Peter Sloterdiik’s newly translated English version (the first volume of his Spheres Trilogy) sets up, his ‘archeology of the intimate’, his couplings, and re-thinking(s) outside of Freudian and Lacanian dogmas regarding ‘critical’ stages. Leaping off from the aspects covered or not covered in Heidegger’s Being and Time he charmingly swoops from macrosherics to microspherics, hopscotches across convenient philosophical metaphors and anecdotes in order to animate his strategy of flexing out his sphericocentric philosophy. There are two things to say about spheres. The first of which is, admittedly on first glace mildly critical, but hopefully in revealing this criticism I’ll also extrapolate sentiments about why I feel his work is so important.
“Recent psychoacoustic research, especially that of the French otorhinolaryngologist and psycholinguist Alfred Tomatis and his school, has attempted a suggestive explanation of the unusual selectivity of the human ear that manifests itself in the siren effect. Not only do these investigations in the human auditory sense and it’s evolution show beyond doubt that unborn children can already hear extremely well because of the ear’s early development – possibly from the embryonic stage onwards, and certainly in the second half of pregnancy; in addition, there are impressive observations showing that this early listening ability does not result in the fetus being passively at the mercy of the mother’s sonic inner life, or the water-filtered voices and noises of the outside world. Rather, the fetal ear already develops the ability to find it’s bearings in the ever-present, invasive sonic environment actively through independent, lively listening and non-listening. As Tomatis untiringly emphasizes, the child’s stay in the womb would be unbearable without the specific ability not to listen and to mute large areas of noices, as the mother’s heartbeat and digestive sounds, heard in such close proximity, would be like the noise from a 24-hour building site or lively barroom conversation. If the child did not learn to avert it’s ears at an early stage, it would be ravaged by permanent noise torture.” (Sloterdijk, 2011, pp. 501-502)
Allegedly Tomatis has shown that the unborn child has selective hearing, it ignores the cacophony of respiratory hummings and digestive gurglings in order to be at peace. However there is an more intriguing effect of this in-utero aural selectivity: in-utero vococentricism as subject creation (!):
“The child’s state as the object of the mother’s expectations is conveyed by the audio-vocal means to the fetal ear, which, upon hearing the greeting sound, unlocks itself completely and takes up the sonorous invitation. By adopting a posture of listening, the happy and active ear devotes itself to the words of welcome. In this sense, devotion is the subject-forming act par excellence, for devoting oneself means rousing oneself into the necessary state of alertness to open up to the sound that concerns you. (…)
From the subject’s earliest beginnings, the ray of intentionality with which it “relates” itself to something given has an echo character. Only because it is intended by the mother’s voice can it intend the enlivening voice itself. The audio-vocal pact creates a two-way traffic in a ray; enlivening forces are answered with a rising of the self to liveliness” (Sloterdijk, 2011, pp. 504-505)
“Because it is able to listen, the fetal ear can selectively highlight the mothers affirming voice amid the constant intrauterine noise. In this gesture the incipent subject experiences a euphoriant stimulation; according to Tomatis, it is the overtones of the mother’s soprano voice in particular that offer an irresistible stimulus of joy. To make these claims plausible, Tomatis interpreted the mother’s entire body as a musical instrument – albeit one that does not serve to play a piece to the listener, but rather brings about the original tuning of the ear. The transmission of high and extremely high frequencies in the soft, sound-swallowing bodily milieu is enabled, according to Tomatis, by the unusual conductivity and resonant quality of the skeleton; the mothers pelvis in particular is supposedly capable of conveying the subtlest high frequency vibrations of the mother’s voice to the child’s ear like the back of a cello. This ear listens at the mothers pelvic floor and spine as a curious visitor listens at a door behind which he suspects delightful presents. What the little guest cannot yet know is that this listening is its own reward, and that seeking to reach the other side would be futile. The joy of anticipation already contains the wealth of the enjoyable” (Sloteridijk, 2011, pp. 507)
(…)
“This shows that humans emerge without exception from a vocal matriarchy: this is the psychological reason for the siren effect. But while Homer’s Sirens produce sweet obituaries, the mother’s siren voice is anticipatory: it prophesizes a sounding fate for the child. In listening to it the fetal hero embarks on his own odyssey. The irreplaceable voice utters an immediately self-fulfilling prophecy: “you are welcome” or “you are not welcome”. Thus the mother’s vocal frequency becomes a Last Judgment shifted back to the beginning of life.” (Sloteridjk, 2011, pp. 508-509).
