Lexicon of the Mouth

Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary

Brandon LaBelle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623567736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Lexicon of the Mouth surveys the oral cavity as the central channel by which self and surrounding are brought into relation. Questions of embodiment and agency, attachment and loss, incorporation and hunger, locution and the non-sensical are critically examined. In doing so, LaBelle emphasizes the mouth as a vital conduit for negotiating "the foundational narrative of proper speech." Lexicon of the Mouth aims for a viscous, poetic and resonant discourse of subjectivity, detailed through the "micro-oralities" of laughing and whispering, stuttering and reciting, eating and kissing, among others. The oral cavity is posed as an impressionable arena, susceptible to all types of material input, contamination and intervention, while also enabling powerful forms of resistance, attachment and conversation, as well as radical imagination. Lexicon of the Mouth argues for the revolutionary promise of the laugh, the spirited mythologies of the whisper, the schizophonics of self-talk, and the primal noise of gibberish, suggesting that the significance of voicing is fundamentally bound to the exertions of the mouth. Subsequently, assumptions around voice and vocality are unsettled in favor of an epistemology of the oral, highlighting the acts of the tongue, the lips and the throat as primary mediations between interior and exterior, social structures and embodied expressions. LaBelle makes a significant contribution to currents in sound and voice studies by reminding that to hear the voice, and to consider a politics of speech, is first and foremost to assume the mouth.

1

Bite, Chew, Eat

The mouth displays an incredible range of movements that readily pass from the most aggressive to the most gentle, from the most exuberant to the most subtle, from puckered or pouted lips to the gnashing and gnawing of teeth. These oral actions deliver the expressiveness of the body, which is so articulate precisely by weaving together the nuances of our emotional life with the suppleness and gregariousness of the mouth—a “body language” rife with affective agitations. The mouth, in this regard, contributes to our individuated embodiment, and the potential to extend, or reach outward, movements that also connect us to experiences of attachment and loss, love and distress. Each modality of oral expression I’m tracing here—of the voiced and the unvoiced, the sounded and the gestured—twists and turns the mouth to register the extreme breadth of our vitality.

The mouth as a “chief aperture”¹ that gathers in while pushing out, to link and chart all sorts of relations, presents a range of means for literally carving out a space for individual presence. With biting and chewing, this reaches an extreme edge. The bite literally cuts into the material world; it grabs what is around, like a voracious hand, to pull it back and into the body, in moments not only of hunger or want, but also as a primary negotiation between self and surrounding. The bite is precisely a modality of mouthing that obtains material for the body, though as I’ll develop, this extends well beyond a relation to food only. In addition, the primary act of biting participates within a greater and more significant process of individuation and by which our essential relationships are defined. This finds softer expression in chewing—we might snap at the world in the thrust of the bite, but we savor its rich textures by chewing. Biting and chewing thus perform as fundamental operations by which we sustain ourselves as flesh and blood, with eating as the central operation, but also through which we test, enjoy, or combat the materiality around us.

Monster

By taking hold of the world, biting expresses in a raw and palpable way the unquestionable animality central to being a physical body. Biting occupies a complex zone defined by our bodiliness, giving way to behaviors at the core, but absolutely held at a distance, of humankind. Echoing Georges Bataille’s discussion of the “big toe,” as that appendage of the body reminding of our more animal nature, biting may reinsert through sudden exaggeration our deepest instinct within the behaviors of social life.² Restrained through a variety of social etiquettes, and those rigors of taboo, the bite is refined or delimited according to good manners and the proper as well as the organizational structures of productive society.

John Berger, in his essay “The Eaters and the Eaten,” examines how social status and the economic perform to govern when and how much we may put into our mouths. Through a comparison between the “eating habits and rituals” of the bourgeois and the peasant, Berger highlights the dramatic ways in which eating (and food) operates culturally, to ultimately condition a relation to “consumption.” The act of eating, in other words, underscores the individual body as being held within particular social and economic brackets. For the peasant, this appears with the midday meal—as Berger says, the meal that is placed “in the day’s stomach” and surrounded by work. In contrast, the central meal for the bourgeois is placed at the end of the day, close to “the head” and to “that of dreams.”³ For the peasant, “food is familiar like his own body. Its action on his body is continuous” with that of labor, while for the bourgeois “food is not directly exchangeable with his own work.”⁴ Rather, the bourgeois overeats, while the peasant eats in continuity with his own abilities to produce.

