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ABSTRACT
An explicit feature of the World Health Organisation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been to ensure that naming conventions, both for the disease itself and for the variants of its underlying virus, should not have a stigmatising effect on any one population or region. An implicit feature of this undertaking is the recognition that the relation between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is heard’ involves an ongoing and even generative tension that cannot be mapped following a defined set of coordinates. The reason for this, the following paper claims, employing the work of Barbara Cassin, is that there is a uniquely performative (epideictic) aspect to language – one that takes place in a uniquely non-globalised space whose extension remains unscripted or extemporised, a space that is often distended and sometimes localisable but ultimately indivisible. Such a space, this paper shows, is one oriented by an understanding of rhetoric whereby utterances obtain according to the actual use [chreia] or decisive moment [kairos] – as opposed to any definitive place [topos] – of what is said.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 ‘Every symptom is a word, but first of all every word is a symptom [Tout symptôme est une parole, mais d'abord toutes les paroles sont des symptômes]’ (Deleuze 2000: 92; Citation2006a: 112-113).
2 For example, the medical case file for an early patient of what would come to be known as AIDS was originally labelled ‘O’ to designate ‘Out-of-California’, such that scientists spoke of ‘Patient Oh’, but because of the font used by typewriters the letter was mistaken for a number such that the case came to be known in a less value-neutral manner, or perhaps an entirely valueless manner, as ‘Patient Zero’ (McKay Citation2017: 109-110).
3 In this way there could well be said to be a tonic in the uniquely therapeutic import of the passage from Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen that Cassin writes about so often: ‘The power of speech bears the same relation to the ordering of the mind as the ordering of drugs bears to the constitution of bodies [τὸν αὐτὸν δὲ λόγον ἔχϵι ἤ τϵ τοῦ λόγου δύναμις πρὸς τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς τάξιν ἥ τϵ τῶν φαρμάκον τάχις πρὸς τὴν τῶν σωμάτων θύσιν]’ (Citation1982: 24-25).
4 For instance, ‘in Augustine’s De dialectica: the word is instituted as a function of a certain (immediate or mediate) relation to the thing; its pronunciation will thus provoke a sensory impression in the listener, which will induce an intellectual impression dependent either on the nature of the word (the “softness” or “harshness” of its sound, for instance), on the thing it signifies, or on both’ (Cassin et al. Citation2014: 956); ‘Some twelfth century authors try to determine the precise moment when the meaning of the utterance is produced, with the paradox that if it is when all the parts have been pronounced, then it signifies when it no longer exists. Others maintain that the utterance signifies while it is being uttered, the meaning being realised at the last moment of the pronunciation (‘in ultimo puncto illius prolationis’), which is the first instant in which it produces a complete intellection’, explain Baratin et al. (Citation2014: 866).
5 As James I. Porter notes, ‘Hippias seems to have been the first “literary” man, not a musician, to treat language together with music, distinguishing “the value (δυνάμϵως) of letters and syllables and rhythms and scales (ἁρμονιῶν)” … The key term dunamis (value) – among Latin grammarians, potestas – designates the audible, esthetic, and prosodic value or quality of stoicheia once they are “realized” in a given context’ (Citation2010a: 517). Compare his other work of that same year (Citation2010b: 213-239) and so too the discussion in Devine & Stevens (Citation1994) of ‘ancient grammarians’, and particular ‘ancient descriptions such as Plato Phaedrus 268d and Aristotle Rhetoric 1403b’, where the choice of ‘terms they apply to the accent, τονός, τάσις, προσῳδία, are taken from the realm of pitch and melody’ (208).
6 ‘The body is constituted through perspectives it cannot inhabit; someone else sees our face in a way that we cannot and hears our voice in a way that we cannot … Even as located beings, we are always elsewhere, constituted in a sociality that exceeds us. This establishes our exposure and our precarity, the ways in which we depend on political and social institutions to persist’ writes Butler (Citation2015: 97), noting Adriana Cavarero’s earlier project (Citation2005) subtitled Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression.
7 Note here the concern over ‘original Shakespearean pronunciation’, and especially the foreign characters depicted in that theatre, set out in collections edited by Hoenselaars & Bassnett (Citation2012) and Lee (Citation2020).
8 Consider the survey undertaken in the (Citation2009) collection Vocabulaires de la voix Cassin edited with Danielle-Cohen Levinas.
9 Consider the account of the fissure as given by Doris Salcedo regarding her (Citation2007) installation Shibboleth, which she describes as ‘a piece that refers to dangers at crossing borders or to being rejected in the moment of crossing borders … I wanted a piece that intrudes in the space, that it is unwelcome like an immigrant that just intrudes without permission, just gets in slowly and all of a sudden it’s there and it’s a fairly big presence’.
10 ‘A shibboleth, the word, shibboleth, if it is one, names, in the broadest extension of its generality or its usage, every insignificant, arbitrary mark, for example the phonemic difference between shi and si when that difference becomes discriminative, decisive, and divisive. The difference has no meaning in and of itself, but it becomes what one must know how to recognize and above all to mark if one is to make the step, to step across the border of a place … to see oneself granted the right of asylum or the legitimate habituation of a language’ (Derrida Citation2005: 26).
