diff --git a/resonant_bodies_voices_memories.md b/resonant_bodies_voices_memories.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3cc8abe..0000000 --- a/resonant_bodies_voices_memories.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,175 +0,0 @@ -Notes from *Resonant Bodies, Voices, Memories* -============================================== - -Bangma, A. and Piet Zwart Instituut (eds.) (2009) Resonant bodies, -voices, memories. Berlin: Revolver Publ. - -'Phonophobia: The dumb devil of stammering' by Steven Connor, pages 132-144 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -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) - -### Stammering has been regarded through history as the result of a material or physical impediment, not a spiritual one - -- Hippocratic school of Kos: stammering was the result of excessive - dryness of the tongue -- Galen (principal authority for humoral theory in the medieval - period): stammering comes from excessive moisture of the brain, or - tongue, or both -- around the same time (16th century), "engorgement of the tongue - through alchoholic vapors" (pg 134) was blamed for stammering -- Francis Bacon blamed coldness for stammering -- 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" - -- Fenichel: stammering "an anal-sadistic impulse to utter obscenities" - (pg 135) -- I. H. Coriat: stammering was the unsuccessful result to "manage oral - anxietiees 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) - -[Charles Kingsley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kingsley): -stammering is the result of selfishness (allowing too much self into the -voice) \* the remedy for which is a regime of exercise and bodily -movements - -Associations between stammering and other impediments, especially of the -gait - -- Roger Ascham (1545): saw the affliction of a "perverse body" as - connected to a "perverse mind" -- Marc Shell (2005): Moses had difficulty walking as well as talking - -Up till the 19th century, for a horse to "stammer" was for it to stagger - -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 Chaircot 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 -penis - -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) - -19th century: efforts made "to excise the stammerer's knot of speech" -(pg 138) - -- German physician J. F. Dieffenbach: extended his practice of - correcting squint to stammerers -- *phonophobia* = revulsion at the imperfect voice (described by - Dieffenbach) -- Dieffenbach (and William Abbotts) suspected that the tongue got in - the way of free speech -- Dieffenbach conducted an operation which he claimed to cure - stammering: cutting an incision in the base of the tongue - -Connection to religious revelation: e.g. Baptism and hydrophobia, -conferring a voice and phonophobia - -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) - -Stuttering is also strangely "generative" (pg 140) - -People can be tempted to stutter \* 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 -purpose" (pg 142) - -tradition of embracing otherness \* Antoinin Artaud & Diamanda Galas' -screams = "vocal virility" \* "extended voices" of Trevor Wishart, -Luciano Berio, Pauline Oliveros - -the voice as a "mixed body" (Michel Serres) \* 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" - -James Joyce's *Finnegan's Wake* likens the voice of a river to a voice -passing out \* e.g. two washerwomen shouting across the banks of the -river, the river's voice drowns them out - -"The voice is the vehicle and the arena of this agon between dissipation -and replenishment" (pg 143) \* we celebrate too much of the "fullness, -richness, clarity and penetrativeness" of the voice - -Aristotle: "only creatures that have life can give voice, but not -everything that is in the voice, or given utterance by it, is alive." -(pg 144) - -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 \[athos and finesse of a voice that gives out, gives way, comes not -form 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)