The Snag in the Voice

1.

Everyone seems to hate their voice. Listening back to an audio recording of yourself is both a painful form of embarrassment and, like most embarrassments, also a source of narcissistic fascination. Do I really sound like that? The voice always comes to us as a shock, it scrambles our provisional coordinates of self. It is another self. In the recording, we hear these self-made soundwaves without the internal acoustics of our blood and bones, instead encountering the sound as it is bounced off other objects. In horror, we realize that others, those who listen, are more familiar with these sounds than we are.

Supposedly ours but seemingly owned by the other, the voice is also a liability to be contained, as we strain to pronounce words correctly, to lose lisps and accents, or to perfect a customer-service tone. Clearly then, the voice is not experienced as some clean signal or authentic substance that pours out from within. It is more like an alien yet tolerated interference, muddying semantic codes with its own associative signals. Far from being its purest expression, the voice in fact makes trouble for language. It is noise in the transmission, a deviance within verbal communication to be tamed, bridled, and mastered.

Despite this dissonance, the recorded voice has fully infiltrated our contemporary media circuits and generated its own ubiquitous forms. We are probably all familiar with podcast voice, Ted Talk voice, influencer voice, voice notes in message apps, and text-to-voice software. (For better or worse, you can listen to this entire essay in Gwyneth Paltrow’s or Snoop Dogg’s voice on Speechify, if you prefer). We might find a useful analogy of this situation today in the transformation of silent movies into the “talkies” during the late 1920s, as the voice rushes into the visual plane and fills new sonic media attached to it. And like the advent of talkies, some voices have become even more marginalized, such as those with an accent, a pitch deemed too masculine or too girlie, a slow pace, and so on. Just as it was a century ago, the normativity of speech is only intensified by its technological capture. So while these new technical forms offer nearly instantaneous transmission across the globe, every voice now becomes open to scrutiny. Our public forums, social networks, and many workplaces are saturated with speech yet uncomfortable with the unruliness of voice.

A spectrogram (0-5000 Hz) of the sentence “it’s all Greek to me” spoken by a female voice, 2007. License: Public Domain.

Yet even in the most fluent utterance, there is always a friction that rubs against the speaking “I.” I call this friction the “snag in the voice”: an event of disruption to speech that comes from within speech itself, like a snagged thread yanked out from the fabric. The snag is a feature or quality that catches attention. It lies outside verbal signification, but its form is not quite yet aesthetic. In this way, it is somewhat different from Roland Barthes’s famous description of the “grain” in the singing voice—what he described as the material support beneath the song that generates its affective pull, its punctum.1 Yet the snag is neither the lucid semiotic composition nor the prima donna’s exceptional aria, neither bound to communication nor spectacularly beyond it. This extralinguistic yet non-virtuosic quality is always present in the act of speech, yet rises to the surface when one slurs, mumbles, or mispronounces words; speaks too slowly or too quickly; possesses a voice that is too raspy or too guttural. For some speakers, the snag catches and quickly releases. For others, its jagged edge must be constantly negotiated.

2.

Within the expanding field of Voice Studies, two concepts help capture this irritation. The first is the psychoanalytic notion of the “object voice,” which lingers as an unassimilated surplus of the pre-symbolic psyche. The second is so-called deviant speech, critically examined by disability scholars. These patterns of speech are segregated, medically and socially, for having too many repetitions, too many pauses, or too much of some pathological quality. The snag thus contains both conceptions of excess, as a psychic object beyond the symbolic world and a biological product outside the designated norm. It pushes up against the laws of language, sometimes so much so that it is branded as pathological.

Why combine these two models, the partial object and the pathology? Psychoanalysis and the expanded field of disability theory may seem at odds: in the former, the shared trauma of entering language severs the voice from the subject; in the latter, the voice is the ground on which certain speakers are excluded and othered, and is anything but a shared experience. However, at their most fundamental, both fields pose an alternative to the liberal fantasy of an autonomous subject—the singular agent who acts in his self-interest and is the commander of his own wealth, health, and psyche.

