Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 1

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Reanimating the Archive: Collaboration and Performance with the Voices of the Dead / Erin R. Anderson

Openings

<1> I'd like to begin this essay by introducing the project that occasioned its writing. Our Time is Up: An Audio Drama (2014, 43:38, stereo audio) follows the story of an elderly couple, Jake and Helen McCleary, as they struggle to save their troubled marriage. I produced this drama in collaboration with actors Josiah Patton and Juanita Bowman, who perform as the voices of Jake and Helen; I play the couple's therapist. In the opening scene, we meet Jake and Helen as they arrive at the therapist's office for their first session:

<2> The drama unfolds across a series of weekly therapy sessions, in which Jake and Helen sift through the messy details of their failing relationship—his infidelity; her deteriorating health; and the everyday human struggle to listen, to be heard, and to be loved. Over the course of the drama, the audience is invited to listen in on recorded fragments of these sessions, played back on a cassette tape by an anonymous listener—presumably, but not necessarily, the therapist herself. Each of the scenes offers a brief glimpse into the conflict and context at hand, inviting the audience to eavesdrop on the couple's most intimate exchanges, while filling in the gaps with their own inferences and imaginations. Here is a clip from a scene early on in the drama:

<3> As the story progresses, the emotional tenor of the sessions ebbs and flows, moving between verbal spats, tender reminiscences, and painful revelations. In the scene below, following a moment of calm, Helen is provoked by what she perceives as a negative reaction from Jake, and we learn for the first time that Helen is blind-a fact that adds a layer of complexity to their relationship struggles, as they play out in the drama that follows:

<4> As the drama moves toward its conclusion, the sessions become increasingly raw and volatile, until Jake and Helen finally confront the decision of whether to end their marriage. Cutting off abruptly at the end of the couple's final session, in the closing scene, the narrative circles back to begin again, offering a reflection on the ephemerality of human lives and relationships and the paradoxical potential for reinvention that sound reproduction affords:

<5> In the summary above, I describe Our Time is Up as a "collaboration" with actors Josiah Patton and Juanita Bowman, who perform as the voices of Jake and Helen McCleary. To complicate, but in no way contradict that assertion, I would like to add this: that neither Josiah nor Juanita have ever heard the drama you've just listened to; that neither was aware of their pivotal role in bringing it into being; that, in fact, years before the idea for the drama was even conceived, both Josiah and Juanita had died. Unlike a conventional audio drama, which is pre-scripted as text and then performed by the voices of live actors ("live" in every sense of the term), this drama has been composed from the archives of oral history and performed by the voices of the dead. What we as listeners might experience as a co-responsive conversation between three conscious speaking subjects is in fact a digital illusion, constructed from thousands of tiny fragments of words— and stories— and voices-already-spoken—fragments which I have extracted from the original context of their articulation, reassembled into new performative utterances, and then sutured together with my own voice to create a shared story-in-the-making.

<6> The voice of Helen was drawn from a seven-hour oral history interview with the late Clella Juanita Bowman ("Juanita"), recorded on magnetic tape in 1980 and later digitized and posted online as part of Cal State Long Beach's Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive. And, playing opposite Helen is her husband, Jake, whose voice was composed from a two-and-a-half hour oral history interview that I recorded with my grandfather, Josiah Patton, in 2006, three years before his death. With the exception of my own role as the couple's therapist, which I scripted and recorded gradually as the story unfolded, this drama is made entirely of words actually spoken by Josiah and Juanita—in their own voices, about their own lives, for the purposes of historical preservation. However, in the context of this project, these words and voices have been deliberately disarticulated, recombined, and re-performed with the aid of audio editing software, such that they no longer faithfully represent—or even aspire to represent—the precise memories or emotions or intentions of their speakers. The story that emerges is one that is fundamentally constrained, both in content and intensity, by the finite nature of the archival recordings, at the same time as it is enabled by their infinitely malleable, connectible potential.

