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  • The Tenuous Body of History
  • Thomas Looser (bio)

History, as a discipline, has tended to offer us certitude, promising to explain who we are, and how we have become what we are, in assured terms; history is the discipline that claims to unite all other humanities. And the basis for modern certitude has been our bodies themselves—a kind of base of empirical experience, as well as the starting point for the inscription of ourselves into the world. But art (itself a mode of materializing worlds, and therefore related to history) has long known that bodies and their relation to the world are more tenuous than they may seem.

Using performativity as a means for considering the possibilities of a critical history is thus not a new idea—but it is an ongoing project. Some of the work I have recently undertaken is focused on sound as a potentially alternative or even radical mode of conceiving cultural history. Sound, that is, as a relatively fluid medium of interaction and influence, that might point toward formations that among other things escape the kind of linear histories by which we still tend to identify ourselves.

Miya Masaoka's proposal that we might think of the vagina as a "third ear," and that this might somehow model a radical, dialogic social being, is therefore of immediate interest, and serves for me as an ideal entry into a discussion of the varied takes on the relation between body, performance, and radical history that this dossier opens up.

Masaoka's third ear is meant in some ways to be taken fairly literally, and her work offers us real, performative experience: sitting on metal chairs fitted to vibrate at different frequencies for the audience to feel as we moved from chair to chair; and a set of silicon vaginal inserts, similarly set to vibrate differentially to create a kind of sensation and communication. Already, one might see the elements of not only a kind of performative structure of connection—this is not just about performativity—but also the micro-elements of history: along with social connection, there is inscription and transmission; there are the specific materialities of transmission (both inorganic and organic); and there are grounds not only for reproduction but for origination and creation (although Masaoka avoids the more literal connections of the vagina with reproductivity and creation, she underscores its capacities to not only feel or "hear" sound but also to create it). And perhaps because this is a mode of listening that functions only abstractly through felt vibration (there is transmission of vibration more than hearing of words or meaning), Masaoka is explicit in saying that it refuses any kind of monumental concretizing of meaning. Perhaps the vagina might serve as a more radical ear, a different medium both for connecting person to world, and the past with present and future structures of meaning? [End Page 71]

Part of the reason Masaoka turns to the vagina is its sensitivity that in some ways mimics the ear. Setting aside the question of whether you could actually come up with any kind of sociality at all if you entirely give up on semantics—on meaning itself, in favor simply of transmitting vibrations and sound—it's worth further considering the vagina as, in a sense, a uniquely sensitive medium. For me, there's a clear comparison one could draw with the very first machine created to record sound. Called the phonautograph, this too was designed to mimic the ear, with the ability to capture sound ultimately residing on a delicate organic medium—a single pig bristle, attached to the tip of the chamber of the "ear." This too was based on pure vibration, and simply transcribed that sound vibration onto a drum. It was therefore nonlinguistic, and in fact at the time (the 1860s) could not even be used to reproduce the sound that it captured; that would have to wait until very recently, when digital programming was designed to turn the visual sound waves back into the historical voice that was captured by the phonautograph. So we could look at the phonautograph as similar to the radicality of Masaoka's vaginal ear: tremendously sensitive...

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