Disability theory punctures this image by taking seriously lives that are dependent on networks of support, rather than independently sustained. Until recently, the question of intellectual impairment has been marginal within the field, with its key figures writing primarily from the experience of physical disability, whether in terms of mobility or sensory perception. Disability activism has always encompassed diverse positions and tactics, from militant transport blockades to the formal establishment of antidiscrimination legislation and advocacy groups. Even within this range of action, liberation and individual rights have been the cornerstones of disability activism from the 1970s onwards, and the academic discipline of disability studies that followed close behind. In the 2000s, however, thinkers such as Robert McRuer and Eli Clare took a more transgressive approach, reappropriating the figure of the “crip” or the “freak,” defying normative categories with a middle finger raised.2 In refusing assimilation to—or “accessible” amendments of—the status quo, the crip is revolutionary, avant-garde even. The crip wants a total reconfiguration of norms, not just ramps and closed captions.3

But a subject who is truly without language can’t write for academic journals, or speak at a protest, or defiantly refuse the social codes of disability. As a limit case, the nonverbal subject forces us to grapple with impairment, rather than disability. The distinction between these two terms is useful here, with “impairment” being a diminished physical or mental function but “disability” denoting a condition imposed upon certain bodies by an inflexible social and economic structure. (One is impaired by a broken leg but disabled by the lack of elevators.) For anyone who has lived with or cared for someone with a profound intellectual impairment—a semi-verbal autistic brother in my case—agency hardly feels like the point. When independence is totally out of the question, other kinds of dignity, fulfilment, and personhood come into focus.

Some SLPs’ working environments include one-on-one time with the client. Michigan, 1960s. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

In its own way, the much longer tradition of psychoanalysis also casts suspicion on any idealist notion of self-actualization. Sigmund Freud’s most radical assertion, with more consequences than we might wish to acknowledge, is that we cannot know ourselves fully. Half a century later, Jacques Lacan went even further: what we consider the most intimate parts of the self are always written from the outside, as it were, by the laws of language. The subject and their external world are fused together in a continuous loop of language, a clamor of signs. As he once remarked, “The subject is the subject of the signifier—determined by it.”4 To speak of an “I” is already to speak of a human organism conditioned by language.

Within this governing force of language, the voice holds a privileged position for Lacan. For one, it’s both the medium of analysis and its prescription: the talking cure. Yet more than this, the voice is a thing of desire, what psychoanalysis calls a “partial object” seemingly detached from any singular body. As originally hypothesized by Freud, the infant first relates to partial bodily objects—the mother’s breast, for instance—rather than to a unified individual other. To Freud’s list of partial objects— breast, feces, and phallus—Lacan adds two more: voice and gaze.5 Like the breast or phallus, this voice-as-object is an offcut that has found its way back into the flesh proper: not the authentic mark of an individual but a dislocated entity that calls and seduces us, seemingly on its own. From the beginning, this sonic thing floats away from its supposed origin, inherently “acousmatic”: a sound with no visible source.

Over the last three decades, the Slovene philosopher Mladen Dolar has recovered the question of voice in psychoanalysis, historically secondary to Lacan’s discussion of the gaze. For Dolar, the voice is best understood as the element of speech which “does not contribute to making sense”: it is a material that swerves from signification, obfuscating the spoken message.6 Looking closely at Lacan’s algebra, Dolar concludes that the phenomenon we call “voice” emerges after the utterance: not the intake or the vital source but the “excrement” of the phonetic operation.7 Therefore, this voice can only be described negatively, as “a blind spot of making sense, or as a cast-off of sense.”8

The partial voice is an exemplary form of the unattainable objet petit a (“object of the small other,” otherwise known as the object-cause of desire), which promises to fill the sense of lack within ourselves, thereby perpetuating the (retroactive) illusion that we were, very long ago, once happy, once complete, once enough for the other.9 As objet a, the voice spurs immense desire and enjoyment, invoking a psychic drive that ceaselessly circles around it.10

This drive is blunt, brutish even, in its movement forward. However, there is another commanding force behind language not accounted for by psychoanalysis: the very real, organic causes that shape speech. There’s a risk in following Lacan’s thinking a little too closely. If language itself structures the subject, then does this mean that those without language are without psyche? Perhaps Lacan would say that the intellectually impaired remain in the Imaginary sphere of relations, without the intrusion of Law and Father that initiates the Symbolic. But, of course, a nonverbal person continues to develop past infancy, albeit on a different path to the verbal subject. Again, the disarticulate subject is unthought, seemingly outside the vast catchment of psychoanalysis.

