Transference

[Dave Monroe]

How is it that blogs become sites of overinvestment?
Rather than fora for discussion and disagreement, they
all too quickly become stand ins for horrors, hopes,
and disappointments of a sort clearly beyond their
import. How easily we lapse into malign misreadings,
or readings of another clearly in bad faith. How
quickly we speed from disagreement to total
disparagement. What sense can it possibly make to
condense into specific exchanges on specific blogs the
entirety of American first amendment jurisprudence, to
speak of rights to own and to express and to own what
one expresses? What is achieved by attacks masked as
requests for clarification, attacks on others who
offer themselves and their ideas, for nothing? Why do
small exchanges come to stand for the entirety of the
political situation of the world? For all of the
history of philosophy? How is it that failure to agree
comes to stand for the ultimate in complicity with
evil? Surely we do not leap to such conclusions when
we interact with others face to face, when we hear
their voices.

Do blogs take on these roles because each of us, alone
before our own screens, can all too easily transfer
earlier relations, earlier hopes and disappointments
onto others, others known primariliy through their
words? Do we fill in the gaps between those words,
those comments and posts, perhaps fantasmatically,
turning the other person, or our encounter with them,
into encounters from our pasts, encounters that we are
forever doomed to repeat, to revisit? And is it thus
that these sites for multiple transference become
cauldrons of accusations and dismissals, accusations
that may hide behind or travel masked as jokes and
irony, but remain sharp and dangerous nonetheless?

Desire is often present as distortion. Is it possible
that the distortions in reading are political
distortions, distortions wrought by the trapped,.
stalled, unbearble political moment? Or are they more
particular, the distortions inextricable from fantasy
and desire? And, I wonder, reading Mladen Dolar's, A
Voice and nothing more, what role is played by the
absence of our voices here? (And, yes Dolar engages
the metaphysics of presence, introducing another
metaphysical history of the voice, one where the voice
is a menace to consistency and disruptive of sense).

Dolar considers the ambivalence of the voice, the
voice as an object of authority and of shame:

...the sender of the voice, the bearer of vocal
emission, is someone who exposes himself, and thus
becomes exposed to the effects of power which not only
lie in the privilege of emitting the voice, but
pertain to the listener. The subject is exposed to the
power of the other by giving his or her own voice, so
that the power, domination, can take not only the form
of the commanding voice, but that of the ear. The
voice comes from some unfathomable invisible interior
and brings it out, lays it bare, discloses, uncovers,
reveals that interior. ... One could indeed say that
there is an effect--or rather, an affect--of shame
that accompanies voice: one is ashamed of using one's
voice because it exposes some hidden intimacy to the
Other, there is shame which pertains not to
psychology, but to its structure. ... The trembling
voice is a plea for mercy, for sympathy, for
understanding, and it is in the power of the listener
to grant it or not.

Is it possible that in the absence of the voice, one
is more likely to be cruel? That the absent voice is
the inextricable nugget that makes the other a human
other, one whose vulnerability we cannot ignore? That
absent the voice, we can only and at best struggle to
detect the revealed interior (not an inner life but
the remainder induced by the signifying cut)? And, is
it possible, that we experience or seek to distance
ourselves from only our own shame; that, in a way,
when we involve ourselves in blog conversations, we
only "hear" our own voices. So, we confront our own
shame, and our own otherness or foreigness to
ourselves. Because we don't really, can't really, hear
the others, because there is no voice tieing us to the
other, we are caught in an echo chamber of our voice,
which becomes all the stranger.

Dolar writes:

The voice is the element which ties the subject and
the Other together, without belonging to either, just
as it formed the tie between body and language without
being part of them.

My suggestion above that we only hear our own voices
is absurd: when we speak, we rarely hear ourselves. I
am generally appalled when I hear my voice on an
answering machine or on some kind of taped interview.
But the revulsion is not before the uncanny effect of
my voice disconnected from me. Rather, it is the fact
that this is what I sound like, that this strange
effect, this noise, accompanies the words that come
from my mouth. When I speak, I can only speak if I
ignore the sound of my own voice. Yet, in ignoring it,
it can get out of hand, seeming too terse, rude, or
impatient. It interacts with others in ways that mock
my will, my intentions, what I think that I want to
display. So, in blogging, can we, do we confront the
familiar strangeness of our own voices? Is this
strangeness, and its connection with shame, part of
what we try to attack, to dismiss, to avoid? Or, are
their other voices, the voices of others, those caught
inside us, that we hear when we don't hear the voices
of those whose typed words we read? 

It may be that in the silence of blogs, in the absence
of the voice, we are left with subjects and others
that have no tie at all. That only clash

http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2006/05/transference.html

Dolar, Mladen.  A Voice and Nothing More.
   Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a
nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed:
"You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the
feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling
the body from which the voice seems to emanate,
resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the
voice, concentrating on "the voice and nothing more":
this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen
Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work.

The voice did not figure as a major philosophical
topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan
separately proposed it as a central theoretical
concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond
Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and
develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the
paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object
(objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two
commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of
meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there
is a third level of understanding: the voice as an
object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He
investigates the object voice on a number of different
levels--the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics
of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice
of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the
voice and the body, the politics of the voice--and he
scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka.
With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a
philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a
Lacanian object-cause.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10763

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