A way of talking taken as a language_Lawrence Abu Hamdan
On the politics of listening in Yunjoo Kwak’s ‘Downey’s’
Lawrence Abu Hamdam
When I first met Yunjoo Kwak, to discuss her project about Downey’s Cafe in Amersfoort, our exchanges instantly became a subject of confusion. From what became a symbolic gesture about the nature of a project dedicated to evading the constraints of language, the confusion started at the title. My initial point of doubt was in questioning whether the word Downey is used in the same way in Dutch as it is in used in English – that being, a politically incorrect and derogatory name used for someone with Down’s syndrome. Is it only my English ears that understand “downey” as an offensive term? Or does this auditory trigger also apply to the Dutch ear? By naming the cafe, ‘Downey’s’, do the owners of the cafe want to make a statement that challenges and reclaims the use of this defamatory word? And if the cafe does not intend the name to be interpreted in such a way, then does Yunjoo herself?
When asking these questions, a cloud of mystification quickly developed between us; due to a combination of Yunjoo’s hearing, her navigation of the English language, my still croaky voice and inability to articulate myself from the previous night’s activities and my slight mumbling of a Yorkshire accent, this confusing cloud swallowed up the answer to the questions raised above. So I begin this text with a series of unanswered questions, spawning immediately from merely the title of the work. However this not knowing makes me somewhat of an authority on the work of Yunjoo Kwak, for it seems to be that Kwak’s methodology of research and practice is the certain forcing of estrangement, a willful engagement with being on the outside. As an inverted authority then, it seems that a series of unanswered questions is a fitting starting point from which to explore her attempts to “re-examinine the effective value of language.” (quote from Yunjoo’s statement)
Physical Listening
In order to articulate the methodology of a willful estrangement further, I think it’s important to first deal with a specific mode of listening that Yunjoo attributes to herself, an evaluation of which will allow us to engage thoroughly with the Downey’s Project and Yunjoo’s practice as a whole. I feel that this mode of listening is an important concept to grasp, as it is a specific way of engaging with sounds that shift and destabilize the very conventions of speech. Rather than a process of mental cognition or a semantic digestion of sounds, due to a hearing problem, Yunjoo describes listening to speech as a constant physical straining to hear words. In this practice of listening, we can start to think how to grasp the comprehension of language as a physical exercise. In the shift from mental to physical listening we can also imagine a certain leveling of the semantic dominance over the sonic quality of speech, in that just to have heard a word achieves a certain level of understanding, a sort of sonic comprehension of language. This complex sonic experience of language means that speech, in whatever language it occurs, is pushed towards its phonic roots. In this sense spoken foreign language loses certain unattainability or incomprehensibility for Yunjoo, as English, for example, becomes thought of more as a physical limitation rather than as simply an unknown or unlearned language.
As I understand the shift in listening that Yunjoo describes, the physical experience of phonic language became amplified with her move to the Netherlands, where she found herself to be surrounded by a language that she couldn’t understand in the conventional sense. The feeling of estrangement and foreignness was amplified because of the way Yunjoo hears, and this is what she in turn intends to amplify in the project, Downey’s. Seeking out a site for her research, Downey’s cafe, in which this linguistic estrangement is intensified. Therefore the complex conceptual basis from which to unpack Downey’s is the understanding that only through the intensification and sharing of this intensity, with her interlocutors, the physical listening of language can start to emerge as a means of communication not concerned with content but process; through this practice of listening, the physical processes of speech is brought into focus. In Downey’s, Yunjoo attempts to institute the language of a way of talking.
The Inverted Interpreter
In order to establish the language of a way of talking, Yunjoo embodies the role of the interpreter of this language. This leads to a series of absurd exchanges because although she is interpreting the speech of her interlocutors into a process based communication, for the most part, her interlocutors are speaking Dutch, and even sometimes English as well, so they are not just making noise but speaking a language, meaning that the role of the interpreter here is to almost controversially turn speech away from language and towards sound. Here the role of the interpreter is both highlighted and inverted as it is understood here as not the expert whose task is to aid the comprehension between languages but in fact an estranged figure situated outside of the semantic conversation but nevertheless is translating and transforming conversation into another means of communication. For example in the following excerpt we see how a conversation immediately and unusually takes its focus around a way of talking, in this case the tendency of people from Korea or Japan to substitute the English phonemes “R” and “L” for one another.
For example –
“Me: How do you like.
Volunteer 1: Rike? Ik weet niet wat je bedoel. I don’t know what you mean.…….
Hoe ik hier kom of zo? How I come here or something?
Volunteer 2: Of niet…. Ik weet het niet. Or not… I don’t know.
Volunteer 1: Yeah, I don’t get it.
Volunteer 2: What is rike?
Me: How do you? You like Downey’s cafe that’s why you come here.
