'Barker Speaks' presentation notes (adorned with oral images)

Here are the notes that myself and Laura prepared for our Barker Speaks presentation, a key quote from the text IS repeated, but I wanted to preserve the flow of the presentation and post Anna Greenspans posts in it's entirety too. This may not be the most fascinating read (it's presentation notes afterall), but I thought it'd be an idea to keep the genesis and references of primordial vowel howls and logos-cyborgian tic-talk online and visible and calcified in the dead hieroglyphics of HTML!

Notes on Barker Speaks – The Ccru interview with Professor D. C. Barker: Palate Tectonics - It’s got you by the throat. 

The interview is not so much an interview as a set of prose, beautifully, proto-occultian, neo-(grim)noir deleuzian, cthullhian cyberpunkian, hyperstitional voco-cryptics calcified in the morbid hieroglyphics of html.

(Laura) "While explaining his concept of Palate-Tectonics to the Ccru, Professor Barker said: "Due to erect posture the head has been twisted around, shattering vertebro-perceptual linearity and setting-up the phylogenetic preconditions for the face. This right-angled pneumatic-oral arrangement produces the vocal-apparatus as a crash-site, in which thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the mouth. The bipedal head becomes a virtual speech-impediment, a sub-cranial pneumatic pile-up, discharged as linguo-gestural development and cephalization take-off. Burroughs suggests that the protohuman ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue. Its a twin-axial system, howls and clicks, reciprocally articulated as a vowel-consonant phonetic palette, rigidly intersegmented to repress staccato-hiss continuous variation and its attendant becomings-animal. That's why stammerings, stutterings, vocal tics, extralingual phonetics, and electrodigital voice synthesis are so laden with biopolitical intensity - they threaten to bypass the anthropostructural head-smash that establishes our identity with logos, escaping in the direction of numbers."

What first might sound like an impenetrable paragraph might become clearer with a more literal take and lay out the linguistic background for this “interview” in order to tackle Prof. Barkers voco-cryptix. The interview blurs the borders between traditional academic text, it creates a meandering or nomadic thought that draws heavily on Deleuze & Guattari notion of “deterritorialization”: it fusions theory with fiction, philosophy and natural sciences such neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, as well as chaos and complexity theory, become indistinguishable.

The interview is Applied Rhizomatics: Deleuze & Guattari suggest the rhizome as a new model, a map, of writing, a model that gets rid off the objekt of writing: “There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.” Rhizomatic writings refuse notions of stability or ontological thought, they rather create a state of fluxus, conjunctions of unexpected milieus.

A Rhizome is a more of a mapping rather than a tracing. Deleuze writes, “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious”

Expression is not a language-using mind, it is not rooted in a singular body. Expression, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is in constant flux, it is fluid, it disseminates where there is potential for what may become. It is this rhizomatic writing, with its fluidity of content and expression, the mutual inhabitation of objects and subjects, the lines of flight connecting schizoanalysis, geotrauma, neurology and biology that separates Logos from the word, meaning becomes a free floating vector rather than a fixed, frozen constant. This writing becomes dense and schizophrenic, a web of interconnected concepts, the development of a new vocabulary without a pause for explanation or definition. It is this unstable, deterritorialized field of content and expression, with its nomadic Logos that serves as a starting point to tackle this interview. (Laura)

In the small hours, whilst googling “pneumatic oral arrangements” I stumble across old Hyperstition posts where Anna Greenspan, directly quotes Professor Barkers concept of Palate Tetonics as well as mentioning an artificial intelligence machine that could communicate without vowels….

“Vowel-Stripped Tic-Talk”

It's got you by the throat.

It might seem that vowels are more anthropomorphic than consonants - one can 'say' aaaiieeooouuu - but try saying kkttccc without adding vowel sounds.

Ccru discussed this issue with a (now sadly obsolesced) corporate AI called Marvin, who could chatter (vowelless) click-chitterings and polyrhythmic stutterings. Rather than using a voice synthesizer to simulate human speech, Marvin used it to exhume the inhuman 'within' language.

