Echoing between the beginning of one event and the conclusion of another, and departing through the parameters of a definition, this paper explores a relational theory amidst the visual and acoustic that is contested at every juncture; it drifts from oppositional to complementary to co-productive of a false history: fabulation. As I continue to travel in this still fugitive landscape on my way through and over non-illustrative cinematic and video events, I hear voices whispering, sometimes shouting out to me from rocks and behind the trees. I hope that the longer I walk, and the more I write, the more clear my trajectory will become. But, in fact, I’m finding the exact opposite is truer.
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An acousmatic voice is one that is heard but whose speaker cannot immediately, and will most likely never, be seen: the bank teller you speak with on the phone or the platform attendant announcing a train cancellation. It is a voice that arrives from beyond the limits of visual perception but, as will be discussed later, not necessarily from a yet-to-be-seen visual field. A heautonomous voice that, while seeming to be insubordinate to the visual image, is nonetheless, and can be, strategically dissociated. [1] Residing in the interstices of this dissociation between what is heard and seen, this paper hazards an exploration of the creative possibilities lying therein, accompanied by a cast of films and video installations.

Sight is partial and directional while hearing is omnidirectional. When sounds fail to be located we might imagine or perform a constitution of the body/place/thing that is making the noise in order to ‘put a sound to a face,’ and vice versa. “…the passing figure which my desire evoked seemed to be not any one example of the general type of ‘woman,’ but a necessary and natural product of the soil.”[2] In trying to localize sounds, our capabilities of hearing can perform a generalized partitioning or an evocative embodiment. This directional orientation of observation is carried through to language, where discourse has a very strong visually prioritized practice and structure, oriented as it is around accurate citations and locatable references. “In short, sound in all its forms comes to fill the out-of-field of the visual image, and realizes itself all the more in this sense as component of that image: at the level of the voice, it is what is called voice-off, whose source is not seen.”[3] The non-visible body from which the voice or sound emanates is a rupture between vision and hearing. It is an absence of a visual presence that accentuates the intensity of the voice and increases the anxiety to adhere then cohere it to a body. “When the acousmatic presence is a voice, and especially when this voice has not been visualized – that is, when we cannot yet connect it to a face – we get a special being, a kind of talking and acting shadow to which we attach the name acousmêtre.”[4] By stitching the voice back to a body, that body now becomes accountable. Counter to this accountability, the smooth movement that is made possible from this disconnection is non-relative and haunts the visual by resisting the visual anxiety to readhere sound to image. Sounds dart around and through the visual without aligning, if only for the briefest of moments, before disappearing again. I will continue to discuss the potential of the voice to haunt the visual and textual from both an actual and virtual out-of-field, as both a free yet restricted device, and as an affective and productive event.

In the most pragmatic arrangements, diegetic sound is an added component that includes atmospheric sounds and is placed in the action of the story. It has a locatable source in either a character or object. The direct opposite, nondiegetic sound, is the musical score or soundtrack recorded before or after the film then overlaid and has a less direct, more atmospheric relation to the on-screen action. It works, most frequently, as both a visual complement and supplement.[5] Not wanting to waste too much time making the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound more clear, my interest in this set of problematic oppositional acoustic devices is, instead, to set up just one reference point from which to enter the fluid movement across the border of the previously determining limits between on- and off-screen spaces and how they might accentuate the troublesome relation between the filmed cinematic image and recorded (then overlaid) narrations and sound-effects.

As a start: “Onscreen and offscreen space can thus be called by a different name when what’s involved is the voice ‘maintaining’ a character who has left the screen, or better yet, when the film obstinately refuses to show us someone whose voice we hear: it’s a game of hide-and-seek.”[6] “I’ve stopped running, I’ve got to. My lungs are burning and my calf muscles have started to tighten up. The scabs on my forearms have started to peel and bleed again and my face is getting cut up from the hawthorn branches slapping me in the face. Look! Right over there, leaning against that moss covered tree: I can see him taking a rest, just like me. We’re wearing each other out. Except that while he’s watching his back and scanning from side to side, quickly inhaling then exhaling, I keep my eyes locked on him, focused straight ahead; holding my gaze while I creep forward ever so carefully. Breathing deeply, slowly, and quietly I wrap my finger around the trigger.” ‘Hide-and-seek’ is a helpful analogy to mobilize the difference between on- and off-screen space, but only when they are polemics in an analytical logic, that is, when each is distinctly demarcated. Consigned therein, these spatial zones are locked into a struggle of search and capture; captured through vision, locked into place by the gaze. “I blink. He’s vanished. Just like that, and without a sound.” Interrupting this game for a moment, wouldn’t the pursued object exercises its agency in order to hide and camouflage itself, or otherwise keep itself hidden from the desiring subject? Instead of a strict, unwavering directional vector between a desiring subject chasing its object, the object maintains a distance. In other words, it resists.

“This is why we always said there is always an out-of-field, even in the most closed image. And that there are always simultaneously the two aspects of the out-of-field: the actulisable relation with other sets, and the virtual relation with the whole.”[7] Framed as the film and visual information are within the geometrical dimensions of the cells and projection, what does it mean to the sounds contained there in? Does this close everything off into “…a relatively closed system which includes everything which is present in the image”[8]? Is the off-screen, more accurately, a closed visual system: a yet-to-be-seen field instinctively brought back into line with the visual, instead of an acoustic, on- and off-screen? Shortly, we’ll hear from a few films and installations that will show us how the acoustic might be able to bypass the image and move away from the frame in such a way that the coherency of the image no longer stands. But those gaps in between voice and image are spaces of indetermination, irresolvable spaces, which provide the fields for the imagination to perform. It is precisely this sort of visual prioritization over the acoustic that needs to come under stress in order to relieve the acoustic from a space created and maintained by the visual.

