Productive Ambiguities
Bodies, Mistakes, and Voices in
Laura Malacart’s Voicings
Karin Ninetta Thea Anzivino Student number: 5631270
Research Master in Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mireille Rosello Second Reader: Dr. Jules Sturm
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Contents
Introduction
Chapter one: Invisible Bodies
Chapter two: “Speaking for”
and Unlearning from Mistakes
Chapter Three: (Dis)embodied Voices
Conclusions
Epilogue
Bibliography
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Introduction
I want to play a game. A game of hide-and-seek. It will be between me and
Voicings – a video work by artist Laura Malacart.
As in any hide-and-seek game, someone closes their eyes and starts counting slowly to a prearranged number in order for the others to conceal themselves in the surroundings. I will not conceal myself, Voicings will. And you will watch us play.
Playing is often seen as something frivolous and pleasurable, as something only children do. Most of the times, it is not taken very seriously. Games, however, offer different tools to critically inquire something. They can create a space in which to imagine and analyze things differently so that certain mechanisms, forms of constructions, or default views on the world may be subverted, and other alternatives may be created. By playing this game, I want to blur some boundaries. Certainly, hide-and-seek is a game mostly played by children, but it also involves “adult” themes such as visibility, hiding, winning, and power. In reality hide-and-seek is often used, but it exceeds its entertaining uses. One can think, for example, of the illegal immigrant hiding from the police. I decide to play hide-and-seek to think about the ambiguities of representing the real while knowing full well that personally I am only “playing.” Furthermore, I want to highlight also that not all the characters at stake here are playing or can actually play. I can stop playing with and using visibility and invisibility paradigms, but some of the people in the video cannot.
I will close my eyes now and start the counting. Then, I will walk around and do the seeking.
…Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, hundred! I open my eyes and see a black screen, the title of the video piece is superimposed: Voicings. The first image follows. My eyes are still readjusting to the light of the screen. A woman is sitting on a chair that is put against the wall of what seems to be a bathroom. She says in an impeccable British accent: “Four years ago I moved to Southgate.” She stops, pauses for a moment and resumes the phrase. “Four years ago I moved to Southgate, then my big problems started. My neighbours were very different people. First my daughter she couldn’t speak English.” She stops again, repeats the last sentence slightly differently, and continues: “First my daughter she didn’t speak English and when she went outside the other kids said ‘you need to learn English first then your going to play with us’”.1 The camera is positioned perpendicularly to the
woman who is en profil and gazes at something that is outside the range of the frame. She carries on narrating her difficult story with frustration: she does not like the neighborhood where she is living; she is having problems with the nearby residents who are not friendly.
1 These are the first
spoken sentences in
Voicings. Look for the
almost imperceptible grammar mistake. Every transcription of the “monologs” of
Voicings will be
rewritten without using any device such as Italics to emphasize the mistakes.
4 But, most of all, she hopes that one day they will get used to her and her family.
At first glance, the whole setting and visual set-up remind me of the usual documentary format of the interview. Nothing is really happening visually, the camera is pointing at an interviewee, the woman, with a motionless frame shot, and the interviewer is behind the camera, invisible. The same happens with the other four scenes that follow the first. With the exception of a different setting, character, and story, the positioning and behavior of the speaker in relation to the camera remains the same.
What I am watching, however, is not a documentary interview. The interviewees or characters never look at the camera or at any interviewer or filmmaker behind or next to it: there is no one interviewing and no one being interviewed. They are looking at texts that are not included in the frame.
I must keep searching, then.
To play a hide-and-seek game, one ought to use not only sight to focus and detect things or persons, but also to apply the sense of hearing and listen very carefully. Someone’s hidden body may accidentally move something; fast, rhythmical breaths, an indication of the state of suspense in which the hidden person finds him or herself, may be detected. Hence, when watching Voicings, I realized that while “walking around” I should not only look closer, but also listen more carefully. The video develops and signifies beyond what it merely portrays. Its visual “surface” covers up and reveals at the same time. I should put more attention to its different levels and layers, to the stories and the way they are told. I should fully use my senses. Who is really in front of me? What am I hearing? Who am I hearing? Whose stories are actually narrated?
Sometimes, in a hide-and-seek game, it takes a lot of time to find all the concealed persons. Voicings is hiding from the viewer behind its characters and its narrative. It is constructing a hide-and-seek game with the viewer by playing with visibility and invisibility. By simultaneously revealing and concealing, the artwork tactically constructs a space for investigation while triggering the viewer to inquire, to go look for relations, mistakes, gaps, disconnections, disengagements. In other words, it asks to construct the “missing pieces” of the story, which seem to be disclosed, but are actually concealed in its very aesthetic modality. I have to keep looking for things, discover them, and excavate different layers: nothing is given for granted at first sight. As a matter of fact, whenever I think I am able to locate the concealed, whenever I think I am able to see or hear, I am actually not seeing anything, or not open to hear. Whenever I believe to hear someone, I realize it is not what I thought I was hearing. I am going to tell you who they are and what I see and hear, but I am asking you for your patience.
At the core of Voicings are personal stories about everyday experiences written by a group of refugees. As written homework for an English language class, this group of refugees was asked to write a short account of their problems caused by language barriers when they arrived in the UK. Laura Malacart, an Italian artist based in London, decided to create an art piece about them. She spoke to a friend who taught English to refugees in a college about her own memories of having to readjust to a new language. Being an immigrant in England herself, she was invited by the teacher to do a “session” with them. This resulted in the written accounts of the refugees.2 The stories belong to Meral, Chelvi,
Bukurie, Shiva, and Abolfazl, coming respectively from Turkey, Sri Lanka, Albania, and the last two from Iran. We do not know if these refugees are documented or undocumented, or if they are waiting for their asylum requests to be granted. During the session at the college, Malacart did not “delve into their personal situations more than their wishes to share.” It was an informal meeting where “they were able to share ‘their’ experiences of failure and frustration” generated by the acquisition of a new language.3
Remarkably, however, what I see on the video are not the refugees, but five white English-looking people. The artist has found an interesting way to explore the refugees’ experiences of failure and frustration: instead of representing and confronting the refugee in front of the camera, as in most standard documentary attempts, she has decided to exclude their physical presence from it. Absent from the screen, they are not nameless, but somehow remain anonymous, perhaps even become invisible – they are well hidden, at least to my eyes. Voicings, then, is a video in which these refugees are (not) represented. The people positioned in front of the camera are five English professional actors hired by the artist. They confront the viewer with personal stories that clearly do not correspond with their British accent: they read a “script,” that is, the refugees’ written stories. Her decision to work with professional actors and, consequently, not to point the camera at the vulnerable subject (the refugee), which could put him or her into an uncomfortable position, is a political one (Malacart 103).
