Reflections on A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.’ (Haraway, 2000, 291).

In her manifesto, Haraway posits that the cyborg results from a combination of organism and machine, in the conception of coded devices where we no longer talk of reproduction but rather a form of replication. The points at which organism and machine meet have resulted in a border war, at this point we need to take pleasure in the confusion of this boundary and a responsibility for its construction. The notion of organism and machine in conflict in terms of the spaces in which they exist can become blurred through the use of machinic intervention to confront one with the other, Haraway’s point here is very interesting and can be applied to my current thinking surrounding the border between the voice and machinic intervention to expose its fragility and confront sound with object. Haraway here takes this further to suggest the cyborg illustrates the possibility of ‘a world without gender… a world without genesis… a world without end.’ (Haraway, 2000, 292). Genesis is used here in the sense of origin, or the formation of something as the source, the beginning, the birth. In Haraway’s view the cyborg sets up both a world without beginning and without end, this is explored further in that the cyborg is not a separation from a previous state of unity, from the Mother and the wholeness of organism. In actual fact this previous state of wholeness is a myth, the cyborg skips this stage of unity and as such has no origin story and proposes instead the notion of a world without origin. Therefore suggesting that the process of birth, persistence and end I explored in Project 1 are irrelevant, they are instead reworked. The cyborg is seen as the illegitimate offspring of militarism and capitalism, but as such in being illegitimate they are unfaithful to their origins and origins become inessential. This notion links back to the idea of the voice once isolated and combined with machinic intervention, as an illegitimate offspring that is no longer faithful to the human mother/father. ‘But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.’ (Haraway, 2000, 293).

‘Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.’ (Haraway, 2000, 294).

Haraway sets out some interesting definitions for machine and human, machine is seen as fluid, light, invisible and ‘made of sunshine’ (Haraway, 2000, 294). Whereas the human is seen as opaque, material and heavy, in stark contrast to the machine and has a distinct feeling of obsolescence implied. So, ‘cyborgs are ether, quintessence’ (Haraway, 2000, 294), quintessence can be read in two ways either as prototype, epitome or ideal or as essence, ethos or substance. The notion of cyborg as prototype is particularly interesting, linking back to my work in Project 1 in the creation of a 3D printed object from the human effectively saw the confrontation of organism and machine to create a hybrid where the simulation of consciousness was firmly applied through the machinic. Haraway goes on to discuss the move from reproduction to replication, whereby ‘any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly’ (Haraway, 2000, 301). This links to the idea of replication through 3D printing and the disassembly of the organic human reassembled through the machine and plastic to the cyborgic. This similar process can be applied to my current project with the voice; communication technologies are crucial tools for re-crafting our bodies to provide the ability for the voice to occupy different spaces in the reassembly of our bodies with machines. Here tool < > myth, instrument < > concept, systems of social relations < > anatomies of possible bodies are permeable boundaries that can mutually be a part of each other. However, Haraway goes on to state that a break down of communication processes causes the system itself to fail to recognise the difference between self and other, ‘a stressed system goes awry; its communication processes break down; it fails to recognise the difference between self and other.’ (Haraway, 2000, 303). From this we can see that the fragility of the voice and the intervention into it causes a break down and as such the voice can no longer recognise the self. If we are to continue the notion of replication, we must be aware that electronics fundamentally mediate a translation (ie mind > artificial intelligence), the use of electronics as part of communications blurs any boundary between organism and machine. This results in mind, body and tool being on intimate terms with the mediator, the tool of electronics thus intimately becomes a part of the cyborgic reassembly of the voice, creating a copy that no longer has an original. ‘Microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals.’ (Haraway, 2000, 303). Ultimately Haraway states that in this hybrid of organism and machine, the body doesn’t have to be defined by skin (human) or otherwise defined by this outer layer of biological material. The holism of the organic base isn’t needed for the cyborg to possess intimate components; these variants or mutants can possess gender, sexuality, embodiment and skill without the need of the organic to provide wholeness.