In fact, organic etiology on a whole is pushed aside in psychoanalysis. Freud’s foundational conviction, against the teachings of his mentor Jean-Martin Charcot, was that hysteria had no organic cause. Following this, he developed a theory of the unconscious without reference to cerebral matter; that is to say, you can’t find Freud’s unconscious by cutting up the brain or scanning its electrical activity. Alongside the recent practitioners of neuro-psychoanalysis,11 the French philosopher Catherine Malabou has questioned this disciplinary schism, grappling with the damaging event in neurology and the integrated event in psychoanalysis, and the wounds that result from both.12

In Freud’s lecture on “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” he speculates that when the psyche breaks, it shatters like a crystal: along unseen fault lines that precede the fatal impact. Addressing his students, he explains:

We are familiar with the notion that pathology, by making things larger and coarser, can draw our attention to normal conditions which would otherwise have escaped us. Where it points to a breach or a rent, there may normally be an articulation present. If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of this kind.13

In Freud’s metaphor, a psychic disturbance cuts along the subject’s fears and desires first etched in childhood and is, as Malabou summarizes, the “conjunction of an aleatory event and an internal danger.”14 In this way, psychological damage is waiting for us. However, as Malabou continues, damage to brain tissue cuts the psyche along other routes. For example, patients with Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor often appear to gain an entirely new personality—a new subject seems to grow from cerebral degeneration, or “destructive plasticity” as Malabou terms it.15 In the crevice between the organic and the psychological Malabou finds “new wounds.”16 The new wounded are people with brain lesions, neurodegenerative disorders, and those who psychoanalysis has tried and failed to cure: people with epilepsy, autism, Tourette’s syndrome and, I would add, speech disorders like dysfluency.

Malabou stages a confrontation of two locations of trauma: observable neural pathways and the psyche’s dormant crystalline formation. She doesn’t consider the voice as such in The New Wounded, as her focus is largely on this originary schism between neurology and Freudian analysis, but we can glean something from her method. For Lacan, the acquisition of language is itself a traumatic event—a rupture that leaves us feeling perpetually incomplete. How might a neurological or speech disorder change one’s relation to this trauma? Might the prick of the snag be another point where the brain and psyche meet? Of course, an inherited speech condition does not mark an event like a brain lesion might. Yet like Malabou’s new wounds, the locatable and the unlocatable join in the voice’s snag.

3.

Repressed in contemporary life, this vocal trouble, the “wound” of speech, seems to have bubbled to the surface in art. Amongst contemporary art’s many tendencies, there’s one I have noticed again and again in recent years: voices stuttering, mumbling; words giving way to grunts and babble. Against the highly manicured speech that saturates our world, these works instead emphasize voices that struggle.

Nour Mobarak and JJJJJerome Ellis are two such artists that help theorize the snag in the voice. Mobarak is best known for her sound works that sample the minute vocal variations of non-English languages and for her free-form vocalizations. Ellis defamiliarizes language through other means, transfiguring the dysfluent rhythm of their stutter into performance, poetry, and photography, exploring how these speech patterns generate alternative ways of being in time and in dialogue. In both artists’ work, the voice consistently meddles with speech, undermining not only linguistic meaning but all manner of accepted binaries: normal and abnormal, control and accident, impairment and pleasure, self and other.

The first four tracks of Mobarak’s 2019 album Father Fugue feature conversations between the artist and her late father, Jean, who suffered with a neurodegenerative condition that severely limited his short-term memory. For fifteen years before his death, he lived in a nursing home in the small village of Bhersaf in Lebanon. Despite only retaining a thread of conversation for thirty seconds, Jean spoke fluent Arabic, Italian, English, and French—his wide vocal palette marking a life of exile and mobility following the Lebanese Civil War. Interestingly, his proficiency in these languages was in no way diminished by his condition, and he was often tasked with translating old dictionaries to stay occupied in the nursing home. He couldn’t remember why he was translating these texts, and yet he did it perfectly.

The dialogue in Father Fugue hinges on nothing much in particular. The first channel captures roughly twenty minutes of conversation. Jean talks of the beauty of Italy, the meanness of artists, alligators, and recites an old French limerick. Sometimes, the microphone picks up the mutterings of Lebanese daytime TV playing in the room and the general bustle of the nursing home. On the second channel, Mobarak’s vocal improvisations occasionally intercept the conversation, such as her guttural “mmmmmmm”s and “aaaaah”s, repeated phrases such as “Dawn dawn / Dawn dawn dawn / Dawn dawn,” and fragments of the artist singing in the shower. On both channels, certain phrases and motifs recur as a musical fugue rises and falls within a composition. There is also something of a fugue state evoked in the dialogue, in which the two individual identities loosen, giving way to a wandering phonetic errantry.

