Archive for the Eleventh Hour

Luisa Kleemann
Hush! Caution! Echoland!⁹

1 Rosi Braidotti: Patterns of Dissonance, Polity Press, Cambridge 1991 | The Subject in Feminism, in: Hypatia, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1991, pp. 155–172

2 Anne Carson: Glass, Irony and God, New Directions Publishing, New York 1995, pp. 119–142

3 Adriana Cavarero: For More than One Voice. Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2005

4 Louis Chude-Sokei: Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber: Reggae, Technology and the Diaspora Process, in: Popular Inquiry: The Journal of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture, Aalto University, Aalto 2018, pp. 46–60 | Return to the Echo Chamber: Race, Sound and the Future of Community (Excerpt), in: Journal of World Popular Music, Equinox Publishing, Sheffield 2021, pp. 38–48

5 F. R. David: Words (Don’t Come Easy), 1982

6 Haytham El-Wardany: How to Disappear, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2018

7 Luce Irigaray: This Sex Which Is Not One, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1985

8 Andrea Jonsson and Heather Warren-Crow: Young-Girls in Echoland. #Theorizing Tiqqun, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2021

9 James Joyce: Finnegans Wake, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012

10 Brandon LaBelle: Lexicon of the Mouth. Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary, Bloomsbury Academic, London/New York 2014 | Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance, The MIT Press, Cambridge 2018

11 Bettine Menke: Respondance: Das der Rede eingeschriebene Andere, die Echoräume der Rede (mit Ovids Echo), in: Die Praxis der/des Echo. Vom Widerhall in den Künsten, dem Theater und der Geschichte, Leipzig 2013 (symposium) | Rhetorik der Echo. Echo-Trope, Figur des Nachlebens, in: Weibliche Rede – Rhetorik der Weiblichkeit. Studien zum Verhältnis von Rhetorik und Geschlechterdifferenz, Rombach, Freiburg 2003, pp. 135–160

12 Karolin Meunier: Hearing Voices. On the Reading and Performance of Poetry, in: Texte zur Kunst, Verlag Texte zur Kunst, Berlin 2016, pp. 134–147

13 Quinn Latimer: How to Live in Another Body for an Hour, in: extraextramagazine.com, 2018 | Bookforum talks with Quinn Latimer (with Annie G. Larmon), in: bookforum.com, 2017

14 Eva Meyer: Legende sein, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2014

15 Trinh T. Minh-ha: Woman Native Other. Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis 1989

16 Jean-Luc Nancy: Being Singular Plural, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2000

17 Paul B. Preciado: An Apartment on Uranus, Fitzcarraldo Editions, London 2020

18 N.H. Pritchard: EECCHHOOEESS, DABA, New York 2021

19 Sylvia Pritsch: Rhetorik des Subjekts. Zur textuellen Konstruktion des Subjekts in feministischen und anderen postmodernen Diskursen, transcript, Bielefeld 2008

20 Romy Rüegger: Language is Skin. Scripts for Performances, Archive Books, Berlin 2018

21 Maayan Sheleff and Sarah Spies: (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies, oncurating.org, 2021

22 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Echo, in: New Literary History, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1993, pp. 17–43

Romy Rüegger writes:

One thinks of the texts that you have written, of the words that you were able to capture momentarily, that you received back from Echo. When asked where you had got all your words from, you said: […]. ²⁰

EECCHHOOEESS ¹⁸ as spatial sound phenomena spread out in waves, but the sounds are not always reflected. If they meet a soft surface like acoustic foam shapes, their energy is soaked up and absorbed. Timbral patterns of disturbance caused by the movement of energy. Irritant waves that travel through the air, beaming into arbitrary directions, that ping pong throughout eavesdropping ears. Circulating voice-overs that bounce smoothly like a word bouncing off the ground. Fading in and out,

echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo

ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing

echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing echo ing¹⁸

Increasingly amplified at a closely matching frequency, resonating back and forth and back and forth and back to the mythological figure of the same name, who appears as a mountain nymph in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

echo (n.)
mid-14c., “sound repeated by reflection,” from Latin echo, from Greek ēkhō, personified in classical mythology as a mountain nymph who pined away for love of Narcissus until nothing was left of her but her voice, from or related to ēkhē “sound,” ēkhein “to resound,” [...]

