POSSIBLE SILENCES – SOUNDING LIVES.
It is a pleasure to be here today. I would like to thank David Samuels and Martin
Daughtry for inviting me here today to speak.
What I will do in my presentation today is present ideas that are just in their initial
stages of formation. These ideas do not come out of nowhere. They are derived, in
part, from what could not be addressed in the book Aurality that I just finished.
However, since in part they emerge from the research for the book – or at least from
the background questions that prompted the research and that take new forms today,
I will entangle my new questions with reviewing or addressing, in conversation
mostly, part of the ideas presented in that, at times, very dense book. So, in part what
I will present is new emerging material but also how our thought about a research
object, the questions we forge around it, change as the research moves along. One of
the wonders of research is this capacity it has to challenge the very core of our
assumptions, and in the process transform ourselves.
This presentation is divided into four parts. I will present each part as I come to it
since I think it helps follow the argument and the talk.
PART ONE – present the question.
This presentation begins where Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in
Nineteenth Century Colombia, ends. Or rather at the threshold of a book just released
and the new questions that emerge at the closure of a particular project. This paper is
about silence as a type of threshold or in the words of Elizabeth Povinelli, about
“projects that have not yet achieved a concrete existence but persist at the threshold
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of possible existence”. Such persistence is central to the way different forms and
understandings of endurance redefine the political in the deployment of possible
forms of life.
The question that obsessed Aurality, the book, is the way in which listening practices
shaped understandings of the oral and the aural and their centrality to the formation
of concepts of nature and culture, orality and aurality, music and language and the
dialectic between them in the Latin American mode of relating language, music, being
and thinking. To explore this question, I centered myself on what Jonathan Sterne calls
audile techniques or techniques of listening as they appeared in the nineteenth
century Colombian colonial archive and the way such listening practices shaped the
way understandings of music and of sound took form. For authors such as Jairo
Moreno, Benjamin Steege, Mara Mills, Carolyn Abbate, or Veit Erlmann, among many
others, theories of music and sound presuppose a listener and an understanding of
listening upon which those very theories build. So, following these authors and
building on their work, the book Aurality traces how such practices of listening were
constitutive of notions of personhood, of music and language tied to different notions
of life, of the juridical and of the ontological value of those different understandings of
life. In short, the book explores the centrality of such listening practices to the
formation of a mode of thinking that imbricates the anthropological, the literary, the
musical, and the philological in questions about the nature of life and its political
consequences. The claim is that this mode of thinking about the oral- aural has been
historically central to the formation not only of epistemologies of music and sound in
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Latin America and the Caribbean, but to practices of understanding forms of life
themselves.
What I present today is the beginning of the continuation of this inquiry, but in
different directions. On the one hand, I seek to re-turn to the historical period with
which the original research project behind aurality was formulated – the period
between the 1920s and the 1970s and the formation of a series of sonic practices and
modes of thinking about music and sound in Latin America and the Caribbean.
EXPLAIN HERE. But I also want to give room to separate entry points and interests
that complicate or even question some of the aspects of the book. As a separate and
very fragmented field of inquiry I have also been slowly cultivating an interest in
silence, as an acoustic category, as a category of thought, as a mode of action. And
silence is an acoustic category that at its core, is characterized by the potentiality to
challenge our very understandings of listening and hearing, because it turns the
question of what listening is and therefore the notion of what a sound is, into a
problem. What interests me for this presentation, is how silence problematizes the
relation between the idea of audile technique or practices of listening as the necessary
condition for the formation of musical or acoustic knowledge. I want to entangle this
with another question, which is the following.
Now that I have returned to explore comparatively the archive of the 1930s
and 1940s, one element comes through as the major initial contrast that I find in my
very incipient research: women are much more present than before. What happened
between the 1880s and 1920s or 1930s in Latin America and the Caribbean that
enabled women to become major figures in philological and folkloric research as well
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as in composition and artistic production and cultural management? They are not
many true. But the difference is notorious and I think cannot be solely answered by a
transformation of their presence in the public sphere – which of course is part of the
issue, one I will not address today. Rather, I think that what they changed and what
they brought forth was a problematization of the relation between listening, silence,
voice and musical thought. And an initial trait becomes obvious is that their mode of
theorization involves, to use Judith Butler’s words, giving an account of themselves.
