Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism
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Connor, Steven. (2000) Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford University Press, NYC.
Embodied voice (3)
Voicing
- Produced by vocal apparatus
- Identifying physical attribute
- Unique in that it is produced
- Establishes presence
- "Coordinating" (Merleau-Ponty)
- Temporal
- Spacial
- Oriented
- Establishes fronting, frontality
- "Out loud"
- At the top of my voice, En voz alta, en haute voix
- Imagined interior/exterior split existence
- Monitoring one's expression
- Auto-simulation, pleasure, affirmation
Disguising the voice:
- Unlike changing hair color, adopting new gait
- Not merely incidental, about me but my way of being me
Voice: defines me, accomplishes me
- Not something that i have but something that i do
- Merleau-Ponty: voice is a way of bringing the speaker's world into being. (4)
- Issues from me
- Reflexive, hear myself
- I can only participate by becoming apart from it
- In use, provides shape to my whole body
- Talking with ones hands
- Consider the ways that cartoon bodies are drawn to reflect the production of sounds
Recorded voice (7)
Voice-confrontation experience:
- Revealing the voice's split condition
- One's voice outside of one's bodily production
- Hearing the voice as unfamiliar
- Hearing what others hear
- Momentary awareness of aspects of his personality which are mirror in his voice. (8)
- Speaking: not only constantly self-listening but self-monitoring
- Alert to slippages, revealing by accident
- Expressing that which was not intended to be expressed (8)
- Alien, unpleasantly unfamiliar
Animating voice (10)
Singing along, mimicing, repeating, onomatopoeia
- Taking the sounds into one's body
- Possessing them
- Affirming, sharing in their existence
Vocalic Space (12)
Voice not only inhabits and occupies space
- It "actively procures" space for itself
- The voice is space
- Voice articulates different conceptions of space
- Voice enacts different relations among body, community, time, divinity
Implicated space:
- Insides, outsides change places
- Produce each other reciprocally
- Gave way to explicated spaces in 17th, 18th
- Under increased observation of life sciences
- Body is then an object in a coherent, fixed field
Aural / Visual historicization and distinction
Ongian view:
- Visual cultures are literate
- Words are records, fixed, external
- Seer is situated in front of the scene
- Aural cultures, oral comm central
- Words are events, passing, radiating and fading
- Listener is situated amid or in the center of a scene
Frontality of vision (16)
- Ears poorly tuned to directionality in sound
- Vision requires a distance and division
- Sound is cooperatively produced (resonance of one's body)
But this arrangement does not confirm the "domination for which the eye has sometimes been held responsible." (16)
Optional eye: eyelids
- Close your eyes
- Blink
- Visually withdraw
- "Look away"
Always-on ear: no earlid
- No "listening away"
- No closing ones ears
- Even the deaf sense sounds in vibration
Continuous, passing, proceding world of sound:
- Sounds are momentary on much faster scale than sights
- Look away from a building and expect it to remain
- Turn attention from a sound and it will be gone
The eye apprehends a world waiting to be seen
- Sounds arrest the ear and compete for attention, consideration
- Especially true for the blind, who have no visual indication of approaching sounds
- Hull's onset of blindness accompanied by a loss of the sense of his body as the locus of consciousess and presence (18)
Different, complementary roles in sensing arrangement:
- Hearing is kinetic, arousing
- Seeing is interpretive, sense-making
Seeing voices (13)
Ventriloquism: making voices appear to issue from elsewhere than their source
- history of, reveals complex alternations between two contrasting possibilities
- power of "unlocated or mobile" voice
- historical accounting for includes naming, storytelling
- Presently occupying space alongside magic, illusion
- Historically shifting among theologist, pathologist, physicist, psychoanalyst/psychologist, sound-technician (14)
- Tugs at tensions, relations between seeing and hearing
Explanations of Ventriloquism
Aural-visual illusion:
- physical feat re: mechanics of voicing
- belief that sound had power to undermind authority of sight
- Ventriloquism distrupts, transcends space as it is seen
- Eye, ear differently governed wrt space
The "truth" about ventriloquism
The illusion depends on the co-operation of eye and ear.
- Hearing registers a new sound, eye asks, "From where?"
