Bergen, Session #3 - On Laughter

Session #3 - On Laughter

Henri Bergson, Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic (Dover, 2005)

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Non-knowledge (Minnesota Press, 2001)

Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008)

Helene Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa"

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"Let us suppose that that which induces laughter is not only unknown, but unknowable. There is still one possibility to be considered. That which is laughable may simply be the unknowable. In other words, the unknown nature of the laughable would be not accidental, but essential. We would laugh, not for some reason which, due to lack of information, or of sufficient penetration, we shall never manage to know, but because the unknown makes us laugh." Bataille, p. 90.

(Laughter as rupture, as breaking the surface, as putting forth the unforeseen, the limits of knowing: to reintroduce the rapturous)

Laughter and Tears: Sam Taylor Wood, "Hysteria"

"Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo. Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on forever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laugher is always the laughter of a group." Bergson, p. 3.

"Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a social signification." Bergson, p. 4.

The involuntary: mishap, tripping up, to err (clowning): to laugh at the other.

Lack of elasticity (rigidity) in contrast to the "living pliableness of a human being".

"Society will therefore be suspicious of all inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common center round which society gravitates: in short, because it is a sign of an eccentricity." Bergson, p. 10.

(Chaplin, Modern Times – the dysfunctional worker)

"This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is the corrective". Bergson, p. 10.

(Question the particular politics of Bergson's position)

"Any image, then, suggestive of the notion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, so to speak, will be laughable. Now, such a notion is formed when we perceive anything inert or stereotyped, or simply ready-made, on the surface of living society. There we have rigidity over again, clashing with the inner suppleness of life. There ceremonial side of social life must, therefore, always include a latent comic element, which is only waiting for an opportunity to burst into full view." Bergson, p. 22.

Masquerading as a performance that disrupts the particular order by introducing an ambiguous body. (see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble)

Acts of Voicing exhibition - Stuttgart

Württembergischer / Kunstverein Stuttgart

Acts of Voicing deals with the aesthetic, performative, and political significance of the voice from the vantage point of visual art, dance, performance, and theory. The exhibition centers on the agency and performativity of the voice. The aim is to examine the resistive the disciplined, and the disciplining voice—those voices that are heard and others that are not. Fighting to have one's voice heard is as much of a topic as the power to silence someone or to force them to speak.

Acts of Voicing, which evinces specially designed exhibition architecture, not only exhibits works of more than 30 artists but is also conceived as a stage for performances, workshops, lectures, and screening programs. It embodies a series of process-related installations, which are expanded during the course of the exhibition and are thus perpetually shifting the overall scenario. In lieu of a static space, an ever-changing experiential space is engendered, through which the exhibition visitors advance along different planes, even physical ones. Both the exhibition choreography and the way it is displayed accommodate the performative character of the voice.

The political implications of the voice, as explored and questioned by Acts of Voicing—which still resound, for example, in the German words for parliament, suffrage, and voting—hark back to ancient Greece. Aristotle for instance differentiates between the bare voice, meaning the scream that can do little more than express desire and pain, and the meaning-producing voice, which may signify the just and unjust, the good and evil. This difference is—at least in the Occidental tradition of thought—constitutive of the distinction between human and animal, between bare life and political life: that is, between those excluded from the political community and those included.

For the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, in contrast, political agency—as well as aesthetic agency—consists in the constant challenging and redistribution of precisely that order which is responsible for certain voices being understood as speech and others only as screaming. The aim is to prize open the existing orders—whether of a sensate, societal, political, spatial, or aesthetic nature—and to introduce thereto foreign elements that had previously been excluded.

The voice residing both, the inside and the outside of the body, in general is indwelled by a foreign kernel. It seems, as Slavoj Žižek has noted, as though the voice had never completely belonged to the body of the speaker, as if a hint of ventriloquism were taking place while speaking.

