Let's Talk About Unspeakable Things

by Angeliki Diakrousi

Research question

How can the female voice occupy public space and reveal dark aspects, that in its mediation can be anything else than harmful for the establishment of a democratic society?

Introduction

In recent years my ongoing concern has been on the presence of the female voice in public. During my previous studies I gradually realized how my gendered body had been silenced or marginalized through slight gestures from male figures or institutional powers that were obfuscating this situation. Observing, as well, female in their roles as members of my family, teachers, workers and immigrant neighbors of my youth I discovered different types of marginalization and silencing. Examples would be women working at home, taking care of everything in the family and leaving behind their own desires, men interrupting them when articulating arguments in a political/formal dialogue and underestimating their knowledge. The mediation of their voices and the way they were becoming present, active participants and visible in public spaces and spheres became one of my main interests. My past projects reflected and responded to that concern while I worked with voice and sound which, as forms of art are underestimated in the context of western visual culture. They are forms connected to irrational attitudes and oral cultures. The sound of voices reveals hidden suppressed aspects and subjectivities. Because of its temporariness, non-linearity, invisibility and border-less character [long sounds text] sound can exist and travel within multiple dimensions of spaces simultaneously, creating bonds between them. Throughout history, oral cultures, by being based on vocal expression, differ from the literate cultures in that they embrace the collective sharing of knowledge. More specifically they create "personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates" (Ong, 2002, pg. 67). Feminists have included and embraced voice in their practices because there is a uniqueness in it that embodies the speakers and their personal stories while connecting the ones being present. Together with this concern I also experienced a gender-based differentiation between amateur and expert knowledge, when approaching telecommunication networks and technologies, with the intention of learning to build and use them. This separation goes together with the gender exclusion. I quickly found out that I was not alone in this regard. In the example of an activist collective, called Prometheus, volunteers expressed similar concerns in the construction of a radio station:

"The radio activists presented the work of soldering a transmitter, tuning an antenna, and producing a news program or governing a radio station to be accessible to all. Nevertheless, they were conscious of patterned gaps in their organization and volunteer base: men were more likely than women to know how to build electronics, to be excited by tinkering, and to have the know-how to teach neophytes.This troubled the activists"(Dunbar-Hester, pg. 53-54).

In one of my projects, Sound Acts in Victoria Square I 'inserted' the recorded sounds of women’s voices into existing conversations at a public square in Athens that was male dominated. Most of the frequenters were immigrants and refugees from different periods of migration to Greece. They had come from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Albania, Georgia, Russia and other foreign countries. The gender bias and the way they used the public space differed according to their country of origin. However it was common that many of the young women visiting the square were just passers-by with shopping bags or kids in tow. The men, on the other hand, were hanging out with their friends, occupying many spots of the square for hours. My intervention was like so; first, I realized and recorded conversations, over two months, with women I met in the square, as well as archived and ordered the collected material. Then I planned and realized the in-situ broadcasting of the collected sound material and directed the new relations and conversations with the public for one day in June 2015. The intervention lasted for some hours and different people, mostly men, were participating in conversations that would include the women's voices or not. Their voices came from a past time of the same place, when they were physically present. At another time only their words were there and 'participated'. From my description of the project: "The broadcasted female voices were abruptly intervened with the existing conversations in the specific places, giving the impression of an non-invited 'absent' guest" (Diakrousi, 2015, pg. ). They were distant voices. The audio speaker and myself were mediating them in the then-current public space.
My ongoing research after that lead me to the public forums, speech, and the technologies that facilitate them, from a feminist perspective. This thesis is a series of three essays which relate to female voice, collective voice and their mediation. They address the voice as a feminist tool for communicating, and an object of presence and inhabiting space. Historically, some modes of addressing have been marginalized and shut out of the public domain (see the monstrosity of female voice). The separation between private and public space has played an important role as it reflects and it is related to gender separation. The collective voice is marginalized under the realm of the patriarchal individualistic society. The female voice is part of it. The texts deal particularly with the voice as a medium for collective practices (see the monstrosity...). This collective vocalization affords the amplification and multiplication either with the aid of technology or embodied practices (see Multiplication vis a vis amplification) that refuses dominant ways of establishing presence and dialogue. In our democracy there is a fear of ugly forms of address which are connected to the female body- blood, birth, death, mourning- and other dark aspects and passions that are perceived as threatening to society. These are forms of vocalization that are excluded from public discourse which centers on “self-control” and “reason”. Such things are seen to create noise and disorder and "have to be kept" silent according to the patriarchal norms. But alternative mediums and forms of communication have been developed against this (see transmitting ugly things). There are technologies for self-control and filtration. Men are taught to express themselves in particular ways and they are taught to instruct women to be silent. In the current era we see how technologies serve to filter forms of collective voices; again this aims to reduce “noise” and thus to exclude [more details in the text].

