Speech, vocalized, is disarticulated by the air. Words resound as sonic intensities just as they become empty indexes of an event.
From the machine to the voice: to the voice as exactly that which makes a rupture in the midst of an indexing machinery which is built on the legibility of the text.
The voice as a surplus to, but also as the cause of the text—as that element which always eludes the capture of sense but which at the same time founds an authority of meaning.
—The sound of the voice as the material of asignifying intensities, a sound that cannot be fully inscribed as a text but can instead be traced as linking sets of disconnecting paths and circling divagations.
(And: transcription of the voice as the image of thought which is a contingent becoming. There is a sense in which the true and elusive machination of thought inscribes its presence in the asymmetrical circles of our talking—in the foundering and hesitation—in the jumping forward …backtracking, which nondiscursively marks our talking to another. —And in the often unconscious rhetorical mechanism (prosopopeia) by which one voice inhabits another, as citation and indirect speech. I am pursuing this intersection of the vocal and the machinic as the image of thought. I am trying to find, to reveal in its occlusions, the hidden and machinic lever of thought which is embedded in the rupture of the voice. “The search for the voice in language, this is what is called thought.” (Agamben quoted by Nancy 2002, p.45))
While there is a clear psychoanalytic context for thinking through the sense of the voice-as-object (as objet petit a), my sense of the voice-as-rupture equally describes the semantic economy of the internet: a voice cannot be searched—it does not yield to the indexing machinery of the search engine. It poses therefore a void in the heart of contemporary networked productions of meaning. This is the rupturing event—the voice as void—I am tracking in all its negative singularities.
1.15 Enigma Machine
1.16 Cybernetics
1.16 Artificial Intelligence
2.2 XML
2.2 XSL-FO 1.0
2.10 Unicode
2.10 Camel Case
2.10 Demonstratives
2.10 Deictic
2.12 Las Meningnas
3.19 Prosody
3.21 Autopoesis
3.23 Conversation, Bohm Dialogue
3.24 Enthymeme
3.24 Basic English
3.26 Asterism
3.27 Interview
3.27 Nevermind It’s An Interview
3.28 Transclusion
3.30 Compiler
4.1 Computational Linguistics
4.2 Audio Search Engine
4.2 Disambiguation
4.10 Relational Database
4.14 Google Search
4.15 Unicode
4.15 Clinamen
4.15 PunCtuation
4.28 Free Association
4.28 Speech Corpus
4.28 Man Pages
5.17 Vocal Folds
5.30 Free Indirect Speech
5.30 Prosopopeia
6.02 Oracle
6.02 ESP
6.05 Grammar
6.05 Encylopedia
6.10 Open Document
Imagine the following model for writing.
Every text exists first as something read aloud by another. If a text is authored, if it is original, it must be vocalized by its author; it cannot be written down. A text, as writing, can only exist as something copied by a listener in the time in which it was vocalized by its author.
Any text can be produced only as a partial transcription of the speech of another.
February 18, 2009 – 11:37 am
It is very evident early on that any transcription will be produced by virtue of serious exclusions and distortions. An early question I am having is to what degree to intervene in the transcription, in order to produce something coherent and readable.
If the transcription cannot be produced accurately by software from audio recordings, then discriminating strategies of transcription must be developed in a human agent.
In this scenario it is readily admitted that the transcription will be partial. The rule is as follows: the time of the transcription is equal to the time of the transcribed. That is, the transcription can only take place within the time of the speech.
Within this constraint, how does the scribal agent operate? What further rules constrain his transcription? In this picture, is he a machine or does he function more as an antenna?
February 18, 2009 – 11:22 am
The project is to capture speech and to transform it into writing according to a developing system of constraints.
The project is—at the same time—to develop a space and set of tools by which a community can author a collective statement.
And: there is an emerging interest in this research to document the very process of research itself. That is, there is an interest germinating in the scribal agent (jack) to map within the text-repository every citational movement and articulation of knowledge connected to the subject, which is: the machinic enunciation.
This is the surplus activity of research, conducted by the scribal agent, which occurs alongside the action of transcribing.
February 15, 2009 – 3:10 am
In a film for which subtitles in another language are provided, the subtitles are presumably derived from the script which the actors follow, if there is one. This is evident in certain moments of a film, for instance when the speech is too quiet to be heard but still receives a subtitle. Thus the subtitles are not a register of what is spoken, but belong to the inscription which exists prior to its being-spoken.
How might this model be made to impact the conceptualization of my transcription project? That is, what would it mean if the often garbled and nonsensical text which is called the transcription is regarded, in a reversal, as the script which the actors at the Jan van Eyck are speaking—and diverging from in order to bring their speaking into “sense?”
February 2, 2009 – 1:35 pm
What is the minimum of typographic form necessary to legibly reproduce a text and/or to write? Italic, the underline, a space between paragraphs.
There is a possible book in which italics, say, do several kinds of work: to indicate citation, proper name, but also (at the same time) as an emphasis.
What would it mean to collapse these semantic orders into a single distinction?
January 29, 2009 – 8:08 am
Turing reformulates the question, Can machines think?, in the terms of a game in which an interrogator questions two (invisible) entities in order to determine the gender of each [Turing, 1950]. The question becomes whether the interrogator will decide wrongly as often when one of the entities being questioned is a machine.
It is critical in this game that the answers be given as printed, as typewritten, rather than vocalized or written by hand. “The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms.” The printed letters eliminate traces of gender. Typography furnishes the condition for machinic masquerade.