vocalic projection: a work in progress

Music: Between Interval: Autumn Continent (2006)

Today I worked on two measley paragraphs. TWO. I am uncertain why it takes me so long to spit something out these days (well, that's not true: I know why, I'm just frustrated I cannot "bracket" as well as I once could). Once I get the thing rolling out, though, the writing spirit usually takes over, maranatha style. Maybe that will happen this weekend.

Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past is an awesome book, by the way. Reading this tome makes me nervous: my next book will simply pale in comparison to its brilliance. It's not discouraging; its just one of those books that, when you read it, gives one a sense of his or her place in the pecking order of good scholarship.

Anyhoot: here's a draft of the introduction of the current essay in progress:

On the Uncanny Voice of Acoustic Projection

Results obtained by my collaborators affirm the existence of the phenomenon, and unless the mind is immovably fixed on some preconceived theory, we seem to be faced with the inescapable conclusion that the voice-phenomenon confronts us with an autonomously existing world hitherto unknown.

--Konstantin Raudive (303)

For the Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive, "dead air" was not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps with the exception of local college and National Public Radio station broadcasts (respectively with their untrained "uh"-prone disk jockeys or those slow-speaking, commonly cold commentators), dead air is that unfortunate if not startling moment when a video or radio broadcast falls unexpectedly silent, rupturing the charged "flow" of broadcast with a blank screen or an audible buzz of ambient hiss (Williams 179-187). As one of the earliest pioneers of capturing "electronic voice phenomena" or "EVP," however, Raudive registered dead air as faint and often nonsensical messages from the dead, ghostly voices discernable only with an ear finely tuned to rapid, rhythmic streams of multilingual speech.

Inspired by the ghost voices accidentally discovered in the 1950s bird-song tape recordings by the Swiss artist Friedrich Jürgenson (Banks 77), Raudive devised a series of experiments in the 1960s in which he used a microphone and magnetic tape "to record the ambient sound in an apparently empty room. The experimenter then replayed the ten-to-fifteen-minute section of the tape several times, listening very closely for voices that emerged only with intense scrutiny and concentration" (Sconce 85). Raudive eventually moved on to finding EVP with a radio tuner, and then published his findings in English as Breakthrough: Electronic Communication with the Dead May Be Possible in 1971. Apparently the book was read by academics, psychics, and paranormal investigators worldwide, thereby spawning an EVP movement that was more recently popularized in the 2005 Hollywood horror misadventure, White Noise, and its stronger 2007 sequel, White Noise 2: The Light (Bander 9; Sconce 85).

Of course, many have dismissed EVP as the aural equivalent of the Rorschach inkblot test, which operates on a "hard-wired" human tendency to find patterns in otherwise nonsensical sensory stimuli (Banks 80; Nass and Brave 2-7). In addition to our well-documented and researched cognitive tendencies, however, the vocalic attribution that underwrites this postmortem preoccupation also participates in the affective processes of projection. As a common defense mechanism, projection typically refers to a practice whereby "qualities, feelings, wishes or even 'objects' which the subject refuses to [recognize] or rejects in himself, are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing" (Laplanche and Pontalis 349). As Joe Banks has detailed, however, studies from Gestalt psychological perspectives identify projection as a central mechanism of listening, such that our cognitive tendencies to "read familiar shapes into clouds, or melodies into the monotonous rattle of a train" are motivated by "emotional agendas," of which an individual may not even be conscious aware (78-79). For example, although an individual cannot help but recognize a pattern in a Rorschach inkblot, the character of what she sees is shaped by latent and overt fears and desires. Hence, projection is not simply a process whereby an individual displaces things she does not like about herself onto another (projection), for it is simultaneously a form of wish fulfillment (indentification). From a secular standpoint, then, EVP is a practice of acoustic or vocalic projection that bespeaks an unwillingness to accept mortality or, alternately, a strong desire for immortality.

A number of media theorists and historians have observed the constant and ubiquitous association between fantasies of immortality and communication technologies. John Durham Peters has argued a centuries-old belief in "soul-to-soul" communication, rooted in Plato and extended through the work of Christian theology, was literally amplified to a popular, Spiritualist craze by the technological innovations in the Nineteenth century (63-108). The "dream that electricity can mingle souls" was exacerbated by the advent of telepresence-via telegraphy and telephonics-and led to a popular movement with mediums claiming to be psychic telegraph and telephone operators to the hereafter (94). Jeffrey Sconce has shown that EVP and related spiritualist practices is also a consequence of disembodiment: the intellectual leap from voices of the living traveling across a geographical distances to the speech of dead souls traveling across the spiritual plane is a rather short one (59-91). Finally, Johnathan Sterne has demonstrated that from the advent of the wax cylender phonograph, writers interested in sound recording

repeatedly produced tracts on the possibilities for hearing voices of the deeased as some kind of guarantee or signature for the cultural and affective power of recorded sound. The chance to hear 'the voices of the dead' as a figure of the possibilities of sound recording appears with morbid regularity in technical descriptions, advertisements, announcements, circulars, philosophical speculations, and practical descriptions. (289)

Telepresence promised communication with deceased loved ones; sound recording, however, promised a new form of archival immortality-one that escaped the deadness of script to dwell in the interior presence of recorded speech.

Although fantasies about voices from the dead are ubiquitous in the history of modern communicative technologies, few scholars have explored why human speech is foregrounded and celebrated as the primary object of communication with the dead as well as the most cherished means of preserving them.[i] In the spirit of Walter Ong's work, in essay I argue that modern communicative technologies have "stepped up the oral and aural" in pursuit of Ong's now famous thesis: "Voice, muted by script and print, has come newly alive," even in after death.ii Of course, Ong is most known for arguing that the transition from an oral culture to a print culture effected profound epistemological changes. Perhaps contrary to the assumptions of some readers, however, in the 1960s and 70s he argued consistently that new visual technologies only increased the significance of voice and speech in Western culture. "Recordings and tapes have given sound a new quality, recuperability," said Ong, and, interestingly enough, at the very same time period that Raudive was recording and scrutinizing dead air.

What is it about the human voice that gives it such a special, ontotheological status for Ong and Raudive? What is the relationship between this privilege and sound recording? Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Mladen Dolar, Steven Conner, and others, in this essay I examine EVP and its demonic counterpart, backwards speech, in order to suggest that speech as such is uncanny, often provoking a deeply ambivalent, characteristically religious response of fear and hope from auditors. This response, in turn, is catalyzed and intensified by the practice sound recording, goaded by an archival impulse. Hearing voices in a recording of noise-from dead air, to the gurgles of one's coffee pot, to the sounds of a record album played in reverse-is merely an exaggerated form of vocalic projection that I argue is becoming increasingly common in our image- and screen-saturated environment: from the "black-box" recordings of downed aircraft, to the taped emergency phone-calls of Nine-eleven victims, to the saved voice-mail messages of a deceased loved one, vocalic projection has become a primary means by which we memorialize-and avoid-the dead.

Notes

[i] Stearne's history of sound reproduction is a notable exception. Although he does not grant ontological privilege to any one of the human senses (e.g., the assumption that visual studies has trumped sound studies, and so on), Stearne does underscore the fantasy of "idealized hearing (and by extension, speech)" that underwrites discourse about the possibilities of new communicative technologies (15). From Plato onward, hearing and speech are understood as "manifesting a kind of pure interiority," while seeing and vision concerns the outside and exterior. Consequently, the dead are often heard before-or if-they are seen.
[ii] Ong, Presence, 88.

the ethics of projection

Music: Claire Voyant: [self-titled] (1995)

Last week was admittedly a rough week for reasons both public and private, and thankfully the chaos of school starting provided just enough joy to have me laughing inside at the things falling apart; there's always clown inside the visibly mournful (counterpoint to Jack Nicholson's Joker). And in the key of mourning, I've been laboring on this holiday of un-work in discovery mode as I tinker on an essay tentatively titled, "On the Uncanny Voice of Acoustic Projection."

To abide by the dictations of our new Overman---the publisher, who has come to replace the editor just like the producer has replaced the film director ---I've been asked to cut 3,000-4,000 words from the review essay on speech. The perfect candidate for cutting is my running example of EVP (ghost voices caught on tape); so I figured I would parlay that material into a new, full-blown essay that I intend to reprint as an article and, later, a book chapter. The new essay argues something like this: recording technologies have amplified fantasies of communicative transcendence by catalyzing the archival impulse. The amplification of these fantasies are discernable in what I will term "memorial listening," the practice of discerning good voices or bad voices in recorded speech. My two examples are, of course, EVP (good voices) and backwards masking (bad voices). I argue that this amplification is the effect of three elements: a hard-wired tendency to hear in binary; a cultural fantasy of the angelic and demonic voice [they are the same thing]; and a sort of death-drive that Derrida dubbed "archive fever."

Father Ong was arguing about the "new vocality" in the 1960s, which was a consequence of the increasing accessibility of magnetic tape. Implicit in this newer vocality is the well-known spirit/letter distinction (the letter is dead, whereas the spirit, that animates dead things) that Derrida is careful to critique, and what I would write vis-à-vis presence and so forth is fairly predictable. What's got me intrigued today is Archive Fever, a talk Derrida gave at a symposium on the Freud archive in London and then later turned into a book/record (archived). I'm still working through it, but, Derrida's use of the archive as a metaphor for control with the death drive as the motor is pretty damn interesting, and really yields some insights regarding EVP that go beyond the obvious, psychoanalytic riff on projective identification and so forth. The oscillation between the archive (trace) and the repertoire (doing the archive, taking the photograph, capturing the voice) bespeaks the ambivalence of projective assignment: angelic voice or demonic growl? Well, that does depend on which illusion you prefer. EVP enthusiasts are looking for angels; concerned evangelical parents are hearing Satan urging young people to get naked. Oral historians, perhaps aware at some level of the instability of projection, avoid it altogether via transcription. In the move from speech to text, the voice beyond speech is put away, safely, and re-presented by the dead letter.