From the album’s opening lines, it’s clear that what follows will not be a conversation in the normative sense. The listener enters in what appears to be the middle of the dialogue:

A portrait of Italy. Of course. And introduction is … You know where this is. Where is it? This is Italy. Wow. Italy is a beautiful country. Of course it is a … That’s northern Italy. Oh yeah! You know what’s northern Italy? What is it? It’s the North of Italy. Uhum. Of course. Hmm. Do you like the North of Italy? Of course mad’moiselle. Is there any part of Italy you don’t love? No I think all … All of Italy is beautiful. Oh yeah. Of course. What’s so beautiful about Italy? It’s a m … marvelous country. Why is it so marvelous? It’s a marvelous country. What’s so marvelous about it? Why … It’s a beautiful country. Eh vabbè. Aaaaah Bello. E bella. E bella. E bella. Italia.

Within the track’s many loops and folds, the beauty of Italy is returned to again and again. But, needless to say, Italy isn’t really the point of the conversation. Jean’s polite refrain, “of course,” “of course, mad’moiselle,” seems to be directed not so much to his daughter but to some other force which compels him to speak—of course, the conversation must continue. His voice endures even as meaning has left the discussion. The voice is still rolled around, so to speak, played with and passed between father and daughter.

What we hear in this dialogue, and feel in daily life, is a certain kind of drive towards constant articulation, even when we have nothing in particular to say. This drive is perhaps most lucidly understood through psychoanalysis, and the account it gives of how, as an embodiment of the objet a, the voice becomes a crucial pivot point of drive.17 If desire names the elusive search for the missing object, mistaken for a metonymic chain of substitutes, then drive names something else. The machine of desire strives towards meaning—that is, the signifying operation is propelled by desire, although this itself is a negative force that cannot be located or stabilized. By contrast, the invocatory drive is oriented purely towards an endlessly short-circuited enjoyment. The drive circles around the object voice, that remainder of speech, which itself is “evasive and not conducive to signification.”18 The object voice is thus the secret aim of the drive, obtained by never reaching its communicative goal. It is “the object around which the drive turns; the side satisfaction, but one which suffices to fuel all the machinery.”19

As the real aim of the drive, the voice provides a non-dialectical moment of self-satisfaction. Our hope for the other’s reciprocation nurtures desire, yet drive is oriented otherwise, indifferent to reciprocation. Here, a private, iterative enjoyment is laid bare. As a by-product, the voice, understood as that partial object and remainder, exposes this whirling trajectory of the drive, the effect of which can be obscene or uncanny. The conversations in Father Fugue are made from this side satisfaction. It is perhaps for this reason that the recordings feel so intimate.

Jean and Nour Mobarak at Longue Vie, Bhersaf, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Two voices meet, and then meld. This is far from the classic liberal imaginary of two equal parties vocalizing their interests, moving through a dialectic towards consensus. There are clear differences between the cognition of the artist and that of her father; one voice typically leads, the other typically follows. Jean Mobarak’s impairment renders him a “figure outside the linguistic loop,” as the literary theorist James Berger puts it.20 In The Disarticulate, Berger traces modernist and postmodern imaginings of those on the fringe of language—the nonverbal characters in Conrad, Faulkner, and De Lillo; stutterers from Billy Budd to Forrest Gump. Through this study, Berger critiques a dominant strand of disability activism and theory that centers on an autonomous, voiced subject with the ability to enter, or leave, a social contract. This is perhaps best exemplified in the transgressive crip, who “comes out” against the normative codes of disability, refusing society’s implicit terms of engagement.21 Following thinkers like Martha Nussbaum and Eva Kittay, Berger instead argues for an ethics that includes positions of utter dependence, not transgression, taking seriously those people who cannot speak in the liberal political arena but must be spoken for.22 The attempt to make every disabled person voiced is, for Berger, to “deny the facts of dependence and vulnerability per se.”23

From this perspective, Jean Mobarak resides on the fringe of language, not yet on the outside. Almost disarticulate, he follows his daughter’s prompts and questions. He is “vulnerable” to her decisions. However, from another vantage point, it is Jean who has the upper hand. He commands certain languages that the artist does not; she is the impaired one when measured against this polyglot. Either way, there is a disjunction. The conversation is leaky, with many messages sent but few received. However, this mesh of lost signals should not be mistaken for trivial nonsense. Rather, it tracks one form of the disarticulate relation: a sharing of voice without sense, an exchange full of mimicry, non sequiturs, and the intrusion of pure vocal noise.

