[-empyre-] November 2007 on -empyre- : Memory Errors in theTechnosphere: Art, Accident, Archive

[norie neumark]

Hello Judith,
On 05/11/2007, at 2:59 AM, roof12 at comcast.net wrote:

> And doesn't this bring into question whether the human voice itself  
> was ever "authentic" or "embodied"?  Doesn't the voice occupy a  
> strange  site of ambivalence and departure from embodiment? And  
> once loosed, once an utterance made, never more emboded except in  
> some odd analogy to Bazin's notion of cinematic ontology?

the question of embodiment and sound is always so tricky, and yes  
ambivalent -- or 'paradoxical' as Mladen Dolar describes voice. To  
me, to abandon any reference to embodiment means that something of  
the visceral, grainy quality of the sonorous voice is lost. maybe  
there needs to be some other way of saying this without saying  
embodiment, which makes everyone so uneasy that you're invoking some  
essentialism whichof course i don't want to do.

> And timeless in that the idea of a locus for recorded voices is  
> always in doubt since in the very act of being recorded the  
> "authenticity" of the voice is both apparently guaranteed and  
> forever displaced?
  i like this way of putting it. the thing is for all the recognition  
of the doubtfulness of authenticity -- there still seems to be such a  
desire for it (a renewed desire?) -- on YouTube, for instance, and  
that's what I'm interested in thinking about.
norie