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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)