Lacan and silence in television

"Abstract.

"Voice does not simply persist at a different level with regard to what we see, it rather points toward a gap in the field of the visible, toward the dimension of what eludes our gaze. In other words, their relationship is mediated by an impossibility: ultimately we hear things because we cannot see everything." -- Slavoj Zizek

What should we make of the off-camera noises of Psychanalyse I, Lacan's television broadcast of January 1973, better known under the title of its 1974 redaction, as Télévision? Someone coughs; a shifting chair (?) squeaks; the recording machinery -- or maybe it's a central air system -- whirs noticeably throughout the film; the sounds of heavy traffic can be heard through the closed windows of Lacan's Rue de Lille bureau. Many of the aural artifacts of the film are obviously due to the poor state of the recording. But even if we discount that residue of the event -- and I would argue expressly that we cannot do so -- Télévision is a remarkably noisy performance.

The viewer -- or, more precisely, the auditor -- may be tempted to ask, was it always like this in Lacan's consulting room? The classic scene of psychoanalysis depends, we may have assumed, on an absence of sound: the hushed speech of the analysand, punctuated by periodic full-stops, signalling her resistance; the pursed lips of the phlegmatic analyst -- stand-in for the most impassive of all audiences -- speaking only when the silence becomes unbearable for everyone. But our phantasies of that sepulchral scene are, it would seem, discounted by the evidence of Télévision.

To respond that these noises are merely an incidental background to Lacan's utterances in the film misses, I propose, the crucial sense in which the noises are accidental, but in a specifically Lacanian sense: which is to say, the sense in which their fortuitousness is essential to the properly psychoanalytic reception of Lacan's message. The ultimate irreducibility of noise is a founding element of Lacan's address to his television audience."

I can't remember where I got it, except that I wrote in down after reading it somewhere while I was in Bacolod last year. I find it strange because we are often told that television cannot be too quiet. One watches television while attending to post-dinner chores, while brushing your teeth. It doesn't take into consideration those who sit and watched totally enraptured, an audience willing to suspend all other activities except to watch and listen. So what we have is a television that is often noisy and rambunctiously so. There are screams and slaps and tendencies for melodrama. While the video about terrorists or soldiers or protestors roll on in the six o'clock news, there is an accompanying voice commentary, the ambient sound playing in the background. Nowhere is there total silence. Which reminds me of something Allen Ginsberg once said: "Whoever controls the media - the images - controls the culture."