Eating, as that prominent act of “consumption,” is regulated by the conditions of social standing, plenty and scarcity, and labor and leisure. What interests me is how these dynamics effectively shape the individual body, tapering it to particular contexts, economies, and geographies. Moving closer, we might register this upon the mouth itself, and the behaviors of biting and chewing: as that extremely vital oral action, biting is tuned to the presence or absence of food, and its location within the daily rituals and rhythms of life. These regulatory structures come to place emphasis on biting as a gesture of participation within a productive modality: I bite as part of the operations of the market, which immediately extends to affirming my place within the social order.

Relations to the social order find expression on and through the body, in the habits of mastication, and it is with the meal that these relations are defined as an order of the edible and the eaten. A political economy thus surrounds the mouth to radically shape how we use it. In this way, biting is directed toward eating, and the structures of production and consumption, but it may also endanger the balance of a social order by turning toward other matters. As Mary Douglas examines in her compelling account of taboo, every bodily orifice “symbolizes” the balancing between an interior and an exterior, and effectively regulates in a larger way the “social body.” Ultimately, this expresses itself according to what can go in and what must be kept out, when and where we bite and chew, as well as how much we eat, and certainly what we bite into.⁵

The potentially transgressive nature of the bite can be glimpsed in the sport of boxing, and especially with the example of Mike Tyson. On June 28, 1997, during a fight against Evander Holyfield, Tyson infamously took a bite out of his opponent’s right ear. Although boxing already occupies a zone to the edge of social behavior, literally calling forth the dramas of blood sport and the animality at the center of the human body, Tyson’s bite went even further. Leading to the cancellation of the fight, and the suspension of the boxer’s license, the act of tearing off another’s flesh with one’s own teeth stages a beastly confrontation. “You could never think there would be anything more outrageous that would occur until this . . . Fights were breaking out throughout the stands and fans were throwing things toward the ring. It was really bad. It was a scary time . . . We made Tyson into a monster . . .”⁶

The Tyson–Holyfield “bite fight” throws us into the mouth as unquestionably tied to the monstrous, a body impelled by violence. Biting firmly locates the mouth as a fulcrum by which law and taboo are held in the balance—a balance equally found in the management of what goes in and out of the body, what we ingest, and what we spit out. Accordingly, the mouth performs as the central organ around which so many regulations and contagions circulate.

Bat

The tensions surrounding the biting mouth carry within them additional erotic energies. From a gentle tug at the skin, that of the “love bite,” which leaves its mark, to the more forceful bites that may even draw blood, biting has its place within acts of lovemaking. The erotic is precisely an operative space for entertaining animal behavior, of a body stripped bare or in masquerade, and by which gender and the sexed individual may play at heterogeneity.⁷ Here, biting appears within the gestural vocabulary of such enactments, further highlighting the mouth as an organ of radical expression. From the catlike hiss to the full bite, flirtations with animality may supply us with means for bending the often-rigid vocabularies of subjectivity and sexuality.

This “animal eroticism” finds particular articulation in the tale of Count Dracula. Bram Stoker’s narrative of the vampire captures the bite as a mesmerizing and magical puncture. Luring his (mostly female) victims through his haunting stare, Dracula’s bite ultimately draws blood, casting his victims into a nether realm, a liminal zone between life and death. The tale of Dracula locates the bite as an uncivil gesture which fully usurps the social order, if not the order of the human, one haunted by the ambiguous energies of the undead. Following Dracula, biting appears as the very act that disrupts the order of human society, inserting instead one defined by blood, fangs, and above all, by the bat and its nocturnal qualities.

Dracula performs according to the logic of the bat—a hauntological order operating according to the nocturnal movements of blood passing from one to another. The bat symbolizes a supplemental order functioning alongside that of the human, to ultimately ghost the mouth with an unspeakable hunger—the fang quite dramatically reinforces the oral element within this haunted imaginary. In feeding off the blood of humans—a central taboo to normative oral productions—the vampiric bite comes to haunt the orality of the social, sharpening the teeth according to greater mythologies of the animalistic and the undead, the supernatural and the occult. The vampire ultimately gives expression to a primary oral ambiguity, which is equally a sexual ambiguity, a bodily uncertainty, tapping into a greater fever of unconscious grammars, hidden drives, forgotten myths: is not Dracula a figure whose nocturnal habits and occult strategies give radical expression for literally tasting what should not be tasted?

