Self-Discipline for [improv] Sound Poetry

We're them void guys

We're them pose guys

Lean each with each

With weed full head.  Alas!

At the close of my last post I mentioned wanting to concoct a similar plan for re-engaging my monophonic improv sound poetry. If the emitter plans I discussed are an attempt to get some discipline back into my improv practice for "proper" lexical words. What might I do in parallel to that for my improv sound poetry?

First a few limits which might be arbitrary from some POVs but that are important to me, or perhaps to my sense of what sort of sound poetry I have made and desire to make.

1. Echoing something Mark wrote in the SOUND node for the anthology, I do not want it to move over into "song" however loosely construed that might be. In that interview with Christian Bök mentioned in the last post, he has a lot of things to say about sound poetry and I'd like to post about some of that in time, but he references "vocal percussionists" and "beatboxers" such as Dokata and Rahzel… & both have impressive skills or so my web-hunting quickly revealed. Rahzel is clearly pursuing music and Dokata is as well, if in a rather different vein (unlike Rahzel he does not sing, but mimics the music itself). Yet both are also very beat-dependent in a way that I have no immediate interest in. Sound poetry for me is not music and it is not song either.
2. While I will often enough abandon the tenor of "everyday speech" I do not want that abandonment to be the sole focus or what ensures that I am in fact doing "sound poetry." My everyday voice and careful pronunciation will remain a default whenever possible (that is, at any time some other impulse does not directly negate these things). This is not to defend against a charge of doing the police in different voices, nor is it a valorization of my everyday ("natural") voice, just a starting point: the voice I have.
3. I'm not against electronic manipulation of the voice, but in terms of a disciplined practice I prefer to see how far I can go with voice alone before I use effects of any sort. As the local Atlanta scene already has ample evidence, simply using delay and so forth on one's voice while doing poetry is too easily a crutch for doing really bad poems. (If you do not get that reference, count yourself lucky.)

Next, I suppose that I need a distinction between the Hypothetically Lexical and the Generally Unlexical… even if the boundary will be blurred much of the time. What then will these two terms mean for me? Well, whatever they describe, that is all they will be - descriptions - they're not meant to carry conceptual weight (the range of noises that might come out of our mouths could be described in many other ways I'm sure).

Hypothetically Lexical [HL] - here I have in mind things like Joyce's "thunder words" and all that I mean by the 'lexical' here is that they are renderable as words no matter how aberrant. Thus I might say something like "frusstoiklej" - one can look at this and say something with a reasonable degree of phonetic loyalty to this rendering with basis English expectations regarding pronunciation. These sorts of words can be, like "frusstoiklej," completely neologistic and having no clear meaning-bearing particles, or they might have parts which are meaningful but break that in their unified form. As an example of that latter situation, consider "omnithrummage" - 'omni' and 'thrum' and the suffix '-age' all have meaning effects or are meaningful in and of themselves, but as a conjoined word they are not especially meaningful without a bit of wildly ungrounded interpretive work. This then is what I mean by Hypothetically Lexical.

Generally Nonlexical [GN] - here I am thinking of vocal sounds of all sorts, even if some might be potentially rendered as "words" the vast majority cannot be. Things which we would describe as growls or hums or squawks or… however one describes such things. Mimicry, of non-human sounds of whatever sort would be included here.

What might I then do with HL or GN that could be pursued in a disciplined fashion that might result in greater variety and impact in my monophonic improvised sound poetry? Much of what follows I have already been doing, but in a more haphazard, now & then, fashion which I'm trying here to make more deliberate (with the proviso that improv can only take so much deliberation and must always depend on the haphazard - upon chance and spontaneous impulse).

impressively complicated looking, isn't it?

Hypothetically Lexical

Morpheme or word stem study is one option & need not be limited to English & if it isn't obvious there is no need to know the meanings associated (it might even be counter productive in some respects). Much of what follow are 'practice modalities' for improv but not improv themselves.