Malacart’s strategy to present her work with white English actors, who rehearse the refugees’ personal written accounts, foregrounds several layers of meaning and triggers different readings and interpretations. One aspect of the video explores how language can be a vehicle of oppression for those who are forced to move to another country. If I give ear to the stories without putting too much attention on the way they are told, I hear stories of bullyism, of miscomprehension, of narrow-mindedness, accounts that mark the immigrants’ arrival in the UK. They are stories that could be meaningful and incomprehensible at the same time, depending on what I decide to concentrate on. Some
2 E-mail interview with Laura Malacart
6 stories do not entirely make sense because words are used idiosyncratically. I can choose
to focus and listen to those mistakes or just hear and acknowledge that those mistakes have been made in the first place. However, if I use both senses in combination (sight and hearing), I realize that something is happening to the way the performers are acting. Through Malacart’s tactic overturning of the protagonist, the video not only intentionally conceals the refugee, but also reveals the other side of the coin: in a very subtle way, while making the viewer conscious of the difficulty of learning a new language, it simultaneously documents the parallel process of language unlearning. The white British actors experience difficulties in rehearsing the stories of the refugees because they are all written in a grammatically and syntactically incorrect way. This double movement, inherent in the video, confuses the senses. In turn, this confusion is triggered exactly by the simplicity of the video – there are only white actors in a medium shot frontal to the camera – which is able to epitomize intricate issues of representation, language apprehension, and language unlearning, and helps to reflect upon complex thoughts. Consequently, what I experience looking at the video, is a discrepancy of embodiment provoked by the parallel existence of two or more simultaneous perspectives within the audio-visual sphere of the video: one situated in the (invisible) bodies, one in language, and another in the (soundless) voice.
However, the work is problematic, as it seems that those white Western actors, by the very fact of being on the screen instead of the refugees and by recounting their stories, consciously reinstate an imperialist discourse: they are speaking for them and instead
of them even though the refugees were able to “speak up” during the English language class showing a form of agency. What are the problems, then, of dealing with such a paradoxical representation? How does this type of (non) representation operate and to what extent does it propose a different, more productive solution, compared to what we see on the news and in documentaries?
In this thesis, I explore the ambiguous interplay and relationship between body, language, and voice in the experience and representation of the refugee. Specifically, I will analyze embodiment as a discrepancy, how the voice (vocal) and language (verbal and non-verbal) can or cannot represent the refugee’s body, which is marginalized and invisible. In turn, I explore how this invisible body is actually haunting language, which results in the actors’ arduous delivery of the story.
The intersecting experiences of the refugees and the British actors are examined concentrating on three different horizons of perception that intimately coincide with my experience and reading of Voicings: what I see, what I hear, and what I feel. Each chapter
targets a particular set of arguments, which develop within the visual, audible, and affective dimensions of the video. I isolate each aspect precisely to offer an exploration into these different sensorial and affective spheres. The three chapters focus, thus, respectively on what happens on the level of the body, what happens in the sphere of language on a linguistic and narrative level, and what happens in the realm of the voice.
The first chapter’s research was triggered by a simple question: what happens when a work that clearly sets out to address issues of misrepresentation actually works exactly the opposite way, namely by proposing a subtraction of embodiment? By looking at both the perspective of the refugee as well as the privileged white actor through notions of (in) visibility and absence as outlined by Drew Leder, this chapter focuses on the body and explores issues of (un)representability. The second chapter concentrates on language and the narrative level, on what is said in the “monologs” of the actors. Departing from the replacement of subjects that Malacart stages in her video, and drawing mostly on Gayatri Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern cannot speak, this chapter specifically proposes an analysis of what it entails to “speak for” the refugee. By slowly shifting the focus from the visual towards the audible, the examination takes into account issues of mistranslation and explores whether there is any kind of affective and effective exchange through the re-possession of the words, stories, and mistakes of the refugee. The third and last chapter focuses instead on the uses and abuses, or political advantages and limits of “speaking for” by investigating the voice. Following Mladen Dolar’s and Adriana Cavarero’s seminal works on the voice, the political agency of the voice versus its containment of/ in the body is scrutinized. In order to do so, I am particularly indebted to the concept of the acousmêtre exemplified by Michel Chion in his work on the voice in cinema. By employing this concept, I hope to link the analysis of the voice to questions of invisibility and embodiment in the first chapter.
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Chapter one: Invisible Bodies
“I am an invisible man.” Simply, but forcefully, this sentence inaugurates the beginning of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man (3). After assuring the reader that he is not a “spook” or a “Hollywood-movie ectoplasm,” but a real man, “a man of substance, of flesh and bones, fiber and liquids,” the narrator explains why his invisibility is not a physical condition, but rather the result of the predisposition of the eyes of the people he comes across (3). “I am invisible,” he claims, “simply because people refuse to see me” (3). In a similar fashion, near the end of Stephen Frears’ 2002 British film Dirty Pretty Things, the main characters Okwe and Senay encounter a white English man in an underground parking garage. The man, who is waiting to be given an illegally extracted human kidney, asks them why he has never seen them before. Okwe, a Nigerian doctor and fugitive working as an illegal cab driver and hotel night receptionist, after having handed over the box containing the kidney to the man, promptly replies: “because we are the people you do not see.”
Whereas Ellison’s book recounts the experiences and struggles of a black man in the racist American society of the 1930s, Frears’ film about the misadventures of Okwe and Senay, instead, makes visible the difficult position of the two illegal immigrants in contemporary London and their exploitation by the underground world of the metropolis. Although set in different contexts and with more than fifty years of difference, both works address issues of invisibility. As stated by the main characters of the novel and the film, their invisibility is generated by a refusal of recognition: a blindness from the powerful, socially privileged white subject. This invisibility, however, is more or less “embraced” by the protagonists in order to survive. It protects them from the police, as in the case of Okwe and Senay who will be otherwise deported to their home countries; or it gives them (literally) power, as in the case of the invisible man who is able to tap electricity from the electric company without them being able to trace the loss because, in their eyes, he does not exist. Artists concerned with political and social issues have always pointed out, on the one hand, the problem of magnification in which one is “too big,” hence vulnerable, and on the other hand, that of invisibility, where one does not exist, therefore, has no right, exactly by addressing issues of visibility and invisibility.
Differently from the previous examples, however, the invisibility of the refugees in
Voicings is not so much a question of blindness, of not representing them because we do not want to see them; rather invisibility is performed in order to make them visible again. Penelope McGhee, Jane Boston, Kaye Topping Smith, Hannah Boyde, Piers Plowright –
Western names, British accents, white people, all of them professionally trained actors, confront the viewer in the video. They are privileged subjects that replace, stand-in and tell the stories of Meral, Chelvi, Bukurie, Shiva, and Abolfazl respectively. The actors’ presence on the screen discloses and denounces the absence of the real protagonist.