<7> For example, in the third excerpt above, we listen as Jake taunts his wife by tapping on an object he knows she can't see, before saying to the therapist:

<8> In fact, this brief, five-second line of dialogue is composed of four distinct clips, extracted from unrelated segments of my grandfather's oral history, in which he: (1) remarks on a photograph from his youth, (2) recounts his mother's death in childbirth, (3) reminisces about a house he used to rent that looked out over Seattle's Puget Sound, and (4) laughs at one of any number of stories he told me over the course of our conversation—he laughed so often that I've lost track.

<9> And, on the other hand, the entire subplot of Helen's blindness is also a work of fiction, fabricated from a pattern of figurative speech that I noted in Juanita's interview, in which she repeatedly expresses her incomprehension by saying:

<10> Unlike an oral historian or documentarian, who might listen to these voices for the underlying meanings they contain, in this project, I listened for the multiple, emergent, even contradictory meanings they might be made to perform—and then manipulated them accordingly.

<11> By way of illustration, here is a quick peek behind the curtain at the final scene of the drama:

<12> On the surface, to describe Josiah and Juanita as "actors" in this context might appear absurd. After all, neither was living at the time of the drama's production, and thus neither was capable of "acting" in the sense that we might traditionally understand the term, whether as "live" dramatic performance or volitional activity more generally. However, in this essay, I would like to maintain that Josiah and Juanita are not simply actors in this drama; they are also collaborators in a complex and co-created performance. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from sound studies, musicology, and new materialist philosophy, I will take up this audio drama as an opening: to reconsider the possibilities for agency, ethics, and invention in the vocal archive. In what follows, I will talk through the theoretical provocations that inspired my work on this project, the unexpected effects that my practice produced, and the prospects it suggests for a relational, material ethics of archival reanimation.

Interventions

<13> Our Time is Up emerged, first and foremost, as an intervention into prevailing cultural attitudes toward vocal archives and, more specifically, toward the voices of the dead. According to Sound Studies scholar, Jonathan Sterne, the voices of the dead played a central role in the cultural history of sound reproduction, such that, for early users of the phonograph, "death somehow explained and shaped the cultural power of sound recording."[1] As Sterne explains, alongside of the rise of sound reproduction in the Victorian era emerged a belief that the human voice might "be preserved indefinitely on record"-"embalmed" much in the same way that the human body could be embalmed through chemical processes.[2] It was in this context that the human voice emerged as the quintessential subject of sound recording, celebrated less for its own sake as a living intensity in the present and more for the future that it promised as a protection against "the seemingly inevitable decay" of human life. [3] And it was in this context that our present ethical relationship to the voices of the dead would emerge: a relationship of benevolent stewardship, in which the archive serves as a "cemetery" for the so-called "speaking dead." [4]

<14> Of course, this fixation on death is in no way specific to the vocal archive. As Jacques Derrida has famously argued, the very concept of the archive is predicated on "a diabolical death drive, an aggression or a destruction drive: a drive, thus, of loss." [5] In other words, without the possibility of decay, of forgetting, of losing hold, we would have no "feverish" impulse to remember, to capture, to preserve. But while we might like to imagine the archive as a means of honoring and protecting the dead, we cannot escape the fact that the archive is also a powerful site of containment and control. As philosopher Achille Mbembe argues, it is precisely from its inevitable "trade with death" that the archive derives its power:

"The act of dying, inasmuch as it entails the dislocation of the physical body, never attacks totally, nor equally successfully, all the properties of the deceased (in either the figurative or the literal sense). There will always remain traces of the deceased, elements that testify that a life did exist, that deeds were enacted, and struggles engaged in or evaded. Archives are born from a desire to reassemble these traces rather than destroy them. The function of the archive is to thwart the dispersion of these traces and the possibility, always there, that left to themselves, they might eventually acquire a life of their own. Fundamentally, the dead should be formally prohibited from stirring up disorder in the present." [6]

<15> Thus, we might say that, in the very act of rescuing the voices of the dead from oblivion, the archive must always at the same time render them inert, as static objects that might be properly managed and manipulated, contained and controlled.

