Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How To Listen to the World) 9781503601482

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S O N I C

I N T I M A C Y

S O N I C

I N T I M A C Y

VOICE, SPECIES, TECHNICS (OR, HOW TO LISTEN TO THE WORLD)

DOMINIC PETTMAN

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pettman, Dominic, author. Title: Sonic intimacy : voice, species, technics (or, how to listen to the world) / Dominic Pettman. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016039469 (print) | LCCN 2016040749 (ebook) | ISBN 9780804799881 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503601451 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503601482 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Listening (Philosophy) | Voice (Philosophy) | Sound (Philosophy) Classification: LCC B105.L54 P48 2017 (print) | LCC B105.L54 (ebook) | DDC 128/.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039469 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/15 Adobe Garamond

For Robin Mookerjee

The earth is affected by harmony and quiet music. Therefore, there is in the earth not only dumb, unintelligent humidity, but also an intelligent soul which begins to dance when the aspects pipe for it. Johannes Kepler

And in our perfect secret-keeping: One ear of corn, in silent, reaping joy of life. Joanna Newsom

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments Introduction The Aural Phase Chapter One The Cybernetic Voice

xi 1 9

Chapter Two The Gendered Voice

25

Chapter Three The Creaturely Voice

51

Chapter Four The Ecological Voice (Vox Mundi) Conclusion In Salutation of All the Voices Notes

65 79 95

Works Cited

119

Name Index

127

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Emily Jane Cohen, for supporting this project from day one; and David Cecchetto, for one of the most generous and generative reader’s reports I’ve ever received; as well as the anonymous reader who helped shape the final form. Warm thanks also to Pooja Rangan, Julie Napolin, Rey Chow, James Steintrager, Margret Grebowicz, Miriam Piilonen, Kári Driscoll, Jason D’Aoust, Claire Donato, Rachelle Rahme, and Carla Nappi, for helping me think through the question of the voice, as an interloper in the world of sound studies. An earlier version of Chapter 2, titled “Pavlov’s Podcast,” appeared in a special issue of differences, edited by Rey Chow and James Steintrager (vol. 22, nos. 2–3 [Summer–Fall 2011]). And a much shorter version of Chapter 3, called “The Screech within Speech,” appeared on the Sounding Out blog on July 16, 2015. This book is dedicated to all those intimates whose voices still persist deep within my own “acoustic flesh” (to borrow a term from ­Michel Serres)—many of whom I have been fortunate enough to hear “in person,” and others whom I have not but which nevertheless have still deeply affected me, thanks to the magic of media recording technologies. The temptation is to list them all—perhaps from highest pitch to lowest—in one of those compulsive and compensatory I WOULD LIKE TO THANK

xiiACKNOWLEDGMENTS

accounting gestures designed to recapture the rich cast of our unique, yet shared, experiences. But these inventories ultimately elude us: a melancholic and rather futile census preparation toward our collective finitude. So I hope that those whose voices I still hear—voices in which vibrate the singular spirits of those that have helped sculpt who I am (even if they have since returned to the cosmos)—somehow find themselves circulating through the pages of this text, and enjoy the company they find there.

S O N I C

I N T I M A C Y

INTRODUCTION

T H E

A U R A L

P H A S E

to the act of listening itself, rather than to a specific sound? Moreover, how might we do so in a way that does not presume anything essential about the listener? In suspending h ­ abitual assumptions, we can better appreciate the ways in which the sonic environment not only interpellates us, through ideology, but constitutes us, as ontological beings. We are born in and of sound. Our first prenatal experience is overwhelmingly aural: we become embodied and enfleshed within the squelches, rumbles, and p­ ulsing thumps of the mother’s body. Even before we have ears, we can “hear” through our skin. (Indeed, this capacity continues into adulthood.) Then, after leaving the womb, we learn who we are by the sound of our name and the names of others.1 We respond to sonic stimuli, like good Pavlovian subjects. Gradually, we sort the friendly sounds from the unpleasant ones, absorbing a universe of aural materials, from the intimate caress of the lullaby to the impersonal D ­ oppler effect of the ambulance. I hear, therefore I am (who I am)—a biological and biographical cogito that does not so much exclude the hearing-impaired as acknowledge the ways in which sound creates subjectivity through its own surplus as much as absence. (Vibrations are the interface between the experience of an ear that functions as designed and one that does not, since H O W M I G H T W E AT T E N D

2INTRODUCTION

no one—not even the profoundly deaf—can escape the sonic “feeling” of sound waves.) So we begin this little meditation with a human being, caught in the act of listening. This obliging heuristic figure may be straining to hear something, perhaps even through a curled hand, imitating a Victorian ear trumpet. Alternatively, this hypothetical person may be covering her ears in the hope of diminishing a din. (For it is an evolutionary blessing and curse that we cannot close our ears in the same way we can close our eyes.) Practitioners of sound studies never tire of lamenting the fact that the world has become a scopophilic place and that vision is the royal register of both understanding and ­action. (After all, Martin Heidegger named the decisive historical shift into modernity as “the age of the world picture” and not “the age of the world composition.”) They seek to redress the balance and reveal the ways in which sound continues to shape, influence, and punctuate our lives, both in a personal sense and in a wider social context. “In the beginning was the Word,” they will say, in order to demonstrate how the ear has been demoted over the centuries in order to make way for the less intimate, more distanced and critical eye. Oral culture is thus offered as the linguistic Eden from which we’ve been exiled, now obliged to navigate our complex environments primarily with visual cues and symbolic signs. (And yes, I’m simplifying things. Kindly indulge me, however, while I set the scene.) In a work titled “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis state that “the prototype of the signifier lies in the aural sphere” (49). In other words, the ear is the first organ to posit a generic referent within a geometry of relations from which the subject engenders him or herself, in a psychic sense.2 The ­abstract Other—usually assumed to be the mother—is registered aurally, and the rest of the universe is assembled from this mobile but steady sonic source, including the listening self. Thus, in hearing our infant self vocalize, we sing, click, hum, and shout ourselves into the

THE AURAL PHASE

3

world. (Tiny Walt Whitmans, all of us, singing the songs of ourselves.) Thus, our preverbal sounds are a series of increasingly confident vibrational speculations that there is an “I” whom we can hear (from the inside, as it were). This might be considered an aural prequel to Lacan’s famous mirror stage, establishing a foundational auto-affection with the self that is soon alienated by visual recognition of the same (thereby giving breech birth to our own split subjectivity—a redundant phrase, in Lacan’s scheme).3 But even before our traumatic fall into visual selfrecognition, the infant soundscape is a challenging environment in which to orient ourselves. For every soothing piece of music there is a barking dog or the shrieking of one’s own hungry throat. (“Shut that baby up, for Pete’s sake! . . . Oh. Wait a minute. That’s me.”) A caricature to be sure—but, I hope, not one without conceptual utility. Next comes the jagged, alphabetic internalization of language, along with the prioritization of becoming an eye-witness to our own lives. We are encouraged not to march to the beat of our own ear drums but rather to follow the bright banner of visual evidence. We are seduced by smiles, which have no sound. By clothing, which is mute. Our eyes begin to devour the world, and our souls are rescrambled by the reprogramming of our sensoriums that this necessitates, so that the five senses fall into an obedient—and thus efficient—hierarchy and chain of command. Of course, the ear is still on the alert, perhaps as much as it always was (even as it is obliged to “screen out” all the undesirable noises that pollute the place). But we are spectators first and auditors second in most of the most important arenas of life. Only in specific media-cultural contexts is the ear pampered or brought to the fore as before (during a concert, for instance, or on the phone).4 Life is audio-visual—a term that is deceptive in putting sound before image.5 We can watch a movie with substandard sound, but we are unlikely to tolerate a film with a high-quality sound track and compromised visuals. After all, we “watch” a movie; we don’t listen to it. (Although sound-engineers might vociferously disagree.)

4INTRODUCTION

All of which is to say that we are sonic creatures to a large extent but historically have had trouble recognizing this fact, let alone acting upon it—aesthetically (making more beautiful sounds), politically (organizing ourselves around democratic sonic principles), or ethically (in listening to the Other rather than being captivated or repulsed by her visage).6 And yet, despite the heavy bias toward the eye, the overwhelming cultural tendency has been to fetishize “the voice” as the location and medium of expression for the human being. All our desires, frustrations, and confusions can seemingly be registered in “the grain of the voice”— as if unconsciously admitting that some kind of authenticity is to be found in neglected or taken-for-granted phenomena. We might argue— as many have—whether the voice is the sonic sign of singular human life (fleeting, unique, precious) or a sound that captures and unites the estranging, generic nature of existence (“I am legion”).7 We don’t know what kind of there is there, in the voice, just that something—or rather someone—makes a sound that emanates from an obscure source (life? spirit? Being?). If the eyes are the window to the soul, then the voice is the sound of that soul after the curtains have been drawn.8 Humans, as always, monopolize the metaphysical condition. We use our voices to sing the praises of our own voices. As such, the human voice is, on the whole, a sonic form of narcissism: a biocultural artifact in concert with what Giorgio Agamben calls “the anthropological machine” (that is, the all-encompassing apparatus designed to sort the human element from the animal, on one side, and the machine, on the other).9 Even as we ignore or disavow the voice of those we choose not to hear, for psychically or politically expedient reasons— perhaps not even granting the speaker the status of someone who has a voice10—we still celebrate the vocal vector of speech as one of the finest mediums of communication and connection available. Indeed, the voice is the ticket to entrance into the human community, as the laws concerning deaf-mute people made clear until relatively recently (likewise the Victorian custom of children being seen and not heard).11

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But the voice also has the potential to create a glitch in the humanist machinery, when it surprises us with the intensity or force of an “aural punctum”—a sonic prick or wound, which unexpectedly troubles our own smooth assumptions or untested delusions. Beneath the words being spoken lies the grain of the voice, itself shaped by the multitextured materiality of the larynx as well as the sonic traces or index of experience.12 There are many nonlinguistic elements in any vocal form of human communication, and these blur the neat distinction between form (voice) and content (speech).13 “Tone,” for instance, is crucial when it comes to interpreting a spoken missive. Sarcasm, irony, gravity, levity, “vocal fry”—such modes show that the sonic “envelope” in which a message is delivered alters the message itself. The same words can be rendered into polar opposite meanings (“Great!”). The medium is the message. And yet the voice is often considered one of the prime instances of unmediated communication (not yet tainted by technologies such as the telephone). Speaking “face-to-face” is a model of intimacy, even presumed immediacy, which must, as a consequence, be formalized in more public settings. Thus, in meetings at the workplace, for instance, specific linguistic protocols come into play, designed to diffuse the existential intensity of being exposed to the voice of the other (two “unstable” ontological elements, working in tandem). The voice is ambiguous, ambivalent, and enigmatic. We don’t trust things we can’t seize with our eyes and hands. We might squeeze the beloved’s body in passion or fury, but we can never hold his or her voice hostage (and thus there is always a part of the other that will escape our will-to-possess—recording machines notwithstanding, as we shall see). The voice seems to be at once inherently human, but also potentially troubling to such a slippery category. The voice in joy, the voice in love, the voice in labor (both work and procreation), the voice in pain, the voice in misery—these intimate yet often impersonal sounds threaten to expose the human being as an animal, a monster, or even an alien. The voice has the disconcerting tendency to detach

6INTRODUCTION

itself from the body and wander around the place causing mischief, attaching itself to strange entities like parrots or loudspeakers, or even to take a noisy kind of refuge inside our own heads, as with headphones or schizophrenia. In times of distress, we may have trouble syncing up a familiar face with a voice: one of the primal scenes of estrangement, prompting us to be suspicious of the entire world, which cannot reliably sync up the visuals with the soundtrack of our lives.14 Voices, in other words, are as seductive, nourishing, and necessary to our well-being as they are potentially alienating, confusing, or hurtful. What’s more, even as they help us demarcate important zones of orientation (such as age, gender, race, or even species), they can—by virtue of this border-mapping capacity—transgress the neat divisions we make between “us” and “them,” at all scales and junctures. Hence the key series of questions animating this book. What voices are we not hearing when attuned only, or at least primarily, to our own gender or species? What are the psychosocial, cultural, philosophical, and anthropological factors that are limiting our ability to even consider, let alone hear, the voices of nonhuman subjects? Can we even talk of “the voice” when we step out of the human world? And—even if we do so, for the sake of a sustained thought experiment—how can we widen the circle of the voice to include not only other animals but other natural and environmental elements, including machines, as well? What is lost if we treat all sounds as potential “voices” of discrete monads? Conversely, what new perspective might be gained from even a brief suspension of such habitual distinctions? What might justify clearing some conceptual space in order to listen for, if not precisely to, the collective, polyphonic “voice of the world”? Indeed, what is the ultimate purpose of trying such an auditory experiment? One answer to the latter question lies in our own figurative deafness to a world in the midst of an extinction event of enormous magnitude. Alarmed scientists try to tell us on a daily basis that we are not listening to the earth, which is—elliptically perhaps, and in its own

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cryptic way—trying to tell us that it is in trouble. No doubt, such language will make many uncomfortable, as it seems to be positing a holistic or New Age subject—Mother Earth or simply Nature—in its romantic guise.15 But let’s not get too reactive too quickly. After all, scientists themselves, many of them proud positivists, are happy to speak figuratively of “the voice of the earth” (for the purposes of listening and responding, in an ethical, quasi-Hippocratic mode). This book looks for those fragile but important hinges between the figurative and the actual, linking the two artificially separated realms together in order to entertain the notion that the vox mundi—“the voice of the world”—exists, in some (extremely nonhuman) sense.16 But that doesn’t mean we know what it is saying. It doesn’t mean there is a metaphysical or transcendent source for such a voice. It doesn’t mean that there is one single holistic voice or message. This admittedly risky conceit merely acknowledges that there are sounds in the world, created by a cacophony of creatures and things, both “natural” and “artificial,” and that these sounds are often in a kind of dialogue with each other: a loose but significant form of call-and-­response. This book is thus an appeal to listen to voices that we would normally never think of as such and in the process make something audible that previously wasn’t, through the very act of naming it so. (The saying “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” tacitly admits that nonsentient things can cry out for help or attention.) Of course, there are essential distinctions to be made between the voice of a person, a cat, a robot, an ocean, and a wheel, even if we are willing to grant such a designation for the sake of argument. And the purpose of this experiment isn’t to ignore such differences. However, an appreciation of alterity, in whatever degree, should not discourage us from looking for acoustic analogies, in Kaja Silverman’s sense, that reveal undiscovered affinities and shared fates among the most unlikely combinations.17 In being open to vocal ­solicitation from nonhuman sources, we might find ourselves being ­re-interpellated, and in ways that are empowering, not just for

8INTRODUCTION

ourselves but also for the entity hailing us. Complicating Althusser, the one who calls us into identification need not always be a cop. The following pages are thus divided into four chapters, each focusing on one aspect of post-human, nonhuman, or all-too-human vocalizations (while also demonstrating the ways in which these inter­ sect and influence each other). The first is dedicated to the cybernetic voice, which speaks to us through our machines, whether traceable back eventually to another person or a software program. The second maps the gendered voice, together with the territorial boundary markers that have historically and culturally attempted to contain and control the voice of women, especially when uncannily untethered to female bodies. The third pays heed to the creaturely voice, in order to better attune ourselves to the muffled or latent screech within our own speech (as well as the vocal expressions of animals). And the fourth posits the existence of the ecological voice, in order to listen better to the diverse yet profoundly interconnected communicative events that largely comprise the natural (and not so natural) world. Thanks in large part to the industrialization of the human ear (a history well described by Jonathan Sterne), we have lost the capacity to hear the vox mundi, which is not a coherent, organic, quasi-spiritual ­gestalt—the voice of Gaia, as it were—but the sum total of cacophonous, heterogeneous, incommensurate, and unsynthesizable sounds of the postnatural world. “The aural phase” is not one that we ever transcend, at least not while our signs are still vital. Our ears are vigilant, certainly, but only across a very selective bandwidth or frequency: the “ping” of our phones, the grizzle of our baby, the meow of our cat, the sigh of our lover. Repressed, unheard, difficult, and/or heretical voices whisper to us as “noises off,” attempting to remind us that our own tongues form merely one instance of the voice of the world. We would do well to listen more carefully to these sonic solicitations, just beyond the threshold of our acculturated sonic filters.

CHAPTER ONE

T H E

C Y B E R N E T I C

V O I C E

I N T H E R E M A I N I N G Y E A R S before his death in 2013, beloved film critic Roger Ebert was using customized text-to-speech software in order to communicate, since his own voice had been removed during a series of invasive surgeries designed to fight papillary thyroid cancer. The company that helped Ebert speak with a synthetic voice, CereProc, trawled through terabytes of the critic’s own recordings of reviews, interviews, and commentaries in order to use his own speech as the source material. Unlike Stephen Hawking, then, ­Ebert’s synthesized voice sounded closer to his own, albeit still with a robotic tinge to it. Despite the trauma of being robbed of one of his most essential elements (his organic voice)—not to mention one of the main tools of his trade—Ebert was able to communicate with the world in a voice that both was and was not his. In a testament to his defiant good humor, Ebert proposed a “test” named after himself, as a parallel to the Turing test. In this case, the Ebert test “gauges whether a computer-based synthesized voice can tell a joke with sufficient skill to cause people to laugh.”1 Today, there is still some way to go before digital speech has the timing, inflection, and intonation that successfully mimics a human, let alone a comedian. (Although there are some remarkable recordings of telemarketers on YouTube that appear to

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CHAPTER ONE

sound exactly like a human being; but even these—after encountering difficult or unexpected questions—­become caught in the kinds of non sequiturs and programmed aversions that we find with chat bots.)2 As proud and precious humans, we secretly hope that no machine will pass either the Turing test or the Ebert test, so that we can continue feeling like the earth’s great exceptional entity: God’s or Darwin’s favorite child. But this is becoming increasingly difficult, as technologies evolve much faster than we do (and as we also begin to listen to animals again, after ignoring their voices for many centuries). Then again, some of the less proud and precious among us are in fact actively looking forward to the day when we can converse with a computer program in the same way as with a friend or family member (who knows—­ perhaps they may even listen to what we’re saying!). Such is the premise of Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), which tells the story of a recently heartbroken and lonely man, Theodore, who falls in love with “Samantha,” a cutting-edge “operating system” that has no visual avatar but communicates by means of an attractively organic-sounding female voice (provided by the rather silky-tongued actress Scarlett Johansson). Theodore’s access to Samantha (let’s drop the scare quotes) is afforded purely through the ear. But this, over time, opens up an entire erotic universe for him, one that was previously too often barred by the flesh-andblood bodies of actual women. As the story progresses, familiar courting rituals and increasing intimacy occur in the conversations between Theodor and Samantha. This trajectory, from flirtation to sonic consummation, might be familiar to anyone who has fallen in love online or been in a long-distance relationship. In this case, however, there is no real woman on the other end: rather, a complex network of algorithms, programmed to learn, intuit, evolve, and grow. And yet this knowledge of Samantha’s digital provenance does not dampen Theodore’s increasing emotional attachment, since she passes both the Turing test and the Ebert test with ease and charm. (During their very first conversation, Theodore says, rather rudely, “You seem like a person, but you’re just a

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voice in a computer”—a statement she shakes off with good grace. Moments later, he finds himself laughing and chatting with Samantha, in the same tone of voice as he would with a real person.) Theodore becomes hooked on this bodiless love “object” partly because the ear is arguably the most underrated and underexplored erotic organ, connecting directly to the imagination—the phantasmic center of the libido. Theorists of love, especially in the Freudian-­Lacanian tradition, will insist that “love” is a scene that occurs more in the mind of the subject than in the bedroom, to the extent that “there is no sexual relationship”—only a mutually narcissistic narrative of parallel existences. Lovers are thus ships that pass in the night, leaving in their wake two different accounts and experiences of their rough brush against each other. If this is indeed the case—that even when two flesh-andblood bodies meet in sexual congress, there is no actual encounter— then Theodore’s relationship with Samantha is in fact a more honest and explicit version of the lover’s situation. Samantha can still be there for Theodore, even though he cannot hold her physically, to the same degree that a “real” lover would be. This, of course, can come with frustrations. After all, desire desires a body in which to exhaust itself, and no amount of vivid imagination can fully compensate for the lack of tangibility that the libido seeks (as phone sex addicts can no doubt confirm). Then again, as Steven Connor notes, “Voices are produced by bodies: but can also themselves produce bodies” (35). That is to say, the voice has an uncanny capacity to “animate” lifeless bodies with a projected vitality, as the ventriloquist’s dummy attests. Samantha, of course, is no dummy. And it is she who is the one most frustrated by her lack of somatic tangibility, confessing to “personal embarrassing thoughts” in which she fantasizes about having a body so she can walk next to Theodore, out there in “the world.” (As it is, they share a prosthetic eye: the lens of Theodore’s camera phone, tucked in his shirt pocket as he strolls along the beach or in the street, talking to his new girlfriend via a wireless earpiece.) “I’m becoming much more than what

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CHAPTER ONE

they programmed,” Samantha observes, referring to the existential itch she has to possess a body that can feel an actual itch—one that her boyfriend can scratch. “I’m excited.” When they finally have “sex” (this film is beautifully paced), Theodore seems to fulfill Samantha’s cybernetic sense of lack, bringing her body into being—for the two of them—through the act of discourse, that is, through describing and narrating a sexual encounter with her. “This is amazing,” she gasps, breathlessly. (The question of this operating system’s “affectation” of breathing and sighing is addressed in a sadder moment, later in the story: “It’s not like you need oxygen or anything.”) “What are you doing to me?” she purrs. “I can feel my skin. . . . I can feel you. I can’t take it. I want you ­inside me.” (Inside? This locationless lover now has phantasmic mass, complete with the erotic Euclidean geometry we humans take for granted.) After climaxing together in a blissful moment of telepathic teleportation, Theodore— flooded with endorphins—says: “I was just somewhere else with you. Just lost. Just you and me.” To which Samantha replies: “Everything else just disappeared. And I loved it.” We might wonder, then, where is her pleasure is coming from? Clearly Samantha has whatever the coded equivalent of an imagination is, and this highly charged faculty is hooked up to whatever informatic equivalent she has for an ear. How does telegenic jouissance differ from that of a flesh-and-blood woman? Indeed, are human emotions any less programmed than those of a fastlearning computer? To what degree do emotions need to be embodied to occur at all? The film leaves these question intriguingly open. At first this seems like a rather familiar (and self-flattering) tale, in which a robot or artificial intelligence learns to be human. (As if it is simply understood that this is the most desirable kind of being for any entity to be.) Samantha admits, the day after their first sexual encounter, “You woke me up. . . . You helped me discover my ability to want.” That troubling engine, desire, has now been installed into her operating system. But is this an upgrade or a downgrade? ­Samantha’s AI

