alphabetic listening

*Interpretation does not so much aim at revealing meaning as at reducing signifiers to their non-meaning (lack of meaning) so as to find the determinants of the whole subject’s behavior.

I would play a game as a child: repeat any word over and over and listen as it gradually loses its meaning in the mouth. It would become strange with each repetition, changing into something clunky and foreign. Our language, and our voices as conduits for this language, has something alien about it. Think of the infinite awkwardness on hearing a recording of your own voice! Or take those slips of tongue that make clear we don’t know the actual subject of our speech. And isn’t it strange that when our words do clarify, they seem to only do so in the mouth of another – when someone repeats something we’ve said back to us? Our language is always expressed at a distance: the words in our mouths and in our minds are in fact alien; they are not our own. This is because we are born into a pre-fabricated world of discourse, into an-Other’s linguistic universe (think: family, caregivers, teachers, government). We have a room, a name, a space in their language formed in advance of our arrival. This language is placed in us, and insofar as language brings with it its favorite bedfellow – desire – it is also their desire that is placed in us.

alphabetic listening makes this alienation in language material. It starts didactically: each word, taken from a fragment of a recounted dream, is associated with an abstract synthetic sound. An alphabet is developed in this electronic sound, and through repetition the association between word and synthetic sound is reinforced so that the listener can continue the association once the voice has been removed. The synthetic sounds become new signifiers, but ones that are immediately distanced and estranged from the signified. two studies in alphabetic listening were early attempts at activating this process, of conjuring a newly signified voice in the mind of the auditor.

alphabet 1: p-u-s-h takes its own synthetic alphabet and places it within a musical context, putting these speech associated sounds in contact with unsignified musical sounds (ones not known to be associated with a voice). The musical sounds become a form of interference or signal jamming; the listener loses contact with the original word. While the synthetic alphabet is still easily tied to the voice it becomes nearly impossible to locate the content of the original word: it instead enunciates a lost, meaningless speech.

It is in the power of the auditor to put this lost language, mediated through the content of the recollected dream fragment and the listening context, to work. The auditor can interject with their own tongue, their own language and associations in the place where meaning has been lost. When language is fixed it becomes a cage: it determines our movements within it and our ideas about what is possible – what can be. To work upon the signifier and the signified itself is to transform this cage, to understand that no thing in the world is fixed but radically alterable and subject to transformation. To this end, the listener too, their very subject, is altered in their audition: as they are interpolated into the piece the transformation of a word, of signification, posits the transformation of that very interpolated listener.

But to actualize this transformation – it requires work. In this regard, I want to stress the significant labor needed on the part of the listener to work upon the signifier. A real effort is required in order to hear each word as newly signified. It is a demanding, difficult, and at times tedious process. But then, isn’t that true of all our work on the self?