Picking up this tool, “[framing] determines an out-of-field, sometimes in the form of a larger set which extends it, sometimes in the form of a whole into which it is integrated,”[9] my continued aim is to destabilize the primacy of a visual off-screen with a still unexplored yet imminent acoustic off-screen. As a counter to the off-screen, and working with the virtual relations amidst the story and plot, a virtual out-of-frame device works in the hair-line fissure events that interrupt these definitions in the cinematic language and opens them to an out-of-field into which they are extended or added on to. Besides the new (and, it should be noted, potentially excessive number of) sets these commensurables would make possible, this counter-relation is dependent upon a counter-movement away from previously relative sets for the potential mess of strategically dissociative connections within the cinematic and video frame, and in doing so, hopefully, the ineffability of the visual field. “At last it came—a soft, irregular set of footfalls on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way; to my disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence…”[10] The discursive maneuver of a ‘relatively closed system’ that I’ve been feeling around for in the dark and trying to compose is in order to liquefy the frame and open it to an outside, to let all the sub-sets formed within it to spill outward without indexing a specific or referential out-of-field.

In the Fritz Lang film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse we see how the captured criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse, now mute, is nonetheless able to move beyond the bounds of the asylum where he has been admitted to continue his elaborate crime spree in pre-World War II Germany. Early in the film we see the almost machine-like productivity of Mabuse’s recovered written-voice as he fills page after page with, first, incoherent scribblings which then develop into elaborate and carefully planned criminal schemes. Although Mabuse hasn’t spoken since his internment in the asylum, he is still ‘speaking’ in the body of the papers that he continues to write, each of them “…a written text, which has been waiting for someone to decode. And when Baum [Mabuse’s doctor] looks at it through reading it out loud he unleashes its force. In turn this reading voice summons another voice, an I-voice that inhabits him and then becomes the voice of a ghost that becomes visible, immobilizing him with hypnotic eyes.”[11] In the text referred to here, from the scene where Professor Baum reads the text after Mabuse has died in the asylum, we might index the death of Mabuse as the event that holds his ghost in the present: why it might haunt a person (Professor Baum), a space (the asylum), or a text. In short, what is the scar or wound, represented by the ghost, to be healed and eventually disappear?

In this same scene, when Baum sees the second ghost of Mabuse rise up from his chair and cohabitate his body we see more than the power of the written document named in the film’s title. True enough, in a cause-effect chain of occurrences, the written then read text unleashes the machinic criminal menacings of Mabuse, as if his body and powers of hypnosis were actually contained therein, like a genie waiting to be released then deposited into Baum. Although it’s not a voice that is heard acoustically, the text still has some of the criminal hypnotic powers (that we, as viewers, also risk coming under the influence of) Mabuse practiced so well in the previous film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, and ultimately led to his incarceration. As a convergence of voices though, this superimposition of Mabuse’s voice over Baums’s body is a hijacking of the logical mind of the Professor; in spite of his protective set of analytic normatives and scientific rationality, Mabuse’s ghost still manages to overcome these defenses to take advantage of and hide behind the Professor’s social (external) reputation to commit his crimes, to the point where, by the end of the film, Baum finds himself a tenant in his own asylum.

The voice of the ghost as it speaks to Baum is important as an instance of the supposedly mute Mabuse speaking, but there is more. With everything that might be said about commensurable registers and movement between subjectivities appearing to be summarized and included in this scene, the haunting we are privileged enough to witness is more than a cohabitation of subjectivities: from this scene forward, Ba(Mabuse)um is a speaking from within. What we have here is a possession, that is, the ghost doesn’t move through Baum but inhabits him, haunts his house. This scene shows the seemingly smooth traffic of ghosts, an ability to move through and across physical borders, registers, and zones. Still, this fabulous potential for movement is balanced by a dose of immobility so that Mabuse is locked and held in place within the body of Baum and only able to act through him as a criminally malevolent supplement. Presumably, the ghost might move on but it seems to necessitate, and rely upon, a host of some sort. It arrives intact to speak to and organize others, but not move through.

By not seeing the voice that comes from off-screen, whether it’s presence is acknowledged or not, there is a bleeding of registers in which an unseen presence has been blended into the on-screen action. “…the film deploys the new power exercised by texts and above all by the voice – just as there is a succession from the visual device of super impositions to the auditory device of the acousmatic voice.”[12] Additionally, once this voice begins to speak, with varying levels of omniscience and omnipotence, we find that its seeming smooth movement across the surface and around the screen is also frozen and immobilized by that same frame. When Mabuse’s testament as read by Baum is folded back into the rest of the film, and how this possession is carried through subsequent scenes, we find additional events where voice and host conspire, and the institutional restrictions holding the voice in the visual field become a bit clearer as well.