Computer-based language processing using things like Travesty can produce some very un-English "words" and sometimes these have no unambiguous translation to utterance. But, not every such new word is un-utterable, and if one steps out of English-derived pronunciation rules, opting rather for Sanskrit/Nepali or German for example some will have a less ambiguous pronunciation.

Non-English pronunciation protocols can also be applied productively across language barriers, consider the German or Sanskrit way that one would attempt to utter words like "lynchpin", "motor", "eucalyptus" or "siphon."

Accent study would be another way to think about some of the above. There are a number of books like Paul Meier's Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen (includes 12 CDs) which covers "Afrikaans (South Africa), American Deep South (Mississippi/Georgia/Alabama), American Southern (Kentucky/Tennessee), Australian, Cockney, Downeast New England, French, General American, German, Hampshire, Indian, Irish, Italian, Liverpool, New York, Northern Ireland, Russian, Scottish, South Boston, Spanish (Castilian & Colonial), Standard British English (Received Pronunciation), Welsh, Yiddish, and Yorkshire." & thinking about what such a book offers one can then imagine working through different accents while dealing with the stems or morphemes mentioned above: Castilian to Russian to Deep Southern.

Mimicry of others, though risky and potentially prone to complaint on PC grounds is another option for HL, thus gay voice, gendered voice, possibly "racial" voice (to the extent that such things can be distinguished from accent). & certainly I have met many people whose distinctive way of speaking I can to some extent imitate.

probably for the best that you can't read this...  

call it a token of my systematic imaginary

Generally Nonlexical

One might start with a sort of "whole earth phonological survey" (another lovely impossibility). My study in German and Sanskrit/Nepali both had repeated drills on phonology, but were one able to practice such things for other additional languages, this might help provide a base of sounds to then work over more intensely (this notion is perhaps relevant to HL as well, but I'm trying to pull it into the GN territory).

Whatever might be adaptable from vocal percussionists or beatboxers which does not move toward song or music is certainly open for the taking (assuming I have the skills).

No nifty name for this but let's just call it vocal-storming for now (on the model of brain-storming),.. basically just trying to make unique and repeatable vocal sounds (fun if you're in the mood) and then to name them or record them or something for further use.

Cataloging and practice of non-lexicals that are common in everyday speech ("shhh" for 'be quiet' etc) is something I have done before to a small and not terribly systematic extent. Presumably this could be extended.

result of an image search with "non lexical" I think

Other Possibilities (applicable to either, depending and paralinguistic in each case)

Pitch; deep voice to high (trying perhaps to make this sound as 'natural' as possible).

Timber is surely imitable to a degree - rough, raspy, creaky, whispery, smooth, hard, whimpering, etc.

Pace or tempo is surely a possibility, though much constrained by my ability to control it. If I had all the words ready in my head (or in Tzara's hat) I could surely include pacing as a variable, but when they come from the fleshy aether of my head…

Tone leads toward acting perhaps, but cataloging the various emotional tones that can be applied provides more options (& some overlap with timber).

Breath manipulations (like speaking during an inhale, coughing words, panting words, etc).

Body manipulations (altering the 'normal' positioning and movement or flexibility of the tongue, face, lips, etc as a way of generating new vocal sounds)

more thoughts about Affect / Language

Back in February I was trying to work out some thoughts about the connections between language and affect and what I found troubling about the preeminence of Language in so many discussions of Affect. Well, now I have more thoughts to try and get out of myself in some quasi-coherent way and so, here we go…

Let's assume, for now at least, that so far as the account of Language derived from structuralism; langue/parole, signifying chain, the X/Y of the metaphorical and metonymical axes is adequate to its object of study. [I am not sure about that, but just for the moment, let us take it as given.] This model when plotting utterances of whatever sort does so in a way that we might reasonably think of as two-dimensional. Speech unfolds in one direction, forward in time. The other dimension is provided by the axis of substitution.