This got me to thinking about a disagreement with E! I had last week on the politics of projection. At my invitation she visited my "Rhetoric and Religion" class along with some other colleagues. To demonstrate the power of projection and its centrality to religious discourse, on the first day of class I hold a séance. In dialogue with certain students, in a darkened, candle-lit auditorium I speak with the relatives and loved ones that have passed on to the other side (think about Crossing Over with John Edward; that's pretty much my model). A number of students always drop (we lost about ten students to the séance, but gained a few more after word got out). A number of students are anxious to talk to me after the séance about their experiences with ghosts and spirits. In the course, we do not return to discussing the séance for another six weeks; my goal is to get students thinking: was it real or a put-on? This ambivalent feeling of doubt and wonder, of cynicism and hope, is the same affective response we have to the uncanny voice: angel or demon? Presence or illusion? I want students to drawn on this uncertainty so that by the time we discuss faith we have a shared experience.

Anyway, E! was angered because, if I was not really talking to dead people, then I have opened the course with a deceit. I replied that even if I admitted I was deceiving my students, its possible that spirits were making me do the séance in the first place. Nevertheless, for her, if I knew I was deceiving my students, then I was breaking an implicit contract with my students because I presumably stand on the side of truth. My response was that I do not stand on the side of truth, I stand on the side of training or experience or whatever, and my job is to encourage critical thought. To me, the dynamic behind religious discourse is projection (and now, also something like "archive fever") and I want my students to think about how projection goes wrong in extremism.

What point am I coming to here? Well, my point is that I tend to believe we live a fantasmic life and this creates a kind of ethical quandary. If (social) life is a collection of fantasies, and these fantasies always involve projection, what are better and worse ways of projecting? What's the criteria of judgment for projections? Having read Wired for Speech and some of the work coming out of the MIT speech labs, I'm also inclined to believe that we cannot help ourselves: our brains must attribute, and it's hard to keep the processes away from binarism. When you add into this tendency our cultural fantasies of good and evil, or---noting Derrida's insistence that the archive is always about state power---friend and enemy, then the identitarian logic of the Same seems almost inevitable. So: what if psychics and mediums help others to grieve their loved ones? What if no physical or psychological harm results from dialoging with spirits? What if discerning my deceased wife's voice in the white noise of the television set is a comfort? Is there an ethical misstep here?

Obviously, these days (with apologies to Badiou) a retreat to truth is not an option. It would seem more ethical to adopt a posture of hospitality, as it were. So if we displace the possibility that good and bad voices are really centered as either, it would seem the responsible route is one of unsettled certitude. Whence, then, enjoyment? Judgement? The enjoyment of judgement? The Law?

Last week, the day before the séance, my therapist described me as a hopeless romantic. I recognize the Truth in that.

things falling apart

Music: Kirilian Camera: Eclipse (1988)

Things Falling Apart is the title of a less than successful Nine Inch Nails album. It is also my theme for the past week:

• One of the upper-legs of my coffee table has finally given way. I got a new paycheck and, therefore, a new coffee table should arrive in the mail this week.
• Yesterday my Airport Extreme thingie was not transmitting properly. I went to unplug it as the troubleshooting guide instructs you to do, and the plug itself came unhinged from the base. I am now without Airtunes to my infinite chagrin. Worse, the budget cuts at UT mean that I will have to purchase its replacement myself. Boo. What a shitty design for an Apple product.
• When I restart my laptop, it takes two and a half hours for it to reboot. When I run Disk First Aid, it says "no volume repair needed."
• I tried to burn a DVD on my desktop. I received a "drive failure" report. I tried to burn a CD-R. Same message. Also, after about six hours of being on my desktop cursor is unable to click on anything, but freely moves around the screen. When I run Disk First Aid, I get the message "Unable to repair volume; fatal error on exit." So now I must decide: which sick computer do I take into repair first. It's a gamble.
• Because of the previous two incidents with my computers, I recently purchased a 750 GB external drive to back up my documents (mostly my MP3 collection, which is comprised of my 4,000 CDs in addition to my legal downloads, about 1,000 more songs). It seems to be working beautifully and after three days I'm almost done backing up, but I predict disk failure at any moment.
• Jesus, King of the Indoor Poo, has re-earned this title. For the past three days he has consistently pissed and shat in the house. He also knocked over a bunch of paint on the downstairs tile floor (I was painting a new garden gnome). This, after almost two weeks of pretty good potty behavior. I am uncertain if this is the last gasp of a habit (so-called "extinction of habit" symptoms) or my failure to be a good doggie parent and notice when he has to go. Although he is a sweet doggie, I'm having second thoughts about keeping Jesus; the constant stress caused by his elimination habits (not to mention the $200 I just spent replacing a couch cushion for such habits) is wearing me down. He is now fully crate trained (yay) and does a couple of tricks (sit and beg), but the little guy has gone through a gallon of "Simple Solution" stain and odor remover. [just as I'm about to post this, he comes and sits in my lap and looks lovingly at me; . . . awwww . . . bastard!]
• I cannot keep my night guard in my mouth at night; I always awake to find myself sleeping on it. I've noticed that my teeth have been extra sensitive the past few days.
• Eudora, my email client, has been discontinued. The university no longer supports it. For the past week I have been trying to use Thunderbird. For a reason apparently beyond my capacity to apprehend, the SMTP server information is incorrect. I can only receive mail; I cannot send it unless I use my notebook computer or a web-based client on the desktop.
• For the past four days my DSL connection has been intermittently dropping me. The week before last I had a similar problem, which led to staying at home all day for two days so that a technician could come out. They replaced both my line and my modem. Things were fine after the second visit, and then, four days ago, the dropping started again. AT&T cannot figure out what the problem is, even after downgrading me to a lesser speed.
• I have had a recurring dream the past few days or so: I am asked to teach a class, or consult on a legal case, but I'm bluffing. I have no idea what I'm doing. For example, last night I dreamed I was teaching an adult education class on the Italian occult tradition; I was in front of the classroom about to open my mouth when I awake. In these dreams, just about the moment that someone is going to call my bluff, I awake.
• I'm off for my first UT football game ever. I predict, owing to my presence, the Longhorns will lose.
• I could go on. But if I do, I am fairly confident I will spill my Tab energy drink on the keyboard.

scripted

Music: Today on NBC

When I was a senior in high school, during my last semester, a rumor was circulated that I was spotted at a downtown club kissing another boy in a parking lot.

It was true that I was a "club kid"---every weekend my friends and I used to drink, drop, and go to a club called Boys and Girls, which then moved and renamed itself Plastic. I don't doubt that I was spotted out and about town on the weekends (with gaudy mod or goth drab and hair that stuck straight-up, I was hard to miss). But I do not recall making out with another guy in high school—which is my loss, of course, but back in the 80s sexual experimentation twernt quite as permissible as it is today.

Regardless, what really upset me was that the high school wrestling coach, who also taught advanced algebra, was relating this rumor to his classes. Is it true, he would ask each period of mostly seniors, that "your class president is gay?" I got word of this, and one day during the last period (like around 1:30 p.m I think) I walked out of English and into his classroom. He looked up in mid overhead-projecting action, and I remember saying, defiantly, that I was not gay and the rumor circulating was not true and that I didn't appreciate his talking about it in class. I was angry, but I suspect I came off as fairly polite.

Surprisingly, there was little fall-out. The stories that I fantasized would circulate about my outburst didn't circulate. One would expect some disciplinary action---that Coach would've turned me in. He didn't, which means the reports of his rumor spreading were probably true.

I learned later, the year after I graduated, he was fired for having sexual relations with a high school student.

Memory of this rumor came to mind when I heard on the radio Idaho Senator Larry Craig passionately deny that he was gay after being arrested---and pleading guilty---for cruising in an Atlanta Minneapolis airport bathroom. Apparently rumors of his liaisons had been circulating for years. His defiant speech reminded me of my own, the speech of a smug 18 year old moving out of state for college (virtually unheard of in Snellville, Georgia at that time, the Spring of 1992).

If I could re-live my high school moment, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have said anything, but simply let people wonder (you'll get hit on twice as much). Senator Larry Craig, however, doesn't have this option because of the self-destructive, teenager script he has elected to follow: rather than acknowledge his homoerotic feelings, he acts out in binarism (secret liaisons, then public persecutions of gay people and denials). There are only two routes to go by today: complete denial, or rehab. What makes either script so ridiculous is that they are so cinematic and evangelical: hasn't everyone seen American Beauty at this point? Hasn't Reverend Ted Haggard taught us what being the poster boy for the "repressive hypothesis" entails? Craig provides yet another example of the real-world labor of fantasy. The fantasy of denial, as the film teaches us, is one step-away from violent rupture.

voicing chocolate rain

Music: The The: Dusk (1993)

Some stay dry; others feel the pain.

I read in the newspaper this morning that Internet celebrity Tay Zonday (real name, Adam Bahner), a very smart American Studies graduate student at my alma mater, has been at the center of a publicity explosion. He's been on television numerous times (most notably on the network show i-Caught, CNN, and Jimmy Kimmel Live). His claim to celebrity circulation is a bad YouTube.com video of his musical genius, "Chocolate Rain." His voice seems unusually low for such a young face (he is 25), and the song's topic and lyrics are—well, they are cheesy.

The story in the Austin American-Statesman this morning detailed the tension in Zonday's celebrity: although the song is about the suffering of racism, its popularity concerns a deliberate avoidance of that topic. All but one of the parodies on YouTube.com seem to highlight the mismatch of the vocalic body (that is, the imagined body we tend to associate with voices) and Zonday's boyish figure instead of race. This mismatch---which Michel Chion has also termed the "acousmatic voice"---is the publicity propellant. It is the same uncanny effect that Citibank used to promote its identity-theft program. It is the same effect that is central to horror films (think here of the prank caller inside the house, or Mother's voice in Psycho).

