------------------------------------------------------------------------
	 
	 How To Lose Your Voice Well

      *Marc Botha *
      / University of Durham/
      m.j.botha@durham.ac.uk 

	 (c) 2007 Marc Botha.
      All rights reserved.

      ------------------------------------------------------------------------


            When the conversation gets rough . . .

   1. The human impulse to talk is fundamental, whether in the form of
      conversation, discussion, debate, or argument. I am no exception,
      but whenever I participate I also find, sadly, that my attention
      wanders easily. I am often caught, or catch myself, hearing and
      not listening, as the voice/s with which I am an interlocutor (I
      have assumed this role and taken this responsibility) gradually
      lose their vocality. They become accents and inflections that give
      the illusion of holding my attention, but then disintegrate to a
      drone, to white noise, while my own internal voices race in any or
      every direction--haphazard, discontinuous, serrated lines, a messy
      and garbled dialogue. The moment I say something along the lines
      of "Could you just repeat that last bit?" I must accept my
      disgrace. I am a bad listener. I cannot follow the commands of
      your voice, although I try to obey its regulation of time and its
      imagined teleology.

   2. The voice brings us together in this always slightly dysfunctional
      conversation. But the voice divides us again because, in our
      conversation, it is the most obvious reminder of our separation
      from each other--our individual voices, as they drift through
      endless talking. And as these individual voices mingle, closing
      distance, creating new gaps, they remind us that as inevitable as
      communication is, miscommunication is its inseparable twin.[1
      <#foot1>] They are not even different sides of a coin, but the
      self-same thing. We give voice to our mis-/communication, to being
      mis-/understood. In recent times vocality, inasmuch as it may be
      related to a tradition of orality, has come under significant
      theoretical scrutiny. This essay, however, does not trace
      competing ontologies of the voice, nor does it trace its role
      within either the all-too-frequently invoked Derridean critique of
      logocentrism--reached, I think, via a progressive, if amnesic,
      history of vocality in the notion of phonocentrism--nor in a
      phenomenological taxonomy Steven Connor notes in oral language's
      uncontrollability, its aptness, in relation to writing's
      comparative ineptitude, "to suggest a world of power and powerful
      presences" (24).

   3. Instead, the aspect of the voice most relevant to the present
      concern emerges in Connor's theoretical construct, the /vocalic
      body/:

          Voices are produced by bodies: but can also themselves produce
          bodies. The vocalic body is . . . a projection of a new way of
          having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the
          autonomous operations of the voice . . . . The leading
          characteristic of the voice-body is to be a body-in-invention,
          an impossible, imaginary body in the course of being found and
          formed . . . . the voice seems to precipitate itself as an
          object, upon which it can then itself give the illusion of
          acting. (35-6)

      Connor's evocation of the voice incarnate as a sonic body in a
      phenomenologically affirming relationship with itself does not end
      in merely effecting an auto-productive whirl. The idea of the
      vocalic body also provides an interesting model for discussing a
      mode of intersubjectivity I should like to call "intervocalic
      communion." This term is intended to invoke the complex aspects of
      mis-/communication involved in the interactions of the voice with
      itself and with its speakers and auditors, aspects described below.

   4. The idea of /communion/ evokes both conjoined experience and the
      imperative of communication that informs much of the argument.
      Together with the first term, "intervocalic," the phrase suggests
      a tension like the one we have seen in the voice that divides us
      even as it brings us together: /inter/ maintains the discreetness
      of vocalic bodies (designating their separateness by virtue of the
      space between them) even as /com/ implies their proximity. Much of
      this discussion concerns this tension, and in partial resolution
      of it a third term will emerge--silence. Returning to the idea of
      communion: while it may lead to a deeper understanding of an
      ethics of being-together, such being-together is not a heightened
      spiritual sharing. Rather, a study of intervocalic communion will
      ultimately reveal its value negatively, not as a space of profound
      insight /per se/, but as an absence of lack-of-insight.
      Intervocalic communion is thus not a mechanism involved in the
      production or analysis of little epiphanies, but proffers a
      conceptualization of the ordinary and the everyday that is itself
      sufficient to generate insight and change without announcing its
      emancipatory potential.

   5. Intervocalic communion enables, in the first instance, the
      plotting out of the relations within vocalic bodies as abstract
      entities; the emergence of a vocalic body has the dual function of
      positing within the voice both the abstract space of acting
      subject and self-referential object. It is capable of this because
      the vocalic body as subject not only acts outwardly[2 <#foot2>],
      but also on itself, hence constructing itself as object of its
      actions, deconstructing itself as agent, and reconstructing the
      entire vocalic body in this way as a functional entity capable of
      operating simultaneously as subject and object. This is, perhaps,
      how we are able to recognize the voice as an entity without having
      to associate it with a specific predetermined physical agent, such
      as when we hear voices behind us getting onto a train--they have
      physical presence without requiring corporeal substance.

   6. Secondly, these abstract vocalic bodies, existing thus as
      auto-productive subjects, enter into an inevitable environmental
      intervocalic communion with one another. Such a relationship is
      significant because it demonstrates that intentionality is not a
      prerequisite for the voice to have specific effects in the world.
      Let us assume, for example, that vocalic bodies encounter one
      another not in active conversation but in a so-called passive
      setting between rooms whose occupants do not know of each other's
      presence. Even in such a situation, this collision proves to be
      active, as the vocalic bodies do work on one another, affecting
      their internal relations as well as the overall soundscape.[3
      <#foot3>]

   7. The intervocalic communion of vocalic bodies demonstrates the
      complexity with which we are faced when we communicate.[4
      <#foot4>] William Rasch's essay, "Injecting Noise into the
      System," takes as one of its points of departure Serres's
      discussion of the nature of communication. Moving from the
      apprehension that communication "is triadic . . . see[ing] Self
      and Other [sender and receiver] . . . united against a common
      enemy, the parasitical third party called noise" (63), Rasch
      reports that Serres goes on to associate noise with the empirical
      variation, and excluded possibilities of each communication, an
      Otherness that, ultimately, also points to the receiver as the
      Other of communication, concluding that "no amount of dialogue can
      eliminate noise and still preserve the Other" (64). Rasch goes on
      to develop a model of the interlaced functioning of noise,
      information, mis-/understanding and mis-/communication, according
      to which

          misunderstanding is no longer understood as a special case and
          understanding is no longer to be the self-evident ground of
          communication . . . . The issue at stake is control (in the
          sense of establishing order out of chaos), but control becomes
          tenuous when misunderstanding is seen to be constitutive of
          understanding. (70-1)

   8. So on the one hand we have the need for noise, for complexity, in
      any communicative system, and on the other we find, again, the
      inevitable saturation of the system with miscommunication. These
      are both demonstrated and heightened by the confrontation and
      subsequent commingling of vocalic bodies to which intentionality
      and selection are simply not applicable, and yet which remain
      active powers.[5 <#foot5>] Might one go as far as to suggest that
      miscommunication is an ontological imperative, a defining function
      of the very being of vocalic bodies coming into mutual contact,
      active and powerful, but without agency?

