My performance at the Flows event at the Vibe Gallery in 2013. My idea was to set up a dialectic between my non-verbal vocal performance and a text I had written for the occasion, copies of which were handed out to the audience. I reproduce the text below the video player.
OF COURSE, WE WRITE ALL THE TIME
(Text
written for Flows, an event exploring
the interface of performance and writing at the Vibe Gallery on the 2nd
of December 2013)
Of
course, we write all the time. We read all the time. We inscribe and decode
constantly; processes which cannot easily be separated. The assumption that
they are separate comes from an assumption inherent in writing – that writing
is done at a distance; the distance of the writer from the reader, temporarily,
spatially or both. As if there was a primal closeness that was temporarily lost
and must be replaced – as if there was ever a place to be, except where we are
not.
It
is worth cosidering distance. Do I write myself with speech, simultaneously
reading myself back – hearing myself? To do this, I must be somewhere else,
looking back.
If
it is writing, it can be read. It can be read it can be read because it has
already been written and that is how we can find a way through the thicket of
cacography, misprints and spelling mistakes, stutters and burps, cries.
Cacography is endemic. The world is a writing made with broken fingers that we
nonetheless navigate via the recognition that we share its fractures.
A
forest of cacography.
Writing
with broken fingers.
The tongue
stumbles, convulses.
[…]
“communication” in much contemporary discourse exists as a sort of ill formed,
and differentiated conceptual germplasm. Rarely has any idea been so infested
with platitudes. Commuication is good, mutuality is good, more sharing is
better; these seemingly obvious dicta, because unexamined sweep too much under
the rug. […] “communication” has become the property of politicians and
bureaucrats, tehnologists and therapists, all eager to demonstrate their
rectitude as good communicators, its popularity has exceeded its clarity.
[…]
in classical rhetorical theory communicatio
was also a technical term for a stylistic device in which an orator assumes the
hypothetical voice of the adversary or audience; communicatio was less authentic dialogue than
the simulation of dialogue by a single speaker.
John
Durham Peters Speaking into the air
[Gossolalia…]
this fiction of language does not cease to be taken for a language and treated
as such. It is ceaselessly obliged “to mean” something. It excites an unwarying
impulse to decrypt and to decipher that always supposes a meaningful
organization behind the sequence of sounds. The history of glossolalia is made
up almost entirely of interpretations that aim to make it speak in sentences
and that claim to restore this vocal delinquency to an order of signifieds. In
our era in the West, from the interpretation of the glossolalia of the
Pentecost given in Acts of the Apostles (“pious men of all nations” understood
“in their own languages”) down to Fredinand de Saussure or to psychoanalysis,
the serious and jublilant play of speech always receives a rather clever
hermeneutic response that reduces the “want to say” to a “want to say
something”.
The
history of this equivocation goes back to relations that, since antiquity,
Reason has maintained with Fable while usurping its place. The scholarly
hermeneutic effects a substitution of bodies: in the very space established by
Fable, it replaces the spoken story with the content of its own analysis.
Western modernity developed the sleight of hand in all of its forms of
ethnological, psychiatric and pedagogical exegesis as if it were necessary to
write in the place where “that” speaks. Savage voices and voices of the people,
mad voices and infantile voices define the places where it becomes possible and
necessary to write. Voices furnish the hermeneutic with its condition of
production, that is, with the sites it occupies where it converts them to text.
In face of the glossolalic chain, the hermeneutic work mobilizes its scientific
apparatus. But in so doing, it unveils the belief that animates it. Whereas
glossolalia postulates that somewhere there is speech, interpretation supposes
that somewhere there must be
meaning. Interpretation searches for meaning, and it finds it
because it expects it to be there, because interpretation relies on the
conviction that especially where meaning appears to be absent, it is hidden
someplace, present “all the same” thus, the hermeneutic pursues its object most
obstinately in those non-sense places where it postulates “secret languages.”
Michel
De Certeau Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias
It
seems that the “illegible” must have a twin; but I have no common (or uncommon)
word for signfying that which cannot be written
upon. It is as if the idea of something as unreceptive to
inscription was beyond thought, or as if the idea of being a something - at
all- is predicated on its hospitality to our writing.
It
is, at first, strange that the idea of a thing that cannot be read has its part
in language, but that which cannot be written
on is denied the
name. But it is exactly this quality that bans it.
