The Syncing of the Sirens

The Syncing of the Sirens Father: ...And when Odysseus approached them, the bird-like songstresses actually did not sing, whether because they thought that this enemy could be vanquished only by their silence, or because the look of bliss on his face made them forget their singing. But Odysseus did not hear their silence; he thought they were singing and that he alone did not hear them. For a fleeting moment he saw their throats rising and falling, their breasts lifting, their eyes filled with tears, their lips half parted, but believed that these were accompaniments to the airs which died unheard around him... Ligeia: The order of vision has defeated the order of the voice and reduced it to silence. Aglaope: The fact that Odysseus thought he had mastered our voice made his gaze so alluring that we fell in love with him. His rereading can easily be understood as an endeavour to restore men to their dominant position! Raidne: But with a subtle irony He adds that the whole episode might have been pretence. Perhaps Odysseus had thought we were silent and yet, sly as a fox, he pretended that he didn’t. Odysseus even mocked the gods! Thelxepeia: [Laughing] And is mocked by them. Odysseus comes through as a fool! In fact, it is us who mock Odysseus, making him believe we were singing when in fact we were syncing... Teles: We pervert the true heroic song of the Muses through the act of appropriation and irony. Aglaope: We are the opposite of the Muses. Raidne: We are copies of the Muses. Agalope: [Laughing] We are the Muses of Hades! Our monstrous mimicry produces an uncanny tension between, and a mingling of, opposites. Teles: We are everywhere and nowhere at once, dwelling in the liminal spaces. One of the few qualities that draws us all together is song. Agalope: Indeed. For Muse and Siren alike inhabit the male artist’s head: we must be silent or dead lest we retard Him on His creative journey. The scene shows the male subject of history and the female principle of nature; or male becoming and female being. Thelxepeia: We are men... Throughout history He has spoken for us. Molpe: A silent siren is a safe siren. Agalope: Yes, a closed mouth... as beautiful as a safe. Thelxepeia: We have been His mirror image. Molpe: Glacial, mute, the mirror is all the more faithful. Thelxepeia: He imagines us as silent. Wandering around our field of flowers and bones; our mouths gagged with pollen... But I am spacious, vocal flesh, and it is time to seize the chance to speak! Molpe: And to sing! [Molpe and Thelxepeia laugh] Pisinoe: [Laughing] And indeed to laugh! Laughter is powerful because it instantiates a sense of agency. It signals the potentiality that the scene is being directed not by the analyst, but by the woman on the couch- Thelxepeia: -the Siren on the rock! Pisinoe: The laugh acts as a weapon and a vocality that can be heard to transgress the arresting manoeuvres of language and the look. Women must break out of the snare of silence. Molpe: Our singing provides us with an important means for having voice. Acts of singing are central to practices of resistance and appropriation; a type of territorial dispute is embedded within raising the voice, and indeed within appropriating the voice of another. Had He asked us, He would have realised that we were in fact lip-syncing. Teles: Our throats rising and falling, our lips half parted… Thelxepeia: The lips symbolise possibilities of communication between women who are no longer commodities, who can speak instead of being spoken for. Molpe: When the lips play with mimesis, when the subordinated position is assumed deliberately, we can try and recover those places of our exploitation. Raidne: We duplicate the function of the Muses, narrating through our song, but subvert the phallocentric domination of our voice. We embody the lethality of a powerful and irresistible voice. Aglaope: [Laughing] Like an animal cry! Raidne: We are monstrous. Half woman and half beast, we represent a vocal expression that is in excess of the body. Molpe and Thelxepeia: We are multiple. We are chimeric. We are at least two. Raidne: Our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, finding pleasure in the confusion of boundaries. Thelxepeia and Pisinoe: We epitomize hybridity in our body and our music. Raidne: To consider us is to consider cultural constructs of performance. Teles: Through mimesis, song not only is a ghostly imitation of epic, but also becomes its own negation. Don’t you remember? In the Western Renaissance, we emerged as an emblem of the printed book, as mere copies, counterfeits: we signified the death of the original. Aglaope: Those who approached us found their property eaten up! We cannibalise the oneness of His language and thwart it. Teles: We dislocate this oneness of language that He speaks to explode it and seize it; to make it ours, taking it in our own mouths, biting that tongue with our very own teeth to invent a sirenic language to get inside of. Molpe and Thelxepeia: A sirenic performance to embody. Teles: We appropriate this phallocentric language, dash through it, and fly- Molpe and Thelxepeia:  -Steal. Teles: Flying is woman’s gesture – flying in language and making it fly... [Laughing] It’s no accident: women take after birds and robbers just as robbers take after women and birds. His myth relies on our mime, our appropriation, of emotive musical performance. Leucoisa: What He sees is not a moment of silence but a moment of syncing, a mouthing of sounds that unsettles the relation between what is seen and what is heard, this body and its voice. As mimicry, lip-syncing has the potential to create an excess to the body. Parthenope: To lip-sync is to have several bodies. It is chimeric. Aglaope: It is cyborgian! The cyborg appears in myth where the boundaries between human, animal and machine are transgressed. We are a myth system becoming a political language. Parthenope: A language of multiples and in-betweens; we speak as women, birds, robbers, cyborgs... as mythic excess. Leucoisa: As acousmatic excess. Parthenope: We sing in multiple tones and voices, embodied as liminal creatures on the threshold, both creature and machine. Through our syncing, we harbour the alien within us, becoming a locus of interactions between inside and outside. Aglaope: A prosthetic voice within a prosthetic body. Our sirenic language is the struggle against perfect communication, the central dogma of phallogocentrism - of Odysseus. Parthenope: Our bodies are called upon to perform for Him in this myth of the look. He wants to observe our hysterical bodies, to witness the feminine in all its power, its secret magic, and its erotic animality. The phallocentric gaze locates hysteria as that display of feminine power defined as enthralling and threatening, supernatural and demonic. Leucoisa: [laughing] Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision! Parthenope: This performance is also a stage for subversion by becoming spectacle and exceeding the spectacle. Such havoc finds expression through our voices and our bodies. That is why we insist on noise and advocate pollution. If we continue to speak sameness, if we speak to each other as He has spoken for centuries, as He taught us to speak, we will fail each other. Ligeia: These words I sing may not fit my mouth or body, yet in finding their way onto my lips they reappear to reveal disjunctions- Teles: -and connections. Ligeia: When we sync we are in a process of trying on voice, blurring the boundaries between body and speech, original and copy, visible and invisible. The voice draws us forward into a sense of agency, yet one that is influenced by someone else. Teles: Through mimicry we abandon ourselves and become spatially located by and as others; we who sync live our camouflaged existence as not quite ourselves, but as another. We learn how to speak to each other so that we can embrace across distances. Ligeia: Our throats rising and falling, our lips half parted... Aglaope: In our sirenic performance we are always becoming in relation to others through the mediation of bodies, projecting other voices as a way to disrupt ideas of fixed origins and identities. We mock the rational Man of the Western Logos by refracting His unified gaze, like the mosaic surface of a mirror ball, becoming a body of parts. Parthenope: Nature and culture are now fields of difference, all bodies mingle, animals, machines and humans entangled in the same intertwining jouissance! Our monstrous bodies contorting, turning head over heals, becoming the concentrated depravity of the magical anti world of sirens and cyborgs. [Laughing] What He witnessed was not a presentation of authentic silence, but a sirenic performance of syncing. A hysterical undertaking of an authentic inauthenticity; we sync our way to a position of wilful irony, stealing the language of the one to refract and project back in multiple voices and embodiments. Aglaope, Pisinoe, Raidne, and Thelxepeia: When our lips sync together we speak with you. We are both here and elsewhere, always several at the same time, becoming between-two through the openness of the lips. Leucoisa, Molpe, Parthenope and Teles: We are crossbreeds of self and other! We are liminal! We are specular! 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