clear: a return is a response, in effect, an acknowledgment of a debt owed to those who have otherwise not forgiven her for the withdrawal of her presence, her desertion of the field of the visual. A comeback, by contrast, involves no such acknowledgment. It appears to be utterly narcissistic, utterly scripted. Whether tenable in the long run or not, what strikes me as useful about this distinction is that it cues us to a subtlety that calls out for attention when we are thinking about the contemporary theoretical status of the voice. How, in other words, should we think about the resurgence of scholarly interest in the topic? Or, put differently, what do those involved in this resurgence think they are doing? Is this the voice’s comeback or its return? Or is it something else altogether? Moreover, is the difference here yet another way to approach the problem of residualism?
This may seem like an odd place to begin, especially to begin what is conceived as an examination of the relation between philosophy and radio, so allow me to explain. Certainly one way to think about what I have called the “resurgence” of interest in the voice is to grasp it as part of a response to the waning of poststructuralism, or, more precisely, to the attenuation of the critique of “phonocentrism.” Although many have jumped onto the bandwagon of this critique, it was put in play with exemplary rigor by the late Jacques Derrida. In its emergent formulations this critique sought to draw out the consequences of the collaboration between Saussurean linguistics and Husserlean phenomenology. Specifically, Derrida found in Husserl’s fuzzy and ultimately untenable distinction between expression and indication the same ambivalence to be found in Saussure’s risky reduction of the signifier to an acoustic image (literally, image acoustique), that is, an entity devoid of all physicality yet capable of yoking together something seen and something heard. Recognizing this allowed Derrida, through the distinctly French pun on the heteronymic word entendre (that is, “to hear” and “to understand”), to tease out the centuries-old open secret of the essential link between the voice and meaning. The fact that this insight derives from a heteronym, a word whose written or spoken signifier produces two apparently different signifieds, is interesting but does not merit further elaboration here.
In the opening section of Of Grammatology Derrida fastened phonocentrism not only to logocentrism but also to ethnocentrism, arguing that logocentrism is “nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism” (3). Once in place and taken up by those interpellated by the grammatological project, the voice became untouchable. To engage the voice, perhaps even to pronounce it, was understood to consign one to an ethnocentrism that, in the sixties, was under siege in every corner of the decolonizing globe, most conspicuously, perhaps, in Vietnam.1 Indeed, an entire, carefully cultivated rhetoric of the voice as the very embodiment of revolutionary agency was suddenly and fundamentally challenged. It was as though Derrida had discovered, a decade before Foucault, the “repressive hypothesis,” not in the vow, but in the voice itself.
I am not, of course, saying anything terribly fresh, so let me get to the point. What remained, as Don Ihde and others sensed, foreclosed in the critique of phonocentrism was precisely the matter of sound. For it is one thing to show how hearing and understanding collude or collide but quite another to say that the voice is nothing but the sounds heard in the event of understanding. Saussure himself struggled with the matter when, in the chapter on “linguistic value” of the Course in General Linguistics, he pondered over how the sound units of the phoneme, that is, the acoustic molecules of the signifier, were initially separated from the chaotic flux of sound without, at any point, presupposing the arbitrary conventions made possible through this very separation. Even if we grant him the principled disciplinary procedure of simply setting certain things outside the purview of linguistics, one cannot fail to recognize the sonic dross left in the wake of this procedure and his lack of theoretical interest in it. What is the relation between this remainder and phonocentrism? Can sound gain access to meaning only through the mediation of the voice, not primarily as the faculty of human speech, but as the philosopheme of the understanding that is at bottom a hearing? Is a meaningless listening possible?
These questions are but samples. One could certainly proliferate others (indeed, the whole notion of “secondary orality” might immediately come to mind). However, if such questions herald what I have called a resurgence of interest in the voice, then what this clarifies is that this resurgence takes place, not just anywhere, but specifically in the wake of the critique of phonocentrism. That is, instead of being an anxious denial of this critique, the resurgence is an immanent requestioning of the voice, by which I mean that it retrieves and reanimates questions that the critique of phonocentrism could not, on its own terms, answer. Obviously, one of those questions is the question of sound itself, precisely the sound escaping the call and response that Saussure located at the heart of the sign.
I turn now to the distinction between comeback and return teased out of Wilder and Brackett’s Sunset Blvd. My aim is to flesh out this distinction in two ways: first, I will deploy it as a rationale for pondering the implications of two figures in what I have called the resurgence of scholarly attention to the voice, Mladen Dolar and Giorgio Agamben; and second, I will import this distinction into the concept of resurgence in order to evaluate it both theoretically and politically. Is it, as I have suggested, an avatar of one residualism or another? And the residualism of what? The voice? The radio? Their theoretical superimposition?
Doubtless the most sustained recent reflection on the voice, in English, is to be found in Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (2006). This is a very rich, very compact book that seeks to change the way we think about everyone from Derrida and Lacan to Kafka—and change in a rather specific way. As Slavoj Žižek puts it in his introduction to the series in which the book appeared: “After reading a book in this series [“Short Circuits”], the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time” (viii). Because Žižek also blurbs Dolar’s book, insisting that, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, its author is “not an idiot,” one can safely assume that this book is one through which we will encounter something disturbing about ourselves that we knew all along. The obvious question is: What?
For my purposes the most immediately relevant aspect of the text is its discussion of Saussure, Derrida, and Lacan. Here Dolar seeks to tease out the radicality of the voice by clarifying its status as an object, invoking the series of objets a enumerated by Lacan in Seminar 11 from 1964: the gaze, the voice, the breast, and the turd. Structurally, these are all objects that tear a hole in our wholeness, meaning that they mark a limit of and in our identities. We cannot, as it were, leave home without them. Dolar’s discussion is as rich as it is intricate. Although it resists easy summary, this is how it concludes.
So, if for Derrida, the essence of the voice lies in its auto-affection and self-transparency, as opposed to the trace, the rest, the alterity, and so on, for Lacan this is where the problem starts. The deconstructive turn tends to deprive the voice of its ineradicable ambiguity by reducing it to the ground of (self-) presence, while the Lacanian account tries to disentangle from its core the object as an interior obstacle to (self-) presence. This object embodies the very impossibility of attaining auto-affection; it introduces a scission, a rupture in the middle of full presence, and refers it back to a void—but a void that is not simply a lack, and empty space; it is a void in which the voice comes to resonate. (Voice 42)
Stated semantically, the choice is clear: the voice as object or the voice as ground. If I may risk repeating Dolar’s own strategy of attributing to his interlocutor values the latter is known to have repudiated, less clear is the “real” difference between these voices. One senses the difficulty instantly when Dolar pulls his punch, saying, “The deconstructive turn tends to deprive the voice of its ineradicable ambiguity,” as if conceding in advance that the more blunt and theoretically decisive formulation, “The deconstructive turn deprives” (that is, as a matter of principle, that is, as a matter of credo) “the voice of its ineradicable ambiguity,” is both unfair and untrue. Despite my having raised the issue of the truth about deconstruction, the issue here is not quite as petty as all that.
