Fleshy Translations

By Moad Musbahi

I,

We do not know what the body is capable of.

Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza

The Great Vowel Shift is an event whose reverberations are still heard today, a phonetic rupture that has had a lasting echo from the 14th century. It occurred over a three-hundred-year period that began contemporary to the Great Famine and the Black Plague. These were all occurrences that prompted the mass migration and displacement of people, matter and in the case of the Shift, the dislocation of the breath traveling through the larynx, the mouth and out into the atmosphere. A resonant migration that continues to be felt across the hard border of the auditory canal. 

This muscular action was first coined by the Danish scholar Otto Jespersen in 1909. It is a contentious issue, in which its very existence has been a rumbling debate among phonetic philologists and historical linguists. At stake is an issue of causality, clearly how one speaks today, here, among this group, is different from back then, over there, among those others. A dialect, where the dialectological differences condition our encounter, inform our subjectivity and determine our positionality. They are a set of unconscious gestures that arose involuntarily through audible mimicry. A resampling and looping of the surroundings during an early age. Yet these differences of speech underwent the synchronising pressures of the printing press and its necessary codification of language, so that phonetic variance in modern English is less malleable to change.  

As the name suggests, the Great Vowel Shift, is an alteration of the vowels within the English language, and it is said to mark the turning point between (Medieval) Middle English and what today is spoken as Modern English. Some say that causes for such a shift, though all are far from conclusive, are due to the increased coordination and travel required for physicians and the clergy in dealing with Black Plague, a long-lasting side-effect from a prior pandemic. 

A break in the order of things, causing a break in the vowel, from the social to the sonic. The story tells of how this annunciatory revolution lifted all the phonemic long vowels, ‘raising’ their place of articulation, and those that could be raised no further were ‘pushed out’. These castaways were transformed into double-vowels or diphthongs, in a process that is called diphthongisation. Here the sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable begins with one and moves to the other yet is altered and made harmonic to the earlier sound. A form of assimilation by the latter to the former, bitten away by the tongue. Bite, prior to the shift was pronounced beet, during it beit and finally until it came to be heard as the word of the closing of one’s teeth to dig into a piece of meat. Another word, formerly m’air’t, then mate, until we understand its form as the fleshy matter of meat today.  

This argument for phonetic progression builds on a series of necessary abstractions and deductions. Methods for the recording of speech and their re-contextual rehearsal were not imagined possible prior to Scott de Martinville’s patent for a Phonautograph, drawn in 1857. Ten years after this date, in 1867, Melville Bell published Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetic. In both, the two authors created systems for the visual representation of sound. A translation from the sense of hearing to that of seeing.  

Bell’s book was cited as a key reference in the latter discovery of the Shift, as within it he sets out a universal alphabet system that can bd used to recreate the signature of any sort of speech. A re-sounding study, it was used to be able to not only bridge the voice between different linguistic groups but was finely tuned to do so for differing regional dialects within each language itself as well. It was a form of bodily training, modulating the air released through reordering of the space of the mouth. The ‘universal alphabet’ was an indexical representation of the place of the tongue within the mouth, the buccal cavity. Flexing against the roof, flicking to the throat and presses against the back of the teeth. It used vision as a force to transform sound through the gesture of this most flexible of muscles housed above the voice box. Different sensations order each other, to create a notational device of transporting sound across the temporal disjunction of the eye. 

This interdependence between two systems, two planes of logic, was used by Alexander Ellis in his Early English Pronunciation of 1874 to reproduce the sounds of different regions in different periods of time across the long durée of the English language. He notes the difficulties in describing some ephemeral, yet visceral phenomena discursively:

“Sounds are termed thick, thin, fat, full, empty, round, flat, hard, soft, rough, smooth, sharp, clear, obscure, coarse, delicate, broad, fine, attenuated, mincing, finical, affected, open, close, and so on, till the reader is in despair.”

Ellis fixed on translation, creating synchronic bridges between different systems of speech, such as William Salesbury’s Welsh and English Dictionary of 1547. The preface of this book had included a short introduction to the equivalence between the two pronunciations. Welsh being a more phonetically written language, aided in the ability to recall the spoken English words of the time. The second doubling logic was in poetic verse, within the coupling of rhyme. This created a space of linkage between words, beyond the graphic means in which they were written to the ways in which they worked together at the eardrum. Two words were used together as a couplet, tied by the sound of their rhythms, yet over time they slip away, losing their vocal relation. Thus, the history of phonology, is a poetic history, one that follows a careful arc from Chaucer to Spenser, Dryden and to Goldsmith. The double reduction of the work into a polyharmony of verbal assertions and linguistic echoes. 

II,

In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai.  To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor”—a bus or train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organize places: they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Punctuating punctuation punctually. 

Stop. 

Breathe. 

Stop, breathe.

