More Neuroscience Nightmares (response to LCH)

So scary. especially after hearing Lawrence Abu Hamdan's 'Aural Contract : The Freedom of Speech' - check out his article in Cabinet 43.... not too hard to imagine a dystopic world where an immigrants geo-vocal, is sonically and neuro-linguistically mapped onto preset criteria.... a horridly politicised mix of pseudo-sciences such as speech analysis and 'interpretations' of neuro-linguistic data....

Broca's area is fascinating:

"Broca's Area is named after the French physician Pierre Paul Broca, who identified the brain region during post mortem examinations of two patients who had lost the ability to speak after suffering strokes. These patients were still able to understand the speech of others perfectly well, and the area Broca identified - which is located in the inferior frontal gyrus of the left hemisphere - was later found to control the throat and tongue muscles required for production of speech. It has therefore long been assumed to be involved solely in speech production."

But this is all very logos-centric right, it's language but not voice, voice is not language. Isn't one of the most fascinating things about the voice (and singing) it's connection to the physical body, to breath - how you can sense when someones excited or nervous? So 'analysing' accents or studying brain activity in Broca's Area is really limited to language which is vastly separate to voice.... So the saccharine, hollow "Have a nice day" can be analysed through these 'scientific' or empirical processes with no scope to understand why sentiment from behind a MacDonalds counter means much less then the same sentiment uttered by your family or partner - yknow?

So can an animal, reptilian, grain can be communicated? Ripping straight off wikipedia:

"The reptilian complex, also known as the R-complex or "reptilian brain" was the name MacLean gave to the basal ganglia, structures derived from the floor of the forebrain during development. The term derives from the fact that comparative neuroanatomists once believed that the forebrains of reptiles and birds were dominated by these structures. MacLean contended that the reptilian complex was responsible for species typical instinctual behaviors involved in aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays."

So you can say "don't worry, I'll deal with it" with a soft, sympathetic, caring tone or an aggressive, reptiloidally mediated snarl. The same language, presumably the results of exactly the same phenomena in Broca's Area etc - but both tempered and warped by physiological aspects outside of language, - the formers delicacy and sweetness - its meaningful essence governed by the speakers softness of breath, the latter's aggressiveness governed by the speakers physiological speech affects of aggression, or the fight or flight syndrome (which is linked to the reptilian cortex)......

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It's a shame that paleopsychology and phylogenetics only talk about the mammalian, reptilian and 'recent' human neo-cortex - if there is any mention of fish or chordates then I could really start having fun with my Mermaids/Sirens analysis!!!!

Ariel the Siren/Mermaid in Echoean situation?

Ariel the Siren, Ariel the Mermaid trades her beautiful, beguiling voice for human legs...

From the H.C. Anderson tale:

"But if you take my voice,' said the little mermaid, 'what have I left?'

'Your beautiful form,' said the witch, 'your gliding gait, and your speaking eyes; with these you ought surely to be able to bewitch a human heart. Well! have you lost courage? Put out your little tongue, and I will cut it off in payment for the powerful draught.'

'Let it be done,' said the little mermaid, and the witch put on her caldron to brew the magic potion.

There is nothing like cleanli- ness,' said she, as she scoured the pot with a bundle of snakes; then she punctured her breast and let the black blood drop into the cal- dron, and the steam took the most weird shapes, enough to frighten any one. Every moment the witch threw new ingredients into the pot, and when it boiled the bubbling was like the sound of croco- diles weeping. At last the potion was ready and it looked like the clearest water.

'There it is,' said the witch, and thereupon she cut off the tongue of the little mermaid, who was dumb now and could neither sing nor speak."

cut to after she's drank the potion and has lost her voice and her tail (tale?!!?)

"When the sun rose on the sea she woke up and became conscious of a sharp pang, but just in front of her stood the handsome young prince, fixing his coal black eyes on her; she cast hers down and saw that her fish's tail was gone, and that she had the prettiest little white legs any maiden could desire; but she was quite naked, so she wrapped her long thick hair around her. The prince asked who she was and how she came there. She looked at him tenderly and with a sad expression in her dark blue eyes, but could not speak. Then he took her by the hand and led her into the palace. Every step she took was, as the witch had warned her beforehand, as if she were treading on sharp knives and spikes, but she bore it gladly; led by the prince, she moved as lightly as a bubble, and he and every one else mar- velled at her graceful gliding gait.

Clothed in the costliest silks and muslins she was the greatest beauty in the palace, but she was dumb, and could neither sing nor speak. Beautiful slaves clad in silks and gold came forward and sang to the prince and his royal parents; one of them sang better than all the others, and the prince clapped his hands and smiled at her; that made the little mermaid very sad, for she knew that she used to sing far better herself. She thought, 'Oh! if he only knew that for the sake of being with him I had given up my voice for ever!' Now the slaves began to dance, graceful undulating dances to enchanting music; thereupon the little mermaid, lifting her beautiful white arms and raising herself on tiptoe, glided on the floor with a grace which none of the other dancers had yet attained. With every motion her grace and beauty became more apparent, and her eyes appealed more deeply to the heart than the songs of the slaves. Every one was de- lighted with it, especially the prince, who called her his little found- ling; and she danced on and on, notwithstanding that every time her foot touched the ground it was like treading on sharp knives. The prince said that she should always be near him, and she was allowed to sleep outside his door on a velvet cushion."