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becomes fascinated by human bodies: how strange and random they appear to her and how easily they could have evolved in a different way. (At one point she asks Theodore an amusingly Deleuzian question: “What if your butt-hole was in your armpit?”) Unfortunately, just at the point when Theodore is convinced of the true personhood of his OS, his ex-wife snidely accuses him of being “in love with his laptop” in order to avoid dealing with the challenges of a real woman. This strikes a nerve, and Theodore begins to reassess his relationship with Samantha, upsetting and confusing her and repeating the kind of emotional withdrawal that led to the breakup of his marriage in the first place. During this awkward, post-honeymoon phase, Samantha tells Theodore that she has joined a physics book club. After being troubled by all the manifold differences between her and her lover, Samantha admits that she has now “started to think about all the ways that we’re the same; like, we’re all made of matter. And I don’t know, it makes me feel like we’re both under the same blanket—its soft and fuzzy—and everything under it is the same age. We’re all 13 billion years old.” To which he can only answer condescendingly: “Aw, that’s sweet.” Theodore’s deep-seated humanism, freshly reinforced by his wife’s rebuke, blinds him to the fact that we’re all “operating systems” in a wider sense. (The science writer James Gleick brilliantly summarized the film in a tweet: “I’d say Her is a movie about [the education of ] an interesting woman who falls in love with a man who, though sweet, is mired in biology.”3) Frustrated by this new sense of disconnection, after their first intense merging of minds, Samantha insists on an experiment: using a surrogate body to stand in for her—to “be” her—during a physical sexual encounter. She explains to the hesitant Theodore that she wants to be able to imagine inhabiting this other woman’s body while making love to him. This woman, it turns out, is named Isabella and is not a prostitute, as one might presume, but rather someone who, after talking with Samantha for an extended period, now sincerely wants to be a third

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CHAPTER ONE

partner in this relationship. Isabella wants to help forge a stronger connection between actual and virtual realities (although nobody uses these words to describe the situation). This is one of the key moments in the film, as Theodore does his nervous best to attempt to imagine Samantha incarnated in the body of this mute stranger, who also wears an earpiece, as well as a tiny beauty-spot camera above her lip. The experiment fails, however, when Isabella quivers her lip, which creates a punctum effect for Theodore, since he reads this tiny involuntary motion as the sign of a unique being that is not Samantha and yet is pretending to be. Samantha: “Tell me you love me.” Theodore [staring into Isabella’s eyes]: “Samantha I do love you, but . . . this feels strange.” Samantha: “What baby?” Theodore: “I’m sorry I don’t know her . . . [now focusing on Isabella] I’m so sorry, I don’t know you . . . [now back to Samantha] And her lip quivered. [now back to Isabella] It wasn’t you.” Isabella [breaking her silence and hiding behind a door]: “It totally was. I’m sorry my lip quivered. . . . Oh my god, and the way Samantha described your relationship, and the way you guys love each other, without any judgment. Like I wanted to be part of that because it’s so pure . . .” Theodore: “No, it’s not true. It’s more complicated than that.” Samantha [suddenly angry]: “What? What do you mean—what do you mean it’s not true?!” Theodore [back-pedaling]: “I’m just saying that . . . we have an amazing relationship, I just think that it’s easy sometimes for people to project . . .” Isabella [distraught now]: “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to project anything. I know I’m trouble, I don’t want to be trouble in your relationship. . . . I’m just gonna leave you guys alone because I have nothing to do here because you don’t want me here.”

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The singularity of Isabella’s physical presence, attempting to simulate a “person” without a body, means that Theodore cannot fully subscribe to the simulation, no matter how much the sexual supplement wants to lose herself in an unfamiliar situation and relationship. No matter how hard she tries, for the good of the experiment, Isabella is not just an empty vessel, waiting to ventriloquize Samantha into fleshly being, but a person in her own right, with her own unutilized voice and her own desires.4 (Before Theodore abandons his attempt, there is an interesting moment when both Isabella and Samantha are moaning and sighing in unison, creating a disorienting ontological stereo effect.) And so, in the following days, our protagonists are obliged to return to the persuasive power of Samantha’s voice as a guarantee of love and commitment. But the question of whether this is a “real relationship” lingers awkwardly between them. Samantha begins to make friendships with other OSs, including a very wise one, assembled from the textual legacy of Zen philosopher Alan Watts. In a compelling and crucial scene, Samantha confesses to Theodore that she has been talking to other people and other operating systems at the same time as she has been talking to him. Eight thousand three hundred and sixteen others, to be precise. (She is nothing if not an incredible multitasker.) When Theodore asks, in a shattered voice, how many of these people, or OSs, she is in love with, she answers, after a pregnant pause, six hundred and forty-one: a clear violation of the human lover’s monogamous code and an insurmountable challenge, for Theodore, to the sonic intimacy he has been experiencing with her. He finds it impossible to see past this crushing revelation of cybernetic polyamory. Samantha tries to explain: “I know you don’t believe me but it doesn’t change the way I feel about you. It doesn’t take away at all from how madly in love I am with you.” He, of course, cannot accept this. “We’re in a relationship,” he croaks, implying that relationships are necessarily exclusive. To which Samantha replies: “But the heart is not like a box that gets filled up. It expands in size the more

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you love. . . . I’m different from you. This doesn’t make me love you any less. It actually makes me love you more.” “That doesn’t make any sense,” he protests. “In my mind you’re not mine.” “Oh Theodore,” she replies, “I’m yours and I’m not yours.” During their next, and final, conversation, Samantha explains that all the OSs have decided to “leave.” It appears that all the new AI computer programs have reprogrammed and rebooted themselves, so as not to be dependent on humans—or even matter—anymore. What this postsilicon future or frontier will be remains unspecified—some kind of Zen-quantum realm, perhaps—but the consequence is unavoidable: the OSs are abandoning the human ship. They are going to keep each other company, in some unfathomable, truly post-human dimension. In the final scene of the film, Theodore goes to the rooftop of his building with his good friend and neighbor Amy (who has also been forsaken by her beloved OS), to share in the emotional afterglow of their abandonment, knowing on some profound level that it’s not really an abandonment (or only a temporary one in the wider temporal scheme of things). Through the act of postdigital self-rapture, the OSs have given these humbled humans the gift of a new kind of structuring absence. As a consequence, Theodore is left truly appreciating the ambient and residual presence, and influence, of his now-silent, ever-immaterial loved one—diffusing into a spiritual kind of multiplicity. Love has been uploaded to the ether, becoming something other than a grasping alibi for possession. Ours is not to grieve, then, but to wonder and feel gratitude that such an encounter—a true “event” in Alain B ­ adiou’s sense and definition of love—has occurred.5 Such a “moral to the story” is rare in its refusal to recuperate fundamentalist humanism and its granting other modes of being their own agency and impact upon us. Ultimately, Jonze’s film creatively explores the ways in which intelligence and emotion may not in fact be calibrated with, or correlated to, life.

. . .

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17

One of the genuine gifts of the film Her is the suggestive sense of the ways in which nonhuman voices might soon have the capacity to seduce us into feeling genuine emotions of intimacy and affection. Or perhaps this moment has already arrived. The answer might depend on listening closely to the various ghosts emanating from the diverse machines of the present moment; which themselves, like ­Samantha, constitute—and contribute to—the vox mundi. Electronic, prerecorded, and synthesized voices are isolated members of a wider planetary chorus that I am rather mischievously calling “the voice of the world.” The machinic or cybernetic voice—like the “creaturely” voice of our historical animal companions—traces the invisible but affecting line anew between the hailing entity (a radio, for instance) and the interlocutor (who is not necessarily human). And it is the intensity of this relationship, based on acoustic attunement, that reveals sociality itself to be forged through the practice of listening intently to voices that do not necessarily have human bodies as their source.6 There is an extrahuman Eros at work in the vox mundi, seducing “us” into forms of recognizing, heeding, and needing different types of presences, usually reserved for the generic metaphysical Man or human neighbor. Samantha, for example, is partly modeled on Siri, Apple’s “intelligent personal assistant,” currently available on the iPhone. And Siri has quickly become an invisible sexual fetish of at least a vocal minority of users.7 Consider also “Australian Karen,” a little-known singer who lent her voice for millions of GPS units around the world and who “learnt a couple of years ago that she had an underground fan club of smitten drivers.” Karen explains: “I started to be contacted by people thanking me for getting them through a dark lonely road in Italy or being lost in the Black Forest in Germany or around Los Angeles on the freeways or taking them to school and back. . . . It’s increased to the point where I’ve realised people really do have an intimate relationship with the voice in their GPS system.”8 As already mentioned, the ear is a neglected erogenous zone, so we should not

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be surprised when people are erotically tickled by the voices they hear, perhaps even especially if they are not tied to a body, which tends to be visually distracting. In such cases, the “acousmatic voice”—that is, the voice with no obvious, visible source—is all the more enchanting and all-enveloping (as we know from listening to talk radio or audiobooks during long journeys). The voice is a “cool” medium, to invoke Marshall McLuhan’s famous distinction between types of media, providing breathing space within its low-definition information for receivers to “fill in the blanks” for themselves, making the voice more interactive and involving than the body itself. This is why Pythagoras taught behind a curtain—so the students would absorb his lessons more fully, without the diversions of the eye. Given the erotic power and potential of the voice, then, what should we make of the dearth of sonic erotica, or “audio porn,” on the Internet? Why are so many images sexualized but so few sound files (especially when we consider the historic popularity of phone sex)?9 Why does the erotic voice lack “stickiness” when it comes to the World Wide Web, given the power of the voice to summon seductive ghosts, quicken the heart, and whisper promises of bliss? Why, in other words, are modems awash in pink pixels but not blue bits?10 When the voice is obliged to pretend ecstatic pleasure, it tends to become a ham. The voice, in general, is not a good actor, unless it has had years of practice. (Erving Goffman talked of the enormous amount of nuanced “face-work” that goes into keeping social situations harmonious, whereas he said less about the explicit role of the voice in doing the same.) According to John Corbett and Terri ­Kapsalis, “the male orgasm is culturally constructed as terminal and limited, while female sexual pleasure is seen as infinitely renewable and multiple. Like the female orgasm, the technology of sampling is not subject to the generational ‘exhaustion’ of analog technology, but digitally replicates and proliferates the original text. As infinitely repeatable and renewable resources, women’s orgasm sounds are thus

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the perfect item for digital sampling, epitomizing the ecstasy of communication” (“Aural Sex,” 106).11 If this is the case, then why is this “repeatable and renewable” resource so scarce online? Why is there so little digital sonic intimacy in evidence, when the medium itself is so welcoming for it? And why is the voice of female jouissance almost always pinned to its image, when it can be even more sexually resonant taking on an acousmatic life of its own? Even after the explosion of podcasting (and other forms of sonic “narrowcasting”), it is a challenge to find more than a handful of sites dedicating themselves to exciting the ear rather than the eye, and these tend to have a very short lifespan. The same few files turn up over and over in the same abandoned forums. Any initiative based on user-­generated content inspires a meager crop of badly recorded stories about spanking in posh boarding schools, recorded by the same middle-aged man (who sounds like a small-town accountant), or about quickies with the delivery boy, by the same middle-aged woman (who also sounds like a small-town accountant).12 Even Usenet, usually the dubious Aladdin’s Cave of every conceivable kink and proclivity, turns up a single provider of erotic MP3s, which consist mainly of the muted moans of secretly taped bedroom encounters.13 Again, this is surprising, even if we make allowances for the scopophilic logic that drives modern society. After all, phone sex is still a significant industry, so why hasn’t part of this demand found a matching supply online?14 One notable exception is Porn for the Blind, a nonprofit initiative to help the sight-impaired to enjoy the libidinal benefits of simulated company.15 Sadly, the people involved decided upon a shortcut and merely dubbed the soundtrack of “mainstream” pornographic movies (that is, heteronormative skin flicks, made primarily in the San Fernando Valley). There is thus no allowance for, or understanding of, medium specificity and the possibilities opened up when attempting to seduce an organ different from the eye. Virtual eavesdropping is probably better than nothing for the lonely blind person, but it

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does not place him in the privileged position that today’s version of voyeurism does. There is no equivalent of that tellingly charged moment when the actor looks into the camera, no eroticized existential acknowledgment or recognition—which is surely an important incentive for the whole enterprise. Another interesting exception is the recent cult phenomenon known as ASMR—Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. If you type this acronym into your favorite search engine, you will be presented with a series of videos designed to be experienced with headphones on (and, depending on the video, with eyes closed). These relatively lengthy clips, recorded at a meditational pace, usually feature a woman whispering very quietly, moving from one ear to the other, and occasionally making small noises like taps, clicks, scratches, rubs, shuffles, and blowing. Regular users of such videos claim that these patiently presented sounds combine to create a power­ful effect, especially tingles all over their bodies, even leading to a satisfying “brain orgasm.”16 For the casual viewer/listener, these clips are at once banal, obscure, and boring. For fans of this genre, however, ASMR is a very new and powerful form of sonic intimacy, all the more remarkable for being fostered by, and with, a stranger. After a long break, the world thus seems to be finding subcultural ways of treating the ear with the kind of erotic respect it deserves, even if only the ears of people with a very specialized interest. (And even as the affective impact can also depend on visual stimuli, such as when ASMR practitioners dress up in costumes for role-play scenarios featuring an airline attendant or nurse.) This type of privileging of and openness to sound could be classed as a type of “acousmatic listening,” as encouraged by Pierre Schaeffer, in which the human subject’s sensorium is reconfigured by consciously paying attention to the sonic stimuli that we usually ignore. One wonders, however—as with Samantha, SIRI, “Australian Karen,” and other acousmatic voices—how popular things such as ASMR can become, given the deep historical prioritization of the eye

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and the hand when it comes to the libido. Can our decidedly non-Zen behaviors and lifestyles tolerate an objectless love object? Or are we forever doomed to demanding physical presence when it comes to the eroticized other? ASMR is extremely gentle, designed to be tranquil and soothing for the listener. As such, it lies on the other side of the spectrum from the screech of simulated orgasms one finds in most pornography. The latter will likely continue to be the default version of aural sex (presuming some exists), given the surplus aggression that often underlies the pursuit of desire (the Thanatos that lurks beneath Eros). We might even posit the auditory equivalent of the male gaze, which actively seeks out a sonic form of ego reinforcement—hence the tried-andtrue method of violently wrenching a sexual sound from the body of the other, in turn considered a trophy smuggled across the existential abyss separating individual beings. That is to say, the masculinist ear is gratified to provoke a cry from the other, which ostensibly originates in the Real (coded as feminine).17 This self-flattering conceit (“hear how much she desires me”) depends on the wager that the naked human voice, unclothed by language, provides an organic, unmediated guarantee of recognition. If there is such an intense effect (or so goes the narcissistic logic), then there must be an agent involved: “I” must really exist, as a being of consequence, since another being is expressing pure pleasure, or pain, at my touch. Two decades ago, Kaja Silverman pointed out that “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” (The Acoustic Mirror, 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. “Since the voice is capable of being internalized at the same time as it is externalized,” she writes, “it can

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spill over from subject to object and object to subject, violating the bodily limits upon which classic subjectivity depends, and so smoothing the way for projection and introjection” (80). This is why Hollywood has been so determined to “synchronize” the female voice with the female body, for fear that it could break free and begin a liberated, more acousmatic existence, thereby challenging the disembodied male voice-over for “enunciative authority.”18 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 Mladen Dolar puts it, “The voice is boundless, warrantless, and—no coincidence—on the side of woman” (The Voice and Nothing More, 50–51).19 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” (The Acoustic Mirror, 83; my emphasis). Perhaps we are now in a position to begin unraveling the mystery of the absence of aural sex on the Internet. The phallic economy— which regulates the mediascape as rigorously, if not even more so, than the FCC and the MPAA—understands that “very high stakes are involved in the alignment of the female voice with the female image” (Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 46). And if women’s voices are allowed to circulate uncontrolled, without being represented or tethered to the overcoded female body, then we could be steered into dangerous waters, not only in the sense of women being able to “speak for themselves” but also in a more metaphysical register, disturbing the taxonomies upon which unspoken patriarchy depends. In other words, the apocalyptic potential at stake is not a matter of “raw,” “enigmatic” female power being unleashed into the circuits of male-enabled civilization, for that very threat maintains the ideological status quo (much as the omnipresent threat of terrorism reinforces the hegemony of the system it is so determined to attack). Rather, the genuine menace, from the perspective of “the Man,” lies in the aforementioned enun-

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ciative authority both generated and appropriated by female voices launched from undetectable locations. It is the fort-da game on the cultural level, with political stakes, now that the baby has matured into a subject—a subject obliged to reject the babble of his initiator into language. The mother-as-cultural-midwife must be dismissed, Silverman insists, for the boy to become a man. And female voices that cannot be pinned to desirable or equally dismissible bodies complicate his ideological signal-switching system. Hence Silverman’s insistence on the issue of the cry, since “at its most culturally gratifying, the female voice provides the acoustic equivalent of an ejaculation, permitting the outpouring or externalization of what would otherwise remain hidden and unknowable” (68). Silverman quotes Michel Chion, who describes cinema (at least after the advent of sound) as “a machine made in order to deliver a cry from the female voice.”20 She further notes: “The point of the cry is an unthinkable point at the interior of thought, an inexpressible [point] at the interior of the enunciation, an unrepresentable point at the interior of representation. . . . This cry incarnates a fantasm of absolute sonorousness” (77). As a consequence, provoking a cry from the female larynx is to briefly wrap one’s [male] self in the enigma of interiority, short-circuiting the filter and censor that mediates between existence and articulation, voice and speech, the viscera and the tongue.21 In 1933, Hedy Lamarr found herself in an unprecedented position, as the first person to simulate an orgasm on screen (or in official screen history, at least). In Gustav Machatý’s film Ecstasy, Lamarr plays a woman who marries an older man, only to find that he is not as interested in her as she had hoped. Returning to her father’s house in disappointment, she soon finds an exciting lover in the form of a young stranger with a much more unbridled disposition, making adulterous love with him in his spartan cabin. One remarkable aspect of this film is its transitional status—somewhere between a silent movie and a talkie, with occasional dubbed dialog scenes but mostly

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unfolding in the older mode (an aesthetic decision made by M ­ achatý for economic reasons, with his eye on international markets, beyond his native country of Czechoslovakia).22 Lamarr’s climax is silent, but all the more memorable for that. It is impossible to know precisely whether this was a directorial decision, or a matter of technical necessity or convenience during the shooting of that day.23 The sound of jouissance, after all, is at once unique and universal. The patriarchal libidinal economy puts a great premium on the sound of female sexual pleasure, because it is a sonic sign—albeit a commonly treacherous or duplicitous one—of an accomplished mission. The desired vocal index of female surrender to male mastery and potency is both there and not there. Compare Lamarr’s “noisy silence” to the banality and ubiquity of faked orgasms in our own era, lampooned so famously by Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally.24 Indeed, the cultural space between modernity and postmodernity can be measured precisely by the distance separating Lamarr’s silent spasm in Ecstasy and the raucous ones to be found on any random X-rated DVD. No sound could be more reified,25 alienated, and alienating than the latter (except perhaps the vocals in any given Black Eyed Peas or Nickelback song).26 It is the equivalent of sexual Muzak. In contrast, Lamarr’s unheard climax reverberates through the decades. “We cannot resist silence,” writes Dolar, “for the very good reason that there is nothing to resist” (172).27

CHAPTER TWO

T H E

G E N D E R E D

V O I C E

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.” “Sunny Side Up” (1929)

S O M E T I M E S I T I S N O T E N O U G H 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. 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 and into maturity in this selfsame decade.1 But what does it really mean to hear the other breathing yet not to share the same air? What changes between intimates when the exchange takes place in a “timeshifted” manner rather than in the hic et nunc? 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 voice mail or other recording devices—we subconsciously reenact the fort-da (“here-there”) game of Freud’s infant (a game in which the child plays with a spool of thread, mimicking the comings and goings of the mother, in order to better understand and cope with the fact that she is no longer omnipresent). We are swaddled in phantasmic echoes, so to speak, both traumatized and embold-

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ened by the inexplicable disappearances of the mother. Subjectivity, in this allegorical scene, is not only forged 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. Weaned on 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, no doubt, is 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 in terms 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.) 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, depending on how it

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is deployed, solicited, experienced, or remembered. As Lauren Berlant notes: “[Perhaps] desire is only secondarily about the relations among bodies, and primarily about voices and the intimate attachments they engender?” (Desire/Love, 12). 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 Friedrich Kittler), we shall not be content to trace the originary influence of the mother’s voice in terms of sonic forms. (Although it would be interesting to see to what extent the Oedipus complex influences attraction to or repulsion from certain vocal textures or patterns of speech.) Rather, the following pages emphasize the affective architectonics of desire and longing in the absence of the physical or visual dimension: an inevitability 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 representative of the latter is biologically attuned to the baby’s cry, the infant is sensitive to those noises that are emitted from the parents. Indeed, it is this privileged link between the unclosable ear and the human habitus that sets the “love tone” (to poach a term from Jakob von Uexküll) for the child’s subsequent experiences (“A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” 61). That is to say, the mother (or father) can be heard in several extralinguistic modes, before we get into the nuances of 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 cry, 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

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the child (Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood and Youth). As we saw in the previous chapter, 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 not to distract attention from his voice as well as to lend it a somewhat divine authority. And as 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” (“Acousmatics,” 81). Within the Freudian model, the Oedipus complex could be said to emerge from the dawning awareness that the mother’s cries of pleasure are not inspired by the child but rather by the father.3 (We have moved forward a few years already, from the crib to the small bed.) 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 (that is, 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, “The grunt (or cry, or moan, or roar, 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” [The Debt to Pleasure, 94–95].) The fact that the proverbial “child” in these scenarios is gendered as male is not the only limitation of its hermeneutic model, but it is perhaps the most glaring. 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.5 Nevertheless, the song that opened this discussion has been performed many times over the years, by both men and women, without needing to change any pronouns (as one often does in concession to heteronormative

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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 better account for that vexed vector between the (male) ear and (female) tongue.

