more reflections (voices/archive/exile)

In the last week, I've posted a few thoughts on exile and a few on archive-and-exile, so I reckon it's time to look at the third term we're working with and write something about voices-and-archive-and-exile. Over the last year I've come to feel that the idea of voice has an interesting relationship with BOTH of our other terms...

Exile and Voices

It's clearly the case that literal experiences of exile produce an acute awareness of voice. The German Jews who came to the US in the '30s had to live in a new language, one that they didn't necessarily speak all that well and one that many always spoke with a 'foreign' accent. (Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno have both written or spoken about this.) This kind of experience has a complex dynamic.

The process of 'becoming foreign' that is part of the experience of exile may include the defamiliarisation of one's own voice. But this is more than just the defamiliarisation that many people experience when they hear recordings of themselves speaking. We are so immersed in our own language and its associated forms of communication that we are often only dimly aware of it as the medium in which our lives take place. The experience of exile forces upon one the realization that familiar ways of speaking do not 'work' in this new context and this can lead to a heightened level of reflection on the nature of both 'native' and 'foreign' languages and their relation with the self.

I would want to be careful of saying this necessarily results in a more 'objective' view of one's own language. Defamiliarisation is not necessarily identical with the discovery of an 'objective' viewpoint and - in my experience - a great deal of emotion often surrounds the discussion of language in exilic texts, although this emotion can, of course, become an object of contemplation in its own right. At any rate, defamiliarisation produces a new kind of perspective that I think might be interesting for us.

Turning now to exile-as-ideal, the experience of literal-exile might figure the sort of moral pattern we are talking about here (with all those provisos about acknowledging the impossibility of voluntarily going into exile, etc). In a sense, your journey down the Mississippi involved meeting people and hearing voices that led you to reflect on your own. I do want to emphasise that I'm still talking about voices here and am not drifting away from that concept. Your comments on meeting an old white guy in the south - they appear here - are essentially about the language in which we express ourselves and the contrast between his language and yours is what sparked the moment of reflection. If I'm understanding you correctly - and do say if I'm not - the experience you describe seems to have revealed something of the limitations of taking language as the central site where our moral relations with others are worked out? It led you to think about how much his use of language matters when considered alongside the reality of his life and how much your well considered language is worth if you are not in a place where the relations among the particular American cultures involved here are really worked out.

However, we also have mythological texts - like the Odyssey - which can be seen as figuring exile-as-ideal and in which voices play an important, but different, role. Odysseus among the Sirens does not function as an allegory of literal-exile I think! The American voices involved in producing Adorno's new sense of his own voice, for example, were not Siren voices. In a sense, his positioning among them was the mechanism that gave rise to the kind of critical distance that I think is characteristic of exilic experience. It is not that those voices were all dangerous and needed to be treated with caution. It was rather that the contrast between own-voice and other-voice contributed to producing a special kind of awareness that could be turned on the world in general.

By contrast, in the myth of Odysseus, it is not Odysseus' positioning among the Sirens that produces critical distance. Quite the opposite! The risk is that he will not be able to achieve any critical distance from them at all. So a contrast between own-voice and other-voice is not here the mechanism by which the special vision of exile is achieved; the voices do not figure the means by which exilic distance will be produced. They figure that from which one needs to achieve an appropriate level of distance. And the mechanism of distancing is figured in terms of the self-imposed disciplines that the crew and the hero adopt: plugging the ears with wax in one case and binding oneself to the mast in the other.

I'm sorry if I'm labouring the point a bit but I've actually struggled to get the relationship between Adorno and Odysseus clear in my own mind :o) And I think it's important because it is relevant to how I understand the practice of travel (or pilgrimage?) that you engaged in last summer and that we've taken as the basis of our work.

I've already discussed the idea that the contrast between the 'old white guy's' language is a bit like that of literal-exile (with the usual provisos). But is it also like the experience of Odysseus? Well, in a way, yes. After all, you wouldn't want to take on his way of speaking - really not! But you do want to see what you can learn from it, or, rather, from considering the relationship between his speech and his life. And that kind of 'listen but remain detached' is very much what the Odysseus story is about.

OK, I'd intended just to write a few lines and I've actually been working on this for about an hour and half, so I'm going to stop and resume at some later point. What I think is important here, I suppose, is to work out the significance of the voices in two different narratives: those of people in literal-exile and those in mythological narratives like that of Odysseus. They are both revealing, I think, but they aren't identical. They may overlap - there are times where the mechanism of contrast involves an encounter with a voice that itself needs resisting. But they don't necessarily overlap. And that's all for now...