1. Transmitting Ugly Things

What ugly things, and the medium

Marginalized people vocalize things that are unacceptable for the society, unspeakable, politically incorrect, emotionally overwhelming, disorderly. They are too personal, too emotional, too embodied. Carson explains how the direct mode of address of women's voices has been an annoyance for the patriarchal society since Ancient Greece. A woman would expose her inside truths that were supposed to be kept private. Examples of these would be emotions that reveal pleasure or pain either from sexual encounters, or the birth of a child. "By projections and leakages of all kinds- somatic, vocal, emotional, sexual- females expose or expend what should be kept in" (Carson, 1996, pg. 129); this reveals society's fear of death, blood, darkness, birth, the female body. This direct continuity and linkage between the inside and outside has been a threat for the human nature and society as it is not filtered through the rational tool of humans, 'speech'. It has been established that our inner desires and needs have to be expressed indirectly through speech, and in the case of women, through their men’s speech. It is very common that women remain inside their homes when their men take to the streets to protest or talk about their family concerns (Kanaveli, 2012)[example]. There is a connection of sound and voice with externalizing our inside truths. One of the principal characteristics of sound is its unique relationship to interiority. According to Ong (2002, pg. 69) "[t]his relationship is important because of the interiority of human consciousness and of human communication itself".
One perceptively ugly form of address in Ancient Greece was an utterance, a high-pitched cry, called ‘ololyga’ which was a female ritual practice (more in 'Monstrosity...'). This is still valid in Greece and the Middle East, and it is related to mourning. In their rituals women would also say offensive bad things under the context of 'aischrologia'; a process in which a woman acting as a proxy, would freely discharge unspeakable things on behalf of the city. A more recent one is 'hysteria', introduced by Freud, that connects the psychical events within a woman's body directly to the outside, her exterior behavior. Females are often associated with sins and evil within the collective memory. For example, gossiping is another form of address that reveals secrets that should have stayed hidden. It is an alternative way of communication existing in the private domain and has been created in response to the exclusion of speech in public. Gossip "provides subordinated classes with a mode of communication beyond an official public culture from which they are excluded" (The Gossip, 2017, p.61). But even in Ancient Greece this form was undesirable; Plutarch tells a story about how a secret is spread fast by women creating chaos and ruins, in contrast to men that keep themselves from revealing it (Carson, 1996, pg. 130).
Other ugly things are the private and hidden events of family violence. For feminists in the early 20th century, public speech, in a group of other women sharing the same problem, was a way to externalize the personal violence and suppression of women, without using violence in response. Protesters, respectively, talk collectively about the unfair economical and political structure of the society either by demonstrating or occupying public spaces. All these examples do not follow the rationalist approach of the context they are part of. They express passion, vulnerabilities and unfulfilled desires with their voices and presence. The idea that democracy is a civilized way of making decisions that doesn't accept any form of over-emotion or overflow of expression, is nothing more than an illusion, one that threatens the existence of democracy by creating exclusion and disregarding the importance of passions and desires in politics. As Mouffe (2013) says, "[i]f there is anything that endangers democracy nowadays, it is precisely the rationalist approach, because it is blind to the nature of the political and denies the central role that passions play in the field of politics". Thus, democratic processes should take into consideration any irrational fantasies and desires that the public express. Their suppression may lead to repressed pain, fanaticism and totalitarianism.

Streaming media in relation to female continuity

In ancient medical and anatomical theory women had two mouths, the upper and the lower, connected through the neck. The lips of both these mouths guarded a “hollow cavity” (Carson, 1996, pg. 131) and they had to remain closed. Having two mouths that speak simultaneously is confusing and embarrassing, and this creates ‘kakophony’. Females were expressing something directly when it should have been said indirectly. This direct continuity between the inside and the outside is repulsive for the male nature, which aspires for self-control, interrupting this continuity and dissociating the inside from the outside (Carson, 1996, pg. 131). Women 'transmit' unfiltered information. At this point I would like to draw a parallel with streaming media, that has been used as a tool of direct and urgent communication for protesters, like in the case of the Occupy Movement. Similarly with the continuity I described before, streaming protocols and processes deliver unedited live messages that sometimes disagree with the mainstream current public opinion. At Occupy Wall Street, for example, streaming media, like Livestream, Ustream and Youtube stream, was a way for protesters to be immediately heard in public and to broadcast their own news online ("Multiplication..."). Thus, experts or official media platforms could not filter their speech and alter messages before they were spread online. The companies providing online streaming didn't agree with the actions and messages of the #occupy and thus they would publicly differentiate themselves from them. "Both Livestream and Ustream officials say they simply operate platforms and are not supporting the movements. They have made some adjustments on their platforms and provided some extra resources to accommodate Occupy movement video. Mr. Haot removed advertising from the Occupy channels after some brands complained that they did not want their ads appearing next to streaming video of protesters"(Preston, 2011). Similarly, radio streaming has been a way for activists, protesters and citizens to share their own news and music [example of wartime radio. Women in Afghanistan]. This unaltered and direct speech of (radio/streaming) broadcasting [(Ernst, 2016, pg. 104) more from his text] has similarities with the uncontrolled direct expression of the female bodies in public (like 'hysteria', 'aischrologia', 'ololyga'). There is a fear of continuity related to the message that comes out. unedited, from the inside of the human 'container' and its channels. This continuity seems to me like an 'embodied streaming' that relates the medium with the human body, based on the need for a message to be articulated and distributed to others. Live streaming provides the opportunity for a body to be present somewhere else, with a slight delay through the voice or a video representation. There is a small delay, the transmission delay [more on that].

