The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies

271 Pages·2016·8.143 MB·English

by  Haun Saussy

THE ETHNOGRAPHY
OF RHYTHM
Orality and Its Technologies
HAUN SAUSSY
Fordham University Press
NEW YORK 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Saussy, Haun, 1960-author.
Title: The ethnography of rhythm : orality and its technologies I Haun Saussy.
Description: First edition. I New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. I
Series: Verbal arts I Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036361 I ISBN 9780823270460 (hardback) I
ISBN 9780823270477 (paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Oral tradition. I Poetics. I Orality in literature. I
Storytelling. I Folk literature-History and criticism. I BISAC: LITERARY
CRITICISM I Semiotics & Theory. I SOCIAL SCIENCE I Anthropology I
Cultural. I TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING I Social Aspects.
Classification: Lee GR72 .s28 2016 I DDC 808.5/43-dc23
Le record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036361
Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
A la memoire de
Anne des Prez de la Morlais
Frarn;ois Desgrees du Lou
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Olga V. Solovieva ix
Preface xiii
List of Figures xvii
Introduction: Weighing Hearsay 1
1 Poetry Without Poems or Poets 17
2 Writing as (One Form of) Notation 57
3 Autography 86
4 The Human Gramophone 127
5 Embodiment and Inscription 156
Acknowledgments 173
Notes 175
Bibliography 211
Index 247
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FOREWORD
Olga V. Solovieva
What do the learning of the Druids, the abbe Rousselot's "speech in
scriber;' and Marcel Jousse's little dancing girls have in common? The
answer resides in the pocket of any user of a cell phone today. Every
"text" we send or receive participates in embodied orality. To be sure,
a "text'' is made of letters, but letters supplementing what is conven
tionally known as writing with abbreviations, misspellings, diacriticals,
capitals, emoji-introducing hybridity into the alphabet and making it a
distance-projection of the gesticulating body.
If this is "secondary oralitY:' it is nonetheless not that predicted by
Marshall McLuhan from his observations of the rise of radio and televi
sion in the 195os.1 Those "post-Gutenberg" media simply recorded and
transmitted speech as speech, perhaps increasing the presence of spoken
words in our lives but not changing substantially the ontological status of
oral versus written communication. Our habits of electronic mediation
now tacitly reverse the very episteme that understood orality simply as
the absence of writing. Text messaging pulls writing into the orbit of oral
ity while capturing the movements of orality in a "writing machine:'
But this new paradigm, as always, is not entirely new. Though orally
transmitted, the Druids' sacred knowledge, we learn, was wired into the
priestly minds like writing through decades of memorization. Rousselot's
phonautograph wrote down individual modulations of speech to capture
forms of orality usually treated as peripheral to the system of language.
Jousse, the inventor of the so-called rhythmocatechism, interpreted the
X / FOREWORD
Scriptures as a written code accompanying gestural, dancelike recitals,
memorized to assure the everlasting immediacy of God's word.
Media archaeology, as exhibited in this book, feeds back into media
ecology. All media relate to one another genealogically, as predecessors
and successors, and functionally, as alternatives. Etienne-Jules Marey's
early recordings of movement, which guided Rousselot's search for a form
of writing specific to orality, are not an imperfect anticipation of cinema,
Saussy provocatively suggests, but a culmination of older technologies
of writing. I would add that these extensions of writing reappear today
on a radically new technological level in digital text-images. Thus Lev
Manovich, for example, performs a surprising return to precinematic de
vices such as painting and animation in order to explain digital cinema,
in the process leaping over the Bazinian obsession with photography as
the shadow of the real.2 In both cases, a radical break in techne is bridged
over by a continuity in episteme.
This book's pursuit of the constructions of orality substantiates (I
am tempted to say "proves") through a network of historical examples
drawn from a rich array of interconnected disciplines-literary studies,
anthropology, linguistics, psychology, science, religion-what has until
now been articulated only theoretically and therefore, in our theory
hostile age, doomed to obscurity and mistrust: that oral literature (and
the oxymoron is a portent) has always been a form of writing, indeed
of arche-writing, and that the difference between oral and written poetic
production is not one of kind, but of differance-the active production of
a divergence.3
The drawing of the boundary lines, Saussy conveys, has been historical
and ideological rather than substantive. From time to time moments of
rapprochement occurred, as in Caesar's appreciation of the written qual
ity of Druids' orality, or in the invention of orally punctuated vers libre.
Rhythm is the technology of oral inscription, and the human body, with
brain and muscle (including all their varieties of technological extension),
has been for ages its material base. Saussy's "show and tell" should be read
back to back with Derrida's Of Grammatology. It then appears as a tour
de force of mediating function, bridging over the painful rift between