The performers are all filmed in the comfort of their homes. While the camera is fixed and concentrates on recording the actors’ performance in a medium shot, there are some attributes that signify a familiar and intimate place. One scene is set in a bathroom with light-blue colored walls, another in a red painted room with checkered curtains and a heating system. One more view reveals a glimpse of a room with a velvet tapestry, a window, and a small table in front of it, on top of which there is a beautiful pink orchid, another plant, and a book. As described in the introduction, the refugees are not to be seen in the video. They are not physically present in those British houses, neither are they behind the camera. They are just not there. They are invisible to the eyes of the beholder not because we do not want to see them, but simply because they cannot be perceived by the visual system. If that which is not visible is outside representation, how, then, are the invisible refugees represented in Voicings?
The video plays with sight in different ways. It asks the viewer to concentrate on and carry out all the diverse meanings of the verb to look. It pushes me not only to look at what is indeed in front of me, the white character, as in its most common sense of recognizing, of acknowledging, and, thus, somehow “to look no further,” but also to examine, to study and think about the fact that there is a disconnection between the character on the screen and what he or she says, and, consequently, to actually “look farther.” Hence, it demands “to look out” for someone, to pay attention to what is and is not in front of me, and, at the same time, it challenges to “look for,” to try to find something that has been lost, something that does not make sense, something or someone that is not where it should be. Along these lines, it then asks to “look around” as in trying to find someone, the refugee, to have an investigative look and state of mind. Therefore, it invites to “look into” as the attempt to find out the truth about a problem in order to solve it. And, last but not least, it proposes to “look after,” that is, to be responsible in dealing with certain types of issues – in this case, the question of the refugee in our contemporary society and its relation towards the host country.
Following Mitchell’s inquiry into “what pictures want,” Voicings’ ability to push its spectator to initiate and partake in a process of investigation can be retranslated as “this type of image wants me to” if we acknowledge and understand the video as “present[ing] not just a surface but a face that faces the beholder” (Mitchell 28 and 30).4 Mitchell notes
4 It is important also to mention the different kinds of gendering of the image and gaze that we are used to calling either masculinist or feminist, exemplified by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Another type of gaze would be the “able-bodied” one, a gaze that translates more into a staring whenever we see a novelty, unusual or extraordinary fellow human. This type of gaze has been the subject of study in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s book
Staring: How We Look.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
10 in “What Do Pictures Want?” that in order to “scale down the rhetoric of the ‘power of
images,’” we need to “refine and complicate our estimate of their power and the way it works” (33). That is why he “shift[s] the question from what pictures do to what they
want” (33). Only by changing perspective and asking what pictures desire, is it possible to move “from the model of the dominant power to be opposed, to the model of the subaltern to be interrogated or (better) to be invited to speak” so that images may be given a voice to express a need, a demand or a lack (33).5
In this first chapter, I paradoxically wish to look at the invisible bodies of the refugees. I wish to look at an absence, or as Mitchell might put it, at the image’s desire “manifested as lack” (36). Inevitably, to look at this absence, I have to look at the materially visible bodies of the actors. More specifically, I am interested in the possibilities of “returning the gaze” without creating a mirroring effect and, therefore, I wish to look at the discrepancy that is created by replacing the refugee with the British actor – a substitution that creates exposure. Consequently, I concentrate on the absence of the body as the principal agent in dialogue in the work. (In)visibility and absence become two productive concepts that can reflect on the experience of the actors’ bodies and the agency of the refugee. To tease out the political tactic used in Voicings, I am mostly indebted to the thought of Drew Leder.
By making the migrants even more invisible than what they already are in daily life,
Voicings intends to reveal differently something that ordinarily remains hidden or gains a distorted and only partially negotiable image within the media.
Making the already politically and socially invisible subject not visible again within the realm of aesthetics creates a double concealment that, initially, does not seem to work in favor of the figure of the refugee.6 Nevertheless, this doubling effect does not translate into
an annulment, which is to say, an inadequacy or incapability of representation. Rather, it proposes a different strategy and perspective within their very representation.
According to Chris Gilligan, visual images of immigrants in the Western media too often propose a particular type of image that is inclined to mirror only a “binary representation as either victims or threats” (Gilligan et al.). He continues by giving an example of the most recurrent “trope in the negative coverage of immigration:” the image of squeezed and packed people on boats too small to transport them all, arriving at “our” shores and threatening us like devastating “floods” (Gilligan et al. sec. 2.1). These problematic media images are, moreover, accompanied and reinforced by politicians’ speeches that employ and exploit those very images to create a negative discourse around the asylum seeker and immigrant. As Sara Ahmed notes in “Affective Economies,” there have been certain types of speeches that circulated and “became ‘stuck’ to the ‘asylum seeker’ speech…through
5 Mitchell’s idea of transferring the location of desire to pictures themselves reminds of Mieke Bal’s idea of the object that “talks back” and which needs to be understood “on its own terms” as outlined in
Travelling Concepts in The Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto:
U of Toronto, 2002. 8-10.
6 It is important to note though that the refugees at stake in
Voicings are made
semi-anonymous on purpose. We do not see them, but we know their first names, listed in the reversed credits at the end of the video, i.e. Meral as Penelope McGhee. These names identify them as specific persons, however their surnames, which would “complete” their identification, are missing. Malacart decided not to reveal the latter to protect the refugees’ privacy, as we do not know if they are documented or undocumented.
the repetition with a difference of some sticky words and language” (122). “Words like
flood and swamped,” or “dirt and sewage” are abused to “create associations between asylum and the loss of control” (122). It is precisely the use of these words, Ahmed points out, that “mobiliz[es] fear, or the anxiety of being ‘overwhelmed’ by the actual or potential proximity of others” (122). Language fortifies and, at the same time, authorizes the unfavorable reading of those images, reinforcing the overall negative discourse on migration as a threat.
Other standard images are, for example, the ones depicting immigrants that have been washed up on Southern European beaches and rescued by tourists or local people. In contrast to the first type of “threatening” images, the latter one proposes a reading of the immigrant as victim or vulnerable survivor. “Often employed by immigrant advocates,” this type of representation functions as “an attempt to counter the representation of migrants as a threat” (Gilligan et al. sec. 2.1). The adoption of this images category “aspire[s] at creating attention and feelings for the vulnerability of the refugee,” seeking thus to construct and re-propose a more positively nuanced reading of him or her that is equally problematic (sec. 2.1).
