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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)
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