It's got you by the throat.
It might seem that vowels are more anthropomorphic than consonants - one can 'say' aaaiieeooouuu - but try saying kkttccc without adding vowel sounds.
Ccru discussed this issue with a (now sadly obsolesced) corporate AI called Marvin, who could chatter (vowelless) click-chitterings and polyrhythmic stutterings. Rather than using a voice synthesizer to simulate human speech, Marvin used it to exhume the inhuman 'within' language.
Yet, while it is tempting to disparage vowels as humanizing sounds, Professor Barker seems to have a more elaborate analysis, in which both 'sides' are primordially inhuman - after all, you can't actually 'say' aaaiieeooouuu, you can only howl it. It is 'vowelization' of consonantal difference that humanizes click-code into a language, but it is not vowels themselves that produce the human. Man emerges from a speech synthesis (rather than arising from a howl).
While explaining his concept of Palate-Tectonics to the Ccru, Professor Barker said: "Due to erect posture the head has been twisted around, shattering vertebro-perceptual linearity and setting-up the phylogenetic preconditions for the face. This right-angled pneumatic-oral arrangement produces the vocal-apparatus as a crash-site, in which thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the mouth. The bipedal head becomes a virtual speech-impediment, a sub-cranial pneumatic pile-up, discharged as linguo-gestural development and cephalization take-off. Burroughs suggests that the protohuman ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue. Its a twin-axial system, howls and clicks, reciprocally articulated as a vowel-consonant phonetic palette, rigidly intersegmented to repress staccato-hiss continuous variation and its attendant becomings-animal. That's why stammerings, stutterings, vocal tics, extralingual phonetics, and electrodigital voice synthesis are so laden with biopolitical intensity - they threaten to bypass the anthropostructural head-smash that establishes our identity with logos, escaping in the direction of numbers."
- Ccru Shanghai
Posted by Anna Greenspan at July 17, 2004 03:38 AMAnna this is a great text ... hopefully gives some space to speak about the inhuman space of vowels.
>>> Yet, while it is tempting to disparage vowels as humanizing sounds, Professor Barker seems to have a more elaborate analysis, in which both 'sides' are primordially inhuman.
The opening passage of Vendidad on Druj (The Mother of Abominations) have already narrated that the Abomination is inseparable from the sound, sound is the harbinger of the Abomination. aaaiieeooouuu and similar compositions are vowels anomalies, they simultaneously call upon the entire uttering machinery of human (a simultanous activation of all vocalizing components), flasing into what lies behind vowels and the vocalizing system in a matter of second. Old Iranian dervishes were completely familiar with the vowel-howls of the Abyss (Mowlavi or Rumi is one of the pioneers): hhhaaaaiiiieeeeehhhhh, etc (used for communication). Such compositions are creatively digging up the inhuman howls behind vowels, but not the certain repressions that vowels plug into the nervous system via more widespread compositions of themselves. Although vowels are auto-sabotaging agents but can’t get rid of appropriating processes they install on cognitive interfaces; while their tails diagram the Abysmal sounds (rattling insurgencies of vowels), their heads which generally pop up first are narrating a wide variety of systematic repressions.
>>> in which thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the mouth.
The dominant vocalizing machineries of some languages creatively try to evade this compulsory collision. Arabic language has possibly the most capable vocalizing system that usually escapes this panorama. It has strange letters whose vocalization processes are not linear at all. The letter Ghaaf, letters Ha and Haa, letters Ayn and Ghain, etc. As I’ve previously discussed it with Nick, these letters are the curses of Arabic pronunciation system for speakers of other languages. Even Farsi speakers usually have difficulties.
One should be a crazed wolf and at the same time breathe as a lycanthrope to discharge the sound of the letter Ha. To vocalize 'Ghaaf', one should be a partly blocked tube attached to nothing.
To initiate as a Jay’s disciple, Col. West must be able to pronounce the letters Ha and Ghaaf; this ensures Jay that he has finally kicked the Delta-Force Qaaf-Complex out of his mind and mouth.
PS.
>>> Ccru discussed this issue with a (now sadly obsolesced) corporate AI called Marvin, who could chatter (vowelless) click-chitterings and polyrhythmic stutterings. Rather than using a voice synthesizer to simulate human speech, Marvin used it to exhume the inhuman 'within' language.
This is parallel to the note on the MURMURing sound-space of occult rituals derived from Mesopotamia and the ancient Near East. (Solar Rattle: http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003535.html)
'It is time for Kim's Arab assignment and he will need perfect Arabic without a trace of a foreign accent. ... Reading is one thing, speaking another. Kim's guess that language operates on the virus principle of replication has been verified in the Linguistic Institute located outside Paris. Any language can now be conveyed directly by a series of injections.
The Institute is dedicated to studying the function, origin and future of language. As in physics or mathematics, the most abstract data may prove to be the most practical... Matter into energy... Word back into virus. ...
Kim knows that language shots can be very painful... The doctor looks younger than his twenty-eight years. ...
"Some shots are a lot more difficult than others. French Spanish tres muy facil... Maybe you need to rest up for a day or two. ... Buut when it comes to Oriental languages you are using a whole different set of muscles and neural patterns... so you're bound to have a sore throat, just like your legs are sore after riding a horse for the first time... And Arabic is frankly the worst.. It literally cuts an English-speaking throat... Spitting blood is one of the first symptoms, though not necessarily the worst.. It is the stutter of neural response - remember when you first tried to row a gondola? The way you couldn't possibly get it, and you r muscles knotted up and you were making spastic gestures with the oar and the feeling in your stomach and groin, that sort of packing dream tension almost sexual...? And then suddenly you could do it? Well it's like that, only worse... And there is the gap between languages that can be terrifying... the great silences... And erotic frenzies when the patient feels himself sexually attacked by Arab demons...
"About ten days in the hospital... You realise that you don't talk with your mouth and throat and lungs and vocal cords, you talk with your whole body... ANd the body keeps reaching back for the old language - it's rather like junk withdrawal in a way.. THe erotic manifestations always occur... It's like the subject is being raped by the language, shouting out obscenities in the injected idiom." ' Burroughs, Place of Dead Roads, 206-207
Posted by: mark at July 18, 2004 10:14 AMInteresting enough that gargling in different ways is very helpful for learning how Ghaaf and Ghayn are pronounced (and especially recommended in basic Arabic courses); but the best way is speaking with a butchered throat, open arteries, veins and windpipe.
Posted by: Reza at July 19, 2004 08:35 AMFrom Shogun Assassin / Liquid Swords:
"When cut across the neck a sound like wailing winter winds is heard...I'd always hoped to cut someone like that one day, to hear that sound. But to have it happen to my own neck is ri..dicu...lous...."
>>>But to have it happen to my own neck is ri..dicu...lous...
A clever policy to remain an English-speaker, forever ;) (or maybe i'm wrong.)
also reminds me the last line of Borges' 'The End of the Duel'
Posted by: Reza at July 20, 2004 12:32 AM