Endnotes
[1] The “right” techniques of breastfeeding are widely negotiated and constantly re-discussed in the diverse guides on care for the newly born. See, for example, step-by-step advice entitled “It’s all about the Latch”: http://www.americanpregnancy.org/firstyearoflife/bflatch.html
[2] The recordings were made with a stereo pair microphone so that I held the microphones in my hands and moved them dynamically during the recording. This enabled a smooth reaction curve for the transformations in the breastfeeding sounds that occurred when the baby was moving or changed her latch etc.
[3] The complex issue of an arranged and perhaps rehearsed set-up for data collection fits the context of ethnographic research: see, for example, Ball & Smith, 2001, p. 311.
[4] I consider the sound here as an aural-tactile instigator of the textual feed. The sound emanates through the words and vice versa, the words emanate through the sounds.
These two constantly oscillate and intertwine to each other; they are words sounding and bodies speaking, they are sound-text-meshes forming a rhizome of writing/recording the bodies. So this sound is not a sonic illustration to the text – neither is it a verbal illustration to the sound. Therefore I did not choose to include here an unedited recording, instead I layered and processed the sound, and created some circulating movement within the sound flow. These processes were made to exaggerate the liquid quality of the breastfeeding event, and to create an immersive textu(re)ality to the sound flux.The use of the loop in the exposition continues the overall liquidness.
[5] Irigaray, L. 1985 [1977]. This Sex Which is Not One. p. 26.
Listening, recording technologies and the ethos of preservation
In this current era of the daily experienced and
widely used close recording of breathing, bodily
fluxes and intestinal resonances it is exciting to
recall how the invention of recording technologies,
scientific interest in human sensations and the urge
to create analytical parameters of emotional states
were closely entangled at the beginning of the twentieth
century. As Ian Penman remarks, “listening in” was a
crucial act both in the practices of psychoanalysis and in
the first field recordings (1999, p. 26). In their desire
to hear the “inner” and “other” voices, these early
psycho-scientists and anthropologists used the vertiginous
loop of endless takes, replays and playbacks as an inherent
mechanism for interpreting the visceral depths of human
existence. The tremors of amplification,
the phantasmagorical a-temporality of storage and the
disarticulating repetition potential all affected how the
auditory ontology of “the subject” as detached from the
outer world started to take shape. In this process the human
voice, as wrenched “from its cultural pre-eminence and
inviolable position in the throat” (Kahn 1999, p. 9), was
re-territorialised in an altered relation with its visceral
origins. The dualisms of inside/outside, hidden/revealed,
significance/utterance, form/matter and absence/presence
inhabited both the understanding of the self (with its parasite “other”)
and the modes of communication. The focus on listening,
particularly on listening to “different things”, and “to more of
them and on listening differently” (Kahn 1999, p. 9) was
intertwined in the larger cultural spreading of industrialisation
and its effects with a heavy emphasis on preserving – of voices,
rituals and communication, for example.
As Jonathan Sterne (2003) remarks, late-nineteenth-century
preservationism was closely rooted in the newly invented canning
of food and the embalming of dead bodies, which represented the
“heuristic of bourgeois modernity” – the macabre allusion to both
in the same sentence is perhaps not that implausible if we consider
today’s food industry. According to Sterne, in this atmosphere the
sound recordings “took a triple temporality for their early users:
the geologic decay of the medium; the linear sense of historical
time and an immutable and inevitable break with the past; and
cyclic notion on the time based on fragment, the sonic element of an event”
(p. 332). In a way, this “triple temporality” incorporated the
idealism of late-nineteenth-century scientific and scholarly
objectivity; the assumed accuracy of the time-fix potential was
captured ‘as such’ by a mechanical machine, not through the verbal
inscription and dubious memories of fleshly humans. Meanwhile,
the lauded scientific and technical promise with its undercurrent
ideology of promoting Western civilisation over more ‘primitive’
cultures (cf. Brady 1999, p. 16) sowed the early seeds of techno-dystopia,
the apocalyptic worry of alienating humans from their
“essential humanity” through the use of technology
(cf. Law & Fortunati & Yang 2006, p. 259).
