The acoustic body
Bogdan Wolf
In one of the letters to Fliess, Freud boasted he was on the verge of discovering the source of morality[1]. In his theory of the partner in Entwurf, 1895, he situates infant’s primary encounter with Nebenmensch as that with the mother and therefore with the voice, its tonality, intonation, tenderness, or impatient abruptness, as mother’s first interpretation of the child’s being. This is long before subject’s inscription into the Other as symbolic order. First encounters between the mother and the infant amount to body encounters with the voice, producing body effects in the infant.
We can therefore start with the ear. It is without the lid. It makes the outside and the inside of the ear the topoi of a continuous space. Lacan approached the voice, later taken up by J.-A. Miller, in a twofold way: voice as an object and as a signifier. “The voice […] is without doubt a function of the signifier”[2]. Here, we can define the signifier as what is heard. As heard the signifier will have body effects. In its signifying function outside signification, ergo in its asemantic function, the signifier emerges as the indivisible one that circumscribes a body as a hole. The voice as signifier assumes a vociferating function, a voice carrier, that marks the body, envelops it while being enveloped by it, and lets this body resonate from the echoless darkness to which belongs its flesh. There, a signifier was heard as resonating. Before we see, breathe, scream, it is heard first. Pascal Quignard captured well the acoustic scene that extends between the unheard and the heard of the maternal tongue. What precedes this encounter are the mimetic, cardiac, somatic rhythms whose eternal monotony will be disrupted, even disturbed, for which Lacan, when speaking of “the most intimate disturbance” chose a very precise term provoqué. “Sound is never quite liberated from the movement of the body that causes and amplifies it […] it touches the body as if the body presented itself to sound more naked: lacking skin”[3].
The infant described by Freud is clearly gazing at his mother which allows us to say that the contingency of an encounter with a body, is not unlocalised as an encounter with a free-floating sound. There is that too. A musical tune can have the same effect on an infant as the mirror stage bringing her to what Lacan called a “unity seized”,[4] a point when the fragmented body is brought together as a whole with an effect of satisfaction and sleep. That these effects can be observed prior to the mirror stage allows us to say that the primacy of the voice as signifier is incontrovertible: “the voice is everything in the signifier that does not contribute to the effect of signification”[5]. Following that, we can say two things, firstly that a body is primarily an acoustic body, a hole extended to a tube with one of the orifices, ear, permanently open. Secondly, the acoustic body is made of vocal resonances that reverberate inside the tubular body. These resonances turn inside out. A speaking body is first a hearing body or a series of encounters with the voice in its signifying, inscribing function that will come to form a chain as such. The voice signifies, signifying nothing.
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The traumatic character of the difference between the unheard and the heard of the maternal tongue Lacan called lalangue, is provoked first by the trauma of birth. In a generalised way I am presenting it here, Lacan reads this event in Rank’s book, and Freud’s reaction to it, as a traumatic event and in this sense as a paradigm of all traumas. Its rupture causes a distance to arise in relation to the mother’s heartbeat while the vocal signifier is heard in the nearest proximity, “at the most intimate juncture”, as Lacan put it. The intimate can only be approached from the extimate. The voice is not internal but external, extimate in so far as it can only be heard against the maternal rhythm.
The signifying function of the voice consists in signifying nothing. In this, the voice differentiates the hole from the infinite nothing and delimits the chasm of the cardiac rhythm by circumscribing a rim. A hole can only emerge as the effect of this distance created by the voice. We can say that the rim of the ear is the limit and the border that circumscribes the hole. It is in this sense that the rim is a condition of resonance, of the heard, just as a sound can be heard echoing in a cave. The voice makes the unheard resonate and become audible. In this way the voice disrupts the rhythmic pounding of the mother’s heartbeat. In delimiting the beat a variation, indeed a divertimento, is introduced. This will lead to form a metonymic chain that is extimate. The Lacanian voice is always extimate. We can say that this audible body emerges first as a rim and then resonates in reiteration, as a tube written around the hole, without any chronological date attached to it. The uniqueness Lacan attributed to the ear, especially in Seminar X, makes the inside/outside binary of the acoustic body topological, i.e., continuous. The primary differentiation therefore is provoked not at the level of sensory perception but between the hole, say cochlea, and the void, between the rim and the rhythm. We could add that it is solely through the function of reiteration that resonance in the hearing body can lead to the unheard becoming audible in what is said which forms part of verbal hallucination as Miller noted. Phonatory movements are without law and unconstituted because they belong to the body as fragmented, as real.
What did Freud mean by the “source of morality”? Before the superego imposes on the subject a jouissance of listening to and to obeying the universal command for all coming from the voice, hearing must be distinguished from listening. Before morality for all, the mores of the acoustic body come first. The infant’s body obeys the resonances and vibrations provoked by the voice that disrupts extimately. Obedience comes from the Latin ob (near, beside) and audire(to hear). We obey in so far as the speaking body is subject to and obeys lalangue, its resonances, tonalities. It would not be too far-fetched to call it tinglingua because it is as tingling that the acoustic body becomes disparate from the flesh of an organ. As analysts we aim to direct interpretations to the non-semantic soma of vociferations provoking a little, reminding the speaking being that before it is captured in the snares of meaning it is heard first. Where it is heard, there comes a saying, would be a formulation of the clinical direction where satisfaction is achieved only singularly. These mores of the audible body, the body that is heard before it listens, is where resonate, through repetitions and reverberations, hallucinatory voices that are one by one inscribed as points of orientation for a speech to come.
References
[1] S. Freud, Letter 64, 31 May 1897, SE 1, pp. 253-54,
[2] J.-A. Miller, Jacques Lacan and the Voice, trans. V. Dachy, in Psychoanalytical Notebooks Nr 6, 2001, p. 99,
[3] P. Quignard, The Hatred of Music, trans. M. Amos & F. Rönnbäck, Yale University Press, 2016, p. 73,
[4] J. Lacan, RSI, Seminar XXII, 1974-75, unpublished, lesson of 11 March 1975,
[5] J.-A. Miller, Ibid.