Thursday, July 09, 2009
Montiglio concludes:
Silence is never neutral in the land of the logos. Many of its appearances seem to be variants of a similar sentiment, which could be called horror of the void. The Greek world is resonant, filled with circulating voices. On the battlefield, in the assembly, in the theater, in the city as a whole, the voice is an organizing principle. Silence threatens this fullness of sound. As a troublesome, paralyzing interruption of the verbal flow within the speech code of the Iliad; as an impenetrable and concentrated attitude in tragedy; as a sudden suspension of the normal course of nature, silence heralds disruption and provokes anxiety. Ominous silences most often break into cries: the horror of the void fills silence with its opposite, as if to re[e]stablish a lost equilibrium through an overcompensation of sound.
(p. 289)
I'd let this pass in silence but I want to note a possible difference between cultural representations of silence (the logos of silence, if you will) and silence as it actually experienced (the silence of the logos, perhaps). Does the consideration of silence as speech act obviate this difference? In any case can logoi encompass their own silences?
Labels: logos, Montiglio, pragmatics, silence, speech
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Montiglio turns briefly from the study of Greek tragedy to the study of medical texts:
[T]he Hippocratics insistently note the appearance of aphôniê as a most significant symptom. The meanings of this term range from speech difficulties, to a partial or total inhibition of the vocal organs, to aphasia, to the inability to speak on account of a physical lesion. Such an extended semantic field fits within the Greek pattern of calling "silence" not only a total absence of words or sounds, but also their partial presence. Just as the dative sigêi and the adverb siga (in silence) can apply to a bad speaker, that is, to someone who does use his language even though inadequately, the term aphôniê equates all kinds and degrees of speech disturbances with a "nonvoice." In the view of the Hippocratic doctor, patients who fail to communicate as he hopes are simply "voiceless."
The symptom of aphôniê is all the more disquieting for the doctor because he urgently needs his patients' words in order to understand the nature of their illnesses. Ancient Medicine stresses the importance of entertaining a dialogue with one's patient on a theoretical level. A concrete application of this principle, the Prognosis relies on the possibility of a regular communication with the sick, which alone enables the doctor to describe the symptoms of the disease in the most accurate way possible and to formulate a prognosis along with its evolution.
The troublesome character of aphôniê may explain why its emergence is repeatedly marked as "sudden" (exaiphnês). For it is unlikely that the onset of aphôniê was always so sudden in reality, considering the wide range of meanings of this term. As Danielle Gourevitch remarks, here "the observation is somehow replacing its object." To the doctor's eyes, a loss of speech and voice is apparently so fatal a symptom that it seems to manifest itself unexpectedly, abruptly, with no progression or warning: "When she was given a fragrant application of ground meal and myrrh, suddenly she lost her voice and died," writes the author of Epidemics 4 (30). Not surprisingly, this sudden loss of the voice is followed by an equally sudden death.
(Silence, pp. 228-229, my bold)
The disappearance of the voice more than the disappearance of language disquiets. Are all animal species endowed with a voice? To what extent might the voice be "given" through experience, developed rather than merely genetically endowed? Some species we know are able to learn vocalizations—but do they learn the voice itself? Biologist Stephanie Watwood, who studies how social interactions affect vocal development in animals, notes that the signature whistle of the male bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) assimilates to the signature whistles of other males whom they ally with as they fully mature. For females the signature whistle does not change over the lifespan. (See the video labeled "Whistles of Bottlenose Dolphins" here.) Does the juvenile male dolphin lose its voice as it enters adulthood? Is the autocognominal call an indication that dolphins are recognizable to each other by their voices, or does it signal some need for an additional unique identifier because the dolphin's voice alone isn't in fact unique? Does voicelessness represent the loss of the cognomen, the loss of any and all identity? Did the ancient Greeks conceive of disappearances of the voice that didn't symptomize dying, or is it perhaps the nature of conceptualization to remain loosely bound by a constellation of established usages and pregiven meanings, or to move within the ambit of affiliations, to assimilate? No, I rather imagine—assimilation means this much as much as it means an implicitly thoughtless con-formity— humans conceptualize more freely than that, at least as freely as dolphins and a few other types of animals create vocalizations in response to their acoustic milieu.