What's interesting to me about this video is the intersection of race, the acousmatic voice, and Internet publicity. Zonday has said that while he is disappointed the video doesn't encourage critical thought, he recognizes its popularity has to do with its "quirkiness." Of course, part of its kitsch appeal has to do with the word "chocolate," which has long been associated as a fun/funky term in popular music for black folks (we can thank Parliament and the blacksloitation films for that)---and it seems whenever this fun term is used in a serious way it draws ridicule. To his credit, on interviews Zonday often overcomes the ridicule by attempting to bring attention back to race when he is given the chance. He is sometimes astonishingly blunt, which is refreshing to hear and read.

What is implicit in many of Zonday's remarks---and this is really fascinating stuff to me---is the way voices are raced. In their interesting book on the social science of speech, Wired for Speech, Clifford Nass and Scott Brave argue that our brains are "hardwired" to instantaneously imagine a body for voices that we hear (bearing out Conner's theory of vocalic bodies in his book Dumbstruck). The most fundamental attribution is that of gender, which is not hardwired, but rather, for cultural reasons and a hardwired over-reliance on binarism, the second object lesson of self-consciousness (the first, of course, is "me" and "not me"). Nass and Brave suggest that further associations of identity are also culturally learned later; next comes geographical location (which is associated with accents) and, finally, class and race. They suggest among least reliable attributions is, in fact, that of race (think of the stink over Hootie and the Blowfish many years back; white voice, black vocalist). Nass and Brave suggest we cannot help to make these attributions because of the way our brains process information.

Zonday's deep, baritone voice and articulate speech contracts with the funk implicit in the word "chocolate," so certainly there is an attribution of class and race here. "Chocolate" needs to be pronounced with a grain that reeks James Brown's sweat or Bootsy Collin's whiney pelvic thrusts. Aside choosing the right word to express the suffering of racism, however, Zonday's voice itself simply does not play by the vocalic rules of race. This is, in part, a consequence of his musical background (or rather, lack of it); the video is "weird" because Zonday's voice refuses to submit to our tidy categories---of the way in which we have been taught to recognize black voices.

I think Zonday's (usually implicit) suggestion that the attention given to his song and video is racist is correct, but perhaps for reasons that we hear, not necessarily for reasons that we see. The party-line of critical race studies usually adopted by (of course) white people, including this white guy, is that race is socially constructed. The argument usually goes like this: believing is seeing, that before one sees race she has internalized the categories that make it possible to recognize it. What this video teaches us, though, and I think in a way that is much more persuasive once it is pointed out, is that believing is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, hearing.

I think this point has important implications for how we teach critical race studies to our students in the classroom, which usually orbit race as "color." I am not sure what those implications are at the moment, but it will be my project to figure it out in Spring 2008, when I'm on leave. I'll be studying the "Voices from the Days of Slavery" audio archive at the Library of Congress. The circulation of Zonday's voice is a startling and useful way for me to think about the human voice vis-à-vis publicity and identity construction and authenticity. And the idea of a sonorous archive. In a very odd way, "Chocolate Rain" challenges many of the assumptions of those at the LoC who put together the audio archive of "slave voices." Well, hmmm. I'm still thinking about it.

At this point if you've not seen the video on-line or on television, then you probably live in a electricity-free shack in Montana, but here it is nevertheless:

the importance of being secret

Music: Peter Gabriel: Two (1978)

A short, 1,500 word article that shall appear this fall in the Scottish Rite Journal. I suspect it will be heavily edited because the audience will expect less of a scholarly tone (and because I usually write for other academics, I need help un-learning some academese). The longer, 12,000 word essay upon which it is based will appear in Rhetoric & Public Affairs this winter. Finally, a revised and modified re-vamp of the R&PA version will be reprinted in the Masonic scholarly journal, Heredom, sometime next year.

Over the past year at my home lodge in Austin, Texas, we have entertained over a dozen of young men in their twenties interested in learning more about the Craft. These young men are sometimes friends of brothers, however, the majority of them came to our lodge because of an Internet search for local lodges inspired by a genuine curiosity about the Masonic Mysteries. Unquestionably, Dan Brown's wildly successful mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code, the film version of that novel, and the publicity the fraternity has received as a consequence, are responsible for the recent, renewed interest in Masonry among the general public. The young men who appear at our door sometimes speak of a passed relative who was a brother, however, more frequently they mention an interest in the secrets that a beloved grandfather "took to his grave," or express excitement over the spiritual and moral teaching exclusive to our brotherhood. In other words, it seems that the same sense of mystery that inflames readers of The Da Vinci Code to continue turning pages is also that sense of mystery that goads potential Entered Apprentices through our lodge doors. For this reason, as well as others I shall suggest, the recent efforts to downplay the secrecy central to the Craft in the popular media may be doing more harm than good.

Owing to the public interest inspired by the entertainment industries, a new commercial market for Masonry has emerged in the past few years: Christopher Hodapp's Freemasonry for Dummies, S. Brent Morris' The Complete Idiot's Guide to Freemasonry, and John K. Young and Barb Kari's The Everything Freemasons Book have been published for a general audience, and the History Channel produced and aired a number of programs that were either directly about or concerned with Freemasonry. During the week that The Da Vinci Code film debuted in the United States in April, 2006, the American Broadcasting Company aired a tour of the House of the Temple and interviewed a number of Masonic leaders for their Good Morning America program. From a historical vantage, all of these recent forms of publicity are noticeably different from the ways the fraternity has responded to public scrutiny in the past: they are characteristically invitational and, sometimes, dismissive of fraternal secrecy. For example, in his interview with Charles Gibson for ABC, Richard E. Fletcher denied Freemasonry was a secret society. "There are parts [of Masonry] that are private. . . . if you're talking about what goes on behind closed doors and all those secret things. They're not secret. They're private." Similarly, in his Freemasons for Dummies book, Hodapp stresses that a better way to describe our secrecy is as follows: "what goes on in a lodge room during its ceremonies is private."

The problem with these newer forms of publicity is that they downplay the central function of secrecy to our community in the language of privacy. Of course, many of the ways of identifying fellow Masons have been published in books and on the Internet, and blow-by-blow accounts of each degree are relatively easy to find; these are not only what I mean by "secrets." Masonic secrecy also refers to the endlessly deferred mystery of Masonic understanding: in the early degrees one is told the meaning of a given symbol, however, successive degrees teach the light-seeker that there are yet more meanings to be revealed, many of which can be specific to each individual Mason. Furthermore, I submit secrecy is not simply a content or a "what," but also a form or a "how." For example, when a candidate first takes the obligation, it concerns a secret that he does not yet know. His solemn agreement is literally a blind one, signifying his faith in a community of strangers and his ability to trust others who have made the same promise. Making an obligation in ignorance is, in fact, the basis of our democracy and the rule of law: as U.S. citizens, in blindly promising to abide by the laws of this country irrespective of race, religious orientation, gender, and so on, we are made equal. Furthermore, by promising to keep the secrets of Freemasonry, a brother becomes accountable to others, subjecting himself to the judgment of those who have gone before him. The bond between men forged by the obligation requires secrecy for the mortar of trust and faith. The dynamic of secrecy and revelation makes a brother; privacy does not.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the disavowal of secrecy among certain Masons in the public eye is the recent trend to devalue the secrets themselves. To a television audience of millions Fletcher told Gibson that "the handshakes---if you want to go in that direction---the handshakes are a throwback to our early days when Freemasonry was related to actual builders in stone," as if today these are somehow not important. The devaluation of secret content also includes summary dismissals of some of our most venerated Masonic philosophers. In his Freemasonry for Dummies, Christopher Hodapp writes that "Albert Mackey, Manley Hall, Arthur Edward Waite, and Albert Pike" have "filled reams of paper with scholarly observations of Freemasonry," which amounts, apparently, to so much "Masonic mumbo-jumbo." He continues the "works of these men were filled with fabulous tales and beliefs and cultures and cryptic theories of the deepest and earliest origins of Freemasonry. In short, they wrote a lot of crap." Today it seems complete openness---to the point of being flip, in fact---about one's life and a willingness to be surveilled, signified by the popularity of YouTube.com and MySpace.com, has almost become an imperative. Should we worry, then, that the contemporary lust for publicity has infiltrated our fraternity? Should we worry that some of our most respected and gifted Masonic leaders are explaining away, and sometimes dismissing wholesale, the Mystery tradition of our Craft?

Of the many young men who have shown an interest in petitioning Austin Lodge 12 in the past year, one quality is constant: curiosity. Curiosity about the Masonic Mysteries is the fuel that drives Masonic study and continued interest in our centuries-long teachings. These young men are not simply interested in fellowship, or in a generational legacy, or in participating in our valuable charity work; they are also interested in learning more about our symbols, our teachings, and our secrets. They are interested in "more light," which is---as any Mason who has studied our philosophical works quickly learns---inexhaustible. Curiosity is an important quality for a good Mason, but if we keep explaining away our secrets or dismissing our Masonic forbears as worthless and our traditions as "throwbacks," and if we abide these with a posture of complete openness and transparency, the Craft may continue to receive petitions, but they will not necessarily be from curious men hungry for Masonic knowledge.

