There is no such thing as a neutral voice, a voice
without desire, a voice that does not desire me.
If there was, it would be an experience of absolute terror.
[The] rigor of performance [is] engaged with what
memory wants to forget.
The ear, observes Michel de Certeau, “is the delicate skin caressed or irritated by sound: an erogenous zone, exacerbated, so to speak, by the interdictions which banish from language and good manners, coarseness, vulgarity and finally passions.”1 How then to define the ear’s most intimate lover—the voice? Régis Durand demonstrates the volatility of voice as a cultural and psychoanalytic concept positioned between reality and representation, and functioning as both a metaphorical support of pure time and a physical production.2 Writing comes into being through the midwifery of fingers and a trained competence with encoded incisions. But in order to reach Certeau’s erogenous zone, human sound, like human birth, must pass from a cavity through a hole dilated under pressure. Indeed, “voice” is an inadequate term to describe the full workings of this organ concept, and Certeau’s definition of it as “a sign of the body that comes and speaks” factors out the complex buccal and respiratory labor essential to its functioning, and thus proves insufficient.3 Voice is a polis of mouth, lips, teeth, tongue, tonsils, palette, breath, rhythm, timbre, and sound. Less a component than a production of a materiopneumatic assemblage of interacting bone, liquid, cartilege, and tissue. Enjoying such complexity even a single voice resonates as a simultaneity of corporeal, acoustic events; the consequence of energy and respiratory force in flight through fixed cavities and adjustable tensors.
The twentieth century presents two distinct scenarios for the voice in poetry. One is a primal identity, culturally empowered to define the property of person. This is a phenomenological voice that serves in its selfevidence as the unquestionable guarantee of presence—when heard and understood through its communication of intelligible sounds this voice is named conscience.4 The other scenario—renegade and heterological—requires the voice’s primary drive to be persistently away from presence. This second is a thanatic voice triply destined to lines of flight and escape, to the expenditure of pulsional intensities, and to its own dispersal in sounds between body and language. Aspects of this second scenario are traced in this paper as the adventure of voice from the rebellious and jubilant pyrotechnics of early modernism, through its bigamous encounter with two graphisms, to its failure in the 1970s to establish the poem as community.
Barthes is responsible for introducing into theories of the voice the concept of granularity. Rhapsodizing on the paralinguistic effects of that vocal modification, as an amorous entwining of timbre and language whose aim, we are assured, “is not the clarity of messages,” but the blissful search for “pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.”5 Despite Barthes’s consummate rhetoric, this attempt to emancipate voice from code succeeds no further than a repositioning of the existing relationship. Language, signification, and code are certainly corporealized—Barthes is emphatic in this claim—yet voice, empowered by this embodiment, is still not freed from language. A voice outside of language? Blanchot offers a tremulous hint of such a siting in what he terms the “neutral” voice; a voice in intransigent nonidentification with a self.6
Let us trace a similar dynamic in that protracted cultural irregularity, the twentieth-century sound poem, emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an uncompromising effort at abstraction; its primary goal being the liberation and promotion of the phonetic and subphonetic features of language to the state of a materia prima for creative, subversive endeavours.7 Mike Weaver describes the modus operandi of this poetry as that of “the figure (sound) [rising] off the ground (silence) producing a configuration of filled time against emptied time.“8 This emphasis on the sound poem’s temporality had already been emphasized by the Dada poet Raoul Hausmann when claiming his own “optophonetic” poetry to be “an act consisting of respiratory and auditive combinations, firmly tied to a unit of duration.”9
Hugo Ball’s Lautgedichte or poetry without words possessed a more mantic base. “In these phonetic poems,” claims Ball, “we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, we must even give up the word too, to keep poetry for its last and holiest refuge.”10 Ball celebrates these aspirations realized in a journal entry for 18 June 1916. “We have now driven the plasticity of the word to the point where it can scarcely be equalled. We achieved this at the expense of the rational, logically constructed sentence … We have loaded the word with strengths and energies that helped us to rediscover the evangelical concept of the ‘word’ (logos) as a magical complex image” (Ball, 68). These desires are, to say the least, paradoxical: a quest through a “poetry without words” in order to obtain the word’s innermost alchemy. However, Ball’s interior verbal transmutations do approximate those undertakings of linguistic delirium noted by Foucault in Brisset—“to restore words to the noises that gave birth to words, and to reanimate the gestures, assaults and violences of which words stand as the now silent blazons.”11
In their experimental zaum or “transrational language,” the Russian Futurists Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh grant a similar autonomous value to sound—an independence endorsed and scientifically scrutinized by the Russian Formalists. Yet even a cursory glance at their theoretical statements and manifestos makes it clear that the voice’s emancipation is at most a coincidental achievement and not zaum’s central concern. Markov suggests that much zaum was written as a conscious imitation of foreign linguistic sounds,12 a claim endorsed by Kruchenykh when he describes his own proto zaum texts as verbal constructs whose words “do not have a definite meaning” (quoted in Markov, 44). The target of Kruchenykh’s attack is not the word as such but the word’s semantic and grammatical subordination to meaning.