   9. The third mode of intervocalic communion is somewhat less
      esoteric, but no less significant. Remembering that vocal
      production is an act of identifying the self as a subject--"giving
      voice is the process which simultaneously produces articulate
      sound, and produces myself, as a self-producing being," as Connor
      puts it (3)--the ties between the speaker (as subject) and the
      vocalic body (as both the product of the speaker and a subject in
      its own right) reinvigorate the speaker and its relation to other
      speaking subjects. Subjects are always miscommunicating, but their
      proximity, and the role the vocalic body plays in adducing such
      proximity, provides a conceptual model which is somewhat less
      confrontational than the idea of speaking /to/ someone, without
      sacrificing either directness or the accomplishment of communication.

  10. The vocalic body becomes the conceptual extension of the speaker,
      but since it is also autonomous, in contact with other such
      autonomies--and all speaking subjects experience such an
      extension--it is also, in a sense, a systemic operation that
      provides a functional overlap between speaking subjects without
      enforcing physical proximity. It follows that intervocalic
      communion may also be responsible for a recognition within the
      subject of a particular internal cleavage. This occurs because the
      vocalic body is a self-referential emanation in the process of
      becoming: it emerges from the speaker as voice, but returns to the
      speaker as a body in a self-sustaining state, which is both
      produced by and is productive of the speaker. This intervocalic
      communion, between the voice of the subject and what was the voice
      of the subject, demonstrates a shortcoming of subjecthood. It
      shows the impermanence of the subject's power to create something
      with genuine sustainability. As the sound leaves the subject's
      mouth, it is his/hers, but as it re-enters the ears, it is already
      a vocalic body.

  11. The complexity that emerges when one considers that all these
      forms of communion happen whenever there is intervocalic sound is
      entirely overwhelming. Conversations, discussions, and
      disagreements abound, discourse proliferates, and at any moment I
      am struck with the possibility of one of those very vocal
      arguments alluded to above. Intervocalic communion saturates space
      all the time, so that there seems to be no respite from it: the
      voices of speakers, the voice of each speaker reconstituting
      itself as a vocalic body with its own internal relations, the
      interaction of various vocalic bodies. We might add internal
      voices to this list--the monologues and dialogues in our heads.[6
      <#foot6>] Indeed, are these not also vocalic bodies in every
      sense, although their referential world is substantially different
      from that of the voice externalized? And if this were not enough,
      intervocalic communions are amplified through environmental
      reverberations, and as these echoes return, reconfirming our own
      positions, they also confirm a world, a very noisy world, beyond
      both our comprehension and our control.

  12. If this situation, these collisions upon collisions, helps explain
      why we are bad listeners, its progressive analysis may provide us
      with the clues to becoming better at this crucial task. Through
      the complexities of intervocalic communion, the voice reaches
      other people, other entities, bringing them into proximity and
      pulling them together. Intervocalic communion is a frenetic
      happening that calls for responses, and this call and answer bring
      us together. They also reveal the essential otherness of the
      Other, the division between the self and other which provides a
      basic ground for ethical interaction. Thus, it is possible to see
      both the uniting and the dividing functions of intervocalic
      communion as essentially productive. But let us not forget that
      they are productive of an essential miscommunication. So in this
      union and division we still manage to miss each other in a
      significant way.

  13. Rasch reminds us that from a scientific perspective, "the chaotic
      noise of the universe can serve . . . as a continuous and
      spontaneous source of new order and new information" (65). Indeed,
      it is possible to imagine that all articulation requires the
      presence of an unarticulated morass. Serres's statement that "the
      work is made of forms, the masterpiece is the unformed fount of
      forms; the work is made of time, the masterpiece is the source of
      time; the work is in tune, the masterwork shakes with noises" not
      only reinforces this assertion, but also insists on the role of
      noise and chaos in form and formation, and in the way these impact
      on communication.[7 <#foot7>] The vocalic body, and its
      interactive matrices in the idea of intervocalic communion, is
      unquestionably a form through and from which the work of
      mis-/communication is wrought. In Rasch's words, "the problem of
      communication can be formulated as both the necessity for a
      restrictive code and for chaotic noise" (67).

  14. What, then, is the situation when one concretizes such
      abstractions? Noise and chaos seem acceptable general indicators
      for some primal substance, but what precisely is their
      relationship to specific instances of intervocalic communion and
      vocalic bodies? Should I feel guilty for being a bad listener, or
      is the voice precisely that one emanation of sound that, when
      overlaid with other voices to a point of chaos, does not make a
      good noise?


            Polyphony?

  15. In music, the term polyphony refers to a compositional method that
      simultaneously presents more than one melodic line of equal
      importance.[8 <#foot8>] Should the term polyphony mean literally
      many sounds (vague, undefined), or are we to favor its dominant
      usage in musical discourse, which implies eventual agreement,
      order and form? One could argue whether the /phonos/ of polyphony
      should be understood as any sound, musical sound, musical voice,
      or any sort of voice--or combinations of these. The path from
      monophonic plainchant, the simplicity of which aims for "the clear
      recitation of text" and does not desire "musical complication"
      (Seay 36), to the increased vocalic texturization of the Ars Nova
      period, casts doubt on the monolithic performance of the /Logos/
      as either the speaking or intoned but in either case /singular/
      voice. This tendency culminates in twentieth century movements
      like deconstruction, reflected, albeit anticipatorily, in iconic
      statements such as Gertrude Stein's "rose, is a rose, is a rose"
      (Stein v-vi),[9 <#foot9>] and, in musical terms, in compositions
      such as John Cage's Dance/Four Orchestras in which the composer
      "divide[s] the orchestras into four parts, with four conductors,
      going at four speeds . . . . It's a circus situation . . . a
      four-ring circus" (Cage 96).

  16. Musical polyphony had been exclusively vocal, but contemporary
      polyphony includes, in Cage at least, sounds as diverse as those
      made by cacti, traffic, and conch shells; this progression
      demonstrates an increasing incorporation of noise--in the
      scientific sense of it as "sound that is disorderly" (Levarie
      21)--into music. At play, though, is another form of polyphony,
      which, although it shares common structural elements with its
      musical counterpart, is usually called on to demonstrate a certain
      position of ethical equivocity. Mikhail Bakhtin and Edward Said
      have given particularly convincing models of this polyphony. Of
      Bakhtin's conceptualization of polyphony, Morson and Emerson write:

          The dialogic sense of truth manifests unfinalizability by
          existing on the "threshold" . . . of several interacting
          consciousnesses, a "plurality" of "unmerged voices." Crucial
          here is the modifier /unmerged./ These voices cannot be
          contained within a single consciousness, as in monologism;
          rather, their separateness is essential to the dialogue. Even
          when they agree, as they may, they do so from different
          perspectives and different sense of the world. (236-37)

      Bakhtin claims that the "fundamental category in Dostoevsky's mode
      [of writing is] coexistence and interaction" (28), a dynamic that
      erases conventional expectations and enables the replacement of
      hierarchical monologism with the equivocity of a polyphony that
      still operates as a unity, albeit "a unity standing above the
      word, above the voice, above the accent . . . [and] yet to be
      discovered" (43). In what follows I trace this persistent unity of
      polyphony (applicable beyond Dostoevsky's novels to other forms of
      polyphony), the reasons for its persistence, and the path to and
      from its breakdown (sometimes temporary, sometimes irreversible).

