Spoken

In the reviews of the Anthropocene Project film, critics remained focussed on the relationship between the visual image and meaning generation, giving little attention to the regulation of affect that was delivered by the narrator’s voice as she read the script. It is an interesting experiment to overlay a laugh track on a scene from a horror movie, or to simply remove the laugh track from a sitcom. By having the articles performed via audio as I was able to consider them in quite different ways.

I was also interested in the way we privilege the eye-to-brain pathway of knowledge-exchange, that is abilist in the exclusion of those with limited sight or for the neurodivergent who may appreciate non-vision based stimuli.

In the context of collaboratively written material, how does it get vocalized, and how are the problems of pronunciation and comprehension managed? When text is received aurally, it has resonance, tempo and a type of physicality that would be impossible to deliver in a text-based document.

“Donna Haraway, in her seminal essay on Situated Knowledges, offers a brilliant tour-de-force critiquing not just visual representation but the extreme and perverse privileging of the eyes over the body that has dominated Western thought” (D’ignazio, 2016). In her post she urges the reader to say Haraway’s 1988 words aloud:

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity — honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy — to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of disembodiment (p. 581)

As words cease to be straightforward negotiations between the eye and the brain and instead become enunciations of bodies and voices, they generate different forms of embodied knowledge. Due to the body's deliberate and unexpected movements, the voice's intonation, inflections, and breathing are all entangled. As a polysensorial experience, it stimulates both the visual and auditory senses. In the section below, four of the joint compositions are read aloud, and I have left the edits and mispronunciations so that I may hear another intertextual phenomenon that is impossible to grasp if only the written text is seen.