For all their subversive accomplishments, Dada and Futurist sound poems fail to escape an ultimate organization by the signifier. Ball’s verse without words, for instance, is testimony to the omnipresent possibility, in cacophony and gibberish, of language returning in either recognizable words or a comprehensible “syntax” suggestive of an unknown language. The xenoglossic evocations in Ball’s and Kruchenykh’s poems conjure up a sense of texts whose meanings are inherent, but defiant of comprehension. The consequence to vocality is that voice retains its quality as ontologic presence with the mandate to communicate at least a semantic suggestion. To link Ball’s poetry without words and zaum to cross-cultural glossolalia or to the Jewish automatic speech known as “maggidism” is thus a natural temptation. For speaking in tongues, zaum, and the Dada sound poem commonly retain the simulacra of a semiosis.
Certeau describes the experience of such heteroglossia as “voices” haunting a plurality of boundaries and interstices. “The voice moves, in effect, in a space between the body and language, but only in a moment of passage from one to the other and as if in their weakest difference … The body, which is a thickening and an obfuscation of phonemes, is not yet the death of language. The articulation of signifiers is stirred up and effaced; there remains nonetheless the vocal modulation, almost lost but not absorbed in the tremors of the body; a strange interval, where the voice emits a speech lacking ‘truths’, and where proximity is a presence without possession” (Certeau, 230). Certeau’s formulation of voice as the prime constituent of a breach in normal signification differs significantly from the one advanced by Derrida who—in the now famous critique of Rousseau’s theory of speech—detects the marked privileging of speech over writing with the former authenticating presence and marking the closest proximity to the signified (Derrida, 11).
Despite their celebration of non-sense and attendant consecration of orality, Dada and Futurism did not provoke a disavowal of the written. On the contrary, the legacy left by both is one of conspiratorial innovations realized through a bigamous relation with both sound and the written mark—its heritage, a condition of voice that can best be described (to borrow a category from Gertrude Stein) as a “dependent independence.” One of the undeniable achievements of Dada and Futurist poetics is their decisive advancement of poetry’s graphic notation. Ball’s frequently reprinted “Karawana” employs a variety of typefaces in its first printed form, and Hausmann’s optophonetic poetry achieves a notational precision that he himself likens to musical notation—a score for repeating the poem’s vocalized entailments of intonation, volume, and pitch.13
Graphic and sonic innovation go similarly hand in hand in Futurist practice. It is less the liberation of the voice than a successful application of advanced typography that allows Marinetti in his parole in libertà (words in freedom) “to treat words like torpedoes and to hurl them forth at all speeds: at the velocity of stars, clouds, aeroplanes, trains, waves, explosives, molecules, atoms.”14 And Marinetti is not an isolated case. Francesco Canguillo’s “Piedigrotta” and “Caffè concerto, alfabeto a sorpresa” are stupendous, unprecedented typographic tours de force. But despite its verbal deformations parole in libertà still commits the performing voice to a textual dependency—a confinement clearly hinted at in Marinetti’s comments on his own poem “Zang-tumb-tumb” where “the strident onomatopoeia ssiii, which reproduces the whistle of a tugboat on the Meuse, is followed by the muffled fiiii fiiii coming from the other bank. These two onomatopoeias have enabled me to dispense with a description of the breadth of the river which is thus measured by contrasting the consonants s and/” (quoted in Clough, 50). In its dominant goal—a mimophonic representation of ambient technology and powers by means of predominantly martial and industrial onomatopoeia—the most lasting accomplishment of parole in libertà is a graphic system of notation for sonic rhythms and forces—in other words an efficient score for voice.15
Language, be it sonorized, pulverized, deracinated, plasticized, lacerated, or transrationalized by this collective avant-garde still resists an ultimate demolition. Voice, as a consequence, remains subordinated to the dictates of a graphism, the resultant poetry remaining an ars dictandi, that learned Scholastic expertise in the speaking of a written text.