As stated by Van Dijk, “both positive and negative representations of immigration tend to focus on the exceptional and the dramatic,” and therefore they bereave the viewer of an image that instead could also represent “the everyday lives of immigrants,” an image that we “seldom read” (qtd. in Gilligan et al. sec. 2.3). As a matter of fact, both representations of immigrants as threats or victims concentrate on and aim the attention only at the extraordinary. In doing so, “such images tend to present immigrants’ experiences as radically different to those of the rest of society” (sec. 2.1). The exploitation of this visuality serves exactly to further accentuate the divergence. They are limited to visually portray the immigrants’ arrival at the “gates” of Europe or other continents, however those portrayals are only partial, for such stereotyped images are “not representative of the immigrants’ experiences” (Gilligan et al. sec 2.1).
According to Jacques Rancière, the “symbolic distribution of bodies” presents a rather unsatisfactory division that distributes bodies as “those that one sees and those that one does not see, those who have logos…and those who have no logos, those who really speak and those whose voice merely mimics the articulate voice to express pleasure or pain” (22). However, as exemplified by the media image, these categories do not necessarily have to conjoin a double positivity (being seen and speaking) or a double negativity (not being seeing, not speaking). Another category is also constructed, one in which bodies are visible, discernible but have no logos. Positively or negatively connoted, the common
denominator of the two widely used types of media representation is the “figuration of ‘the refugee’ as ‘speechless’” (Rajaram 248). What appears to become the “normal” and accepted representation is, in other words, a “mute image of the body” (252). The tendency in humanitarian discourse and in the media is to represent the refugee physically, to make him or her visible, in possession and in “control” of his or her body, but deprived of voice – a mute body. All in all, both image tropes and discourses dispossess the refugees of agency.
The “confessional mode,” as Malacart calls it, is another ordinary form within documentary practices: a method in which the construction of a story and the way it is told focuses on delivering a “compassionate” message.7 Whether the subject interviewed
is directly and wittingly engaging the camera, or the image of the interviewee is obscured for privacy purposes, the camera points at a body, at something present, but focuses on the voice. The “full” image of the refugee or just his or her outlines and contours are perceivable, but what “counts,” what assumes primacy is not the body anymore but the words, the stories told.
What happens, then, when the body and the audible words are completely left out in representation? Malacart’s choice not to point the camera at the vulnerable subject renouncing any type of visual designation is a methodological strategy that stands in sharp contraposition to these media representations and documentary forms. According to the artist, the only way to counteract these images is to place at the symmetrical level of the screen of the public, yet again the privileged subject instead of the “pitiful” refugee.8
Malacart’s video creates a confrontational effect in the viewer: in the immediacy of the visual encounter the spectator recognizes their same subject category on the screen.
By collaborating with professional actors, Malacart renders the video to some extent “fictional.” It becomes a genre that epitomizes and “mediates between the documentary and narrative fiction” (Bal 43). Simultaneously, however, the actors’ performance,
7 E-mail interview with Laura Malacart. 28 January 2015.
8 Ibid.
14 “mostly undirected and unrehearsed, is reproduced in real time and documents a
non-fictional experience:” on the one hand, it recounts the actual experiences of the group of refugees she has been working with during the language class; on the other hand, it documents the experience of the actors rehearsing (Malacart 106). The work is neither essentially linear in narrative, as the stories we hear are syntactically broken and contain linguistic mistakes, lack a clear beginning and/or ending, nor representational, the refugees themselves are not entirely, that is visually, presented. In 2 Move: Video, Art, Migration, Mieke Bal speaks of a widespread “reluctance to represent” within contemporary forms of “migratory aesthetics” (32). This reluctance comes very close to Malacart’s statement about her artistic practice, namely, her propensity not to direct the camera at a vulnerable subject. In an email exchange I had with Malacart on the implications of generating a form of identification with the refugee, the artist wrote:
It was absolutely crucial for me not to point the camera at the refugee. In spite of a rigorous training in photography, because of my politics, I have always found it very hard to point the camera at a subject. In the early days, I considered it almost a violent act “to shoot” because of the implications inherent in the politics of representation and the power imbalance involved. (E-mail 28 January 2015)
It is interesting to note how Malacart’s use of the verb to shoot between inverted commas simultaneously comprehends both transitive and intransitive functions of the word: as the violent act of hitting, wounding, or killing someone with a weapon and thus disempowering them, and as the cinematographic technique of filming a scene. The fusion of the two meanings exemplifies the inherent violence of recording: it inscribes filming with a constitutional violent connotation. Bal argues, furthermore, that “representation tends to suffer from the contamination of its two primary meanings: the semiotic one, where representation is a form of depiction; and the political one, where one (elected) person represents a constituency” (32). She continues by suggesting that depicting others brings with it “risks of stereotyping, voyeurism, and misrepresentation” and, concomitantly, instances of “speak[ing] for” (32). Initially, it may seem that Voicings encompasses all these dangers and traps of representation, as the artist replaces the marginal figure of the refugee with its antithetical figure, the white, dominant, Western subject. However, it is exactly this replacement that attempts at destabilizing the reading of the too often recurrent media image of the victim/threat immigrant, an image that ask for compassion or triggers anger and resentment. Voicings aims at challenging and reconfiguring the desire to create a picture that must be fully representative, one that relies
only on sight. To do so, it proposes a lack, a visual deprivation; it presents an absence that triggers an experience in the body and speech of the actor, which, in turn, becomes for the viewer a manifestation of the reason to make the refugee invisible. The disempowering, “excessive visibility” of the socially and politically invisible subject created by the media images, an “overwhelming or threatening” image “that the eyes cannot or do not want to take in” and therefore overlook, is replaced in Voicings by an “excessive invisibility” (Peeren 36). This absence becomes a presence.
Unrepresented, the refugee nevertheless embodies a pivotal role in the video. Following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the visible and the invisible, in The Absent Body, Drew Leder emphasizes the prominence of sight within the perception of the world. He takes (not) seeing a step further, translating the concept of invisibility/visibility into absence/presence and posits that absence is “intrinsic to the perspectival nature of embodiment” and “haunts the perceived world” (12-13). Subsequently, by means of its Latin etymology, he establishes a positive reading of absence as something that is always essentially “being,” esse, but is not there, it is “away,” ab (22).
The absence asks to pay attention to the connection between the body we are able to see and the one we cannot to see. As a matter of fact, slowly, but poignantly, the audience realizes that something is happening on the level of the actors’ bodies: the actors’ faces assume concentrated facial expressions. The actors’ body language also reveals the audience that they need to focus in order to perform: they frown, hands are set in motion, stretched, or pointing somewhere, pauses are made. At the same time, bewilderment, almost disorientation, can also be read from their faces when uttering the refugee’s mistake as in the case of actress Hannah Boyde, starring Shiva from Iran. She stubbornly repeats several times the word lady that Shiva uses continuously at the beginning of every sentence: “lady said so, lady did this, lady was not friendly.”
