Happiness
…and my whole life Ève took me to Osnabrück with a hundred stories a year, one passed the corner of the cathedral and the theatre, while running on the paving stones, there was also the story that took us to the Hase, the river that made Ève laugh so much with its name of “hare”, she used to run and laugh along the Hare, she peed in her pants and she wrote it in her version that she had laughed so much that she peed in der Hase, which is to say in der Hose, and that is how literature begins, with a river that runs like a hare while peeing, while joking, while cultivating plays on word on its banks. 1
This is the space within which Cixous’ writing begins. The joy of laughing so much you pee in der Hose as you run down the riverbank. And run down the path of a sentence on a page. The path that leads to another sentence that begins writing as a space of joy while cultivating criticism on its banks.
Cixous writes this memory of her mother as a way of finding the space to start a book about the devastating impact of the Holocaust on her family. Cixous’ family lived in Osnabrück, Germany. Her uncle André (Andreas Jonas Klein) died on some unknown date in Auschwitz, whereas her mother, Ève, left Osnabrück in 1930, escaping the same fate by travelling to Algiers.
Cixous grew up with her mother’s stories and uses the space within these stories to start to write about her family. These stories become the space within which her writing can begin. They are the path upon and within the page that Cixous runs along, following in the slipstream of her mother´s childhood joy, which becomes a spatial organisation that gives the impression of proceeding along the flat surface of the page, reading lines one after another, but only when we follow the line we think she writes. Because, of course, we don’t. Instead, we meander and move around and above. Our thoughts hallucinating meaning, and our own memories producing the depth of what lies behind the fidgeting movement of our eyes, often leaving the lines we read; sensing another space, dense with potential meaning, circumnavigating the order and extending and performing the (sonic) space of (Cixous’s) writing.
We read, we write. I wrote a book by Cixous yesterday when it is meant that we read a book. Reading and writing exist in the same space, they run along the same river, they both laugh until it hurts.
We can also add touch. We tap, we swipe, we run a finger along the line when our mind is particularly alive, to keep us on the line. And we run barefoot to feel the ground and slip on it.
Such an extended and performed space enjoyed barefoot and through fidgety eyes, of course also exists in dissertation writing. But it is hardly heard within the tight space of its sentences. It is not given the voice to speak, perhaps because of an institutional fear of the voice appearing anything other than straight forward and canonically legitimate. The preference is to honour the straight unwavering, unlaughing line that does not pee in der Hase but is sealed, water-tight. This is the tight line of a propositional writing that has a historical weight, which one can still hear in the dull skull shattering thud of the pointless conclusion that its linearity demands.
By contrast, it is within the self-abundant joy of running along the Hase, a joy made more potent by the context of Cixous’ family story, that a potentially rich, speculative and diverse space appears within the text and its writing. These are the spaces that allow the passage of writing to giggle uncontrollably in sheer happiness, madness or devastation, and to bring other more speculative meanings to the argument. In audio papers this space is ever present and explicit, generated through the sonic in manifold ways. However, this is not a new or different aspect of research, not at all. Instead, it draws upon what exists muted already within the written form of the dissertation. It is what in (dissertation) writing remains somewhat oppressed by the authority of the propositional, linear flat line that nobody runs along and nobody sings. Dissertations create the non-space of the page in the same sense that the lines of cartography do not imagine dimensionalities.
As an evocation of a space of writing that holds a silent sound, Julia Kristeva describes the writing of Marguerite Duras as containing within its syntax a sonic silence.
Duras’ writing does not analyze itself by seeking its sources in the music that lies under the words nor in the defeat of the narrative’s logic. If there be a formal search, it is subordinate to confrontation with the silence of horror in oneself and in the world. Such a confrontation leads her to an aesthetics of awkwardness on the one hand, to a noncathartic literature on the other. The affected rhetoric of literature and even the common rhetoric of everyday speech always seem somewhat festive. How can one speak the truth of pain, if not by holding in check the rhetorical celebration, warping it, making it grate, strain, and limp? There is some appeal, however, to her drawn-out sentences, lacking in acoustic charm, and whose verb seems to have forgotten its subject. 2
Kristeva follows the travels of Duras’ sentences through the space of her melancholia and depression, as a space where sound could be heard as silence. She suggests that Duras’ writing is deliberately without acoustic charm. And explains that her writing is not a silence but silences certain sounds, editing out certain sonic qualities. She remarks on the walking gait of the sentences that limp and strain along their own paths, sounding a silence through their contorted and profound rhythms. It is in the silent spaces that are left by these contortions that the sonic in this writing, and the knowledge it offers, speaks volumes of what has been experienced and what one is unable to write.
These hidden sonic spaces of writing and the different forms of knowledge they can give us, are made explicit and sounded in audio papers. In turn, audio papers help us perceive and make explicit the acoustic space of knowledge, and by extension, they also reveal the sound in the written dissertation; the sound of research unfolding, unfurling, moving, performing.
It is the tacit awareness of this space that allows the sound as well as the unspoken. It is a space that generates a performative sonic communication, that is not rooted in what has been schooled, on the tight line, but opens the space of writing to fidgety eyes, laughter and as well as profound sadness and even despair. Writing about such a performance, Italo Calvino describes how Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, who spoke different languages, developed a form of communication, which involved telling stories by placing objects taken out of one’s bag onto a table, pointing at them with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or of horror, and imitating sounds associated with the significance of each object. The connection between the objects would not always be clear, and in the mind of the listener, there could be numerous meanings to what they would ‘hear’.
But what enhanced every event or piece put on the table, every object of news reported… ‘was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words.’ Instead ‘you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.’ After a while however, words began to replace actions and gestures in Marco’s tales: first exclamations, isolated nouns, dry verbs, then phrases, ramified and leafy discourses, metaphors and tropes. The foreigner had learned to speak the emperor’s language or the emperor to understand the language of the foreigner. The void, the space, was filled with words. But as Calvino notes, now ‘communication between them was less happy than in the past’. 3
The audio paper is an attempt to re-open that space. Not to fill its void but to keep on performing it, to allow the reader as listener to wander through it, to become lost while gaining new knowledge. At the same time, the audio paper does not contradict but extend and produce the dissertation in its own sonicness. The audio paper is the dissertation’s sonic mirror that shows how writing can sound, even in the silence of horror or when muted into lines. In this way, with this second edition of audio papers from the BA Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, LCC, University of the Arts London, UAL, presented here by “Glissando”, we hope to open the space of their audition as a “happy place”, one of laughter and joy and melancholia, not insincere, but aware of its power to make us feel; the exaltation of lifting something very heavy and it turns out to be light: tickling our sense of knowledge and understanding away from the straight line, its history and legitimacy, to find legitimacy and meaning in the felt space of sound.