Labels: dolphins, environment, Montiglio, silence, voice, Watwood
Monday, June 15, 2009
Montiglio tells us, speaking of ancient Greek tragedy, "Silence often heralds a sudden, and sinister, transformation of one's being, such as the emergence of a pain that cannot be told but only cried out" (Silence, p. 224). Silence and cries represent an homology, rather than an opposition, because both signify the collapse of the logos (p. 225). (I can't help think that attention to the syntagmatics of silence and crying would tell us something more.) Silences, too, are heavy and physical, carried by the body that cries or that will cry. Greek audiences, Montiglio reasons, shared an interpretation of silences "as preludes to destructive outbreaks" (p. 220). Do these vocal outbursts genuinely fail to communicate anything whatsoever? How much space do we want to allow for the incommunicable? Is anything human lastingly unintelligible?
Two aspects of Cassandra's silence apply more generally to the tragic representation of silence. First, breaking silence does not mean making contact; on the contrary, the silent character moves from silence to an incomprehensible and solitary language. Second, silence gives way to a resonant and exuberant voice that overcompensates for its absence.
(p. 216)
Labels: Greece, humans, idiolectics, interpretation, monologue, Montiglio, silence
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
"From its very beginnings," Montiglio says, "a structural aspect of Greek drama has favored continuous sound over silent breaks: the nearly total absence of empty scenes. Permanently inhabited by the chorus, the stage is filled with its visible and audible presence at the end of each episode" (Silence, p. 160). The image of the drama parallels the image of speech even as one informs (interpolates) the other. Today instead of imagery I'll speak of cosmology, a cosmology of the continuous, the continuous drama, the continuous dialogue. Does a euphemistic cosmology by itself tell us anything about what it leaves unsaid? The unsaid must be interpreted. Too true. If we engage in cosmology–is that what we do? Do we do cosmology by engagement? If we involve ourselves, somehow, with cosmology, with the understanding that the said must leave room for response, that the unsaid must leave room for response, even quiet response, how do we account for our understanding? What kind of understanding is it? Cosmological? We have a cosmological understanding of cosmological understandings, we understand cosmology through cosmology. Ah, if that were true we'd be between cosmologies. Perpetually? Alternatively, one cosmology might dominate another cosmology. That's another cosmology. So is the question of the day "How are we instilled with cosmology" or "How do we move between cosmologies?" Are we able to routinely shake ourselves free of cosmology? Given certain cosmologies (the euphemistic cosmology, for example), would it always be sufficient for freedom from cosmology to merely stop talking about the world? This is dubious, but, if so, to free oneself would one have to specify which world of which one were no longer speaking? How?
Labels: cosmology, interpretation, Montiglio, silence, worldview
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Montiglio tells us that Athenian orators of the fourth century, in contrast to Homeric public speakers, "want their voices to be made of a pure disembodied logos, and not of a powerfully resonant substance. . . .From being ligeia, their voice has become lampra (luminous)" (Silence, p. 148). She recapitulates and expands on ligus:
[I]n epic poetry ligus modifies not only the voice of good speakers, but also the song of the Sirens and the dirge of the Muses, thus associating different forms of expression on account of their clear and powerful resonance. As regards speakers, there is no incompatibility between the audible physicality of their voices and the clarity of their words. By contrast, in the classical age ligus is applied to specifically to kinds of music and utterances in which sounds prevail over words: the lovely melody of the aulos, but also, and more insistently, the voices of mourning.
(ibid.)
Ligus, Montiglio says, speaking still of the classical age, "describes voices that are cast at the margins of the city: that of the nightingale, a plaintive song reminiscent of barbarian rhythms; that of mourning women, like the Thebans who pour out their ritual cries over the dead, or like the Suppliants, barbarian women similar to nightingales, who cry out their lament with a barbarian voice"(pp. 148-149). The marginalization of voices ripples–no, the disturbance is deeper. Sundered from sound, wrenched from its body, the voice loses its capacity to legitimately express suffering in public spaces, paradoxically just as further suffering is imposed by force; subaltern dissent is stifled at the cost of a muted logos for everyone, and, consequently, a muted democracy. Passions, any passions, including the passions of the Muses, have become a threat to the web of orders: the political, the epistemic, the linguistic, the expressive, the noetic, all sustained now by not just a denial of vocal power but by a violent reification of speech and concomitant suppression of the real, a devaluing of the real in the economies of the recognized. Recognition. The irony of course is that the voice is the epitome of recognizable of personal expressions, gestures that tell who we are. If hearing consigns us the world and its contingency, as Cavarero says in echo of Jonas (For More than One Voice, p.37), then the deafness codified by excision of voices from the shared logos makes problematic any discussion of a shared world, except in the most rarified, least inclusive settings. I have to stop myself here. I don't want to rely on pre-established habits of thinking in order to assimilate what Montiglio has to say. The dematerialization of language means something to me personally, and I suspect the dematerialization of silence does as well. Silence feels.