  17. By reading Bakhtinian polyphony through Nussbaum's claims in
      "Narrative Emotions," the concept assumes broader implications.
      Nussbaum's criticism that "literary study has too frequently
      failed to speak about the connectedness of narrative to forms of
      human emotion and human choice" (290-91) prepares the way for this
      movement between the narrative form of Dostoevsky's novels and its
      application to the broader concerns of the present discussion.
      Nussbaum insists quite unequivocally that "certain types of human
      understanding are irreducibly narrative in form," emphasizing "the
      connections between narrative forms and forms of life" (291).
      Although her discussion gives prominence to emotion, she proceeds
      to trace the reciprocal relation that emerges between narrative
      and emotion, and indeed between written and lived narratives.

  18. In this light it seems plausible to find support in her assertion
      that "narratives are constructs that respond to certain patterns
      of living and shape them in their turn" for the idea that a
      narrative structure is related to forms of real life, although of
      course this does not imply that it is identical to these (310).
      Nussbaum is careful to take note of the differences between spoken
      and written narrative (311), but this does not necessarily imply
      that ideas cannot be translated effectively from a written to an
      essentially vocal field.[10 <#foot10>] These claims help to
      formulate a connection between narrative form and perceptions of
      reality in terms of the article's argument for the extension of
      polyphony as both a product and a tool of formal analysis. Bakhtin
      refers to the "artistic will of polyphony . . . [as] a will to
      combine many wills, a will to the event" (21). Intervocalic
      communion is this /event/ in the present context. Reciprocally,
      Bakhtinian polyphony demonstrates an idealized intervocalic
      communion: each vocalic body (/voice-ideas/, in Bakhtinian terms)
      exists as an individual entity, possessing a dual subject-object
      status in a manner that neither disrupts nor actively enforces
      exchange in the communication channels resulting from the
      polyphonic overlaps of vocalic bodies.

  19. Edward Said's model proposes that "various themes play off one
      another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any
      particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is . . .
      organized interplay from the themes, not from a . . . principle
      outside the work" (qtd. in Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 93). A similar
      observation emerges of the way in which the interpenetration of
      textual voices, rather than a principle imposed from an external
      position, is responsible for the operational effectiveness of a
      contrapuntal or polyphonic work. Although Said's particular
      program lies in the discovery of "what a univocal reading might
      conceal about the political worldliness of the . . . text"
      (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 93), the process by which univocity is
      undone emphasizes, in common with Bakhtin, the singularity of the
      voice and of the way each voice plays a singular role in
      constituting any polyphonic instance.[11 <#foot11>]

  20. Musical and literary theoretical definitions of polyphony
      intersect in the idea of the voice. In the three scenes examined
      below, musical and speaking/spoken voices come together in the
      concept of intervocalic communion. These three scenes demonstrate
      the various passages of the voice between polyphony and noise. As
      we examine these passages, we realize that it is not so much that
      we are /not/ listening to each other, but merely that we listen to
      different things. We forget to listen to one another, instead
      imposing and ordering procedures of giving and receiving voice. We
      proverbially "pass the conch" by raising our hands, by appointing
      chairs to meetings, by creating a hierarchy of speakers--all of
      this to perpetuate the idea that communication can occur
      unambiguously. A polyphonic intervocalic communion that
      facilitates communication radically becomes at once our goal and
      dream.

  21. The first of the three scenes is a choral performance with a choir
      singing a contemporary composition in which each voice is assigned
      an individual part, largely or entirely different from the others.
      The second is the opening of a Roy Lichtenstein art exhibition
      focusing on his earlier works from the 1960s, inspired by
      comic-strips--a gathering of critics, socialites, and collectors:
      a chatter of opinionated groups. The third scene attempts to
      capture the intervocalic communion imaginable in the UN General
      Assembly hall just before the commencement of a meeting: the
      confusion not only of voices, but of vocalic bodies carrying
      multiple languages and dialects and their translations--a complex
      political din of linguistic belonging and its relationships to
      lobbying, domination and mis-/communication.

  22. In his celebrated study of the sociology of music, Jacques Attali
      claims that "music is prophecy. Its styles and economic
      organization are ahead of the rest of society . . . . It makes
      audible the new world that will gradually become visible" (11).
      Examining the effects of the imagined choral work in light of this
      statement, we recognize the inevitable dissonance that emerges
      from a situation in which thirty to fifty individuals sing
      independent melodies. The extreme dissonance of works such as
      Krzysztof Penderecki's St. Luke Passion prophecizes the parallel
      decay of traditional polyphony in both the musical and the textual
      senses occasioned by extreme complexity. Like most of Penderecki's
      work, St. Luke Passion draws on an eclectic blend of compositional
      techniques, one being extremely dense blocks of tone-clusters,
      common around the mid-sixties when the work was composed.[12
      <#foot12>] While it generally steers clear of traditional harmony,
      its occasional explosions of extreme vocal confusion illustrate
      the particular dissonance embodied in the idea that each voice
      operates independently.

  23. The most notable of these occurs toward the end of the first
      movement when Jesus is brought before the High Priest of Jerusalem
      and is mocked. Penderecki's characteristic technique of overlaying
      very similar lines, which compound into an almost unimaginably
      dense polyphonic canon, effectively conveys the hysteria that the
      program requires.[13 <#foot13>] The voices carry fragmentary
      words, disembodied phonemes, in a swirling polyrhythmic vocalic
      sea. Here the voice is sometimes intoned, sometimes noise, and the
      intertwining of the two proves particularly unsettling, evoking
      dark intensity and foreboding. This sense of foreboding is
      intensified by the associations that the oscillation between tone
      and noise evoke and by the way in which this oscillation seems to
      intensify both the intonation and the text intoned. The intoned
      voice is thus laden with the weight of several cultural
      institutions, and so is difficult to ignore.[14 <#foot14>]
      However, if the contextual knowledge of the work is bracketed, we
      can see in this specific scene a clear example of how expectations
      regarding the voice are often defeated. Given that, until
      relatively recently, dissonance in music was conventionally seen
      as a tension necessary to the reassurance provided by the
      consonance that follows, it is not unreasonable to think that many
      listeners in an audience might bestow on this dissonance an /a
      priori/ communicative role--clearly the composer must be trying to
      /say/ something by breaking the rules! However, instead of
      refocusing attention on the intoned voice and its role, this scene
      presents an intense intervocalic communion in which the parallel
      decay of the polyphonic function in music and of voice-ideas is
      evident.

  24. No longer can the intoned voice in intervocalic communion be said
      to engender communication. What we encounter, then, is precisely
      the miscommunication alluded to earlier: vocalic bodies interact
      in such a complex manner that their effective function is to erase
      the presence of the speaker/singer at the specific instance
      referred to, both in relation to the audience and to other
      speakers/singers. The structure and functioning of a choir seems
      to require such an erasure. Such cases of intense polyphonic
      overlap would presumably secure individuality, but paradoxically
      end up placing it in a more tentative position than ever, as
      Otherness is subsumed by our inability to distinguish between
      voices. The dissonance of this particular intervocalic communion
      sounds the warning that noise and chaos are not always benign and
      generative. Instead this scene effectively reinstitutes a
      univocity in the idea of polpyhony which Bakhtin and Said contest
      (albeit their protests emerge from within what is generically
      literary). This is in no way an indictment of Penderecki or of
      contemporary compositional techniques as such. Rather, it
      demonstrates that the program of the music (which aims to show
      precisely such a breakdown in communication, a miscommunicative
      chaos) is well-accomplished, technically and structurally.