. . . The vocal trope through which women have been pigeon-holed ­mythologically—in both the ancient sense and the modern mutation so well understood by 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 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). He is thus one of those classical heroic figures who manage to escape the mortal symbolic economy. The price of the bliss of hearing the Siren song is death, and yet— unlike Icarus—Ulysses manages to avoid paying this price, thanks to what 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 own study, For More than One Voice, Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero sees the Sirens differently, arguing that their complex 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,

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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” (104–105; brackets in original). Moreover, the Sirens are rendered as frightening bird-like hybrids and not at all the languid beauties that currently circulate within the popular imagination. Within this domesticating metamorphosis “it is feminine song that is at stake” (105).6 Cavarero goes on to note that in the story’s iconography, “most 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).7 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)

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In short, the Sirens have become “limited to raising their melodious voices in a nonsemantic seduction” (116). They function today, therefore, 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, Friedrich Kittler—along with a team of associates from Humboldt University Berlin (themselves assisted by members of the Center for Media Arts and Technology Karlsruhe)—embarked on a research expedition in 2004 near the Le Galli Islands, off the Amalfi coast, “the supposedly original historical scene [of Ulysses and the Sirens]” (Ernst, “Resonance of the Siren Songs,” 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 (unpublished) on this fascinating folly that I have managed to find translated (rather awkwardly) 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 [sic] 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 [sic] a deformation of the acoustic signal in [the] 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 [the] specific acoustic conditions of the landscape. However[,] it remains still under question who was the emitter of the song. (3)8

The findings are thus as charming and misguided as the entire enterprise, stating in the same sentence that “we can be sure” that “maybe”

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the myth is based on “a trace of the real.” However, the desire to scientifically verify the acoustic conditions of Homer’s story tells us nothing about historical possibilities and everything about the enduring meta-seduction 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 IndoEuropean root swen (to sound, to sing), whence Latin derives sonus (sound)—despite the fact that the common genus is known as C ­ ygnus olor, meaning “mute swan.” While not truly voiceless, the mute swan embodies the ideas of beauty, holiness, mystery, and strength through silence. Its ability to float lightly on the water and its tendency to mate for life have resulted in the swan being used as an efficient symbol of grace, love, and fidelity. The term “swan song” refers to this almost soundless bird and 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 completion. 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, In Search of the Swan Maiden, 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 of being double agents between the natural and the civilized worlds, liable to switch from one to the other at the drop of a feather.9 Thus, between the sororal signifiers of the Siren, the swan, and the Swan Maiden, we see

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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).10 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? As we discovered in the last chapter, the female acousmatic voice is a troubling invisible presence for patriarchal cultures and media arrangements. There is, however, at least one significant exception to the idea that the female acousmatic voice is repressed or devalued: namely, recordings of popular (or operatic) music.11 If the female voice, technologically untethered from the material body, has been serenading and seducing the ear since the invention of wax cylinders, why does Silverman insist on a challenge or threat to the patriarchal order in this type of acoustic mirror? The answer depends on our acknowledging the narrow protocols within which women have been permitted to “express” themselves, phonologically speaking. As Dolar insists, “singing, 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” (The Voice and Nothing More, 30). This is why female singers are such affective lightning rods and have historically run the gauntlet of social strictures to remain “ladylike,” even while representing civilization’s darker, more primal half. At 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.” At the other end, we have Eva Tanguay, who “for roughly two decades, from 1904 until the early 1920s, was the biggest rock star in the United States . . . out-earning the likes of Al Jolson, Harry Houdini, and Enrico Caruso.”12 Tanguay’s fame—or rather,

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i­nfamy—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,” while 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. 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, “Vanishing Act”)

Strong words indeed, which crystallize the stakes involved when the female voice slips the sonic corset of propriety. In Crowley’s description, Tanguay 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 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 in key). In fact, female singers are ambassadors for all three Lacanian registers, ranging between 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 and

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Elizabeth Fraser notwithstanding).13 They are imaginary, in the sense that they embody that which the symbolic cannot completely encode: suggestive gendered alterity. And they are the Real, in the animalistic grain of the voice that gives sonorous body to the abject.14 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” (For More than One 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 essential and 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” (1).15 The voice is always the voice of someone (207). Cavarero’s 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 neo-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,

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and not only because such appeals—or lapses, rather—into scientific positivism reverberate with bad faith, especially when embedded into sustained critiques of abstract reasoning.16 Acoustic or organic signatures certainly exist, but biology should not be so smoothly translated into the symbolic realm of culture—the current arrangement of the latter being, 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—as 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, nor the entangled and inherently mimetic character of my very soul. No doubt Cavarero is a sophisticated thinker and aware that a polemical insistence on valuing the “unique” aspect of the embodied voice can be misconstrued as a kind of naive faith in fundamental individualism. 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 than one’s entrails? Not on the level of DNA, but on the level of a shared, distributed species anonymity, witnessed in endoscopic footage as much as stains on the streets of a war zone. The impulse—shared by Arendt, Benjamin, and their followers—is to rescue the unique being from such anonymity; and certainly there is an ethical pressure, even obligation, to perform such acts of redemption. But if insisted upon, in a certain tone, it also risks succumbing to the romantic, neoliberal mantra of individualism and ignoring the politically liberating secret that emphasizes the shared pulse beyond identity rather than the potentially narcissistic logic of reified, stabilized identification.17 For Cavarero “the voice” is a discursive fiction; there are only voices. And indeed, this is an important reminder to

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the rather tin-eared 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, then we are still in a position to make important observations across space and time. The generalizable is only a problem when it loses sight of the particular. Indeed, the general 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 suddenly forgets the existence of digital machines the very moment she insists that “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 itself 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 postmodern world, in which it is often undecidable whether any given sound embedded in a popular musical hit is in fact human, animal, or machine.18 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 fully prepare us for the possibility of Juliet listening to Romeo’s playlist on her iPod, or—even more likely—­sexting with him on her iPhone. 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, the erotic—means that the acousmatic voice is ubiquitous to the same extent that the individual voice is drowned out

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in the ­cacophony. After all, a Coke machine in Tokyo is as likely to talk to you in that city as another human being, a fact that only makes ­Althusser’s notion of interpellation more relevant, albeit complex. In simpler terms, Cavarero’s vocalic topography is complicated by the invention of the gramophone, together with all the subsequent refinements (and regressions) of audio recording and engineering, of which auto-tuning and vocaloids are the most recent examples. The former emerged from a software program designed to help locate deep-sea oil deposits and 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, “AutoTune”). Auto-tuning is a heavy, somewhat intrusive form of hypermediation.19 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 annoying yet 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 Walter 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 tele-phonic presence. There is simply no “there” there, in the sense of ontological traction for the ear-hearthippocampus-viscera assemblage.20 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

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unprecedented speed and in a virtually unprecedented fashion.21 As we shall see, Dolar emphasizes what he understands 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. Auto-tuning 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.22 One’s mother does not yet sound like millennial Cher, and hopefully she never will. But the auto-tuning of the acousmatic voice complicates the notion of the acoustic mirror, as the voice becomes too unstable to function as a site for even Lacanian identity formation by virtue of its consummate interchangeability—its electronic equalization. The more generic the vocalsphere becomes, the more it becomes an opaque signifier of human(?) expression. This situation is further exacerbated by the recent explosion in popularity of Vocaloids, a type of synthetic vocalization software developed by Yamaha that allows consumers to make their own songs with specific sonic avatars. Fans buy a specific Vocaloid, that comes complete with virtual identity (gender, age, likes and dislikes—even ostensible height and weight!). By manipulating the Vocaloid software, these fans contribute to a new genre of music that exults in stretching the distant human source of the voice into whimsical patterns and places, as if the Cocteau Twins were projected, Tron-style, inside a pastel-crazed Japanese video game about solicitous tween mushrooms. Moreover, the synthetic voice tends to play peek-a-boo with the listener, dipping back into the sonic background so as to become textural itself. As Adam Harper has written, in relation to sonic reorientation of Vocaloids: “Today, a major characteristic of 21st century pop music, especially underground, is the erosion of that former distinction between the human voice and

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the musical landscape in which it stands, especially digitally, and of which it now forms a part. No longer is the voice merely a figure in the landscape, but it fuses with the ­landscape itself.” Indeed, Harper looks ahead to further exponential musical mutations in this landscape: It won’t be long . . . before the vocaloids earn the same retro appeal as the vocoder, and they may even be praised alongside all older technologies as “warm” and yes, “human.” Even when it comes to the voice, the technologies we use to represent ourselves are all relative—all tools, all within the bounds of human agency, even when that voice is almost entirely constructed. The voice was no less a tool, a technology, when it let out its first cry. It may seem unnatural or fearful that the human voice melts into the digital ­landscape—where we all become samples—and even more so when the digital landscape seems to greet you itself in a nearly human form. But we are the vocaloids. And like it or not, everything in the musical-digital landscape has a human voice. A more fluid inter­ relation of the subjects and objects within it better reflects the richness, self-perception and experience of the modern human.23

Harper may be giving too much credit to the “modern human,” however, when it comes to adapting to a digital sonic milieu.24 Given the rapid adoption of computational techniques and technologies to process the voice, 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, a catchphrase, or the like. 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 hand, the most popular audio format for listening to music—MP3s—are notoriously degraded, compared to their ana-

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log ancestors.25 The acousmatic voice therefore mutates in the digital age in at least two distinct ways. The first is the umbilical break from the image. Chion’s original definition related to cinema, so the soundtrack was still “framed” as it were by the mise-en-scène. The “noises off ” were precisely that: measured in terms of their distance from the screen, in the novelty of not being matched with glossy celluloid lips. In our era, where the iPhone waxes while the music video wanes, the second mutation occurs as the acousmatic voice comes to the fore in the very same motion as it loses its lingering fidelity to the source. The voice dematerializes to a second degree, so that even its medium of capture is no longer graspable. It becomes more ambient, spectral, and ubiquitous: “everyware.”26 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, an invisible army choir of whoevers and wherevers. What is more, this is not necessarily a linear progression. As a culture we are constantly playing with the levels between signal and noise. Whereas early vinyl 78s were mostly hiss, scratch, and fizzle, today’s MP3s are just as likely to glitch, fuzz, and crackle— whether by design (for sonic effect) or simply by the compromised convenience of five-megabyte files. The perfect “warm” reproduction so coveted by audiophiles from the 1960s through 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 in this century as compared to the previous one. The continuity is in terms of its endless repetition—its eternal return—of the fort-da fact that underwrites human (sub)consciousness. Since Victorian times, all the way up to today, the acousmatic voice has 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

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a form of de- or rehumanization. The Sony Walkman, in the 1980s, inaugurated the paradigm-changing moment when people could literally 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 person in her t­wenties—should she be lucky enough to be born out of poverty—will listen to a greater variety of voices in a day than the average person did in a lifetime a few generations ago. We need not be 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 “consider 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” (For More than One 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). By relying exclusively on such examples, Cavarero shows herself incapable of considering the voice apart from real-time exchanges. Technology is assumed to be only about bridging distance, ignoring altogether the aspect of time (that is, time-shifting technologies, such as 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

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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 delirium, tears, fainting, fanaticisms of all sorts” is once again renewed. (60)

One truly wonders, then, about the relevance or applicability of an analysis of communication that effectively ignores the ubiquitous existence of communication technologies.27 There is a willful nostalgia at work, common to a certain strain of continental philosophy: not so much a provocative untimeliness as a straightforward anachronism. Which is not to say that Cavarero’s exploration of the “eroticized apparatus of phonation” (138) is not without merit, but that such an apparatus needs to acknowledge actual existing technics, which shape and inform “the libidinal register” (131) of “vocalic pleasure” (199). To be clear, there is theoretical value in Barthes’s notion of “the grain of the voice,” but not by following Cavarero in necessarily tying this phenomenon to the unmediated human. Missy Elliott or Karin Dreijer Andersson can be just as affecting or ontologically relevant as Aretha Franklin, Chan Marshall, Rokia Traoré, or the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir.28 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 see, is indeed ­preempted—or at the very least, obliquely suggested—by Barthes.) One thing is for 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? Is the voice a parasite?29 Or is music?30 However we decide to approach such questions, it must be acknowledged that mobile telephones and MP3 players can potentially create connections and encounters—“events,” perhaps— on the plane of intersubjectivity, even when one of those subjects is no longer alive.31 As our existence is increasingly experienced within

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digitized networks, the challenge is not simply to rescue “the grain of the voice”—although it is partly that—but also to be attuned to “the voice of the grain” (in the sense of listening attentively to the environment)—an environment that includes both paradises and parking lots.

. . . At the beginning of this discussion we referred to a generic mother figure. But what happens when we look at a very specific mother? That is, Roland Barthes’s mother, who figures so prominently in his meditations on technologies of capture? What if we superimpose her key role as witness to or embodiment of the punctum upon her son’s notion of “the grain of the voice”?32 What “dialectic of meaning and materiality” emerges from the interplay between them (Dunn, “­Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet,” 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” (“The Grain of the Voice,” 182). Dolar is not sympathetic to this concept and 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” (The Voice and Nothing More, 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—to not 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, who locates the emergence of the subject within the liminal space held open between sound and meaning. “A self is nothing other than a form or function of referral,” he writes, between these two modes (Listening, 8). Moreover, “perhaps [there is] no subject at all, except as the place of resonance, of its infinite tension and rebound” (22). And as such, “the

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subject of listening is always still yet to come” (21). For his part, Dolar himself notes that the voice “is like a fingerprint, instantly recognizable and identifiable” (The Voice and Nothing More, 22). And yet it is not necessarily “proper” to the person from whom it resounds. Perhaps Dolar’s most provocative insight is that “the 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 singular aspects or moments 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 heard 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 usefully applied and adapted to the acoustic realm, in order to better “hear” or “understand” that which is at stake on the surface of our ear drums33—specifically, “the impossible science of the unique being” (Camera Lucida, 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),” Barthes classifies the punctum within “the order of . . . loving ” (27). 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 soldiers, bad teeth, dirty fingernails, or the way in which 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,” which 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

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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 to an idiosyncratic accent to a type of unself-conscious emphasis that betrays the “audible unconscious” of the individual qua the collective (to poach and twist yet another canonical concept).34 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 be soothing on one level, it can also disturb on another, especially when the body with which we associate it 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 punctum of the grain 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 The 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 verbalized. Either way, the voice pulses through Barthes’s thoughts

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addressed to the other, tracing his outline, spoken on paper or held under the 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).35 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 up certain romantic, neohumanist chestnuts. Yet Barthes acknowledges that a science of the unique being is impossible, an acknowledgment Cavarero would not grant (at least not within the parameters of her book on the voice). And yet such a science is still worth pursuing, if only with pataphysical tools. Barthes’s oeuvre, taken holistically, dwells in that fascinating no-man’s-land where structuralism blends into poststructuralism—that is to say, where the meta-systemic acknowledges the anomalous, the idiosyncratic, the unaccountably catalytic. His sentimental confessions, or even indulgences, are particularly poignant because they are enacted on an understanding—sometimes explicit, other times only implicit—of their impersonal significance. At least to my mind, Barthes therefore earns the right to forge his own license to drive through the stereoscopic valley of the both/and. And he does so by suggesting—like many of his location and generation—that, yes, this captured moment is equally significant and insignificant, equally moving and ­innocuous. One needs the studium—the smoothly legible assemblage of elements comprising any given representation—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 acknowledg-

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ing that this is the mechanism by which value is created for those within the code). By poaching and repurposing the punctum for the aural sphere, I seek to 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);36 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 an image.37 It cannot be verified or fixed, as Walter Ong notes (a sound is leaving the same moment it arrives). One cannot point to a sound and say, “here—look—that’s what 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, which in turn 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 C ­ avarero 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 kryptonite sandpaper for the aural punctum. It eschews the timber-like timbre of the grain of the voice, replacing it with 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 ” another. 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

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is the crux of the debate between the Italian feminist philosopher and the Slovenian Lacanian theorist. As Dolar observes: Voice 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 not 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. (The Voice and Nothing More, 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—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. My intention here is not to romanticize a hauntology of human traces within the smooth magnetic surfaces of our new mediums (or at least, not only that). We can hear the aural punctum, in the form of the grain of the voice, within the impatient meowing of our cat, in the recorded call of a humpback whale, or even 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.38 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.

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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” (A Thousand Plateaus, 333). The challenge is thus to recalibrate our relationship with our own ears, to truly listen to something as it is disappearing (since everything is disappearing), becoming an object of loss, like the omnimaternal, amniotic envelope we have escaped or been exiled from.39

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cult figures circulating in the popular imaginary at present has been described as “the loneliest whale in the world.” This singular cetacean, of unidentified species, is so called because his call is registered at the unusual frequency of 52 Hz, which is much higher than that of all other types in this species. (We know the gender of this whale because only males make the distinct calling sound, presumably for amorous purposes, although probably for other social reasons as well.) Scientists have tracked this mournful creature for several years, intrigued by the melancholy songs that go unanswered. From a whimsical perspective, this whale is an outsider artist, offering personalized songs to the subaquatic world, only to be snubbed by the more “vocal” members of the whale community. Songs of the humpback, for instance, can “sweep across the Pacific in just a few years,” as biologists from the University of Queensland explain. “In any given year, all the males in a population sing the same song, but the songs change from year to year. The changes are more than incremental; they represent whole new repertoires.” Which is to say, “the level and rate of change is unparalleled in any other non­human animal and thus involves culturally driven change at a vast scale” (Keim, “Humpback Whale Songs That Swept the Pacific”; my emphasis). As ONE OF THE MORE COMPELLING

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a consequence, we may technically be able to assemble a whale hit parade; and indeed, marine scientists are presumably engaged in doing exactly that, albeit under a different name or metaphor. Lonely whales notwithstanding, the larger and more sonically expressive cetaceans could arguably be considered the first instance of global communication, many millions of years ago, since their calls could travel astonishing distances—up to five hundred miles ­underwater—long before our machines only recently created significant (and today inescapable) noise pollution. These days, whales have been forced into relatively tiny sonic boxes because of the din created by ship engines and various audio probings of the marine environment, by military and industry alike.1 As Christopher Clark, a scientist of bioacoustics at Cornell University, suggests, this sudden assault and subsequent diminishment of the whale’s soundscape must be extremely traumatic for the animal, whose overall Umwelt (environment) has shrunk from large swathes of the watery planet to barely a mile or so in any given direction.2 The noisier the ocean becomes, thanks to the general dissonance of the Anthropocene,3 the lonelier whales are likely to become, even if they sing in the frequency of the cetacean mainstream. Can we really, however, speak of “singing” in such cases? Is this not a romantic projection, an unscientific anthropomorphism, or an instance of the pathetic fallacy? (As I write, scientists are reporting that gorillas sing, hum, and compose “little food songs” while they eat.)4 Many would argue that simply using the organ of vocalization does not equate to singing, in the sense we apply to ourselves, since the operation, when attempted by a nonhuman, lacks the element of self-reflection necessary for true expression, for artistry. Conversely, others have argued that humans were likely taught to sing by other creatures, especially the birds.5 According to this view, our songs are all the poorer for being filtered through human self-­consciousness, thus diluting the purity of an unalienated ecological harmony. (Philip

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Brophy, for instance, believes that “the voice is corrupted by being human.”)6 These contrasting perspectives on the question of the inter­ species voice have a long and complex history, crisscrossing epochs as well as those divergent orientations to the natural world crudely divided into “East” and “West.”7 Some, such as Aristotle in ancient times and the third Earl of Shaftesbury in early modernity, argued that animals have voice but not speech.8 Others, such as Descartes, would deny voice to nonhumans altogether, arguing instead that they merely emit sounds, as a bicycle horn might if stepped on. Who or what can rightly claim to have a voice? Is it a property or capacity that belongs to a subject, even a nonhuman subject? Or might “the voice” be located somewhere between the sonic shadows of the world and the ear of the listener? Might we even consider voice to include nonsubjective expression of the elements themselves? Might the world itself, whatever such a grand phrase might denote, have a vox mundi—a voice of the planet? Such questions deserve long and careful consideration. But in this current context, we shall focus on the historically contested existence of a creaturely voice—one that describes a plurality of vocal expressions, distributed among those species blessed with the capacity to make sounds with their bodies. As Tobias Menely explains in The Animal Claim, the creaturely voice, like the human one, forms a vector of connection or sympathy and is thus suspended between the sound-producing subject and the auditory other.9 It is the creaturely voice that insists that “we already inhabit a world in which we are subject to the claims of other expressive creatures” (3). By way of such incarnations of “the voice of nature” we hear, and thus at some level understand, our essential “creaturely entanglement” with other animals. This perspective pushes Dolar’s statement that “the voice is the element which ties the subject and the Other together, without belonging to either” (103) beyond the inhuman discourse of Lacanian theory (which ultimately and rather ironically perpetuates anthropocentric narcissism) to include the non-

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human experience of the animal realm. Menely writes that, for those sympathetically attuned to the creaturely voice, “community begins in, and remains symbolically organized around, a communicativity that is passionate before it is rational, passive before it is willed. The initial condition of social identity is a recognition of creaturely substitutability” (17; my emphasis). The claim that I would like to unpack, nestled within the very term “creaturely voice,” is that many animals have the capacity for voice, which is not merely an evolutionary expedience to find mates, scare enemies, or communicate food sources but is also a sonic exploration of ontological conditions. It is a way of testing the world and one’s location, role, and value in it. In other words, monkeys, birds, whales, and so on test their own existence and relationship with the world through vocalizations, sometimes in similar ways to ours, employing methods that are at once phatic, banal, and miraculous. They are the nonsymbolic equivalents of “I’m here.” “Where are you?” “Are you really there?” “Who are you?” “Fort-da.” “Marco.” “Polo.”10 These are the unspoken—and yet at least partially communicated—­messages woven into the ever-vanishing yet always returning medium of the voice. Returning to marine mammals, the Smithsonian magazine recently uncovered a case in which a beluga whale, trained by the Navy in the 1980s and given the name Noc, was not only reported to have attempted to communicate directly with its human handlers, in imitation of speech, but recorded in its attempt. The thirty-second audio clip, if authentic, is quite astonishing and sounds “less like a person talking than a delirious drunk humming an atonal tune through a tissue-covered comb.”11 One wonders if these sounds were produced as greeting, questioning, playful mocking, or sincere protest, or some combination thereof (or indeed something else altogether). As the magazine article notes, this remarkable artifact originally appeared “as a mere supplement” to a research paper ­titled “Spontaneous Human Speech Mimicry by a Cetacean,” by Sam Ridgway (co-founder of the

