Abstract
Lacan positioned the voice as a partial object equally vital as the gaze to the constitution of subjectivity. Perceptually disembodied from yet fundamental to the subject, the voice for Lacan was one of only a few primordial phantasms that possessed the capacity to bridge (and, by consequence, simultaneously rupture) the Symbolic/Imaginary divide. The voice is, in Žižek’s own turn of phrase, a “little piece of the Real.”1 Theorists who have taken up Lacan’s general observations on the voice are gradually emerging, marking what appears to be a vocal turn in Lacanian cultural theory. Chion’s initial film scholarship on acousmatic sound,2 for instance, has proven influential on Žižek, who over several works situates the voice as an intruder in subjectivity, a sinthomatic contour of the maternal superego that saddles the potential for jouissance in the undoing of the structural apparition of the Other. Consistent amongst Žižek’s diffuse writings is the following observation on the voice: it is the surplus of signification sewn to the word like a virtual prosthetic experienced all at once as pleasure and pain.3
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Notes
Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 154.
Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso Books, 1997), 69–70.
Slavoj Žižek, “The Structure of Domination Today: A Lacanian View,” Studies in East European Thought 56, no. 4 (2004): 383–403.
John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2007).
Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, (New York: Verso Books, 2002).
Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Jacques Derrida, quoted in Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 38.
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (New York: Verso Books, 2000).
Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 57.
Olivier Julien, Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 80.
Barry Miles, Frank Zappa (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), 334.
Frank W. Hoffmann and Howard Ferstler, Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound: A-L, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2005), 63–4.
Virgil Moorefield, The Producer as Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 1–42.
Reebee Garofalo, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A., 5th Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2011), 202.
Robert Walser, “Eruptions: Heavy Metal Appropriations of Classical Virtuosity,” Popular Music 11, no. 3 (1992): 263–308.
Jay Hodgson, Understanding Records: A Field Guide to Recording Practice (Continuum, 2010), 1.
William Echard, “Psychedelia, Musical Semiotics, and Environmental Unconscious,” Green Letters 15, no. 1 (2011): 61–75.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2–4.
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© 2014 Matthew Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis
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Vallee, M. (2014). A Little Piece of the Reel: Record Production and the Surplus of Prosthetic Vocality. In: Flisfeder, M., Willis, LP. (eds) Žižek and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361516_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361516_9
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