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Notes from *Resonant Bodies, Voices, Memories*
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==============================================
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Bangma, A. and Piet Zwart Instituut (eds.) (2009) Resonant bodies,
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voices, memories. Berlin: Revolver Publ.
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'Phonophobia: The dumb devil of stammering' by Steven Connor, pages 132-144
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The voice is a dream voice - "when we speak of the materiality of the
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voice, we evoke imaginary substance and mythical powers" (pg 133) "there
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is no disembodied voice" (pg 133), a voice always has "somebody,
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something of somebody's body, in it" (pg 133) "The voice is the body's
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second life---something between a substance and a force---a fluency that
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is yet a form." (pg 133)
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### Stammering has been regarded through history as the result of a material or physical impediment, not a spiritual one
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- Hippocratic school of Kos: stammering was the result of excessive
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dryness of the tongue
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- Galen (principal authority for humoral theory in the medieval
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period): stammering comes from excessive moisture of the brain, or
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tongue, or both
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- around the same time (16th century), "engorgement of the tongue
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through alchoholic vapors" (pg 134) was blamed for stammering
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- Francis Bacon blamed coldness for stammering
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- Alexander Ross refuted Bacon's claim, proposing that the stutterer's
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speech was overheated, not congealed
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Although humoral theory was replaced by mechanical theories of the
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body's functioning, old ideas persisted
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In 1879, William Abbotts' [*Impediments of Speech*]() blamed stammering
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on the weather (wet, cold weather rather than dry bracing weather being
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the culprit) and breathing through the mouth rather than the nose
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Freud's development of psychoanalytic theory encouraged a turn to
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psychogenic theories of the functioning of the stammer It was seen as "a
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physical disturbance that enacts contrary impulses---the impulse to
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speak, and the impulse to withhold speech" Other psychoanalytic theories
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represented stammering with "anxious ambivalence"
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- Fenichel: stammering "an anal-sadistic impulse to utter obscenities"
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(pg 135)
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- I. H. Coriat: stammering was the unsuccessful result to "manage oral
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anxietiees related to nursing" (pg 135)
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- Peter Glauber: the struggle in the mind and body of the stammer is
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between a huge investment in "the magical omnipotence of words" and
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the need to repress a desire for verbal power
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Altogether, these are representations of castration anxiety Although
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psychoanalysis comes closer to analysing the fantasies of the magical
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omnipotence of the voice (and its fearful failure), by its nature it is
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also part of the "delusional apparatus", being "part of the cultural
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framework that forms and deforms the voice" (pg 135)
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[Charles Kingsley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kingsley):
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stammering is the result of selfishness (allowing too much self into the
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voice) \* the remedy for which is a regime of exercise and bodily
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movements
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Associations between stammering and other impediments, especially of the
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gait
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- Roger Ascham (1545): saw the affliction of a "perverse body" as
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connected to a "perverse mind"
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- Marc Shell (2005): Moses had difficulty walking as well as talking
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Up till the 19th century, for a horse to "stammer" was for it to stagger
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Freud in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*: the limp is the expression of
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the life-instinct & death instinct Flannery O'Brien's novel *The Third
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Policeman*: a character clumps down stairs in iambic parameter Freud's
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teacher Chaircot instructed his students in imitating neurological
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damage: altered accents and gaits
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"The speech of the stammerer or lisper is the aural enactment of the
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wound borne by the castrated" (pg 137) However, castration has also been
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linked to an enhancement of vocal power, as well as a preternatural
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strength, "as though the robustness of sexual life had been absorbed
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into the body" Circumcision as a minor/symbolic form of castration is
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associated with the unloosening of speech; Moses "I am of uncircumcised
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lips" (The Bible, Exodus 6.12, 6.30) Circumcision in Judaism is seen as
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an opening, and can be applied to heart and ears, as well as mouth or
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penis
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Not just the tongue, but also the voice of the stammerer is imagined as
