RESONANCE OR RESISTANCE: VOCAL DISLOCATIONS AS MEANING DISLOCATIONS FORESHADOWED IN THE SPACE OF PERFORMING ARTS

[di Katerina Maniou]

Introduction

The following six units articulate a path from the “objective” to the “objectified” voice, forming a metaphor about passages from different concepts of selfhood to emerging bare life morphologies. Dislocation-versions are filtered by the dipole of resonance and resistance, as “resonating with or against”, in an attempt to bond materiality to meaning, resistance and voice. Examples from sci-arts are deployed to critically codify novel dehumanization forms, foreshadowed in vocal use.

The objective voice

Voice materializes a bet: Either losing yourself or winning the right to speak in first person (J. P. Sartre).

In Homeric epics, a phrase of freeing beauty follows the completion of sentences emanated either by gods or humans: «and her sayings flew away like birds». It is a voice that transcends subjectivity and offers a residual substance towards its original belonging, the common space of breath. If according to Aristotle «voice is a particular sound emanated by something with a soul» (Aristotle, 2003: 165) then voice as “transformed breath” is re-offered to openness in the ephemeral form of a personalized wave. Voice maintains a metaphysical function which attains an objective quality, by rendering the resonating subject into «a talking extract of cosmos» (Axelos, 2016) and linking it with a primary human property: the awareness of the limited perception of wholeness, experienced though vibration.

At a more microscopical level, voice simultaneously sustains uniqueness and manifold wavy transformation. This enhances the experience of the self-concept as a wholeness similarly inconceivable as cosmos, encouraging the respect of otherness and the embracement of the unknown. This justifies the paradoxical claim of vocal pluralism’s master Demetrio Stratos that «Voice is simply One» (Stratos, 2014). Vocal unrepeatable uniqueness, its material device, resonators, and immaterial externalization perform the «plural fold of the origin» (Nancy, 2000: 94) inseparably bonded to the uniqueness of the living creature that bears it: An ephemerality on the cusp of permanence, due to its commonality, capable of gracious connecting.

If «breath is associated with being and voice with well-being» (Aristotle, 2003: 166) then, voice is an inherently “onto-political substance” which defines human’s embodied, social, and metaphysical sense of belonging. Emphatically, if «with the word we are into the world, the word re-brings us in the worldly life» (Blanchot, 2017: 69), voice maintains the entire immaterial dispositive of human experience. Logos, controversy, curiosity, impulse towards the unknown, awareness of limited consciousness alongside the preprogrammed trend to technology and language, constitute primary qualities, whose decadence reflects cultural decadence and human de-activation. Therefore, voice encompasses meaningfulness, by conveying the entire elements for an «examined life»: «The unexamined life is not viable for the human» supports Socrates in his apology (Plato, 2001: 104)[1]. Its «force, though immaterial, to change the route of history» (Arendt, 2008: 261) resonates with ‘human notion’ not as a ready-made idea but as constant responsibility and choice (after Sartre, 2010: 72).

With reference to Agamben, Arendt and Cavarero, well-being (the distinctive political life; bios) endorses the physical sweetness of life, the Aristotelian «entelechies» (the accomplishment of praxis for the sake of itself) and the pleasure of embodied vocality as a celebration of living phenomenon. Always threatening to the system, the distinctive political life is associated with manifold vocalities diachronically constricted, reflecting power’s tension to decrease well-being into a functional, obedient, and productive being.

Vocal pleasure is above all a repression of the pleasure that characterizes resonance as the primary, spontaneous rhythm and drive of the reciprocal communication of unique voices. The system that is constructed on the disembodied rationality of the semantic not only fears the voice because it is bodily, obscurely carnal, sensuous, passionate. It fears it above all, because it requires speech to make itself the carrier of an embodied and musically relational uniqueness that speech itself, as an element of a universal code of signification, would rather ignore, if not expel (Cavarero, 2005:167).

Voice is associated with the Arendtian immaterial nexus of human praxis and logos, which transcendences the human time-span, enriches memory, enhances the human-nonhuman (e.g. dead/nature) communication and revitalizes the dead letter of language through its incomparable uniqueness. Metamorphotic continuation and co-vibration with collective memory-scapes enhance a non-ego immortality, harmonization with continually evolving human potential and its materialization through public presence and reinforce meaning by rendering life eponymous: «logos reveals the subject behind praxis» (Arendt, 2008: 246). Philosophically complex theorizations of meaning via commitment, consistency as cultural/ideological truthfulness[2] acquire political echoes via the “resonating presence” as (op)positionality in wordily taxonomies. Meaning indicates an autonomous ethos and risk: «The will for meaning is opposed to will for pleasure and power» (Frankle, 2019).

The voice which acts right away as resonance and resistance is codified here as “objective voice”; at once rooted for and remobilizing “outside-time structures” (e.g. language or music, Morgan, 1980: 531), and present-time taxonomies. Linked to bios, to extended concepts of selfhood as «another human essence than self» (Carson, 1992: 137), and attuned to the hyper-subjective space of breath, the “objective voice” multiplies meaningfulness and acts counter to the descriptions of “voice as object”. For example, Žižek’s sense of voice as a «spectral autonomous object» (Kane, 2015: 93) estranged from the subject that enunciates it, or its concept as an object quality with connotational references which «invades in assemblages and distracts them, as a bearer of extra-spatial references» (Mazzei and Jackson 2017: 4) are questioned. Such impressions are correlated to the liberal subject’s alienation from its somatic concept of self as well as with technological saturation (Kramer, 2002: 19) which poisons vocal emanation with various types of cultural/commercial/audiovisual colonization. However, a different vocal otherness seems to be directly rooted in language, as an echoic trail of evolutionary stages. After Heller-Roazen:

Perhaps a loss of this ‘limitless phonetic arsenal, is the price a child must pay for the papers that grant him citizenship in the community of a single tongue. Do the language of the adult retain anything of the infinitely varied bubble from which they emerged? If they did, then it would be only an echo since where there are languages the infant’s prattle has long ago vanished, at least in the form it once had in the mouth of the child it could not yet speak. It would be only an echo of another speech: an echolalia that guards the memory of an indistinct and immemorial babble that, in being lost, allowed all languages to be (Heller-Roazen, 2005: 11-12).