Today our world is characterized by a lust and zeal for publicity, and Freemasonry has been, from its inception, an exclusive, secret society. The pressure to divest Freemasonry of its secrets is thus only equaled by the demands made of the fraternity after the Morgan Affair in 1826. Hence, it is time again for us to reconsider the underlying assumption of many recent attempts to promote Freemasonry. Some of us believe that the health of our fraternity is measured by the size of our membership. Unquestionably, this belief has lead to the disavowal and devaluation of Masonic secrecy and secrets in mass media promotions. Others of us believe, however, that a stronger fraternity is made by curious Masons thirsty for the Mysteries and our long tradition of contemplative scholarship. This less popular belief requires more public circumspection about our history and teachings. Nevertheless---and regardless of one's stance on the divide between quantity and quality---I suspect that most of us would agree that a good Mason respects the fraternity and keeps his word.

my other so-called life

Music: Ambulance Ltd: [self-titled] (2004)

It has felt this week like school is already in full swing, although classes do not begin until next week. I am already reading and thinking about my lectures next week (I will need to research my graduate class lecture this weekend), getting jackets to the dry cleaner's, and meeting with students. I do enjoy my job, and I am looking forward to teaching and writing as a diversion from myself, but I really didn't get much of a vacation this summer (friggin' home repair killed any travel plans). And as I near the tenure review process (which begins next summer, I think), I worry about how underdeveloped my life is outside of the academy.

For starters: my DJ-business has gone one full year without a gig. I should resolve this year to be more proactive with that. First step: business cards. Second step: purchase a fog machine (I discovered at the Walpurgisnacht party that my old one burned out). Third step: get my DJ booth banner silk-screened with logo. Forth step: advertise in the school newspaper. In addition to generating some spending money, you can meet a lot of people through DJ-ing, and it is kind of fun.

Another outside of school element to cultivate: doggie manners. Jesus is signed up for ten training sessions. I forgot he was supposed to go to attention training last night. Ooops. He is now barking like a madman. I need to figure out how to get him to stop barking at everything (this morning, he went ape-shit over a corner of the newspaper that was flapping because of the ceiling fan).

In addition to trying to get out more to see shows (I saw two this summer), I’ve also worked hard on being more active in Freemasonry. This summer I have been going to the lodge almost every week, and getting to know some of the "brothers" a little better.

Yesterday I wrote an article (2000 words) for the Scottish Rite Journal, sent it off, and went to see the personal trainer. When I returned home after an hour-long commute on Mo-Pac in sweaty clothes (traffic here in Austin sucks), I discovered with an email check that the editor of the journal had already accepted the damn thing! If only academic publishing was so speedy. I'll post the article if there's interest, although it's based on an argument I've made here on the blog before: some of our respected and talented Masons are "betting the farm" by publicly declaring Masonry's secrets are all published. They seem to forget that in a number of the degrees brothers are told that the real secret has been lost.

I also enjoy gardening, but it's been so darn uncomfortable outside the only time one can do it is early in the morning. My garden is burning up in the sun, anyway (it's garden ugly time).

Regrettably, I don't really have the time to cultivate more life outside of work (at least when school is in session), but even with exercise, DJ-ing, gardening, dog training, and the Masons, it seems like there is room for something else. Perhaps it is "starting a family," as my parents remind me in mournful tones. Perhaps I just need to take up guitar?

cities of the dead

Music: Chillout 2003: The Ultimate Chillout

This, my friends, is the world's largest Jackalope. Or so the sign says, and you can sit on him for a dollar. He was the featured attraction at the Pioneer Emporium Cowboy Museum in Pioneer Town, a roughly two-acre development that was built in Wimberley, Texas following the second world war. The town extends two blocks, beginning with a charmingly anachronistic shack built out of coke bottles (you could peer inside the front door and see a model train that clearly had not been operated in twenty years). There's a saloon, a bank, an operative two-room hotel, a game room, and other necessities (tellingly, there was no brothel).

In addition to the hammock and hot tub lounging, Pioneer Town was the highlight of my and Brooke's three day "vacation." We vowed not to work the whole weekend and do a lot of nothing. We watched trashy television (Flava of Love 3 on VH1); we peered off the back porch at the waterfall behind our cabin; we hot tubbed with margaritas (which is apparently a no-no); we cooked dinner; we played Scrabble, and so on. But Pioneer Town was just the sort of David Lynchian feature that got me excited and troubled, the apex of our much too brief vacation: this place may have been popular in the 50s, but now it is literally a ghost town. I know there is a lot of literature out there on tourism and ghosts, but still: I think there's a lot to say about the assumptions behind such a strange amusement, assumptions about whiteness and values and . . . getting a haircut.

You cannot enter the buildings, but rather, must peer through plexiglass to see what is going on inside the them. We caught a mannequin cheating in a poker game (he was also missing two fingers). We spied a family getting ready for bed (or something like that). But the creepiest was the man getting a haircut and a shave. Someone had glued fake hair to the man's face on one side to simulate some hair-action. And then we discovered the barber's hand had---terrifyingly!—fallen off.

I was haunted by this hand in a dream last night, in fact. Fortunately, all I have to think about is this breath-taking art that was in our bedroom and peace is restored.

The people of Wimberly were nice, just like small-town folk. The town square is supposedly full of antique shops, but really, it's just knick-nacks and other useless detritus (you know, angel sculptures, wreaths, random signs to hang in your home that read "peace," or "happiness"). Two of my favorite sound bites of the day: Brooke and I are entering a Western weapon and jewelry shop. Two middle-aged women are looking at a display outside, and one of them sits in a lounge chair made out of branches: "Oh Baaaaaarrrrrrrb, you just gotta sit down. This is sooooooo comfortable." She was serious. Second bite: Brooke and I want to go to a thrift store on the edge of town. We near the door, and discover that although Wimberly depends on tourism to survive, the shop closed at 2:00 p.m. It was 1:54 p.m. An elderly lady hobbles by holding a lamp on her way to her car. She says, in a you-should-know-better tone: "I'm sorry, we're closed. It's Saturday in Wimberly!"

One night we ate at one of the worst restaurants I have ever dined in, Juan Henry's, on River Road. This was two restaurants---a steak house and a Mexican place---that was combined under one roof. I had fahitas that consisted of microwaved fahita meat from the previous day. What was surprising, though, is that the place was absolutely slammed with people (standing room only in the waiting room). Small towns [sigh].

Finally, one of the biggest surprises of our vacation was CNN. I do not have cable, and have not watched cable since I last traveled for a conference (which was, uh, NCA a year ago). On Sundays I am addicted to Meet the Press and so on, and we didn't have any local networks. So I turned to MSNBC. Informercial. I turned to CNBC. Show about India's economy. I turned to CNN. They were discussing Lindsay Lohan. I turned to CNN's Headline News: Hurricane Dean is coming. Then, the "lead" story was about a woman who dirtied her wedding dress at a county fair in Iowa. I was dumbfounded: what happened to the news? I mean, I cynically teach this stuff in class, but I had no idea cable news had become that bad.

So we drove home Sunday, two days too soon both of us thought. I bought a new garden gnome in Kyle, Texas. I'm painting him this week. He should be properly installed in my garden before the first day of class.

Gallery of our trip here.

happy fifth anniversary, rosewater

Music: The Tear Garden: To Be An Angel Blind, The Crippled Soul Divide (1996)

I have returned from a lovely holiday in Wimberly, Texas, where Brooke and I lounged and toured. Details about Wimberly, and the uber-creepy Pioneer Town, in a future post. Now life is about catching up on email and trying to keep promises before school duties bury me alive.

Saturday was the fifth anniversary of the Rosewater Chronicles. I have been blogging since 1998. I began this dubious practice on livejournal, then moved to blogger for this journal's debut in 2002. Now this blog is housed on my friend's server and uses wordpress software.

To commemorate this monumental achievement, I thought I would paste in my first Rosewater Chronicles post. The post answers a common question ("how did your blog get its name?") and also details my nervous jitters as a newly minted assistant professor. Egad. It's fun and disturbing to read.

Also, to help celebrate and to get my inner-Narcissus aroused, I'd invite readers to rummage around in the archives and share with us their favorite post (or three) from the past five years in the comment section. I'm curious to know what kind of things folks have enjoyed reading the most. I might create a "Rosewater Chronicles Greatest Hits" page or something.

Anyhoo, without further ado, the first post of the Rosewater Chronicles:

Sunday, August 18, 2002

I thought it was time for an update on my whereabouts, my state of mind, and my thoughts about the meaning of life in general, as well as the price of grits in New Orleans per pound (generic, $1.00; brand name, $1.35 to $2.39).

I begin with a perfect, representative peroration from Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. to Major General William D. Connor, superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, dated March 30, 1937:

"My Dear General Connor:

"Your letter requesting my formula for mixing mint juleps leaves me in the same position in which Captain Barber found himself when asked how he was able to carve the image of an elephant from a block of wood. He said that it was a simple process consisting merely of whittling off the part that didn't look like an elephant. The preparation of the quintessence of gentlemanly beverages can be described only in like terms. A mint julep is not a product of a formula. It is a ceremony and must be performed by a gentleman possessing a true sense of the artistic, a deep reverence for the ingredients and a proper appreciation of the occasion. It is a rite that must not be entrusted to a novice, a statistician nor a Yankee. It is a heritage of the Old South, an emblem of hospitality, and a vehicle in which noble minds can travel together upon the flower-strewn paths of a happy and congenial though. So far as the mere mechanics of the operation are concerned, the procedure, stripped of its ceremonial embellishments, can be described as follows:

"Go to a spring where cool, crystal clear water bubbles from under a bank of dew-washed ferns. In a consecrated vessel, dip up a little water at the source. Follow the stream through its banks of green moss and wild flowers until it broadens and trickles through beds of mind growing in aromatic profusion and waving softly in the summer breeze. Gather the sweetest and tenderest shoots and gently carry them home.

"Go to the sideboard and select a decanter of Kentucky Bourbon distilled by a master hand, mellowed with age, yet still vigorous and inspiring. An ancestral sugar bowl, a row of silver goblets, some spoons and some ice and you are ready to start.

"Into a canvas bag pound twice as much ice as you think you will need. Make it as fine as snow, keep it dry and do not allow it to degenerate into slush. Into each goblet put a slightly heaping teaspoonful of granulated sugar, barely cover this with spring water and slightly bruise one mind leaf into this, leaving the spoon in the goblet. Then pour elixir from the decanter until the goblets are about one-fourth full. Fill the goblets with snowy ice, sprinkling in a small amount of sugar as you fill. Wipe the outside of the goblets dry, and embellish copiously with mint.