While within normative dialogue, repetitions and excessive hesitations are considered redundant, detracting from the primary transmission, here Nour and Jean’s relationship is only strengthened by these conversational hiccups and returns. The relentless invocatory drive propels a different model of dialogue, one full of misunderstanding and nonverbal play. The snag might disrupt fluent discourse, yet in doing so, it enables another, disarticulate meeting between two subjects.

4.

Through incorporating the voice of her father in the final stages of a neurodegenerative disorder, Mobarak opens the problem of the cerebral, as well as psychic, nature of the voice. This tension is at the core of JJJJJerome Ellis’s work. Ellis’s practice is an ongoing collaboration with their stutter, a coauthored labor that is as demanding as it is rewarding. According to the artist, if fluency represents a forest, then the prolongations of their stutter offer open “clearings.”24 We might think of these as clearing the way for misconceptions or communicative breakdowns, but equally as making space for other pathways towards meeting the other. As the artist reflects, revealing to someone that they have a stutter might “facilitate … communication, it may make it easier, but sometimes that’s not what I want to do. Sometimes I want to stay with that gap.”25

Stuttering is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of what I am calling the snag. While a stutter doesn’t necessarily inhibit meaningful language, it does produce a moment of hesitation, a hitch within its unfolding. Ellis’s stutter often takes the form of glottal blocks and word repetitions, which create what seem like pauses in the conversation. The listener must be attentive, able to hear these silent intervals as speech sound.

For Ellis, as for many people who stutter, the most difficult words are those without synonyms: proper nouns that name individuals, cities, species, and so on. These terms break the metonymic chain of similarity that the dysfluent speaker can use to avoid certain words, thereby concealing a stutter. For instance, the artist often stammers when speaking their name, for which there can be no substitute, which is why they have come to spell it as “JJJJJerome.”

JJJJJerome Ellis, Thank you, Elder PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPartridge Pea, 2023, from the series Exposure. Courtesy of the artist. 

The artist’s recent photography series Exposure (2023) begins with this halting moment of the proper noun. Ellis uses an analogue 35 mm camera first owned by their father and a handheld shutter release. Immersed in the forests and fields of Norfolk, Virginia, they delayed the camera’s shutter release for as long as it took them to say the name of a surrounding plant species. A slow shutter speed allows more light to enter the camera, leaving a trace of Ellis’s speech on the photographic surface through the images’ blur and overexposure. Their consonant repetitions and stoppages are also typographically represented in the artwork titles, which they consider a form of closed captioning for the silent image.26 Through these visual and textual registrations of sound, Exposure also extends Ellis’s larger project to transfigure eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspaper notices for so-called “runaway slaves,” a subset of which were described as having speech impediments.27 Ellis utters, and stutters, the names of plants that these people may have run through as they escaped, thus finding a thread between nature, fugitivity, Blackness, and dysfluency.

In one image, we see the artist lying on the grass in front of a small bush, their hands folded on their stomach. Their speech would have been relatively fluent here, as only the contours of the artist’s face are soft with movement. In another image, their face is fully blurred, the silhouette of their profile faintly doubled. Here, Ellis’s figure vibrates in the bottom left corner, while the yellow wildflowers to which they speak remain in focus. From the title, we know they uttered the name “Partridge Pea,” stammering on the “p” for some time (transcribed with 154 letters). In other images, the artist’s vocal block obliterates all figuration. Saturated with light, these photographs are nothing but blur: overlapping abstract forms in shades of green.

JJJJJerome Ellis, Thank you, Elder PPPPPPPPPPPhytolacca, 2023, from the series Exposure. Courtesy of the artist.

JJJJerome Ellis, Untitled (End of Reel), 2023, from the series Exposure. Courtesy of the artist.

JJJJJerome Ellis, Thank you, Elder PPPPPPPPPPPhytolacca, 2023, from the series Exposure. Courtesy of the artist.

One photograph in the series marks an even greater reduction. The left side of the image is entirely white, the film strip fully exposed. The right side, narrower by a small margin, is purely black, created by the final edge of the film reel. There is a tear down the middle of the image—a fuzzy red line where black and white meet. And so, an intrusion of light, caused by a suspension in time, meets absolute darkness. This might be the closest we can get to an image of a clearing: a negativity ripping through the image, dividing it into too much time on the one hand (white) and a blank finality on the other (black). An action in time and yet a refusal, a simultaneous feeling of too much and too little, are what make the stutter’s clearing.