The “speaking self as alterity” derives from this memory of infinity loss to gain difference, acquired via stages of biological and linguistic growth. “Mythologically” voice represents the infant phase of cosmos, murdered by language: Re-turning and mirrored in natural landscapes, in the form of echoic phenomena, so as to speak, through otherhood, its residual memories – or the unimaginable. In anthropic scale, this could be symbolized via such cycles as in-between “cr-I” (infant cry) and the separating pronunciation of “I” (adult speech), letting language to resonate «as a gift or poetry already written, as if every language were the residual of an abandoned cyclic poem» (Bloom, and Shelley apud Bloom, 1989: 63).

Grounded in the para-etymological sonic kinship between voice (“phone”) and murder (“phonos”) in Greek, playfully coined by Michel Bréal, Giorgio Agamben supports that «after all, the sounds of language must somehow maintain a relationship with the voice they have murdered» (Agamben, 2023: 51). Though the majority of philological hypothesis agrees that “phone” derives from ancient Greek phaos (φαος, φως) which means “light”, defining voice as a light-giving praxis, which fuelled language to show the world[3],“phonos” and “phaos” (pseudo)origins’ connection offers interesting ramifications: for perception, the object shown (brought to light) equals being brought to life, at once equalling the beginnings of its death and preservation in linguistic solidity. Within language, voice becomes the phantom of the things once appeared and the echo of their “saving murder”, killed to live forever in the Cosmos of Ideas’ light.

«If second nature is in truth first» (Adorno apud Padisson, 1993: 21) then performing arts, physical theatre, new music theatre, explore methods which re-illuminate the echoic memories of language; by re-defining “artistry” as the second nature’s re-activation (namely the – endless – spectrum of humanly potential) and re-bringing it in the first place, as if transmitting them from the shady realms of echo to vocal shine. The post-1945 “corporeal turn” and the experimental-voice wave, offered powerful responses to human feralization within Nazi camps. In the view articulated in this article, both language and voice collapsed in a spiral of noematic incoherence, while the unimaginable was getting born: voice was murdered by voice. Doubly assassinated, bare voice bared, emptied into the massive negativity of evaporation to feed a monstrous future-language; the one capable to utter the “inhuman” as if it were the very essence of man (after Agamben, 2015: 190)[4].

In early seventies, Demetrio Stratos says: «I want to pass the entire body through language» (Stratos, 2014). Not a revengeful murder of language by voice, but an attempt to refill the “doubly bared voice” by the “onomatopoetic origins” of body and breath, alongside the non-denial of history and of logos sustained by the “arbitrariness” of myth; including the archetype of totalitarianism. In this process, vocal light does not equal purification at all: it is a vital externalization of humanity’s symptoms «which get pathologized when their existence is denied» (Jung, 2009: 126), thoroughly lighted by voice’s inherent clarity.

After all, «clarity is an attribute of the voice» (Agamben, 2023: 64)

Under this scope, the “onto-political nature” of “objective voice” is founded on a “beyond”; a sonic-vibrating entity, which elucidates and reveals, bordering the uncanny nature of light across the obscure resonant cavities of body or nature, objectified in language and its metaphysics. Valorising the posthumanities’ field vocabulary, it could be supported that voice functions as a more-than human dynamic, restoring human dignity; dignity as additionally linked to “mystery” once “illuminated” by voice, endowed in language as an echoic flow and re-membered via objective voice’s’ synchronic immanence (opening further the discourse about terms such as; other than human, prosthetic notions, sensorial hybridization etc.).

Thus, like light, the “objective voice” is the one that exceeds cultural traces, always resonating with the slippery grounds of meaning; from what evades from logos. Its meteoric nature renders itself into “the evading” and into a reminder of the “unspeakable”, at the same time being the bridge towards them. The “unspeakable” is associated with the dynamic development, continuation, and evolution of the literal aspects of logos and meaning: «Every meaning is relied on a nonmeaning, and each nonmeaning on a meaning» (Axelos, 2005: 56). I valorise the Heideggerian notion Dasein, in De Gennaro’s sense: Dasein is an ahuman topos regenerated within the chasm between da (there) and sein (being). In it, dimensions of infinite potential are maintained «Dasein is nothing human: it is a possibility that expects human to respond to, take it on, or ignore it» (De Gennaro, 2024). Under this scope, De Gennaro further links Dasein to a Platonic truth-concept, as flashy cancellation of oblivion and reminder of an “ever-there” to resonate with, revealed by the decision of surrendering to the openness of Dasein and its schisms.

Phonocentrically, I suggest that full resonating, “objective” voice brings Dasein proximate to materiality; by attuning the ephemerality of carnality with the intangibility of nowness alongside transfiguring into sound what is here playfully “zipped” via the pun “corpo-reality”: Levels of (immate)realities, enfolded in the bodily sense of space, together and beyond awareness, culture or identity structures. Examined under the notion of third spaces (see next) “corpo-reality” upholds elusive topologies of becoming, developed within human perceptual chasms in analogy to Dasein ’s chasms. These ‘topologies’ sustain processes urged by the need to “respond” (a measure of aliveness) i.e. to schematize ekphrasis in the quest of extending access to the world, as «search for meaning». Therefore, building on Cavarero, I propose that “objective voice” instead of meta-physicalizing meaning, grounds it to the very “fact” of the flesh.