Terms of the 'embodied streaming': >channels, flow, unedited, live, source, distribution, protocols, delivery systems [more]

caption Caption text

[Explaining the structure of streaming in relation to the structure of female continuity in the beginning of the paragraph: Streaming online depends on protocols that can stream directly or indirectly filter with TCP]

For an agonistic streaming [streaming media in relation to voice and gender and Hot media]

This uninterrupted continuity shows us that what is important is not the message but what is happening right now at present, and what practices of democracy are emerging. It is like Chantal Mouffe's 'agonistic' model of democracy, in which there is not an external power that filters the message and no time for thinking about future utopias and realities, but only what is happening now. It creates space, allowing conflicts to happen naturally. Streaming media reflects a sense of liveness and presence. There is no time to reflect or edit the message [Clara and pauline oliveros mediation, workshop at tender]. The audience receives the message directly from the proprietor and can see clearly who is broadcasting, what is the source, how it looks like.[text of chronopoetics] The democracy of agonism accepts all the ideas, thoughts and concerns on the table. [Through a healthy conflict...]

Conclusion

Marginalized modes of address share concerns that seem uninteresting for Western, formal, civilized society, which supports a democracy rooted in the politics of Ancient Greece. Because of their disparity, they are suppressed and accused as ugly forms, then filtered and censored before they being expressed in public. They share unfiltered, unedited messages that skip the rational sphere of speech. From my perspective, the medium used by these modes reflects their character. They are based on instant and urgent communication, liveness and a guerilla approach (from Multiplication...). Today, streaming media is used constantly by protesters or citizens to autonomously broadcast news and avoid government censorship. Streaming media is characterized by the distribution of unfiltered data, the sense of liveness and the continuity (direct distribution) of the message. In this essay I wanted to highlight how the use of streaming media and the concept of streaming in general can be related to these 'ugly' forms of mediation. How these kind of media transmit 'ugly' things, according to a rational society, and also, that marginalized people need this media to communicate, to establish their own voices, and to find space for their own desires. These ugly things may subvert, also, the formal society. I think that the acceptance of continuity and direct mediation can facilitate more democratic processes. As "the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions or to relegate them to the private sphere in order to establish a rational consensus in the public sphere. Rather, it is to 'tame' those passions by mobilizing them towards democratic designs" (Mouffe, 2013). Focusing more on the media that allow/facilitate this process to happen can open possibilities and alternatives of democratic processes. 'Embodied streaming' suggests resistance, with our unfiltered/uncontrollable mediated present selves/bodies.

2. The Monstrosity of the Female Voice

What modes: the annoying noise

In Ancient Greece, there was a superstition that associated high-pitched voices with evil. Human nature, as defined by the patriarchy, differs from the other animals' nature on the ability to articulate with sound and create ‘logos’ (speech). In the primitive stage of consciousness, "the brain was ‘bicameral’, with the right hemisphere producing uncontrollable ‘voices’ attributed to the gods which the left hemisphere processed into speech" (Ong, 2002, pg. 30). It was after the figure of Odysseus appeared that these voices didn't matter any more and the self-conscious mind was established. Through 'logos', humans can develop dialogue and democratic processes of communication and decision- making. All the other forms of expression are wild and therefore irrational, including sign language [example?] and the 'hysterical' exposures of women [more detail on describing why the noise is annoying]. Aristotle and his contemporaries believed that vocal sounds were based on physiognomy, particularly the genitals of a person, and that is why men speak at a low pitch. The high-pitched utterance of women, called 'ololyga', which was a ritual practice dedicated to important events of the life, like the birth of a child or the death of a person, was considered a 'pollution' of civic space. If expressed in public, they would create chaos and provoke madness. In mythology, when Odysseus awakens on the island of Phaiakia, he is "surrounded by the shrieking of women (...) and goes one to wonder what sort of savages or super-natural beings can be making such a racket". These women were Nausica and her girlfriends, described by Homer as "wild girls who roam the mountains in attendance upon Artemis" (Carson, 1996, pg. 125). Similarly Alkaios, an ancient poet that had been expelled from the city, where public assemblies took place, was disgusted by the presence of women’s voices talking 'nonsense'. In the ancient world, women were excluded, and so occupied the margins of society, the dark and formless space where speech and thus politics, were absent. This disorderly, loud female noise was related to an uncivilized, wild space and sound deemed politically incorrect. It seems like these primitive 'uncontrollable voices' became related to some modes of address that were reminders of the past condition of the human brain, judging it as having a malignant influence.
Today women in public life worry if their voices is too light or high to command respect. Thus radio producers and politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, are trained to learn how to speak in public, to deepen their voice and being taken seriously as a male speaker would do [interesting side note - "vocal fry" is a vocal effect whereby a woman's voice deepens slightly, criticised by many older men as "ugly" - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/24/vocal-fry-strong-female-voice deep voice bigger size of bodies---vocal fry mimic male deep voice? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_LmC-ynqGM]. Carson (1996, pg. 120) observes that the female voice in public is related to madness, witchery, bestiality, disorder, death and chaos. And thus has to stay hidden from sight.
Here I go on to list, from the text of Carson, how, since ancient times the female voice has been described;

