This audio is made up  of 6 tracks that are extracted from three pieces of news reports. The short piece of music in the beginning sounds like an intro of a news program and it corresponds to the big booming noise in the end.   The speech by a NASA leader and the applauding sound are intervened between the news reported by anchors. I rearrange the six clips with a new order, which presents a connection among the tracks that are originally unrelated.

Having seen Susan Howe deliver Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives as a lecture at Harvard University, I could not help but contemplate the effects of technology that are present in the composition and presentation of this project. Circling and dissecting the ideas of materiality, expression, knowledge, and experience, the content of Howe’s project directly addresses the issue of media translation in the introduction: “As they evolve, electronic technologies are radically transforming the way we read, write, and remember” (9). Spontaneous Particulars takes up the issue of what’s lost, recovered, degraded, and enhanced by moving from analog to digital collections, both in terms of our of-the-body experiences and our of-the-mind knowledge in relation to our interactions with archival objects. However, the ways that these issues are taken up in Spontaneous Particulars as a lecture and as a book seem distinctly different to me.

As a book, Spontaneous Particulars juxtaposes reprinted digital scans of archival selections with poetry, quotes from various thinkers, and Howe’s reflections on the processes of collecting, confronting, and interpreting archival materials. We encounter text and image side-by-side, each symbols of either aural or physical material (the text a symbol of speakable language and the image a symbol of a touchable object). The process of printing the text and images in facing pages has essentially flattened the tactile and sonic presences of the original materials on a single, symbolic plane.

In contrast, the “reading” experience of Spontaneous Particulars as a lecture is not so singular. An audience member listens to Howe—hears the sonic elements of her voice—while encountering projections of the digital images of archival materials. It’s possible to experience what would be the textual or language-based portion of the lecture as mere aural material—to encounter the sounds-in-themselves, if you will. The simultaneity of processing Howe’s reflection on names (sonic stimuli) and a visual projection of a prescription written by William Carlos Williams (visual stimuli) has a much different effect on the way one reads and remembers Spontaneous Particulars. It feels bodily, now.

In this way, Howe’s project reenacts the very issue that it addresses. While listening to Howe recite the lecture is a performance and not the initial thoughts that she captured through language, experiencing Spontaneous Particulars in person does remind me of the experience of touching an archived object. There’s a now-ness to hearing Howe speak that’s similar to the now-ness of touching WCW’s prescription pad. Howe’s voice and WCW’s handwritten notes are material objects that no longer exist in their original context, but remain present for us—the listener, reader, researcher—in a sensory way that interpreting text on a page does not. In the same manner that the archive effect may fool us into deeming an image or clip historical or “real,” I can see Howe’s voice as fooling us with its ephemeral yet salient presence in material validity. Thus, I view Howe’s intentions for Spontaneous Particulars the book to be “a collaged swan song to the old ways” as a celebration in the book’s relationship to the process through which it was created (rather than in the product itself). Like Farge, Howe’s fervor for digging within the physical archives seems to place value in the act of seeking, not the products that seeking creates.

I found Susan Howe’s different re-uses of archival material interesting, and with regards to both That This and Spontaneous Particulars I could not help but think of Arlette Farge’s statements about the allure of archives and about Derrida’s association of the archives with the death drive. The death drive stood out to me as an important theme of Howe’s work, as she was obviously grieving for her lost husband and trying to make sense of this loss in This That. The sentence “Peter took eternal wordlessness into himself” (That This, 14) reminded me of the way in which the people who are found in the traces of archives (like the Parisians Farge discovered) are now eternally wordless, as in no longer capable of speaking for themselves. It is up to those who are left behind to reanimate the life that has been lost. In processing her grief over the sudden loss of her husband, Howe ruminates “Now – putting bits of memory together, trying to pick out the good while doing away with the bad” recalled Farge’s description of the archival research process. The historian must sift through the traces found in the archives, discard those that do not fit in with their narrative and keep those materials that work well.

