There is no soundtrack

Rethinking art, media, and the audio-visual contract

Ming-Yuen S. Ma

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526142122
• eBook ISBN: 9781526142146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

There is no soundtrack is a study of how sound and image produce meaning in contemporary experimental media art by artists ranging from Chantal Akerman to Nam June Paik to Tanya Tagaq. It contextualises these works and artists through key ideas in sound studies: voice, noise, listening, the soundscape and more. The book argues that experimental media art produces radical and new audio-visual relationships challenging the visually dominated discourses in art, media and the human sciences. In addition to directly addressing what Jonathan Sterne calls 'visual hegemony', it also explores the lack of diversity within sound studies by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. As such, it contributes to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship, building new, more complex and reverberating frameworks to collectively sonify the study of culture.

1
Radical otherness: voiceover, autoethnography, performativity

Our voices say something about us. To express ourselves, we speak, yell, cry, whisper, sing, murmur, scream, and otherwise vocalize; usually to someone like ourselves – another human – or to more than one person. Sometimes, we vocalize to other living beings, as well as to machines. In Keywords for Sound, anthropologist Amanda Wiedman identifies two powerful ideas from the Western metaphysical and linguistic traditions about voice: one is voice as an expression of subjecthood, ‘from which springs the familiar idea that the voice expresses self and identity and that agency consists in having a voice’, and the other is ‘material vocality’, or voice as a bodily function or practice which is pre- or post-linguistic, and in some cases outside of any system of signification all together.¹ These two ideas have informed how voice is understood in the fields of philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, as well as in music, performance, and media theory within European and American intellectual discourse. Ideas of vocality are central to Ferdinand de Saussure's study of language, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong's respective theories of communication, and the philosophical investigations of Edmund Husserl and Don Ihde focusing on the phenomenon of human perception, to name a few influential trajectories.² Jacques Derrida, in his critique of Husserl's model of phenomenology, is equally focused on the voice. His critique is centered on what Derrida calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’, where he argues that speaking – long considered to be a fundamental act of human subjective communication – is, in fact, an act of ‘pure auto-affection’ that is built on a set of differences. For Derrida, this auto-affection, a function of ‘hearing oneself speak’ (s'entendre parler), is also fundamental to any assertions of subjecthood: ‘This auto-affection is no doubt the possibility for what is called subjectivity or the for-itself, but, without it, no world as such would appear.’³

Michel Chion observes that in cinema, ‘there are voices, and then everything else’.⁴ In his concepts of vococentrism and verbocentrism, Chion asserts that the human voice speaking dialogue is likely the most important sound heard in the majority of commercially released films today.⁵ Yet, this primacy of the human voice in film sound, which Chion likens to a musical instrument performing a solo in an orchestra, for which the ambient and other sounds on the soundtrack are ‘merely the accompaniment’, is equally invested in the tight synchronization of sound (voice) and image (actor) in film.⁶ Filmic voices that are not anchored, or nailed, as Marguerite Duras puts it, to a visible body are often considered uncanny or comedic; ‘un-natural’, thus a technical problem or mistake.⁷ One of Hollywood cinema's truisms on the voiceover is that it is ‘the last resort of the incompetent’ because the codes of narrative realism demand that the voice be rigged to a body.⁸ However, what Mary Ann Doane calls ‘radical otherness’ endows the disembodied voice in non-narrative cinema with a certain authority: the authority to speak with discursive power.⁹ The so-called ‘voice of god’ narrator, most often heard in documentary and propaganda films, is a common articulation of this discursive power. For French film critic Pascal Bonitzer, the disembodiment of the voice renders it ‘beyond criticism’, therefore its power is ‘a usurpation’.¹⁰ This usurpation of the power is quite literal in ethnographic films, in which the images of non-Western peoples and cultures depicted are defined by the ‘voice of god’ – usually signified as white and male – speaking over them. The discursive power of the voice is stolen from the subject of these films, whose silence parallels the exploitation and depletion of natural resources, human labor, and political and cultural sovereignty by the larger projects of colonialism and imperialism. Can this vocal power be reclaimed, or is the disembodied voice's radical otherness the purview of the hegemonic subject only? If the others speak, what will they say?¹¹ And how will their voices sound? This chapter explores the power of the disembodied voice in media, with a focus on non-fiction films and film-based performances referencing ethnography and documentary. These works draw from pre- and early cinematic practices, autoethnographic performance, and contemporary sound-mixing as well as processing technologies to displace, deconstruct, and eventually reclaim the power of the subjective voice. In their vocal performances of self, these experimental media works create meaning through both the discursivity and materiality of the voice, and suggest ways of exceeding this and other normative dichotomies, including self and other, male and female, white and of color, colonizer and colonized, individual and collective. In the process, they open up a space of resistance in their vocality.

Voice in media: disembodiment and synchronization

The symbolism of the voice and its accompanying discourses are key to discussions of subjectivity and difference. Slogans and speeches from racial civil rights movements are peppered with terms such as ‘speaking the truth’ and ‘reclaiming our voices’. Liberationist writing, poetry, and songs are often collected in volumes titled ‘The Voice of …’, as are activist projects in radio, film, video, and other media. Frantz Fanon works through psychoanalytic theories and postcolonial discourse to explore the power of voice as both a tool of domination as well as a path to liberation. In his writing, Fanon explores the psychic dimensions to unlearning the colonizer's imposed language and values, and the cultivation and reclamation of the native tongue.¹² This process produces a subject incorporating attributes from both the colonizer and the colonized: a hybrid voice. This hybrid voice is evident in contemporary cultural productions ranging from the poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa to the drag performances by Vaginal Davis to the collection of Asian American writing Aiiieeeee! – itself a vocalization.¹³ Mladen Dolar, in his discussion of Derrida's idea of ‘hearing oneself speak’, relates it to Jacques Lacan's theory of subject formation in the ‘mirror phase’. He writes: ‘the auto-affective voice of self-presence and self-mastery was constantly opposed by its reverse side, the intractable voice of the other, the voice one could not control’.¹⁴ French feminists, including Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, theorize a form of feminine writing (écriture féminine) that incorporates women's vocality, referencing key ideas in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis while resisting their patriarchal paradigms. Some of these ideas became very influential in the interdisciplinary work done by feminists in the United States and Europe from the 1980s to the early 2000s, a pivotal period during which discussions of gender and sexuality were introduced into the study of the voice in film and media, theater, and classical mythology, as well as diverse musical forms ranging from opera to the blues.¹⁵

While vocal expression is key to articulations of identity and subjectivity in media, the technologies that facilitate media representations of the voice have also separated that voice from the human body. In his study of ventriloquism, Dumbstruck, cultural theorist Steven Connor traces practices of disembodying the human voice back to Greek and Roman oracles while noting its transformation through media technology: ‘modern acoustic technologies, which allow the transmission, reception, and multiplication of voices at a distance, produce new configurations of the imaginary space of the body and the socio-cultural space of its utterance’.¹⁶ Chion, in turn, found more recent precedents of the disembodied voice in theater, opera, and pre-cinematic media presentations, including magic lantern shows and lectures incorporating projected images. Rick Altman's detailed investigation in Silent Film Sound shows an even more wide-ranging and heterogeneous array of practices in early cinema that utilized ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: film without images
• Introduction: rethinking the audio-visual contract
• 1 Radical otherness: voiceover, autoethnography, performativity
• 2 History, noise, violence: Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag
• 3 Media soundscapes: listening to installation and performance
• 4 Sounding a politics of place: acoustic communities, aesthetic colonization, and sound imperialism
• Epilogue: notes on acoustic time
• Index