‘Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the seventeenth century till now, machines could be animated – given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechanised – reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/ organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary.’ (Haraway, 2000, 314).

Ever since it leaked I can’t seem to stop listening to the Kanye West SNL rant audio, soon it began creeping into my thoughts for my current project exploring the voice. After you’ve listened to this a few times it begins to morph into some form of aggressive spoken word poetry, changes in tone and volume crescendo into a listing of influential figures punctuated by declarations that we shouldn’t fuck with him. Listening to the voice on a muffled amateur recording gives a layer of noise that seems to add to the immediacy of the words, when we’re considering the voice that can be recorded on many different devices and is so often done so, for the everyday person, without any high quality production techniques. This feels real, but when it’s Kanye what even is real? Authenticity, intent, reality are all subjective when you’re experiencing the voice out of context and don’t know the space or even the structure in which it was delivered.

Let’s take a second to appreciate the poetic aggression:

But let’s not forget, #prayforkanye.

As a culmination of some of the research I have done so far I have formulated some musings on a direction I could take my project in, taking into account notions of:

• Intervention
• Collectivity – the collective voice
• Mediation of the voice – through online social channels
• Compression 
• Exception – the removal of the oppressor in order to exist authentically

I am hoping to collaborate with Jamila Faber, a writer and musician from the Netherlands, and utilise her knowledge of sound and also the voice as a tool within art. We have been throwing ideas back and forth in relation to my research:

This has formulated ideas around a creation of a layering of voices/ different vocal experimentations and sounds that could form a base, then interventions into these could be staged in order to highlight the intrinsic fragility of the voice (seeing it as an object through a spatial/temporal interaction of intervention). Perhaps these interventions could be achieved through an interactive triggering of sounds to build up into a spontaneous composition. The performativity of the intervention is something that was thrown up when reading a Rhizome interview with V4ULT (a curatorial platform initiated by Anna Mikkola and Hanna Nilsson in 2013), their second exhibition (Episode 2) centred on the theme of intervention where those of another temporary in nature were inserted into the populated exhibition space. They stipulated these interventions could take any form and allowed them to see what type of interpretations emerge when two practices overlap, setting up layers, clashes and frictions in the creation of a dynamic exhibition format where art works and practices come together in agreement or dissonance.

Interesting example I remembered of uses of experiments with the voice in music, Simon and Garfunkel included the ‘song’ Voices of Old People on their album Bookends. This is a form of sound collage made up of tape recordings by Garfunkel at the United Home for Aged Hebrews and the California Home for the Aged at Reseda. The song effectively old people sharing memories, but features a departure from any form of music we would expect and provides an air of sentimentality that wouldn’t have been as effectively communicated any other way.

On Tuesday 16 February I visited The Imitation Game exhibition on currently at Manchester Art Gallery, the exhibition focuses on the relationship between human and machine and features some interesting work where these opposing concepts intersect and interact. The pieces I found particularly inspiring were Tove Kjellmark’s work where two robots discuss the nature of human consciousness, David Link’s LoveLetters 1.0, Mari Velonaki’s Fish-Bird and Ed Atkins’ Performance Capture.

David Link:

Link’s work re-imagines Christopher Strachey’s software Ferranti Mark I from 1954, which used an algorithm to randomly generate texts intended to express and arouse emotions. Link has re-programmed this the project on show here using 12 vintage cathode ray tubes showing a live output of the algorithm on an old monitor. Alongside this there were example of love letters created by the machine, they are poetically surreal and seem to surprisingly make sense (despite being a tad lyrical). I particularly like the notion of an algorithm to re-create human emotion and the live performance of seeing the machine work through this to output a randomly generated letter that you begin to connect with. It somewhat feels like a form of intervention into emotion, the machine being the intervening agent in the process and coming inbetween human and human. The development of an algorithm in relation to my current project could form a way to go from sound > object. The object being created as part of the process, as a form of an output.

