User:Max Dovey/Reading Writing Research Methodologies/TheVoice&NothingMore

The Voice & Nothing More

History of speaking things "You are just a voice and nothing more' Edgar Allan pose "Maelzel's chess player' in which he tried to disapprove the speaking device created by Wolfgang Von Kemplen (the same man who who made the Mechanical Turk). Kemplen would tour the mechanical turk and the Malzel - speaking device' around together. While the mechanical Turk was an illusion (the small human chess player inside) the impression of the Malzel was all too real - a detached voice and speaking subject was encountered. In 1780 there was a competition to produce an organ device that could produce phonetic vowels. Die Sprech Machine (1971) ( see 'mechanisms deer menschlichen Sprache' These early experiments in to speech simulation formed the basis for the speaking machine paper that Alexander Graham Bell wrote and went on to invent telephony.

Today All our social life is mediated by the voice, the voice is the instrument, the vehicle, the media, and the meaning is the goal. The voice is precicley what cannot be said 'Speech sounds are first and foremost entitles which are contrastive, relative and negative. There is no linguistics in the voice - There is only phonology. There is no linguistics in the voice There is no linguistics in the voice There is no linguistics in the voice There is no linguistics in the voice Prelinguistic and postlinguistic phenomena - the voices beyond the signifier.

Non-Voice (caughs and hiccups) Plato talked about hiccups being an intelligible voice. The presymbolic use of voice - the infants babbling. Experimentation with phonetics, sound and voice before training to use it in a codified way. pg 31 The child does not speak for himself. 'A la contrade' - to someone who can hear them to to the good listener to who they can send a greeting. There may be no linguistics in the voice, yet the non voice sound the carries the meaning is untamed by structure and is often undefinable.

We are all ventriloquists as the source of the voice can never be seen even when we see body + person talking there is detachment that is created by the speaking voice.Breath is the voiceless voice. In Munch's Scream the painting is a voice void and vacuumed from the image.

Voice & Authority The voice as authority is only one part of the story. On the hand it is also true that that the sender of the voice , the bearer of the vocal emission, is someone who exsposes himself and this becomes exposed to the effects of power which not only lie in the privilege of emitting the voice , but partially to the listener (pg 77) Too much ha been manifested and revealed by the voice and we fear disclosing 'too much' of ourselves in the noise. (pg 124) Lauschphatasie - "The fantasy of overhearing' This is why perhaps we don't like hearing our own voice played back - it reveals too much of ourselves. "It is the defines against the excessive nature of the initial moment , it frames the voice and underpins it with friction, it emerges in the place of understanding, instead of understanding , as a stand in for understanding, before the concluding moment when the true sense will finally be revealed and there will be no longer any need for fantasy. "

What can only be heard The time between hearing and understanding is precicely the time of construction of fantasies, desires, symptoms, there is never a point when one can say with clear objectivity and equanimity with calm composure 'so this is what it was all about, it was my parents having sex' everything would make sense but the sound leaves so much to be imagined. so much that cant be imagined as the very act of your parents having sexual intercourse is your inception and conception into the universe. The subject is always stuck between voice and understanding, caught in the temporality of fantasy and desire.

Words server as a raw material for unconscious process. What counts in them is their particular sonority, resonance, echos, consonances, reverberations, contaminations. We can take only the simplest of them. Freuds study of slips of the tounge followed by slips in speaking and reading (Versprechen und verlesen 1895) Stop Making Sense

The question 'How can sounds make sense?' must be enlarged ion another question 'How does language produce poetic effects? but on the way to making sense it always produces more than the sense catered for, the sound of language exceeds its sense.

The sounds of the title are not the phonologically relevant sounds, they produce an irrelevant surplus in the currency of sense , a frivolous addition, a supplement to the primary function of language. "Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves" - Lewis Caroll adaption of the popular phrase "Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves"

LALAnguage is to make language aesthetic pleasure.

The power of silence

Abbe Dinoart :L'art de se tiara (1770)  "The Art of Keeping Silent" 

Dinoart apposed the church and saw silence as the weapon against the flood of speech inundating the enlightenment century. Dinort diagnosis 10 different silences- 1. A prudent silence (A prudent man knows when to keep silent and when to speak) 2. A contrived Silence (used to confuse the other and to hide ones thoughts) 3. A Compilant Silence (so as not to infiltrate the other and keep out of trouble) 4. A Mocking Silence (expressing criticism and ironical distance) 5. A Spiritual Silence 6. A Stupid Silence 7. An Approving Silence 8. A Contemptous Silence 9. A Moody Silence 10. A Political Silence.

Dinoarts very attempts to make sense out of silence proves a tradition of attempting to find sense in phonetics, or the absence of phonetics, and that they all must have symbolic or coded meaning. The dispossession of the voice in the mist of the universe of speech there is a break introduced by silence, by this deaf voice which dispossesses all over. Voices disrupts the universe of sense.