Majena Mafe Thesis
Soundage:
a Practice-Led Approach to Gertrude Stein, Sound
and Generative Language
Majena Mafe
Submitted in fulfillment of the requirement of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2013
Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology
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Keywords
Sound; Soundage; Sound in language; Sounded-language; Sound theory; Gertrude Stein; Listening; Third-ear; Language; Discourse analysis; Content analysis; Literary canon; Event; Meaning/unmeaning; Sound thinking; Non-cochlea; Delire; Non(sense); Jouissance; Love; Matrixial Borderspace; Bracha Ettinger; Luce Irigaray; Feminist theory; Psychoanalysis; Sonic Poetics; Digital animation; Digital opera; Ventriloquism; Fictocriticism; Inter-disciplinarity; Digital; Sonic arts; Practice-led research.
Signed Statement of Originality
The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any ‘other’ higher institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due knowledge is made in the text
Signature
Date 10th June 2013
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Abstract In this practice-led research project I work to show how a re-reading and a particular form of listening to the sound-riddled nature of Gertrude Stein’s work, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother, presents us with a contemporary theory of sound in language. This theory, though in its infancy, is a particular enjambment of sounded language that presents itself as an event, engaged with meaning, with its own inherent voice. It displays a propensity through engagement with the ‘other’ to erupt into love. In this thesis these qualities are reverberated further through the work of Seth Kim-Cohen’s notion of the non-cochlear, Simon Jarvis’s notion of musical thinking, Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s notion of délire or nonsense, Luce Irigaray’s notion of jouissant love and the Bracha Ettinger’s notion of the generative matrixial border space. This reading then is simultaneously paired with my own work of scoring and creating a digital opera from Stein’s work, thereby testing and performing Stein’s theory. In this I show how a re-reading and re- listening to Stein’s work can be significant to feminist ethical language frames, contemporary philosophy, sonic art theory and digital language frames.
Further significance of this study is that when the reverberation of Stein’s engagements with language through sound can be listened to, a pattern emerges, one that encouragingly problematizes subjectivity and interweaves genres/methods and means, creating a new frame for sound in language, one with its own voice that I call soundage.
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Final Submission Written Exegesis 50% Soundage a Practice-led approach to Gertrude Stein, sound and generative language.
Creative Works 50% SOUNDAGE: A DIGITAL OPERA(TION) SOUNDAGE: AN APPENDIX
Supervisory Team
Principle Supervisor: Professor Brad Haseman - PhD Assistant Dean of Research CIRAC Creative Industries Faculty QUT Kelvin Grove
Associate Supervisor: Professor Julian Knowles Portfolio Director P3 Creative Industries Faculty QUT Kelvin Grove
Associate Supervisor: Susan Carson - BA JCU, MA, PhD Head of Postgraduate Studies Creative Industries Faculty QUT Kelvin Grove
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Table of Contents
Keywords ……………………………………………………………………………………… ...2
Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………...3
Final Submission …………………………………………………………………………………4
Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………………………...5
List of Images …………………………………………………………………………………….7
Supplementary Material ……………………………………………………………………...…8
Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………………9
Chapters
1. Sound Is Saying Something ……………………………………………………….……..11
1.1 Research Question …………………………………………………………………….11 1.2 Stein’s Two and the Sound Inside It …………………………………………………..20 1.3 Outline of Chapters……………………………………………………………………26
11. Gertrude Stein, Two And The Sound Of Language: Towards A Theory Of Soundage …………………………………………………………………..…………………………30
2.1 The Third Character: Sound ………………………………………………………… 33 2.2 The Sound Filled Language of Two …………………………………………………..38 2.3 Repetition, “Bottom nature” and Meaning ……………………………………………41 2.4 The Pure Sound of Two …………………………………………………………………….44 2.5 Sounded Ecstasy ………………………………………………………………………48 2.6 Towards a Theory of Soundage ……………………………………………………….52 2.6.1 Sound as Sound in Language ……………………………………………....55 2.6.2 Sound as Sounded-language ……………………………………………….56 2.6.3 Sound as Soundage ………………………………………………………...57
111. Soundage A Conceptual Exploration …………………………………………………..59
3.1 Soundage and the Non-cochlear……………………………………………………..65 3.2 Soundage and Musical Thinking …………………………………………………... 69 3.3 Soundage as Délire: Hearing the Song of Non(sense) …………………………...…73 3.4 Reverberations of Jouissance and the ‘Other’……………………………………….78 3.5 Love and Listening………………………………………………………………….. 82 3.6 Soundage and the Notion of the Matrixial Borderspace …………………………....84
5 IV. My Creative Practice: Translating And Transcoding Soundage …………………….90
4.1 Context and Background to Practice …………………………………………………92 4.1.1 Sounded Dyss-lexia and Non(sense) ……………………………………. 93 4.1.2 And Being a Girl: Feminism as a Context …………………………..…...97 4.2 Methodology ……………………………………………………………………… 101 4.2.1 Ventriloquiseing as a Method: the Matrixial Voice and Soundage..……107 4.2.2 Listening as the Instruction Manual for Creating and Working with Stein…………………………………………………………………………....109 4.3 Contextual Review of Exemplar Artists/Writers who have Influenced my Work…...113 4.3.1 Context 1 Non(sense) Materiality of Sound and the Body ……………. 115 4.3.2 Context 2 Non(sense) Via Language Constructs ……………………… .122 4.4 Making: My Digital Sonic Practice in Four Parts ……………………………...…...128 4.4.1 Sound Objects ………………………………………………………….. 129 4.4.2 Scoring Two ……………………………………………………………..148 4.4.3 SOUNDAGE A DIGITAL OPERA(TION) ………………………………160 4.4.4 GIRRL …………………………………………………………………..169
V. The Anticipation And Implications For Soundage ……………………………...……174
5.1 Implications and Conclusion ……………………………………………………….174
Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………...183
Appendices ...…………………………………………………………………………………...196 Contents of Appendix ………………………………………………………………………....197 Two In Sound: Sound In Two, That’s Three Appendix One: Theme Index for Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother by Gertrude Stein ……………………………………………………………………………………………198 Appendix Two: Instructions To Read/Hear Two (or how to infect you with too ear) ….. 200 Appendix Three: An Analysis of Gertrude Stein’s Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother Read for Sound, Theme, & Syntactical Meaning ………………………………………..201 My Reading of Gertrude Stein’s Work, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother ………....203 Appendix Four: My Own Work - Architecture of the Throat - Notes on Performative Compositions ……………………………………………………………………………255
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List of Images
1. Majena Mafe 2010 Still from The Big Sounder digital opera
2. Majena Mafe 2009 Still from Inside the mouth digital opera
3. Majena Mafe 2010 Unsound Unsaid
4. Majena Mafe 2012 Screen shot from that-unsound
5. Majena Mafe 2010 Selections of works from 2010
6. Majena Mafe Screen 2010 Threee
7. Majena Mafe Screen 2010 shot from The Ventriloquist Project
8. Majena Mafe Screen 2010 shot from Gertrude Stein Opera Project
9. Majena Mafe Screen 2010 shot from The Biography of Sound by Gertrude Stein
10. Majena Mafe 2010 Two of my recordings based on Stein’s voice
11. Majena Mafe 2010 Still from Droorn a Voice Opera
12. Majena Mafe 2010 Blobber: sounded-language is it soundage?
13. Majena Mafe 2010 stills from short call and response opera Grrrr …
14. Majena Mafe 2010 stills from short call and response opera Curly Toes
15. Majena Mafe 2010 Stein Sings Blue Bayou http://stein-sings.blogspot.com/
16. Majena Mafe 2012 Sound file image
17. Majena Mafe 2011 Choir stall and the shape of their sound
18. Majena Mafe 2010 Scan of my mark-up of text Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother
19. Majena Mafe 2010 Extract from score for text Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother
20. Majena Mafe 2011 Detail of Score 22 of Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother
21. Majena Mafe 2011 Extract of Score 8 of Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother
22. Majena Mafe 2011 Extract of Score for Soundage taken from Gertrude Stein’s Two (this score can be ‘played’ by putting it through text to sound software)
23. Majena Mafe 2011 QWERTZ program still Sound is coming out of her … her
24. Majena Mafe 2010 12789 Ventriloquist Project Pinker Sound QUT Precinct, Brisbane.
25. Majena Mafe 2010 12789 Ventriloquist Project Pinker Sound
26. Majena Mafe 2012 still image from Soundage a Digital Opera(tion)
7 27. Majena Mafe 2012 instillation of Soundage a Digital Opera(tion)
28. Majena Mafe 2012 still image from Soundage a Digital Opera(tion)
29. Majena Mafe 2012 still image from Soundage a Digital Opera(tion)
30. Majena Mafe 2012 still image from Soundage a Digital Opera(tion)
Supplementary Material
CD of thesis DVD of SOUNDAGE: A DIGITAL OPERA(TION) and supporting films. Book SOUNDAGE: AN APPENDIX
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Acknowledgement
I wish to sincerely thank the following for their support during the research, creative production and writing of this thesis.
First I must acknowledge and thank Gertrude Stein, whose intellectual curiosity and creative genius, (in her own words) inspires me no end. I hope my work goes some way to do you justice.
I am grateful too for the help provided by the Beinecke Library at the Yale University, whose advice and patience have been unerring making this project possible.
I wish to thank my advisors Brad Haseman, Julian Knowles and Susan Carson. I am grateful for the financial support during my canditure and the use of The Block to present my final work. A big thank you to the technicians, Nigel and Blair who helped so much to make it all happen. I want to thank too my colleagues and peers who engaged in conversation with me regarding sound, language and Gertrude Stein. All your conversations are in some ways now part of my thinking and this thesis.
I also wish to thank my dear dear daughter Phoebe and dear friend Mela who both provided much needed love, encouragement and distraction right through and at those key blah moments, thank you, and thank you too for your patience.
But mostly I wish to thank Daniel Mafe, my darling husband, for his love and goodness, good talks, good soup, heartfelt encouragement, intellectual friendship, good humor and kindness during the whole of my PhD period. Your companionship on this journey has led directly into the unfolding of my ideas and to their flourishing in this PhD form. Thank you with all my heart.
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… a belief that has translation is not all there is of exultation. Stein, Two 1951:142
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Chapter I.
Sound is Saying Something
She is one having sound filling, filling in coming out of her. Stein, 1951:4
1.1 Research Question
In a little known text written at the beginning of the 20th century, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother, the modernist writer Gertrude Stein, points to a particular way of engaging with sound. Sound as an inherent meaning-maker as well as a quality, an affect, within language. Significantly, Stein presents or performs sound with its own voice. In Two,
Stein is not just describing or narrating a sound informed literary trope within language, nor is she using sound as a metaphor or simply engaged with languages prosody,1 Stein here creates, indeed sounds, something ‘other’ within language. And this ‘other’, as sound, is engaged with its own ‘being’ Stein is saying is saying something big:
1 In linguistics, prosody is the study of rhythm, stress, intonation, tempo, and related features of speech, contribute to a speaker’s meaning, but given this, prosody is generally not understood as a form of language in its own right with its own engagement with its own particular forms of meaning nor its own voice.
11 Sound comes out of her.
Sound coming out of her is expressing that thing, is saying something.
Sound coming out of her is expressing something, is saying anything. Sound
coming out of her is expressing everything, is saying everything. (1951:8)
Stein is telling us sound comes out of ‘her,’ and out of ‘her’ expression and significantly also out of language itself in that it is saying that is expressing “everything” both within and outside of it. Stein is shaping or allowing language to perform that sound that “is saying everything.” Stein here is not just presenting the auditory aspect of sound but presents a sound that works at a subtle level one which perhaps can only be approached through a particular way of listening, and a re-listening to it through the current thinking.
This includes creative and especially sonic art and digital frames now available to us.
Indeed Stein’s work can be seen as a precursor to sonic art engaged with vocal aesthetics.
The sound of voice and voice as a sound quality both have physical and psychoacoustic properties, and this range of ‘sound’ is now provoking questions of the distinction of an qualities of sound in language and in digital language as well.2
Stein began her work on sound within language as early as 19023, which culminated in
2 See VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, (2010) ed. by Neumark, Gibson and van Leeuwen; Morris and Swiss’s (2006) New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories; Malloy’s (2003) Women, Art and Technology; Lovink’s (2002) Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentia; Grau’s (2003) Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion; Goldsmith’s (2011) Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age; and Mark Americas (2011) Remix The Book; Delville and Pagnoulle ed. (2003) Sound as Sense: Contemporary US Poetry &/in Music. 3 Stein did preliminary work on sound during her work on The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress. The novel traces the genealogy, history, and psychological development of members of the fictional Hersland and Dehning families, but Stein also includes frequent sound meditations during the process of writing the text. These periodically overtake the main narrative. Written between 1902 and 1911 published 1925.
12 the work of Two. Since then some aspects of the particular type of sound in language that
Stein reveals here, and sound and language in general, have been explored, by Ferdinand de Saussure for example, and then theorists such as the linguist and literary theorist
Roman Jacobson, the philosopher, literary critic, sociologist and psychoanalysist Julia
Kristeva, and the literary theorist, philosopher and semiotician, Roland Bathes. All open up ways to consider language in terms of languages structure, its phonetic framework, the semiotic, and the sensation/pleasure of the text in turn. And all these theorists and their works touch on sound as an aspect within language. But it is Stein’s particular engagement with language in terms of its sound and the sound inside it, an engagement that teaches one how to hear and not just read language, that allows sound to performs its own voice, and which details as it ‘sounds’ particular ways of thinking through sound and of the relational quality of sound to thinking, that I am concentrating on here. This aspect of sound in language has not been previously addressed in any significant way4 nor in the way I am intending to engage with it here, which is as Stein suggests … through listening. Given this, for this research, I chose to focus on and approach Stein’s sound as directly as possible through listening to its own voice and voiced qualities. This type of engagement is important I think in terms of the long term and general deep refusal of the quality of sound in language in terms of rational discourse and so our continuing problem with hearing it.5
It is also important to proceed in this fashion because in doing this research I have
4 These critics though do touch on Stein’s use of sound, Neel (1999); DeKoven (1983); Dydo (2003); Pound (2007) and Heijinian (1995); Retallack (2003) and Chessman (1989). 5 This is detailed in Adriana Cavarero’s (2005) For More than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, where she explains the long history of philosophy closing its ears to voice and the sound of voice in particular. p7.
13 become particularly aware that this sound, the sound Stein presents here, has not been heard before. This is because Stein’s work with sound in language has not been elaborated on to any extent and in any focused way in the secondary texts and criticism that surrounds her work.6 The secondary literature on Stein’s work takes two forms, the first is an examination of Stein herself, of her alleged perverse sexuality7 her bohemian lifestyle and of her placement within the social and critical involvement in Modernism in
Paris at the turn of the last century.8 In this type of reading she is often placed as
6 There is a wealth of valuable literary criticism surrounding Stein and her work. And though early on in my research for this paper I conducted a thorough re-reading of this criticism and went on to shape chapters that outlined Stein’s Two through various literary theory readings of her work pointing towards misreadings of Stein’s work, I ultimately chose to abandon this tack and address instead the sound I heard in her work, directly. I chose not pursue the breadth of positioning Stein and the missing of sound in the past in this thesis because it did not add to but complicated in an unhelpful way my argument/method of listening to Stein and the sound in her work Two to reveal the sound of the text in a direct way. It was my intention to let the sound in Two reveal its own frameworks of and for thinking. Also I have purposely not detailed or followed here the more established frames for reading Stein’s oeuvres whose work places Stein’s value to literature positioning it within modernism and/or postmodernist frameworks, its reliance and relationship to cubism and/or positioning Stein herself as an outcast of literature, writing coded works. Whilst I found some of the literature surrounding Stein scholarship to ‘almost’ point to the sound in her work, the work of Neel (1999); DeKoven (1983); Dydo (2003); Pound (2007) and Heijinian (1995); Retallack (2003) and Chessman (1989), in particular, in general I found much of the literary criticism on Stein did not support my particular research object, question or method. A method focused on listening and reflecting on what I heard in Stein’s writing and trying to make sense of what I heard though various theoretical and creative and digital frameworks that supported such a reading/hearing. I found more encouragement for my listening-way of reading Stein through sound artists and the writing of John Cage and Steven Ratcliffe (2002) and Craig Dworkins (2012) in particular. Their engagement with Stein and sound in general was primarily through their creative practice and directed toward making sound works for an audience. More specifically the work done by Salvaggio (1999), Norman (2004) and Retallack’s work in general were and are of considerable importance in terms here because of their readings of language and the creative and ethical frames within it. 7 In particular Bridgman’s (1970) book Gertrude Stein in Pieces, but also Catherine Stimpson’s, The Mind the Body and Gertrude Stein (1977), and more recently Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives (2007). 8 See, for example, Mabel Dodge, "Speculation, or Post-Impressionism in Prose," Arts and Decoration, 3 (1913), 172-74; L. T. Fitz, "Gertrude Stein and Picasso: The Language of Surfaces," American Literature, 45 (1973), 228-37; Samuel H. McMillan, "Gertrude Stein, the Cubists, and the Futurists," Dissertation, University of Texas, 1964; Marilyn Gaddis Rose, "Gertrude Stein and the Cubist Narrative," Modern Fiction Studies, 22 (1976-77), 543-55; Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978); Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York: Random House, 1963); William Wasserstrom, "The Sursymamericubealism of Gertrude Stein," Twentieth-CenturyLiterature, 21 (1975), 90-106. The most recent treatment of Stein's work from this point of view, and a sophisticated, persuasive argument, is Marjorie Perloff, "Poetry as Word- System: The Art of Gertrude Stein," American Poetry Review, 8, No. 5 (1979), 33-43. Though Marianne Dekoven’s work Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism Contemporary Literature Vol. 22, No. 1 (Winter, 1981), pp. 81-95 takes it further.
14 secondary to Picasso and the great male artists of the day. The second strand of criticism primarily consists of decoding her work, and though this thesis could be seen in light of this strand of engagement, this has principally taken place solely within literary criticism.
The secondary literature on Stein’s work to date, also seems to have not taken into consideration her background in psychology working with William James and the experiments she set up with him on perception and the reception and non-perception of language within language, nor in her intense interest and engagement with philosophical questions. Stein’s formative years as a writer were shaped by her correspondence with both Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead,9 and also Eastern Philosophies notions of ‘being,’ reverberation and the continuous present.10
There has been a limited reception to Stein’s work overall and her distinct projects in the individual works, in general. Another factor was that Stein’s work on sound, Two, was not published until 1951, almost fifty years after its being written. But suffice to say even given this Stein’s work is still primarily thought of as difficult, more about form, that is cubist, and without content. I intend to prove that there is content within her work and it is rich and still contemporarily relevant.
Now overwhelmingly there is within contemporary culture a growing interest in all things sound. Especially sound as a separate ‘medium’ and not necessarily aligned to music.
9 Read of this connection in Sarah Posman’s Time as a Simple/Multiple Melody in Henri Bergson’s Duration and Simultaneity and Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Writing. (2012)
10 The Eastern influence on Stein’s work is yet to be addressed by scholars, it is one I think that will provide considerable insight into her philosophy and use of sound in language. It is work that I plan to develop after this PhD period.
15 Whilst this interest is primarily focused on sound in terms of electronic procedures with digital data, there is now room to rethink sound in language as part of a new understanding of sonic art,11 including sound in language as a quality worth re- investigating and building both creative works and ideas from. As I work as a sonic art who works with sound in language this is where the impetus of this thesis lies especially in terms of opening to listening instead of reading a text.
My working with Stein’s sound involves opening to various listening portals and creative gestures, which are the applied to but also are drawn from Stein’s work. I have outlined this process as listening through scoring Two, in my Appendix Three, where I detail meticulously the combed through text of Two with the annotated qualities that I hear within it. I have not placed this detailed reading of the sound in Two within the body of the thesis because instead I wanted to concentrate on the question of how to listen and comprehend what Stein’s sound was saying. The resultant notions that occurred as a result of this listening are reflected on in Chapter Three.
This thesis is, in a sense is a listening, then paraphrasing, and at times a ventriloquising of
Stein’s work on sound. My intention has been to draw attention to and somewhat clarify
Stein’s particular work on sound in language, creating a contemporary instruction manual for hearing it, whilst all the while pointing out that Two has been functioning as such a
11 Read Tony Gibbs (2007) The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Sound Design, who defines sonic art, “(I) take the view that we should define the work by its intentions and by the conceptual thinking that informs it. Thus a work that seeks to communicate with its audience through sound or be informed by ideas that are based on sound would be a work of sonic art; by contrast, a work that happens to make sounds as a byproduct of another activity (as many kinetic works so) or that has no conceptual reference to sound would not.” By this reading Stein’s work Two is an extremely innovative work of sonic art, perhaps the first, it certainly predates Russolo, Duchamp, Saussure and Jacobson.
16 un-read manual all along. The reasons this is so is because as I said there is a general refusal of sound in language, it is seen as a glitch to meaning, so too there is a turning away from sound as a subject within the frames of philosophy because of its ‘thought’ interference and complication of meaning.
My thesis question then is, what the sound in Stein’s text Two: Gertrude Stein and her
Brother doing and what does it mean for language in the broadest possible sense?
Through my research, it is my intention to show that the sound in and of language embedded as reverberation in Two, and as Two as a whole, can now be both heard and read as a substantial and radical early and highly significant sound experiment by Stein, reshaping what it is to say, to mean in language and even to be. Two is an entirely new and foundational reformation of what it is to use language and reshapes what language is.
It reshapes articulation of the subject as one of reverberation within language, providing a deeper understanding of what it is to be a human being. Stein’s work is a source of new material that needs unpacking and listening to if we are to understand her unique contribution to language frames, and communication now in a digital age of communication.
This thesis then is part of ongoing working towards an answer, in part because I do not believe the question of Stein’s oeuvre is finished being asked, nor is it ever fully answered. Indeed I believe my thinking and working with Stein’s understanding of sound in language is just beginning. I am fascinated with sound in this mode, and with the range
17 of thinking it opens up in thinking through how one can communicate through it and engage with it. Stein work with sound has changed my thinking and my thinking about thinking and the language I use to think creatively.
This paper was written at the end of a period of four years of theoretical and creative research as part of a practice-led approach, listening for its sound meaning in language, in
Stein’s text Two. It is my reading that this sound is unique. This is especially so when considered through psychoanalytic and feminist theoretical frameworks, and then more significant in relation to sonic poetics within contemporary digital frames, and again, when tested and expanded upon within a creative practice-led practice. To make it clear, my practice-led research examines what this sound in Stein’s text Two is doing through two seemingly separate but in fact dual frames of critical theory and creative practice. In this case both forms, or filters of engagement are so closely interwoven and engaged with the generative possibilities for thinking through language, as to be understood as two ears in one head and a third ear when they are intertwined. In my praxis, it is impossible to separate the two, as my thinking folds and unfolds into creative decision making and theoretical speculation in a seamless and reverberatory manner. The outcome of the project, as a whole, can be thought of as fictocritical, the creative aspects acting as a voice alongside and not subservient to the voice of theory. Both are generative and both are critical. It is only for the form of the PhD that I have separated them into separate sections. I deal with the theoretical frameworks first of and then my creative processes and outcomes.
18 In the first section, I assemble a range of thinkers that to some degree help steer our thinking in fresh ways to hear this sound in terms of a particular type of hearing. Drawing on psychoanalytic and philosophic thinking particularly in terms of subjectivity for the subject sound, I focus on the notion of the non-cochlear, sound-thinking, the event of non(sense) and love as theoretical notions which I draw on to better hear the sound within
Two’s sounded voice. In this I position sound within a wide field of understanding.
Though this section is not intended to be a thorough reading of theorists and their thoughts on language that are relevant to this approach, I am thinking here of Kristeva in particular who I have not mention in any detail12, nevertheless I found that these thinkers,
Seth Kim-Cohen, Michel Jarvis, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Luce Irigaray and Bracha
Ettinger, open up the conversation for listening and thinking in the particular way Stein is instructing us to through the voice of sound in her Two.
Stein’s voice and what she was saying, like ‘other’ voices that are not heard, significantly put me in mind of the consequences of what this sound could be seen to be doing in relation to contemporary feminist notions of generative and ethical language. I was especially drawn to develop this approach after using the theoretical and practical framework of listening to open my ears to really hear Stein’s work.13 Given that, all my
12 Though Kristeva would seem a useful conduit to think through Stein’s work I find her underlying model is as Alison Tate (1994:334) says “propositionally and logically based and this does not allow her to explore linguistic signification adequately.” This is especially so in terms of sound in language and its engagement with, meaning and (un)meaning, considered as a means and meaning whole, a key issue of this research. Though I would like to explore the differences and similarities of Stein and Kristeva’s projects further, I was interested in this instance of relying more on Stein’s words to articulate the language of this inquiry and reflect aspects of thinking that arose within her work through the theorists I have engaged with. 13 I am especially indebted here to the work of Ruth Salvaggio and her text, The Sounds of Feminist Theory, (1999) where she calls for the sound of feminist theory be included as part of theory itself, asking for it to be so positioned because it holds its own unique frames of meaning. I was also interested and influenced by
19 creative work is driven by my interest in listening for ethical feminist language frames and how the notion of love and relationship can play a part here. So the inclusion of this perspective within my approach was natural, as was the inclusion of my own personal engagement with listening through a dyslexic framework.
Though writing this thesis I have come to understand that Two’s sound is (still) generating its unique sounded language some hundred years after it was first written and in this it is generating a continuum of sound meaning, meaning a new type of continuing.
Further that this sound continuing is a complex sounded language whose focus is expressing a type of love in language, achieved through a deep and ever present engagement with ‘otherness’ or difference at every meeting point, indeed this sound is turning language into a dense ever reverberating field of engaging generative possibilities. Stein’s deep and thoughtful engagement with sound, works for me as the most exciting space of deep communication, a space both matrixically philosophical and tenderly relational.
…
1.2 Stein’s Two and the Sound Inside It
Stein’s work Two is full of sound thoroughly engaged with articulating its own sound
the work of Rosemary Waldrop, Against Language (1971) which pointed to experimental impulses within and dissatisfaction with current frames of working with and thinking through language.
20 voice. From close readings and reverberations set up within the original text and in the language that it contains, reflected and reverberated through the sound in my own creative works, I have found within Two what can be noted as an infant and unique theory14 of sound as it occurs in and generates language as sound. I have found that Two, and the sound inside it, performs a detailed argument for a unique way of communicating with language, an embryonic sound theory that reverberates through its unique language, bridging and affecting what we might come to think of as a generative language in the making. I should make it clear that Stein in Two does not explicitly articulate that she is writing a theory of sound, indeed when she wrote it there was no framework for such theory as we know it today.15 It is only with the invention of recent frames of sound and sound thinking spelt out and explored within sonic arts and its theory, plus psychoanalytic and feminist theories of a potential and ethical language that we can begin to hear Two not just in revision but in what I feel could possibly be its original intention.
It is a text that thoroughly and systematically details sound in all its aspects. It is a close examination almost a dissection of sound as it occurs in the language of the text, in dialogue and within the said characters of the text, in this Stein includes the voice of sound itself. This is hearing it anew. Stein’s oeuvre around the time of writing Two points
14 In using the word theory I am talking of a type of poetics of thinking talked of by Critchley in her article [D]oubts, Complications and Distractions, where she outlines how Lynn Heijinian talks of theorizing as an enactment of poetic thinking, where thought is of an ongoing and inclusive kind which is “shifting, … not authoritative, … not finished and thus far from traditional academic epistemologies. She quotes Hejinian from her preface to ‘Reason’: “A theory, then, is not a theorem, a stating of the case,” “an idea accepted or proposed as a demonstrable truth,” a “stencil.” Theorizing is, in fact the very opposite of theorem-stating. It is a manner of vulnerable, inquisitive, worldly living, and it is one closely bound to the poetic process.” 15 The text Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother was begun as early as 1902 but not published till 1951. Historically the next published work on sound was by Luigi Russolos. His Art of Noises was published in 1913. Russolo’s work was very different to Stein’s in that it focused on sounds from outside of man, noises from the machine, noises bombarding the senses and attacking even destroying both man and nature. Given this Stein’s work can possibly be seen as the first contemporary work on sound, and one unique still in having an engagement with sound through language and not the machine.
21 to an early and strongly established interest in sound in language16 leading I feel to her need to explore in detail her understanding of how sound works in language.
Sound is so deeply and thoroughly embedded and the focus of the text, Two that one has only has to read the first sentence to hear sound sounding itself in a constant repeated state of potentia:
The sound there is in them comes out from them. Each one of them has sound in
them. Each one of them has sound coming out of them. (1951:1)
It is evident, on a reading of the text, that Stein’s work Two points to sound being - working - performing itself in multiple ways. In this it is a complex work. In its complexity and density of sound, Two shows how the very notion of sound in language as sound-filled meaning changes notions of how we speak, the very basis of language and how we think within it, and it follows what we can mean and who we can be, and even how understand the notion of relation to the ‘other’. This happens because the creative and generative embodiment of this sound, something I refer to as soundage, stages its own ‘event,’ and performs itself within the borderspaces of meaning/unmeaning in a continuity … in a reverberatory manner of making meaning.
Along with presenting this rearticulation of Stein’s early and embryonic theory of sound, my intention is to reposition Stein so she can be read anew within the context of
16 Stein was still writing The Making of Americans, when she started Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother. This text is built around the speech patterns of the characters of the plot, which aims to be a history of American people.
22 contemporary philosophy and sonic art theory. Though Stein’s work, in general, has been tentatively acknowledged as being highly influential on contemporary music,17 the focus on her work with sound as explored as sound in language is still largely missing from theory including contemporary sound theory. I believe this is because Stein was engaged with sound as the basic nature within the voice as it occurs in both verbal and in written language as theory, her work begins to describe sound as the event that extends notions of meaning by assuming we are all within a much more open space of continually becoming(Being) in sound.
The philosopher Michel Serres in his book Genesis calls for sound to be considered a new object for philosophy, though both a new and common object, one that is outside of the frame. “We recognise it everywhere, yet reason still insists on ignoring it.” (1995:6)
There is extensive work hardly begun on sound as a philosophic object, and this thesis aims to contribute to this in some way. Overwhelmingly the discussion of sound as part of philosophic theory has frequently been focused on in terms of noise18 with associated negative qualities.19 Stein’s Two with its implications for sound as a positive, generative, even loving, relational reverberation within language is unique and a correction to the negativity. This is addressed further in chapter three.
17 That is from La Monty and Cage onwards etc., see Strickland, Edward. Minimalism: Origins (1993:128) and Peter Dickinson’s Stein Satie Cummings Thomson Berners Cage: Toward a Context for the Music of Virgil Thomson The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 3. (1986:394-409) 18 The work of Jacques Attali, Noise (1977) Michel Serres, Genesis (1995) and David Troops, Sinister Resonance (2010) to name a few. 19 The following writers: Veit Erlmann (2010) Reason and Resonance-A History of Modern Aurality, Jacques Attali (1985) Noise-The Political Economy of Music, David Toop (2010) Sinister Resonance-The Mediumship of the Listener, Michel Serres (1995) Genesis, though other writers, Michel Chion, trans of Pierre Schaeffers Sound Objects and Audio Vision, Allen S. Weiss (1989) Phonetic Gaps and Gasps, Yve Lomax (2004) Sounding the Event Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time, and Ruth Salvaggio (1999) The Sounds of Feminist Theory, have all championed the notion of sound in language and looked at it as a positive object.
23
My positioning of Stein within a philosophic and sonic art context is new. Until now her work has generally been discussed solely through frames of literary theory.20 This has meant that Stein’s work has been read as primarily experimental poetry, with the focus being on its form and the notion of non(sense) that critics find there. I intend to show how
Stein’s work operates within a broader frame and is significant and relevant to philosophic and psychoanalytic argument today and for digital creative work.
Stein asks us to rethink not only the relationship of language and sound but also the relationship of sound to being and to ‘otherness’, even though and perhaps especially because it is hard to hear. The sound in Stein’s text Two needs to be listened to. And in this it needs a serious and sympathetic ear to investigate what it is doing. Three frames and ‘types’ of sound exist in Stein’s text though all reverberate as one, sound in language, sounded language and soundage, I outline these below in chapter II. Given this it is the third frame of soundage that I focus on for most of this study. Soundage is a quality of sound, which can only be comprehended with a third ear.21 I am using this term to refer
20 Bridgeman (1971), Mellow (1974), Walker (1984), DeKoven (1983), Pondrom (1986), Grahn (1989), Dudnick (1991), Quartermain (1992), Meyer (2001), Dean (2008).
21 The ‘third ear’ is a term coined by the Swiss composer and installation artist, Maryanne Amacher. She worked extensively with the physiological (not psychoacoustic) phenomenon called an ontoacoustic emission, in which the ears themselves act as sound generating devices. The subtitle of her first album Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear) references these "ear tones." Amacher describes this phenomenon: “When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head ... (my audiences) discover they are producing a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially with the tones in the room. Tones 'dance' in the immediate space of their body, around them like a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes ... Do not be alarmed! Your ears are not behaving strange or being damaged! ... these virtual tones are a natural and very real physical aspect of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two images resulting in a third three dimensional image in binocular perception ... I want to release this music which is
24 to an ear open to a listening that opens towards what Kim-Cohen describes as non- cochlear sound.22 This is something I address in more detail in chapter III. Within this frame is it possible to begin to hear and begin to recognise Stein’s work as a sound theory and see the implications of it. I will show that Two has a unique way of saying things, that move beyond linear or simple interpretation. It is well noted that Stein’s works have left readers confused and frustrated by both her ‘meaning’ and means. To swage this I have conducted a thorough and close reading of Two for its sound meaning and means, this is available as appendix III. It is my hope that by re-sounding the sound-meaning in
Two, through post-structural feminist notions of love and borderspaces and then activating the same sound within a myriad of ways in various creative frameworks I will go some way to making Two accessible. Thereby adding Stein’s critical work on sound to the critical work on Stein’s oeuvre.
1.3 Outline of Chapters
In chapter II, I outline how Gertrude Stein’s text, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother, presents sound in such as way that it can be read as an embryonic frame for a particular theory of sound on dealing with sound in language. I map this theory in its three aspects as sound in language, sounded-language and soundage.
produced by the listener.” When played at the right sound level. Displaced Sounds. http://www.displacedsounds.com/?p=241 accessed 24 6 2009. 22 Kim-Cohen’s Non-Cochlear. Sound Today. http://noncochlearsound.com/?page_id=101 accessed 2 5 2012.
25
I focus on and develop my readings of soundage in this research in chapter III, through looking at its qualities their extension in terms of relationship, and, finally where soundage can be heard and understood, (imaginatively), to be situated. I do this by having soundage vibrate alongside particular notions within contemporary post-structuralist and feminist theory. In particular I position soundage’s qualities of the non-cochlear (Kim-
Cohen) against notions of sounded thinking (Jarvis), sound as an event, and as meaningful délire, the non(sense) or unmeaning (Lecercle). I then go on to speculatively position soundage as a quality of relationship and ultimately, love, and jouissance through a reading of the French philosopher and theorist Luce Irigaray and then as a quality that can be potentially positioned alongside, and not outside, the symbolic through the psychoanalytic notion of Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial borderspace.
I chose Irigaray to reflect on the qualities of sound Stein presents us with because of her speculative thinking linking ‘otherness’ and for me this is the aspect of sound in language to love through what she explains is an approach that is a tender engagement with
‘otherness’. Irigaray talks of an approach to ‘otherness’ through love that is non- sentimental but inclusive of all difference. Ettinger’s thinking extends these ideas and creates the space to think potentially of a space/place of situates soundage that performs and acts with its own frames of meaning within a very broad framework, one that encompasses the dominant phallic model with its binaries and limits. In effect Ettinger discusses a potentially place where soundage sounds within an ever expanding expanded field. The significance of this reading is that it situates soundage’s qualities as being in a
26 reverberative relationship both alongside but also ‘in’ language, creating a space/place for soundage in that it encouragingly problematizes soundage’s modes and methods as means, as new forms of sound-meaning. This is has been important to establish in terms of further work with soundage in language.
In chapter IV, I develop my research into soundage by working with it through my own creative research and sonic poetics and sonic orientated digital works, that themselves are emergent and strongly influences and affected by the previous chapters theorists and their thinking. My research, numerous projects, exhibitions, publications and the final work that come from this engagement demonstrate soundage eventing itself as not just the medium, a new medium of sound in language played out digitally but the becoming space of being in making.
Built directly from the synthesis of this approach to sound in this research, I will show two major creative outcomes. The first is my large installation and performance of the digital opera named SOUNDAGE a DIGITAL OPERA(TION) that was exhibited in July
2012 at the Block QUT Creative Precinct. This work, in its making and final form, is a synthesis of the work I have done with Stein’s text, it allows the audience to access soundage experientially. A second creative work that came from the development of this is a digital sound networked organization I have started called GIRRL girrlsound : digitalgirrl.23 This work exceeds the frame of this research and will go on to engage with voice and sound of women’s voices in particular into the future. Both SOUNDAGE and
23 http://www.girrl-girrlsound-digitalgirrl.org/
27 GIRRL.org provide a place and a way to both research further and disseminate further the emergent notion and creative possibilities of soundage. Indeed, as I will show, GIRRL in part forms a synthesis of soundage in that it both exposes and fills in a gap that exists for women with regard to sonic practice and establishing some form of cultural recognition.
In chapter V, I conclude my findings with a discussion of the significance of Stein’s work. I also outline briefly my theory of soundage as a tool for feminist ethical language frames and generative language. Finally I mention the implications that I feel are provided by this theory for engaging with communication and knowledge, and contemporary digital frameworks in relation to sound.
A detailed examination of Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother with notations is supplied in my appendix. This appendix is available at the end of this document and also in the accompanying book soundage : and appendix. It contains, three sections related to
Stein’s work Two, appendix one - Theme Index from Two: Gertrude Stein and her
Brother by Gertrude Stein, appendix two - Instructions To Read/Hear Two (or how to infect you with too ear), appendix three - An Analysis of Gertrude Stein’s Two: Gertrude
Stein and her Brother, read for Sound, Theme, & Syntactical Meaning, and a section on my own creative work as a response to working with Stein’s text, appendix four - My
Own Work Architecture of the Throat- Notes on Performative Compositions (2008-
2012).
This appendix proved to be a substantial document of research that formed part of my
28 scoring of Stein’s original text Two. It consists of quotes and annotations from the text that extrapolate on the texts many layers of meaning. Whilst I was searching for the answer to what Stein was saying in Two about sound, what I was predominantly and repeatedly struck by was her way of generating sound as language. Because of Stein’s unique use of sound as language I needed to offer frame works that would make this accessible to the reader as much as possible. I do not consider this appendix finished, it is a work of reverberation and continuous emergence. I intend that it will form the basis of further research and further writing projects on Stein and sound. I offer it as a primary source of my thinking that led to my articulation of Stein’s work as a theory of sound and the development of the notion of soundage as part of that framework.
Further, the accompanying book soundage : an appendix, acts as a visual appendage to this research project. It contains images of visual scores and stills from video works from my creative projects made during the course of this PhD research. It also contains a copy of the original text Two with my own mark ups, which in itself is a score. My process and the patterns of marking up are interesting to view in terms of rhythms and repetitions of the notion sound in the text especially evident in the tooing and froing between ‘him’ and
‘her,’ two of the ‘characters’ of the text. The book contains a copy of the above appendix as well.
29
Chapter II.
Gertrude Stein, Two and the Sound of Language: Towards a Theory of Soundage
A sentence has been heard, now listen … Stein, Sentences and Paragraphs in How to Write
I don’t hear a language, I hear tones … Stein, Autobiography of Alice B Toklas
Gertrude Stein, arguably the twentieth century’s pre-eminent literary figure, wrote not just experimental literature per se, but literature that has embedded within it, an embryonic theory of sound in language, of sound as language, and this sound is engaged in performing its own voice. In particular Stein’s work Two is highly significant and applicable to sonic art and sound theory today. This is because it outlines a sound-based relationship to language that has thinking through sound as its chief quality; this follows the definition of sonic art, provided by Gibbs (11:2007). In these terms Stein can be understood as being an early sonic artist. To proceed with this claim I will focus on the often-overlooked text by Stein written in the early 1900s,24 Two: Gertrude Stein and her
24 In Stein’s notes at the Beinecke Library is a small piece of paper 1 & 1/2 x 2 inches in Alice’s handwriting - ‘Cone Sisters.’ Underneath in a big bold hand (query Stein’s) is ‘TWO - 1910 08-1912.’ This shifts the date of beginning Two to two years earlier than it is dated in the published text. It means the
30 Brother. It is I believe a text that’s intention is to work with sound to articulate sound.
Embedded within the text is a new field for literature, that of sound’s own voice. It is about sound in language and how that sound works and thinks and creates meaning within this guise. It does this through sound itself, and in doing so it allows sound itself speak in its own unique voice. In this, Two points at and presents something that does not fit the traditional not the structuralist meaning-making function of language. Stein’s sound filled work is a radical shift in language, which necessitates in the reader a break with what Ihde (2007) has referred to as Cartesian meaning frames.25 With an interest in feminist ethical frameworks that let the refused operate within language, I am exploring such shifts through Stein’s work. With this agenda in mind, I mine the text Two for sound and patterns of sound meaning and syntax, pulling from them language’s own resonance, something much more than its content or form.
