Taking from Heidegger’s
essay, “What is Called Thinking?,” Fiol-Matta establishes the concept of the
thinking voice, or “an event that can be apprehended through but is not
restricted to music performance. It exceeds notation, musicianship, and fandom,
although it partakes of them all. No artist owns the thinking voice; it cannot
be marshalled at will or silenced when inconvenient” (173). Although the author
expands on the thinking voice mostly in Lucecita’s chapter, I would also like
to highlight the thinking voice manifested through Ruth Fernández as a token
Black voice during the twentieth century in Puerto Rican society and as a
political vehicle to promote an ideal of racial unity. Furthermore,
appreciating the fact that Fiol-Matta’s conceptualization of the thinking voice
is quite broad and abstract, I imagine it as also constituting an assemblage in
which many contradictory phenomena can exist at the same time to create
something that is not easily definable or articulable, but perhaps detectable
at moments through musical performance. In this presentation, I focus on Ruth
Fernández’s contradictory sociopolitical role as the first so-called authentic
Black voice of Puerto Rico, who, while seemingly breaking racial barriers in
society, was musically stifled by demands of the white elite, eager to be
entertained, and at times, also seemed to internalize associations of blackness
with the grotesque, cheap and undesirable. Similarly, I also talk about
Lucecita’s constantly changing image, first as a model of mainstream American
consumerism and later as the poster child of political dissonance, against her
affirmations of truth and nothingness. In the end, I want to get us to think
about what their thinking voice is trying to think through or transmit to us.
What is your definition of the thinking voice? Is it detectable in the performances
below?
In Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist
Theories of the Human, Alexander Weheliye coins the term racializing
assemblages, from Deleuze and Guattari’s original conceptualization of
assemblage (or agencement in French)
defined as “continuously shifting relational totalities comprised of spasmodic
networks between different entities (content) and their articulation within
‘acts and statements’ (expression)….Assembleges are inherently productive,
entering into polyvalent becomings to produce and give expression to previously
nonexistent realities, thoughts, bodies, affects, spaces, actions, ideas, and
so on” (46). Weheliye defines racializing assemblages, on the other hand, as
constituting components that create constructed racial categories that over
time come to appear natural. I think that both the concept of assemblage,
coined by Deleuze and Guattari, and the racial component that Weheliye adds to
this are helpful in understanding what I perceive as the thinking voice in both
singers.
Throughout the chapter
“So What if She’s Black?” Fiol-Matta constantly questions whether Fernández
used racial discourse as merely an artistic and political tool or as a
reflection of her own self-perception. Although in earlier interviews, even up
until her transition into politics in the 1970s, the singer often claimed that
she had never experienced racism, keeping with the ELA (estado libre asociado,
or in English, commonwealth) discourse of Puerto Rico as a territory virtually
devoid of racism. However, in later interviews, Fernández confesses to not even
being aware of her blackness until one of her schoolteachers prohibited her
from going on a choir trip simply because she was the only Black girl in the
group. A passionate speech by her grandmother on perseverance in the face of
racial prejudice then leads to her now infamous tagline “so what if I’m Black?”
(104). Surely, Fernández knew that blackness—or racism— in Puerto Rico,
although not talked about or recognized—represented a much graver issue than
her “so what?” persona might lead one to think. Despite Fernández’s insistence
on the fact that she did not just want to sing music that made people dance,
but something that made people really stop and listen to her voice, which she
managed to do by resorting to the semiclassical genre, her earlier releases of
Afro-Cuban music, her musical interpretation of “Y tu abuela onde etá,” and her
role in the Cuban operetta Cecilia Valdés
as the slave woman Dolores Santa Cruz in the 1930s and 1940s, had clearly
marked her as representing a certain cultural primitiveness, an “acousmatic
blackness” as Fiol-Matta calls it (84). Even songs of black identity
affirmation like “Yo soy la que soy” and “Yo soy mulata” strongly indicated her
role as an Afro-Puerto Rican songstress commissioned by the ELA to diffuse the anti-Black
racism prevalent in Puerto Rican society. As Fiol-Matta asserts, there is
inevitably sorrow, pain and disappointment that constitutes her “So what if I’m
black?” and her affirmative “I always make people want me” (103). Through this triumphant
diva attitude is an assemblage of personal experiences, racial imaginaries and
state business that does indeed leave a gap in the thinking voice. What exactly
was her voice, what other voices were superimposed on hers, and is it even
possible or productive to separate them?