Although locked into a room, the shadowy ‘man behind the curtain’ that we meet a few times throughout the film has omniscient powers of surveillance over the gang of thugs that he controls and assigns to various act of crime, including arson, jewel robbery, and counterfeiting. Isolated as he is into physical immobility in a room, and further behind a curtain, it’s still not enough to prohibit him from being privy to disputes among his crew where his authority is questioned. He is feared for this reason. Kent, a member of the gang who decides to disobey his orders so he can escape a life of crime, tries to kill the kingpin. At a crucial point in the film, when Kent takes his chances shooting through and then lifting the veil on the shadow silhouette we’ve so far been barely able to discern, the phonograph and telegraph wire that transmitted then projected the voice through the weave of the curtain is brought into unobstructed view: there is no ‘man behind the curtain.’ Those previous powers of omniscience and omnipotence that sustained such a strong sense of fear are instantly deferred. The desire to confront, and therefore align, the voice with a body reveals a bullet riddled cardboard cutout and a rapidly deflated climax. It would seem that the game of hide-and-seek is over; the objectified subject has revealed the subjecting object. Kent, understanding that “We take this temporal co-incidence of words and lips as a sort of guarantee that we’re in the real world, where hearing a sound usually coincides with seeing its source…”[13] confronts, instead, a voice that is even further displaced. “Have they been able to locate my voice? I know that they’ve been listening for me but have they listened to me? Do they even know what to listen for? They must. I’ve been on the run for so long, being so careful not to get caught, trying to stay ahead of their precision bombs and Special Forces raids. So careful. But how long can I keep this up? My god, they’re coming for me! In the middle of the night they’re going to kick down the door and stick their rifles in my face. I can almost feel a rifle barrel jammed under my chin.” Placing the voice with a body is a sort of verification that it came from a specific person who can then be confronted. There are vast technological systems that can verify the voice without a body but only because there is an archive of verified recordings that have already been captured. “…and I kept my eyes fixed on her, as though by gazing at hear I should be able to carry away and incorporate, to store up, for later reference, in myself the memory of that prominent nose, those red cheeks, of all those details which struck me as so much precious, authentic, unparalleled information with regard to her face.”[14] Without a physical person to match to these fugitive voices, you might say they have been reduced to a sound byte, a digitized recoding on a computer database, or a video tape delivered anonymously to a television station. It’s only when the voice is nailed-down to a body that those powers are made mortal, or we realize that our perceptions of them were exaggerated.

Might we be able to recognize the voice enough to ascribe it to someone regardless of a physical body, similarly to the way in The Testament when Kent wasn’t able to recognize ‘the man behind the curtain’s’ voice until he heard it recorded on the record in Baum’s office? Brought onto the case to investigate a murder, Inspector Lohmann’s clever system of trying to implicate Baum as the leader of the crime spree, he tries in vain to get the gang to recognize Baum. Not yet knowing he is under suspicion, Baum meets face to face with Lohmann knowing that it’s only his recorded voice that can implicate him. Transmitted through the lo-fi technology of the speaker, his voice is tarnished enough to make it unrecognizable as his own, therefore unattributable to him. But when Kent and the Inspector break into his office and Kent hears Baum’s recorded voice, it is at that point he knows that Baum and ‘the man behind the curtain’ are one and the same. “The nation has been raised to an elevated-alert again - Code Orange. There’s been some more of that anonymous chatter floating along the airwaves. The government seems to think that there’s enough to make a general warning, not to alarm anyone of course, but enough to ask everyone to ‘Please keep your eyes open for anything suspicious while we secure all borders and monuments.’ These warnings always used to make me so tense, so alert and aware of what was happening. There was an ambience of fear that I just couldn’t shake or get away from. I always felt like the nation had taken a collective deep breath, held it tight, and, ironically, closed its eyes, waiting to get punched in the gut. What is this chatter anyway? Besides a collective form of communication, is there anything more specific? Not knowing who or where it is coming from all that I can do is wait and see if this chatter materializes into anything. I doubt it will, but I also hope nothing happens.” “The process of ‘embodying’ a voice is not a mechanistic operation, but a symbolic one. We play along in recognizing a voice that comes from an actor’s body as his, even if we know the film is dubbed, provided that the rules of a sort of contract of belief are respected…”[15] Embodying a voice, that is, returning it to a body is a performative gesture in which one attempts to materialize an ‘other.’ The body can’t actually be concretized, marked, or otherwise cohered but there is a kind of layering of sensation upon sensation that becomes muddled and confused, so many that one single sensation can’t twinge by itself for too long; their ineffability is all that survives from their being smothered in a moist lather of perceptions. “Perhaps it was owing to his own ignorance of music that he had been able to receive so confused an impression, one of those that are, notwithstanding, our only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and irreducible into any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, an impression sine material.”[16] De-prioritizing the materiality of the object has, instead, fore-grounded the sensations of objects; a particular liquidity that prevents sensations to be wholly extracted from a larger piece that, I would argue, never arrive intact. Disoriented and unable to measure these sine materials, we let go of the capacity to speak from a firm, located ground where the precise questions that insulate ourselves from these impressions are formulated and composed.[17]

“It is true that it is not sound that invents the out-of-field, but it is sound which dwells in it, and which fills the visual not-seen with a specific presence.”[18] At this point, working with an actual out-of-field, if a sound is heard from off-screen the sound would dwell within that space and would encourage the viewer to perform a certain kind of construction for it, giving it a physical relation to what we have already seen. Here, the out-of-field exists before the sound, at the moment that the visual is seen, or brought into view. Wouldn’t this foreground the centralization of the visual field in orienting sensations, even for those that we don’t actually see? Maybe I should accuse the cinematic frame of consciously withholding something from possible outsides in order to create anxiety, fear, and suspense. But without the visual as an accomplice, those accusations are dismissed when we acknowledge the refusal of the acoustic to participate in this framing; the voice will become all that is necessary to achieve the same and greater suspens(e)ions. “I still hear things that go bump in the night, they rattle their chains in the dark.”

