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6
Contents
editorial
KEVIN DAVIDSON
“Soulbrother #1”
TESHOME GABRIEL
Ruin and The Other: Towards a Language Of Memory
MLADEN DOLAR
Singing in Pursuit of the Object Voice
Theme Graham Newcater
STEPHANUS MULLER
Sapphires and serpents: In Search of Graham Newcater
ARYAN KAGANOF
Of Fictalopes and Jictology (2018)
MEGAN-GEOFFREY PRINS
Toccata for Piano (2012): The gift of newness
OLGA LEONARD
The Leonard Street Meetings (2008-2012)
ARYAN KAGANOF
Her first concert - 15 October 2011
STEPHANUS MULLER & GRAHAM NEWCATER
Interview (2008, transcribed 2010)
AMORÉ STEYN
The Properties of the Raka Tone Row as seen within the Context of other Newcaterian Rows
STEPHANUS MULLER
The Island
GRAHAM NEWCATER
CONCERTO in E Minor Op. 5 (1958)
ARNOLD VAN WYK
A Letter from Upper Orange Street, 14th June 1958
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Concert Overture Op. 8 (1962-3)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Variations For Orchestra Op 11 (1963)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Nr.1 Klange An Thalia Myers (1964)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Allegretto e Espressivo (1966)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Variations de Timbres (1967)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
String Quartet (1983/4)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Songs of the Inner Worlds (1991)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
ETUDE I For Horn with Piano Accompaniment (2012)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
ETUDE II For Horn with Piano Accompaniment (2012)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
SONATINA for Pianoforte (2014)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
CANTO for Pianoforte (2015)
LIZABÉ LAMBRECHTS
The DOMUS Graham Newcater Collection Catalogue
galleri
TAFADZWA MICHAEL MASUDI
Waiting For A Better Tomorrow
ILZE WOLFF
Summer Flowers
NIKKI FRANKLIN
Sans Visage
BAMBATHA JONES
Below the Breadline
TRACY PAYNE
Veiled
STAN ENGELBRECHT
Miss Beautiful
ALEKSANDAR JEVTIĆ
We Are The Colour of Magnets and also Their Doing
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Augenmusik & Some Tarot Cards
EUGENE SKEEF
Monti wa Marumo!
borborygmus
PASCALE OBOLO
Electronic Protest Song As Resistance Through the Creation of Sound
AXMED MAXAMED & MATHYS RENNELA
A Conversation on the Bleaching of Techno: How Appropriation is Normalized and Preserved
FANA MOKOENA
A problem of classification
PHIWOKAZI QOZA
Choreographies of Protest Performance:
MASIXOLE MLANDU
On Fatherhood in South Africa
VULANE MTHEMBU
We are ancestors in our lifetime – AI and African data
TIMBAH
All My Homies Hate Skrillex – a story about what happened with dubstep
TETA DIANA
Three Sublime Songs
LAWRENCE KRAMER
Circle Songs
NEIL TENNANT
Euphoria?
frictions
LYNTHIA JULIUS
Vyf uit die Kroes
NGOMA HILL
This Poem Is Free
MSIZI MOSHOETSI
Five Poems
ABIGAIL GEORGE
Another Green World
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships
RIAAN OPPELT
The Escape
DIANA FERRUS
Daai Sak
KUMKANI MTENGWANA
Two Poems
VADIM FILATOV
Azsacra: Nihilism of Dancing Comets, The Destroyer of the Destroyers
claque
ZAKES MDA
Culture And Liberation Struggle In South Africa: From Colonialism To Apartheid (Edited By Lebogang Lance Nawa)
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Promise of genuine literary stylistic innovation
ZUKISWA WANNER
[BR]OTHER – Coffee table snuff porn, or...?
SEAN JACOBS
Davy Samaai The People's Champion
KNEO MOKGOPA
I Still See The Sun/ The Dukkha Economy
CHRISTINE LUCIA
Resonant Politics, Opera and Music Theatre out of Africa
ARI SITAS
The Muller’s Parable
ZIMASA MPEMNYAMA
CULTURE Review: The Lives of Black Folk
RIAAN OPPELT
Club Ded: psychedelic noir in Cape Town
DYLAN VALLEY
Nonfiction not non-fiction (not yet)
DEON MAAS
MUTANT - a crucial documentary film by Nthato Mokgata and Lebogang Rasethaba
GEORGE KING
Unknown, Unclaimed, and Unloved: Rehabilitating the Music of Arnold Van Wyk
THOMAS ROME
African Art As Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, And The Idea Of Negritude. By Souleymane Bachir Diagne.
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Making Africa visible in an upside-down World
ekaya
BRIDGET RENNIE-SALONEN & YVETTE HARDIE
Creating a healthy arts sector ecosystem: The Charter of Rights for South African Artists
KOPANO RATELE
What Use Would White Students Have For African Psychology?
NICKI PRIEM
The Hidden Years of South African Music
INGE ENGELBRECHT
“Die Kneg” – pastor Simon Seekoei in conversation.
SCORE-MAKERS
Score-making
off the record
BARBARA BOSWELL
Writing as Activism: A History of Black South African Women’s Writing
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
MUSIC AS THE GOSPEL OF LIBERATION: Religio-Spiritual Symbolism and Invocation of Martyrs of Black Consciousness in the Azanian Freedom Songs
IGNATIA MADALANE
From Paul to Penny: The Emergence and Development of Tsonga Disco (1985-1990s) Pt.2
ADAM GLASSER
In Search of Mr. Paljas
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn
PATRIC TARIQ MELLET
The Camissa Museum – A Decolonial Camissa African Centre of Memory and Understanding @ The Castle of Good Hope
IKERAAM KORANA
The Episteme of the Elders
OLU OGUIBE
Fela Kuti
MICHAEL TAUSSIG
Walter Benjamin’s Grave
ANTHONY BURGESS
On the voice of Joyce
feedback
FRÉDÉRIC SALLES
This is not a burial, it’s a resurrection : Cinema without the weight of perfection.
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Social Media Responses to herri 5
the selektah
boeta gee
Hoor Hoe Lekker Slat’ie Goema - (An ode to the spirit of the drum)
PhD
MARY RÖRICH
Graham Newcater's Orchestral Works: Case Studies in the Analysis of Twelve-Tone Music
hotlynx
shopping
contributors
the back page
DANIEL MARTIN
Stuttering From The Anus
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    #06
  • editorial

