Marc Botha

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

When the conversation gets rough . . .

 

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.

 

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 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).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 outwardly², 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.

 

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

 

The intervocalic communion of vocalic bodies demonstrates the complexity with which we are faced when we communicate.⁴ 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)

 

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 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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

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 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).

 

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?

 

In music, the term polyphony refers to a compositional method that simultaneously presents more than one melodic line of equal importance.⁸ 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 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).

 

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).

 

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.

 

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 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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 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.

 

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 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 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 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

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

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 “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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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?

 

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)

 

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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.

 

 

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. 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. The autonomous vocalic body taking place is also the vocalic body taking space.

 

3. 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. 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 miscommunication 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. 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. 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. Serres 53. Here he uses the metaphor of the painting not only to represent the creation, but also creativity and generativity.

 

8. 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. 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. 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. 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. Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion dates from 1966.

 

13. 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. These might include the textual, musical, and religio-political institutions.

 

15. 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. 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. 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. 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. These six languages are English, Spanish, French, Russian, Mandarin, and Arabic.

 

 

Works Cited

 

• Ashcroft, Bill, and Pal Ahluwalia. Edward Said. London: Routledge, 2001.
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