In ancient Greek mythology, Echo was cursed to speak only in response to other voices. Condemned to repeat the words spoken by the mouth of another, any other mouth. Catching last syllables and sentence endings. Endlessly articulating herself as soon as

another voice takes the floor ¹, another voice takes the floor ²,

another voice takes the floor ³, another voice takes the floor ⁴, another voice takes the floor ⁵,

another voice takes the floor ⁶, another voice takes the floor ⁷,

another voice takes the floor ⁸, another voice takes the floor ⁹, another voice takes the floor ¹⁰,

another voice takes the floor ¹¹, another voice takes the floor ¹²,

another voice takes the floor ¹³, another voice takes the floor ¹⁴, another voice takes the floor ¹⁵,

another voice takes the floor ¹⁶, another voice takes the floor ¹⁷,

another voice takes the floor ¹⁸, another voice takes the floor ¹⁹, another voice takes the floor ²⁰,

another voice takes the floor ²¹, another voice takes the floor ²².

Vocal crossing, overlapping in constant. Echo appears compelled to always respond vocally, under the conditions of repetition and foreshortening, against what is said. What is already out there, here. Hear, hear! Lending an ear to someone. Letting something go in one ear and out the other. Out of Echo’s mouth who cannot remain silent to any incoming call. Call me, call on me. Recall one or more features of the former sentence, such as the last word, the last syllable, the last letter. Such as the final r in letter.

Are you feeling something like mild anguish while waiting for the words?

Words, don’t come easy to me. This is the only way for me to say I love you.⁵
(Echo discovers Narcissus in the forest but cannot address him to confess her love.
Instead, Echo is bound to wait until Narcissus puts the words in her mouth, words out of his mouth, words of mouth.)
I am awaiting Narcissus’ voice, speaking words, words on the tip of the tongue.

Turning them around, round and round, away, way back. Doubling and splitting into themselves. Tangled in tongues, a slip of the tongue. A sound being carried over from one word to the next, slightly twisting the tongue. Rolling, folding, rotating. The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue, the tip of the tongue, the teeth, the lips.

Feeling deceived by Echo’s talking, in circles, Narcissus rejects her overtures. Over and over again. Captivated by the attraction of his own reflection, but not of his own words. Words that have found her and elude the narcissistic illusion as soon as they are being uttered. Words that became hers, hear her calling. In a continuous dissolution and a process of bodily transience, Echo gradually no longer appears in her corporeality. Her bodily presence is said to merge with the landscape due to Narcissus’ rejection. Disappearing to such an extent that only her lingering sounds live on, almost invisible. Surround sounds, sweet spots.

I am a fiction
Me who has dissolved M
e who has disappeared [...]
Me who is imagined,
[...] always entangled and related. ²⁰

All that remains is Echo’s voice within earshot that speaks with the tone of a young woman’s voice, said without choice. Understanding her fate more positively, as some kind of power, however compromised, we could say that “Echo can disseminate” while her notoriously self-obsessed non-lover “Narcissus is fixed”. Gayatri Spivak [...] closes her essay with a quotation from Finnegans Wake: “Hush! Caution! Echoland!”. ⁸

Sound a note of caution. Question the relationship of Echo’s echoing speech to her culturally coded femininity, how connotated female speech became modulated in literary writings and myths. Re-read the narrative of Echo and Narcissus as a figuration of feminine speech that points to gender-based speech positions and power dynamics. A re-reading that opens spaces for critique and resistance. A re-writing of traditional narratives, dedicated to expose constructions of the feminine, and to subvert established gender stereotypes and wordings.

Anne Carson writes:

Consider how many female celebrities of classical mythology, literature and cult make themselves objectionable by the way they use their voice. [...] There is the haunting garrulity of the nymph Echo [...] who is described by Sophocles as “the girl with no door on her mouth” (Philoktetes). Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. ²

Reading between the lines, so that an implicit meaning may be revealed. Reading between the meaning and the music of words and words. A meaning that is hidden or implied rather than being openly stated. Reading the room prior to speaking, with a tone, so that your tone does not match the said narrative.

Noticing the subtle, nonverbal cues. Proposing another speech position in the reinterpretation and reevaluation of Echo’s figure. A counter-construction that enables a different form of agency. A counter-voice or call or song or sound or tone or tongue that is not considered mute.