Mari Velonaki:

Fish-Bird was a seemingly simple concept of two characters who fall in love but can’t be together but continually try and communicate to each other and the audience. It created quite a magical effect, making the robots seem very endearing and responsive to the environment around them. The robots took the form of two wheelchairs, one given the character of Fish and the other of Bird. They were equipped with various sensors that monitored the body language of the visitors to the space and changed their behaviour according, this worked for the visitor to explore intimate relationships in digital and robotic characters. The wheelchairs were also fitted with thermal printers that every so often printed out a message as a communication device not only between the two robots, but also between the robots and the human visitors. These were programmed so that each wheelchair had its own handwriting, again giving this notion of individuality and an independent personality to transform your perception of them as robots to them as characters we can emphasise with.

Tove Kjellmark:

This was quite an unexpected piece, it was housed in its own separate room and upon entering the space you felt like you were intruding on two people having a conversation in a living room. The robots themselves were interesting in that most of their mechanics were exposed and only isolated elements such as the rib cage, hands, feet and the face were given a human-like facade. These human elements were created using 3D printing in white, this reminded me of the use of 3D printing as a translation device from human to object for my first project. Here it does similar, except this time acting as the translation tool from object to human. Aesthetically you felt as though you were watching two robots communicate, which once you had made this realisation took on an even more unsettling feel. Situated between the two robots was a kinect that was monitoring people in the room where motion and noise triggered the robots to react, at times telling the visitor to ‘shut up’ or ‘do you mind, we’re having a private conversation’. This extra element was the most fascinating for me, without this the robots could have seems quite passive and purely delivering a pre-programme monologue. But the inclusion of a live interactive element made the robots active in the space, you instantly felt like you had to be quiet so as not to disturb their conversation. This again had an unsettling feeling, visually you knew they were purely mechanical and programmed by electronics but the feeling instilled was one of real and reactive intelligence. This live reaction element is something that can be considered as part of my project, it appears to work to make something active in a space as a participatory object.

I’ve been thinking a little about mumbling as a phenomenon since my mum complained at me about the use of it in the opening episode of Happy Valley. Then the backlash against Rihanna’s new single Work cemented the notion that we see mumbling as bad and an irritant, I’ve been accused of being a mumbler (mostly by my mum) and seems to be a common occurrence in conversational speech. Mumbling effectively becomes a stream of sound, rather than having any discernible words that we can understand. However, often we can understand each other just fine even without pronouncing all our words properly and things such as tone, rhythm, intonation, volume etc come to the fore to fill in the gaps. Sam Wolfson sums this up quite nicely in his article ‘From ‘War and Peace’ to Rihanna – Why Is Everyone Mumbling?’ for Vice, Wolfson puts forward the case for mumbling as a linguistic fine-tuning that is far from lazy. Rihanna along with rap artists such as Fetty Wap, Young Thug, Gucci Mane, Future and Rich Homie Quan are cited as examples of the use of mumbling in music and seems to be an interesting trend where the song are pretty much made up of 80% of vowel sounds. Wolfson then lists the TV Shows recently that have garnered significant complains due to ‘incoherent mumbling’; War and Peace, Jamaica Inn (and we can include here Happy Valley) and then actors Heath Ledger and Kirsten Stewart who have been deemed mumblers.

‘Some people – Zoella, for example – feel required to make some kind of mouth noise almost constantly, even if they have nothing to say. That’s why we have mumbling; it’s a vocal fart that provides the scent of speech without containing any actual content.’

But is mumbling really that bad? Wolfson brings up an interesting area of linguistics called patois, which is language that is considered non-standard and can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects and native/local speech. All of this can work, as Wolfson suggests, as ‘a way of involving you in a world that goes beyond just the meaning of the words.’ Here mumbling evokes a feeling of naturalism akin to everyday conversation that is punctuated by trailing off and remaining incomplete. Mumbling can also produce a narrative that is meandering and atmospheric, I particularly like this visual reference and presents us with a very object-like image of the voice. Wolfson also refers to another article ‘Mumbling Isn’t a Sign of Laziness—It’s a Clever Data-Compression Trick’ by Julie Sedivy for Nautilus, here Sedivy makes an interesting link from mumbling to the production of MP3s and JPEGs. Sedivy posits that whereas mumbling is stereotypically associated with laziness, weakness, and ‘linguistic wimpiness’ as Sedivy puts it. Mumbling can now be seen as having a logic similar to data compression in the creation of MP3s and JPEGs in order to throw out information that is redundant.