The final move away from the written to a full orality begins in the early 1950s with four young French writers: François Dufrêne, the Situationist Gil J. Wolman, Jean-Louis Brau, and Henri Chopin: collectively known as the Ultralettristes.16 In the late 1940s the pioneers of Lettrisme, Isadore Isou, and Maurice Lemaître, opted for the letter over the word as the basic unit of their poetic composition. The break with the word (which in Dada, zaum, and parole in libertà succeeded no further than its plasticization and deformation) was finally accomplished. Celebrating the lettristic impulse amidst the debris of the word, they developed in their works both visual and auditory innovations.17 The seeds of Ultralettrisme were already nascent in this parent movement. Isou’s New Letteric Alphabet reascribes to alphabetic characters nonphonetic values and paralinguistic features: A = hard inhalation; В = exhalation; О = coughing, clearing the throat; P = a clicking of the tongue. Fulfilling the demands for Lyotard’s “theatre of energies,”18 Dufrêne’s cri-rhythmes, Wolman’s mégapneumes, and the instrumentations verbales of Brau are all morphological transformations in extremis. Less texts than sonic performances the ultralettristic poems comprise a high-energy expulsion of inarticulate sounds, cries, and grunts.19 In linguistic parlance ultralettristic performance emancipates non- and subphonomatic material from the necessity of primary articulation, and as a category of sound poetry explores—at its maximum level of intensity—the area of human expression David Crystal terms paralanguage, “a kind of bridge between non-linguistic forms of communicative behaviour and the traditionally central areas of ‘verbal’ linguistic study—grammar, … vocabulary, and pronunciation.” 20
Breton insists on a discernment between the work of art as a “happening” and the work of art as a “ribbon” of repetitions, preconceptions, and anticipations. However, it was Apollinaire in “The New Spirit and the Poets” who reminded poetry that its greatest resource was surprise.21 The ultralettristic performance is such a surprise happening. Neither a preconception nor a sedimented terminal signification, it registers—like pleasure—as a pure affect, reconfiguring performance not as a validation of authorial presence (there is no author) but as a profoundly destabilizing force, removing the poem from familiar semantic and orthographic certainties.22 Poet Bob Cobbing describes the cri-rhythmes as utilizing “the utmost variety of utterances, extended cries, shrieks, ululations, purrs, yaups and cluckings; the apparently uncontrollable controlled into a spontaneously shaped performance.”23 Due to the abolition of any normative meaning in this poetry, the distance between poet-performer and audience becomes radically altered from its standard configurations. The functional separation that derives from a traditional transit model of communication (with a message sent across a textual or auditory space to a receiver) no longer obtains. Rather than validating their creators’ presence as an immediate emotional “truth, ultralettristic performances destabilize all ontological grounding and free the productions from both semantic and orthographic hegemony.”24
The auditory reception of these performances, first presented in 1950 under the category of “Prelinguism,” is described colorfully by Arrigo LoraTotina. The sonic expulsions “strike the ear as brutally as a material in the pure state of incandescence, a brute, heavy, physical substance still fresh from the flesh that has expelled it, impregnated with the weight and the electricity of the tissue of the cells that has created it, a torid place of existential incubation” (Lora-Totina, 33). The sense evoked is of Barthes’s vocal granulation pushed beyond all connection to language, as vocal emissions without meaning whose closest proximity is to a “death of language.”
A profound and obvious commitment is evident in Ultralettriste improvisation to the release of primary and libido-genetic processes via spontaneous voicing. Writing in 1963 Raoul Vaneigem extolls the revolutionary potential of spontaneity as a vital component of radical subjectivity. “Spontaneity is the true mode of being of individual creativity, creativity’s initial, immaculate form, unpolluted at the source and as yet unthreatened by the mechanisms of co-optation.”25 One might be tempted to regard this description of vocal Evian water as an attractive agenda for poetic praxis, but what guarantees the emergence of unconscious drives in automaticity or spontaneity?26 If Kristeva’s formulations are correct and a semiotic interruption of instinctual drives is always present in the sociolectal, symbolic order, then the loss of conscious control within the spontaneous act of voicing will always emerge as symptomatic of a double disposition and cannot fail to index a dialectic of drives.27 Barthes, however, cautions against such optimistic determinism, alleging automatism “is not rooted at all in the ‘spontaneous,’ the ‘savage,’ the ‘pure,’ the ‘profound,’ the ‘subversive,’ but originates on the contrary from the ‘strictly coded.’ “28 “The ‘spontaneity’ which people normally talk to us about is the height of convention. It is that reified language which we find ready-made within ourselves, immediately at our disposal, when we do in fact want to speak ‘spontaneously.’ “29 LoraTotina admits to similar misgivings about Ultralettriste performances concluding that “divorced from the common language, repetition rapidly and inevitably generated boredom, for, when it comes to the point, inarticulate expression, like sex, does not have an infinity of ways of conjugation, in fact it is extremely limited” (Lora-Totina, 33-34). We should also recall the austere warning offered by Althusser “that every ‘spontaneous’ language is an ideological language, the vehicle of an ideology.”30
Whether from premonition of this subsequent criticism, or developing their own misgivings, the Ultralettristes quickly modified their performances into multimedia events. Early in their history a technological turn occurred toward the use of human sound as a primary material for technological modification. Lora-Totino describes these works as embroideries of “primitive and indistinct material with rhythm, superimpositions, accelerations, … creating veritable ballets of expectoration, cascades of little noises and disagreeable noises” (Lora-Totino, 34).31 Paralanguage in such manifestations merges with concrete music, as a component in a complex instrumentation of speed, timbre, volume, and quantity. If Charles Olson saw advanced and untapped possibilities offered to poetic notation by the typewriter, then Wolman, Dufrêne, Brau, and Chopin see equally lucrative potential offered to Prelinguism by the tape recorder. It would be straining genealogy to argue that these later Ultralettriste tape recorder productions comprise merely an extension into acoustics of the treated text—indeed, the intransigent difference between media here is absolute. Clearly they signal a return to a graphism, arrested and repeatable, but most crucially, through their recovery of human expenditure as a new vocabulary for secondary orality, they signalize a revised poetical economy. The tape enhancements of the Ultralettristes are the culmination of the romantic subject in the unfolding (via technological prostheses) of its insular “lyric” interiority. Unquestionably the conceptual base of the spontaneous voice is radically altered. Impromptu ephemera become recoverable, redeployable as combinatorial and distortable material in a complex, textural composition. If the cri-rhythme and megapneume fall within the purlieu of Bataille’s general economy as acts of expenditure,32 these later poems—the products of recovery, preservation, and modification—announce the extreme limit of the voice in a powerful alterity, a cacophonous amplification, pulverized into a microparticularized Other, the experience of which is more of an extra than a paralinguistic phenomenon. If such is the fate of voice, it is the sound poem’s ironic destiny not to escape repetition but to enter it and give itself over to the fixity of digital imprint. For with the seductive advent of the tape recorder, technology offered Prelinguism a secondary orality capable of transforming its acoustic ephemerality into the electro-acoustic data of the Foucauldian archive.