Extending the acousmêtre into a few sub-categories but still leaving it on the screen of the actual, “…the complete acousmêtre, the one who is not-yet-seen but who remains liable to appear in the visual field at any moment. The already visualized acousmêtre, the one temporarily absent from the picture, is more familiar and reassuring – even though in the dark regions of the acousmatic field, which surrounds the visible field, this kind can acquire by contagion some of the power of the complete acousmêtre.”[19] Let’s take a moment to think about the ‘dark regions’ of the nomadic acousmatic spectrum ‘which surrounds the visible field.’ As quoted above, we might think that the visual and acoustic are exclusive territories, that one surrounds another. In opposition to the visual field, these dark regions are outside the realm of what can be seen, and still not having been explored, are relegated to an aberrant space of unknown and dangerous potential in direct opposition to the prioritized visual field. With the visual being surrounded, we might be able to see how the acoustic could haunt it, show the limits of the visual and make it more distinct.

At the same time, being woven into the visual (or that realm), it does inhabit to a certain extent and circulate through it without being seen, only to withdraw at will. They’re interwoven and implicated within each other. “…it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival.”[20] Written in this way, as a mode of practice, the potential for the acousmêtre to appear at any moment is the same sort of smooth movement that was able to haunt Professor Baum. It is able to appear and disappear as it wishes, like the ‘already-visualized-acousmêtre’ described above, but without becoming more reassuring. This ghostly movement and threat keeps the visual frame from becoming too rigid from its instinctual border-making defenses.

The film The Thin Red Line, based on the battle between America and Japan for Guadalcanal during World War II, is haunted by numerous acousmatic voices that speak through the visual narrative and perforate the lush and weighted cinematography of the film, like caterpillars eating through leaves. In the film’s opening sequence a narrator asks philosophical questions on nature’s contentions and returns unexpectedly numerous times in the film but we never discover who he is. Considering the other voices that we hear in the film, this one isn’t tied to any location, event, or character in the film but floats about more un-specifically. The other narrations that we hear (and can attribute to a character) are removed from the immediate present of the scene and daydream a highway on which the temporal coherency of the film is interrupted; we are often departed from the present to another place without being fully prepared, only to return at another place and time. The voice becomes a finely woven externalized connective tissue that moves from the film’s present into someone’s past.

Often these moments of comfort and protective memories occur when there is an imminent danger. Early in the film, as Pvt. Jack Bell and his fellow soldiers in C-Company prepare for a beach landing on Guadalcanal, he calmly speaks to his wife through himself: “Why should I be afraid to die? I belong to you. If I go first, I wait for you there on the other side of the dark waters. Be with me now.”[21] When these inner-most thoughts have been externalized his voice swirls around the ship, touching lightly upon his fellow soldiers as they hurry to prepare themselves, almost baptizing them with the enunciation of a common thought. When we next see Pvt. Bell, he’s on the deck of the ship falling into formation with his fellow soldiers, realigned with his voice on the other side of its downy narration. An inertia is created which provides a counter-movement to the chronological narrative that carries us through the film with carefully montaged temporalities.

Although the narrated voice both initiates and accompanies multiple visual flashbacks, it does so as a bridge between scenes (actually) and across time (virtually) by refusing to participate in the hegemony of the visual field. It troubles the coherency of the film in such a way that the external ‘identities’ of the characters, as well as the singularity of the army in the larger conflict of the story, are no longer held to our expectations of consistency. “Shut up in a tomb. Can’t lift the lid. Play a role I never conceived.”[22] Spoken by Lt. Col. Tall just as he arrives at Capt. Staros’s base in order to put together a strategy for capturing a Japanese machine-gun position we, as intercessors, hear these private thoughts as half-formed, grammatically chopped phrases. While seeming to fly into direct contradiction of Lt. Col. Tall’s authority and gravitas, this irresolvable confluence with deep internal regret is, instead, something we cannot verify with what we see nor with what is spoken. We won’t know. As viewers it’s not a matter of reconciling this contradiction within Lt. Col. Tall’s character but describing and articulating the space where this conflict is located.[23]

The narrati(ons)ves in The Thin Red Line are not machines whose output remain consistent. Through out the film Pvt. Bell’s thoughts, especially, fly off into the distance, over nature, spilling into the environment, back to his wife, and his precious past. Never performing in the same way, Bell’s voice sometimes speaks from afar but just as frequently it speaks of the present. Being recalled in a present, the voice and ensuing performed memory is not inextricable from it. “[…] you still recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little drawn round and enclosed them (while I went on with my book and the heat of the day declined) in the gradual crystallization, slowly altering in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.”[24] An open valve from which mnemonic moments flow. It becomes a time that is ultra-sensorial. The day, being a larger frame, wraps around these moments and is that which permits, allows these adventures to be brought back into unexpected intervals. The memory ceases to be locked into the past but is massaged outward into the present, trailing along with it externalized and partially intact bodily senses.