The detailing of how sound engages with meaning-making through its own voice is within the text Two, is available in Appendix Three where I annotate the text in detail, noting and unpacking it line by line. I have chosen not to detail this here in the main body of the thesis because of space and focus of the thesis question. This initial scoring of the
roots of Two can be read in Stein’s previous text The Making of Americans … and can be dated as early as 1903. MSS76 Box 87 Unpublished Manuscripts Folder 1685 reel 139 Scraps / fragments / drawings. 25 Don Ihde the author of Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, outlines this well, when he says phenomenological readings of sound in language must be “anti-Cartesian” as this sounded type of “linguistics,” which Stein is doing, must also be “anti-Cartesian linguistics.” (2007:150) Ihde says of meaning, that “Cartesian linguistics … does not hear. It supposes its listening to hear “bare sounds,” “acoustic tokens,” which in an undiscovered “translation” are mysteriously and arbitrarily united with the disembodied and elusive “meanings.” These meanings float above and beyond the embodiment that is what presents itself to listening. Experientially just as the thing is always already found as the “unity” of its “qualities” so in language is a word always found already embodied and significant. (2007:151)
Stein, I will show does not start nor continue with language with this perspective.
31 text can be seen as preliminary work that both allowed and formed my thesis question.
For encapsulation of Two and the role or quality the sound inside it takes I outline key its points here.
Two is a difficult and odd text. Indeed it is so odd, so ‘other’ and porous, that it opens language and lets something else into it or through it. In Two we hear a language that is open to the generous play of sound flooding through its material and syntactical structures that beg to be listen to.26 I will go on to show that this predominance of sound enters or rather pours forth and reveals its own qualities, its own inherent voice. This has the effect of unpleating language, opening it as a broader field, that in turn unpleats the named world, rendering it as an expanded field approachable through the cultivation of a third ear, an ear open to a multiplicity of resonances.
Stein’s Two not only contains, but is sound. This sound is a third character in this initially apparent two character text. It is also the reverberating meaning - maker of the text and indeed, as I will show, that sound is in fact the text. But an alternative text to what it first or superficially appears Stein is offering us. This sound breaks meaning and reverberates into ecstasy, an ecstasy that embraces the ‘other’ and difference. This creates new ways of thinking about meaning, subjectivity and language.
In what follows I open with a discussion of sound as Two’s third character. I present
26 William Carlos Williams argued for just such a relationship to Stein's texts when he suggested that her "results aren't something that (one) can ignore [... T]he repellent nature of her page, or the fascination of her page, means a regeneration of the processes of clean thinking and feeling [... and] it's a man's business to pay attention even when he can't read" (Selected Essays 164).
32 sound’s language, its focus on repetition, and its nature as ‘pure sound’ and finally how this sound moves to ecstasy. These are all qualities that define sound’s capacity as a meaning re-maker. I will then point to how this sound, as a sound in language, points to a new theory for sound that has implications philosophically and within current sound theory.
2.1 The Third Character: Sound
Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother is a dense compilation of discussions between two entities that though spoken of as ‘him’ and ‘her’ soon break down into abstract models of difference. Stein was known for using language in ways that complicated meaning. For example, if I start at the beginning and ask what does Two say, I need to consider that for
Stein “two” could mean “too” or “to” … or just “more.”27 Two could and does seem to evoke all of these amounts or multiplications it is in affect multivalent. Given Stein’s writing style of engaging with word play, in the same vein, the last part of the title “… and her Brother,” could also mean either of her two brothers, Leo or Michael, or her creative brother, Picasso. Stein could equally mean28 bother and not “Brother,” bother meaning her dilemma or her question with language … thereby stating the problem to be solved, re-solved. I say this because something is solved with and through sound in Two.
Though this is unspecified and in this still emergent. Nevertheless something is pointed to. We proceed not knowing the question and Stein never enters into it, except through
27 Stein frequently played such word games, focusing on the sound of words and that sounds association and the second meaning within a text. 28 Ulla Dydo says “She is often said to write for the eye rather than the ear, but nothing is further from the truth. Any writer who relies on punning works with both ear and eye. Most of her puns are both visual and auditory, homonyms and homophones, and are not limited to English” (2003:221)
33 the voice of the character ‘him’ in the work. The arguments against opening to sound in language, are solely from ‘him’ and his voice throughout the text. Yet even given this vagary Two definitely can be read as a substantial answer to something, something as
Stein says that is “everything.” (1951:9)
From this position, a range of ambiguity and displayed difference, the ‘characters’ discuss their hearing, their being, and being in general, including their relationship to sound:
[T]here are two of them … they are both living … both knowing … each has
their own sound coming out of them … one is a man and one is a woman,
[and] each one has their own sound. (1951:1)
Sound then here becomes or is revealed as a third character;29 one that exists in and as the dynamic between the two. But it also is its own ‘self.’ In this, it has its own voice or voices expressed through the text’s multiple identities. But there is more. Because then
Two starts to situate sound as central within the text, performing its own voice, sounding out, sounding everything, creating in effect an early surround-sound. Sound here is also the author. Read this way sound becomes everything, the whole lot:
29 Toibin in New Ways To Kill Your Mother, discusses character as “ … the role of a character … must be judged not as we would judge a person. Instead we must look for density, for weight and strength within the pattern, for ways in which figures… have more than one easy characteristic, one simple affect (The text) is a set of strategies, closer to something in mathematics or quantum physics than something in ethics or sociology. It is a release of certain energies and a dramatization of how these energies might be controlled, given shape.” (2012:8)
34 Sound sounding is sounding. Some sound is sounding. Some sound
sounding is sounding. Some sound sounding she being one some sound is
sounding. She being one some sound is sounding. Some sound sounding she
is one. …Any sound being sounding sound if surrounding that she's the one
sound is sounding. She being on any sound being surrounding she is on the
sound is surrounding. (1951:27)
Here, sound both comes out of ‘her’ and is its own character with its own qualities.
Further on in the text sound talks of ‘doing,’ ‘making,’30 and ‘being’ and/or ‘becoming.’31
Sound has qualities to its nature, it pleases, mingles and importantly, listens and talks …
Sound coming out of her had been something that was pleasing, mingling,
flattering, attacking, discouraging, escaping, quoting, changing,
encouraging, believing, hurting, one listing, listening and talking, talking
and listening and some where talking. (1951:10)
Sound makes things happen. And things happen around sound’s presence. To explain briefly, there is an argument within the text, sound is argued for by ‘her’ and against by
‘him.’ After a dense period of ‘her’ “making,”32 and this is described in detail, there is a period of “anticipation,”33 and then what follows is something explained as ‘her’
30 Stein 1951:90 31 ibid 1951:42 32 ibid 1951:90 33 ibid 1951:107
35 “marvelous articulation.”34 During this event within the text, sound talks of love and expresses it as a sort of transcendence or ecstasy, that is a subtle sound reverberation type of moving towards the ‘other’ ‘him’ and all ‘other’ as “a union.”35 This union is not between ‘him’ and ‘her’ but between ‘her’ and ‘otherness’ accessed through this close engagement with sound’s qualities within language. This love is facilitated through sound. The whole text seems structured to culminate in this union. It builds slowly but perceptibly through the shifting rhythms and intensities of the language of the text, and though this is almost impossible to show with separate quotes, it is perhaps evident here:
She was the particle and the resemblance … She was the one to have and
she was not the one to have what was had. She was approaching and she
could not that way if she did not have all that she had and she was not
anticipating, she was not participating, she agreed and she said that what she
said and what she heard was what she said and what she heard and she said
that she was not accumulating. She said she was only waiting … She was
the whole when she was there and there was there for the one to come. She
was the whole and she gave out what there was to be when there was one
not empty. She was one and she had that son and she was giving what was
not inundating. She had that most which was that which was that which was
that which was that. (1951:126)
The union or love is understood, or felt, especially through reading the text aloud,
34 ibid 1951:108 35 ibid 1951:119 & 127
36 because here we catch the text in its whole resonance. The text quivers as ‘she’ quivers.36
The union that follows, the narrator (or is it sound?) says, is solely experienced by the
‘her,’ of the text. This implies or seems to infer it does not occur in ‘him.’37 Through this love, sound and ‘her’ become entwined as consciousness. Sounding itself is conscious, especially in its own creating, indeed the creative gesture is what seems to initiate the union.
In listening sound coming out of her and sounding was feeling that
understanding is creating. (1951:54)
This profound experience with sound changes ‘her’ and ‘she’ moves into a different space of making (through sound) and being in relation to ‘him.’ This is a sound-based engagement with the ‘other.’ Though this engagement is difficult it is simultaneously resolved ultimately and endlessly, even repeatedly, within ‘herself’ and this is achieved clearly through sound and love:
She was tendering that she being feeling had not being completely suffering.
She was receiving they're going to be explaining she had been not one
completing or remembering having been existing. She was receiving what she
was giving. She was not denying in being existing. She was not rehearsing
36 ibid 1951:49 37 It is possible to read this text as a prelude to Stein’s text Patriarchal Poetry (1953), with her criticism of ‘his’ use of language and his refusal of the ‘bottom nature’ of sound within it. Indeed Stein through the character ‘her’ of the text subtly but repeatedly seems to infer this. I have chosen not to focus on this reading of the text but to read it for the profoundest sense of engagement with the other. ‘He’ is included in this as by the end of the text some deep resolution within ‘her’ occurs through an inclusion, almost, of ‘him.’ But it is ‘he’ as part of a field of otherness. Note: the ‘he’ in the text is more other than sound.
37 anything. She was not continuing. She was a sound sounding was coming out
of her the sound that sounding was coming incoming out of her. (1951:75)
Once ‘she’ achieves this state, and arguably this is the aim of the entire text, ‘she’ goes on with her being, and the text closes on this event within language and within being. But it closes with sound inside it, not against it:
All the day was that way. And that which was penetration and reversal was
saying good-bye. She did turn to die. She was not in that eye. She was the
pleasing reunion that was not being in being where there was no seeing. She
came to stay that way. (1951:142)
2.2 The Sound Filled Language of Two
The language of Two points to sound as something that is there but, at the same, nowhere but also everywhere. In ‘other’ words, Two begins in the middle of something that is more an event, a suddenness, than an anywhere.38 In this event the three differences or
38 Stein uses diagrams to break down sense and time as a plan for writing much like a score for music. In the notebooks for An Acquaintance with Description … (Beinecke Library Stein Manuscripts MSS76 Box 1 Folder 5 reel 1) Stein interleaves time/time/sense till they break every skerick of meaning.
x a difference Page 1 1# (?time?) 1# 1 S (?sense?) 1 S 1 ? time ? sense (I think the word is time the question make is also a slash) 1# 1# 1# 1S
38 characters are engaged in a very deep way with what it is to say. To express this, Stein sets up a particular sound-based grammar that both examines and undoes itself. This is necessary to allow sound, as a character, to be in the text, but it does more than this.
Stein, in plying structural tensions that work against traditional grammatical form, opens the text to a sort of jewel-like multifaceted-ness. In this faceted way she enables ‘he’ and
‘she,’ the two in Two, to stand for primal binaries in the sense that they are more like two paths in language rubbing against each ‘other,’ creating new possibilities to say, think and be.
The language of Two opens the reader to the play of sound within the text. At first glance
Two looks deceptively simple and straightforward, especially as there are a surprisingly limited number of different words used. Yet it soon becomes evident that despite this, the work is pure complication. As a text it works in difficult ways. Two multiplies meanings and purposely confuses. At first the multiplications seems to come from mere repetition,
11SS 1# 1# 1# (across bottom of page)
1# 1# 1S 1S 1S 1#S 1 # 1N(?) 1# 1# 1#
Page 3 1# 11111
39 and it is true the text repeats, endlessly. But when read slowly and carefully, a clear and significant difference is spelled with each repetition:
She is one having sound filling her in coming completely filling her in
coming out of her. She is one having sound filling, filling in coming out of
her.
He is one filling himself with the thing, with the beginning, and the sound of
that thing, the sound of that beginning filling is coming, has been coming out
of him … (1951:4)
What also complicates the text is it’s pacing. Two moves at a snail’s pace. Nothing happens. And yet everything happens. The text gives nothing. It gives everything. It is not reasonable. It reasons. It unpicks meaning and then reinserts it at another level … and it does all of this simultaneously. This approach, evident from the outset, works to dull the comprehending intelligence of the reader while at the same time sensitizing the ear.
Stein seems to show us that it is with the ear alone that one can go forward. Indeed the experience of reading the language of Two is one of slipping and sliding over its myriad sss sounds. Within this slithery space there is the feeling this language is wrong, or rich, or very funny, and maybe saying something very profound:
She did say that what she was she saw and what she saw she heard and what
she heard she knew what she knew she said. She did say that what she said
40 she felt and what she felt had come and having come it would be that and
being that she would not ask and not asking she would know and knowing
she would hear and hearing she would work and working she would express
and expressing she would be helping and helping she would come and
coming she would speak and speaking she would smile and smile and she
would rest and resting she would save in saving she would have and having
she would have what she could have what she had had but she must have.
(1951:87)
The language of Two makes one face one’s impatience and one’s unexamined expectations of a text. One faces, at the same moment, one’s boredom and one’s delight in language. And all through it, Stein mercilessly and with the precision of a surgeon cuts into the heart of every assumption of language to expose its sound.
Two’s paragraphs echo and jamb into each ‘other’ across its 142 pages. Every notion, every word, every being-ness of the three characters ‘him,’ ‘her’ and sound interweave and translate each other’s being in sound. It is a circular arrangement that functions not towards any resolution but rather steps out of language and then out further in a sort of animation of grammatical abuses. The text performs itself through sound as a continuum of exclamations, as exclamation in itself. In this it is a form of play, of joy. In its intensity
– Stein would call it emphasis39 – this sound can be seen to work like a music score for an
39 Regarding emphasis, in Kid’s What is a Portrait and Why Did Gertrude Stein Produce so Many of Them, quotes Stein ‘in Portraits and Repetition, published in Lectures in America in 1935, where Stein elucidates on her fascination with portraits. “The key concern behind this interest is that of "repetition." A quick scan of any of Stein ’s short works reveals what appears to be a love for repetition. A particular series of words
41 ecstatic play, or an opera.
2.3 Repetition, “Bottom Nature” and Meaning
Parts of Stein’s earlier famous text Making Of Americans (MOA) and Two were written concurrently. Indeed Two can be understood as an abstract version of MOA. In the first text, Stein is outlining who people are through their language and how language is closely aligned to their being. In Two, Stein explores how the deep sound structures of language themselves effect being and how this impacts, in that it evokes and in fact amplifies meaning. In both texts Stein’s trademark repetition, is involved. Clive Bush in his book Discontinuity in Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans, points out how Stein first uses this child-like playing of repeats together with the notion of storytelling in
MOA.
Loving repeating is always in children. Loving repeating is in a way earth
feeling. Some children have loving repeating for little things and story-telling,
some have it as a more bottom being. Slowly this comes out of them in all
their children being, in their eating, playing, crying, and laughing. Loving
repeating is then in a way earth feeling. This very strong in some. This is very
strong in many, in children and in old age being. This is very strong in many
in all ways of humorous being, this is very strong in some from their
will appear rapidly repeated, sometimes altered just slightly, or added to, sometimes not altered at all. But Stein insists that her motif is not repetition, but insistence or emphasis. "Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition." http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma99/kidd/resume/stein.html accessed 21 4 2011.
42 beginning to their ending. (Stein quoted in Bush 1978:29)
This is an example of using the action of repeating to access “the motorized rumble of daily life,” something “Stein would later refer to as the “bottom nature,” of the human subject.”40 Stein’s uses the sensation of repetition to reveal the “bottom nature” of the authorial voice. This bottom nature of sound, as it is in Two, is not only described in Two but also performed. Here is a quote from MOA followed by a quote from Two for comparison:
Always then from the beginning there was in me always increasing as a
conscious feeling loving repeating being, learning to know repeating in every
one, hearing the whole being of any one ways repeating in that one every
minute of their living. There was then always in me as a bottom nature to me
an earthy, resisting slow understanding, loving repeating being. As I was
saying this has nothing to do with ordinary learning, in a way with ordinary
living. (1995:301)
And from Two,
In sound coming and sounding and sound coming out of her was sounding, in
sound coming she was expressing that being one needing something being
existing, she being one having come to a decision that something being
existing was denying, she being that one she was needing that she was
40 Will 2000:24.
43 expressing that sound sounding she was expressing that something being
existing was what she was expressing in stating that the thing being existing
is being existing … She being that and being one sound coming out of her
was coming out of her and sound coming out of her was sounding.
(1951:45)
A new type of density has been reached here. The repeating of words in Two blurs their meaning, leaving us with their pure sound, but more than that these repetitions leave us with a complication of sound itself. This complication has a thickening to it that can be understood as an event in language that cannot easily be broken down into pure grammar and syntax frames. For example, when sound coalesces in this way it shifts any notion of border in terms of where meaning starts or stops. Instead it creates a between-space a becoming(Being)41 space a borderspace of meaning. And this will become more important as we read about this ‘potential generative space/place/reverb’ in my second chapter.
2.4 The Pure Sound of Two
The opening sentence of Two is, “The sound there is in them comes out from them.” Here
Stein indicates that this text operates in another realm of language, one where sound is.
41 By using the term becoming(Being), I am referring to a continually becoming and reverberatory space of being. In this I refer to Heidegger’s notion that “Language is the home of Being. In its home man dwells” Letter on Humanism and Cavarero’s notion that the individual has been lost from philosophical discourse – with the sound of the voice, and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that the becoming-woman is the primary becoming. Also Butler’s notion of a subjectivity in flux. Whilst this is an area that begs further unpacking it will need to be delayed for further research in the future.
44 From the opening sound comes out at first from ‘him’ and ‘her.’ But while sound continues to come out from them it also coming out of language, text and voice based, and out of literature.
Initially as I have said, sound circles around or is attached to the two characters ‘her’ and
‘him.’ Stein’s Two says, “each of them has their own sound inside them, each one of the two of them …There has always been sound in them in each one of them.”(1951:1) Here
Stein indicates that the sound in them has always been present. This is indicative of a very different sound than just sound in language.
Once this point is established sound is presented in a myriad of complexities. There are sound complications, sound interweaving, and sound translations. This sound breaks down subjectivities. Increasingly we hear sound presenting itself as having a voice and through this voice, an agenda. The sound coming out of ‘him’ for instance, comes out and is engaged in imagining without a beginning and needing something that is without knowing:
Coming and not coming, enjoying and being charming, jerking and not
jerking, gently and with enthusiasm, brutally and not completing,
occasionally and continually, steadily and explaining, excitedly and not
deciding, deciding an beginning again, completing and repeating, repeating
and denying, hesitating and terrifying, angrily in beginning, angrily and
completing, concluding and denying, completing an undetermined, ending
45 without beginning, continuing without realising, ending without
experiencing, imagining without beginning, imagining without ending,
imagining in beginning completing, denying in denying, doubting without
affirmation, imagining completely imagining without complete beginning,
without complete middle without complete ending, feeling without emotion,
trembling with out continuing, giving without needing, withholding with out
decision, coming with denying the coming, needing without knowing,
happening with exhaustion, going on with listening sound is coming out of
him. (1951:7-8)
Along with this presentation of the multi-dimensionality of sound, the importance of hearing this sound is also spelled out. The first mention of hearing is on page two: “the one is one hearing himself and making sounds then with that thing. The ‘other’ one is one hearing some one being one and then making sounds of that thing” and then … “They are not alike. They are very much alike.”(1951:2) Here like and hearing are paired. Stein goes on to say that this sound is meaning, too much meaning for any sense of its ending:
They both of them have sound coming out of them that has too much
meaning for the ending that is sounding out of them. (1951:3)
Stein insists this sound is not song. This sound is not being sung:
They are not one singing. They are ones being ones talking. Sound is coming
46 out of them and some of the sound that is coming out of them is coming is
coming as talking. (1951:3)
So this sound in them is sound in language, and this sound is talking. The two, ‘him,’ and
‘her,’ are expressing and that expressing is expressing them, through sound. As sound,
The two of them are ones expressing that thing expressing being ones
having the sound come out of them, the sound that is coming out of them.
(1951:3)
This event of sound, not just in ‘him’ and ‘her,’ but in language as a whole breaks open meanings wholeness. Indeed sound so complicates meaning that a new form of meaning occurs. Meaning, in close relation to sound aligned with Two’s unique sound grammar
(or is it sounded syntax?), is then positioned as a new philosophic object, that Serres calls for.42 Yet here it is not a background noise and here it is a noise/sound of love. I will talk more of this in the next chapter.
Through complex sounding, but with a minimal sense of common time and no physical space described, the work of Two is, in effect, a field of sound. Extremely dense with seemingly identical but in never exactly repeated phrases, the sound in the text creates a backwards and forwards ‘rub’ of meaning against itself. This friction creates frustration in the reader who reads for narrative, and tension for the reader looking for transparent
42 Michel Serres. Genesis calls for a new philosophic object …“We recognize it everywhere, yet reason still insists on ignoring it.” (1995:6)
47 meaning. The repeated sss sounds create a field of sound in the mind at the deeper levels of being and of consciousness.
In this sense, Two, sound performs and critiques language’s frames of grammar and meaning through emphasis, repetitions43 and variations of the sound in language. Through this complication of meaning, sound in Two presents a radical way of re-thinking and communicating and re-creating meaning within language. This aspect of sound in language creates a unique space between and through reverberating means and meaning.
Two says repeatedly that sound is. This sound is intimately expressing its own nature while it is evolving from ‘her’ and speaking about ‘him.’ In this sound presents as an
‘other.’ This sound then is situated in a marginal zone between the two characters, ‘him’ and ‘her’ and between and at the edge of meaning and (non)meaning. This sound is sounded and in that it is constantly in the state of reverberated becoming, becoming(Being). It is in this reverberating state that it achieves coherence through relationship and especially tin terms of ecstasy.
2.5 Sounded Ecstasy
By the end of Two, there is a particular culmination whereby sound breaks into a new
43 “… once started expressing this thing [the repeating that is the same thing], expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis …” Stein, Portraits and Repetition in Lectures in America (1935:166-67)
48 state of being, one that is in ecstatic relationship with the ‘other’ – indeed, with difference itself. This occurs after a long descriptive passage on working and all the qualities that go into working and through that its relation to becoming. This section highlights how this working is unique because it is achieved through intense listening and listening to meaning in reverberation with meaning making. This is a making/listening of meaning in all its creating, deciding, submitting and acting:
She worked then, she followed and she led all that she had in following, she
led what she led, she led what she would have in following. … She would not
have a decision and deciding that she would not be saying, she would be
having a decision in meaning that reflection is interpretation and
interpretation this decision and decision is regarding meaning and regarding
meaning is acting and acting is expression and expression if not resisting
winning and not resisting winning is submitting and submitting is leading and
leading is declaration and declaration is beginning and beginning is intending
and intending is deciding and deciding is creating and creating is not
contending and not contending is destroying and destroying is submitting and
submitting is decision and decision is creating and … (1951:90)
After this passage there is an imperceptible, though key, event. The subject ‘she’ shifts fully into an ‘other’ range of being and becomes a becoming(Being) subject, an active, articulate sounded-being deeply engaged with her own subjectivity as a whole in the broadest sense. This is a re-articulation of the subject as reverberation:
49
She was the particle and the resemblance … She was the whole when there was spared the one who was a comfort there. She was the whole when she was there and there was there for the one to come. She was the whole and she gave out what there was to be when there was one not empty. She was one … she was giving what was not inundating. She had that most which was that which was that which was that which was that. (1951:126)
Within Two, this ecstatic shift is also indicated by an increase in sound rhythms between words paired with a staccato effect. It is this that seems to culminate in what I describe as an intensity of something like ecstasy, which seems to be able to be translated as a type of love becoming/happening. Apart from sound being in language and that sound having a voice and its own subjectivity, this is the key event of the text. This becoming/happening seems to be love, love through and of ‘other.’ This is a move to a type of inclusion that is an embracement of all difference. It is relayed as a density of passages about sound and being and becoming that enfold ‘him’ and in this all ‘his’ previous positions and arguments. Though the whole text is a convoluted surface of sound full of complications arising from within its depths something definitely happens at this point in the text. When we look back we realize it did not happen all at once but has seeped through reverberation into ‘her’ through ‘her’ being ‘with’ language in all its sounded-ness. This is a profound shift towards union:
What the way the union of all that is everything comes to have with all that is
everything is the way of explaining everything ... This is the way that is all
the way and all the way is the way and each and that is all each is there where
50 that one is the remainder of all that has been and will be there. They are each
one. (1951:119)
This union is a type of embracing; Stein says this is a receiving of the ‘other’:
When she received the other she had that way and that was what did make that a
reception. (1951:141)
This receiving/embracing is achieved through a steady and repeated but also constant sounding. Earlier on in Two, there is the sense of building towards something and drawing the union out. And this is stepped to through accentuation, which for Stein is pronouncing, through the sound of sound speaking. But it is the culmination of ecstatic reverberation that offers the whole, the generative possibility wholeness of not only saying or thinking but being one with sound within language. This affect, an upraising as in praising, both flattens language and opens it to, much more to say:
She said, the accentuation was not unpraising, she said, and the accentuation was
not prolonging, she said, and the accentuation was evening, she said, and the
accentuating was pronouncing, she said, what she said and she was agreeing. She
said that she had known there were remaining words that she was to say…
(1951:109)
Stein and/or ‘she’ says this is very “evening,” meaning I think equalizing. And this evening levels language out into pure ecstatic sound. This approach is intimately tied to
51 love in a type of resonance/acceptance. Indeed it is through this move to love that Stein directly instigates a new type of language, one that allows difference to be not just thought about but to be said, spoken, sounded.
As stated at the opening of this chapter a full and detailed reading of the dynamics of sound and its voice performing meaning in the text, Two, is available in my Appendix
Three.
2.6 Towards a Theory of Soundage
Both the activity and the presence of sound in Two acts as a new object within language that by its very implication effects as I’ve indicated what it is to be and mean. In this
Stein’s engagement with sound as sounded-language, allowing it its own voice is a radical way of thinking about communication. It is a way of ‘languaging’ that is in itself is between ‘spaces,’ bordering both means and meaning simultaneously. This type of sound reverberating with sound meaning, also acts like a philosophy of sound/being.
Reading Two in this way is unique because with this perspective it is understood as a quite radical text. At the time of its writing there was nothing else like it within literature or philosophy. The psychoanalytic spaces, which I will touch on, that soundage borders were not yet even born let alone discussed, … and yet Stein is quite able to think about sound on three levels and interweave them through both language and subjectivity.
52 Two presents and performs a quality of sound, resounding, re-member-ing, and reconstituting the very ground of language. The abstract nature of sound-language in Two presents its own inherent coherence, Stein’s work has genuine logics if read through its own framework. Close listening is required to really hear Two’s particular theory and what that theory is doing especially to meaning. Stein is saying that this becoming(Being) space is always and has always been, and will always be happening within language.
Sound in this mode works within language and alongside it and in another realm entirely in what could be said, referencing the psychoanalytic theorist Ettinger,44 to be the
“borderspace” of language.
It is clear Two is about sound. But as I have said, more than that, it is sound. Indeed Two is sound sounding itself as a new philosophic object. In terms of what it is expressing, this philosophic object, is as Stein says, expressing everything. Stein herself explains how her thinking and the text Two can be seen as a move to more fullness:
The ending which is not ending in the beginning which is continuing in the
continuing which that sounding and the sounding which is expressing, the
time has not been coming and going, there has not been winning and losing,
there has been then abundant stemming and surging in framing
discrimination. This has all that reality. (1951:137)
Two in this way is really an instruction-manual-come-theory, for thinking and working with sound. It also works by speculating that this “complete connection” is also available
44 The theorist and psychoanalysist Bracha Ettinger has written extensively on this, I will discuss her ideas re borderspaces in the next chapter.
53 within all language and the communicate-able relationships within it. (Walker 1984:117)
In this I believe one of Stein’s aims was to create a frame within language that could engage with sound, through its own form or means of meaning that would be applicable within all communications.45 What then is needed is a way to untangle the various intertwining resonances of sound in Two and understand what Stein intended them to do within language, separately as well as a whole. Here I am going to say certain things about these frames. I start by putting them into three categories of sound, thereby spelling out three different types of sound found in Two. Each works in different ways. The three as a whole can be read as a working theory for sound in language.
Much about Stein’s work Two becomes clearer when it is read as a theory of sound in language. Listened to carefully it is obvious that at least three qualities of sound reverberate within the text activating three separate and sometimes overlapping levels or resonances. The first is sound as sound in language, the second, sound as sounded- language, and the third as soundage. Soundage is a term I have coined to define an unmediated field of a particular type of sound at the becoming-borderspace46 of being.
Soundage has its own inherent form of meaning. These qualities of sound, when looked at as qualities within language, cannot truly be said to exist without each ‘other’ or as separate entities. These frames are not spelled out in any linear way within Stein’s text, but they are performed. Through their performativity, they seamlessly interweave within
45 Communications is usually referred to as electronic, recorded, written and visual messages: I am implying that the expression of difference developed by Stein can be extended to other types of communication, even to visual communications. 46 I will examine this is detail in chapter IV.
54 the text and even beyond it, complicating and suspending our engagement with meaning in the usual sense. There is with all three a breakdown in traditionally accepted forms of meaning-content; in Two language does not refer to things, explaining, narrating etc., but it does something quite unique: it performs in an extended sense a further or an ‘other’ form of meaning.
2.6.1 Sound as Sound in Language
Sound is the structure of Two. Sound facets itself repeatedly as a presence performing the grammared text. Within Two sound in language is extremely and repeatedly, emphatically evident. Two is the expressive sound of sound. Sound in language can be heard and then described as the sense-based auditory emission initiated through forming language in the mouth or on the page. In Two, sound, is the material shaping of words and by resonance formation. It is also the sounds that are excess to grammared information, by this I mean the slips and slurs of the tongue/mouth, and the auditory drone of language as it is emitted over intervals in space (be it aural resonance or page- based). This is sound in relation to time, which complicates it, as I will go on to show in terms of space, because sound has a differing relationship to space than ‘visual’ meaning.
Sound here acts like the full glitch, full of meaning and unmeaning. In Two this register or form of sound in language erupts as the sounded ‘materiality’ of language. This sound is surface.
Sound sounds.
55 2.6.2 Sound as Sounded-Language
These sounds “are not surface.”47 Sounded-language in Stein’s text Two is the producing of the sounded meaning/unmeaning/complications-to-meaning, in language. It is sounded-language as an assemblage of the whole ensemble of language’s common means and the means to make them. In this it is the complete complex of sounds making-up the whole orchestration of sounds within the system of language and within the text. As the whole frame of language, it is a soundscape of coagulations with the aim of sounding functionality.
Sound means.
2.6.3 Sound as Soundage
Soundage presents the most interesting but baffling dimension within language, and it follows, baffling consequence for making meaning and communication within it. This is sound as Seth Kim-Cohen calls the non-cochlear,48 separate from the aural dimension.
Here means assemble with no distinctions, and so no binaries can exist within and/or between form and content. In Two, this soundage is the wider frame of deep relationship between sound and language, where sound sounds its own being from within its own
47 Erin Moure in My Beloved Wager says “Sounds are not surface; they endure in the brain longest of all sensory information.”(2009:23) 48 A term coined by Seth Kim-Cohen to refer to sound beyond the auditory. Critique Of Instrumental Reason (By The Use Of Drums) 2010 http://noncochlearsound.com/?page_id=44 accessed 12 4 2010
56 jewel-like register49. This soundage in ‘being’ has its own qualities, those of relationship and love.
This register of soundage engages complications of meaning, as it surpasses even the portal of the ‘about to become,’ into a continuous becoming(Being) space of possibilities.
In this soundage is a virtual space not situated in any real sense in time or space, but in this it is no less of an entity. In its non(sense) it makes its own form of sense. Soundage is expressed in Two as sound’s self. As soundage, sound exists, or events itself continuously within even the largest field of generation in what could be called a plane of immanence or consistency.50 Even named, soundage is impossible to locate directly as it activates both beyond as well as inclusively of the two previous frames of sound I have laid out above. Even though it cannot be situated in a syntactical sense, we become highly aware of soundage reverberating within the intervening border space or field of resonance between the form of language and the content of it. And in this incongruity something like an event is performed, an event as in a leap or series of leaps or breaks that be-come continually into being. In soundage, this becoming, a feedback loop of becoming(Being) is created. A loop that in turn expresses itself, not just as form and content or language and sound but as engagement, an engagement that is performatively reverberating and activating itself. And more importantly, this performativity demonstrates a becoming(Being) that through repetitious emphatic-ness becomes the ‘other’ as a love object ‘in’ relationship. It does this or achieves this through love. Here all is dissolved.
49 A notion explained by Erin Moure in My Beloved Wager (2009:22) 50 Deleuze and Guattari refer in A Thousand Plateaus to a virtual dimension of reality in general as the "plane of consistency" or " plane of immanence” 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.
57 We move into the ether of emerging generative potentiality, the place of all affect.
Soundage murmurs being.
Chapter III
Soundage: a conceptual exploration
A belief that has translation is not all there is of exultation. Stein, 1951:142
58
In the previous chapter I have detailed how Stein’s work Two performs and activates sound within language and how this sound points to three interwoven but separate resonances. Sound in language, sounded-language and soundage. I have pointed out a range of notions that this sound, but that soundage particularly gives rise to, especially that of it requiring a different type of thinking, of it acting like an event in language, of it as a unique sound reverberating as a non-cochlea form, and of this sound reverberating through being and love activating meaning at the borderspace of language.
In this chapter I position soundage in relation to a range of current critical thinking that begins to shape its significance and generative potential within language now. This positioning involves much bending and blending of both language and ideas, indeed much of my thinking for this section also took place through my creative testing of my ideas, setting up new resonances in and for thinking. I have chiefly kept those separate from this section though for clarity, see chapter IV. But simultaneously I read and reflected on Stein’s work whilst reading from contemporary theory. This gave rise to resonances between ideas across texts and time. What follows then is an emergent answer to how we read Stein as both a contemporary theorist and innovative sonic artist that I believe she is. It is not a comprehensive situating of Stein in terms of critical theory rather it is an initial and overall somewhat idiosyncratic attempt to further understand what her notion of sound in language is for myself. It is my hope that this reading in some way helps shape the reading of Stein’s work and the notion of soundage that I draw
59 from it as an object with both philosophical and psychological ramifications.
But here I must digress before going forward. Stein is famous for saying, “Listen to me and not them.” One must somehow walk with Stein even in this. And a more thorough examination of her work on sound read in relation to her whole oeuvre is recognizably needed. Still the poet and theorist Lynn Hejinian asks, how can we read Stein and “give a reading of Stein that will permit itself to turn around and be read by Stein herself?” In this Hejinian infers that any difficulties of comprehension are in someway compensated for when we read Stein through her own parameters:
Stein’s work is irreducible and unsynopsizable, because for every
proposition that she makes, she also makes counter-propositions; her
whole project is an enormous and spreading study of the relationships of
everything to everything else, … always vibrating next to each ‘other’, and
that there are vast numbers of them. That's something that contemporary
physicists can deal with, but contemporary literary critics are driven crazy
by that degree of plenitude and then they blame Stein.
(Hejinian, 1995)
Stein’s commitment to plentitude so ‘messes’ with notions of order that in reading her work we cannot rely on any linear framework. Echoing Heijinian, the theorist Ulla Dydo stresses that, “our categories do not fit Stein’s work.” (2008:1) My intention here then is to open those categories to include soundage as the sounded ‘other’, an ‘other’ with its
60 own voice. It is my contention that Stein, in outlining sound’s open-parameters, is claiming that sound in language, in all its forms, must be considered as deeply engaging with being and the event of language in such a way as to structure new ways of thinking about language through its own non(sense). To do this, Stein says, we must understand and listen to this sound lovingly. Though this examination of the contemporary notions that soundage gives rise to then, I am openly and tenderly speculating that soundage is a space of relation within which is embedded the possibility of forming radical and generative ways of thinking especially when read alongside contemporary theory. This furthers my positioning of soundage as a new object of not just language but of philosophy. Through this speculative reading it is my intention to show how soundage has consequences for creating an ethical language that is inclusive of ‘otherness’ through a type of ecstatic love while being in line with ‘other’ critical theory in its re-articulation of the subject, and of meaning and difference.
I proceed by working with soundage as if it is a kind of meaning making/enabling philosophic friction. Whether or not this fiction is true in its self or not is not as important as the creative truth it orbits, which enables me to make and create alternate worlds of sound in my thinking and in my artwork. In a way this may be said of all philosophy, in that at any given point it enables worlds to be created and hence seen and maybe even grasped and acted within.
To support my claim that soundage is a new object of philosophy, I place it within the context of a range of particular post-structuralist and feminist post-structuralist thinking.
61 Sometimes these contemporary ideas echo Stein’s work with sound, sometimes they amplify it in particular ways. In some ways Stein’s work could easily be read as a precursor. In all instances, I feel, they extend her work, complicating our understanding of what soundage is and how it can be seen to function within thinking. I listen to, touch and rearrange these thinkers’ thoughts in such a way as to point them in certain directions, mirroring what I have understood as soundage from reading Stein’s work.
Though these different realms of thought cannot be held fast or explicated in their entirety within the scope of this thesis, they clearly and in many ways shape how soundage can be seen to extend and animate meaning within itself and within us.
I divide this exploration into six sections each dealing with a particular aspect of soundage in relation to a different conceptual context. I will briefly outline the approach of each of these parts. In the first section, Soundage and the Non-cochlear, I talk about soundage in its relationship to a particular type of perception that is beyond the auditory called the non-cochlear. I explain this through the work of sound theorist Kim Seth-
Cohen. In Soundage and Musical thinking, I then introduce the notion of Michael Jarvis’s musical thinking as a way of appreciating types of knowledge and experience that are considered outside of Cartesian logics. I transpose this musical thinking to the notion of sound thinking that I hear directly occurring in Stein’s Two. My intension is to focus on how this type of thinking has particular implications for understanding how soundage fits within a philosophical framework, despite it working within its own parameters, because these parameters can be understood as non(sense). In Soundage as Délire: the hearing of non(sense), I discuss soundage’s frame of non(sense) through philosopher Jean Jacque
62 Lecercle’s notion of délire, which is a description of the parameters of non(sense).
In the next three sections, I go on to discuss soundage as ecstatic and generative and outside but also alongside but also within in a relational affect within … rational discourse; I do this through the feminist post-structural work of the Luce Irigaray and
Brucha Ettinger. In the sections Reverberations of Jouissance and the ‘other’, and Love and Listening, I show how a reading of the feminist philosopher Irigaray’s notions of jouissance and love articulate the ecstasy that is soundage and a call to listen and engage with meaning in similar and yet specifically tender ways. I then consider positioning soundage as reverberating meaning in relation to the matrixial borderspace as described by the theorist, psychoanalysist and artist Ettinger in Soundage and the Notion of the
Matrixial Borderspace. Ettinger talks of this borderspace as a space of particular sound- informed and vibrational knowing that further makes space for, and allows us to engage with, and think through soundage in its broadest sense. (2011:222)
Though in this chapter I do not detail how the working with this theory in a practice-led framework has impacted on my creative methods and outputs, I want to say here that the separation of the two is as arbitrarily a separation as is Stein’s use of two gendered voices to argument for sound in language. In the depths and breadths of my creative thinking they are intimately intertwined. They both impact and fold into each ‘other’ as emergent frames for possibilities and gestures towards thinking creatively in wider and in more complex ways in an ever present and constant engaging reverb. In chapter IV when I focus on my creative works and the creative thinking evident in my making this will be
63 evident.
3.1 Soundage and the Non-cochlear
As I have previously indicated, sound as Stein presents it in Two, is so complex and amorphous and repetitive that it may be difficult to hear. Soundage as an extenuated field of sound in language may be even more so. Soundage reverberating beyond our understanding, is only just accessible within the margins of our perceptual field if we attentively listen with what I have come to call a third ear. So broad and particular at the same time, it sounds as a field of resonances. Stein indicates in Two, that in this mode, this sound could even be seen as a frame for consciousness (1951:54). If it is sound as consciousness or languages consciousness that Stein is bringing to us, or us toward, what this sound says or is, is of critical interest and worth trying to listen to51. Thinking of this hearing/engagement with soundage through the notion of the non-cochlear, we can begin to understand how a deep listening might be imperative and might occur, what might be involved, and in what potentiality this sound as soundage is/is might/ has yet/can still/ always be, in its sounded/saying … communicating to us. Supporting Stein’s argument or proposition Kim-Cohen uses the term non-cochlear, to describe sound that is a
“conceptual, contextual construct.” He says,
Sound, like everything else (maybe more than everything else), is a product
51 I don’t even know if one can completely hear and hear completely soundage in the simple sense, with the ear, because to hear it, one needs an ear shaped in a particular way. And one needs to think of this ear in a certain way, to remove borders to the ear to hear through it anew. But for the sake of engaging with it, hearing soundage is necessary, even if it is, and probably especially when it is heard in a particular way.
64 of interaction: stick with skin, wheel with street, wind with grass. Logically,
then, sound is also a product of the situations in which these interactions
occur. Non-Cochlear Sound addresses sound as a conceptual, contextual
construct. Non-Cochlear Sound might function in a sound-like fashion
without specifically referencing or making sound, it might use sound as a
vehicle for transporting ideas or materials from point A to point B, it might
even make sound but only as an excuse for initiating ‘other’ activities.