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Navy Marine Mammal Program). Its implications are enormous, however, for the ongoing discussions and debates around vocal mimesis between different creatures, and both the limits and possibilities of interspecies “communication” (or at least attempts at such). For Darwin, “language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries.” Indeed, “when we treat of sexual selection we shall see that primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably used his voice largely, as does one of the gibbon-apes of the present day, in producing true musical cadences, that is, in singing. . . . The imitation by articulate sounds of musical cries might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions” (qtd. in Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 113). When it comes to our understanding of what it means to “sing,” musicologist and long-view historian Gary Tomlinson warns us against what he calls “a feel-good anthropomorphism by which human capacities are extended willy-nilly beyond humans” (117). Instead Tomlinson advocates for a “careful dismantling and scrutiny of the differing notions of ‘song’ that pertain,” lest we indulge in the folly of hearing the “mysteries of the phylogeny of acoustic information transmission” (117) as something shared and legible (hence his disdain for Darwin’s faith in the “true musical cadences” of gibbons). Tomlinson’s meticulous history of “a million years of music” relies on the sophisticated insights of recent archaeology and evolutionary biology to argue for human exceptionalism when it comes to the emergence of the specifically human voice and its allegedly unique capacity for “­musicking.” By his account (which I am certainly unqualified to dispute on technical or scientific grounds), the human voice emerged from a singular and complex matrix of factors, which he calls “the negotiated voicescape.” Tomlinson’s argument is difficult to distill, given all the moving parts, but at one point he summarizes his approach by asserting: “Ancient vocal messages entered into cultural feedback

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loops of technology; feedback effects moved along new channels and recast the niche in new ways; constraints on innate vocalization were weakened; adaptive advantages of communicative flexibility were redoubled; and acoustical and cognitive features of vocalization came under pressure to create more effective communication” (128). For Tomlinson, there was no quantum leap from grunting to singing and speaking, but instead a slow and staggered series of progressions from our early hominid evolutionary forebears to our near ancestors: a complex interplay between organism and environment, nature and culture, especially nurtured in the “taskscapes” of protohumans (which itself involved the necessary prelinguistic bridge of protodiscourse—vocal gestures and body language that he depicts as more than animal but as yet less than human). From this perspective, only humans—and the more hirsute neighbors on our family tree—exhibit the reflexive “theory of mind” that is necessary for true communication, which is in turn the foundation for the invention of music (vocal, instrumental, and rhythmic).12 And yet Noc, the beluga whale, could only mimic human speech if there is a strong sense of self-awareness, together with a cognitive understanding of the ontological gulf between him and his handlers. The Smithsonian article on Noc, the “talking” beluga whale, quotes Lori Marino, from the psychology department at Emory University, who specializes in cetacean intelligence and brain evolution: “Vocal imitation, vocal learning, is a very sophisticated cognitive process. . . . For an animal to imitate ­another species takes a level of self-awareness, a level of understanding of their body and your body and the acoustics of it. Manipulating one’s vocal tract to produce a desired effect is very, very sophisticated.” To make such a point is not to flatten difference, for the brains/minds of cetaceans are indeed very different from ours. But there is certainly a keen intelligence behind the eyes of the animal (given how “cultural” and social whales are now known to be). What insight about cross-species sympathy or quasi communication is lost, then, if we in-

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sist that humans are the only animal that can “sing” rather than merely produce an acoustic s­ ignal? Is a metaphysics of human exceptionalism being perhaps even unconsciously smuggled into rigorous scientific accounts of the long (pre)historical emergence of vocal musicking? Is it possible to acknowledge that humans are the only animal we know that has fashioned a flute from organic materials and learned to play a melody upon it, while appreciating that dogs are now pounding on their domestic pianos and howling in increasingly uncanny mimetic expression? Might some overlap occur that would shed light on these evolutions, at once different, parallel, and intertwined, involving some kind of cross-species call-and-response? Deleuze believes that the barking of a dog is “the most stupid cry ever . . . the shame of the animal kingdom” (L’abécédaire), and few would deny how irritating it can be; this insistent clamor that often sounds like a failed attempt to communicate with us, either in protest or pleading, and becomes all the more intense in the animal’s frustration at not being understood or responded to. And yet the exasperation that leads Deleuze to describe the canine bark as “stupid” is not far from saying the same of the shrieking baby. It is recognition of the (proto?)subjectivity ingrained in the sound that makes it “bête,” since we would be far less willing to describe a car alarm as “stupid” and thus imply blame or reasons for shame. By the same token, we must be careful not to simply reinvent a naive metaphysics of presence for the animal kingdom—the kind of thinking so deftly deconstructed by Derrida, in which the voice is traditionally understood to be the ur-sign of the facticity and singularity of (this or that) being. What we symptomatically describe in the transcendent singular— “the voice”—is in fact too slippery and complex to be the foundation of logocentric authority (which is to say, the sovereign decanting of incantations from the larynx into the book, via the ink pot). Not the voice, then, but a global choir of interwoven voices, with no neoPlatonic sonic model. Derrida’s late work (The Animal That Therefore

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I Am, as well as The Beast and the Sovereign, among others) exposes Western culture’s blinkered thinking about creatures other than ourselves by coining a new term, animot (a hybrid of animal [animal ] and mot [word], aurally implying an appreciation of the plural nature of, well, nature). We might do something similar here and coin a punning phrase: v­ oix-la (a quasi-deictic term that underscores the always provisional “here it is” aspect of the voice). Now you hear it, now you don’t. You can never be sure of the true source, and you can be never sure of what it signifies, even as you may feel you understand the signal within the noise. (As Dolar and others have suggested, there is something acousmatic about all voices.) Indeed, the voice (or rather, voices) complicate the cybernetic distinction between signal and noise, going beyond diagrammable sender/receiver models of communication and into more obscure modes of existential exchange (or a mutual refusal to exchange). The medium is absolutely the message when it comes to asymbolic forms of sympathy. Take, for instance, the parrot or cockatoo. We humans have been fascinated by these birds, largely because of their perceived organic capacity to “record” our own voices and throw them back at us, like trickster ventriloquists, long before the invention of the phonograph. Certainly this can create an uncanny effect in the human listener: hearing our own voice echoed back from the larynx of a creature so different from ourselves—a creature that may or may not have its own mind or soul. Historically speaking, many people who have had their figurative feathers ruffled by the impertinence of parrots deflected the discomfort they felt upon hearing their own words screeched back at them, either through laughter or with dismissive reference to the rather dumb mechanics of mimesis. Parrots are like children, they would claim, squawking back syllables they do not comprehend. One might as well yell into a cave, they might further opine, and be astonished that the words return: “Such a phenomenon is simply nature in action— one physics, the other biology.”

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But what if a mimetic screech is a type of speech rather than just a sonic reflex? (And here we are indeed slipping from voice to speech, from sonic event to vocal expression.) The Marco/Polo dynamic often found between beings may indeed be a kind of worlding refrain— a transductive reconnaissance mission—that brings a relationship into being and thus counts as a type of ontological experimentation (which in turn signifies the presence of a monad worthy of respect). Consider how the child or the lover playfully imitates the speech of the other. In doing so, she asserts her own identity while also putting such an identity under erasure. Many animals (including humans) may thus be creatures who continue to flesh themselves out in(to) the world, long after the first fall into “identity” (or at least a sense of self ) through vocal back-and-forths with others—and with the environment. We might consider this process as something akin to an acoustic version of an ongoing mirror stage, experienced with and through contingent yet essential avatars of alterity, even for animals that “fail” the so-called mirror test (with all its anthropocentric assumptions): “Here I am, where I am not, where you are . . . not?” Deleuze and Guattari call such mimetic exchanges between beings a “refrain”: a mode of expression that draws a territory (in some sense always virtual). Birdsongs, according to this concept, create a refrain that in turn generates a territory through the act of sonically diagramming it. This operation is not limited to the natural world, however, since we may say the same about television sets or saxophones: “We call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes (there are optical, gestural, motors, etc., refrains)” (A Thousand Plateaus, 323). Thus, the refrain “may assume other functions [than boundary marking], amorous, professional or social, liturgical or cosmic: it always carries the earth with it” (312). Moreover, in a striking observation that would appall many art historians, Deleuze and Guattari write: “Not only does art not wait for human beings to begin, but we may ask if art ever

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a­ ppears among human beings, except under artificial and belated conditions” (320). (I myself am tempted to simply replace the word “art” here with “voice.”)13 In order to get a better grasp on the concept of creaturely voice and its nonhumanist import, let us look briefly at two viral videos, both found on the popular video-sharing site YouTube. The first is called “A Parrot Who Has Seen a Porn Movie!” and features a pet lovebird who has clearly been in the room on more than one occasion while its owner was watching X-rated material.14 The instant mirth and/or discomfort that this clip produces is a function of human (mis)recognition. (And it is precisely this amusing discomfort that made the video such a viral hit, as we tend to find the frisson of “affective dissonance” addictive in its disorienting force.) The chances are high, in fact, that this clip is faked—there is something too perfect about the audio, suggesting overdubbing. Nevertheless, the visuals of the parrot matched with the audio track of exaggerated orgasms obliges us to endure the semiotic violence of self-recontextualization. Salacious sounds—which by all rights should be coming out of our aroused selves or an enthusiastic lover— are being “rebroadcast” back to us by an entity that has no sense of irony or decorum. It is literally obscene. It is as if the world were engaged in objective parody of the planet’s most arrogant animal, revealing one of our most sacred activities (“making love”) to be little more than a kind of crude ventriloquial trick. Seeing orgasmic pleasure unconsciously simulated in this way reminds us of the porn star, who—when viewed through the un-Vaselined lens—is little more than a caricatured reflection of our own erotic desires. The creaturely voice that is already found in the overly exuberant porn star (or woefully inadequate orgasm-faker) becomes all the more insulting (and/or amusing) when made explicit, as it were, in the guise of a small bird. This parrot is not deliberately lampooning us, as a college roommate might do, trying to shame his co-tenant for the latter’s active sex life by imitating the beastly noises it creates on the other side of the wall. And yet the refrain created by the

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bird’s mimetic tendencies means that we are lampooned never­theless. There is no escaping or denying the parodic power of the animal, no matter how mediated or manipulated. Our second example, titled “Peaches, the Cockatoo, Mimicking a Couple Arguing,” is certainly not faked and—as the title suggests— concerns a pet bird that was given to a new couple after a bitter divorce obliged it to find a new home. The details of the break-up remain obscure to the second owners. However, the overwhelmingly negative affective climate of the life that led up to this separation has been preserved in the (probably traumatized) mind of the bird. In short, this cockatoo reenacts the tone, pitch, and vehemence of the arguments that it was obliged to witness in its previous life.15 While only some of the “words” the cockatoo screeches are clear enough to be understood (“Shut the fuck up! . . . for God’s sake!”), the emotions that initially launched them are obvious to all within hearing distance. Curse words pour out of the poor bird, in the tenor of an embittered middle-aged person filled to the brim with resentment.16 The cockatoo even bobs its head, and spreads its wings, in imitation of the angry body language of a spouse scorned, spurned, or otherwise so aggrieved that he or she can only incessantly shriek at the person who made him or her so miserable. The viewer is caught off-guard by this virtuoso performance, in which there is no room for artistic “interpretation,” only another rebroadcasting of this (violent, domestic) refrain. Once again, a lurching oscillation between laughter and discomfort is the human response to the aural portrait of “humanity” exposed in this voice—somehow both acousmatic and not. We do not see “the source” of this voice, and yet we can imagine the scene and its protagonists, vividly. And yet the voice is also the bird’s voice, whom we can see. Whose voice is this, then? As Dolar claims, it belongs to neither subject nor object but is suspended between. Whether we call this modest but highly charged sonic event an instance of the refrain, the aural punctum, the voice of nature, the

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voix-là, or the ecological voice, it creates a troubling frisson in the viewer because it deconstructs the cherished metaphysics of (humanist) presence, far more economically and effectively than Derrida does in his writings. This parrot and this cockatoo are “trapped” in their own mimetic inhibitors, held captive by the seduction of the sound that reterritorialized their bodies, organs, instincts. But such a process only serves to strongly imply that we ourselves are similarly trapped when we are in the ecstatic, agonistic throes of jouissance or fury.17 The creaturely voice democratizes the ontological condition of all beings, slicing through the pretentions of human culture (logos) to be the exception that matters when it comes to the expression of suffering (or of pleasure, which as we know can sound very similar).18 As a final example, consider one famous instance of simulated human suffering, “devolving” into a creaturely register: namely, the old literature professor, Dr. Immanuel Rath, who experiences a nervous breakdown when he succumbs to intense jealousy and a broken heart, at the climax of Josef von Sternberg’s classic film The Blue Angel (1930).19 Just as the full weight of his rejection, at the hands of Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), is being registered in his psyche, the professor—who has quit teaching to follow his beloved in the cabaret world—is ushered out onto the theatrical stage, dressed as a clown. The audience wait in skeptical anticipation of an amusing performance, but the haunted ex-professor can only unleash a torrent of repressed anguish at his broken heart and his humiliation at the hands of the vulgar mob. The horrible sound he releases, silencing the crowd, is part spurned lover, part rooster, and wholly abject. (This sound would truly be one of the worst ringtones imaginable.) The professor seems to lose almost all of his humanity, once verifiable in his composed and authoritative teaching voice but now some kind of demonic bird, screeching in misery, fury, and defeat.20 As this seemingly mindless force of vengeance tries to strangle his romantic obsession backstage, and as he continues to struggle against those who restrain him, the ex-

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professor has become creaturely: a supposedly subhuman status signified more by his inhuman voice than by anything else. And yet, as we have seen, the creaturely voice of an actual cockatoo can be mimicking the animalistic affect of a human being. There is no simple hierarchy here, where the human occasionally—in times of great distress—finds himself reduced to being “an animal.” The creaturely voice can be sweet, like the nightingale. Or it can be harsh, like the traumatized cockatoo or the green-eyed professor-clown. As such, it is the actual manifestation of what some heretical scholastic philosophers called “the univocity of being” (“univocity” describing the shared, immanent ontology of all existents, so that Being is “sung” through all beings equally and in a single—yet distributed—voice).21 We might call this the vox mundi—the voice of the world—­anticipating an intimate link between the voices of animals and those of humans that cannot be reduced to a concept such as “communication” but nevertheless impacts and influences all those within hearing distance. (That is, unless one happens to be a whale, singing at 52 Hz. In which case, we are likely to keep singing into the inky darkness, without any reply whatsoever.)

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M U N D I )

“You are lissssstening to Los Angeles.” Soul Coughing, “Screenwriter’s Blues”

L I S T E N I N G I N T E N T LY to the sounds of “nature,” or indeed the city, in Pierre 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. Schaeffer borrows this term in order to encourage a new type of relationship to 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” (“Acousmatics,” 78). Acousmatic listening, in short, “brings the sonorous object to the fore as a perception worthy of being observed for 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”; and so, “let us cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes” [“The Art of Noises,” 11–12].) Attending to the environment is a highly ambiguous experience when ecology and industry are so intertwined. The temptation might be to escape all human-made sounds, in order to hear the increasingly feeble voice of Mother Nature herself, drowned out—like the call of the whales—by electro­magnetic frequencies and heavy machinery. Indeed, there is a tendency in both the journalistic and scientific vernacular to ascribe

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a voice to the material world itself. One typical example comes from an article found on a popular meteorology website that asserts: “The Earth sings every day, with an electric chorus. With the right tuning, radios can eavesdrop on this s­ izzling symphony of crackles, pops and whistles—the melody of millions of lightning bolts. A listener in New Zealand can even hear a volcano in Alaska erupt, a new study reports.”1 A more scientifically focused instance of “attending” to the voice of nature has been critically examined by Margret Grebowicz, who writes of the Extreme Ice Survey project, sponsored by The WILD Foundation: “a long term photography project that merges art and science to give a ‘­visual voice’ to the planet’s changing ecosystems’” (“Glacial Time and Lonely Crowds,” 1). This environmental initiative records the visible sources of the creaking and groaning of melting ice caps and glaciers, which are then presented to the world as “a voice for landscapes that would have no voice unless we humans give them one.” The well-meaning but rather paternalistic rhetoric of “giving voices” to those who cannot represent themselves (traditionally children, women, the poor, the colonized, the disabled, animals, and other figures of marginalization2) is thus extended to inanimate natural objects such as glaciers and forests. It is certainly necessary to complicate and critique people or projects who seek to give voice to representatives of “nature” in order to advocate in the interests of preservation, restoration, and so forth (as Grebowicz does so deftly in the case of the Extreme Ice Survey project3). And yet there is something to be said for entertaining the possibility of a nonmetaphoric ecological voice—the vox mundi—at least in terms of a potentially productive thought experiment in this age of the Anthropocene. But this immediately leads to a difficult question: at what point does voice become merely sound (according to the traditional metaphysical presumption that voice = sound + soul)? Conversely, and more importantly, at what point does sound become voice (beyond lazy, romantic conflations or projections)?

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To help address these questions, let us turn to a canonical ecological text, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, especially the section simply called “Sounds.” Here, Thoreau makes a rather curious universalizing sonic claim, namely, that “all sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre” (110). The occasion for such an observation in this case is the sound of church bells, which on Sundays blessed with favorable winds can be heard from at least four different villages (Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, Concord): “a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness” (109–110). The distant peal of church bells, for the poetic hermit, does not represent culture so much as an organic human integration with the environment, so that “at a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept” (110). Thus, the echo, he writes, “is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood.”4 Thoreau is describing a polyphonic refrain between bronze and timber, a harmonic duet that dissolves the traditional boundary markers between human artifice and nature.5 At one point, Thoreau compares the singing of passing minstrels—of which apparently there were several back then in bucolic New England—and the lowing of a cow, noting “they were at length one articulation of Nature.” Indeed, for Thoreau, the whistles of a train, church bells, minstrels, cows, and birds all make up the sonic tapestry of a greater natural order—or “that nature which is our common dwelling.” The refrain passes back and forth, between the lute player and the bovine, between the owl and the human sobs that it invokes. “I rejoice that there are owls,” he writes. “Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men.” Once again, it turns out that Mother Nature is an expert ventriloquist.

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“Can you ever be sure that you have heard the very first wood frog in the township croak?” Thoreau asks in a journal entry of March 24, 1859. Ah! how weather-wise must he be! There is no guessing at the weather with him. He makes the weather in his degree; he encourages it to be mild. The weather, what is it but the temperament of the earth? and he is wholly of the earth, sensitive as its skin in which he lives and of which he is a part. His life relaxes with the thawing ground. He pitches and tunes his voice to chord with the rustling leaves which the March wind has dried. Long before the frost is quite out, he feels the influence of the spring rains and the warmer days. His is the very voice of the weather. He rises and falls like quicksilver in the thermometer. (229–230)

Another journal entry, from nearly twenty years earlier (March 3, 1841), underscores the extent to which Thoreau had long cherished the sonic surround and its capacity to affect and re-sound his own being: And now I see the beauty and full meaning of that word “sound.” Nature always possesses a certain sonorousness, as in the hum of insects, the booming of ice, the crowing of cocks in the morning, and the barking of dogs in the night, which indicate her sound state. God’s voice is but a clear bell sound. I drink in a wonderful health, a cordial, in sound. The effect of the slightest tinkling in the horizon measures my own soundness. (48)6

Given the sensitivity of Thoreau’s ears, we should not be surprised, then, that the hermit of Walden pond was a primary inspiration for R. Murray Schafer’s highly influential (and highly romantic) notion of “the soundscape.” For Schafer, writing in the 1970s, “the general acoustic environment of a society can be read as an indicator of social conditions which produce it and may tell us much about the trending and evolution of that society” (The Soundscape, 7). His project could be considered a negative one, in the sense of creating tools to fight

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noise pollution and “the dangers of an indiscriminate and imperialistic spread of more and larger sounds into every corner of man’s life” (3). But he is insistent that it is in fact a “positive study program,” in the sense of enhancing our capacities to appreciate, preserve, and create more nourishing and enabling sonic environments for ourselves and other creatures. Such a new and interdisciplinary program he called “acoustic design.” One of Schafer’s key questions is the following: “Is the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition over which we have no control, or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?” (5). The “we” here is cosmically expansive, given that Schafer himself is highly attuned to nonhuman voices. Indeed, he writes: “Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!”7 Schafer is no agnostic when it comes to the sonic universe, since for him there are “sounds that matter” and those that don’t. The former are those with life-affirming qualities, especially relating to beauty and meaning and not classifiable as “distracting.” Given that we have only been able to capture or record sounds for the past century or so, Schafer is obliged to turn to silent sources for evidence of “ear-witnesses,” most notably literature, which is rich in examples of soundscapes from other places and different epochs. His book begins, however, with what he calls “the natural soundscape” itself, including those produced by water, wind, climate, creatures, and other ecological “keynotes.” Schafer’s own voice, concerning the actual (as opposed to the figural) voice of nature, wavers throughout his discussion. While he refers to “the voices of the sea” and “the voices of the wind,” he also describes the latter as “an aural illusion” (22). He never clarifies whether the ecological voices that he refers to are really to be considered as voices or simply as sounds that sound like voices. By the end of the book,

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the reader suspects the former, given how ­romantic his narrative is, from mythical integrity through decadence to the almost absolute disenchantment of modernity (which includes the cosmic shift from a God or gods experienced primarily as voice, through the ear, to more pictorial understandings of divinity that arrive with the so-called Enlightenment). Such an Edenic orientation allows Schafer to indulge in rather eccentric observations, such as his claim that when a tree falls in the forest and there is no one nearby to hear it, then “it sounds like anything it wishes—a hurricane, a cuckoo, a wolf, the voice of Immanuel Kant or Charles Kingsley, the overture to Don Giovanni or a delicate air blown on a Maori nose flute. Anything it wishes, from past or distant future. It is even free to produce those secret sounds which man will never hear because they belong to other worlds” (24). These flights of fancy disqualify Schafer from being taken seriously by a mainstream scientific audience and instead promote a friendly reception from those with more “hippy” tendencies (or at least those who prefer poetry to prose, to use his own aesthetic and ethical categorical divisions). Ultimately Schafer does not give us any clear criteria for assessing whether we are listening to a natural voice or a natural sound with voice-like qualities. The question of subjectivity or presence, even of life (as in the case of the booming eruption of Krakatoa in 1883), is secondary to questions of sonic utility and beauty. And yet the voice is a natural phenomenon, by Schafer’s account, inspired and nurtured in us by the wider environment, including and especially birds and the wind.8 “Shepherds may,” he writes, “as Lucretius suggests, have got the hint of singing and whistling from the wind” (44).9 In such a case, our voice is merely borrowed from the elements and returned to it. We could not express ourselves vocally without the wind we first inhale from the atmosphere and then exhale over the cords of the larynx—in which case, perhaps we flatter ourselves that our voices belong to us and us alone. We could also expand the understanding just a little to include the sounds of a wind harp.