Lots of parallels and opportunities can come out of Ariels rather myopic trading with the witch. However the situation is not quite a complete tracing of the Echo and Narcissus tale - in Echo and Narcissus (well according to the Ovid version I've been feinding over) the love is not mutual, Echo loves Narcissus and would like to tell him that she loves him but cannot, Narcissus, nymologically, only loves himself and has no time for Echo. In Hans Christian Andersens tale the love between the Prince and the Mermaid is painfully mutual. The tragedy of not being able to vocalise love is where a predicament that both The Mermaid and Echo share (or harbour - Bore!?!):

"Day by day she became dearer to the prince; he loved her as one loves a good sweet child, but it never entered his head to make her his queen; yet unless she became his wife she would never win an everlasting soul, but on his wedding morning would turn to sea- foam.

'Am I not dearer to you than any of them?' the little mermaid's eyes seemed to say when he took her in his arms and kissed her beautiful brow.

'Yes, you are the dearest one to me,' said the prince"

Whereas Echo could only echo, the last fragments of Narcissus' sentences and twist his words, twist his meaning, warp his logos through re-uttering his last breath (E.g. "are you here?" - "Here!" etc)... through the forest at a distance; The Mermaid has the exact inverse of this problem. She has her love in her arms (unlike Echo), she has the proximity that Echo yearned for, but, importantly,..... not the capability to communicate verbally.

The other mode of communication, a mode prior to linguistics is action, and both The Mermaid and Echo find themselves in positions to express their love through action at the end of their tragedies, they both resort to expressing their love through action after the verbal, vocalistic opportunity to do so is rendered impossible. Echo's ultimate act is to fling her arms around Narcissus:

"To throw her longing arms around his neck.

He bolted, shouting 'Keep your arms from me!

Be off, i'll die before I yield to you.'

And all she answered was 'I yield to you'"

The Mermaid also has an opportunity to express her love through her own actions, she has to kill her love to lift her curse (to die upon the prince's wedding night unless it is to her). The Prince is to be wed to someone else and she is given the opportunity to kill her love:

"The little mermaid drew aside the purple curtain from the tent and looked at the beautiful bride asleep with her head on the prince's breast. She bent over him and kissed his fair brow, looked at the sky where the dawn was spreading fast, looked at the sharp knife, and again fixed her eyes on the prince, who, in his dream called his bride by name. Yes! she alone was in his thoughts! For a moment the knife quivered in her grasp, then she threw it far out among the waves, now rosy in the morning light, and where it fell the water bubbled up like drops of blood.

Once more she looked at the prince, with her eyes already dimmed by death, then dashed overboard and fell, her body dissolving into foam."

Echo expresses her love overtly and is shunned, The Mermaid makes the ultimate expression of love covertly, she saves the princes life and sacrifices her own unbeknownst to the Prince. This shows action as of greater truth than love but there is a darker facet to these two tragedies - they both re-inforce the 15th century proverb: "A mayde schuld be seen, but not herd.". Let's examine Echo's fate after acting boldly:

The nymph, when nothing could Narcissus move, 

Still dash'd with blushes for her slighted love, 

Liv'd in the shady covert of the woods, 

In solitary caves and dark abodes; 

Where pining wander'd the rejected fair, 

'Till harrass'd out, and worn away with care, 

The sounding skeleton, of blood bereft, 

Besides her bones and voice had nothing left. 

Her bones are petrify'd, her voice is found 

In vaults, where still it doubles ev'ry sound.

Whereas The Mermaid, who committed the ultimate act of love, who committed self sacrifice - but covertly, finds a silver lining in her tragedy:

"You have suffered and endured, raised yourself to the spirit-world of the air, and now, by your own good deeds you may, in the course of three hundred years, work out for yourself an undying soul.'

Then the little mermaid lifted her transparent arms towards God's sun, and for the first time shed tears.

On board ship all was again life and bustle. She saw the prince with his lovely bride searching for her; they looked sadly at the bub- bling foam, as if they knew that she had thrown herself into the waves. Unseen she kissed the bride on her brow, smiled at the prince, and rose aloft with the other spirits of the air to the rosy clouds which sailed above.

'In three hundred years we shall thus float into Paradise.'"

Bad Music, The flute, The Beatles and dead symbols

OK less voco-centrism, upon the music tip now. I have noticed a lot of intriguing histories around music in the Dolar text and also through the greek myths, probably sharing a similar genesis to the history of 'dealing' with the exo-irreducible remnant part Voice (as discussed in the Dolar essay). I keep stumbling across examples of people struggling to except, or come to terms with, or just fearing the un-coded remnant side of musical communication, by musical communication I think it's fair to say that musics (I say musics, because I am not just referring to pop songs, or rock, or classical but everything that either has a system notation or can be employed as a form of musical communication - be it western or otherwise) are coded, so entrenched in this code, that it can be used in the same manner as a matrix of signifiers to 'talk', this example of Deliverance is a great:

This is pure musically coded communication, both instruments are fretted I think, there is a call and response part too - quite obvious.