Sound always makes meaning by interacting with ‘other’ things in
proximity: geographic proximity, ideological proximity, and philosophical
proximity. Non-Cochlear Sound is nothing more - and nothing less - than
the acknowledgement of this reality. (Unattributed exhibition description,
2010)52
Kim-Cohen’s notion of the non-cochlear opens up a way to think of sound and of soundage as conceptual objects, as objects with their own voice, but also how we might hear them. If we think of soundage as a non-cochlear object, soundage can be understood to engage with language and its meanings as a sort of relationship of interacting ideas, and I am thinking of contemporary philosophic and psychoanalytic ideas here, ideas that now shape what we think of as meaning and it follows what it is to be and to be in the state of becoming53. When we understanding how soundage works as part of relationship
52 http://rhizome.org/announce/events/55922/ accessed 1 12 2011 53 Though Stein’s writing of Two in the early 1900’s was at a time pre-the formation of the discipline of psychology as we now know it with its branches of psychoanalytics and psychoanalytic theory, it is evident that she read Freud’s early work at Baltimore. In her notebooks housed at the Beinecke she notes that her and Alice both strongly rejected Freud’s work on Hamlet and thought little of his ideas on analysis of the subject in terms of sexual fantasy in childhood. There is some indication that Stein met with Jung when he
65 with the widest of fields, including one of perceived non-heard, non-present and its inherent non(sense) or unmeaning, we can begin to understand how soundage working within the space of non-cochlear sound and engage with it there, in its particular space/place of continuity. This positioning of the reader that Stein’s work effects is a significant move towards and one that is inclusive of otherness. Indeed soundage calls up the sound ‘other’ at every point. Derrida (1991) is helpful to bring in here as he talks of a zone similar to sounds space of continuity:
As soon as we admit this continuity of the now and the not-now, perception
and nonperception, in the zone of primordiality common to primordial
impression and primordial retention, we admit the ‘other’ into the self-
identity of the Augenblick; nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into
the blink of the instant. (cited by Claude Evans, 1991:102)
Kim-Cohen, whose theory relies on Derrida, says his notion of the non-cochlear is an extension of linguistic meaning into the “extra linguistical,” where …
The symbolic conversely, has no status as, or material connection to the
[Lacanian] real. The symbolic is a translation, a transformation, a
transubstantiation of the real into a mediated grid of signs. Language is such a visited Paris in his 1902-3 visit, around the same time as the writing of Two. They were working on similar ideas in terms of automatic writing and the unconscious impulse. Indeed I think it might be argued that Stein’s work started before Jungs. (This research is something I intend to follow up in another paper). Stein did though have contact with Alfred Whitehead, and William James and both engaged with her in intense psychological and philosophical conversation. During her studies in medicine and then I psychology, she was dissecting brains at Cambridge whilst Freud was publishing his On Aphasia (1891) with the outcomes of her two papers published in the Psychological Review, Motor Automatism (1896) and Cultivated Automatism: A Character in Relation to Attention. (1898), co authored with Leon M. Solomons.
66 grid. (2009:95)
While it is not my intention to say that soundage is outside the symbolic, it certainly seems to work at the unknottable/knotted borders of it, if this is possible to perceive and or say. I will go on to explain this in more detail later on in this chapter when I discus soundage through Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial space. But suffice to say, within the notion of the non-cochlear, itself a transformational space of continuity, we can read soundage as an enmeshing but not diffuse or insignificant continuum that contributes to and is engaged with its own relation to meaning and its own inherent type of meaning. Kim-
Cohen implies that traditional thinking’s non-access to the field of sound has been because of a prejudice towards visual and directed attention. (2009a:xx) The sound theorist Kim Cascone’s thinking is helpful in this, showing us that directed attention is a tyranny of sorts. As a re-directive, Cascone introduces the notion of grain into our understanding of sound:
Once we escape the tyranny of directed attention and remove our frame we
find ourselves cast adrift in the meshing and mixing of indeterminate sounds
forming a flux-field of energy, a tapestry of interwoven routines, conspiring
to ignite the soul or grain of a place. Grain is the ineffable and sometimes
inexplicable quality that infuses a place; a transcendental atmospheric sum
greater than its parts. Grain radiates outward from a place’s intangible core its
inner mystery casting an aura that simultaneously identifies and separates one
place from another. Grain doesn't communicate so much as induce
sympathetic vibrations in the listener, completing an inductive circuit through
67 which energy is transferred. When we allow this energy to flow through us
we create meaning and are able to perceive the grain of an auditory field.
(2009:2)
Soundage as it performs itself within Two has qualities that are very similar to Cascone’s notion of grain. For both Cascone and for Stein, this grain of sound, which I am calling soundage, is an active ineffable circuit, eventing itself in language, which must indicate it is part of the larger frame of meaning. Through considering soundage as the grain of sound-meaning, active with a non-cochlear resonance, we also start to think and tentatively imagine/understand that soundage itself might offer an organic and contextual continuous framework far beyond the affects of sound in language in terms of its prosody, that consists of its own types of thinking and making of meaning. This leads us to consider the notion of sound-thinking as a way to further understand how soundage engages with and is potentially or generatively engaged with meaning.
3.2 Soundage and Musical Thinking
In approaching soundage it is important that we understand soundage not as something that is simple or even extra to meaning and so perhaps useless, but through the frame that
Stein offers us, as a potentially valid philosophic object and a theoretical tool/voice for thinking and re-thinking what it is to think and say. Sound, as Stein has indicated, can express and somehow be - a becoming(Being) that, is, “everything.” As the third character in Two sound is the key voice in the answer to the question Stein has asked, but
68 which we never clearly hear. Through the reading of sounds arguments within Two for the hearing of its own qualities as to be a type of thinking, we are positioned as to be actively wrestling with what sound in language is, and does, including how it works through its own unique reverberating voice. A voice almost in song, or a type of song although Stein refuses this simple reading and is at pains early in the text to establish that the sound coming out of them and out of language is not song:
They are not ones singing. They are ones talking. (1951:3)
It is clearly not song or music, but something else. Two as a sounding-board repeatedly indicates sound as to have its own ‘thinking.’ (1951:45, 52, 90, 106, 109, 119,133, 136,
139,142)54 I place thinking in quotation mark because the very nature of sound in the text reveals sound to, more than think, it more readily and repeatedly sensate-s sound. In this it calls for a type of thinking that is significantly sensate orientated. This thinking of sound in Two, and particularly when it effervesces as soundage, is not logical, linear, or familiar in any way to current Cartesian types of thinking. In its own affect it is full of repetitions, and rhythms that could be seen to simply a tool for delivery. Instead Stein indicates it is what is to be delivered as meaning in the text, and not just meaning but this meanings, thinking. Soundage does make sense but it makes its unique sense only after ones own sense has shifted towards the parameters it indicates, which in turn are very very wide and constantly shifting in themselves. So wide, that perhaps there are no edges to its ‘quality.’ Soundages sound can be heard as pure sensation when understood
54 For a complete list and unpacking of the texts articulation of sound thinking see my Appendix Two at the end of this document.
69 through the non-cochlea.
In Two soundage arouses within the reader echoes of poetry yet it is not poetry, its voice has echoes too of song within yet it is not song. The scholar of poetry and poetics, Simon
Jarvis, talks of the song of poetry as being a type of philosophical musical thinking that is often overlooked and because of this ultimately unheard (2007:3). In this he champions the songs of verse, and/or the song lines in poetry and their inherent meaning, as being a type of thinking that is more complex than simple, indeed when this sound is heard at all, he suggests it is in itself a very particular type of philosophical song:
It might mean that a different kind of thinking happens in verse – that
instead of being a sort of thoughtless ornament or reliquary for thinking,
verse is itself a kind of cognition, with its own resistances and difficulties
… it would be philosophic song precisely in so far as driven by the felt
need to give utterance to non-replicable singular experiences in the
collectively and historically cognitive form of verse – to obstruct, displace
or otherwise change the syntax and the lexicons currently available for
the articulation of such experience. (Jarvis, 2007:3)
Jarvis’s approach of fitting song with philosophy reveals that there are ways of thinking philosophically through sound driven language and texts. Though Stein’s text is not a poem nor a song still Jarvis’s thinking is helpful for us in our discussion of soundage because it broadens the ranges of thinking about thinking in terms of sound. It makes philosophy inclusive of sound. It also comes close to explaining how we can consider
70 meaning readable in such a work and points to the realm within which that meaning may be meaningful and generative. Indeed it is not hard to transpose and expand Jarvis’s notion of musical thinking towards that which is facilitated within the space of soundage to sound thinking. When we do, we start to get a frame for defining how soundage disrupts, inhabits and engages with philosophic discourse and meaning that asks us to include non(sense) and unmeaning discourse as meaningful discourse within philosophy.
Given soundage in Two is deeply enmeshed within language in terms of the rhythm fields that set it up as a subject, be they either a sense of consistency and/or rhythms, this enmeshing with the reverberating subject (of the ‘he’ and ‘she’ of the text, of language, of sound itself) Stein is making it evident through evidence within the text Two that sound is a key component to thinking differently about thinking in its sound sense. Stein here is presenting a sound subject that is engaged with sound thinking. And it is sound engaged in the broadest frame of thinking … continuing,
To continue, to commence to continue, to believe in continuing, to end continuing,
to mean continuing, to expect continuing, to continue again, to explain continuing,
to enlarge continuing, to restrict continuing, to deny continuing, to begin continuing
is to arrange what can be arranged in arranging anything and to express everything
of continuing is to have sound coming out … (1951:59-60)
Here we have something more than rhythms, creating a subject, and a subject within a subject, creating meaning within a creative subject field. When Jarvis quotes Henri
71 Meschonnic on Hegel, “There can be no theory of rhythm without a theory of the subject, and no theory of the subject without a theory of rhythm” (Meschonnic cited in Jarvis,
2005:57), it raises the question or is it an answer that Stein is asking us to reach for … a considerable rethinking of thinking through listening.
Sound in Stein’s Two is almost non-representational, non-replicable. Though not completely adequate Jarvis’s discussion is initially helpful in terms of understanding how both the cause but also the subtle and coarse even tangled and at times contradictory reverberating complexities of soundage might be understood to work philosophically when one opens to sound thinking.
Stein in Two, is indicating through sounds voice that sound thinking exists within language and so within meaning. Soundage radically extends the possibilities for thinking and meaning. Soundage then can be thought of as a type of sound thinking constituted from the means of language, that is, of sound itself. In this soundage is something previously un-named and un-expected that generates its own forms of thinking and that this thinking can be understood to work within philosophical frameworks of being.
3.3 Soundage as Délire: Hearing the Song of Non(sense) as Meaning
Soundage, as we have heard, is continually engaged with zones that move away from reason. In this soundage seems to be a quality in language that makes room for ‘other’ forms of sense. The French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, postulates an
72 understanding of sound as a valuable event within language (1985:98). He explains that sound complicates meaning, indicating that with it, “there are no longer any clear frontiers between words and things.” (1985:162) Lecercle goes on to focus on what he refers to as délire, or the delirious in language, as an aspect of sound that is embedded within language. For Lecercle, délire is a special form of discourse where the philosophical relationships between sense and non(sense) receive a new formulation.
Soundage as a form of délire is just such a discourse; its presence reverberates as language’s delirious ‘other’. Lecercle explains only certain kind of language can do this:
… [It is] neither information nor communicative in a strict sense; it ejects
the separation between language and the extra linguistic, between words and
bodies; it is heterogeneous and cannot be accounted for through general
rules, that is, not a (Chomskyan tree), rather a rhizome … it becomes the
embodiment of the struggle of minor literatures within and against the
dominant ones … But given that these four postulates are fallacious
according to Deleuze and Guattari délire then can also be seen as ‘the truth
of language’, its basic form. (Lecercle, 1985:189)
In this passage Lecercle identifies two registers for délire that are interesting to consider in terms of Stein’s working with and though sound and of soundage. The first identifies language as a system, a set of rules that are seen primarily as negative, temporary aberrations of discourse. This register is often referred to as gibberish. It is aberrant to meaning. In the second register the function of délire or non(sense) is considered in a
73 more positive light. Here délire is regarded as a substratum of all discourse, a necessary stage in the emergence of meaning. It is one with which every speaker must come to terms, as délire is present in every utterance, as an element of possession, but also of creativity.
In Two Stein regards sound via the second register, allowing us to reconsider how all language in some way reverberates with the delirious. I extend this understanding to say that soundage produces a form of délire that is an emergence that holds within it the production of meaning. It is my understanding that soundage in itself articulates the field of not just all language but all meaning. In this, there is a repeated engagement with non(sense) that keeps meaning open.
The ‘him’ and ‘her’ of the text, made manifest from the midst of their sounded expression, echo what it is to actually mean in all its delirious convolutions. It is through this that we are led to read non(sense) as a meaning-becoming space within language, inflamed with resonance, a sounded délire that effervesces as a sound-textured eroticism.
The theorist and poet Susan Holbrook says this effect in Stein’s work is created by the
(sounded) materiality of her language:
The materiality of (her) language creates an insistence, extravagantly
repeated, full of unpredictable lexicons that ferry meaning to the un-space
that usually ferries the signified. (Holbrook, 1999:752)
74
Soundage as a spacious un-space is a type of fullness within/behind language. This fullness is formed by Stein’s breaks within language-frames that allow, indeed privilege, délire. I believe Stein calls on language’s fullness to write extreme experience, too
‘other’ for language to hold. Here we are beyond sense. But, as I have shown, if we can open those categories of sense to include the sounded ‘other’ then this move alone creates openings to broader frames for meaning.
Soundage is continually becoming itself. That this could be called a space of innocence is perhaps not surprising. It is a space that, in its repeats and reverberations, eternally reframes and resonates meaning as non(sense). Stein’s aim seems to be to re-create or draw attention to the innocence of language through a very sensitive yet emphatic re- examination of its sound sense. Stein explains this in relation to the notion of delight.
No sense in no sense innocence of what of not and what of delight. In no
sense innocence in no sense and what in delight and not, in no sense
innocence in no sense no sense what, in no sense and delight, and in no sense
and delight and not in no sense and delight and not, no sense in no sense
innocence and delight. (Stein, 2008a:199)
In its innocence soundage disrupts singular meaning to re-create its own compounded, complicated meaning. Stein indicates that this is the quality that performs or generates meaning. In terms of meaning, soundage is the whole or everything in its inherent vibration (Grahn, 1989:257-8). As a radical uncertainty soundage is a powerful creative
75 tool, playing upon the “arbitrary relationship between signifier and the signified …”
(Johnson-Laird, 1983:90) to create new frames for meaning that involve, include, incline to ‘otherness’. This particular ‘otherness’ that Stein points to and creates is simultaneously both outside and inherently inside language in the same instance. This simultaneously complicates, erases, interpolates and reverberates, glitches, jams and messes with simple common sense meaning. By this I mean soundage as revealed within
Stein’s words re-establishes meaning on the very ‘cusp’ of the symbolic order. In ‘other’ words, Stein’s introduction of sound thinking and its non(sensical) meaning provides the means for us to engage with this space as a string of moves to meaning. The theorist,
Ratcliff sums this up:
The sound/shape of Stein’s words is not meaning at all but a string of means
towards … (Ratcliff, 2000:4)
In other words, though it is impossible for language not to mean something, Stein stretches language’s meaning sense by her inclusion of sound within meaning. In Two, she says:
Sound is meaning something. (Stein, 1951:133)
Here Stein is clearly saying that the sound, in language, has its own inherent meaning and that this meaning is something, something saying something. Throughout the whole text
Two expresses what that sound is both saying and meaning and as we have seen it is not
76 in any way simple. Indeed it is in sounds complicatedness that we find new relationships between meaning and language, especially as meaning here verges with unmeaning. I will go on to show that this is a relationship of ever-emergent ecstasy born of a type of love within language. In this quote, “Sound is meaning something.” Stein takes the simplest of language phrases and upsets language by extending our notions of language to be operate-able within its broadest and most basic vibratory sound possibilities. Thus the reading of Two for its sound meaning/unmeaning is like being set the task of re- setting language to re-sound its inherent sound, and at the same time inventing for oneself, within the hearing/cognite-ing space of one’s third ear, a translation or transcoding relationship with which to hear it. Creating a new languaging relationship that vibrates and hovers and reverberates the relationship between the two.
3.4 Reverberations of Jouissance and the ‘Other’
According to Kelly Ives, Irigaray, in her work, “concentrates on the act of enunciation, the act of producing discourse” (Ives, 1996:17). In this, Irigaray outlines a position for the excess of language within critical thinking and ethical language frames, reading excess as a type of ecstatic overflow or jouissance that can be articulated within language as a “different way of speaking” (Irigaray, 2002:57). Further, Irigaray talks of how jouissance, as love, plays within any ethical engagement with the ‘other’. In this her work calls for a radical re-saturation of our contemporary frames of philosophy with love.
This radical shift for philosophy necessarily requires “a different way of speaking.” In
77 this Irigaray proves a further reflecting a vibratory field within to consider soundage and its relationship to language through love and the ecstasy of becoming
In her text, The Way of Love, Irigaray attempts to re-orientate philosophy towards what it is to be towards the human being as a whole (Irigaray, 2002). This is a restating of earlier work where Irigaray calls for “two lips to become one” (Burke and Irigaray, 1980:69-79).
In doing so she is calling for a love of knowledge to become a knowledge of love.
(Humm, 1992: 207; for relevant quote, see footnote)55 In this the particular qualities of jouissance play a part.
Jouissance is a term used by Lacan to indicate an aspect of being.56 In his seminar Encore
(1972–1973) Lacan states that jouissance is essentially phallic. (Fink, 2002:15) He also speaks of jouissance as ‘other’ and says it is not capable of being expressed, that it is unutterable and even indescribable. Irigaray’s view differs in that she understands
55 From Irigaray’s When Lips Speak Together “…You speak from everywhere at the same time women’s all over eroticism. You touch me whole at the same time [touch as instant karma] In all senses [synesthesia]. Why only on song, one discourse, one text at a time? [a Rimbaudian question, the question of poetry as pure experience] To seduce, satisfy, fill one of my holes [cp the patriarchal view of woman as ‘three holes’ I don’t have any, with you [we are different, special] We are not voids, lacks which wait for sustenance, fulfillment, or plentitude from an other [a la Lacan] That our [labial/sexual] lips make us women does not mean consuming, consummating or being filled is what matters to us …” (Humm 1992:207) 56 “In his Seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960) Lacan develops his concept of the opposition of jouissance and pleasure. The pleasure principle according to Lacan, functions as a limit to enjoyment: it is the law that commands the subject to ‘enjoy as little as possible.’ At the same time the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle. Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this 'painful principle' is what Lacan calls jouissance. (Dylan Evans). Thus jouissance is suffering (Ethics). In his Seminar Encore (1972–1973) Lacan states that jouissance is essentially phallic. That is, insofar as jouissance is sexual it is phallic, meaning that it does not relate to the Other as such. Lacan admits, however, that there is a specifically feminine jouissance, a supplementary jouissance, which is beyond the phallus, a jouissance of the Other. This feminine jouissance is ineffable, for both women and men may experience it but know nothing about it.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jouissance accessed 20 6 2012.
78 jouissance to function beyond the phallus and that that it erupts as a limitless ecstasy of becoming. This then can burst into the ‘other’ as a type of engagement. In this Irigaray points the way for jouissance to be effable through its very fullness:
What comes to pass in the jouissance of woman is in excess of it. An
indefinite overflowing in which many a becoming could be inscribed. The
fullness of their to-come is glimpsed, announced, as possibilities, but in
extension, a dilation without determinable limits. (Irigaray, 1985:55)
Though Irigaray points to this “different way of speaking,” as “loving speech” (Irigaray
2002:57), she no where describes what this speech could be ‘other’ than by stating that to access it we should ask of language itself to speak:
More than the adequation of the thing to the word, of the word to the thing,
such a path demands forgetting words previously defined, progressing beyond
their frontiers and asking language itself how it can allow for proximity…
Almost everything is to be reinvented, rebuilt. And for this building site, what
is most necessary is to discover how speech can change levels - vertically and
horizontally. (Irigaray, 2002:57-58)
The particular speech Irigaray is talking must, it seems, be vibratory, in that it could/would perform vertically and horizontally at the same time. Might it be this
“different way of speaking” has been thought of as impossible simply because there has
79 been no way yet to articulate it through language, that is until sounded? Stein’s articulation of being, that is of soundage, performs both the voice and the “subjectivity” of language in what could be said to be in the state of its own jouissance, that is, language in the state of becoming(Being). I believe this points to a place of articulacy for feminine jouissance.
Let’s look at how this is effected in Two. The soundage embedded throughout Two is excess to language. It positions itself in a space that is separate but in relation to meaning and to what it is to be. This is a move towards a type of wholeness. Stein makes Two, and by implication soundage, whole by voicing ‘her’ as excess (which is pure sound). This is a state of ecstasy where all difference is ultimately resolved, not enfolded or assimilated but laid parallel within the space of becoming(Being). In this ‘she’ moves towards being love as a way of being, through a loving engagement with ‘otherness.’ And because this first is achieved in relation to ‘him,’ representing the position of all ‘others’ soundage then goes on to become an embraceable ecstatic communicate-able, ‘non-other’ itself. In this Stein is saying, I believe, that this event of language as sound-love is initiated through a type of existing/being that is both whole and inclusive of the ‘other’:
She was the whole when there was spared the one who was a comfort there.
She was the whole when she was there and there was there for the one to
come. She was the whole and she gave out what there was to be when there
was one not empty. (Stein, 1951:126)
Stein here is talking from a space of wholeness that has reverberated into openness. Two
80 presents us with a language that is extremely, even erotically, open: where love is an ingredient, perhaps the ingredient, for communication. I believe this is what Irigaray is speaking of when she says this is what is needed in a “different way of speaking.”
So while Two’s language might be considered by some as shocking, disruptive, and unsettling, there is within it a loving joyous ecstatic-ness that I would call jouissant. This ecstatic-ness vibrates steadily towards an inclusion of all ‘otherness,’ and of all difference. Situating soundage as being engaged with theory and philosophy through love rather than logic opens the door to additional ways of thinking about both soundage and jouissance.
3.5 Love and Listening
To hear soundage, I have pointed out previously, requires an engagement with a different type of listening, a listening that occurs through what I call a third ear. Irigaray’s philosophy is an affirmation of the developing of a third ear in relation to love. But to what and to where does this love-ear listen? In juxtaposing Irigaray’s idea with Two we hear language engaged intimately with difference and the ‘other’ through love. Two is a call to listening, to simply listen to this unfolding and its consequences for thinking and meaning.
Irigaray’s approach to listening requires love as a pulling back from patriarchal thinking, which she says is not necessarily a model of effective communication. Irigaray says,
81
Listening that does not exclude respect, especially for the ‘other’’s
experience, for the unique contribution he or she makes to culture beyond
the transfer of information. The first model is not, strictly speaking, a model
of communication. It is, at best, an information model, constituting
knowledge as an aggregate of information and as a power [le pouvoir] it is
likely to confer within institutions in the opinion of colleagues or followers.
The second model offers itself as an opening in the field of communication,
as a world of the creation and exchange of thought and culture in which no
man or woman can become master or slave for fear of destroying the given
objective. (Irigaray cited in Robinson 2006:77)
This is listening where listening may let itself be touched differently. This happens through a different sounded thinking. Our engagement towards the ‘other’ is a matter of asking new questions and listening for the answers. Irigaray suggests we advance in this by both forgetting language habits and asking language itself fresh questions:
Advancing towards the other is not carried out, for all that, in a blind minute
immediacy. It requires a different way of speaking than the one we currently
know. To become enraptured in a language already there signifies an ex-aisle
with regard to an approach of the near. More than the adequation of thing to
the word, of the word to this thing, such a path demands forgetting words
82 previously defined, progressing beyond the frontiers and asking language
itself how it can allow access to proximity. (Irigaray, 2002:57)
Here Irigaray’s approach to proximity mirrors Stein’s project of dissolving both the subject and language through/in/with an enraptured reverberation. In establishing this as a new frontier within language, Irigaray’s approach offers both a clarification and a development of our reading of Two. Here she establishes a position where inclusion of the ‘other’ through jouissance as relationship, one that is ecstatic, is also one that we can begin to think of as articulating the complexities of ecstasy from ourselves. Soundage might be able to be thought of as the voice of the ineffable, it might possibly contribute to an ethical language frame for women to speak of their experience. Whether or not soundage and jouissance are the same thing, soundage can point to qualities that Irigaray identifies as part of jouissance. This perspective reveals soundage as reaching towards radical becoming spaces that are fueled by simply listening, a gesture towards a generative language that is within reach of us all.
But where do we go to engage with such exciting spaces within language? Where does such jouissant-soundage speak? And where do we position ourselves to focus our attention on it? Next I will talk about speculatively or imaginatively placing soundage at the threshold of a particular borderspace. This will highlight how we can enter this space of ecstatic thinking and work both with and from within it.
3.6 Soundage and the Notion of the Matrixial Borderspace
83
In the previous section we gleaned that an encounter with soundage, through an understanding of what it does to notions of meaning and being, presents notions of the separate subject being dissolved: dissolved in love. Two can be read as a description of an engagement modeled upon intimate sharing within the transcendent and transgressive space of jouissance. We hear with a third ear sound sounding as borderless, and we feel the impact of this resonance as a new ‘other’ type of meaning. In this we are necessarily made different.
Bracha Ettinger, artist, theorist and psychoanalyst, calls for a “more complex” reading of subjectivity (Pollock 2004:6) that includes the edges of and the overlaps found at that bordering with the ‘other’. In reading Two we are tuned or rather re-tuned to engagement with the ‘other’ through a re-thinking of cognitive as well as ethical and aesthetic fields as relational. By repeatedly rearticulating ‘otherness’ Stein creates a field of becoming.
Stein, in rearticulating for us this field of language, remodels it through musical or sound based metaphors that create, in Ettinger’s words, a “shared resonance-cavity where sounds reverberate, echo and transfer” and where, “vibrations manifest,” in every relational possibility with what it is to be. (Ettinger, 2004a) Two, through soundage, creates an articulation that borders presence and absence, meaning and unmeaning.
Ettinger’s perspective has transformed contemporary debates in contemporary art, psychoanalysis, women studies and cultural studies, and it has initiated a range of thinking that complicate and oust the notion of a separate subject-object frame. In this
Ettinger creates a radical re-framing of the subject, because in her eyes the subject must
84 now include the ‘other’. Ettinger points this out by highlighting a borderspace between subjects. Like Stein, Ettinger creates foundations for thinking a new model for the subject. She explains this here:
In my work, I have tried to think about a model that breaks with both the
Freudian-Lacanian paradigm and the intersubjective as a field of
communication, rethinking desire and the unconscious by reference instead
to the transgressive encounter between I and non-I grounded in the maternal
womb/intra-uterine complex and a notion of affective economy that avoids
phallocentrism. (Ettinger, 2006a:218)
Ettinger calls this the space of the matrixial or the matrixial border-space. This is a transgressive psychic sphere, a matrix that is open to the unknown ‘other,’ the literally unheard of. Within the matrix there is a co-emergence causing linkages towards the
‘other.’ Ettinger says, there is a “relational difference in co-emergence” (Ettinger
1995:30) made “possible through [an] allowal of ‘borderlinks’” (Ettinger 1996b:125)
This is a psychic creative space similar to Two’s space of continuous becoming. It links all that is possible and all that is presently refused in language: Ettinger calls this the creative space of encounter:
[The M]atrix I understand as a psychic creative borderspace of encounter;
metramorphosis, as a psychic creative borderlink; and the matrixial stratum
of subjectivization reveals subjectivity as an encounter of co-emerging
85 elements through metramorphosis. (Ettinger, 1996b:125)
But given this connection there will also be elements of the unknown within this creative space:
There will always be unknown elements in the matrix. That which will give
meaning to a matrix, is the unknown. It is from this non-knowledge that the
matrix gains strength, from that which the thing finds out about its sphere of
comprehension. As soon as the unknown enters conscious, the matrix is altered.
Then a new element, a new unknown, is created. (Ettinger cited in Bertelsen,
2004:134)
One can understand Ettinger’s overall concept of the matrixial as a type of refrain that works in a mode similar to the soundage Stein spelt out and activated in Two, allowing us to read/hear/be sound as, in Bertelsen’s words, “the co-creative of material and semiotic system.” (Bertelsen, 2004:121)
Stein, in a key passage in Two, just before ‘she’ breaks into ‘her’ ecstatic subjectivity, presents a very detailed account of the “co-creative” material of her own making. I have presented the quote in its entirety because it shows the subtle shifts that take place within making, and how these have indications for making meaning:
She would not have a decision and deciding that she would not be saying, she
would be having a decision in meaning that reflection is interpretation and
86 interpretation this decision and decision is regarding meaning and regarding
meaning is acting and acting is expression and expression if not resisting
winning and not resisting winning is submitting and submitting is leading and
leading is declaration and declaration is beginning and beginning is intending
and intending is deciding and deciding is creating and creating is not
contending and not contending is destroying and destroying is submitting and
submitting is decision and decision is creating and creating is leading and
leading is reflection and reflection is exacting and exacting is decision and
decision is meaning and meaning is progressing and progressing is not
denying and not deny feeling and feeling is thinking and thinking is arranging
and arranging is continuing and continuing is rebeginning and rebeginning is
submitted and submitting is decided and deciding is creating and creating is
reflecting and reflecting is meaning and meaning is deciding and deciding is
believing and believing is continuing in continuing is leading and leading is
expressing and expressing is meaning the meaning is feeling and feeling of
submitting and submitting is deciding and deciding is creating and creating is
following and following is leading and leading is following and following is
deciding and deciding is creating and creating if submitting and submitting its
meaning and meaning is expressing and expressing is accepting and accepting
is submitting and submitting is following and following is feeling and feeling
his meaning and meaning is creating and creating is doing and doing is
continuing and continuing is expressing and expressing is leading and leading
is following and following is expressing and expressing his meaning and
87 meaning is expressing and expressing is leading and leading is expressing and
expressing is following and following is creating and creating is expressing
and expressing its meaning and meaning is doing and doing is following the
following is creating and creating is leading and leading is expressing and
expressing his meaning and meaning is expressing and expressing is feeling
and feeling is following and feeling is leading and expressing its meaning and
meaning is creating and creating is meaning and meaning is meaning. (Stein,
1951:90–91)
This procedure involves a wide range of approaches that are applied to the process of making, pulling the co-creative material into yet another facet. In this Stein’s creativity is engaged on almost every level simultaneously. There are no boundaries in this type of activity. In this, Stein’s becoming space is brought to creative frisson by the friction of repeated merging. Ettinger, in reference to a similar creative space, talks of breaking the pre existing order in radical ways, which like Stein’s, work with what are merged dichotomies of him and her. In this Ettinger echoes Stein’s way of creating a new ethical realm. Ettinger explains:
This perspective opens up a non-psychotic connection between the feminine
and creation, and thus points to an artistic practice that reconnects with an
enlarged symbolic in which the feminine (neither male nor female) is fully
active and informing knowledge and the ethical realm. … in terms of a
transgressive psychic position in which the co-emergence and co-fading is
prior to the I versus others, a different passageway to others and to
88 knowledge arises – suitable for transformative links that are not frozen into
objects. (Ettinger, 2006a:218)
This enlarged symbolic is what is needed if we are to not only hear what soundage is saying but, even more importantly, from my perspective, to be able work with it.
These frames for reading, listening to, and expanding the scope and our understanding of soundage are useful only if we are open to engagements with it as a space and as a tool for working with language in new ways. In the next chapter I explore how I engaged with soundage within a creative practice.
Chapter IV
My Creative Practice: translating and transcoding soundage
To work in the excitedness of pure being …
to get back that intensity into language …
Stein, Four Lectures vi
89
1. Majena Mafe 2010 Still from The Big Sounder digital opera
Following on from the previous chapter, Bracha Ettinger likens an art practice to a
“transport-station,” that is, the creative realisation of borderlinking and the border spacing of the matrixial … which she sees as a place “that allows for” creative encounters:
… a transport-station that more than a place is rather a space that allows for
certain occasions of occurrence and of encounter … the transport is expected
at this station, and it is possible, but the transport-station does not promise
that passage, will actually take place, it only supplies the space for the
occasion. (Ettinger 2000:91)
90 My engagement with soundage has worked in similar ways. For me, soundage’s potential relationship with the theoretical spaces I have just discussed creates a wealth of imaginative tools for sound-thinking to occur. Given this project’s overall aim to expand and re-frame an engagement with sound as an object of ideological political and theoretical complexity with its own inherent field of meaning, in this chapter I draw upon my skills and experience as a creative practitioner to extend that trajectory into an emerging creative space for sonic poetics within contemporary and emerging digital forms to occur. In so doing, I both test my theories and add to them, so my creative practice works as both an interpretive and transcoding machine, which generates sound objects.
I open this chapter with my own particular engagement with language through dyslexia and place my practice within a feminist paradigm focused on my engagement with feminist theory that allows for a generational and ethical language/sound practice and theory. I follow this with my methodology focusing on two particular notions at the core of my practice, ventriloquism and listening as an instruction manual. This section is followed by my contextual review of exemplar artists/writers who have influenced my work. Here I focus on two types of practice, the first dealing with sound, meaning and the body, and the second dealing with sound-meaning and sound-syntax.
What then follows is the presentation of my work with Two and its sound during the PhD research period. This discussion is divided into four sections, Sound Objects, Scoring
91 Two, SOUNDAGE a DIGITAL OPERA(TION) and GIRRL. In the first, Sound Objects, I outline my making of sound works and films. The second, Scores, outlines my attempts at scoring Two, and in the third, SOUNDAGE a DIGITAL OPERA(TION), I outline the large creative project that is the creative culmination of my research for this PhD. I conclude with a discussion of GIRRL.org, which is an international digital networked organisation I have set up to distribute and promote sound works by women.
4.1 Context and Background to Practice
I am a sonic artist, working in the frame of sonic poetics engaged in re-verbing the sound of subtle or ‘other-ed’ content in language. I see my creative work as directly informed and engaged with the fluidity of the matrixial praxis as a feminist embodied theory that works as a type of metaphysics of sound as it borders with language. I am especially interested in notions of unmeaning being transformed into meaning as they becomes
‘heard’ as soundage. This approach then, can be seen to be an engagement with feminist ethical language frameworks, especially open to difference. Paradoxes arise through my creative practice as the process of thinking/making produces tensions between working within systems and deviating from them. This process calls for a creative position that works with and deals with inner prompts, fragments, and the layering of incoherence, unsureness and even extreme vulnerability.57 My creative practice involves a position and a practice that deals with doubt, ambiguity, and resistance to conceptual closure as a
57 Fraser, Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press (2000:76)
92 positive affirmative form. By form I do not mean Aristotle’s form “as the space in which,” but Merleau-Ponty’s “the means through which.”58
What follows is my interpretive paradigm which concentrates on two frames that support my practice, the first being my relation to language through dyslexia, the second being my association and working with feminist notions of ethical language.
4.1.1 Sounded Dyss-lexia and Non(sense)
My original hypothesis of an embedded theory of sound within Stein’s text Two is drawn from my own very particular reading, and a particular listening. I read the text Two for sound, as full of sound. And this is in some ways influenced by my own ear being affected in part by dyslexia. In stating this as one of my paradigms I am not arguing for an exception here in terms of difference but an inclusion in terms of extra sensitivity to sound’s affect in language.
For me language is always odd. It is an evocation, a rich but inadequate, ever shifting system of meaning and unmeaning. For me, language is a riddle, riddled with complexities, sound being just one of them. But in sound words don’t completely name things. Sounded words make meaning slippery. Sound makes sense ambiguous. To make
58 Merleau Ponty L’espace n’est le milieu dans lequel se disponent les chores mais le moyen par lequel la position des choses devint possible cited in Two Novels viii by Waldrop, this is quoted in [D]oubts, Complications and Distractions: Rethinking the Role of Women in Language Poetry by Emily Critchley published in Hot Gun Literary Journal, Summer 2009
93 sense, words for me are heard as separate sounding boards, put together one at a time.
The sound sense of them is mined from the inside of the roof of my mouth up near my inner ear. Because of this, there has been nothing more dangerous and fascinating than the mining of the place they come from, conceptually and abjectly. From sound. To me the smallest word-sounds contain all of an ‘other’ language.
As a writer, engaged with language as one of the mediums of my articulation I am continually dashed, but also hearkened by language’s limits. As an experimental writer/sonic artist the borderspaces of the limits of language are my playground and the position of my creative challenge. For me reading means listening, it means taking fragments and feeling them as sensation, not always in context, sounding them as abstractions that have their own inherent sensations and enthusiasms. In this words are like Braille sounding out their affect. Words for me are flexible and malleable and as such form fields that are interconnected and resonate with multiple affects across each
‘other’ and further. From this perspective I read theory as literature and literature as theory. This dyslexia is synaesthesic, so strong that it makes words into things, full things that arrive as sound shapes that push against the top of my palette and then pause before being processed into meaning. In this I have a very particular and idiosyncratic relationship to language and meaning and their intersection. This complex has created an interwoven field of interests and influences around language for me that range from the practicalities of creating language though a dyslexic mindset to attempting to position this language as a language of equal knowledge, philosophically and psychoanalytically and creatively.
94
In hearing sounds in language, louder than the words of it, sounds that sound things in language, much like the things in the world that always sing and do not for me ever remain mute, I have become interested in how language and the subject and the excess of the subject flow beyond meaning, without constrains, and how this actually works in terms of both traditional and ‘other’ ways of reading meaning. This is a function of what the Lecercle’s délire. Because of my unique ways of reading and thinking through dyslexia and the insights I come up with I have come to understand non(sense) and language that borders on unmeaning as positive rather than a pathology or a dis-order.59
All texts I feel can be seen in some ways as delirious. And not just in terms of being read by those with dyslexia. At the point where language falls apart there is the granulation of sound, something sounded. This délire is also a place of the long drawn out event that trauma performs in a life and in language. Sounded-words for me in such a state are both within language and without it, and it is this affect, the very event of this drama, that interests me. Not in terms of creating obscurity for its own sake but in making clearer language’s inherent complications, which in turn I hope, lead me to a broader understanding of what, for me, it is to be. This is a playing at the edge, of a multiple seam, perhaps the limit of the symbolic order, perhaps bordering on the Kristevan semiotic; it is a straddling of the inside/outside, this relation to words as sound, always from this body. A body that is quite happy to claim, that is, reclaims its erotic autonomy.
Literature in this space is an erotic space itself in terms of its breadth of possibilities.
59 See Thomas G. West’s, (1997) In The Minds Eye, for a rich and informed view of dyslexia.
95 This quality of dyslexia, from which I cannot hope to separate myself, is, I find, a true extra to the frame of my creativity. My particular version of apprehension offers me a perspective and experience of language, which I experience as a felt, multifaceted diagram in almost every engagement that I have with word, either read or spoken. A similar space seems to be available to certain works by outsider or, to use Allen S. Weiss’ term for those producing work from a space of particular rawness, ecriture brut artists.
(1992:158)
As a dyslexic, I am not less but in fact more engaged with the language of language and what is refused or marginalised from it. As a woman too, I am always reminded by language that I don’t fit - that I am excluded by the gender of my very tongue. I am acutely aware of the weight of certain voices and the power involved in voice itself to sound in such a way as to obliterate whispers. I am aware of the futility of words to express both ecstasy and obscenities beyond human speech. There is rhetoric here aplenty, empty hollow, dry sounds and there is the ‘other’ side of rhetoric, a grim and often silent fury, but in-between them are voices made from sinew, nerve and bone, that echo the indescribable and unheard as part of language, as language told to tell. The crucial conduit for me in this my own personal journey ... with saying ... has been the space between the tongue and thought ... oral sounded-language.
4.1.2 And Being a Girl: Feminism as a Context
96
My practice is to a significant extent an engagement with feminist political questions of cultural criticism and the issue of an ethical language. In this I am part of a group of women writers/artists/sonic artists and emerging sonic poets who challenge their audiences to literally think differently about language and sound and the consequences thereof in the relationship between language and meaning the extension of that frame with the aim of what more … and ‘other’ … can be said. I consider this way of working and this work ficto-critical.
My own project works with language to shift ideologies by collapsing traditional and artificial distinctions between meaning and unmeaning, non(sense) and sense within language. In the move towards creating an ethical language frame that includes the sound of language, I have been influenced heavily by a strand of thinking, a particular poetics, being put forward by the women of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics.60 The theorist Erin
Critchley, (2009:30) describes this feminist project as one of situating doubts consistently within poetics and happily grappling with them, creating “complications and distractions in a vigorous and even generous way.” The writers she talks about – Hejinian, Waldrop,
Harryman, Armantrout, Retallack and Scalapino – are engaged energetically with evolving the practice of embracing dualities as they border notions of the
60 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is an avant-garde tendency in American poetry and poetics that emerged in the early 1970s. In developing their poetics, members of the Language school took as their starting point the emphasis on method evident in the modernist tradition, particularly as represented by Gertrude Stein. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_poets accessed 20 5 2009.
97 objective/subjective, political/private, narrative/non-narrative61 and thereby shifting notions of difference (‘other’), in literature and so in language claims. These writers do not shy away from the destruction of borders or the erotic. Scalapino writes of
“demonstration/commentary, with its enjambing slash, ‘in which both sides’ exist inseparable - demonstration and commentary - so that it may be examined.” (2009:31) I have applied a similar approach to the setting up and reading of my entire practice.