(...)high-pitched (...) loud shouting, having too much smile in it, decapitated hen, heartchilling groan, garg, horrendous, howling dogs, being tortured in hell, deadly, incredible babbling, fearsome hullabaloo, she shrieks obscenities, haunting garrulity, monstrous, prodigious noise level, otherwordly echo, making such a racket, a loud roaring noise, disorderly and uncontrolled outflow of sound, shrieking, wailing, sobbing, shrill lament, loud laughter, screams of pain or of pleasure, eruptions of raw emotion, groan, barbarous excesses, female outpourings, bad sound, craziness, non-rational, weeping, emotional display, oral disorder, disturbing, abnormal, "hysteria", "Not public property", exposing her inside facts, private data, permits direct continuity between inside and outside, female ejaculation, "saying ugly things", objectionable, pollution, remarkable

Mechanisms of marginalization

The mechanisms of marginalization of these specific modes of address are based on control and filtering. One example is the repetitive action of self-control that comes from the ancient tactic of controlling emotional exposure of one's own. Carson (1996, pg. 126) says that patriarchal thinking on emotional and ethical matters is related to ‘sophrosyne’, or self- control of the body. A man is feminized when he lets his emotions come out, and so he has to control his body, and subsequently himself. "Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly" (Carson, 1996, pg. 129). It was believed that the masculine deep voice, by default, indicates self- control. So the doctors of archaic periods would suggest exercises of oration to men to cure the damage inflicted by repeated use of a loud, high-pitched voice. This means that they would practice public speech so to learn how to filter their inner emotions when they were externalized. In addition to that, so as to be taken seriously, a low-pitched voice would be the right one to use in public assemblies.
The female version of this practice was perceived more as a way for men to silence women when they were loud or screamed from pain or pleasure. Because they weren't able to control themselves by nature, this inability was related to animals and primitive human behaviors. Silencing of women, the female ‘sophrosyne’, had been an object of legislative arrangements in the ancient world. Women didn’t have the license to express their ‘noise’ in specific places and events, and there was a also a restriction over the duration, the content and the choreography of their rituals in funerals so that they wouldn’t create chaos and delirium. But there was a way to cure the women and city from this. Normally these unpleasant female tendencies had to stay hidden from the men’s view because were annoying, non-human and disorderly. But in Dionysian festivals the task of one selected woman would be to discharge the unspeakable things on behalf of the city, in a practice which was called ‘aischrologia’, that lead to ‘katharsis’, which means the 'clearance' of the soul. She was free to express all these weird noises but only then and for the benefit of society. ‘Aischrologia’ (pg.132-133) seems similar to the therapeutic practice of hypnosis on hysterical women by Freud, who aspired to resurrect this ancient idea. Their emotions, and unspeakable things, were polluting them inside, and employing a ‘talking cure’ or in other words, ‘katharsis’ would help them. Freud's 'talking cure' was concerned with channeling these negative emotions through politically appropriated containers, through 'speech'. [The silencing of women has to do also with the interruption of their voice when they express an argument in a dialogue and men are participating in it. example]