That is, the presentation of their own theoretical work, of their mode of thinking and
writing about music or sound often implies an autobiographical self-presentation that
may take many forms – letters, paintings, forms of address to committees, etc. – in
which the entanglement of themselves to their theory becomes obvious. This is of
course true of everybody. We all work with an imaginary addressee and when one
reads the archive, one of course does an analysis of the cultural context in which a text
or a music theory is produced. But Alexander von Humboldt, to take one example, did
not need to justify the theory he was elaborating. He might have needed to defend it
theoretically from different opposing currents. Whereas in the women researchers I
have begun to explore, since they are challenging the ethical norm of presence to
which they are accountable, by the very act of writing, end up producing a very
different body of theory – one that overtly entangles autobiography with with theory.
Since they challenge the norm of writing and theorization to which they are subject,
they need to give an ethical account of themselves. This involves then dealing with
various temporalities – the temporalities of the life that is lived, and the temporalities
of the norm which they inherit. As stated by Judith Butler, “the norms by which I seek
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to make myself recognizable are not fully mine. They are not born with me; the
temporality of their emergence does not coincide with the temporality of my own life.
So, in living my life as a recognizable being, I live a vector of temporalities, one of
which has my death as its terminus, but another of which consists in the social and
historical temporality of the norms by which my recognizability is established and
maintained. “
What seems to come through is that rather than assigning a mark of difference
to women through a particular acoustic mode – and I know there has been plenty of
that - the relation between voice, silence and being seems to take us to a different
terrain, a terrain in which the notion that audile techniques are central to the
formation of knowledge about sound and the consequent understandings of life that
derive from there, cannot be taken for granted. Because the problematic issue that
women posed to colonial authorities was not how they sounded but how to listen to
how they sounded and the challenge to the definition of the mode of life their
presence implied. In other words, to use Butler’s language, since the temporality of
their life and the temporality of the norms of their life was so much at odds, it was
simply difficult to listen to them with the result that the elaboration of a theory of
sound involved elaborating an account of themselves. What they raised, was the
impossibility of fixing the idea of identity as the mode of normative interpretation for
a relationship between personhood and sound. With racialized others, on the other
hand, no matter how they were grouped, the mode of racialization proceeded by
assigning musical traits to groups of people. The task of the racialized male
intellectual in Colombia in the nineteenth century, is to challenge the normativity by
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which his traits are assigned to a group as a culture. EXPLAIN HERE. Whereas, it
seems to me, that then the theories regarding modes of doing and thinking of women,
were explained as an exceptionality, a monstrosity, if you will, whether highly
esteemed or not. This poses a different type of threshold between listening, thinking
and theorizing about music or sound, one that brings the question of “self-formation
in the shadow of the insurrection of subjugated knowledges” to the foreground and
that invites or even necessitates addressing the relation between singularity and
normativity in the production of the relation between acousticity, forms of life, and
producing theory about music or sound (Povinelli 454). Let me then begin the second
part of my talk exploring such relation between non-hearing, silence and producing a
theory of music or sound as part of an account of oneself.
PART II
As stated by Michel Trouillot the historical archive always inevitably has
silences and the historian works with how such silences shape our questions.
Specifically, one of these silences that the historian works with, says Trouillot, is “the
incapacity of contemporaries to deal with the unthinkable even as it happened. ” (73).
Trouillot was thinking about the slave revolution of Haiti, how it was unthinkinable
for eighteenth century plantation owners, that slaves might revolt. He states and here
I quote him
But in my case it seems to be a beffudlement that the problem of silence poses to
listening, when the point of departure of such listening is colonial modern women’s
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own exegesis on the category of silence and its relation to other sounds. So to explore
this question, I leave the nineteenth century archive and turn to different works,
peoples and sounds. SLIDE TWO
I would like to play the opening of a composition by Mexican composer Marcela
Rodríguez called Rasgando el Silencio, Tearing the Silence, for voice and cello. This
composition emerged in conversations about silence and voice between Elena
Climent, Marcela Rodríguez and myself and was fist performed last year in a
conference on the voice organized by the Center for Ethnomusicology and the Spanish
and the Latin American and Iberian Cultures department. The piece begins with a
citation from Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s famous novel of 1955, Pedro Páramo. The
words are SLIDE 3 Qué es? Me dijo. Qué es qué? Le pregunté. Ese ruido. Es el silencio.