The ambivalence between abhorrence and enchantment, as well
as the diverse strategies for maintaining boundaries between human
and machine, and between nature and culture therefore seemed
to include understanding of recording technologies in the initial stages.
Listening to one’s own deboned voice and sounds – thereby retouching
one’s self – connects us to the location of the voice in recordings.
In his discussion of the actual impossibility of the ‘disacousmatized’
voice (the vocal source is never actually seen) Mladen Dolar points out
that the voice is like a “bodily missile that separates itself from
the body" and spreads around, but on the other hand it points to a
bodily interior, ”an intimate portion of the body which cannot
be disclosed” (Dolar 2006, p. 70). What, then, is the difference
between listening to the “intimate portion” of the very interior
of the human body conducted by air, or conducted by digital waves?
Although sensing the epidermal difference between one’s own voice
in reality and listened to, and in a recording, it does not quite
erase the sense of self in the voice. Almost on the contrary,
in its liminal and radically re-territorialised location, one’s own
recorded voice is “the very impossibility of the division” between
interior and exterior (Dolar 2006, p. 71). With its multiplying,
fluctuating and oozing movement, the recorded voice inscribes
diverse spatio-contagious layers far beyond the presumably fixed
stratifications, and in the tactile sensing of the other in one’s self.
Introduction
The act of recording the breastfeeding of a new-born
baby in order to collect intimate bodily frequencies
for sonic works includes several critical crossings of
various cultural, social and embodied borders.
Directing the microphones towards the vital sucking hub,
the mouth-breast alliance of mother and baby, suggests
both deconstruction and reconstruction of the relational
assemblages between baby, mother, sound collector,
recording technologies, touching, listening, and the
linguistic inscription of bodily sensations. Presumably
the most obvious socio-material division emerges
between the mother-baby component and the
recordist-technology component. However, being
highly multi-layered the relational affiliations in
this particular case also include the symbolic and
concrete transmission between the sounds and
the listeners, as well as the gendered and
authorial economies around art making, media,
tools and commodities.
In this text/sound I explore the process of recording
breastfeeding in terms of art making (sounds),
artistic research and writing bodily experiences.
In my reflections I meander through the epistemological
and aesthetic negotiation of the continuously
mutating ethos of sound preservation (cf. Sterne p. 292),
and the political aspects of body-sound recording.
The theoretical rhizomes around the reflection
fluctuate among the various approaches of sound studies, deconstructive philosophy and cyber-feminism.
“Women take more pleasure from touching than from looking” [5]
Openness, the constant potential of always being in motion, constitutes the basis of feminine desire, self-reflection and linguistic elaboration in Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of feminine sexuality. The openness is closely entangled with plurality in the identification process, pleasure, and the nearness that has no primary owning or possessing purposes. Thus:”[w]oman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either” (1985 [1977]) p. 31). Within these practices, touching is crucial because of its infinite denying of form, the actual palpating of “the incompleteness of form” (p. 26).
In and on the imprecise zone(s) of the “silent, multiple, diffuse touch” (p. 29) also lie the nothing-everything-nourished mechanics of fluids of feminine becoming-subject. According to Irigaray, the specific economy of fluids cannot be rooted in the concepts of volumes or instrumental measures. “Metamorphoses occur in which there is no complete set, where no set theory of the One is established (Irigaray 1985 [1974], p. 233). When “two does not divine into ones” (p. 236) a certain obscure flux oozes to the very heart of defining a/the woman:
And there almost nothing happens except the (re)production of the child. And the flow of some shameful liquid. Horrible to see: bloody. Fluid has to remain that secret remainder, of the one. Blood, but also milk, sperm, lymph, saliva, spit, tears, humors, gas, waves, air, fire…light. (p. 237)
In the context of popular culture, female pleasure is closely connected to liquid as/in sound. In the absence of clearly visual evidence of the sensual climax, sound becomes a proof of feminine satisfaction (Corbett & Kapsalis p. 98). One liquid is substituted by liquid sound: diverse excretions of sighs, moans, shrieks, gasps and the cultural coding of them. Strikingly, the sounds of newly born nutrition, the sighs and gasps during breastfeeding strongly resemble the sonification of female erotic pleasure. Various activities in the mouth dominate both sound realms, and the absence of semantic language is prominent: it is a grammar of groaning.