Shut out of the public: Separation of public and private space

Ancient Greek thinkers had set the gender binary and its reflection in the space. According to Kevin Fox Gotham (Ελιάνα Καναβέλη, 2012), territorial restrictions, identities and meanings are negotiable, as they are defined through social interaction and controversy. Thus, space is the material of the human action and the outcome of the social interactions. Western philosophical thought, based on ancient social structures, supports the division between the private and public domains. In public space everybody should be civilized and resolve conflicts through dialogue, but the interior of private spaces is ruled by a domestic power where violence is permitted. This separation has reached a point where men are the main political operators in public space. But the division is also between politicians and citizens, natives and immigrants, and experts and amateurs in rhetoric. Representations of gender and space are not immutable, but they consolidate dominant realities because of their repetition. Outside public spaces have historically been the main arena for male- gendered subjects. Public spaces has been turned in gender constructions that privatize men and female subjects are expressing their needs and desires through them. The social life of the latter is restricted by the 'housewifization' and the private abode of the house.
The dominant notion that men are the main operators within the public sphere, together with the idea that women are vulnerable and weak, leads to the normalization of fear of women in outside spaces. Their presence and safety in inappropriate and dangerous spaces is their responsibility. The idea that women are excluded from public space because of male violence doesn't mean that men direct exclude women. There are complicated power relations that create this exclusion. Freedom of speech relates to political participation, and in theory everyone can have it, but in practice unwritten rules and power relations define what is going to be said, and to whom. The factor of fear intervenes in that. These rules construct the public sphere and restrict female subjects in expressing harmless thoughts. The voices and speeches of women in public are directed to “non-listening ears” and they remain silent. [example of syrian wartime radio]

The Roots of Collective Voice

The voice is a medium for collective practice. According to Ong (2002, pg. 67), "[o]ral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading [of literate cultures] are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself". Orality, or thought and verbal expression which is not based on writing and reading skills, has still a presence in the contemporary western cultures. It has been transformed into a new orality that "has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment (...) But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality" (Ong. pg.13). However, the rational individualistic democracy stands against this collective vocalization that includes the sounds of all the other species and marginalized genders. But mainly it is a reminder of a primitive human mode of address that creates alienation and feelings of fear of looking back in our nature.

Conclusion

The association of the female voice with bestiality and disorder justifies the tactic of patriarchal culture to ‘put a lid’ on the female mouth since the ancient times. Different mechanisms have been developed to exclude specific forms of address from the public that are based on complicated power relations. Collective and female vocalizations are perceived as threats for the society and are undergoing filtration and 'normalization'.

3. Multiplication Vis a Vis Amplification

The mediation of voice through multiplication

Urban space hosts several political activities like squatting, demonstrations, politics of culture and identity that are visible on the street and non- dependent on massive media technologies. Since the beginning of human societies there has been a need for gatherings and sharing of knowledge through verbal communication. Today the agonistic dynamics of primitive oral thought, which have affected the development of western literate culture, have been "institutionalized by the ‘art’ of rhetoric, and by the related dialectic of Socrates and Plato, which furnished agonistic oral verbalization with a scientific base" (Ong, 2002, pg. 45). That is where speech acts come from. The presence of the bodies in a speech act provides a layer of trust and safety. [text of butler on public forums]. These bodies with their voices create and inhabit the space they are part of. In this way they materialize their needs. In a contemporary context, public speeches are happening in both physical and digital spaces with the help of several media like internet (podcasts and live streaming) and radio (community radios). In the diverse media landscape individuals or groups can easily form and communicate speeches happening in a physical space by themselves without being dependent on a newspaper, publisher, state or other institutional power. In the Occupy Movement ¹ both known and unknown public speakers would spread their messages to an audience by standing in a public square. This action followed the principles of the Speaker's Corner. "Speakers’ Corner symbolizes the kind of forum for debate sought for today’s post-industrial, highly mediated cities, encouraging face-to-face interaction and real-life conversation, albeit arranged by people texting each other, recorded by shooting and uploading video on YouTube, reported on twitter or documented on face book" (Speakers Corner Trust, no date). It is "the home of free speech, where anyone can get on their soapbox and make their voice heard" (Coomes, 2015). Anyone becomes a speaker in a public street or square and can be heard by passers- by. Part of the occupy events would be public speeches, often delivered by philosophers, writers, academics, resistance figures on the site of the occupied space. The audience would often be very big and thus an amplifier was needed for the voice of the speaker to be heard by everyone. However, in the case of the Occupy Wall Street, amplified sound devices, like microphones and megaphones, were only allowed outside in public spaces when special permission from the municipality was given ¹. But "when the technologies above them are removed somehow, the foundational elements remain embedded and embodied in our cyborg bodies and brains" (Pages, 2011). The participants of #occupy became the 'human microphone', as they called it. This means that all together they would repeat the words of the speaker for the benefit of those located in the rear. "Even given that many of the participants of #occupy are in full possession of smartphones, verbal address to the crowd from a singular source is still important" (Pages, 2011). The public space seems to exist in a more 'primitive' and embodied expression for the ones that lack platforms of representation. Saskia Sassen (2012, pg. ?) observes that in the cities today a big mix of people coexist. The ones who lack power can make themselves present through face-to-face communication. According to Sassen, this condition reveals another type of politics and political actors, based on hybrid contexts of acting, outside of the formal system. Kanaveli (2012) says that something that is visible and can be heard is reality and can create and give power. Site specificity is also very characteristic in these cases.
From my point of view, the Occupy Movement revealed a lot about the relation of the media technology with presence and resistance, as an amplified process, in public. What I find interesting is that those people, because of their multilayered relation to technology, like social media, are able to spread words and make them disperse virally on the Internet. As it can be seen from the Youtube videos documenting #occupy, the crowd uses a lot of different media technologies, like their smartphones, to record or stream the words of the public speakers on Livestream platforms. This process was also a way to archive and make public bottom-up initiatives in public spaces in diverse networks. At the same time there is a temporariness in this action as internet platforms are constantly changing or disappearing. So, the events and speeches are appearing in fragments of videos, transcriptions, and conversations in forums. It is more likely that the users, protesters are leaving as many traces online as possible; fragments of resistance. The multilayered communication of events is manifested in their urgent and fast multiplication, in different forms and spaces [more]. The use of all these media doesn't require any special skill and the presence of an expert is not required. So, mainstream media journalists are not always needed for news to spread to a wider public. This also means that messages aren't always edited or altered by large news media companies. "With cellphones, iPads and video cameras affixed to laptops, Occupy participants showed that almost anyone could broadcast live news online. In addition, they could help build an audience for their video by inviting people to talk about what they were seeing" (Preston, 2011)

