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Strategies of working with the sonorous body: Identifying other/new writing techniques in the field of bodily sound expression
Abstract
The issue of the entanglement and interdependence of corporeality and textuality in the process of creating writing attracts attention both in the field of sound and of semantic and bodily expression in sound. When the body is established in the process of semanticization (and re-semanticization), as a specific threshold o f writing, the place and role of the sonorous body forms the focus of theoretical research in that discursive space. This text explores the body's relational connection with writing, focusing on the always present transformative potential of speaking writing (again) as a consequence and condition of bodily expression in sound.
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Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is often taken for granted. In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the voice-body relationship itself is a producer of meaning, she furthermore posits this relationship as one of the major driving forces in recent opera. She takes as her focus six contemporary operas - La Belle et la Bête (Philip Glass), Writing to Vermeer (Louis Andriessen, Peter Greenaway), Three Tales (Steve Reich, Beryl Korot), One (Michel van der Aa), Homeland (Laurie Anderson), and La Commedia (Louis Andriessen, Hal Hartley) - which she terms 'postoperas'. These pieces are sites for creative exploration, where the boundaries of the opera world are stretched. Central to this is the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a redefinition of body-voice-gender relationships. Novak dissects the singing body as a set of rules, protocols, effects, and strategies. That dissection shows how the singing body acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera's meanings.
The “acousmatic voice”—as famously defined and deployed by Michel Chion and Kaja Silverman—has in recent years unanchored itself from its cinematic context and become a free-floating aspect of the information age. We thus find ourselves adrift in a sea of solicitous voices without a visual origin or point of reference. The inherent uncanniness of the voice—whether it be the dog’s absent master, man’s distant lover, or woman’s internalized other—is normalized by digital technologies such as MP3 compression. Depending on the conditions of production, distribution, and reception, this serves to either further or obscure, or violently reveal, what I call (in the wake of Roland Barthes) “the aural punctum.” This article explores the importance of such detached voices for simulating, or even summoning, intimacy and presence in a time of long-distance relationships and time-shifted exchanges. As such, it asks what role the voice plays in the ongoing game of fort-da that underlies everyday human experience, and whether the ontological stakes change in different technological situations and environments. Paying particular attention to the gendered voice, this piece attempts to steer a middle course between the Lacanian “object voice” of Mladen Dolar and the intense focus on human singularity of Adriana Cavarero. Through discussions of the libidinal economy circulating within certain mythological tropes (Sirens, Swan Maidens, Narcissus/Echo, etc.) as well as an aesthetic genealogy of contemporary pop music, this article encourages a more sensitive ear for the sonic dynamics of the gendered acousmatic voice.
I. Approaching Abjection2. Something to Be Scared Of3. From Filth to Defilement4. Semiotics of Biblical Abomination5... Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi6. C line: Neither Actor nor Martyr7. Suffering and Horror8. Those Females Who Can Wreck the Infinite9. "Ours to Jew or Die"10. In the Beginning and Without End...11. Powers of Horror
The article examines the nature of sound by taking as its starting point Kafka’s story “The Burrow,” in which an animal, a badger, builds an elaborate and labyrinthine burrow as a bastion of protection against the outside. In this refuge it is disturbed by the intrusion of a sound of which it cannot find the origin. This situation is taken as a sound laboratory, where the nature of the sound and the subjective attitudes it implies are closely scrutinized. From this vantage point, the article pursues an analysis of sound and proposes to place sound at the pivotal point of twelve oppositions: wakefulness/sleep; inside/outside; cause/disruption of causality; floating/fixation, location/dislocation; time/space; one/multiple; duration/intermittency, sound/silence; subject/Other; reality/fantasy, meaningless/meaning; sound/voice; “being and time,” “being and nothingness,” “being and event”; and finally, the edge of modernity of which Kafka is the major harbinger. The article argues for a view in which sound, and the particular experience of sound in Kafka’s context, can be taken as an ontological opening with ample ramifications in contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis.
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