Let's pick up again on Montiglio's discussion. Her interpretation of the conceptualizations of the vocal quality of ritual mourning is, naturally, informed by Nicole Loraux's study of ritual lament. She ties work to a conceptual dematerialization of the voice, and also, coincidentally, a dematerialization of the logos.
As Nicole Loraux has shown, the legal effort to reject the vocal expressions of mourning outside the public space is prompted by the political urgency to contain feminine lament, which supposedly upsets civic order by its unbridled affectivity. Accordingly, it is to be expected that the voice of the orator refuses to resemble these voices of lamentation: while the latter are all-sonorous, ligeiai, the former dematerializes by coinciding with the rational content that it conveys. In fact, lampros applies to the logos as well as to the speaker's voice; and persuasive speech, as Athena reminds us, is provided with eyes, with a gaze that emphasizes its rationality. This speech that wants to be manifest to the eye makes itself visible through an equally transparent medium: an immaterial voice, a pure "mirror of thought."
(pp. 149-150)
The nurturing of empathy leads to a realization that we not only acknowledge gaps in soulful encounters but that we feel our own impulse to respond to gaps. I speak now, to be critical of my own thoughts, from experience and from memory, which we may wish to regard in its physicality. Is luminosity an aspect of its physicality? Is it any less questionable for being embodied? Obviously I harbor doubts about the nature of my feelings, my impulses, my responses. Shall I cull the margins of the city for the secrets to my soul? How could that be empathy? Because it would represent a commitment to listening?
Labels: Cavarero, Greece, Jonas, Loraux, Montiglio, silence, voice
Friday, May 15, 2009
Montiglio interprets Pindar's poetics, supplying some broad thoughts about the materiality of sound according to the ancients. "Poetry is a sonorisation of the silent mind, and its coming to being depends on a restless movement of the vocal organ" (Silence, p. 95, her emphasis). And, worth noting in passing: "Reading out loud is a metaphor for both the execution and the composition of the poem. It is only through this reading that poetry comes to exist. Mental writing does not produce a nonrecited poem" (p. 94). Liquid sounds. Dramatic sounds. Sounds too powerful to be human. Did silence ever call to be animated? Somewhere a poem slips out of existence, into the silences that never give birth to conversation. Not even rereadings let us escape oblivion indefinitely. The poem knows that. Every poem secretly knows that. "The 'liquidity' of song, which takes us back to its oral origins, favors a thorough diffusion of the poet's voice"(p. 98). This would be a thespian voice, a persona attached to an arc ever near completion, the figure of sonorous presence, approximating total presence–cut down by skop as foretold. The voice of the ancient poet, though, is it not the voice of a rereading? "The voice of the Muses, which engages other voices in a contrapuntal response, seems to have the same capacity of spatial diffusion as the light; it is as tireless as the rays of the sun and spreads like dawn on the sea; it makes itself heard everywhere"(p. 97). Rereading is the silence of the said, or, better, it insists on the silence of the said, reads it aloud so as to put it to sleep, exactly a lullaby. The polyphonization of the unsaid, the said's remainder, rests on this sleep of the said within the rereading. What does the page symbolize amidst such tireless conversation? It too must be reread, polyphonized along with the rest of the unsaid. Symbolize?
Since the experience of poetry, in an aural culture, consists in the hic et nunc of its performance, the real or imaginary listener who wants to describe it follows the movements of its musical unfolding, just as we would describe a symphony following the succession of its resonances. Sappho seems indeed to be reproducing the many instrumental and vocal components of a true symphony, the subject matter of which is only mentioned at the end.