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Multiplication could be seen as a way of manifesting parallel, multiple presences in diverse private and public places. Internet, “[r]adio and television have brought major political figures as public speakers to a larger public than was ever possible before modern electronic developments” (Ong, pg. 135). There are two ways of multiplication in the above examples. One is through a unified collective voice, and the other is messages through a networked web. The 'human microphone' example of collective voices in public, which is the 'ololyga', the female collective utterance (see 'Monstrosity...'). Even though this may not be a direct expression of resistance, it was an alternative temporary and informal [not specialized] mode of address that was suppressed and used only for specific occasions that became acceptable to the society at those times. The second case reminds me of the very ancient practice of gossiping [example of gossip-based algorithms/ Gossip protocol/ peer-to-peer communication]. It has a negative connotation especially when connected with women [text of Federici]. However, sometimes this is more an attempt to claim and exchange knowledge when there is no platform for those that practice it. In the relay of messages, the Internet and social media have the same 'baton effect' and even though this is misused by mainstream political voices, it also serves the voiceless [examples and images].

The mediation of voice through amplification

At some occasions, the amplification of the voice, as a mode of prohibition and presence, becomes possible both literally and metaphorically [definition of amplification]. This means that somebody can amplify their voice with the use of a microphone so to strengthen the signal on the spot, and at the same time to make themselves loud and present, so as to be heard over dominant others. For example, anti-fascist microphonic demonstrations in Greece, occupy a public square for a couple of hours using speakers, microphones or megaphones broadcasting music and speech.[Relatively nazi soundscapes with the megaphone and the van/the history back]

File:Mikrofoniki.jpg

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Suffragette speech-making workshops were a way to provide women with tools “with which to take their concerns out into the public domain” (Rose Gibbs, 2016), or in other words to amplify their voices in public. Speech was a civilized way to respond to domestic violence. Feminists focused on the voice because there is a uniqueness in it, that embodies the speaker when entering a dialogue. It is an approach that rejects the abstract and bodiless universal identity of one's person that has been developed by the western thought. By such an identity, I mean that one person is represented as a universal entity that shares the same characteristics and problems with all the people. So, this person can be represented by somebody else by proxy, like a politician or family member, in a conversation concerning her/his own body. But from a feminist perspective, each individual is unique and carries personal and situated problems and principles, so they are the only one that can represent themselves. Arendt () observes that the speech becomes possible with the existence of a group of people. Even more, the voice through speech- that can take the form of songs passing from one to the other or the collective voice of protesting- links one another and at the same time keeps the individuality of the speaker. In contrast to mainstream political spheres, feminists, like anarchists, looked for horizontal ways of communication where no voice dominated over others (Gibbs, 2016). Listening and waiting for everyone to speak, even the most timid ones, is a basic element of these kind of practices.