  25. The intervocalic communion of this passage from Penderecki's St.
      Luke Passion engages the question of mis-/communication by
      demonstrating in its constitutive vocalic bodies a highly
      ambiguous relationship between the bodies, which provide both
      definition within the undifferentiated noise of dissonance, and
      themselves produce noise, indistinction, and confusion. Once again
      the voice joins as it divides. As each vocalic body reaffirms its
      membership in the homogenous group (the choir) in the course of
      the performance, the performance pulls the voices together by
      projecting the concept of a single work and a single performance.
      But it is also a conglomeration of separate vocalic bodies acting
      in dissonance, simultaneously highlighting the possibility of
      polyphony to do destructive violence, to reinstitute, ironically,
      a certain univocity into the intervocalic communion, and thus it
      also pulls apart. In the midst of this tension the shared ground
      between singularity and plurality is reinaugurated, the dual space
      of subject-object, a space that also opens a path between
      intervocalic communion and white noise.

  26. If the choral scene opens this path, its particular intervocalic
      communion does not make the journey. The opposing pulls of its
      implicit homogeneity and its explicit heterogeneity prevent it
      from undergoing this final metamorphosis. The move from the
      complex vocalic polyphony to effective white noise is, however,
      mapped in the movement of the two subsequent scenes--the opening
      of an art exhibition and the moments before the commencement of a
      meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations. In
      Levarie's comment that "spoken language exemplifies well the
      mixture of noise and tone" (22), we find some support for the
      voice's ability to resist its transformation to noise. If it is
      not due to a substantial change of the vocalic body (in the second
      scene, at least) that the emergence of white noise is observed, it
      is possible that the structure of intervocalic communion in these
      scenes is instead responsible. Of white noise, Serres writes that
      it "is at the very limits of physics and surrounds it . . . . [It]
      is the original one but the original hatred as well" (51). Serres
      points to a radical threat in white noise. The problem of
      mis-/communication is but a small feature of this all-enfolding
      phenomenon, though it dominates the following scene.

  27. The conversation at an art exhibition opening is often contrived.
      Unless the opening is a more formal one in which the bar and
      finger-foods are withheld to keep the guests attentive, a restless
      throng tends to spread from the area where these refreshments are
      found. At this particular exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein's 1960s
      comics-inspired works, let us assume, the wine and consequently
      the conversation are flowing. Here we find a mixture of the
      dignitaries, press, and other guests one might expect at an
      exhibition as prestigious as a Roy Lichtenstein retrospective:
      critics, photographers, artists (successful, failed, fledgling,
      imagined), socialites, academics, collectors, pretentious
      commentators; the sincere and insincere, honest and dishonest. The
      babble is overwhelming, as the guests bandy about public and
      secret terminologies interchangeably in the growing din. In such
      situations it becomes increasingly obvious who are the privileged
      few and who the aspirants. The crowd stratifies into smaller
      huddles of fours, fives, sixes--all becoming louder as they
      gravitate toward particular works and try to shout each other
      down. These groups grate against each other, sometimes
      intentionally, marking out their collective space. The noise
      mounts as the voices become increasingly protective of their
      opinions.

  28. However, the situation departs significantly from the banality of
      petty exhibition politics, for, recalling Connor's idea of the
      vocalic body as a "body-in-invention" (36), it becomes necessary
      to examine the specific vocalic relationship these works of
      Lichtenstein have with their viewers, and the manner in which the
      characters they depict are subtly transformed into interlocutors.
      Apart from painterly techniques that make these early works highly
      controversial, even revolutionary, many are noteworthy for their
      inclusion of comic-style speech bubbles.[15 <#foot15>] In Drowning
      Girl for example, we encounter the comical melodrama of the
      drowning girl who tearfully announces, "I don't care! I'd rather
      sink than call Brad for help!" (Waldman 118). In a similarly
      dramatic fashion, a woman on the telephone proclaims, "Oh, Jeff .
      . . I love you, too . . . but . . . " in the painting of the same
      name (163), although here her address is not to some absent figure
      on the open ocean, but is mediated through the telephone. "Forget
      It! Forget Me!" (56), addressed to a rather forlorn looking woman,
      presents, on the other hand, a clear interlocutor. But all of
      these speech bubbles--whether addressing an absent figure, an
      object, or a visually present character--not only intensify the
      sense in which the spectator is drawn into the representational
      world of the painting, but also the projection of the painting
      into the so-called real world of the spectator, occupying a type
      of vocalic space.[16 <#foot16>]

  29. The suggestion here is not so much that the relationship between
      the painting and the person observing it is different from the one
      that might normally be anticipated, but that a second and parallel
      relationship emerges that is based on the simultaneous dependence
      of the vocalic body on a speaker and its independence or object
      status. The speech-bubbles and the words they contain can still
      occupy a conceptually vocal space without exercising a sonic
      presence, without being voiced. If it is possible to accept that a
      particular mute vocality is enacted in this way, then what is
      initially only the graphic equivalent of a vocalic body takes on
      uncannily real qualities. Might such a situation--the parallel
      presentations of the visual and the text (the printed words of the
      speech-bubbles), and the visual and the voiced (the speech-bubbles
      as vocalic bodies in the process of /becoming/ in an ontological
      sense)--not help explain why the present value of comic books and
      graphic novels has so thoroughly exceeded their initial
      confinement to so-called popular culture?

  30. In a significant sense the paintings speak with a greater clarity
      than do their viewers, as their immanent vocalic bodies enter into
      the intervocalic communion, but without being noticeably affected
      by the complex interference patterns that already characterize the
      situation. These mute voices are both vocalic bodies and part of
      the intervocalic communion of the opening, and yet they are
      neither, for they are, after all, just paintings. Such an
      ambiguous position inaugurates the transformatory potential of
      silence explored in subsequent argumentation, for if the silent
      voices, vocalic bodies in the process of becoming, are able to
      present, in a sense, a more constructive communication than our
      own intervocalic communion around them, they also warn us of our
      vocalic dysfunction.

  31. We must now reexamine Lichtenstein's insistence that
      "transformation is a strange word to use. It implies that art
      transforms. It doesn't, it just plain forms" (qtd. in Wilson 10)
      in light of the claims above. While it is clearly true that art is
      capable of forming--in this case the focus is on the formation of
      /becoming/ vocalic bodies--it is also transformatory to the extent
      that these mute representations of voices draw our attention to a
      communicative dysfunction that emerges from the intervocalic
      communion, while still being part of the same. The transformation
      that this art seems to enact relates closely to its physical
      presence, and is not only of the entire intervocalic environment
      and its relationship to such so-called silent voices, but also of
      various of our notions of what constitutes speech and embodiment
      of the voice.

  32. To illustrate further the transformatory potential of these works,
      we can reconstitute the exhibitionary space in terms of the
      vocality they inaugurate, where the letters of the guests' speech
      bubbles smudge and blur, covering one another and erasing the
      identity and coherence of the utterances. Of the commercial art
      from which he drew the material for these works, Lichtenstein
      famously said, "'I accept it as being there, in the world . . . .
      Signs and comic strips are interesting as subject-matter. There
      are certain things that are usable, forceful and vital about
      commercial art'" (qtd. in Wilson 9-10). It is unlikely that the
      vitality he was referring to is the sort of autonomy I evoke for
      his paintings above. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which
      Lichtenstein's ideas regarding forcefulness and usability are
      clearly endorsed by the present argument.