<16> As Sterne has noted, since the earliest emergence of sound reproduction technology, voice recordings—as present or future "voices of the dead"—have never been collected and preserved for their own sake, but rather so that they "may continue to perform a social function." [7] In the case of oral history, this social function has shifted over time, in line with the tides of history-at-large, from a function of historical "data," or objective Truth, to one of memorial "text," or subjective truth. [8] In this context, we have seen increasing interest in the oral history narrative as a narrative—and, importantly, a narrative that is always co-constructed through the interaction between interviewer and narrator. [9] Furthermore, with the rise of digital audio technologies and online repositories, we've seen rising interest in the artifact of the voice recording itself, which has now largely eclipsed the once-privileged status of the alphabetic transcript. As a "corrective" to the field's tendency toward abstract, disembodied, or literary analysis, these newly accessible elements of vocal performance—"the silences" as much as the "intonation, pitch, and style of delivery"—have been taken up by oral historians as "an opportunity for more complex exploration of how people construct their narratives," such that it is not simply what the narrator says but also how she says it that matters.[10]

<17> With few exceptions, however, the field of oral history tends to approach archival voices in terms of their representational value—or what they say as interpretive windows into the past (or at least a particular human being's subjective experience of that past)—as opposed to their material or performative value—or what they do as sonic events in the present and future. In this sense, we might say that the agency of these voices is seen to start and end with the interview itself, couched, as it is, in the conscious intentionality of live human speech. Once a voice has been committed to tape (or the digital equivalent) and deposited in an archive, it becomes an object, not an agent—and, crucially, an object of our protection. Following Sterne, we might understand this preservational impulse as a fight against time, driven by the tripartite sense that: "we must preserve the voices of dying cultures so that we have them (linear-historical time); we must then preserve the recordings themselves so that we can keep them (geologic time), so that we may then break them down and study them at our leisure (fragmented time)." [11] And, while we tend to imagine the archive as an "intrinsic good" [12] for the benefit of future generations, paradoxically, the only "future" that we allow archival voices themselves is one fundamentally oriented toward the past, where any act of intervention is always already suspect as an act of exploitation. Certainly, by imagining ourselves as the self-appointed guardians of the voices of the dead, we ensure that these voices will in some sense "live on" and continue to "speak" beyond the lives of the bodies that produced them. However, in approaching these voices as static memory objects, we also erect formidable boundaries around their ability to do so.

<18> Of course, there have been noteworthy efforts, at the margins of oral history practice, to propose alternative futures for vocal archives. In his essay "Painting in Sound: Aural History and Audio Art," historian Charles Hardy III critiques the limitations of scholarly and documentary values, which take up oral history interviews only "for the information contained within them."[13] Calling for a reorientation toward the "physical properties—both psycho-acoustic and electroacoustic" and the "aesthetic qualities" of vocal archives, Hardy works to shift the conversation in oral history away from an exclusive focus on meaning and toward emergent questions of materiality and performance. Delighted by the sounds of people's recorded voices, Hardy describes his experience applying artistic practices of "paint[ing]" or "sculpt[ing]" to the materials of oral history, weaving together fragments of archival voice recordings with other archival sounds and music to create multilayered audio montages or "past pastiches," in an attempt to reanimate the lost worlds they evoke.[14] While Hardy's approach to voice is more celebratory than overtly critical, his work is notable to the extent that it seeks to position the archival voice itself as "living history, a historical artifact, a vessel of culture," with value in its own right. [15] And rather than take this status as requirement that we close off archival voices to creative intervention, Hardy encourages readers to listen to oral history "with an ear toward what you might create as the universe speaks to you in response to your own purposes."[16]

<19> Hardy's oral history-based audio art&mdash;like my own work in Our Time is Up—might be considered within a larger tradition of appropriation art, perhaps as an audio-only version of what film scholar Jaimie Baron calls "the appropriation film."[17] In her book, The Archive Effect, Baron describes the process through which an archival recording becomes invested with new possibilities and meanings through its relational interaction with other materials as it is reused toward new creative works—and, importantly, as an audience comes to recognize the distance between the recording's original context and the new context in which it has been placed. [18] Such practices suggest a clear violation of what Baron refers to as "the unspoken law of the archive: that every trace that has entered the archive must be preserved in its 'original' state, or as close to this state as possible." [19] At the same time, as Baron suggests, "[o]n some level, every use of a found document is a 'misuse,' because recontextualizations always reconfigure meaning."[20] In this sense, even the most experimental work of appropriation art may be no different in method or in kind than a conventional, indexical documentary, which repurposes archival recordings to tell a "true" story—even if it may be different in scale or purpose. Thus, in considering the art of archival appropriation, perhaps we must look beyond easy accusations of exploitation and "misuse" to consider the complex relations and imaginaries that such practices enable.