MLADEN DOLAR

Singing in Pursuit of the Object Voice

Singing represents a different postlinguistic stage than laughter[1]“Laughter is different from other phenomena considered above because it seems to exceed language in both directions at the same time, as both presymbolic and beyond symbolic; it is not merely a precultural voice seized by the structure, but at the same time a highly cultural product which looks like a regression to animality.” Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More : it brings the voice energetically to the forefront, on purpose, at the expense of meaning. Indeed, singing is bad communication; it prevents a clear understanding of the text (we need supertitles at the opera, which dispel the idea of an initiated elite and put the opera on the level of the cinema). The fact that singing blurs the word and makes it difficult to understand – in polyphony to the point of incomprehensibility – has served as the basis for a philosophical distrust for this flourishing of the voice at the expense of the text: for instance, for the constant efforts to regulate sacred music, all of which tried to secure an anchorage in the word, and banish fascination with the voice.   

Singing takes the distraction of the voice seriously, and turns the tables on the signifier; it reverses the hierarchy — let the voice take the upper hand, let the voice be the bearer of what cannot be expressed by words. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann darüber kann man singen: expression versus meaning, expression beyond meaning, expression which is more than meaning, yet expression which functions only in tension with meaning — it needs a signifier as the limit to transcend and to reveal its beyond. The voice appears as the surplus-meaning. The birth of the opera was accompanied by the dilemma of prima la musica, e poi leparole, or the other way round; the dramatic tension between the word and the voice was put into its cradle, and their impossible and problematic relationship presented its driving force. The entire history of opera, from Monteverdi to Strauss (Capriccio), can be written through the spyglass of this dilemma.[2] I think it is in bad taste to quote oneself, but here I must make an exception, and cite our book on the opera (Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death, New York and London: Routledge 2002) where this is scrutinized at greater length.