Many thinkers who are trying to cope with the question of how affect relates to signification are incorporating it directly into the signifying chain in some fashion. To give but two; Laclau ties it directly to signification arguing that "affect requires signification"; Johnston does this differently, arguing that "affects are signifiers." I will not replay here my critique of Laclau's position, but I do not think that affect can be shown to require signification and that the laugh of the infans is proof enough of that for this moment. Johnston's position is much better argued and I am not yet ready to try to engage it fully just yet. I will say that I agree with a great deal of what he says but still feel as if something is missing. What is missing I turn to now…

Let's say that three friends attend a dinner party making a total of 10 people. The three friends are dispersed around the table and talking to various others as the meal progresses. Many things are said, now and then everyone is listening to a single person but often enough things break into smaller side-conversations. There are any number of moments when the three friends are all aware of things that are said which are a bit problematic but none of them is in a great position to make a critique of these things without breaking the code of the dinner party. When it is over and the three are riding home together they begin to collectively process the evening and those moments when each was uncomfortable with the implications underpinning some other person's speech.

Now, let's assume the three are at home, continuing to recount things they heard or thought and one of the three reveals that they were very angry about something, and in telling this they release a great deal of negative affect. Here I want to tread lightly as I am unsure of the best choice of vocabulary. Does 'release' imply too much conscious intention? Would it be better to say that one 'gives off' affect? [We'll return to this below, just flow with me for now]. So one of the three is quite worked up and they state their criticism very strongly and then tired from the dinner and the discussion they go to bed. We are left with two now who remain in place. But now, things are very different. They are both left talking about their night still, but grappling as much with the content of the absent 3rd's criticisms, but also with the "affect bomb" that was set off at the same time.

It seems to me that while, yes, the 3rd did give an affect-laden chain of significations, that affect does not inhere only in those significations, rather that it colors the signifying chain. [Again, terminology alert - to be resumed below]. I, as one of the three friends (one of the two who remained behind when the 3rd left) was very conscious of change in 'mood' which was quite pervasive. I and the other spoke about the criticisms, about the night overall and about things unrelated to the night entirely, but it seemed very much to me that the tone (mood, vibe, coloration, etc) of the discharge of so much affect had colored all that came after, even the purely humorous discussion that was no longer about the evening at all.

This example, though it is what prompted my thoughts about this, is perhaps not the best one to make the point that I am making. But the thing I am pointing at is the way that someone's mood, their "affective charge" can and does impact others' affects. Now the thinker who favors language as model here will attribute this to signifiers. The person in the bad mood we must recognize as being in a bad mood and so there must be signs of this which we read to make this attribution. If it is countered that we may not always be aware of these signs, then perhaps the signifying chain where these details are registered is unconscious. Maybe. But I wonder still.

If the pre-linguistic child, the infans is productive of what seem very much like affects, smiles, laughter, fright, worry, etc. Then it would seem that affects precede language. I am sure that once the child becomes a speaking being that all of that is over-coded with signifiers. But I have a hard time believing that because of this an affect simply becomes just another signifier.

It seems that affects are at times much more nebulous, that we can not know what this 'weird mood' we are in means or what caused it. We may manage to satisfy ourselves about that by means of a statement at some point ("I guess I feel ______") but other times the mood simply changes and we never are able to really articulate what was happening affectively.

If we consider a sentence like "my father just died" we have pretty clear access to the basic signification, the meaning of this sentence. But as a written text without other detail or context we have no bearings on the affect involved, all that we can do is project an affect upon the statement. Affect can surely enter the signifying chain if someone says this to us and we reply by saying "you say that like you are happy about it," that is, if we explicitly enter the term "happy" into the signifying chain to name the affect which we felt in some way by virtue of the way that the sentence was uttered. In that case a signifier of an affect is present in the chain, but does this give any grounds for assuming that the affect is a signifier? In the famous 'the word is the murder of the thing' quote, is affect not the thing? Would "happy" not have to be utterly distinct from that to which it refers in order to be able to refer at all?