<20> Importantly, for Baron, the openings suggested by appropriation art are not only aesthetic but also deeply ethical. As she puts it: "The freedom to continually use and reuse archival documents means that we will never determine a stable, objective truth about the past, but it is that freedom that makes the archive a site not only of repression and limitation but also of possibility."[21] Part of this possibility is the potential to open new pathways for identification and empathy across conventional boundaries of past and present, living and dead, such that, "when we feel that we share the same context across time and space, we are charged with a moral responsibility toward those 'others' to whose traces we bear witness"[22]—a prospect I encountered through my work on Our Time is Up, and to which I will return later in this essay. At the same time, the question arises: what role do these "others" play in the forms of futurity that appropriation art allows? And is "appropriation" the only framework for understanding our relationship to their traces?

Provocations

<21> Turning to the work of musicologists Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, we find a provocative alternative to such an arrangement, which assumes that "the living […] one-sidedly handle the dead."[23] In their article, "Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane," Stanyek and Piekut consider the contemporary pop music phenomenon of the posthumous duet. Through a case study of "Unforgettable"—a 1991 collaboration between Natalie Cole and her father, Nat "King" Cole, produced 25 years after his death—these authors work to demonstrate that this duet is, in fact, a "collaboration": an act of mutually agential "co-labor" in which one of the key participants happens to be dead. They arrive at this strange possibility by rejecting limited, human-centered notions of agency-as-intentionality in favor of Karen Barad's new materialist framework of agency-as-"effectivity"[24]—and, in doing so, they work to open up a space for the recorded voice to continue acting beyond the life of its speaker. Under this framework, the voices of the dead become not simply inert relics of the past, but rather vibrant material forces with the ability to create effects in the present and future—and, indeed, the ability to participate in relationships of "mutually effective co-laboring" with the living.[25] In other words, while it may be true that "the dead cannot respond, cannot change or adapt to their living counterparts,"[26] this does not mean that they are simply passive objects at the mercy of the whims of the living. Instead, Stanyek and Piekut ask us to consider how these recorded voices—as complex "interanimations of voice, body, and identity"[27]—might work to structure the possibilities and effects of our practice in substantive and lasting ways.

<22> In their analysis of "Unforgettable," Stanyek and Piekut describe a complex set of "intra-action[s]," through which Nat "King" Cole comes to participate in the duet, despite the fact that he was not living at the time of its production.[28] Toward this end, they propose the concept of "matching," in which particular qualities of the original recording help to determine the shape and arrangement of the later composition. For example, they describe how fluctuations in the tempo of Nat's voice, recorded prior to the development of mechanized "click tracks" for keeping the beat, served to modulate the tempo of Natalie's vocal performance—and, conversely, how Nat's performance was also obliged to give way to the requirements and limitations of his daughter's through the use of post-production techniques to regulate variations in vocal amplitude. [29] In this sense, rather than understanding matching as a process of "mere mimesis"—a rudimentary "fidelity to an inert aesthetic past"—Stanyek and Piekut propose it as "a method for reactivating the latent capital stored in recorded performances"—one which is always "shared" and "co-performed" by past and present, living and dead.[30]

<23> Furthermore, Stanyek and Piekut emphasize the extent to which this co-participation extends beyond the boundaries of human actors to encompass the many nonhuman participants that contribute to the effects of the final performance. Citing "[m]icrophones, cables, tape heads, headphones, and architectures" as some of the many nonhuman players, Stanyek and Piekut argue that "the role played by technology cannot be overstated." [31] For example, they describe how a major factor in the matching process, in the production of "Unforgettable," came down to a question of microphone selection: Natalie Cole was provided with a vintage microphone of the same model her father had used in the original recording, in order to more closely match the "grain" or quality of his voice. In this sense, the form of "collaboration" that Stanyek and Piekut ask us to imagine is one that takes up humanly-produced sounds as part of much larger material constellations of nonhuman bodies and technologies, which challenge the very categories of "living" and "dead" at their core.