This repetition is not uttered to memorize the script; rather, it emphasizes the incongruity of the performance, the estrangement involved in pronouncing someone else’s words,
16 in carrying over their message. However, it also works on another, parallel level. The
“annoying” repetition is needed. It helps the actors to make the audience aware of the refugees’ negative experiences in the UK, and it underscores their absence in the video. The actor’s linguistic and bodily struggle can be translated as a moment of consciousness, of awareness of the refugee’s body and story; this struggle reinserts the marginalized refugee into the screen of the video and thus makes them somehow visible or, rather, present again in the eyes of the audience. Hence, Voicings makes the refugee invisible by precluding their presence from the video, thus denying them an image of representation, yet, at the same time, it gives them a form of agency through the language mistakes that they have made uttered by someone else with a perfect accent.
The representation of the white British actor discloses and denounces the absence of the refugee exactly by way of his or her very presence. The refugee’s invisibility thus entails a presence that cannot be seen, but can be felt. Consequently, their absence, their “being away” from the video, is visible. The decision of the artist not to point the camera at the vulnerable subject of the refugee is, then, a political one, in that the absence brings about a productive “distancing effect” that is used as a strategy to “avoid generating empathy” toward the figure of the refugee which might re-instigate a “process of othering” and of victimization (Malacart 207).
In this way, the absence of the refugees in the video functions as a presence that is imagined. Their “lack,” their absence is precisely that with which we see them. The “redoubling” of invisibility, Malacart’s making invisible what is already invisible and marginalized in society, proposes a new strategy of representation that does not entirely exclude the refugee from the image, but encourages to “look” beyond what is merely portrayed on the screen. The in-between proposed by the video solves the distinction between excess of vision and excess of hiding. However, the “productivity” of such a non-representation is ambiguous, for it remains open to an interpretation of invisibility as something dreadful and favorable at the same time. Hiding to become invisible is produced by a fear of being in danger, whereas vulnerability or powerfulness is exposed when being visible.
If I am supposed to see what I cannot see, in other words, the absence, then looking must be activated by other senses too. Invisibility, in fact, following Merleau-Ponty’s unfortunately unfinished discussion on language and truth (the invisible), implicates the importance and involvement of other senses outside mere vision in the development of the sense of one’s body (“Translator’s Preface” liv). That which is invisible is also helpful in constructing an embodied representation of the subject and the world. A shift from
the visual to the aural will take place in the next chapter. It sets out to analyze how the oral “fills up” the visual absence of the refugees. How do the mistakes function as markers, something that simultaneously produces and leaves traces? The visual lack is “replenished” by a linguistic deficiency. The errors reveal another interesting discrepancy between the (non) visual representation of the refugee and its tangible aural embodiment.
18
Chapter two: ‘Speaking for’ and
Unlearning From Mistakes
I have been walking around for some time now, but I could not find you yet. Are you still there? I cannot see you, but perhaps I can hear you.
Although not pertaining to the voice, to sound production, the mistakes of the refugees function inside the sphere of the body’s capability to recognize sensory stimuli. The mistakes are captured by the audience’s auditory sense, the ear. They are outside of the visual realm, but not outside of perception. According to the most radical Embodied Cognition theories (Gallese 2008; Glenberg 1997), “cognition is constrained by the specific kind of body we possess” and the body is always considered exclusively as “an acting body” (Borghi and Cimatti 763). The outcome of this account exposes the limitation of “the notion of ‘sense of the body’ to the restricted boundaries of the flesh of brain-body system” (763); it demonstrates the necessity to investigate more exhaustively “the extent to which words help to enlarge the perception of our body and to overcome the borders between ourselves and the other” (770). The experience of one’s body outside mere actions, objects, and other (visible) bodies is possible and it can benefit from the use of the “external and social component” of language (769). This leads me to ask, if, in watching Voicings, looking is activated by other senses too, what happens when seeing translates into hearing?
While the first chapter concentrated on the sense of sight, on what is and what is not to be seen on the screen, this chapter undertakes the journey of exploration through the game of hide-and-seek focusing on the sense of hearing. Although the auditory system perceives, detects, and captures sound, during my quest (a reconnaissance9 of sorts), I do
not yet focus on the apparatus of the voice, which will be analyzed and discussed in the following chapter. Instead, I turn to words as written and spoken modes and not (yet) as voiced. Our ear captures certain sounds, and we are stopped by the mistakes that function as semi-comprehensible sounds, as marks, traces of the refugee, and thus as substitutes for their absence. At the same time, I want to look at the mechanisms those mistakes initiate in the actors and how the linguistic flaws affect the actors’ experiences and performances. It is for these reasons that, even if I opened my eyes when I finished counting and started seeking, I now close them again to pay full attention to what is narrated by the refugees.
In this chapter I propose to examine how language enables or delimits the experiences of the refugees and the actors through the analysis of the overall negative accounts of the refugees and the “resistant” performance of the actor. By carefully looking at what it
9 According to the
Longman Dictionary,
“reconnaissance is the military activity of sending soldiers and aircraft to find more about the enemy’s forces” (1455). It is a preliminary inspection, an exploration of an area. I am fully aware that reconnaissance is a military term that brings with it notions of authority and surveillance, but I use it because it entails movement and examination at the same time, which is what I want to perform in this research by using the idea of a hide-and-seek game. In using this word, I recognize the danger that the reader might frame this within current border politics and position me at the same level of the police: the refugee, the illegal is hiding, and the police, the state are seeking him or her. However, I want to discourage this analogy, as I do not want my seeking to be compared to an attempt at control.
entails to “speak for,” my companion in/of exploration is Spivak’s “Can The Subaltern Speak.” Other Spivak’s texts are employed as a means to concentrate on the process of learning and unlearning a language. How does an unlearning process function and to what extent is it productive?
In the field of language (and second-language) acquisition and cognitive psychology (Chomsky 1975; Yang 2006), the processes of gaining possession, of mastering a particular language are fundamental. Language disorders and the loss of the ability to speak are also investigated within linguistics and cognitive neuropsychological approaches. There, the focus lays predominantly on brain damage and on a dysfunctionality, caused by external or internal factors, inherent in the speaking subject. However, as Voicings shows, the dysfunctional performance of the actors is not inherent to the speaker but is rather triggered by relational (invisible) encounters. Hence, the reverse operation of unlearning is also of considerable influence in thinking about the relationality of language and specific forms of agency.
To start thinking about the issues that language raises in Voicings, it is important to return to the prima facie of the video, to the first confrontation with the visual discrepancy, in other words, it is necessary that I reopen my eyes again for a while. Positioning white, Western, professionally trained actors (representative of a certain upper-middle class) in front of the camera on behalf of the refugees may be a daring decision, one that might lead to a negative interpretation of the work. The methodological set-up of Voicings provokes thus an initial politically laden controversial reaction: why are the British actors speaking
instead of and for the refugees? Would this move not consciously reinstate an imperialist discourse? And, what would the purpose of such a “trap” be? The absent figure of the refugee and its replacement by the white constituency immediately bring to mind and advance a parallel with Spivak’s famous forceful statement that the “subaltern cannot speak” (308). It is, therefore, crucial to scrutinize in which ways Malacart is aware of the difficulties of “speaking for” and is either proposing something new or attempting but discovering the limits of her experiment.
