I have awesome timing

Just in time for everyone to run out and see the new Star Trek movie (which you should do super soon...it's awesome), here is a link to my Star Trek essay.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfw523gg_2f8d6p77p

This whole project began with a frantic note I scribbled in my copy of Silverman's Acoustic Mirror: "Pg 54: 'inside' filmic space=female; 'outside' = male. ---> what about the computer in Star Trek? ---> both 'inside' and disembodied." From there, I had an excellent excuse (like I needed one) to sit around and watch Star Trek for about a week straight until I began thinking about the "sexy voice" episode ("Tomorrow Is Yesterday"). And really, the rest just sort of fell together. Now I just need to take it someplace. To be perfectly honest, I'd most like to take it to the Trek convention in Vegas. But, since that neither counts for my career, nor would I likely be able to find anyone who cares enough about the Oedipal or Latency Stages to read it, I found a couple of "real" conferences I could send an abstract to.

1. San Fransisco State University's Cinema Studies GSA conference titled "Breaking Barriers: Borders and Beyond Liminality in Cinematic Media." According to the description, they're looking for papers that discuss the ways in which things break outside of the norms in mediated fiction. Since a lot of my paper talks about the episode in which the norms of the Latency Master Narrative of Star Trek is breached, I think it would be perfect.
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=168437&keyword=science&keyword=fiction

2. Pacific University's interdisciplinary conference on Gender, Sexuality, and Power. My paper is, essentially, about gendered voices, the power of said voices, and the ways in which male sexuality and subjectivity may or may not be threatened in relationship to such voice, so I think it would fit perfectly at this conference!
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=167596&keyword=gender&keyword=media

Other than conferences, I had a few other ideas for ways to expand the paper into publishable length. First, I think it would be interesting to compare Star Trek's Enterprise to 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000. The former is female and coldly mechanical, while the latter is male and soothing. Of course, the outcomes and media are entirely different, so it would make for a fascinating study, I think. Another possibility is to just expand my discussion of the Enterprise voice into the spin-off shows. Majel Barret did the voice for every single Star Trek computer (including the new movie, just before she died), so it's really interesting to see her evolution over the years, despite the fact that the ship essentially serves the same maternal function throughout. There are also tons of venues for such papers, include Cinema Journal, The Journal of Popular Culture, etc. etc. etc. And even if I never do get around to writing these things, at least the next time a friend says to me, "Really, Liz, you're watching Star Trek again!?" I'll be able to respond, "Dude, it's research!"

Enterprise Doc-ing Bay 1 (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

In case you'd prefer the googled version of my abstract, here's the link.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfw523gg_1hggjrdd2

It's the exact same thing as what's posted below, but for the sake of techno-joy, I thought I'd googledoc it anyway.

"Computing, Dear": The Female Voice-Over as Disruptor of Male Subjectivity in Star Trek: The Original Series (ABSTRACT)

In Star Trek: The Original Series, the computer aboard the Starship Enterprise (voiced by Gene Roddenberry's then-wife Majel Barret) serves multiple functions. Within the narrative, she performs whatever computations the crew verbally asks of her, then she reports aloud her computations.

On a psychoanalytic level, the computer's female voice also, quite evidently, serves as a maternal voice, reenacting a womb-like situation for the ship's crew. The computer speaks to them from a disembodied, though omnipresent, position—she is the ship, inside which the crew is enclosed, much like a mother whose child is enclosed in her womb. Furthermore, the crew treats the ship as a beloved woman, describing her as “she,” and often saying how beautiful she is. In particular, both Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the ship's chief engineer, Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (James Doohan), all but worship her as as a thing of beloved beauty. In one episode, Scotty goes so far as to start a fight with a crew of Klingons because they “insulted the Enterprise.”

Thus, the computer serves for them both linguistically and emotionally as a maternal figure; however, this primarily auditory role of the computer disrupts the typical alignment of speech with male subjectivity, as Kaja Silverman describes it in The Acoustic Mirror. According to her, “Male subjectivity is...defined in relation to that seemingly transcendental auditory position, and so aligned with the apparatus” (57). Silverman applies this solely to classic cinema, though I argue that it is equally applicable to television. The computer is aligned with the apparatus—she serves simultaneously within the narrative as the literal apparatus that enables the voyage of the crew and externally to the narrative through the mechanism of literal voice-over in order to suture over the indicators of production. Yet the fact that the computer is gendered as a maternal woman disrupts male subjectivity by re-inscribing auditory characteristics typically gendered as male through cinematic voice-overs. Furthermore, I posit that this tension between the female-gendered computer voice and the male subjectivity of the crew is most evident when the lines between maternal voice and sexualized female voice combine, as is evident in the episode “Yesterday is Tomorrow,” when the computer has been reprogrammed to address the Captain as “Dear.” By analyzing this episode, I will show the ways in which the disembodied female voice not only threatens and disrupts male subjectivity, but also is seen in media situations other than classic cinema, thereby revealing the ubiquitousness of the tension between male and female subjectivity.