My monitored listening/sensing of the recorded sound of this vital eroticised mouth-sound flux included some curious interaction between the feminine sharing of post-natal intimacy and artistically legitimised voyeurism. I shamelessly enjoyed listening closely to the milk flowing in the breast of the mother, who could not hear it in the same way. It is not akin to looking through a magnifying glass at her skin, but is more like touching her intestines through arthroscopic-operational listening. The fluid I palpate through listening has no hidden face.
Nowadays sex, birth and death are typically isolated in closed and private spaces (Burkitt 1999, p. 51). The breastfeeding of a two-week-old baby thrillingly included fleshly elements of all three; the violent, fatal act of birth is still almost tangible, referring subtly to the intercourse that started the process. This particular fragile liminality of the newly born baby encourages preservative acts: replaying in extreme. Replaying supreme.
Anyone wishing to enter this fragile and liminal space as an outsider, even for artistic purposes, needs an ethically valid reason. At this point the politics of art is perhaps first and foremost the effort of overturning “the logic of the theatre by making the spectator active”, as Jacques Rancière describes projects in which the art exhibition is treated as a place of political activism, for example (Rancière 2010, p. 137). The artist’s intrusion into the closed space is justified through the performative embodying of the senses in it. It gives the privilege to the bodies in action.
According to Katherine Norman, the beauty of field recording is that the sound slice can be “owned”; it can be listened to in a private set-up beyond the recording situation (however, usually in order to share the sound with others at some point) (2004, p. 61). What I find important in this assumed detachment process of sound recording is the understanding of a singular recording as plural. Given the continuous re-playings, re-sensings and re-creations, recording is never actually fixed in one form or another. It is in-definite, infinite, form is never complete in it/[her] (cf. Irigaray 1985 [1977], p. 229).
Literature
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Ball , M. & Smith, G., 2001. Technologies of Realism? Ethnographic Uses of Photography and Film. In Atkinson, P. & Goffin, A. & Delamont, S. & Lofland, J. & Lofland,L. eds. Handbook of Ethnography. London: Routledge, 302–319.
Brady, E., 1999. The Spiral Way. How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography. Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi.
Burkitt, I., 1999. Bodies of Thought. Embodiment, Identity & Modernity. London: Sage.
Corbett, J & Kapsalis, T. 2001. Aural sex. The female orgasm in popular sound. In Weiss, A. S., ed. Experimental Sound and Radio. New York: Massachusetts Institue of Technology, 97–106.
Demers, J. 2010. Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
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Irigaray, L. 1985. [1977] This Sex Which Is Not One. Transl. by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Irigaray, L. 1985 [1974]. Speculum of the Other Woman. Transl. by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
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Penman, Ian. 1999. On the Mic. How Amplification Changed the Voice for Good, teoksessa Undercurrents: the hidden wiring of modern music, toim. Rob Young. London: Continuum. 26–34.
Plant, S. 2000. On the Matrix. Cyberfeminist Simulations. In Bell, D. & Kennedy, B. M. The Cybercultures Reader. London & New York: Routledge, 325–336.
de Preester, Helene. 2007. To perform the layered body – a short exploration of the body in performance’, Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, 9 (2), 349-383.
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Scales, C. 2004. Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry on the Northern Plains. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Sterne, J. 2003. The audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Weiss, A. S. 2001. Erotic nostalgia and the inscription of desire. In Weiss, A. S., ed. Experimental Sound and Radio. New York: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 8–21.