"Then comes the delicate and important operation of frosting. By proper manipulation of the spoon, the ingredients are circulated and blended until nature, wishing to take a further hand and add another of its beautiful phenomena, encrusts the whole in a glistening coat of white frost. Thus harmoniously blended by the deft touches of a skilled hand, you have a beverage eminently appropriate for honorable men and beautiful women.

"When all is ready, assemble your guests on the porch or in the garden where the aroma of the juleps will rise heavenward and make the birds sing. Propose a worthy toast, raise the goblets to your lips, bury your nose in the wind, inhale a deep breath of its fragrance and sip the nectar of the gods.

"Being overcome with thirst, I can write no further.

"Sincerely, Lt. Gen. S.B. Buckner, Jr., VMI Class of 1906.

If you read Buckner's letter without skimming and enjoyed it, Baton Rouge is a great place for you to relocate. Please come join me, and we will frost goblets and partake in the nectar of the gods.

The length of Buckner's recipe for a julep (which is only three lines long in the New York rendition) is a good analog for the pace of life here. From highway commutes to lines at even the largest of grocery chains (including Super Target), haste is of no concern to anyone whatsoever. "Leisurely" is the perfect adjective for the pace of life in Baton Rouge. Slow and traditional, Baton Rouge remains an Old Southern city in *almost* every way one could imagine (I say "almost" because the Spanish, French, and Canadian [cajun] influences have given rise to a number of baffling, quasi-southern practices and expressions that are very foreign to this Georgia native, about which more shortly). In other words, this is not necessarily the best place to be a feminist, nor is it an ideal place to find oneself in a hurry. However, the people in general are friendly, interesting, and willing to chatter endlessly about nothing. Diversity is not an issue, which is refreshing. For longwinded people like myself, the locals here are a good bunch of listeners. One can ramble on endlessly about one's lusty desire for a Vespa scooter or need for decent set of bookshelves, and strangers listen and smile and nod as if they have had the very same lusts and needs. Even better, my southern accent (or what remains of it) is welcomed! I have been mistaken for a native on a number of occasions, which has been oddly refreshing.

The move south went fairly smoothly. For $80 two overworked, underpaid electrical engineers emptied the truck in an hour flat on a hot, summer day (heat index: 110). My apartment--or rather, house--is a two bedroom shotgun duplex in a historic section of downtown Baton Rouge called "Spanish Town." The house has been gutted and refurbished; with hardwood floors and Jacuzzi in the master bathroom, I ain't complaining. The cats seem to like all the extra room and have found the long hallway delightfully skiddable. Two blocks down my Cyprus-shaded street is a small grocery store where the retired locals gather daily for morning coffee. Although a small can of Tang is $7.50, the company gathered outside is cheering. I make it a point to travel down there every Sunday morning for the newspaper. People are beginning to recognize me.

Indeed, the neighbors in Spanish Town, for the most part, are very friendly. My neighbor Maimee, just two doors down, offered to pick me up a hamburger on her way to the store not too long ago.

I live approximately three and a half miles from the LSU campus, a short and pleasant commute. Parking, as is likely with every state university, is a bit of a problem, but I am assured that in seven short years I will have a spot right in front of my building. My office in Coates Hall, however, is worth the hike from the outer limits: With a ten foot window overlooking a large, squirrel-infested live oak in the university quad, I worry about getting work done in my office (in fact, I should not neglect to mention that LSU has one of the most beautiful campuses I've seen. It is quite a lovely place to go to work). Mine is a nice office with many bookshelves and an old wooden desk; after six years in a graduate corral, it is a good thing. At least I can hang up my Jane's Addiction poster without the requisite "censored" bars over the paper-mache private parts. I take the space with some sense of sadness, however, as its former occupant, Harold Mixon, is retiring and will be missed.

School has not started yet, but I am looking forward to teaching two courses in the fall. I am teaching one course in contemporary rhetorical theory, and another in the rhetoric of popular culture. Both courses are right up my alley, of course, and I look forward to engendering a new generation of socialists.

As for the nightlife, I'm afraid I must admit it is nonexistent. Apparently, there used to be a thriving gothadustrial scene here that has since dwindled. I attended one of the last "gothic" nights at a downtown bar here; ten were in attendance (although everyone was frightfully nice and chummy--something that strikes me as odd compared to the usual Minnesota gruftie chill, my buddies excepted, of course). Bit acts do come to town, however. At the club Spanish Moon, not five minutes drive from my door, many notable acts come. Meg Lee Chin and Chris Connelly will be here next month. Even better, The Mission UK will be in New Orleans next month too, an act I do not plan to miss (call it the nostalgic, crustie goth in me).

Most of my time here has been spent unpacking and organizing. I have only recently started working on the projects I left half-finished in Minnesota. I have been cooking a good bit, however, trying out new Cajun and Creole recipes (the food here at local joints is unquestionably delicious). Although my gumbo still needs some work, I must say I have been able to create the most delicious Smothered Greens and Red Beans and Rice ;-) I even picked up a recipe for fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches in Memphis that I hope to try out here real soon; after all, THERE IS A BANANA TREE IN MY YARD.

So far, the hardest part of adjusting to Louisiana culture has been the tropical heat and the used car salespeople.

The weather is, well, simply unbelievable. Hurricane and storm warnings are the norm on television, and the heat index is frequently above 100. The humidity is the most remarkable aspect of Baton Rouge, and days are spent literally, moving as quickly as possible from one air-conditioned space to the next. The winters are, apparently, delightful, and you can be sure I will be advertising that in February when most of you are in sweaters.

The most unexpected adjustment, by far, is coming to terms with the used car television commercials here as "normal. They almost seem like some kind of noir-ish joke concocted by David Lynch and whoever Kevin Spacey's language coach was for *Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil*. Of course, they all begin with someone screaming about unbelievable financing and model clearances and so forth; yet every one of these salespeople end their speeches with a strange coda that, while intended as endearing, is just plain bizarre. One of the most memorable commercials is of a bald man in his late 60s in a motorized wheelchair who urges folks to "come on down and see his wheels." Between his urging he pants in staccato, and moves his arms up and down in awkward, punctuating gestures. At the end of his pitch, his urgent tone softens and he whispers, "Dahlin!" The softly whispered "dahlin" thing is ubiquitous in these local car commercials. And when someone doesn't end with "dahlin'," it is phrase or word even more bizarre. One used car saleswomen, usually dressed in a tank-top and skimpy shorts with a whiney voice that sends my cats into the bathroom in fear (horrid flashbacks of Catherine Lanford of MPR fame), screams "Cha!" at the end of her pitch. Apparently, this is the Louisiana rendition of "Cher," translated as "darling," I'm told.

Well. "Sweetie," "Darlin'," "Cha!" or whatever, these commercials take some getting used to. For some reason, they are much harder for me to accept than serial killers or killer mosquitoes.

Nevertheless, all is well. I am happy to be here. And I miss my friends. If you ever make it to New Orleans, please do look me up. I'll drive down to share a pint or two.

More updates after recovery.

articles versus books

Music: Allinson/Brown: AV1 (1998) In the comments from the previous journal entry, Jim Aune asked a good question:

I just noticed your comment about being expected to publish articles first and books second. I (We)’ve been getting this message at Texas A&M as well. I’m curious if you’re getting any explanation about why. 15 years ago we got the message we (humanities folks) aren’t publishing enough books, then we did that. The only thing I can figure out is that journal articles/”impact” are quantifiable and books really aren’t, except for those that get awards and are published at the “right” places (roughly 10 presses). Part of the problem is that all of us can list on one hand places to publish articles (and we’re supposed to stay away from regional journals–except for Western, something I’ve never fully understood). I think “we” in the most general sense need to talk about all these things.

Well, I agree. It's a good question and one I've had an answer for in the back of my head for a few years after a fateful job interview. I'll get to that shortly. To start a tentative, half-baked answer, I think the "article first, book second" imperative is fueled by two things: our situatedness in the discipline formerly known as Speech Communication and your suspicion, the quantification of scholarly widgets (capitalism . . . same as it ever was).

Regarding the latter: the reading group just finished Zizek's Parallax View, which three of four of us found disappointing. More about that in another post. The point here is that he has an interesting section on whether our discourse today is that of the Analyst (since everything is permitted) or the University (the rationalization of the master discourse, a la Gramsci). It's an interesting question for you Lacan readers out there. [later edit: oops, I realize this paragraph is probably cryptic as heck to most . . . because I didn't finish my thought.  The point here is that the University discourse is the one that places "knowledge/truth" as the agent and she who speaks it is supposedly doing so in the name of knowledge/truth, however, Lacan says she is most assuredly doing the bidding of the Master; the Analyst's discourse places the objet a as the agent, it is not predefined b/c it must be produced by the the analysand/consumer, and its production is pure enjoyement; the bromide is "enjoy! . . . or else!" --- consume! exercize! get in shape! whip it! whip it good! . . . . ]

Anyhoo: both the disciplinary and quantification tack seem to be a part of the way in which scientism and capitalism meet at the university. From a disciplinary standpoint, in the beginning (like, 1914) the problem was not simply to produce research, but how to do it. In an article Winans penned in the first or second QJS, he said:

. . .I hold that by the scholarship which is the product of research the standing of our work in the academic world will be improved. It will make us orthodox. Research is the standard way into the sheepfold (in Cohen's History, 37)

Insofar as the human ear and mouth were concerned for speechies, I gather that some early models for research were deliberately scientistic. Other shoulders we looked over were literary studies, of course (leading to the speech as literature push). Anyhoot, where I was going with this is that even after the so-called Black revolution, criticism aspired to scientism. I get this from my own informal sleuthing in respect to psychoanalysis in rhetorical studies. From talking with folks who came up in the 70s, I'm told psychoanalysis got the cold shoulder because (a) the scientific community discredited it; and (b) some people really, really hated the mental hygiene movement. The proper kind of research eschewed what science did (at least until Burke was absorbed into the rhet crit blob).