However when this code is broken, or an un-coded sound dominates (shofar springs to mind here, alongside fender squalls, and football chants) we may feel uneasy, over excited, angry or worse - politically motivated. The history of classical music riots is worth recalling here, as is The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to which Autechre infamously responded... Music is littered with spontaneous reactions to the uncoded, the ghostly remainder.

So whilst Dolar traces our 'problem' of dealing with the Exo-remnant in Voice, the endless shackling of the voice to logos, the feminization, the sexualization of this sonic 'other' (resembling mirroring our literal repression of women over histories), or on the other hand the thunderingly masculine sounds of the shofar or gods voice etc.... I wonder if there are similar enquiries or studies into the history of music, stepping outside of logos, of the irreducible a-logos facet of song?

There must be. See Sirens, Mermaids, Pan, Orpheus, Plato's dislike of the flute (the un-coded instrument, the instrument that is most open to sound, the flute Plato refers to would be a small free sliding 'scale' wind instrument), The Puritans organ burning. Infact, to kick up a rather corny pop culture relic - The Beatles. After Lennon made his infamous 'bigger than Christ' comment a good old fashioned furore of burning The Beatles record broke out across some southern American states.

OK, so whilst the The Beatles records themselves are not stritchly a-logos, they are not totally uncoded, I feel it's fair to say the 'X-factor', the special appeal (sonically) may have been the anomalous sonic remnant outside of musical codification - perhaps their live shows had that extra zing that erects goosebumps, the je ne sais quoi, that special something - but lots of fantastic musicians have this, this something is not exactly ubiquitous but there are certainly a lot of sublime and inspiring musicians and performers for every generation.

I'll speculate that the catalyst for such a wax inferno was Lennon's comment. Or rather, the sonic-logos implications behind the comment. To strictly juxtapose The Beatles with Christ created an unnerving dichotomy. The uncoded sonic of The Beatles appeal, something they had and could culturally surf, against or opposed to the word, logos, the book, the Bible. One was living, moving, globe trotting and inspiring and communicated on levels that were, arguably, unbeknown previously, the pandemonium of live music, the fandom of the record etc. The charming, charismatic liverpudlians had something the good book didn't, they were alive and touching people through music, emotionally in a way that a bunch of dead symbols never would, and never will do.

This brief dominance of musicality (along with it's a-logos appendage) over logos/the good word  coupled with Lennons ill founded comments about being bigger than jesus maybe made the more logosphilial people in southern american states uneasy, some to such a degree they felt compelled to burn their own Beatles records.

I accept that a large proportion of the outrage was due to Lennon criticising Christianity. However I do wonder, even though we'll never be able to gather an empirical basis for this sequence of events and myriad subjective agendas, metaphysical, political, peer led or other (quite fittingly considering the phenomena in question), I wonder if there is not a reasonable basis for the assumption that the mixture of theological criticism, music, hysteria and uncoded a-logosonic aspects of The Beatles songs was a large part of the reason why  such events occurred.

"A change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard to all our fotunes. The modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling the most fundamental political and social conventions. It is here, then, I said, that our guardians must build their guardhouse and post of watch. It is certain, he said, that this is the kind of lawlessness that easily insinuates itself unobserved.
Yes, said I, because it is supposed to be only a form of play and to work no harm.
Nor does it work any, he said, except that by gradual infiltration it softly overflows upon the characters and pursuits of men and from these issues forth grown greater to attach their business dealings, and from these relations it proceeds against the laws and the constitution with wanton license, Socrates, till it finally overthrows all things public and private."(Plato, Republic IV)

and...

"Bacchic frenzy and all similar emotions are most suitably expressed by the flute" (Aristotle, Politics VIII)

Is there anything for the uptight logos lover to fear today? As soon as something is deemed 'new', it is absorbed into capitalism and commodified. There are economic problems now, and subsequently political problems and music feels boring and coded like never before. Is it because I am no longer a wide eyed teen reliant solely on HMV for music? Or is it because torrent sites have spoilt me and ipods jaded me? Is there anything exciting to come? Musophobia as relic - I fear.

EDIT - I'm tuggin at something here, not sure what, if it reads like i'm wringing my hands and mincing my feet to and fro it maybe because it's late and the post has drifted onto more questions than answers. I'd really like someone to recommend me some nice music analysis text around the subject I'm scraping (clumsily) at... Maybe it's just because i'm bitter that Shackleton (who programs each individual beat, so the tracks sound lifelike and organic - I wanted to work this into one of my theories) has released an eponymous LP with Pinch and it is the most anaesthetizingly dull record I've heard for some time now.