I know that there is much else to be done to shore up this general line of thinking about affects, but this at least gives my reasons for being dissatisfied with it being incorporated fully into the signifying chain. What remains is to ask what can be said about affect as distinct from signification and that will be difficult. My word choices for this are all tentative, but the one term which keeps reemerging as I try to think this all through is "colors." I think there is something valid in claiming that affects color the signifying chain. But this doesn't help all that much with trying to conceptualize this. I find I am also attracted to metaphors of charge and discharge, and certainly this has vernacular support, as when we say that an question is, for someone or other, very "affectively charged." In saying something like this we seem to be saying that the question is not one that people can seem to deal with in a non-affect-laden way, that emotions get in the way of reasons, etc. I do not know that I would be willing to accept any absolute distinction between reason and emotion, but neither would I assume that they are coextensive.

If the characterization of the structuralist view of language as two dimension has any merit, might we propose that affect is something like a third dimension? One that intersects in many ways with the two but that remains nonetheless of an other order. This is at least my intuition about this, though it is one that is sorely in need to a better conceptual grounding.

My unease about Language's preeminence

Something that has been troubling me under new names or new instances for some time now has to do with how language is used in lacanian theory.  The way the story goes is that the squalling little infans, the biologically human and pre-linguistic child is nearly another being entirely from what it will be once it accedes to language, to the No that grounds signification, after which it will always mean rather than be. Now, I am persuaded by so much of this argument and so comfortable in its basic parameters that I sometimes have difficulty formulating my unease with it.

But, due in part to last semester's intellectual escapades (Ernesto Laclau, William E. Connolly, also The Affect Studies Reader) I find myself feeling that something significant is lost in the psychoanalytic accounting of these matters... and that something either is or has something very much to do with affects.

My thoughts run as follows...

It seems that there is a lot of research and documentation about the infans' relation to others and in that research much indication that before using language at all, that those squishy little ones are more than able to signal with affect and receive affective signals. Then given the broad continuity of affect signals, whether one is a speaker of any language or not, it seems that while language may very well retroactively overcode those things, those affective signals or expressions... but that they retain their form in large part. As such it seems that to make the moment of learning to speak a language such a divisive cut is to ignore those factors and how they impact how we live, relate, love and hate, and most pertinently how we mean and interpret. On a particularly moody and glum day, a joke may not make me laugh, an idea may strike me as inert, a poem I have loved before may seem lifeless and dull.  On a particularly ebullient day, I may find large significance in small, everyday things, hear the poetry in the kids massing for the bus, etc. But if affective relations show this continuity from before we spoke to now, isn't it somewhat non-dialectical to assume that once language is uploaded that those factors are simply taken in, absorbed by language? Would it not seem more apt to assume that their continuity across that boundary of speech (the laugh of the infans and the laugh of the octogenarian being mutually recognized & recognizable) is an indication of their persistence either 1. alongside each other without significant mutual impact, or (as I think is the case) 2. in an evolving dialectic, perhaps (and only perhaps) in which learning how to manage their overlap involves finding each already at work in the other? Isn't the clinical process of the 'talking cure' in part about finding the words for the affects - and isn't that finding also a way of feeling the affect in question for what it actually is in its connections with one's life? If I am plagued by some floating and unshakable guilt whose justification I cannot name, and by whatever means I do manage to find its name, to comprehend what it is that I feel guilt about, do I not then have the chance to feel the guilt for what it really is, meaningfully connected to it object?

That this - what Freud means (or so I understand him) by the idea of 'working through' - linking of the affect with the words that name it adequately is not simply a furthering of my alienation in the realm of the signifier?

Anyway, such run my thoughts. & saying so, repeatedly (as this is not the first time I have tried this line of thought) as a process of working through has lessened the unease in some ways, in that at least I am inching toward a clearer notion of precisely where and with what I am uneasy. Not a very big step perhaps, but progress (or so I console myself).