Relations

Returning to the human order, we might read the bite as an action of the mouth shaped by the central conditions of being a physical body—it is the forceful expression of want, need, and the existential condition of hunger. The bite, in other words, is never to be trusted, for it easily succumbs to an inherent drive, that of drawing blood, or of taking too much. Here we might linger over the intersection of the erotic and hunger, the oscillation between desire and craving, and how the intensities of physical need echo with that of sexual longing. Dracula is a type of seducer, giving shape to this dark sexuality—that is, the articulation of lustful appetites, a hunger for the other. Hunger is thus marked by these dual trajectories that accordingly are not so far apart and that may crisscross to form an unsteady zone of passions to which the mouth is extremely central. This finds articulation not only in lustful bites, but also in oral fantasies, for instance, the fear of being impregnated through eating. Such an oral fantasy and phobia immediately draws parallels between eating and sexual penetration, emphasizing the mouth as an orifice whose dramatic function of taking things in imprints itself onto our psychological life. As Melanie Klein notes, fear of impregnation through eating often leads to disgust for certain foods, and a general paranoia fixated on the oral.⁸

Klein’s work on the topic of object relations, in particular, provides a deeper view onto this interweave of eating and desire, hunger and longing. For Klein, our psychoemotional life is fully charged by the relations we have as infants, and in particular, experiences of warmth and affection, of love, and importantly, its withdrawal or absence. These experiences are fundamentally produced and represented by parents, as well as by extended family relations, who are subsequently incorporated as “objects”—features or conditions whose repetition through infancy come to solidify and rest within our psychological view. Objects are thus internalized and reappear as subconscious references that interfere with as well as support the dynamics of future relationships.

Object relations highlight the degree to which our experiences with other people as well as things are continually negotiated or modulated through expressions or acts of introjection and expulsion, between what we take in and what we force away—in short, through the establishment of boundaries. Our sense for attachments, for example, is shaped by distinguishing between “good and bad objects,” which are also often the same object, the same relationship, but under different conditions or states.

Following our primary relationship to the mother, and the experiences of breast-feeding—which also relate to experiences of affection, such as cuddling and caressing, as well as types of oral expression, that of kissing, nose-touching, smiling, etc.—it is clear that the mouth performs a vital channel for developing connections between people and things and, importantly, for often “holding onto” the loved object. The mouth is a type of cradle, an active container for capturing and prolonging the love relationship, and all such intimacies. To keep it in the mouth. Experiences of love are deeply connected to an oral drive, an oral wish, and the range of oral behaviors that dramatically reveal the ways in which the world passes across our lips.

Relating to the world, as well as to others, is radically shaped by these oral experiences, whether in the form of verbal language or in acts of tasting, chewing, and ingesting: a constellation of oral gestures by which self and other are brought into relation. Although to incorporate the loved object into oneself—that primary oral drive—also runs the risk of devouring, endangering, or even destroying it. One might bite too hard, or even tear it apart.

Marks

As an instance of punctured skin, Vito Acconci’s Trademarks (1970) opens, or rather closes the bite onto the body, where the teeth take aim at one’s own flesh. The performance, as Acconci suggests, aims for his body, to take stock of oneself through the skin: “Turning in on myself, turning on myself (my action drives me into a circle): a way to connect, reconnect, my body . . .”⁹ Tracing over his bodily contours, wherever the mouth may reach, from shoulders to knees, Acconci’s biting leaves its mark. In doing so, Trademarks surveys the skin as the limit of the self, the exterior sheathe, or envelope of individuality which literally defines physical form. He tries to get back into the body, into himself, by way of the mouth (Figure 1.1).

Such gestures, as Kathy O’Dell suggests, act to stage the skin as an extended surface of self-containment, self-protection, as well as where so many exterior elements force their inscription.¹⁰ Following the work of Didier Anzieu, and his theory of the “skin ego,” O’Dell poignantly highlights how skin holds us in, to keep us safe, while also conditioning relations to our surroundings; skin is susceptible to worldly intensities, and their interrupting presence, as what might at times press too hard, back onto the skin—to puncture, imprint, or breech. Acconci takes aim at his skin: to turn against himself, test his own exterior, and register this body that he is. (As a final aspect of the work, Acconci applied ink to his bite marks, producing prints onto various surfaces, inc...