What’s it? He told me. What is what? I asked. That noise. It’s silence. And continues
with a text by the Honduran and Guatemalan writer Tito Monterroso that has a single
word: Ay. We will listen then to the beginning of this piece.
PLAY PIECE
NEXT SLIDE – EN BLANCO.
In one of our conversations about voice and silence, Marcela, said and I quote “the
palette of the composer is silences. The composer tears silences with sounds”. This
seemed to me a radically different mode of understanding of silence as that deployed
by John Cage when he challenged the interpretation of silence as “the time lapse
between sounds useful to a variety of ends” (Cage (1958) 2011, 22) through his
famous observation, pronounced upon entering the anechoic chamber at Harvard
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University in 1951: "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them
to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in
operation, the low one my blood in circulation…. Until I die there will be sounds. And
they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music"
((1939) 2011,8). Simultaneously, he reaffirmed silence’s central role in twentieth
century musical experimentalism (Novak 2010), stating “when none of these or other
goals is present, silence becomes something else – not silence at all but sounds, the
ambient sounds” (Cage (1958) 2011, 22). John Cage, as we well know, did this as a
strategy to incorporate what was formerly considered noise into musical composition
through the idea of ambient sound. So he does not oppose noise to silence, so much as
challenge the existence of noise and silence as an outside of musical elaboration – a
classical avant garde strategy for incorporation of the sonically otherwise into the
tenets of musical composition.
But what for Cage seems to be a radical avant garde innovation, is, in the case
of Juan Rulfo’s words – silence as noise – and of Marcela’s understanding - sounding
as a tearing of fabric - is, to the contrary, a taken for granted inheritance. This is what
Mexican essayist Carlos Monsivais, in reference to Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo
calls the scarcity and the baroqueness of silence. He says, “in the century inaugurated
by the Mexican Revolution, Rulfo is the essential narrator, not the one that describes
Mexicanness but rather the one who goes to the bottom of the scarcity and the
baroqueness of silence (lo mexicano) …el que va hacia el fondo de la escasez y del
barroquismo del silencio” (Juan Rulfo, declaración de bienes, monsivais, 1996). This
scarcity and baroqueness of the noisy silence proposed by Rulfo, adumbrated by
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Carlos Monsivais and musicalized by Marcela Rodríguez is very different from an
avant garde experimentalism on form. It is a noisy silence that appears as a particular
constitutive mark of living at the threshold, constituted by deploying a sense of life
that constantly teeters in the relation between risk and potentiality. Here nothing is
guaranteed. Here knowledge is less about accounting, than about risk taking. In the
words of Elizabeth Povinelli, it is “about thought as an experiment on the world,
thought as a method of trying things out” with no guaranteed results.
It is in the words of Bolívar Echeverría’s understanding of the Latin American
baroque “a formal principle that is generative of forms” (24) in a simultaneity that
explores the threshold as a plenitude that simultaneously invokes an emptying out
(26). So, we return to the site of (auto)biography as an accounting for one’s life, an
accounting for oneself, a site of thought. Let me elaborate briefly on this heritage of a
baroque scarcity, a noisy silence that emerges more as an experiment of thought as a
form of life on the threshold than a clear cut theorization of sound that takes form
through specific audile techniques by way of the theories on silence elaborated by
seventeenth century Mexican nun and literary figure, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
SLIDE 5
Mexican writer and philosopher, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote in November
1690 a text entitled Carta Atenagórica or Letter Worthy of Athena, a theological text
that takes the form of a personal letter to her friend the bishop of Puebla. The text was
a theological refutation of Jesuit Father Antonio Vieyra's famous sermon on "Christ's
Proofs of Love for Man." Father Antonio Vieyra was a Jesuit Father, known as the
Prince of Pulpit orators of his time, a major theological and rhetorical authority. Sor
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Juana then was refuting the major theological and rhetorical authority of his time.
Says Rosa Perelmuter in her study of this piece “Sor Juana presenta su caso con tanta
habilidad que el obispo de Puebla Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz encarga la
publicación de la Carta, añadiendo como apéndice una carta suya, firmada con el
seudónimo de Sor Filotea de la Cruz. Aunque en esta carta el Obispo elogia “la viveza
de los conceptos, la discreción de las pruebas y la enérgica claridad con que
conevence el asunto” luego pasa a reprobar el interés de Sor Juana en los estudios
profanes y la insta a dedicarse más a las letras divinas.” Her critique of Father Vieyra
prompted an ambiguous reply by the bishop of Puebla to her, a reply that while
acknowledging her great theological knowledge reprimands her dedication to the
wordly pursuit of letters and incites her to do so but in the devotional service of Christ
rather than polemical theological disquisitions.
