Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More.
What is the voice when stripped of signification? Of its metaphorical resonances? Of aesthetic fascination, appreciation, and fetishization? What is the voice and nothing more? To answer this question, Dolar theorizes the “object voice.” This “third level” of the voice is not 1) a vehicle for meaning (think speech and phonetics), nor 2) the source of aesthetic appreciation (think Barthes and music criticism more generally). Dolar’s “object voice,” this voice-as-voice-alone, is best understood through psychoanalysis, he argues, as Lacan’s objet petit a. He traces this object voice through various theoretical and philosophical genealogies, considering its function in linguistics, metaphysics, politics and ethics. The chapter I’ve seen referenced most frequently is his first chapter on the linguistics of the voice. Here, he contemplates the voice as not what carries language, but rather as what is left over before and after language. Dolar explores non-voices”—coughing, hiccups, babbling, screaming, laughing, and singing—non-linguistic utterances that are, at the same time, “not simply outside the linguistic structure” (41). By the very virtue of failing to signify, failing to convey a discernable, semantic meaning, these non-voices, he argues, seem to embody linguistic structure and meaning “as-such,” its “zero-point” (32). This paradox—that the object voice both seems to embody and/or aim at meaning while also not signifying or articulating anything at all—threads through Dolar’s book as he considers the voice’s relationship to morality, the body, law, and politics.
I do not foresee psychoanalytic theories of the voice playing a central role in my historicist approach to reading aloud and Victorian listeners. That being said, several of Dolar’s insights speak interestingly to my thoughts and observations on oral reading and audition. One example is Dolar’s history of the voice and ethics. In a tour through Socrates, Rousseau, Kant and finally Heidegger, Dolar discusses how and why conscience and reason are figured as a “voice.” Dolar argues that the voice allows for “a certain view of morality where the signifying chain cannot be sustained for itself; it needs a footing, an anchorage, a root in something which is not a signifier” (98). Moral authority requires, in short, the concept of a voice that doesn’t say anything, a voice that appears as the “non-signifying, meaningless foundation of ethics” (98). The voice without signification is the concept that makes morality possible. This analysis of the “voice of the conscience” is interesting in light of reading aloud in the Victorian novel, an act almost always figured as one of imparting moral authority or ethical instruction. How does the trope of the “voice of conscience” inform the authority bestowed on the reading voice both in Victorian culture and literature?
