Bergen, Session #4 - On Stuttering

On Stuttering

Readings:

Christof Migone, "Utter the Stutter" (see: "Sonic Somatic", Errant Bodies Press)

Michel de Certeau, "Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias"

Works:

Isidore Isou - Lettrism sound poetry (1950)

Gil Wolman - Ultra-lettrism (1967)

Vito Acconci - "Waterways: four studies of saliva" (1974)

Richard Serra - "Boomerang" (1974)

Alvin Lucier - "I am sitting in a room" (1970-)

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"The threat to coherence, to the established course, to smooth flow, proliferates in the mouth that utters – site where the run is at its most vertiginous." Migone, p. 4

"No abyss is as familiar as one's mouth; the unheimlich mouth. An internalized abyss which we presume to control, but which always exceeds such tidy precepts." Migone, p. 4

To remind of the corporeality of language.

"The solidity of language's rationality seems to be contingent on language's ability to evince itself from its mode of production." Migone, p. 4

"But where we can locate the formless, the nameless? Is the unnamable within language, or outside?" Migone, p. 5

Bataille:

The formless.

The heterogenous.

Excess as liberating force; as that which exceeds representation, and the name. To force a space for the unnamable.

Spit / Spittle / Stutter: the introduction of the formless within language, from the gaping mouth.

The Other.

"If one conceives the body as porous, it becomes impossible to think of an individual without a collective, impossible to keep your distance, impossible to delimit the outside from the inside." Migone, p. 10.

"Porosity is both the somatic and metaphoric condition of possibility of this intimate stranger, wantonly crossing our borders by erasing them." Migone, p. 11

The stutter, as the foreign tongue. As the foreign of one's own mouth.

To communicate the incommunicable.

The stutter as a sign of weakness, within a society that demands fluency. To amplify the stutter as a break within such a paradigm, as a counter-vocalization.

"The intent of this formulation is not to mystify but to resist and repel any move which subsumes excess and noise into a system of dictionary." Migone, p. 16

The double-mouth: glottis within the mouth; double-speech: stutter within word.

The stutter as creative act.

The remainder: to impede any totalizing system or schema. Stutter as Noise.