Hejinian posits a poetics of thinking as a continuum that does not separate making or being and thinking, practice and theory. She states,
Where critics used to debate, as if it were a real thing, a difference between
form and content, so now they would separate ‘theory’ from ‘practice,’ and
thus divide a poet from his or her own intentions and poetry from its
motives. But in fact poetic language might be precisely a thinking about
thinking, a form of introspection and inspection within the unarrested
momentum of experience, that makes the polarization of theory and
practice as irrelevant as that of form and content, mentally and physicality,
art and reality.62 (Hejinian 2000:363)
61 ibid (31) 62 Lynn Hejinian’s blurb to Scalapino’s How Phenomena Appear to Unfold. Elmwood, Con: Potes and Poets Press, (1989) Heidegger’s instruction to his students: “one must philosophize not ‘about’ factual life but ‘from inside’ it,” from Rudiger Safranski’s Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. by Edwald Osers. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, (1998:112-13) cited by Hejinian in The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, (2000:363)
98 Bracha Ettinger and Luce Irigaray, whom I talk about in detail in this thesis, characterise the particular sounded language terrain that I am interested in as “the meeting point between the properties of physical matter and an elaboration of sexualised subjective identity” (Irigaray 1987:167; 1993:153), (Robinson 2006:3). I paraphrase this quote to suggest that I am interested in finding the meeting point between sound matters and elaborations of self from the ‘other’. I relate strongly to Irigaray’s discussion/description of physical matter as the qualities of sound interwoven with the functionality of sounded- language, this points towards or indicates the fluidity of the sound object I call soundage.
In particular, when read in light of the post-Lacanian and feminist psychoanalytic framework initiated by the philosopher Luce Irigaray’s work on listening and love,
(2002; 1977; 1979; 1983; 1985), and through the work of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha
Ettinger (2004; 2006) on creativity and engagement with the ‘other’, Stein’s work, becomes positioned in such a way that it can be heard in a truly contemporary way, placed alongside contemporary theories. The text then sings for us a contemporary theory of sound … as sound itself.
This is always a marginalised space. One at the edge of meaning and meaning making frames. The work women are currently doing and have done in writing but also in the sonic arts and digital and electronic composition field exemplifies this. In my own move from the poetic to the digital poetic I embrace the sprawling nature of this new virtual frame for meaning making. The collection of works by women through the HER NOISE
99 collection exemplifies and performs this space in a myriad of generational ways. Creating reverberatory fields and forms which within, women can speak.
If the feminine domain is heterogeneous, polymorphous, uncentered and
rhizomatic, it explains why women thrive in the realm of avant-garde electronic
composition ... incomplete, sprawling, non hierarchical and with a spread energy. It
doesn’t have a centre, there is no nucleus…. [creating] a pulsating labyrinth of
women in sonic experimentation. (Neset, http://hernoise.org/tangled-
cartography/ 2007 accessed 13 2013)
This in turn has implications for talking about the sonic arts. And subsequently this approach within Stein’s work opens up ways to engage with and talk about the deeply resonant potentials and meanings within communication and communication tools today, namely the sound in all data.
4.2 Methodology
As I have pointed out, for me language is an odd evocation and a rich but inadequate ever-shifting system. In my creative practice I drill down into this odd-ness, in that I am engaged in becoming the method of my own methods. This is an emergent and personal engagement with both material and method. I work towards this engagement in two ways: I ventriloquise language and I listen carefully to the sound in language and write it and make creative works from it. In particular, I ventriloquise women's voices, and the sound inside them.
100
Whilst my working enthusiasms are eclectic. But in my working methods Allen Weiss’s work has been highly influential; indeed in some ways it has been the model for my working practice. His frames of how to subvert a work of art offer me both direction and a methodology.63 In this I am particularly interested in the notion of multiplying origins.
This approach has been useful in reading and working with Stein’s text. So, too, the notion of dissociating significations. Also significant are the processes Weiss calls excavating voids, condensing givens, and plying and weaving mannerisms. In using these methods I embrace interferences and seek out and valourise polyphonies I find in the sound of language. I am engaged in confusing genres and neutralising techniques and media and understand this as a creative and politically creative method. This is often a being-engaged with sounding out, and performing paradoxes. All these approaches are taken directly from Weiss’s work. I see Weiss’s strategies as having relevance to feminist projects of establishing ethical language frames for language, in that they creates frames for more and more open possibilities. Applying this method produced notions and writing as scores of possibilities. It also has woven possibilities into seemingly authentic calculations, which in turn have been able to be performed. This is a practice like that of
Ada Countess of Lovelace64 diagramming the machine. It is a method that gives rise to
63 This approach was drawn from Allen S. Weiss’s notion of subverting a work of art. Allen S. Weiss. Ten Theses To Subvert A Work. Theatre Journal vol. 58, no. 3 (2006)
64 Ada, Countess of Lovelace, regarded as inventor with Babbage of first computer program, (1842) called the Analytical Engine her notes are available here, http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/contents.html.
Ada was also interesting ideas re music/sound and the computer, Again, [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of
101 monsters with voices, and monstrous voices. The French writer Monique Wittig, in Les
Guerillieres, also speaks of this monstrous voice, she details it as rosy coloured and in a
permanent state of singing:
Somewhere there is a siren. Her green body is covered with scales. Her
face is bare. The undersides of her arms are a rosy color. Sometimes she
begins to sing. The women say that of her song nothing is to be heard but a
continuous O. That is why this song evokes for them, like everything that
recalls the O, the zero, the circle the vulval ring. (1985:14)
Wittig goes on to expand her descriptions of this point zero as she describes the precipice
from which we are working:
At this stage one must interrupt the calculations and begin again at zero.
If one makes no mistake with the calculations, if one jumps with both feet
together at just the right moment, one will not fall into the snake pit. If
one makes no mistakes in the calculations, if one bends down at just the
the operating notation and mechanism of the engine . . . Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. Ada in Babbage’s notes P. Morrison and E. Morrison (eds.), Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines (New York, 1961). A thorough outline of Ada’s work and impact is spelled out in Sadie Plant’s (1997) Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technologies. New York: Doubleday.
102 right moment, one will not be caught in the jaws of the trap. At this stage,
one must interrupt the calculations, and begin again at zero. (1985:14)
This engagement with sound involves interpretation, but a particular type of translation,
one on the continuum towards transcoding, as a re-making of what it is to say. This zero
then is both a starting and a being-beyond-this point, a zero plus one plus one plus one. It
is a being beyond its original form. Wittig exemplifies this in her work, and my work in
many ways continues her project. This is one of pure invention at the most radical.
Because, while she urges us to “take time, consider this new species that seeks a new
language …” this is never simple. (1985:14) Wittig like Stein before her urges us to listen
to our own tongues, listening for the it in it. Make an effort to invent, Wittig says,
echoing Stein, make an effort, and invent if you have to … re-invent even what it is to
invent.
In part my working methods are also draw from the situationists’ use of the dérive (or
drift). Plant describes this as a “technique of locomotion without a goal” in which “one or
more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action,
their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the
attraction of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”65 I am engaged in intuitively
establishing multiple processes of drifting, in terms of listening, recording and making.
65 Quoting Sadie Plant: “… the dérive …[l]ong a favorite practice of the Dadaists, who organized a variety of expeditions, and the surrealists, for whom the geographical form of automatism was an instructive
103
Specifically in my engagement with sound and sound ideas I ply them with repetition, reversal, amplification, disassociation, and disembodiment. In this I test and research the possibilities of refiguring sound in language so it can be apprehended as a range of potential events for saying the unsaid. This approach works often with humour, at the contested edge of represented meaning. As such it is engaged with non(sense) in a deeply psychological way.
But it is also a practice of building emerging social network paradigms. I build creative networking groups that develop communities, and work collaboratively, exploring relationships, connecting with new audiences. In this I am actively borderlinking and working in co-emerging borderspaces. This is a paradigm that can be phrased as focusing on “abstract, invisible, subtle processes and feedback loops” and “escapes the centrality of the icon to visual culture.” (Lovink and Schneider, 2004:6)
Ultimately my sonic art practice consists of making sound objects and sound scores that make up elements within online presentations or large, multi-screened, digitally animated operas. These operas are sung by animated, digital, ventriloquist dummies or puppets that perform lead-roles and form choruses that sing theory, as synthesised digital voices. They are heavily cacophonous with sound, glitched sound and images, non(sense), repetitions, pleasure, the dérive, the drift, was defined by the situationists as the ‘technique of locomotion without a goal’, in which ‘one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there’. The dérive acted as something of a model for the ‘playful creation’ of all human relationships.” (Plant, 1992, 58-59)
104 loops, reverb and play. Though my art can seem to be focused on matter or substance and so is seen as sound based, digital work, it is also highly self-reflective and poetic in the broader sense of the word. In primary mode its focus is to work with language and meaning. I am especially focused at the point where language merges with the larger abstract machine – the great diagram-er – and there breaks down. It is at this point that I am interested in extending language’s parameters, and creating the tools, means or performance pieces that structure the means for doing that. This is the core event of my practice, this place of extended fluidity as the collapse of reason.
The languages I deal with – and by language I mean the breadth of representational systems and regimes, be they text, vocal, image, sound and/or code and digital data – can be seen to intersect with each ‘other’ to interpret their own sound. For example digital text mining used in a way to translate or transcode Two or an animated ventriloquist dummy can be used to narrate a part of the theory of sound in Stein’s own voice, cut and pasted from interviews. These new objects will then form the basis of further works, in this instance into the larger digital operas.
For me, this gathering together of creative-material, is always in relation to meaning, always an embracing of the much-more-than-one-was-thinking-was-meaning, an embracing of the ‘other’. This is achieved through a leaning toward this gesture. Which for me in essence is a loving gesture. This creative gesture involves disruptions and glitching of meaning. It is thus necessary for the reader/audience to be prepared to be
105 confounded. The fact that my work and its content unmake meaning means I challenge modes of discourse and what it is to speak and how to know, and to be. This means I am consciously and repeatedly asking viewers to rethink the position they are engaging with unmade meaning from. And to do this I use certain visual tropes to prepare viewers for this re-reading of unmeaning. This concern with unmeaning and the marginal leads me now to a more in-depth discussion of the importance of ventriloquism to this project.
2. Majena Mafe 2009 Still from Inside the mouth digital opera
4.2.1 Ventriloquising as a Method: the Matrixial Voice and Soundage
106 As a creative practitioner engaged with theory, I literally perform voices of ‘otherness’ in a somewhat grotesque66 translation. This is evident in my work with digital ventriloquist dummies, for instance. For me the ventriloquist dummy points directly to the mediation of speech and of subjectivity.67 The dummy’s voice is engaged in extending and multiplying in particular ways that are both profoundly creative and full of implications regarding sound and voice. In my creation of digital dummies to perform theory and translations I complicate and draw attention to the sound of theory, a notion outlined very well by Salvaggio in The Sound of Feminist Theory (1999). In this my works can be read as literal translations: a culturally aware, politically creative act. This is against dominant syntaxes, which in their phallocentricity can be understood to be exclusive, that is, against inclusion and the birth of the unformed. In this I instead listen for and create syntaxes from a broader base, one perhaps useful and or appropriate to women.
(Robinson 2006:13)
As my practice presents me with sound, the translation of women’s voices, the unsaid, the refused, the hysterical gesture, the marginal lisps, slurs and slips of the tongue, the odd, the grotesque etc, I see this as feminist work in the margins to make the marginal central; feminist not for the fact that it is work by a woman but because it is bringing back from the margins what is valuable. And this is influenced by Ettinger’s notion of placing herself at the same juncture, which she terms the matrixial borderspace, to
66 Original meaning of grotesque is hollow, from the same Latin root as “Grotto”, meaning a small cave or hollow.
67 For a fantastic reading of the ventriloquist dummy read Dumbstruck (2000) by Steven Connors.
107 formulate a space of feminine difference. It is from this space that a matrixial voice develops.
For me this sourcing of the matrixial voice as an expression of soundage takes place in the sensate jamming of difference, a cacophony of possibility the nature of which is evident in the unmediated realm of digital language, especially in its relatively free engagement or linking with the ‘other’. This is the other-as-different and as the completely unmediated unrepresentable. But this type of engagement is not a refusal of the world; it is not a madness in itself, it is an engagement with “the whole lot,”68 the whole of the problem/situation, to obtain access to its unmediated veritable ideas, its potentials. Yet this, in itself, has its own set of symptoms.
In working with and through digital media on the computer, I actively take on
‘otherness,’ a ‘cyber-otherness,’ through the use of digital ventriloquisms, digitally animated and engaged in creating digital sound. All this is mimicry. I see my practice as embroiled in mimicry, mimicry of transcribed earlier resources. This overflows in a
68 The quote “the whole lot” is taken from Emily Kngwarreye (1910-1996) Australian aboriginal artist who “whenever she was asked to explain her paintings, regardless of whether the images were a shimmering veil of dots, a field of 'dump dump' dots, raw stripes seared across the surface or elegant black lines, her answer was always the same: Whole lot, that's whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming), Arlatyeye (pencil yam), Arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), Ntange (grass seed), Tingu (Dreamtime pup), Ankerre (emu), Intekwe (favourite food of emus, a small plant), Atnwerle (green bean), and Kame (yam seed). That's what I paint, whole lot.”
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, interview with Rodney Gooch, trans. Kathleen Petyarre. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/utopia_the_genius_of_emily_kame_kngwarreye/emily_kame_kngwarr eye/ accessed 12 12 2011
108 philosophic and psychoanalytic sense. These notions of ventriloquism and of mimicry have and continue to offer a very broad and fecund space for feminist writers, poets, and theorists to reclaim voice and re-shape knowledge claims and what it is to say.
4.2.2 Listening as the Instruction Manual for Creating and Working with Stein
In my creative practice a particular type of listening is indicated, one open to the subtleties and convolutions of sound, one I have mentioned as a third ear.69 This reflects
Irigaray’s call to be sensitive to listening, not for classification but for what exactly the sound itself is saying, even outside of meaning. (Robinson 2006:77) I have already referred to my aural dyslexia and the heightened experience of language both aural and written it facilitates in me. Other writers, Steven Connors for instance (1997), point out that there has been a long association of hearing with feeling that is phenomenological and even biological. Regarding where this sound resides and how it works he says, “We think of sounds as the after-shocks or indexical signs of certain occurrences, but they are in reality not the sign of an occurrence, but the occurrence itself.” (1997:147) Connors says sounds not only bear witness to actions, they participate in them. (1997:149) Stein shows us they not only participate, but they are the thing itself. In developing my attention to listening, I have used Stein’s work almost as an instruction manual; reading and scoring her texts this way has steadily increased my capacity for its sound as in sound-meaning. I have had to develop attention to sound and, from this, a notion of
69 Drawing on the notion of a physiological (not psychoacoustic) phenomenon called an ontoacoustic emission.
109 sound-meaning. If we read Stein’s Two as a treatise on making it really re-orientates us as to what it is to make through sound.
3. Majena Mafe 2010 Unsound Unsaid
I read-hear something in Stein’s text Two that is not anywhere else for me or that indicates a not anywhere yet for me in me, an opening to a place not anyway me yet a place I lean-yearn for, creatively, politically and personally. To make from. To make.
Stein says “Sound there is in them comes out of them,” (1951:3) … and the whole text reverberates with sound spelled out a syllable at a time, literally as a message, a language
… in language. Stein says, he said and she said and they both said and say, sound.
Through repeated tellings of both him and her and their sound, sounding, and through the sound of sounds voice overlaying it all the listening to sounding meaning becomes an endlessly relentlessly lovingly becoming(Being) state. Sound reverberating also is engaged in listening to the grating, grinding, sanding, almost of the differences between words and tenses and states and notions of being until language is not language …
110 anymore … but a type of relationship, a type of love. And Stein says sound listens to love. My own ear/tongue hinges on her cochlear’d cryptic transmutation-ing. This is a deep loving extension of the common origin that would make solvent difference. This is listening to the sound of the stone’s stone.
Through a contemporary re-reading and listening to Stein as a practitioner-theorist, I am forced to rethink not only language as a non-linear object, but also myself as an artist listening rather than looking. This is a position of being in and in relation to ‘otherness’ in language, through listening. In Two Stein asks us to listen, think (and be) sound as a being that re-organises meaning.
In hearing Stein’s text Two I feel I am forced to take a particular position regarding her work that differs considerably from ‘other’ readings and past critiques. This is because I read Two for form, that is, sound, and form’s meaning, and for the something more – soundage. This is because I take the content of Stein’s work literally as a methodology and a theory of not just language and literature, but of being. Stein’s work constantly changes my thinking, reforming my notion of myself as a reader, my notions of literature, language and meaning. What a sentence is for example, and what it means to say, to write and then think and to listen. Indeed, once absorbed with this type of writing/thinking/making – digesting, Stein would say – it is almost impossible to go backwards. In this sense, reading Stein remakes me into the perfect reader of her texts, and then all types of texts, all others. Two is like one big thick and complicated
111 instruction manual. Stein’s writing is a training ground, like a mind-gym, to being with and in relation to language.
Stein’s form of sound is also present in the form of the production for Stein. I read her unpublished notebooks for Two at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Through this reading I listen to the intensities of her handwriting, the pressures, the gaps between words, the words on the page, some times only three frantically scribbled words to a page, the intensities of cross-out-scribbles throughout her text, and what they reveal but also hide. I read and listen to the notes left in the margins, the drawings and when they occur within notes for a text, drawings that can be seen as about loss and her mother for instance, the asides, the pacings, the energies of sound. I listen to them as soundage. Though listening I simultaneously score her texts, in that I follow word placements in sentences, passages, pages and wholes of text, noting the shifts of subject to object and back again, the variety of repetitions, the structuring of them, and the shifts in meaning that this causes. In this I am always looking for the meaning Stein was intending. In this I am “listening to her and not to them,”70 as Stein asks us to do. In so doing I find a range of sound-meanings that
70 Listen to me and not to them quote … “Let me listen to me and not to them May I be very well and happy May I be whichever they can thrive Or just may they not. They do not think not only only But always with prefer And therefore I like what is mine For which not only willing but willingly Because which it matters. They find it one in union.” In union there is strength. Stanzas in Meditation Stanza VII (1994:49)
112 add too and indeed can be used to shape my reading of Stein’s work, and I read it afresh and go on to make new work, translating and interpreting it anew.
4.3 Contextual Review of Exemplar Artist/Writers who have Influenced my Work
My practice is embedded within a complex/compounded transdisciplinary field of influences consisting of writers, poets, visual artists, and sonic artists.
The first camp of influences I turned to in this project, I call the Non(sense) materiality of sound and the body camp. These artists are mainly involved in the deconstruction of meaning through sound, and their work often involves the body or notions of the body.
This field, of course, includes the work of Gertrude Stein via her use of repetition (a strategy picked up by minimalist composers). But it also includes artists such as the sound-in-voice-focused singers Meredith Monk and Sainkho Namtchylak who engage with material excess. It also includes particular works by the contemporary American installation artist Ann Hamilton, and the work of the contemporary voice artists Cathy
Berberian and Diamonda Galas. In this group I also include early sound/voice artists such as Artaud and Henri Chopin, who can be aligned with a similar project to that of the Dada and Fluxus movement. At the edge of this group there is an overlap with so-called outsider artists such as Sister Gertrude and practices such as glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, and ecriture brut.
113
The second contextual category, which became my major influence, I describe as the
Non(sense) via Language Constructs – those focusing in working and engaging with the deconstruction of syntax and of sense and meaning in language. This frame starts with
Gertrude Stein; indeed, she can be seen to have influenced many of these artists/writers.
These include people like the American contemporary video artist Ryan Trecartin, the
American composer and creator of contemporary operas and sound works, Robert
Ashley, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets such as Bernstein, and the key experimental women writers.71 The overall project of the contemporary writing experiment, Flarf, also fits under this frame for me. Flarf has been influential in its use of notions and techniques of copying and repeating found phrases, thereby sculpting voice as language material into something new. I am also interested in their use of humour. Flarf writing is interested in terms of making and engaging with non-linear narratives. Other writers express antagonism towards linear narrative, for example David Shields, in his book Reality
Hunger: a manifesto (2010). In an interview in the Huffington Post, Shields says we now live in a post-narrative world. (2010) It is this post narrative framework that I am also engaging in, offering the frame of the OPERA(TION) as a field of multi-becoming affects as a generative and emergent meaning making field.
Of the writers and artists in the Non(sense) via Language Constructs category, I will focus on, in terms of their overall projects, Ryan Trecartin, Robert Ashley and the
71 I’m talking here about writers, some of whom I have already mentioned, such as Waldrop, Scalapino Armantrout, Harryman, Retallick, Heijinian, Maso, and Blau DuPlessis. More about them follows.
114 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. Between these related and at times overlapping poles of engagement with sound, I position my interest in ideological performative politics, in queered language and in Feminist ethical speak and theory.
4.3.1 Context 1. Non(sense) Materiality of Sound and the Body
I began this PhD research project with more interest in the first group of artists – the
Non(sense) materiality of sound and the body camp – and their influence than in the
Non(sense) via Language Constructs artists. In my masters study, Sounding the Ineffable
- The Pre-Socratic Notion of Subtle Light, Mystical Testimonies and Brilliance in
Gertrude Stein’s Song, (2008) my focus was on the disavowal of ecstasy in language. In it I highlighted jouissance in Gertrude Stein’s work and contrasted it with a tract of excluded language in medieval languaging frames that refused the word lux (which originally meant inner radiance) from the speech of medieval mystics by the church. This research paper and the accompanying experimental novel, Sounding the ‘other’ Light… a biography, focused on language and its relationship to interior spaces of the body.72
72 Titled SOUNDING THE INEFFABLE - The pre-Socratic Notion of Subtle Light, Mystical Testimonies and Brilliance in Gertrude Stein, this research focused on the exclusion of particular words and experiences from language, namely the word lux in 11th century as a term used to describe the ecstasy of inner light and the ecstatic work of Stein as a contrast.
115 In my research I focus again on gaps and the excluded within language, particularly the aspect of this I am naming soundage. This is the sound Stein talks about and presents in language. Stein’s writing is as writing in progress, writing writing, as writing, engaging in an almost medieval oral-ism, in its physicality. Stein’s work at times has been heavily involved with the body, for example in Lifting Belly and Tender Buttons as extensions of that body. In terms of the material nature of her work and the body, Stein is a prime influence for my work in OPERA(TION).
Ann Hamilton, an installation artist who uses sound and space to refer to ‘other’ layers of meaning, is another writer/artist who has influenced me in terms of sound, language and the body. Hamilton’s work draws heavily on resonances from the body. In an essay on her work, On a Detour of Language, Bruce Ferguson writes about Hamilton’s work in relation to speech and the delirious dilemma of speech and excess:
There is no space external to language...[so] there must be practices (art
practices) that have no assurance of meaning; practices that moonlight from
the economy of language, acting as offerings of a necessary displacement;
practices that generate catastrophes of meaning. The nonlinguistic, when it
is art, does just this- it resists language for as long as possible, avoiding the
inevitable clash with its eager clutches (and the logic of commodities). Art
creates a cultural space of experience which might, when the ideas are still
circulating, literally create a space of non-recognition, a space which the
116 active, even erotic, movement of materials is still out of control and out of
reach, a preparation for another future, however impossible. For Ann
Hamilton this space is achieved again and again. She is embroiled in
amplifying, however temporarily (and its temporality is part of the
achievement) uncanny spaces just on the threshold of language. (1993:111)
Hamilton’s work is situated up-close to and even within the body, as well as within that body we call the text. Language features strongly in her work, but it is language reframed. In her installations she sometimes erases text by burning it off the page, in performance works she rubs text out of the pages of books, she floats text through the gallery space. Her work engages the senses and applies them to a material experience of text and language. In this she has been called a sense reframer.73
In her 1993 work, Untitled (Mouth/Stones), Hamilton shows a mouth filled to bursting with stones. This work embodies a ventriloquism of silence or near silence, where what cannot be said is said through the mouth as a puppet-tool. I was drawn to and influenced by this work because of its reflection on what it is to speak through a mouth that was either inadequate or jammed in some way. I imagine this work produces only the guttural sounds of language, only the sounds of the throat, the ooohs and the aaarhs, with no tongue and palette involvement to clip and/or package words. I found these poignant engagements with the mouth personally moving in terms of my own engagement with
73 Madeline Shwartzman, See Yourself Sensing: Refining Human Perception, London, Black Dog Publishing (2011:21)
117 language as a dyslexic. This work in particular encouraged me to create my own animated ventriloquist dummies that would work as a third ear, being both sensitive to the hearing and speaking of a sounded-language and even of soundage.
Meredith Monk, is a composer, singer, theatrical director/choreographer and creator of new opera, films and sound/voice based installation pieces. Monk is a recognised as a pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance.” “Monk creates works that move sound to the “intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound in an effort to discover and weave together new modes of perception.”74 “Her voice work is often considered “groundbreaking, [an] exploration [of] the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself.” 75
Monk treats language as a range of sound objects and sound as a form of language; she composes stretches of voice sounds that echo complications in meaning. “In most of my music, theater pieces and films, I try to express a sense of timelessness; of time as a recurring cycle.”76 As Monk herself states, she works within the cracks of language:
I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the
body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema … 77
74 Meredith Monk, taken from the liner notes of her album Book of Days, ECM New Series. (1990) 75 ibid 76 ibid 77 Deborah Jowitt (1997) ed. Meredith Monk Johns Hopkins University Press. p2
118 Monk’s scoring of voice sounds has also influenced my own attempts to score Stein’s
Two. Her embodiment of sound within the score as being beyond the classical notation system, indeed seeing it loop within such a frame, offered me the permission to try and structure scoring frameworks that would be applicable to and useful in my own attempts to score sounded-language and soundage.
I am also particularly interested in the voice/sound-related work of performer Cathy
Berberian. This renowned contemporary composer, mezzo-soprano singer, and vocalist is well respected for her wild vocal play with excess. Berberian works with extremes of language to create a range of performance experiences for the listener. Sylvano Bussotti,
John Cage, Hans Werner Henze and Igor Stravinsky wrote works for her voice. Berberin interpreted contemporary avant-garde music, Armenian folk songs, Monteverdi, The
Beatles, and her own compositions in thickly sounded-language. Her best known work is
Stripsody (1966), in which she exploits her vocal technique using comic book sounds.
This is a return to the use of humour, the absurd, the odd, as a key ingredient in the performance of sounded-language and soundage.
Berberian’s use of humour in works like her Stripsody came to have a strong impact on how I viewed the presentation of my own OPERA(TION) as a comic depiction of puppets that represent the third ear. I have also been heavily influenced by Berberian’s use of humour in her sound/voice play to articulate and make central the often refused or marginalised element of speech and language.
119
More extreme uses of language as sound have also influenced me. The pioneering French actor, playwright, poet and theatre director Antonin Artaud, the French avant-garde poet and musician Henri Chopin, and ‘other’ Dada and Fluxus artists have been highly influential to me. Within their work I found my first understanding of sound in language expressed as sounded-language, and of how that sound interferes with sense and plays with non(sense) to reveal new senses within their own new order. Artaud, a passionate, intense and controversial artist, was interested in strange and disturbing sources of sound and frequently used his own screams in his work. He can in many ways be seen as the origin for this intersection of body and sound. In The Theatre of Cruelty (2010) he is described as setting up a particular type of language, one he believed disassembled that text had been a tyrant over meaning. Artaud instead advocated, for a theatre and a language made up of a new language that wrestled for articulation from somewhere between thought and gesture.
Chopin was an early sound poet who favoured a raw and ‘barbarian’ approach to language. Wendt describes his approach:
Chopin's poesie sonore aesthetics included a deliberate cultivation of a
barbarian approach in production, using raw or crude sound
manipulations to explore the area between distortion and intelligibility.
He avoided high-quality, professional recording machines, preferring to
120 use very basic equipment and bricolage methods, such as sticking
matchsticks in the erase heads of a second-hand tape recorder, or
manually interfering with the tape path. (Wendt 1985:16 -17)
The work of both Artaud and Chopin features strongly as an influence in the foundation of my practice. Drawing on their particular use of the voice and the broad scope and arena of that voice I have been working with writing experimental sound based texts exploring excess and extremes for a number of years. Elements of their work that have influenced mine include creative experimental writing methods such as shifting narrative, jamming, shifting syntax and grammar frames, playing with humour and the carnivalesque, mixing genres, skewing meaning, dis-ordering sense, working with rhythms, rhymes, riddles and all the while anchoring the work in the sounded language of the voice to liberate sound from language. These sounds on one hand can best be described as particular sounds within language.
Moans, screams, sighs, cries, chokes, roars, gasps, mumbles, whistles,
yelps, slurps, groans, chortles, snorts, pops, clicks, wheezes, babbles,
hisses, hums, whispers, hoots, whines, puffs, drones, stutters, lisps,
rattles, and countless ‘other’ imperfections … (Weiss 1989:1)
Allen S Weiss, who was also influenced by Artaud and Chopin explains this sort of writing as, “the pathological breakdown of quotidian speech-culminating in either the
121 incoherent jumble of word salad, the inarticulate simplicity of one-word sentences or the utter silence of aphasia universalis, which proffers new modes of poetic form …”
(Weiss 1989:1) These works influenced my own translation of Stein’s text to the opera libretto.
4.3.2 Context 2. Non(sense) Via Language Constructs
I am particularly interested in artist/writers who are engaged with sound and non(sense) through the play and examination of language constructs and syntax and of course sound.
These artists, while interested in the embodiment of sound and the disruption of language, are also interested in what this produces in terms of meaning. In chapter three I explored the notion of sound, as it is described in Two, having its own parameters of thought, (as in Jarvis’s notion of Musical Thinking). Writers and artists who actively engage with sound at that point of non(sense) have influenced me considerably.
But Stein here has been most influential. From my perspective Stein belongs to both the non(sense) via the body and the non(sense) via language construct camps. This is because
Stein’s work Two works on many levels at once. By this I mean it ‘works’ as a narrative of sorts be it extenuated and non-linear, and it cancels out any traditional form of narrative. Though Two seems to be non(sense) within its play with syntactical frameworks devoted to sound it makes its own type of sense. Reading Two engages the body in this non(sense) and causes the tongue to lisp and words to splatter over the tongue. The breath is caught up in the rhythms of sound.
122
As a sonic work Stein’s Two can also be seen to engage with gender shifts and eruptions of stereotypes. I find Steinian similarities, inspiration and influence in the sound-heavy luridness of the video work of the contemporary American artist Ryan Trecartin.
Trecartin is a multimedia, video, sound and installation artist who works with chaotic narratives that reflect overloaded contemporary media. Like YouTube on speed,
Trecartin’s work is as a contemporary visual digital poetry that draws on imagery and patterns of language from cliché, chat, and popular media, to reconstruct a new critical poetics. Trecartin’s use of interchangeable characters, some standing in for office sirens, others standing in for entire countries – for example North Korea in K-
CorealNC.K(Section A) – point to a type of character play that extends my interest in ventriloquism. In this work and others, I am primarily interested in Trecartin’s use of sound, particularly how he plays with the sound of his language generally both through the voice and text. This involves use of the glitch, glitching both images and meaning.
Trecartin presents language works at the margins, as the place where ‘codes of order are transgressed, as non(sense) is elaborated, and sonorous distortion interfaces as noise are established as a delirious crazed portal of the unsaid.’ Also Trecartin uses queer speech much like Stein does. Both of their languages are queered so as to say the previously unsayable, thereby extending meaning to make it inclusive rather than exclusive.
Trecartin can be seen to be working with the theme of power as a generative place of resistance. In this he is engaged in presenting language as an instrument of power while simultaneously providing for places of redistribution of that power (Butler 1990:93, 97;
Foucault 1990). By queer speech, I refer to ways of doing language, including gendered
123 language, that represent, in the words of Donald E. Hall, “a particular threat to systems of classification that assert timelessness for fixity.” (2003:14). In a recent article on queer voice that accompanied an exhibition with Trecartin in, the Pennsylvanian Institute of
Contemporary Art described it in terms of its engagement with the ‘other’ and difference through a particular voice:
Presenting video, installation, and audio works, this group exhibition foregrounds
the voice as a material in contemporary art—in particular, a queered voice.
Manipulated, mediated, or otherwise affected, the voice present in these works both
signals a disengagement with gender norms and with everyday conventions of
communication. Casting light on what it means to "sound strange," they insist that
the viewer become a listener too, engaging with art works that are performative and
narrative in nature. Throughout the voice takes on a complex of guises and
strategies: it can mask the speaker, tweak identity, obscure gender, test points of
view, amplify and nullify emotions. It may create a disembodied or virtual
presence, filling the listening space with avatars and mediums, the very presence of
which signal a shift in the nature of reality itself. The queer voice opens up a queer
space where a heightened sense of artifice and affect signal a new norm.
(http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/queervoice.php accessed 26 4 2013)
Trecartin’s work and his presentations of queer speech both challenge my approach to sound and reflect my interests in it as they are unfolding.
124 The American composer Robert Ashley’s work with opera and voice also has influenced me, in particular his Extended Voices - She Was A Visitor (1967), and his Automatic
Writing (1979). Ashley has worked experimentally with the amplification of small sounds,78 and with a combination of voice and electronic instruments. In this he uses his own involuntary touretted voice for this work. Regarding this use of particular unmediated voice sound Ashley has stated that he felt his Tourette’s syndrome had to do with sound-making. He wondered, “because the manifestation of the syndrome seemed so much like a primitive form of composing whether the syndrome was connected in some way to his obvious tendencies as a composer.”79 I find this interesting in terms of my work with sounded-language and soundage. I also wonder if my dyslexia has made me sensitive to these forms of speech.
Ashley works with operatic formats and contemporary notions gleaned from experimental sound, technology and literature practices. Ashley’s oeuvre, like Stein and
Trecartin’s work, has been important in my developing the notions of SOUNDAGE THE
DIGITAL OPERA(TION).
Work from contemporary writers who were influenced by Stein has also been an important source of inspiration for me. I’m talking here about avant-garde experimental writing, especially that of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers such as Charles Bernstein,
78 a b c d e f g h i j Holmes, Thom. (2002) Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition. London: Routledge. (2002:187–195, 199–205, 266). 79 ibid
125 and Lynn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Rae Armatrout, Cara Harryman, and Joan
Retallack, some of whom I have previously mentioned. These writers all build, not just their themes, but the method and sound of their writing from theory and philosophic ideas. Their writing is a form of method a true praxis.80 Cazé, a critical theorist, expands on the relationship between theory and practice in his discussion of Charles Bernstein’s work:
… here, the poetic shape in which theoretical discourse is cast,
parodying the artifice of lineation, only folds poetry back onto poetic
theory just when it seemed to make it possible for the former to
subvert the latter. But the reverse is equally true. (Cazé 2000:102)
In his 1986 essay Writing and Method, Bernstein claims that “forms of art investigate the terms of human experience and their implications” and concludes, “poetry and philosophy share the project of investigating the possibilities (nature) and structures of phenomena.” (1986:217) The affinity with philosophy in this type of contemporary writing creates work that is sensitive not just to topography, vocalisation and performance, but to the underlying meanings of language itself. Reading these writers
80 Praxis in terms of Schrag’s notion … “So, I tried to do a kind of semantic clarification in which praxis— if not on the thither side of this divide-was perhaps somehow between the theoretical and the practical as they are generally understood, and particularly as they are understood in modern philosophy. Praxis as the manner in which we are engaged in the world and with others has its own insight or understanding prior to any explicit formulation of that understanding ... Of course, it must be understood that praxis, as I understand it, is always entwined with communication.” —Calvin O. Schrag. Ramsey, Ramsey Eric; Miller, David James (2003). Experiences between philosophy and communication: engaging the philosophical contribution of Calvin o. Schrag. SUNY 2003:21.
126 and their experimental literature and their sensitivity to praxis challenges me as a writer and as a reader/writer of theory but also as a maker. Bernstein says of these ways of working:
… the energy inherent in the referential dimension of language, that these
dimensions are the material of which the writing is made, define its
medium. Making the structures of meaning in language more tangible and
in that way allowing for the maximum resonance for the medium–the
traditional power that writing has always had to make experience palpable
not by simply pointing to it but by (re)creating its conditions. (Bernstein
1980:115)
These contemporary artists/writers work, like Stein, through sound and a vocabulary of saying as a type of performed forensic or minute analysis of the syntax ‘sound’ in language. This type of language crosses the areas of perceptual reason and language frames into the place of performance to talk of the performative nature of language itself.
4.4 Making: My Digital Sonic Practice in Four Parts
127 For ease I have categorised a wide variety of creative works,81 from scores for sounded- language, to essays and a digital opera performance, into three separate interlinked frames. This model of practice echoes the three levels or resonances of sound, that is, sound, sounded-language and soundage, I have previously described. The first is Sound objects, followed by Scoring Two and then SOUNDAGE THE DIGITAL OPERA(TION), and finally GIRRL.
4.4.1 Sound Objects
During my engagement with Stein’s Two I created a large body of sets and series of works,82 that I think of as sound objects.83 Consisting of sound compositions, texts, short
81 Mafe. Majena Mafe’s Work http://majenamafe.blogspot.com/ and Majena Mafe Further Field Projects http://www.furtherfield.org/display_user.php?ID=848
83 Pierre Schaeffer, French composer and musicologist recognised for his work in electronic and experimental film, also wrote of “sound object,” operates within a different domain than music. In the forward to his book Schaeffer explains traditionally there were two approaches to music, “... on the one hand, music is considered to be based on acoustics, or even mathematics, which ought to give it the status of a science; on the other hand, it is acknowledged that it proceeds from psychological and sociological phenomena which, over the ages, have developed into an art, itself depending on various crafts.” Schaeffer sees that there no longer need be any contradiction between these two approaches, and this idea goes some way in supporting his idea of sound as object ... “so long as one is prepared to accept them jointly, with enough insight to respect the methods proper to each end of the chain.” Schaeffer’s ideas help me build a model for exploring sound in language as a discernable unit, with inherent qualities.
But Schaeffer adds, there are two problems in doing this, “the first relates to the correlation between sound, which is the physical vehicle of music and pertains to its nature, and [is] the sum of the psychological phenomena of perception which constitute the sound object: the second [problem] relates to the choice of infinite objects which are deemed suitable for music by reason of their perceptive criteria, and leads to a sound morphology and a musical typology.” It is my understanding that Stein had no problems with discerning which object would be appropriate; she took language to be the ‘object’, the human voice to be more precise and the sound in that voice to be the particular as the ‘performance’ of that sound itself. In this Stein uses both text and sound as psychological meaning.
Schaeffer, P. 1966. Solfege de l'object Sonore. In Ubu Web Papers. www.armario.cl/Arte/Artes_Musicales/.../Schaeffer%20Pierre.pdf accessed 14 12 2010.
128 films, and actual objects, these explore and explicate what I have interpreted and translated from Stein’s original text. To consolidate this range of work I focused on the creation of web research project spaces to both present my work and engage with ‘other’ theorists and practitioners within the field. The works are as follows:
1. A blog titled that unsound, which contains over a thousand entries for sound and
sound in language.84 This virtual, web-based site allowed me to collect together
and re-publish a diverse range of sound art and related works, and theory and
ideas. The site has developed a large following and has enabled me to connect
with ‘other’ practitioners, researchers and institutions. It has facilitated over a
dozen collaborations and some international exhibitions. I consider the site itself a
sound object.
84 Mafe. that unsound blog http://that-unsound.blogspot.com/
129
4. Majena Mafe Screen shot from that-unsound
2. I also set up a list of sound works,85 and linked it to an online presentation site
called Further field Projects,86 to make my work accessible and available for
critique and remixing. This is an activity I am very open to, as I remix works
myself. Further field is a British based sound network; linking with them made
the reach of my work and my research more available for review and critique,
85 Mafe. Majena Mafe’s Work http://majenamafe.blogspot.com/ 86 Mafe. Further field Projects http://www.furtherfield.org/display_user.php?ID=848
130 which has been very helpful in developing my work. Whilst the scores of works I
created over the research project are available mainly on-line, I also see the
Further field site as a sound object vibrating at various resonances with different
projects. The work I have presented on Further field and my site range from links
to my published texts, to on-line short operas and online sound works, and to
collaborations.
In addition I also constructed a series of web-based hypertext works that focused on
Stein, sound and ventriloquism. One, called The Ventriloquist Project a Digital Opera,87 contains a plethora of sound objects, singing gifs, short videos, my writing, scores for sound quotes and ideas built around Allen Weiss’s ideas of how to subvert a work.88
Weiss sets up a system for how to subvert a work, and I began using his model as a methodology for working with language in an attempt to subvert and reveal ‘other’ layers of sound and sound meaning. As mentioned previously, in this work I focus on ten particular types of engagements with the text object. They are as follows:
ONE … multiply origins TWO … neutralise techniques THREE ... accept interference FOUR … confuse genres
87 Mafe. The ventriloquist project http://ventriloquist-project.blogspot.com/ 88 Weiss, Allen S. Ten Theses to Subvert a Work (A Manifesto) Theatre Journal - Volume 58, Number 3, October 2006:393-394 http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/theatre_journal/v058/58.3weiss.html accessed 25 3 2009.
131 FIVE … valourise polyphonies SIX … exacerbate paradoxes SEVEN … excavate voids EIGHT … condense givens NINE … love mannerisms TEN … disassociate significants89
This approach was drawn directly from Allen S. Weiss’s notion of subverting a work of art that I have mentioned previously. When first working with these methods I became interested in the device of doubling as a way to multiply origins, exacerbate paradoxes and condense givens. In fact by mirroring or doubling the image I was able to subvert the usual readings of order by reflecting them back on themselves and in the process creating the monstrous ‘puppets’ that I would go on to animate and ventriloquise. This approach was in part influenced by the work of Kaja Silverman, who in The Acoustic Mirror
(1988:18) outlines the dynamic of voice and ‘woman’ as a split subject as indicated through Freudian terms. Her work inspired me to consider the effect of doubling images of woman, thus making her monstrous, and that this gives rise to thinking of her as something to be feared, as something outside of reason. Mirroring thereby led to my creating forms that could and would go on and speak the sounded language and soundage
I was interested in articulating. These images became my ventriloquist dummies.