“Being involved in the image means that the voice doesn’t merely speak as an observer (as commentary), but that it bears with the image a relationship of possible inclusion, a relationship of power and possession capable of functioning in both directions; the image may contain the voice, or the voice may contain the image.”[25] Are the voice and the image so easily consigned and allocated to their respective spaces that we can record incursions and measure border crossings between each of them? Possession as it is traditionally connoted, as we saw in Dr. Mabuse, is defined by the crossing of an oppositional boundary and occupation of that territory. Behind these boundaries there is a presumption of coherency, a desire for order, and perhaps most importantly, a control over movement. In the phenomenological sense, possession can be rethought as a concept without boundaries, arrayed in a smooth space without destinations or arrivals; in performing against, while also sharpening, the focus upon the state’s mechanizations it usurps all the enforcements withholding the detainees that are contained within those regions, enforced as they are behind impassable walls, fences, trenches, doors, and gates.[26]

Bringing to the surface a certain anxiety at not giving over to the instinct, on our part, to lock it down, the distributed voice counters the cultural habit to allocate a voice to a body, what Chion calls de-acoustimitization: “[…] which results from finally showing the person speaking, is always like a deflowering. For at that point the voice loses it virginal-acousmatic powers, and re-enters the realm of human beings.”[27] Was the voice ever pure? This virginity (objectivity?) is diluted by the fact that the voice already has an immanent relation to the image, one which isn’t specific but singular; neither is concrete, both are non-illustrative. Making the voice visual, that is, showing the body from which the voice is spoken does supplement the voice but the term ‘deflowering’ is a bit moralized. It colors sound with a taint, marks it as spoiled, or otherwise non-productively penetrated. What has been so hard to articulate, what has so far been slipping from my grasp, what I know is there but I remain unable to materialize, is that the voice doesn’t come from a neutral and separated space that has complete objectivity. This re-entry ‘into the realm of human beings,’ while sounding like a homecoming or restoration, is the repossession of a fugitive voice that has so far avoided and slipped around the primacy of the visual; akin to locking the now aligned voice-body to an archive where it is hereby locatable. There is a concrete grasp and ‘seeing’ of the visible instead of a less passive ‘looking,’ in spite of the blockages to this grasp that will occur and continue to do so. Locked into a struggle, the different sides are continually created through resistances to being consigned and these contentions will persist without any presumption of resolution; the struggle (war) won’t be decided (won) by either side. “We’ve been moved around the prison by the guards for weeks, maybe even months. I know that people are looking for us, and want to know where we are. “No. They’re not here. You cannot see them.” Still, our families have been waiting outside the prison for weeks, waiting for someone to come out, and at the very least, let them know that we’re not dead. “Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate we break the spell—we are seen by those whom we would warn, console, or punish.”[28] Please, let us speak, let them hear us: I want you to know I’m here.”

Borderlands are those spaces only a short distance from the physical demarcation between two regions where, depending on the porousness of the border, we might find a merging or sharing of cultures and languages, yet more likely be inflicted with a strictly enforced limit that restricts movement and flows between ‘us’ and ‘them.’[29] But with at least one foot stepping over and into…a border and a division have been crossed. Not, for example, region to region but region into region, then, hopefully, echoing back again. It is a crossing from one register into another and resounding from within what was, presumably, a subject. The acousmatic voice moves in- and out-of-frame, but is only heard and not seen. “The acousmêtre, as we have noted, cannot occupy the removed position of commentator […] He must, if only slightly, have one foot in the image, in the space of the film; he must haunt the borderlands that are neither the interior of the filmic stage nor the proscenium – a place that has no name, but which the cinema forever brings into play.”[30] Speaking from beyond the grave, the acousmêtre bears itself backward but also cleaves a separation. Haunting the frame as it does, the acousmêtre surrounds and is laid over its restricting geometry; where the evocations created by the incommensurability of sound and image do so in order to foreground a personal navigation instead of a measured trajectory departing from a (presumed) located position.

It’s no wonder that there is a huge scar running along the crown of the head in the still frame of 7th November. Not exactly a film per se, Steve McQueen’s installation consists of a single image (included above in b/w) accompanied by a man’s recorded voice recalling, among other observations and stories, the moment when his brother was accidentally shot and killed. In the actual sense, this long jagged scar is a remnant reminiscent of the trauma being recounted by the film’s narration. In another sense, that scar is a rift that has been cut, yet not completely healed, between the narrator’s distributed voice and this allocated image. As the narration in 7th November proceeds, the image, although immobile, moves into and out of a narrative correspondence with what is heard like a floating illustration, to the point where there is a critical alignment between the two, reaching a tragic commensurability for just a few moments before tearing away from each other again on diverging lines. At the beginning of the film, it might have been possible to anticipate an approaching correspondence between narration and image but as the film carries on, the realization that the relation created at that moment was a false one becomes, ironically, more clear. “’Nailing-down’ nicely captures the rigidity and constraint in the conventions that have evolved for making films voices appear to come from bodies […] cinemas seem obsessively concerned with synchronization that has no detectable ‘seams’.”[31] Coherency and seamlesness, whether the voice ‘belongs’ where it has been placed or not. But additionally, no breaks or fissures as evidence of a previous disruptive movement-moment. Here, the less adhered, unsettled narration is able to activate the image into a virtual alignment; not a movement that can be measured but an affective movement where sensations are accelerated.

“The sound film also has an offscreen field that can be populated by acousmatic voices, founding voices, determining voices – voices that command, invade, and vampirize the image; voices that often have the omnipotence to guide the action, call it up, make it happen, and sometimes lose it on the border line between land and sea.”[32] So these acousmatic voices populating the off-screen aren’t consigned to this space but are always in movement, inwards and outward. The violence that seems implicit to the acousmatic voice that populates this field is almost militarized. Vampirizing the image is quite a provocative description of the acousmatic voice but not completely off the mark; the voice does gain a certain amount of sustenance from the image but the image reciprocates as well. Stopping there though, the voice does not go so far, through such sinister, parasitic, vitality depleting means, in order to do so.