(p. 97)
Imagine a word too powerful to be human. Don't we do this all the time? Symphony, aural, resume, the silent mind. Imagine what it would take to voice such words, and only such words. To voice discretely, and only with the voice, the voice itself. Never happen. (Let "the vocal organ" be a metaphor for its never happening.) We call upon other voices–as if to converse? The experience of poetry has always been like hanging out with the daughters of Mnemosyne, the way we used to, when it rained. Would our aural materialism propose to explain away the touch of Terpsichore and her siblings, or her symbol? Unstring the Canon of the Nine? Step lightly, dear imaginary listener, in your interpretation of the boundlessness of musical voices, a boundlessness that coexists with the silent mind. The silent mind is a wild animal. The excursion of the poem means not to tame. Nor to bewilder. We are coming closer to saying what it means for the silent mind to stand for a material cause–the meontic efficiency of the symbol, incidentally, is nowhere near that of the ordinary sign. Do you suppose there is some balance to be struck between silence and restlessness?
Lagoon. Tortoise. Lagoon.
I threw myself at the shores of your tongue, restless you. What solace was there in sweet centuries we spoke them too. And we stole the silence of the said from the public library, its bright corners, musics, ours and Sappho's, who seemed never to have learned how to die, but fragment, fragment. . . taught us words like mythoplokos.
Labels: causality, imagination, Montiglio, muses, myth, Pindar, poetry, Sappho, silence
Friday, May 08, 2009
The undertaking to thoroughly describe communicative, illocutionary silence necessarily requires working with an image of speech, if only to go around it. All images of speech are not reconcilable, though we may recognize any collection of them as all being ideas about speech, which if it doesn't approximate a reconciliation, at least suggests the possibility of one. In making such a recognition we may cede to an epistemic aporia about speech. We act as if we knew that certain ideas were ideas about speech, but we haven't yet been able to define speech, certainly not in a way that would make sense of contradictory propositions made about speech. Practically, as intellectuals, such as we are, we may well find ourselves in a defensive position regarding our grasp of speech. We put ourselves into question simply by noticing that two images of speech cannot be reconciled–but I am being hasty. Let's try to reconcile two views. First, there's my naive sense that conversation requires breaks in speaking, and that on that basis conversations can in fact be carried out episodically, over long hiatuses in some cases. Speech is rawly hiatal. This is an image of speech that conditions my thinking about verbal exchanges and interactions of all kinds. It is not the only image of speech one could imagine, live by. One could imagine a completely antithetical view. In the Homeric world, Montiglio tells us, "speech ideally circulates without ceasing" (Silence, p. 60). Montiglio uncovers a notion of something like a "speech economy," but one must wonder about the nature of speech as it would appear in such a system, and how its differences from speech according to the image of hiatal flows would illuminate the problem we have here with speech.
Homeric epic regards speech as the object of a continuous exchange. The verb for "to answer," ameibomei, literally "to exchange," inscribes speech within the ethic of reciprocity that should govern the behavior of heroes. But what is an exchanged word? First and foremost it is an entity that goes around incessantly, bandied back and forth without ever disappearing.
Outside the domain of speech, ameibomai signifies to alternate, to compensate. Emphasis is placed on the absence of any interruption during the movement. In Iliad 9, for instance, ameibomai means "to interchange watches": "They mounted guard in turn, and the fire would never go out" (471-472). Parallel to the constantly burning flame, the changing of the guard ensures continuity. No void is allowed: as soon as a soldier departs, another takes over.
(p. 61, my bold)
Montiglio has us draw a distinction between listening while waiting one's turn to speak, implicitly expected, and silence. To sit listening, for the ancient Greeks, belongs to speech whereas sitting in silence does not. Thus she leads us to the conclusion that "it is only to signify anomalies in an exchange that silence interrupts the verbal flow" (p. 62). It is the exchange which gives speech meaning and simultaneously calls for the entification of the utterance. Well, what exactly is our image of exchange? Do we have an image of exchange without a prior image of speech? Must we imagine the word that is a promise, sent forth on its journey, and yet, on the other side, interchangeable, a commerce? How does speech come to its other sides? In being imagined? If I said one needn't form an image of speech in order to speak I too would be asking you to imagine an essence of speech, "real speech," or "actual speech," unimagined speech. One doesn't evade speaking easily. Silence exists in relation to an imaginary speech, and this may be especially true if we are talking about something like a cultural construction of language instead of "The Idea of Speech"; imaginary speech, even praxiologically understood, tacitly informs even those operations that break from speech, provided, perhaps, that there exists something like a communicative intent, even one given through a purely rejective gesture, a blunt silence so blunt it's not even blunt. Imaginary speech is not metadiscourse, or, if you will, it is not merely to be explained as metadiscourse. Imaginary speech escapes itself. It delineates its silences. Yet silences persist, imaginary and inimaginary. Just as it practically remains possible to communicate between contradictory imaginary languages, notwithstanding the rise of minor misunderstandings or moments of miscommunication, that is, people who do not share the same image of speech may nevertheless communicate, so too does it remain possible to hold a communicative silence in reference to different images of speech. Well, this is a thesis. Possibly in such an instance one holds more than one silence simultaneously, for instance the silence that is continuous with the pause and therefore belongs to speech, and, on the other hand, the silence which speech defines as its disturbance. Of course we have already criticized this position. The silence that accomodates two images of silence is itself delineated by an image, a model, of communication.
