Mourning Speech

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Text and Performance Quarterly i j RoutledgeVol. 24, No. 2 , April 200 4, pp. 91-114 « » T » y i o , & ? , . „ * c o u p

Mourning Speech: Haunt ing and theSpectral Voices of Nine-Eleven

Joshua Gunn

In this essay I forward a psychoan alytic theory of haunting that privileges the object ofspeech in cultural and theatrical performan ce. Using this theory, I analyze the mass

media exploitation of the panicked and dying voices of Nine-eleven. I conclude with two

observations. First, performan ce is haunted by an ontological dualism central to

subjectivity, which challenges any easy distinction between the live and the recorded.

Second, the Nine-eleven archive is frequently used in the civic performan ce of political

amnesia.

Keyw ords: Speech; Audience; Hau nting; Mo urning; M elancholia; Archive; Repertoire;

Dualism

Only when the horror of annihilation is raised fully into consciousness are we placed

in the proper relationship to the dead: that of unity with them, since we, like them,

are victims of the same conditions and of the same disappointed hope. (Max

Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno 178)

A specter is haunting the United States. It made its most visible appearance on the

ninety-da y anniversary of the attacks on Septem ber 11, 2001 as two "g hosts, twoethereal colum ns of pu re l ig h t. .. filling the dark void created when terrorists

bro ug ht down the World Tra de Cente r tow ers" (Saffron par. 1). The twin beam s

highlighted a profound need to visualize the invisible, to presence the absent, to

materialize a phantom lurking in a dark and smoky night sky. The phantasmagoria

was only discernable from a distance, requiring the hovering clouds of smoke and

smog to make itself known. The gigantic, glowing presence of the lights seemed to

Joshua Gunn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State

University in Baton Rouge. Earlier versions of this paper were delivered to the Department of Communication

Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and to the Communication Department at Georgia

State University in Atlanta. The author thanks Michael Bowman, Mindy Fenske, Ronald Walter Greene, Tracy





Mourning Speech 93

departmental nameplates, and I make an intentionally polemical call for its return in

the examination and crit icism of contemporary cultural and theatrical performances.

Drawing on the insights of psychoanalytic theory, I suggest that the haunting of

speech can be understood in two related senses. First, the haunting of speech refersto the ghosting or spectralization of the human voice that results from the forgetting

catalyzed by the dominance of visuality. Second, the haunting of speech refers to

haunt ing by the human voice, or the ways in which speech troubles us as a

disembodied object, which is the consequence of technologies of recording and

telepresence (e.g., the phonograph and telephone; see Peters 177-225; Sconce

59-91) . Understood in this double sense, I suggest that the haunting of speech

demonstrates that haunting in general is a common experience in our l ives that has

little to do with superstition or the paranormal. Rather, haunting is a psychical force

motivating performances that attempt to mourn, a force animating practices thatattempt to presence the dead in traces as a means of knowing and, especially in

respect to media coverage of Nine-eleven, as a means of coping. Further, because

ghosts paradoxically denote an absence made present, I also suggest that the notion

of vocal or sonorous haunting helps to challenge the imagocentric, representational

logics motivating clean distinctions between what Diana Taylor has termed the

"archive" and the "repertoire," often experienced as a dichotomy between the

written (recorded) and the embodied (live). I conclude by arguing that the haunting

of speech points to a radical alienation of the subject from the biological body, and

the murdering made possible by the simultaneous recognition and repression of this

gap-

Haunting/Subjectification

The Idiom o f Haunting

According to the OED, the dom inan t meanin g of "ha un t" is to "practice [something]

habitually, familiarly, or frequently." Essentially, haunting is a repetitive practice of

an individual in relation to something familiar, a meaning that eventually became

associated with ghosts, those disembodied beings draped in sheets that some readersare imagining. In her masterful exploration of ghosts as an idiom of subjectivity.

Gho stly Ma tters: Ha unting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon suggests

t ha t hau n t i ng "desc r i bes how th a t wh ich app ea r s no t t o be t he re is o f ten a s ee th ing

presen ce , ac t i ng on an d o ft en m e ld in g w i th t aken - fo r -g ran t e d r ea l i ti e s . " She a rgues

t h a t :

the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting

is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure,

and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make

social life. ... Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and alwaysa bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as



94 /. Gunn

the intrinsic and extrinsic, the historical and the subjective, the external and internal.

Haunting ties one to a "structure of feeling," an entire web of communal produc-

tions and emotions during a specific moment (Williams 25-41). Further, ghost

hunting, trying to document the traces of what was or that which eludes in scholarlyperformance, necessarily forces one to articulate a historical and emotional context.'

For these reasons the idiom of haunting has been somewhat popular in performance

scholarship; haunting neatly encapsulates the interplay of presence and absence

central to performance. Herbert Blau has referenced the "ghostliness" of perform-

ance as the Eternal Return of some, unmentionable "interior resistance" {Eye

172-73). Similarly, Marvin Carlson describes the memorial function of theatre as

"ghosting," which concerns the accretion of audience memories of past perfor-

mances into a kind of terministic screen or perceptive filter (7, 58—63). Extending

Roland Barthes' observation that photography captures ghosts in its "rehearsal fordeath," Peggy Phelan has suggested the same of cultural performances, adding that

unlike any other art form, live "performance ... understands the generative possibil-

ities of disappearance," and "enacts the productive appeal of the nonreproductive"

("Francesca Woodman" 980; Unmarked 27, 146-66; also see Kairschner 14-20). In

distinction from Carlson's positivistic materialism, however, for Phelan ghosting

could be characterized as that which replicates without reproduction (also see

Haraway 149-81). Ghosting captures the "ontology of performance," understood as

the way in which performers' bodies are used to emphasize the impossibility of

physical and psychical harmony, the lie of representation (Phelan, Unmarked 150-

51).