Howe made several observations that conjured up debates about the authenticity of archival traces. “Even if ideas don’t exist without the mind, there may be copies or resemblances” wrote Howe (22), but do these copies or resemblances do justice to the original complex functions of the mind that generated those ideas? Howe’s discussion of names in both works really gets one thinking about the value of words and names as mere traces of what they actually represent. When Howe wrote “can a trace become the thing it traces, secure as ever, real as ever – a chosen set of echo-fragments” (That This, 29) this reminded me of issues surrounded authenticity, especially with regards to audio and other digital media. Can a digital or digitized item ever be as secure or real as the original? Can an audio recording of a person’s voice or of an event ever fully capture the essence and reality of the thing it has recorded as a trace?

I was initially not sure at all what to make of the second section of That This but after going over the segment several times the traces Howe used started to speak more to me. At first I was completely frustrated by this section, trying to impose some sort of order and meaning onto the disarray of text in the center of each page, but I came to have multiple interpretations of Howe’s chosen arrangement and presentation of these materials. The different sliced up and pasted selections of text reminded me immediately of absence and unfinished thoughts, and implicitly about the absences in historical records and archives. Some statements stood out as being intentionally separated and profound (“distemper I was seized with it” – p 55, “pursuing shadows & things” – p 62, “something delirious and therefore lost I was to a degree rational” – p 64). It is clear that Howe (for her own reasons) wanted these statements (or fragments of statements) to stand out to the reader. The fact that these are fragments and Howe intentionally placed gaps implied gaps in the historical record, even in the presence of such excess. In addition, I felt these gaps served to represent the void left behind after Howe’s husband passed away.

Howe wrote that “Maybe there is some not yet understood return to people we have loved and lost. I need to imagine the possibility even if I don’t believe it” (This That, 17). Though I think that Howe was speaking quite literally of somehow being reunited with the dead in some afterlife, I think that pouring through personal archives after someone has passed away is indeed a way to return to that person. We may never physically be with them again, but we can reanimate and reimagine them. “I’ll go to him – I’ll find him,” writes Howe. I often think these same thoughts when I stumble across the name of a long deceased person, involved with a movement I am researching. I resolve to go and find that person, to bring them back to life through research and writing. Howe expresses that she feels intrusive for looking over personal family items in her mission to “find him,” but this is what the historian does all the time in archival research. We are always the unintended reader, the unanticipated researcher come to disturb the peace of the deceased in order to reanimate them for our own purposes. The archival materials that are so necessary to resurrecting the past are usually “enclosed in a world of their own” and do seem “to offer reluctant consent to being viewed,” but these are the types of “secretive” sources that Farge would argue can reveal so much.

There are one or two things which stood out to me in listening to these very different approaches to sound art, ways to characterize the relationship between the source text and its repurposing. One is the relationship or attitude towards the appropriated text itself — clearly the Reagan piece seems to be making a stronger gesture towards a political statement than Son of Strelka, Son of God’s use of Obama’s voice; even though I looked around and saw that the artist did intend for it to be a commentary on Obama’s elevated style of rhetoric and around the near-Messianic resonance his campaign and early presidency gained for his followers. I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that, though; it could have been merely using Obama for the aural qualities of his voice or for its recognizability. Even the titles point out this type of difference, it seems.

In Charles Hardy III’s essay, I was most intrigued by his discussion of Greame Miller’s “Linked” project and Toby Butler’s “MemoryScape Audio Walks: Voices from the hidden history of the Thames.” Both of these projects utilize oral histories and other audio ephemera__ surrounding particular locations, then presents them to be heard at the locations about which the audio refers. Here, we can see a use of archival setting to alter the archive effect and affect of the audio. This is not the same as what I would refer to as archival context, like that heard in Hardy’s “Mordecai Mordant’s” audio creations wherein oral histories are surrounded by real archival recordings from the era being spoken about.

In Hardy’s (or Mordant’s) works the archive effect arises in the juxtaposing of the reflective oral histories with the archival recordings wherein the oral histories thus affirm the pastness of the archival recording and conjure temporal disparity between the two. The archive affect, then, can be seen as arising from the vibration and tone of the speakers’ voices which are identifiable as elderly, coupled with the real sounds of a world since-passed for both the recollector and the listener.