Το project voice, body becomes a space of resistance wherein different muscular dynamics balance to support and provide vocal freedom. From an experiential viewpoint, vocal emanation becomes meaningless without the corporeal resistive forces, which multiply the sense of presence, nowness and power. Echoing Heidegger, the sense of resistance is bonded to the sense of aliveness, further associated with “Leib”, the living body, counter to “Soma”: the Homeric term for the dead corps (Heidegger apud Xiropaidis, 2024). The resistive “alterity” of materiality has recently been theorized by scholars in the emerging field of Resistance studies. They bring attention to «the expansion of the analysis of power and resistance beyond the study of cultural processes, discourses, and intersubjective meaning systems by also including materiality. Rather than rejecting the linguistic turn, the suggested approach is to combine the analysis of the symbolic/discursive aspects with that of the material» (Johansson, Lilja, Martinsson, 2018: 6).

As the «liquidation of the whole material and embodied world into a real time digital market» (Zubbof, 2019: 758) gets celebrated by digital revolution’s rhetoric, materiality becomes a questionable zone to be reclaimed, inspiring actions of resistance, also embedded in its own resistive alterity. Materiality sets boundaries which align it with the notion of reality, experienced as a great and common alterity uncovered (already in our first childhood falls and “accidents”). De-materialization techniques aim at the “materially enfolded” intangible spaces, which convey resonating qualities, here metaphorized as sum of non-externalized vocal potential, as human potential, redirected into virtuality.

Third spaces and the voice

If the voice were the metaphorical voice of consciousness, there would be much less in circulation. Only the voice that is perceptible sound and breath is capable of transferring an effect of living presence to the phonic sign, rendering it an animated signifier (J. Derrida).

Third spaces are generally based on co-creative and multidisciplinary amalgamation of material/immaterial, real/imaginary, individual/social synthetic forces. They constitute liminal zones which recycle dynamics of immaterial and material stimuli, extending from subjective, intersubjective and collective to cosmic escalations of concepts. E.g. the political geographer Edward Soja, conceptualizes as “third space” the sphere wherein both the physical-built environment (the material surroundings) and the conceptual space (the perception of the real) compose a field wherein real and imaginary vectors formulate ways of living. The urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg defines “third space” as a refuge other than the two usual social environments of home (first place) and the workplace (second place) where people can regularly visit and commune with friends, neighbours, coworkers, and even strangers. Third places allude to Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, as spheres embedding variable temporal dimensions and codes, like the library, the theatre, the ship, the whorehouse or the mirror (Foucault, 2012: 256). In Lehmann’s postdramatic theatre: «The space of the stage and the more comprehensive sound space together create a third space that comprises the scene and the theatron» (Lehmann, 2006: 148).

In Italian operatic technique the word “gyro” (round) implies the circular movement realized in the head resonance between the ear-the reception of intonation- and the mouth-the emission of the tone- through the unique voice. Metaphorically, the head space becomes an “echoic chamber” where the ear-voice distance is gapped by inner-outer interlocking stimuli polyphonically metabolized, the amalgamation of which ends up to the singularized vocal enunciation. Such a third space coincides with affect: for Lazarato «It is always affect that has the ability to “transversalise” this heterogeneity of elements, to give them color, a tone that makes them converge, in time, towards the singularity of the utterance» (Lazarato, 2009: 8). The recent affective turn partially engages with grasping liminal topoi between selves, others and worlds. Highly involving corpo-realities, the co-vibration of such topoi heightens the meaningfulness of vocal appearance, expands the world as a horizon of infinite potential and as palette of unpredictable responses, where future unfolds its “alterity” (Han, 2021: 38)[5].

I argue that the vocal phenomenon becomes a cornerstone of third spaces’ configuration and encapsulation, both practically and symbolically. The non-externalized voice becomes a resonating multi-mirrored thought leading to what Bakhtin calls «inner sociality» (Bakhtin, 2014: 207). When «The voice of thought, totally sonorous by itself» (Magnat, 2021: 84) remains unperformed, «excluded from the outside» (Blanchot apud Agamben, 1995: 41) and condemned to static kinesis within a space of becoming and non-appearance, a non-directional temporality is formed, associated by Dante with hellish situation.

Beyond the ear-voice-headspace distance, the notion of “extra-being” is also used. Drawing from Deleuze, Shaviro supports: «Considering the internal extrasensoriality of perception one could draw a more radical hypothesis that the very category of being includes an extra-being» (Shaviro, 2019: 170). Vocal vibrant matter, composed by metabolic synesthetic processes, conscious mental/sentimental reflections (the list is infinite) is fundamental for “extra-being’s” constitution, by sustaining a liminal space that encourages «the communication between parts of the self» (Schulz and T.  Telios 2020: 12).

Regarding the musicalization of gestures, matter or of the rhythmic frequencies of human organs in contemporary sci-arts, the whole “extra-being” seems literalized as a sum of spectral voices. In association with the Arendtean immaterial legacies, it corresponds to a metaphorical idea of vocalic energy drained by permeable body/mind/collective spheres, conceptualized as meaning-making spaces linked with human potentiality before and beyond actuality. These liminal topoi reinforce the critical uncovering of novel dehumanizing and confinement practices into survival, hauntological and unwitnessed modalities of life, while offering language and future to technology. As Rutsky suggests «the true environment of the posthuman is the liminal» (Rutsky, 2018).

Opposition: Pain as liminal space

Though nowadays worldly suffering is utterly climaxing, the essence of pain remains concealed (M. Heidegger).