Yet, while it is tempting to disparage vowels as humanizing sounds, Professor Barker seems to have a more elaborate analysis, in which both 'sides' are primordially inhuman - after all, you can't actually 'say' aaaiieeooouuu, you can only howl it. It is 'vowelization' of consonantal difference that humanizes click-code into a language, but it is not vowels themselves that produce the human. Man emerges from a speech synthesis (rather than arising from a howl).

While explaining his concept of Palate-Tectonics to the Ccru, Professor Barker said: "Due to erect posture the head has been twisted around, shattering vertebro-perceptual linearity and setting-up the phylogenetic preconditions for the face. This right-angled pneumatic-oral arrangement produces the vocal-apparatus as a crash-site, in which thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the mouth. The bipedal head becomes a virtual speech-impediment, a sub-cranial pneumatic pile-up, discharged as linguo-gestural development and cephalization take-off. Burroughs suggests that the protohuman ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue. Its a twin-axial system, howls and clicks, reciprocally articulated as a vowel-consonant phonetic palette, rigidly intersegmented to repress staccato-hiss continuous variation and its attendant becomings-animal. That's why stammerings, stutterings, vocal tics, extralingual phonetics, and electrodigital voice synthesis are so laden with biopolitical intensity - they threaten to bypass the anthropostructural head-smash that establishes our identity with logos, escaping in the direction of numbers."

- Ccru Shanghai

Posted by Anna Greenspan at July 17, 2004 03:38 AM

In the comments section of the site I find posts by Mark and Reza Negarestani, they hint at the (in many ways Lacanian notion) of language/logos as mutilation, as well as exploring language as virus and the role of vowels within this dynamic.

Reza expands on the vowel’s influence further and remarks on aaaiieeooouuu and hhhaaaaiiiieeeeehhh:

Anna this is a great text ... hopefully gives some space to speak about the inhuman space of vowels.

>>> Yet, while it is tempting to disparage vowels as humanizing sounds, Professor Barker seems to have a more elaborate analysis, in which both 'sides' are primordially inhuman.

The opening passage of Vendidad on Druj (The Mother of Abominations) have already narrated that the Abomination is inseparable from the sound, sound is the harbinger of the Abomination. aaaiieeooouuu and similar compositions are vowels anomalies, they simultaneously call upon the entire uttering machinery of human (a simultanous activation of all vocalizing components), flasing into what lies behind vowels and the vocalizing system in a matter of second. Old Iranian dervishes were completely familiar with the vowel-howls of the Abyss (Mowlavi or Rumi is one of the pioneers): hhhaaaaiiiieeeeehhhhh, etc (used for communication).

Such compositions are creatively digging up the inhuman howls behind vowels, but not the certain repressions that vowels plug into the nervous system via more widespread compositions of themselves.

Although vowels are auto-sabotaging agents but can’t get rid of appropriating processes they install on cognitive interfaces; while their tails diagram the Abysmal sounds (rattling insurgencies of vowels), their heads which generally pop up first are narrating a wide variety of systematic repressions. >>> in which thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the mouth.

The dominant vocalizing machineries of some languages creatively try to evade this compulsory collision. Arabic language has possibly the most capable vocalizing system that usually escapes this panorama. It has strange letters whose vocalization processes are not linear at all. The letter Ghaaf, letters Ha and Haa, letters Ayn and Ghain, etc. As I’ve previously discussed it with Nick, these letters are the curses of Arabic pronunciation system for speakers of other languages. Even Farsi speakers usually have difficulties.

One should be a crazed wolf and at the same time breathe as a lycanthrope to discharge the sound of the letter Ha. To vocalize 'Ghaaf', one should be a partly blocked tube attached to nothing.