In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Gayatri Spivak, by way of a “circuitous route,” examines the ways in which Western academic thinking “problematizes the subject” to move then “to the question of how the third-world subject is represented within Western discourse” (271). Her reading of “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze”10 criticizes Western discourse for not being conscious of
the contradiction inherent in its very position when it purports to “valorise the concrete experience of the oppressed” but, simultaneously, fails to produce a critical stance toward
10 In: Foucault, Michel.
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans.
Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.205-17.
20 “the historical role of the intellectual” (275). The problem, she continues, is that “[t]wo
senses of representation are being run together: representation as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics [Vertreten], and representation as ‘re-presentation,’ as in art or philosophy [Darstellung]” (275). Consequently, the identification of this confusion leads her to ask: “[a]re those who act and struggle mute, as opposed to those who act and speak?” (275). Her final answer to the question if the subaltern is able to speak is then no. If the Western institution is incapable of dropping the paradigm with which they talk about and relate to the other, the subaltern cannot speak. Later on, in several interviews, Spivak re-elaborates her ideas about the subaltern’s impossibility to speak by underlining that it was not a definite statement, but “an interrogation of the academic effort to give the gendered subaltern a voice in history” and carefully introduces another aspect of this impossibility: “even when the subaltern makes an effort to the death to speak, she’s not able to be heard. And speaking and hearing complete the speech act” (“Conversation” 609; “Subaltern Talk” 292).11
Malacart’s strategy of replacement leads, somehow, to a reading of Voicings as a video that makes the refugees not able to speak for themselves on purpose: they are not linguistically “developed” and, if they do “speak,” as documented in the written texts, they are misunderstood or not understood at all. They are devoid of agency. However, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of a Vanishing Present, Spivak implicitly responds to critics that have simplified her argument and seeks to promote “a recovery of the validity of speaking about subaltern contexts” as “‘[a]ll speaking, even the seemingly most immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception,’” and decipherment and interception, although only barely an initial gesture, imply that there is at least a moment of recognition (emphasis added, Farrier 16; Spivak 309).
In this work of art, I suggest that despite the performers position, the actors are not properly speaking for and about the refugees. It might be a visual translation, but what the viewer experiences is not an interpretation of their words. In “The Politics of Translation,” Spivak asks how “the translator attend[s] to the specificity of the language she translates” and encourages to “surrender to the text” that needs to be translated, as translation is after all “the most intimate act of reading” (370). If we consider acting as a form of translation, then the resistance that the performers experience is exactly the contrary to Spivak’s surrendering: the actors are made incapable to surrender fully to the texts not because they are not able to read intimately, but because the text is made “inaccessible” by the presence of the mistakes. As trained actors, they ideally have to “internalize” the refugees’ mistakes. This, however, is a strenuous effort expressed by words or sentences
11 In an interview published in The
Spivak Reader, Spivak
explains: “By ‘speaking’ I was obviously talking about a transaction between the speaker and the listener” (289).
repetitions, strong gestures, uneasy facial expressions, and hesitation in speaking. Their bodies “reject” the refugees’ mistakes (Malacart 106).
22 As a matter of fact, the spectator realizes that the actors are actually struggling with
performing the individual stories: those are written in a language that is their “own,” a common language, the Lingua Franca, yet these stories do not obey to accepted standards of legibility, recognition, or understandability. As native speakers, the actors have incorporated grammatical rules and a correct syntactical construction. Hence, their difficulty in performing the refugees’ personal written accounts attests not only to the uncomfortable refugees’ presence in the UK, but also to the realization that the instances of “speaking for” work only in the visual sphere. The “impersonation” of the British actors in his or her character is, in a way, betraying the negative experience of the refugee, positioning it on a second level. As a matter of fact, their struggle signifies the inability to completely identify and thus empathize with and embody the account of the refugee, re-installing their agency as white English actors. The actors, therefore, speak in the place of the refugee, but cannot become “spokespersons for subalternity” as the mistakes undermine their role as acting agents (“Subaltern Talk” 292).
How, then, does Voicings function in relation to Spivak’s theory? Glimpses of awareness, of consciousness, can be distinguished on the actors’ faces when performing the mistakes: it is as if they have let “someone in” through their mouth, as a result of the very pronunciation of someone else’s words. This instigates a reactive body language. Simultaneously, they look bewildered and disconcerted while uttering the refugees’ English. In the audience’s eyes, a twofold process is set in motion.
Now, I must close my eyes again and fully hear. The actors’ often-employed repetitions function on two levels. As previously analyzed, they are the tools by which the actor can re-introduce the figure of the refugee to the audience and make them aware of their distressing position as migrants in the UK. However, they also emphasize a certain incompatibility within the performance itself that results from an estrangement involved in uttering someone else’s words and experiences. What I experience is not merely a discrepancy between the visually present body that speaks and the invisible body that I “should” hear telling the story. To borrow anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s term, what I experience is not a “denial of coevalness,” but exactly the acknowledgment of a shared present as coeval, or as Malacart would have it, the experience of the “uncanny acknowledgment of ‘two points of speech’” that coincide in the same auditory “space” of the viewer, but are located at different levels: in the visible speaking body of the actor and the invisible hand that writes the story (Fabian 31; Malacart 15). Consequently, if one would pay attention only to the visual and audible surface of the video, one would miss out other equally important aspects. The refugees’ mistakes function in effect as the “tangible
24 signatures of the migrants,” the remainder of their presence in the UK (Malacart 103).
Hence, they become the nucleus and productive part of what seems to trigger an invisible “encounter.” I am placing encounter between inverted commas, as it does not take place physically – the actors and the refugees have never met – but from my angle, from the point of view of the spectator, in the sphere of language, both as verbal and non-verbal communicative exchanges. The encounter is presumably inherent in the “shared” content of the utterance and manifests itself in the actor’s reactive body language. In this fictitious meeting, Voicings creates a space where an intermediate position might be established; it creates “the conditions of possibility of hearing” (Ahmed 157). As a matter of fact, the mistakes function as a kind of asynchronous space: whenever the actor reproduces the errors, the producer of those mistakes is physically absent but conceptually present. It is precisely in the linguistic flaw captured by the viewer’s ear where the shared space of the actor and refugee reside and the agency of the latter re-emerges, not as visuality, but as a potential audibility. The mistake produces a continuous oscillation between meaning and its delivery. This oscillation recalls Spivak’s demand to enter “into a responsibility structure with the subaltern, with responses flowing both ways: learning to learn without this quick-fix frenzy of doing good with an implicit assumption of cultural supremacy which is legitimized by unexamined romanticization” (“Subaltern Talk” 293).