Acts of Voicing traces this foreign kernel, that is, this paradox, of the voice—at once familiar and foreign, internalized and externalized, tied to and detached from the body (and words). For it is the gap between the own and the foreign, the inside and the outside voice, that unbolts the space of the political and poetical.
Further information at www.wkv-stuttgart.de

conversa-coletiva 1

Voice - Introduction quotes (Sept 25th, Bergen)

Voice - Introduction quotes (Sept 25th, Bergen)

Walter Ong, The Barbarian Within (MacMillan)

Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice (Stanford)

Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A History of Ventriloquism (Oxford)

Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (MIT Press)

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Walter Ong: Question of Interiority

“To consider the work of literature in its primary oral and aural existence, we must enter more profoundly into this world of sound as such, the I-thou world where, through the mysterious interior resonance which sound best of all provides, persons commune with persons, reaching one another’s interiors in a way in which one can never reach the interior of an object.” (p. 46)

"All verbalization, including all literature, is radically a cry, a sound emitted from the interior of a person..." (p. 47)

“The cry which strikes our ear, even the animal cry, is consequently a sign of an interior condition, indeed of that special interior focus or pitch of being which we call life, an invasion of all the atmosphere which surrounds a being by that being’s interior state...” (p. 47)

Adriana Cavarero: Uniqueness

"The voice is sound, not speech...the act of speaking is relational: what it communicates first and foremost, beyond the specific content that words communicate, is the acoustic, empirical, material relationality of singular voices." (p.12-13)

Steven Connor:

"My voice defines me because it draws me into coincidence with myself, accomplishes me in a way which goes beyond mere belonging, association, or instrumental use. And yet my voice is also most essentially itself and my own in the ways in which it parts or passes from me. Nothing else about me defines me so intimately as my voice, precisely because there is no other feature of my self whose nature it is thus to move from me to the world, and to move me into the world. If my voice is mine because it comes from me, it can only be known as mine because it also goes from me. My voice is, literally, my way of taking leave of my senses. What I say goes." (p. 7)

Connor: / from The Strain of the Voice

"For voice is not simply an emission of the body; it is also the imaginary production of a secondary body, a body double: a ‘voice-body’... voice is produced through a process that necessarily creates stress, as air is directed under pressure through the larynx and then out through the mouth. As it moves it is modified, bent, detained, accelerated... The breath is drawn as a bow is drawn, by applying a force against the resistance of the diaphragm and intracortal muscles. The power of the voice is the release of the kinetic energy stored in these muscles as they return to their resting positions. But the voice's energy is not simply given out. For there to be voice, there must be a secondary resistance, the impedance or thwarting of this outflow. Where the breath simply escapes, there can be no voice."

Mladen Dolar

“Now the voice as the object, the paradoxical creature that we are after, is also a break. Of course, it has an inherent link to presence, to what there is, to the point of endorsing the very notion of presence, yet at the same time, as we have seen, it presents a break, it is not to be simply counted among existing things, its topology dislocates it in relation to presence. And – it is precisely the voice that holds bodies and language together.” (p. 2)

 “The voice separated from its body evokes the voice of the dead.” (p. 4)

“The real problem with the acousmatic voice is: can we actually ever pin it down to a source?” (p. 5)

“Every emission of the voice is by its very essence ventriloquism.” (p. 7)

“in every utterance there is on the one hand the dimension of signification, which in the last instance concurs with the dimension of desire…On the other hand, there is the dimension of the drive which does not follow the signifying logic but rather turns around the object, the object voice, as something evasive and not conducive to signification” (p. 8)

Syllabus: Bergen course

Syllabus: Bergen course

The course sets out to query the nature of voice, and to explore how it performs as material within various artistic works. The course will be run in collaboration with Prof. Ricardo Basbaum and students at the art school in Rio de Janeiro. We will connect Bergen students with students from Rio, to exchange and develop sound projects together that investigate what it means to speak, to have different languages, and to bring voices together. A final exhibition of student projects will be presented in Bergen and in Rio de Janeiro.

What particular questions does voice bring forward, and what forms of listening experience does it demand or invite? How does voice appear within our contemporary global condition, and what does it mean to be voiceless? The course will set out to unfold the voice as a sound connected to issues of identity, social exchange, political representation, embodiment and aesthetic practices. Voice will be explored as an animating and complex sound, and questioned as to how it delivers presence to material form as well as to states of collectivity.

The course will be structured as a reading seminar, as well as a platform for project development. Each session will be devoted to a particular modality of voice, from whispering and laughing to singing and stuttering. Cultural phenomena as diverse as ventriloquism, radio drama, laughing records, and voice recognition technologies, as well as particular artistic projects, will inform the course, and inspire the making of projects.

September 25, 10.00: Introduction - On Voice
September 27, 10.00: On whispering
October 17, 19.00: On laughter
October 24, 13.00: On stuttering
November 7, 10.00: On singing
December 4, 19.00: On self-talk
December 12, 19.00: On choking

Sessions to meet at Bergen Academy, C. Sundtsgate 53, 4th floor lecture room.