Anyway, seems to me the impulse toward articles was there from the beginning in Communication Studies because of the imperative to do research published in journals. Does this comport with your sense of institutional history, Jim? I'm just speculating here—I've not actually done the research. I just get the general sense that speech aspired to distinguish themselves from English by donning lab coats, so to speak. I should compare notes with friends in composition to see if the article first, book second thing is also with them (probably, since we are from the same root, more or less: NCTE).

As for the university itself: I think the ideal from the perspective of the Man would be more and more books! (Zizek style: one a year or something). I think that even the system recognizes the limit of that kind of demand: you can only exploit the laborer so much. One can demand more and more articles, though. To this I would add the demand of publicity: in R1 institutions, the "big name" syndrome has now metamorphosed into the brand syndrome. In some cases, it seems that programs have a brand (UC Santa Barbara, for example). In other cases, the brand does seem glommed onto a personality (e.g., Dana and Jim as "our" Marxist scholars; Biesecker as "our" poststructuralist, and so on). In our gig, articles have the fastest circulation time (one or two years to publication) and the farthest "wavelength," as Hartley might put it. So the idea here is that an article focus is keyed specifically to circulation.

Now, for the job interview story. I really think that---related to both disicplinary and larger, university-level explanations---we're now laboring under the charge toward publicity. Today, there is a new imperative signified by myspace.com and YouTube that has made its way into our profession: it is better to be noticed than to produce good work. I'm not saying getting noticed just anywhere works for us, it is a getting noticed in numbers and prestige thing (hence, Western versus, say, Southern as an outlet). Getting noticed and circulated is better than "doing good work." Some folks would argue this is not true internally (that, in general, publicitiy is an aim external to the goods of our practice), however, my short experience tells me otherwise. Recognizing this fact can be a good thing: you can publish an article about shit and no one on your home team will bat an eye, as long as there is other goot (less explicit) shit out there circulating.

Ok, so, to stop withholding: I will never forget the talking-to I got from an outgoing chair at a job interview a few years ago. I had just flown into MidWest University, a very high-caliber program that, admittedly, I didn't know I could really do well at (I'm not good under pressure). The two-day interview went pretty well, despite getting gored at a research presentation, and everyone was super friendly. I was feeling pretty good about the interview all told, and right before I was going to be taken to the airport I had an "exit" interview. The interview was odd, because it was an outgoing chair and an incoming chair. The incoming chair said absolutely nothing. The outgoing chair began the interrogation (and it was precisely that) in somewhat broken English, as if to show the new chair "how it's done."

This guy began by asking what it would take to get me there. I gave him my magical, many-thousands-too-high salary number, and mentioned how at LSU I had a pre-tenure and post-tenure sabbatical that was very valuable to me. Besides, I said, it would take a lot, I said, to get me to leave people I really loved (and believe me, my heart aches leaving many of my former colleagues to this day). I was still getable, I said. At some point when I was saying all this (and not in a snotty way, I promise), the chair laid in on me. He said he thought he was a "hot shot" too until he came to MidWest University. Then he realized what an honor it was to be there and didn't make demands. He said such and such a program had a tradition of greatness, and what they expected was three articles a year, and at least one in QJS. He kept going on and on about publishing articles, not books (he was a social scientist comm. scholar), and that they expected the next hire to have his or her name plastered on all (four!) rhetoric journals routinely.

I was so insulted and angered I literally almost stood up and walked out of the room. I didn't because, had I done that, no doubt a story would have "circulated," and not in my favor. It would have been, well, bad PR . . . .

The Moral: I would argue that the shift back to an article focus is principally and most explicitly about a larger, cultural ideology of publicity; this seems in-step with the imperative to grant-get as well (I'm thinking here of Jodi Dean's work on the concept of publicity, btw). In the last instance it is economics, no doubt, but the operating system that rides on that circuitry seems to be about re-presentation and a mode of publicity that is less and less about the internal audience at whichever level you analyze: for the insulting chair, it was publicity within the field; for the field, it's publicity within the academy; and so on. To me, the coming skirmish in rhetorical studies (or rather, that apocalyptic that is already internal to our discipline as it is with any discipline) is NOT about public address versus cultural studies. No no no. The real skirmish is about publicity: those who would focus in promoting a critical citizenry through teaching, and those who would promote the field to deans.

I reckon in one sense this is MacIntyre on goods and practices warmed-over, however, the key for our times is recognition. Alternately cast, this is the true Age of Aquarius: recognize me! circulate me! LOVE ME!

grant writing in the humanities

Music: The Orb: Bicycles and Tricycles (2004)

Yesterday, along with Super-Scott and DJ Dr. D, I attended a day-long seminar for grant writing in the humanities. It was led by a former UT grad and now the chief development officer (viz., Rainwoman) at UNC Chapel Hill. It was funny and she did a good job.

After the morning half, however, I realized for the most part the seminar was designed to combat what I might simply term academic arrogance. The single lesson that was intoned, in differing ways, was to network and sell yourself. The biggest problem with grant writers is that they do not know how to sell themselves, and humanities folks in particular are not taught how to do that.

I also realized that the seminar really wasn’t meant for me. Folks there were interested in domestic violence, pedagogy, and library collections. There are foundation grants for that sort of thing (anything, in fact, that relates to health or community wellness in one way or another). But then there's me. I sit and think. I watch movies. I read. Jot notes. I write. I edit. Rinse, repeat. This process does not require start-up costs. I need a computer, some books. A cup of coffee or tea. I don't even need a teaching assistant. In fact, 98% of what I do is all up to me, on my dime. The only thing I can use grant money for is to buy out my teaching; I need time. And guess what? Foundations don't buy out your time. Nope. The only options are, well, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. That's it, pretty much.

I asked a question at the end of the seminar. I explained what I said above, and then told her I was at the seminar because I was told I need to get grants, even though my research doesn't really require it. I then said: "Given the fact that you started out as a scholar on medieval poetry, I reckon this is just a philosophical question based on the contrast with your position now: is my line of work pretty much doomed?"

Her answer was somewhat flip. Dana thought it was funny. I found it a little, well, a little insulting, though I suppose I should have a better sense of humor. She replied by telling a story of a small pond in which there were two fish. One of the fish developed legs as the pool got smaller and smaller and eventually crawled out, becoming an alligator. The other fish evolved into a catfish. When the pool of water dried up, the alligator ate the catfish.

gorno be gone

Music: Between Interval: Autumn Continent (2006)

The recent Variety devoted the front page to a "gory story" that forecast the demise of the torture subgenre of horror films. The surprise success of Eli Roth's Saw in 2004 (which I have still not seen) was largely responsible for the trend, however, now there is a glut and so executives are reportedly ordering no more gore productions (Saw IV is going to the be litmus; if the film tanks, no more torture flicks for a while).

One of the reasons that hardcore gorno films went into production is that they are cheap to make: without the production costs of monsters, low-budget schlock could be churned out fairly quickly, and the returns were pretty decent. This year's to-date proceeds are 265 million, compared to last year's 405 million, so horror is taking a supernatural turn back to vampires and ghosts.

I wonder, however, if it's just the glut? Everyone I go to films with squirms when we see the preview of this "I'm gonna pull out your fingernails, little lady" kind of movie. I recognize I should see one before I pass judgment, but, still: couldn't it be that fantasy projections are simply not as hateful as we've been led to believe? Could it be that audiences are simply sick of, well, getting sick at the movies?

burnt

Music: Harold Budd: Abandoned Cities (1982)

I'm happy to report that this morning I finished a complete draft of my review essay, "Speech is Dead; Long Live Speech." I read and reviewed the final book on synthetic and recorded voices by Nass and Brave. It's a fascinating book, although their constant summaries about how to make more money through design is off-putting. They summarize a bunch of research that shows how voices are processed by fetuses in the womb, and then how gender is the first "language-based" binary in the brain. It's interesting that some of this empirical research comports with some Lacanian views on sexuation. At least in respect to gender, psychoanalytic folks are on the same page as brain-research folks on the notion of "primary identification."

I also concluded the essay with a brief analysis of the film White Noise, which is on EVP, which I compare to my academic field's ambivalence over the term "speech." That was fun to write, because some of the arguments offered for dropping speech and replacing it with communication are so motivated by inferiority and a lack of publicity. Ironically, the field so determined to rid itself of speech complained that it had no voice. Oh well. Nevertheless, I've decided not to share any more of the essay, so eager readers (all two of you) will just have to wait.

Speaking of waiting, school approaches swiftly like a ravenous madman. With two months of home repairs, teaching, and writing for a couple of weeks, I must admit I'm worn out. The shrink insisted I go away for a few days to someplace else to "recharge [my] batteries" before school begins in a couple of weeks. I've been scratching my brain about somewhere to go, and even entertained joining Eric in Maine for a while until he revealed there is going to be a kind of family reunion (I don't want to intrude on that)---so perhaps next summer. Maybe if Christopher is back from his European rambling I can hang out in College Station? Or, I thought perhaps I might just kill the Tubes, play video games and cook for three days, and top it off with a professional massage?

I dunno. Traveling is stressful to me too. I just feel sort of wanting, needy for something I cannot quite name.

Today I will try to finish prepping for courses by getting packets together. Tonight there is a degree at the lodge, which I'll try to make, which will be a welcome diversion from academese for a while.

Speaking of burning out, Brooke and I saw Danny Boyle's newest, Sunshine, on Saturday night. We both liked it. As a Sci-Fi junky it did hit all the right buttons (cool gadgets, cold ships, neat space shots). I don't want to ruin the film by relating the entire plot, but basically, it's a crew trying to restart the sun with a big fat bomb. It is a synthesis of Event Horizon and 2001: A Space Odyssey, with plot elements from each, and a little bit of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd ("Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," you know).