Listening to recordings, re-sonances, replaying, re-touching
The primary reason for my recording the breastfeeding of a two-week-old baby was simply the desire to listen to, to sense, to be part and to ‘have’ the intimate and unique sounds for future audio works. This desire is deeply rooted in the existence of the recording technologies – I would not arrange a meeting with the mother of the baby ’just’ to listen to the act of breastfeeding through uncontaminated ears if I could not have the recorded files to listen to whenever I wish. Therefore my desire follows first and foremost a certain economy of sensing in/through technologies. It is – now and always-already - borne and nourished through the self-evident existence of recording technologies. In a way, the practice of recording as an ecstatic replaying, as re-sensing the sounds of other bodies, has become my unquestioned basic need. My listening techniques derive from the prerequisite guidance of the machines, the recording devices, just as the newly born baby’s feeding is guided by her nipple contact. We both need buttons to feed our desires.
It is obvious that this basic need is highly political and privileged in its unquestioned existence in the realm of sound making and the arts. The arranged set-up [3] in which one listens to someone in order to record and capture his or her acts is already imbued with heavy hierarchical tension. As Jacques Attali remarks, “eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance are weapons of power. The technology of listening in on, ordering, transmitting, and recording noise is at the heart of this apparatus” (Attali 1985, p. 7). According to Attali, the technologies of recording are inseparably intertwined with various activities around listening: the desire to listen in itself, and the particular interest in further organising, categorising, controlling, interpreting and valuing the listened-to material. In this circulation, noise is understood as a power of resistance and a complex tool for de-coding and re-coding the hegemonic assemblages in sounding societies.
My desire to listen to breastfeeding through microphonic contamination follows a certain political economy of noise. The noise I palpate here is not a loud sound, or a disturbing sound, or even a Russoloan “complex” sound, it is the overall bodily stance or attitude of listening as sensory-politically totalising activity. This corresponds vaguely with Salome Voegelin’s notion of the first and foremost, excusive quality of noise (2010, p. 43). In her account of the rave-nights she experienced she names her body as “the host of noise” in which the sensory-motor actions had become “reactions to the intense and obsessive demands of the sounds that command” her space (Voegelin 2010, 47). She treats noise primarily as a sound, as an object and a subject of experience. Although agreeing with her in her sonic descriptions, I refer to noise here, in the context of recording breastfeeding and the encounter between two machinic assemblages, as something more imprecise in its boundaries: I consider it a liminal stage/state/space of activity, a socio-material setting as well as a means of both privately totalising and publicly sharing the tactile sensations in sound.
My recording of the breastfeeding is noise and noisy because it assumes a certain performative and accessible openness in the relation between the newly born baby and her mother beyond the self-evident tactile symbiosis. It impregnates a sounding tissue-flow of the productive politics of bodies. It follows the economies of monitored proxy and dismantled intimacy. It constantly re-territorialises the embodied spatio-temporal assemblages between the baby’s mouth and the nourishing nipple, and it reshapes the epidermal contagion lines between the present agents and the situation. Furthermore, it permeates and infiltrates the imaginary and symbolic structures of action flows with thousands of endlessly whirling listening/sensing circuits. My being very close to the microphone changes the air around the baby and the mother to the infected past-present-future-plateaus. My recording is noise and noisy because it haunts the ultimate re-sounding, re-playing, re-touching, re-membering, re-shaping and re-preserving…in and on the organic resonances of breastfeeding.
Recording understood as noise highlights the centrality of the “re” in re-sonance, the listening as sensing the return. The constant intimate encountering with the sonic returns makes the listening a highly self-reflexive activity. Jean-Luc Nancy writes that listening is always “straining toward or in an approach to the self […], and that “when one is listening, one is on the lookout for a subject, something (itself) that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same and other than itself, one in the echo of the other, and this echo is like the very sound of its sense” (Nancy, 2002 p. 9). In this constant re-sensing of the re-vibrating, the listening “opens (itself) up to resonance and that resonance opens (itself) up to the self: that is to say both that it opens to self (to the resonant body, to its vibration) and that it opens to the self (to the being just as its being is put into play for itself)” (ibid. p. 25).
