Liam Gillespie
The choice is ours. The voice is ours. Thank you for allowing me to share in your voice today – George Christensen.
Introduction
While most of us encounter it every day, the voice is perhaps the most uncanny form sound can assume. This is because the voice is fundamentally ambivalent. It is at once sensory (in the sense the voice is, or makes sound), and symbolic (in the sense the voice ‘speaks’, be it for an individual or collective). And yet, despite its ubiquity and ambivalence, what the voice is and does is frequently left unthought. In this article, I hope to think about the relationship of the sensory and symbolic power of the voice. To do this, I will analyse a speech given by a far-right Australian politician, George Christensen, at a rally organised by ‘Reclaim Australia’, a now defunct white nationalist group.
In reference the work of Mladen Dolar, Giorgio Agamben, and Anja Kanngieser, I explore the voice’s potential to function as a modality and vector of (far-right) political violence, arguing the voice carries criminogenic potential not only due to its capacity to be weaponised for direct violence (such as via yelling, or the transmission of racism and misogyny), but so too, through its power to convert those who ‘listen’ into audiences that can function as social and political movements.
Christensen’s Address
On the 18th of July 2015, the Australian politician George Christensen delivered an address to a rally held by the now disbanded white nationalist group, ‘Reclaim Australia’. To massive applause he declared:
My friends. I am proud to be a voice for North Queensland today. We all have a voice: Notwithstanding our choice to use it or not. Notwithstanding the best efforts of those who would render us silent. We have a voice – not a voice of hatred, violence, and extremism – but a voice of warning, defiance, and of hope. Our voice does not go unchallenged but that is the beauty and appeal of the free and open democratic society our voice speaks out to defend. Our voice says: ‘We will not surrender.’ We will not sit idly by and watch the Australian culture and the Australian lifestyle that we love and that is envied around the world be surrendered and handed over to those who hate us for who we are and what we stand for. (2015, n.p.)
After urging nationalists to defend the nation against migration, multiculturalism, and Islam, Christensen concluded his speech with a final exhortation: “The choice is ours. The voice is ours. Thank you for allowing me to share in your voice today” (n.p.).
It is important to consider the function of ‘the voice’ to which Christensen is here appealing. How does his voice relate to the metaphorical collective voice that he invokes? How does the repetition of the idea of the shared voice—and the elisions he makes between his voice, and that voice—work? How is this voice mobilised, and what effects might it have on those gathered to listen?
From Sound to Voice
To explore these probing questions, it is necessary to consider what the voice is. In A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Dolar argues the voice can be differentiated from mere noise insofar as the former “points toward meaning” as “sound which appears to be endowed…with the will to ‘say something’” (14). However as Dolar elaborates, although the voice provides a vehicle through which words and meaning can be conveyed, the voice itself does not provide or contribute to meaning linguistically, but rather, extralinguistically (15). Just as a string can provide a structure that holds beads together, while itself remaining invisible, so too for Dolar, the voice, as an uncanny form of sound, can function as a “string” that holds words together in a “signifying chain” (23). The voice thus occupies a status of ambivalence: it is sensory, but not only sensory; and it is symbolic, even if its meaning cannot be discerned.
Dolar’s understanding articulates with Agamben’s claim that within a discourse, the voice functions as “the pure intention to signify” (1991, 33 [emphasis in original]). There is of course no guarantee that an intended meaning will be received, nor even understood in the slightest. Despite this, the voice is subjectively differentiated from sound through the attribution of the intention:
What would happen if one heard an unfamiliar sign, the sound of a word whose meaning he [sic] does not know…Certainly, the subject will desire to know the meaning. But for this to happen he has to realise that the sound he heard is not an empty voice… mere sound…but meaningful. (33)
For Agamben, it is thus not meaning that turns sound into voice, but rather, the subject’s perception of the Other’s intention to convey meaning. Just as for Dolar the voice enables linguistic meaning despite itself being extralinguistic, so too for Agamben, the voice is ambivalent. It is at once a “no-longer” and a “not-yet”: no longer sound, but not yet meaning (35).