Once everyone who is going to see it has seen it, I'd be interested in blogging about two elements of the film: (1) the ending and the question of spirituality; and (2) the way in which Boyle features Cillian Murphy as the eye candy. Unquestionably Cillian is a beautiful man—and, I must admit he's replaced Johnny Depp as my top choice of sleep-with-another-man list. Sorry Johnny, you've dipped too much in that Keith Richards look too long. Anyway, Boyle really goes to town with shots of Murphy's face and feminine body, staging shots that clearly shift the gaze into deliberate homoerotic territory. I'm reminded here of Brookey and Westerfelhaus' essay on Fight Club . . . what Boyle does not do is shy away from homoeroticism. It will be interesting to see what the "special features" of the DVD are, and how Boyle situates the film's gazes.

Finally, speaking of eye-candy, Mirko reports that a new German band has debuted that seeks to replace the eurohomo success of Tokio Hotel. Move over Kaulitz twins, here comes Cinema Bizarre!

holy shit!

Mirko just phoned to tell me that a MAJOR, multi-lane bridge of I-35---the same highway that runs from here in Austin to Minnesota---collapsed on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. 40 cars are reported to have ended up in the river---and it's a long way down. This is terrible. I have always had a fear of interstate bridges, especially because you can feel them move and bounce about in traffic jams. This does not help. I hope to goodness no one I know was on that bridge!

a politics of voice

Music: Marconi Union: [distance] (2006)

Hooray! I think I've finished reviewing Cavarero's book. The ending chapter is quite good, and despite her repetitive style, she did manage to bring things to a satisfying end. I'm not sure I buy her understanding of the political, and as someone who is not familiar with Jean-Luc Nancy's work on politics and voice, I cannot say I am in full trust (indeed, unlike reading Dolar or even Ong, I found myself distrustful of Cavarero's claims at many turns). But insofar as this is a "report" and not a gospel, I just put the words in her mouth. Anyhoo, that book was somewhat of a slog; the last one by Nass and Brave is "easy reading." This is a relief, insofar as I am outlining a chapter from Zizek's parallax stew this weekend for reading group.

I'm cooking gumbo tonight for guests, which must be prefaced with a house-cleaning and a lot of chopping, so I’m done from the screen for the day (I think). Here's the rest of my take on Cavarero:

Central to Cavarero's vocal ontology of uniqueness is Levinas' distinction between the Saying and the Said, which she argues foregrounds uniqueness as the precondition of any communicative encounter:

Saying is in fact understood by Levinas as "anterior to verbal signs, anterior to linguistic systems and to semantic reflections---preface to languages." Again, this is not the phonetic aspect of speech, not a voice that reverberates. Rather, Saying is here-at least in its simplest meaning-the act of speaking, the event by which human beings speak to each other one by one, without regard for what they say. This saying is distinguished by Levinas from a Said that is, at the same time, that which they say to one another and that which the entire knowledge of the west says. But the Said is above all the system that organizes speech."[1]

The Saying necessarily involves a someone who speaks, neither an "I" nor "thou"-since self- or other-awareness is a re-presentation and thus in the domain of the Said-but a uniqueness-in-relation that Cavarero says is best captured by the notion of voice. Although she briefly questions why Levinas has a "surprising tendency" to ground sonorous metaphors in the visual (e.g., "the face"), she takes from his thought the notion that ethics is not an epiphenomenon of self-consciousness (the Said), but a Saying better expressed in the voice beyond speech. In other words, for Cavarero the vocal ontology of uniqueness is the ethical. Alternately cast: there is no choice in hearing, only a kind of default, radical passivity.[2]

This default passivity signified by the mouth and ear is also necessarily a dependency, one that each of us encounters "on the scene of infancy," where it is "the mother who links the sphere of the voice to that of speech."[3] When the infant cries, it is the parent who must assign meaning to that phonetic excess; a scream requires another to hear it and register it as a demand (for food, for a diaper change, and other basic needs). After ruminating on the figures of the muses and sirens in Plato and Homer, the second part of Cavarero's book takes up the psychoanalytic work of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous (and while not explicit, there is a discernable murmur of Kaja Silverman's The Acoustic Mirror as well) focused specifically on the dependant relationality of voice. She is keyed to the "pre-Oedipal" relations of primary identification, which Freud suggests is initially with the mother by way of her breast.[4] Kristeva and Cixous, however, argue that prior to the breast is the voice:

[by] insisting on the libidinal register of the vocal, these thinkers trace vocality back to the pre-oedipal phase. That is, they trace it back to the originary scene in which the fusional relationship between mother and child also works to frustrate the category of the individual. From this perspective . . . the pleasure rooted in the acoustic sphere has above all a subversive function: that its, it destabilizes language as a system that produces the subject. Rather that stand in opposition to writing . . . voice stands in opposition to language-that is, to the disciplining codes of language, to grammar and syntax, to the "Law of the Father" that separates the child from the mother by consigning the child to the logic of individuality.[5]

Again, we read the influence of Jacques Lacan, who referred to the self-consciousness made possible by representation (language) as the intervention of the paternal metaphor or the "Law of the Father." The basic idea of primary identification is that there is an affective relation of immediacy-a primary mother-child dyad-that is eventually triangulated with onset of language represented culturally by "the father," who lays down the law ("no, you cannot have mommy to yourself"; "don't touch that or it will fall off," and so on).[6] Language is equivocated with "the law" because it is an order, a system of codes that begin with the simple command of "no!" Cavarero suggests that both Kristeva's conception of a preverbal chora in her Revolutions in Poetic Language and Cixous' powerfully poetic critique of phallogocentrism in Western thought articulate an ontology of voice that situates relationality before sexual difference. On this, the writerly and readerly side of language, voice nevertheless erupts. In language voice is gendered feminine and renders the originary Other as mother, "the source of language and its rhythm," and yet ultimately these "women who sing" remind us that voice as such exceeds the meaning of speech; although we cannot think it, voice is consequently without sex or gender.[7]

Finally, spring-boarding from the speech-centric philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, Cavarero closes her book with a third section devoted to the relation between an ontologico-ethical conception of voice and the domain of the political as conceived by Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy.[8] For Cavarero, a recognition of the preverbal, dependent relationality betokened by voice is also the core of the political, which she defines, following Arendt, as a plurality of individuals expressing their uniqueness. For Arendt, argues Cavarero,

the political lies entirely in the relational space between human beings who are unique and therefore plural. The faculty of speech is political because by speaking to one another in a relational space and communicating themselves, men at the same time communicate the political nature of this space. What they communicate-contents, signifieds, values-might be congruent with this space, however, it is secondary with respect to the political act of speaking. It is in fact the relational plurality of unique beings that constitutes the criterion on which the congruence of "what gets communicated" can be judged. . . . The political, the exclusively human sphere of the world, consists in the "in-between," in what relates and separates men at the same time, revealing their plural condition.[9]

Cavarero contrasts her understanding of Arendt on the political with Nancy's work on community to help characterize this "relational space" of communication. She asserts that Nancy substitutes relationality with the term "knot" and uniqueness with "singularity" in a way that foregrounds community as a scene of a "politics in the with, the among, the in . . . that is, in any particle that alludes to the original, ontological relation inscribed in the plurality of singular beings."[10] Politics is not, then, merely a space of judgment vis-à-vis the proper recognition of the singularity betokened by a voice; for Nancy, at least, politics is "the seizure of speech" or, as Anne Dufourmantelle has said elsewhere, a "pact with speech," a thirdness, a relational bond of utterance.[11]

In distinction from Ardent, Cavarero points out that for Nancy there is no "proper sphere to politics" because the political, as a register of knotting singularities, is always-already inscribed in any ontology. Despite the collapse of ethical and the ontological throughout the book, Nancy's conflation of ontology and politics is a move that she seems to oppose: without the communication and the interactive recognition of unique voices within a given community, suggests Cavarero, "uniqueness remains a mere ontological given-the given of an ontology that is not able to make itself political."12 Judgment and recognition seem central to Cavarero's politics. Perhaps it is in this respect that Cavarero chose to conclude For More Than One Voice by relating the story of a three-year-old child, without name and incapable of speech, discovered at Auschwitz after the liberation. Fellow survivors named him "Hurbinek," and he did attempt to speak and make sounds for his short life. The child had a voice that registered his uniqueness, recognized and named by others, a voice that mimed "the musicality of speech, the relational fabric of resonance, the echo that comes from the mouth for the ear of the other."[13] The inarticulate cries of Hurbinek implicate a politics in the recognition of a singular voice on its way toward speech (and death).

Cyborg Trouble

Cavarero reports that Aristotle's famous definition of the human in Politics, "zoon logon echon," has been wrongly and commonly mistranslated as "'rational animal,' but to the letter it means 'the living creature who has logos.'"[14] Coupled with Aristotle's insistence in the same volume that humans are the only animals who signify, Cavarero suggests it is better to understand the Father of Philosophy as having specified human being as the speaking animal. This is precisely the opening argument of Clifford Nass and Scott Brave's fascinating, empirically researched study, Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship. Although the authors unabashedly announce their interest in the commercial implications of their research---an ambition that drives their research and which some readers would find troublesome---Wired For Speech nevertheless lends empirical support to many of Ong, Dolar, and Cavarero's ontological claims. Cavarero helps us to contend with the ethical and political implications of an ontology of voice. Nass and Brave, however, modify Aristotle's definition with the aid of social science: human being is the speaking and listening animal because she is hardwired to be that way.

[more later, with hope, soon]

Notes

[1] Cavarero, For More, 28.
[2] Cavarero, For More, 30-31. For a book-length treatment of hearing-and, in a sense, a kind of counterpart to Cavarero's project, see Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Shocken Books, 1985); and Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
[3] Cavarero, For More, 179.