11 In this way, the very appearance of the Greek ἀθηρηλοιγός is itself both hapax legomena (a term attested only once in) and locus classicus (the best, or most authoritative, attested source) for thinking about such things. In a more modern sense, consider what Gilles Deleuze describes as ‘complexes of space and time, no doubt transportable but on condition that they impose their own scenery, that they set up camp there where they rest momentarily: they are therefore the objects of an essential encounter rather than of recognition. The best word to designate these is undoubtedly that forged by Samuel Butler: erewhon’ (Citation1994: 285), a word which for Deleuze amounts to ‘not only a disguised no-where but a rearranged now-here’ (Citation1994: 333).
12 ‘In Sprechgesang Schoenberg heard above all the irregularity of the vocal phenomenon, a skidding of one category over the other and, as a result, an abrupt aesthetic strangeness, the basis of a new harmony in which the sound of the voice is meaningful in itself’ writes Cohen-Levinas (Citation2014a: 1049, emphasis added). ‘Is it not already a first element of ordered complexity, of beauty, when, on hearing a rhyme, that is to say something that is at once similar to and different from the preceding rhyme, which is prompted by it, one is conscious of two systems overlapping each other, one intellectual, the other prosodic?’ asks the narrator in The Guermentes Way (Proust Citation2000: 51).
13 More broadly, and amid the vast phenomenological interest in the notion of voice – together with criticism of the same (Derrida Citation1973) – consider David Pascal’s assessment of two respective renderings into French (tonalité for Martineau, disposition for Vezin) of Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit which Pascal surveys as belonging to a ‘family’ of terms: ‘Gestimmtsein, stimmen, Ungestimmtheit, Verstimmung, rendered respectively in French as: tonalité, fait d’être disposé, (être) intoné, atonie, aigreur/disposition, état d’humeur, (être) disposé, morosité, mauvaise humeur. That neither of the two French translations manages to capture the paronomasia of the German text shows the resistances offered by the term Stimmung to any attempt at translation’ (Citation2014: 1062).
14 ‘The use of Stimmung as an expression capable of representing a notion exceeding the framework distributing voices by register is recent. It is owed to Stockhausen … [Stimmung] is far removed from a logic of heights. It occupies a place that can be qualified as spectral by virtue of its radiating and molecular function in the musical realm – spectral music, which emerged at the end of the 1970s, explored the vibratory and acoustic dimensions of sound-phenomena in particular’, writes Cohen-Levinas (Citation2014b: 1063).
15 Consider the ongoing influence of Antoine Meillet on Dixon (Citation1997: 98) in this regard, and so too the chapter in Campbell & Poser (Citation2009: 163-223). In view of the related interests of Rousseau and Herder, Gode notes that the Linguistic Society of Paris ‘had in its bylaws the provision that it would not, under any circumstances, accept any kind of communication on the origin of language’ (Citation1986: vi).
16 Whatever Leibniz’s account of the phylogeny of languages, to be noted are what he describes as ‘new root words created in our languages by chance but for reasons which are grounded in reality [sur des raisons physiques] (Citation1996: 281; Citation1990: 219, emphasis added). The materialism implicit in this claim is taken-up elsewhere by Cassin’s interest in atomism, but cannot be pursued here.
17 ‘The phoneme is one only for someone who subverts it with the gaze, constitutes it as – acoustic – image, or for someone who transcribes it, represents it, which is also a way of submitting it to the formalization of the eye. For the one articulating it and the one receiving it, it is multiple from the beginning, the articulation of differences. Whatever is simple, identical to itself, always slips away, is from the beginning outlawed, unpronounceable, unreceivable, relegated to silence’ writes Irigaray (Citation2002: 103, emphasis in original) in view of the role of ‘signifier’ in Saussure. ‘The phoneme is not one. It is a bundle of differential traits’, she later reiterates (126, emphasis in original). ‘Reflection requires a reflective surface, in principle external to the visible thing. Resonance is inside of sound itself: a sound is its own echo chamber, just as it is its own timbre, its overtones, and what is called its color’, explains Jean-Luc Nancy (in Szendy 2008: x) in a similar manner, adding in a note: ‘Of course we must not ignore the fact that this immanent structure of layering or folding over [pli ou repli] belongs to every register of sense, once again in all the senses. There is nothing visible, of course, without its immanent reflection. But the sonorous is in a way the origin and presentation of this structure for itself’ (2008: 145, emphasis in original). Note too Ruthrof’s discussion (Citation2020: 19) of ‘word sound consciousness (Wortlautbewusstsein)’ in Husserl.
18 Compare here Deleuze’s discussion of discrete as opposed to continuous multiplicities in the work of Riemann. ‘The former contain [portaient] the principle of their own metrics (the measure of one of their parts being given by the number of elements they contain [contenaient]). The latter found a metrical principle in something else, even if only in phenomena unfolding [déroulant] in them or in the forces acting in them’ (Citation1991: 39; Citation2004: 31-32).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tim Flanagan
Tim Flanagan is Lecturer in Humanities at Murdoch University. He is the author of Baroque Naturalism in Benjamin and Deleuze: The Art of Least Distances (Palgrave, 2021).