Psychoanalysis and Performance

Patrick Campbell, Adrian Kear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134616244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The field of literary studies has long recognised the centrality of psychoanalysis as a method for looking at texts in a new way. But rarely has the relationship between psychoanalysis and performance been mapped out, either in terms of analysing the nature of performance itself, or in terms of making sense of specific performance-related activities. In this volume some of the most distinguished thinkers in the field make this exciting new connection and offer original perspectives on a wide variety of topics, including: · hypnotism and hysteria · ventriloquism and the body · dance and sublimation · the unconscious and the rehearsal process · melancholia and the uncanny · cloning and theatrical mimesis · censorship and activist performance · theatre and social memory. The arguments advanced here are based on the dual principle that psychoanalysis can provide a productive framework for understanding the work of performance, and that performance itself can help to investigate the problematic of identity.

Section B

PARALLEL
PERFORMANCES

5
VIOLENCE, VENTRILOQUISM
AND THE VOCALIC BODY

Steven Connor

Ventriloquism is one of the most pervasive metaphors by which issues of identity, ownership and power have been articulated within a culture of performance. It could be said that all performance is broadly ventriloquial, in a double movement whereby the performer gives his or her voice to another, and, in the process, takes the voice of that other into him- or herself. Cultural theorists interested in the ways in which identity can be both sustained and violated in different kinds of verbal performance – in playing the part of another, in borrowing and mixing idioms and intonations – have developed what I have elsewhere called the ‘proprietary thematics’ of the voice.¹ Psychoanalytic theory, especially of a Lacanian variety, has assisted mightily with this formulation of problems of ownership and identity with respect to language, asking, when I speak, do I, really? With whose words? Whose voice? Ventriloquism has become the master trope for articulating the contemporary concern with the ethics of the voice.

But there is another way of thinking of the meanings of ventriloquism, by means of a somewhat less abstract, and less immediately moralising approach to the voice. I offer in what follows a reading of the contemporary workings of ventriloquism as a specific, which is to say, archaic form of performance, in terms of a Kleinian reading of the primary dynamics of the voice. The widespread use of ventriloquism as metaphor allows the violence and violation that are bound up in the exercise of the voice to be deflected into a judicial register of ownership, possession, property and appropriation. What follows attempts a desublimation of the ventriloquial metaphor, in order to disclose and examine some of the more primary corporeal processes involved in the disembodying and re-embodying of the voice in performance.

The greatest power of emanation

Guy Rosolato suggests that the infant may experience in the exercise of its voice a sense of sonorous omnipotence, the power to exercise its will through sound which perhaps corresponds to what Freud called the stage of magical thinking, or ‘omnipotence of thoughts’. The voice, writes Rosolato, ‘is the body’s greatest power of emanation’.² Initially, the cry produces a generalised vitalisation of the world, in which mass becomes movement, and inertness is subject to excitation:

The infant takes its measure very early on, like the irradiation of its still largely immobile bodily mass into a much larger space, covering an area which shows itself extending in all directions and overleaping the obstacles to sight. Right from the beginning, the cry is the manifestation of the excitation of living matter in pain or pleasure, at once autonomous and reacting to stimulation – an excitation which is life itself.³

This apprehension of a generalised vitalisation through the voice gives way to the willed control over vocal sounds. With the fantasy of sonorous omnipotence, another aspect of the voice develops. As well as being the power of emanation, the voice comes to be experienced as something produced. The infant’s first cries vitalised and animated the world, surging out of inert objecthood and resisting the relapse into it. The more conscious exercise of control over the voice, and therefore over the world through the voice, begins to form, out of the generalised power of emanation, vocal precipitates, or emissions,

which are separated off from the body, which come from a subterranean work of fabrication, a metabolism, and which, once given out, become objects distinct from the body, and without its qualities of sensitivity, of reaction and excitation, and take on a value which interests the desire of the Other. ⁴

At this point in its development, the infant’s capacity to produce or project power may exceed its capacity to receive or acknowledge that power as its own. The voices of appeal, threat or raging demand of the child produce a sense of sadistic mastery, which both produces an object of its own, and makes the world temporarily an object. The rage of the infant and the toddler will often manifest itself in a desire to put its will into sound, to force sound into a permanent form; as though the amplitude of a cry would imprint it more firmly and permanently on the world, and give it the quality of manipulability that the child finds lacking. The pleasure in the objectification of sound is perhaps the origin of the sense of sound sculpted into form, by patterning, repetition and synchronic overlay, which provides the pleasure in music. Like the infant’s cry, the singing voice manipulates itself into an object. However, once the voice has been separated from the child, it may also be experienced as a Kleinian ‘part-object’, a part of the body which provokes love or desire (typically the breast, penis or faeces) and therefore becomes split off from the body. For Klein, this separation of the part-object comes about as a result also of ambivalent feelings towards the object, which get affectively polarised: thus the breast which is withdrawn or fails to satisfy also takes on a ‘bad’ or persecutory form.⁵

The baby is hungry and cries; hunger for young humans is inseparable from crying. No hunger for humans without crying. The cry is the response to the hunger and the means employed to defeat it. The cry is the form of the baby’s sonorous omnipotence. The voice is the means – the sole means – that the baby has to escape from so much suffering, and reach and fetch to it the comfort and sustenance (breast, bottle, company) that it needs. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have emphasised this close relationship between need, language and power in the newborn infant, observing that language first arises in the painfully empty mouth. ‘The emptiness is first experienced in the forms of cries and sobs, delayed fullness, then as calling, ways of requesting presence, as language.’ The executive power of this calling creates a transition ‘from a mouth filled with the breast to a mouth filled with words’, and then a powerful association between them.⁶ The voice is the auditory apparition of the breast, the sound that swells to fill the void opened by the breast’s absence. It seems to me that Abraham and Torok do not have good reason to assume that what arises in the empty mouth to substitute for the breast is already ‘language’; I would prefer to call it ‘voice’, meaning by this a raw, quasi-bodily matter from which language will be made. Human beings, I am surmising, can never afterwards give up the belief in the power of the voice to command and countermand space, and to ease suffering.