As someone that was there as a witness to the incident recounted in 7th November, and as a close relative of the person killed, this man’s narration carries with it, above any others, a fraught and weighted bearing in recounting the story and from which we are lead as we attempt a reconstruction of the events. But in spite of being placed in this piece as a witness we, as an audience, are able to perform an alignment of the still image and narrated voice as they are recorded off-frame from each other. Their co-presence during the duration of the piece is an artificial, yet highly strategized, dissociation since at no time does he talk about or refer to the image directly. With Deleuze’s sound-image, there is a convergence yet an incommensurability between the visual and acoustic. “Between two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between two sound images, between the sound and the visual: make the indiscernible, that is the frontier, visible.”[33] If we begin with the assumption that the visual is impossible to totalize, the same being true of the acoustic (one voice being unable to speak for everyone or anyone), they might come together in a creative encounter that speaks through fiction. By fiction, I don’t mean a fiction that is opposite to truth or non-fiction, it’s more than a surface device. In troubling the alignment between what is heard and seen, time and spatial correspondence are no longer links in a chain of successive associations, but open themselves to a territorial texture (textured territory) that can be navigated along affective paths instead of extracted ‘meanings.’ It is a subjective fiction that exists in the gap between vision and voice, with a ‘truth’ stronger than any critical objectivity in spite of its plasticity and inability to be focused.

In a scene from Claude Lanzmann’s epic Holocaust documentary Shoah, we are lead over a pile of snow-covered ruins as a Holocaust survivor recalls his memories as a gas chamber attendant at Treblinka Concentration Camp. That, at the time of filming, the site is in a complete state of ruin only accentuates a sense of potential historical and physical recovery; the piled bricks and crumbling concrete foundations that rise out of the blankness of the snow provide, literally, the raw materials for that performance. “The most disconcerting, in fact, is not when we attribute unlimited knowledge to the acousmêtre, but rather when its vision and knowledge have limits whose dimensions we do not know. […] Much more disturbing is the idea of a god or being with only partial powers and vision, whose limits are not known. […] Seeing all, in the logic of magical thought we are exploring, implies knowing all.”[34] Here again, in a moment where the narration and image are recorded off-screen from each other (and mixed together in post-production), the survivor’s recorded voice, being unable to perform a recalled reconstruction of the site, is nonetheless empowered at the same time that the filmed ruins fail to be reconstituted into an absolute past that we might physically navigate. The productive incommensurability of the voice and images have left the question of ‘what has been on this site’ behind.

Returning to the voice of the narrator as he recalls his memories of the Nazi architectural machine and the events that occurred in the ante- and gas-chambers, his position as survivor is reductive and contested, but it also returns the voice back to a body, locking it into physical limits and also a specific history. This voice, recorded as it is, exercises its denial of the body from which it emanates, as if it could be separated from the organs which produce it, in order to float through this hollow but nonetheless still haunt(ing)ed location. While both narration and image continue their failure to cohere, the affective potential of the site is no less diminished by its ruined and empty state. Left to fall into disrepair, the concentration camp had not been restored (sanitized) into an historic monument, destined, no doubt, to become a tourist attraction shortly thereafter. While there’s a certain amount of freedom in this positionality, it can be further extended into a temporal register in which positionalities are formed, unformed, and reformed continuously and in every instant, in constant flux and upheaval. As we follow this voice, removed as it is from a ‘who’ and a ‘where,’ it awakens in this crumbling haunted house an immaterial archive that the camera is unable to locate and film yet is somehow still present. “…the relation between image and sound, subject and object, is distinct and incommensurable, yet it nonetheless keeps sliding one between the other, oscillating in a free indirect relation. As a result, the model of the true cannot hold; identity cannot be ‘found’ in either image or voice, or narrator and characters, but only in an image of incomplete becoming.”[35] Voices and images in Shoah do not recover a specific history but motivate a perpetually immanent singularity played out through serial relations; a history, as performed in its recollection, of ongoing and continuous struggles instead of tidy events. “But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the following, or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this indefinite perception would continue to smother in its molten liquidity the motifs which now and then emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown; recognized only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instill, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name; ineffable […]”[36] The pleasurable ripples that spill away from each motif as it plunges animate the surface of this liquid body. As the powerful recollections and material remains of past events that we still struggle to fathom, they nonetheless spill apart and fall away, slowly disappearing, in spite of being recorded, never to return or heard from again.