Ammendment to the Following Blog

I realized this morning that I forgot to mention what software Martina and I used for our soundscape. It's really not 100% relevant to my discussion, but I figured for the sake of sciencey type accuracy, I should at least note it.

When the files were recorded with my phone (a crappy Nokia thing that does little more than let me communicate with the planet), they were saved in AMR format. So after I uploaded the files to my PC (I have a data link cord thing) I downloaded a freeware program called FormatFactory to convert all my files quickly to MP3s. I then used a Blaze Audio program called Rip Edit Burn (something I've had since high school when I was doing a lot of powerpoint projects that needed music mixed to the correct times. It was well worth the $20 I spent way back then and has become even more useful now for creating my own ringtones) to cut out the individual line I wanted to use from each file, then mix them back into one big poem.

Since we did our parts individually, I have no clue what Martina's got. See her blog for more on that.

The Real Shakespeare is Studying English at WVU

Part 1: The Creation

For our soundscape, Martina and I used my cell phone to record some of our students (who were provided two extra credit points) and several GTAs (who were coaxed unabashedly by us) reading two of Shakespeare's more famous sonnets—“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day” and “My Mistress's Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun.” For each person we recorded, we asked him/her to read the sonnet directly from a piece of paper in his/her “best” British accent. Strangely enough, quite a few of our students had difficulty calling to mind exactly what a British accent sounds like, but since they were being rewarded with extra credit, they were more than willing to give it a shot. The GTAs, on the other hand, had no trouble understanding what the accent “should” sound like, yet they were all reluctant to try it when being recorded.

Once we had the recordings, Martina mixed “Shall I Compare Thee,” and I mixed “My Mistress's Eyes.” In the mixing process, we took individual lines from the poems out of the recordings and put them together so that a different person was reading a different line throughout. Then I sent my mixed poem to Martina, who put the two together into one file. The results can be found on Martina's blog: http://bloggershewrote.blogspot.com/.

Part 2: The “Readings”

There were several questions we set out to answer with our soundscape, and in truth, we didn't really answer any of them. When we started, I wanted to do something with a multi-vocal poem, Martina wanted to do something with British accents, and we both wanted to do something that would make a statement about authenticity. In the end, as the following discussion shows, we really came up with more questions than definitive answers. For this reason, I'd like to narrow my close listening down to just two problems: authenticity and ownership.

The biggest question we both wanted to answer was that of authenticity. What exactly is an “authentic” Shakespearean reading? (In actuality, we didn't set out to answer this question. We just picked Shakespeare's sonnets because they're easily recognizable and definable as British. Even so, this is where the soundscape led us.) Several of the scholars we've read (though none more so than Maria Damon in her defense of slam poetry) seem to want to argue that authenticity stems from authorship; in other words, for a reading to be authentic, the author has to read it in his/her authorial voice. Well, Shakespeare's dead, and sound recording was invented well after his life, so there's no possible way to have an “authentic” recording of his sonnets. So what exactly would be authentic here? As I mentioned above, one of the major concerns for the people we recorded was getting the British accent “right.” And as you'll notice in our soundscape, a lot of people failed miserably. But even if we went to England and found people who had been living there their entire lives to read for us, would it still be authentically Shakespearean? Probably not. In fact, it's entirely likely that the only “correct” sounding Shakespearean reading would likely have to come from a classically trained Shakespearean actor—one who's accent has been carefully tweaked to sound most British. (In my head, this sounds like a blend of the guy from Masterpiece Theatre, a BBC newscaster, and John Lovitz's “Aaacting” skit from SNL.)

Clearly, though, no one we asked to read for us is a classically trained Shakespearean actor. So what have we got? There are several readers who sound more British than others, particularly in the lines with soft “r”s. Take, for example, the first two lines in the soundscape. “Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day” sounds nasally, and the pronunciation of “Summer's day” sounds like “Summah's Day.” These are, arguably, the most recognizable characteristics of British accents. The second, though, is not only read by a male, instead of a female, but the reader also doesn't capture the soft “r” as clearly as the first. If we just take into consideration these differences in pronunciation, we might say the first is more authentic than the second. However, the female voice is gendered differently from what we'd expect William Shakespeare—as a man—to sound like. So how authentic can a woman reading Shakespeare be?