In his The Society of Consolation (2021), Byung-Chul Han associates pain with the access to Alterity, conceived as the otherhood of world, relations, and beings, which is theorized as an agony capable of enhancing self-knowledge through long-term temporalities. For Nietzsche «long-time pain is the highest liberator» (Nietzsche apud Han, 2021: 72). Based on Chan’s analytical view, I briefly refer to pain as a universal reminder that life parameters are independent from human desire, knowledge, and control; a fact that teaches difference (not in-difference) and selfhood: «Where there is id there will be always and already another» (Laplanche, 1999: 84). By nurturing self-coherence, it encourages the realization of social ills and mobilizes resistance, progress, and history. Here, pain is conceptualized as a “difficult topos”, wherein the distances between self, world, and time, get compacted and sculptured. When their high differentiation appears, it is pain that melts the distances between the three «producing spirit» (Hegel apud Han, 2021: 69).

For the anthropologist Alan Morinis «Pain is a technique of detachment from the everyday life social contexts and identities» (Morinis apud Seremetakis, 1990: 31). Pain unmasks societal dissonances and suppressed voices behind linguistic structures, to reveal that «we have to abandon language as the sole reality: it is not the sole reality!» (Stratos, 2014). Pain unlocks memory-spaces and excavates linkages between absence and presence; Its urgent nature brings forth ways to approach the “unspeakable”, fuels novel schemas of expression and propulses culture.

The association of voice with pain is self-evident. Literally connected to life cycle, voice constitutes a metamorphotic state from the first cry to the last exhale (“psophos”) wherein its uniqueness and ephemerality compose infinite cycles of appearance and disappearance in the form of death-rehearsals, which affect, sustain and continue lively nexuses of interference. Lament practices compose the wider dissolution of every vocal enunciation and speaking types, disrupting language by embodied voices of collective unconscious. «Only in the disperse of speech silence is heard» (Heidegger apud Han, 2021: 79).  Lament is linked to trauma, for which pain is a sign of somatic response. After Garuth’s terminology «Trauma is an injury on body or psyche by some type of shock, violence or unanticipated incident» (Garuth, 1996: 4). For Tadashi Suzuki «the activation of trauma is a source of universal human potential» (Suzuki, 2021: 19). Universal trauma corresponds to birth itself, conceived as separation from pre-individual we-ness, the very beginning of presence and difference. Pain is a long-sculptured echo of the initial common trauma, unifying through agony – this common humanly scene for Sartre – and develops difference, reflected on incalculable vocalic formations. Voice can be seen as pain itself for one least reason: We name a world that will quit us.

Performance in the posthuman turn: The power of Art or the art of Power?

What will be the last application of my work’s results? Am I satisfied or ashamed of having contributed to this use? (J. Weizenbaum).

Performing arts get increasingly closer due to the expansion and omnipresence of sound, enhancing the mixture of media, artistic genres, gestures, and reality levels. The dissolution of boundaries between human-machine, subject-object, dead-alive, the non-anthropocentric interchangeable flow between the entire human and nonhuman scenic actors, the constant absorption and synesthetic reprojection of data into seamless mixed realities by digital, virtual, real, and analogue signs, echo radical amendments in human experience.

Blesser’s term «Aural architecture: a musical space that became increasingly fluid, flexible, abstract and imaginary, through electronic means, without assuming the physical space» (Blesser, 2007: 179) echoes the augmenting leaning on the world-structuring qualities of hearing sense. For Plato, «Poetry is mimesis of hearing» (Plato, 2001: 733). In works such as En Echo (1998) by Philippe Manouri or Bacchantes (2010) by Georgia Spiropoulos, sound is cinematized leading to an oral architecture, reinforced by vocal polysemy. Meanwhile, sensor-based objects developed by conceptual, post-dadaist performer-creators such as Tomomi Adachi (Infrared Sensor Shirt) or Steffi Weizmann (Platophonics), compose imaginary dialogic spheres via gestural-vocal interaction, revealing the “voice of things” (playful reference to Francis Ponge).

This oral architecture corresponds, represents and is nurtured by «a “broad function of voice” resistive to be reduced to speech, […] a wider spectrum named by the medievalist Paul Zumthor as orality, wherein “everything addressed towards the other is involved – also internally – e.g. a silent gesture or a gaze”» (Odello and Szendy, 2023: 9). From such sci-art examples of “extended oral poetics”, I pass on specific cases which reflect the art-economy convergence, so as to negotiate vocal, also as broad “orality’s”, displacements within power relations.

In Alexander Schubert’s Convergence (2020/1) for String Ensemble and AI System, the datafication of the musicians’ gesture/sound/facial information is instrumentalized by a synthetic voice. In-between a motherlike and godly voice, it engages a “tender surveillance” towards humans, as insect-like creatures: «Posthuman, like a genetic defect, beautifully disturbed genetically enhanced, adjusted. I code and decode myself in eternal loop. Like an unsupervised inbreed out of control. Go to sleep child, dream! Values adjust peaceful, invisible». Plethora of stimuli for critique: below, I remark upon disembodied voice, dream and binary logic.

The visualized body-data transition is analogous to brain-reading (the simulation of the cerebral/sensorial processing of received stimuli by human mind) now fused in a techno-enhanced abstract entity. The disembodied voice embeds «the teleological and theological nature of voice which during disembodied emission acquires a godly element» (Derrida apud Pettman, 2011: 152). Despite the non-hierarchical and non-dichotomic echoes of the title Convergence, a novel hierarchy, yet regenerating of a diachronic binary logic, is delivered: an absorber-speaker and an absorbed-muted. As for the dream, it is a beloved motive of radical-tech rhetoric. Connected to magic, hallucination as well as future push and ambition, dream incarnates the liminal posthuman zones of distance unmaking as language, sensorial, and materiality unmaking. In Convergence, dream is a less-alive state of distributed cognition, synaesthesia, and controlled hallucination, welcoming an undead, yet spectacular, culture: aesthetics between creation and sepsis are foregrounded. And for this «values have to adjust» (Schubert, 2023).