Coinciding with
Fernández’s declaration, “negra, ¿y qué?” in the making of the thinking
voice(s) of these great woman singers is Lucecita’s “I am nothing.” Taken from
an interview done in 1974, Fiol-Matta highlights the definition of nothing that
the singer fervently implies, suggesting that “she was not legibility, but
potentiality. She could not be generalized: She was singular” (3). Indeed, from
the very start of her career in the 1960s Lucecita herself, as well as the
molders of the music industry who tried to match the young pop sound with the
political sentiments of the time in Puerto Rico (Operation Bootstrap, a
burgeoning middle class). Her transformation from a youthful, girly and very
moldable singer into a mature, melodramatic, and at times aesthetically “masculine”
artist reveals just how much this notion of nothingness, a fluid, even
rhizomatic identity, shaped her career and her public reception, often in very
misunderstood ways. Due to her beliefs in truth and freedom across any and all
boundaries, as manifested through her activity in leftist political groups and
her public support for the Cuban Revolution, Lucecita was essentially
blacklisted in the 1970s, her name slandered in the Puerto Rican press and her
career—at least in a commercial sense—almost completely ruined. The 1980s saw a
comeback, but only within the confines of the dominant cultural trends of the
time, relegating Lucecita again to a place where her voice became nothing more
than a source of pure entertainment, her next albums mainly targeting the
middle-upper class crowd and the nostalgia market. Lucecita’s notion of sonic truth, described
by Fiol-Matta is “a moment of suspension when the listener was completely keyed
into her voice, subordinating the social content, the symphonic arrangement,
the conductor’s authority, everything to that moment of transmission and
reception, creating a fugitive subjectivity” (212). One might say that this
truth ultimately fizzled towards the latter part of her career. Just as the
singer had stated years earlier, she could sing, but she could not speak (199).
Much like Ruth Fernández, Lucecita did not just want her voice to be danced to,
she wanted to call people’s attention, to create silences in the crowd, and to
have them really listen. I think that it might be interesting to think of not
just those heart-stopping performative moments as constituting the thinking
voice, but to also consider those times of restraint and cultural conformity in
both Fernández’s and Benitez’s careers as constituting a chain of performative
assemblages in an untold racialized, feminine Puerto Rican history.
For the activity in
class, I will have everyone watch the following three videos, the first, a live
performance of Lucecita’s award winning “Génesis” at Carnegie Hall, and the
last two, performances by Lucecita and Ruth Fernández singing in movies. I
would like you to first ask yourself, based on Fiol-Matta’s definition, or your
own thoughts and experiences: what is the/a thinking voice? What does it sound
like, and what does it do? Can you think of any other artists who have iconic
or even very little-known songs and performances that transmit your conception
of the thinking voice? Secondly, can you perceive a thinking voice in the on-screen
performances of these great woman singers? If so, what does it say? How does
the intersection of voice, staging, and visuality affect your listening (in general,
or compared to live performance, for example)?
Lastly, if you care to watch the videos now to
get a feel for both singers’ performance styles, please do so!
Lucecita Benítez – “Génesis”
Lucecita Benítez – “Todas las mañanas”
Ruth Fernández – “Yo soy la que soy”
Additional sources cited
Weheliye,
Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and
Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, 2014.
I was also interested in these ideas which encompass/illustrate the "thinking voice," and how a singer's voice--or, in this case, the voices of Lucecita and Fernández--seems to know what is expected of it; the voice seems to rise to the occasion within which it performs. Last semester, I read the book "The Race of Sound : Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music" by Nina Sun Eidsheim while attempting to understand how various identities (in the case of this book, racial identities) interact with the voice as a *performed*, *not* an essential or a priori, piece of human identity. "A given voice comes into being and is defined by and founded on myriad circumstances, none of which— alone or in combination— defines the voice," Sun writes (177). Our voices sound different when we do different things or are around different people--and none of those voices is alone and only our one "real" voice. Like Fiol-Matta writes on page 69, by the time of her circa-1940's interviews, Fernandéz "was performing and simultaneously reenacting a particular voice, one she adjusted and refined as her career unfolded, with the clear intention of intervening in Puerto Rico’s cultural and political decolonization across the twentieth century." This voice is certainly "real," as it comes out of her body without straining--but it is a voice that shapes and is shaped (like all voices, to widely varying degrees) by its particular sociopolitical situation. Thus, the voice can act as refuge--using the voice to seek, as Lana points out, moments of "fugitive subjectivity," within a popular culture simply seeking to join "middle-class, corporate taste in music with a vaguely left- leaning repertoire" (212, 202). I agree with Lana that it is really helpful and evocative to conceive of the voices not only as instances of learned, conscious and unconscious performances--but also as one in many links in this yet-"untold" history.
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ReplyDeleteLana, I think it so helpful how you frame the thinking voice as an assemblage wherein many phenomena exist in (a sometimes contradictory) relationship to offer a broader thing, “detectable” as you say though maybe not articulable. I’m drawn to such a kind of epistemological project that leverages the mess of thinking, its distortions and evasions, over capture, containment, and definition. Further, your introduction of Weheliye’s text and its usages of assemblage therein, particularly the ways in which it creates and codifies racial categories, is a valuable caution against over signifying assemblage to the point of naturalization. I’d love to hear more from the class on assemblage as methodology, its advantages and problematics.