To initiate as a Jay’s disciple, Col. West must be able to pronounce the letters Ha and Ghaaf; this ensures Jay that he has finally kicked the Delta-Force Qaaf-Complex out of his mind and mouth. Posted by: Reza at July 17, 2004 05:53 AM

PS. >>> Ccru discussed this issue with a (now sadly obsolesced) corporate AI called Marvin, who could chatter (vowelless) click-chitterings and polyrhythmic stutterings. Rather than using a voice synthesizer to simulate human speech, Marvin used it to exhume the inhuman 'within' language.

This is parallel to the note on the MURMURing sound-space of occult rituals derived from Mesopotamia and the ancient Near East. (Solar Rattle: http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003535.html) Posted by: Reza at July 17, 2004 06:51 AM

Mark quotes Burroughs on Speaking Arabic:

But when it comes to Oriental languages you are using a whole different set of muscles and neural patterns... so you're bound to have a sore throat, just like your legs are sore after riding a horse for the first time... And Arabic is frankly the worst.. It literally cuts an English-speaking throat... Spitting blood is one of the first symptoms, though not necessarily the worst.. It is the stutter of neural response - remember when you first tried to row a gondola? The way you couldn't possibly get it, and you r muscles knotted up and you were making spastic gestures with the oar and the feeling in your stomach and groin, that sort of packing dream tension almost sexual...? And then suddenly you could do it? Well it's like that, only worse... And there is the gap between languages that can be terrifying... the great silences... Burroughs, Place of Dead Roads, 206-207 Posted by: mark at July 18, 2004 10:14 AM (Laura)

I find the excavation of the vowel as screaming, howling primordial remnant fascinating. The ordering of vowel’s through inhuman consonants (as a way of shackling our howls to an order) feels not dissimilar to some of the notions explored in Dolar’s The Voice and Nothing More. Reza’s and Mark’s examples of this vowel-trauma in non Arabic speakers learning Arabic are fantastic, I was speaking with a friend this weekend how is learning Arabic and she told me that words like ‘dog’ and ‘heart’ composed of exactly the same order of consonants, the only difference being the vowel sound – but this vowel sound is not always written, sometimes the vowel sound is missed in a kind of shorthand (I guess). I think the dichotomy or extimacy of consonants and vowels is another manifestation of the conflict at the core of language, for conflict of the animal and flesh against order and post anthropoid communication constructs.

Interesting enough that gargling in different ways is very helpful for learning how Ghaaf and Ghayn are pronounced (and especially recommended in basic Arabic courses); but the best way is speaking with a butchered throat, open arteries, veins and windpipe. Posted by: Reza at July 19, 2004 08:35 AM

From Shogun Assassin / Liquid Swords:

"When cut across the neck a sound like wailing winter winds is heard...I'd always hoped to cut someone like that one day, to hear that sound. But to have it happen to my own neck is ri..dicu...lous...." Posted by: L?RK?R at July 19, 2004 06:00 PM

>>>But to have it happen to my own neck is ri..dicu...lous...

A clever policy to remain an English-speaker, forever ;) (or maybe i'm wrong.)

also reminds me the last line of Borges' 'The End of the Duel'”(1)

But palate tectonics go back further as Kent G. Bailey studies in Human Paleopsychology 1987.

“The split brain research of Roger Sperry and his colleagues in the 1950’s revolutionized neuropsychology. This and the subsequent research on the brain hemisphericity revealed that the neocortex is really two brains rather than the one. The left brain specializes in language, speech and linear-rational functions, whereas the right brain is more imaginistic, holistic, intuitive, and spatially oriented. It is not clear as to why the human brain became lateralized, but several contending theories were discussed.

The interplay between brain structures is not only basically horizontal, as with left-hand brain interaction, but vertical as well. Paul MacLean view the human brain as like an archeological site composed of the recently evolved neocortex, the mammalian brain, and the reptilian brain. Our brain is thus really a “triune brain” composed of phylogenetically primitive reptilian structures, upon which are situated the paleomammalian structures, and, finally, sitting at the top of the hierarchy is the phylogenetically advanced neocortex. Although distinct neurochemically and behaviourally, the three brains interact functionally and dynamically, both protagonistically and antagonistically.. It is important to note that we humans share much of the repitilian and mammalian brain matter with lower animals, and that only at the neocortal level is the animal-human differential great.