If we consider this evoking self-reflection at the moment of recording/listening/sensing the breastfeeding, the sound is not in this instance “a vector” (Demers 2010, p. 114), a linear phenomenon travelling from one location to another. It is not something that moves as separated from the sensing self-skin - on the contrary, it becomes tangible through the inevitable touch of the listening body. Therefore, when we listen to the recorded voice or any body sounds of the other “the resonance that opens up to the self” often includes a convoluted sphere of (auto)erotic sensing of the interaction between the sensual body parts: lips, tongue and ear.
Forget the real contagious tongue in your ear: all you need is sound.
A nipple, a mouth and machinic relations
During the recorded breastfeeding sessions the baby took nourishment several times, and acted in the same way each time. First, with her eyes closed and the nipple in her mouth, she breathed heavily and quickly through her nose in intensifying and calming waves. Then she proceeded seamlessly to the actual milk sucking, and suddenly the gulps permeated the repetitive hissing of the breathing. Finally, after some silent pauses in the sucking and swallowing continuum, she started to breath calmly and silently, falling eventually and smoothly into sleep.
The totality of the skin-to-skin contact and the tight sticking to the nipple is vital for the baby in this practice. The nipple, at that moment a custom-made organ for her mouth, guides her to suck. [1] The machine exists before the technology of taking nourishment. In other words, the machine is “a prerequisite for technology rather than its expression”, (Guattari 1995 [1992] p. 33). In his discussion on functional relations Felix Guattari describes a dynamism that turns certain practices into machinic assemblages. As he remarks, “the term assemblage does not imply any notion of bond, passage, or anastomosis between its components. It is an assemblage of possible fields, of virtual as much as constituted elements, without any notion of generic or species’ relation” (p. 35). He thus brings the realm of symbols, desires, senses and fantasies into the production of machinic relations. At the moment of breastfeeding, the mother’s control of the latch and her awareness of the different feeding ‘techniques’ form a large sphere of virtual fields that affect the material bond between the baby’s lips and the nipple. Subsequently, the kinaesthetic and socio-material micro-transformations in these fields (both intended and unintended) shape the fleshy territories of breastfeeding that constantly mutate the nutrition conditions between baby and mother.
In its various states of squeezing and sucking, soaking and oozing, latching and unlatching, the procedure of breastfeeding could be understood as a machinic assemblage between baby and mother. This assemblage is capable of creating heterogeneous layers between the abstract, virtual, bodily, cultural and social components at the very moment of the milk flow. When the diverse registers of this particular machinic relation are preserved with the help of recording technologies, the question of the authorial role of the technological machines intertwines with the spiral processes between baby and mother. Within the larger theme of separating “the semiotic productions of mass media, telematics and robotics” from the psychological aspects of human subjectivity, Guattari states that “[t]echnological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but within its sensibility, affects and unconscious fantasms.” (Guattari 1995 [1992], p. 4) He argues that technological machines function in interaction with the “a-signifying semiological dimensions” that operate at the borderlines of strict linguistic formulas. It is in these liminal territories that the production of subjectivity is actualised. At the moment of directing the microphones to the mouth-nipple nexus [2], there emerges a rhizomatic mesh of socio-cultural myths around the ethos of preserving unique, ephemeral bodies, the 21st -century obsession with experiencing sensory acts in/through media(ted) realities, and the persistent need to excavate ‘other’ skins in the search for a zero-defect self-other decomposition. The microphonic epidermis plateau as listening/sensing redefines the borderlines between the listener and the sound, as well as between private and public. To monitored ears the recording sound is here-now private and there-then public at the very same time. The recordist touches sound in the thickening orbit of past-present-future layers.
Live-recorded sound and body politics
Indeed, in both philosophical and
performative contexts, the non-theoretical
fleshy body is often experienced as “threatening,
corrupting and contagious”
(de Preester 2007, p. 350).The ambivalent
flickering between repulsion
and attraction often dominates the encountering
with the explicit flesh. The contagious effect is
particularly striking in sound, and in the case of
recorded body-sound/sound-body, because the
“sound has no hidden face, it is all in front,
in back, and outside inside” (Nancy 2002, p. 13).
