rubbadub dub a dubbed Dybbuk box-office dibbouk

....rubbadub dub a dubbed Dybbuk box-office dibbouk has all the eating, voice horror/ possession horror tropes you could shake a bottle of faux-holy water at. You could see this as a film about puberty, fearing change, vocal change, bodily change etc. But I'd also like to think of the dybbuk box (which in this is film is spliced with the old pandora's box myth to some degree) as an avatar for the shiny little boxes of friends, spirits and voices that kids carry around all day.... the power of the little box becoming their friend before possessing them entirely and taking over their lives.... Anyhow, fun flick, and if you don't fancy hearing Mercedes Cambridge's roars of "Merrin!!!"this is a lighter substitute - it even has some scenes taken directly from Friedkin's classic (the MRSI, is a direct rip - with a pseudo subliminal face emerging to boot).

I'd like to think about the Yampolsky text and this film along with a Michael Jackson/Prince story.    The version presented in the Spike Lee "Bad" documentary tells of how MJ got spooked when Prince brought a voodoo box along to their first meeting - and that is why their collaborative single never quite happened. That is all I know, its a story of hearsay. But I'd like to think it, the box that spooked MJ, was a dybbuk box - a box harbouring a spirit from outside, a change, a possession - a vocal change. Everything that, people say, Michael Jackson (peter pan) was deeply averse to. Prince brought along a box containing the unnerving prospect of uncontrollable physical and vocal change. As one comment in the documentary mentions, MJ had a massive vocal range and would answer the phone in a gruff 'regular' voice - when asked why he doesn't talk like that more often, or sing using his lower vocal range, he replied that he just preferred the other way. MJ spent his life controlling his voice and his body (through gravity defying dance moves, or plastic surgery) - and so he would've had the most to lose, the most voice to lose, the most body to lose, the most control to relinquish, the most reasons for fearing the box that was brought to the meeting.... The Prince's dybbuk box scared The King of Pop away.

Mabuse Bouche

Couple of clips relating to the Chion text...couldn't find the Psycho landing scene..can anyone else?





Was also looking for the out-of-sync clip from Naked Lunch that Charlie mentioned a few weeks back. Couldn't find that (not sure where it crops up in the film) but found this instead. It seemed relevant!



Slightly regret watching all of these pre going to sleep....

Telephonic Bodies...

...Some loose connections and crackling lines between the Ronell text and discussions from previous sessions...

This quaint little film is not exactly riveting but its focus on the many spectacular component parts of the machine.. Copper, Nickel, Cotton, Gold....Silver... and the painstaking stop motion that depicts the assembly - the hand cranking out the existing parts to be reconfigured into the telephone - led me to think of it as the formation of a body of sorts.

Perhaps this curious amalgamation of materials is comparable to the cleanly functioning machine of the singing body so favoured by Barthes. Its own jouissance producing version of "..the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose..." (GOTV p183). Could it be said then that the telephonic voice has a grain? Perhaps rather the apparatus applies grain to the voice - indeed to any voice that cares to be mediated by it. The telephone becomes a co-opted body then or an extended one - a reordered system of human interconnection implicating and zoning in on the fingers, the mouth the ears, moving towards something like the "zones of intensity" described by Deleuze and Guattari - the focus of all desire. A body without organs perhaps?

Is a telephone call between two people something of a ménage á quatre? The presence, intervention and caress of all four bodies necessary for the conversation to take place...

(What are the implications of this on conference calls??)

Ronell seems to allude to the composition of the telephone as a somewhat reordered systems of organs - the nipple allied with the mouthpiece, the cord becoming umbilical, the entire object a kind of prosthetic limb - a body reduced and made essential for altered purpose. Perhaps something to link to D&G's suggested program "Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breath with your belly.." (How To Make Yourself a Body Without Organs p151)

(Has LG had the same thought and taken it too literally??)

Also consider how much time is spent staring at a telephone and waiting for it to ring or jumping at the sound of it, knowing there may be menace or bad news at the other end? The machine becomes the embodiment of the desired or feared - the agent of amorous contact or exposure to peril.  A telephone makes its presence felt both in silence and in its moment of alarm. There is an association here with the acousmatic voice as we have discussed - but could we consider a ringing telephone a silent acousmatic? A voice dominating with the same puissance as the classic voice over without the physical manifestation or vision of the body that emits it? When a telephone rings we know a voice is in our midst, it is imminent - but the co opted body of the telephone allows the speaking voice to remain silent while simultaneously holding court.

The telephone implies the possibility of a voice, it holds sway over the other, in this case over the receiver. Perhaps in this mode there is a reciprocal becoming telephone? 

Another thought I had for possible silent acousmatics was the Human breath, as exemplified here in Beckett's 1969 work (excuse the cheesy YBA rendering). 

The heavy breathing voice tends to reside in the realm of the telephone - allowing a dominating presence in a space while essentially keeping shtum...

This Beckett work is full of vocal presence despite the absence of the body and indeed of the speaking voice. The original play script describes the bookmarking of the exhalation with a birth cry (vagitus) which this version omits. 

Also interesting then that in this video - the crackle at the other end of the receiver sounds like 'someone crying' (01:14)  - the lost child that Bell sets out to recover perhaps? 

Lastly how often is the telephonic voice marred by bad signal - words split and cut, meanings lost and connections failing, breaking up and lost in tunnels....the voice to voice setup is still marked by the space of différance the same deferral that Derrida attributes to the written word.

How then might we characterise the sound of a busy signal - so full of signifiance? The background tone signalling the space into which bodies may enter and conversation can occur; equally the death knell that cuts the interaction back to nothing. A sonic full stop. 

Or an endless row of them ".........................................................................................." (The Deaf p341)

DeLanda on the Body without Organs

A long and in-depth talk on the body without organs, as well as several of the other things which were mentioned during the latest session, such as psychedelics, Spinoza's impersonal God, virtual diagrams and the question of the One vs. the Multiple (I really like the part near the end where he critizes Badiou and the student's are trying to dismiss it as false). Another important thing is Deleuze's use of science and mathematics, which is emphasized clearly in this talk, and which I think is important not to forget, since it is easy to just dismiss all of this as some kind of new-age thing, but that's far from the truth, as he points out.

Great session yesterday, particularly the discussion on the embodied voice in relation to Silverman (and D&G), which was something I hadn't thought of earlier. That will probably be useful for me when writing the essay(s).