Whether meaning is imagined known or unknown, the perception of the intention to convey meaning creates a relationship between subjects. When one body speaks, those that hear it—whether willingly or unwilling—become an audience. Through their hearing—or perhaps more accurately, their listening—they enter a relation with one another. To this end, the voice creates what it depends upon: a collectivity or community, without which it cannot exist. As Kanngieser explains, the voice is not just sound that happens to transfer information, it also facilitates “affective transmissions that make up our different relations” (2012, 337). As Kanngieser elaborates, “voices, and how we listen to them, reconfigure our relationships to each other and to our shared worlds” (339). The voice is therefore fundamentally intersubjective: it does not belong to the individual subject or body, but rather, to the relations between bodies that the voice itself constitutes. Thus, just as the voice can function as an invisible string that holds words together in a “signifying chain”, so too it can function as an invisible string that holds bodies together. And this is why a sensory analysis of the voice, and its socio-political power, is vital.
From Voice to Violence
The ability of the voice to reconfigure if not inaugurate new forms of relationality can be identified in Christensen’s speech, including both his literal voice, and the metaphorical one he invokes. In his speech, Christensen’s voice works to constitute those who gathered to listen as a collective body—an audience—united via a common political project. Through their listening they share a collective voice.
And yet, although Christensen’s voice constitutes that collective, it does not necessarily precede it. Just as his voice implies a collectivity—that of the listening audience—so too, that collectivity gives his voice its meaning (or perhaps, significance). Indeed, Christensen explicitly acknowledges this when says that the voice with which he is speaking is not really his own voice, but rather, theirs. In positioning himself as a literal mouthpiece, he is not merely claiming to speak for them: instead, he is claiming it is they who speak through him. This can be identified in the elisions he makes between his, and the collective voice. “I am proud to be a voice for North Queensland today”; We have a voice…”; “Our voice does not go unchallenged …our voice speaks out to defend. Our voice says: ‘We will not surrender.’” The idea Christensen is not speaking in a voice that belongs (exclusively) to ‘him’ is conveyed most strongly by his concluding line: “The choice is ours. The voice is ours. Thank you for allowing me to share in your voice today”. In an ironic twist, this final invocation of the collective voice echoes tactics typically associated with the left, in that he calls on those before him to rediscover and reassert their voices, which have supposedly been lost to multiculturalism, Islam, political correctness, and the left.
The above analysis aligns with Slavoj Žižek’s claim that although sound is only converted into voice when the “intention to signify” is perceived (à la Agamben), that nevertheless, the voice that emanates from the subject paradoxically does not belong wholly to the subject who intends to speak. This is because for a subject to speak their ‘internal’ voice, they are reliant upon that which comes from outside of themselves. First, because they must speak in a language that is fundamentally not their own; and second, because they must be heard by a listening Other who bestows recognition. As Žižek elaborates:
An unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from ‘its’ voice. The voice displays a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we see, so that even when we see a living person talking, there is always a minimum of ventriloquism at work: it is as if the speaker’s own voice hollows him [sic] out and in a sense speaks ‘by itself’, through him. (2001, 58)
While this “unbridgeable gap”—the distance between the subject and its voice—can be undermining, in Christensen’s speech, we can detect something altogether different, whereby he strategically distances himself from his ‘own’ voice, and instead explicitly names and exploits the “ventriloquism at work” in his voice to appeal to a higher authority: that of the white nationalist political agency he seeks to invoke. This political agency is embodied in the collective voice he inaugurates: the one that “speaks out to defend”, and says, “‘We will not surrender.’ We will not sit idly by and watch the Australian culture and the Australian lifestyle that we love… be surrendered and handed over”. Through this quick manoeuvre, Christensen’s own voice provides a sensory, symbolic, and affective reification of the white nationalist audience before him and their collective power to act. As he emphasises: “We all have a voice: Notwithstanding our choice to use it or not”. Cohered as an audience, they share political agency and the capacity to choose to mobilise as one to defend the nation against those who he claims “hate us for who we are”.
The above analysis of this brief address provides an example of the sensory, symbolic, and affective power of the voice, highlighting its capacity, as an ambivalent sensory phenomenon, to convert those who ‘listen’ into audiences that can mobilise and indeed, be weaponised towards political ends.
References
Agamben, G. (1991). Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Christensen, G. (2015). “Reclaim Australia Address”, July 18. [blog post]. Retrieved from: <http://www.georgechristensen.com.au/reclaim-australia-address/>
Dolar, M. (2006). A Voice and Nothing More (ed. Slavoj Zizek), MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England.
Kanngieser, A. (2012). “A sonic geography of voice: Towards an affective politics of voice”, Progress in Human Geography, 36(3): 336–353.
Žižek, S. (2001). On Belief. London: Routledge.
Sensory Criminology 