There is, or course a rather obvious connection here to the original acousmatic voice and its cropping up in literature and film, the original source-less vocal in The Wizard of Oz, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (Prince Myshkin listening behind the door) and Door scene in Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “"Ah, that's not Jekyll's voice--it's Hyde's!" cried Utterson. "Down with the door, Poole!"”. However, the idea of the matriarchal voice, selectively perceived through an intrauteral skeletal resonance, as the original moment of subject formation feels radical. Firstly because it departs with the well worn, western, and ocular-centric mirror stage, but more interestingly because it leads me to connect this original voice, to language – in particular to the relationship of vowel howls in language, and the mechanistically cranial dominance of consonants.
In reference my own musing’s around Vowel Stripped Tic-Talk of “the excavation of the vowel as screaming, howling primordial remnant” and “the dichotomy or extimacy of consonants and vowels as another manifestation of the conflict at the core of language, or conflict of the animal and flesh against order and post anthropoid communication constructs” I have a question to pose. Wouldn’t the soprano tones of the original matriarchal voice be vowels? Can such violent consonantal/vowel splices such as “Kcht” , “PPh” or “St” resonate though to the fetal hero via the mother’s skeletal vocal door? I doubt it. So, I’d like to add to Sloteridjk’s observations of the original “subject-forming act par excellence” and propose that, on top of being pre-mirror stage, the catalyst, the core of this intrauteral voco/aural revelation for the fetus is a vowel, and not a consonant. In regard to this I’d like to re-think the previous texts I’ve studied concerning the voice – for example, when Roland Barthes speaks of “The Grain of The Voice”- is he referring to the consonants as well? The dyadic relation ship of consonantal brutality inflicted upon the original vowel is, for me at least, emerging as an important dyad within the dyad of the voice.
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Bibliography
Peter Sloterdijk, 2011. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents). Edition. Semiotext(e).
Posts
With regard to the argument presented here on intra-uterine subject formation from the sounds originating in the mother's womb.
ReplyDeleteI can see that the child would have to differentiate between the mother's (and others') voices as well as the sounds of the body. so your question of tiks may be something to do with that pre-natal lack of definition.
When my son was young, less than a year, I would often get up when he woke at 6 with him to let my wife sleep. After an hour or two he would get tired, but as he was breast-fed I required non-nipular means to help rather than wake his sleeping mother. I had read that 'white noise' such as a washing machine was particularly affective, so I would put on some Merzbow at a low volume. It worked every time and them worked later with my daughter too.
I was working on the theory that this replicated the 'noise' of the womb. He's four now and still enjoys certain noise musics. But he's taste in music has changed with his later subject formation.
The point i'm making is that I like the theory you present in that it may, speculatively, have something to do with subject formation, but I wonder if it is latent subject formation. Surely, and to bring in the oracular here, it is later when the baby starts to form a recognition of its mother that the differentiation that we talk about of when we talk of consciousness is concerned with regard to his mother's voice occurs. And it is the face, although even a new born of a month or so sees so poorly that hering, as well as touch play a far more important part in this recognition even then.
so i accept that as far as unconscious subject formation is concerned this would make the auditary prior to the oracular, but does the oracular take prominence in the discourse because of the history of object naming, which includes the mother.