89 Ibid. These notions from Allen S. Weiss’s have provided key interrogation and creation forms/methods for my practice.
132
5. Majena Mafe Selections of works from 2010
At the same time I began working on an on-line project called The Ventriloquist Project – a Digital Opera (Operation). This site became a testing ground for exploring ways to make my dummies speak, as well as enabling me to engage with the flexibility of digital media.
6. Majena Mafe (2010) Threee
133
7. Majena Mafe Screen shot from The Ventriloquist Project
In a second project tilted The Biography of Sound by Gertrude Stein, I explored Stein’s
work and voice in direct and in-direct ways. This web project works as a spoof on an
134 imagined document that Stein never wrote. This web-based document has a similar
form to the first but is solely devoted to sound and Stein’s quotes and ideas. I chose this
format to articulate my thinking regarding Stein and her engagement with sound
because a web-based document allows the interweaving of text with sound and moving
image. Since most of my research objects included all three media, it seemed not just
appropriate but necessary to use a web format. I consider both of these projects as in
flux and as flexible works in progress.
8. Majena Mafe Screen shot from The Gertrude Stein’s Opera Project
135
9. Majena Mafe Screen shot from The Biography of Sound by Gertrude Stein
136 In addition to these online projects I also composed new sound works, remixing the sound from Stein’s radio interviews from the 1930s with her texts after being put through text-to-sound software. I disassembled then reassembled words from Stein’s interviews and reconstituted them to talk specifically about sound.
http://soundcloud.com/that-unsound/patrircal-poetry-prittily-ma
http://soundcloud.com/that-unsound/gertrude-wood-napoleon-1
10. Majena Mafe 2010 Two of my recordings based on Stein’s voice
Simultaneously, I began working with text-to-sound software, making and writing works that when extenuated and jammed sing. Significantly, my translation of Stein led to my creation my own sound-mediated experiments, including numerous individual sound works and an attempt to build bodies of sound in language libraries, built of found voice sounds. Some of this work went towards collaborations, for example the collaborative sound-opera Lady McBeth, and small sound operas or operations, as I came to call them,
137 that perform as web-based objects, such as Droorn a Voice Opera (2010. http://majenamafetexts.blogspot.com/)
11. Majena Mafe 2010 Still from Droorn a Voice Opera
Droorn is a work made up of voice sounds layered in dense vertical structures that are built around my text on sound in language. This is interwoven with ‘other’ found sounds.
It was my first voice opera work. It was closely followed by Blobber: sounded language is it soundage?, which is an animated ventriloquist dummy/puppet that is made up of a doubling of Jean Auguste Ingres’ painting from 1808, Oedipus and Sphinx, which I digitally manipulated until it doubled and mirrored itself. The text as libretto explores
138 how to say sounded-language, and is full of riddles and complexities as well as a sort of vertical sound. This work is part of a series of works taken from classical art where it borders the space of the sphinx and ‘other’ female, language focused, oracles. In this particular work the sphinx is removed and Oedipus is left to answer his questions alone.
12. Majena Mafe 2010 Blobber: sounded-language is it soundage?
139
The following work titled Grrrr… and Curly Toes, is a call and response work featuring the two separate but related digital sound/image works that are a remix of tacky porn records made by women in the 1930s and sent to inmates of state prisons in the USA.
13. Majena Mafe stills from short call and response opera Grrrr …
140
14. Majena Mafe stills from short call and response opera Curly Toes
Around the same time as making these small operas, I became interested in the possibility of using the web for projects where endless singing could occur, and I built a series of singing gifs that now chorus eternally in cyberspace. These were constructed from remixed recordings and text-to-sound and ‘other’ digital sound media. These works were also placed on the web.90 I then developed digitally animated ventriloquist dummies performing/singing the matrixial – that is, Stein’s theory – and made these available on the web. The dummy and the ventriloquist dummy in my work, although instruments of
90 Majena Mafe sound works available http://soundcloud.com/search?q[fulltext]=that+unsound
141 delivery, can also be seen to be responses to Freud’s notion that woman is a mimic impostor; the ventriloquist dolls mirror Freud’s version of woman as a lack.91
15. Majena Mafe 2010 Stein singing Blue Bayou http://stein-sings.blogspot.com/
To counter Freud’s point I have been particularly interested in developing the excesses in voice and in the synthesised voice as the excess of pleasure. Excess for me, though bordering on the incoherent, is being used as a way to theorise creatively ‘other’ dimensions of subjectivity or to play out dimensions of ‘othered’ subjectivities. For example, when language and the voice is put through the text-to-sound data on the computer, it seems to become extra to language; that is it has odd or weird qualities that change how sentences sound and how words are pronounced, and this in turn invents a
91 Quoting Freud …“This is all I have to say about femininity. It is certainly incomplete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly... If you want to know more about femininity, inquire from our own experiences of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information.” Sigmund Freud, (1964:169)
142 new relationship to language much as Google translator can be seen to write poetry.
Working with the text-to-sound program I found a way to adjust the text so the software causes the synthesised voice to sound as if it is singing. So in essence I have found a way to use it as both my ventriloquist dummy and as a musical instrument. In this I was playing with the idea of the non-instrumental voice.
This notion of excess is also relevant to the imagery I am using in the visual work that accompanies the sound pieces. I am interested in the grotesque as an excess mode of being, especially in terms of imagery of woman. In mirroring images of women taken from classical art and/or contemporary erotica/pornography I was able to re-create images of women that were engaged in mirroring themselves. I see these images as activated, in that the eye keeps tying to meld them into a common form. While this mirroring does create a grotesque new being, it also furthered my working notions of multiplying origins and accepting interference within the visual plane. These are visual glitches. Principally, although this mirroring works to challenge given ideas of how woman looks, it has also been my intention that in the process these images are given voice: that the re-making of the female form in some way puts a throat to images, making them sing.
In my various attempts to extract sound from language there were some failures. I attempted to set up a sound library, but failed because of a problem with cataloguing sounds. A catalogue exists but at the time I could find no practical way to use it. For
143 example, I was unable to name or code the collected sounds; I was struck dumb when I tried to name the recorded sound made from the back of the throat with the tongue lying flat, with the diaphragm held down, whilst looking into the sun and so on! These failed attempts at naming certain sounds from language in the end pointed to a possibility for scoring them in subjective and speculative ways, and I will go on to explain these experiments below, but before I began these experiments I became interested in failure itself, and began experimenting with the purposeful glitching of information.
As part of my working methods I hack into data to gather/extract the sound of it, from it.
I see that this engagement and re-reading of meaning glitches it, creating often uncanny and seemingly shrill, brutal effects; they effervesce at the breaks in the flow of technology, be it as language or art. Notions of the glitch and noise once had negative connotations in new media work, but increasingly in contemporary art the glitch is seen as a work in itself. I am especially interested in the work on glitching done by Rosa
Menkman especially her Pomylka Tipping Point of the Future (2010). In her text,
Menkman explores the tipping points of the future and failure and the glitch as accident verses the glitch as art. She quotes Lotringer (2005:63) as summing up this new way of looking at the glitch:
The accident doesn’t equal failure, but instead erects a new significant state, which
would otherwise not have been possible to perceive and that can “reveal something
absolutely necessary to knowledge.” (1:2010)
144
Glitches are often understood as damaged or inarticulate data. But for me the glitch opens data anew, both digitally and conceptually, allowing me to extract from it its sound and then work with that in new ways. The glitching of image files and turning them into sound has been for me the most interesting extension of working with sound as an object within language. I am literally able to extract audible sound from a digital image file. As new independent works, translations in a sense, these works actively extract sound from language. Focusing once again on Stein, I have glitched or extracted glitches from a variety of jpegs, diagrams, texts and sound recordings of Stein, which I then re- contextualised/remade, generating new ideas as data files. I have also extended my writing practice to explore the glitching of grammar as experimental writing.92 In this
92 My selected publishing done during this PhD period.
FESTIVAL: GLI.TC/H ?? 24 HOUR NO PASSWORD PARTY ?????????????? Link: http://tinyurl.com/readerror
Via Error, How2. Vol.3., Issue 3., Strictly Speaking Caroline Bergvall 1–6 August 2010. http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal//current/index.html
Kipple http://kipplepoetry.blogspot.com/2010/03/three-poems-majena-mafe.html March 2010.
(INSIDE ALICE'S FACETS) Figuring the Unstable World of Perceptual Meaning (meanings and unmeanings) ... in the word of a lit up face. Bukker Tillibul Journal Vol. 3 Swinburne University, 2009.
What does a feminist writer look / sound like? Delirious Hem, June 2009. http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/2009/04/what-does-feminist-poet-look-like-by.html
Opera for Glossalali’ Zswound 2008, http://zswound.blogspot.com/2008/05/majena-mafe-opera-for- glossolalia
Issue 1. Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter http://www.forgodot.com/labels/issue%201.html
5 Grappled Steps in the Method Making of Writing (a mary-festo). Chloe Outskirts Journal, peer-reviewed journal on Ficto-criticism, June 2009. http://www.chloe.uwa.edu.au/outskirts/archive/volume20/mafe
Henry/etta. Enoagh Journal http://eoagh.com/issuefive/mafe.html September 2009.
145 writing I have focused on glitching the ‘sound meaning’ within language. The presence and the framing idea of glitching now feature heavily in all my works. It is one of the key ways I have been able to transcribe Stein’s borderspaces within my own practice. I see the glitch as no longer being the reject of language but rather the event of it. The glitch is an interruption that shifts the object into (its) borderspaces, thereby disrupting discourse and creating another one.
16. Majena Mafe Sound file image 2012
17. Majena Mafe 2011 Choir stall and the shape of their sound
146 All this work with the object of sound in language led me to working with ideas of scoring, and it is to scoring I now turn.
4.4.2 Scoring Two
During this project I created a range of scores and visual scores for sounded-language and soundage by diagramming patterns and topographies of sound from the text. This approach rose directly from reading and listening and studying Stein’s texts as if they were scores for ‘another’ language or ‘other’ layer within language. The function of
Stein’s works as scores became especially evident to me on viewing her unpublished manuscripts at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. My in initial working with the text Two, involved direct various scorings from the text for meaning, this is what makes up my Appendix Three.
My approach to scoring also arose from my interest in the diagram and Cathy Berberian’s work reflecting on the relations between score and voice performance. Teresa Havelkova and Peter Verstraete in their essay, Cathy Berberian: From Score to Stage (2006), outline a way to create scores based not on diagrams and linear framework but on the notion of a biogrammatic approach inspired by Brian Massumi’s book Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002). Havelkova and Verstraete say “The biogram means the ‘living word.’”(2006:1) Quoting Massumi, they write:
147 The biogram is not lacking in order. It is overorganized, loaded with an
excess of reality. It is deformed by experiential overfill. It is hypersurface.
Its hyperreality explains why it is so stubbornly abstract. Since it cannot
concretely hold everything it carries, it stores the excess fused in
abstraction, ready for useful recesses (Massumi 2002:190)
The writing of sound notations or scores for contemporary sonic objects and especially digital works has become a 21st century problem/paradox; the scores and the sound never meet seamlessly. This open frame for scoring sound and/or music, however, provides an extension to the space of interpretation, hitherto not considered by traditional music notation. My initial aim in scoring Stein’s text Two was to try to extract from the text the sound she embedded within it, or at least the sound indicators spread throughout the words. I scored the text by mapping repeats of words and phrases, the meaning of words in various passages, the ‘hims’ and the ‘hers,’ and the lists of qualities repeated throughout.
As I have said, Stein’s text Two is a sound object. Over the course of my reading and re- reading of Two, my copy became heavily annotated, and I treated the annotated text as a palimpsest that extended both the object and the meaning contained within the text. This annotated or altered text also started to work as a series of scores for new sound works, which became the source of small operas I began making.
148
18. Detail of scoring of text Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother
149
19. Majena Mafe 2010 Extract from my score of text Two by Gertrude Stein
My scoring of the text also involved tracing the repetitions of words and their placement
within the text.
Sound is coming out of her.
150 Sound has been coming out of her.
Sound can come out of her.
Sound coming out of her is coming out of her and she has not been hearing not been hearing the sound that has been coming out of her.
Sound has come out of her and she is listening and sound can come out of her.
Sound comes out of her.
Sound coming out of her is expressing that thing, is saying something,
Sound coming out of her is expressing something, is saying anything.
Sound coming out of her is expressing everything, is saying everything.
Sound is coming out of her.
Sound has been coming out of her.
Some sound comes out of her.
Sound comes out of her.
If sound comes out of her it is a sound that expresses that thing expresses sound coming out of her.
Sound does come out of her.
Sound coming out of her does express this thing does express sound coming out of her.
Sound coming out of her comes out of her and is expressing sound coming out of her.
Expressing sound coming out of her is something sound coming out of her is doing.
Sound coming out of her is something. Sound is coming out of her.
Sound is coming out of her and that sound has been the sound that has been expressing that that sound is coming out of her.
Sound coming out of her is something that has that meaning that has the meaning that that sound is coming out of her.
Sound coming out of her is something that the sound coming out of her is not explaining.
Sound coming out of her is something that the sound coming out of her is not suggesting.
Sound coming out of her is something that is not relating to her having been one having had sound coming out of her.
(Gertrude Stein Two 1951:8-9)
20. Majena Mafe Score 22 of Two by Gertrude Stein
Scoring the repetitions indicated rhythms within Two. Below, I text mine a section in Two
in which Stein outlines what it is make, pointing out the complexities involved. This
section of Two influenced my own making. Like a work song Two, scored for its repeats
and to simplify understanding occurs at the turning point of the text where through
working ‘she’ becomes all sound and that sound engages with this ‘her’ of the text, to
151 make the something more. Stein here is talking about making writing, making sound her voice but also and most importantly Stein here is particularly talking of making meaning, the key creative act ‘she’ engages with, and with it make herself becoming(Being). This is the event of making. Each gesture is interposed within the borderspace of each ‘other’ gesture with the self in reverbing flux. Such complexities, I realised, were involved in all making.
She would not have a decision and deciding that she would not be saying, she would be having a decision in meaning that reflection is interpretation and interpretation this decision and decision is regarding meaning and regarding meaning is acting and acting is expression and expression if not resisting winning and not resisting winning is submitting and submitting is leading and leading is declaration and declaration is beginning and beginning is intending and intending is deciding and deciding is creating and creating is not contending and not contending is destroying and destroying is submitting and submitting is decision and decision is creating and creating is leading and leading is reflection and reflection is exacting and exacting is decision and decision is meaning and meaning is progressing and progressing is not denying and not deny feeling and feeling is thinking and thinking is arranging and arranging is continuing and continuing is rebeginning and rebeginning is submitted and submitting is decided and deciding is creating and creating is reflecting and reflecting is meaning and meaning is deciding and deciding is believing and believing is continuing in continuing is leading and leading is expressing and expressing is meaning the meaning is feeling and feeling of submitting and submitting is deciding and deciding is creating and creating is following and following is leading and leading is following and following is deciding and deciding is creating and creating if submitting and submitting its meaning and meaning is expressing and expressing is accepting and accepting is submitting and submitting is following and following is feeling and feeling his meaning and meaning is creating and creating is doing and doing is continuing and continuing is expressing and expressing is leading and leading is following and following is expressing and expressing his meaning and meaning is expressing and expressing is leading and leading is expressing and expressing is following and following is creating and creating is expressing and expressing its meaning and meaning is doing and doing is following the following is creating and creating is leading and leading is expressing and expressing his meaning and meaning is expressing and expressing is feeling and feeling is following and feeling is leading and expressing its meaning and meaning is creating and creating is meaning and meaning is meaning.
Gertrude Stein Two (1951:90–91)
21. Majena Mafe 2011 Score 8 of Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother
Though my scores were doomed to fail in any strict literal sense, they did provide an opening to the text and material for further reflection. This reflection in turn helped me open my ears to the levels of sound Stein was inserting in the text. From this I was
152 directly able to construct what I heard as Stein’s theory of sound and then go on to understand the impact of what I call soundage within the text and within language. In an attempt to keep extracting through repetition or emphasis I went on to create sound recordings from my scores. I then turned these sonic pieces back into text, and performed them through animated ventriloquist dummies presented on video. To facilitate the development of my work model for soundage I created/composed a large range of sonic digital pieces that detail soundage in its aspect of délire or non(sense), the term Lecercle uses to describe that which is refused but still encapsulated within language’s meaning.93
These digital sound pieces were also translated into digital video objects for presentation.
I intended that each one should push the possibilities and abstractness of such a language approach further and further into something new, thereby showing what soundage does under differing conditions.
22. Majena Mafe 2011 Extract of Score for Soundage taken from Gertrude Stein’s Two
(this score can be ‘played’ by putting it through text to sound software)
93 I explain the notion of delire in some depth in the previous chapter.
153 This effort to score sound in language moved me to explore another register of sound as I found ‘other’ scorings could be created by reading and sounding the text though ‘other’ means. This type of scoring fell more within the biogram framework outlined by
Massumi. The key for me here was the use of text-to-sound and voice-to-text (Dragon) software. In the text-to-sound software experiments I found I could quite literally make the software sing if I changed the syntax and spacings and repetitions of vowel sounds within the typed text. In the Dragon software experiments I read the text into the computer and the software made its own sense of the words and often revealed word play that Stein was involved in.
Though both these strands of research could be seen in many ways to have failed, it was through this failure that they made it possible to hear contents that were invisible on reading Two as a straight literary text. This stage of the work, scoring the sound objects within Two both before (scoring the verbal/text based language) and after (scoring the sonic data works) their transformation into sound works that became increasingly interesting and important to me. In this process I also engaged in ‘other’ types of text- mining to extract rhythms and patterns from within, underneath and through the flow of words. Here I found there were densities and a type of vertical sound similar to cacophony that I found within the text, which was initially conceptually impossible to realise, though I tried to realise it in various way: through the composition of layered and compressed sound works, and exploring the ways experimental libretto language can reflect the sound of the work. Currently I am working with the raw text of Two, translated into a moving language form through the digital software QWERTZ 4:33. This approach
154 was developed through collaboration between N3krozoft Ltd. and myself. My work with
QWERTZ creates Stein’s work as a flexible, digitally augmented score which recreates its own readings of Two, that can be read for density and vertical sound. It is my intention that these are scores that can literally be reinterpreted as sound.
23. Majena Mafe 2011 QWERTZ program still Sound is coming out of her … her
155 From this notion of scoring the sound in language I moved into working with image in video work and digitally animated ventriloquist dummies.94 The theorist Steven Connors defines ventriloquism as making voices appear to issue from elsewhere than the source.
Whilst this idea of the displacement of voice interests, me I am mainly interested in how, when activated or enlivened by the sound of language, ventriloquist dummies became instruments for transmission. My interest in dummies as transmitters (or translators?) reflects my understanding of all language as a cover in the sense of a oft-repeated popular song trope, with the popular song being acceptable meaning. My interest then in ventriloquist dummies can also be seen to stem from my interest in lowbrow and monstrous or carnivalesque tropes for performing information. The notions of dummies performing speech acts such as theory interested me very much.
Associated with this is an interest in off-colour humour and the speech that delivers this in performance. I was drawn to the use of ventriloquist dummies when I came to understand their use as instruments for delivering sounded-language. There are two sorts of performance frames for ventriloquism. One is the blue or ribald type of dummy, who delivers insults, dirty jokes etc. The ‘other’, directed primarily at children, is the ventriloquism or puppetry of speaking animals. Both types of ventriloquism were also interesting to me in terms of Freud’s engagement with the mimicry of so-called hysterics
94 For a cultural history of ventriloquism read Steven Connors Dumbstruck
156 and his proclamation that woman could only ever mimic man.95 Double voice is also a position Irigaray enters but then extracts herself from.96
The animated dummies I developed speak and sing through low-tech software packages.
In creating them I played with the notion of grotesque facial frames. As I pointed out above, I was conscious of working with both visual and auditory notions of the excess and the grotesque in the images that would present (ventriloquize) this body of sound works. In the work I put together the dummies act ostensibly as performing heads.
In terms of what these dummies could sing/speak I was interested in how the scores I had created could be transcribed or transcoded into sound from the sound and soundage I found within Stein’s Two. To that end I started out by constructing complex sounded, multi-screened performance pieces in the hope of replicating the density of Stein’s meaning spaces.
95 Regarding Freud’s claim that women can only mimic, Irigaray says “It is not that she lacks some ‘master signifier’ or that none is imposed upon her, but rather that access to a signifying economy, to the coming of signifiers, is difficult or even impossible for her because she remains an outsider, herself (a) subject to their norms. She borrows signifiers but cannot make her mark, or re-mark upon them. Which all surely keeps her deficient, empty lacking, in a way that could be labeled ‘psychotic’: a latent but not actual psychosis, for want of a practical signifying system.” (1974b, 71) in Psychoanalyses/feminisms Peter L. Rudnytsky, Andrew Gordon (2000:61-2) 96 Psychoanalyses/feminisms Peter L. Rudnytsky, Andrew Gordon ‘Irigaray does not tie herself to Freud’s exact words, preferring instead to laugh at his theories. She repeats Lacan’s gesture of claiming, ‘Freud, the very name is a laugh.”’ (Lacan 1975, 157) (2000:63)
157
24. Majena Mafe 2010 12789 Ventriloquist Project Pinker Sound QUT Precinct
158 25. Majena Mafe 2010 12789 Ventriloquist Project Pinker Sound
4.4.3 SOUNDAGE: a DIGITAL OPERA(TION)
One major outcome of my engagement with sound as soundage is the digital opera
SOUNDAGE: a DIGITAL OPERA(TION) drawn from Gertrude Stein’s text Two.
SOUNDAGE moves from being a translation of Stein’s text to becoming a transcoding of it. This work is a transcoding into another genre and an interpretation of it through another medium, that of digital data. In this work I intend to demonstrate that the digital as an interpretation tool enables new readings of Stein’s work by re-presenting formerly unsaid or inhibited in writing (within print culture), anew, thus facilitating readings that allow submerged textual and social patterns to emerge. As interpretation aides, digital tools offer new kinds of evidence and uncover new opportunities for [re]situating the modernist works of Gertrude Stein as contemporary texts.
159
26. Majena Mafe still image from SOUNDAGE: a DIGITAL OPERA(TION) 2012
As I have previously described, within Two I found evidence of what I have come to call soundage as an embedded theory of sound that ascribe a new order of sound. No longer obfuscated though sound in language and sounded-language, soundage as a definable notion adds to the discussion of language within an ethical framework. This is particularly important when thinking of language as a becoming space that works in relation to the ‘other’ that includes difference – that is, includes that which is excluded, the ‘other’. This is a relationship that is evident in the borderspace between meaning and unmeaning, one that embraces the ‘other’ in a relational position similar to love.
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SOUNDAGE: a DIGITAL OPERA(TION) is the realisation of the practical application and performance of soundage working as a means of including the often-excluded
‘other’. I have named the work an OPERA(TION) because it involves more than the presentation of an operatic libretto/narrative. While OPERA(TION) involves a complex delivery and presentation of language as a libretto, SOUNDAGE acts as an operation, that is, as a procedure with some analysis of what it is to sing/say. As an act, the
OPERA(TION) creates something; as an action the OPERA(TION) is a process, a transaction within language.
27. Majena Mafe instillation of SOUNDAGE a DIGITAL OPERA(TION) 2012
The OPERA(TION) consists of variously-sized projections of animated ‘heads’ singing/speaking extracts from Two. They are arranged within a large darkened space almost as though on stage. Two large heads, the leads, sing the two language-sound-arias, whilst facing the audience. Behind these are placed the twenty heads of the chorus, which
161 sing/perform their version of Stein’s sound theory. The individual heads of the chorus change, one at a time, to different heads at two-minute intervals. En masse, the group of screens appears to flicker as the heads shift and deliver the sound piece. The heads themselves, made-up out of digitised and glitched classical paintings of nude women, are sexualised: their ears are oversize and their animated eyes and mouths are exaggerated in various ways. Each face is highly coloured, even lurid. In creating these ‘puppets’, and for me they work like puppets in their capacity to ventriloquise the sounds of language, the heads draw heavily on an aesthetic that has been long established in my work: that of the lurid, the exaggerated, the extreme digital artefact, be it sound or image, In this aesthetic I engage, as well, as with lowbrow and glitched technology.
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28. Majena Mafe still image from SOUNDAGE: a DIGITAL OPERA(TION) 2012
Digital failure is especially relevant to my project. What is digital failure? In terms of sound it is a move away from clarity, crispness of sound, and incorporates sound- feedback and sound-glitches into the work to the extent that they become the work itself.
In a similar way I have been interested in working with extending this type of failure into the visual rendering, making images that are grotesque and carnivalesque. In terms of the matrixial these ‘failures’ activate and present an in-between space for the audience that is at times uncomfortable and challenging. The grotesque theatricality of the heads or ventriloquised dummies is also important. As they sing in the dark they seemingly replicate the gesture of birth where the head faces outward in what is known as face presentation. The intensity and richness of the colour parallels the intensity of sound that
163 the works seemingly generate. The sound is thickened with the slurs of speech/song, and in production the sound has been modified and shifted so that both speaker delivery and volume vary.
In different ways the heads refer to both infancy and women. Birth is a raw state of becoming and in referencing birth and infancy the infantile head also stands in for the infantilisation of woman and what she can say.
29. Majena Mafe still image from SOUNDAGE: a DIGITAL OPERA(TION) 2012
I want to further explain that I justify the use of sexualised images of women in my work by saying my intention was to de-territorialise sexist images and re-make them. These
164 new faces of women are able to speak for themselves. While giving agency to woman the ventriloquised heads are nevertheless still engaged in what I see as the puppetry of language. The effect I was after in constructing these visual images was that of exaggeration, a heightened experience.
Indeed, the works seem to offer exaggerated effect beyond that of the sensible. This is why there are so many screens. I wanted to produce the effect of a choir of voices, but generating a cacophony rather than a single or integrated chorus. This layering/complication is extended by in adding to the density of the sound in
OPERA(TION). I added generic sound loops from Garage-band software and cut-ups of various found sounds to the previously scored and manipulated text. For example, I have used parts of the soundtrack to the opera by the German composer, Boris Blachner,
Abstract Opera No 1, which I then played backwards and put through various ‘other’ reinterpretations. This was overlaid with brief, simply-composed runs from a small range of instruments/sounds in garage band. This worked to leaven the spoken/sung track by adding moments of dry humour, and generally thickened and complicated the sound, helping to turn the work into a field of intensities.
As a consequence of my orientation towards the notion of a field, when engaging with my work, the reader/viewer/listener is forced to look/ listen into the becoming ground of objects. As a psychological study, SOUNDAGE: a DIGITAL OPERATION poses questions of subjectivity, agency, language and difference in terms of engaging with the
165 ‘other.’ By this I mean listening to the ‘other,’ but also being the ‘other’ listening - as in listening with a third ear. Within the work the heads are engaged with the matrixial in that they are positioned as if they emulate their effect from a between space, somewhere between non(sense) and sense, somewhere between meaning and unmeaning, and somewhere between being and becoming: that is, from an in-between space. The work
‘plays’ the communication game, but in its intensities it also scrambles language into something ‘other’ through self-reflection and mirroring. In their articulation of subjectivity the heads also engage with each other in relation in a type of digital love game, playing with the sounds that have been placed in their throats, which are, in effect, the throats of the machine of language.
The work is autobiographical in that it represents my own frustrations and voice-play with language. The thickness of the chorus of lisps reflects for me a type of language that
I am predisposed to because of my dyslexia. By highlighting the grotesque ‘beauty’ in this type of language, I open up channels of engagement between me and my audience, and between me and my own auditory framework.
Each screen projection works as part of a cacophonous field; they start as a chorus, speaking/singing simultaneously, and very gradually slip out of synch. Two projections present themselves as the central leads of the opera. These leads are each framed by the choruses. As previously mentioned the heads work as ventriloquised dummies that have been set up to sing/speak the digitised (text to sound) script/score derived from Two.
166 While I have talked previously of the importance of ventriloquism to my work I now want to explain here how the notion of ventriloquism has been involved in the creation of the voice for the OPERA(TION). For me the process of making the animations sing was similar to making a wooden puppet speak, but using digital languaging systems. The voice/sound of the work is a process created from transcoding text to speech, through text-to-speech digital software. The voices are those of Vickie, Victoria and Kathy, three female voices freely available and downloadable through internet and software providers; they are also supplied on most computers as a basic add-on. These voices are ‘other-ed’ in that they are purely synthetic, digitised simulacra of women’s voices. These voices speak in the same measured tones on porn sites for the blind and as the distribution voices of advertising jingles.
167 30. Majena Mafe still image from SOUNDAGE: a DIGITAL OPERA(TION) 2012
In my creative practice, my works are focused on the engagement and performativity of soundage; they communicate and explore the idea of soundage, but they also are soundage. I am interpreting Stein’s ideas through contemporary digital frameworks and media. My interest lies in opening up spaces within the digital that can explore and perform sound in and through the virtual and the matrixial. So for me the practice/theory relationship continues to be dialogic in text and sound and visual media, and the relationships between them. I will go on to show, in the next chapter, I have combined them to create a further networked creative/theoretical work.
4.4.4 GIRRL girrlsound :: digital girrl organisation
The second major culmination of this project is the development of an international networked site for women working in sound called GIRRL. After scoring Stein’s text Two for sound to create a sound theory and testing that theory through my own creative work,
I began to think of how to disseminate a synthesis of the work through a digital networked framework. This developed into thinking of how to find ways to create more socially engaged, networked works as a larger part of my practice.
168 With this in mind I founded an international networked organisation called GIRRL girrlsound :: digitalgirrl.97 GIRRL grew out of other web-based sites that I created during the research for this PhD. In particular GIRRL grew out of my online sound research space, titled that-unsound blog/web space,98 within which I had collected examples of sound-based work. that-unsound works as an assemblage space for research on sound in language, especially where it is marginal to but related to the canon of critical theory. that-unsound has had over 7,830 log-ins over a three year period, which shows me that there is significant interest in sound studies with a marginal twist. During my research I also created and collaborated on many ‘other’ web-based research spaces, for example
Multi-Mary Manifesto,99 which collects a range of feminist manifestos for creative works to initiate conversation around ways of working. Another web project art+research+art,100 links artists and questions together. It is aimed at emerging artists playing in the fields of both art and research. All these blogs functioned as experimental networked spaces that put me in touch with a wide community of people working in a variety of theoretical orientations and creative practices. GIRRL is a natural outgrowth of all these initiatives.
GIRRL has two sub groups. The first, Girrlsound, promotes and represents women work/thinking/researching in sound through a number of ways. The second, Digitalgirrl promotes and represents women working in the digital arts, encouraging new innovative
97 Mafe. GIRRL http://www.girrl-girrlsound-digitalgirrl.org/ 98 Mafe. that-unsound, http://that-unsound.blogspot.com.au/ 99 Mafe. Multi-maryfesto http://multi-maryfesto.blogspot.com.au/ 100 Mafe. art+research+art. http://artresearchart.blogspot.com.au/
169 work, offering critique and distribution. The vision of GIRRL is to support and encourage women’s creative and critical engagement as active co-creators in contemporary culture.
It is for women who are saying things with sound, creating new digital languages and technologies. In other words, GIRRL’s mission is to present a co-creative networked space within which to promote, appreciate and acknowledge women’s unique contribution to the field of sonic and digital arts. GIRRL provides distribution and publication opportunities for women, offers links to new sound and digital collaborative relationships, and presents women’s sonic work for review and discussion. On the GIRRL website there is a growing list of interviews with contemporary artists and pioneers in women’s sound and digital arts. GIRRL also hosts a blog space that features new and innovative use of sound and digital media. GIRRL has a very active on Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/groups/222176084467779/, and since its launch in October
2011, has acquired more than 200 members.
GIRRL arranges and presents sound projects, exhibitions and events as well as local and web-based workshops in sound technology and creativity, and professional practice and offers opportunities for artists to collaborate with one another. In addition, locally organised events such as meetings and presentations by sonic and digital artists are held in association with GIRRL at The Glasshouse, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, and workshops, performances and presentations are held in various Brisbane venues. I plan to extend the range of events coordinated through GIRRL to other major cities within
Australia. GIRRL has been partnered in these events with QUT Creative Industries
Precinct, Griffith’s Conservatory of Music, and Room 40 in Brisbane.
170
As a web-based networked organisation, GIRRL is international in its reach. Whilst
GIRRL’s base is in Brisbane, GIRRL members activate sound and data from all over the world. This is in keeping with GIRRL’s aim to make links and partnerships with regional and international organisations to build the community of creative women working in the sonic and digital arts. GIRRL is setting up hubs in New York and London, Finland and
Russia. These hubs will host their own events that can be shared with a larger networked audience. The London base is very interested in setting up collaboration opportunities for women to work within networked spaces to facilitate new work and is setting up the framework to make this possible.
A further aspect of GIRRL is an annual symposium. The first of these symposia, Excess of Sound, was held in Brisbane, Australia in May 2012. Papers of the conference proceedings are available from the GIRRL website. The symposium helped serve as a forum for international sound artists to disseminate ideas, to present the work, creative work research and ‘other’ professional activities of GIRRL members and Australian women working in sonic arts. Visiting Canadian sound artist and theorist Erin Gee was the keynote speaker. A larger symposium is planned for 2013 on the voice and sound art.
A key ingredient in the development of this research project has been my interest in feminist theory and ethical language frameworks that include the female voice as ‘other’, these are outlined well by Flanagan in her undated article Hyperbodies. Hyperknowledge:
171 Women in Games, Women in Cyberpunk, and Strategies of Resistance, where she talks in some detail of the epistemological implications found in women’s work within the digital arena. I am very drawn to the potential for language as knowledge, as it is facilitated within digital communication media and systems. At the same time I am also very aware of how little promotion of or interest in women in the sonic arts, sound theory and in digital communication exists in general. This is an unfortunate situation that I am interested in working to address. I am inspired in this work by the writing of Jean Fisher.
In her undated online essay Reflections on Echo - Sound by Women Artists in Britain,
Fisher talks of a “depreciation of the female voice and a usurpation of its creative potential found in contemporary media representations.” This is something that I wanted to be engaged in changing, and in setting up GIRRL and the things I have been able to establish through ‘her’ already, I feel I have come some way in doing that.
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Chapter V.
The Anticipation and Implications for Soundage
She is the anticipation of conviction ... She is the anticipation of crossing. She is the anticipation of regeneration. She is the anticipation of excelling obligation. She is the actualization … Stein, 1951:107
5.1 Implications and Conclusion
In my introduction to this thesis, I indicated I intended to explore what the sound in
Stein’s text Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother is doing. I asked myself, what it was?; how it operated?; what it called forth and is missed?; what the speaking of it entailed?; and what were its characteristics and position within language and meaning? Through answering my thesis question, what the sound in Stein’s text Two: Gertrude Stein and her
Brother doing and what does it mean for language in the broadest possible sense I have been able to engage with and re-activate a broad field of sound making and meaning within Stein’s work. This has been an engagement with sound in its complicated physiological phenomenon, a type of ontoacoustic emission, from the position of being a sonic artist, engaged in practice-led research with a strong interest in creating feminist
173 ethical language frames. It has enabled me to begin sounding out a frame understanding how such sound works and has provided me with a perspective to proceed further in research along this lines.
In attempting to answer the thesis question I established four findings or outcomes for my project. In brief these are:
1) The presentation of a new perspective on Gertrude Stein as an early and innovative theorist of sound.
2) A reading of Stein’s use of sound in three modes and the creation of a theory of sound identified as soundage, and the situating of it alongside contemporary philosophy and post-structural psychoanalytical theory.
3) The creative development and realisation of the notion of soundage in my own creative work. This consisting of the myriad of sound and sound and image works which I created as part of this project, the articles and essays and creative writing pieces I’ve written, the blog sites both creative and research based, and finally the digital opera, SOUNDAGE a
DIGITAL OPERA(TION), that presents soundage for us all to hear with our third ear.
4) A further outcome is the setting up of GIRRL.org (http://www.girrl-girrlsound- digitalgirrl.org/) as an ongoing and emergent digital network, providing a digital forum for women to present research and generate new work in the areas of sound, and sound and language.
174 I will now expand on these findings.
1.
The first and most significant finding is that the close reading and listening to how the sound in Stein’s Two performed and articulated itself through the text, reveals a complex and thorough engagement with sound in language, but not sound as music or as poetry,
Stein here is outlining a type of new quality of perception and communication, situating
Stein as pioneer sound artist and theorist. In Two Stein presents sound sounding out its own voice as both a creative object and a philosophical object, as she presents sound in its physical and psychoacoustic properties, both working to establish a framework of love and relatedness in language through sound. Further to this, Stein’s work establishes sound as a quality of language with its own inherent voice and engagement with meaning. This
‘new’ sound has implications for how we view the limits of language and how we think of ourselves in relation to both language and sound. This is especially evident through my close reading of Two revealing language as sound embracing ‘other’ ways of engaging with meaning, including notions of being and what it is to say, and that in this sound in language becomes relevant to an ethical framework that resonates with the feminist language project particularly because it extends the parameters of logical meaning. It is also significant that Two shapes language so it itself can speak, something that has not been achieved through sound in this way before. And lastly and most significantly, the work of Two opens language to deep relationships of love that reverberate within meaning/unmeaning, making them one. The way Two presents sound changes what we understand as the workings of language and its borders. In this it also impacts on how we
175 previously or currently understand sound itself. Sound, Stein’s, bottom nature of language is reactivating itself in Two, to such an insistent and well mapped degree that I have read it as an emergent theory of sound in language, one that I have called soundage.
2.
The second finding established the significance of aspects of soundages qualities reverberating in particular in contemporary critical and feminist theory. Though examination of soundage as a theory of sound in its affect mode is clearly in its infancy, I believe further examination could have significance in terms of how this quality of sound as soundage could be constituted even further, and in greater detail, as both a philosophic and a sound object with broad significance to ethical and generative language frames for communication especially in terms of the digital age of communication that we are now within.
As previously stated, during this PhD project the text Two and soundage were examined not through traditional formal analysis but rather in relation to a range of contemporary post-structuralist and feminist ideas. In examining my thesis question, I found significant and creative precedence for my ‘thinking through sound,’ in post-structural thinking. One could even say that post-structural thinking contains much of the groundwork for receiving Stein’s theory of sound and it follows my theory of soundage. Indeed I found that Stein’s notion of sound could be received even in its non(sense) when read within current post-structuralist notions of delire (Lecercle) in particular, and feminist post- structuralist notions of the borderspace (Ettinger) and love (Irigaray) as a relational
176 dynamic encompass its breadth and particular type of activation and affect. Specifically it was Irigaray’s notion of jouissance and love as a space of blurred and evanescent boundaries that provided the way to understand soundage as a place of eternal reverberatory engagement without borders. When I placed soundage against Bracha
Ettinger’s concept of the matrixial borderspace it reflected on the qualities of soundage as they related to meaning and becoming in a larger, largest, framework of meaning bordering the symbolic order. To my mind both Irigaray and Ettinger’s work contribute to understanding Stein’s articulation of the qualities of soundage and indicate the breadth and scope of further readings of it within contemporary theory, particularly psychoanalytic best in terms of their engagement with relational spaces of love. Given these forms of reflection and is ultimately through my own reading of Two that I find soundage itself articulating its own territories and relationships in terms of being, meaning and language. It is my intention to focus on this aspect of soundage in further research, keeping in mind one has to listen and listen in particular and perhaps more complex ways to do so.
But to sum up the significance of Stein’s work on sound and the theory I take from it of soundage for contemporary critical theory is that this understanding of sound in language changes the very notion of how we think, who then we can be, and how we understand ourselves in terms of and more specifically in relation to the ‘other.’ This is a space increasingly needing extension within communication and the digital dialectics being written and thought of today and tomorrow.
177
3.
The third finding was established directly within my own creative work, where I stretched sound in language to its multiple and emergent borderspaces, thereby complicating traditional notions of aesthetic and literary meaning. In this I produced the effusive and reverberatory affect of soundage in the creative works that accompanied this research. My creative engagement with the sound within Two, plus contemporary critical theory instigated my experiments and contributed to the tropes and creative devices I used in the many small and final large finished creative work, titled SOUNDAGE a
Digital Opera(tion).
In testing soundage I asked could such a sound, born in text a hundred years ago, be made workable today through contemporary digital media? I asked this from a position of being a practice-led researcher, writer and sonic artist. With this in mind I attempted to score the sound in Stein’s text Two and then soundage in a myriad of ways. My intention was to transcode it into the digital data in as many ways as possible. While most of these transcodings failed, if one thinks of a logical or literal direct translation as success, their failure opened up ways to both re-read and to re-make their unmeaning. In this though the scores of the text consistently indicated a break with common sense they led to my examination of delire or non(sense) as an equally valid form of knowledge. These developments allowed glitching of language, sound and meaning to be a creative possibility within the transcoding of Stein’s original text. Though it is impossible to tangibly grasp soundage, I did find openings that pointed to it within the digital creative
178 works from these engagements, which included experimental texts, sound scores, sound works, digital sound and image operas etc. The work led directly to working with the notion of ventriloquism as a method, which produced a core of my work and also opened the way for exploring that notion further as a creative method with texts and sound in the future. More work in this area awaits me, especially in terms of the scope of soundage within digital culture and literacy, remix culture and sound theory.
4.