Haunting, then, suggests much more than a tidy critical protocol. Gordon writes

that she was led to the idiom because "the available critical vocabularies were

failing ... to communicate the depth, density, and intricacies of the dialectic of

subjection and subjectivity ..." (8). She refers, of course, to the critical project of the

Posts (e.g., poststructuralism, postmodernism, posthumanism, and so on), which

has helped to produce an understanding of subjectivity that no longer requires the

sense of unity, coherence, or autonomy implied by the concept of the individual (see

Silverman, Subject 126-93). Consequently, haunting is also an idiom that challenges

traditional notions of audience as a discretely knowable group of individuals, insofar

as any performative encounter produces, and is produced by, uncontrollable sub-

jects. "Although we may sometimes think so," suggests Craig Gingrich-Philbrook,

"the audience is neither as singular, nor as single m inded, as a swarm of angry bees"

(90). Even so, Herbert Blau has suggested that "how we think about an audience is

a function of how we think about ourselves ... and how, if at all, we may accommo-

date the urge for collective experience" (Audience 28). While no one would deny the

obvious distinction between the folks "sitting out there" and the folks "moving

around up here," the audience is nevertheless a discursive production that reflects

more about the person or group who brings them into being than the thoughts ordesires of some quantifiable number of bodies "out there." The audience, in other



Mourning Speech 95

performance have yet to develop sophisticated vocabularies or methods for under-

standing "audience." Linda M. Park-Fuller has argued, for example, that "few recent

studies of audience exist" because of "privileging of performing over audience" and

the "lack of sophisticated language and procedures" (304). In search of a"sophisticated" alternative, Park-Fuller suggests that "quantitative methods loom

large as an obv ious m ethod olog ical choice .. . to m easu re the types and extent of

social disturbance and regeneration prompted by performance" (290-91). Ironically,

psychoanalysis, one of the most sophisticated perspectives for discussing audience

reception or "audiencing," is passed over, presumably because it renders the concept

of audience "chaotic" (289).^ Below, I argue that insofar as cultural performance in

general is experienced as a haunting, this chaotic (read "abstract") audience can be

mapped and understood with psychoanalytic theory.

Suhjectification and the Pleasure of Uncertain Derivatives

Freud worried that "psycho-analysis has li t t le prospect of becoming liked or popu-

lar" because its jargon referenced unverifiable hypotheses and postulates that "are

bound to seem very s t range to ordinary modes of thought . . . " ("Some Elementary

Lessons" 282). One of those strange, unverifiable postulates is that ghosts, under-

stood as phantasms or fantasies, have real effects (see Gunn, "Refitting Fantasy"

1-23 ; Lap lanche a nd Po ntalis 314—18; Zizek, Plague 3-44). In other words, one of

the fundamental principles of psychoanalysis is that psychical life is haunted, that the

experiential world is a parade of memories, mnemic traces, and perceptual ghosts

that may not necessarily correspond to a mind-independent reality—nor should it

have to (in fact, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, any attempt to adapt the haunted

psyche to some "natural" environment is rejected out of hand; see van Haute

xxvii-xlii i). Because of this extraordinary position against adaptation, no other

theoretical perspective has mapped the complexities of ghosts and haunting more

than psychoanalysis, so much so that it would seem impossible to ignore it when

addressing haunting as a performative phenomenon (strangely, Carlson has in fact

achieved the impossible by writing an entire book about haunting and performance

that avoids any mention of psychoanalysis). In spite of its challenging prose,

psychoanalysis does offer a sophisticated alternative to understanding audience

reception without recourse to positivism or quantitative measures. ' ' This alternative

does concern, however, the audience in the abstract, or understanding the experience

of an audience, as well as the performer, in terms of a more technical understanding

of "the subject."

Ghosts and haunting comprise one of the most popular idioms that psychoana-

lytic scholars have used to grapple with the key difficulty of our posthumanist

awakening: (over)simply expressed, the subject is fragmented or "split," a dialectical

exchange of internal and external forces that, absent of the certitude and fixity ofEnlightenment "man" (e.g., the masculinized, rational agent), is difficult to analyze,



96 /. Gunn

most well-known psychoanalytic theory of subjectification. Although Lacan is an

obscure writer and difficult to read (in good humor, Althusser speaks of Lacan as

"the 'Gongora of psychoanalysis, ' 'Grand Dragon,' great officiator of an esoteric

c u l t . . . , " Writings 21),'* the difficulty of his pro se is inte ntio na l an d design ed toproduce new idioms for thinking and talking about "hitherto unexpressed workings

of the unconscious," which are impossible to capture fully (Kearney 271). The

necessity of producing new ways to speak about the unconscious is in turn premised

on the assumption that the notion of a coherent and unified subject is an illusion

that represses unconscious dynamics. The idea of the individual as we commonly

think about i t is a mistake of consciousness, a mistake of embracing an imagined

unified vision of the self, or imago, over tbe reality of the symbolic structures that

constitute us— structures that precede our birth and that will continu e long after our

death. The most primary and privileged of these structures for Lacan is language or

representation, otherwise known as the Symbolic order or the big "Other."

In Lacan's scheme, the imagination or the "imaginary" (as a noun) also plays a

central role in subjectivity. The imaginary is botb a mytbic stage of development and

an order of tbe psyche. As a mythic stage or allegory of subject development, tbe

imaginary refers to a moment in childhood maturation that Lacan calls tbe "mirror

stage." In this stage of maturation, tbe child, wbo experiences him- or herself as a

fragmented, incoberent collection of desires and memories, happens upon an image

of bim or berself in a "looking glass" or reflective surface. Tbis image stimulates tbe

idea of a complete entity entirely independent of otbers: tbe imago (Lacan, "Mirror"

1-7; also see Lacan, "Split" 67-78). Seeing her or bis unified copy, tbe cbild

triumpbantly proclaims, "that 's me!" As tbe cbild grows older, tbe imago, in turn,

becomes invested witb all sorts of expectations from witbout (e.g., from its motber).

For Lacan, tbis primary identification witb tbe mirror image and tbe consequent

imago is a mistake, and as subjects we are constantly negotiating a series of

bomologous gaps tbat tbe imago belies (for example, between tbe conscious and

unconscious). Insofar as tbe imago is an impossible ideal from witbout, it is also

necessarily of tbe Otber. Because we constantly pursue tbe imago for a sense of unity,

for a sense of "individuality," we are necessarily being-for-Otber. One migbt also say

tbat tbe imago is a kind of gbost and one of tbe many imaginary elements tbatcomprise tbe domain of ideology. Inspired by Lacanian psycboanalysis, Louis

Altbusser argued tbat tbe primary function of ideology is to "interpellate" us as

subjects wbo believe tbat tbey/we are autonomous "individuals" ("Ideology" 127-

86). In tbis sense, becoming a subject (subjectification) involves tbe continuous and

repetitive bau nting of ideology, wbicb is tbe perform ance of repression par excellence.

Witbout a gbost to provide tbe map of consciousness, tbe individual is merely a

mindless, biologically driven macbine. Tbis continuous, largely unconscious per-

formance of subjectification produces identity, and tbe process or doing of tbis

perform ance is often terme d "performativity" (Butler 171-90 ).Tbe ambivalence of Self/Otber central to modern subjectivity leads to a number



Mourning Speech 97

ideological, and/or biological? The idiom of haunting provides us with a compelling

way to negotiate (as opposed to a way to solve or answer) these kinds of questions.

Further, the haunting idiom also helpfully brings into focus the ways in which

audiences are interpellated as the subjects of a cultural or theatrical performance.The invisible presence of ghosts, the there/not there, seen/not seen, heard/not heard

ambivalence of tbat which haunts is homologous to the contradictions of the

modern subject. In this context, performance can be understood as a field of

haunting not only in the sense of subjectification in general (tbat is, performativity,

the continuous identity performances of actor and audience alike), but also in the

sense of how a given public is made subject to a given performance. ' In other words,

the ways in which an audien ce is bro ug ht i nto being by a given perfo rm ance reflects

the more fundamental haunting of subjectification, a central premise of the psycho-

analytic approach to "audience."

Mourning, Melancholia, Archive, Repertoire

If haunting is habitual, then it is a kind of compulsion to repeat, an instinctual,

pleasurable behavior most noticeable in children and neurotics. Freud outlined

repetit ion compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920):

Novelty is always the condition of enjoyment. But children will never tire of asking an

adult to repeat a game that he has shown them or played with them, till he is too

exhausted to go on. And if a child has been told a nice story, he will insist on hearingit over and over again rather than a new one. ... repetition, the re-experiencing of

something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure. (42)

Repetition is the basis oi form itself, and the recognition of the repetition of form

is the source of pleasure for the audience of any performance (Burke 30-31). Novelty

is also a source of pleasure, and in the context of the repetition of form, it appears

in terms of a unique iteration of the identical (e.g., a particular performance of a

play, a live performance of a hit song, and so on). Yet, as the principal forms of

haunting, ghosts make the process a compulsory and therefore neurotic one because

their origins or motives are unknown or forgotten (as in the supernatural sense) or

repressed. Repetition compulsion is necessarily a cycle, and repetitive behaviors

continue because the origins of the compulsion are concealed, as is the case, for

example, with a person who is haunted by the same dream night after night. Only

by remembering the source or origin of a compulsion, argued Freud, will a

compulsion (or haunting) cease. Hence, ghosts can also be understood as represen-

tatives of the causes of repetition, as marks of the unmarked, as conscious,

symptomatic i l lusions of unconscious wishes and forgotten deeds, and haunting, as

a simultaneous experience of the pleasure and pain that ghosts inspire. In short,

haunting is a semiotics of repression.*Understood as a compulsion to repeat, the continuous need to memorialize and



98 /. Gunn

violent scene. What keeps audiences watching, reading, and listening to the stories

of the victims of the attacks years after they occurred is the complex, contradictory

pleasures of terror made possible by split or ambivalent subjectivity. Many of us have

felt a compulsive need to consume continuously one Nine-eleven media productafter another. Although it almost goes without saying that it is in the interest of

media capitalism to perpetuate a sense of crisis and anomie in order to stimulate

consumption (Chvasta and LeVan; Gunn and Beard), ironically the representational

logic funding the mass media simultaneously urges the spectator to "move on," to

distance herself from the traumatic loss, and thus to mourn.

From a psychoanalytic vantage, this curiously pleasurable experience of repetition

compulsion, of moving back and forth between trauma and reflection, grief and

consumption, is often described as a kind of unsuccessful mourning or

"melancholia." According to Freud, "normal" mourning concerns the psychicalprocess by which an individual is able to "detach" herself from a loved object that

has been lost, which is only accomplished by working through and archiving the

matrix of mnemonic traces and memories (fantasies) associated with the lost object.

Melancholia, however, involves an identification and internalization of the lost

object as a phan tasmal body, a spectral con sum ption of the imaginary object and the

consequent inabili ty to expel or detach it from the ego (Freud, "Mourning" 243-58;

also see Fischer 115-31).

Diana Taylor's personal narrative in her remarkable book. The Archive and the

Repertoire: Performing Cultural Mem ory in the Americas, helpfully illustrates the workof mourning in a chapter titled, "Lost in the Field of Vision: Witnessing September

11." There she recounts a photographic compulsion and obsessive recycling of

mediated bits that is typical of melancholia:

Like many others, I went inside to turn on the television, trying to find sense in what

I was seeing. I could not assimilate it, either live or on TV. As in a sports stadium, I

watched both at the same time. ... I'd turn to the television and see the running, the

screaming, the collage of frantic yet nonetheless contained images of disaster on the

screen. ... Then I'd run back to the window. I took a photograph, not knowing why

exactly, and started taping the CNN broadcast: TV, window, photo, TV, window,

photo, back and forth ... (238-39)

Like Taylor, the television would also perform similarly, "obsessively" repeating

images, "itself trapped in the traumatic loop" (241). The mirroring performance of

Taylor and her television was a kind of perseveration, a kind of bodily stuttering, an

inability to accept what had already been understood unconsciously as the arrival of

death. And yet:

Each click of my camera was my own pause/hold, as I entered into the suspendedrhythm of the present. The archival impulse prompted me to save the images to

understand them at some future time. One day I would write about it, I told myself,

even as I considered taking out my journal and writing about it now. I put the no waway for later. I envisioned the moment from the postnow, what I would do with it



Mourning Speech 99

performance of the existence of what no longer was physically there" (Taylor 247),

principally in photography and scholarship. This move toward reflection marks the

shift from melancholia to grief and, finally, the acceptance of loss. Taylor's move-

ment from pathological mourning, from an inability to detach from the lost object,to what Freud would characterize as proper mourning, is dependent on moving

away from an experience of lived trauma toward recording and documentation.

In Taylor's terms, the process of mourning would seem to move from lived,

embodied, expressive performance, or "the repertoire," toward the comforting logic

of progressive temporality, "the archive." Her initial, neurotic movement from the

television, to the window, to the viewfinder—"TV, window, photo, TV, window,

photo, back and forth"—worked against the archival impulse because of a desirous

inability to escape the (impossible) experience of the immanent present or never-

ending now; the performance of the ephemeral movement of body in space enacteda repertoire of embodied knowledge—watch, take, look—in a kind of nervous

feedback loop. Archival memory, however, only exists in terms of "documents,

maps, literary texts ... bones, videos, films," and it is the sort of thing that "sustains

power" as it "works across distance, over time and space" (19). The archival impulse

to take pictures that Taylor describes in her Nine-eleven experience is therapeutic

because it functions to separate "the source of 'knowledge' from the knower" (19).

If all performance is a rehearsal for death, then both the archive and the repertoire

are needed to avoid performative melancholia, to avoid getting stuck with the ghost

ofthe

object that has left or been lost.' Yet to successfully grieve, time must interveneand mourning must eventually succumb to the archival. Losing one's identity in the

perpetual live, in this sense, is a melancholic madness, a spectral stuttering most

discernable in moments of monumental catastrophe like Nine-eleven.

Insofar as Taylor notes that trauma makes witnesses of us all, then the mournful

experience of haunting seeks to move us from the embodied stuttering of the

repertoire arising in traumatic experiences to the comforting past-ness and silence of

archival spectatorship (252). Even the more mundane context of performance art

creates a homologous, mournful haunting, for it creates an experience in which the

subject attempts to reduce and file away the trauma of performance into the security

of meaning, place, and past. Melancholic haunting, consequently, is of a different

category. While it is a kind of mourning, melancholic haunting resists the work of

mourning. M elancholic haun ting is seemingly live, in the m om ent, and unm ediated.

Melancholic haunting seems to capture the pure effect of the collapse of archive and

repertoire, a continuous, embodied enactment, citation, and iteration of archival

traces of the lost.

The Uncanny Un(re)marked

Un-Real Visibility



100 /. Gunn

the idiom of haunting. Using Diane Taylor's description of the dialectical work of

the archive and repertoire, I have also suggested that the haunting performance can

be understood in terms of an experiential continuum between the mournful work of

archiving and the melancholic neuroses of the repertoire; melancholic hauntingcharacterizes a liminal state in which the continuum folds upon itself in trauma, a

collapse of the archival and the repertoire. Pu t alternately, the archival represents the

successful work of mourn ing, whereas the repertoire represents the m anifold ways in

which the object of mourning cannot be grieved—melancholia. If anything, Taylor's

account of Nine-eleven is a testament to the hegemony of the archive. But what is

this impossible object of the repertoire? What is this thing that cannot be detached

or grieved? What is this loved object that the archive attempts and fails to frame or

capture in order to move on?

Psychoanalytic theory, particularly of the Lacanian variety, terms this impossibleto describe object of love and loss the "objet a," which, in general, is any object that

sets the subject's desire into motion (ultimately, this is the desire for the Other's

desire; see Fink 50-71; Lacan, "Tuche" 276; Zizek, Metastases 177-181). Yet the key

characteristic of this stimulus that is most relevant to haunting is its impossibility;

the objet a connotes the order of the Real. The Real is the traumatic ineffable, that

which escapes the symbolic and cannot be represented, and ultimately that which is

impossible (see Biesecker 222-40; Evans 159-61; Lacan, "Tuche"; Lacan,

"Deconstruction" 165-8). In this sense, the mournful production of archival mem-

ory attempts to represent that which cannot be represented, which seems moreproperly the province of the repertoire. The liveness betokened by intimations of the

Real, that which is constantly experienced and repressed in the performance of daily

life, and, most notably, that which is directly experienced in trauma, cannot be

archived.

Insofar as performance could be characterized as dancing around the Real, one

can understand why so many performance artists and practitioners are reticent to

video tape their theatrical performances. As Taylor notes:

The live performan ce can never be captured or transm itted throu gh the archive. Avideo of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the

performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is

part of the repertoire). Embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive's

ability to capture it. (20)

When a live performance is recorded, the presumed source of l iminality and the

unsettling, political flows of the libidinal and melancholic that Taylor terms

"embodied memory," this is to say, the haunting of performance, gets screened in

many senses. As Taylor's Nine-eleven snap-shots attest, this is because the archival

impulse is always subject to the hegemony of visibility, the spectral, fixing work of

subjectification, and this is precisely the reason why theorists like Judith Butler and



Mourning Speech 101

d i scour ses a r e sub j ec t t o t he hegemonic f r eeze o f r ep resen t a t i on . A l l d i s cour ses , f rom

Nine-e leven, to sc ience , to law, to :

theatrical realism, autobiography, and psychoanalysis are alike in believing their own

terms to be the m o st .. . fundamental route to establishing or un settling the stability of

the real. ... I know this sounds oh-so-familiar to the ears of weary poststructuralist.

But what is less familiar is the way in which the visible itself is woven into each of these

discourses as an unmarked conspirator in the maintenance of each discursive real.

(Unmarked 3)

Visibility as such is a trap, argues Phelan, because, like all representation, "it

summons surveillance and the law," erasing in the process "the power of the

unmarked, unspoken, and unseen" [Unmarked 6-7). In reference to media coverage

of the events on Septem ber 11, 2001 , then, o ne m ay be led to ask: wh at has th e

tyranny of visibility and the fetishization of Nine-eleven erased? What do our

archival memories of that fateful day obscure? Have we mourned, or are we still

afflicted with a melancholic haunting by something we cannot let go, file away, or

otherwise visually represent? The answer, of course, has something to do with

speech.

Nine-Eleven and the "Real" Body of Voice

Regardless of the archival entry one consults, the cultural performance of Nine-

eleven was unquestionably sonorous, riddled with the sounds of explosions, sirens,

speeches, and silence. Perhaps more than the creation of memorials (initially as

shrines, and later, as permanent structures), a strong impulse in traumatic moments

is to scream and, afterwards, to speak. Indeed, every mourning moment invi tes the

revival speech genres, particularly the eulogy. Consequently, the importance of

speaking and speech at memorials and other places of mourning has been widely

discussed among rhetoricians (e.g. , Jamieson and Campbell). What has largely

escaped discussion among rhetoricians are the ubiquitous "moments of silence" that

punctuate eulogies. As a vestige of prayer in our increasingly inclusive social spaces,

moments of silence are effective in eulogistic moments because of their en-thymematic invitations to the atheist and religious alike.

As tokens of solemnity, I think that the emotional (and some might say spiritual)

effectiveness of moments of silence also has something do with the sometimes

inescapable experience of hearing voices in one's head during them. In contrived

silence, whether one's consciousness is visited by one's own voice in prayer, or

whether one continues to hear echoes of the speaker, one often experiences voices,

or at the very least thoughts, that refuse to leave. Steven Conner terms these

imagined, immaterial voices or thoughts "vocalic bodies":

The vocalic body is the idea—which can take the form of dream, fantasy, ideal,



102 /. Gunn

uncomfortable, and the experience of a sourceless voice intolerable. ... a disembodiedvoice must be habited in a plausible body {Dumstruck 35; also see Conner, "Violence"75-93).

In other words, when we hear or experience voices without discernable origin, realor imagined, we either try to locate their source or mentally fashion bodies for them.

For example, i t is not uncommon to imagine a head and face for a radio announcer;

hence our frequent astonishment when we discover the announcer looks nothing

like we imagined. From a psychoanalytic vantage, this need to assign plausible bodies

to disembodied voices is part of the repression of subjectification: these authentic

ghosts remind us that we are radically alienated from the biological body, that we

are, as subjects, barred from any reconciliation or harmony with "nature." Vocalic

bodies, in other words, are imaginary structures akin to the imago, which protect us

from remembering or realizing something we would rather not remember or realize.The real event of "hearing voices" in one's head helps to locate the imagocentricism

animating the dichotomy between the archive and the repertoire. To be sure,

spectacle remains an important part of ritual, and the need to create visible bandages

like the memorial of light beams, particularly in the Age of the Image, is to be

expected. Consequently, discussion about the cultural performance of Nine-eleven

has tended to focus almost exclusively on imagery (e.g., the ethics of showing footage

of people jumping from the doomed buildings). The archival impulse central to

mourning is thus unquestionably imagocentric and representational, which is why

Nine-eleven lends itself so easily to fetishization, from the accoutrements and

knick-knacks of patriotism (commemorative ceramic firemen, US fiag Christmas

lights) to the airing and re-airing of collapsing buildings on television news pro-

grams, to the creation of monuments. Mournful haunting is achieved and resolved

by means of spectatorship, and consequently, recovers from the trauma of melan-

cholia by eclipsing sound with image, by succumbing to scription.^ The mourning

performance, in other words, is seen, not heard.

Melancholic haunting, on the other hand, is more readily experienced as a

sonorous phenomenon whereby the archive and the repertoire recycle acoustically,

particularly in a manner that makes no distinction between the live and the

reproduced. Speaking of the recorded voice in cinema, Kaja Silverman explains that

the voice participates in:

that powerful Western episteme, extending from Plato to Helene Cixous, whichidentifies the voice with the proximity of here and now—of a metaphysical traditionwhich defines speech as the very essence of presence. ... When the voice is identifiedin this way with presence, it is given the imaginary power to place not only sounds bymeaning in the here and now. In other words, it is understood as closing the gapbetween signifier and signified. {Acoustic Mirror 43)

This power underscores the irony of speech that both Lacan and Derrida intone:

"speech produces absence, not presence" (Silverman, Acoustic Mirror 43). Yet the

"not here" of speech, rendered most obvious in the psychical replay of the vocalic



Mourning Speech 103

Silverman, Acoustic Mirror 44). The "vococentrism" that Chion argues structures the

acoustic field is thus explained by the way in which the biological body haunts

speech as a "vocalic body," by the way in which the h um an voice seems m ore present

to us than other sounds, ambient or instrumental. Consequently, the il lusion of thecollapse of the signifier and the signified achieved by the voice (the illusion, of

course, is due to the fact that there is no signified) is homologous to the collapse of

the archive and the repertoire. This is why the no-where of the disembodied voice

heard in a darkened room is so haunting: we hear the Real body but cannot fix i t .

To understand better the psychical basis of speech in cultural performance, I turn

to a practice common in the media coverage of Nine-eleven: the exploitation of

spectral voices. Since September Uth, we have been encouraged to listen to terrified

and grieving voices repeatedly in multiple, anniversary scenarios. In his 2002 State

of the Union Address, for example. President Bush attempted to swell feelings of

sadness and loss by presencing the Voice of Innocence in his own, manipulative

brand of "oral interpretation." "For many Americans," the President said:

these four months have brought sorrow and pain that will never completely go away.

Every day a retired firefighter returns to ground zero to feel closer to his two sons who

died there. At a memorial in New York, a little boy left his football with a note for his

lost father: "Dear Daddy, please take this to Heaven. I don't want to play football until

I can play with you again someday." (2002 State of the Union par. 4; also see Gunn,

"The Rhetoric of Exorcism" 1-23).

The invocation of a past voice is described as a present one in Bush's remarks,

assuming that presencing is, in fact, what voices seem to do. The president's remarks

betoken a mo urnful hau nting because we assume the vocalic bod y of innocence finds

its double in the Real; somewhere in the world the body of a boy who has lost his

father lives on. If, however, the president had read the remarks of someone who had

died, or if the president had played the panicked scream of a Nine-eleven victim

captured on a recording—as others have done repeatedly—there would be the

archival mark of the unmarked biological body, the impossible to mourn, the

melancholic haunting of disembodied speech.

A weird paradox occurs when one hears a voice of the presumed dead; that which

ann oun ces "I am h ere" is paradoxically no t (of course, the experience of the presence

of voice is l i terally the announcement of absence—but we habitually repress that

fact). Although hearing the recorded voice of someone who has died can be a

comforting experience, as if the deceased were somehow still with us and archived

for repeat visitations, it can also be a chilling experience, particularly if the voice is

recognizably suffering, as when hearing the black-box recording of a plane that has

crashed. In fact, the creepy effects caused by the paradox of spectral voices have been

used time and time again by media outlets as an anxiety-stimulus for the ambivalent

process of melanchol ic consumption. For example , among the outpouring ofcommemorative videos and DVDs, such as 9/11: The Filmmakers' Comm emorative



104 /. Gunn

employ rousing music for emotional effect, WTC : The First 24 Hours makes the most

unsettling use of voices because of the absence of narration or an instrumental

soundtrack. In the opening two minutes, one is presented a letterboxed shot of a

burning World Trade Center tower. The tower abrupt ly lowers and disappears intothe bottom of the screen, and slowly the screen fills with billowing, white smoke.

Most of the ambient noise is caused by small explosions, sirens, and the crumbling

tower; however, one can distinctly hear shrill shrieks as the tower collapses. In his

recent filmic polemic, Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore similarly exploits the spectral

voice to harrowing effect. After a garrulous recounting of the 2000 presidential

elections, the spectator is confronted abruptly with a black screen and a lengthy

playback of the sounds of explosions and screams from "ground zero." One is not

able to see the bodies from which these terrified voices emanate; mentally fashioning

bodies for them, one must consider the possibility that they are presently dead ones.

What inspired me to write this essay was my own unsettling experience of

Nine-eleven. Like Taylor, I found myself subject to the repetitive compulsions of

melancholia as I watched television o n the m orn ing of September 11, 2001 : watch,

phone friend, eat, watch, phone friend, eat. Yet I also found it difficult to mourn in

the months after, when the events became "Nine-eleven," the contemporary cultural

performance of traumatic repetit ion compulsion par excellence. Thankfully, media

coverage of the events of Nine-eleven becomes less compulsive as the years pass. Yet,

it is important to revisit the way in which we mourned, if only because it reveals the

centrality and subsequent repression of the human voice. Many of us remember the

pictures, but have forgotten the speech.

Consider the disturbing presentation of spectral voices on Thursday, October 4,

2001. Less than three weeks after real-time trauma. New York state authorities

released a number of the recorded conversations of emergency personnel to the news

media, presumably to demonstrate the courage and valor of America 's many heroes.

Every network station aired portions of these recordings in their morning and

evening news programs. What follows is a transcription of the recorded voices that

NBC chose to air on the Today Show.

MALE VOICE ONE: [in the background one hears the horrified screams of men andwomen]. Help [unintelligible] is down! Get away from it! Get away from it! [silence]

VOICE TWO: [unintelligible] is down!

MALE VOICE ONE: [unintelligible] is down! Get away from it! [silence] Everybody

move away from—[voice is muffled by something] [unintelligible] move away from

the tower!

MALE VOICE TW O: [muffled] that's a ... that's a 10-13.

FIRE DISPATCHER JOHN LIGHTSEY: That's a 10-4. We gotta 10-13, we gotta

second tower down.

MALE VOICE ON E: [muffled] [a wom an screams in the backgrou nd noise] Move



Mourning Speech 105

the fourth floor. We're not sure though, they're conducting a search in regards to this

female officer down.

It is difficult to describe with adjectives the timbre of these voices. The first male

voice is scream ing loudly, so muc h so that at times his radio ca nn ot effectively

transmit it. Whenever the first male voice speaks, one can hear terrified voices and

numerous high-pitched screams of abject terror in the background. The conver-

sation is full of pops and hisses, and the sound is flat and bass-less.

After the first segment, NBC aired another:

CAPTAIN ALFREDO FUENTES: [unintelligible; voice is slurred and in obvious pain]

yeah ... [unintelligible] ... beneath the collapsed unit. Ah, this is Captain Fuentes, a

couple other members [unintelligible].

LIGHTSEY: Are you trapped Cap? [long silence with no answer]. Captain Fuentes, are

you trapped?

FUENTES: 10-4 [radio squelches loudly].

LIGHTSLEY: Alright, we're sending you some help.

Finally, NBC aired a third segment:

MALE VOICE THREE: ... got an ambulance full of cops. And ah, pedestrians, that we

need help.

MALE VOICE FOUR: [beep] We got possible members of the service down. Trinity

and Cedar, Trinity and Cedar.

FEMALE VOICE ONE: [beep] Be advised we have units trapped in a train station.

Park Place on the two and three line. Park Place two and three [beep] and we have

officers trapped.

When heard, it is not difficult to describe the effect of these voices as haunting,

precisely because of the kinds of vocalic bodies that we mentally conjure for some

of them—bodies that are injured, bleeding, and on the verge of death.

There is no mistaking the patriotic packaging that each of the major network and

cable news channels used to frame these voices, cycling them from the unsettling

liveness of the repertoire to the comfortably captured archive. NBC's Today Show

devoted a lengthy segment to airing the recordings, with the corroborating narration

of an emergency operator in the studio. The panicked voices were aired to the

backdrop of a gray, gold and red montage of video images. The most stable video

image was of a US flag slowly undulating as a backdrop for other video elements. In

front of the flag a series of horrific images dissolved into one another: images of

ashen people fleeing in horror dissolved into images of the second tower exploding,

which predictably dissolved into images of smoldering rubble. Text clarifying the

hurried and panicked voices appeared in the middle of the screen. In between

interrupting narration by the operator and reporter in the Today Show studio, NBC

aired more segments with the patriotic video elaboration over and over again.



106 /. Gunn

sources of terror here are the disembodied voices, some of which we fear have long

since been divorced from their actual bodies. The voices seem to herald a continuous

doom in their excesses; something troubling looms in their grain.

If we describe these horrified vocalic bodies as ghosts, the question remains: whatis the hidden or forgotten element that causes a sense of fear and dread? One

obvious answer is that these voices remind us of things we would like to repress,

such as the fact that we will also eventually die. Another is that the voices

communicate a sense of acoustic space in the echoes of their meeting with walls of

rubble, a sense which shatters our profound and unrealistic fantasies about buildings

"as a form of protection" and as "an insulation from danger" (Wigley 71). Another

answer is that vocalic bodies of this sort are tokens of something that is unconscious

and beyond our immediate grasp or control. In respect to the latter, one may begin

to locate the cause of the uncanny effects by thinking about our own discomfortwhen hearing our own recorded voices. In their 1966 study of this common

discomfort titled "The Voice as Percept" (Conner, Dumstruck 7-8, Philip S. Holzman

and Clyde Rousey theorized that to some degree we dislike hearing our own

recorded voice because it "has a very different sound quality from the voice we hear

conducted through the bones of our skull" (in Conner, Dumbstruck 7-8). Yet, as

Steven Conner recounts in his cultural history of the disembodied voice (that is,

ventri loquism):

this difference in sound quality alone does not seem enough to account for what

Holzman and Rousey call the "complex confrontation experience" brought about bythe "loss of ancho rage ... [and] loss of the cathected familiar." [They suggested,

rather,] that this experience may result not so much from the unfamiliarity of the

voice, as from its familiarity. {Dumbstruck 8)

The psychologists continue by speculating that many people are displeased by their

own voices because, at some preconscious or unconscious level, we are forced to

recognize that there are meanings communicated by our voices that disclose parts of

the self that we wish to keep secret. In other words, our own voices threaten the

return of the repressed. '