The migrants undergo difficulties in their everyday life. Chelvi, for examples, writes about particular moments in which feelings of anger and desolation were generated by her lack of English:
I am writting about when I came to England I have got language problems. When I came to England I couldn’t speak or writ English. It was very difficult for me. For example when I went to Western union Bank to recive the money send from my husband. One women at the bank who was Indian Lady shouted a time, because I did not no how to fill the form. I put wrong way sender’s name and receiver’s name. The Lady was very angry with me. She told me yo go back your country and learn English first and when you finished come back here. I was very upset. I come back home and spocke with my sister-in-law. I was cry lots. My sister-in-law also was angry with her.12
In an interview with the Italian Radio Papesse, Malacart states that with Voicings she attempted to “address those subtle, yet very powerful, moments of social interaction, when people try to negotiate their new existence and are discriminated against because they inhabit a different language” (Malacart, Papesse). The affective reactions of the migrants attest to the fact that “the singular material body uttering ‘I’ is incompatible with
12 Excerpts of the transcription of some of the hand written accounts sent to me by Laura Malacart as jpegs.
the linguistic ‘I’ because although language is only an abstract structure, it is one that has to be mastered in order to negotiate any social sphere” (Malacart, Papesse).
If we go back to Leder’s notion of “the absent presence of the perceiving body” and how this structures questions of embodiment in daily life, it is of relevance to consider what it entails to learn a new language (13). Leder proposes, in fact, that the mastering of a new skill, for example swimming, requires a disappearance (as not-to-appear) through and as incorporation (31). This means that a new skill conforms the body and, therefore, becomes invisible. The refugees involved in Malacart’s work are enrolled in an English language course in order to “readjust” to the language of the host country so that those feelings of frustration, humiliation, anger, and embarrassment may be finally spared and they may ideally fit in that society. Following Leder’s ideas, this language learning process entails an act of incorporation, literally “bring[ing] within a body,” of a specific vocabulary, a set of grammatical rules and syntactical structures (31). Accordingly, the outcome of such an acquisition would be the ability to perceive and comprehend language and, at the same time, also to produce it, to assemble words in order to construct sentences that facilitate communication. As Leder suggests, “a skill is finally and fully learned when something that once was extrinsic, grasped only through explicit rules or examples, now comes to pervade my own corporeality” (emphasis added, 31). It follows then that, although only partially, in Voicings incorporation functions and fails concomitantly on two sides: on the one hand, the refugee is not capable of completely mastering the language and experiences moments of incomprehension and bullyism because unable to express themselves; on the other hand, the actor is unable to entirely impersonate, incorporate, and thus to fully understand the refugee, making him/her even more marginalized, in that a process of “elimination” of the mistakes has been set in motion.
The refugee’s “rudimentary language,” to borrow Mireille Rosello’s concept, becomes a “teaching language” as it activates, it triggers the inverse process, that of language dys-apprehension/unlearning within the actor that, in this way, becomes conscious of his
26 or her position and unlearns his or her own privileges (Rosello 318; Spivak “Interview”
27).13 This results in a continuous flipping over of one’s “power” position and agency.
There are some moments in the video in which this “turning upside down” is clearly perceivable. In the written account of Chelvi, for example, she begins by stating that when she arrived in England she had got “language problems.”
The actress representing her states: “When I came to England I have got learning difficulties. When I came to England I have got language difficulties. When I came to England I have got language problems.” The actor needs to repeat the sentence three times before rehearsing it correctly, that is, according to what is written down in the script. The first time she auto-corrects the sentence by using “learning difficulties” instead of “language difficulties,” exposing in this way a subconscious “slippage” that signifies more the actress’ inability to accurately articulate the script, than the refugee’s inability to learn English (Malacart 107). As soon as the actor realizes her mistakes, the word
difficulty, indicating more than anything her inability, is finally replaced by the original
word problem. The auto-correction emblematizes cultural and linguistic inculcation. What seems to unfold, then, is a form of (unconscious) resistance that originates from that which they already know, their “own” language, in other words, that “grammar is already in the body of the actor” (Malacart 106). This resistance, therefore, arises from the fact that they are not able to “forget” what they already know, that which they have already incorporated. Ideally, to make the performance flawless in terms of professional acting, they would have to pretend “not to know.” Unlearning, however, does not equal forgetting, obliteration, but questions what someone has already assimilated.
Another scene, instead, shows a moment in which the actress consciously intervenes in the performance.
Where is your husband? I went with my husband because I didn’t speak English. [The actress pauses and repeats] I went with my husband because I didn’t speak English. Lady was angry and said ‘where is your husband?’ When my husband came and lady said to my husband ‘your wife couldn’t answer the question and filled the form, we don’t have any alphabetical class for your wife’. [Repeats with a rather surprised face] We don’t have any alphabetical class for your wife. [Accentuates the word alphabetical] But the lady was very angry and we went to see her manager and said ‘you go home and I call you for you’. I was very upset because lady was not friendly…I came to England in 2004, after three months, after three months, after three months I went to college to enrol. [Repeats] After three months I came to college to enrol and three months later I went for test, for test, for a test.14
Almost as if annoyed by the broken syntax and mistakes, at the end, she forcefully
14 Transcription of two parts of the fourth scene in Voicings. 13 The decision to film the actors in their respective houses, in an intimate, “real-life” setting, instead of on stage is a well-thought device to further highlight the discrepancies inherent in the artwork. The image of the home and the decision to let the actors perform at their places creates a contraposition between the “safe” home of the actor and the “unsafe” language of the refugee. In its aesthetic modality, the video also troubles and puts into question the idea of “feeling at ease” in one’s own language and, consequently of feeling comfortable and safe in the intimate space of the home, of “being at home,” surrounded by known things. Ironically, the “rudimentary language” of the refugee that narrates exactly the difficulty of feeling at home and comfortable in the UK makes the actors uncomfortable in their own private sphere. Speaking a language that is “uncommon” to them, the actor’s home becomes a place of unlearning.
reintroduces the determinate a in front of the word test to correct the sentence. This intervention creates a friction that stands in contraposition with the goal of the performance: it refuses the “tarnishing of the language” as a consequence of the refugee’s language apprehension (Malacart 107). It thus delegitimizes that very language, declining, if only just at the end of the performance, “an unbearable feeling of incompetence and alienation,” as if unable to fully surrender to the script (Rosello 321).
As showed in this example, repetition is not only employed to memorize the script; rather it emphasizes the actor’s negotiation with the words and voice of the refugee. In the production of the linguistic mistake and its refusal lies the shared space and agency of both refugee and actor.
