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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)