El pensamiento helenístico como la tradición sapiencial de occidente

In this chapter’s gradual working towards dissenting discourses, what (if

anything) can still be recuperated from dialogue? As a representation of something more universal, it is not without value. In a new foreword written a decade after “Gender Trouble” was published, Judith Butler revises her previous criticism towards universality, saying that it does have “important strategic use precisely as a non-substantial and open-ended category”. This enables it to promote “a future oriented labor of cultural translation” (Butler, 1999, p.xviii). In a similar spirit, this chapter critiques the summoning of dialogue, but only insofar as its disintegration into a myriad of day-to-day speech possibilities would enable a greater frictive understanding towards what is already there: we do speak with one another, just not in that perfectly pitched, egalitarian way. The issue, instead, lies in the thoughtful usage and serious examination of these rarely condoned frictive modes – like the aforementioned gossip or teasing – and refusing the insidious descriptors that encircle informal discursive practices.

By reframing dialogue as an idealised speech type based on presumptions of equal participation, the potential of informal speech types is highlighted in contrast, turning them into sites of knowledge, solidarity, and social negotiations. This is an effort to reconfigure some of the optimistic rhetoric that continues to define art practices in the social realm. What falls between the cracks in thinking about these practices as art or socio-political instrument is the work itself, which involves an embodied criticality of relations and new modes of communication, indigenous as they are to the needs of the projects.

To talk about what these practices do as a kind of “dialogue” does little to unearth the complications that mire conversations in situ, while also

presuming an educationally constructive experience. Crucially, the drive for dialogue ignores the how quarrels, and indeed gossip and teasing are already sites for reflection (Moersch, 2011).

In critical psychologist Lisa Blackman’s 2001 text on voice-hearing, she questions the “curative process” in psychiatry that equates auditory hallucinations to insanity (Blackman, 2001). Her argument problematises the ways that voice-hearers are encouraged to reject all the voices that do not fall in line with “the voice of reason” (p.203) – a critique that strikes a chord with this study. That unified voice is aligned with the one imagined for dialogue, located as it is within the realms of reason away from the untamed rest. Yet, as we have seen in 2.2., impassioned and candid speech perform activist functions (Young, 2001) of frictive meaning-making. The rationality persistently called for in dialogue is thus complicit with the erasure of alternative, dissenting meanings; as discussed in this chapter, gossip and teasing are two discursive practices examined that generate bonds as well as knowledge in subjugated groups (see: 2.2.1., 2.2.2.). In a similar vein, Blackman sees the pathologisation of voice-hearing and psychiatry’s corrective processes of removal as “a problem of government and regulation”

(Blackman, 2001, p.152). She argues that

[t]he socially and historically produced meaning of the voice-hearing experience, embedded within the contemporary ‘psy’ disciplines, is intimately bound up with the discursive production and maintenance of a very specific image of human life and morality. (ibid., p. 187)

The assertion here is that, as with activist, dissenting discursive practices, the multiple voices are seen as “a random, uninvited and uncontrollable assault […] on a person’s psychological functioning” (ibid.). This convergence makes it is possible to draw a direct connection between the psychiatric, institutional mandate to have a unified voice with the educational mandate to dialogue in the same even-tempered voice: both prioritise reason, thus stabilising governance. This is predicated on what Blackman calls a “pre-discursive”

ability to “self-regulate and operate with a sense of responsibility and guilt”

(ibid.), echoing the refrain of the naturally rational human being.

By drawing attention to voice-hearing, the intention is to underscore how polyvocality is capable of producing ongoing agonistic commentaries. And as such, the conflicting cacophony of voices behaves much like the disagreeing perspectives that bump and collide in the messy relational material of an art project: without exploring the friction of discursive practices, there would be no relationships to speak of between artists, participants, commissioners, collaborators, etc. Dialogue, sought after for its ostensible neutrality and horizontality, is desired for the unity it implies when, in fact, it takes away the possibility of situation-specific speech. Techniques mentioned in Blackman’s study to treat voice-hearers include “distraction, denial, negation, and diversion” (Blackman, 2001, p.187), all of which seek to shut down rather than acknowledge the voices. As such, Blackman’s approach towards voice-hearing veers towards a reparative polyvocality, one in which the meaning of selfhood is multiple, shifting, negotiated. This also directly impacts the

(irresolvable) struggle for congruence between consciousness and embodiment – which, as we understand through gender performativity (Butler, 1990; see: 1.1.1.), are mutually co-constitutive. Indeed, voice-hearing is not always pathologised, as “the ‘psy’ disciplines” distinguish between “pseudo” (random or situation-specific) and “real” (completely consuming) auditory hallucinations. While the voices and visions may vary wildly, it is ultimately an issue of control that determines pathologisation:

Control is taken to be a measure of social and work functioning, where the focus is upon specifying how well a person is seen to be functioning within the external milieu. […] Control is therefore not measured in relation to vividness, but with a person’s relation to the eternal world. It is a measure of behaviour and conduct, and not a measure of the quality of a person’s own internal reverie. (Blackman, 2001, p.23)

In this light, the voices are seen as a sign of bodily as well as mental disintegration (ibid., pp.198-199). Translated to the larger social realm, discursive practices of dissent are then similarly pathologised as disintegration. For Blackman, working with voices entails their (re-)integration into a person’s life not so much by individual therapy but by group dynamics.

In other words, the voices would need to be socially negotiated:

[T]he experience of hearing voices can even become a marker of sensitivity, or even oppression. It is not just about changing ‘beliefs’,

but radically transforming the ways in which voices are problematised and acted upon, often occurring within a particular dynamic of group processes. (ibid., p.202)

The use of the frictive in this chapter is to highlight dissenting voices not in oppositional contrast to dialogue, but in a productive refraction that brings other spoken discursive practices to bear. Polyvocality is embodied and situated in the many; it is therefore always performed in relation with others.

Returning to Butler, she reminds us in “Excitable Speech” (1997) that while speech can be “a force that both presages and inaugurates a subsequent force” (Butler, 1997, p.9) by saying what is about to happen, it fails to acknowledge speaking itself as a performative act of the body. Utterance is meaning finding its way out through physicality, which often ends up as a surprise; we do or say what was never intended in the first place.

In a way, the uncoupling of speaking from consciousness turns it into an act over which a subject does not have full control, which reiterates some of the important subjective dispositions looked into in chapter one: dispossession (see: 1.1.3.), which stresses a social orientation of the self that allows a “you”

to emerge from the body as well as its surroundings; and material-discursivity (see: 1.1.4.), which posits a performative agency of matter and doing.

Different voices and speech types therefore occur as much as they are, relying on bodily performance as much as intention. As such, it is embodied criticality that we return to time and again in this research; by insisting that dialogue, and social negotiation for that matter, be more than the brutal

equalising between subjective positions, this study seeks to carefully nurture a frictive approach that accounts for situated elements – bodies, stimuli, affect, social powers, etc. – at play. By refracting dialogue’s pedagogically constructive obligations and the horizontality that it strives for, this chapter argues that dissenting multiplicity and intimate forms of frictive communication both need to be centred in critically embodied, situated practices of a socially negotiated art. Following Ahmed (2006), an abundance of other possibilities – of other “worlds” – can emerge if we can queerly disorient ourselves from the dialogical horizon and attend to the intimacy of speech.

3. The difficulties of love: political attachments and the