Speech, vocalized, is disarticulated by the air. Words resound as sonic intensities just as they become empty indexes of an event.
From the machine to the voice: to the voice as exactly that which makes a rupture in the midst of an indexing machinery which is built on the legibility of the text.
The voice as a surplus to, but also as the cause of the text—as that element which always eludes the capture of sense but which at the same time founds an authority of meaning.
—The sound of the voice as the material of asignifying intensities, a sound that cannot be fully inscribed as a text but can instead be traced as linking sets of disconnecting paths and circling divagations.
(And: transcription of the voice as the image of thought which is a contingent becoming. There is a sense in which the true and elusive machination of thought inscribes its presence in the asymmetrical circles of our talking—in the foundering and hesitation—in the jumping forward …backtracking, which nondiscursively marks our talking to another. —And in the often unconscious rhetorical mechanism (prosopopeia) by which one voice inhabits another, as citation and indirect speech. I am pursuing this intersection of the vocal and the machinic as the image of thought. I am trying to find, to reveal in its occlusions, the hidden and machinic lever of thought which is embedded in the rupture of the voice. “The search for the voice in language, this is what is called thought.” (Agamben quoted by Nancy 2002, p.45))
While there is a clear psychoanalytic context for thinking through the sense of the voice-as-object (as objet petit a), my sense of the voice-as-rupture equally describes the semantic economy of the internet: a voice cannot be searched—it does not yield to the indexing machinery of the search engine. It poses therefore a void in the heart of contemporary networked productions of meaning. This is the rupturing event—the voice as void—I am tracking in all its negative singularities.