‘Far from being a symptom of linguistic indifference or moral decay, dropping or reducing sounds displays an underlying logic similar to the data-compression schemes that are used to create MP3s and JPEGs. These algorithms trim down the space needed to digitally store sounds and images by throwing out information that is redundant or doesn’t add much to our perceptual experience’

Sedivy goes on to posit a ‘Phonetic Reduction’ where we are more likely to reduce common words such as fine from our everyday conversations, speakers unconsciously and strategically only preserve certain information. Sedivy also calls this ‘Strategic Laziness’, which has interesting connotation and perhaps rewrites how we read the term lazy. Rather than being a lack of action, it becomes purposeful. Out of both of these I particularly like the concepts of compression, reduction, incompleteness and meandering. Perhaps combined with these can be the notions of collective voices and choirs (a mumbling choir?) alongside technology to create sound as object as an intervention such as 3D printing, voice recognition etc?

Examples of mumbling:

Rihanna’s Work

Young Thug’s Check

I also came across Cities Aviv’s Don’t Ever Look Back, here he uses a level of noise combined with viscous vocals to form a frustrated inner monologue mumble. The layering of sound also evident in his other work is interesting, especially how the vocal seems to be fighting an ever growing noise threatening to overcome it.

Jamaica Inn

Mediation of the Voice

Robin James here is responding critically to Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2009), in particular the notion of vital materialism defined succinctly as human attunement to the non-representational [voice – in our case]. James sets up that:

‘“Voice” is Bennett’s term for non-propositional or “nonlinguistic” (104) communication. Voice is a rippling agency, a type of resonance or “buzz” (14) that is induced by and induces sympathetic vibes “as a swarm of vibrant materials ente[r] and leav[e] agentic assemblages?” (107). “Voice” doesn’t express or represent a content; it sets things in motion.’ (James, 2014).

James then follows on to challenge Bennett’s view of the objection that communication (i.e. via the voice) is possible only through the intermediary of humans. Bennett’s view is that vocal communication necessarily requires an intermediary and as such this objection is irrelevant. This however entails a reduction of communication to only those that happen in our human networks, ‘sure, all communication is mediated, but this is not the same claim as “all communication is mediated by and through humans.’ (James, 2014). Can we mediate the voice outside of the human? Or does the human just become a mass media company responsible for the distribution of the voice. If the voice is distributed through different channels outside of the human how will this affect it? For example the mediation of the voice through the laptop, through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram etc, linking back to Holly Herndon’s use of the laptop as an exit to a new platform.

‘Every mode if it is to persist, must seek new encounters to creatively compensate for the alterations or affectations it suffers.’ (James, 2014).

‘When sounds interact with the material in which they’re transmitted (air/stone, air/electric components, code/hardware), their vibratory patterns change.’ (James, 2014). There is a base interaction with sound and the material it is mediated through and this mediation distorts/ changes the vibratory patterns. As such, if these patterns are to persist they must seek new encounters to compensate for the affectations they suffer in their mediation – to seek to maintain their consistency or conatus, “’conatus” is Bennett’s Spinozist term for the activity or energy that keeps a frequency vibrating at a consistent rate, not despite but because of interference.’ (James, 2014). But this notion of consistency is difficult, what is consistency when things (effects/ objects/ bodies) are constantly under deformations? Also from an OOO perspective, to end is to reduce to consistency. The death of the voice is as such in its reduction to consistency.

