diff --git a/resonant_bodies_voices_memories.md b/resonant_bodies_voices_memories.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3cc8abe --- /dev/null +++ b/resonant_bodies_voices_memories.md @@ -0,0 +1,175 @@ +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)