Finally my fourth outcome was established while I was working with sound in relation to digital media. In this context the space of the digital network as an emergent, virtual
‘sound’ space became increasingly important to me as a place to work with soundage in a fluid and relational engaging space that allowed layers and reverberations of networking.
Throughout the second half of my research period I began to ask myself, could this new theory of sound be so situated as to be continually engaging with contemporary culture and thereby setting up particular reverberations within it? In attempting to explore possibilities for this I created an ongoing international and on-line site of sounding explorations through the digital networked organisation, GIRRL.org. (http://www.girrl- girrlsound-digitalgirrl.org/). GIRRL is an online space for women working with sound.
As a place of community and so relation, GIRRL fuels the kinds of generative dialogues that could and can exist within such a space. This organisation allows for a particular range of sharing, discussion and publishing of research, all with the aim of promoting new sound work by women in the digital and sonic arts but also in literature and theory.
179 I pointed out early in this thesis that to be really heard, the sound in Stein’s text Two needed listening to with a serious and sympathetic ear. In earlier chapters I have called this ear a third ear based on Kim-Cohen’s notion of the non-cochlear. It is only through this frame, that understanding the full impact of Stein’s sound, manifesting as soundage, is possible. Though my own engagement from the borders of my own dyslexic thinking has produced an evocative and rich but ever shifting frame of meaning/unmeaning to integrate my research enthusiasms and where they led me, I believe it is possible for others to hear it as well. As Stein indicates language is a riddle filled complexity, a complexity sounding out its meaning. Given this, my exploring of Stein, as an early pioneer and initiator of sound theory and what I now call soundage, and the development on the qualities of soundage itself anticipates further developments of a truly generative language one with possible trajectories of thought regarding sound and language for future research in terms of women’s voice.
Future implications for research in this area could be focused on various approaches to understanding further and in more detail the affect of soundage, the psychoanalytical and philosophic spaces it opens within language and within meaning especially in terms of feminist ethical language frameworks. The ground spelt out in this research also points the way to explore how soundage works in terms of all digital media and its languages of compressed data be it text, sound based, or visual as they all in essence are a combination of language, zero and ones, that in themselves ‘must’ sound. And lastly and for me most compellingly it opens the way for further research on Stein. This thesis indicates that a new understanding of Gertrude Stein as a significant and contemporary sound theorist
180 needs to take place. From there an exploration of her development of sound and its implications in her later work and her work as a whole would undoubtedly reveal more insights into how she understood sound in language to work.
“Listen to me,” said Stein. “Not every belief that has translation is not all there is of exultation.” (Stein, 1951:142)
Listen.
Let me listen to me and not to them May I be very well and happy May I be whichever they can thrive Or just may they not. They do not think not only only But always with prefer And therefore I like what is mine For which not only willing but willingly Because which it matters. They find it one in union. In union there is strength. (Stein 1994:49)
181
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APPENDICES
Two In Sound: Sound In Two, That’s Three
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Contents of Appendix:
APPENDIX ONE Theme Index from Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother by Gertrude Stein
APPENDIX TWO Instructions To Read/Hear Two (or how to infect you with too ear)
APPENDIX THREE An Analysis of Gertrude Stein’s Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother, read for Sound, Theme, & Syntactical Meaning
APPENDIX FOUR My Own Work Architecture of the Throat- Notes on Performative Compositions (2008-2012)
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APPENDIX ONE
Theme Index taken from Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother by Gertrude Stein
Art 117(she says, art did not express everything)
Anticipation 107(hitting the pin – she is anticipation)
Argument 81(him), 103(him), 113(him the old way)
Asking 43(her), 48(sound asking), 118(she did not ask every question) becoming(Being) 3, 7, 6(thing in being), 17, 26, 27, 42(linking being knowing completing expressing), 45(through sound emphasizing), 48(her sound loving being existing), 106(she was the first to be the last- she was reflecting what was missing)
Beginnings 38(his)
Believing 43
Connection 17, 18
Consciousness 54(sound is conscious)
Completing 43
Continuous (present) 59, 69(her beginning to continue), 136(she, sounding sound is expressing that which is continuing - the continuous present)
Difference 3, 4, 19, 36, 37
Emphasizing 9
Exceeding 57(she/sound was), 104(he was not sublime), 137(steaming and surging)
Explaining 13(him), 46(him), 108(marvelous articulation), 109(the articulation was not surprising)
Expressing 1, 14(him), 24, 32, 39, 66(he expressing what he is knowing), 68(he arranging what he is knowing, query grammar), 92(she said all she said carefully), 93(she opposing) 94(he statement of staying), 95(saying is showing), 98(he agreed and denied), 108(marvelous articulation), 109(the articulation was not surprising), 116(not expressing meaning refused…whistling not expressing everything), 132(he did not have the voice- the whole sound), 133(she conversation not the same as sound which is duller, he only reached the outside), 142(she, a belief that has translation is not all there is of exultation)
Event 9(sound is coming out), 10(sound is), 11(sound is)
Friction/frisson 86(backwards and forwards, 107(she did she did not)
Giving 56-7(she)
Judging 43(him), 44(him), 45(him)
Knowledge 78(she is not stupid), 79(he, facts)
Language 69(she was not attacking language), 70-71(she did not leave language), 108(marvelous articulation), 109(the articulation was not surprising), 117(she did not learn al of language)
Listening 7, 10 (hearing him), 12, 16(sound not listening), 22, 25, 41-42(hearing), 76(meaning to hear and not hearing),
197 80(he not listening), 81(him argument not listening), 88(she felt all she heard), 107(a distinctive noise was heard as his cloths were burning)
Loving 14, 46(him not loving), 47(not loving), 47(her loving), 48(her sound loving being existing), 50(loving is existing for her), 53(she-extreme thinking/feeling)
Making 90(sound making), 109(the way)
Meaning 9, 15, 24, 30, 70-71(she did not leave language she was staying and giving meaning), 71(his discoveries re meaning), 73(she discovered meaning with feeling), 87(meaning-being), 106(she was the first to be the last, she was reflecting what was missing), 109(the articulation was not surprising), 123(she was not moving as she was emphasizing. And he did not ask if he could divide meaning), 133(she, sound was meaning something), 133(the room of meaning sound was meaning something), 139(she says his sound does not pale the range of reason), 142(she, a belief that has translation is not all there is of exultation)
Nonsense 11(troubling-stirring), 107(hitting the pin), 126(she was the particle) the whole text examines the shape, the sound of non-sense. otherness 10, 118(she did not tire out it was all of the ‘other’), 141(she accepts the ‘other’ behind the persona)
Particle 136(a small aspect of speech)
Pleasure 10(her)
Precision 110(him)
Quivering 49(her)
Reason 139(parting the face of reason)
Repeating 55(she repeat), 56 (she repeats – the nature of sound)
Sound 1, 4(filling), 6-7(as thing), 8(as something), 9, 10(pleasure), 11(troubling-stirring), 15(as something), 17(telling) 27(sounding), 45(long description), 48(her sound loving being existing), 57(exceeding she/sound was), 56-7- 8(she/sound expressing), 59-60(saying the whole thing continually), 66(sound waits –anticipation), 75(she was sound sounding), 78(sound fills), 90(sound making), 105(sound not destitute), 106(slipping sound sounding), 107(she with laudation and intoning), 108(marvelous articulation), 111(he coming into sound that was accompanying something), 116(he was leaving-he did not have the sound), 133(she, sound was meaning something), 133(she conversation not the same as sound which is duller, he only reached the outside), 133(the room of meaning sound was meaning something), 136(she the tune was one element sound not expressing all of excess, sounding sound is expressing that which is continuing), 138(she says he cannot hurt the hum),139(she says his singing was not expressing any division, not expressing moving, he was not singing), 139(she says his sound does not pale the range of reason), 142(she, a belief that has translation is not all there is of exultation)
Sublime 104(he was not sublime), 133(the room of meaning sound was meaning something), 136(she, sound not expressing al of excess), 142(she, a belief that has translation is not all there is of exultation)
Thinking 6(she), 7(he), 51(he), 52(thinking thinks its thinking), 53(she-extreme thinking), 139(she says paling the range of reason), 142(she, a belief that has translation is not all there is of exultation)
Two 122(two halves and the whole)
The Way 109(the way), 113(he found the old way) 114(he accumulated all he said), 119(the way= union)
The Work 88(her work was feeling and doing), 88(his work was increasing the light), 101(she had the succeeding), 105(he did achieve the light that was bright), 118(she did not tire out it was all of the ‘other’ ie sound)
Theory 90(sound making), 109(the way), 119(her theory) 123(she was not moving as she was emphasizing), 125(she autograph and not authority), 136(she, sounding sound is expressing that which is continuing- the continuous present –it is winged), 139(she says paling the range of reason), 142(she, a belief that has translation is not all there is of exultation)
Union 119(the way= union), 126 (she long passage), 142(she, the pleasing reunion was not in seeing)
(Un)meaning The whole text explores the border of non-sense and un-meaning.
Visuality 89(his work increasing it and through that burning), 142(she, the pleasing reunion was not in seeing)
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APPENDIX TWO
Instructions To Read/Hear Two (or how to infect you with too ear)
Gertrude Stein has been saying for over a hundred years now, ‘Let me listen to myself and not to them …’ In her text Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother she says ‘Sound is coming out of her …’ And with this opening she goes on to say that sound sounds sound and so, meaning and ultimately being, repeatedly. Stein’s project introduces us to the notion that to ‘work in the excited-ness of pure being … to get back that intensity into language’ is to build a new relationship to sound. In saying sound, Stein has positioned a new ‘subject/object’ to be heard in language, that of a sound theory that I name soundage. Through this notion she positions herself as a sounding board to reflect this enigmatic and ‘basic’ sound quality of language and languaging - expounding/performing/ theorizing what sound in language is and does.
There are many ways through this labyrinth of a text, and none of them are the ‘right’ way. I have decided for the sake of future scholars of Stein to offer my detailed readings of the text here. I do this for a number of reasons. Stein’s register of meaning repeatedly interrupts any sort of analysis, making of it a mockery, though she states she does not intend to. Her ideas are always spilling out of the work, out of language and meaning. So I am going to outline Two theme by theme and page-by-page. Though this takes a number of pages it is the most essential way to ground what I wish to go on and say about Gertrude Stein’s contribution to knowledge.
Reading is always a rereading of text a ventriloquiseing project, a reinterpretation of the ‘original’. Any reading tends to disruption. This one is no exception. The text contains its own instructions for both reading and understanding it.
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APPENDIX THREE
An Analysis of
Gertrude Stein’s Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother
Read for Sound, Theme, & Syntactical meaning
SOUND
Two is a text full of sound. You will find sound becoming and being making sense and nonsense making meaning and (un)meaning here at every level and in every way. Here you will find sound performing as the event of language and if you listen carefully as the something more.
THEME
There are two layers of theme to Two, two separate but interwoven readings reading one Two is an outlining of a relationship between a man and a woman, men and women and or between Gertrude Stein and Leo Stein her Brother and/or her ‘‘other’’ Brothers that is, her intellectual peers. On the surface if it seems to refer to Leo, and reading into it with biographical facts here (re such texts as James R Mellows Charmed Circle (1991), Janet Hobhouse’s Everybody who was Anybody – a biography of Gertrude Stein … (1975), John Malcolm Brinnin’s The Third Rose - Gertrude Stein and her World (1987)), Leo likes art and art criticism. Gertrude Stein likes words and meaning, and going to the core of things. Leo likes to explain, to be seen as the genius, and Gertrude just ‘is’ the genius. Gertrude does genius work. Leo does not like Stein’s thinking and some of her speaking. Leo is deaf. [Literally] He turns away from many things. Stein outlines his losses, losses that he does not recognize, leaving more than the shared house/home, leaving an open conversation, an open engagement with being, with living, he becomes as hard as wood, but specifically his rejection of her ... He admonishes her. He tells her she is wrong. He is certain. He ‘knows’ she can’t write. Gertrude is writing. Gertrude continues to be writing is ‘in’ writing’ her texts and in this is thinking and it is upsetting to Leo. On the level of relationship, Gertrude is also ‘in love.’ There are three. Leo is left out. Leo doesn’t want love he wants facts and opinions. Differences become their only ‘being’ together. Leo refuses this ‘being,’ Leo leaves, not in the text, he leaves after the text is completed. Gertrude Stein continues on, to happily write.
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If we read Two as about a purely abstract ‘she’ and ‘he’… she and he are similar and yet different, they each have ‘sound inside them’ but he doesn’t hear it in the same way as she does. She listens to it and realizes it is expressing ‘being.’ He, when he hears it, tries to analyze it, contain it, and limit it. She is open to the continuing unfolding of it. She likes to ‘feel’ it rise up in her and in this she hears that it is meaning itself. Meaning in its ‘way of being and in its sound’. He on the ‘other’ hand, ‘knows’ he is meaning and engages in making meaning himself in his way. He does not hear much. He does not hear the maker of meaning, sound. He turns instead fiercely to looking and analyzing looking, he is critical of what others see in looking. He is the best ‘looker.’ He advises others on the right way of seeing. He turns away from hearing them … their difference. Any difference. reading two This text on this reading is outlining a ‘quality’ being expressed (even discovered) mapped at least, through language that ‘she’ (really Gertrude Stein), examines and explicates and calls sound. This sound sounds meaning, which because it is anything and everything includes the performance of sound ‘itself.’
This is a new thing, a pretty big thing, an unfixed thing, a becoming being thing/space, similar in scope and in terms of its holding of meaning qualities with what we call everything. Stein outlines this ‘quality’ – literally sounds it out, through compressing and beating the rhythms of the binary of two, in difference and similarity. This binary dynamic reaches towards a type of ecstatic union of the two either constantly or eventually. There is a marriage of the two as the too much. But the two is really a code for multiple beings and then a frame for two ways of thinking, the old way and a second ecstatic whole sounded way … that hears itself and adds that to meaning. This new way reads like a Gnostic feminine fury entering the text and then language. Stein works with this and makes herself and language new. It is a creative language constantly re-sounding itself. It is this reading that this theory is focused on.
SYNTAX-ICAL MEANING
Within linguistics syntax is from the Greek to arrange - together - an ordering, the term is used for studying the frames of constructed sentences as they shape their components into or towards meaning. The term syntax is also used to refer to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, in mathematics and computer logic. I am using it here to hold qualities and behavior of sound as it ‘works’ in language (and to point out their overlaps with linguistic meaning).
In terms of the text Two the syntax-ical meaning is one built from both language and the sound of it, pointing out that fort Stein ‘her’ sound is the sound of ‘‘other’’ meanings and the ‘‘other’ing of meaning.’ In this Stein, ‘syntaxes’ sound. Turning it into an ‘other’ order … To understand this one needs to read the text. So lets begin systematically from the beginning, in Two’s opening sentence …
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MY READING OF GERTRUDE STEIN’S WORK TWO: GERTRUDE STEIN AND HER BROTHER
One page 1 Gertrude Stein says,
The sound there is in them comes out from them.
So first sound is. This is the beginning. The texts’ opening is sound. It is Stein’s premise. It comes out from them. It’s nature ‘is’. And in being/doing that it comes out of the text. It comes out also from the language… both are living and knowing there are two of them one of them is a man and one is a woman, each make their own sound … each of them has their own sound inside them, each one of the two of them.
Each one of them is having sound coming out of them. Sound is in each of them. They are each one of them having it come out of them the sound inside them.
Sound is, ‘the sound there is in them, comes out of them’ The situation is emphasizing that sound is. In fact sound has already happened. It has happened (inside) and now is moving. We will go on to find this sound
… is equal and moves outward [the sound] comes out from them.
… there has always been sound … there always will be …
… they are completely alike in having sound come out of them.
But for now there has always been sound. The two are in some way evenly sounding through each one of them having sound coming out of them … a chorus if you will. A small chorus.
But by the third paragraph then there is suddenly expeditionally ‘more.’ More confusion, complication and ‘‘other’’ factors enter the discussion. The ‘two’ of them, for we do seem to have two at the beginning, is changed when Stein indicates now that …
… there are not two of them. There is one of them, and there is one of them. There are sometimes two of them, the one and another one.
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… two becomes ‘one’ and or, at the same time which is now, ‘ones.’ Perhaps this is indicating that there are two ones, two of them as two separate ones … or two or if this was math’s twenty-two.
By now you will have some sense of the sound of sound and the complication of this in Two. On the opening page presenting 30 sentences there are 16 mentions of sound, ‘sounding’ in various guises. But lets settle down and read this text page by page, keeping your ear open for how sound operates not just between the two but in them and so in language.
On page 2 we have …
Sound is coming out of each one of them. A good deal of sound is coming out of each one of them one is a man. One of them is a woman. They are completely alike in each being one having had sound come out of them.
The multiple reverts to two again … then ‘the them’ is being - becoming multiple.
Given this they are completely alike in sound. They do make sound ‘She’ and ‘he’ ‘make’ sound come out. Both have been ones that are comprised of single units. They are like. They are also not unlike. There is difference …! They are changing meaning as they go on living more meaning in beginning … and this is the difference. They are alike. They are not a-like, and or a-likes. Past present and future.
Here is the first mention of hearing …
…the one is one hearing himself and making sounds then with that thing. The ‘other’ one is one hearing someone one being one and then making sounds of that thing. They are not alike. They are very much alike.
And this discussed by the text itself and the two discuss it themselves, and seeming to teach ‘other’, but as it is perhaps ‘too’… (much?) they both, though they respond do not seem to hear each ‘other’. They are involved with the sounding. They are making and changing and being changed by sound-ing.
They are alike in making sounds that have meanings when they make them [but] one is hearing himself and making sounds the ‘other’ one [she] is hearing, hearing someone and then making sounds of that thing. They are not alike.
203 With inserted [but’s] there is difference. They are then not alike in this respect, is it in terms of meaning? This and ‘other’ profound differences are formulated and get unformed, throughout the text of Two, unpicked beautifully lovingly and in the end wholly, with the aim of building something inclusive of this difference, with this ‘other’ …
Hearing is tied up with this and in some way important for [her] ‘being.’
And among all this sound is suddenly linked to meaning … Stein writes about sound changing meaning.
They are alike in making sounds that have more meaning than beginning. They are alike in making sounds that have when they are making them.
Have…? Whatever this means, it’s meaning must be important – it is introduced early in the text, right after the two ‘him’ and ‘her’ (fronts for multiples) are introduced … their sound ‘means.’ This alone is enough to write a whole thesis … there is even more to hear (here).
Page 3 By page 3, already ones thinking is that these pages are so full of the reverb of the sound of the sound word the pages are lapping sound and producing sound as laps. They are so heavily rhythm-ed my tongue starts to ‘feel’ the recurring pattern on front of my palette of saying ‘sound’ over and over again … (like a seed sound) now building reverberations - densities … meaning has shifted to its excesses …
…they both of them have sound coming out of them that have too much meaning for the ending that is sounding out of them.
There is an ending. It reads like a deep pause - a concern a break. Too much the ‘ending meaning’ for what? What does this mean? Too much meaning for language?
Stein, as the author, says,
They are different in the same, being and existing.
One wonders, is this singing? I wonder and Stein is there before me saying ‘Sound is not singing - soundings coming are talking, expressing. Singing can be expressing, I think- this must be different still.
But then something is happening and it is in ‘him’ first – the ‘hims’ (note: it is important not to forget this. ‘he’ is always multiple). ‘One of them is hearing sound ‘being’, ‘expressing being’. And ‘he’ heard it first, expressing being …
Then, small dramatic shifts appear when ‘she’ heard ‘it’ secondly, (and I feel like I’m reading Hansel and Gretel walking down the path to the forest and the gingerbread house) ‘She’ heard ‘it’ and/as ‘she’ did sound it, then something shifted and sound really came
204 out of ‘her’ then. So by page three we have another multiple excessing … not just an excessing ‘him’ and ‘her’ but an expressing of excessing sound.
Two’s pages become chorus like - fields of word chant. A sound field.
What follows then begins the big discussion of difference & sameness. This is central to the text … and this in itself is in relation to sound. Because it is sound talking and not singing for example.
Sound having been coming out of each one of them is something that has been being existing.
Being existing.
They are not one singing. They are ones being ones talking. Sound is coming out of them and some of the sound that is coming out of them is coming as talking.
So not singing. Partly talking. Sound is talking.
The two of them are ones expressing that thing expressing being ones having the sound come out of them, the sound that is coming out of them.
So expressing it's important. At the bottom of this page hearing.
Sound is coming out of each one of them. One of the two of them is one having been one being one hearing sound being in him and one is having sound coming out of him.
Even though there is this difference they are alike in ‘both of them having sounds coming out of them that have too much meaning for the ending that is sounding out of them. ‘They are not ones singing’ they are talking the sound in them ‘has been existing’ ‘coming as talking’ ‘expressing that thing being ones having sound come out of them.’
Page 4 By page four, ‘she’ not ‘he,’ is different in that ‘she’ is having heard hearing sound. One heard when one heard ‘she’ really had sound come out of ‘her.’ And this sound filling ‘her,’ sound filling ‘her’ sounds becomes increasingly ecstatic here and as we shall see this ecstasy permeates the whole text, stepping up to intensity through density. In coming it was completely filling ‘her.’
She is one having sound filling her in coming completely filling her in coming out of her. She is one having sound filling, filling in coming out of her.
He is one filling himself with the thing, with the beginning, and the sound of that thing, the sound of that beginning filling is coming, has been coming out of him …
Though … They were both of them having noise come out of them …
They are not making the same sound. They are not making (sounding) the same sound.
205 There is difference – ‘she’ was thinking ‘she’ was different; ‘he’ wasn’t thinking, ‘he’ was. ‘He’ heard sound; ‘she’ heard the hearing of sound. There is a differing point of beginning, of origin. It is subtle its profound. Here is the first mention of ‘noise.’
They were both of them having noise come out of them. And ... She was thinking about being a different one …
Here they are very different from one another - So then begins thinking and talking about the difference.
And I note, there is a change here in the text (bottom paragraph). ‘She’ was different because sound was coming out of ‘her’?
But still only one is hearing and this is emphasized all through the text.
One of the two of them is one having heard hearing sound that is being existing …
And when she hears this sound, really having sound come out of her, the sound ‘filling’ ‘her’ fills ‘her’ completely. ‘He’ fills ‘himself’ with the beginning and ‘she’ repeatedly fills ‘herself’ with the continuing of sound ‘being.’ In that they are also both of them having ‘noise’ come out of them, this noise is different from sound but it is not explained how. This is the second big theme of difference following ‘his’ and ‘her’ different ‘beings’ in sound. This elements difference from sound is the first in a long line of differences some abstract and others quite foundational, and basic …
Now we are aligned. Lets notice the introduction of ‘otherness.’ Stein here indicates that sound sounding establishes otherness, she does this through discussing the difference in the ‘other’ (‘him’) repeatedly.
Each of them was different from the ‘other’ one. They were thinking about that thing thinking about being different each one from the ‘other’ one. Each one of them each one of the two of them was different than the ‘other’ one.
Page 5 By ‘his’ differences in terms of thinking ‘she’ is only ‘a kind of one’ one version of a oneness in a dichotomy. ‘His’ view is one of splits of two’s.
Even though there are two voices, two ‘sounds’ in Stein’s text, ‘hers’ and ‘his’… the voice and sound of ‘her,’ which I read as Stein’s herself, partly because of the title partly because of the position of the author within the text but more so based on the integration of these dialogues in relation to the whole of Stein’s project, … clearly dominates. It is the voice we are told to hear. It is the voice telling … and in itself, it alone as the one is two.
206 Here on page 5, Two now describes ‘him’ through and in relation to sound … which quickly becomes about ‘his’ sense of ‘himself’ in being … Where being and ‘his’ being is a lot about thinking … ‘his’ thinking. It is a portrait of ‘him’ through ‘his’ thinking about ‘himself,’ being.
He was not thinking about being a different one than the one she was being in being living. He was not thinking about this thing he was thinking about her being one and having had and having sound come out of her. He was thinking about his being one and he was thinking about sound having come out of him he was thinking about his being one being living he was thinking about her, he was thinking about her being one being a kind of one he was thinking about himself being one, he was thinking about sound having come about sound coming out of her.
So ‘he’ was thinking ‘she’ was a kind of one where ‘his’ ‘he’ was thinking of ‘himself’ as purely being.
‘She’ was thinking differently.
She was thinking in being one who was a different one in being one and he was in being one. Sound was coming out of her and she was knowing this thing. Sound had been coming out of him and she had been knowing this thing. She was thinking in being a different one than he was in having sound come out of her then was thinking about being a different one. She was thinking about that thing. She was knowing that thing. He had sound coming out of him, she was knowing this thing each of the two was different from the ‘other’ of them. Each one of them was knowing that thing. She was different from him in being one being living. She was knowing that thing … She was thinking this thing. She was thinking in this thing ... She was different from him.’
‘She’ was thinking in sound! ‘She’ was the one being different. ‘She was/is different than in being.
Page 6 There is difference here.
She was different in being one being one. She was knowing that thing.
And this seems to be an important difference. The difference is in knowing.
She had sound coming out of her. This was a thing she was being.
‘She’ then becomes the one ‘he’ is compared to. ‘She’ goes on to say,
… she was different from any ‘other’ one in being one having sound come out of her. She was one having had sound come out of her she had been then different from any ‘other’ one. She was then different from any ‘other’ one. She might, this thing is not certain, she might go on being different from any ‘other’ one. She might not be different from any ‘other’ one. Certainly she was different from one ‘other’ one. She was different from the ‘other’ one, the ‘other’ one of the two of them.
An ‘‘other’’ here is differentiated in the sense that there is at least one ‘other’. An ‘‘other’’ of the pair. This is difference in relation. One that is inclusive not exclusive.
Here ‘she’ places ‘him’ in relation to her.
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He was different from her.
Here ‘she’ mentions the sound is that thing.
Sound coming out of her incoming very often is that thing is the sound coming out of her.
Sound and being … Sound equals being.
‘She’ was thinking much more about this difference than ‘him.’ And this is because of sound in their thinking. ‘She’ was thinking in sound about this difference. ‘She’ is knowing that thing, knowing the difference, ‘she’ was thinking in sound, ‘she’ was different in being. ‘She’ was thinking that with sound coming out of ‘her’ … This is a particular way of being. Like being different. It is a thing almost. Stein called this genius.
… this was a thing she was being. (my italics)
Sound is a thing and ‘she’ is a ‘thing’ in being.
Sound is now named as ‘that thing’. This thing is sound.
Sound coming out of her and coming very often is that thing is the sound coming out of her.
‘She’ is that thing. Sound is – that thing!!
Page 7 Both sound and being are here, are a type of ‘thing.’ A thing in being. Sound plus being. ‘He’ understands. ‘He’ states the understanding of sound- understands and refuses. ‘He’ refuses sound repeatedly. Sound can be refused. By refusal does ‘he’ refuse sound I wonder? Can it be refused completely – he is steeped in it as ‘he’ only exists as sound?
He is not allowing that thing, not allowing any piece of that thing of sound coming out of him to come out of him again.
But, of cause, the refusal is only that, … and sound continues to come out of ‘him’ and in a long list Stein says it is …
… coming and not coming, enjoying and being charming, jerking and not jerking, gently with enthusiasm, brutally and not completing, occasionally and continuing, steadily and explaining, excitedly and not decidedly … repeating and denying, hesitating and terrifying, angrily and beginning, angrily and completing, concluding denying, ending without beginning, continuing without realising, ending without experiencing, imagining without beginning … ending, … completing, …
Sound coming out of her is that being is sound coming out of her, is the sound she has been hearing in being one being living, is any sound she has been hearing.
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Now there is a query for her, is this any sound? ‘He’s’ beginning ‘he’s’ always hearing everything ‘he’s’ always hearing of the sound that is coming out of ‘him.’ ‘He’ understands. ‘He’ states the understanding of sound. ‘He’ refuses sound.
Sound is coming out of him and that sound is a sound that anyone listening can be coming to be realizing is something that he is understanding, that the one having that sound coming out of him is understanding.
Sound is coming out of him, he's not allowing any piece of that thing of sound coming out of him to be coming out of him again. He is not allowing that thing. He is stating that thing quite stating that thing. Pieces of sound coming again and again out of him pieces that he has been changing, quite changing. Sound is coming out of him.
So ‘he’ understands, ‘he’ states the understanding of sound, ‘he’ refuses sound, in this he intervenes, his intervention ‘he’ changes sound! What follows is a list an exhaustive list of the tumultuous sound dynamics coming out of ‘him’ …
Coming and not coming, enjoying and being charming, jerking and not jerking, gently and with enthusiasm, brutally and not completing, occasionally and continually, steadily and explaining, excitedly and not deciding, deciding an beginning again, completing and repeating, repeating and denying, hesitating and terrifying, angrily in beginning, angrily and completing, concluding and denying, completing an undetermined, ending without beginning, continuing without realising, ending without experiencing, (continued page 8) imagining without beginning, imagining without ending, imagining in beginning completing, denying in denying, doubting without affirmation, imagining completely imagining without complete beginning, without complete middle without complete ending, feeling without emotion, trembling with out continuing, giving without needing, withholding with out decision, coming with denying the coming, needing without knowing, happening with exhaustion, going on with listening sound is coming out of him.
This reads like a criticism, a fine critique as in detailing of ‘his’ denying and doubting. He is angry, he is hesitating and terrifying or terrified.
Page 8 So this is the first criticism of ‘him.’ A picture of ‘him’ through his being expressions. ‘He’ sounds confused, without a centre, without a middle, without emotion, without continuing, without needing, without decision-making. ‘He’ is in denial. ‘He’ is needing without knowing. ‘He’ sounds fool-like. Nevertheless sound is still coming out of ‘him.’
Sound is coming out of him he is hearing that thing hearing sound come out of him and he is increasing that thing he's increasing the sound coming out of him. Sound is coming out of him and he is hearing that thing filling sound coming out of him and he's steadying that thing steadying sound coming out of him …
On and on, in havoc. Overall it can be seen in ‘him,’ to be causing or even itself ‘be’ confusion and denial at the same time it is increasing ‘itself,’ ‘living,’ ‘hearing, producing and steadying’ ... ‘him.’ It is ‘increasing’ and ‘steadying’ in ‘him.’ Living and steadying,
209 producing.
‘She’ has not been not hearing.
Where ‘she’ had been listening and ‘he’ was not, now ‘he’ is listening and ‘she’ is not and while ‘she’ is listening ‘she’ hears something, something else she hears that the ‘sound coming out of ‘her’ is expressing ‘that thing’. That it ‘is saying something.’ ‘She’ then realizes that it is not only saying something but ‘anything’ and ‘everything.’ In this sound is expressing itself in sounding itself coming out of ‘her’ and this is in some way causing something that might be called reverb. It’s seemingly a virtual space in ‘being’ and for ‘her’ and for ‘him’ it is a becoming being.
And here we find meaning. A differing type of meaning based on sound. So lets proceed by doing this listening along-side meaning or accompanied with meaning.
On page 9 In this preceding, this and the next page are all about ‘her’ … ‘She’ has been expressing something saying anything. Everything. Stein here as the narrator says, ‘Sound expresses the sound coming out of her.’ This is a doubling in telling and of the told. And here there is a doubling of meaning, accompanied but not folded away by explaining, a not suggesting, a not relating. This is two or three times removed …
… sound coming out of her is something expressing that thing expressing that sound is coming out of her.
With ‘her’ sound is emphasized in a multiplicity of origins that never the less remain ‘her.’.
Sound is coming out of her. Sound has been coming out of her. Sound can come out of her. Sound coming out of her is coming out of her and she has not been hearing not been hearing the sound that has been coming out of her. Sound has come out of her and she is listening and sound can come out of her.
Sound comes out of her. Sound coming out of her is expressing that thing, is saying something. Sound coming out of her is expressing something, is saying anything. Sound coming out of her is expressing everything, is saying everything. Sound is coming out of her. Sound has been coming out of her. Some sound comes out of her. Sound comes out of her. If sound comes out of her it is a sound that expresses that thing expresses sound coming out of her. Sound does come out of her. Sound coming out of her does express this thing does express sound coming out of her.
Sound coming out of her comes out of her and is expressing sound coming out of her. Expressing sound coming out of her is something sound coming out of her is doing. Sound coming out of her is something. Sound is coming out of her.
Sound is coming out of her and that sound has been the sound that has been expressing that that sound is coming out of her. Sound coming out of her is something that has that meaning that has
210 the meaning that that sound is coming out of her. Sound coming out of her is something that the sound coming out of her is not explaining. Sound coming out of her is something that the sound coming out of her is not suggesting. Sound coming out of her is something that is not relating to her having been one having had sound coming out of her. Sound coming out of her is something expressing that thing expressing that sound is coming out of her …
Sound is here something? Here is something. Here is something coming, continually coming out, forward into now, by being said repeatedly by being said…Sound comes out of her. Is coming - out. Something that is expressing… ‘Sound coming out of her is expressing that thing, is saying something. Sound coming out of her is expressing something, is saying anything. Sound coming out of her is expressing everything, saying everything…’ If sound comes out of her it is a sound that expresses that thing expressive sound coming out of her. Sound does come out of her. ‘Sound coming out of her does express this thing does express sound coming out of her ...
So here we find perhaps for the first time in written language sound expressing something, as saying something, anything, everything, because this sound expresses the sound coming out of itself and ‘her’ as a language in itself, and this sounded language in turn expresses another language/meaning making everything thirds. Making everything said relational. The sound that comes out of ‘her’ is talked about in terms of meaning not explaining, not suggesting, not relating, it is two or three times removed, is emphasized, is gentle, ‘it would be a gentle thing,’ harsh thing, dull thing … if ‘she’ had not heard it … then! What then is the syntax of this ‘sound’? How does it ‘be’…? As we read more about it in relation to ‘her’ we begin to understand. And in this ‘she’ starts to become a model for this sounded language … and the gentling of it all sounding out a notion I call soundage. Hearing disperses it some how though.
Sound is coming out of her. It would be a gentle thing if she had not been hearing it then. Sound is coming out of her, it would be a harsh thing if she had not been emphasizing it then. Sound is coming out of her, it would be a dull thing if she had not been one having heard something, it would be a dull thing if it were not emphasizing that anyone is interested in being one knowing that sound is coming out of her and that sound coming out of her is expressing that being expressing sound coming out of her. Sound coming out of her is expressing something expressing that sound is coming out of her.
Gentle, harsh, dull expressing that thing, soundage. It is gentle. It is harsh. There is a contradiction; sound is ‘a gentle thing, a harsh thing, a dull thing.’
There is a difference perhaps a big difference between ‘his’ relation to sound, and ‘her’s.’ ‘Her’s’ is increasingly now ‘being’ the voice of the narrator, what is being explained/presented /performed is Gertrude Stein's relation to sound.
While words are becoming units or blocks of sound meaning similar to notes on a score I also feel compelled here to stay in the detail, unpicking the differences between ‘him’ and ‘her’ as them, as their paradoxes are exacerbated and played out. But my sense is they are not where this text is leading us only perhaps where it is playing out. Though they are givens as givens are condensed, this drama is apparently much bigger. It’s about much more. Language and meaning are at stake. ‘He’ and ‘she’ represent larger frames than just two people. They represent two differing, at times opposing, ways of being/thinking/
211 and making meaning. One, ‘his’ way is language based on order, on the visual frames of things in relation to meaning handed down to us from the pre-Socratics and then Aristotle. The ‘‘other’ ‘her’ voice represents increasingly language that is sound based and so reflective of sound thinking/meaning/being-ness.
Page 10 From being multiple now in sound, ‘she’ is ‘one.’ ‘She's’ one having expression …‘she is that one.’ She is completely ‘her’ … Sound coming out of ‘her’ is completing her ‘being’ on listening. Sound is, in ‘her,’ very completing. Sound is entirely completing. That in completing-ly, ‘her,’ listening ‘sound coming out of ‘her’ is completing ‘her’ being one entirely listening.’
Sound coming out of her is completing anything is completing listening being existing.
Sound always has been … ‘she’ says, ‘she’ as in Stein says. Then ‘she’ says …
She then was one being one helping and sound percent coming, sound came out of her, sounded come out of her, she had heard something she heard everything. Sound coming out of her had been something that was pleasing, mingling, flattering, attacking, discouraging, escaping, quoting, changing, encouraging, believing, hurting, one listing, listening and talking, talking and listening and some where talking.
Stein here is dealing with difference in ‘otherness’ in a sense then this text is starting to detail and express, … otherness.
Page 11 Here we read a key passage on sound and its impact in terms of it in ‘being.’ Being it seems is not easy, it is troubling and stirring in being … there is interference, from language …
The following are sounds qualities as Stein understands them or as ‘she of the text’ interprets them, hears them. And remember these two, the author and the ‘she’ are both separate and one together. Matter as in personality is dispersed here. Nothing matters in terms of division in this text …
Sound coming out of her was troubling in being stirring to have sound come out of anyone. Sound coming out of her was soothing in being stimulating to sound coming out of anyone. Sound coming out of her was convincing as to feeling being existing. Sound coming out of her was affecting as to attention being flattering. Sound coming out of her was assisting to being certain that conviction is existing. Sound coming out of her was comforting as to certainty heavy expression. The sound coming out of her was deciding to anyone hesitating. Sound coming out of her was a convincing as to quick decision being certain. Sound coming out of her was troubling gesture emphasising being existing. Sound coming out of her was distressing as to resisting not being existing. Sound coming out of her was appealing as to needing having protection. Sound coming out of her was terrifying something that would be coming. Sound coming out of her was dulling as something that was changing. Sound coming out of her was stimulating as being something she was resonating. Sound coming out of her was meaning that she had been one
212 completely feeling hearing.
She was feeling being one having meaning in being one having sound coming out of her. She was feeling that she was creating meaning in being on having sound coming. She was feeling that sound coming out of her existing. She was feeling in being one creating meaning that sound was coming was coming out from her creating meaning.
Creating meaning in sound coming, she was feeling was being in sound coming out of her, in listening being in her, in sound coming out of her. She was feeling that creating meaning was being existing in sound having been coming, in sound coming out of her … She was feeling in the hearing.
Sound is also soothing, it is also terrifying and also appealing, stimulating, and also resonating … it fills ‘her’ with feeling. Meaning and feeling … with also’s … with more. Sound is the approximate and inexpressible. Disorder and chaos. Interference and excess. All and more flood through the text as sound articulates its own ‘being.’
Page 12 There is an overwhelm here of feeling/meaning. Remember … ‘she’ had been hearing. But now there is a separation of feeling in ‘her’, from feeling about sound. And where is ‘he’ while this is ‘happening?’ ‘He’ is there …
… understanding everything and sound was coming out of him. He had been understanding everything and sound had been coming out of him. He was understanding anything and that was coming out of him … He had been understanding everything.
Sound was coming out of him. He was feeling the complete hearing of this being, the complete hearing of sound coming out of him … He was not completely hearing sound coming out of him. He was not even feeling anything of this thing anything was not completely hearing the sound that was coming out of him … He had not been explaining not having been hearing all the sound coming out of him. He had been sometimes feeling something about and explaining not having been completely hearing all the sound coming out of him. He had been explaining his hearing or the sound coming out of him. He had been explaining this thing, he was explaining this thing. He was explaining his being hearing or the sound coming out of him.
There are doubts that ‘he's’ hearing everything because ‘he's’ doing lots and lots of explaining. And it is fair to say here … lots.
On page 13, ‘he’ continues and is continually busy in explaining … ‘he’ adds ‘convincing’ to ‘his’ explaining.
The sound coming out of him was the sound of that had been going to be coming out of him. The sound going to be coming out of him had been coming out of him. Sound going to be coming out of him was going to come out of him the sound going to come out of him was coming out of him.
Sound coming out of him was something, it was the sound coming out of him, he was expressing something, it was expressing the sound he had been hearing in listening inside to him to sound coming out of him.
‘His’ convincing is sound based on what ‘he’ already thinks, already knows, already ‘he’ is inside of ‘him.’ Queried this is different from what Gertrude Stein hears.
213
On page 14 ‘He’ seems to be saying sound coming out of ‘him’ was the thing ‘he’ had been hearing, expressing ‘his’ being, explaining something, telling that sound is something.
…that some feeling was being existing, that was a sound that would be meaning that some listening was coming, that was a sound that was showing that some listening had been existing, that was a sound that was expressing that pleasantness was increasing, that was a sound that was telling that understanding had been trembling, that was a sound that was meaning that gentleness had been existing, that was a sound that was telling that expecting something was not existing, that was a sound that beginning might be continuing, that was a sound that was expressing that understanding was denying, that was a sound that was expressing that understanding is beginning being convincing, that was showing that understanding being existing is having meaning, that was showing that it not having been coming was not meaning that understanding is denied then, that was showing that being experiencing was something not showing in any changing. That was showing that being experiencing is something being quite existing, that was a sound that was something.
This is confusing. Is this the sound independent of ‘his’ thinking? Is it/that the sound of ‘his’ being? Stein says ‘he’ expresses ‘his’ being. The expressing of ‘his’ being is more touching than ‘his’ sense of himself. Perhaps this can be read as the author lovingly listening to the sound coming out of ‘him.’ If so this is the first mention of love and a loving of the ‘other’.
By page 15 Here we read sound was something … something existing.
Sound had been coming out of her had had been something. Some sound was coming out of her, that was something.
Sound coming out of ‘her’ had been coming and sounding, going on and rising, continuing and waiting and rising and going on and waiting and rising and going on and rising and rising and waiting then going on and rising and going on and going on. Sound coming out of ‘her’ had been a sound coming out of ‘her’ in going on in coming out of ‘her’ thing coming out of ‘her’ going on …
This is both a continuing, and a continuous presence. And another quote re sound and meaning.