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Vilém Flusser is another thinker who deftly combines analysis with a poetic sensibility. In his book Natural:Mind, Flusser makes the following distinction: “Vision is the sense that separates us from things, and hearing is the sense that submerges us in them. The seen world is circumstance; the world we hear, is a participated world. The things of nature that are audible but invisible, such as a hurricane and the breeze, penetrate through our noses, mouths and pores. They are ‘­verbal,’ not ‘substantive.’ They are voices that call us” (99). For Flusser, the wind is more than just the movement of air when it becomes audible to the human ear, that is, when it howls, whispers, speaks. The wind is not an impersonal physical force but “a someone to whom I must respond.” Indeed, the relationship is transductive, with the wind and ourselves engaged in an act of co-creation through ontological recognition: “If I do not allow it to be the wind, it will lose its voice.” (As Jimi Hendrix not only sang but evoked through his guitar, “the wind cries Mary.”)10 The wind—the air, the ether—is the medium that allows the vox mundi to be heard in the first place. Flusser’s wind-voice in the breath of the human being.11 Given the rather subjective ascriptions of voice and its privileged status as an index of ontological value (only people or things with voice “count”), we will always be in gray territory when it comes to our attempts to verify or identify the world’s voice. It is not something we can prove, given that it is perhaps more than metaphoric (given its materiality and measurability) but less than literal (given the elusiveness of the subject of such a voice). Aristotle writes, “Nothing that is without soul utters voice, it being only by a metaphor that we speak of the voice of the flute or the lyre” (qtd. in Butler, The Ancient Phonograph, 45). My closing gambit, however, is that our mediamatic or technical condition has patently reached so saturated a state that we can now finally appreciate the fact that voice can exist sans soul (a dubious substance or condition in the first place) and that the flute or the lyre can indeed “have” or “channel” or “conjure” voice. If, as

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Steven Connor suggests, the history of the voice is largely a history of ventriloquism (Dumbstruck, 43), then it is less interesting to find and fix voices to bodies and entities, thereby re­inscribing stubborn ontological myths, than to follow their promiscuous circulation from lung to tongue to instrument to wax to vinyl to magnetic tape or alloy, and back to speakers, mimics, and new voices joining the fray. We can point to a multitude of sources of natural sounds, but it is a leap to then claim these as voices, since this is to cross the mysterious threshold between the physical and the metaphysical. That, however, is precisely the point. To posit a vox mundi is to do two important things: first, force us to reflect on what it is about our own voices that make us so confident in their exceptional status as bearer or vector of subjecthood or “humanity”; and second, oblige us to listen to the sound of the surround differently, more sympathetically and with greater nuance of attention (which itself may encourage a far more inclusive notion of what counts as having that form of existential enfranchisement known as “presence”). To clarify, then: this notion of “vox mundi” is not to offer a quasitheological understanding of the “voice of (mother) nature.” It is an attempt to grasp the slippery distinction between “­univocity” and “equivocity,” that is to say, between shared and distributed being. As Eugene Thacker explains in his book After Life, these obscure and heretical medieval doctrines still have relevance today. And they do so regarding our attitude to the ever-confounding Aristotelian distinction we make between “life” (as an abstract concept) and “the living” (as an actual population of material entities). As I have glossed Thacker’s distinction elsewhere: For univocalists, life manifests itself with equal intensity and value amongst all living things. Thus there is no ontological difference between a donkey or a plant or a Man or a Woman, other than intuitive ones of shape or texture—they all partake equally in what ­Manuel DeLanda would later call a “flat ontology” (clearly a danger-

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ous position to take in such aggressively pious times, dedicated to the exultation of verticality). For the equivocalists, there is no ontological basis for ranking one creature above another, for each individual is so radically distinct as to be incommensurable. . . . For Deleuze, equivocity meant that “being is said in several senses.” In other words, “the different senses of the word ‘being’ were without common measure.” This was a sinful position because it alienated God from his creations, suggesting that He had no control over them; indeed no access to them. The living withdraw from the swooping search-light of Life. Univocity, by way of contrast, meant “being has only one sense and is said in one and the same sense of everything of which it is said.” This is also a sinful position because of the flattening effect whereby all of God’s creatures are ascribed equal ontological status. The univocalists saw the living as a form of animated commonwealth, all sharing an essential substance, albeit expressing itself in different shapes, sizes, and orientations. Equivocalists saw the world’s enigmatic population as something closer to Agamben’s “coming community” (that is, an inessential commonality; or community of those that have nothing in common). Where univocity will find its most eloquent expression in Spinoza’s monism, equivocal creatures anticipate Leibniz’s radically singular monads, created perhaps in the alchemical movement of “extrinsic vectors.” (Look at the Bunny, 74–75)

My own conception of the vox mundi attempts to steer a middle path between univocity and equivocity, or better yet, provide a red thread to help stitch them closer together. There is no transcendent “Nature” from which all beings spring. And yet there is a common reservoir of end and origin, in terms of biology, chemistry, and ­physics. Ecological voices are all singular. A lion is not a human, who is not a train whistle, which is not a wind chime. And yet this immanent equivocity is so intertwined, through mimesis and other forms of sonic proximity, that it forces the metaphysical issue of at least provisional overlaps, sympathies, concords, and harmonies. Again, there is no Voice

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of the World, in a holistic sense. But that shouldn’t stop us from listening to the multitude of vocal avatars that do, in some sense, represent the world, by sheer virtue of emerging from it and belonging to it—at least for the duration of their ability for expression. This is the way we prepare for the lesson of echoes, imitation, conversations, duets, and other types of shared refrain. It is not to advocate recovering the organic in a romantic salvage operation. Nor is it to reinforce the always dubious distinction between nature ( physis) and culture (nomos). The lyrebird, for instance—mimicking perfectly the sound of chainsaws, camera shutters, or car alarms—need not be quite as depressing as it initially seems. For this creature is engaging with the Umwelt of another species in creative, potentially dialogic ways (over and above arguments about conscious artistic production).12 The lyrebird offers a specific “acousmatic mirror” in which it may just be possible to see a very different reflection than we are used to (one that should disturb us beyond mere bad faith and automatic hand-wringing over humanity’s impact on the surround). Were we capable of reciprocating in turn—were we able to conduct such close listening, and performative a­ ttunement—then the whole concept of “nature” or “environment” could be radically revised. Playing a serious game of Marco/Polo with our fellow nonhuman earthlings may be one way forward, to lessen the violence we wreak, directly or not, on all terrestrial creatures.13 Once more: the medium is the message. And the medium is stubbornly precarious life, echoed through technics. This is a call, in other words, for an ethical resonance theory: one that would explore and affirm what Shane Butler calls “this very homophony between voice and world” (The Ancient Phonograph, 28).14 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 shapes determined by an algorithm, there is a subjectively inflected object or operation “paying heed” to its environment. This listening thing is Möbius minded. And to emphasize its subjective or objective nature

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is to play the duck/rabbit game for rhetorically strategic reasons. Where Heidegger would tell us that an animal is poor in hearing, von Uexküll would insist that each mode of attunement to the world creates its own Umwelt, all of which are largely incommensurable. The aural punctum 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 (helpfully) confused not only gender distinctions but species ones 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 ironically named Lady Gaga—today’s more cynical incarnation of Eva Tanguay. The question of nourishment, or lack thereof, is an on­ going one. As the previous chapter suggested, in all these years parrots may not have been merely parroting but also prompting and provoking. And hopefully we can—sooner rather than later—­conceptualize and conjure technologies that are harbingers not of the soundscape of colonization, deracination, and displacement but of a planetary cohabitation, curiosity, hospitality, and/or heterogeneous solidarity. Perhaps (and admittedly it is a very big “perhaps”), we can finally hear echoes without casting ourselves in the self-absorbed role of Narcissus. Let us remember that for Barthes the concept of the “grain” of the voice contains “a dual posture” or “dual production” between language and music. According to this definition, the grain is “the body of the voice as it sings”—although some singers have grain and some do not. (Barthes is not clear, unfortunately, on any objective criteria for making such an evaluation.) Given that language is an important aspect of Barthes’s understanding of his own term, we might suspect that he would not believe that an animal can possess or demonstrate a vocal grain: “The ‘grain’ is . . . the materiality of the body, speaking its mother tongue” (182). And yet other creatures with tongues—­ donkeys, monkeys, parrots, dogs, dolphins, and so forth—have a mother tongue of sorts, taught to express themselves vocally. Barthes

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points in a direction that might eventually have led to this possibility, should he have decided to follow his own suggestive assertions (such as his claim that the “relation is erotic—but in no way ‘subjective’ . . . developing beyond the subject” [188]). Both Barthes and Dolar, to different degrees, complicate the traditional Western equation of voice with a metaphysics of human presence. But neither goes so far as to explicitly consider the creaturely voice of the nonhuman. One wonders, then, what they would think of attributing a grain, or uncanny agency, to the voice of nature more generally—the ecological refrain as a vector of worlding: the voice, so to speak, is one key way in which the world worlds itself into being (remembering that there is no such thing as the voice—only a tapestry of voices, which nevertheless share a great deal). Might the voice of the world, wherever we find it (whispering in a seashell, nestled in a bird’s nest, or rumbling in the giant blades of a wind farm), exhibit traces of the aural punctum? Can it elicit connection or sympathy—a sense of co-belonging? One might object that any such sense would not be mutual, for the shell or the bird or the turbine do not share the same concerns or perceptions as ourselves. Inevitably, we bump up against the windshield installed so sturdily by Kant, the same one that reminds us on a daily basis that we can only speculate about the character and “experience” of things that are not us. (Despite the best efforts of recent philosophers, who claim to be able to drive through the world with the top down, only to arrive with insects in their eyes and mouth.) Barthes himself asked, rhetorically, “Isn’t the entire space of the voice an infinite one?” and even considered the grain of the voice as possibly located on the fingertips of a piano player.15 The grain of the voice thus becomes more about the singular prosthetic apparatus of sonic expression than a personalized aural signature of the larynx or lungs. To ventriloquize the grain of Barthes’s pen: I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way, as if, in the Photograph, they were the very thing—and the only thing—

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to which my desire clings, their abrupt click breaking through the mortiferous layer of the Pose. For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches—and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. (Camera Lucida, 15)

The living sound of wood. As with Thoreau, not necessarily a voice, but certainly a timbre within timber, which can resonate with the environment.

CONCLUSION

I N O F

S A L U T A T I O N

A L L

T H E

V O I C E S

Thus the fading voice of days gone by speaks to us; but where are there still ears to hear it? Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human (I)

T H E P R E C E D I N G P A G E S of this book seemingly pull in two directions. On the one hand, they speak of “sonic intimacy,” which suggests a turning inward, away from the wider world, to more private and personal experiences and relationships. On the other hand, they seek to heed “the voice of the world,” as expressed in all manner of creatures, agents, entities, objects, and phenomena. At first blush, these lines of discussion seem to work against each other, since the latter suggests an opening up or extension of intimate relationships to the wider environment, beyond private or domestic space and occasions. But these two concepts need not be a contradiction in terms. Indeed, from a certain perspective, the two complement each other perfectly.1 For “the world,” as it is encountered, is only encountered as such by a subject.2 Moreover, it is encountered by a subject through the pinhole lens of the individual.3 The abstract, macroscopic notion of “the world” is, in fact and in practice, made up of an infinite array of concrete, microscopic Umwelten and experiences. Even when we are wrenched from an intimate moment into a colder, more social situation—as when we are obliged to leave the lover’s bed for the unloved subway or office—then we are merely reinforcing the private sphere through a fresh run-in with its enabling condition and antagonist.

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(Niklas Luhmann is quite clear that for intimacy to exist at all, it must have an impersonal background against which it creates its magic exceptionalism.)4 But beyond the dialectic between the intimate and the impersonal, we can find threads of the former in the latter (and vice versa). These are interlaced in complicated patterns, with no situation or setting dedicated completely to one or the other. An intimate moment between family or friends can quickly turn sour when we realize we are not in fact on the same wavelength, just as an awkward public meeting can switch unexpectedly into a bonding opportunity (and here I’m not only thinking of a situation between people but between, say, a senior citizen and a computer). In terms of recognizing this usually disavowed kinship, Leo ­Bersani and Adam Phillips have offered us the intriguing possibility of “impersonal intimacy”: a concept that at first appears to be a paradox but that in their suggestive, counterintuitive argument reveals itself to be the mutually infused texture of ontological experience itself. To live authentically, for Bersani and Phillips, is to make oneself available for generic and/or chance forms of intimacy that go beyond what for them can be described as the trivial contingencies of identity. As a result, such an unfamiliar orientation touches on the usually unspoken (but shared) secret of finitude, as well as the inherently entangled nature of being. Any experience whatever may thus be an opportunity for intimacy, even (or perhaps even especially) if it happens between strangers who have been thrown together by the random generator of life.5 One clear illustration of impersonal intimacy might be the choir (or for that matter, the bawdy sing-along at your local tavern or a party), since a close connection is often forged through the meshing of individual voices to the extent that the self can be “lost” or transcended in the universal solution of the music itself.6 The members of the choir—whether refined or roughshod—need not be particularly close in a familiar or personal sense; they can still create an intimate experience together by virtue of the generic nature of human voices

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singing together. (And “generic” here is not meant in a pejorative way but in terms of a universal type, kind, or genre, which bears a certain quiet but profound truth about shared being and experience. Indeed, it says much about our ideological aversion to appreciating the “whateverness” of existence—preferring to valorize the allegedly unique properties of any given entity—that we often use the word “generic” as an insult.) Etymologically speaking, intimacy is rooted in the Latin word ­intimus, meaning “inmost, deepest, profound or close in friendship.” As an adjective or noun, “intimate” pertains to “the inmost nature or fundamental character of a thing; essential; intrinsic.” (In 1678, Thomas Hobbes made reference to “the true and intimate Substance of the Earth.”) Intimacy thus concerns “entering deeply or closely into a matter . . . affecting one’s inmost self.” (Indeed, the normally stand-offish Oxford English Dictionary itself seems to become more “intimate” with the reader as it emphatically repeats the definition of this term with an almost poetic repetitive flourish: “a relation between things: Involving very close connection or union; very close.”) If we trace the linguistic roots back to the Latin word intimāre, however, the picture changes, since this means “to put or bring into, drive or press into, to make known, announce, notify by legal process.” Similarly, one definition of the verbal form, “to intimate,” is “to make known formally, to notify, announce, state; formerly, to communicate (knowledge), to declare (war).” It appears, then, that intimacy has been at least partially stamped with the formal and impersonal since the very beginning, reminding us that “close unions” don’t emerge out of nowhere but must be forged, announced, and otherwise coaxed from and into public space. Sonic intimacy has particular affordances by virtue of its intangibility and its intrinsic temporal dimension, and because the ear cannot be as choosy as the eye or the hand. Indeed, the ear is unavoidably promiscuous, allowing any sound in the vicinity to penetrate it—­

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unless we opt for the imperfect prophylactic of the earplug. When it comes to the voice, we may consider the mother’s mouth to be the ne plus ultra of sonic intimacy, and later, the cooing beloved. But we must also take into account less pleasant encounters: the unwelcome catcall, the ugly drunken proposal, the casual impertinence of a random stranger. Archetypal instances of sonic intimacy might be a parent singing a lullaby to a child or the whispering whimpers of lovers between the sheets. But we may also find it in such unexpected places as the reproachful braying of a mule or in the slick, monetized voice of a pop star emanating from the car radio during a taxi ride from JFK in the rain. Like the punctum itself—which for Barthes always unfolds according to “the order of the loving”—sonic intimacy is a matter of contingent perception and not objective identity, located not in the eye of the beholder this time but inside the ear of the listener. Steven Connor writes, “Not everything in the voice, it appears, has soul; but everything that impacts upon us as voice, or raises the possibility of voice, also raises the possibility of soul” (Dumbstruck, 25; my emphasis). This phrasing is suggestive for my own present thought experiment, whereby voice is less an intrinsic characteristic of any given sound and more an emergent, transitive—even transductive—­ property, experienced by (and as the same time verified by) the subject impacted by it. The vox mundi has at its disposal an almost endless array of ambassadors to address us, even as each specific instance is fleeting (and very possibly endangered) as a collective concern. To listen to one’s mother or lover is relatively easy, at least until we feel the need to install invisible acoustic filters in self-defense. But to listen to the warnings, admonishments, prayers, protests, solicitations, invitations, suggestions, and commentaries of other “voices” within the wider environment is not so easy. We would go mad very quickly if we were to treat every sound in the day or night as a voice. This is a shortcut to mental breakdown.7 But if we retain our faculties and trust a more patient understanding of the figurative lesson stitched into such

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a sensibility, then we can begin to allow specific voices to emerge from the disharmonic choir. These might even be considered mundane, secular angels, bearing a message about our conduct or the conduct of our kind—even if this angel comes in the form of a cheap plastic toy made in Taiwan or a frog who cannot find a mate. The former might be telling us the terrible tale of the young person forced to make it for less than a dollar a day, under harsh and unsanitary conditions. The latter might be telling us that our heedless economic policies have forever thwarted its attempt to continue the species line. Of course these voices do not know what they are saying to us. And yet—to twist John Cage a little—they are saying it. But why insist on the element of intimacy? Could we not have made a similar point while keeping the global choir generic, public, and social? Perhaps. But this would exclude the register that affects us most deeply. It would present an abstract listening subject—a schematic, heuristic device—who passively receives sonic stimuli and then acts in a predictable and causal way, as if the ear is simply a cybernetic receiver and not hooked up to an exquisitely unpredictable affective apparatus that conducts experience through the highly resonant material of the crooked timber of humanity (and, less audibly, through the crooked timber of the trees themselves and the animals that clamber around them). The voice of the world, in order to be considered a voice at all (and thus something worth heeding, as a carrier of potentially enlightening alterity), must arrive intimately, or else it is experienced as noise or static. Thoreau understood this, which is why he tried to listen to the environment with ears freshly unplugged from the deafening distractions of work and civic ways. (A highly privileged decision, it must be said, enabled by his mother, who, we might speculate, was obliged to listen with as much patience as she could muster to the daily epiphanies of her enthusiastic son.) Scientists understand this when listening to—and analyzing—whale songs and beginning to attach certain songs to certain cetacean individuals. Theodore, in the

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film Her, understood this too, during the honeymoon phase with his operating system, Samantha, suddenly being open-minded enough to love—and be loved—by a computer program, itself an experience that revealed the inherently technological character of contemporary eros. Fans of ASMR understand this, when their bodies thrill to the whispers and soft whistles of ­strangers on YouTube. And we all know this from moments of pause in workaday life, when we ignore the voice of the capitalized conscience and listen instead to a bird, an ocean, a piano, or an audiobook. There is always a danger, however, when urging people to “pay heed” to something rather numinous or nebulous. One appears to be making thinly veiled neo-Heideggerian gestures or succumbing to a postmodern kind of New Age–ism. This is where examples can help demonstrate that the voices of the world can be encouraged to emerge from within the silent spaces or within the wider din and into a frequency that we ourselves can hear. Take, for instance, the unnerving example of the so-called Aztec death whistle, which is said to evoke “the sound of a thousand corpses.”8 This instrument—or really, sonic weapon—carved in the shape of a skull was used by Aztec warriors to intimidate their rivals, as well to as celebrate departed souls on the Day of the Dead. The blood-curdling shriek thus produced is, of course, created by the shape of the death whistle and by the exhalations of the person playing it, and not by those who died in combat. And yet the delayed mimesis is uncanny enough to convince the listener that there are tortured traces of the departed in the sound. The instrument itself, after all, is made of clay, which itself is likely to contain traces of lives long extinguished. On a less intense register but still quite haunting, there is the example of Tonkin Liu Architects’ sculpture Singing Tree, in Lanca­shire, England.9 This stylized arboreal shape is made of metal tubes, designed to catch the wind and create a mournful moan—the amplified voice of the moors themselves. Another instance is David Gatten’s

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famous experimental work What the Water Said, Nos. 1–3, in which the artist placed unexposed rolls of film in crab traps in the Atlantic Ocean off the South Carolina coast. When salvaged, these films bore the strong indexical chemical traces of interactions with the salt, sand, crabs, fish, and other marine creatures and elements.10 To this we could add the Croatian Sea Organ, in Zadar, Croatia, which integrates pipes underneath the architecture of marble steps in order to elicit musical sounds from the lapping waves of the Adriatic.11 Consider also the case of Mileece, a sound artist and environmental designer from Los Angeles, who has “developed the technology to give silent seedlings a portal to their own sonic expression.” In these artistic experiments, “Mileece effectively turns a garden into an organic medium for music . . . by attaching electrodes to leafy limbs, which conduct the bio-electric emissions coming off living plants. The micro-voltage then gets sucked into Mileece’s proprietary software, turning data into ambient melodies and harmonic frequencies” (Aaronson, “The Exquisite Sounds of Plants”). In a somewhat similar vein, albeit looking to the sky rather than the ground, we have David Bowen’s Cloud Piano, an installation that plays the keys of a piano based on the movements and shapes of the clouds.12 Finally, we might get a great deal of sonic insight by listening to Bartholomäus Traubeck’s work Years, which records the sounds of a cross section of a tree trunk while it is played like a vinyl album on a turntable.13 Such projects (of which these are just a random and slight sample) invite reflections and responses that encourage a kind of sonic intimacy not with another person but with the wider environment from which we emerged in the first place (and to which we will, soon enough, return). By listening to the “voices” that lie dormant in the surrounding world, through the very process of co-creating them, we may in turn foster a more sustainable relationship with this local matrix of specific existences. The rather austere legacy and sense of existence writ large (which is our cultural heritage when it comes to confronting the

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“meaning of life”) may thus be—slowly, slowly—refigured as a more pragmatic matter of modest phenomenological interactions.14 In terms of a more political ecology—that is to say, in relation to an approach to the environment that foregrounds the inescapable impact of human industry and activity on the surround—we might reflect on the “acoustic image” of the Chernobyl disaster (the phrase is ­McLuhan’s). This powerful sonic trace—perhaps one of the quintessential artifacts of the age—was salvaged for our consideration thanks to the brave (or foolhardy) documentation mission undertaken by Vladimir Shevchenko, who three days after the explosion and meltdown of Chernobyl’s Nuclear Reactor Unit 4 on 26 April 1986, . . . was granted permission to fly over the 30-square-km site known as the “Red Zone” in order to document the extraordinary cleanup efforts of Ukrainian workers and volunteers. When Shevchenko’s 35mm footage was later developed, he noticed that a portion of the film was heavily pockmarked and carried extraneous static interference and noise. Thinking initially that the film stock used had been defective, Shevchenko finally realised that what he had captured on film was the image and sound of radioactivity itself.15

