has to respond, although one can never measure up to it. The responsibility is infinite and it grows with its accomplishment: “The better I accomplish my duty, the less rights I have; the more I am just and the more I am guilty.” 4 So the subject responds, but never enough, never adequately, and the Other infinitely exceeds one’s response, one’s permanent responsibility, reproducing one’s permanent guilt. Psychoanalysis differs from this, it doesn’t sustain the enigma of the Other as an infinite demand, but rather works at dispossessing the Other of its enigma. One could say that the object is the limit of the Other, not something perpetuating its infinity, and that the object doesn’t pertain to the Other any more than it pertains to the subject. It is their link, but this link is a practice, a constant renegotiation of the limit. The voice may not be mine, but it has the power to operate in the Other, to dislocate its enigma and its demand, rather than maintain it as the infinite abyss of otherness and transcendence. Response and responsibility is not quite enough to get to what is at stake in the voice.

To give a more cheerful line on this, one could think of the practice of comedy, which hinges on constant renegotiation of the object between the subject and the Other (as opposed to e.g. Heidegger’s complete lack of comedy, to say the least), and which is closer to the psychoanalytic bone than the usual vision of tragic loss and guilt. This line is magisterially developed by my friend Alenka Zupančič in her book The Odd One In (MIT, 2007).

Aaron Schuster:
You warn a number of times against the aestheticization of the voice, and even give the impression that art, as opposed, for example, to philosophy, does not allow access to the voice in its most radical dimension. On the other hand, you turn to literature, Kafka in particular, in order to gain insight into voice – yet even here, in the story of Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk you find a kind of parable of art’s failure. My question is thus, bluntly put, can there be an ‘art of the voice’, and if so, do you see any examples of it in contemporary art?

Mladen Dolar:
‘I didn’t include a separate chapter in my book on the aesthetics of the voice, along with the ethics, metaphysics, physics, politics of the voice, and in retrospect I am a bit sorry about it, for certain formulations, warning against the inherent fetishization of the voice in music, have given rise to a criticism from various quarters and even raised a suspicion about my hostility to art. Yet, I have co-authored a book called Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek),5 where I deal at great length with the problem of the proper aesthetics of the voice, of staging the voice, of operatic voice as the bearer of social fantasies and its capacity for provoking and registering social transformation. And yes, I am a great opera lover, as well as a follower of various contemporary artistic practices which tackle the voice. In the last months, I participated in a strange exhibit at Manifesta 7 and engaged with the work of VALIE EXPORT, Smadar Dreyfus and Katarina Zdjelar, among others. I am not listing these names as model examples, their work is extremely different, just stating that I gladly engage, theoretically and practically, with people working as artists on the voice in various manners.
Is art doomed? Absolutely not, and the parable of the singer Josephine is there as a warning against a certain trap: the confinement of art to a particular glorified place within the social, turning it into a cultural good. One could even roughly say, although this is a bit quick, that culture basically functions as a domestification of art, endowing it with sense, a higher meaning, and allotting it a socially recognized and codified place. To worship art in this way is to condemn it. It only exists as a constant question mark displacing its own boundaries (“a social antithesis to society”, to again quote Adorno), and hence necessarily trespassing on the political.’

Aaron Schuster:
The final chapter of your book Kafka’s Voices ends with a tantalizing suggestion about how we might rethink freedom from a psychoanalytic perspective. As you remark, ‘freedom’ is hardly a word that looms large in Kafka’s universe, and yet there it is at the conclusion of Investigations of a Dog – you even go so far as to call it Kafka’s fin mot, the key term that in its very absence resounds throughout his writing. The same might be said of Freud and Lacan. Both of them rarely speak of freedom, and when they do, it is usually in a dismissive way; Freud denounces free will as a narcissistic fantasy, and Lacan famously stated (inaccurately, I might add) ‘I have never spoken of freedom’, letting it be understood that he considered such talk naïve humanist ideology, a misrecognition of the subject’s radical dependence on the Other. Yet one could argue that the whole wager of psychoanalysis is precisely to create a ‘freer’ relation to those desires and fantasies that move one so inexorably. I wonder if you could elaborate here a little on the conclusion to your book: what is the new conception of freedom you see in the wake of Kafka and Freud?

Mladen Dolar:
‘Lacan was notoriously a man of extremely difficult style, but this arduous side was as if counterbalanced by his great talent to produce a number of short and striking slogans (like “The Woman doesn’t exist” or “There is no sexual relationship”). And one of these slogans is Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche: “There is a cause only in something that doesn’t work”, 6 or “There is a cause only in what limps”. The line is paradoxical and I suppose counterintuitive. For it would seem that causality is what works in a network of causes and effects which constitute the basis of regularity and law, and so that which doesn’t work or doesn’t add up would appear to be a breach of causality, a crack in the causal chain. Yet it is in the place of this break, this glitch, that Lacan places the question of the cause. This is indeed something that has to do with the very origins of psychoanalysis, since the first phenomena that it dealt with were tiny things like slips of the tongue, or dreams as slight slips of conscious life, something appearing in a crack of normal causality, a momentary hitch, which hinted at another kind of cause, irreducible to both the causality of nature or the intentional causality of consciousness.

Yet, Freud insisted on the strict determination of psychic life, so that even such slight phenomena must have a determinist explanation, and therefore it would seem that there is no space for freedom. Still, what is a slip determined by? Is the unconscious the name of another causality determining us behind our backs? If we look at it more closely, we can see that the basic problem is that no such substantive, objective, independent causality exists, that it cannot be spelled out as a latent content or a latent cause simply to be unearthed behind the manifest one. Rather, the spelling out of the latent content makes the paradox of the cause even greater: it shows that the distorted form of the unconscious formations cannot be explained away with the latent content, so that the form itself is endowed with a surplus of distortion which testifies to a glitch, a crack of contingency within the regularity of laws and rules.

This is where the object appears, precisely the object as cause, “object cause of desire”, as Lacan would insist, and the object voice is one of the ways of getting to it. So the object appears as cause at the point of the missing cause, and there is subjectivity only insofar as there is a missing link, a glitch in the seamless chain. And this is the trouble with the talk about freedom in psychoanalysis: it is not to be posed in terms of the freedom of the will or as an abandonment of determinism – relying on sheer will-power or glorifying the decision can easily lead to condoning repression and the self-delusion of the ego. It is only by working through, by repeating, by engaging with the object that one can work towards the point where necessity and contingency overlap, and where one is far more free than one can imagine, or more than it is supposed by the usual theories of subjective freedom. This is where Kafka takes on a special value, for it seems that his universe is the epitome of non-freedom, of total closure and entrapment, yet he works all the time towards an opening in midst of the very closure. One could say that what both Kafka and Freud have in common is the following: to look very closely at the ways of entrapment, and through this to work towards the way where the seemingly objective causality crushing us itself involves contingency and subjectivity, and the way we are inscribed in it gives us more power than we could ever hope for.

Notes
1 Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts, London: Penguin, 1979, p. 258.
2 TWA 18, p. 495
3 Santner, Eric, My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, Princeton University Press, 1996.
4 Levinas, Emmanuel, Totalité et infini, Paris: Le livre de poche, 1987, p. 274.
5 Dolar, Mladen, and Slavoj Žižek, Opera’s Second Death, New York: Routledge, 2002.
6 Lacan, op. cit., p. 22.

Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, MIT 2006, ISBN 9780262541879

Aaron Schuster is an art critic and philosopher based in Brussels