Even a blind person has to use an oracular weighted language to converse when conversing using the voice. (With language as communication necessarily being external for it to be suitable for communication between differing beings in the first place and the majority of speaking beings are also seeing beings).
So the noise of the womb is a pre-linguistic emotional state.
I'm also interested in the work of Damasio, and this would suggest that the aural affects the emotional mammalian brain whilst the oracular affects the cognitive (specious at mo)
P.S In Order of things Foucault talks about Rousseau's suggestion at the time of a general grammar, that vowels are related to emotions and consonants to needs. What are your reflections on that?
Hi SS - Great to hear from you (even though it's HTML!?!?!?!)
ReplyDeleteI'll come back at a later date to the finer points you make, but the intra-uterine acoustics as 'primer' for later occularcentric mirror stages of subject creation are commented on here
http://vocalitiesavc.blogspot.com/2012/02/voice-in-bubbles.html -
it's the later half of this post with some extra thoughts and 7 comments thrown in afterwards - musing around exactly what you mention....
Also - the division between language, emotion, primal and signifier, is also explored, hypersitionally, here
http://vocalitiesavc.blogspot.com/2012/02/consonantal-tyranny.html
Could you expand or specifically ref the Damasio? The split between the variously paleopsychologically defined cortex(t) - and the contingent implications on audition/ vocal/musical perception is of great great interest to me.
Damasio is a neuroscientist who argues that the emotions underpin social cognition. He formulated the somatic marker hypothesis, that suggests that our emotional reward system takes over when the cognitive processes get overwhelmed. An interesting book is 'Why Love Matters' by Sue Gerhardt, where she compares the evidence for attachment theory with neuroscience. Given your post on intra-uterine aural subject formation and the howl, you may be amused to know she is interested in primal therapy and rebirthing experiences.
ReplyDeleteTo avoid the blog and post jumping will reply to the comment on chemicals on this post http://vocalitiesavc.blogspot.com/2012/02/voice-in-bubbles.html as what i know I have gleaned from my knowledge from above authors.
ReplyDeleteThe point Gerhardt makes using Damasio is that the brain is not fully formed immediately after birth, it takes until about the age of four to get to the form it will take throughout adulthood. At this stage and before including intra-uterine there is evidence that it is affected by the experience of the mother and others as well as any morphogenesis from the DNA code itself.
Damasio is from the evolutionary theory school that suggests that there are evolutionary parts of our brain. Thus the amygdala is the reptile brain, fight or flight, then there are a whole load that are called the mammalian brain, which is the majority of the brain, often referred to as the elephant, and then there is the ant that leads the elephant the cerebral cortex, which is where most cognition takes place.
Linking the mammalian brain and the cerebral cortex is the ordo-frontal cortex, which also regulates things like Cortisol. Which Gerhardt identifies as a major chemical the regulation of which affects whether cognition gets overwhelmed, leading the eomtive brain to take over (Damasio's somatic markers hypothesis).
Gerhardt links somatic creation (as a stress hormone) to post-natal trauma as the ordo-frontal cortex that links the mammalian brain to the cerebral cortex does not develop till later.
With regard to your question about reptilian brain and aural learning, according to Damasio, the development of the brain intra-uterine follows an evolutionary path, and so amygdala forms first, therefore the effect of the development of the ear will track the effects that aurality in the brain has on subject formation.
Also with regard to objects as part of recognition, as the cognitive parts are not fully formed and related to the emotions, this may be to do with why sound has a more emotional response than the oracular.
On a different tip. i disagree that X is purley morbid. with regard to the idea that viatlity is realted to knowledge of death, impending death and decay. X also siginifies life, hence signing your name away with an X xan also result in you signing your life away. Pirates mythologically bury their treasure under an X. (Damn I had thought of loads more but forgot them typing the above...)
*(edit) Gerhardt links cortisol creation (as a stress hormone) to post-natal trauma
ReplyDeleteThis is absolutely fascinating stuff, I'll have to find these books!
ReplyDelete