<24> I encountered many of these requirements for "matching" in my collaboration with Josiah and Juanita's vocal recordings in Our Time is Up. As a dramatic narrative, my work was not constrained by requirements like tempo and pitch, which were central to the Coles' two-part harmony. However, because I sought to create an illusion of seamless dramatic co-presence, the overall consistency of the audio quality was a principal concern. In other words, because I wanted it to feel as if these three actors were performing coterminously in a shared dramatic space, I faced the challenge of conjuring and creating a shared acoustic space, matching my own vocal performance to the archival recordings, while also matching the two archival recordings with one another—and, in some cases, with themselves. In order to create a more consistent acoustic texture across the recordings, I used a variety of editing techniques to deliberately reduce the quality and complexity of both my grandfather's voice recording and my own vocal performance in order to mimic the analog aesthetic of Juanita's recording. And, conversely, I used graphic equalizers to brighten the quality and clarity of Juanita's voice in relation to extraneous noise and digital distortion. Thus, in keeping with Stanyek and Piekut's insistence on matching as "co-labor" as opposed to simple mimicry, I enlisted the participation of all of the voices involved in order to achieve the optimal aesthetic balance between production value and the illusion of a shared performance.

<25> Like many oral histories, both Josiah's and Juanita's interviews were recorded far from the sanitized confines of the soundproof studio in the domestic spaces of their homes. As such, these archival voices necessarily carry with them not only the sonic register of the acoustical space, but also the many other sounds and rhythms of day-to-day life. Once committed to tape, these unwanted noises become inseparable from the voice itself, sounding behind it and with it and, in some cases, against it. Stanyek and Piekut might make sense of this phenomenon in terms of a so-called "leakage effect," wherein "an activity in one area expands unexpectedly into another area, setting in motion a second process, project, or concern."[32] Over the course of my work on this drama, such auditory interruptions—whether a revving engine, a chiming clock, or a stray laugh or vocal affirmation from the interviewer or another person in the room—stood as a profoundly irritating obstacle to my practice, as I struggled to minimize their impact or imagine how they might exist in the diegetic space of the drama. However, despite my desire to sanitize, compartmentalize, and ultimately control these unwanted sounds, they ultimately served as an important reminder of the highly idealized, abstracted nature of the voice sounding alone—and an important reminder of the distributed agency of the archive more generally.

<26> At its root, the kind of agency-as-effectivity that Stanyek and Piekut propose here is deeply material and grounded in a notion of "corpauralities" or sounding-bodies-in-relation.[33] Rather than understanding voice recordings as mere "traces" of a past embodiment, which has come and gone with the life of the singer or speaker, these authors invite us to imagine them as existing in "an emergent, interactive, dialogic presence," such that "we must hear the voice emerging from the resonant body as the body resonates in the voice."[34] For Stanyek and Piekut, this corpaural "imbrication of sounds with fleshy bodies" [35] does not stop at the boundary of the particular human body that produces a voice, or even at the boundary of the human body in general. Rather, it participates in an ongoing, relationally entwined agency with all manner of material bodies, begging the question: "Where does one body—one sound—begin and the other end?"[36]—and thus, by extension, where does one agency—one effectivity—begin and the other end? In this sense, as we consider the fullest range of "entities that have effects" [37] in such a collaboration, perhaps we must also consider the many marginal or coincidental agents—both human and nonhuman—that unwittingly attend or obstruct or construct the vocal archive.

Extensions

<27> Of course, in the case of oral history and audio drama—as explicitly narrative arts—it is not only the sound of the archival voices, but also the words those voices speak, which have the capacity to produce effects. If this is the case, then we need to consider the extent to which language might also participate in the relational effectivity of intermundane collaboration. I find it useful here to turn to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin for a perspective on the fundamentally lived, dialogic nature of language. Rather than understand language as something apart from, other than, and superior to what Stanyek and Piekut call the "fleshy bodies" of the material world, Bakhtin's approach to language allows for an opening to a similar form of mutual "imbrication."[38] Central to Bakhtin's thinking is the idea that speakers do not draw their words from the dictionary, but rather encounter them "in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions" and then appropriate them for their own purposes.[39] As such, one's own speech is always first and foremost invested with "echoes and reverberations" of the speech of another,[40] often in the form of audible "accents" and "expressive intonations" that are constitutive of meaning.[41] This material dimension of language only becomes more palpable when we make the shift from writing with words to writing with voices.