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In the examples of radio art and pirate radio activism, the temporariness and site-specificity of these actions- of prohibition, sharing of knowledge and communicating through voice- were tangled with the materiality and specificity of the medium. [In an interview I had with Reni Hofmüller it was a hit and run action...the radio station was a fragile hardware. Text of Dunbar]
Since 1920, radio was criticized as a wasteland of commercials and state propaganda. It was Bertolt Brecht that perceived it as transceiver to experiment with, and questioning its use, and Walter Benjamin [more on Benjamin text] who noticed that it would fail as long as the separation between practitioners and public dominated it. From early on, tight regulations restricted the electromagnetic public sphere so that artists didn’t engage deeply with its elements and it was constantly seen as “an unrealized and undertheorized social and aesthetic space” (Kanouse, pg. 87). Only pirate radio practitioners, with their low-tech practice and self-broadcasting, could interrogate the public, critical and political aspects of radio, as Brecht and Benjamin would imagine. Kanouse sees the use of prohibited technologies and the confrontation with these restrictions as a political act, one that can propose an “anti-authoritarian radical democracy” (Kanouse, pg. 89) through the formation of small groups that learn to broadcast and produce alternative media cultures. An unlicensed broadcast can challenge what public art wants to; the creation of a public sphere willing to interrogate the “democracy” of which public space is a part of.
She brings the example of a project, called Talking Homes by John Brumit, which was realized under the residency of the Neighborhood Public Radio (little NPR) arts collective of Detroit. The inhabitants broadcast personal stories through transmitters located in their houses and other buildings, revealing the struggle and the daily routine of these people living in degraded neighborhoods. The interviewers were trained by the artist to use their transmitters. It seemed that the exposition of the private sphere, reflected in the localization of the media and the gossip produced, to the public more clearly re-framed clearer the struggle for the neighborhood than big radio networks had. The public engagement, which was not of the typically privileged audience of art spaces, was deep even though the broadcast may have been illegal. The project embodied the spirit of NPR, characterized by the smallness, site-specificity and listener’s participation. Even though these small transmitters don't have many listeners because of their small range, NRC sees that as a way to link people and thus negates the previously mentioned separation of practitioner and public mentioned before. The little NPR, in contrast to National Public Radio (the big NPR), embraces amateurism on the base of its “polymorphous” structure [ref to Kanouse]. In other words, it embraces the instability, diversity, discomforts and the contradictions it produces.
The second project that Kanouse talks about is The Public Broadcast Cart made by Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, which is a portable home-made radio, broadcasting the voice of someone driving a cart in several places. The voice of the participant becomes public on site through speakers and extends to radio frequencies and the Internet. The legality of the radio cart doesn’t concern the present, public and this unusual object attracts their attention even more. Based on an open- source, pirate radio spirit, this offering of access to the technology refuses the specialization and the prohibition of the airwaves. The parallel expanses of the voice and the uncensored speech in three different public spaces occupies at the same time the physical, on-line and electromagnetic realm. The DIY electronic media empowers both individual and collective voices.

File:Broadcastcart.jpg

caption Caption text

cars together playing the same frequency. Similar to multiplication https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=28&v=GC8MIa98f-E, https://www.a-n.co.uk/events/temporary-local-broadcast/, http://www.tadeosendon.com/temporary-local-broadcast/

Caption text Caption text

These technologies of amplification devices, that relate the embodied and the distant voice, enhance the presence of the person carrying it. They give the ability to be here now and at the same time elsewhere [Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere]. The mediating role of all kinds of media that detach the voice from its physical proprietor, enables "its circulation in places and contexts in which physical bodies may not have access" (Panopoulos, no date) and enables others to listen to that speaker even if they are not sharing the same space. The medium still creates bonds between them, and channels for sharing knowledge, it always relates us to the absent other through the sense of listening.[Telephone Book, Ronell]
[example of feminist futurotopias]

During conflict in Syria, a group of people that wanted to broadcast their own news for the safety of the citizens and the avoidance of more killings, set up a radio station. Its programs would include urgent announcements of battles, strikes, and skirmishes, tutorials for medical care, music and other topical issues. The station, which was called Radio Fresh ¹, stopped to exist in 2016 because of a sudden intervention from Nusra, an extremist Islamist group. While it was on the air the male initiators invited women, who were mainly hidden in their houses, to produce their own programs. Some group of women decided to go and first learn vocal techniques. They then broadcasted their own music and speech, but after a while Nusra threatened to close the station if women didn't leave. "Nusra considered their voices shameful, a form of nakedness" (667: Wartime Radio, 2019), similar to the political nakedness that Carson refers to in her text. The voice of a woman is like her naked body, private data that she should be ashamed to expose. But isn't that also related to the political nakedness that the female voice has? This kind of male extremist group aspires to preventing women from political expression. After these threats, these women were helped to technically transform their voices from female to male [how? e.g. {using pitch lowering}].

