This is the basic and interesting question Imogen Stidworthy asks in her 153 pages long dissertation Voicing on the borders of language from 2020 at the Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, Sweden. Something to read!
Glossary: âVoicingâ: In encounters between people, different forms of language communication may be happening, but we cannot be certain. What we take for a voice may not in fact be a form of address at all. (âHe missed the voice, or the voice missed him.â â Fernand Deligny). Or a voice may take a form that we do not recognize as a voice. To engage with different forms of language means widening our scope of attention to different registers, so that voicing includes speech sounds and sonic utterances, but also somatic registers of bodily gesture and movement, rhythms, spatial and temporal forms, imperceptible vibrations, and silences. Voicing: âcalling forthâ in the impulse to mobilize oneself towards another or to âme.â Â
Glossary: âRub-upâ: The rub-up is what is produced in encounters between people who voice themselves through different forms of language. Bewilderment, energy, friction, heat, intimacyâthe rub-up arises in grappling with unfamiliar terms, in not understanding. When language reaches its limits, our relationship with it is exposed in new ways, and in this sense the rub-up is inherently reflexive. In these conditions we learn to attune to different registers of voicing around and beyond our own, broadening the scope of communication.
Losing a sense of bodily boundaries can happen when we are dancing, attuned to another person, or immersed in nature. Many people on the spectrum describe intense feelings of a âleaky sense of selfâ: becoming confused with other people or with oneâs surroundings, losing or having no sense of being âme,â in ways that can sometimes be existentially threatening, but also exhilarating, liberating, and joyful.
Different forms of voicing call me to listen with all the senses, because when I engage with a language I do not know, I do not know what I am listening for.