<28> Indeed, in my work on Our Time is Up, it was not simply the linguistic material of the oral history recordings that structured the possibilities around which the drama could emerge, but rather, the fundamentally audible, intonational material of the spoken utterance. In other words, given my desire in this project to create an illusion of "natural" human speech, it was not enough that the archival recordings I used contained words and phrases that would "make sense" in the context of the emerging dramatic narrative. Rather, there was an additional requirement that those words and phrases be accentuated or intoned with what Bakhtin would call an "emotionally evaluative attitude toward the subject," [42] in order to suit the relevant social context of the new performative utterance. Thus, while language played a key role in the "matching" process of the posthumous audio drama, it did so in a way that was inextricably tied to the material performativity of the voice itself.

<29> As I sifted through my index of audio files from Josiah and Juanita's recordings and worked to reassemble them into a dramatic dialogue, I was forced to confront this material excess at every turn, adapting my compositional process to the constraints of the archives at hand. At any given moment, however much I may have wanted Helen to respond to Jake with a particular configuration of words, if those words were not contained in the archive—or if the intonation in which they were spoken clashed with the context at hand—more often than not, I was forced to shift directions. Unlike a director in a traditional work of live theater, in this project, I didn't have the luxury of asking my actors to shift the tone of their performance to accommodate my artistic vision. In this sense, Josiah and Juanita's role as "actors" in the drama went well beyond the (albeit far from simple) act of bringing to life a performance-already-scripted. Instead, they became co-participants in imagining the shape and possibilities of the story itself, such that the processes of scripting and performance became rolled together into a single, co-responsive compositional process.

<30> Following Jaimie Baron, we might imagine this "excess" as a constitutive feature of the archive itself, such that recontextualized documents always "carry traces of another intention with them and seem to resist, at least to some degree, the intentions that the appropriation filmmaker—by argument or design—imposes upon them."[43] At the same time, it would be highly problematic to suggest that what we might call the sticky intonation of these archival voices guarantees that the speakers' original intentions are somehow preserved. Rather, as Bakhtin reminds us, in seeking to "divine the real meaning of others' words in everyday life, the following are surely of decisive significance: precisely who is speaking, and under what concrete circumstances."[44] In other words, context matters. And, in this experiment, while my practice was constrained by both the finite set of words contained in the archival recordings and by what Bakhtin might call the "brute materiality"[45] of their intonations, it is precisely the context that becomes malleable, as I work to disarticulate and rearrange fragments of these voice recordings into new configurations. In this sense, while it might be tempting to imagine that intonation somehow gives way to a form of posthumous agency-as-intentionality, we must remember that the archival voice, as recorded sound, is only, in the words of Jonathan Sterne, an "exteriority" or "a resonant tomb." [46]

<31> With this in mind, I should also be careful not to underplay the extent of my own participation in this process. Effectivity aside, as the only conscious, intentional agent in the collaboration, there is no question that I had enormous authorial control over the precise configurations of words and syllables and stories that these voices expressed. While the material speech and performative effects of Josiah and Juanita's recorded voices did provide formidable constraints—and thus considerable direction—for the thematic and aesthetic development of the drama, in the end, the decision of precisely how to recombine these materials within the given structures of possibility and toward what end was mine alone to make. In this sense, while I sincerely believe this project to be a work of collaboration—between myself, my grandfather, Juanita, and a whole range of other technological and material agents—it would be absurd to suggest that it were somehow a collaboration between equal partners. Undoubtedly, certain "asymmetries of power—and thus of responsibility—persist." Although, as Stanyek and Piekut are quick to point out, "collaborations with the dead are no different in this regard than those with the living, and we should be careful not to condemn intermundane projects out of hand." [47]