Sound had been coming out of her. The sound had been a sound that was sounding the meaning of something that was existing. The sound was sounding the meaning of something.
The sound somehow indicates but she is the one – that she being one was being one and being one sound was coming, and being that one an sound coming out of her she was one.
Page 16 It seems here, sound has not just voice and qualities but consciousness, presence, opinions, it does and does not listen and then does. In this sound is knotted with paradoxes and it exacerbates it’s paradoxes repeatedly, rhythmically even.
214 The sound coming out of her was not listening it had been hearing that some one being existing was saying. The sound coming out of her was not listening, it was saying what some one being existing was coming to say. The sound coming out of her was not listening, it was going on saying what some one being existing was saying.
The sound has consciousness in that it is not listening but hearing … But now it is listening It was meaning. It was coming, sounding, being. Coming, being, existing. Existing is query being, that is the same. Sound again has being …
Sound coming out of her and that was coming out of her, sound coming out of her was expressing opinion be existing about somethings being existing.
Page 17
The sound coming out of her was telling this thing.
Sound here is talking, talking it is a ‘thing’ with a voice. ‘It’ was telling that some opinions were being existing … that its opinions were existing.
Sound coming out of her was coming out of her and it was coming out of her as a sound comes that is a sound that is expressing an opinion the existing about something that is existing.
Then there is a need to sum up. In summing up …
Sound coming out of her was coming out of her that it was coming out of her and she was one being one who was one having that being in her of the sound coming out of her there was a sound expressing their opinion is existing of something being existing. She had sound coming out of her that it was sounding and it was coming and she was one and the sound coming out of her was expressing that thing, she was one being one having been on having sound come out of her and being one out of him sound is coming that is sounding and sounding that thing sounding that an opinion is existing about something being existing. She was being one and sound being sounding and coming out of her, she being that one she was one and she was feeling the sound sounding and coming out of her, she was being one and being one feeling sound sounding coming out of her she was one being on feeling and being one feeling she was one feeling sound coming out of her sounding and she was feeling that an opinion being existing about something the existing, she was feeling that sound sounding coming out of her the sound sounding coming out of her.
This is key. Sound is actively engaged in becoming being and it does this through sounding.
Sound has re-connection, is ‘feeling’ re-connected. Felling here is important. Here we start to notice the deep connecting rhythm and repetition that seems to be sounds voice speaking now through both ‘her’ and Stein. This passage is about the deep connection felt now that the connection between being and existing and sound has been sounded out. Stein as the author explains how the ‘she’ of the text feels now that connection has been made … This ‘she’ now is impossible to distance from the author as the whole text its
215 shape and its direction is itself influenced by this insight. I have numbered these below the quote for ease of understanding.
Feeling that sound sounding was coming out of her she was feeling that there was complete connection between sound sounding and sound coming out of her. She was feeling that there was complete connection between sound sounding and sound coming out of her and something being existing. Feeling that there was complete connection between sound sounding and coming out of her she was feeling that there was complete connection between sound and sounding coming out of her and an opinion being about something being existing.
or
Feeling that sound sounding was coming out of her she was feeling that there was complete connection between … 1) sound sounding and 2) sound coming out of her. She was feeling that there was complete connection between sound sounding and sound coming out of her and 3) something being existing. Feeling that there was complete connection between sound sounding and coming out of her she was feeling that there was complete connection between sound and sounding coming out of her and an 4) opinion being about something being existing. [my added numbers]
Is this connection beyond time and space as we usually experience/know it. Yes. Here we are no longer ‘being’ within the Newtonian framework. As readers we too are exited from that system. Stein as the author has separated herself, language and us from the Cartesian and Newtonian framework of order and meaning.
Meanwhile sound was coming, coming out of ‘her’ and ‘she and ‘it’ were feeling.
… she was completely feeling feeling complete connection.
And through feeling , which is gradually becoming love, we return to the problem of two here again, regarding difference again and again echoing the title, again.
… they were two of them they were different the one from the ‘other’ of them …
Page 19 There is continuing talk of difference. And the fact that changing is happening, ‘she’ was changing ‘he’ was changing, yet they were not changing, is both paradoxical and becoming a mannerism, a baroque abstraction of language. ‘She’ was one, ‘he’ was one, ‘he’ was one. Both ‘one’s.’ Sound had been coming …
… as if it were rushing, as if it were appealing, as if it had been coming and had been using in coming, had been using strength as if it were existing.
216 ‘She’ says ‘she must be a strong for the strength of sound to be coming through her.’
What is this ‘thing’ sound then? We tend to start asking what the hell is this ‘thing’… but this is a wrong turn in the road of language … stay instead with what it does … It is an-’other’. An ‘‘other’’ in being. Stein here refers to the ‘other’ one as ‘him.’ ‘Sound is coming out of the ‘other’ one. Sound coming out of him if the sound coming out of him. ‘Her’ one, ‘he’ is that one ‘he’ is one and the one ‘he’ is the one having the sound come out of ‘him’.
Sound comes out of him. There are two of them.
Page 20 There is strength in this being one.
Sound had been coming out of her. Sound was coming out of her. She was one. She was using in sound coming out of her, she was using the strength of being one …
Page 22 Regarding ‘her.’ she opens this section saying she is sounding a completion, saying it … or she? Condensing givens once more. There is establishing. There is convincing that stopping is existing. Sounding sound coming out of ‘her’ was convincing that listening was existing’… also.
… was determining the listing had been existing.
Sound sounding was helping that expressing was continuing.
And … sound coming out of her was disturbing that beginning had meaning. Beginning itself had meaning. And, this is disturbing some one who had been developing.
She was being one because of sound.
She was giving what was wanting.
She being on and sound being sounding I thing being existing is being existing.
Sound was completing that expression.
In completing expression ...
Sound being sounding in something being existing and she be one she was on completing that expression.
In exhausting expression ...
She was someone needing feeling she was one exhausting expression.
217 There is then a passage about remembering …
She being one and sound coming out of her she was one and sound coming out of her was remembering that she being one something had been done…
Sound itself here is remembering that something had been done … What needs to be remembered? For sound to ‘be’… something must be re-attached, re- constituted, re-built.
Remembering brings wholeness. Sound itself is a completion a whole … it is becoming full. As ‘she’ is exhausting expression. Expression is exhausted. Both these things are happening simultaneously.
Page 23 There is a shift here, quite a big one, now that remembering has happened. This remembering profoundly affects the dynamic that is unraveling. What follows is about helping. Maybe with the whole now ‘she’ is engaged in helping.
She being one and sound coming out of her … she was helping …
In helping ‘she’ was ‘reminding’ ‘She’ was ‘doing what could please’ ‘She’ was ‘not helping remembering’ ‘declaring’ ‘telling what had been told’ ‘accepting’ ‘expressing having been waiting’ ‘feeling certain’ ‘noting’ ‘feeling is everything’ ‘agree-ing’ ‘not being leading’ ‘expecting everything’ ‘not expecting what others expect’ ‘expressing what she was deciding’…
This is a good long list of how ‘she’ was being … and in being, being helpful And after exhausting language or expression all this doing was ‘helping’ language.
Page 24 And in this ‘she’ was expressing lots …
… expressing asking justification … expressing attacking and justifying … expressing listening and following … expressing going on and quitting … expressing feeling and forgetting … expressing denying and asking … expressing deciding and succeeding, changing and beginning, appreciating and intention, leaving and coming, remembering and needing to be winning, talking and intending, giving and needing, needing being being one, continuing and having justification.
218 … sound coming was impressing that she having meaning it was meaning that she would be getting what she would be getting. Sound coming was transmitting … … not opposites … she was impressing … meaning … getting … transmitting … needing to be meaning … getting arousing exciting getting … she needed to be changing.
Page 25 This is ‘her’ helping. This type of language ‘helps something come through. In this ‘she’ is leading. ‘She’ here becomes excited that leading, is also following.
She was exciting that leading is following. … perturbing the following is leading … realizing what feeling … listening in giving … asking being receiving … giving in listening
Then here there is a felt introduction of someone else … someone whole.
She was being one and someone was being one and she being one and someone being one then she was being one and she was being one and someone was being one then.
There is a sense of some change here - someone else - a self-consolidation, as the one becomes the one becoming the one … being one. Being changed here by sound in these ways where the self is made to implode … almost.
Page 26 She was supporting being according … which is another type of helping.
… According with the existing. … sounding attacking was being existing … remembering having been feeling … the yielding … needing being one having been giving, having been attacking … being one and sounding and feeling and listening
That is according existing that is with existing that is language is according with existing.
Page 27 This leads to being, in loving. Being so mixed up in sound was creating loving.
… This was being emphasizing. … Asking to be one being loving. … Sound having been coming and she having been needing being winning she was needing being one being asking to be one being loving.
219 Needing sound …
… she was needing sound being … needing … leading …
Here is love sounding, a polyphony that condenses givens. ‘She’ and sound sounding are so mixed up they are something else.
Sound sounding is sounding. Some sound is sounding. Some sound sounding is sounding. Some sound sounding she being one some sound is sounding. She being one some sound is sounding. Some sound sounding she is one. Some sound sounding and some sound is sounding, some sound sounding she is one. She is one and some sound is sounding. She is one and some sound coming out of her is some sound sounding. Some sound sounding, some sound is sounding. Some sound having been sounding and some sound coming out of her she is one. She is one and some sound is coming out of her. Some sound is sounding and she is one some sound is coming out of her. Some sound sounding and some sound sounding coming out of her she is then being one and being then one sound that is coming out of her.
Any sound coming out of her. Sound is sounding and sound sounding she is the one and that is sounding. She is one and sound sounding. Any sound being sounding. Sound is sounding that she be one sound is sounding.
Any sound being sounding sound if surrounding that she is the one sound is sounding. She being one any sound being surrounding she is one the sound is surrounding.
She being one and sound having been sounding she is asking that she is needing protection … She is being one attacking.
Attacking is mentioned. ‘She’ is attacking the old school of language. Is attacking firm … devouring? Insistent? But also protection, this is a fragile state of making meaning from.
Page 29 Stein and the text, both are the same. Both are the same in sound. What follows Are long passages and ‘the sameness.’ And this is in terms of meaning.
Page 30 In that ‘sameness,’ regarding meaning …
Each one of them, each one of the two of them is one expressing something of meaning coming to be, having been, needing to be, needing to have been, completely going to be being existing.
Page 31 Here we return to ‘him.’ ‘He’ is figuring intention.
… having figured any intention, is one having determination … He is one deciding indecision.
Page 32 ‘He’ is explaining expressing everything …
He is one expressing being that one at expressing it in explaining anything and explaining
220 everything in explaining that being explaining is expressing decision.
‘He’ is being that one adding being that one and sound coming on ‘his’ speed that one and sound is coming and sound is then not surrounding that sound is coming. It is deciding it is not sound – ‘he’ is not sounding that sound is coming!!
Page 33 ‘He’ would be completing explaining. ‘He’ would be ordering order … ‘He did order that thing’– follows a long list of ‘his’ ordering.
Page 34 ‘He’ is certain. ‘He’ is very often certain.
He was certain that sound coming out of him had not been coming as sound had been coming when sound was coming.
Page 36 Here there is difference. A return to again. Difference as interference. But a difference that excavates love.
She was a different one from him.
‘He’ says …
… in reasoning he was concluding and concluding he had expressed the reason of his understanding but some one doing something was one having done that being, and having done that being he was reasoning that he would have explained that thing if the one who had done that thing had done the thing that he would have done if he had done that thing … That anyone who had come to be understanding what they were explaining would not have been explaining without understanding… Who had explain something had not explained that being it having explained that thing … He was expressing that he was understanding something that was beginning very often.
‘He’ is in constant rationalization, which prevents ‘him’ not only from feeling but also from doing anything. ‘He’ is sort of paralyzed within ‘himself.’ This can be read as a paralysis within language which is full of conclusions.
The sound coming out of him and sounding was expressing that in reasoning he was concluding ending concluding he had expressed the reason of his understanding that someone doing something was one having done that thing, … That thing that he would have done if he had done that thing.
Page 37 ‘He’ is being different. One of the differences is outlined here. ‘He’ is expressing what he is understanding. Explaining, explaining.
‘She’ was giving everything giving everything giving everything.
221 Each one was needing that, having the listing, sound that was sounding was coming out of them. … He was needing. … He was needing that. … He is denying that he is needing. … He is denying that he being listing, is needing that sound being sounding is coming out of him.
‘He’ has a reliance on beginnings …
In beginning he is creating is being.
Page 38 ‘He’ needs beginnings – ‘he’ needs the root cause of being.
‘He’ is needing being beginning.
Sound was sounding to the end of the beginning of the sound that was sounding and coming out of him.
This is important, ‘his’ sound is very limited ‘he’ keeps having to begin. And this is because ‘he’ is needing to arrange something. This is ignoring ‘her’ insistent beginnings- and it is doubled- tripled as Stein begins the whole lot repeatedly.
He was needing that having been arranging something and having been hearing that arranged being as being existing inside him, he was needing that being one needing to be certain that he had been completely having that being arranged in him, he was dealing that being one reading that he was not repeating anything, he was needing that he was telling what he was hearing as being exciting inside him. He was needing sound coming out of him in being one needing telling again and again what he was telling. In needing being certain that he was completing the telling of what he was telling he was needing to be telling that sound coming out of him was sound that was convincing…
‘He’ is needing telling. ‘He’ unlike ‘her’ does not want to be repeating, in this ‘he’ is very firm. To ‘him’ repeating seems to cancel out convincing.
Page 39 ‘His’ need is expressed. ‘He’ was needing telling of the arranging. ‘She’ was needing continuing. ‘He’ was not needing anything – ‘she’ needed that being this is a subtle difference,
He was needing that being one and not needing anything he was on completing in being one not needing sound sounding coming out of him. She was needing that being one and having something she was completing in being on having and not needing sound sounding coming out of her.
This is a subtle difference that is important here. Stein is being both democratic and as she says ‘working with the intensity of pure being’ to expand meaning and language.
Page 40 Stein as the author goes on to interrogate ‘his’ expressing. A critique of his sound through the word ‘If.’
222 And … if he?
If sound coming out of him had been the sound expressing that the whole of him was one needing being such a one then the sound that had been coming out of him and expressing something would have been a sound that was more coming than it had been coming and in coming more would have been expressing that he being that one he was one completing having been one who was one hearing the sound that was coming out of him he was coming to be one who in being one not hearing the sound coming out of him could be one feeling he was being the one who was the one having sound coming out of him that was expressing something. (my italics)
‘His’ lack is that the sound in ‘him’ was not more coming … and it was not more coming because it was not expressing the whole of ‘him.’
‘She’ on the ‘other’ hand was not alarmed at being in this way …
She being one not needing anything and not needing that sound was coming was one who had come to be one who in being one hearing something was one who was not alarming in being on having sound sounding incoming out of her …
Here there is a multiplicity and multiplying of origins. And/but given this, either way …
Each one of them … was being certain that they were meaning what they were believing.
Page 41 This section is about belief in hearing through conceptual frames about ‘him’ … In criticizing ‘his’ ‘beliefs’ is it about faith, or outdated frames of meaning, and or the connection between syntax and sound?
Page 42 The whole lot. (being- hearing-being) What ‘she’ tells ‘herself.’
She was one and being that one she could be telling herself what she was not hearing. In telling herself something and she was telling herself anything in telling herself what she was telling herself she was not hearing what she was telling … Sound sounding in coming out of her she was telling that she was being one and hearing something she was one and being that one if she was one telling something should be would be one telling that thing.
In being one and being that one she was expressing that being one and being that one she had been listening any listening she had been hearing at the hearing she had been knowing and in knowing she had been knowing again that something she had been knowing was something that she was knowing.
This is very important, linking hearing, knowing, completing, and expressing and being. A coming to being through listening – the text here has an ecstatic feel. This is the sense of genius Stein talked of having within her self.
Page 43 A judging theme is coming from ‘him.’
223 The whole lot continues with the three whole lot.
She was completing and in completing that being she was being one she was being that one any being that one if she was expressing anything she was expressing that thing.
‘She’ was questioning others of their experience,
In deciding anything she was asking that she being one who was deciding she be the one who was accepting who had been accepting any decision. She being that one the one she was being was asking any one if any one who was one was not one who had been deciding as she had been deciding. She being that one the one she was she was asking every one if some one had not been one deciding something …
‘He’ was not believing, instead ‘he’ remembered.
He not believing in sound coming and sounding was being one who could be one remembering that he had felt something in being the one he was in being one …
This is very important. What follows is all about belief in sound … ‘He’ could not believe in sound and did not believe in it coming out of him. He instead relied on what he had already experienced and condensed as a memory. A certain amount of judging is involved in this.
What follows is about ‘him’ and a sense of judging.
He was one who could believe in sound and not coming in sound not sounding. He could be one believing in that in sound not coming out of him, in sound coming out of him not sounding. He being one the being one who could believe in that thing he was one who could believe in something. In believing he was one believing that he had been believing in sound not coming, in sound coming out of him, in being one he was one believing that he had been believing in sound coming out of him, in sound coming out of him not sounding.
He being one he and believing that he was being one was that one he being one and believing that thing he was one who could be one judging that something was a thing that did anger him. He being one and he believing that he being one was that one he judging that something was angering him was deciding that he feeling that being he would be one deciding that he will would not justify that … (cont. below)
Page 44 He was angry. Continuing the theme of judging continues, judging as a shut-off to the hearing of sound.
… thing the thing he was judging. In deciding that being he was being that one he was being one believing that he being that one was being that one. He was that one and being that one he was deciding to be judging some things he would be judging.
‘He’ was judging shaping himself after deciding what one ‘he’ was being.
She too was needing judging a justification and that blinds heard to the sound coming out of her.
Meanwhile
224
He not repeating a decision.
Page 45 Judging continues … This passage is about existing and denying this follows judging. And maybe more importantly ‘he’ expresses ‘he’ is not loving. “He’ as language is not aligned with love.
What follows is the first a big description of sound, its expressing, it’s being …
In sound coming and sounding and sound coming out of her was sounding, in sound coming she was expressing that being one needing something being existing, she being one having come to a decision that something being existing was denying, she being that one she was needing that she was expressing that sound sounding she was expressing that something being existing was what she was expressing in stating that the thing being existing is being existing. In being that one, in stating that she was expressing was being existing, she was stating that something being existing, something existing that was denying that being was not existing sound coming out of her and sounding she was expressing that the thing being existing is existing and she being one needing that being one needing that something is being one existing, she being one stating that thing she was one expressing that being expressing that the thing is existing that is existing and being one stating that thing again that the thing that is existing if existing, stating that thing again she is expressing that the thing denying that that thing is existing is not that thing is not the thing existing, she being one leading that thing getting that the thing is being existing and in stating that being one expressing that the thing existing is existing. She being that and being one sound coming out of her was coming out of her and sound coming out of her was sounding.
Then, He being one and being that one he was one and sound was coming out of him and sound coming out of him with sounding and sound sounding coming out of him he was expressing that, love the existing, he was not loving. Expressing that thing he was expressing something.
Page 46 ‘He’ was expressing love was not loving.
He was being one who had not been, who was not loving.
If … ‘he’ describes what ‘he’ would feel if ‘he’ was in love … ‘he’ imagines … but it is not love. Instead there is using.
In describing he was describing what he had been feeling if he had been feeling in loving. In describing this being he was being one and being one he was that one and being that one he could use what he was needing when he was using what he was using.
‘He’ expresses explaining. Instead of being a whole one – ‘he’ is /was explaining.
He was expressing explaining, he was expressing not explaining, he was expressing not being loving, he was expressing using what he was using, he was expressing explaining beginning, he was expressing explaining not continuing. (quote continues below)
Page 47 Each passage starts again and adds more info and start again and that's even more.
225 ‘He’ is expressing comment here, explaining, beginning, but not continuing … ‘He’ was …
… perfecting and in affecting he was not continuing and in not continuing he was not describing and in describing he was expecting and did expecting he was feeling and feeling he was arranging and in arranging he was deciding.
In being one, loved being existing, he was not loving and in being one not loving he was one who could use what he was needing when he was using what he was using.
‘She's’ very different.
She being that one she was expressing and expressing she was expressing this thing and expressing this thing she was feeling everything and feeling everything she was loving and loving she was being living and being living she was continuing and being continuing sound was coming out of her and the sound coming out of her was sounding and the sound coming out of her and sounding was telling and asking anything and telling and asking anything it was expressing that she being that one was one. (quote continues below)
Page 48 This sound is coming out of ‘her’ from that space with telling and asking anything. This is very different then from ‘his’ sound, which was closing down of possibilities.
She was needing what she was increasing she was having what she was expressing in having loving and being one completing everything she was expressing mingling she was expressing that she was receiving and in expressing that she was expressing receiving she was expressing loving and in expressing that she was expressing loving she was expressing that being one she was that one. In expressing that being one she was that one she was expressing that expressing receiving, mingling, loving and being she was expressing that she was that one and expressing that she was that while she was expressing being one adding expressing been one she was giving and in giving love is existing … She was being and loving being existing, she being one and being living, she was being one loving and being one loving she was one expressing loving being existing and expressing loving being existing in expressing being loving she was expressing that sound coming out of her was emphasising that the sound coming out of her sounding that loving is existing and that she be loving she is completely all of that, all of loving the existing. (quote finished page 49)
This is love love love. Seeing is hearing. The big five, expressing, receiving, mingling, loving and being … are mingled in an ecstatic space. The sound coming out of ‘her’ was found that loving existing.
Page 49 Here ‘she’ quivers. ‘Her’ language is one of vibration, of movement. ‘She’ has not needing everything of loving ‘she’ could forget something is. In expressing loving ‘she’ was completing remembering what ‘she’ was being. Not the same sort of remembering is being told something. By emphasizing ‘she’ was loving in being ‘she’ was emphasizing everything. Then in emphasizing everything she was asking for feedback ‘she’ would quiver if ‘she’ was not in ‘herself’ loving–criticism ‘she’ was vulnerable to it.
226
She could be quivering. She would be quivering if she were not on asking anyone if she was not one having what she was having. She was quivering. She could be quivering if she was not one emphasising in loving being existing.
Page 50 The telling was about loving. Loving is existing this is for ‘her’. For ‘him’– remembering ‘he’ is always in explaining … in this there was repitition.
He was certain that he could be telling all of this thing again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
… he considered everything in considering anything and in considering everything he was beginning a decision.
A narrow loop of possibilities …
Page 51 ‘He’ is thinking. ‘He’ is remembering thinking. This is the quality or type of sound coming out of ‘him.’ This way of thinking demands that some of what’s paid to, in being existing, is narrowly purely descriptive.
Page 52 The resulting situation is that thinking thinks that it is thinking.
He being thinking will be determining that thinking is what thinking is. He is interested in his own thinking any others in thinking in general.
Page 53 Sound, ‘his’ sound is expressing the feeling that ‘he’ is interested in thinking. ‘He’ is arranging and ordering. ‘She’ is considering extreme thinking.
She is one being one and being that one is one feeling that thinking being existing is existing. She is one being one saying that any one being one in the way some can be one is one being one in being one extremely thinking.
‘She’ assists thinking in being. And this being is being that is exciting.
She is one understanding and being understanding she is one being one assisting in thinking being existing. She been one feeling and she being one she is one feeling, she being one feeling she's expressing understanding and understanding being existing thinking is continuing. She feeling and being one she is feeling, she feeling is expressing that feeling is continuing and extreme thinking is existing.
Here now extreme thinking is existing!!!
Page 54
227 In this passage sounding itself is consciousness, especially in terms of its activities in about its own creating. ‘She’ is saying ‘understanding is creating …’
In her, sounding was feeling in thinking being existing. Sounding was feeling into thinking the existing. Feeling understanding feeling in agreeing, it's understanding is creating …
In listening and in listening sound coming out and sounding can be coming, in listening sound coming out of her and sounding was feeling into thinking the existing.
In listening sound coming out of her and sounding was feeling understanding being existing. In listening sound coming out of her sounding was feeling in agreeing to have thinking be continuing. In listening sound coming out of her and sounding was feeling that understanding is creating. In listening sound coming out of her and sounding is feeling that understanding in feeling thinking is feeling in thinking continuing and feeling in thinking continuing is feeling that understanding is thinking and feeling that understanding is thinking is stealing in thinking being existing and understanding being existing and thinking and understanding being continuing. In listing sound coming and sounding was coming and coming out of her was fielding and feeling was sustaining understanding being existing and understanding being existing, thinking being existing, feeling it's feeling and being understanding and being convincing and being sustaining and being sustaining and being expressing understanding, and thinking being existing, listening being existing and listing being existing sounds sounding and coming was coming and feeling. Sound was coming out of her sound that was founding and feeling was coming out of her she being listening and understanding, thinking being existing. (my emphasis)
‘He’ to develop could not be ‘in’ repetitions … ‘In developing he could not be repeating.’ ‘He’ then according to sound sounding could not be ‘creating.’ In sound, in it’s sounding there is consciousness. Speaking.
Page 55 ‘She’ says ‘she’ repeats because that's the nature of sound sounding. ‘He’ says there is a link between intending and expecting. Obliquely … or is it obliquely. Explanation is not the same as creative repetition.
Page 56 ‘She’ repeats because that is the nature of sound. ‘He’ has expectation, though. In feeling ‘he was full of expectation. The expectation is left off and instead in one long conversation, we start examining language in relation to ‘work.’ Focus is on ‘her’ work …
‘She’ here talks of her ‘work ways.’ The ‘field’ of neutralized techniques here has so confused genres that we can read this passage as the creative approach to being, making, sounding and loving..
She was one and doing what she was doing and working when she was working on finishing when she was finishing and preparing when she was preparing and feeling in being one expressing that she had been, that she was doing what she was doing.
She was not preparing. In being that one she was not doing what she was doing. In not preparing she was asking and it asking and receiving protection she was expressing that she had not been
228 preparing and not having been preparing she was experiencing the doing what she was doing and doing what she was doing she was exceeding she was succeeding in preparing.
Page 57 In this is exceeding. ‘She’ was exceeding. There is energy here exceeding.
She was doing what she was doing. Sound, sounding tells her that something was being done some energy expressed.
Sounds sounding and coming was telling that something that had been done had been done. Sound sounding and coming out of her incoming and telling that something that had been done had been done by her and had been done was expressing the energy being existing and giving being existing and she was being existing what had been done had been done … (my italics)
‘She’ was one energy giving accepting being existing.
She was telling of what was done being done and of her being one, energy, giving, accepting being existing.
Giving being existing and giving is existing, giving being existing and sound sounding coming she was expressing that if she had done what she did, accepting would be existing and she might have done what she did. She did what she did. In doing what she was doing giving being existing, accepting being existing, she, sound coming and sounding, might have done what she did and might not have being on being that one she might not have been one being that one … Sound coming out of her might have been expressing what was expressing.
‘She’ did what she did. Sound might have done what she did. ‘She’ might not have sound might have!
Page 58 Sound might have been expressing just itself independent of her … He has black-and-white thinking. She has black-and-white thinking too, two. But still she can hold both perspectives/language frames.
Page 59 Regardless there is continuing. And in this continuing details of expression say things one after another … saying one thing after another is ‘saying one whole thing’. This is a plug for continuing in all forms.
To continue, to commence to continue, to believe in continuing, ending continuing, to mean continuing, to expect continuing, to continue again, to explain continuing, to enlarge continuing, to restrict continuing, to deny a continuing, to begin continuing is to arrange what can be arranged in arranging anything and to express everything of continuing is to have sound coming out and sound sounding was continuing. In her sounding was feeling in thinking being existing. Feeling understanding feeling in agreeing, it's understanding is creating … (continued on page 60)
229 Page 60 This expresses that ‘he’ is continuing. To deny, restrict continuing was in fact continuing. About saying,
If saying something is saying that being and he's being on saying something he is being on saying that thing, if saying something is saying that being then he's saying that, saying something is saying that being is saying something. He is saying that saying something is saying that thing.
More about saying on same page. Listening can cancel this idea out …
Page 61 This is the real thing. And it is accompanied by understanding. Sound saying can express a great deal ‘She’ did say …
That one thing coming to be impressing a something on her come to be understanding was the thing that was following the deed of being the real thing it was and she, sound coming out of her and sounding, she would be if she could be expecting to be understanding what she was understanding. She was and could be and would be appreciating understanding what was following to be coming again and again to be understood and she wouldn't could was expressing believing that she would, could and was expressing, sounds sounding and coming out of her …
This is an exclamation as in ‘she’ did say, the need of being the real thing …
Page 62 ‘She’ expected sound to come out of ‘her’ … Sounding. About doing ‘he’ was on incompletely telling and not doing long explanation about that follows.
Page 63 ‘He’ is claiming and denying. ‘He’ is not having done what ‘he’ had not done.
He being that one was claiming that he was claiming was denying that he was denying.
More claiming and denying follows.
Page 64 Now the focus is on claiming. ‘Her’claiming. ‘She’ did say that ‘she’ was not hearing what was not heard. In the beginning expressing replying commencing determining saying and then in listening replying commencing beginning determining expressing deciding … There is a difference here in beginning it is expressing replying commencing determining listening was involved with replying in being in hearing listening commencing hearing…
Page 65
230 ‘He’ is listening ‘he’ is feeling.
Page 66 Another quality of sound is introduced - it waits.
Sound coming out of him was waiting and waiting was expressing that he had been saying what he had been saying and that he might not come to be saving what he might be saying.
Here there is anticipation in the waiting. There is anticipation growing in the text, in the sound sounding, waiting for ‘him’ to hear. Sound waiting even, was expressing. And now we hear that sound waits … is in waiting. ‘He’ was saying ‘he’ was not waiting and sound was not coming out of you and waiting would be listening.
Page 67 ‘She’ is ending something. And query, this is because of ‘his’ mistaken ideas…
… he was expressing that he was knowing what he was expressing.
This is ‘his’ repeated black-and-white thinking. ‘He’ likes ‘his’ own responses …
He did like what he said when he heard what he heard.
Page 68 He began explaining what he would be arranging what he would be expressing … I think this is about him moving out … if we are thinking small- in the larger sense it is about language, and moving past the ‘arranging of grammar, description, sense, meaning etc …
Page 69 ‘She’ is beginning. Beginning is continuing. ‘She’ is arranging this difference - ‘she’ is writing it out – sounding as ‘she’ goes. ‘She’ arranged what ‘she’ gave.
She could keep what she had if she had what she had as she would give what she had if she felt what she felt that she was what she was and she would arrange what she had if she had what she had and she did express what she said that she did say that sound coming out of her was saying what she expressed.
‘Her’ attacking exposing approaching was not forgetting. ‘She’ was attacking – (which was not attacking) ‘she’ was not attacking. Not attacking language. The only attacking that is not attacking is in telling about it- writing about it.
Page 70 If ‘she’ were coming going ‘she’ would not be receiving resting which ‘she’ was. Asking about anything not feeling. ‘He’ is leaving.
231 ‘She’ is not leaving – (she did not leave language) but expressing not enquiring what she should be receiving, giving, meaning–seeing.
If saying what has meaning is saying what he is saying then he is saying that which has meaning and saying that which has meaning he being one saying what he's saying he is arranging what has meaning in arranging what he has been saying in saying what he's saying. If he is saying what has meaning, and he is saying what he is saying, then what is being said having meaning and he saying that which has meaning, in listening he's hearing that everything that has meaning and that not any one is saying is what has meaning and anyone saying it saying that which has meaning if saying that which is meaning. He is saying that which has meaning and knowing what he is saying and saying what he's saying and saying that which has meaning he is not listening in hearing and he is knowing that he is nine what he's knowing. (continues on page 71)
‘She’ is staying … and giving ‘her’ meaning. This is a different sort of consolidation than ‘his.’
Page 71 Stein outlines here her discoveries re sound and meaning through ‘her’ contrasts. She contrasts them through ‘his’ notions and way of being. For ‘him’ …
He has discovered what he has discovered …
Its fixed there is noting opening
Sound sounding coming out of him is expressing that he is saying that which has meaning…
‘His’ knowing is closely aligned with ‘his’ sense of already established meaning.
In discovering anything he is knowing what he's knowing and in telling that thing he is telling all of having come to know what he discovered what he knew …
He has discovered what he has discovered and having discovered what he has discovered he has heard what he heard and having heard what he heard and knowing what he knew, he telling is expressing that he is saying that which has meaning and he being on and being that one in saying that which has meaning he is continuing and saying what he is saying and saying what he is saying he is saying that he is saying that which has meaning. He did discover that which he did discover. He did say that which he did say. Sounds sounding coming out of him is expressing that he is saying that which has meaning.
There is a feeling of ‘him’ packing up, finishing off … summing up, leaving the conversation, leaving the new language, leaving the ‘two,’ the twosome that was Leo and Gertrude. Leo did leave the close relationship he had with Stein. Stein also indicates ‘he’ left himself through his denying of certain realities, the possible realities of sound in meaning and being accessed through the sound in language.
He was compelling, he was arranging, he was exploring, he was exciting in having that he was excited in expecting, and he was welcoming in explaining and he was denying in listening and he was repeating into denying and he was claiming in exploring and he was feeling in expressing and he was having in discovering …
232 This ‘his’ discovery is circular and enclosed. In ‘other’ words ‘he’ was not listening to ‘her’ or anyone else …(continues below)
Page 72 What is in order, there is a slow deliberate pace - what doesn’t fit for ‘him’ is axed.
He waited when he expected, he expected when he intended he discovered when he had what he had he would deny he arrange what he would have he felt what he would feel he said what he would say that which had meaning. He repeated what he repeated and he expressed that sounds sounding and coming out of him would not be saying that he would, that he would not arrange he could not arrange.
This is about meaning.
He was repeating that he was saying that which has meaning.
‘She’ discovered being itself as having meaning.
She then discovering was feeling that discovering being existing and discovering having meaning, she was expressing that she was telling what has meaning.
‘Her’ exclamation/breathing is very different here the rhythm shifts – there is a feeling of excited gasping in the sound of the text.
Page 73 In this ‘her’ meaning and discoveries are here like beads on a string – a long list.
She discovered …
She in discovery was feeling that discovering being existing and discovering having meaning, she was expressing that she was telling what has meaning. She did discover that discovery is being existing and she did discover that she was feeling discovering being existing and she did discover that being feeling and telling what has meaning she was feeling that discovering is being existing …
If she discovered that discovering being existing feeling has meaning, she did discover that she was feeling. Discovering that she was feeling she was feeling what she was doing and feeling what she was feeling she was completing discovering that discovery is existing. In completing discovering that discovery is existing she was feeling and feeling she was discovering all of the feeling that feeling she was feeling. In discovering all of the feeling that feeling she was feeling she was helping extraordinarily helping that discovering is being existing and extraordinarily helping that discovering is being existing she was feeling all that she was feeling.
‘She’ was having and being in discovery. This was causing a lot of feelings and ‘her’ feelings were equaling meaning. Through listening to meaning and discovery itself ‘she’ found feeling.
Page 74 ‘She’ was one ‘she’ did express that … but ‘she’ goes on to express more. This is the erroneous.
233 She could be one not living in what she had been feeling in having been living …
What does this mean ‘she’ wasn't living this way ‘she’ wasn't respecting this part of herself? But here ‘she’ is not saying … this, ‘she’ says ‘she was not saying that thing.’
‘She’ here is including even contradictory thought … Evenly.
This is about meaning to hear and not hearing.
If she was saying that she had said what she had said she was saying that doing what she was doing was doing what she would have been doing she had been meaning to hear what she heard. She was not saying that doing what she was doing was doing what she would have been doing if she had been meaning to hear what she heard. In this way there was every way of her being not hearing what she heard. In this way there was any way of her being not hearing what she heard. (more follows)
Page 75 What would be would be what it was. This is about knowing … ‘she’ did not know and this is articulated as a positive.
She did not know that hearing is being existing. She did not know that talking is being existing. She did not know that remembering is being existing. She did not know that feeling is being existing. Feeling, hearing, talking, sound coming out of her and sounding she is expressing that she is saying what she is saying and saying that that what is here is what it is and saying that she had said what she had said in having said that what would be was what it was. (my italics)
It is not through ‘knowing’ that ‘she’ knows … but through another faculty. Stein never explains what this is except when ‘she’ highlights how important love is to this sounded language. It is definitely not through remembering (a way of language ‘he’ uses), where remembering is not sounding. It is something to do with being first then ‘doing.’ ‘She’ was being doing. In language this is in ‘saying’ or sounding it.
Doing, saying, believing, feeling, thinking, receiving, attacking, rising, fearing if all of that is remembering, then remembering is not sounding in expressing being existing. This is not being a decision changing is not existing.
And then ‘she’ says ‘she’ did not come in (to language) ‘she’ is staying which ‘she’ was … staying … ‘She’ ‘was, and sound sounding was coming out of her…’ This is a definitive statement.
She was tendering that she being feeling had not being completely suffering. She was receiving that going to be explaining she had been not one completing all remembering having been existing. She was receiving what she was giving. She was not denying in being existing. She was not rehearsing anything. She was not continuing. She was and sound sounding was coming out of her the sound that sounding was coming in coming out of her.
‘She’ was no rehersing. ‘He’ was taking … to ‘keep what he kept.’ ‘She’ was being, not remembering, doing, staying. Being in the present writing sound in the present sense of being.
234 Page 76 ‘He’ is doing/being, beginning arranging.
Page 77 This passage feels again like ‘him’ packing up his thinking … in rushing, shifting, coming, not needing, telling, to be existing, expressing not asking … Then ‘she’ is stilling - filling. Turning ‘his’ rushing into ‘his’ way of being. Through out it all sound is – the sound of filling.
If quietly then certainly not continually she stayed where she was when something that could be coming was rushing. She had gone and rushing was being existing when moving she was progressing. She did arrive when she was going and arriving was being existing. She was going where going was being. She had the way and having the way she went the way she was going, rushing being existing. She did move and moving she was completely filling, arriving being existing. She did start, she did go, she did arrive she did move.
But then sound fills. Too.
Sound was the sound that filling was feeling and feeling was staying, if quietly not continually, and it was staying in continually and feelingly and giving and receiving and arranging, arriving being existing …
Page 78 Being pleasing ‘he’ was not saying all that ‘he’ was stealing. Stealing away ‘He’ was saying something that was not the meaning. Being duplicitous.
‘She’ felt good about asking questions of listening … feeling winning she did not feel stupid. Stein knows she is onto something here.
She did ask if she had not said that what was was not not stupid. She was feeling winning asking what she was asking in hearing what she was hearing She was refreshing accompanying asking.
And ‘she’ was ‘being’ in the asking.
Page 79 The meaning and what ‘she’ did not …
She did not mean, she said she did not mean that anything that was not something that was what she was expressing. She said that she meant that she was feeling that anything that is something is what she was mentioning in asking what she was asking.
Here there is outlined lots about feeling, feeling and asking permission almost… of what?
To say that she felt that it was right to say that she would ask what she had asked in believing what she was feeling was her way and a way that was her way was the way that she said what she said in asking if she had not asked if she was believing what see was feeling …
And now we have believing … but a clear believing now, a believing in ‘her’ self,
235 through asking, in the way of being. Then follows a passage re ‘his’ facts – ‘his’ expecting.
Page 80 ‘His’ proving that ‘he’ didn't realize it was only one way. ‘He’ completely is not asking listening – this is a conflict.
Page 81 Arguments.
He was saying everything and in saying everything he said that things not being existing things that being said and meaning that saying anything being existing he's not then listening.
‘His’ is a type of thinking … a type of language, a type of being, creating a type of meaning.
Page 82 This is all about ‘him’, and his own arguments. What follows is ‘language’ using all of its arguments.
Page 83 More about ‘him’. It is endless and repetitive.
Page 84 All about ‘him’. It is endless and repetitive.
Page 85 More about ‘him’. It is endless and repetitive. And closed.
Page 86 ‘He’ is knowing and saying.
‘She’ instead is simply saying everything.
In saying everything and she was the one who was saying everything, in saying everything she was saying everything she was saying. She was saying everything. In struggling and she was not struggling, in struggling she was not refusing what she was leaving. In struggling she was having what she was having that she was not struggling, she was saying everything, she was saying everything she was saying she was not struggling …
In the saying she is saying everything. In the sound of it. In the saying … ‘she’ is saying everything.
Page 87 ‘She’ was different in that ‘she’ asking all of asking. Asking all. Asking al the questions that mattered.
236 What follows is a passage about ‘his’ winning and then eating.
He did say then the winning is winning and if he had won he would not know all the new is what he knew is what it is and what he could win would be what it is and he would begin all of saying everything. He said everything.
If he were eating …
He changing, reading, writing, hearing, talking, meeting he was hoping …
What’s eating got to do with it? Digesting, she’s referring to digesting meaning maybe? (though Leo is reported as having an eating disorder, one of not digesting)
‘She’ talks of meaning/being through what ‘she’ heard … but its an open hearing.
She did say that what she was she saw and what she saw she heard and what she heard she knew what she knew she said. She did say that what she said she felt and what she felt had come and having come it would be that and being that she would not ask and not asking she would know and knowing she would hear and hearing she would work and working she would express and expressing she would be helping and helping she would come and coming she would speak and speaking she would smile and smile and she would rest and resting she would save in saving she would have and having she would have what she could have what she had had but she must have. And she was not quite appealing to herself to help herself win what she would win.