Singing, by its massive concentration on the voice, introduces codes and standards of its own – more elusive than the linguistic ones, but nevertheless highly structured. Expression beyond language is another highly sophisticated language; its acquisition demands a long technical training, reserved for the happy few, although it has the power to affect everyone universally.

Yet singing, by focusing on the voice, actually runs the risk of losing the very thing it tries to worship and revere: it turns it into a fetish object – we could say the highest rampart, the most formidable wall against the  voice. The object voice that we are after cannot be dealt with by being turned into an object of immediate intense attention and of aesthetic pleasure. To put it in a formula: “If we make music and listen to it, …  it is in order to silence what deserves to be called the voice as the object a ” (Miller 1989, p. 184). So the fetish object is the very opposite of the voice as object a; but, I should hasten to add, this gesture is always ambivalent: music evokes the object voice and obfuscates it; it fetishizes it, but also opens the gap that cannot be filled.

Bringing the voice from the background to the forefront entails a reversal, or a structural illusion: the voice appears to be the locus of true expression, the place where what cannot be said can nevertheless be conveyed. The voice is endowed with profundity: by not meaning anything, it appears to mean more than mere words, it becomes the bearer of some unfathomable originary meaning which, supposedly, got lost with language. It seems still to maintain the link with nature, on the one hand —  the nature of a paradise lost —  and on the other hand to transcend language, the cultural and symbolic barriers, in the opposite direction, as it were: it promises an  ascent to divinity, an elevation above the empirical, the mediated, the limited, worldly human concerns. This illusion of transcendence accompanied the long history of the voice as the agent of the sacred, and the highly acclaimed role of music was based on its ambiguous link with both nature and divinity.

When Orpheus, the emblematic and archetypal singer, sings, it is in order to tame wild beasts and bend gods; his true audience consists not of men, but of creatures beneath and above culture. Of course this promise of a state of some primordial fusion to which the voice should bear witness is always a retroactive construction. It should be stated clearly: it is only through language, via language, by the symbolic, that there is voice, and music exists only for a speaking being (see Baas1998, p. 196). The voice as the bearer of a deeper sense, of some profound message, is a structural illusion, the core of a fantasy that the singing voice might cure the wound inflicted by culture, restore the loss that we suffered by the assumption of the symbolic order.

This deceptive promise disavows the fact that the voice owes its fascination to this wound, and that its allegedly miraculous force stems from its being situated in this  gap. If the psychoanalytic name for this gap is castration, then we can remember that Freud’s theory of fetishism is based precisely on the fetish materializing the disavowal of castration.[3] “the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute….It remains a token of triumph over the threat of catastration and a protection against it. (PFL 7. p.353)

If there is no linguistics of the voice, only the linguistics of the signifier, then the very notion of a linguistics of the non-voice would seem preposterous. Obviously all the non-voices, from coughing and hiccups to babbling, screaming, laughing, and singing, are not linguistic voices; they are not phonemes, yet they are not simply outside the linguistic structure: it is as if, by their very absence of articulation (or surplus-articulation in the case of singing), they were particularly apt to embody the structure as such, the structure at its minimal; or meaning as such, beyond the discernible meaning. If they are not submitted to phonology, they nevertheless embody its zero-point: the voice aiming at meaning, although neither the one nor the other can be articulated. So the paradoxical facit would be that there may be no linguistics of the voice, yet the non-voice which represents the voice untamed by structure is not external to linguistics. Neither is the object voice which we are pursuing.

This excerpt from chapter 1 The Linguistics of the Voice, in his book A Voice and Nothing More is published in herri with kind permission of the author.

Notes
1. ↑ “Laughter is different from other phenomena considered above because it seems to exceed language in both directions at the same time, as both presymbolic and beyond symbolic; it is not merely a precultural voice seized by the structure, but at the same time a highly cultural product which looks like a regression to animality.” Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More
2. ↑ I think it is in bad taste to quote oneself, but here I must make an exception, and cite our book on the opera (Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death, New York and London: Routledge 2002) where this is scrutinized at greater length.
3. ↑ “the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute….It remains a token of triumph over the threat of catastration and a protection against it. (PFL 7. p.353)
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TESHOME GABRIEL
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Graham Newcater
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute