Tristam V Adams

Voice and the stone seem to be opposite. Voice stands on the side of all that is vital, fleeting, precious and spirited. Voice is vital, immaterial, sonic and energetic, whereas stone is dead, material, silent and still. But they share a similarity; it is an ineradicable extimacy, the horror of which shall be explored here.

Piece written as a blog for the ICA website as part of the ICA Friday Salon: 'Sounding Dark' Sept 9th 2016, curated by ICA Associate Curator - Education, Carey Robinson.

What is it to ‘sound dark’? What is it to ‘sound black’? Such terms highlight the unhelpful assumptions about race at the core of how many talk about voice. These questions also betray a shortcoming of language and a prejudice of audition. To be clear, calling a voice ‘dark’ or ‘black’ makes no categorical sense. Voices cannot be judged in visual terms, yet ways of talking about voice and sound make this categorical slip all the time. This is part of a continuum of ways we project our assumptions about ethnicity, gender, sexuality, texture and appearance into the voice.

Voice is a partial register not just of who we are but how we are. It reflects, in part, our experience, our trauma, the environment we live in and how we engage – or are required to engage. The accelerating demands of semiocapitalism that exploit our communicative and cognitive capabilities is reflected in our voices: in syllabic speed.

This book reframes the Lacanian object a voice as a horrific register of alterity. The object gaze has received, as it does in Jacques Lacan’s work, more commentary than voice. Yet recently voice has garnered interest from multiple disciplines. The book intervenes in the Slovenian school’s commentary of the ‘object voice’ in terms of two questions: audition and corporeality. This intervention synthesizes psychoanalysis with recent theorizing of the horror of philosophy. In this intervention the object a voice is argued to resonate in lacunae – epistemological voids that evoke horror in the subject. Biological and evolutionary perspectives on voice, genre horror film and literature, music videos, close readings of Freudian and Lacanian case studies and textual analysis of ancient philosophy texts all contribute to an elucidation of the horrors of the object a voice: Vox-Exo.

Psychopaths seem to be everywhere. They are on the news and at the movies. People who lack empathy, be they ruthless entrepreneurs or crazed ‘spree killers’ are frequently labeled psychopathic; the charming socializer is just as suspect as the awkward anti-social loner. The conception of what defines a psychopath seems to be a morass of contradictions, the only consistency being the supposition of a lack of empathy.

The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy examines how the requirements, stimuli, affects and environments of work condition our empathy. In some cases work calls for no empathy – characters who don’t blink or flinch in the face of danger nor crack under pressure. In other cases capitalism requires empathy in spades – charming, friendly, sensitive and listening managers, customer service agents and carers.

When workers are required to either ignore their empathy to do a job, or dial it up to increase productivity, they are entering a psychopathic modality. The affective blitz of work, flickering screens, emotive content, vibrating alerts and sounding alarms erode our sensitivities whilst we are modulated with attention stimulants, social lubricants and so called anti-anxiety drugs. This is amidst a virulent and exacerbating climate of competition and frenzied quantification. Capitalism pressures us to feign empathy and leverage social relationships on one hand, whilst being cold and pragmatic on the other. We are passionate and enthusiastic whilst keeping a professional distance.

Sympathy, care, compassion and altruism are important; The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy argues that it is a mistake to presuppose that empathy can achieve these. Rather than being subject to the late capitalist organization of our empathy, psychopathy could be a means of escape.

This article examines how exposure to capitalist environments accelerates speech. Voice is proposed as a partial register of how we are as bodied subjects within affective environments with semiotic and communicative pressures. Voice is a locus of trauma, a sonic scar that sounds out the semiotic pressures of capitalism. Accelerated speech is posited as symptomatic of semiocapitalism. Mirroring, vocal convergence, psychotropic stimulation and exposure to accelerated speech in television and Internet are proposed as key factors that influence our speech rate. The trend of compressing increasing amounts of dialogue into television shows is argued to be a dramatic microcosm of how semiocapitalism conditions us to communicate faster. Finally, manifestations of our speed limit are explored. Vocal stalls or hesitations, the deceleration or pause of the semiotic flows we voice, are posited as symptomatic of the disjunct between the accelerating demands of semiocapitalism and the human cognitive and corporeal limit. The shift from speech to voice is symptomatic of trauma. The human buffering of the vocal fry is the sound of the human, subjected to the accelerating demands of semiocapitalism, reaching its limit.