Trinh Minh-ha writes:

Finding a voice, searching for words and sentences: say some thing, one thing, or no thing; tie/untie, read/unread, discard their forms; scrutinize the grammatical habits of your writing and decide for yourself whether they free or repress. Again, order(s). Shake syntax, smash the myths, and if you lose, slide on, unearth some new linguistic paths. ¹⁵

Longing for a sprawling retelling, or a reconstituted echo. Echo, not only as being a voice without her own agency, but as having a voice like, say:

This means that I do not remain relegated to self-surrender, but that I could bring the process of symbolic attribution to confusion.

Examining the implications of the gendering of sound and the ascriptions of ground-lessness to forms of female-coded speech. Subverting language conventions and logical reasoning, like the opposition of sense and non-sense. Detaching the materiality of the voice from its relation to non-sense, not to get some common sense. Sensing the meaning, dispersing. Soft words that juxtapose the register of the semantic with a sonic substance. Calling for alternative spellings along the strings of sound, listen!

Anne Carson writes:

Greek women of the [...] classical periods were not encouraged to pour forth unregulated cries of any kind within the civic space of the polis or within earshot of men. Indeed masculinity in such a culture defines itself by its different use of sound. Verbal continence is an essential feature of the masculine virtue of sophrosyne (“prudence, soundness of mind, moderation, temperance, self-control”) that organizes most patriarchal thinking on ethical or emotional matters. [...] We should look a little more closely at the ideology that underlies male abhorrence of female sound. And it becomes important at this point to distinguish sound from language. For the formal definition of human nature preferred by patriarchal culture is one based on articulation of sound [...], is the use of rationally articulated speech: logos. ²

Mimesis, mimetic or inauthentic speech (disambiguation). Not to be confused with imitation, representation, the act of resembling, and the presentation of the self. Questioning the means of sonic agency, acoustics of assembly and resistance. Articulating a different economy of meaning, based on a syntax of the feminine, so to speak, beyond the patriarchal masculine order.

An economy of meaning that is less about a specific female sounding, [...] said to have different inflectional patterns, different ranges of intonation, different syntactic preferences, different semantic fields, different diction, different narrative textures [...] ², but about revealing the fiction of a universal speaking subject that speaks in the language of a patriarchal logic. Revise, recast.

Luce Irigaray writes:

One would have to listen with another ear, as if hearing an “other meaning” always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them. For if “she” says something, it is not, it is already no longer, identical with what she means. What she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. lt touches (upon). ⁷

A voice that composes itself around sounding moments of touch and resonant encounters. Set in motion by waves, accelerations, delays. A voice that traverses its words in their given meanings. Being pulled or twisted out of shape, misleading. A voice that is not organised according to Echo’s intentions but rather follows the relational rhythm of repetition.

Turning against the assumption of powerlessness in Echo’s compulsion to repeat, and in the articulation of her desire. Not only appropriating Narcissus’ utterances but subjecting them to transcription. On repeat, recite, revoice. On and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and out of sync.

Feels like we are drifting apart, you and I.
My tongue expects the soundsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssounding along different lines.

Multiple readings for both the meanings and the sounds, positioned within the lines, breaks.

Slippages of sound and sight, slip, slide. Slipping out of my mouth.
When fitting the words into my mouth, I may also contour and test, inflict, and even accent their giving meanings.¹⁰

Still, no shortage in sight, but the relative loudness of a speech sound, rhythm, vibration, reverberance. Taking into account [...] that “word-sound” has “power” indeed more power than the actual language, the actual lyric [...] ⁴. The sonority of Echo’s reverberating speech read aloud as a medium of resistance that confuses the notion of one’s own. Turning again and against the assumption of an ultimate originality of one’s own voice that is located within the inner self, and to which other voices remain only external, like a ricochet that resists the primordial.

Rebounding off a surface, off a wall. Springing back, springing away. Imagined as a reflective surface, a linguistic mirror, that throws back Narcissus’ words like a mirror-image. Or, to put it another way, read through an inverted mirror: A relational structure full of noise and variants, movements without any depictive function. The mirror-image then no longer appears to be identical, but eventually breaks with itself, resulting in recurring distortions, entangled waves, entangled distortions, recurring waves.

resonance (n.)
mid-15c., resonaunce, in acoustics, “prolongation or repetition of sound by reverberation;” from Old French resonance (15c.) and directly from Latin resonantia “an echo,” from resonare “to sound again, sound back” (see resound) [...]