  33. Turning from more abstract theoretical considerations, the ensuing
      scene at the exhibition opening is at once intimidatingly chaotic
      and meaninglessly absurd to the uninitiated. There are, however,
      numerous political motives underlying these interactions. In his
      excellent study of the exhibitionary complex, Bennett writes that
      this political space provides "a context for the /permanent/
      display of power/knowledge . . . a power which . . . manifest[s]
      itself precisely in continually displaying its ability to command,
      order, and control objects and bodies, living or dead" (88).[17
      <#foot17>] Not only do the works in question represent a power in
      themselves (partly explored above), they also comprise a
      conceptual field on which various games of domination are to be
      played out. The underpinning motives for these games vary, and
      their purported character may thinly mask more dubious qualities.
      A detailed analysis of exhibition politics is as difficult as it
      would need to be extensive, and it would not directly concern this
      study, but it is possible to identify among these economic games,
      games of social standing, and intellectual games.

  34. In these games--which manifest as a series of moves--we see again
      how the voice brings together and how it divides. The Lichtenstein
      paintings provide common targets for the conceptual content of
      intervocalic communion, but the political instability of the scene
      as it manifests in sound also opens up divisions that are not
      easily repaired. If we imagine that each of these political
      players produces an individual vocalic body, and if we also
      imagine that, due to their specific contexts, these vocalic bodies
      are directed in a specific way, then we are once again brought
      into a complexity that tends to be noise rather than voice.

  35. Elaborating on the Bakhtinian idea of polyphony as unmerged
      voices, the intervocalic communion of the exhibition demonstrates
      an increasing indistinguishability of vocalic bodies, largely as a
      result of increased complexity. While the choral scene displays a
      similar complexity, the pull between homogeneity and heterogeneity
      (noted above) limits one's ability to recognize in it genuine
      noise. At the exhibition opening, however, the particular
      intervocalic communion ensures the emergence of localized groups
      defined both internally and in relation to others by a
      heterogeneity. In practical terms, people, for the most part, seem
      to be conversing, but the freneticism in this vocalic scenario
      prevents any real communication. The subsystems are not
      operationally contained; voices penetrate across boundaries in
      generally disruptive gestures. Such intervocalic communion is
      complicated as the mute voices of Lichtenstein's work reach out
      into the subgroups, fuelling conversation, or as Wilson suggests,
      "inviting the spectator to speculate" (12), mute participants
      always on the verge of finding their vocalic bodies.

  36. The ground for mis-/communication is opened to a far greater
      degree than in the case of the choir: not only is a stable
      audience for vocalic performance missing, but the actual audience
      consists of producers of other vocalic bodies, or imagined bodies
      in the case of the paintings.[18 <#foot18>] This increasing lack
      of distinction in the channel of intervocalic communion between
      sender and receiver might be seen as the functional rift that
      readmits white noise into the system. Rasch reminds us that "the
      question of how communication is possible can be elucidated as the
      paradoxical unity of both restricting and generating information"
      (67), which was related earlier to the opposition of code and
      noise. If the choral performance and the exhibition opening show
      how intervocalic communion can make a noise, they also show how
      information can decay in the process.

  37. The third scene, however, presents a move to white noise, a final
      mode of intervocalic communion in which it is entirely possible to
      lose one's voice. This may seem a surprising claim in light of the
      fact that the United Nations is an organization designed to ensure
      equality between the voices of its members. In arguing the
      ascendancy of white noise in the U.N., one first needs to
      recognize that the moments before the commencement of a General
      Assembly meeting see the mingling not only of hundreds of people,
      but of almost as many language groups as well. Here the concept of
      the vocalic body is made even more complex by its extension to
      include these different tongues and dialects. The heterogeneous
      vocalic bodies are further arranged into complex subsystems of
      intervocalic communion, usually around particular global powers,
      which are often also characterized by a specific language: to use
      the most obvious current examples, the Middle East and North
      Africa speaking Arabic, or the United States, United Kingdom, and
      Australia speaking English.

  38. A scene unfolds with a certain inevitability: the intervocalic
      communion is intensely chaotic, but the scene's predictable end is
      predicated upon the political power structures in place. In this
      way, again, the voice demonstrates its dual ability to present
      division in the heterogeneity of the groups, their resistance to
      being drawn into a global agreement, and to pull together, both in
      the sense that the dominant vocalic bodies enlist cooperation and
      obedience, and in the sense that the different languages form
      nodal attractors within these essentially heterogeneous groups.
      Although there are six official languages at the UN, the complex
      intervocalic communion of the many others--spoken, murmured,
      imagined--stresses the atmosphere prior to the opening of the
      meeting to a point of informational overload.[19 <#foot19>] "This
      noise is the opening . . . [t]he multiple is open and from it is
      born nature always being born," writes Serres (56). But if this
      noise is indeed generative, the use of translation surely adds
      difficulties that test this definition to the utmost.

  39. As the translators babble, their ear-pieces already operational,
      the vocalic body undergoes the ultimate metamorphosis in this
      complex intervocalic communion, that of the voice technologically
      transformed, multiplied, transmitted and circulated as
      electricity. McLuhan sees in such technology an "extension of the
      process of consciousness itself" (90), but emphasizes electrical
      technology rather than language, as superceding language:
      "computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation
      of any code or language into any other code or language. The
      computer . . . promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of
      universal understanding and unity" (90). In retrospect, McLuhan's
      utopian predictions (some skeptics might suggest they are
      dystopian) have proved quite accurate, though computer programs
      still struggle with the idiosyncrasies of figurative language and
      syntax.

  40. Although our trust in and reliance on technology is always
      increasing, the fact that translators are still central to the
      process of communication in the General Assembly hall indicates
      that the transformatory potential of technology is neither
      absolute nor irreversible. At the same time, it is fascinating to
      contemplate the effects of such communication technology on the
      idea of intervocalic communion. In McLuhanist terms, the
      microphone is an extension of the ear, and the ear-piece of the
      voice. But the vocalic body experiences a potentially unlimited
      multiplication. If Lichtenstein's paintings find their voices
      through a more abstract process, electronic extensions of human
      vocality seem to present a concretization of the vocalic body that
      is at least on equal terms with those derived directly from the
      voice itself. They may be even more autonomous. Technological
      multiplication of the voice seems to erase progressively the lines
      that trace it back directly to the concept of "voice," which means
      that in an important sense vocalic bodies that proceed from
      technological reproduction are functionally "original." The result
      is a multiplied complexity of the intervocalic communion in which
      both the increased number of different languages and the discrete
      vocalic bodies threaten to suspend any sense of ordered
      communication.

  41. Translation may be the final hope for communication as white noise
      encroaches, as the dream of the communicative function of the
      voice is progressively glossed over. But as Paul de Man's essay on
      Benjamin's "translation" work indicates, "the translation . . .
      shows in the original a mobility, an instability, which at first
      one did not notice" (82). De Man goes on to claim that "all these
      activities--critical philosophy, literary theory,
      history--resemble each other in the fact that they do not resemble
      that from which they derive . . . . They disarticulate, they undo
      the original, they reveal that the original was always already
      disarticulated" (84). Furthermore, we do not encounter meaning in
      translation, but rather a failure to translate meaning, or to
      convert meaning into a translatable form. Translation is the heart
      of miscommunication, and fails in terms both of strict
      translation, which loses all nuance, and of idiomatic translation,
      which sacrifices semantic content.

