Thursday, January 07, 2010
The Elephant Listening Project was on the popular American television show 60 Minutes last weekend. A little surfing on seismic communication among elephants turned up reporting on research by Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell: (1), (2) and (3). Also, see O'Connel-Rodwell's review article, Keeping an "Ear" to the Ground: Seismic Communication in Elephants.
A couple of lines of inquiry. First, is "listening" at bottom a too comfortable metaphor for conceptualizing how elephants perceive seismic vibrations, how they live with vibration? In any case let's ask ourselves what listening could possibly be. Second, elephants can apparently recognize each others' "voices." (This too, this thing we call "voice," among the metaphorical—even as we learn that voice may be something that develops "in" nature, as if nature had no concourse with imagination.) "I know you." "I recognize your vibration." "I hear your voice." And already I have gone too far. Does an elephant say "I"?
Labels: elephants, listening, phatic communion, semiotics, vibration, voice
Friday, October 02, 2009
Barbaras quotes Merleau-Ponty taking off from Malraux' idea that we hear our own voices through our throats while we hear the voices of others through our ears: "I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within; as Malraux said, I hear myself with my throat. In this, as he also has said, I am incomparable; my voice is bound to the mass of my own life as is the voice of no one else" (in Being, p. 281). For my part, while cognizant of the sense in which my voice is bound to my concrete existence and my uniqueness, I feel that, as previously noted,the ear comes late to hearing, late to hearing the other as well as (if differently than) the self.
Let's talk about listening to speech in particular, recognizing speech with its implicit dimension of listening as an example of coexistential ideation, an ideation characterized by quasi-interiority, an as if quality of its inner horizon. Here I'm thinking of ideation as allusive, as governed by methectic laterality rather than being directed "from above" or from the outside. Barbaras' thinking about this topic inspires. Under the heading "Sense as Articulation" Barbaras sketches out an ontology of the sign premised on the reversibility of the voice. He says:
Nowhere are we confronted with signs that are strictly vocal; they cannot be characterized as sensible, audible atoms, as individuals situated in exteriority. Most assuredly, I do not hear anything other than sounds, and yet it is not the sounds themselves that I hear. Their relationship escapes worldly exteriority; they are not situated side by side. Rather, they bear witness to a quasi-interiority corresponding to the quasi-reflectivity of the voice. Each sound already slips into the others, makes allusions there and, by this very relationship, sketches a meaningful unity. Nevertheless, this movement does not rest on the presence of a meaning possessed elsewhere; sense is nothing other than this lateral relation between the signs. It is implicated in words and phonemes, as a coherent deformation, rather than being possessed by them. Sense remains, at the heart of expression, "organic" rather than pure meaning, a "matrix of ideas" [Signs, p. 77] rather than an idea. Thus the incarnation of sense in the voice corresponds to the quasi-exteriority of signs.
(p. 288)
Just as it's obvious that there can't be deformation without form, there can't be as if without irrealization. However, irrealization in its usual forms emerges not from an isolated "interiority" (in an Idealist acceptation) but rather from matrices of delocutary vibrations, echoes which one echoes, gnoseologically, as it were. The aesthesiologicality of the vocal recovers a meaning of the as if as coexistential resonance and at the same time cadacualtic.
The vocal, it must be added, represents only one modality of embodied sign usage. Nonvocal coherent deformations are both imaginable and empirically evident. The vocal ought not be reified, as there are other routes to irrealizing coexistential vibration.
Labels: Barbaras, form, ideation, listening, Malraux, Merleau-Ponty, vibration, voice
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
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, March 27, 2009
"Music is not the origin of language, as people have so often wanted to think, but what withdraws and sinks into it" (Listening, p. 75, No. 42). Although I've taken a great interest in the musicality of language I should want to hesitate to adopt the position Nancy criticizes. Does music come before sense? Does it come before a kind of sense that might be called linguistic? What exactly is Nancy's view? "One can say of music that it silences sound and that it interprets sounds: makes them sound and make sense no longer as the sounds of something, but in their own resonance" (p. 32). Music makes sense, but it is not the only sense to be made of the sonorous. There is antemusical sound, the sounds that have been silenced by music. Nancy quotes Wallace Stevens on the existence of an antemusical: "the self/detects the sound of a voice that doubles as its own" ("The Woman That Had More Babies than That," in Listening, p. 72, No. 21). Resonance is the stuff of bodies. Is embodiment a basis on which to deny music priority to language? I'm being crude, it's true. Let's listen to how Nancy speaks of resonance, and its relation to timbre.
Rather than speaking of timbre and listening in terms of "intentional aim," it is necessary to say that before any relationship to object, listening opens up in timbre, which resounds in it rather than for it. In truth, resonance is at once listening to to timbre and the timbre of listening, if one may put it that way. Resonance is at once that of a body that is sonorous for itself and resonance of sonority in a listening body that, itself, resounds as it listens. (At the same time, this resonance is not an immobile given, since timbre itself is an evolving process, and, consequently, listening evolves along with it.)