In the 1970s the body emerged as both a conceptual and actual preoccupation in art and performance. We might cite as its most memorable examples the Dionysian enactments of Herman Nitsch complete with dripping animal carcasses and blood-splattered stage; the self-mutilations of the Vienna Aktion group that culminated in Swartzkogler’s self-castration; the extreme physical submissions of Gina Pane or Chris Burden; and Linda Montano’s self-application of acupuncture needles to her face in “Mitchell’s Death.” The ambient theories of the times were to be found in “Anti-Oedipus,” “Libidinal Economy,” and “Revolution in Poetic Language,” each offering libidinal templates by which to reformulate a theory of the body as process, or becoming.33 Out of this convulsive context appeared a species of collective, improvised sound performance that might be dubbed “paleotechnic,” its practitioners largely Canadian (The Four Horsemen: Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, and bp Nichol) and British (Konkrete Canticle: Bob Cobbing, Paula Claire, Bill Griffiths, as well as Jgjgjgjg: Chris Cheek, Clive Fencott, Lawrence Upton).34 Via such ensembles, sound poetry reappeared as a practice of outlay and dispossession. In Canada especially there was a wholesale rejection of technological enhancement and manipulation of the voice.35 Inspired neither by a purism nor a primitivism, a collective human group emerged, highly conscious of the pressures from both its ambient cultural theories and radical psychopolitics—schizoculture—to rethink the body, poem, and community through formulations of assemblage, movement, and intensities.36 Consciously developing (in part) from Tzara’s famous dictum that “thought is made in the mouth,” the paleotechnic sound poetry of the 1970s was formulated around two primary desires: to create a poetry of spontaneous affect predicated on a paradigm of unrepeatablity (this was the antitechnological component) and to reformulate the “poem” as a manifestation of unpremeditated and ephemeral community.37 Conceptually speaking, these readings pushed ontology toward polis, addressing the accidental configuration of two intermeshed ensembles—performers and audience—as an urgent issue of community.
There is a Greek term—hyponoia (the underneath sense)—that aptly describes the telos of those performance-presentations. What was absorbed from Marx and Freud—at a minimum—is the basal illusion of appearances. Beneath the envisaged performance of sonic outlay was a required loss of self in the region of spontaneous enactment. We might figure here a body-before-self as the negative presence operative in the paleotechnic sound poem. Breton had spoken earlier of his own desire to experience what lay beneath appearances as an uninterrupted quest (Breton, 106). Conceived as a function of movement and evanescence these collective spontaneities claimed the status of phonocentrism’s heterological dimension and dynamic. Such vocal performances do not index or supplement stability; they function through overdeterminations of rhythm and energy as the conduit for a loss. Falling under the primary conceptual governance of expenditure rather than orality, voice in these occasions—no longer a guarantee of a conscious self—precipitates a maximum rupture in any signifying system.38 Replacing the traditional author is a complex machinic assemblage generating performances that take the form of pulsional escapes from meaning and being, their release effected by a community of agents/“poets” functioning as a complex interrelation of transistors.39 An assemblage is to be understood as an “increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.”40 The variant machinic assemblage is bifocal. “One side … faces the strata, which doubtless makes it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate” (Deleuze and Guattari, 4). We should not lose sight of the intense corporeality of this machinic assemblage, which I have insisted on calling a community. But can such assemblage be reconciled to a concept of community? As a community-in-process yes, it can be constantly positioned in that double estrangement between a signifying social organic called “the group” and that totality’s self-diremption in a performed expenditure by numerous bodies in occasion—a performance “without organs.”
In the distinction offered by Romanticism between ergon and energeia paleotechnic sound poetry, like its Ultralettriste precursors, sided unequivocably with the latter term of being-in-action, and the unqualified valorization of energy clearly links the paleotechnic sound performance with Olsonian notions of Projective Verse. With their depreciation of textuality and a stress upon high-energy emission, the sound improvisations of the 1970s entailed a forceful decanting—though not a rejection—of Olson’s basic theories. The poem’s source in both cases is physiological “down through the workings of [the poet’s] throat to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings, where drama has to come from, where the coincidence is, all act springs.”41 Defining energy in “The Gate and the Center,” Olson grants it a cosmologic status: “The proposition is a simple one (and the more easily understood now that we have been shocked at what we did not know nature’s energies capable of, generally) : energy is larger than man, but therefore, if he taps it as it is in himself, his uses of himself are EXTENSIBLE in human directions & degree not recently granted.”42 There is a substantive difference in application, however, that must be remarked. In Olson’s biopoetics the imperative project is to embed energy in a sonographism by means of a precise written placement of energy within the imprinted syllable. The syllable is to Olson what onomatopoiea is to Marinetti: a threshold in biomaterial language where the paralinguistic enters graphic stability. The significant disagreement of the paleotechnic sound poem with Olson’s Projective Verse thus centers on the issue of how and where that energy manifested. In retention and recall through the binding fixity of a printed text? Or in the anasemantic expenditure of performance?