[4] Sigmund Freud, "An Outline of Psychoanalysis." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE) 23, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 141-208. For an lucid explication of primary identification see Diane Davis, "Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are" (unpublished manuscript, but hopefully not for long!)

[5] Cavarero, For More, 132.

[6] For Lacan, primary identification and the arrival of the Law of the Father (which thereby creates new object choices) are both prior to the Oedipus Complex in Freud, which represents sexual difference or what Lacan refers to as "sexuation." The reason primary identification is important to gender scholars is that it implies relationality is prior to sexual difference, which has important implications for ethics, social theory, and so forth. See Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000), esp. 115-151.

[7] Cavarero, For More, 145.

[8] Cavarero, For More, 174.

[9] Cavarero, For More, 192.

[10] Cavarero, For More, 193-194.

[11] Cavarero, For More, 194; Anne Dufourmantelle, "Invitation," in Derrida, Of Hospitality, 122. The related Lacanian term is the "paternal metaphor," which implies the pact was more or less a forced choice.

[12] Cavarero, For More, 196.

[13] Cavarero, For More, 211-212.

[14] Cavarero, For More, 34.

a vocal ontology of uniqueness

Music: Moody Blues: On the Threshold of a Dream (1969)

I've been having a difficult time finishing up Adriana Cavarero's For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, and this in part because the book is starting to annoy me. Have you ever picked up a book and wanted to like it, but found yourself resisting the prose even though you agree with the argument? Cavarero's writing annoys me: she repeats herself, over and over again, and sometimes entire chapters read like a bunch of words signifying nothing---like a scratched record stuck on an aria that sounds good, then not, then not, then not, then not . . . . Well, anyway, I worry sometimes if I'm just plain grumpy and projecting that into the book.

Regardless, I managed to squeeze out a little more of the review. I now need to pick up some Hannah Arendt to properly finish Cavarero and move on to the last book. Between now and then, however, I must heave the packed boxes of two very important people. Anyhoo, here's some mo':

For Dolar the voice is ultimately "an opening to radical alterity" that Heidegger suggested issues "a call eluding self-appropriation and self-reflection."[i] In a qualified sense, Dolar advances an understanding of the human voice that provides an ontological basis for ethical being toward others:

The voice is the element which ties the subject and the Other together, without belonging to either, just as it formed the tie between body and language without being part of them. We can say that the subject and the Other coincide in their common lack embodied by the voice, and that "pure enunciation" can be taken as the red thread which connects the linguistic and ethical aspects of the voice.[ii]

In rhetorical studies Eric King Watts has underscored this binding tie and argues consequently that voice is "constitutive of ethical and emotional dimensions that make it an answerable phenomenon."[iii] Likewise, drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and his distinction between "the Saying" and "the Said," Diane Davis has argued for "a rhetoric of the saying-that is, an elaboration of rhetoric's explicitly nonhermeneutic, ethical dimension" that does not flatten human relations into text.[iv] What Dolar, Watts, and Davis tacitly point our attention to is that "pure enunciation" is an ontological nexus of individual uniqueness, voice, and speech that has important implications for communicative ethics. Adriana Cavarero's For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression endeavors to provide a book-length elaboration these ethical implications with a terminus in the political.

From multiple vantages, Cavarero advances a "vocal ontology" or "phenomenology of uniqueness" by beginning with the "simple truth of the vocal," which announces a number of

elementary givens of existence: uniqueness, relationality, sexual difference, and age-including the "change of voice" that, especially in men, signals the onset of puberty. There would therefore be any number of reasons for making voice a privileged theme of speculation on the problem of ontology. But, surprisingly, authoritative precedents for this kind of speculation is lacking.[v]

Cavarero endeavors to remedy this lack by investigating these givens in three themed sections: part one, titled "How Logos Lost Its Voice," is a philosophical history of voice and speech comprised of nine short chapters; part two, titled "Women Who Sing," takes up the centuries-long association of woman with embodiment, speech, and music in seven longer chapters; and part three, titled "A Politics of Voices," is comprised by four chapters that link voice to politics by way of Hannah Arendt's thought.

As evidenced in part one, whereas Ong and Dolar are largely concerned with a phenomenological approach to voice, speech, and language, Cavarero couples her theory with a philosophical history rooted in the thought of the ancient Greeks. Assuming that readers are familiar with Derrida's critique of logocentrism from the onset (and perhaps because her book never really engages that critique, Cavarero has added an appendix "Dedicated to Derrida"), the author opens For More Than One Voice by announcing she intends to trace the "devocalization of logos" in the history of philosophy in order to rethink "the relationship between voice and speech as one of uniqueness . . . ."[vi] In a number of the early chapters, Plato takes center stage in this respect, insofar as "it has been said that the entire history of philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato."[vii] For Cavarero, Plato inaugurated "videocentric thought" by subordinating speaking to thinking and cleaving voice from logos: "logos concerns itself with saying, but not with the human world of singular voices that, in speaking, communicate themselves to one another."[viii] Drawing on Plato's remarks in a number of dialogues, Cavarero argues that Plato

projects onto speech itself the visual mark of thought. The result is the firm belief that the more speech loses its phonetic component and consists in a pure chain of signifieds, the closer it gets to the realm of truth. The voice thus becomes the limit of speech-its imperfection, its dead weight. The voice becomes not only the reason for truth's ineffability, but also the acoustic filter that impedes the realm of signifieds from presenting itself to the noetic gaze.[ix]

Of course, this dead weight of philosophy presumes some kind of relationship to "speech." As with Dolar, voice represents a "sphere" that is "constitutively broader than that of speech: it exceeds it."[x] Voice is the sound that registers the singularity of every individual that has one, whereas speech concerns the domain of meaning and signification that is the "essential destination" of voice. Perhaps because their relation changes over time, Cavarero avoids any precise definitions of speech and voice. Forcefully and repeatedly like a broken record, however, she does argue that "logocentrism radically denies to the voice a meaning of its own that is not always already destined to speech."[xi] For Dolar, philosophy has sought to kill off voice in the name of God or Language because of its unstable ambivalence and threat to self-presence and transparency; for Cavarero, voice has been subjugated to the signifier because it interrupts and violates universal aspirations with the demand to recognize a particular, unique person with a "'throat, chest, feelings, who sends into the air this voice, different from all other voices . . . .'"[xii] In other words, voice is a dead weight because it betokens the singular uniqueness and meaninglessness of individual mortality.

Central to Cavarero's vocal ontology of uniqueness is Levinas' distinction between the Saying and the Said, which she argues foregrounds uniqueness as the precondition of any communicative encounter:

Saying is in fact understood by Levinas as "anterior to verbal signs, anterior to linguistic systems and to semantic reflections---preface to languages." Again, this is not the phonetic aspect of speech, not a voice that reverberates. Rather, Saying is here-at least in its simplest meaning-the act of speaking, the event by which human beings speak to each other one by one, without regard for what they say. This saying is distinguished by Levinas from a Said that is, at the same time, that which they say to one another and that which the entire knowledge of the west says. But the Said is above all the system that organizes speech."[xiii]

The Saying necessarily involves a someone who speaks, neither an "I" nor "thou"-since self- or other-awareness is a re-presentation and thus in the domain of the Said-but a uniqueness-in-relation that Cavarero says is best captured by the notion of voice. Although she briefly questions why Levinas has a "surprising tendency" to ground sonorous metaphors in the visual (e.g., "the face"), she takes from his thought the notion that ethics is not an epiphenomenon of self-consciousness (the Said), but a Saying better expressed in the voice beyond speech. In other words, for Cavarero the vocal ontology of uniqueness is the ethical. There is no choice in hearing, only a kind of default, radical passivity.[xiv]

This default passivity signified by the mouth and ear is also necessarily a dependency, one that each of us encounters "on the scene of infancy," where it is "the mother who links the sphere of the voice to that of speech."xv For Cavarero, a recognition of this dependency is the core of the political, which she defines, following Arendt, as . . . [more later].

Notes

[i] Dolar, A Voice, 102.
[ii] Dolar, A Voice, 103.
[iii] Eric King Watts, "'Voice' and 'Voicelessness' in Rhetorical Studies." Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 179.
[iv] Diane Davis, "Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation." Philosophy and Rhetoric 38 (2005): 194.
[v] Cavarero, For More, 8.
[vi] Cavarero, For More, 13.
[vii] Cavarero, For More, 42.
[viii] Cavarero, For More, 43.
[ix] Cavarero, For More, 42.
[x] Cavarero, For More, 13.
[xi] Cavarero, For More, 13.
[xii] Cavarero, For More, 4.
[xiii] Cavarero, For More, 28.
[xiv] Cavarero, For More, 30-31. For a book-length treatment of hearing-and, in a sense, a kind of counterpart to Cavarero's project, see Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
[xv] Cavarero, For More, 179.

cock fight

Music: Moody Blues: Seventh Sojourn (1972)

Catherine Liu discovered them first, but you know, it's still worth reposting. Look out LOLCats, here comes the LOLTheorists!

ventriloquism

Music: David Sylvian: Secrets of the Beehive (1990)

Brooke speaks for Jesús. Here he is saying, in a booming, terrifying voice: "pay no attention to the girl in the hoodie!" Other images here.

molly's other refrain: "no please no I said no"

Music: Rosewater Elizabeth: Le Petite Morte (1995)

Dear Prof. Gunn:

We recently received a revision of the above essay and could use one last, final review of it from you. We see, however, that you've blocked yourself off on Manuscript Central until September. Is there any chance you'd have time to review this piece, nonetheless?

Back-story here and here.

neo-whimpy

Music: Susanna and the Magical Orchestra: Melody Mountain (2006)

Not getting much accomplished today except for reading. I had hoped to write; perhaps I'll have it better tomorrow. Meanwhile, there's something undeniably hilarious about this avatar I stole from a newsgroup. Ha ha ha.