Freud would suggest that the uncanny effect of terrified voices is premised on a

similar kind of recognition and displeasure. Indeed, Freud defines the uncanny in

general as a compulsive obsession with the traumatic, when obsession is defined as

the simultaneity of a wish and counter-wish (again, that ambivalence of pleasure and

pain typical of the experiences of the modern subject). '" According to Freud, the

uncanny is an aesthetic phenomenon involving an event and a feeling. The event is

the failure of repression, and the feeling is a variation of negativity (e.g., fright,

horror, dread, and terror are variously used to denote the feeling). The failure of

repression and the "uncanny effect" results when either a "primitive belief," which

we have previously repressed, finds confirmation in experience, or when something

familiar to us (including a feeling) that we have previously repressed recurs (Freud,"Uncanny" 130-46). For Freud, these failures fundamentally cue the castration



Mourning Speech 107

Oedipal analogy of sexual development is unimportant, however, because Freud's

compelling discussion of the number of elements that cue the failure-event does not

depend on an Oedipal logic. He is preoccupied with two failure-events in particular.

First, an experience of doubling, such as a doppelganger or an unexpected mirrorimage, can invite terror (which Freud speculates is the double of feelings of unity

before the ego separated itself from the world). Second, the "eternal recurrence" of

the same—repetition of the same character traits in different people, or a recurrence

of similar events (deja-vu)— can invite an unca nny effect (which Freu d asserts

reminds us of the instinctual compulsion to repeat).

In light of Freud's theory of the uncanny, the spectral Nine-eleven voices have an

uncanny effect in terms of their producing a double and their surfacing repressed,

primitive beliefs. The doubles produced by the disembodied voices of terror are

manifold: There is the recognition of a voice that is alive and the simultaneousknowledge its source is possibly dead; there is the recognition of our selves in the

voice, the semiconscious doubling of identification itself. Furthermore, our re-

pressed, primitive beliefs are characteristically religious, such as the idea that the

spirits of dead bodies survive somehow in their recorded voices. Like a widower who

will not erase the message on his answering machine because it replays the voice of

his deceased spouse, these terrified voices both herald our deaths and subtly promise

eternal life.

Hauntopics: The Cogito/Retum of the Repressed

Whatever the ghostly thing, there is an abrasion in performance (the "rub"), some

interior resistance to the aboriginal romance of a pure libidinal flow. That is the real

substance of the representational split which doubles over and over. ... It is exactly

what goes out of sight that we most desperately want to see. (Herbert Blau, Eye 173)

Or perhaps it is that which we cannot hear in silence that begs for the return of the

repressed, this Real that evades representation? What is this uncanny familiarity, this

" rub" that Blau suggests haunts all performance, this ungraspable thing that would

render all ghosts the interchangeable form of some substantive yet ever-elusivecontent? In this essay I attempted to provide a partial answer by urging us to close

our eyes and attend to the ghost of speech. I have suggested that the abrasion of the

Real is best captured by the grain of the voice, which can be experienced both as a

comfort and a threat. Better than the examination of images, I argued that attending

to the object of speech helpfully isolates the performative dynamics of haunting as

a continual process of subjectification and repression. I argued that mournful

performances are hauntings of this elusive, impossible Real, which is most directly

experienced in melancholic repetition, alternately described as the (temporary)

collapse of the archive and repertoire. To illustrate these claims, I examined the

spectral voices in media coverage of Nine-eleven as an ambivalent mourning

performance: on the one hand, spectral voices were exploited to encourage the





Mourning Speech 109

glass, and the child says, loudly, jubilantly, and erroneously, "that's me!" (Lacan,

"Mirror" 1-7). In echoes of that fateful moment of our first death (entry into the

Symbolic), in living from here to that final, second death, we repress the voice that

ceaselessly intones that we can never coincide with ourselves—that we are, in fact,subjects barred from "nature." In other words, one might say, "Descartes lives!"

Insofar as we are trapped in a centuries-old problematic, this obsession with body

trouble, liveness, and performance will continue to haunt. Exorcism is futile.

What, then, are the political implications of haunting for civic performance? What

object or deed does the ghosting of speech and the haunting by voice implicate? If

the exploitation of the spectral voices of Nine-eleven provides any clue, the pleasures

and displeasures of reliving and forgetting vocalic trauma must be surfacing and

repressing something more than bodily alienation or the fear of death. The answer

to these and similar questions is locatable in the perverse familiarity of Nine-eleven.Like media coverage of the Challenger and Columbia explosions, the Oklahoma City

bombing, and the Columbine High School shootings, the mourning of Nine-eleven

is an obvious rehearsal of melancholic practices, a hauntopia for the audience to

reaffirm what Robert Bellah has described as civil religiosity, a kind of religious

patriotism whereby one places "faith" in a transcendent ideal of progress and unity.

This religion is most commonly experienced, of course, as a kind of patriotism

whereby piety is equated with the purchase of automobiles (General Motors adver-

tisements continuously urged us to "keep America rolling"), and publics are led to

reinvest in the values of the mythic "American Heartland" (Johnson 57-75; also see

Blau, Audience 124)." Taken together, the simultaneity of these religious and

economic logics means that these images and sounds of catastrophe are involved in

the creation of what Renee Bergland calls an "American Mind" or an idealized

"American Subject," which continually recreates itself by simultaneously reliving and

repressing trauma in collective performativity.'^ The haunting of Nine-eleven is an

invitation to experience, again and again, what it is "to be an American."

Insofar as the "American" Subject refers to the collective performativity of reliving

and repressing trauma in the production of mass identity, it is not surprising that

Nine-eleven is evoked repeatedly by politicians and commentators in the service of

a civil pedagogy that insists "we Americans" have changed radically—usually for the

better— from what we were before Septem ber 11, 2001. For exam ple. Presidential

hopeful John Kerry recently remarked that "the w orld tonig ht is very different from

the world of four years ago," and urged his audience to relive the trauma:

Remember the hours after September 11th, when we came together as one to answer

the attack against our homeland. We drew strength when our firefighters ran up stairs

and risked their lives, so that others might live. When rescuers rushed into smoke and

fire at the Pentagon. When the men and women of Flight 93 sacrificed themselves to

save our nation's Capitol. When flags were hanging from front porches all across

America, and strangers became friends. It was the worst day we have ever seen, but itbrought out the best in all of us. (paras. 32-3)



no /. Gunn

argues that Indian ghosts, such as those in the James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of

the Mohicans, represent the simultaneous wish to destroy the racial other and unite

with them in miscegenetic bliss. Ultimately, the repression fueling an uncanny

experience with Indian ghosts is the historical event of Indian removal, the literal

spectralization of American natives (also see Derrida 77-94). In this respect the

repressed objects of performance and politics are yoked: the unbridgeable, imposs-

ible gap between the biological body and conscious experience, between being and

thought, is the fundamental, ontological alienation that makes it possible to blow the

Other to smithereens (cf. Fenske).'^ The many ghosts of Nine-eleven must be an

encounter and an amnesia to the largest specter haunting the United States—a ghost

that drives any wartime economy as much as it does a wartime politics. To name

what is mistaken as the ineffable in so many memorialized moments of silence, this

specter is unquestionably a result of US sponsored violence, the muffled scream ofa body that wants not only to survive, but, impossibly, to (be a-)live.