But the voice is also the voice of the infant’s suffering and need. When the cry does not bring instant relief, it becomes itself the symbol of unsatisfied desire, even the agency of the frustration of this desire. It is almost as if there arose a ‘bad voice’, in parallel to Klein’s ‘bad breast’. But the crying voice is not the breast and cannot provide what the breast can provide. Instead of filling the baby up, it empties it, adding to the need for food an unpleasant and frightening constriction of breath. For the baby, for whom, we may surmise, negation is as difficult to encompass as for the dreamer, the voice is not something other than the breast, which fails to satisfy precisely because it is other than the breast, but is the breast gone bad, the breast that refuses to feed, the breast that screams instead of yielding pleasure. If the cry is the form of the infantile hallucination of the breast, it is a disappointment. The child attempts to feed itself with its voice, but its voice simply crams starvation back down its throat.

Just as the bad breast is the negative version of the good breast, which is both the hypostasis of the bad qualities of the breast and the anxious image of the angry breast’s retaliation for the infant’s imaginary assaults on it, so the bad voice is both the expression of the infant’s rage and the embodiment of the retaliatory rage that the infant fears from the bad breast as a result of its own destructive anger. This is why the bad voice is always directing its angry energies against itself in crying or screaming. The angry voice assaults itself, because it is itself the ugly proof of the hostility that threatens to spoil the transcendent beauty of the good voice. There is no frightening voice – no roar, or scream, or ugly or demanding voice of any kind – that we do not recognise as this bad voice, the voice of rage, and of frustration. This is to say that there is no bad voice – including the ugly and alien voice that we hear in our own voice when it is played back to us – which is not partly our own.

The good voice, on the other hand, is the voice of pleasure and beneficence. When the child is fed, its cry is stifled and then stilled. As the infant feeds, it takes in something good and precious to itself from outside. But, as it feeds, it hears the voice of the one who feeds it. If it takes into itself in a psychological sense the breast that provides the milk which it takes in biologically – Klein’s introjection of the good breast – then it also takes in the voice which accompanies the milk which feeds it. Like the introjected image of the ‘good breast’, of which, perhaps, it is itself the most important and influential form, the good voice becomes an important repository of life and hope and reassurance. This voice is the most important factor in the formation of what Didier Anzieu has called the ‘sonorous envelope’.⁷ It holds, secures, encloses and supports. The bad voice is the infant’s own voice which has been violently estranged from it. The good voice comes initially from the outside, being the voice of another or of many others which the infant hears: but it too can be introjected.

Gradually, the child learns to introject, not just the voice of the ‘mother’, but also its own voice. But the pleasure it takes in its own voice (and do we not regularly hear and speak of people who are ‘in love with the sound of their own voice’?) indicates that something of the value and ideal form of the mother’s voice may have been requisitioned for the purposes of the propria persona. The child gradually comes to recognise its own voice as the good voice. Thus the bad voice is the voice of the self become other: the good voice is the voice of the other become self. Idealised voices of all kinds derive their power, prestige and capacity to give pleasure from this willingness to hear other voices as one’s own.

The exercise of power through and over the voice thus results in the production of vocal objects. But such objects can also suggest a voice which is an active and autonomous presence in the world, and can exercise power on its own account. For the young child, who both relies upon its voice and is so vulnerable to the threat of auditory assault and extinction, a gap may open up between the voice that is spoken and the voice that is heard. The voice, as pure, lyric, unselfconscious I-hood spilling or erupting into the world, suddenly becomes part of that world and recoils upon its originator. Under these conditions, the child may be left depleted and itself vulnerable to the vocal assaults it launches on the world. The exercise of the voice then threatens to make the child part of the objectified world that the exercise of the voice itself creates.

At the same time, the idea of a vocal object, of the voice not as an event but as a thing, also suggests the possibility that it may be manipulated or controlled. It is for this reason that D. W. Winnicott includes the beginnings of control in the baby’s voice, in its ‘mouthing, accompanied by sounds of “mum-mum”, babbling, anal noises, the first musical notes and so on’ along with the incorporation of objects such as blankets, bundles of wool or cuddly toys, in the category of what he calls ‘transitional phenomena’. These exist between the conditions of ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ and assist the passage from oral self-stimulation to a more mature relationship with objects.⁸

The dissociated voice is always closer to the condition of a cry than of an articulate utterance. A cry is not pure sound, but rather pure utterance, which is to say the force of speech without, or in excess of, its recognisable and regularising forms. A cry always seems in excess of the one from whom it issues, and in excess of the semantic content which it may have. In the cry, something else speaks apart from the person from whom it issues. In the cry, and its associated forms, we hear not so much the voice of the feelings, or even of the body, as in certain accounts of hysterical speech, but rather the uttering of utterance itself. The uttering of utterance strikes us as transcendent or frightening largely through its distinction both from subjective origin –...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: The Returns of Psychoanalysis, and Performance
• Introduction
• Section A: Thinking Through Theatre
• Section B: Parallel Performances
• Section C: History, Memory, Trauma