Volunteer 1: Yes, oh, yeah, with bike…with bike.”
So as demonstrated above there is often two conversations developing at once in Downey’s, one which we can be transcribed and the other which can only be heard. To further explore Yunjoo’s practice as the inverted interpreter of the language of a way of talking, I would like to call upon the glossolalic practices and the loss of language of Mlle. Hélène Smith via the essay by Michel de Certeau Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias. Here Certeau describes the case of Mlle. Smith’s speaking of “sanskritoid” (half martian half sanskrit, though she knew how to speak neither), a language named by Professor Ferdinand de Sassure after his 3 year analysis, from 1895-1898, of Mlle. Smith’s (a former French speaker) glossolalic babble. After three years of profound listening to Mlle. Smith’s vocal sounds, Sassure ( professor of Sanskrit) and a forum of various scientistic experts make the following conclusions: “(1) this speech resembles Sanskrit, it recalls some words from it, and it includes meaningful fragments; (2) the rest, while unintelligible, never has an anti Sanskrit quality [...] Apart from this he diagnoses that underneath Smith’s discourse there is a syntactic weave of French words” These listening experiments on Mlle Smith prove nothing about Smith’s babble but reflect more interestingly back on the practice of listening that Sassure and his team employed. This experiment shows the scientific fear of the meaningless and the anxiety caused to this particular scientific forum by the idea of noise overtaking speech. Into this fear, Sassure and his team pour all their aural efforts, straining for three years to hear (desire) the meaningful fragments through the noise, in order to unearth, on Smith’s behalf, the buried knowledge of language. Sassure’s experiment shows us clearly that listening (or receiving) is never a passive act, but an active agent in the organization of the other’s speech. It is in this agency of listening that we can see parallels between Sassure and Yunjoo’s performance of listening. At times she too, morphs Dutch noise into her own meaningful fragments, for example finding similar sounding words in English. However, it is the appropriation of the examining listener, or interpreter of babble, that allows her to in fact reverse the outcome that such experiments such as Sassure’s produces, i.e. rather than listening to babble to find meaning, Yunjoo listens to Dutch to find babble. Yunjoo desires to hear Dutch not as a language but as a process of speech. In Downey’s, we see a proposition that Certeau makes with regard to case of Mlle. Smith become realized, what “if the Areopagus of examiners had considered responding to her rather than observing her and had sought after a mode of communication (talking) rather than an already existent knowledge (a language)” Perhaps in Downey’s we don’t find the answer to Certeau’s postulation but we see Yunjoo embody and enact such an idea. An enactment of which essentially makes the deeply emancipatory statement that speech can take place between anybody. Countering Sassure in the belief that both learning and communication can occur through the meaning situated on the fringes of language.
The Subtitles
Until now a lot of what I have explained about the method of listening employed in Downey’s as well as Yunjoo’s role of the inverted interpreter makes sense only in the context of a purely sonic focus upon the work. Furthermore my statements thus far could be contradicted by the use of subtitles in this work. In the subtitling of this video we see the return of the hierarchical orders of language; its inescapable logic, its value system and its semantic constraining of the phonic quality of speech. This legible dubbing turns down the volume of the phonic speech which Yunjoo’s listening strained so hard to emancipate. In this process of subtitling we see the return of Professor Ferdinand Sassure’s logic, in that clear distinctions are made between what sounds are unintelligible (indicated with question marks which grow and contract depending on the level of incomprehensibility as in the image below) and what amongst the babble can be considered “Dutch” (as we see in the following image). These controversial decisions are of course fundamental political distinctions. At the root of the democratic ideology is the giving of voice, being heard and the right to free speech. What this ideology determines as speech and what it determines as noise has a huge impact on society. It is my argument that the notion of speech within this political ideology is very specific, fine tuned to a juridically determined bandwidth. If this bandwidth is out of range i.e if this specific quality of speech is irreproducible to members of society then they will remain inaudible to the politics which governs over them. In the subtitling of this video we see the violence of this decision making process, determining speech from noise, animated before us.
The first time I watched Downey’s I felt that these two dialectic approaches to communication where irreconcilably placed together and that one, the subtitling, had violently muted the other, Yunjoo’s amplification of the speech process itself. However, on thinking further into this irreconcilability I discovered that these two processes placed together demonstrate as a whole what is at stake in the practice of listening itself. What we almost uniquely witness in Downey’s is the emancipatory potential of employing new forms of listening directly engaging with the political conditions conventional practices of listening de facto emplace onto society. In this dialogue between practices of listening you could argue that Yunjoo Kwak proposes to extend the way society listens; and with it perhaps extend the fundamental political concept of free speech, from only concerning the freedom to say words without censorship to also including the freedom, from semantic conventions, of the sonic quality of the speech itself.