I’d like to take a look at how the following contraption from Chion will help us continue. Let’s listen to him for a moment: “Burial is marked by rituals and signs such as the gravestone, the cross, and the epitaph, which say to the departed, ‘You must stay here,’ so that he won’t haunt the living as a soul in torment. In some traditions, ghosts are those who are unburied or improperly buried. Precisely the same applies to the acousmêtre, when we speak of a yet-unseen voice, one that can neither enter the image to attach itself to a visible body, nor occupy the removed position of the image presenter. The voice is condemned to wander the surface.”[37] Although only a sketch, the metaphor between acousmêtre and ghosts as drawn here is similar to what I’ve been trying to compose throughout: that voice that floats over the surface of the screen yet not vested to a visual counterpart. But is the body a tomb and resting place for a fugitive voice that has to be reattached, buried and put to rest? If something is left un-buried or improperly buried, what does this imply? The implication that I’m hearing here is that there’s a procedure to be followed, or a ceremony to be performed, so that an agreed upon set of boundaries can be established and normalized; a division can be drawn between living and dead. These striations, from which threats to this normative are marked then assessed, maintain a very strict coherency of forecasted results that is immune to contradictions. But in ignoring the ceremonial order ‘You must stay here,’ the voice can perform against the ingrained cultural and discursive habit of consignation, entombment, and other forms of burial. This ‘stay here’ also points to the archival grasp that would try to partition things into designated spaces, places that partition and hold ‘beings.’ “You who consult us in this imperfect way -- you do not understand. You ask foolish questions about things unknown and things forbidden. Much that we know and could impart in our speech is meaningless in yours. We must communicate with you through a stammering intelligence in that small fraction of our language that you yourselves can speak. O God! What a thing it is to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an altered world, a prey to apprehension and despair!”[38] With this new acoustic positionality, still struggling to free itself from the bounds of the visual, it would be tempting to think the acoustic and visual as separate realms. There is a bleeding between the two though. Opting instead for a kind of haunting narration that floats into and around the frame, as soon as the voice denies its body, away from a set of physical signifiers, it leaves a ‘from where?’ behind for ‘how?’ “Given one image, another image has to be chosen which will induce an interstice between the two. This is not an operation of association, but of differentiation […] Given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of potential is established between the two, which will be productive of a third or of something new.”[39] Previously, this interstice was the point of differing potentials, that point which imparts and establishes otherness, a mediated border that ensures a cause-effect movement between frames. The interval seems to suggest a path and the next step. Here, the interval is unbridgeable; not to be routed through on an oblique path but accentuated as no longer being a transitory space. Removing it would take away all sense of determinacy. But can an association still be made through differentiation? In looking back over a sting of previous associations, we might find a pattern of associations. Ignoring the past (refusing to repeat?) keeps every interval dissociated. “…the force of time produces a serialization organized by irrational intervals that produce a dissociation rather than an association of images. The interval is no longer filled by a sensorimotor situation; it neither marks the trajectory between an action and a reaction nor bridges two sets through continuity links. Instead, the interval collapses and so becomes ‘irrational:’ not a link bridging images, but an interstice between them, an unbridgeable gap whose occurrences give movement as displacement in space marked by false continuity.”[40] This ‘frontier between the before and after’ is often an interval or bridge, a becoming-present where the interval is no longer clear, markedly present, or otherwise made distinct. The interval isn’t just a link but is also the limit between two presents, what separates them from each other. It’s a counter-maneuver out of the habit/instinct to create associations between images, a move out of the tree and root framework of absolute pasts and traceable histories. Past, present, and future become themselves and each other.

Evocative of both a personal history and a national conflict, Zarina Bhimji’s film installation Out of Blue is its own collective speech-act. Through a deterritorialization of the homecoming, documentary, and road movie filmic vocabularies (these being indexical locations, clichés, and ‘real’ histories) the film’s sound-narration stutters to pronounce the language of a sensory-motor logic. Using sound effects and recorded noises along with human voices, acoustic and visual ambience over the slowly panning shots provide the raw materials for fabulation. “In other words, the interstice is primary in relation to association, or irreducible difference allows resemblances to be graded. The fissure has become primary, and as such grows larger. It is not a matter of following a chain of images, even across voids, but of getting out of the chain or the association.”[41] As the film continues, as the camera shots move from the Ugandan landscape to a prison then the airport, the buzzing of mosquitoes and falling rain create more than just an intersection of converging acoustic and visual documents; it’s a continuously dividing non-didactic account.

“Fabulation requires intercessors to formulate strategies for breaking down subject-object relations and making them indiscernible. Becoming-other is the task of the intercessor […] This means constructing a narration between two points of enunciation where author and subject continually exchange roles so that their relative positions become indistinct or undecidable. In this way the narration passes between them as ‘a reflected series with two terms,’ each of which falsifies the other. In this encounter, the intellectual’s discourse is deterritorialized in one direction, and the minority subject’s in another. Both become-other in the creation of a new minority relation.”[42]

The audience-intercessor acts as a circuit between the visual and acoustic in a gap of indiscernibility that coheres but resists being unified. Failing, intentionally, as it does to present a recorded landscape, history, ‘coming home’ event, or accompanying acoustic atmosphere Out of Blue composes, instead, an affectual immateriality that refuses to be dominated. It’s slipped away from me. I’ve lost it again. Via a ‘strategic dissociation’ of sound and image, it exercises its potential to become an ennunciative event (not document) that moves freely between concepts while still retaining a prescribed dose of consignation within the film. It’s a ghost story, a s(chimera)ring piece of writing that moves through and fluctuates on affective paths of locatability while continuing to be locked into a binary [book-ended] placement: a film. The coherency and documentary logics of discourse are upended by the ineffability of the written structure, carried through to the successive layers of text, “…a linguistic mutation capable of expressing the impossibility of living under domination.”[43] More interestingly, it employs the acknowledged limits of spoken and visual texts in such a way that their respective failures fuse into a powerful collective.[44]

Deleuze goes on to say that when the speech-act splits from the time-image, the out-of-field is closed off and comes into a dissociation with the visual. This contestation becomes framed and is confronted. Appearing to be held in place, prevented from moving freely along a whole but quite smoothly along with and amidst the visual: separate and incommensurable yet complementary. “There is in fact a complementarity between sound and image based on their strategic dissociation.”[45] Yet even if it were a moment of two virtual out-of-fields coming into contact, there must still be a continued relation between virtual and actuals, seemingly reflecting each other at individual moments. The same film will have numerous instances of both, a continued correspondence, “communication, a circulation which constantly reconstitutes the continuum.”[46]