  42. Not only is miscommunication inevitable in the General Assembly
      Hall, but there is an important sense in which communication,
      certainly in its narrowest definition as direct and unambiguous,
      was impossible to begin with. As the complexity of the vocalic
      communion is multiplied feverishly in this scenario of
      articulation, translation, disarticulation--heterogeneous overlap,
      densest imbrication--we become increasingly aware of the white
      noise around us, or increasingly ignorant of discrete vocalic
      bodies. We are once again wakened to the paradox of our
      situatedness in a language and a noise we cannot unambiguously
      decipher, but in which "one must swim . . . dive in as if lost,
      for a weighty poem or argument to arise" (Serres 53). Rather than
      clarifying meaning, as such, translation demonstrates that
      trans-linguistic meaning was already unobtainable.

  43. According to Blanchot, "a language seems so much truer and more
      expressive when we know it less . . . . words need a certain
      ignorance to keep their power of revelation" (176). The
      double-edged nature of communication is again exposed: we must
      always miscommunicate for there to be any communication. In its
      relationship to miscommunication, white noise reiterates itself as
      both promise and threat:

          Perhaps white noise . . . is at the heart of being itself . .
          . . White noise never stops, it is limitless, continuous,
          perpetual, unchangeable. It has no grounding . . . itself, no
          opposite. How much noise has to be made to still the noise?
          And what fury order fury? Noise is not a phenomenon . . . but
          being itself . . . every metamorphosis or every phenomenon is
          . . . [a] local answer and a global cover-up . . . the
          information [is hidden] in a wealth of information. (Serres 50-1)

      What Serres drives at here is precisely the failure that emerges
      from not recognizing the dual nature of white noise. As we reflect
      on the path between the three scenes, we find that polyphony has
      been progressively neutralized, lost to the complexity of the
      intervocalic communion and its emergence as white noise. There
      remains, however, a productive relation as regards white noise and
      potential meaning. If one is to accept Serres's reading of the
      phenomenon, then this is one thing that is at stake in the UN
      General Assembly. Must all descend into white noise for
      communication to be re-established, for order to reappear? Do we
      not tend to look for this solution in structure and structuring?
      But we have seen that structures are breakable and also that they
      become functionally impossible to interpret in cases of extreme
      complexity. Structuring voices again become noise.

  44. Governed by order and convention, communication becomes empty and
      often subject to hegemony. We dream up a simplicity of meaning and
      communication which fails. "Simplicity and objective rigidity seem
      foreign to us," Blanchot tells us, "as soon as they appear to us,
      no longer coming from our language but transported into our
      language, translated, moved away from us, and as if fixed in the
      distance by pressure of the translating force" (178). Given the
      inevitability of miscommunication that emerges from the three
      scenes above, it seems I will always be both a bad listener and a
      worse speaker. If I construe meaning, as I must, I do so by losing
      my voice. But this loss is dangerous and damaging. There must be
      another way.


            The Equivocity of Silence

  45. Rituals permeate daily life and can develop within even the most
      mundane actions. I emphasized earlier that the idea of vocalic
      /communion/ should not be understood in terms of religious
      revelation; rather, it exposes the profundity of the ordinary, and
      the notion of ritual exposed in the following argument should be
      understood in this light. Instead of analyzing, demythologizing,
      and debunking its authority, I wish merely to identify three
      rituals in the above scenes that introduce into the present
      argument its paradoxical climax: silence. Various symbolic "high
      priests" emerge as initiators to enact these rituals of silence:
      the conductor for the choir, the curator for the exhibition, and a
      session chair at the United Nations.

  46. Each silence emerges only as a moment, a singular moment, and one
      of great import and potential. As the conductor ends a musical
      work that illustrates the mode of intervocalic communion (a work
      of the type we encounter in parts of Penderecki's St. Luke
      Passion), that moment of silence which marks this ending, what
      Dauenhauer calls an /after-silence/--maximizing an utterance's
      expressive force by causing both a recollection and an
      anticipation (10)--is followed by one far more profound. In the
      midst of this silence we find a near explosive tension between the
      vocalic bodies of the performance, already fading, and the vocalic
      bodies in formation--the deep silence of the /to-be-said/
      (Dauenhauer 20-1), or the /about/-to-be-said, to expand on
      Dauenhauer's idea. The audience can go either way--judge these
      works, assimilate such works into the dominant cultural practice,
      or reject the otherness of such works--so this moment of silence
      presents a radical ambiguity. The audience may respond either in
      jeers or cheers; the intervocalic communion that follows may
      either reinstitute an imbrication of confusion and interference,
      or a generative noise.

  47. To recollect, the intervocalic communion at the Lichtenstein
      exhibition proves a radical threat to the positive attributes of
      polyphony proposed by Bakhtin and Said precisely because it
      threatens the autonomy of unmerged voices (contradicting Bakhtin),
      and because it is enforced from an outside produced by
      exhibitionary politics (/contra/ Said). In this situation the
      polyphonic function degenerates; the situation moves toward chaos,
      and a radical threat to the promise of communication develops. The
      rather contrived silence that (occasionally) descends at an
      exhibition opening when the curator taps a wine glass or clears
      his or her throat over a public address system once again forces a
      decision. There are those who will turn their attention and
      re-enter into the formal exhibitionary discourse. Others will
      drift further away, toward an obscure corner where they can
      consume wine in peace. At either end, the silence of this position
      forces a reconsideration of our relationship to the aesthetic, and
      the miscommunicative process that often surrounds its emergence
      introduces what one might call a liturgy of the formal exhibition.

  48. In the last scene, silence is transitory, if it occurs at all. In
      a sense, the call for silence by a chairperson in such a
      multilingual setting always misses its mark as it occupies the
      space intended for silence. Silence is always being delayed in the
      vocalic echo, and yet, as Blanchot points out, "dialogue counts
      very much and is very silent . . . dialogue does not seek to
      attain silence by terseness but by an excess of chatter" (188). Is
      it possible, /contra/ Serres, that white noise erases noise, or is
      a genuine active silence possible? This institutionalized or
      ritual silence, one way or the other, is particularly pertinent in
      this context. Because its intervocalic communion presents a
      genuine approach to a reconstitution of white noise, it has great
      potential for meaning-production. In this silence, the bodies
      present once again have a radical option--quite simply, to produce
      interference, or to listen.

  49. What I am suggesting is that silence, as it presents itself in
      certain cultural rituals that may normally be seen as repressive
      and hegemonic--telling someone to "be quiet" is to my mind a
      tremendously violent act--may emerge as representations of a
      near-forgotten radix of effective communication, an equivocal
      moment where the interlocutors "about-to-become" have before them
      a series of options, the linguistic and vocal manifestation of
      which inevitably results in miscommunication. Perhaps the loss of
      this moment is as inevitable as taking the next breath. That is
      not the point. Rather, its value lies in the fact that our society
      and culture--the culture of the learned, for all its brave and
      admirable attempts to extract form from white noise, to recall
      Serres's earlier claims--have forgotten the promise of
      communication. Instead we invent mechanisms to control and order
      the voice, both in discourse and as a phenomenon, progressively
      hierarchizing the phenomenological world of voices we encounter
      and create. We order the voice, we lose this order, and we lose
      our equivocity and our potential for generative communication.