Let's take a male voice, then. The line “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see” was read by one of my students. He doesn't use the characteristic soft “r,” but the deep timbre of his voice can automatically be read as male, and as soon as I hear it, I think, “That's Jeffrey,” because it sounds exactly how Jeffrey does when he reads in class. So would it be less authentically Jeffrey if he were speaking in a British accent? Or would it just be more authentically Shakespearean? Is one preferable over the other?

This brings me, then, to the question of the work itself in terms of ownership and authenticity. What happens to a creative piece when multiple people, none of whom are the authors, appropriate the piece through a recorded reading? Shakespeare's works are now entirely free access; weirdly enough, though, we're still drawn as a culture to cite him as the author. Because of this, if Martina and I had billed our soundscape as “Two original poems written by us and read by various people we know,” the whole class would've gone nuts, someone would've turned us in for plagiarism, and our lives as scholars would be over. So who owns our soundscape? Again, Shakespeare's dead, so he can't really own anything. But I own the phone that recorded it; Martina and I own the software that mixed it; the people who read for us own the voices they used to deliver the poems; and the recording itself is posted on Martina's blog, which is accessible for free to anyone who wants it. I also own at least 5 different books with those two poems printed in them, although for the actual recording, we used a piece of paper Martina had created by copying and pasting the poems from a website she'd found into a Word document. But none of us owns the poems themselves. We merely took it and made it our own, though I'd argue not quite in Lethem's “second use” way. Yes, we recontextualized it, but we also tried to make it as “authentic” as possible.

So where does this leave the poems themselves? Have we taken two of the most beautiful poems ever written in the English language and horribly, disgustingly, defaced them by composing a mixed recording? In other words, we've come to the “vs.” part of any authenticity discussion: “good vs. bad,” “accurate vs. inaccurate,” “authentic vs. inauthentic.” In a technical sense, the poems are accurate, since every word written is accordingly spoken. And I, personally, think the soundscape is good—bordering on awesome—simply because I recognize all the voices, some of which make me laugh, and I had a good time putting it together. As for whether it's authentic, I argue yes, though not in the same way other people would. It's authentic in that it really is a collection of voices we took from people and mixed together to make two poems, right down to the clatter I purposefully left in during the line “Music hath a far more pleasing sound.” (Get it? Sound? Clatter?) On the other hand, if I were Shakespeare, I'd probably be shocked and horrified at what two reckless graduate students had done to my work. There's no regular emotion, nor even real emotion, unless you count the frantic student reaction, “I need extra credit so I don't fail my English class!!” Instead, there's a trace of identifiable voices, some of whom are better at faking a British accent than others. So I'm left with one last unanswerable question: does this trace count for authenticity if you can't trace it back to the author, and if the trace does lead us to the author, as he exists in the minds of the readers, what other form of authenticity could possibly exist?

Am I being objectified or thingified by using this medium?

Question 1: A dominant theme among the writers in Sound Unbound seems to be the emphasis of taking something everyday and making it new or recontextualizing it. I think this is all fabulous and necessary for us to avoid slipping so far into familiarity and product hyper-recognition that we're suddenly living out 1984 (which, oddly enough, was essentially a reworking of Zamyaten's book We). But Dick Hebdige brought up the fact that we're returning to the necessity of the "unimaginable," particularly in this post-9/11 time. So my question is: just how "revolutionary" or "avante-garde" or, in fact, NEW can anything really be? Lethem spends his entire essay talking about how nothing's really new, but it can have what he calls a "second use." Isn't the experimental, then, just a perpetuation of the cycle of capitalism? When we get overprogrammed, we suddenly need to reprogram ourselves. In turn, that reprogramming becomes the "second use" overprogramming until someone else comes along and tries to reprogram us. It's the Kurt Cobain Dychotomy: how can you be counter-culture and make an impact when your ideas have grown to the point of being culture itself?

I have no answer to that one. In fact, I'm not even sure there is an answer to that one.