Adriana Cavarero writes:

Free from the pretenses of Narcissus and from Ovid’s textual games, Echo comes to appear as the divinity who teaches an acoustic relationality [...]. ³

A curled re in resonāre, read as an indication of a repetition, and a reaction. A word-forming element, placed at the beginning of a word to change its meaning. Do that verb again, reverb. Anew, once more or back from, back to. Reread, rewrite, repeat, redo. A rewritten script, a rearrangement. To say something more than once. To consider something again. To find a different use for something. To answer. Conceived as an acoustic resonance, the spatial sound phenomena of the echo appears no longer as a mirror-image, but as an answer. A sonic relationality in which different voices relate to each other.

A corresponding practice responding to the initial dependence of every speech on preceding speeches, echoes of the echoes of the echoes of the echoes of the echoes of the echoes of the echoes of the echoes. Drifting along in echoic choirs, speaking with many tongues. Out of tune but into resonance. Stretching the voice in its traditional representation of meaning and being, of intentional speech and statement. Focusing on its tonal components, as an articulation of another non-semantically organised carrier of meaning. Susurrous, soft fluttering or crackling.

Adriana Cavarero writes:

If we transport Echo onto this scene—which is renewed wherever the semantic succumbs to the vocalic—then the Ovidian nymph ends up recuperating a different sense for her vocalic repetition, one that is no longer punitive or forced. For as Ovid himself no doubt knew, Echo is not so much a tragic figure of interdicted speech as she is a figure of a certain pleasure. And continues: In other words, in the devocalization of logos that accompanies the history of metaphysics, the repression of vocal pleasure is above all a repression of the pleasure that characterizes resonance as the

primary, spontaneous rhythm and drive of the reciprocal communication of unique voices. It is, simply put, the repression of the echo. ³

Unfolding a conversation amongst common threads. Reflecting on the sociality that inhabits the voice as an organ of communality, entangled in heterogeneous collectives. Reverberation found in choirs, a subset of an ensemble that implies more than one singer per part. Like a kind of song “for more than one voice” [...]. ³ Singing together as a whole, with an opening. Many entrances to one’s own voice, heard as a collective voice. The being-in-common ¹⁶ as a uniqueness-in-resonance ³, being unique but not singular.

An understanding of one’s own voice as a polyphonic relation that counteracts the narrowing of the voice as truth and verification of a subject. Insisting on its specificity that does not dissolve in its polyphony but is rather constituted by it. A commoning voice that holds a multiplicity together but does not seem to be coherent or enclosed. A voice that is littered with holes, leaking.

Louis Chude-Sokei writes:

[...] [T]hat though music can be claimed, sound itself cannot be owned; and though sound may emerge from specific cultural and individual experiences, it is always also about something else and for someone else. It echoes, feeds back, loops and distorts. It is as much about the other as it is about you, and that is central to the physics and politics of sound as well as its ethics. ⁴

Unmasking the fictions and constructions of originality and authority in relation to authorship, so that the boundaries of one’s own voice can swing into motion. A composite entanglement, like a porous mesh. Not traceable to a core self that speaks through a primordial voice, but layers over layers over layers. Along or together with, as well as, also, at the same time, go and, come and, then: one’s own voice makes itself heard not as a property, but as a relation. Not being conceived as one’s own in the sense of possession. Not belonging entirely to the person whose mouth is moving, but appearing through the mobile combination of other voices whose inscribing effects compose it. The combinations pluralise due to the diversity that they consist of, but are specific in the ways they are composed. Out of which tones and words.

Brandon LaBelle writes:

For example, echoes and echoing greatly lend to practices adept at appropriating and mimicking, to give support to appearances that never quite “fit in” – that return to the dominant order and the master tongue its own performative grammars and narratives yet reshaped by an altogether different rhythm, an errant migrating repetition that may sound out alternative futures. ¹⁰

Imaginings, embodiments, polylogues. One’s own voice thought of as a permeable membrane through which other speeches diffuse (fluid) (prose) (community). A porosity that dives into discontinuities, forming a transition. A number of words rotating around an ensemble of threads that balance each other out. Words that move as the air around them moves, floating in and around. When speaking, air is constantly flowing through the entire sentence. Letting one’s own voice resonate with a supported sound. Using the breath to support the words, instead of holding it in. In the same breath: a voice yet to become haunted by EECCHHOOEESS ¹⁸ that set the tongue moving. A voice yet to come that rebels against the plot.