  50. In a discussion of the Jena Romantics, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
      discuss equivocity in a particularly evocative way:

          At the very most, through its equivocity, the motif of
          mixture, without being or producing mixture itself . . . leads
          to the extreme edge of what it mixes: genre, literature,
          philosophy. It may lead to the edge of what unmakes or
          interrupts the operation, to the edge of what could be called,
          with deliberate equivocity, the ab-solution of the literary
          Absolute. (123)

      According to this version of equivocal discourse, "the
      manifestation in question here . . . seems to be one that can
      designate itself . . . only through a peculiar eclipse of the
      manifest in manifestation" (Lacoue-Labarthe 124). We should
      remember that the Jena Romantics were writing, even if the
      auto-deconstruction of their /genre of genres/ sought to undo the
      work as it was made manifest. By this logic, are we to find
      equivocity--which, in the present context, demarcates not only a
      communicative space between equal voices, but also a certain
      communicative continuity; the unfinalizability of many ends--only
      in such works as those of the Jena Romantics? How then can the
      three scenes sketched above, and most other real and hypothetical
      scenes of daily life, be seen as ethically and communicatively
      plausible when they are embroiled in a vocality that can never be
      equivocal?

  51. A solution, which is precisely an /ab-solution/ in the sense
      employed above, may appear in silence. If it is true that silence
      is not merely a phenomenological opposite to noise, but "an active
      human performance . . . [which] involves a yielding following upon
      an awareness of finitude and awe" (Dauenhauer 24), then silence
      may invigorate equivocity precisely because it allows for doing
      work and production without producing a work, as such. In yielding
      and still acting, silence provides a profound background to the
      possibility of genuine ethical action. Ambiguity, interwoven as it
      is in the fabric of language, is not identical to equivocity.
      Ambiguity and irony twist together, but do not necessarily open a
      path to equivocity. They may present such an equivocity, as in the
      case of the argument of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy with regard to
      the Jena Fragment, the Literary Absolute. But these are ideal
      anomalies, and are certainly not comparable to most of the
      investments of meaning in intervocalic communion that, when
      carried to their extremes, present the growing univocity and the
      decay of productive polyphony which we feel vibrating
      threateningly in the three scenes discussed above.

  52. Silence reopens two paths that are particularly relevant to this
      essay. The first leads inward, infinitely inward, beyond the heart
      of the subject. It introduces into the subject a stillness that is
      curiously missing in much Western thought. In Buddhism, this is
      referred to as /Anatta/, which, in brief, implies that no insight
      can ever reveal the true nature of the Self, or of the self as
      subject. In an important sense this path mirrors the function of
      intervocalic communion which returns to the vocalic body the
      knowledge of itself as both subject and object. In its counterpart
      in silence, however, we find not a contrived equivocity, an equal
      loudness, but rather a mutual respect between subject and object,
      and also between the subject as object and the object as subject.
      Silence reintroduces a radical equivocity because not only does it
      force a radical reconsideration of what it means to be a subject
      or an object in the world, but it also shows a way in which
      neither of these is important, neither is final--they are forever
      regarding each other as the other. In terms of an internal path,
      surely this silence may express the heart of equivocity?

  53. The second path leads outward again, into the world, and engages a
      more formal ethical stance. It relates very closely to John Cage's
      observation that "silence is . . . [a] change of . . . mind. It's
      an acceptance of the sounds that exist rather than a desire to
      choose and impose one's own music" (229). Cage's silence is a
      yielding (in line with Dauenhauer's use of the term), not from the
      world, but from the imposition of an order on the sounds and
      noises of the world. Miscommunication occurs in the intervocalic
      communion of the three scenes as an exaggerated expression of the
      subjecthood of the voice, a merging of vocalic bodies and a loss
      of polyphony. Silence opens up a path to and from noise. It
      reminds us that

          the interference that noise produces may be seen as
          "destructive" from the point of view of those interested in
          the transmission of a discrete message . . . [W]hen viewed
          from elsewhere or from without the system, noise may be seen
          as "autonomy producing" . . . . Noise can therefore be seen as
          inherently ambiguous, neither desirable nor undesirable in and
          of itself. (Rasch 66)

  54. If noise is ambiguous, silence in the present argument is
      equivocal. It leads us to experience the noise of our environment
      as generative of possibilities, and hence as getting away from the
      miscommunicative babbling of the intervocalic communion of the
      three scenes above, which is to say, distinct from a politics of
      vocality that manifests increasingly as univocity. Most references
      to silence in recent academic discourse on the subject are
      noticeably negative and accusatory. Particularly in relation to
      sociological, political, and historical discourse, they tend to
      deal with silence as a transitive verb: these understandings
      assume that in order to be silent, one needs to have been
      silenced. While I do not wish to trivialize such instances in any
      way, this attitude typifies the notion that it is possible,
      always, to talk things through.

  55. Intervocalic communion is inevitable, and it is productive
      inasmuch as it exposes the nonfinality of language and hence
      encourages hope for ethical dialogue. Momentary silence allows us
      to reconsider the origins of such a dialogue and thus to enter it
      with renewed openness. In juxtaposing the vocalic body with the
      lost voice of silence, we may reconceive of silence as a space in
      itself, an internal dimension of the voice, always already lost
      when the voice emerges, but never quite forgotten. The highly
      complex relation between silence and space-time cannot be expanded
      in this context, but it is worth noting that it is possible to
      conceive losing one's voice as the paradoxical articulation of a
      third space: if one sees one's own physical emanation as a first
      subjective space, the vocalic space as a second that incorporates
      the powers of the subject and object, then the place of silence
      can present a third and /other/ space.

  56. The equivocity of silence is noncoercive. Dialogue often starts
      without ill intention, but conversation can quickly get rough in
      the growing freneticism of complex intervocalic communion. In this
      world of sounds, if there is a cry worth sounding, it must be for
      equivocity: an equivocity that silently opposes the neo-fascism of
      the ordering of voices and of intervocalic communion into
      hierarchical utterances, one speaker dominating others. This
      silence presents a type of pre-vocal voice--the voice about to
      become, the about to-be-said. Such silence occupies a vocalic
      position like that of the speech bubbles of Lichtenstein's
      paintings to the extent that it is an abstraction that relies on
      the possibility of future intervocalic communion. Yet silence
      differs significantly not only by virtue of its occupying a space
      prior to ontology (the about to become, as opposed to becoming),
      but also by being entirely receptive. In his fascinating study of
      silence in Buddhism, Panikkar notes that "not only is the Buddha
      silent, but his response is silence as well . . . . It is not
      simply that his is a silent answer whereas the responses of so
      many others are lively and verbose . . . . The Buddha makes no
      reply because he eliminates the question" (148).

  57. Vocality is lost in silence, and yet it is also always potentially
      present. This silence is both nothing more than a single moment
      and also infinite. We lose our voice in an equivocity that reminds
      us of the simultaneity of our singularity and plurality. It
      reminds us that it is possible to be together. Serres summarizes
      the position as follows:

          There is a path from the local to the global, even if our
          weakness forever prevents us from following it. Better yet,
          noise, sound, discord--those of music, voices, or hatred--are
          simple local effects. Noise, cries and war, has the same
          extent of meaning, but symmetrically to harmony, song and
          peace . . . . Chaos, noise, nausea are together, but thrown
          together in a crypt that resembles repression and
          unconsciousness known as appreciation. We often drown in such
          small puddles of confusion. (55)

      The locality of the self, of the vocalic body reflecting both the
      subjecthood of the self and itself as subject, divides us once
      more. It becomes a noisy place as localities compete on the path
      to the global, to the dream of equivocity. But univocity is often
      the menacing reality. Walking this path successfully is not easy.
      We cannot simply talk it through. Reinvigorated by silence, I can
      begin to communicate its existence and then later its special
      turns and snares. I lose my voice well as I remember how to listen
      to silence.