The failed “incorporations,” furthermore, question the notion of “inhabiting” a language for both the refugee and the actor, which would follow Derrida’s idea of speaking a language that is always already the language of the other (9). Although the outcome of partial incorporation may be different in scope and effect, it is nevertheless symmetrical from the point of view of the spectator: the refugee does not master the language in the same degree as the actor’s moments of repetition and auto-correction signify the inability and the refusal to fully impersonate the refugee’s story. Both agents are characterized by a (temporary) inability and become vulnerable. It seems as if the linguistic mistake plays a precarious game of balance and reversal that deprives one of agency to return it to the other and vice versa, overturning a reality more familiar to us (white equals agency, refugee, instead, none). It is when the actor starts unlearning that the refugee speaks, and I can hear them.
The ambivalence of performing the words of the refugees without re-appropriating completely mastery of our language stages, however, the ambiguity of wanting to “speak for,” which is what Spivak warns us about. Also exposed is the reversibility of such structures of learning and unlearning. Voicings’ strategy, then, is less a solution than a formulation of the problem, but the performance of the problem makes us imagine a realm where such encounters are if not easy, at least possible.
28
Chapter three: (Dis)embodied Voices
Voice is situated in a contested, unstable space, one that is continuously disputed and negotiated by its potential and its result, its theory and practice, its use and misuse.15 The
voice oscillates, or rather undulates, and positions itself approximately at the intersection between subject and other, between speech and writing, between bodies and languages, but never belongs fully to either of them.
“There is no voice without a body,” notes Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More, however, “this relation is full of pitfalls” (60). As a matter of fact, in the visual and acoustic gaps of Voicings, in the discrepancies and disjunctions of bodies and stories, I am continuously trapped in one question: after all, whose voice am I (not) hearing? I think I hear you. But this “you,” is it singular or plural? Am I hearing voices within the voice? If, in watching Voicings, seeing and hearing coincide with what is front of me on the screen, namely the actor’s body and the voice that comes out of her or his mouth, it seems nevertheless that this very voice I “see” and hear “pertains to the wrong body, or doesn’t fit the body at all, or disjoints the body from which it emanates” (60).
In this chapter, I concentrate on the complicated aspect of voice and how it conceals and reveals itself within, without, and in relation to embodiment and language. Focusing on the voice is important, in that one of its essential features as a sound is its ability to resonate. It is in resonance that languages and bodies rejoin in the voice as that which simultaneously connects and exceeds them. Furthermore, it is necessary to move to the theme of the voice in order to continue following (and maybe completing) the “sensorial path” that I have created in relation to the hide-and-seek game as a means to analyze the artwork. While we have seen that there is, so to speak, nothing to see, since the refugees are hidden, and we have acknowledged that, although absent and “mute,” they are nevertheless present in the linguistic space, the voice offers a new and complementary perspective to look at, or better, to listen to their agency. The split and discrepancy between the visual and the verbal is further emphasized by the vocal.
To frame my analysis of the voice in Voicings requires me to continue transferring the concept of (invisible) encounter that I briefly introduced in the second chapter as a linguistic encounter supposedly inherent in the “shared” utterance to this chapter. This time, I understand this concept, outlined and scrutinized by Sara Ahmed in Strange
Encounters, as “a meeting which involves surprise and conflict” and does not necessarily
entail presence and being in the present (6-7). As I have outlined before, the invisible encounter between the refugee and the actor can be conceived through the actor’s
15 I am torn between two opposing tendencies in philosophy: on the one hand, Jacques Derrida’s critique of metaphysics as being phonocentric, most thoroughly illustrated in La Voix et
Le Phénomène (1967);
on the other hand, Adriana Cavarero’s counter-history of metaphysics, in which she advocates for a return to the voice in philosophy as, according to her, metaphysics has rather forgotten about the voice. Logos, she articulates in For More
Than One Voice, has
been devocalized since Plato. These are very contrastive theories, and, although I acknowledge and understand the implications of both their stances, I do not feel like taking one position at the expense of the other. Departing from the written accounts of the refugee and their subsequent vocalization, Malacart’s work positions itself in-between these theories.
reactions to the linguistic mistakes. Ahmed proposes and investigates mostly two types of encounters. Drawing from Levinas, she thinks of encounters as “face-to-face” meetings, which “can be thought of as ‘eye-to-eye’, involving a visual economy of recognition, and as ‘skin-to-skin’, involving an economy of touch” (7). In addition to this, I want to propose a different type of encounter that involves a “voice-to-voice” meeting (given that we do not see the refugees) and thus, echoing Ahmed, an economy of hearing. Unlike the visual “face-to-face” or the physical “skin-to-skin” encounter,16 the vocal exchange does
not only rely on proximity to be heard, but it presupposes a relationality that exceeds the physical and the visual (after all, we can hear voices also in darkness).
Furthermore, I want to highlight the asymmetry inherent in the encounters that take place, on the one hand, between the voices of the actor and the refugee, and, on the other hand, between those supposedly interwoven voices and me, the spectator: these voices “resonate” differently, and are thus perceived and felt distinctly amongst the various meetings. One voice is sonorous – the actor’s – and the other is not – the refugee’s. Within the refugee-actor encounter the respective voices enter into an antagonistic relation for, even though the actor should give voice to the accounts of the refugees through the performance, he or she fails to do so the moment in which the performance is compromised by the linguistic mistake producing, therefore, a form of disconnection. Within the artwork-spectator encounter, instead, the meeting draws attention to the uses and abuses, or political advantages and limits of “speaking for.”
These encounters are also genealogically asymmetrical. Ahmed emphasizes that “meetings are antagonistic” for, in the case of embodied subjects, the encounter “always hesitate[s] between the domain of the particular – the face to face of this encounter – and the general – the framing of the encounter by broader relationships of power and antagonism” (8). Consequently, “[t]he particular encounter…always carries traces of those broader relationships” (8). In fact, the encounter that unfolds from the perspective of the actor towards the refugee carries with it as many past histories of domination as the encounter that occurs between the refugee and the English language. On the one hand, we experience on the screen the instances of the “speaking for;” on the other hand, we “hear” the scripts handwritten by the refugees “lament a discomfort in their interactions with state institutions” (Malacart 108). It is precisely in these asymmetrical encounters and the incongruities thereby created that the political potential of the voice manifests itself – both in its metaphorical and literal use.
Voicings plays with and problematizes the voice both as a concept and as an object.
In For More Than One Voice, Adriana Cavarero notes that voice always pre-logically
16 I am well aware that I am simplifying Levinas’ and Ahmed’s notion of face-to-face by putting “visual” and “physical” before face and skin as their arguments transcend the perceptual field and extend well beyond mere phenomenological implications, but I do so to stress the relevance of the auditory sphere that is central to this chapter.