Her response to him titled "Response to Sor Filotea de la Cruz" is a singular
document, unique in the literature of her epoch. An intellectual autobiography, it is
also a defense of women's right to learning. In short, in both letters Sor Juana gives an
account of herself. And in doing so, elaborates on the relationship between silence and
thinking adopting a mode of address that combines the familiar letter with the
rhetorical theological discussion and self-defense.
Much has been written on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and this particular
historical moment, from 1690 to 1695, is a critical historical turning point in her own
career, towards the end of her life. Rather, I wish to build my understanding of a
baroque noisy silence, as deployed by Juan Rulfo and Carlos Monsiváis on Sor Juana’s
own complex exegesis of different elements of silence. First, a bit of a background.
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Today, the Carta Atenagórica and the Response to Sor Filotea are pieces that are
valued for their mastery of their art of rhetoric and, according to Rosa Perelmuter,
take the form of a deep knowledge of the structure, terms, and forms of address of
juridical debate and defense. It combines the personal genre of a letter addressed to
someone with theological argumentation.
I want to highlight two elements of her understanding of silence. The first is
that she says that “remaining silent is not about not having what to say, but rather
about the impossibility of fitting into voices the many things that are to be said – que
el callar no es no haber qué decir, sino no caber en las voces lo mucho que hay que
decir.” Silence then like fabric, the term used by Marcela is, to use Elizabeth Povinelli’s
words, about “the dwelling of potentiality, asking what to do when we reach the limit
of critical theory” (454). Notice, how different this is from John Cage´s point of
departure. John Cage had to prove that the notion of silence as an absence of sound
did not exist. That was his revolutionary contribution. But what both Sor Juana and
Marcela seem to be saying is something different – that the point of departure for
thinking about silence is not the avant garde challenge to its normative understanding
as an absence of sound but rather a type of knowing that, in excess of words, signals a
threshold, simultaneously naming both its risk and potentiality.
Sor Juana also names a second element. The difficulties she faces as a famous
exegete of doctrinal texts as well as a highly recognized poet, are two. On the one
hand, those that reprehend her through negative critique for being a woman who
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engages in lettered knowledges imbued with profound disquisition of philosophical
texts. Something that only men should do. Yet for her, the worst and most damaging
critiques of her work, are those that, in her words “loving me and wishing me all good
intention have mortified and tormented me more than others with words such as:
“such worthy study as the one you do is not convenient, because it is to be lost on ears
that cannot understand it, due to its high quality, perspicacity and acuity”…. SLIDE 6
Rare type of martyrdom this in which I was at the same time the martyr and the
executioner” or in contemporary terms, the victim and the victimizer. That is, what
Sor Juana references is a type of constitutive duality in which the critique of voiced
knowledge is reprimanded both for transgressing what seems to be the normative
convention for knowledge in women and simultaneously, for engaging so creatively
and well in it, that it falls on deaf ears – no one can hear it because it exceeds in its
acuity the standard modes of constitution of knowledge of the day. This doubling over
into silence due both to transgression of the norm and to a constitutive excess of
perspicacity and knowledge, rather than an absence becomes then, a form of presence,
a heritage that names at the same time its modes of plenitude and emptying out. In
Juan Rulfo’s characters such plenitude speaks of the impossibility of radically
distinguishing between life and death, but rather of a noisy silence that names the
finitude of life while challenging its very limit.
Now, this statement is not only about silence, it is also about vocality – or
voices. A multitude of voices. So what is this relation between vocality and silence?
What does it mean for understanding a decolonial stance in the history of
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understanding the theorization of the acoustic in Latin America? Here I begin the third
part of my talk.
Third part of my talk:
Let me recall the beginning of this talk. that one of the central elements that I explored
in Aurality was the relationship between orality and aurality in which the emergence
of the idea of the musical work did not necessarily separate itself from the
valorization of eloquence in language. This brings a radically different temporality
into play when thinking about the history of musical thought and of acoustic
categories in Latin America and the Caribbean. I explore such a relation through
different dimensions of the relationship between vocality and different
understandings of personhood.