Distributed Agency – Patterns/ Swarm

Following on from this James discusses the notion of distributed agency, a concept that the real action isn’t the primary tones (chords), but the patterns that emerge from their interaction. There is a phase relationship occurring between overtones and harmonics that makes up a single chord and the most important aspect, in terms of an interaction sense, is the resonance of them. Termed differently, ‘“In nonlinear assemblages, ‘effects’ RESONATE with and against their ‘causes’”’ (James, 2014). Vibrant materialities are therefore the harmonics that emerge from the “anthropomorphism” chord that acts to rub “things” up against “human agency” (James, 2014), or to look at this differently it rubs the voice (a thing – an effect) up against the human causality that produced it. The two resonate with and against each other to form a pattern of their interaction.

 ‘A theory of distributive agency…does not posit a subject as the root cause of an effect. There are instead always a swarm of vitalities at play. The task becomes to identify the contours of the swarm and the kind of relations that obtain between its bits (31-2).’ (James, 2014).

Here a subject is not the root cause of an effect; the singular human is not the root cause of the voice (thing as effect). Rather there is a swarm of vitalities. We are therefore tasked to identify the contours of the swarm and the patters of relations in-between. ‘The theorist’s task is to find the signal–literally, the frequencies or phase patterns (contours, peaks and valleys) of the major players, and their resonance (consonance/dissonance, harmonics)–in the swarm’s noisy buzzing.’ (James, 2014).

The notion of contours of the voice is interesting to consider, contours gives the voice a 3-dimensionality that allows you to get up close to it, but still maintain your conceptual mind’s grip to not see it as completely opaque (linking back here to Deleuze’s notion of smooth). To see the patterns. [There is also perhaps a link to Timothy Morton’s notion of Hyperobjects to consider, James goes on to mention that when we are confronted with the alien-ness of the human it dampens vibrations with its viscosity. The viscosity of Hyperobjects puts them here, right here in my social and experiential space. They stick to us so that we cannot see them in their entirety, we are always-already in the midst them.]

Exception/ Oppressor

If we move on to consider the voice as removed from the human we can begin to see how vital materialism seeks to take the figure of life as removed from the body/human. This however forms an organicism that is mechanistic and deterministic in the sense of the body as a whole (seen as an integration of systems of organs that function together).

‘Vital materialism understands life as neither mechanistic nor integrated. “Life” in this view, is “an interconnected series of parts, but it is not a fixed order of parts, for the order is always being reworked in accordance with a certain ‘freedom of choice’ exercised by its actants” (97)–it is, in other words, an “ecology”’ (James, 2014).

What this leads on to is therefore: physiology > ecology. The view that life is not mechanistic or an integrated whole but an interconnected series of parts, the order of such are always being reworked in accordance with a certain freedom of choice. This presents a shift from physiology to biology and in turn a biopolitics, when we see this shift we can link back to notions of consistency as discussed in the mediation of the voice. A politics of exception is the move from the instant elimination of whatever makes that body incoherent or inconsistent to beginning with including everyone (as everyone has the right to be a full participant), but material conditions ensure that some groups are unable to meet the requirements of entry. James quotes Lester Spence’s breakdown of this into three groups:

‘(1) Those who already exhibit the behaviours required for membership; (2) those who are included as in need of reform, or those who do not currently but can potentially exhibit the behaviours required for membership; and (3) those incapable of exhibiting the behaviours required for membership, those who are incapable of reform.’ (James, 2014).

This is interesting to consider in terms of the fragility of the voice and the maintenance of consistency. If we were to include group 3, what effect would this have? To confront the voice with that which makes it inconsistent, would we destroy it even further or would the destruction form creation? James then goes on to counter this notion of exception with an ethics of ambiguity, which is in essence an existential authenticity to actively become something I ‘am’ not. ‘Humans are not beings, they are virtualities, and authentic existence is the capacity to act upon, realize, or flesh out — to give life to, even — the virtualities that one ‘is.’’ (James, 2014). Oppression is that which diminishes authentic existence for all. To commit yourself to the freedom of others can mean the killing of the oppressor. Ethics here isn’t about health, it is about freedom and therefore different in notion to the biopolitical killing off of pathogens (or the interventions that are exploiting the fragility of the voice in order to push it out of consistency). Oppressors such become those who society strengthens. Biopolitics kills off the weak, authenticity kills off the strong. We can as such view the voice from another direction, rather than focusing on the pathogens (interventions) on the voice as needing to be killed off, we can see the consistent voice (the oppressor) as needing to be killed off in order to achieve the freedom of existential authenticity.