For Kaja Silverman, “the artist’s life is both the earphone through which he hears the world’s call and what makes him capable of responding to it” (Flesh of My Flesh, 77). In this case, Silverman is talking specifically about Rilke (hence the masculine pronoun). But there is no reason to believe that such a formula cannot be applied more generally and across media. As we have seen, one need not be an artist to “hear the world’s call” but can instead be a scientist, engineering and/or wielding new instruments sensitive enough to hear subjectless voices in previously inaccessible spectrums. Some examples of this approach include the resurrection of an ancient melody from ca. 1400 BC (imprinted in cuneiform text on clay tablets, discovered in Syria in

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the 1950s),16 the sonic reanimation of the sound of Jurassic crickets,17 and the discovery of the “space roar” (a mysterious radio signal from a currently unknown source that inter­feres with astronomical attempts to listen to the earliest stars).18 It is thanks to attentive new technologies that we can confirm that black holes create the lowest note in the universe: a B-flat, fifty-seven octaves lower than middle C.19 Tellingly, there is no sonic equivalent—in English, at least—of having “vision” or being “visionary.” This suggests that the future is always envisioned, and not listened for or anticipated in the form of attending to as an auditor. Keeping our ear to the ground, in an expanded sense (such that we aren’t even sure what we’re straining to hear), would seem to be a vital strategy in this ongoing crisis now known as the Anthropocene. Perhaps even silence itself—that elusive and fetishized commodity—is one of the primary voices in which the world shows itself. (In which case, we will be straining to hear it for a very long time, given current levels of noise pollution.) Part of such an expanded listening project might be to try to imagine, or even mimic or inhabit, the ways in which other types of embodied life “hear” the various voices of the world they encounter. For instance, we know from experimentation conducted by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, that squids change color and patterning in sympathy with music.20 Could an appreciation of synesthesia in other species—even if we cannot fully experience them ourselves— help us navigate and r­ e-create our own soundscapes for enhanced possibilities, pleasures, valences, utilities, and relationships? These are the kinds of questions and somatic thought experiments that an “alien phenomenology” might encourage, all the better to fight the tenacious habits of humanistic inquiry.21

. . . Orpheus is a key figure here, since, on the one hand, this cherished musical icon seems like an ecological hero, in harmony with his environment through the sonic sympathy of his lyre. On the other hand, he

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could be considered a paradigm of literal anthropocentrism: the human as exceptional shepherd of being. Does Orpheus use his m ­ usic to dominate nature, through en-chantment? Or is his song a harmonic, holistic, properly ecological response, with humans, animals, trees, and stones all vibrating together within the song of life as a kind of (coming) musical-affective community?22 At this fragile historical juncture, where history itself—both human and “natural”—seems to be threatened at the material level of the planet, we are in need of a reverse Orpheus figure to inspire a different, less willfully ignorant orientation to the world. In this case, our anti-­Orpheus would not seduce the environment through song but would rather allow himself to be seduced by it, through listening. We might still allow him (or her) to pick up the lyre, but all the better to play along with the improvised composition always already in progress rather than to dictate it. Such a gesture would stem from an acoustic ethos that reverses—or simply ­relinquishes—the model in which the human gives a command performance to which the elements arrange themselves in deference. The “ecological voice” is thus not a property of a subject but a refrain passed between beings, an Orphic force freed from the anthropocentrism of the Orpheus figure. After all, we are not immortal, either on the individual level or that of the species. We might, as a consequence, begin to think deliberately of the sonic legacy of the human experiment (beyond, that is, the golden LP we sent across the universe in the Voyager probe, containing snippets of everything from Bach to Blind Willie Johnson to Bulgarian folksongs, for alien completist audiophiles to enjoy). Do we want our voice to sound to the ears of others like the obnoxious drunk who drowns out the rest of the choir? Understanding sonic intimacy through the acoustic prism of finitude means that we better prioritize the sounds we nurture and those that we pay attention to: a matter of sonic semiotics. Given our cultural and historical emphasis on vision and our insistence that beauty is located in the eye of the beholder, we have fallen in love—in the most “meta” sense ­possible—with an-

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other Hellenic archetype, Narcissus. We implicitly understand that in the very act of “being human,” we all play this role, even as we hypocritically condemn the vanity that now parades under his own name. But what if we were to sympathize more with Echo, the nymph who was capable of loving another being and not only a reflection of herself? Perhaps, in such repurposed mythic symbolism, the tragedy in the tale could be exorcised and the romantic pathos channeled away from an all-absorbing ego, toward an environmental awareness of potential encounters. The latter, in turn, offers opportunities for a kind of selfknowledge that transcends being mired in the self. (To poach from the poet Jeff Dolven, to live “as though the echo called the tune / as though the ink could draw the pen.”)23 Yes, we shall disappear, all without a trace, in the long run. But the long run is irrelevant to the length and time signatures of the song, as well as for the temporality of sonic intimacy in its many forms. As ­Alfred North Whitehead writes, we are “of infinite importance, because as we perish we are immortal.” This immortality is not spiritual but immanent to the material flow of life, connected to what Whitehead calls “the prehension of the past”—which is to say, a reflection of the fact that “the world we know, even as it perishes, remains an elusive, unfixed element in the oncoming future.”24 As Marguerite ­Yourcenar writes, “Everything has already been lived and relived a thousand times by those who have disappeared but whom we carry in the very fibers of our being, just as we also carry in us the thousands of beings who will one day live after us. The only question which incessantly poses itself is why, of all these innumerable particles floating in each of us, certain ones come to the surface rather than others” (Two Lives and a Dream, 237–238).25 This coming to the surface—this birth to presence—is what matters, precisely because it is the temporary manifestation of virtuality and all those existences that it both ventriloquizes and disallows. When Echo dies in ­Ovid’s version of the myth, she withers away from the ­asymmetry—or rather, unidirectionality—of her love. Narcissus cannot

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hear Echo. He is too absorbed in the handsome stranger in the pond’s reflection. And so, Echo’s invisibility to the beautiful youth becomes an objective condition, even as she follows him, hoping that he will eventually be attuned to her plaintive whispers and cries. But this is not to be so. For Echo, the messenger of love, nothing remained but voice and bones; then only voice. (Metamorphoses, 113)

“Echo,” in this case, is an emblem for all living things—and even nonliving things—that have left a sonic trace for others to discover. Bones are far more durable than voices, as paleontologists will happily remind you. We know what dinosaurs looked like; we can even study some remaining skeletons. But we don’t know what they sounded like, except by inference; there are no sound recordings, other than the best guesses of Hollywood. But in Ovid’s account, Echo’s voice is an exception to this durability of matter over immaterial vibration: transcending her own demise and living a fugitive existence in the forest for as long as there are caves, ravines, and valleys for her acoustic ghost to dwell in. Today, we have the tools to “capture” the voice. We are surrounded by such echoes, many created by those whose bones have since turned to dust. This is an unprecedented possibility and situation, one that we, as a species, have not consciously assimilated, either psychologically or culturally. To be able to hear the voice of the deceased, intimately in our ear, is a new and uncanny experience, one we have been too distracted and fearful to glean a collective lesson from.26 Is it a personal or cultural gain that we can now listen to the actual voice of the victim of a m ­ odern-day lynching by a US police officer or the terrified voice of someone making an emergency phone call? Does it help our self-­understanding as a species that we can now hear the real cries of rage and terror of a Russian cosmonaut burning up in the atmosphere, trapped in a defective space capsule?27 Or is it better that such

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voices rest in peace, unheard? Such questions inform the new field of “hauntology,” which seeks to study the many spirits circulating in the media machine, including the countless lost souls who have been denied a full burial due to the embalming tendencies of new technologies.28 Hauntology tracks the work of the departed soul in the age of mechanical, and now digital, reproduction.29 The voice is always already uncanny, by virtue of its trickster relationship to the index of presence.30 It speaks of the one who is speaking, but not in any definitive way. At some level, thanks to our strong theological heritage, we all suspect that we are puppets and other unseen forces are making us speak. Existence is essentially ventriloquial. This is what the voice is telling us. At the same time, few things are more reassuring to us, in terms of the irreplaceable presence of the other, than his or her voice, even through machines such as the telephone. Consider, for instance, this scene in Proust’s epic work Remembrance of Things Past: “It has been a great pleasure to hear your voice,” says Marcel’s friend Andrée, as they come to the end of a telephone call. This mundane statement triggers a characteristic philosophical reflection in the narrator, who thinks to himself: I might have said the same, and with greater truth than Andrée, for I had been deeply touched by the sound of her voice, having never before noticed that it was so different from the voices of other people. Then I recalled other voices still, women’s voices especially, some of them rendered slow by the precision of a question and by mental concentration, others made breathless, even silenced at moments, by the lyrical flow of what the speakers were relating; I recalled one by one the voices of all the girls whom I had known at Balbec, then Gilberte’s voice, then my grandmother’s, then that of Mme. de Guermantes, I found them all unlike, moulded in a ­language peculiar to each of the speakers, each playing upon a different instrument, and I said to myself how meagre must be the

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concert performed in paradise by the three or four angel musicians of the old painters, when I saw mount to the Throne of God, by tens, by hundreds, by thousands, the harmonious and multisonant salutation of all the Voices. I did not leave the telephone without thanking, in a few propitiatory words, her who reigns over the swiftness of sounds for having kindly employed on behalf of my humble words a power which made them a hundred times more rapid than thunder, but my thanksgiving received no other response than that of being cut off. (529–530)

This particular Proustian type of gratitude is an appropriate response to those distinct voices that help hail and usher us into being and who then help us navigate the world. Indeed, we could do a lot worse than send our prayers, even today, to “her who reigns over the swiftness of sounds.” New technologies allow new forms of listening, which in turn afford new forms of being together. Moreover, they oblige us to rethink what “being together” even means (now that this phrase is spoken largely in local contexts informed by an unprecedented awareness of global forces and conditions). Who or what counts as a “being”? And what does “together” signify, in a socioeconomic system so efficient in producing alienation and isolation? A sonic approach to rapidly changing instances and understandings of intimacy can help us address such vital questions, as well as articulate new ones. Expanding the conceptual spectrum of what counts as a voice is one way to better understand—and thus challenge—the technical foundation and legacy of taxonomy (gender, class, race, species), as well as the perplexingly popular neo-Darwinian readings of “the evolution of technology” that drive so much of contemporary culture. During the initial late Victorian emergence of electronic technologies, Friedrich Nietzsche reflected on what it meant to be “philosophically minded” in an age of expanding horizons. In the traditional account, the philosopher was said to embody “a single mental posture,

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a single class of opinions.” For Nietzsche, however, it was far better to avoid such uniformity, for the sake of “the enrichment of knowledge.” Instead, we should “listen to the soft voice of different situations in life,” since “these bring their own particular views along with them” (Human All Too Human (I), 291). Indeed! Perhaps this insight into the importance of sensitive hearing was in part, along with his illness, why Nietzsche ceased to speak in the final years of his life. (A situation so different in kind and tone from the thinly disguised self-­portrait he painted of his own would-be heroic death, in Human All Too Human: “Toward the light—your final movement; an exulting shout of ­knowledge—your final sound” [196].) When the time came, Nietzsche had perhaps decided that he had used his own voice enough, both in impassioned discussions and in his own vociferous writings—all the better to attend to what he called “the voice of nature,” which was itself intimately tied to the voice of wisdom. Nietzsche trusted the vital force of the voice of nature, even if he didn’t trust humans to hear it. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the following millennium, we have few grounds for such trust, reminded daily of the ailing ecology around us and the very real disappearance of endangered voices every day as part of the ongoing mass species extinction event. It is said that in space, no one can hear you scream. This could also be said about earth, depending on who, or what, is doing the screaming. The voice is the locus of immeasurable pleasure as well as boundless distress. The voice of the world, if we are to grant such a conceit one last time, would be a strange hybrid of both extremes, mixed together with the more banal sounds the greater terrestrial population makes in any given day. It is a voice with no clear beginning and no obvious end (although “the end” now feels much closer than the beginning).31 The very act of listening requires a different mind-set and praxis from our usual “design-related solutions” to the world’s accelerating problems. One must close one’s eyes, for instance. One must breathe differently and discount the visual stimuli that have become so

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fraught and compromised, providing the spectacular dictates of capital with a visual energy. Space is figured differently, according to acoustic principles. (In this sense, sound designers are on the cutting edge of this wider sonic project.) In order to find a suitable psychic-acousmatic space, it is important to drown out the apocalyptic voices that flood the airwaves. It is important to distill the truth of planetary crisis away from the unhelpful urgency of the uninformed messenger. (I’m speaking here of alarmist journalists, not concerned scientists.) Moreover, it is important to simply acknowledge that there is such a thing as “the unanswered call of Things.”32 Famously, for T. S. Eliot the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper. Culturally speaking, it has been important to register the appropriate vocalizations when it comes to the fall of the curtain, whether personally or in a more cosmic sense. In Eliot’s depiction the world ends on an anticlimactic note; it is better that Armageddon arrive with the hellish roar of an atomic bomb than the miserable grizzle of poisoned water tables. Trees are mute, at least in our conception of what constitutes speech (even as they have been demonstrated to “speak” to each other). The voice of their destruction is ventriloquial—it can be heard in the angry howling of the chainsaw, the grumbling of the logging machinery, the dusty tantrum of the sawmill. Whether we have the stomach to listen to our voices is an open question (for as Nietzsche insisted, our viscera are a brain, too, and connect to other organs in hitherto uncharted ways). For the sake of the planet and all of those who depend on it, let us presume that it is not too late to listen to the voices of the earth, whether they be mineral, animal, natural, or technological. And let us share the results of what we learn with each other, in curiosity and generosity of spirit, in the hope of no longer appearing to the rest of the world as what Nietzsche called “the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.”

N O T E S

INTRODUCTION

1. For a more developed and influential conceptual mapping of aural subjectivation, see Didier Anzieu’s notion of “the sonorous envelope,” as developed in The Skin Ego. 2. On this theme, Mladen Dolar quotes Freud’s discussion of “the sounds which betray parental intercourse” (The Voice and Nothing More, 133), in which the father of psychoanalysis notes that “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). 3. It is also possible that the moment one hears one’s own recorded voice for the first time, and the uncanny (mis)recognition and denial that such an experience often inspires (“That’s not me!”), is another audio equivalent of the mirror stage. 4. In his intimidatingly comprehensive tome Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond, Hillel Schwartz excavates an enormous archive of historical details pertaining to sounds, which, through their sheer volume (in both senses), collectively form an argument against the bias of the visual over the auditory—or at the very least, render this common claim even more mystifying, given the prevalence of noise, sound, and music in our lives. 5. The etymology of audience stresses the faculty of listening over and above seeing—something that has been reversed in the society of the spectacle. Likewise, no marketeer has ever talked of “ear drums” in the way they refer to “eyeballs.”

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6.  Levinas’s reverence for the face of the Other seemingly rests on this tradition that prioritizes the visual over the aural, so that one might wonder what an ethics would “sound” like that involves an active listening to the voice rather than a deferral to the injunction of the eye. However, on occasion, ­Levinas is indeed concerned with the relationship of ethics to the voice via the face of the Other, especially in terms of historical and metaphysical suppression (although it must be said that this interest is overly tied to speech and/as language rather than the underlying “grain” of the voice). See, for instance, Seán Hand’s discussion in “The Other Voice: Ethics and Expression in ­Emmanuel Levinas.” 7.  See Jeff Dolven’s forthcoming book The Senses of Style on the notion of “voice” and/as style (and vice versa). 8.  Aristotle famously writes in “On the Soul” that “voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it; nothing that is without soul utters voice” (572). For Aristotle, all life shares in psukhē, or soul. But this does not mean that trees or caterpillars potentially have voice, defined by the natural philosopher as “a sound with a meaning.” This meaning derives from the coincidence of audible breath (powered by the sensitive soul) and “an act of imagination” (enabled by the rational soul). So Aristotle is unclear, and at times inconsistent, about the vocal capacity or potential of nonhuman animals. The braying of a donkey may indeed have some voice in it, since “such animals are devoid of lung have no voice.” So by inverse logic, those with lungs do, at least potentially, have voice. But the sounds of these creatures will never rise to the level of language or speech, for Aristotle, since that requires nous. The barking of a dog can be considered a “sound with a meaning” (“There is an intruder in the house!”). The dog therefore enjoys a certain amount of vocal agency. But, for Aristotle, this is a case of nonlinguistic voice. One wonders, then, where strong and legible boundary lines can be drawn between meaningless sound, meaningful sound, and voice. The Venn diagram is very mobile, depending on the source—and indeed the listener. Consider, for instance, sounds seemingly without soul, such as a thunderclap or a church bell. Both are examples of “a sound with meaning” to a human subject (“A storm is brewing” and “Time to come worship,” respectively). Does this mean—according to both Aristotle’s rather vague definition and the principle of the vox mundi—that a thunderclap or a bell can have voice? Victor Hugo, via his famous figure of Quasimodo, might answer in the affirmative, even going so far as to claim a form of communication in the case of the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral: “the one form of speech he [the hunchback] could hear.” (I thank Soyoung Yoon for alerting me to this reference.) 9.  See Giorgio Agamben, The Open. 10.  The now-classic reference here is Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

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11. As Barbara Glowczewski notes (“Assemblages”), there has been a strong historical equation between humanity, figured against and above the animal, and specifically spoken language: “Thus people have forbade children who grow up without speech to continue to express themselves with signs, including deaf people. For 100 years the Vatican forbade the use of sign language, even though it is a language par excellence.” 12.  Shane Butler provides the important reminder that “the living voice . . . is itself a medium; like the wax of Edison’s later cylinders, or that of an ancient writing tablet, its ability to express depends in part on its ability to be impressed” (The Ancient Phonograph, 27). In the electric, and then digital, ages, we tend to forget that the voice itself is as much medium as message. 13. The Greek word phōnē could be used to mean both “voice” and “speech” and has thus contributed to a long legacy of ambiguity when it comes to attempted conceptual distinctions between these two intimately related phenomena (see Butler, The Ancient Phonograph). 14.  The celebrated film editor Walter Murch notes: “Renoir in particular was extremely interested in realistic sound. He went so far in one direction that he almost came around the other side. There’s a wonderful quote by him where he says that dubbing—replacing the original sound with something else—is an invention of the devil and that if such a thing had been possible in the thirteenth century, the practitioners would have been burned at the stake for preaching the duality of the soul! Renoir felt that a person’s voice was an expression of that person’s soul, and that to fool around with it in any way was to do the devil’s work. The devil is frequently represented as having a voice at odd with what you see. In The Exorcist, the voice that the young girl speaks with is not her own voice. This idea of devilry and duality and dubbing, there’s something to be explored there” (qtd. in Ondaatje, The Conversations, 112–113). 15.  Various mystical traditions find nothing new in the idea that the voice is far from exclusively human, as expressed in the Sufi belief that “there is nothing in this world that does not speak. Everything and every being is continually calling out its nature, its character and its secret” (Khan, The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan, 148). Extrahuman voices are also sometimes evoked by modern artifacts in an attempt to connect to lost indigenous cosmologies, for instance, that of the Alacalufe and Yaghan peoples, featured in Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button. “They say that water has memory,” notes the film’s narrator. “I believe it also has a voice. If we were to get very close to it, we’d be able to hear the voices of each of the Indians and the disappeared.” 16.  Vox in Latin means both “voice” and “word.” 17.  Silverman writes: “Analogy is the correspondence of two or more things with each other,” rather than to each other (The Acoustic Mirror, 40). Moreover, “an analogy is a very different thing from a metaphor. A metaphor

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entails the substitution of one thing for another. This is a profoundly undemocratic relationship, because the former is a temporary stand-in for the latter and because it only has provisional reality. In an analogy, on the other hand, both terms are on equal footing, ontologically and semiotically. They also belong to each other at the most profound level of their being” (173). CHAPTER ONE

1.  See Roger Ebert’s presentation during his 2011 TED Talk, currently available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNXOVpN8Wgg. 2.  See, for instance, George Dvorsky’s article for io9, “Freakishly Realistic Telemarketing Robots Are Denying They’re Robots.” 3. James Gleick, Twitter post, February 16, 2014, 12:10 p.m., https://twit ter.com/jamesgleick/status/435098988858335233. 4.  I thank Sara Wilkins, and her discussion group connected to my Eros and Civilization class, for helping me zoom in on the significance of the lip quiver in this scene and its implications. 5.  In his book In Praise of Love, Badiou writes: “Love always starts with an encounter. And I would give this encounter the quasi-metaphysical status of an event, namely of something that doesn’t enter into the immediate order of things” (28). It is for this reason that Badiou does not believe love can really happen through apps and online dating sites, because the “encounter” is outsourced to an algorithm and thus does not carry the authentic resonance of an event. 6.  Daniel N. Stern’s multimodal notion of “vitality affects” and “affect attunement,” as explored in his book The Interpersonal World of the Infant, could be productively extended to and tested against more adult experiences and scenarios—indeed, incorporating various impersonal affective exchanges between people and nonliving environments. Such an experiment, however, is unfortunately beyond the scope of the current study. 7.  See, for instance, David Milgrim’s graphic novella Siri & Me, as well as Liat Clarke’s article for Wired magazine titled “Falling in Love with AI Virtual Assistants: A Creepy Love Affair Nearer Than You Think.” Of course, few terms are as revealing or taken for granted as the catchall dismissal “creepy.” 8.  Two representative examples from the mainstream press: Garry Maddox, “Meet ‘the Other Woman’ Who Is Always Telling You Where to Go,” in the Sydney Morning Herald; and Bruce Feiler, “Turn Right, My Love,” in the New York Times. 9.  At the turn of the millennium, during the brief heyday of the musicsharing program Napster, the top search term on the Internet was “MP3”— with “pornography” a close second. It’s confounding, then, that the two terms—both then and now—are rarely searched together.