<32> From an ethical standpoint, then, perhaps the primary risk that this project presents is the possibility that the audience might mistake Josiah and Juanita's participation in this project for another kind of participation altogether: namely, intentional performance, if not precisely speech. Drawing as it does from the conventions of the audio drama genre, this experiment invites its audience to experience an illusion of simultaneous, live performance—or at least conscious performance by witting "actors," in every sense of the term. As would be the case in nearly any work of drama, in Our Time is Up, Josiah and Juanita do not purport to be playing themselves, but rather the fictional characters, Jake and Helen McCleary, around which the narrative has been constructed. At the same time, it is important to recall that neither Josiah nor Juanita have had the volitional capacity to decide to use their voices to enact these characters in the first place—and, crucially, that there is little evidence in the work itself that makes this fact clear to a listening audience. In this sense, we might say that the ethical dilemma that arises here is not an ontological question of being or owning, but rather a phenomenological question of being received—and thus being implicated in the consequences and effects of the work at hand.

<33> Ultimately, if we take seriously Stanyek and Piekut's suggestion that "[a]ll entities" in intermundane collaborations "are co-responsive but not always co-responsible,"[48] then perhaps we must consider what forms of responsibility might be expected of those of us capable of exercising them—and, in particular, what forms of accountability we owe to our archives in a project like this one. While there is no question that Josiah and Juanita should receive credit for their participation in this project, it is also important that this credit be clearly defined and delimited—that they not be mistaken for conscious, intentional subjects with the ability to direct and account for the consequences of their participation. With this in mind, perhaps we might say that ethical approaches to intermundane collaboration are those which are transparent about their status as such, making evident both the power and the limitations of all entities involved. Perhaps what is called for is a new model of archival ethics, one that does not preemptively restrict the terms of our engagement with archival materials, but which seeks to make our relationship with those materials self-evident as a core requirement of the work itself.

Prospects

<34> As a tentative opening into this possibility, I find it useful to turn to another practice of aberrant vocal performance for a potential inroad: the practice of ventriloquism, as an idiosyncratic art of "speaking in another voice or even in another's voice" [49] for performative effect. Like the ventriloquist, in this project, I am engaged in a practice of mobilizing others' voices in order to "facilitate the appearance of conversation"[50]—a strange kind of conversation, which is at once an act of talking with myself and talking with another. And, like the ventriloquist, my practice is characterized by a back-and-forth responsivity in which I must "act as if listening to another while, at the same time, speaking for that other," [51] in turn. Building on these connections, I wonder if we might take inspiration from what philosopher David Goldblatt has called the guiding principle of the ventriloquial performance: the performance of "illusion without deception." [52] Unlike puppetry, which attempts to hide the source of the dummy's voice behind a curtain, "in ventriloquism the voice-source appears with, is present to the figure and is itself a character in the performance as the ventriloquist impresses the appearance of the singularity of her role."[53] And, unlike the magician, whose success is based on the audience's inability to determine how the act was performed, "[a] ventriloquist who actually deceives an audience would undermine his own act." [54]

<35> It seems to me that this model—of "illusion without deception"[55]—might be a powerful ethical framework not only for intermundane collaboration with the voices of the dead, but for recombinatorial work with archival materials more broadly. As I have noted, in Our Time is Up, one of my primary goals was to fracture and recombine these archival voice recordings to create an illusion of "live" drama through fluid, intonationally-driven editing. At the same time, it is in no way my intention to trick my audience into believing that the actors' voices are in fact the voices of conscious speaking subjects. To the contrary, to succeed in passing off Josiah and Juanita as intentional, living performers would be to undermine the foundation of the conceptual experiment I am undertaking, as well as the uncanny effect of the experience I am seeking to create. As Jaimie Baron argues, "the viewer's [or "listener's"] recognition of the manipulation of the archive effect is precisely the point." [56] In this sense, far from aiming to dissimulate the constructed nature of the piece and the true sources of the voices from which it is comprised, my goal here is to present to my audience an impossible dramatic encounter between the voices of the living and the voices of the dead-voices which feel as if they could be sitting in a room, speaking to one another, sorting through their differences in the familiar ways that people do, but which we all know obviously cannot.