philosophy and philology, theory and practice, while rendering accessible
and crystal clear what seemed to be so cryptic.
The book remediates the philosophy of writing with an ethnography
of orality.
This ethnography is twofold. On the one side, it describes many modes
of embodiment (for example, hain-teny, Scott's writing machine, the neu
ropsychology of Ribot and Janet). They demonstrate the corporeal basis
FOREWORD f XI
of oral literature. Ethnography opens the way to what the new-media the
orist Katherine Hayles calls a medium -specific-analysis (MSA), the acute
need for which oral literature shares with electronic writing: "Under
standing literature as the interplay between form, content, and medium,
MSA insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The
materiality of those EMBODIMENTS interacts dynamically with linguistic,
rhetorical, and literary practices to create the effects we call literature:'4
Oral texts are structured by the materiality specific to the human body,
just as electronic texts are structured by the materiality specific to the
computer's software and hardware. Neither can be read without aware
ness of the material artifact. Orality has been always based on the system
of a complex corporeal apparatus: sound, ear, brain, memory, muscular
movement, articulatory organs, sound.
Human bodies were writing machines before writing machines ex
isted. In this sense, oral texts are prototypical "technotexts:'
But "textual functions must not only be based on the marks appearing
on screen but also [have] to take into account what was happening inside
the machinery:'s This machinery, in the case of oral literature, might take
the form of motor-psychology, or of springs, tubes, and metronomes at
tached to human faces to record their speech.
The discovery of oral literature as another form of writing and another
form of materiality is not unlike the discovery of electronic literature as
another form of speech described by Hayles: "Writing, a technology in
vented to preserve speech from temporal decay, here is made to instanti
ate the very ephemerality it was designed to resist. [The reader] under
stood that her relation to this writing was being reconfigured to require
the same mode of attention she normally gave to speech:'6
The theory of orality is thus a media theory.
On the other side, this book's ethnography also pursues the customs
of academic scholarship. "Oral literature'' is a nonexistent subject mat
ter that can be approached only by inference and approximation, always
already mediated through some sort of writing. The book retraces de
cades of the gradual formation of a pattern of thought, bringing across
the humble idea that scholarship is always a matter of collective endeavor
and that academic writing is always an adventure filled with hazards and
contradictions. Scholarship on orality was generated, we see, again and
again, as if in successive throws of the dice, out of the code of the Homeric
problem, later generated anew in biblical studies, and diffusing its conclu
sions through a variety of academic disciplines.
Scholarship is a global village, where insights won in Madagascar turn
out to apply to the most ancient Chinese poetry. Voices from a distant
XII f FOREWORD
African island are echoed in Prague, Paris, and Harvard. In intellectual
research, as in art, Saussy teaches us, the slightest differences in the choice
of words, the versions of reprinted articles, the accidents of translation
matter: they change or reveal the meaning.
Scholarly texts are honored here with the same precision of reading
with which literary critics honor literature. No insight is awkward or shal
low enough to be discarded. Jean Paulhan set out to study the Merinas
but was taught by them. We can't be reminded enough that the path of
the intellect is never straight but tortuous. It forks and loops. A fallacious
statement, if not taken absolutely, but read next to another fallacy, is a way
of discovery.
The book captures the fluid complexity of the intellectual process,
without restricting itself to end results and foregone conclusions. In that,
maybe, it mimics, in writing, certain features of orality: "the gradual
construction of thoughts during speech;' as Kleist put it.7 The reader is
treated here to a rare adventure of reliving the process of unbiased re
search, equipped with a new insight that subtly moves aside the crutches
of various ideologies in order to see the pragmatics of the problem for
what it is. The multifaceted notion of orality slowly emerges out of a maze
of crosshatched strokes, constantly shaken and reconfigured in a kaleido
scope of ideas, under gentle and attentive questioning and dialogue.
As to the refreshing quality of its intellectual surprise, this book gives
me the same joy of unexpected constellations of ideas, of unpredictable
turns and reversals, as Katherine Hayles's spirited writings on electronic
materiality, or Byung-Chul Han's witty techno-political aesthetics.
How to capture the experience of reading this book? To me, it felt like
opening a rusty window in a stifling library vault. Imagine that familiar
labyrinth of dusty shelves full of old-fashioned, unreadable, methodolog
ically obsolete and awkward books in different crabbed scripts, among
which you got lost for years. But suddenly, a blast of wind raises the dust,
a beam of sunlight makes visible forgotten names and titles, and you
while looking out into a green, fresh courtyard and breathing in cold,
crisp air-hear them talking.