Listen to Yourself!
Voice, Technology and the Self
Linda Sandino
l.sandino@vam.ac.uk
‘Hearing Voice in Oral History’
Oral History Society Annual conference,
University of Strathclyde, Scotland
3-4 July, 2009
Backstory
Audio tape as the foundation of oral history work
Video as providing a ‘bigger and better’ access to oral
history material [myth]
How audio and video operate to construct oral history
narratives through their form
Life histories/oral histories of the self
• What conception of the self does oral history and/or
life history represent?
• How do the technologies of inscription generate
historically specific conceptions of the self?
Technology: Time and Space
• Time is no longer linear: fast forward, playback time
• Space: can be virtual, imaginative, distant, or near
• ‘In conditions of modernity… the media do not mirror
realities but in some part form them’.
(A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Stanford UP 1991)
Self-Identity
‘A stable self-identity is based on an account of a
person's life, actions and influences which makes
sense to themselves, and which can be explained to
other people without much difficulty. It 'explains' the
past, and is oriented towards an anticipated future’.
(A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Stanford UP 1991)
Samuel Beckett Krapp’s Last Tape (1957)
‘First and full exposition and dramatization of memory as essential
ground and agent of identity’. (James Olney, 1998)
• Just been listening to that
stupid bastard I took myself
for thirty years ago, hard to
believe I was ever as bad as
that. Thank God that's all
done with anyway”.
•
http://www.ubu.com/sound/beck
ett_krapp.html
The Subject/subjection
‘Power, that first appears as external, pressed upon
the subject, pressing the subject into subordination,
assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s
self-identity’.
(Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection,
Stanford: University Press, 1997 )
Richard Serra ‘Boomerang’ (1974)
“I am surrounded by me,
my mind surrounds me,
goes out into the world,
then comes back inside
me. There is no escape”.
http://www.youtube.com/watc
h?v=m5S3_dmj8BU
Audio tape
• The play emphasizes the archival quality of Krapp’s enterprise
represented in the quantity of tapes on the stage, in boxes,
some locked away.
• Tape player functions in linear terms [forwards, backwards]
sustaining the concept of historicity, change over time.
• Audiotape’s spool/ ‘spooling’ is an analogy for
linearity/chronology of Krapp’s life, the history of the self over
time, echoing Giddens’ point that self-identity is ‘a person’s own
reflexive understanding of their biography’.
Video/audio
Boomerang documents and stages instantaneous estrangement of
the self produced by technology.
“I’m once removed from myself. I am thinking and hearing and
filling up a vocal void. I find I have trouble making connections
between thoughts… I am detached from my normal thinking
process. I have the feeling that I am not where I am…”
• It illustrates Butler’s challenge: ‘how can it be that the subject,
taken to be the condition for and instrument of agency, is at the
same time the effect of subordination, understood as the
deprivation of agency?’
Two versions of the self
A self produced over time, archived, chronologically on
tape (1957)
A subject produced/ ‘subjected’ through the apparatus
of surveillance/spectacluar technology (1974)
………..(2009)?
Time
• Krapp: ‘Lie propped up in the dark-and wander. Be
again in the dingle on Christmas eve […] Be again on
Croghan […] Be again, be again.
• Nancy Holt: ‘Time in this isolated castle of television
experience is cut off from time as we usually
experience it’.
Hearing Self and Others
Acoustic technologies enable a ‘self defined in terms
of hearing...as a membrane…as a channel through
which voices, noises, music travel’.
(S. Connor, ‘Sound and the Self’, 2004).
‘So be it’
• Even though digital recordings rely on established
visual metaphors: II [play/stop] < [back] > [fwd]
• Lack of materiality increases the attention on the
voice as the site of embodied representation
• But thereby magnifies the abstraction and/or
separation of the voice from the body
Splitting
• Estrangement is produced by splitting the self into
voice and body
• Voice represents reflexive ‘being-in-the-world’ [both
Krapp and Holt]
• Oral/life histories take account of the specific moment
in which the recorded self was both made and found.
The metaphysics of presence
• Bjork ‘.. with my voice I’m always gonna show what
happened to me that day, that month, that year’
• Voice and orality stand ‘for the desire of all that is
“authentic”, for lived experience.’
(Alessandro Portelli, The Text and the Voice, Columbia University
Press, 1994).