A pause for breath, a certain rhythmic flow through marks on the page. A clear and concise picture of how to modulate the air passage. Yet reading might also cause hesitation, a misplaced, unpunctual comma can wreak semantic havoc on the speed of recital, against the linkage of meaning. The comma as an upstart into the notational arena, famously referred to as a ‘crooked point’ by the headmaster of St Paul’s school in 1562 when it first appeared, needing discipline. This leaky dot has been a legal thorn on the side of many statutes and laws that it has been completely banned in some instances from use. A pivotal point over which heated battles have been waged. Its violence can be most directly seen in what Adam Freedman called the ‘Long Comma War’. A war over a passage of the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment, typically composed in some states as either three or four clauses as, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It is the text defining the right to bear arms, whose clarity has been obscured by the paucity of these skewed curls and as they were debated over most recently at the US Supreme Court in 2007. The distinction was over if it was the right of the collective, Militia, or the individual, people, to bear arms, as some states sought to curtail the use of guns. Notwithstanding the ‘founding’ father’s peculiar use of capitalisation, here the auditory pause, as the held breath in the courtroom, was layered with the violent physicality they permitted in their interpretation.  

The introduction of these points within the English language varied significantly until the moment of the language’s mechanical reproducibility. The Latin base from which it derives its phonetic sample had no such punctual marks. No space between its words, no capital letters marking the beginning of its sentences, or circular point rounding them off. The need to place pauses, stoppages of distinction between words, and create semantic signposts and parcels were required as mechanically reproduced texts reached greater distances and wider audiences. Such auxiliary marks prop up and supplement speech. In the case of one American, self-appointed Lord, Timothy Dexter, who wrote and distributed freely his 1848, ‘A Pickle for the Knowing Ones’. A treatise on world governance, among other ruminations, all exacted in paragraph long sentences, letters in only one size and a total absence of punctuation. In his second edition, he includes the following edit: 

“Note to Dexter’s Second Edition:“fouder mister printer the Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops I put in A Nuf here and thay may peper and solt it as they plese”

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‘I put in enough here, and they may pepper and salt it as they please’. More pages of punctation accompanied the 965 shown here. This salting and peppering, these notational prostheses are supposed to be understood deictically, their meanings are related to their positionality on the page, sprinkled with a precise intended modulation of how to inhale and exhale. A deictic expression or gesture is one that is dependent on its context, with its semantic meaning fixed, its denoted meaning varies depending on time and place. The placement of a crooked mark, or the declamatory wave of a hand. At times they move beyond their supplementary value but are an intrinsic part of the act of communication. An exemplar case is of the Walbiri, an Aboriginal people of the Central Australian Desert, as described by the anthropologist Nany Munn in 1973. Here, the men and women of the Walbiri draw upon the sand particular designs as they converse. A type of gestural trace considered integral as the words and bodily movements that accompany and inscribe them. These drawings are standardised to the extent that they add up to a kind of vocabulary of graphic elements whose precise meanings are heavily reliant on the conversational or storytelling contexts in which they appear. Thus, a simple straight line can be, among other things, a spear, a fighting or digging stick, or a person or animal lying stretched out; a circle can be a nest, water hole, tree, hill, billy can or egg. As the story proceeds, marks are assembled into little scenes, each of which is then wiped out to make way for the next.

One imagines such forms are imbued with an excess, yet an excess that is of vital value. The multiplicity of moving limbs, earthly inscriptions and vibratory tones, seeding a sensorial atmosphere as a moment of communication, speaks to the position of the person implicated in this encounter. Their vantage point, their ability to decipher, follow, and decode the choreographic intensity determines what they receive and what becomes lost signification, leftover meaning. The efficiency of the process is a product of their attentiveness, their learned knowledge and their place in relation, in which, however perfectly aligned these may be, there is an inherent loss. A friction against the structures determined by the technicity of the linguistic form itself, its strictures. The economy of creating difference in meaning, against the coherent need for following linguistic conventions. The correct spelling, a syntactical straight sentence, the proper sequence of words to name but a few. These grammatical demands have prompted certain linguists to give numerical ratings for languages’ speed of data transmission, with some giving the English language an efficiency rating of only 50%. This issue was made most urgent when such forms of speaking, in real time, were met with the limitations of technological infrastructure. From beacons lit atop of walls, to the electrical telegraph. A contracting of lips against the constrained bandwidth of telecommunication. The first form of speaking-at-a-digital-distance was a referential system, a process of locating the prepared passage from the transmitted code that recalls it. Speaking become ordered through a non-binaural binary. 

III, 

So, word by word, and line by line,

The dead man touched me from the past,

And all at once it seem’d at last

The living soul was flash’d on mine,

And mine in this was wound, and whirl’d

About empyreal heights of thought,

And came on that which is, and caught

The deep pulsations of the world.