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"twisted, tangled, contorted, a body closed in or folded over on itself"
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(pg 138)
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19th century: efforts made "to excise the stammerer's knot of speech"
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(pg 138)
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- German physician J. F. Dieffenbach: extended his practice of
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correcting squint to stammerers
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- *phonophobia* = revulsion at the imperfect voice (described by
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Dieffenbach)
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- Dieffenbach (and William Abbotts) suspected that the tongue got in
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the way of free speech
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- Dieffenbach conducted an operation which he claimed to cure
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stammering: cutting an incision in the base of the tongue
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Connection to religious revelation: e.g. Baptism and hydrophobia,
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conferring a voice and phonophobia
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McLuhan: "language is a form of organised stutter" (pg 140) Perhaps it
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can be thought that the voice is "a kind of stutter in the order of
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things" (pg 140)
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Stuttering is also strangely "generative" (pg 140)
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People can be tempted to stutter \* Nineteenth-century physiologist John
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Good: children should not spend time with stutterers
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"For the voice to fail is not only for it to wane, weaken or be broken,
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to become less itself. it is mixing as well as dimming. For the voice to
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fail is for it to become adulterated, more than what it was." (pg 141)
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"It is surprising how often animals and other foreign bodies insinuate
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themselves into less than perfect utterance"(pg 141) e.g. Donald Duck,
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or Porky Pig \* to have a frog in one's throat / a harelip / speaking
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with a forked tongue / cat's got my tongue / to "buzz", meaning speaking
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unintelligbly or emptily / and "stut" is recorded as an alternative name
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for a gnat / a fly in the ointment of the voice / cuckoos as stuttering
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birds
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Stuttering has been seen as an alienation from the human - wrestling
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with a foreign tongue \* early Greeks dubbed those from foreign lands as
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"lispers, babblers, barbarians" (pg 142) \* "Hottentot" people were
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named thus from an onomatopeic mockery of stuttering that early Dutch
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colonialists thought they heard in the South African natives' speech
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The speech of others - often not only unintelligible, but also
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offensive, "a maimed imposture of speech, which mocks the meaningfulness
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of the *logos*" (pg 142)
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Mladen Dolar: the otherness of the voice \* "when we speak, something
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else---law, desire, unconscious---speaks in our stead, or midst" (pg
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142) \* "the voice is everywhere apparent, but nowhere fully
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apprehensible as such" (pg 142) \* the otherness of the voice is "a big
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otherness, an intact otherness, an otherness with a profile, point and
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purpose" (pg 142)
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tradition of embracing otherness \* Antoinin Artaud & Diamanda Galas'
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screams = "vocal virility" \* "extended voices" of Trevor Wishart,
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Luciano Berio, Pauline Oliveros
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the voice as a "mixed body" (Michel Serres) \* Alvin Lucier's I Am
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Sitting in a Room (1969) "the voice and the room blend" (pg 142), "the
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body of the voice as it always anyway, inaudibly is, amid things." (pg
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143) \* room-tone - a sound into which other sounds can be embedded \*
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Lucier's voice "ends up ventriloquizing the room" (in particular how his
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stammer "is progressively repaired by the accretions of room-resonance"
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James Joyce's *Finnegan's Wake* likens the voice of a river to a voice
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passing out \* e.g. two washerwomen shouting across the banks of the
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river, the river's voice drowns them out
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"The voice is the vehicle and the arena of this agon between dissipation
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and replenishment" (pg 143) \* we celebrate too much of the "fullness,
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richness, clarity and penetrativeness" of the voice
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Aristotle: "only creatures that have life can give voice, but not
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everything that is in the voice, or given utterance by it, is alive."
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(pg 144)
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In coughs, whispers, drawls, hisses, hesitations, laughs, stammers the
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voice \"meets and mingles with what it is not---indeed, it is, in the
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end, nothing more than this mingling
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The \[athos and finesse of a voice that gives out, gives way, comes not
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form the virile figure it cuts against the ground of things, but rather
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from its suggestion of a *persona*---a being that has its being 'through
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sound', which is like our own bodies, rather than our dream of those
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bodies\" (pg 144)
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