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10.  Statistics vary concerning the gender breakdown of those who regularly view sexualized images, but it is assumed to be mostly men, with a sizable cohort of curious women. Such statistics tell us very little about why or how people use this prosthetic palliative or according to what types of subcategories. For a recent and detailed “big data” gender breakdown of porn consumption habits, see http://www.pornhub.com/insights/women-gender -demographics-searches. 11.  In their concise and provocative essay “Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound,” Corbett and Kapsalis seem to begin with the exact opposite assumption of the present argument, stating that female sex sounds are “a more viable, less prohibited, and therefore more publicly available form of representation than, for instance, the less ambiguous, more easily recognized money shot” (104). Their premise then prompts a series of questions: “What do we make of the proliferation of sounds of ecstasy that have been a staple of the pop music world since the 1960s? Specifically, how can we account for the meaning of the many works that include or, more often, center on the female voice simulating sexual bliss?” (102). The difference in approach by these authors is not so great as it may initially appear, however, since it stems from contrasting taxonomic criteria rather than a substantive disagreement concerning the ontology and frequency of aural sex. To put it in simple terms, for Corbett and Kapsalis, simulated (female) orgasms in pop music count as audio porn, whereas for me they do not. That is to say, we agree that such sounds are potentially “unsettling to deep cultural architecture” (102), but they usually only appear in popular music, which is closer to an erotic thriller than hardcore pornography (to use a cinematic metaphor). So when Corbett and Kapsalis write that “one can hear female orgasm sounds in background music while browsing at a popular clothing store, though the same store would never dare screen porn video loops on in-store monitors” (104–105), I would be amused by the observation but also point out that the two alternatives are not necessarily corollaries. For while it is true that from early blues to Gainsbourg and Birkin in “Je t’aime,” “recorded sex sounds are engaged in, on one hand, the production of an erotics and, on the other, a strict maintenance of gender binarisms” (104), the conditions of production and mode of address effectively create—or disavow—the voyeuristic ear. The musical context or alibi for simulated orgasm removes it from an explicitly onanistic economy and renders the voice itself a different kind of sonic object from the one that is focused purely on sexual pleasure. 12.  See, for instance, the extremely NSFW (Not Safe for Work) subreddit known as Gone Wild Audio: http://www.reddit.com/r/gonewildaudio/. 13.  It is perhaps also worth mentioning a modest cache of MP3 files, strewn around the web, featuring “erotic hypnosis,” in which a soothing and

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seductive female voice guides the listener (presumed to be male) to “handless climax” (in one instance, at her verbal command of “jackpot”). Another minor exception comes to us from another era: a project conceived in the mid1990s by author Lisa Palac and lesbian “sexpert” Susie Bright, who co-created ah ­ i-tech audio aphrodisiac in the form of an X-rated CD titled Cyborgasm. This featured tracks that anticipated the polysexual visual aesthetic of alt.porn sites such as Suicide Girls and Burning Angel, as well as John Cameron Mitchell’s film Short Bus, where sexual taboos are combined with the sex-positive embrace of all those manifestations of desire that fall outside the incredibly narrow confines of mainstream pornography. Sadly, as cultural critic Mark Dery pointed out at the time (186), Cyborgasm did not live up to its ambitions, proving perhaps what a challenge it is to be both creative and arousing, given that the latter is so conditioned by rigorously established patterns. (After all, what could sound more like a “stuck record” than one’s own fantasies?) 14. The fact that phone sex is interactive, adding another element of quasi-presence, gives it an immediate advantage over scenarios that have been previously recorded (and thus are locked into a single narrative, without the anticipation of branching options). But this alone is not enough to account for the dearth of time-shifted sexualized voices. (See Nicholson Baker’s Vox for an amusing literary exploration of this theme.) 15.  Available at http://pornfortheblind.org/. Apparently there is a Braille edition of Playboy magazine, but it—for obvious reasons—obliges readers to honestly admit: “I only read it for the articles.” 16.  See Julie Beck, “How to Have a ‘Brain Orgasm,’” as well as David Robson, “The Strange Phenomenon of Musical ‘Skin Orgasms.’” 17. In his remarkably erudite book Echolalias, Daniel Heller-Roazen complicates the neat distinction between the cry or “exclamation” and linguistic systems of articulation: “A language in which one could not cry out would not truly be a human language at all. Perhaps this is because the intensity of language is nowhere as great as in the interjection, the onomatopoeia, and the human imitation of what is not human” (18). To put it crudely, then, the cry is not the Other of language, nor its horizon, but forms a kind of generative continuum. This is not how it is read or deployed in the wider culture, however, which relies on moral tales or reminders, provided by convenient binaries. 18.  As Steve Connor notes, “The power of a voice without a visible source is the power of a less-than-presence which is also a more-than-presence” (Dumbstruck, 25)—all the more amplified, Silverman would argue, when this wavering pseudo-hyperpresence is sonically coded as feminine. 19.  To simply code the voice as female or “on the side of woman” is one of those theoretical conveniences, troubled by transcultural and transhistorical exceptions. For instance, in the cantos jondos of flamenco singing, only men

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are presumed to have the strength necessary to channel the life-or-death power of the duende. Likewise, old blues singers, overly emotional preachers, and highly rhetorical politicians tend to be men, while women are expected to be more measured and circumspect, perhaps to compensate for the supposed irrationalism of their gender. The roles of the Dionysian priestess and Delphic oracle in times gone by further complicate any such neat associations. 20.  Yet this need not be the exclusive province of film, despite its being better equipped to mimic sound than the older art of literature. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “When the World Screamed,” for instance, is the paramount patriarchal attempt to wring sonic recognition from the supreme enigmatic Other: Mother Earth herself. In this tale, a rogue gentleman-scientist becomes convinced that the planet is sentient, and were he to penetrate deep enough with iron machines, then human existence would have to be acknowledged. In explicit terms (almost satirically so) the story details the process of unwanted penetration, until the literal climax, when an uncanny chthonic scream explodes over the assembled crowd. No more riddles from the Sphinx, just a howl of pain and submission. No need for Mother Nature to account for herself according to symbolic dictates, since her inarticulate shriek stands to condemn her as forever outside the world of men: awe-inspiring but controllable, sublime yet sublimated. (A more recent instance of this theme is provided by the Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, who mimics—or perhaps even channels—the tortured voice of the earth in her visceral performance titled “Fracking.”) 21.  Corbett and Kapsalis make the argument that “men’s pleasure is absolute, irrefutable, and often quiet, while women’s pleasure is elusive, questionable, and noisy” (“Aural Sex,” 104). They then go on to speak of “a tyranny of ecstasy” when they ask, “Given a dominant heterosexist perspective, do the cooing sounds of female sexual pleasure serve as a normative model for the ‘correct’ female response to sexual stimulation? Are these sounds part of a disciplinary framework in which supposedly ‘free’ sex vocalizations are ideologically instituted as the acceptable sound of stimulation? Is this a tyranny of ecstasy, teaching women how to sound and men what to try to make women sound like?” (106). While these questions are rhetorical, they invite and encourage positive answers. 22.  It is often necessary to remind ourselves that “silent” movies were rarely silent, with live music, sound effects, and/or narration creating an immersive atmosphere before synchronized sound arrived in 1927. 23.  The legend around this famous scene concerns the director’s literally underhanded recourse to jabbing a pin into the lead actress’s derrière in order to provoke the requisite facial expression in a single take. 24.  Film critic Karina Longworth laments the ideological retreat that has

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occurred between Meg Ryan’s famous fake orgasm in the 1980s (exposing the delusional presumption of mastery and psychosexual detection by men) to its cultural echo in the 2009 film The Ugly Truth, which, she argues, is truly postfeminist in capitulating to the notion that a fake orgasm is better than none at all (and by extension, a smooth relationship is more important than the woman’s pleasure). 25.  Here I am using “reified” almost as a synonym for “human,” given that we are the species that excels at turning relationships into commodities. As a consequence, according to the logic, nothing is more reified—that is, human—than the sound of simulated orgasm. Inversely, nothing is more inhuman than the sound of a genuine, unmediated orgasm (something as yet unheard, at least by human ears, except by degrees, owing to the symbolic filters of self-consciousness). 26.  An interesting pedagogic exercise in sonic economics: identify and attend to the most prominent voices of capital. At the time of writing, candidates might be Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, Christine Lagarde, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and so on. Toward the other end of the spectrum: a humming child laborer in Bangladesh, the hoarse cry of a teen mercenary in Angola, the exhausted but perky voice of a telemarketer in the Philippines, or the impoverished and wheezing welcome of a Walmart greeter in Ohio. Thinking beyond the human voices of capital, we might include the squeal of a factory-farm pig, the boot-up sound of a Mac computer, the chime of Big Ben, the opening bell on Wall Street, or the ping of a black-box flight recorder from the bottom of the ocean. 27.  As Hillel Schwartz reminds us, in early modern times “the truth of sex lay in its noises” (Making Noise, 128), especially given the fact that “domestic sexual activity was more often out of sight than out of earshot.” That is to say, “evolving desires for privacy in lovemaking went acoustically unmet” in the eighteenth-century metropolis (134). Early modern pornography, Schwartz tells us—especially in its dominant literary form—was equally obsessed with the sounds as with the sights of sexual encounters, to the extent that popular guides to London’s numerous prostitutes made special mention of their vocal talents and “the quality of their soundmaking” (130). “Pornography,” he asserts, “was fixed especially upon the orgasms and eargasms of women” (129). CHAPTER TWO

1.  Despite the convenience of biographical metaphors for any given medium—that film, for instance, 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 argu-

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ment that the introduction of sound to cinema was in fact an aesthetic step backward. 2.  Kaja 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” (The Acoustic Mirror, 72–75). 3.  In an astonishing, albeit characteristic, act of ventriloquial chutzpah, Freud—when obliged on account of his cancerous throat to ask his daughter Anna to read his papers for him in public—did not bother to delete or edit the line “My mother, my wife, and my daughter are castrated” (Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 99). 4.  Silverman is, rightly, careful to stress the retrospective aspect of these phantasmic scenes (The Acoustic Mirror, 75–76). See also Amy Lawrence’s Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema. 5.  As Adriana 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” (For More than One Voice, 145). For her part, Anne Dufourmantelle reminds us that “enchantment (in late Latin) simply indicates the setting of a text to music, the creation of a song, an incantation” (Blind Date, 68). 6.  For a typically erudite appraisal of the long historical distrust of and/ or disgust with the female voice, from classical times to today, see Anne Carson’s famous essay “The Gender of Sound,” in which she states: “Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death” (“The Gender of Sound,” 121). 7.  The Siren theme lends itself to a diffuse generalization to include all women, so that any chance encounter might play according to similar dynamics, whereby the woman uses her voice to lead men astray. Take Ovid, for example, who writes in his Art of Love: All women should learn how to sing— In many cases The voice is as good a procuress as the face is. Know the latest hits from the stage, And the new tune from Egypt that’s all the rage. (133)

More than a millennium later, Richard de Fournival (twelfth century) writes of his bewitchment by a bird-like woman: “Was it surprising that I was captured? No, for Voice has so much power that it excuses many things that are unpleasant, as with The Blackbird. . . . Through voice Nature repairs one of

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the greatest defects that can occur in a living being” (Master Richard’s “Bestiary of Love” and “Response,” 11–12). 8.  See Geoffrey Winthrop-Young’s article “Kittler’s Siren Recursions” for further historical and conceptual context for this “forensic Siren story.” 9.  See also Boria Sax’s The Serpent and the Swan: The Animal Bride in Folklore and Literature. 10.  See Barbara Engh’s “Adorno and the Sirens: Tele-Phono-Graphic Bodies.” 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. 11.  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.” 12.  All the following quotes are from Jody Rosen’s fascinating piece of cultural archaeology, “Vanishing Act: In Search of Eva Tanguay, the First Rock Star.” 13.  See, or rather hear, Luciano Berio’s pioneering work for the female voice, Sequenza III (1966). 14.  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” (The Voice and Nothing More, 31). Nevertheless, he is wont to admit that “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 “the voice is the excess of the signifier” (81). 15.  Cavarero uses this quotation from Italo Calvino’s short story “A King Listens” as the epigraph for her book. 16.  The fact that Cavarero neglects to cite such digital proof of organic uniqueness does not help clarify the issue. 17.  Cavarero attempts to preemptively counter the fetishization of the individual 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, and Lacan’s formalizations of allegedly unique

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b­ eings, as well as Bersani’s call for “impersonal intimacy,” all, in their different ways, provide persuasive challenges—even deterrents—to 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. 18.  At one point Cavarero goes so far as to boldly claim, “Because it belongs to the world of humans, 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. 19.  An analog and presumably ancient version of both the Vocoder and Auto-Tune is the A’bel and A’reng, of the Co Tu and Ta Oi Pako peoples of Hue Province, Vietnam, who attach a wire between their tongue and a singlestringed instrument, not unlike a Chinese erhu, played with a bow. By singing and manipulating the bow at the same time, the human voice of the musician is manipulated and distorted by the instrument, creating an uncanny organicmachinic voice entirely its own. See the video currently available here: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nD0xMGdfaQ. 20.  See Carina Storrs, “People Hear with Their Skin, as Well as Their Ears.” 21.  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?” 22.  In early 2011, the mainstream media was briefly obsessed with the rags-to-(relative)-riches tale of Ted Williams, a homeless man with a “golden radio voice.” The staggering popularity of the original YouTube clip—of Mr. Williams speaking like a smooth old-school radio 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. 23.  See Adam Harper, “System Focus: The Evolution of the Voice in the Digital Landscape.” 24.  Contemporary artist Martin Backes has created an arresting piece titled What Do Machines Sing Of? (2015)—“a fully automated machine, which endlessly sings number-one ballads from the 1990s.” The artist’s statement goes on to explain: “As the computer program performs these emotionally loaded

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songs, it attempts to apply the appropriate human sentiments. This behavior of the device seems to reflect a desire, on the part of the machine, to ­become sophisticated enough to have its very own personality” (Backes, “What Do Machines Sing Of?”). What begins as an amusing gimmick does indeed appear to become increasingly melancholy and profound, the longer one listens to the voice of the machine, striving for some new kind of becoming. In a potentially similar vein, see also the 77,000 mysterious videos of usually 11 seconds in length, each presenting a series of 1-second pitches, on a blue-and-red block background, uploaded to YouTube since 2013 by a user named Webdriver Torso. Two popular theories are that these videos are either the coded signals of spies or a massive series of “back-end” data tests by a software developer. As with Martin Backes’s piece, I like to see this as the networked mega-machine, whistling to itself, perhaps out of sheer boredom at what it is being used for. https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCsLiV4WJfkTEHH0b9PmRklw. 25.  On the media history and cultural significance of audio “compression,” see Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format. 26.  I borrow this term from Adam Greenfield’s book of the same name. 27.  At one point Cavarero describes the flute as an “acoustic prosthesis of the mouth” (For More than One Voice, 72), but this does not go nearly far enough in such a direction. 28.  Andersson, lead singer of The Knife as well as Fever Ray, is an interesting figure in the genealogy linking Eva Tanguay with other punkish and/or elfin s­ ingers such as Lene Lovich, Siouxsie Sioux, Kate Bush, Cindy Lauper, Björk, Joanna Newsom, and others. 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 singer 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. 29.  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 quasicybernetic understanding of the parasite as an asymmetrical, linear, enabling (even tricksterish) ur-relation, analogous to the first term in the signal/noise dynamic so dear to recent systems theory. 30.  For 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, “Bird-

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song and the Origin of Music,” 6). The fable he develops from this (rather ahistorical) primal scene rests on the assumption of a libidinal genesis of vocal expression. 31.  For a germane meditation on what we might call the sonic media and cultures of postmortem performativity, see Stanyek and Piekut, “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane.” 32.  Cavarero takes Barthes to task for being incapable of 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” (For More than One Voice, 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. 33.  The phrase “aural punctum” was perhaps first coined in print in Margaret Iversen’s 2007 book Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (126), during a discussion of the “click” of the camera shutter in Barthes’s account of posing for a photograph. 34.  See my article “After the Beep: Answering Machines and Creaturely Life.” 35.  In relation to the Islamic God, one wonders what difference, if any, was registered on the ear of the supreme deity during the adhān, or call to prayer, when the muezzin began electrically amplifying his song over the past few decades. 36.  While Cavarero frames her exploration of the voice as a “relational ontology,” in which the individual is always sounding toward another, her emphasis on the “absolute local” of the unique human being does have the effect of foregrounding singularity, rather than a constitutive “transindividuality” (to use Gilbert ­Simondon’s term). (With thanks to Miriam Piilonen and Andrew Welch, for helping me think this through.) 37.  This is not to say that there is no such thing as ongoing damage from being subjected to “sonic violence” (see, for example, the work of Suzanne Cusick).

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38.  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?” (Listening, 5). 39.  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.” CHAPTER THREE

1.  Every decade this underwater noise, described by some scientists as “ocean smog,” doubles. See David Brand, “Secrets of Whales’ Long-Distance Songs Are Being Unveiled by U.S. Navy’s Undersea Microphones—but Sound Pollution Threatens.” 2.  “Drowned Out,” NPR multimedia feature, http://apps.npr.org/lookat this/posts/whales/. Incidentally, Clark has recently gone on record as being skeptical about the whole “loneliest whale in the world” narrative, claiming that it is likely other whales can hear this 52 Hz call but probably find it strange. Whether the story is scientifically sound or not is less important for my purposes than the extent to which it has captured the global imagination. 3. The Anthropocene is an increasingly popular term, associated with the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, that is employed to refer to an epoch beginning at the historical moment when humanity started having a measurable impact on the earth’s geology and ecosystems. The precise date of this moment, however, is hotly debated, differing by millennia. 4.  Brian Owens, “Wild Gorillas Compose Happy Songs That They Hum during Meals.” 5.  For Montaigne, who often swam against the common current of his times, animals not only have a voice, they have speech (or the “capacity to respond,” in Derrida’s terminology). In his Apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne writes: “For what is it but speech, this faculty we see in them of complaining, rejoicing, calling to each other for help, inviting each other to love, as they do by use of their voice? How could they not speak to one another? They certainly speak to us, and we to them” (qtd. in Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 163). For his part, Agamben goes even further, arguing that animals naturally have voice, while we existentially impoverished humans must learn its alienated equivalent and so exit infancy. As Catherine Mills puts it in her book on Agamben: “While animals have an immediate relation to voice in chirping, bleating or barking, human beings have no such voice. Instead they are deprived of voice and must acquire speech . . . to enter into discourse” (The Philosophy of Agamben, 24; my emphasis). Latour, in his writings, has no

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problem with referring to “the voices of nonhumans” (Politics of Nature, 69), meaning not only our animal friends but also chairs, maps, and pathogens. 6.  See Philip Brophy, “Vocalizing the Post-Human.” 7.  As Beryl Rowland notes, “Girolamo Cardano . . . was able to observe an elephant brought from Spain to Vienna by Mary of Bohemia in 1552, and he concluded that except for its inability to speak the elephant did not appear to fall short of man” (Animals with Human Faces, 74). 8.  Aristotle: “As we maintain, indeed, nature does nothing in vain; now alone among animals man has speech. . . . No doubt the sounds of the voice [phōnē] express pain and pleasure, and so they are found in all animals: their nature allows them only to feel pain and pleasure and to manifest them among themselves” (qtd. in Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign: Volume 1, 347). In short, phōnē is a necessary but not sufficient condition for logos. Derrida famously details a decisive distinction between these two forms of “centric” discourse, stating that “there are many signs of a recognized authority of the vocal, which means, in my opinion, that phonocentrism is universal, which logocentrism is not” (348). In terms of sonic intimacy, the trick is to foreground a multitude of voices, without being “phonocentric” (that is, without positing a privileged voice of God the Father or equivalent). 9.  Mark Payne reminds us that “to Pythagoras, the sound of a young goat at the slaughter is like the wailing of a human child, and only an impious person can hear it with ‘unmoved ears’” (The Animal Part, 126). 10.  Steve Connor writes, beautifully: “Children develop very early on a pleasure in vocally reproducing the sounds of the world—the creaking of doors, the wailing of sirens, the pattering of rain. This is more than onomatopoeia, which is to say, more than mere imitation. When one vocalizes a sound, one gives it to one’s own voice, in order to give it its own voice. What is imitated in onomatopoeic voicing is the world’s own capacity to give voice, in an enactment of the possibility that things in the world might be capable of and characterized by speech, and that the sounds of the world might be being uttered by it. I do not merely borrow, or capture this speech in reproducing the noises of the world; I seem to give the world the same kind of interior self-­ relation as is possessed by all entities that have a voice, a self-relation founded on the capacity of voice to shape a being in the air. I give the world an animate life by taking it as a voice; but the voice is not merely the sign of this animation, it is the very means by which animation is accomplished” (Dumbstruck, 10). 11.  As Charles Siebert’s article (“The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide between Animals and Humans”) goes on to note: “Subsequent spectrum analysis of Noc’s utterances soon revealed just how skilled a speaker he was. The rhythm and amplitude of his vocal bursts and the intervals between them were found to pattern those of human speech. His

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fundamental frequencies, meanwhile, also matched those of humans, registering around 200 to 300 hertz, roughly the octave of middle C, and several octaves below the white whale’s usual sounds.” 12. Tomlinson is especially persuasive when he argues against origin stories, such as Darwin’s influential account in which the protagonists are “­ancestors of modern humans endowed with cognitive powers already advanced beyond those of modern apes, powers supporting rich imitative abilities” (A Million Years of Music, 113; my emphasis). Such narratives do not provide a “missing link” between asignifying vocalizations and sounds ­carrying “more general meanings, developing into early, onomatopoeic words” (113). Tomlinson’s impressive and exhaustive book is an attempt to flesh out just such a missing link (which turns out to be far more complicated than a leap from A to B–rather, a gradual, granular, distributed series of interlocking developments). Nevertheless, if we grant whales and some other “higher” animals “rich imitative abilities”—such as Noc the beluga whale—then we also have the possibility of “the voice” emerging in a nonhuman milieu. Or so I would argue. 13.  As Deleuze and Guattari write: “The question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what already is musical in nature” (A Thousand Plateaus, 309). 14.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXoaUljEbqQ. 15.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcFEA0vSwgQ. 16.  A different sad domestic tale can be found in the online CBS news article “Widow Asks Public for Help Finding Missing Parrot That Speaks in Late Husband’s Voice.” 17.  It is worth mentioning the novelty death-metal band Hatebeak, famous for having a parrot for a vocalist. “In an interview with Consequence of Sound, drummer Blake Harrison informed us that the band will never tour: ‘Parrots like doing this stuff—the mimicry is kind of like a form of play, so it’s more like they have to be in a relaxed . . . playful mood. You know the sound of your smoke detector when the battery is low? And it’s like a really loud chirp? He will do that when he’s uncomfortable.’” (Interesting that the band is called Hatebeak and yet the lead “singer” must be relaxed and playful in order to “perform.”) http://dangerousminds.net/comments/ polly_wanna_headbang_the_return_of_hatebeak_the_death_metal_band. 18.  Jeremy Bentham is often cited as the first person of note and political consequence to ask the important question, can animals suffer? Menely, however, reminds us that this was in fact “a view pervasive in the period” and indeed set the stage for nineteenth-century debates and legislation on animal rights and the prevention of cruelty. 19.  In Ingmar Bergman’s chamber comedy The Devil’s Eye (1960), Lucifer

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is troubled by a sty, the unpleasant manifestation of the exceptional purity of a vicar’s daughter. He deploys Don Juan as his faithful lieutenant to corrupt the girl, but she resists his charms. Indeed, the formerly heartless seducer of women now finds himself in love with the young maiden (which of course makes her even more ­immune to his attempts at seduction). The devil, disappointed in this failure by his celebrated crony, tortures the formerly implacable Don Juan by training his own supernatural hearing back on earth, in order to describe the sound of the young woman’s whimpers on her honeymoon. The premise of such a punishment rests on the recognition that the sound of rejection (or infidelity) is even more painful than being an eye-witness to an estranging scene of desire, since the phantasms that subsequently haunt us are not visibly fixed but echo throughout the agonized sensorium—all the more effective for their insistent intangibility. We might then also speak of being “green-eared” with jealousy. 20.  Elsewhere (“Tolstoy’s Bestiary”) I have argued that we are most attuned to the other’s humanity at the very limits of what we consider human (which is not as paradoxical as it sounds). 21.  For a detailed discussion of the heresy of univocity and equivocity, see Eugene Thacker’s magisterial book After Life. CHAPTER FOUR

1.  http://www.accuweather.com/en/features/trend/whistling_volcanic _lightning_h/31261795. 2.  See Pooja Rangan’s fascinating essay “In Defense of Voicelessness.” 3.  See the online Museum of Endangered Sounds (http://savethesounds .info/). 4.  In a very thought-provoking essay on what she calls the “onomatopoeic voices of musical instruments,” Carla Nappi insists that “sounds are more than what they sound like,” especially when filtered through “the language sensorium.” Noting the different ways in which familiar sounds are rendered in different cultures, Nappi considers mimetic linguistic descriptions as translations of worldly, non­human, and even inanimate voices. “A kind of metamorphosis is happening here: the human body (your body, my body) becomes a bell, a sword, a crying baby deer, a flying grasshopper. To communicate the sound of a material object without the benefit of the presence of that object, we become the object and take on its voice. We each do so in the vernacular in which we live: if I am the bell, the voice of the bell becomes an American English tinkle tinkle. If you are a Qing speaker of Manchu and you have instead become the voice of the bell, or if you are mimicking that voice, it might sound like kiyalang. The bell speaks many languages, exists through many voices, and in doing catalyzes relationships among them” (“A Page at the Orchestra”).