James, R. (2014) MORE ON VIBRANT MATTER: ON NOISE, BIOPOLITICS, NEW PARADOXES OF WHITENESS, & WHY BEAUVOIRAN FREEDOM IS BETTER THAN BENNETTIAN VITALITY. [online] It’s Her Factory. Available from http://www.its-her-factory.com/2014/09/more-on-vibrant-matter-on-noise-biopolitics-new-paradoxes-of-whiteness-why-beauvoiran-freedom-is-better-than-bennettian-vitality/ [Accessed: 14 February 2016].

As another element to my research I have put together a playlist of musicians who experiment with both the voice and the process of listening, asking you to approach the sounds from a new perspective. In the case of Bjork, these are taken from Medúlla that explored experiments with the voice to create a purely vocal album. Here Bjork was concerned with how voices fit together and the relationships between them. The resulting affect is one of feeling and emotion, where every sound regardless of the processes it went through has its origins in the human voice. Pamela Z, Maja Ratkje and Tanya Tagaq each explore the voice and the pushing of this to its limit. In doing so they open up the voice into avenues that we wouldn’t have though possible. In Tagaq’s work she uses Inuit throat singing layered in growls, grunts and raw emotion to convey a power that celebrates heritage and elevates it into new dimensions. Holly Herndon on the other hand explores sound as derived from the laptop as a hyper-emotional instrument. Her voice and accompanying sounds are put through digital technology to form an output that taps into the generational voice as mediated through our smart phones, commenting on the notion that there is no escape from this only an exit and that exit will result in a new platform rather than an impossible utopia.

Perhaps my project could form a collaborative composition that also has an element of collaborative curation? Voices (from experimental vocalists, choirs, everyday speech patterns) can be collated via various online platforms and in turn objectified through them. Sound as object via the medium it is translated through.

Meeting with Marie Thompson 09/02/2016

• The voice is usually theorised as being the essence of the subject.
  • This is linked to the notion of the uncanny – in particular when linked to being dissociated and having no discernible origin, at least not one that can be pointed to with certainty.
  • In a technophobe sense the voice is considered the authentic self.
• The voice is mostly talked about as a feminised occurrence, in particular when discussed in terms of exterior/interior.
  • This brings in notions of politics, notably gender politics. When considered from an object orientated view this is interesting, political implications are usually ignored in most discourse around objects especially when subject is redefined as object.
    • The idea of political implications also beings in thoughts around labour.
• Voice as links to identity – Look into the work of Rosi Braidotti (Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory: 2 (Gender and Culture Series))
• Banality of Affect by Annie Goh – Data streams from Twitter and the Dutch stock market influence the emotional output of the music with a “corrective” function (taken from the info section of http://banalityofaffect.net)
• Notions of materiality have become evident in sound in the discussions on vibrations (See Robin James’s writing on this)

One of the areas I am exploring as a starting point for my project has become the idea of intervention in connection to the fragility of the voice as an object.

• In considering interventions you first need to consider what comes first?
• Is there an ordering to the interventions? How is this defined?
• Can voice exist without interventions?
• What do we need to take into account in these interventions?
• This perhaps links to the idea of process/ relational thinking (see Whitehead’s writing on this).
  • Sets up a clash with OOO thinking and this clash could be interesting to explore within the project

Linking back to my work for Project 1 the notion of the Cyborg is an area I hadn’t explored but fits within my overall thinking.

• Cyborg – as an object that is the meeting of the organic and inorganic / human and non-human.
• Sound is mostly neglected in discussions around the Cyborg – interesting to research as to why this may be.
• See Donna Harroway’s writing on this.

Practitioners working with experimental vocals to look into:

• Pamela Z – combination of the voice and electronic processing.
• Maja Ratkje – vocalist (see interesting idea of sculpting sound).
• Pauline Oliveros – experimentation in listening and deep listening.

