Listen to Yourself! Voice, Technology and the Self

Linda Sandinol.sandino@vam.ac.uk

‘Hearing Voice in Oral History’Oral History Society Annual conference, University of Strathclyde, Scotland3-4 July, 2009

Backstory

Audio tape as the foundation of oral history work

Video as providing a ‘bigger and better’ access to oral history material [myth]

How audio and video operate to construct oral history narratives through their form

Life histories/oral histories of the self

• What conception of the self does oral history and/or life history represent?

• How do the technologies of inscription generate historically specific conceptions of the self?

Technology: Time and Space

• Time is no longer linear: fast forward, playback time

• Space: can be virtual, imaginative, distant, or near

• ‘In conditions of modernity… the media do not mirror realities but in some part form them’. (A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Stanford UP 1991)

Self-Identity

‘A stable self-identity is based on an account of a person's life, actions and influences which makes sense to themselves, and which can be explained to other people without much difficulty. It 'explains' the past, and is oriented towards an anticipated future’.

(A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Stanford UP 1991)

Samuel Beckett Krapp’s Last Tape (1957)‘First and full exposition and dramatization of memory as essential ground and agent of identity’. (James Olney, 1998)

• Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that's all done with anyway”.

• http://www.ubu.com/sound/beckett_krapp.html

The Subject/subjection

‘Power, that first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity’.

(Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: University Press, 1997 )

Richard Serra ‘Boomerang’ (1974)

“I am surrounded by me, my mind surrounds me, goes out into the world, then comes back inside me. There is no escape”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5S3_dmj8BU

Audio tape

• The play emphasizes the archival quality of Krapp’s enterprise represented in the quantity of tapes on the stage, in boxes, some locked away.

• Tape player functions in linear terms [forwards, backwards] sustaining the concept of historicity, change over time.

• Audiotape’s spool/ ‘spooling’ is an analogy for linearity/chronology of Krapp’s life, the history of the self over time, echoing Giddens’ point that self-identity is ‘a person’s own reflexive understanding of their biography’.

Video/audio

Boomerang documents and stages instantaneous estrangement of the self produced by technology.

“I’m once removed from myself. I am thinking and hearing and filling up a vocal void. I find I have trouble making connections between thoughts… I am detached from my normal thinking process. I have the feeling that I am not

where I am…”

• It illustrates Butler’s challenge: ‘how can it be that the subject, taken to be the condition for and instrument of agency, is at the same time the effect of subordination, understood as the deprivation of agency?’

Two versions of the self

A self produced over time, archived, chronologically on tape (1957)

A subject produced/ ‘subjected’ through the apparatus of surveillance/spectacluar technology (1974)

………..(2009)?

Time

• Krapp: ‘Lie propped up in the dark-and wander. Be again in the dingle on Christmas eve […] Be again on Croghan […] Be again, be again.

• Nancy Holt: ‘Time in this isolated castle of television experience is cut off from time as we usually experience it’.

Hearing Self and Others

Acoustic technologies enable a ‘self defined in terms of hearing...as a membrane…as a channel through which voices, noises, music travel’.

(S. Connor, ‘Sound and the Self’, 2004).

‘So be it’

• Even though digital recordings rely on established visual metaphors: II [play/stop] < [back] > [fwd]

• Lack of materiality increases the attention on the voice as the site of embodied representation

• But thereby magnifies the abstraction and/or separation of the voice from the body

Splitting

• Estrangement is produced by splitting the self into voice and body

• Voice represents reflexive ‘being-in-the-world’ [both Krapp and Holt]

• Oral/life histories take account of the specific moment in which the recorded self was both made and found.

The metaphysics of presence

• Bjork ‘.. with my voice I’m always gonna show what happened to me that day, that month, that year’

• Voice and orality stand ‘for the desire of all that is “authentic”, for lived experience.’ (Alessandro Portelli, The Text and the Voice, Columbia University Press, 1994).