(p. 40)
Timbre is an evolving process. If we are not to take the musical as given, and therefore simply project a received idea of timbre upon all sounds, interpreting all sounds through this musicological idea, but instead recognize its evolution, then it becomes of prime importance to investigate how one form develops from another, how listening might be said to evolve rather than merely change or manifest itself in a variety of ways. Perhaps, though, the evolutions of listening are many. The analogy with life on Earth only goes so far. Was there ever a stage in the evolution of listening when music became language? See, already this is a misleading question because listenings are indeed surely many, and we wouldn't rush to say that any one adventure of listening recapitulates *listening, or that a listening must repeat or mimic other listenings, other developmental pathways. No outcome is predetermined. And so we confront the obvious problem of separating the given from the elaborated, and, secondarily, of describing the very how of evolution, and of justifying an implied distinction between a variance and a transformation. Now, in the passage immediately above, Nancy speaks of a nonintentional (in a phenomenological sense) listening as prior to intentional listening, yet in the earlier quoted passage he says that music makes sounds nonintentional. Is nonintentional listening made or discovered by music? If we are to speak intelligibly of the evolution of listening, don't we need an answer to this question of how nonintentionality in listening is arrived at? (I'm not completely sure, though I have enough of an opinion to pose the question.)
Do we move from babble to a speaking that is already listening? How does listening develop through infancy? Can we grasp listening in the context of a transcendental murmuring, "the condition of all words and all silence" (p. 25), without confronting what could be taken for a listening that transcends babble, and therewith a speaking that is already listening, at some stage or another? (I honestly don't know enough about transcendence to say whether it is one or many, or whether it really exists at all. It could after all simply be a reality of our linguistic life that we project onto things of experience in accordance with language's power to fashion reality–the withdrawal of the musical into reality, into the plasma of the real–but I'm just tossing ideas around here.)
This profound disposition [musical listening, FtY]–arranged, in fact, according to the profundity of a reverberation chamber that is nothing other than the body from end to end–is a relationship to meaning [sens], a tension toward it: but toward it completely ahead of signification, meaning in its nascent state, in the state of return [renvoi] for which the end of this return is not given (the concept, the idea, the information), and hence to the sate of return without end, like an echo that continues on its own and that is nothing but this continuance going in a decrescendo, or even in moriendo. To be listening is to be inclined toward the opening of meaning, hence to a slash, a cut in un-sensed [in sensée] indifference at the same time as toward a reserve that is anterior and posterior to any signifying punctuation. [T]he beginning of sense . . . takes place nowhere but in a sonorous attack. . . a stridency where a weighty, murmurring matter breathes, opened into the division of its resonance.
(p. 27, Nancy's emphasis)
Likewise, "sense consists first of all. . . not in a signifying intention, but rather in a listening" (p. 30). First of all. Hmmm.
Let's return for a second to the doubling of a voice, a voice of the self. In listening do we communicate with ourselves? "Communication is not transmission but a sharing that becomes subject" (p. 41). Perhaps we communicate with ourselves in our nascent states, but even so we should question the possibility of the frictionless voice, and, especially, frictionless doubling. How then might we describe any friction we feel in communication with our own voice? Is timbre really the bottom of it all? The musical? Now that we have discovered the musical, and brought its style of listening back from the language it'd sunk into, we can ask, paradoxically, whether there exists a voice without timbre, or any voice that isn't yet doubled, and the question may be not simply a variation on a theme of friction, but an evolution, a movement into the musical, from which we've been estranged. In timbre we hear bodies, hear that voices are voices of bodies. Are the voices of bodies bottomless? Is music? What is the bottom to listening? Is communication a condition for all doubling and all singling out? What are the primitive conditions of listening? Having an idea, perhaps? Or something that could double as a person's own idea?
Labels: babble, language, listening, music, Nancy, sound, timbre, voice
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Nancy imagines that freedom is the sole allocutor of its own injuction: be free!
"Be free!" . . . commands the impossible: there is no freedom that is available or designable before this injunction or outside of it–and the same command commands impossibly, since there is no subject of authority here. Once again we touch the limit of comprehension. But we do so in order to find ourselves once again before the necessary anteriority of freedom, which is no longer illuminated here only in regard to thinking but also in regard to freedom itself (if we are still permitted to make this distinction). Freedom must precede itself in its auto-nomy in order to be freedom. It cannot be ordered, its advent can be prescribed only if it has already freed the space in which this prescription can take place without being an absurdity, or rather without being anterior to the slightest possibility of meaning in general (and yet, is it not also a question of this?. . .). We cannot say "be free!" except to someone who knows what this phrase means, and we cannot know what it means without having already been free, without having already been set free. In the imperative in which freedom differs in itself, it must also have preceded itself. "Be free!" must occur unexpectedly as one of freedom's orders. Freedom must have already freed itself, not only so that the imperative can be pronounced, but so that its pronouncement can be an act endowed with the force of freedom. (In this sense, if it is correct to claim that the imperative, in general, is powerless over the execution of what it orders–it is not the cause–it would not be correct to claim that it is without force. This force is what makes intonation (a form of intensity) a remarkable element in linguistic descriptions of the imperative mode. This force forces nothing and no one. In a certain way, it is a force without function, or is only the intensity of a singularity of existence, insofar as it exists.)
(The Experience of Freedom, pp. 108-109, Nancy's emphases)
If freedom speaks through us rather than to us, are we free to intone it? To caress, sweeten, roughen or bend the note of freedom? Is there a prejudice against intonation, that it would not really be part of the logos, not really be thought. If I start to veer towards the singularity of the voice, I may find I've made a mistake in regarding the singularity as the interlocutor of freedom. If freedom addresses itself, does it tolerate interlocution, that is, interruption? Uninterrupted freedom would seem to be a rarity in this world, but that may be what Nancy is asking us to imagine as the only possible way of freedom.
Labels: agency, freedom, Nancy, voice