This article examines how exposure to capitalist environments accelerates speech. Voice is proposed as a partial register of how we are as bodied subjects within affective environments with semiotic and communicative pressures. Voice is a locus of trauma, a sonic scar that sounds out the semiotic pressures of capitalism. Accelerated speech is posited as symptomatic of semiocapitalism. Mirroring, vocal convergence, psychotropic stimulation and exposure to accelerated speech in television and Internet are proposed as key factors that influence our speech rate. The trend of compressing increasing amounts of dialogue into television shows is argued to be a dramatic microcosm of how semiocapitalism conditions us to communicate faster. Finally, manifestations of our speed limit are explored. Vocal stalls or hesitations, the deceleration or pause of the semiotic flows we voice, are posited as symptomatic of the disjunct between the accelerating demands of semiocapitalism and the human cognitive and corporeal limit. The shift from speech to voice is symptomatic of trauma. The human buffering of the vocal fry is the sound of the human, subjected to the accelerating demands of semiocapitalism, reaching its limit.

Voice reflects corporeal transformation. In horror voice often reflects a change from human to non-human. It signals shift into the supernatural. We examine a particular moment in Michael Jackson's Thriller video and consider why such a moment is horrifying. We also contextualise the scene as being a precursor for Jackson's future voice and persona.

Throughout the writing of The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy a certain real-life character haunted me. Jimmy Savile. Savile never quite fitted into my scheme of categorization. On one hand, he knew how to behave socially and could manipulate others. But on the other hand, he was not exactly a conformist. Nor was he an extrovert either. He seemed paradoxical, chimerical: at once reclusive and secretive whilst also showing off and craving attention, power and control.

I make a distinction between psychopathy and sociopathy. The two terms are commonly used in an interchangeable way, as if they are one and the same, but in my view there is an important difference. I argue that sociopathy ought to refer to behaviour whereas psychopathy ought to refer to internal psychology. More precisely, sociopathy ought to refer to behaviour that fails to meet our expectations and psychopathy to a psychology that does not align with how we expect others to feel and think.

The dominant form of human-based production in the West is no longer based on physical or land-based modes of labour – cyberspace is the terrain. We live in an attention economy. Labour, be it cognitive, emotive or both is primarily attention based. Nothing exploits and harvests this post-industrial mode of labour as insidiously and on such a large scale as the oxymoronically titled smart phone and its ‘social’ platforms: Facebook, Twitter etc. These larger-than-state and state supported companies are the contemporary economic reincarnations of the East India Company.

‘Social media’ qua casino. Compulsive gamblers: we increasingly share and check in the trap of diminishing returns for the dopamine-phantom. We spend our attention in this casino, not a glittery neon behemoth squatting in the amber sodium outskirts of town, but a small glowing attention leech. These vampiric networks and devices exploit addiction and the human requirement for ‘social’ interactions (or a cyber-surrogate) – simultaneously monetizing loneliness and relationships. The casino always wins. We are addicted to our exploitation.

Adam Alter cites the Moment App that monitors screen-gaze times. For 8000 users the average daily screen-time was three hours. How much is three hours worth? (£21.60 at UK minimum wage?) Is a service that shares disingenuous holiday snaps, political hot-takes, snide moral one-upmanship and avocado fetishisms worth that? Social media is never about the content; it’s about the user. Just like gambling is not about the money.

It is time to question the glib re-tweets of gesture politics #JeSuisCharlie #ICantBreathe #Westminster #Solidarity, the hot-takes and 60 character put-downs. The academic left’s engagement in passive-aggressive social entrepreneurialism is indiscernible from political action or altruism.

The din of self-promotion veiled as outrage, moral high-ground taking or pithy gesture politics replete with Patreon account linked in profile – is this altruism? Or is the use of the atrocity-hot hashtag the social media user’s jump for a fix? Addiction manifests as selfishness whilst the silicon technocrats get paid.

Withdrawal is the politics of regression, goes the counter argument. Does it not sound like the gambling addict’s refusal to step back from the roulette table? Can withdrawal be weaponised?

Exploring how psychopathy and sociopathy are gendered and culturally conservative concepts. Firstly through the intrinsic sexism of fictional portrayals and secondly by examining how politicised sciences take the liberties of narrative to engender such 'personality disorders'.

Talk given at Goldsmiths, University of London on 23/03/2017