Conclusion

The mediation of all these marginalized forms of voicing (see "Monstrosity..." ) is happening in conditions that escape the traditional ways of mainstream public platforms, which are dominated by expert males. The collective, or individual concerns of the ones that lack power is spread through different ways of mediation of their voice that bypass these mainstream, dominant modes. In this essay I have separated the examples of amplification and multiplication, but in conclusion these two terms are easily mixed together. All of them have in common the localization, the small scale, the refusal of prohibition and specialization, the participation and presence of people and temporariness. In this essay I will present examples of such practices. But they also have in common the spirit of oral cultures, that are based on presence and vocal expression though they exist in a contemporary western context that differs from them. As Ong (2002, pg.13) says, “[a]t the same time, with telephone, radio, television and various kinds of sound tape, electronic technology has brought us into the age of 'secondary orality'”.

General conclusion

Considering the questioning of how the female voice, which is seen as evil or negative, can inhabit public space and propose alternative democratic processes, I have mapped different aspects of marginalized voices and their mediation. Ancient thought on the female voice (as an ugly form of voicing) has affected the way women could speak in public till today. By associating it with bestiality and disorder, there was an excuse for patriarchal society to silence women and restrict them in the private space of their homes. The female voice is connected in general with the direct emotional vocalization, that resembles the vocal expressions of primitive oral cultures. The continuity of their speech, that connects their inside truths directly to the outside of their body, is confusing for men. Their mode of address is not the only, one that is submitted to filtration and control; the collective vocalization and any other form that deviates from the rational sphere of human nature, and threatens western society excludes them, despite its democratic profile. Women's messages contain 'irrational' passions and desires, and mediation of these messages, because of gender exclusion, happens outside of the main public platform, and with technologies that facilitate an expression characterized by urgency and directness. Practices, of those who are marginalized, embrace the multiplication and amplification of their voices in public, either using their bodies or low-tech apparatus. With these two ways they occupy the public domain. One of my main thoughts, has been around this idea of continuity of speech, that has been related to the two- mouthed female body. The relation between ways of prohibition of normative modes of address, and the mediation of a direct, unfiltered speech, suggests an 'embodied streaming'; a personal and horizontal way to express concerns in public uncontrolled by governments and representatives.

Notes

<a name="myfootnote1">1</a>: It is an international movement since 2011 for social and economic justice and new forms of democracy with meetings in public spaces

<a name="myfootnote2">2</a>: "In NYC, a sound permit is required in order to use these devices in public, and the police may, or may not grant the permit" (NewYorkRawVideos, 2011, note)

<a name="myfootnote3">3</a>: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/667/wartime-radio

Index

Absent Voice
Agonism Agonism (from Greek ἀγών agon, "struggle") is a political theory that emphasizes the potentially positive aspects of certain (but not all) forms of political conflict. It accepts a permanent place for such conflict, but seeks to show how people might accept and channel this positively. For this reason, agonists are especially concerned with debates about democracy. The tradition is also referred to as agonistic pluralism.
Amplification to increase the strength or amount of. Especially : to make louder. A figure of speech that adds importance to increase its rhetorical effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplification
Democracy
Embodied To incarnate, to incorporate
Female Voice high-pitched, loud shouting, having too much smile in it, decapitated hen, heartchilling groan, garg, horrendous, howling dogs, being tortured in hell, deadly, ...........craziness, non-rational, weeping, emotional display, oral disorder, disturbing, abnormal, "hysteria", "Not public property", exposing her inside facts, private data, permits direct continuity between inside and outside, female ejaculation, "saying ugly things", objectionable, pollution, remarkable (from Carson)
Individual empowerment
Invididual/Collective
Liveness
Mediate Occupy a middle position
Mediated Voice
Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy and writing are unfamiliar to most of the population
Past/Present Voice
Public Space is the space that hosts collective decision making activities, democratic processes and freedom of speech. Though many contemporary public spaces are controlled spaces that exclude many modes of address. Big corporations and states are defining the public space and it is more a space of consuming and public access instead of a free space for expression. This space refers to either physical or digital (Sassen...). There is a big separation between private and public spaces that has been established since the ancient philosophy.
Public Speech is the ability to talk in public about individual or collective concerns
Speech is the rational human way of expressing personal stories, opinions. It is what differs human from animals according to the patriarchal principles on human nature (Carson...)
Streaming Media A real-time process. Delivery systems inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps/hot media) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio CDs/cold media). Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real-time, as events happen, much as live television broadcasts its contents over the airwaves via a television signal. Live internet streaming requires a form of source media (e.g. a video camera, an audio interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the origination point, although it frequently is.
Streaming refers to the process of delivering, it is a steady current of a fluid, a technique for transferring data so that it can be processed as a steady and continuous stream.
Transmitting is the act of passing, communicating, sending, to spread from one to another
Voice is the vocal sound that comes from the inside of the body and articulates speech There are challenges with streaming content on the Internet. If the user does not have enough bandwidth in their Internet connection, they may experience stops, lags or slow buffering in the content and some users may not be able to stream certain content due to not having compatible computer or software systems.

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Revisions

23-1-2019
5-2-2019
12-2-2019