All sound seeks a body because it knows whatever caused it was moving. Most of the time, we name sounds after their causes. To vibrate, a body is needed. The shaking body and its surround, necessary for any sound. A voice is the ultimate body-seeker. It wants to be understood and wants something to be expressed in. We ratify voice, not paying other sounds heed until the spoken words are attended to. The tyranny of speech, as Artaud says.
A voice embodied is rooted inside something that can be touched. It occupies a place to measure from, to be in relation to. It is oriented. It is housed. But what about voices dispossessed of a body? Wandering voices, stateless voices, unoriented, escaped. Think of all the bodies that might absorb this voice. Non-human bodies, landscape bodies, mineral bodies, plant bodies, star bodies, the film viewer’s body, your, yes you – your own body. Vagabond voice, dropping into some relational position with the film’s other actors and setting up power ties before suddenly pulling out again. Hermit crab voice, opportunistic, homemaking in various bits of matter. Or the voice that remains unhitched, unrevealed, omniscient, calling worlds into being. Ventriloquist of matter.
Does the dispossessed voice mark dissolution of a self? They say the limits of my language are the limits of my world. It’s not what my language allows, but what it obliges me to. Obligational habits like causation, temporality, denoting what’s inferred vs. what’s experienced, gender, geography. In the Bosavi language, the word for ‘tomorrow’ is the same as the word for ‘yesterday’. 1Eliot Weinberger: Where the Kaluli Live, in: An Elemental Thing, 2007, p. 44. Some languages use cardinal directions instead of ‘left’ and ‘right’ to describe a self-body. “When the Wintu goes up the river, the hills are to the west, the river to the east; and a mosquito bites him on the west arm. When he returns, the hills are still to the west, but, when he scratches his mosquito bite, he scratches his east arm.” 2Dorothy Lee, as quoted in: Rebecca Solnit: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, 2006, p. 17. Here the world is stable and the self, contingent. We’re not masters of our universe. We emerge embagged alongside withinout it. 3s. Ursula K. LeGuin: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 2019, or: Denise Du Pont: Women of Vision. Essays by women writing science fiction, 1988, s. 1–12.
There are voices of fiction and voices of actuality. To the former we grant concessions, an archaic power, Conjurer. The actual, chronicled voice has more fences around it and more at stake because it attempts to speak the interior of One Particular Human. This person is not a fungible person. Even if this person is only presented via voice and therefore capable of dropping into alternate bodies.
Grief reacquaints us with the assembly of selfhood. When we mourn a loss of community, or species, or place, or person, we become inscrutable to ourselves. “I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well.” 4Judith Butler: Precarious Life, 2004, p. 22. The missing, the dispossessed, becomes a psychological presence in the face of perceptual absence. A phantom body, it hollows out the image, and other times thickens it.
Voicing-over is a habit of power. Which is why it’s interesting to try it on. I’m trying too for more voicing-under, between, alongside, more voicing-in. More un-voicing. Trust what can be told without.
Deborah Stratman works as an artist and filmmaker in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois. Stratman presents her work for the fourth time at the Berlinale Forum Expanded. A still from her film LAST THINGS also features in the joint key visual of Forum and Forum Expanded 2023.