- The opposite is not so true (in humans, perhaps the ordering of senses is different in animals?
Acousmêtre
Film term for a voice that appears between sound and vision
- Voice is heard and fit to the narrative but does not emanate directly from people on screen
- Off-camera character
- Tape-recorder, radio playback
Contemporary ventriloquism
- We comprehend that the ventriloquist provides the voice
- But we are not permitted to "see" the voicing
Power, rapture, and the sacred
Voices carry with them purpose, transition
- Voices are done to and on us
- The eye is more sensitive to detail, more detailed
- Thus the veracity of auditory hallucination
- Attributed to power and powerful entities
- Divine beings are frequently unseen but rarely unheard
Voice without visible source has power
- of a "less-than-presence" that is also "more-than-presence" (25)
- in more auditory-oriented cultures, voices are the exercise of power
- command, enchantment, invocation
Excessive sound:
- Rapture
- Frenzy
- Possession
- Exorcism
- Joyful noise
Early accounts of ventriloquism:
- Utterance is taken serious as communication from a non-human, perhaps divine entity (42)
- Ventriloquial voice functions as mediator between the human world and the world of the inhuman
- Supernatural explanations of ventriloquy fade alongside supernatural explanations generally in 18th c.
Ventriloquism:
- Superhuman
- Subhuman
- Inhuman
- Varying across time, space, cultural frame, technological surround
Psychoanalysis
Skin-ego (27)
Developed by Didier Anzieu based on Freud's The Ego and the Id
Sonorous envelope:
- Foetus in vitro
- Blurry boundaries among senses
- Touch, hearing experienced together
- Lacan's "mirror-stage": "audio-phonic skin"
- Leads to development of the ego
Sound-producing infant(29)
Guy Rosolato,
- production of sound leads to voice
- Sense of sonorous omnipotence
- Exercise of will through sound
- Screaming infant objectifies the world
Nicolos Abraham, Maria Torok
- Need, language, power in newborns
- Language arrise within empty mouth
Cry is pure utterance
- Force of speech without, or inexcess of, its recognizable and regularizing forms (33)
- Compact between voice and power
- Megaphone, microphone: magnified cry
Infants wants spaceless experience of the womb
- No distinction between inside/outside
- Must learn to negotiate space, dimensionality
- Sound and voicing is component of this learning process
Vocalic Body (35)
Voices:
- Produced by bodies
- Can also themselves product bodies
Vocalic body is an idea
- Idea of surrogate, secondary body
- New way of having or being a body
- formed and systaubed out of autonomous operations of the voice
- Derives power from the idealization of the voice (40)
- e.g., voice as indicator of the holistic health of its associated body (41)
Just as voices always imply a body
- Voices also partially supply a body (36)
- We then animate a body for the voice
Rage, as in the cry, political performance
- is the creation of a a fiercer, hotter, living, urgent vital body (37)
Types of voices:
- Crying, raging voices
- Seductive, vivifying voices
- Deathly, excremental voices
Sublime, transcendent voices
- Associated to Burke's aesthetics of sublime (Felicia Miller Frank)
- Not reducible to an object without violence, blunting
- Inhuman otherness
Voice captured by microphone (38)
Mic incapable of capturing the dynamic range of a singer trained in an unamplified era
- Prefers the "crooning" voice, later characteristic of popular recorded music
- Full of Barthesian "grain"
- Sounds of a body: saliva, lips, tongue, breath
- Conjures a proximal body
- And invigorates the sense of the listener's own body
- Burke identification
Intervention of playback technologies
Technologically reproduced voice reduces "agentless-agency" of the autonomous voice (39-40)
- Rather than mingled pleasure, menace, it is
- Simply repeatable pleasure (or pleasure in repetition, repeatability)
- Burning bush is much less striking (40)
May also revive some of the enchantment, excess, and uncanny associated with the autonomous voice
Connor's summary
Three possible frames for historicizing the voice:
- Location of the self and the body in imaginary space
- Co-operations and conflicts of the difference senses
- Apprehension and embodiment of different forms and conceptions of power
Common to all three:
- Voice is a means of both integration and disturbance
- Legitimate and familiar exercise of the voice is accompanied by the doubts and delights of the ventriloquial voice