The fundamental break made by this paleotechnic assertion from the prelinguism of the Ultralettristes is in rethinking the poem as a spontaneous community—what Pierre Mabille might term an egregore.43 Its basal renunciation was the antisocial antilyricism of individual composition, replete, in the case of the later Chopin and Dufrêne, with its technologically generated autoaffective nuncupations. The paleotechnic poem was conceived as a communal performance at its outset. Such improvisational activities, involving simultaneity and a resultant indeterminate texturality in its realization, are complicated when manifesting in a group context.44 Herbert Blau illuminates a crucial consequence of improvisation when insisting on “a critical gap between repression and pretense, the construction of an appearance and, more or less overdetermined, the appearance of indeterminacy.”45Opening up the poem to such overdeterminations and indeterminacies of performed community was paleotechnicism’s prime commitment.
I have described the intense corporeality of sound performance as a machinic assemblage of body and voice in the transmission and retransmission of asignifying, nonrepeatable energies, in a collectivity without preparation.46 But is such a poetry of pure outlay even thinkable? Jean Barrot has claimed that “all activity is symbolic,” creating simultaneously a product and a vision of the world.47 If symbolic impedimenta are unavoidable, then how do we assess this species of performance? Theorized through Bataille, the sound poem takes on the defining dynamic of inevitable vocal excess spilling over from a libidinal, phonorhythmic dispositif of evanescent expenditures and meaningless outlays. If it does achieve such a sovereign negativity then the sound poem is truly deserving of the title of literature’s part maudite— a heterological expulsion from the scriptural regime of Logos. But can voice ever escape a minimum signification? Barrot evidently thinks not and if Durand’s claim is true that “[t]here is no such thing as a neutral voice, a voice without desire, a voice that does not desire me” (Durand, 103) then a poetry of pure expenditure is unachievable and we can look back wistfully at these attempts at libidinal assemblage—these struggles to emancipate a praxis of voice from the presidential mandate to mean—and acknowledge their failure in legacy. Sought after (and unattained) was the poem as exemplary community—ephemeral and symbolic—whose manifestation might take the place of the conventional poetry reading and its attendant ideology of appearance. A community was aimed at that would take existence paradoxically outside of language. Perhaps the closest theoretic formulation of such a group is Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the “Coming Comunity”—a community that lays no claims to identity or belonging in which “the coming being is whatever being.”48
Do we then write off the Paleotechnic as yet another failed utopia in poetry? The precise realization of a body-in-process unavoidably involves an absolute decommissioning of the body politic—and a scream can never be a social contract. In his discussions of the differences between interjectional and propositional speech functions, Ernst Cassirer declares propositional speech as unique to humans, configuring the world for us in permanent, stable forms “with fixed and constant qualities.”49 As an interjectional poesis, the sound poem renounces this unique attribute. Breaking with Cassirer’s “Propositional Man”—at the historic moment Foucault proclaims the death of man—this hesitant poetics of negative presence faltered at its inability to specify the exact purpose of its energetic expulsion. Was the performance of expenditure merely recovered into the spectacular society that Debord isolated and analyzed (in 1967)?50 Or can it be explained through the patinated rhetoric of the 1960s as an after-effect of Ultralettrisme, whose dubious accomplishment was a failed radicality of the subject? From the plethora of statements available I choose the following for its domestication of heterology into a community of hope: “If thought is really to find a basis in lived experience, it has to be free. The way to achieve this is to think other in terms of the same. As you make yourself, imagine another self who will make you one day in it turn. Such is my conception of spontaneity: the highest possible self-consciousness which is still inseparable from the self and the world” (Vaneigem, 150).
The extreme mission for poetry from Artaud to the performative enactments of the 1970s was neither expenditure nor spontaneity per se but rather the killing of speech in its capitalistic embodiments. This death of speech—it should be qualified—entailed a theft of silence within sound. To paraphrase a thought of Valéry’s that captures with beauty and accuracy the circularity of this mission: a scream escapes from pain. Out of this accident a poem is made, with an explanation round about it. In this context the scream acquires a role, a function. As was the case with Pascal’s thought: “I had a thought. I have forgotten it. In its place I write that I’ve forgotten it.”51
1. Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 140.
2. Régis Durand, “The Disposition of the Voice,” in Performance in Postmodern Culture, ed. Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello (Madison: Coda Press, 1977), pp. 99-110.
3. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, tr. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 341.
4. “The voice is heard (understood)—that undoubtedly is what is called conscience—closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure autoaffection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in ‘reality,’ any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 20.
5. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, tr. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. 66-67.