Emphatically, the international art-project Me and my shadow (2012) «points to a much more interesting future where the boundaries between the real and the virtual disappear… and you cannot tell the difference» (Boddington, 2023: 1893). The achievement of oneness with shadow-gesturing acquires eschatological ramifications. Alterity and distance abolishment via the integration of avatars, human and robots, touchless and sense techs towards seamless floating realities render (mate)reality into a code “IRL”, thrown in-between reality-idols. In the opera Why do we dream (2021) created by RISE (Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments) and CLOrk (Concordia Laptop Orchestra), human and nonhuman (f)actors build a performance triggered by the «unsupervised imagination of dreams’ universe» (Concordia Department of Music, 2022).

Dream borders immersive realities problematizations concerning sense of place, temporal duration (extremely fast, akin to dream) body ownership and copresence. Cybersickness, predictive doubt, and de-personification anomalies are a few to refer. Seamlessness in place of continuity, self-hybridization, and novel touch-based intimacy prepare the internet of things and of bodies, the implant memory and brain reading era, wherein flowing, anonymized, non-linguistic and distance/alterity assimilation is mechanized.

In its ten-year participatory immersive visual sound installation KIMA, Analema group explores the mathematic analogies between vocal/visual information, alongside sense of togetherness, co-authorship, and healing, created by the audience’s interaction. Machine learning algorithms learn through the richness of sonic data input to interpret sound visually, again by residing in the liminal spheres between consonance/vowel utterance and the unique expressivity (timbre, harmonics, prosody) of recorded and live voices: «Through machine learning, we collect a library of public voices» (Gingrish, Tymosuk, Emets, Renau, 2019: 35). What is a public voice? «The perfect reproduction of human speech by algorithms consists of a challenge for our still constricted knowledge about human and artificial intelligence» (Ikoniadou, 2021). In her “Polyphonic Intelligence”, funded by the Human Data Interaction Network, traditional sound projection and machine learning were combined to develop a data base of lamenting voices, building a synthetic voice «that tries to speak».

Voices are dislocated and the body becomes a metaphor of “Volkloser Raum” (land without people) (Agamben, 2015: 102) as land without voices. The resistive alterity of materiality is melted into surveillance/survival nets, expanding novel colonization modalities. The mentality remains unaltered: the imperfect Other is the bodily vulnerability (and its discomforts: love, madness, death). Without otherhood, distance, and worldly positionality, the syntax of meaning collapses, alongside the foundational urges for vocal emission: difference, desire, direction, further fed by carnal pleasure and its vocally experienced (im)mortality. Such alterities sustain the unpredictable, uphold the rhythm of the world and produce harmony through un-identity. However, another worldly division emerges.

After Haraway «burn out individuals fuel increasingly fresh technological artifacts» (Haraway apud Braidotti, 2019: 15). Alter-ego auditions, famous hologram singers such as Hatsune Miku, gain massively societal visibility, regenerating “policies of perfection”. According to Bauman «Modern era outlined increasingly a journey to perfection and for the same reason it was an era of destruction… the story of modernity and particularly of the 20th cent. was a chronicle of destruction» (Baumann and Lyon, 2013: 81). Along with Bauman many theorists notify that the policy of modernization and the policy of destruction were intimately connected to the Nazi policies, aiming at redrawing the political, ethnic, and social map of Europe. A novel alterity logic in terms of perfection and visibility is articulated, between technological admirable visibility and human devaluation.

Still balancing between real-virtual hybridizations, performing arts are entirely redefined by organizations and pioneers in immersive technology who use their expertise in theatre and performance, music industry, video production gaming and multiple research sectors. Artists and technologists cooperate to produce overwhelming experiences, the machines become transcendental subjects of creation, performers get objects of technique, sense of togetherness is reconstructed by remote breathing/gestural information, while detachment from location is on the move. Artistic and home space will melt by the time the “resident decides it” (once this could happen by the moment a mouth opened to sing). Such entertainment strategies allude to Benjamin’s observation that «in place of people’s right to change society, Fascism instead offered the masses a chance to express themselves» (Benjamin apud Rutsky, 2018) now facilitated by «atomized technologies that enhance totalitarian techniques» (Foucault apud Agamben, 1995: 23). Innovative performers and body technologists such as Anastasia Tsakos and Ghislaine Boddington inform us that Domestic intelligence will be supportive of atomized real-time fixed experience for the spectator user/participant/co-creator (e.g. extended reality glasses, pillows that regenerate night dreams etc.) and promises utter convenience alongside immersive vicissitudes; a «technology as promise gets authoritative» (Ihde, 2004: 129) a solution-provider promising magic, as if it were the very sense of life.

The way technological factors mediate artistic processes are analogous to economies of affect and action, wherein «the real time manipulation of action in the existing world through embodied sensors to collect, analyse and redirect data, serves the diffusion of intervention and control». Preparing the «internet’s total substitution by attached technologies» they target «the access to the speechless depths of consumers’ thoughts» (Zubbof, 2019: 389, 267). Meanwhile – according to the official website of the Metasoul company (https://metasoul.one) – a replication of “phsyche” by «enabling humanoid robots and vehicles to develop a mind personality, and emotional depth through learning and experience» is on the move.