Perhaps more than anything else, human speech enabled man to phylogenetically progress beyond animals. Human speech was something new in the evolutionary process; communication was now a basically neocortal phenomena involving transfer of auditory symbols rather than the transfer of gestural information in the visual modality. It was now possible to communicate in distinctive human fashion. Still, as Laughlin and d’ Aquili (1974) point out, human language is based on animal forms of communication and is only distinctive to a degree.

The phylogenetic regression-progression model is heavily indepted to MacLeans hierarchical brain concept. Following MacLean, we may think of the brain as a dynamic cerebral system involving reptilian components, mammalian components, and the right and the left neocortal components, all intertwined in a mutually interactive symphony of excitation and inhibition as behavior occurs when the lower centres take the upper hand.” (Baily, 1987, pp. 73-74) (2)

Again, I feel this is echoing the earlier notion of the primordial (or perhaps cthulhian) animal in conflict with the post anthropoid, human, communication construct – there is an extimacy at the core (both phonically, metaphorically and also, perhaps, physically/cerebrally- neurolinguistically).

(3)

1. http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003641.html (last accessed 25/01/2012)

2. Kent G. Bailey, 1987. Human Paleopsychology: Applications To Aggression and Patholoqical Processes. 1 Edition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

3. Authors diagram.

(Laura) The Burroughs text we’ve had to read also reflects this primordial animal that is without language.

“In the pass the muttering sickness leaped into our throats, coughing and spitting in the silver morning ... body melting pleasure-sounds in the warm mud. till the sun went and blue wind of silence touched human faces and hair. when we came out of the mud we had names”

If the subject is perceived to be essentially a function of language, its rigorous mediation and that of the symbolic order then Burroughs deliberately shatters subjectivity into pieces. Burroughs puts it that way: Your "I" is a completely illusory concept, he thus does away with a narrative voice, dismissing the reader into linguistic limbo, a pre-logos state of primate bliss, a being without names, without subjectivity. In a way, he aims to speak outside of language as he dismantles the presupposition of an autonomous self. There is no self, no Logos that speaks to us from Burroughs text.

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)

Fever Ray: Towards a Diagrammatic Conception of the Voice

A few notes, in relation to my writings on the course, as well as an earlier post on my personal blog. Hopefully, I will be able to organize this into more coherent pieces soon.

• Music is a molecular deterritorialization and machining of the voice, which pushes it away from language/signifying chains, and molar segments of man/woman.

• There is a question of a fully-real becoming other, which has nothing to do with imitation or symbolic representation.

• Taking DeLanda's reading of D&G's concept of the body without organs as a virtual body plan, out of which fully formed species and organisms differentiate, we have the basics for a diagrammatic conception of the voice (in the form of a neo-materialist idea of the genesis of the voice, opposed to the psychoanalytic idea of the maternal voice pre-birth).

• The problem is, then, how to differentiate the voice; to unfold its immanent virtualities, as opposed to (as Kaja Silverman does) localize points where it produces sexual difference.

• This, in turn, means conceiving of new media technologies not as "acoustic mirrors" (Silverman), or as the "analysts room" (Penman), but rather as a "possibility-space" (DeLanda), which is diagrammatic rather than fantasmatic, and which is characterized not so much by symbolic representation as by (what I'd like to call) electronic differentiation.

• In other words, it is all about rendering imperceptible forces perceptible (D&G).

• Fever Ray, in her music, uses sonic media in this way, in order to differentiate her voice electronically.

• It is no longer the voice of Karin-Dreijer Andersson, but a voice of a pure otherness, beyond the realm of fantasmatics.

• We do not yet know what a voice can do (modification of the Spinozist-influenced premise that Steve Goodman takes as his starting point in Sonic Warfare).

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).