What I want to highlight from the book is that idea the Foucauldian notion of
epistemic classification does not work. As stated by Julio Ramos, In Latin America and
the Caribbean, “eloquence” names “an unequal development, in which a form of
traditional authority (eloquence) is refunctionalized, even operating as an agent of the
rationalization that would ultimately displace it” (Ramos [1989] 2003, 67). That is
why “the concept of the modern episteme as fragmentation of general knowledge
cannot be applied to the Latin American nineteenth century . . . we have to speak of an
unequal modernization that surpasses (desborda) the categories of European
historiography” (67).
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So, the Carta Atenagórica and Respuesta a Sor Filotea are known for their mastery of
rhetoric. Theological oratory. What happenes when the arts rhetoric are taken by
those that are not supposed to dominate them? How is undeniable mastery and
excellence seen in this case? What is the relation of such value of eloquence to the
emergence of a vocalic sensibility that has been central not only to musical thought
but also to forms of vocalization in different musical genres?
Relationship between eloquence and defense: 29 – Antes de proseguir,unas
breves observaciones acerca del arte de la retórica y de su presencia en la obra de Sor
Juana en general. Aunque originalmente significaba ciencia del habla y se ejercitaba
primordialmente en el arte de hablar (ya fuera en el discurso forense, en el
deliberative…)posteriormente la retórixa se proyectó sobre todas las formas literarias
y su sistema pasó a determiner la tradición y también ka producción literarias.
To conclude then. The notion of silence is frequently, across different cultures and
historical moments, marked by a constitutive duality.
On the one hand, silence
invokes a type of plenitude most commonly associated with contemplative techniques
of quietness as a means to bring about a transformation of the self (Corbin 1997,
Merton 1996). On the other, silence is often associated to a “sinister resonance” (Toop
2010) that invokes a haunting, the dangers and fear of the unknown, the insecurities
produced by the ungraspable and by the profound irreversibility of death. It also
invokes the use of silence and silencing as a means of destruction of the self as when it
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is used in isolation techniques. Silence then teeters between the potential of plenitude
and the risk of disappearance. A noisy silence inhabits that duality. Between these
experiential extremes, silence appears as a term “through which we understand our
existence as beings in a world larger than ourselves, a world not entirely of our
making, whose limits and constraints provide the very limits and constraints of
thought itself” (Grosz 2011, loc. 1295, 37%).
This is not then a knowledge that is tied to a relation between clearly fabricated audile
techniques and a consequent structuring of knowledge in sound. The type of
knowledge brought about by a noisy silence is a heritage invoked by ”the kind of
person willing to put herself at risk no matter that no one else seems willing to do so”
(459). “This is “an effort of attention that seems to bend the very fabric of the world”
yet is repeatedly deployed as a risk taking in which nothing is guaranteed. In the
postcolony experimenting with forms of life is as much an aesthetic choice as a risk
taking with the boundaries between the living and the dead. Such experimentation, at
the unresolved edges of the postcolony, often invokes the most brutal responses, as
we have recently seen in Mexico. SLIDE 7 It is not without significance that the
disappearance of the lives and bodies of the 43 students, a disappearance meant to left
no trace of their DNA, is of 43 persons studying to be teachers, engaging in the duality
of knowledge as risk taking that Sor Juana so clearly named, an experimentation with
the noisy silence of the living dead of Guerrero. It is about a knowledge that lives in
the threshold between the risks of challenging the taken for granted forms of life and
the constant deployment of tactics to undermine such challenges. A simultaneous
plenitude and emptying out, a noisy baroque that names a heritage that
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simultaneously exists as potentiality and risk, the threshold of the limit and the limit
as threshold. It is to that threshold that silence as heritage calls our attention.
Monsivais
Pedro Páramo es un relato de fantasmas sin espantos.
Such noisy silence also recalls what Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector calls the scream
object – el objeto grito. The notion of the scream object appears in Clarise Lispector’s
book Agua Viva, in English Stream of Life, which was initially entitled Atrás do
Pensamento, Monólogo com a Vida (Behind Thought, a Monologue with life).
It leads us, to use Elizabeth Grosz’ reading of Darwin, not to the theories of natural
selection, which is what Spencerian anthropology applied to evolutionary theory and
to minorities, but rather to the theories of sexual selection, which imply a different
notion of difference – one in which variation rather than standardization through
identity is the norm. That is,
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