Should we be guided by an image of speech that asks us to believe in questionable ideas like incessance and things that are only apparent, that never disappear? One imagines ghosts of words. Quite probably we would have to call upon an auxilliary image of silence just to make sense of the world of communication. And so we should ask about being guided by images that primarily serve other images, images that don't stand on their own, and won't therefore easily submit to scrutiny. Montiglio nonetheless scrutinizes. She does so without isolating, but rather by examining manifestations of phenomena across the spectrum of ancient Greek culture. Is her image of speech superior to the Homeric image her scholarship has uncovered? More interesting or more useful? Even the proposition that the contact between disparate images of speech engenders creativity in language, a tenet of dialogism, reflects an image of speech. It contests as well as illuminates. We must then put in question our communicative intentions. Are we now in dialogue with the ancient Greeks, who we say had an image of uninterrupted exchange at the heart of speech? What do we mean to say by our engagement in classicist discourse? Will we finally be able to reach the point beyond which there is no discourse, no understanding, because we have already understood, the point where silence intervenes? Was it never our intent to understand? If not then would it be fair to say that we are drawn to the image of the uninterrupted flow of speech, that it is so seductive in fact that we should question the position we've taken with regard to it, and thus put into question our own image of speech, the one we must explicitly hold in order to effect a criticism? Do we really yearn for a speech that isn't mythos? Do we ever really practice such a speech?
Labels: dialogism, Greece, ideation, Montiglio, silence, speech
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Montiglio writes of the Eumenides:
In keeping with their nature that entails verbal negation and dissonance, the Erinyes prove to be the enemies of exchange. First, these forces of destructive speech oppose clear and articulate language. Their strident voice imitates animal sounds, bellows and barks. Their song, insofar as it is incompatible with the lyre, denies all harmony between music and human locution, because the lyre is the instrument that meets the clarity of speech. This "lyreless" song raises its voice against Apollo's soothing muthoi: "Here is the song, a frenzy that ruins the mind, the hymn of the Erinyes, mind-binding, without lyre."
(Silence, pp. 42-43)
Do we hear the vulnerability of the listener in this passage? Will the enemies of exchange had laid waste to silence, or does silence endure like it always does, like the empathy one feels for the person who hears the alyric of the Eumenides? Silence is not the splintered lyre but the lyre on the cusp of speech? The broken lyre? Are we not on the verge of weeping for the man who cradles the broken lyre in his arms, always there, on the verge?
Are the Eumenides, however, really the enemies of reciprocity? We are all tragic figures insofar as our ignorance cries out to be interpreted. It's such a small thing to be ignorant of, our involvement in listening, the gives and takes. Furious whispers escape the lyricist's fingers, as they are eternally on the verge of doing. A string that buzzes, a frenzied hymn. This what has become of music, is it completely alien to the lyrical, the lyricist's hands? They hold things of the lyre, memorize them, and forget. By whose hand were the lyre have been broken? If it's not possible to act then none of us is a tragic figure. This is obvious. And if we never know what it means to know by listening?
Labels: eumenidies, listening, lyre, Montiglio, silence
Friday, April 10, 2009
The very existence in Greece of a "code of silence" that involves the body and pervades cultural manifestations as diverse as religious rituals, Homeric epic, drama, and medical texts, points to a shared tendency to associate an absence of words with specific gestures and postures; an association, in turn, which suggests that for the Greeks silence was a highly formalized behavior, much more so than it is for us.
(Silvia Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos, p. 8)
Labels: body, culture, Greece, language, Montiglio, silence