MIT Visual Microphone http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/.

• Project exploring the imperceptible vibrations of objects, translating the object to sound and then displaying a visual sound.
• Idea of the secret voice of objects.

‘If voice is the very thing that forces itself outward, to carve out a space for the self amid all the intensities of surroundings, the mouth can be highlighted as the cavity that resonates with all such negotiations and brings them back into the body.’ (LaBelle, 2014, 2).

The voice is initially categorised by Brandon LaBelle in Lexicon of the Mouth (2014) as an intervening force lodged within the power dynamics of structures such as the linguistic (of or related to language), the familial (relating to or occurring in a family), the pedagogic (relating to teaching) and the governmental (the form or system of rule by which a state, community etc are governed). As such it is often ‘overheard, underrepresented, and interrupted’ (LaBelle, 2014, 1), or to put this differently the voice is hidden, covered over and ignored. The voice is a powerful that can so easily be ignored by others. The mouth initially is proposed as a space of performativity, operating as ‘architecture or vessel or stage’ (LaBelle, 2014, 1). The mouth is defined by movement where depth of the body > surface of the skin, breath > matter, spoken > sounded. Resulting in a materiality that alongside the tongue, the teeth, the lips, and the throat produces a ‘texturing orifice’ (LaBelle, 2014, 1) that shapes and moulds the voice produced. Ultimately the voice is the exterior, the out there that forces itself outwards. The mouth is therefore the interior, the cavity that brings into contact the material world with the depths of the body.

Materiality is explored through the biological structures the voice travels through, here shaping the interior as a path through the body rather than within it or seen differently a path of vocality.

‘These surfaces of the mouth fully surround our vocality, and should be followed beyond what we can see. Rather, the mouth starts there on the face and folds into the oral cavity, to tunnel down the throat. A series of surfaces equally muscular and viscous, resounding and relational.’ (LaBelle, 2014, 4).

The path of vocality has a materiality that has distinct surfaces at each point, from the mouth, through the vocal chords, to the throat, into the diaphragm etc. Each point shapes the voice and leaves it material imprint, it morphs the voice from sound > gesture, exposure > hidden, figured > disfigured. We experience the voice in the way, by ‘feeling it in our body’ (LaBelle, 2014, 4). LaBelle takes this further in his discussion on the subject to posit that the voice is ‘body textured by force of emotion, sexuality, longing, intellect and language’ (LaBelle, 2014, 5), the voice here is a full body in itself and as such always-already a subject. The notion of the intangible emotion texturing an already intangible voice is interesting to consider, perhaps the representation of these textures can be found in the biology that produces them or can we consider emotion, sexuality, intellect etc as objects in themselves? Linking back to the mouth being a cavity or a chamber, the interior space to vocal’s exteriority, LaBelle sees the voice and the mouth as an assemblage that ‘brings together the texture of oral surfaces with the vocal reverberations of the cavity’ (LaBelle, 2014, 10). Here the thrust of operations > the composition of instruments generates the lyrical or the voice, or the mouth as an operation being put into action to trigger the instruments within to produce the vocal. The voice is corporeal; it relates to the human body, it is bodily, fleshy, earthly, material, tangible.

In its exteriority we see the voice as a paradoxical enigma, in the very act of speaking we see the voice ‘never quite belongs to me; in short, it beings me into the world according to a fundamental separation from myself.’ (LaBelle, 2014, 4). It sets up a gap between what we see and what we hear, it is a break from our strive for self-fulfilment when we use our voice. We use the voice as an expression of self, yet as soon as it leaves the inner cavity of the mouth it is no longer ours and in this sense we can see the voice as object. However, as LaBelle continues, if we see the voice as a cut or interruption intervening onto the structures of our environment then we can see the voice as a substance that augments out there. If we see linguistics as defined by the interrupting orifice then this challenges the separation between me and my voice, there becomes no separation and the two are bound together so as my voice projects outwards it carries me forward ‘- the voice stretches me; it drags me along (LaBelle, 2014, 5). We can also view this intervening another way; the voice itself is vulnerable to the intrusions of another such as silence and noise and the interventions of the foreign, of rupture, of loss. The voice is in essence unstable; it is in a constant dynamic state and open to intrusions that shape and augment the voice and in turn the mouth.