A potential becoming and a people that are missing or not yet here: ‘collective without unifying.’ I would add to this locations ‘that we have known’ as well; places that have been mapped (remembered then written) onto a space of convenience for the benefit of our scrutiny, study, framing, holding, archiving. There is an acknowledged inability, exemplified in Out of Blue, in these sorts of quoted locations and that our convenient mappings of them will never succeed in enveloping the breadth of any place we claim to know. This convenience is a reductive operation that can only bound and limit what we know to be a much larger thing. They are bundles of potential affect instead of materialized objects that we desperately make locatable. “Not the exchange of one identity for another, nor the recognition of a repressed but articulable being.”[47] More than just a thought, an Idea is an ephemerality and a malleable connective tissue for a mutual will between author and intercessor that has the potential to be ‘collective without unifying.’ There is a double-actualization occurring in this indiscernibility: a becoming-ghost. “…shouts being indeed no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which, not being developed to the point at which they might rest exposed to the light of day, rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation, found it easier and more pleasant to drift into an immediate outlet. And so it is that the bulk of what appear to be the emotional renderings of our inmost sensations do no more than relieve us of the burden of those sensations by allowing them to escape from us in an indistinct form which does not teach us how it should be interpreted.”[48] Just as quickly as we are to admit that time and years pass beyond the reach of our senses and faculties (yet are still the frame for our performed recollections of our lives) so too might we think of the everyday objects, or what we might claim to own knowledge of, that surround us because they are the spaces and routes we most frequently attend.

“As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little phrase as performing the rites on which it insisted before it would consent to appear, as proceeding to utter the incantations necessary to procure, and to prolong for a moment, the miracle of its apparition, Swann, who was no more able now to see it than if it had belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, who experienced something like the refreshing sense of metamorphosis in the momentary blindness with which he had been struck as he approached it, Swann felt that it was present, like a protective goddess, a confidant of his love, who, so as to be able to come to him through the crowd, and to draw him aside to speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And as she passed him, light, soothing, as softly murmured as the perfume of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word of which he closely scanned, sorry to see them fly away so fast, he made involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him, the harmonious fleeting form.”[49]

The ‘little phrase’ that departs from the larger piece, any-phrase-whatever, separated from the broader corpus as just one of the sensations wrapped up into that bundle of potential sensations, makes its affective connection with an outside without remaining intact or being able to trace its steps. The subject is released from a fixed, aimed, directed trajectory for a counter perspective that makes contact with more than an external nature; it fluctuates along circuits amidst insides/outsides/beginnings/endings. The scattered phrases, released in all directions, aren’t orders directed to anyone in particular but are distributed sensations whose affects reside in their expression and the brief moment of their occurrence. Not resting after being released, these gestures make their own connections, spilling out of themselves and flowing further and further into the world where they become ‘present’ in the form of an emanation that moves its way through the crowd (cloud) so that it may speak to us. The little phrase is an affect that I begin a conversation with, listen carefully to, and eventually fall in love with: out of an analytic and into criticality.

As I’ve worked through all of this material and tried to arrive at a conclusion, I’ve only been able to do so by avoiding any unifying concept of the cinematic acousmatic voice, thinking it more effective to theorize it as a haunting. Ghosts as producers do so through rarefied encounters with others and by exploiting the strategies of non-coherency and un-locatability. [50] In the brief encounters that I’ve outlined here, these hauntings are events that occur over a period of time and are in a perpetual state of movement and disappearance. As we have seen, the cinematic acousmêtre can’t only be a device that churns out some sort of effect on the visual information projected onto the screen; it’s much more complex and resists being consigned to philosophical and dictionary definitions. Maybe it’s more like a gadget. There’s an attraction to the immense cleverness and practical use of these discrete inventions that people seem so drawn to, not just as an adherent to a collective minor discourse but as a being in the process of breaking down its own micro-fascisms and striations. “But when the interval is opened by time as a force of the outside, space gives way to a series of irrational points and non-chronological relationships. Framing, which assured the unfolding of continuous images in space according to the chronological succession of presents gives way to a series of deframings where time interrupts space as aberrant movements. The spectator is no longer included in the image as part of this expanding whole; there is no ideal or transcendent perspective from which the image must be judged in opposition to life.”[51] If the spectator is no longer ‘included in the image,’ the ground upon which they stand and view from has been eroded, making it difficult to formulate that oh-so-precious grounded and located perspective from which to be critical.

Nevertheless, I’ve found that in spite of opening myself to these acousmatic voices and the liberating expulsion of sensation and memories, there is a certain measure of unconnected-ness and loneliness to bear. Although I have been trying to develop and elaborate on an enjoyment with my objects of study by crashing over their frames and other subjective barriers, I can’t help but feel a bit melancholy when I struggle to find the words to share these thoughts with anyone. “I felt that she would have regarded me as mad, for I no longer thought of those desires which came to me on my walks, but were never realized, as being shared by others, or as having any existence apart from myself. They seemed nothing more now than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creatures of my temperament.”[52] My affective response, while being evoked by the voices coming from the landscape of these narratives, is nonetheless a very specific one because it’s so difficult to share it without reducing it to an abbreviation, if it’s even possible to catch up with it, if it’s only just for a moment. Even though I’ve been careful not to have a go at this all alone, what I was unable to anticipate is: exploring and attempting to build a flow (not a flash flood but a delta) of sensory responses to internal and external stimuli outside oneself into the imminent surroundings can be a very lonely journey, and dangerous if you let yourself be carried out to sea. Coming, finally, to the end, although it’s been quite a pleasurable writing exercise, I can’t help but worry if anyone will hear me shouting towards the shore and find me drifting off the coast of these islands in this tiny little dinghy.