The voice is a dream voice - "when we speak of the materiality of the voice, we evoke imaginary substance and mythical powers" (pg 133) "there is no disembodied voice" (pg 133), a voice always has "somebody,
something of somebody's body, in it" (pg 133) "The voice is the body's second life---something between a substance and a force---a fluency that is yet a form." (pg 133)
- Alexander Ross refuted Bacon's claim, proposing that the stutterer's speech was overheated, not congealed
Although humoral theory was replaced by mechanical theories of the body's functioning, old ideas persisted
In 1879, William Abbotts' [*Impediments of Speech*]() blamed stammering on the weather (wet, cold weather rather than dry bracing weather being the culprit) and breathing through the mouth rather than the nose
Freud's development of psychoanalytic theory encouraged a turn to psychogenic theories of the functioning of the stammer It was seen as "a physical disturbance that enacts contrary impulses---the impulse to speak, and the impulse to withhold speech" Other psychoanalytic theories represented stammering with "anxious ambivalence"
- I. H. Coriat: stammering was the unsuccessful result to "manage oral anxieties related to nursing" (pg 135)
- Peter Glauber: the struggle in the mind and body of the stammer is between a huge investment in "the magical omnipotence of words" and the need to repress a desire for verbal power
Altogether, these are representations of castration anxiety Although psychoanalysis comes closer to analysing the fantasies of the magical omnipotence of the voice (and its fearful failure), by its nature it is also part of the "delusional apparatus", being "part of the cultural framework that forms and deforms the voice" (pg 135)
- Freud in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*: the limp is the expression of the life-instinct & death instinct
- Flannery O'Brien's novel *The Third Policeman*: a character clumps down stairs in iambic parameter
- Freud's teacher Charicot instructed his students in imitating neurological damage: altered accents and gaits
"The speech of the stammerer or lisper is the aural enactment of the wound borne by the castrated" (pg 137) However, castration has also been linked to an enhancement of vocal power, as well as a preternatural strength, "as though the robustness of sexual life had been absorbed into the body" Circumcision as a minor/symbolic form of castration is
associated with the unloosening of speech; Moses "I am of uncircumcised lips" (The Bible, Exodus 6.12, 6.30) Circumcision in Judaism is seen as an opening, and can be applied to heart and ears, as well as mouth or
Not just the tongue, but also the voice of the stammerer is imagined as "twisted, tangled, contorted, a body closed in or folded over on itself" (pg 138)
McLuhan: "language is a form of organised stutter" (pg 140) Perhaps it can be thought that the voice is "a kind of stutter in the order of things" (pg 140)
- Nineteenth-century physiologist John Good: children should not spend time with stutterers
"For the voice to fail is not only for it to wane, weaken or be broken, to become less itself. it is mixing as well as dimming. For the voice to fail is for it to become adulterated, more than what it was." (pg 141)
"It is surprising how often animals and other foreign bodies insinuate themselves into less than perfect utterance"(pg 141) e.g.Donald Duck, or Porky Pig
- to have a frog in one's throat / a harelip / speaking with a forked tongue / cat's got my tongue / to "buzz", meaning speaking unintelligbly or emptily / and "stut" is recorded as an alternative name for a gnat / a fly in the ointment of the voice / cuckoos as stuttering birds
Stuttering has been seen as an alienation from the human - wrestling with a foreign tongue
- early Greeks dubbed those from foreign lands as "lispers, babblers, barbarians" (pg 142)
- "Hottentot" people were named thus from an onomatopeic mockery of stuttering that early Dutch colonialists thought they heard in the South African natives' speech
The speech of others - often not only unintelligible, but also offensive, "a maimed imposture of speech, which mocks the meaningfulness of the *logos*" (pg 142)
Mladen Dolar: the otherness of the voice
- "when we speak, something else---law, desire, unconscious---speaks in our stead, or midst" (pg 142)
- "the voice is everywhere apparent, but nowhere fully apprehensible as such" (pg 142)
- the otherness of the voice is "a big otherness, an intact otherness, an otherness with a profile, point and
- Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) "the voice and the room blend" (pg 142), "the body of the voice as it always anyway, inaudibly is, amid things." (pg 143)
- room-tone - a sound into which other sounds can be embedded
- Lucier's voice "ends up ventriloquizing the room" (in particular how his stammer "is progressively repaired by the accretions of room-resonance"
In coughs, whispers, drawls, hisses, hesitations, laughs, stammers the voice \"meets and mingles with what it is not---indeed, it is, in the end, nothing more than this mingling
The pathos and finesse of a voice that gives out, gives way, comes not from the virile figure it cuts against the ground of things, but rather from its suggestion of a *persona*---a being that has its being 'through sound', which is like our own bodies, rather than our dream of those bodies" (pg 144)
"The pathos and finesse of a voice that gives out, gives way, comes not from the virile figure it cuts against the ground of things, but rather from its suggestion of a *persona*---a being that has its being 'through sound', which is like our own bodies, rather than our dream of those bodies" (pg 144)