Lord Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 95

Melville Bell authored Visible Speech, re-auditioning the histories of the vast difference of speaking, its many extravagances and peculiarities, his son Graham Bell, invented the telephone and propelling a future collapse of sonic distance, prophesising a compression of the vagaries between localities of annunciation. Here, speaking through a telephone required a different set of handy gestures, an altered articulation of the wrists. The motion of picking up the phone with the hand and holding it to the mouth and ear did little to prevent gesticulations, the lonely shaking of the arms, but excluded their sonic silence from the transmission, from being heard. The voice itself underwent a shift, in which the tonality of its expression was reduced to a set of possible frequencies that the microphone was sensitive to. Flattening and distorting the signature of the individual, producing a split subject, fracturing a voice for the new medium. Bent, buzzed, bellowed. In this break, with the reductive functioning apparatus of the telephone, its mechanical mysteries, producing a radically reconnecting ritual of performance of eccentric physical action. Shouting down the phone, an excess of what Fred Moten would blast; the physical (trill-making vibration of tongue or vowel-lengthening squint) that deforms the word conceived of as a mere vessel of meaning. In the clearing, the making out of the inadequacy of verbal representation of sound while at the same time signalling the excessive, out- from-the -outside motion and force with which sound infuses the verbal.

Phrasal peaks. Maximal speaking, through telephonic, radiophonic coordinates. The peak amplitude, which is the loudness one is able to transmit the audio is determined by the power of the amplifier. A power nationally regulated at a common level for all stations, so as not to spill onto neighbouring transmissions. For it to not blurrr. The distinction between each natal occasion, the distance between the highest and lowest sounds sent over the airwaves, the extents defining what was called the dynamic range. The space from the barely audible to the deafeningly loud was a cause for concern, as it was considered that if a radio station was to quiet, it would attract less listeners compared to its more audible competition, and yet with greater overall variance, the quieter the overall volume could be. This attentive concern for the capture of ears, created the labour for a studio control operator in riding the gain, turning the volume knob, in accordance to the real-time loudness of the recorded sound’s fluctuations. This manual dynamic range compression created a potential nervous compression within the operator’s wrist, a limiting mobility of their carpal joints, prompted the invention the 1937 invention of Western Electric’s 110 Limiting Amplifier. Here, compression of the dynamic range, compression of data, determined the signal’s definition across these mediatic infrastructures. A compression that renders the representation adequate to its infrastructure. A shift in the infrastructure’s capacity created a shift in the signal’s definition, the magnitude of its compression, the loss of relation of the output from the input. 

Compression seeks to trim out the excess, creating castaways, yet maintaining representation and bare communicability. Syncopated. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, to syncopate refers to the omission of part of a word, as in “bos’n” for “boatswain”; or it could mean a brief loss of consciousness caused by transient anaemia; a swoon. The squeezed out, the carefully picked out, the sharply in focus. Yet translation swoons, it is hazy, creating an anaemia glow, sfumato, a luminescence that smears at the edge of legibility, the containment, of the image of the letter. Halogen, neon, fluorescent. A lingering touch, floating in the limbo of the cut. Syncopated music puts the stress on a normally weak beat. It skips a beat. The tongue cuts the air, orality as manufactured in the buccal factory. A touching sensation, fleshy. The tongue touches the roof, touches the cheeks, whistles against the open lips. Tele-touch. How does one comprehend the touch of the other, translates this touch? The fluidity of the moment of contact, between two bodies, two sensations. Two autonomous things brought into relation. 

Where the rhyming couplets of Chaucer allows one to vocalise and make discernible the sound of the past, here the two couplets of input and output become in a state of emergent continuity. A recurrent feedback in which their relation is circular. Like how Brian Massumi touches on Gilbert Smondon explaining the interplay of water and oil in the Guimbal Turbine. A hydro-electric structure in the Philippines where the water brings energy to the turbine, but it can also carry heat away from it. Movement between two different systems, translating across registers, with a celebrated remainder. They mix and play multiple roles, even in the closest contact with each other. One requires the other, they are interlocked and yet distinct. “The oil carries the heat of the generator to the housing where it can be dissipated by the water, but it also insulates and lubricates the generator, and thanks to the pressure differential between it and the water, prevents infiltration.” This infrastructure becomes self-maintaining. An operational autonomy in its autoregulation. A continuity that moves across difference, a (thermodynamic) translation across difference. A circular causality without any debris. Without reduction of their functioning. 

Moad Musbahi is an artist and curator living between Tripoli and London.  His work investigates migration as a method for cultural production and political expression, focusing on the social practices and forms of knowledge that it engenders. He recently curated ‘In Pursuit of Images’ at the Architectural Association, (2020) and was part of the curatorial team for the inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial, (2019). Moad is a recipient of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s Production Programme and has worked as a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art.

 Text commissioned to accompany ‘Amba Sayal-Bennett: A Mechanised Thought’ at indigo+madder, London, October 2020