In Exposure, the speech gap is metamorphized into light, registered in the images’ overexposure: time = light = blur. It’s not simply that the stutterer takes longer to speak. Looking at a number of Exposure prints in sequence reveals how dysfluent rhythms of sound and silence shape time. As put by the artist:

Notions of ending and beginning are insufficient when applied to stuttered speech. Fluency mandates its own temporality: the moment someone starts speaking must coincide with the moment we hear syllables, and ditto for when they stop speaking. This is not the stutterer’s temporality.28

In the stutterer’s world, silence does not bookend the utterance, does not negatively define it as it might for the non-stutterer. Rather, the speech act is marbled through with silence.

Is there a place here for psychoanalysis, or, at least, a chance that the discipline might offer us something new, beyond its established set of schemas and categorizations? Can the mechanism of drive be reconciled with the blunt physical reality of an involuntary motion of the vocal cords? Or does the physical intrusion of the stutter mark another form of rupture, a snag of a different kind? If the invocatory drive propels the speaker to “make oneself heard,” then what happens when a glottal block cuts off this possibility?

Facing up to these questions means we must grapple with a disruption that is different from the purely nonorganic (or “hysterical”) symptom, such as the unexplained seizures or aphasia that so fascinated Freud. Yet for many people, their anxieties around stuttering only exacerbate it. Stuttering is complicated precisely because it doesn’t fall on either side of the organic/nonorganic divide, being both a hereditary condition that affects the mechanisms of the vocal tract and an experience with deep psychic consequences.

Might Ellis’s blur and overexposure record something similar to regime of “cerebrality,” as Catherine Malabou coins it? For Freud, the psychic disturbance came in two stages: the “exogenous” (surprising or triggering) incident and the “endogenous” process, which is how the psyche represses, symptomizes, or otherwise fantasizes the occurrence, massaging it into the subject. Yet the course of a cerebral wound is “completely different”:

Brain damage is itself an event that, insofar as it affects the psychic identity of the subject, reveals a certain connection between the exogenous and the endogenous. But this connection is distinguished by the fact that no interpretation of it is possible. In the case of a brain lesion, for example, the external character of the accident remains external to the psyche itself. It remains exterior to the interior. It is constitutively inassimilable.29 (my emphasis)

To be clear, Ellis’s dysfluency is not the same as a severe brain lesion. However, like the neurological impairments Malabou centers, the psyche cannot repress the motor control of speech.

So, unlike the unconscious, the stutter is not really “structured like a language,” to use the Lacanian dictum. Even as it interacts with the psyche, it always remains on the outside, persisting from a cerebral cause. The dysfluent speaker encounters a snag that comes from an entirely foreign place that is the human body. The Exposure photographs visualize this break with the symbolic, identifying a gap that is not quite the inexpressible objet a. Here, Ellis’s clearings yield an authority over the image, and over the artist. In the end, it is not Ellis who controls the shutter speed. The stutter itself takes the photograph.

5.

Perhaps the only shared condition of speech is its sheer difficulty. However, this struggle is not without enjoyment. Here, I mean enjoyment in the technical psychoanalytical sense, which denotes the ecstasy of the unfulfilled drive rather than bodily pleasure: the dumb joy of returning to the object voice again and again. There is also the pleasure of being cut off by one’s own throat, overcome by the snag in one’s voice. Ellis themself has spoken of this: an enjoyment of repeated syllables or glottal blocks, the thrill of a sudden eruption of one’s organs into the virtual realm of language. These delights are part and parcel of the snag’s irritation.

There are profound consequences when we accept that speech is not owned by the subject, the acceptance that forms the grounding premise of psychoanalysis and that reappears in certain corners of disability theory. Between the unconscious drive that circles the object voice and the body that imposes its own limits to speech, there remains little room for the fantasy of unique, unencumbered expression. If the voice seeps out from the confines of language, as Dolar argues, then it also fractures cultural fantasies of individuality and transaction (i.e., we meet on equal footing to exchange words, I pass you my speech act and you return yours, and we leave as separate entities). The snagged, struggling voice slips through this construction of the normate subject—through the cracks of its imagined self-sufficiency, past its disembodied reason.

In this way, a hitch in speech suddenly exposes our forever unfulfilled appeal to the other and the equally fraught negotiation with the demands of one’s body. This vocal tremor also reveals real disciplinary shortcomings, posing a limit to theories of self, psyche, and disability, even to those that aim to speak from marginalized positions. Speakers without language are the “unthought” of these paradigms. The snag in the voice might only catch for a second, yet in this moment, it tears open the very question of personhood and the dilemma of how we are to reach one another, with or without language.