Writing in Motion: Body—Language—Technology

Through Me Many Voices

Walt Whitman's celebrated, still incantatory words from Leaves of Grass, magical and evocative, timeless and modern, pry open one of the perennial mysteries about the voice—or multiplicities of voices surging through one's throat like a sonic river (reading him aloud), refocusing all the conceptions and preconceptions about identity. One body, one voice— hardly. Singularity's song spins a tumultuous plurality of voices and poetic constellations of concatenative signs: "Through me many long dumb voices ... Through me forbidden voices ..." The phenomena of the transformations of vocal registers, whether that of a transcendental poet like Whitman, hip-hop rappers whose speeding, popping fusillades of hyperflexed , steady stream phonemic collisions and rhythmic elisions reach thresholds of genuine digital transmissivity, popular comics like Randy Credico, Lily Tomlin, Rich Little or Dana Carvey, direct voice mediums such as Leslie Flint and John Sloan, evangelical legends like Aimee Semple McPherson speaking in tongues, or the indefatigable Tallulah Bankhead with her overproduced, dramatically deep, drop-dead diction— voices of otherness hold one rapt like the embrace of supernatural paradox. We all enjoy playing with voices, the child humorously lampooning adults by mimicking them and adults endearingly and ridiculously adopt- ing simpering voices when pampering and playing with children, animals and pets. William James has written about some of these primal impulses of mimicry in his Principles of Psychology; Joseph Cornell's parrot habitat series, visually silent but poetically resonant, connotatively evokes an implicitly arresting double mimicry, an absurdist entendre bonanza. James: "Vocalization ... the child imitates every word he hears uttered and repeats it again and again with the most evident pleasure at his new power ... The child's first words are in part vocables of his own invention ... man is essentially the imitative animal... For a few months in one of my children's third year, he literally hardly ever appeared in his own person ."1 Just by compressing, foreshortening or elongating one's trachea, (epi)glottis, mouth muscles, or angle of delivery, voices slide through a host of mercurial registers to surprise by their sudden othernesses; the comedie causes one to "double" up—the euphemism for laughter is metaphysically sacrosanct. The ability to take on an authentic, other vocal signature and imitate the factorial specificities of a foreign voice always proves a delightful surprise.2 The euphonic voices in the voice hovering over and through it, permeating it, alter and lead one through the passes of compossibility—an entrancing audiophilia. The voice, any voice, inherits language, whose awesome pregiveness and anteriority transform it into its double, then supply the figure it inhabits with a shadow (the mark of existence) through innuendo, contiguity , reflexion and resonance. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "Language is the double of being .. ."3 Jacques Derrida: "There is a double effect of the medium, a double relation between logos and sense .. ."4 The voice's power rides the disembodied edge and ontic margins of phenomenality and provides a reciprocal guarantor for language as its producer and praxeologer. How curious that seeing and hearing and hearing and seeing language and language voiced reverse, transpose, transfigure and tropize orders, priorities, contexts, codes and logics. It is vocal production, motoric and mimetically embodied in its virtual, acoustic spectra, and retroactively mnemonic, that makes language exceed itself, scrambles its rules, contexts and proprioceptive proprieties. Every voice embodies a malleable spectrum of potentially permutable and paramimetic modes that has the potential to hyperflex the entire psyche. A voice even slightly altered takes on the eidetic signature and numinous profile of a character and is thus both more and less than a given identity (that is consequently tacitly traced by the iteration of figuration). Even in solitary confinement, the voice creates the Other; language, too, elides its identity. In Speech and Phenomena Jacques Derrida, tracing the fissures and analytics of voice and speech, delves into the lubricous manifolds of ciphers that embed and entrain identity and perception, the psychomimetrics of the dance of signs: "Hearing oneself speak is not the inwardness of an inside that is closed in upon itself; it is the irreducible openness in the inside; it is the eye and the world within speech."5 Words become eyes, and signs become their sensors and antennae. Through listening (an art unto itself) the potential is aroused for a reflexive aurality in the production of the vocal stream; the motoric (im)pulses, flexions and vocopathic isomorphisms in turn create virtualized hearing (semiotropic, physiognomic, neuroacoustic) through...