6. For a full discussion of the “neutral” voice see Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), esp. p. 564.
7. “Fascination with the abstract is an instance of jouissance proper … The abstract does not act through a simulacrum-effect, but by means of the organization of its material alone … [T]he libidinal dispositifis noticeable in every abstraction, and in particular of the theatrical kind, in that it thwarts the client’s transference onto a simulated object, onto a reference.” Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, tr. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 245-46. We might note in passing that the Futurist Depero named his version of onomatopoeic paroxysm “verbalizzazione astratta” (abstract verbalization).
8. Mike Weaver, “Concrete Poetry,” Lugano Review, nos. 5/6 (1966), p. 101.
9. Quoted in Hans Richter, Dada Art and Anti-art, tr. David Britt (New York: Abrams, 1965), p. 121.
10. Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, tr. Ann Raimes (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 71. For an informative and entertaining description of Dada performance see Annabelle Henkin Meltzer, “The Dada Actor and Performance Theory,” in The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Batcock and Robert Nickas (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), pp. 37–55. A more detailed, contextualized, and comparative discussion can be found in J. H. Matthews, Theatre in Dada and Surrealism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1974).
11. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, tr. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 149n.
12. Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969), p. 20. Although the invention of zaum (a contraction of the longer phrase zaumnyj jazyk meaning “transrational”) is usually credited to Kruchenykh, Serge Fauchereau proposes Elena Guro (1877–1913) as its inventor, citing the opening of her poem “Finland” as the primal zaum (Serge Fauchereau, Moscow, 1900–1930 [London: Alpine, 1988], p. 129.) In his own more parsimonious assessment Markov claims Guro’s to be “a minor contribution [made] inconspicuously, subtly, and with feminine gentleness” [!] via a single neologism—shuyat—inserted in the same poem (Markov, p. 19). Fauchereau, who attributes the invention to Guro’s interest in children’s language, counting rhymes and lullabies, does not cite Markov’s example but quotes the poem in full with its arguably “transrational” opening : “Lula, lola, lala lu / Lisa, lola, lula-li.” For details on Guro’s life and work see Markov especially pp. 14–23. Kruchenykh himself claimed that zaum originated in the glossolalia practiced by Sishkov, a religious mystic and flagellant of the Khlysty sect (see Markov, 202).
13. Writing in the Courrier Dada Hausmann describes the optophonetic poem and procaims its historical significance. “In order to express these elements [i.e. respiratory and auditive combinations] typographically … I had used letters of varying sizes and thicknesses which thus took on the character of musical notation. Thus the optophonetic poem was born. The optophonetic and the phonetic poem are the first step towards totally non-representational, abstract poetry” (quoted in Richter, 121).
14. Quoted in Rosa Trillo Clough, Futurism: The Story of a Modern Art Movement: A New Appraisal (New York: Philosophical Library, 1961), p. 52.
15. Existing recordings of Marinetti’s own readings of parole in libertà are convincing proof that in his enactments of voice he never aspired beyond a stentorian declamation. He can be heard reading “La Batagglia di Adrianopoli” on Futurism & Dada Reviewed, produced by James Neiss (Brussels: Sub Rosa CD, 1988). This valuable CD also contains live performances by Cocteau, Schwitters, and Apollinaire.
16. Arrigo Lora-Totina postulates a four-stage evolution in the movement of the written text into a full orality. First is the read text: “the poem is written, its author reading it aloud seeks to give it a different dimension (in this case the author’s interpretation is just one of many that are possible, whether declaimed or merely recreated mentally).” Second is the spoken text, in which graphic and acoustic versions are of equal value, wherein “the sonic element may determine a different disposition of the written text, the declamation becomes an independent creation” (Lora-Totina, “What Is Sound Poetry?” in Futura Poesia Sonora: Critical Historical Anthology of Sound Poetry, ed. Arrigo Lora-Totino [Milan: Memoria Spa, 1978], p. 8). Third is the spoken composition, in which the written composition functions as a score initiating a declaimed event where “every sound of the mouth is admissable, rediscovery of onomatopoeia, creation of neologism, use of techniques of vocal instrumentation” (8). The final stage is sonic composition: a free improvisation either in performance or directly onto recording equipment but without premeditation or revision and without the aid of written or visual texts.
In a brief commentary on the Ultralettristes, Lora-Totina cites a precursor in the Italian Futurist Canguillo who performed an “Interventio di pernacchie” (Intervention of Raspberries) at the Spovieri gallery in 1914 (33).
17. Isou announced a system of metagraphics, or postwriting, aspects of which were resistant to any oral approximation. The component characters in this writing were a mixture of elements from non-Roman alphabets, invented, imaginary signs and ideograms. For a full exposition of metagraphics see Isadore Isou, Les Champs de force de la peinture lettriste (Paris: Avant-Garde, 1964). Isou’s “New Letteric Alphabet” and important “Manifesto of Lettriste Poetry” are contained in his Introduction a une nouvelle poésie et une nouvelle musique (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Isou’s Lettrisme was quickly parodied as “bird-song” in an anonymous entry under “Expression” in the Encyclopedia Da Costa, published in the fall of 1947. This ephemeral publication is now generally available in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, tr. Iain White (London: Atlas Press, 1955), pp. 107–56.