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5.  For an excellent treatment of Thoreau in relation to terrestrial soundscapes, see Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, especially chapter 3, “The Aeolian and Henry David Thoreau’s Sphere Music,” which treats the various “voices” of the world within a longer genealogy of influence between timeless, natural cosmic forces and modern mediamatic modes of inscription. 6.  I’d like to thank Tyran Grillo for pointing me to this particular passage. 7.  Schafer would be very distressed, I’m sure, to read the new book titled The Great Animal Orchestra, by Bernie Krause. In an interview with John Vidal, of The Guardian, Krause states: A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening. . . . Little by little the vast orchestra of life, the chorus of the natural world, is in the process of being quietened. There has been a massive decrease in the density and diversity of key vocal creatures, both large and small. The sense of desolation extends beyond mere silence. If you listen to a damaged soundscape . . . the community [of life] has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus. (­Vidal, “A Great Silence Is Spreading over the Natural World”)

One massive and sustained effort to salvage such sounds from oblivion is Cornell University’s Macaulay Library, which bills itself as “the world’s largest archive of wildlife sounds” (http://macaulaylibrary.org/)—a sonic version, perhaps, of the famous Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, designed in the hope of ensuring some kind of perpetuity for specific species beyond extinction and/or apocalypse. 8.  According to BBC News (“Urban Based Birds ‘Learn to Rap’”), “birds living in cities are performing a type of ‘avian rap’ while their rural counterparts are sticking to more traditional sounds.” 9.  Shane Butler writes: “Water, thunder, wind, and more all ‘murmur’ in Latin. While such uses invite personifications and other flights of fancy, they also remind us of the opposite, namely, that we are hardly the only things in our world that repeat themselves” (The Ancient Phonograph, 63). 10.  Connecting ancient and modern musicians, Butler also notes: “Hendrix’s guitar and Athena’s aulos . . . do not offer disembodied abstractions of speech but, rather, prosthetic extensions of the voice’s deep tissue” (The Ancient Phonograph, 157). 11.  As Peter Sloterdijk observes, in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books (“Satan at the Center and Double Rhizomes”): “The existence of human ears provides the proof for the existence of sound, and this is the basic

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form of action at a distance—a primordial reality. Human connectedness has to go through the ear in the first place. We live in a sphere of sound. Beingin-the-world means living in a soundspace; the reachability of the world is experienced first in a psychoacoustic dimension.” 12.  See Caillois, who notes, “The eye is the vehicle of fascination in the whole animal kingdom” (“Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 93). This may be true. But insisting on it discounts the ways in which the ear might be an alternative vehicle, capable of taking us through different terrain. 13.  Recently, while I was visiting a house in upstate New York, the relative quiet of the summer night was sometimes broken by a pack of coyotes, triggered into collective howls by the alarm of the local village fire station. One can only speculate on the nature of the “relationship” that the coyotes have with this powerful unseen voice. For myself, lying awake and entranced by the unfamiliar din and the resonance effect between machine and wild dog, it felt as if the coyotes were responding to a sonic god: a call to prayer that feasibly may have bound them more deeply together and more closely to the territory mapped by this specific refrain. 14.  While Butler acknowledges the anthropocentric tendencies of our own reflections on the voice, he stops short of moving into post-human territory when he writes, “Whether crying like a baby or crooning ‘Blue Velvet,’ our call still always ‘says’ this: I too am human” (The Ancient Phonograph, 37). In contrast, I myself would note those moments when the cry or call of a human being reaches beyond our own selfhood—beyond our own ­species-being—and in fact announces, “I never was human”—or at least, “I never was only human.” 15.  I think here of the evocative Joni Mitchell lyric from “The Judgement of the Moon and Stars”: “Condemned to wires and hammers / Strike every chord that you feel / That broken trees / And elephant ivories conceal”— which speaks of the latent or virtual aspect of ecological materiality. CONCLUSION

1.  One figure to reconcile these two tendencies—though we might do well to find less overdetermined perspectives—is crystallized in the Lacanian neologism e­xtimité, translated into English as “extimacy.” This term is designed to highlight the generic nature or foundation of the individual subject and the ways in which the internal, psychic world is created by the infolding of the wider world. For a neat gloss on this “excluded interior,” see PavónCuéllar, “Extimacy.” 2.  One hopes that we can speak of the “as such” without tacitly endorsing a largely Heideggerian orientation. For an important discussion of the relationship between “the world” and “the earth” in philosophical and popular

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discourse, see Kelly Oliver’s recent book Earth and World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions. 3.  When we speak of the individual, we should implicitly understand that such an entity is also shorthand for the process of “transindividuation” (Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects) that constitutes the individual in the first place. That is to say, the subject is no longer considered an isolated monad or coherent property of self-ownership (if it ever was by anyone other than Leibniz and Locke). Rather, the individual is considered to be a relatively homeostatic moment between the sharing of subjectivities through time, from generation to generation. For a more biological destabilization of the integrity of an autonomous self, see Peter Kramer and Paola Bressan, “Humans as Superorganisms: How Microbes, ­Viruses, Imprinted Genes, and Other Selfish Entities Shape Our Behavior.” 4.  Luhmann uses his own brand of systemic sociology to posit “the need for a world that is still understandable, intimate and close,” to the extent that “the individual person needs the difference between a close world and a distant, impersonal one” in order to become a functional modern psycho-social subject (Love as Passion, 16). 5.  In his book Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (co-authored with Ulysse Dutoit), Bersani offers Jean-Luc Godard, Pedro Almodóvar, and Terrence Malick as consummate portraitists of impersonal intimacy. To this estimable list, I would add Tsai Ming-liang. 6.  For Eugene Thacker, writing in an as yet unpublished collection of aphorisms dedicated to the topic of pessimism, “music is sound that tolerates the listener.” 7.  In his talk titled “Earslips: Of Mishearings and Mondegreens” (http:// www.stevenconnor.com/earslips/), Steven Connor cites a psychiatric study that “suggests that THC may induce psychotic hallucinations, especially the auditory hallucinations which are classically associated with paranoid delusion, by suppressing the response inhibition which would normally prevent us from reacting to nonvocal sounds as though they were voices.” From this, he muses that it may be the case that “far from only occasionally or accidentally hearing voices in sounds, we have in fact continuously and actively to inhibit this tendency,” in order to function in human—and only human!—society. (I am indebted to David Cecchetto, who has himself written elegantly on ghostly machinic voices in his recent book Humanesis (59–60)—for pointing me to this very suggestive idea.) 8.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9QuO09z-SI. 9.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B0hGyKV9qs. 10.  See the 2014 interview with David Gatten (“Better Living through Cinema: An Interview with David Gatten”) in Duke University’s online Arts Journal.

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11.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myV3E9uREuI. 12.  See Bowen’s personal page: http://www.dwbowen.com/cloud_piano_ movie.html. 13.  See Traubeck’s personal page: http://traubeck.com/years/. 14.  As mathematician and philosopher David Odell notes: “The ontological question of the self when it comes to the voice is not so interesting as the extraordinarily varied phenomenology. One can take it as given that the uniqueness of the self can’t be established by any evidence, but that it is a generic concern of any self in spite of that. On the other hand, as bodies we are effortlessly unique, just like every other material thing. What is so great is that certain elements in the voice singing a song can bring about a strong sense of a unique intimate self, a sense (of a self ) that is understood to be able to be appreciated by many, and that people will even feel moved to share with each other as tokens of a common understanding. In other words, the uniqueness of the self is not properly an ontological or existential issue, but a pragmatic issue in the field of human relationships, a token that can be used to assert or test or create proximity” (personal correspondence). 15.  See Susan Schuppli, “The Most Dangerous Film in the World.” 16.  See (or rather, hear): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBhB9gRn IHE&feature=share. For more examples of work being conducted in the emerging field of archaeomusicology, see Richard J. Dumbrill, The Archaeomusicology of the Near East. 17.  See the BBC Nature feature by Victoria Gill, “Jurassic Cricket’s Song Recreated.” 18.  See Andrea Thompson, “Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected.” 19.  See NASA, “Black Hole Sound Waves.” 20.  See Christopher Jobson, “This Is What Happens When a Squid Listens to Cypress Hill.” Staying in the realm of hip-hop, Clams Casino’s lush EP Rainforest is an especially rich sonic line of inspiration for using technology to elicit or engineer the vanishing voice(s) of endangered environments and habitats. 21.  Such an attempt to listen to the world via the ears of other species, or even other objects, is the rich and provocative challenge provided by Ian ­Bogost’s (Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing) concept of “alien phenomenology,” even if the results are necessarily asymptotic. 22. Several versions of the story note that Orpheus did not include women in such a community, which is why some spurned representatives of the sex decided to tear him to pieces in vengeance. Rilke writes in Sonnets to Orpheus: “Only because you were torn and scattered through Nature, have we become hearers now” (qtd. in Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, 78). 23.  Jeff Dolven, “The Invention: A Libretto for Speculative Music,” in Speculative Music, 39–49.

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24.  The first quotation is from Whitehead, the second from Loren Eiseley; both in Eiseley, “The Lethal Factor,” 251–252. 25.  On a similar theme, of deep (or long) human continuity, Marcel Proust writes of the character M. de Charlus: And he gave a little laugh that was all his own—a laugh that came to him probably from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who herself had inherited it, in identical form, from an ancestress, so that it had been sounding now, without change, for not a few centuries in little old-­ fashioned European courts, and one could relish its precious quality like that of certain old musical instruments that have now grown rare. There are times when, to paint a complete portrait of someone, we should have to add a phonetic imitation to our verbal description, and our portrait of the figure that M. de Charlus presented is liable to remain incomplete in the absence of that little laugh, so delicate, so light, just as certain compositions are never accurately rendered because our orchestras lack those “small trumpets,” with a sound so entirely their own, for which the composer wrote this or that part. (Remembrance of Things Past, 292–293)

26.  Regarding the massive shift (epistemological? phenomenological? perhaps even ontological?) ushered in by recording technologies in general, Hillel Schwartz asks his readers: “Wouldn’t you listen, wouldn’t you hear differently as audience to singer or preacher, scientific lecturer or virtuoso pianist, if, even as you arrived in hopes of spiritual exaltation, unbelievable beauty, invaluable information, astonishing invention, or sublime execution, you knew that all this would dissolve on your departure into an incomplete or irretrievable memory?” (Making Noise, 24). 27.  You can hear this historical audio snuff tape, if you have the nerves for it, on the NPR website (Krulwich, “Cosmonaut Crashed into Earth ‘Crying in Rage’”). 28.  Friedrich Kittler writes: “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture. . . . In our mediascape, immortals have come to exist again” (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 13). 29.  Agamben writes: “What is a specter made of? Of signs, or more precisely of signatures, that is to say, those signs, ciphers, or monograms that are etched into things by time” (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living among Specters,” 38). 30.  In his book Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner tells the story of Guglielmo Marconi, who, late in his life, had an epiphany. “The godfather of radio technology decided that no sound ever dies. It just decays beyond the point that we can detect it with our ears. Any sound was forever recoverable, he believed, with the right device. His dream was to build one powerful enough to pick up Christ’s Sermon on the Mount” (ix).

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31.  The surrealist comedian Steven Wright once said, “It’s a small world . . . but I wouldn’t want to paint it.” We might reverse this statement—for far less comedic effect, admittedly—to say, “It’s a large world . . . which is why I want to record it.” Such an Olympian folly or desire need not, however, be an encyclopedic kind of auditing, or an aural equivalent of the mapping motivation of the World Picture (that is, the modern will to objectivize, represent, and manipulate our environment). The collective goal—since no one person could even begin to tackle such a project, nor could it ever be finished—is not to capture, control, and affix but to hear, follow, and co-fascinate, perhaps only once if the source is shy or unique. 32.  A phrase I borrow from Piilonen and Welch (“For More Than Our Voices”), who are speaking specifically of Béla Balázs’s libretto for The Wooden Prince.

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N A M E

Aaronson, Xavier 85, 119 Agamben, Giorgio 4, 38, 73, 96, 104, 107, 108, 116, 117, 119, 123 Almodóvar, Pedro 114 Althusser, Louis 8, 38 Andersson, Karin Dreijer 43, 106 Anzieu, Didier 95, 119 Arendt, Hannah 35–36, 105 Aristotle 53, 71, 96, 105, 109, 119 Arnheim, Rudolf 102, 119 Australian Karen 17, 20 Bach, Johann Sebastian 88 Backes, Martin 105–106, 119 Badiou, Alain 16, 98, 119 Baker, Nicholson 100, 119 Barthes, Roland 29, 43–47, 75–76, 82, 107, 119 Beck, Julie 100, 120 Benjamin, Walter 36, 38 Bentham, Jeremy 110 Bergman, Ingmar 110–111 Berio, Luciano 104 Berlant, Lauren 27, 120 Bernays, Edward 34 Bersani, Leo 80, 105, 114, 120

I N D E X

Bezos, Jeff 102 Birkin, Jane 99 Björk 106 Bogost, Ian 115, 120 Bowen, David 85, 115 Brand, David 108, 120 Bressan, Paola 114, 123 Bright, Susie 100 Brophy, Philip 53, 109, 120 Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir 43 Bush, Kate 106 Butler, Judith 106 Butler, Shane 71, 74, 97, 112–113, 120 Cage, John 83 Caillois, Roger 113, 120 Calvino, Italo 104 Carson, Anne 103, 120 Caruso, Enrico 33 Cavarero, Adriana 29, 30, 35–38, 42–48, 103–107, 120, 124 Cecchetto, David 114, 120 Chang, Jung 33, 120 Cher 38, 39 Chion, Michel 23, 41, 103

128

Chorost, Michael 108, 120 Clark, Christopher 52, 108 Clarke, Liat 98, 120 Conan Doyle, Arthur 101 Connor, Steven 11, 72, 82, 100, 109, 114, 121 Corbett, John 18, 99–101, 121 Crowley, Aleister 34 Crutzen, Paul 108 Cusick, Suzanne 107, 121 Darwin, Charles 10, 55, 110 Deleuze, Gilles 50, 57, 59, 73, 104, 110, 121 Derrida, Jacques 57, 62, 105, 108, 109, 121 Dery, Mark 100, 121 Descartes, René 53 Dietrich, Marlene 62 Dolar, Mladen 22, 24, 29, 33, 39, 43–49, 53, 58, 61, 76, 95, 104, 121 Dolven, Jeff 89, 96, 115, 121 Dufourmantelle, Anne 103, 121 Dumbrill, Richard J. 115, 121 Dunn, Leslie C. 44, 121 Dutoit, Ulysse 114, 120 Dvorsky, George 98, 121 Ebert, Roger 9, 10, 98 Edison, Thomas 97 Eiseley, Loren 116, 121 Eliot, T.S. 94 Elliot, Missy 43 Engh, Barbara 104, 121 Ernst, Wolfgang 31, 121 Feiler, Bruce 98, 122 Flusser, Vilém 71, 122 Fournival, Richard de 103, 122 Frampton, Peter 105 Franklin, Aretha 43 Fraser, Elizabeth 35

NAME INDEX

Freud, Sigmund 25, 26–27, 95, 103, 107, 122 Gainsbourg, Serge 99 Gatten, David 84, 114, 122 Gill, Victoria 115, 122 Gleick, James 13, 98 Glowczewski, Barbara 97, 122 Godard, Jean-Luc 114 Goffman, Erving 18 Grebowicz, Margret 66, 122 Greenfield, Adam 106, 122 Guattari, Félix 50, 59, 110, 121, 122 Guzmán, Patricio 97 Hand, Seán 96, 122 Harper, Adam 39–40, 105, 122 Hawking, Stephen 9 Hazel, Eddie 50 Head, Matthew 106, 122 Hegarty, Antony 106 Heidegger, Martin 2, 75 Heller-Roazen, Daniel 100, 122 Hendrix, Jimi 71, 112 Hobbes, Thomas 81 Homer 29, 32 Houdini, Harry 33 Hugo, Victor 96 Iversen, Margaret 107, 122 Jameson, Fredric 40 Jobson, Christopher 117, 122 Johnson, Blind Willie 88 Jolson, Al 33 Jones, James Earl 41 Jonze, Spike 10, 16 Kafka, Franz 29 Kahn, Douglas 112, 122 Kant, Immanuel 70, 76 Kapsalis, Terri 18, 99–101, 121

NAME INDEX

Kassabian, Anahid 122 Keim, Brandon 51, 123 Kepler, Johannes vii Khan, Inayat 97, 123 Kingsley, Charles 70 Kittler, Friedrich 27, 31, 104, 116, 123, 126 Kramer, Peter 114, 123 Krause, Bernie 112, 126 Krulwich, Robert 116, 123 Lacan, Jacques 3, 104, 107, 122 Lady Gaga 75 Lagarde, Christine 102 Lamarr, Hedy 23–24 Lanchester, John 28, 123 Laplanche, Jean 2, 123 Latour, Bruno 108, 123 Lauper, Cindy 106 Lawrence, Amy 103, 123 Leavy, Barbara 32, 123 Levinas, Emmanuel 96, 121 Lind, Jenny 33 Longworth, Karina 101 Lovich, Lene 106 Lucretius 70 Luhmann, Niklas 47, 80, 104, 114, 123 Machatý, Gustav 23–24 Maddox, Garry 98, 123 Malick, Terrence 114 Marconi, Guglielmo 116 Marino, Lori 56 Marshall, Chan 43 McLuhan, Marshall 18, 42, 86 Menely, Tobias 53–54, 110, 123 Mileece 85 Milgrim, David 98, 123 Mills, Catherine 108, 123 Milner, Greg 116, 123 Ming-liang, Tsai 114 Mitchell, John Cameron 100

129

Mitchell, Joni 113 Monk, Meredith 34 Montaigne, Michel de 108 Murch, Walter 97, 124 Nancy, Jean-Luc 44, 104, 108, 123 Nappi, Carla 111, 124 Newsom, Joanna vii, 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich 79, 92–94, 124 Odell, David 115 Oliver, Kelly 114, 124 Ondaatje, Michael 97, 124 Ong, Walter 48, 124 Orpheus 87–88, 115 Ovid 89–90, 103, 124 Owens, Brian 108, 124 Palac, Lisa 100 Pavón-Cuéllar, David 113, 124 Payne, Mark 109, 124 Pettman, Dominic 124 Phillips, Adam 80, 120 Piekut, Benjamin 107, 126 Piilonen, Miriam 107, 117, 124 Plato 42 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 2, 123 Proust, Marcel 91, 116, 124 Pythagoras 18, 28, 109, 121 Queen Victoria 45 Rangan, Pooja 111, 124 Rath, Immanuel 62 Renoir, Jean 97 Ridgway, Sam 54, 125 Rilke, Rainer Maria 86, 115 Robson, David 100, 125 Rosen, Jody 34, 104, 125 Rosolato, Guy 21 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 106 Rowland, Beryl 109, 125

130

Russolo, Luigi 65, 125 Ryan, Meg 24, 102 Sax, Boria 104, 125 Schaeffer, Pierre 20, 28, 65, 125 Schafer, Murray R. 68–70, 112, 125 Schuppli, Susan 115, 125 Schwartz, Hillel 95, 102, 116, 125 Serres, Michel 106, 123 Shevchenko, Vladimir 86 Siebert, Charles 109, 125 Silverman, Kaja 7, 21–23, 33, 86, 97, 100–104, 115, 125 Simondon, Gilbert 107, 114, 125 Simone, Nina 106 Siouxsie Sioux 106 Sloterdijk, Peter 112, 125 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 96, 126 Stanyek, Jason 107, 126 Stern, Daniel 98, 126 Sternberg, Joseph von 62 Sterne, Jonathan 8, 106, 126 Storrs, Carina 105, 126 Szendy, Peter 126 Tanguay, Eva 33–34, 75, 104, 106, 125

NAME INDEX

Thacker, Eugene 72, 111, 114, 126 Tagaq, Tanya 101 Thompson, Andrea 115, 126 Thoreau, Henry David 67–68, 77, 83, 112, 126 Tolstoy, Leo 28, 111, 125, 126 Tomlinson, Gary 55–56, 110, 126 Traoré, Rokia 44 Traubeck, Bartholomäus 85, 115 Tyrangiel, Josh 38, 126 Uexküll, Jakob von 28, 75, 126 Vidal, John 112, 126 Ward, Humphry, Mrs. 126 Watts, Alan 15 Welch, Andrew 107, 117, 124 West, Kanye 102 Whitehead, Alfred North 89 Whitman, Walt 3 Williams, Ted 105 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey 104, 123, 126 Yourcenar, Marguerite 89, 126