‘What of the excesses and energies, the sloppy and the inchoate wordings that hover in and around discourses? The paralinguistic flourishes that ghost wording? The subsequent drives that may fuel the mouth to speak other? The poetics of an experimental orality?’ (LaBelle, 2014, 12).

In conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist on the Extinction Marathon by The Serpentine Gallery in 2014, Timothy Morton notes that fragility is what makes a species into an object and every entity in order to be able to exist has to be able to die (Morton, 2014). Here we see the voice is fragile, but it is this fragility that denotes it as an object in the first place and in turn allows it to exist. Morton goes on to say that in order to preserve entities that are ephemeral, fragile and intrinsically finite (of which we all are as none of us are completely plastically transparent to ourselves), we must think of them as such and turn expose the ecological act of preservation. However, it is not just preservation but a fostering of the multiplicity of peculiarities that constitute reality as such (Morton, 2014). Here we must see the voice as fragile in order to preserve it, but we also must allow it to continue in its own evolution of interventions that form and de-form it. We must allow it to be weird, weird in an object sense of being twisted in a loop and all things are basically looped by the very process of existence from birth to persistence to end and back to birth. Therefore we see that to exist is to be twisted. The notion of the fragility of the voice links to the study of the paralinguistic, which are the aspects of spoken communication that do not involve words. They may add emphasis or shades of meaning as an aspect of meta-communication in the form of prosody, pitch, volume, intonation etc. There are also paralinguistic respiration sounds such as gasps, growls, sighs and yawns that punctuate the voice to twist and extend it beyond speech. Roland Barthes discusses this further in The Pleasure of the Text (1975), positing a form of vocal writing as a form of ‘writing aloud’ (Barthes, 1975, 66) that is carried by the grain of the voice as an erotic mixture of timbre and language. Therefore, along with diction, is the ‘substance of an art or an art of guiding one’s body’ (Barthes, 1975, 66). Writing aloud follows the phonetic, the sounds of the language, to search for the pulsional (a pushing outward, again linking back to the exteriority of the voice projecting outwards to carry the body forwards).

‘The language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.’ (Barthes, 1975, 66-67).

Barthes posits that cinema captures the sounds of speech close up to allow us to ‘hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle’ (Barthes, 1975, 67). This throws the body of the actor into my ear, again extending outwards and dragging the body along. This idea of close up also links to the Giles Deleuze’s concept of the smooth as defined by Morton as when things are so granular. When you’re so close to something that you can’t grip it with your conceptual mind, the example given is that of a painting that when you are close up to it you cannot grasp what the painting is even depicting any more, but this doesn’t mean that everything is completely opaque. Just because we cannot grasp the entirety of the thing doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist as such. LaBelle ends the chapter by hypothesising an expanded voice, a voice beyond speech or one that goes beyond words and language. In this sense para is used as the idea of the hidden, the peripheral areas of the voice found in the gasps, growls, sighs, yawns and ticks. Here this notion of an expanded voice is interesting to consider in connection to things such as vocal fry and up-talk which are seen as epidemics on the voice, deforming it by interrupting the ‘natural’ flow of speech.

‘An expanded voice not only for finding a representational space, as a point of entry, and reasonable debate, but also a voice full of imaginary drive, and those animate and poetical expressions that turn our bodies toward other species, other material forms, or immaterial apparitions, as well as each other.’ (LaBelle, 2014, 13).

Barthes, R. (1975) The Pleasure of the Text. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

LaBelle, B. (2014) Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. New York: Bloomsbury.

Morton, T. (2014) Timothy Morton & Hans Ulrich Obrist. [interview] DIS Magazine. Interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned/discussion-disillusioned/68280/hans-ulrich-obrist-timothy-morton/ [Accessed 3 February 2016].