3. THE APHASIC LANGUAGE
3.1. How it started
When I first worked, in 2020, on the piece “Eve's Lament”, one of the textures I created was that of a “stuttering” voice, which would convey the impression of Eve’s lamenting on being expelled from Paradise. I took the relevant fragment from John Milton's Paradise Lost, I “collided” the words against each other, created new words and motives resembling such a state (further analysis will be done in the relevant chapter). Though the aphasic disorder was not a concrete tool in my mind, nevertheless, such an application felt proper.
When I started researching children's language, bibliography quickly led me to this subject. On many occasions, the prelinguistic stage and aphasic disorders share common ground. Aphasia is a disorder that affects the language’s brain region. On further research, two of my main sources – Linguist Roman Jakobson and Sigmunt Freud, made clear parallel observations. Jakobson's magnus opus on language, titled “Children language, Aphasia and phonological universals”, makes this connection clear.
Aphasic disorders offer countless examples of deconstructed speech. It is a “pool” of endless practical information, in the same way that prelinguistic speech is.
In the same way that the prelinguistic stage serves as a metaphor, the same happens with the aphasic language. Demonstrations of aphasic disorders are, apart from extremely musical events, an open wound. It is a hole leading directly into their brain and psychic roots, to the psychological causes and experiences of the person. It is an “arrow” pointing inside, connected to the human struggle, a physical connection to human limitations. It is a tactile sound map of human experience.
3.2. The game of words
"The code of insanity, as the linguists would
say, does not obey to the rules of the transmission
of the message. It allows the excessive flow, or it
does not allow it at all. It cancels the distance
between language and experience, even though
language means the semantic vehicle, not the
experience itself. Language means mediation,
it doesn't mean immediacy".
These lines describe how the relation between the message and the medium is rearranged in the case of aphasic disorders. The medium (language) becomes the message. It does not only describe the experience, it becomes that. A new stream of consciousness is created, overpassing the boundaries of language rules. In fact, it overpasses language itself as a communication concept. It carries meaning and hidden information, which has little to do with what is being expressed.
Aristotle writes "Λόγον δε μόνον άνθρωπος έχει των ζώων" which means, from all the animals, only humans have λόγον. In Greek, “logos” means speech, but, also, “logic”. Jacques Lacan writes that speech is a gift of language. Language is not intangible. It is an indiscernible body, but still, a body.
Freud published his monograph on Aphasia, in 1891. The book was characteristically ignored, partly because he rejected contemporary theories concerning, for example, the localization of the brain damages which caused aphasic phenomena. He is still considered the founder of modern aphasiology, connecting neurophysiology with psychoanalytic thought. It is a book written already 133 years ago, but we read the foundation of terms such as aphasia, paraphasia, aphemia, amnesic aphasia, alalia. It is interesting that aphasia is connected to the Greek word "αμφασίη" which, by Homer, is described as "the difficulty to speak because of overwhelming emotions".
Freud offers countless case studies, through which he justifies his words. One of them describes a patient who had lost memory of all the nouns, but he clearly remembered their initial letters. He wrote down a list of the most common nouns, so that, when he would want to use one, he would look to the relevant initial letter and remember the word by seeing it. This is an example of the relationship between speaking and visual cortex centres. The “word” proves to be a complex representation, consisting of aural, visual and kinesthetic elements. We learn to speak combining the aural and the visual image of the word. After we speak, we own a kinesthetic representation of the speech, which comes from the impressions created by the speaking organs.
The subject of speaking disorders has been dear to composers. Alvin Lucier “uses” his own stuttering as material for the piece “I am sitting in a room” (1969). Robert Ashley, suffering from Tourette syndrome, recorded his “involuntary” speech in order to produce material for his “Automatic writing” opera (1979).
3.3. The relation
The prelinguistic stage's and aphasic disorders' demonstrations are often the same. Jakobson writes that the so-called aphemic disorders (sound-dumbness) and the beginning stages of children's language present a similar picture. Articulations, whose autonomous phonemic value has been lost in patients, is not yet incorporated in the child's speech. Freud already writes that, during the prelinguistic period, children act like aphasics, using an improvised language, connecting various unrelated sounds, only with the sound the child produces. The actual language evolves by connecting the acoustic image the children produce with the cause of this action – In other words, children imitate and repeat the sound of the words they hear, until what they produce and what they hear, coincide. It is an “echolalia” process, also observed in aphasic cases, with different causes.