18. See Jean-François Lyotard, “The Tooth, the Palm,” Sub-Stance, vol. 15 (1977), pp. 105–10.
19. The Ultralettristes are not without their Enlightement precursors. As early as 1714 the Abbé Fénelon proposed a type of theater without language in section 6 of his Lettre a l’académie, arguing that language be replaced by gestures and predenotative cries. This occasioned a reply from du Bos focusing on the difficulty of tragic composition composed solely of cries. For a detailed discussion see Wladyslaw Folkierski, Entre le classicisme et le romantisme (Paris, 1925), p. 175.
20. David Crystal, “Paralinguistics,” in The Body as a Medium of Expression, ed. Jonathan Benthall and Ted Polhemus (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), p. 162.
21. André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, tr. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, 1993), p. 199.
22. We owe to Levinas a primary insight into the ground of the groundlessness of pleasure. Pleasure is affect and as such derides the category being. John Llewelyn summarizes the nature of Levinasian pleasure as a pure dynamic of affect. “If pleasure is to augur escape from being then the categories of being cannot apply to it. It cannot be a state of being. This is why pleasure is an affect. It is affective rather than effective because affectivity is recalcitrant to the categories of activity or will and of being and of thought.” John Llewelyn, The Genealogy of Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 17.
23. Quoted in Text-Sound Texts, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: William Morrow, 1980), p. 20.
24. The great disservice of the conventional poetry reading is surely to have fostered illusions of presence via a purportedly essential corporeal connection to a written text sufficient to restore the author to her work in a fetishized reunification. Celia Zukofsky records her husband’s feelings on the otiosity of the poetry reading and its disagreeable requirement of authorial presence. “Why can’t they read my poetry themselves? Why do I have to read it for them?” (Celia Zukofsky, “1927–1972” in Paideuma, vol. 7, no. 3 [1978], p. 372). Ron Sukenick advances his own misgivings, pointing to several negative implications. “A reading puts emphasis on the performance, not the poem. / Some good poets are bad readers. / Some bad poets are good readers. If the essence of poetry is its performance in public, why not hire trained actors for readings?” (Ron Sukenick, “Against Readings,” in The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language & Performance, ed. Stephen Vincent and Ellen Zweig (San Francisco: Momo’s Press, 1981), p. 317. Both Zukofsky and Sukenick demonstrate a keen awareness of the threat to writing by a reading’s demand for a restored and necessary athleticism or elocutionary expertise. Their disagreements, however, refer to what might be roughly classified as “the spoken word” and fail to address that other confluence of the performative and poetic: the text-sound poem. Prior to both Sukenick and Zukofsky, Hugo Ball expressed his own disquietude around the shortcomings of poetry readings. “Nowhere are the weaknesses of a poem revealed as much as in a public reading. One thing is certain: art is joyful only as long as it has richness and life. Reciting aloud has become the touchstone of the quality of the poem for me, and I have learned (from the stage) to what extent today’s literature is worked out as a problem at a desk and is made for the spectacles of the collector instead of for the ears of living human beings” (Ball, 54). Ball’s reservations confess a different motivation than Zukofsky’s and Sukenick’s. Indeed, they seem to spring from a strikingly polar conviction. Ball’s implication is clear: the written poem alone is an inert configuration of signs requiring the corporeal supplement and oral vitality of the poet in real-time action to realize its destiny.
25. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, tr. Donald NicholsonSmith (London: Left Bank Books, 1983), p. 149.
26. Guattari and Deleuze offer an innovative notion of the unconscious as a productive force, not—as in Freud’s case—a primal scene of repeated complexual enactments. “The unconscious is not a theatre but a factory.” Félix Guattari, Chaosophy (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995), p. 75.
27. In an obvious updating of Nietzsche’s famous agonistic binary of Apollo and Dionysus, Kristeva proposes a double disposition in all language toward two antinomial orders: symbolic and semiotic. The symbolic specifies that inclination within the linguistic subject toward naming, predication, order, and the communal linguistic apparatus of its sociolect. The semiotic, in contrast, is a disposition to asserting instinctual and prelinguistic drives as a propulsion through language. Interpreted through Kristeva’s theory the sound poem, in so far as it abolishes the symbolic, involves a consequential privileging of the semiotic as far as the abolition of the symbolic.
28. Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews, 1962-1980, tr. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), p. 244.
29. Roland Barthes, Writer Sollers, tr. Philip Tody (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 55.
30. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 207.
31. A prescient awareness of the possibility of sonic declamations for use in radio broadcast was a constant factor in the work of the Futurist Fafa (Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini), whose poetry Marinetti lauds in ebullient Futurist terminology. “Sport is entering triumphantly into poetry, enhancing its elasticity, its heroic leaps, its tireless dynamism. We have finally emerged from the mephitic atmosphere of libraries. The muscular surge and the roar of engines impose new rhythmic laws and prepare us for the great aeropoetry” (quoted in Lora-Totina, 16). Among Fafa’s deviant and varied accomplishments Marinetti lists “[r]adio poems with transoceanic wave-jumps to revenge himself for his short-sightedness” (in Lora-Totina, 16).