Question 2: Why are sampling, public commons, P2P, etc., considered so "bad"? A number of the writers in this book have various answers, but most of them seem to want to boil it down to the evils of big business. I just don't see how it can be that easy, though. It seems to me that a big part of the "bad"ness behind sampling and "plagiarism" is the modern anxiety of uselessness and inadequacy. Anthony Giddens talks a lot about this in his book Modernity and Self-Identity in relationship to shame. Apparently, we develop shame in response to feelings of social inadequacy (65). Because of this, we're driven to "make something of ourselves" or "leave our mark on the world." We want to be original and important and, most of all, USEFUL. Lethem inadvertently points this out when he quotes Thomas Jefferson's writing of copyright law: "The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but 'to promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts.' To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work" (42). Notice, though, the word USEFUL in that quote. No matter what, art has to have a use value, whether it's commodified in the capitalist way or some other way. The trouble is that we live in a consumer culture where literally everything is bound up with commodification. Lethem talks about various "values" that can't be commodified. But the word used to describe them is "value." So they have worth. And we wouldn't believe in those values as a mediated culture if it weren't for the fact that all of our pop culture media establishes and reinforces those values. But the media isn't a gift; it's a commodity. So in order to maintain our "free" values, we two things: 1. the media that reinforces the values; and 2. the feelings of inadequacy in relationship to these values that drive us to maintain them in our everyday lives. Now, at this point, it sounds like I'm saying that the media is ruining us. But I"m not. I like pop culture and mass media. A lot. What I'm saying is that tearing down the corporate consumer culture we live in isn't going to help the fear of file sharing. We're still going to feel the need to be useful, something which Thomas Jefferson apparently thought the arts needed, even before arts were as technology-driven as they are now. What would have to change, then, in order for sampling and such to stop being "bad" is the entire way we perceive usefulness. Sure, art could be useful to just one person, who happened to have received said art as a "gift," and in turn, that one person could put that art to a "second use," but if that were to happen, how would art be able to develop in the first place? I'm getting unorganized and sketchy now as this whole thing breaks down, but I think I'm right back where I started in question 1: if we don't commodify things, how will things ever become objects in order to become things again?

Come up and analyze me some time.

Question 1: Silverman writes, "The 'talking cure' films also deprivilege the female psyche by denying to woman any possibility of arriving at self-knowledge except through the intervening agency of a doctor or analyst" (65). So doesn't this use of a male "medium" (i.e. doctor or analyst) mirror the medium of film & the use of the filmic apparatus to distance the male viewer from conscious knowing/facing his lack? I think Silverman would definitely say yes, since she talks a lot about how men are portrayed as striving to be "exterior" to the cinematic space, while women are portrayed as "exterior" to it. However, part of Silverman's larger point seems to be that classic cinema establishes gender boundaries through the voice. Yet if the use a male medium for women to tell their tales--constructing them in the interior of the film--mirrors the cinematic apparatus, rather than deprivileging women, wouldn't this actually break down the boundary between genders? In other words, if we ALL experience lack, and therefore interiorized through castration, but men can become exteriorized in classic cinema through identification with the cinematic apparatus (i.e. bodiless voice-over, etc.), isn't then the image of a woman telling her story to a male medium really just an extra layer of "othering" for the same process that men go through? I guess you could say that by portraying only women in the role of "lacking and in need of apparatus," then yes, gender boundaries are being forced onto women by associating them with lacking individuals and men without lack. However, there are plenty of men in films (though I can unfortunately only think of television episodes right now) who go to see an analyst or doctor. Thus, what's really going on with this type of scene is a rupture in the cinematic suture that covers over the fact that we need an apparatus to get at what we lack, which in turn is a never-ending, unfulfilling process.

Question 2: Silverman also writes, "The third of the operations through which Hollywood reinscribes the opposition between diegetic interiority and exteriority into the narrative itself is by depositing the female body into the female voice in the guise of accent, speech impediment, timbre, or 'gran.' This vocal corporealization is to be distinguished from that which gives the sounds emitted by Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, or Lauren Bacall their distinctive quality, since in each of these last instances it is a 'male' rather than a 'female' body which is deposited into the voice. Otherwise stated, the lowness and huskiness of each of these three voice connote masculinity rather than feminity, so that the voice seems to exceed the gender of the body from which is proceeds. That excess confers upon it a privileged status vis-a-vis both language and sexuality" (61).

Okay, I get the first part of that--the "depositing the female body into the female voice..." part--but my question is about the sexualization of Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, and Lauren Bacall. It's unquestionable that these three women were super sexy in their respective days. But what's unclear is how their "male" type voices, in combination with their overt desirability and sexiness, link to castration anxiety and the oedipus complex in the men who are drooling over them.