Disrupting the Market in Echoes

Abstract

This essay considers questions of writing in its relation to voice, technology and performance through a reading of voiced and printed work by Hannah Weiner and Holly Pester. The essay focuses on two works, Holly Pester’s ‘Buddy Holly on my Answer Machine’ (Pester 2011) and ‘RJ Romeo & Juliet’ from Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems (Weiner 1982). These pieces, with their specific relations to performance, to technology, to voice and the body, are used to examine questions of the physical body and emotional affects in a context of commodification and exchange, and to consider relations of voice to authenticity. Interpositions of technology and bodies, marked and specific bodies (Pester performs her poem while hula-hooping, Buddy Holly was recognised for his trademark hiccoughs, Weiner's poems were performed by teams of trained signallers) complicate the reception of these texts, as texts, as communication, and as events. The essay draws on Barthes concept of signifiance in 'The Grain of the Voice', and Mladen Dolar's consideration vocal associations and distortions in A Voice and Nothing More, to investigate a cultural valuation of the authentic voice. This is developed through reference to research in technology and popular music. The essay concludes with a proposition that these writers, Weiner and Pester, in parallel with others, work to disrupt a commodification of voice and its emotional affects.

Notes

1 Near-homonymic mishearings of song lyrics of the kind collected in Kenneth Goldsmith’s book Head Citations (2002).