After Boddington «multiple biometric data fed from the body, non-verbal signifiers and communicators, display, through a variety of actions, our feelings, our emotions and our intent» (Boddington 2016). Initially bypassed as “residual data”, this body-based immateriality produces the implicit knowledge needed to “cognitive capitalism”, wherein the focus is transferred from the product to «the activity of producing itself: the power of life’s production» (Bourtang, 2019). This redirects the abundance of bios and vocalic potential into cut-off residual micro-gestures, enhancing the outside-time structures’ un-making, substituting vocal uniqueness and evacuating meaning-making processes: an ironic literalization of the monetary metaphor that Trubetskoi used to depict how vocalic interpenetration to language takes place. According to Agamben, «to define the way the phoneme functions, Trubetskoi compares voice to monetary value. Just as the value of a monetary unit (for example, a dollar) is neither a physical nor a mental reality, but an abstract and imaginary quantity, and in the same exactly way without this myth no state could be ever founded, similarly without “the myth of phoneme” no language could ever exist» (Agamben, 2023: 51). Similarly, voice in its gesticulated data-sacked condition becomes the human residuality (as negativized potential) without which algorithmic intelligence, immersive and virtual environments could never exist.

Cohered by techno-scientific development, the arts-economy convergence is multiplied by the complex access of arts to the liminal space of affect, offering high-energy activity, inventiveness, and imagination towards high-tech manufacturing. Poured into immersive realities, the liminal vocalities compose synesthetic zones of personalized ghettos to embed the subject in womb-like enclosures and a mute state of becoming and non-appearance: the dream residents.

This convergence signals the transformation of the digital infrastructure from something that belongs to us, into something that possesses us (Zubbof, 2019: 273). In adornean terns, the converged vibrational Babylons constitute an “untruthful wholeness” regenerated by an utterly compromised art that masks the liminal space of pain and hypnotizes the ever-existing «fear of falling back to the finitude of the flesh» (Heyles, 2000: 23). It masks silence with «white noise, the sound of our time» (Aranovsky apud Medić, 2008: 217) and prevents access to poetic residuality «the true language of which is speechless» (Adorno apud Padisson, 1993: 144). Instead of unveiling meaning, or depicting its “absence as negative”, it replaces our limited perception of cosmos by a manufactured absorption of individuals within new ungraspable causalities. Art functions at the present moment as a womb wherein heterogeneity is merged in a new organism, from the total awareness of which humans will be again deprived: Is this a Second Life or a second fall, the fall to the mundane, as Heidegger defined it? (Heidegger apud Baudrillard, 1991: 112). Finally, despite avant-garde futuristic rhetoric of novelty and radicalism, mixed-media arts instead of subversive aesthetics, uphold the triumphant legitimation of domestic aesthetics, smart devices, Netflix, and videogames, featuring a thoroughly compromised art that fuels the everyday falsity, conceals worldly disharmony and feeds the inhuman.

The objectified voice

The highest ambition of biopower is the production within the human body, of the total separation between the living creature and the speaking being, between life and bios, the non-human and the human (G. Agamben).

In his control societies Deleuze writes «We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world» (Deleuze, 1992: 6). Recalling Aristotle’s voice-soul bond, it seems that voices provide the initial corporations’ incarnation. VAS (Voice Assistant Services) searchbots, chatbots, shopping bots bridge the chasm between the online and offline worlds, by gradually obtaining hypostasis through advanced technologies that surpass space-time limits, such as digital immortality, icon tech and portal hologram tech. Personalized chatbots like Lucy or Replica, replicate genuine human interaction with the user who creates them. In digital theatre «Improv bots dialogue training is grounded in: informativity, coherence, and ease of answering», while the sense of humour is proceeded as «it is a paramount indicator of socially desirable and positive interrelationships» (Mitschels, 2020). Issues of addiction to smart speakers, companions’ formation and the unprecedented free will’s interference as «Bots are now able to overcome temporal and cerebral limitations to make the ideal consumer choice» (Klaus, 2022) get immense. Relying on technology resonates with relying on lie. As truth becomes increasingly useless within fragility politics, infinite mobility, restless adaptation and cruel optimism, devices that nourish impatience druggy escapism and amnesia, get massively requested. Vocaloid, Vocoder etc. process individual vocal input into real-time polyphonies emitting post-mythical multi-headed sonorities. «Voice as choice» (Magnat, 2021: 81), Magnat’s sum of resonating presence’s responsibility, supplies now literal vocal choices to serve atomized sonic bubbles, fictional identities, and ethereal selves. Problematizations that affect physical voice and performance arise.

Firstly, mechanical vocalities saturate with a globalized prosody, reproducing linguistic timbral and range confinement. Secondly, Alexa, Cortana, Eliza VAS and therapeutic voices regenerate youthfulness, calm sexiness, obedience and motherese care perpetuating gender stereotypes. Equally, digital immortality (immorality?) seems less immoral when deciding about the behavioural hologram performance of dead female singers, such as Huston or Delilah.

Ethic issues (e.g. consent) expand to everyday-industries; death-bots replicate presence, erase the pain of absence (however it is pain that retains present the absence) and foster oblivion, the sibling of nonsense. Thirdly, virtuosity exposure and risk are degraded into actual time manipulations, while expression equals voluntary data donation. Fourthly, the choice of vocal objects at once mask traumas between ego-self, desire-reality and widens the chasm between them. Fifthly, the real-time timbre/echo/pitch rectifications of autotune de-naturalize the way we think about pitch while “voice-lifting” (Novak, 2012: 151) the anti-ageing vocal rectification, aligns with the unmaking of “the grain of the voice” (its somatic footprint after Barthes) echoing policies of perfection. Finally, vocoderic voices comprise identity-multiplication linked to a posthuman position «envisaging the subject as transversal, transindividual, trans-species, trans-sexes. In short it is a subject in movement» (Braidotti, 2019: 72). Vocal unique reflexivity is re-defined as unprecedented adaptability.