Much differently, the archival setting, rather than context, of Miller and Bulter’s works places the audio within the place of occurrence, not a mock resemblance of it. While the audio recordings may not have taken place at the location, they are only heard within the setting about which they speak, thus transforming the recordings from being listened to in (what listeners would understand to be) the setting of the interview room itself. Instead, temporal disparity is created between the since-passed place that is referenced in the audio and the listener’s experience of present place within which he/she is listening.

Perhaps a similar example will help in the differentiation I’m attempting to make between context and setting. Chapter 1 of Dan Warren’s Son of Strelka, Son of God provides listeners with a creation account while simultaneously hearing sounds from nature. Now, we know that Obama was not speaking these words out in a cricket-ridden field of the Midwest because of the collection’s description, so we understand Obama’s words to be contextualized within the nature sounds in order to conjure a temporal disparity between the time about which Obama speaks and the sound of nature that we are well-familiar with. Now, let’s pretend for a moment that we don’t know that Obama’s words have been manipulated and placed within the context of nature sounds. Rather, the audio, at least in some places, could be understood as Obama’s setting as he uttered the words heard the track.

With the first experience of audio contextualized in nature sounds, any archive effect/affect is being produced through the relationship of the speaker and the speaker’s words to the archival recordings being used as the context for the audio. In the second experience, however, a pairing of tracks, or a relationship between separate archival recordings has not yet been formed by the producer of the audio—there is only one track encompassing the speaker and the setting, leaving a relationship yet unformed. Instead, any relationship concerning the audio remains to be formed by and with the listener. The archive effect and affect are produced, thus, not in observation of an existing relationship between speaker and context, but by a participatory relationship between the listener and the understanding of what it is to be in that setting.

It seems that the question of ethical appropriation, or ethical use of appropriated sound recordings, is located in the act of editing. There is a violence there, a “cleaving” that is natural to the archive, as it is often mandated by the space restrictions (temporal or physical) of storage or creation: hours of testimony must be compressed into a ten minute news segment. Or, original intention for the media is subverted/reconstructed/made new. But is it possible that the decision to record (a person’s voice, a natural sound, an instrumental roar) marks the entry point for ethical discussion? I wonder this because to record is to create, as Hardy suggests, from a real voice or acoustic event

“…a close facsimile of their vibrations captured by electro-acoustic technologies” (148).

The recording is the first inscription. Not the thing itself but its facsimile. There is another cleavage—captured instants—that otherwise might have drifted into chaotic memory (heard and forgotten) or passed unremarkably into a collision of open-air vibrations. The audio archive is those collected pieces of recording technology. Working with the voices of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, I listened to digitized recordings in the WPR’s web archive, I also handled a clunky cassette player placed on a table in the physical room to access lectures and readings not yet digitized, but stored on tape and kept on shelves in a closet just behind the door to the curator’s office.

Maybe, memory is the first inscription. Hardy makes the distinction that “[m]y memory, narrated through the sound vibrations of my voice, is another piece of history animated through sound” (148). Memory narrated by the body. I think Robert Pinsky says the medium of poetry is not language, but the column of the body through which air flows.

I appreciate what I understood as Hardy’s lingering desire make audio art beyond the audio documentary/oral history documentary. The expansion Hardy seems to be hoping for is a move towards materiality and the construction of space—soundscapes—rather than narrative. Narrative has a place in the construction, but it is no longer central to the document. Hardy points to Graeme Miller’s “Linked.” The public installation he cites as being “[b]illed as ‘a landmark in sound, an invisible artwork, a walk’” (159). In the creation of the soundscape or audio walk history is returned to the body through geography. Rather than sound pumped into the ears through headphones or ear-buds, the body occupies the same space as sound—it affects the skin.

The audio archive is the body. It not only determines how we sound, how we hear, and how we record: why do more than two channels of audio become disorienting? Is the body the site of first inscription? (Is that different from memory?) I think of Derrida’s discussion of circumcision as the “immemorial archive…on your body proper.” And I wonder to what degree the creation of space through sound—and particularly the sound of archival audio fragments, because these are the fragments captured outside of memory as facsimiles—is part of a desire to return (ethically like restitution) memory, and the physical experience of sound.