that is, a social order in which the animal’s mode of openness, that of captivation and extreme boredom, is left radically outside, as it were, both day and night. On Plato’s city map of Athens, and this would not have escaped Rilke, the poet and the animal are found in the same place: outside howling at the moon.
What brings this presentation into connection with the theme of phonocentrism does not, in fact, appear on its face. Instead, phonocentrism functions like what Michael Rifaterre used to call a “hypogram,” a borrowed, often unconsciously borrowed, grit of text matter that allows the pearl of a subsequent discussion to form. In this case, Agamben’s hypogram is the entirety of chapter 6 in Derrida’s Of Spirit (1987). Although Derrida is there concerned with the status of Geist, indeed, the difference between geistig and geistlich, and Heidegger’s avoidance of it, he too comes upon the animal that hides in the thickets of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Precisely because Heidegger defines the world as spiritual, geistlich, the animal, that is, the being poor in world, is essentially without spirit. What Derrida adds, and this will come as no surprise, is the problem of language. Specifically, starting from Heidegger’s acknowledgment that “the leap from the animal that lives to the man that speaks is as great … as that from the lifeless stone to the living being” (Of Spirit 53), Derrida lingers over Heidegger’s use of the “strike through,” the “crossing out” that is put to work in these pages. In discussing the poverty of the animal, Heidegger emphasizes that this bears on the matter that while a lizard may be stretched out on a rock, strictly speaking, the word rock should be crossed out (much as Heidegger will later cross out Being itself) because the lizard cannot relate to “the rock” as such. That is, the animal is poor in phonocentrism. It cannot be present to the signified of the signifier rock, a situation figured in the crossing out of the written word. Note that Heidegger insists that the lizard is certainly present to the referent, the rock upon which it lies, but not to the signified of the phonemic bundle rock. Linking this to the philosophical as such clarifies that we are indeed on the terrain of phonocentrism, that is, that the meaning of the rock in general is tied to the acoustic image that the lizard cannot fail to miss. Perhaps, if Thomas Sebeok is right, the lizard is simply poor in zoosemiotics. To be sure, we may never know.
My point: although manifest in a completely different way, to summarize crudely—through the crossed-out or suppressed Derridean hypogram—Agamben’s discussion of the voice is every bit as engaged with the legacy of its phonocentric critique as is Dolar’s. Whether one thinks about the voice as an object or as the avatar of a life that can be killed without sacrifice—and I am by no means saying that these are the same thing—what matters is that in both cases the voice is redeployed theoretically to get at something, to produce an insight, thought to be inaccessible without it. Because thought, whether philosophical or not, cannot thrive in the absence of such maneuvering, one must concede that what I have called the resurgence of the voice finds its most principled motivation here. But the question remains: Does this get us where we want to go? And where, precisely, is that?
This is where the exchange between Norma and Joe finds its pertinence. Comeback versus return. It seems to me that what Norma protests in Joe’s word is precisely its predictability, the fact that he is already narrating his encounter with her as part of a Hollywood script. The comeback is thus an effort to get started again, but one whose logic and motivation have already been determined by what no one—not even Norma herself—had recognized as her “last” performance. Now, it is certainly true that “return” is every bit as scripted, especially to whatever extent it responds to the call of forgiveness, but what is important here is the very thematization of the temporal join. Norma insists, nay, demands, that we think twice about how one step follows upon another. Brought to bear on the matter of the voice—which, as some will recall, is the topic of discussion in the immediately preceding exchange between Norma and Joe (they quarrel about the sound-image relation in the cinema)—the issue is not so much whether the resurgence of interest in it is either a comeback or a return as whether, as I have said, it gets us where we want to go. If this is to a concept of sound that is radically postphonocentric, it will come as no surprise when I aver that I have my doubts. To clarify why getting here is worth the effort, let me turn yet again to Sunset Blvd.
As Norma and Joe enter her study just prior to the exchange regarding her Salomé script cited earlier, the cut to their passage over the threshold finds it sonic articulation in the beginning of a persistent but distinctly haunted wheezing of the organ on the opposite wall. Norma gestures in its direction, noting that it should be either removed or repaired (we later find Max, her butler, playing it). Joe then quips that she might also consider teaching it “a better tune.” Because the scene is structured sonically around the toggling back and forth between Joe’s voice-over narration and the dialogue of the characters, both the wind playing, poorly, on the organ and the voice-over come from an acousmatic if not quite nondiegetic space. A structural relation is thus forged between the voice and music. Here is my point: of interest in the scene is not so much the rather typical way in which the sound of the organ is buried beneath the dialogue (the very noose of words Norma has only just decried) as the way sound, and here its distinctly acousmatic character, is boxed in between music and voice, as if it can be grasped, or picked up, only on this disciplinary frontier, that is, somewhere between philosophy and musicology.
Thinking outside this particular box is not easy, a fact demonstrated with instructive clarity by Adorno’s voluminous writings on the box he calls radio.3 Several of these are well known. Less well known are the writings recently compiled and edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor in his contribution to Adorno’s ever-completing works titled Current of Music, a volume that gathers virtually all of the work written by Adorno—and, I might add, written in English—while he was affiliated with the short-lived Princeton Radio Research Project. The only significant omission, one addressed in Hullot-Kentor’s detailed introductory remarks, is the still unpublished “Memorandum: Music in Radio,” a text one must consult in the Rare Books Room in Butler Library at Columbia University. In this indispensable collection two texts call out for attention: “Radio Physiognomics” and especially “The Radio Voice.” Elaborations of “Memorandum,” both engage in rich and compelling ways the problem of the box, as furniture and as philosophy. They lead us directly to the vexing interplay between radio and philosophy.
Adorno’s correspondence establishes that he and Gretel arrived in New York from Great Britain in late February of 1938. Adorno writes Benjamin on letterhead from Princeton University, the Office of Radio Research (located in, of all places, Eno Hall), on March 7, 1938, saying that they have taken an apartment on 45 Christopher Street, once the heart of queer Manhattan. He goes on to solicit from Benjamin a short paper on “listening models” that he hopes to integrate into his work at Princeton (“To Walter Benjamin” 240–41). Almost a year later to the day, Adorno presents to the faculty of the Psychology Department at Princeton the paper “Radio Physiognomics,” in which he lays out what he takes to be the most serious limitations of the “experimental methods” of psychology. Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport—the authors of the 1935 study The Psychology of Radio—were, whether in attendance or not, his intended audience. Those familiar with the Frankfurt School critique of “instrumental reason” and the “re-enchantment of positivism” will find nothing particularly interesting in these remarks. Truly interesting, however, is the methodological alternative that emerged in their wake.
This alternative is formulated through an appeal to Johann Kaspar Lavater’s concept of physiognomy, a figure that although translated into English at the dawn of the nineteenth century required the curiosity of Allport and others to make him matter to psychology. As Adorno reminds us, physiognomics referred to the analytical practice of discovering the truth of personality beneath or behind facial expressions. Although in his discussion Adorno has recourse to the English vocabulary of Peirceian semiotics, notably the notion of the index and the sign, he does not underscore the extent to which physiognomy is clearly a rearticulation of the very derivation of semiotics from the Greek practice and technique