Therefore, the fantasised division between “live”
and “recorded” is highly irrelevant here.
The sound can be even more explicitly flesh
when sensed in recording. The recording as
an ultimate live medium is immensely organic
through its simultaneous including of inside and
outside and their installing (and de-stalling)
as self(s)-other(s). Recorded sound [4] is a crucial
medium for creating the body-intrinsic signification
in the context of encountering, communication,
language, and the politics and artistic exploration of bodies and touch.
A certain fluidity in the act of recording as
listening/sensing is located in the collective
and shared randomness of all human interaction,
the vertiginous vastness of unpredictable action
flows. Contrasted to this randomness, the certain
technologically organised interventions act as silent/thick caesuras, the moments when the breath is held
in order to stay alive. The vital cut between
the extreme air-pressure streams. The cut that
does not exclude, that includes.
Openness.
Conclusion: proliferating fluidity in recording breastfeeding
Sadie Plant refers in her discussion on cyber-feminist simulations to Irigaray’s thoughts on “specular economy”, the patriarchal circuit of commodities, in which women are exchanged and controlled by the floating male characters (fathers, husbands, brothers, sons) in their lives (p. 328). In this system, the hierarchically authored control of all the tools, commodities and media in their predetermined fixed places is crucial. As Plant remarks, however, in the late twentieth century the relational interdependence between media, tools and commodities began to rupture and mutate in diverse processes, and “women began to change, escaping their isolation and becoming increasingly interlinked” (ibid.). In these transformations the various new multimedia environments provide fluid foundations for networks and contacts that are borne through touch: touch that is dangerous in its non-obedience of hygienic laws; the touch that is uncontrollable in its multi-layered epidermal imperialism.
Touch, multimedia, new networking and virtual fluidities (rather than “realities”) could thus be understood as possible fields for diverse feminine contribution. The vague materiality of the liquid, actually and crucially, shapes the digitalised realm, as Plant describes it:
Digitization sets zero free to stand for nothing and make everything work. The ones and zeros of machine code are not patriarchal binaries or counterparts to each other: zero is not the other, but the very possibility of all the ones. […] [Zero] neither counts nor represents, but with digitization it proliferates, replicates and undermines the privilege of one. Zero is not its absence, but a zone of multiplicity which cannot be perceived by the one who sees. (p. 333).
The touch I record in breastfeeding is absorbed into my skin through zero-one-assemblages. It is not a representation of touch, but a multi-sensory form of it. The sound of breastfeeding becomes porous when recorded; it allows diverse bodily past-present layers to percolate and excrete through it. The recorded sound has rhizomatic origins; it is borne simultaneously in the mouth-nipple hub, in the recording device, and on the skin of the recordist. These three are inseparably aspirated at the moment of the red light. The zero zones trigger the mutation flows.
My breastfeeding recording is based on tactile and noisy gushes: on listening through sensing and sensing through listening. My only sensory organ is the microphone via the headphones plugged in and onto my skin. The recording flows beyond the abstracted economy of ‘representation’: it is an outright simulation of the difference between skins. The simulation simultaneously allows cutaneous contact with the other bodies; it is an electric shock executed by the other tissue vibrating in and on my skin; it is a visceral inscription of the intestinal pulses; it is an exponential, live modification of the sounding flesh. In making the recording I wanted to totalise the live aspect of the breastfeeding: the baby’s comprehensive devotion to the sucking, the tiny everyday-life details (such as the gurgling of the mother’s stomach) at the moment of sucking, the pervasive skin contiguity.
The baby sucks. The grasping swallows follow each other in spasmodic bursts. I can sense that the mother feels the sucking in her breast. Through the sound vibrations I feel the sucking in my overall tactile organogenesis, the microphonic skin. There is this subtle beating from the resonating umbilical cord between the moist mouth of the baby and the extra-membrane skin on me. The recording act generates a counter-memory to my cutaneous openness. Therefore, recording as writing, writing as reading, and reading as scanning. Theorising as performing. Controlling as free-floating. Desiring as surrendering.