We are caught,

caught in a stream of floating heads

Provocative faces preaching divisive politics

Spewing universalist values as well as those who meme these voices

Through a satiric vernacular

We live in a spectacularly tense age,

the complexities of speaking

bound up with far wider socio-cultural politics,

the question as to how to represent a voice,

to articulate a humanity and indeed an identity

are constantly being redrawn, attacked, and marred

Is speaking for someone, thing or group

always a provocative gesture?

Does it limit their own humanity/identity?

What if we readressed the terms of engagement?

What if we spoke through, and communicated

via wholly non-human or in-human means?

What then?

 

The Major having a conversation with the head of a moose in Fawlty Towers:

Moose (Manuel speaking behind moose head): Hello Major, how are you today?

Major: I,I,I,I’m fine, Mr Moose, thank you.

 

Ventriloquism dates back to the court jester’s sceptre

The jester gained power by not using his own voice

He spoke through the voice of his sceptre,

a miniature representation of his own face

Similarly, ventriloquists speak through their puppets

as a way of ‘distancing’ themselves from criticism

From Manuel, the Major and the moose to Danny

speaking to his finger in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,

ventriloquism can be fun,

but also highly complex when speaking for others:

 

Michel Foucault in Of other spaces, heterotopias (1984):

 

      ‘Certaines personnes parlent pour les choses (l’art et la nature), d’autres parlent aussi pour d’autres personnes, celles qui sont muettes dans la diaspora sociale comme les fous, les pauvres, les malades, les prisonniers.’

      ‘Certain persons speak for things (art and nature), persons also speak for other persons,  those muted in the social Diaspora such as the mad, the poor, the sick, and the  imprisoned.’

What is the potential for ventriloquism to create rupture 

in terms of one’s understanding of themselves?

How about using a proxy to speak for,

to converse with your own (troublesome) inner voices?

Self-reportage bestowing upon you

a certain involvement and moral dilemma

Imagine speaking to yourself through a proxy, in front of a live audience

What you gonna do when you say something

that triggers a potential moment of ‘self-shock’?

Aristotle thought that the only function of humour

was to make certain people seem superior, others inferior

Superiority theory suggests that everything has winners and losers

What about self-deprecation?

If the ventriloquist puppet makes a joke about himself,

it is, of course, the puppet-operator laughing at himself

Question. Operator, ask yourself:

‘If you make a joke about yourself, do you win or do you lose? Or both?’

 

I’ve done my cat called Toby, my heart, and who can forget  my fist?

What will I speak through next, this poet-cum-ventriloquist?

 

I will speak through the trope of the centipede,

the ultimate eavesdropper

 

surveiller

sur- 'over' + écoute 'listen'-to listen from above

 

surécouter

sur- 'over' + veiller 'watch'-to watch from above

 

Je suis un mille-pattes

I am a centipede

I listen from below

I am the  eavesdropper,

l’ écouteur auditeur d'en bas

auditeurs de mille-pattes

The profusion of my little legs gives me my name;

the Latin is centipeda, "many-footed arthropod,"

from centum, "hundred," and pedis, "foot."

Despite my name,  centipedes can have

anywhere from 30 to over 300 legs

Have you counted all 268 of mine?

 

Eavesdropping

listening under walls or windows

invisible

somewhere where I shouldn't be

hearkening after discourse

My listening is intentional, calculated,

purposeful listening with an agenda

Eavesdropping centipedes

We frame slanderous and mischievous tales

We are always associated with

pejorative, false, malicious information,

rumour, gossip - as opposed to truth

 

Eavesdropping and dripping

And dripping and dropping

 

Oh, won't you kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor?

When you get a taste, can you tell me what's my flavor?

I don't believe in God, but I believe that you're my savior

I know that you've been worried, but you're dripping in my favor

 

Overhearing is a condition of listening

and of being heard

integrates the complexity of the new social intensity

and its relational surveying

Accordingly, proximity is always already unsettled,

linked to other actants and agents,

forms and forces of not only open sociality,

but also technologies of surveillance, the Foulcauldian panopticon,

the eavesdropping of certain agents,

as well as by witnesses that may

inadvertently and importantly overhear,

to retell or repost

Listening, an intersection of hearings and overhearings

- even mishearings or unhearings -

-defined by the potency and politics of network life

 

And by the same token, so that the exchange

between eavesdropper and the eavesdropped

may be reciprocal but possibly not equitable,

have you actually bothered to listen to what I’ve got to say?

 

Have you ever engaged in radical deep listening?

Do you listen to what’s crawling around your feet

but is making the loudest sound?

There is no sound as loud as silence

But the centipede is not silent

Listen carefully and  he will deafen your drums

Why do you only hear the loudest speaker with his mic?

The centipede is the one creating the loudest sonic ripples

Listen to me, listen to your centipede friend,

you might learn something about yourself

that you never ever thought of

There’s beauty in my quiet shuffling through

the soil, under rocks, in compost heaps, under the bark of trees,

Not always on a mission to inject venom

It’s often the quiet ones

who have the most important things to say

Ear to centipede

There are bars in my 268 legs

And you choose to ignore me,

Maybe it’s time you choose to listen.