32. In Bataille’s own words, “The general economy deals with the essential problem of the use of wealth. It underlies the fact that an excess is produced that, by definition, cannot be employed in a utilitarian manner. Excess energy can only be lost, without the least concern for a goal or objective, and, therefore, without any meaning” ([O.C.V. 215–16] quoted in Michélle H. Richman, Reading George Bataille Beyond the Gift (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 70).
33. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. i, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977); Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, tr. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). All three titles were originally published in 1974 and Lyotard’s book is an acknowledged response to Anti-Oedipus.
34. It is frequently argued that twentieth-century sound poetry has been a development of two opposing dispositions: the scientific and the primitive. Beneath this binary are two separate interests: one, an embrace of technology as a positive alliance with the human voice; the other an eschewal of all forms of technological contact. Regarding the first interest, the voice is treated as a material point for departure; for the second it is a still not fully fathomed phenomenon in its basic libidinal-acoustic state. Ellen Zweig offers a peacefully coexistent version of this bifurcation: “Sound poetry explores the human voice as human. Sound poets take apart language to see how it works … The poet becomes close to the animal, close to the child. Sound poetry explores the voice as other. Sound poets record and manipulate the voice … They cut the voice into pieces, reverse it, change its speed, make it digital. The voice becomes electronic, a strange machine whining toward communication with other planets.” Ellen Zweig, “Sound Poetry: An Introduction” in The Poetry Reading.
35. For a rationale of this rejection see Steve McCaffery, “Discussion … Genesis … Continuity: Some Reflections on the Current Work of the Four Horsemen,” in Text-Sound Texts, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: William Morrow, 1980), pp. 277–99.
36. If we concur with Freud, however, that the unconscious is our oldest mental faculty, then we might confidently theorize improvisation as a species of primitivism—as an ur performance.
37. René Viénet reproduces graffiti painted by the Marxist-Pessimist Youth during the French student occupation movement of May 1968, which reads, “A bas le sommaire vive l’ephémêre” (Down with abstraction long live the ephemeral) (René Viénet, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ‘68, [no tr. specified] [New York: Autonomedia, 1992], p. 75). Viénet’s book first appeared in French in 1968. I mention it to hint at the uneasy alliance across time between the abstractionist proclivities of Dada and the spontaneous ephemerality in which the group sound poem of the 1970s was figured.
38. Both Self and Identity, predicated upon static genesis, are strategic concepts in the arrest of becoming. Their ideological function is to halt or at least decelerate the flow of intensities producing, when successful, a mineralization of processual ontology.
39. The machinic rather than existing in opposition to the human organism, homologizes its very rhythms: the regular repetition of pulse and heartbeat is repeated in the regulated movements of cogs.
40. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 8.
41. Quoted in Concerning Concrete Poetry, ed. Bob Cobbing and Peter Mayer (London: Writers Forum, 1978), p. 24. In what amounts to a staggering ecumenical defense of breath William James conflates mentation and human respiration. “I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.” After this strident, anti-Cartesian stance James continues and revises Bergson’s stream of consciousness as a respiratory stream. “There are other internal facts beside breathing … and these increase the assets of ‘consciousness,’ so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outward between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded the essence of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness.” Quoted in Don Byrd, The Poetics of the Common Knowledge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 35.
42. Charles Olson, Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Auerhahn Society, 1965), p. 22. “The Gate and the Center” first appeared in 1952; coincidentally at the height of French prelinguism.
43. Egregore, “‘a collective psychic being’ driven by a life of its own.” Quoted in Breton, 95.
44. The collective reading-performance was not a novel phenomenon. HenriMartin Barzun’s “chants simultanés” were performed in 1912 and Pierre Albert-Birot’s experiments in multivocity, published in Sic between 1916 and 1919, include a “Promethean Poem” and “Blue Crayon” for four and three voices respectively. Among the Futurists, Giacomo Balla scored an “onomatopoeic noise canzone for typewriter” scored for twelve simultaneous voices.
45. Herbert Blau, To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 4.
46. An unacknowledged influence on the Canadian paleotechnic sound poem is Gertrude Stein’s credo that there is no repetition, that each reiteration of an identical within a series registers with a slight variation in emotional insistence. Stein argues against the very notion of a neutral voice, an argument repeated in Durand. There is a pertinence in Stein’s assertion to Derrida’s own metaconceptual notion of différance as difference and deferral—as if Stein anticipates this notion and transfers it from the grammatologic to the emotive plane.
47. Jean Barrot, What Is Situationism: Critique of the Situationist International (London: Unpopular Books, 1987), p. 11.
48. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, tr. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 1.
49. Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935–1945, ed. Donald P. Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 150.
50. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red Press, 1983) [no tr. specified].
51. This final passage is a deliberate détournement of a beautiful thought of Paul Valéry’s. “A blob of ink falls from my pain. Out of this accident I make a face, with a drawing round about it. In this context the blot acquires a role, a function. As was the case with Pascal’s Thought: ‘I had a thought. I have forgotten it. In its place I write that I’ve forgotten it.’ Paul Valéry, Analects, Bollingen Series 95, no. 14, tr. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 278.