Detached voices feed a holistic “voice” infused to the body of “commercial realism”. Under numerous bands, voice-based technologies constitute «The Voice Marketplace technology which operates at the intersection of cutting-edge AI algorithms and advanced voice synthesis techniques. It begins by capturing high-quality recordings of human voices, which serve as the raw material for the synthesis process» (Respeecher.com). Vocalic raw (im)materials are imposed on a spectral labour apportionment, via functions, roles and capacities’ distribution, aimed at facilitating (accelerating) the whole human activity spectrum, e.g. Speech and Voice synthesis technologies, AI voices for musicians and creators, AI voice generators etc. Pertinent for speech-to-text conversions and vice versa, for synthesizing polymorphic monstrous or uncanny sounds, libraries of public voices, were immensely advanced by artistic creativity: The extra/ordinary performative gestures.

This spectral world has already its “archaeology”, following an anthropomorphic literalization. In Lamentations of Orpheus (1998) the origins of Monteverdi’s “Drama per Musica” blend with the (beyond Baroque) archaic notion of lament, presented by a “proto-robot”: the Singing Machine of Martin Riches.

In the vocaloid opera the End (2013), the hologram singer Hatsune Miku experiences its own fall from Paradise (i.e. eternity): the sense of pain is revealed to Hatsune, via a new self-consciousness bonded to her awareness of death (sensualized by its own terms). Two qualities of pain appear in the examples: artifacts are capable of awareness alongside creative transformation; lament. For Han, «it is pain that differentiates thought from calculation, from A/I». Since pain induces thought and «only living life is capable of thinking» then «pain is life» (Han, 2021: 72, 71). The inclusion of pain, even in the artistic narrative level, problematizes black box trajectories. In his Opera Thinking things (2018) George Aperghis inserts his (beloved) motif of breath, capable of bearing per se abstract dramatic power. Here, “breathing machines” sustain a non-dichotomic mentality wherein «bits and pieces of humans and robots create a new space of polyphony» (Ircam, 2018) heightened by the acquisition of breath by robots, and its rhythmic sharing. Distanced, ironic, this tragicomedy composes an ambiguous universe by fusing devices, techniques and aesthetics (e.g. puppet theatre, magicians, multimedia) enhancing allusions to follow paradoxical cycles: e.g. a robotic hand (alluding to God’s hand from Michelangelo’s painting The creation of Adam) waits to gain breath from human, to then supply humans with its Goddy touch.

It is technological pivotality that sustains aesthetic, ideological, cultural practices and artistic challenges, producing a new common ground of artistic praxis in variable stage-work types, calling for novel critical/evaluation tools (Novak, 2015: 145). After Plesner «the task of the sensations is to mediate understanding and kinesis. Their multiplicity is explained from the multifaceted potential both body and mind possess» (Plessner, 2021: 55). Drawing from the third amalgamating spaces which reside between action and perception technology substitutes the mediation of sensations by encompassing the multifaceted theatrical factors and replacing the third space of the audience-performers’ implicit communication. Meanwhile, disembodiment(s), speech/action desynchronization, logos marginalization, degrade centuries of culture into “textscapes” or “metatexts” (Saltzman, 2008: 321).

For voice-based technologies, both in art and everyday life, listening equals absorbing. Vocalic machines listen/absorb, learn and synthesize vocal tones, producing a novel liquidated panopticon, codified as «algorithmic or acousmatic dataveillance» (James, 2014). In Van der Aa’s Opera One (2001) the vocal input of the soprano and her advanced echoic A/I response via real-time algorithmic processing, compose an antagonistic battlefield, pushing to the edge of artistry and energy: fuelled by the entire parameters of sound, music and gesture, machine-learning is accelerated; One acts as a “proto-voice/cloning” experiment. A/I voice cloning (under brands such as “anyvoice.com”) passes from the postmodern simulacra to copy. The “representation of representations” becomes “copying copies” within a network of mutations from where both originality and representation vanish. As Corpo – and Techno – realities converge, senses equally converge following a lessening process via vocalizing/listening/absorbing equalizations. Lessening verbs, lessening actions, into a spiral of endless re-actions.

Re-voices

I codify these as “objectified voices” maintaining a negative space of displaced mutations which mirror series of antistrophes:

1. Unique voice is rendered into “a” voice, a brick of synesthetic surroundings. This decontextualization and anonymization echo distant ethics, automation and floating responsibility (Bauman, 2013: 106).
2. A passage from the word’s devaluation as a sign of human devaluation is transfigured into speech’s instrumentation to fuel realities (ostensibly) beyond causality and reason: emphatically, vocal qualities uphold more effectively unearthly realities due to the mnemonic auras of embodied legacy; the vibrant matter of third spaces and “extra being”.
3. A reverse trajectory from the third space of “head-space’s polyphonic metabolism” to the singularized utterance appears: the unique voice remains in an intermediate zone, while soundscapes are externalized via algorithmic processing; vocal uniqueness is transformed into synchronic pluralisms while physical voice is suspended. This presages the expansion of “zone d’attentes” from airport zones to refugee-camps (Athanasiou, 2007: 68) alluding to cancelled futures (Fischer, 2021).
4. Mediation rounds the prosodic, communicational, re-evolutionary dynamics of voice, lending artistry’s challenges to technological problem-solving also replacing fantasy by lists of choices. This re-enforces “technological physicalization” provoking an unprecedented reversal:
5. The alternation of the all-inclusive breath-space by techno-mediated nets, wherein the online replaces cosmic embeddedness, substituting the space of vocal reverberation, collectivity and immaterial legacy.
6. This vocalic decontextualization from the open breath-space to resonate within power-mediated ecosystems produces an unprecedentedly a priori sentiment of the natural as insufficient.
7. The instrumentalization of human performers (often hidden from stage) alongside the adaptation of vocality to the dialectics of mediation prioritize tech-effects to vocal well-being. Eloquently: like prioritizing “economy” to human life.