ReplyDeleteTaking up Fiol-Matta’s concept of “nothing” as informing the voice, I wonder how we can map the thinking voice onto disidentification, or if we should, if it’s generative? I’m curious about the ways disidentification and nothingness as defined by Fiol-Matta are in tension? But are there also overlays? Such as, does nothingness offer an alternative to the binary between assimilation (or subsumation) and separation/refusal? Fiol-Matta writes early in the text that though one is not legibility they are still potentiality (3), that the thinking voice unsettles rather than affirms (5), and that the voice as lack summons thought to think (Lorde overtones here?). Finally, I think Lana’s question about parsing *the voice* from those voices superimposed over it is a crucial one. It insists we question our own positionality in relation to sound, body, performance. So what care can we take to either maintain distance between our voice and another, or to recognize the collisions and tensions between the two?
Something I appreciated in both the book and in your post is how multifaceted Fiol-Matta is in describing Fernández and Lucecita, never oversimplifying either as conversative or revolutionary but instead being critical while recognizing the contours of context and life they had to navigate. The biopolitics that push Lucecita and Fernández between the kind of matronly-but-disempowered mammies trope discussed in Griffin (104)is both present in and resisted by the thinking voice, which to me feels like a recognition of the "grain" of the voice but with even further emphasis on experience, social context, and the body. Specifically, when Fiol-Matta says that her "purpose is to examine embodied existences within the very dense grid of significations in which multiple subjectivities circulate, which includes music producers, arrangers, entrepreneurs, politicians, fans, and citizens who are not especially attracted to music," I feel like she is using the notion of assemblage to recognize how each constitution part/aspect of the singer has its own agential force, along with the other features like the audience, or sound system. That is to say, this book seems interested in embodied performance as the means to understand these singers, providing a theory-based methodology for analyzing artists who sing beyond discussing the lyrics with some attention to the venue. One example from earlier in the semester that I'm thinking of is the Langston Hughes television performance, where he reads in front of several white musicians, and how his positioning and reading style manage to navigate this complexity rather than try to ignore it in service of the words he's communicating.
ReplyDeleteWow, I just want to recognized that I was *so, so wrong" in thinking off-handedly (from a quick shot and no context) that the character ("la india maria") was played by Alex Borstein rather than María Elena Velasco-Fragoso.
ReplyDeleteWhat seems important to me about the exercise that you did and our ultimate inability to nail down what a “thinking voice” is in any concrete terms is how it related to Fiol-Matta’s own methodology—and, I would argue, a methodology we have returned to continuously throughout our class. In the introduction, when laying out methodological frameworks, Fiol-Matta writes that her work “necessitates a method that will privilege the question over the answer” (7). Here, she is specifically talking about the difficulty of piecing together histories of women singers, but I think it fits with her work as a whole, as well as the work of previous artist/writers this semester. Again, like in the work of Vasquez, we are called to think about the questions that we ask as well as the ways in which we ask them, knowing we may not get a resolute answer. I feel like if we were to reframe the questions you posed in a more “traditional way,” (for instance, do these lyrics or words offer a political message), we might come to a more grounded answer. However, the performance itself and the work that Fiol-Matta sets up for us calls attention to different aspects of performance beyond words, and this ultimately shifts how we might think of artists “thinking” through sound and performance and the ability for politics/art/intellect to intersect in new and interesting ways.
ReplyDeleteI wonder too, then, how the movies and the embeddedness of the performance in the movies might offer a new reading of the thinking voice through assemblage (which you bring up). Particularly, what assemblages are at work in these films to allow for a potentially different or new thinking voice to emerge? How does this thinking voice have the potential to interact with new a new collectivity (thinking here about Lucecita’s focus on moments of transmission)?
Lana's argument about the role of Ruth Fernandez as a "token black voice" reminded me of an earlier (optional) course reading that examined "black iconicity" through visuality and performance (Fleetwood). Nicole Fleetwood argues that blackness becomes "visually knowable" through performative codes in popular media. I see a parallel to Lana's consideration of Fernandez's performative representation of blackness for an elite white audience. In consideration of race and performance, Fiol-Matta's notion of the "thinking voice" builds upon Fleetwood's emphasis on visuality to include sonic performances of blackness. Lana's point that Fernandez's performances "seemed to internalize associations of blackness with the grotesque, cheap, and undesirable" reflects a criticism of the visual and sonic performative I codes of blackness we see in Fernandez's performances. Lana complicates this reading by noting the political role that Fernandez's tokenness plays in promoting racial unity. This makes me consider the extent to which black iconicity enacts this idealized unity as it can flatten blackness to stereotypes and falsehoods while simply bringing about minimal (and often skewed) white recognition/attention to blackness.
ReplyDeleteLana, Following your presentation and the last week's readings, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to have a 'thinking voice' The term is somewhat paradoxical because 'thought' following an enlightenment rationality(which I am not fond of) is associated with the mine and not with the body, and definitely voice. So what would this 'thinking voice' entail: would the duress be merely expressed /captured in the voice while the brain is doing the thinking? OR is the voice actively involved in the process of reinterpretation of the thoughts of the mind in such a manner that it is said to be doing the 'thinking'? If I go by the latter definition, then by default every voice is 'thinking voice' because each voice at a specific moment of time is always already involved in the act of thinking-albeit of different modes and kinds. Hence my question is, what is the novelty about a "thinking voice" as a methodology?
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