Notes

[1] The most famous critical use of the idiom of haunting is Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx,

in which the author describes history as "repeating itself with respect to our neurotic

fascination with elements of the past. Marx's many "ghosts" are read by Derrida to activate

a spirit of hope that does not succumb to gross positivistic materialism on the one hand and

a dogmatic utopics on the other. For an excellent blend of Derridian hauntology and

performance theory, see Kuftinec.[2] Of course, film scholarship, particularly that of spectator theory, as well as the theories of

audience in rhetorical studies, suggests otherwise.

[3] In fact, I find the suggestion that performance scholars adopt positivistic (and, in the end,

behavioristic) measures not only misguided, but also dangerously instrumental. As I explain

below, because I understand artful or deliberate performance as an attempt to dance around

and exploit what Peggy Phelan terms the "unmarked," measuring "effectivity" destroys

possibility/hope by fixing the protean into a discernable shape: the number.

[4] "Gongora" is a reference to Luis de Gongora, a sixteenth-century Spanish poet known for

his intentionally complex and difficult writing style, which apparently invited the contempt

of many of his contemporaries. Imitators of this style helped to create the label "gongorismo "

or "Gongorism" as a style of convoluted writing.[5] My understanding of "audience" here is somewhat similar to Michael Warner's description

of a "public" (see Warner 65-124).

[6] In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it is important to note that Freud connects repetition with

the death drive, the push or force of the psyche toward dismantling and destruction. Both

the life drive (eros) and the death drive {thanatos) never exist in a pure state, however, and

are always in some sense commingled.

[7] Alternately, one could describe mourning as "witnessing." The ambivalence of the archival

impulse and the repertoire of compulsive obsession have some important parallels to what

Kelly Oliver describes as the "necessity and impossibility of witnessing" (85-106).

[8] Although Taylor stresses that they do not comprise a binary, she recognizes that the

relationship between the archive and the repertoire easily collapses into one, "with thewritten and archival constituting the hegemonic power and the repertoire providing the



Mourning Speech 111

in the repertoire and "revalorizing expressive, embodied culture" (16). Even though she

aligns speech with the power of the repertoire, Taylor recommends the study of the highly

imagistic "scenario" as something that better mediates the archive and repertoire in scholarly

performance (27-33). But why not the object of speech itself? Why not the human voice? If

vocalic bodies, literally the ghosts of speech, are real and can be "played back" for emotiveeffect (as I am doing right now, hearing my mother say "I love you"), then the tidy

distinctions between the archival and the repertory, the recorded and the lived, indeed, the

contexts of performance and reflection, are difficult to maintain (at least in theory).

[9 ] This is why those "experts" who warned concerned parents about "backward masking" on

heavy metal records in the 1980s were so believable: human utterance as such communicates.

William S. Burroughs made a literary career out of this message. His remixes on the page

were the products of the famous "cut-up" method of textual invention dreamed up by Brion

Gyson, which Burroughs believed helped to convey unconscious messages. At a lecture given

by Burroughs to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in

1976, Burroughs explained how Gyson's method of cutting up newspaper articles and

rearranging the words into new sentences gradually evolved into his spoken-word and sound"tape-loop" experiments with Ian Sommerville in the 1960s. Unlike textual cut-ups, the

audio cut-ups seemed to tap into the unconscious repertoire with a strong sense of

immediacy. When working with tape—at that time, magnetic, reel-to-reel tape—Burroughs

would play the tape backwards or forwards and then randomly splice in another bit of tape.

This method, he argued, relied on an unconscious knowledge of where to splice, which

explained their resulting "coherence" as an artful expression. "Cut ups put you in touch with

what you know and what you do not know you know," he argued (Burroughs, "Origin"

Track 3).

[10] This is a crude sketch of obsession, admittedly. See the theoretical d iscussion of the case of

the so-called "Rat Man" (Freud, Three 58-81).

[11] The term "hauntopia" is Hamera's (66).

[12] Or put alternately, these images and sound s of catastrop he in perpetual recu rrence m ark the

outline of what Fredric Jameson has termed the political unconscious, a collective mind or

subject to which we are all subjected, a collective consciousness that fuses language, social

institutions, bodily pleasures, and market economies into a series of psychological norms

(Jameson; also see Schwab).

[13] Recognizing the alienation of subjectification obviously points to important ethical issues.

Mindy Fenske's recent essay, "The Aesthetic of the Unfinished: Ethics and Performance,"

identifies a problematic "material/virtual" dialectic haunting performance theory and cultural

and theatrical practice (which I suggest is a consequence of subjectification). She argues that

the replication of such a binary tends to close down on one side or the other, therebyfinalizing performance in a kind of unanswerable and unresponsible auto nom y that, in tu rn,

closes down dialogic encounter and negates life, or what Bakhtin terms "Being." From a

Lacanian vantage, this dialectic is none other than that of the "master and slave," or a

relational dynamic in which there is a struggle for recognition (see Evans 105-6). Reckoning

with the fact that desire is, in some sense, the longing for recognition, Fenske's warning

should be taken very seriously. For example, the central practice of "giving voice" and

recognition to "the audience" in interactive performance practices such as Playback Theatre

might be understood as producing the opposite of PTs dialogical, community-building aims,

insofar as it is possible for actors to exploit the suffering of an audience member in order

to produce a finalized aesthetic object (a performed life story). Such performances are

therapeutic and mournful precisely because they are unanswerable, precisely because trau-matic experience gets archived in them. Unquestionably, many audience members enjoy such

recognition and feel better after such a performance. Yet, we need to question the improvised



112 /. Gunn

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