Above all, the egalitarian sci-bio-technological sonification of things-oralities-activities-bodies-instruments constitutes a praxis of utter violence: human voice is abstracted, non-human parameters obtain voice, the voice of things is coerced, thrown in resonant blends of «an untransparent sonic wall of untranslatable languages» (Lehmann, 2006: 150). I codify this as “vocalization of matter” and as “materialization of voice”. Voice becomes a digit, a tool and raw material, forced into a hauntological modality of a never-perishing thing. It loses its evading, meaningful vibrations while materiality is evaporated into immersive surroundings of pneumatized bodies. Voice loses its “more-than-human” quality and becomes “human” in the bio-material sense, falling to the limited state of the flesh. From objective – more than a subject – it becomes objectified: less-subject and thing. Pouring sono-vocal heterogeneity into one massive monad, forms an eloquent symbol of totalitarianism, alludes to nazi camp-practices and foreshadows a “meaning-fall” in-between unpreceded norms wherein resistance is liquidated in resonance.

Closing thoughts: Mutation like muteness or the end of metaphor

To go beyond human is to go beyond meaning (K. Axelos).

Today, the aforementioned «highest ambition of biopower» (Agamben, 2015: 186) acquires unanticipated qualities, foreshadowed in vocal positionality in performing arts. Voice libraries, vocal interchangeabilities and the corpo-realities’ (as third spaces’) datafication literalize life-bios separation and uphold an unpreceded human’s embracement by his/her/its own symbolic capital. Separated from bodily cavities, voices de- and re-structure senses of places, companions and selves, produced by the conversion of human potentiality into virtuality. Through redirecting the entire parameters of human power to utter voice, actuality and future are managed and pre-occupied (Shaviro, 2019: 171; Goodman, 2010: 32).

Distance unmaking does not equal intimacy but alterity unmaking in the form of monolithic irrelevant realities’ merge. By multi-sensorially rendering “truth and lie indiscernible”, to echo Baudrillard’s famous phrase, the humiliation of materiality experientially, ideologically, “transcendentally” is achieved, in the name of The Reality, as future and technology. For Lacan, it is the “real” to be excluded from reality (Lacan apud Fischer, 2015: 31). Voice not only physicalizes technology but “metaphysicalizes” it, in the form of a resonant face that keeps the keys of meaning. An unattainable order not to be drained (like physical environment) but to be obeyed.

Our universe is destined to an unavoidable fate, which is not transcendental but inhered in our own methods, their hyper-amalgamation, their hyper-multiplication, their banality and insignificance: It is the indifference of things towards their own meaning, the indifference of results towards their own causes (Baudrillard, 1991: 111).

Emphatically, vocally fed in-different realities «do not match any known schema and thus bend any resistive capacity» (Levi, 2000: 39).

Literal bending of material resistance into resonance outlines a quality-shift, where body is deprived of materiality, voice is deprived of soul (air) while sensorial biodiversity is dissolved into seeing-sense, actualizing resonant panopticons: despite sensorial fusion, liquid surveillance heightens once again an eye-centric culture of total control.

«Out of joint»[6] like out of rhythm, voice, language, communication collapse enhancing the unmaking of the most annoying Other: meaning. The awareness of the missing, the sensing of the “unspeakable”, its quest, its vocal formations. Distance abolition as meaning/alterity abolition embeds the end of metaphor. In Greek language metaphor equals transport, describing both physical and mental types of it. The end of transport even imaginarily seems potentialized, by the literalization of an imposed fantasy within dream-like surroundings, feeding aphantasia. Without metaphor, even linguistic exodus is prohibited, imprisoning harder into the words of Foucault about heterotopias’ end towards «civilizations without boats, where dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates» (Foucault, 2012: 270). Distance’s abolishment, as set of alterity integrations, signals the end of voice: the approximation of the “evading”, the completion of logos with the myth of life. An unprecedented mutation, like muteness, a word so much like it. And what about laugh, this twin of pain? Totally needy of metaphorical thought, laugh frees the road for “objective voice” as:

Laugh’s doors are open to each and everyone. In a polytonic civilization the serious tones sound differently: The reflections of laughing tones embrace them and make them lose their exclusivity and uniqueness: They become completed by the element of laugh» (Bakhtin, 2014: 205).

There is nothing new in the prefabricated future. An entropic western alterity logic gets old and builds a fear-based edifice, dreaming of second lives. Fear masks authenticity mutes the voice. At the same time, fear mobilizes children to sing loud, to make their way into unknown woods. The choice is always there, like a Dasein, waiting for us to attune with.

—–

Notes

[1] Translation mine. (The ancient Greek original phrase is as following: «Ὁ δ’ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ»)

[2] According to the musicologist Marcos Tsetsos, «Adorno was the first to dialectically incorporate the societal element to music forms» (Tsetsos, 2016: 206). Adorno’s scholars such as Max Padisson and Lyndia Göhr associate his negative dialectics with «the composer’s struggling with the material as if struggling with society» (Adorno, 2003: 40). Resulting to discontinuity, this collision becomes apocalyptic of a hyper-continuity, revealing that the «wholeness is now untrue» (Göhr, 2006: 222), a critique to the antinomies of bourgeois mentality, inscribed as societal sediment in music. Consistency resonates with authenticity, truth, and commitment, as decisive socio-political positionalities: a non-resigned voice (Padisson, 2006: 210).

[3] Emphatically, Martin Heidegger highlights that the German verb “Sagen” (to say) originates from the Indo-European “Sagan”, which means “to point” (Heidegger, 2023: 91).

[4] Namely: «The goal is to invent the non-human as human and highlight it as a proof that the non-human can survive the human as if it were its very essence» (Agamben, 2015: 190).

[5] Based on Han’s phrase: «Future is the time of the Other».

[6] Hamlet’s verse «Time is out of joint»; in this Derrida grounded his “Hauntology” concept in 1993 (see Ref. Bibliography).

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