      / Department of English Studies
      University of Durham
      m.j.botha@durham.ac.uk /

      ------------------------------------------------------------------------


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          Notes

      Sincerest thanks to Professor Michel Olivier, artist Diane Victor,
      and my old friend Johan Freyer for their useful information on
      various aspects of this essay.

      1 <#ref1>. In a sub-chapter titled "You Cannot Not Communicate" in
      her introduction to General Systems Theory (which I find an
      extremely convincing model through which it is possible to take
      account simultaneously of vastly different disciplines and their
      various forms of information), Hanson argues that since there "is
      a constant flow of information back and forth . . . there is no
      such thing as noncommunication" (97). According to this model,
      even though it assumes a great deal regarding the notion of
      simple, unpolluted information, an absence of noncommunication
      does not preclude miscommunication. Central to this essay is the
      notion that communication seems to drift inevitably toward a
      profound ambiguity, akin to the notion in Derridaean
      deconstruction that meaning is always in the process of being
      displaced--as Lucy claims, "defer[ring] endlessly its own
      constitution as an autonomous or fully complete entity" (27). Paul
      de Man likewise notes in language an "errancy . . . which never
      reaches the mark . . . this illusion of a life that is only an
      afterlife" (94). This ambiguity, a tendency toward
      miscommunication, is discussed in relation not only to particular
      instances of intense intervocalic overlay used as nodal points in
      the essay, but also in relation to the idea of translation.

      2 <#ref2>. The autonomous vocalic body taking place is also the
      vocalic body taking space.

      3 <#ref3>. Connor takes note of this ability when he writes that
      "it is in the nature of the voice to be transitive," confirming
      (see page 3) that "sound, and as the body's means of producing
      itself as sound, the voice, will be associated with the dream and
      exercise of power" (Connor 23). From this perspective it is not
      difficult to see that even though the vocalic bodies' autonomy as
      acting subjects may not be immediately perceptible, it is
      nonetheless active and powerful.

      4 <#ref4>. Although this argument does not enter the complex
      debate around the definition of communication, it is worth
      mentioning a few significant elements of the phenomenon as it is
      understood in the present context. Rather than focus on its
      relation to meaning, and hence understanding, communication is
      used here in the more technical sense of information exchange.
      Rasch's understanding of the term in his essay "Injecting Noise
      Into the System" correlates in most respects to the present one,
      and is echoed in Hanson's work cited above; all three take a
      broadly systemic view common to most models that draw their
      concepts from Information Theory. According to these models,
      communication is defined primarily in terms of information flow
      and exchange, and less in terms of whether or not it reaches an
      intended object in the intended way and is decoded in that same
      intended mode. In contrast, I have chosen to preserve the semantic
      point of /mis/communication to embody failures of meaning,
      understanding, etc.--as a mode of failure then--precisely because
      I have noted a tendency to read the term /communication/ only in
      terms of success.

      5 <#ref5>. Rasch points out that the "element of disorder within
      all order is never extinguished. It makes our understanding of
      order contingent. It forces selection" (71). Certainly such a
      selection is necessary for meaning or understanding. It is perhaps
      the occasional absence of this selectiveness that forces several
      distinctions in the understanding of noise that will be explored
      in the following section of the essay.

      6 <#ref6>. Connor notes how inner voices as objects contribute to
      the self-constitution of each speaking subject when he writes, "If
      I hear my thoughts as a voice, then I divide myself between the
      one who speaks, from the inside out, and the one who hears the one
      who speaks, from the outside in." (6).

      7 <#ref7>. Serres 53. Here he uses the metaphor of the painting
      not only to represent the creation, but also creativity and
      generativity.

      8 <#ref8>. Due to the early dominance of sacred choral music in
      the West, such melodic lines are most often referred to as voices,
      which naturally suits the present context well.

      9 <#ref9>. I draw on the following statement by Stein in response
      to a question in which she explicitly talks of the famous line as
      an attempt "to put some strangeness, something unexpected [back] .
      . . in order to bring back vitality to the noun" (Wilder v-vi).

      10 <#ref10>. Although Bakhtin goes on to emphasize that "the
      material of music and of the novel are too dissimilar for there to
      be anything more between them than a graphic analogy" (22), it is
      still possible, in light of Nussbaum's claims regarding the
      linkage of narrative and reality, to progress to the associations
      made below regarding a broader application of polyphony. The
      relationship between voice-ideas and music extends beyond the
      analogical in Penderecki's St. Luke Passion (quoted in subsequent
      discussion), functioning homologically and strengthening the case
      for an explicit connection between narrative polyphony and musical
      polyphony.

      11 <#ref11>. There is a notable difference in directionality,
      however, between the polyphonic "writing" of Bakhtin, and Said's
      contrapuntal "reading." For Bakhtin, polyphony happens as a part
      of the creative process, as multiple voices descend with equal
      gravity on a given text: equivocity accomplished by writing many
      voices of equal stature. For Said, the process of reconstituting
      the text by reading reveals the multiple voices that constitute
      polyphony as they twist their way together away from a text's
      hegemonic univocity.

      12 <#ref12>. Penderecki's St. Luke Passion dates from 1966.

      13 <#ref13>. He uses this technique most famously in his Threnody,
      written to recapture the horror of the Hiroshima bombing. In this
      particular section of the Passion, this technique is used to
      capture the vocalic chaos of the scene in the High Priest's court:
      the frenetic and aggressive chattering and mocking begins in the
      upper-strings, soon spreading throughout the section before being
      taken up by lower woodwinds and passed rapidly, almost as a single
      line, to the upper woodwinds, a process that the brass repeats.
      All the while the texture grows and a sense of extreme discomfort
      permeates the music until it reaches a climax with the the entry
      of the chorus. The same technique is repeated with the voices of
      the choir.

      14 <#ref14>. These might include the textual, musical, and
      religio-political institutions.

      15 <#ref15>. Lichtenstein painstakingly reproduced the stenciled
      dots of the comics on which he based this work, and focused on
      reproducing accurately their thick outlines and bright primary
      colors (Wilson 10-11).

      16 <#ref16>. This claim is supported by the idea that so much of
      the process of defining reality is linguistically dependent,
      particularly as language relates to the materiality of the voice
      as a phenomenological body, albeit this is surrendering to a
      debatable phonocentric bias. The idea that a speech bubble can be
      regarded as having the same phenomenological status as other
      vocalic bodies will be probed in subsequent argumentation.

      17 <#ref17>. Although Bennett is referring to the historical
      emergence of the exhibitionary space in this particular passage, I
      think it can be applied quite accurately to the political space of
      the exhibition in general.

      18 <#ref18>. While the choral scene is staged and formally
      organized, the control mechanisms of interaction at the gallery
      are imbedded more in cultural codes than in a formal order. The
      United Nations General Assembly presents an interesting meeting
      place of the two.

      19 <#ref19>. These six languages are English, Spanish, French,
      Russian, Mandarin, and Arabic.


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