<36> Like an act of ventriloquism, I see this experiment as an "occasion for letting strange voices speak" [57]—and, in the process, an occasion for letting the vocal archive become strange in ways that allow us to hear it differently and reimagine our relationship to it. Just as ventriloquism asks us to challenge "one general assumption of our adult form of life: that things do not speak,"[58] my work here asks us to examine our fundamental assumption that the dead do not speak—or, perhaps more aptly, that we cannot speak with or through the archival traces and voices of others. In doing so, this practice may have the potential, like ventriloquism, to "[extend] the domain of relationships we have with things"—or, in this case, archives—which are "ordinarily off-limits to conversation."[59] In taking on this ventriloquial experience of "being outside the self" by speaking through and alongside the voices of others, perhaps we might even begin to "recogniz[e] other voices in ourselves" and to "problematiz[e] the idea that the self is located in the behavior of a single mind or body."[60] Indeed, it is in this sense that I see my experiment not simply as a challenge to ethical proscriptions against certain forms of engagement with archival materials, but as an opening to a positive, generative ethical alternative.

<37> At the outset of this project, I had no characters, no story, and no real direction to speak of. I had only a simple, or at least single-minded objective: to collaborate with the voices of the dead. Toward this end, the act of composing the drama unfolded gradually over time—through hours of attentive listening (and meticulous indexing and editing)—and in constant, intimate conversation with the joys, and sorrows, and stubbornnesses of these two individuals: Josiah Patton, who I knew all my life as "Grandpa," but have since come to know quite differently, and Juanita Bowman, who I never met—and never will meet—but who now feels, in many ways, like an old friend. Throughout the process, I felt my relationship to these voices evolving and changing, as I winced with the pain of their cries, anticipated the rhythms of their breaths, and responded to the urgencies of their speech in ways that felt incredibly present, in every sense of the term. This was perhaps the most surprising—and most satisfying—outcome of my experiment: Not the extent to which I was able to change these archival voices into something new, but the extent to which, in doing so, these voices changed me.

<38> Through this work, I have come to realize that to write with the voices of others is, in a sense, always to write with those others and to be written by those others in the process. What is at stake here is not simply the artistic freedom to do what we like with the archival voices and traces of the dead without fear of ethical censure. Rather, it is an opening to radically reimagine our relationship with archival materials—and with the material past more broadly—such that we might become ethically implicated, in mutually affecting ways, with that which has come before us and that which will necessarily come after. As Jaimie Baron argues, to experience an encounter with the past in the present is to encounter "the potential otherness of the future, the recognition that the context in which we live and to which we (at least to some degree) subscribe is transient and that it, too, shall pass."[61] At the same time, if we use our practice as a way to move beyond these very bifurcations—between past and present, object and agent, living and dead—then such encounters might also help us to experience the ways in which our time is never really up at all. Ultimately, if it's true, as Stanyek and Piekut suggest, that "being recorded means being enrolled in futures (and pasts) that one cannot wholly predict nor control,"[62] then perhaps we might approach this fact not as a liability, but as an opportunity: to imagine new forms of relationality, of creativity, and of care. In the words of Bruno Latour: "Fleeing from the past while continuing to look at it will not do. Nor will critique be of any help. It is time to compose—in all the meanings of the word, including to compose with, that is to compromise, to care, to move slowly, with caution and precaution."[63] I like to imagine my work here as a potential opening to this project.

Our Time is Up: An Audio Drama

2014, 43:38, stereo audio

Postscript

<39> I would like to close with a gentle reminder that, despite my interventions, the oral histories of Josiah Patton and Juanita Bowman remain alive and intact (if not entirely unchanged), waiting on the "shelves" of their respective archives for a curious listener to lend an ear. And while I hope that this project will inspire imaginative ideas about the creative and ethical potential of archival reinvention, I also hope it will inspire interest and investment in the real people and stories and memories that existed behind and before this collaboration unfolded, and without which this audio drama could have never come to be. My deepest admiration and gratitude goes out to my collaborators, Josiah and Juanita, who will never know the extent of the effects that they have had, but who will have had them all the same.

Notes

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