‘She’ says it the new language is not quite from ‘herself’. Instead it is built in intensity from saying and hearing and feeling and expressing and helping …
Page 88 ‘She’ felt all she heard. ‘She’ worked. Here Stein turns to outlining how ‘she’ worked. ‘Her’ work and feeling … was in doing. ‘His’ work criticized and not increasing like expected. ‘She’ worked. ‘Her’ work was feeling and doing … ‘she felt all she heard.’
If to do what she did was to work when she worked she would continue the way she continued and she continued to work work when she worked and she worked when she did what she did and she continued to do what she did when she worked.
Then there is light. ‘His’ work was increasing the light … Through defining, separating, delineating and criticizing. There is a non-increasing around him an un-expectedly large undigestable non- increasing.
Page 89 Here follows something new, a new word ‘being’… burning. Burning and light.
He liked not arranging all of it when it was all the light that was given by everything that was then
237 not completing burning …
Burning?
Then …
He saw when he saw that he saw. He explained all of that in being illuminating in criticizing. He expected when he intended and he told all of that in telling everything.’
Is this the light of vision? The inner lamp of the eye, the ‘I’, that illuminates and so knows and shapes the world and as a consequence being in it? (pre-Socratic notion)
‘He’ meant, ‘he penetrated,’ ‘he did not follow’, ‘he criticized,’… ‘he versed and he avoided.’ What has this to do with the above passage? Its it to do with burning and burning books? Then can we re - read that strange sentence about burning- not burning as ‘him’ not learning.
He liked not arranging all of it when it was all the light that was given by everything that was then not completing burning.
The illuminating is criticizing. ‘He’ meant–penetrated ‘he’ did not follow but criticized refers to avoided changed next another dense passage about rushing following leading that fencing standing still that ‘she’ stayed but did change agreeing and that ‘she’ worked.
Page 90 What follows is a long piece of text, a block almost, about ‘her’ way of working, and all the qualities that go into making. Her ‘complete connection’ with herself and sound- her whole way of being becomes an ideal of creativity - a model in the language of the text, as it's ever longer sentences use the logical order of syntax to create associations that transcend its limitations …
She would not have a decision and deciding that she would not be saying, she would be having a decision in meaning that reflection is interpretation and interpretation this decision and decision is regarding meaning and regarding meaning is acting and acting is expression and expression if not resisting winning and not resisting winning is submitting and submitting is leading and leading is declaration and declaration is beginning and beginning is intending and intending is deciding and deciding is creating and creating is not contending and not contending is destroying and destroying is submitting and submitting is decision and decision is creating and creating is leading and leading is reflection and reflection is exacting and exacting his decision an decision is meaning and meaning is progressing and progressing is not denying and not deny is feeling and feeling is thinking and thinking is arranging and arranging is continuing and continuing is rebeginning and rebeginning is submitted and submitting is decided and deciding is creating and creating is reflecting and reflecting his meaning and meaning is deciding and deciding is believing and believing is continuing in continuing is leading and leading is expressing and expressing his meaning the meaning is ceiling and feeling of submitting and submitting is deciding and deciding is creating and creating is following and following his leading and leading is following and following is deciding and deciding is creating and creating if submitting and submitting its meaning and meaning is expressing and expressing is accepting and accepting is submitting and submitting is following and following is feeling and feeling his meaning and meaning is creating and creating is doing and doing is
238 continuing and continuing is expressing and expressing is leading and leading is following and following is expressing and expressing his meaning and meaning is expressing and expressing is leading and leading is expressing and expressing is following and following is creating and creating is expressing and expressing its meaning and meaning is doing and doing is following the following is creating and creating is leading and leading is expressing and expressing his meaning and meaning is expressing and expressing is feeling and feeling is following and feeling is leading and expressing its meaning and meaning is creating and creating his meaning and meaning is meaning.
The rhythms and repeats of this passage express the rhythms of a creative process where a flow of processes are moved through and repeated, looped almost.
Page 91 ‘He’ was saying that ‘he’ was not saying all that ‘he’ was hearing.
Page 92 ‘He’ was too repulsed to listen/hear for refusals anyway. ‘She’ … carefully says – ‘she’ was carefully saying.
She did say all she said carefully.
Page 93 ‘Her’ anger. ‘Her’ fire opposing. Opposing …
She would oppose not having said what she had said.
Page 94 Here there is a long passage about space about staying … ‘she’ was being still. ‘She’ is taking a stand, a position, becoming committed to, being situated … where ... there.
She was not completely staying. She was where she was.
He and the extreme statement of staying was not the extreme state of deciding, he and all he said was what he said if he said what he said he said.’
And destroying. He did.
He did deny nothing. He did destroy what he would destroy when he did destroy what he might destroy when he said what he did say and did say that he did not repeat what he said he did destroy when he destroyed the way of repeating what he said he did not repeat and he said that he said he did not repeat.
Page 95 It's saying that the thing that will happen means that feeling his time then he say that anything will happen means that he has been sent… What that one is saying is showing that that one is not grasping what that one cannot grasp.
‘He’ looked well. It is obvious the visual has nothing to do with what Stein is outlining.
239 Page 96 ‘She’ refused nothing.
Page 97 ‘He’ settled …
Page 98 ‘He’ was in agreeing. ‘He’ did not ascertain all that ‘he’ denied.
Page 99 A new quality is entering the text, - the argument, a new idea, it is in the middle. It could be Alice B. Toklas, it could also refer to anew another way of languaging, being, speaking, knowing, through. It is a sound that embraces the ‘other’ thus making a third way.
She said that she knew that she had what she did have when she had had come the one who came was sorry she came.
He was one who was not one of the two of them.
The energy of the text is so different, I am thinking it is a new quality … a third energy or perspective.
Pages 100 ‘He’ and ‘she’ are in conversation. ‘He’ explaining this is not being part of ‘the two.’ About they there are/were two there are/were ‘he’ and ‘she’.
Page 101 She was not deciding not changing.
She did have what was asked and she did refuse what was refused. That was the energy…
‘She’ or Stein was pulled in two …
She had the denial that was inherited what would be losing. She had the winning which was the continuing that was the offering with withdrawing and storming. She had the victory which was coming and staying in the telling of that which was needing and having and the attacking. She had to losing which was the resigning and the reciting in the choosing of that which was the meaning and the duplicating and expecting hardening. She had the succeeding which was enduring and having and stimulating that which was staying and slowing and hesitating and remaining and expecting and holding. She had continuing that which was rebuking and exhorting and dominating and directing in being in seeing and liking and suggesting.
Page 102 There is a feeling of closing. Dividing up assets. Dividing up what fits in each syntax. Much does not fit in sounded language sound syntax.
240 He has an estimate of what had been when he had the and he had a conclusion of what was …
Page 103
He did not say that he ordered what he ordered …
Page 104 ‘He’ was not sublime. And the language of ‘him’ is not open enough for sublimity.
He was not sublime when he aspersed what was the beginning of elevation … He did not deny that he did not judge that which was the remainder when appetite was not natural …
From ‘his’ standpoint ‘her’ way of being was not natural. But it is also a ‘dig’ at language that is not sublime in itself, not open enough.
Page 105 Sound here is not destitute. Sounds not destitute of continuing variation.
He did achieve that the light that was right was lied so that sounds sounding was not destitute of continuing verification. He overlooking did say that sound was sounding close.
Page 106 Here there is slipping sound sounding … and then reflecting.
All the way that there was a there was hay there was slipping and all the way there was slipping sound sounding was not determining that sound be sounding. She who in the midst was reflecting what was missing was not destroying that sound sounding is sounds sounding.
She was the first to be last and this was not when remaining was being existing. She was not remaining. She was not reflecting being the last. She was remaining. She was not reflecting being the last. She was remaining when the departure was not threatening. She was not destroying anything.
A new word ‘hay’ enters the argument is this a reference to Negro workers and their songs? A call out like this is often used in Negro spirituals before the important part of the song is begun and it is also a call to the audience to listen. And is it also a reference to the sounding of language as in its calling out qualities.
‘She’ was reflecting what was missing …
‘He’ was saying…
He did come to stay when he was leaving. He had come to leave when he was staying …
And. ‘He’ moved quickly. Language in this mode refuses and leaves off from its own inherent freedoms.
241 He had freedom.
Page 107 A distinct noise ‘he’ had defective hearing.
A distant noise was farther then he heard and this was because he had defective hearing. He was a light was shining when he stood his clothes were burning.
‘He’ said ‘he’ did not play. Again this is language as a closed system.
But then, a long passage about the new energy coming out of being out of the language of being … or this is Alice or both.
With laudation and intoning … and with appetite ‘she’ proceeds.
She smiling yet, she hitting the pin that is sticking and not pricking the skin that is hanging, she likely yet and not forgetting, she hardly yet and not remembering, she and the water trickling, she and with absent breathing, she and with laudation and intoning, she with appetite not returning, she with diminished attention ... She is the one having a connection that expressing is the thing that rising again has risen, and rising is rising and will be having come to be risen. She is the anticipation of forfeiting what is not forbidden. She is the anticipation of conviction of remembering being existing. She is the anticipation of the new one being an old one. She is the anticipation of a new one being an immaculate conception. She is the anticipation of crossing. She is the anticipation of regeneration. She is the anticipation of excelling obligation She is the anticipation. She is the actualization …
Where this becomes anticipation ... the actualizing of a new sound based language.
Page 108 Leading to articulation that is marvelous … ‘later she learnt marvelous articulation.’ Strength is in conviction. ‘She’ was the centre.
Page 109 ‘She’ [or Stein] is whole now …
She had the way and she did say she had had and had had a way, she did not cling to swim, she did not seize to pull, she did not sully anyone, she did not cease to rest, she did not stop to run. She did not go as she went, she did not move to be learning, she was studying and remembering, she was not removing and forgetting. She did not have what she had to hold. She did not hold what she saw when it hung. She did express what she said has the way. She said that she had what was the way there was a way. If the old thing came in the old thing went. She saw the old thing and she said that she was the reminder, she had the way to hold the way to have, she had the way to decrease and to abstain, she said she had had the way every day that she said what she said she was saying but having is holding and decreasing every day that she said what she said she was saying that holding was abstaining. Everyday as she said what she said she said that having the way was the way of remaining anyway that it is the existing. She did not accentuate all indignation. She was the remains of all that hung as it was seen.
She said, and the articulation was not upraising, she said, and the accentuation was not prolonging, she said, and the articulation was evening, she said, and the accentuation was pronouncing, she said
242 what she said and she was agreeing. She said that she had known what were the remaining words that she was to say. She did not refuse to add changing denying. She said that she did not, feeling that refusing was something coming to be existing.
She could completely have the way that pointed someway and had the vantage of knowing established, well-established resting. She was not resting.
In this whole ‘she’ refuses to be well - established or resting in her ways. ‘Her’ articulation in this is surprising …
Page 110 Believe ‘her’ … ‘She’ was one believing in her the warning ‘her’ believing ‘she’ said.
Believe her and she was one.
‘He’ says–he is the sun. Lingering way. ‘He’ did attain all to precision returning contemplation.
Page 111 Still ‘he’ notices ‘some sound’ … as sound accompanying
He came into a sound that was accompanying something, it was some sounds that if he were listening he was not hearing and this was not depressing him as he had the continuation of some way of repeating… He was pardoning what he was not hearing and he was accompanying what was sounds for existing as if he was continuing …
Is Stein here saying imagination is not real? ‘He’ heard the same thing. ‘He’ did not dominate defining equalization.
Page 112 Here seeing is referred to. Two. Too. ‘He’ was certain could be the arrangement that he was seeing. ‘He’ shone. ‘He’s’ seeing ‘he’ heard the same.
Page 113 The old way … two (almost) distinct ways of saying being of being even are now outlined here. One is the old way.
He found the old way to say that he had away to say what he would say. He said that there was all the way he did not say everything.
This does not delight the author (Stein)
He did not delight everyone.
He said that he did not wish to listen.
243
This is also a further play on light and that it is not all delight.
Page 114 Not life-like. ‘He’ accumulated all ‘he’ said.
Page 115 ‘He’ describes sensation and in this, what does this mean? And. ‘He’ changes his handwriting … why?
He told it all and he changed the rest of the expression of describing that sensation. He organised the expression of the indicated something.
… He came to have the freedom of changing his handwriting.
This sounds like ‘he’ eventually came to change his handwriting but only over time. Is changing ‘his’ handwriting the most he could do to language?
‘He’ …
He had possessed in looking.
He heard the remainder and he said it all and he felt the beginning and he decided the continuing. He led the changing and he refused the listening and the influence of seeing any countenanced the hearing and he remained in and he did not stay in and he did not lose anything when he lost something.
Something is not authentic in ‘his’ writing … it is limited.
Page 116 In his not expressing, ‘other’, that is, sound meaning is refused. There is a not joining. A refusing. ‘He’ refused what was expressing meaning. ‘He’ leaving did not have the sound.
He did the leaving of what was not expressing meaning by refusing what he was refusing.
He had not the sound that was not issuing as pleasure is existing. He had the sound that is issuing as expressing having and increasing. He did not do lives again. He said what he thought any thought where he was and he was where he stayed and he stayed where he conversed and he conversed where he talked and he talked where he was returning and he returning where he was not confusing and he was not confusing, he was not confusing and he gave that which was all of that which was same as they could not be if he was all when he was all. He was not there when he was avoiding a constitution and he was not avoiding the constitution when he was explaining and he was explaining when he was not telling what he was thinking, he was thinking, he was talking.
Whistling was not expressing that he was not thinking, whistling was not expressing that he was expressing everything. He was not whistling louder. He had been exchanging what he had not been denying he was not denying everything … If he wanted to speak some more he used that way to say
244 the rest and he did very well when he said more than he was saying when he came again. He did not join when he said that he understood something.
If … ‘he’ says ‘he’ had no need of writing.
If he was one and loved the same, if it was one and had joined what he mentioned, if he was one any had the way to say that speaking was occupying a relation, if he was one he was the one and he was saying that he was not needing to be writing what would be written, if he was one he had been one and he had been intending and he had left everything, if he was one he was one and he kept what he was explaining, if it was one he was one and he had the way there is that he is a way that is the way when there is listening, … (continued page 117)
Page 117 Stein found art did not express everything …
She did not profit by learning the whole of the language when she had the use of it all and said what she said. She said she enjoyed it she said it very well and she said but that was not all that was remaining. She said she could see any color. She said she would not know if she was blinded. She said she did not mean that she refused what she did not take she said that she had chosen when she found that she was not expressing everything. She said that she was not the beginning … This was not because she was praying …
Praying? We are on an ‘other’ level of languaging now… Not knowing if blinded, not refusing art, that had been ‘not chosen’ when ‘she’ found it was not expressing everything.
Page 118 The whole lot – ‘she’ heard it all … through yielding.
She did not join …
She did not ask every question …
One must follow one's convictions …
It is not enough to say that the one way is that way and to say that this is the way to sit and remain standing. It is not the way she sat.
Up and up a level of intensity is upped. It is tipped towards the ‘other’, opening to the ‘other’.
The big project did not tie ‘her’ out, that it was all of the ‘other’ … She was the rest of mankind.
If more of the best that she had came to be all that she said she heard all she heard and this was not fanciful and she was not determined. She had that expression and she was the only one to do it all. She was not tired. She did not deteriorate. She was the rest of mankind. That was not the way that she said something. She was not pertaining to all. She did the whole of all the rest. She was not marking the finishing and beginning of being existing. All that she saw when she heard it all was that she did see it all. This was not the rest of the beginning. She did not do that. She was the harder to see that she was not resting when she was
245 talking. She came to do that. Then there was that that was not all. That was the same. She had had the likelihood of saturating all the partial examples of solutions with the continuation of expression. She did not anticipate denying that. She yielded something. That was the only decision that was needing to decide what was decided and it was decided that there was a decision that she was there where she said she had not been. She could see that all the same hearing is seeing and seeing his hearing.
So ‘she'd’ heard it all (by this time). The insights –‘she’ was where ‘she’ had not been –‘she’ heard it all. The process –‘she’ studied something so ‘she’ could say that ‘she’ learnt it as she learnt.
Page 119 The new way with language is inclusive of its sound as the union. The way = union. The way equals union. Not destroying expression.
If it is the same that which shows that which means that is the way to say that some way is that way then there has come to be that reason that is not destroying expressing their agreement with anything. This was not the only truth that was not absent. She did undertake to corroborate everything. She did that. The rest was then not using all there been and all they had been if it had been had been there where there was used all that they are have been. This was not enough. There was more!!
The old way is not the only truth there is … the way of union with the three intertwined is an ‘other’ way of saying, being. This is the way to explain everything …
What the way the union of all that is everything comes to have with all that is everything is the way of explaining everything, is the way of saying everything. All the way there comes to be of refusing all that is the contribution is the way of receiving and rejecting, is the way of admitting and denying. This is the way that is all the way and all the way is the way and each and that is all each is there where that one as the remainder of all that has been and will be there. They are each one. That is not destroying anything. That is not substituting everything, that is not the same, that is not where there all that meaning. There is there what there is there. There is there. There is the rest of any hole. There is enough and too much is not enough, enough is more than any piece and all is enough.
The words ‘there is,’ reads like ‘theories’… This is the key to the whole text, Stein’s theory of language/meaning/being is that of a sounded language. Through a super reason a detailing of reasoned saying such that the way of reasoning itself is part of the reason heard.
If it is agreed that the rest remain where they are it is agreed that the presentation of the reason is the most reasonable way of determining it.
Reason reason reason. On the ‘other’ hand sounded reason is a new language a soundage.
Page 120 Here we return to ‘him’ (now clearly representing the old language) struggling. Stein as ‘she’ says ‘He was the partner of all the beginning.’ Stein loves ‘him’ (the old language). ‘He’ was the partner of this beginning.
246 ‘He’ was part of the beginning and so part of ‘her’ language - being.
Page 121 ‘She’ as the author of two positions him (Leo) as ‘her’ half. This is not being marginalized by the canon - by language, by philosophy. The two were the heart of ‘that thing.’ They were the half of it all. And they could tell each ‘other’ nothing … being so separate.
Page 122 If there was a bargain … ‘He’ had control of the halves and of the whole. The complete way. ‘She’ is talking of him as the authority. And the control.
Page 123 ‘He’ did not ask if he could divide meaning – ‘he’ was not interested only to improve…
He did not ask that he could divide the meaning that was meaning something from the meaning that was meaning that expected is not destroying actual respiration. He was not interested then. He had the proof.
But … ‘She’ too had the opportunity. This is Stein’s ‘theory’ of ‘other’ meaning.
She was not moving when she was emphasising and if she listened she said that she too had the opportunity and she had observed that the effect was the same.
Page 124 This is a rarity of affliction ‘She’ was not haphazard not heavy in ‘her’ following not disappearing. ‘She’ talks straight ‘she’ did not deceive.
She did not deceive. She said something.
It was the rarity of the affliction that happened any day that made her say that she had heard what she had heard’ … ‘She certainly knew all that had been done she was not apologetic.
She did not cry. She was talking in the words that had the meaning that she was feeling that she had the one she had and she was not choosing. She was not diplomatic.
‘She’ was poised … balanced … married to joined in language.
She was married too.
There is no apology, no deception. This is a sacred marriage an extra happiness in going into a state of being the feminine … herself – without deception …
Page 125 This is ‘autography not authority.
247
She had that autograph. She was not the authority.
This is what she did …
Saying little words which express a blessing and saying little words which are addressing contemplation and saying the words which can be at fencing and saying the words and saying anything is the particle that accentuates the industry emphasising articulation. She was existing.
This was not the only day that there was the union and it was hardly likely that an explanation makes the difference between the four who are the same. They can accomplish that she was not there then.
Page 126 This text below sounds like a combination of Stein’s working practice with her love being. It starts on the previous page ‘this was not the only day that there was an union …’ and continues below …
She was the particle and the resemblance and she had the edible piece when she did not eat more than she received and she was the pleader when there was not any fashion she undertook all the dressing when they came to be no hats and she was not appreciative and she did not know the aspect when there was all that was worn and not one together and she sanded what was not sandy when the sand was drifting over and she felt and she said but she had when she read what she had when she did and she did what she was as she was when she was and she was by the price that she did not have to say was not what she had to say. She was the weak if she was thicker and she was not the weaker if she was thinner and she was stalwart and she moved and the vigor they are was in her was the vigor that did run when the walking was so much faster and she did not run that way she did not walk that way and there was not the same question when there was an exception. She was not the one to need that which was needed. She was not the one to tell that which was told. She was the one to have and she was not the one to have what was had. She was approaching and she could not that way if she did not have all that she had and she was not anticipating, she was not participating, she agreed and she said that what she said and what she heard was what she said and what she heard and she said that she was not accumulating. She said she was only waiting. She said she had that expression. She was not the only target when she rested. She was not only the only comforter when she gave her expression. She was not the only solace when she received the return of the one intending to marry one. She was the whole when there was spared the one who was a comfort there. She was the whole when she was there and there was there for the one to come. She was the whole and she gave out what there was to be when there was one not empty. She was one and she had that son and she was giving what was not inundating. She had that most which was that which was that which was that which was that.
Pardon the only lady who was suppressing that feeling that made the last one who went away stay. If pardoning that one he was steering that which was not passing. He was not losing anything. He had come to the midst of the enlarging exhibition of the peculiar way that the one who did stay did not have that giveaway. He was not monstrous.
This is loving and being and working through the sounding. Sanding language back to its grit. A detailing of how ‘she’ was being with this new understanding.
Page 127 ‘Her’ and ‘him.’
248 ‘He’ had. More is written here about eating - digesting this and that. About ‘him’ rising and playing and not losing everything.
Page 128 More about ‘him’. And ‘his’ language. ‘He is not just leaving the house, he is leaving the position of the head of the house of language.
Page 129 ‘He’ came to ‘be farther and farther’… (query does Stein mean a double father) ‘He.’ ‘He’ is petulant. ‘He’ was not the object. The plainest of explanation for wrestling and sitting. ‘He’ spoke what was the pleasant way to say. And we know ‘her’ way is difficult and not interested in pleasantries.
Page 130 ‘He’ had the feeling that ‘he’ had one. One language. ‘He’ was not ardent. ‘He’ lessened what was small. Stein here jokes about ‘the painting with the green stripe - Matisse’s wife with the hat’ ‘He’ harnessed. It. Leo brought it. Or ‘he’ meaning Matisse consigned sound, through vibratory colour to an image.
Page 131 ‘He’ did not listen to, too much. ‘He’ thinking was.
Page 132 ‘He’ did not have the voice … the whole sound ‘He’ was rethinking. Even with the accordion violin–he did not have the voice. Eating - digesting. ‘He’ speaks of something …
Page 133 On this page Stein says … ‘Sound was meaning something …’- this is the second time ‘she’ has stated this.
But first … the reasons why ‘his’ way would not do …
The gift that has the sweet paid conversation of listening and advancing is not the same as the sound that coming to be duller has all the patience that is not there where everywhere there is no one coming in. He has reached the outside. This did not disquiet all the apples.
249 He had the strength when there was enough so that he had that reverberation that he had the strength to come in when he opened the door and he open the two of them. He had that which was not a system.
He had not the imagination ‘he was not imaginative.
Temper complaining of talking …
In ‘his’ clatter …
This was the reason and he had that foundation and that which is not any clatter is the same sound ending and surely the identical state is not only that which relates to the beginning and the middle and ending. He had it to say.
Surely the whole room which is the room and another has that meaning and that is the reproduction of all that would be placed with the end has been before they had come all the ending. This did not discourage expression. Sound was meaning something.
There are two rooms for being now… This could be about the paintings getting taken down. But it could also be about the extra space in language.
Page 134 This is like a new ‘her’ a new narrator too that is a new Gertrude … ?
Page 135 There is a shift. She did the most …
She said it was the time to grow.
She had not all that to say …
She and if she was one she was not one and they would to, she and she with their and she had the same time as all the use of any of all that which as change has enough of all the use of any …
Page 136 The tune was an element to the new sounded language.
Expressing, she and if she is all they will be is what there is if she is all of what there will be. She was encouraged and the tune which was that element is the one that if she is there to be included is the one to say that which if it the one is that one and there has been all of that said.
Sound not expressing all of excess.
Sounding sound is expressing the continuing.
She had not that to have which was what was the main beginning of enough of all that was which was all that which was that which was what was what she was doing was expressing as sound was not sounding and noises were not recognising all there was of excess in subduing. She had the exchange.
In the particle of all the presence there is not the same sound and this is not the accompaniment of
250 that practice. There is nothing of all that is which is all there is as there is all their discernment. To hear the same winging when there is all that there needs to be is what is the different plain when the presence is all there and not the same.’ This is the second type of presence–the second presence of sound or in sound. Talking does not destroy any intention. Sounding sound is expression that which is continuing.
If coming into the one who is passing in any direction is a way to talk in talking does not destroy any intention. Sounds sounding is expressing that which is continuing.
Here there is a second type or kind of presence … it is winging, bird-like or angelic.
There is also mentioned the ‘particle’… a particular aspect of smallish scale? Is this a nod to the work being done by Maxwell and Plank overturning Newtonian notions of matter existing as discrete terms…?
Page 137 Here there is no alloy. But there is stemming and surging.
The organ of interpretation and reproduction …
Sound sounding is expressing everything.
If the movement is all day then there is of any day and that interest is that expression. There can be no remainder. There is no alloy. There is that sound. There is the day. There is every day. There is sound sounding. There is all of that. There is that.
The ending which is not ending in the beginning which is continuing in the continuing which that sounding and the sounding which is expressing, the time has not been coming and going, there has not been winning and losing, there has been then abundant stemming and surging in framing discrimination. This has all that reality.
The burden is not that sound which has been sounding there is not every placing everything. There is not that burden which is the sound of sounding there is not the indicating everything following everything.
This is about the burden of reality. ‘He’ was the organ of interpretation and reproductions.
Page 138 Stein here says the hum cannot be hurt … she infers by ‘him.’ By this she means the ‘him’ of language.
He does not hurt the hum and he does say that then and he has all of which theories to leaving that which had not been that order.
He not any piece of name.
That was not the test of that description,…
There follows a summing up of ‘him’ that allows the irritation that allows ‘his’
251 quirkiness.
Page 139 There is mention of a purse … the same purse is as if the same strain ‘His’ singing was not expressing any division, ‘he’ was not expressing moving, ‘he’ was not singing.
There was listening,
Paling the range of reason … whilst leaving the whole connection. Stein her has dissected language to the core of its resonances but still has left it alive even more alive than before. (Stein had done leading research into brain anatomy involving dissection within her studies in medicine)
Paling the range of reason, leaving the whole connection, using the corrugations, spreading the rest of retraction, finding conception, releasing the special action, agreeing to filling talking, choosing the best reception, he who is and was is the one then and all the same purse is if the same strain.
‘He’ skims the surface only.
Page 140 There is that thing.
There has been that thing. There is then something. There is the same and that which occupies it is called the space that separating it is used when each one which is it is altogether.
Page 141 ‘She’ received the ‘other’ … here she folds ‘his’ differences within ‘her’ language.
That they said it that they said that that was the say that they said. He said and she said.
Here ‘she’ rejects the surface – the front … the persona, anchoring her project of using ‘his’ voice to talk on a large scale about language.
She was the one who had the receiving of nothing that was not coming very often. When she received the ‘other’ she had that way and that was what did make better reception. She was not afraid to go away, she withdrew that enables all the likelihood that for a very long time they would be what there was and certainly that was the description and the place was aware that did shine. This was not the only participation. There was this more there was the way to have all that was a strong colour show that the colour was not losing its variety. The way to do this was not the way chosen. The way to have the content was certainly to have that expression which was not absorbing any sound that was receding. There was the return which when and then there was that front was left did not destroy the courage. There was not that feeling.
The closet was not holding all the clothes that have been made. Some one not in the kitchen. This does not mean that day was that piece of housekeeping. She had not left every room empty. They were there in order. This did not make any thickening. The effect was not there are when they had been increasing. The increase that was to cease was not the increase that was a plaster stop there was not the inside cover. This which had that which was accent …
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The received the rare thing … the nothing!! And then when ‘she’ received the ‘other’, ‘she’ had already the way to do it …
Page 142 Thinking was not what had that when it had that which was not passed when there was a release.
If sitting is not evaporating then she did not have that meaning. She was not waiting. All she one was that victory. She had that conviction. It was turning and resetting, it was not adaptation, it was the time of day. All the day was that way. And that which was penetration and reversal was saying good-bye. She did turn to die. She was not in that eye. She was the pleasing reunion that was not being in being where there was no seeing. She came to stay that way.
A belief that has translation is not all there is of exaltation. He had all of any of that use.
….
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APPENDIX FOUR
MY OWN WORK
ARCHITECTURE OF THE THROAT NOTES ON MY PERFORMATIVE COMPOSITIONS (2008-2012)
We don’t understand language because language doesn’t understand itself, nor does it want to… Novalis, Image Language.
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DIGITAL WORK AVAILABLE ONLINE
Overall list of works http://majenamafe.blogspot.com/ Soundage a digital opera http://soundage-a-digital-operation.blogspot.com.au/ That-unsound blog http://that-unsound.blogspot.com/ Further field projects http://www.furtherfield.org/display_user.php?ID=848 artists web http://www.majenamafe.com/ sound works http://soundcloud.com/that-unsound biography of sound by Gertrude Stein http://biography-sound.blogspot.com/ curly-toes http://currly-toes.blogspot.com/ blanks http://blanksarakawalyotard.blogspot.com/ ventriloquist project http://ventriloquist-project.blogspot.com/ o-zer-zero http://o-zero-zero.blogspot.com/ biography of sound http://biography-sound.blogspot.com/ stripe articulate http://stripe-articulate.blogspot.com/ shuttle-throated http://shuttle-throat.blogspot.com/ pinker sound http://pinker-sounding.blogspot.com/
SOUND COMPOSITIONS RELEASED AS CD’s
that-unsound 1
1 patriarchal poetry prettily ma-chine
255 2 let her be shy… oh
3 method method … delightful
4 giggle of I knew that
5 instructions for touching Canada
6 sincere sound of sillience
7 gertruda poema
8 droorn (a voice opera) 4 birdcall
9 gertrude wood napoleon
10 lovelovelove song for repeat’n
11 walk’n on the moon- sound com’n out of her
12 fuckin love me 22
unsound 2 garbled mouth carbled mouth
1 do exactly do
2 fff-innegan’s wake 2x4
3 first 11 pages making Americas
4 gertrude and the listening interviews
5 gertrude sound…song do dooo do
6 more and more than Oh!
7 oh-man throat lullaby with bird call’n
8 smoosy-giggle-ot
9 song for raspberry jamjams
10 song-sound as JJ sound Oh!
11 speek’n speak
12 telephone man
13 that wuld be very nice
14 the way of being and realising it
15 vertical 3 stein-sound
16 wednesday-tuesday, ramblin sound
256 17 shucks
18 telephone man
20 thick sliced sound band
droorn and finn and spot
1 a girl gett’n into a dozen blue Cadillac’s
2 droorn (a voice opera) 4 bird call
3 fff-innegins wake 2x4
4 gertruda poema
5 giggle of I knew that
6 Heidi’s day
7 jabber jabber
8 making snow cakes
9 oh-man- throat lullaby with bird call’ns
10 smoosy-giggleot, non-definitive
11 song for raspberry jamjams
12 song- sound as JJsound Oh!
13 speak softly
14 spot a lot little hand
15 that wuld be very nice
16 thick licked sound band
17 words for speek
stein/mine ventriloquised
1 patriarchal poetry prettily ma-chine 2
2 first 11 pages making americas
3 gertrude and the listening interviews
257 4 gertrude sound song do dooo do
5 gertrude wood napoleon
6 let her be shy…oh
7 lovelovelovesong for repit’in
8 method method…delightful
9 more and more than oooh
10 song for raspberry jamjams
11 the way of being and realising it
12 thick’d lick sound
13 vertical 3 stein-sound
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3 SOUND OPERAS(OPERATIONS) Architectures of throat granulations
six small operas for Gertrude/nine patriarchal poetry prettily ma-chine 2:32 (2008)
For voice and harpsichord. Marie Antoinette composition for the harpsichord + Gertrude Stein’s ‘Patriarchal Poetry’ text read/ventriloquised through text to speech recognition software. repeated let-her-be shy …oh 1:12 (2008)
Song sound for ventriloquised voice. My text on Stein using repetition and the sound of words
Over/under ‘street’ sounds, call and responses, emphasizing the fielded monotone of sound. Horse sounds added method method …delightful (2008)
Patriarchal poetry reads through test to voice recognition software
Over music using overlays and voice sounds+ kissing sounds lovelovelove for repitit’n 1:49 (2008)
Samples and repetition. Voice + singing+ Gertrude Stein interview excerpts gertrude wood napoleon 2:32 (2008)
Samples and nursery rhymes+ Stein interviews call and response talking over theme narcissists gertruda-poema 1:17 (2008)
My text piece on Stein read through text to voice recognition software more and more than oh 1:04 (2008)
Stein repeating + shout out vertical 3 Stein-sound 1:29 (2008)
My own score of Stein’s text abstracted
Stein voice recording extract + layers of found sound + voice
Theme : counting numbers timing
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the way of being and realizing it 0:44 (2008)
Repeat call and response+ Stein extract from reading ‘The way of being…’
Lovelove song for repeat’n (2008)
Repeat’n love song
……..
plus/ply’n STEIN first 11 pages making Americas (2009)
Voice recordings of first eleven pages of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, ventriloquised in voice and layered till they played out. Thickened sound vertical
Gertrude sound…song do doooo do (20010)
Gertrude Stein radio interview arguing about the meaning of words reassembled to explore theory of sound in Two
Gertrude and the listening interviews (2011)
Gertrude Stein radio interview arguing about the meaning of words reassembled to read her theory of sound in Two
Thick’d lick sound (2011-12)
Cut and paste Gertrude Stein radio interview arguing about the meaning of words reassembled to read her theory of sound in Two as a digital opera
……..
thick operetta for sound
song for raspberry jamjams (2009)
Song for sound. Created entirely by chance. Dense overlay of samples + voice sincere-sound of sillience 2:08 (2009)
Collaboration with A. Potts my voice reading his theory + music
Theme ‘expectation music’ + droll voice sounds + silence + piano riffs
What is the sincere sound? Sincerity mocked.
260
Droon a Voice opera 7:33 (2009)
My text ventriloquised through text to voice software
Over bird sounds
Stein voice recordings (cut up) + white noise fuckin love-me 1:06 (2008)
My text ventriloquised + ‘expectation theme music’ samples wednesdy-tuesdy wednesdy ramblin sound 1:33 (2009)
Layered voice with accents and sound (fiddle) cut up
Voice samples + found sound. a girl gett’n into a dozen blue Cadillac’s (2009)
My text ventriloquised + ‘expectation theme music’ samples fff-innegins wake 2x4 (2009)
James Joyce My text ventriloquised + ‘expectation theme music’ samples
Heidi’s day (2009)
My text ventriloquised + ‘expectation theme music’ samples jabber jabber (2009)
My text ventriloquised + ‘expectation theme music’ samples making snow cake (2009)
My text ventriloquised + ‘expectation theme music’ samples
…….
261 SONIC SOUNDED IMAGE WORKS
The screen has always been text based
The Calling 3:19 (2008)
Film of three men calling out, call and response, looped, multi sound recordings added
Sillient Movie 0:41 (2008)
Silent sound, pin holed screen, mouth opened in rounded shapes never tell (2008) Cartoon rabbit with emptiness inside it Set to voice singing you can never tell Finnegan’s trans-mouth thunder : Finnegan’s Wake and Thunder Words 0:27 (2008)
One long word, performing mouth saying Thunder Word no1 from Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake, pin holed screen teeth'n libretto (2008) Voice score with teeth
Opera for Glossolalia 0:44 (2008)
Doubled face (monstrous) showing mouth opened widely, sound as voice added
Extreme guttural sounds, playing with the grotesque
Jigg for to Holler 0:55 (2008)
Doubled face showing mouth opened widely, sound as voice added
Extreme guttural sounds, set to loud polka and multi track sound
Inside the mouth 0:51 (2008)
Dialogue about the inside of the mouth, doubled face showing mouth opened
Sound as voice added
How are U? 3:40 (2008)
262 Mouth asking questions. Doubled face showing mouth blowing kisses
Oh Yeh 1:15 (2008)
Mouth exclaiming. Doubled face showing nose and cheeks. Sound as voice added
The sound inside it 2:25 (2008)
Dialogue and exclamations using repetition about sound, created Marionette ventriloquizing voice, Gertrude Stein reading and multi sound added
Grinding Glory 1.42 (2008)
Animated/ ventriloquised 1950’s pinup, grinding out sound. Voice added and sound
Even the Concertina’d O 3:10 (2008)
Film of debutants dancing/folding unfolding in, dubbed and doubled, multi sound and voice added. Some reverse sound, complicated
87 Channel Opera for Silence 1:45 (2008)
Theoretical treatise on the sound in silence. Collaboration with A. Potts Video-multiple photos of 1950’s pin-ups doubled.Images look like throat. Multi sound as voice added. Pin holed screen how are u? I'm walking the cows (2008) Blah
'more' show episode 1 (2008) Mary Tyler Moore folding and unfolding a typewriter and her arms, set to ‘anticipation music muffeta opera for furred throated (2008) Keyhole throated sounds
I’m watching the cows...how are U, really? 3:40 (2008)
Doubled face showing mouth opened widely (monstrous). Sound as voice added
Extreme guttural sounds. Cacophony of sound layered ventriloquised Stein (2009) Animated face of Gertrude Stein round-sail on (2009) Clouds singing. Round againabdagainandagain (2009)
Voice in repetition, cut up mouth say-ed stripiies (2009) Voice score set to dissolving stripes Twitalot (2009) Letterbox image of double head and cyborg bird singing/tweeting
263 dancing, john done (2009) Debutants dancing to theory of sound and being
Droorn a Voice Opera (2009) Score and voice - sound opera turn around betty (2009) Cyborg-body dancing, you see only its/her back washing zero Zero (2009) Inuit woman flays hyperbolic space with child on back
Dancing with a Black Man (2009) Shirley Temple (to be Black) dances with a black man
Pinkhead 1and 2 (set of 2) (2009) Double work two cyborg ventriloquised dummies sing code
Gertrude Stein singing (2009) Ventriloquised Stein singing Inuit ‘Blue by you’ the organ of saying (2009) Cyborg organ grinding out voice
Bird Red-Sound (2009) Self animated puppet singing sounds father has to keep sawing (2009) Doubled image of Inuit sawing wood set to documentary voice + sound going with gestures- a reader (2010) Doubled image of Inuit children in a classroom, singing
Speak Articulate Babble Score (2010) List of saying words.Set to score of coloured stripes that are in the process of doubling and dissolving spitting stein (2010) Gertrude Stein ‘virtually’ spitting, a type of mouth ventriloquism
What does a feminist poet look like? (2010) Short ‘performed’ essay quoting Irigaray and Wittig as feminist poets. Image ventriloquised double-faced dummy Two-Ay (2010) Two women conversing. Guttural sounds with cracking of the voice Kissing Shut-all (2010) Two women working the shuttle as a kissing instrument Libretto for Mars for Laurel (2011) Composition of sound and synthesised voice Double Trouble (2011) Double animated head cal and response sound work
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PUBLISHING THE VOICE Text based work published during PhD research period
FESTIVAL: GLI.TC/H ?? 24 HOUR NO PASSWORD PARTY ?????????????? Link: http://tinyurl.com/readerror
Via Error, How2. Vol.3., Issue 3., Strictly Speaking Caroline Bergvall 1–6 August 2010 http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal//current/index.html
Kipple http://kipplepoetry.blogspot.com/2010/03/three-poems-majena-mafe.html March 2010
*(INSIDE ALICE'S FACETS) Figuring the Unstable World of Perceptual Meaning (meanings and unmeanings) ... in the word of a lit up face. Bukker Tillibul Journal Vol. 3 Swinburne University, 2009
What does a feminist writer look / sound like Delirious Hem, June 2009 http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/2009/04/what-does-feminist-poet-look-like-by.html
Opera for Glossalali’ Zswound 2008, http://zswound.blogspot.com/2008/05/majena-mafe-opera-for- glossolalia
Issue 1. Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter http://www.forgodot.com/labels/issue%201.html
*5 Grappled Steps in the Method Making of Writing (a mary-festo). Chloe Outskirts Journal, peer-reviewed journal on Ficto-criticism, June 2009 http://www.chloe.uwa.edu.au/outskirts/archive/volume20/mafe
Henry/etta. Enoagh Journal http://eoagh.com/issuefive/mafe.html September 2009
Meritage Press http://www.meritagepress.com/index.htm 2009
Hollandnineteenfourtyfive http://www.holland1945.net.au/index.htm 2010 Issue 1, Fall 2008. ed.
265 SOUNDED-LANGUAGE UTTERANCE LIBRARY
Moans, screams, sigh, cries, chokes-roars, gasps of mumbles, whistles,
yelps, slurpy, groans, chortles snortles, pops, clicks, wheezes, babbles, hisses,
hums, whispers, hoots, whines, puffs, drones, stutters, lisps, rattles
and countless ‘other’ imperfections …
Rabelais
My Sounded-Language Utterance Library has been massing voice sounds for over four years. It is a large library with a complicated archiving system. In fact it is so large it has become like a field of soundage.
Below are some of the headings for sounds in the throat …
THROAT
Architecture of the throat
Making up naming words for this sound
Dumb struck
Making sound for the ‘‘other’’ worded texts writers have used
Fine blabber
Untranslatable indelicate puns
Shout, although not very loud
Mouthwater
Burstoutlaughing
Said the others
Throat granulations
Don’t make me laugh
Rapid queries
Lovers talk
Baby talk.
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