Decomposing the voice: Tape poetics and the politics of listening in Cold War Italy and Latin America

In this dissertation, I argue that magnetic tape is a crucial part of recent cultural history and the expansion of what and who constitutes a political actor. Tape recording challenged the bounds of what constitutes literary expression by revealing the co-constitution of writing and sound and produced new ways of negotiating the nature of political collectivity itself. I examine tape recorders’ dialectical affordances of fidelity and decomposition to explore the technical and social potentialities of listening, situating the emergence and proliferation of magnetic tape in the historical context of the Cold War, specifically in Italy, Chile, Colombia, and the United States. The period was characterized on one hand by the spread of tape media, and on the other by the swelling importance of clandestine parapolitics in the form of surveillance, repression, and armed conflict. The unstable alignments between truth and tape help us understand the changing formats of collective political action (both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic), not only during the Cold War but also in its persistent afterlife, which continues to organize the cacophonous world we live in today. The project puts writers, ethnographers, and musicians into dialogue, revealing varied approaches to and ideologies of voicing and listening.In chapter one, I reconstruct how early tape music was composed, heard, and theorized in Italy’s first electronic music studio. I read and listen to the work of singer Cathy Berberian and her collaborations with Luciano Berio and John Cage. Her theorization of the “new vocality” was a call to listen differently and therefore sing differently based on the ability of tape to decompose sounds from their mimetic identification with a source. I analyze two of Berberian’s works from the studio: “Thema (Omaggio a Joyce),” which uses text from James Joyce’s Ulysses, and “Aria with Fontana Mix,” which juxtaposes cut-up field recordings of Milan with different singing styles and vocal noises performed live by Berberian. The play between tape and voice offered Berberian a way to assert the feminized labor of performance as a compositional practice and tuned conservative listeners’ ears to the musicality of voices and sounds previously dismissed as noise. In the second half of the chapter, I connect this to Amelia Rosselli’s visits to the Studio and work with tape recorders, arguing that material experience with tape influenced her poetry in Variazioni belliche (1964), transposing the magnetic voice into a textual form through syllabic echoes, multiple languages, compound words, and precisely measured lines using a typewriter. Rosselli’s poetic method is based on a methexic form of listening that envisions the body itself as a recorder, an openness that is both powerful and vulnerable. In the years following, Rosselli believed she was being surveilled by the CIA and that electromagnetic waves were being transmitted through her apartment and body. Her perceptions, while attributable to mental illness, are also emblematic of the shifting boundaries of what is considered audible. They bring into relief the darker side of what I have termed the magnetic voice. If Rosselli practiced and theorized a tape poetics through methexic listening, her experiment also exposed her to the dangers of decomposing the boundaries between private and public, self and collective, voice and noise. As women and immigrants, Berberian and Rosselli, invented a magnetic voice that refused the individual as author or owner and language itself as unitary.The second chapter is centered around the work of Nanni Balestrini, a writer and editor who organized politically with the worker and student movements of 1968 and beyond. I detail the history of Balestrini’s use of tape as a tool for writing, from the digital tape drives of early computing to the portable reel-to-reel sound recorders used by journalists. I analyze Balestrini’s novel Vogliamo tutto (1971) through its precursors and production as a tape recording of a FIAT factory worker’s voice that transforms over the course of the novel into a collective political voice, moving from first person to third person to first person plural narration. I theorize the concept of social reelism as a complex of beliefs that tape media, defined by embracing their documentary and decompositional qualities, could represent in real-time the rapidly shifting social movements that were challenging the foundations of inequality. I relate and compare this to the cultural organizing and archival work of Gianni Bosio, whose tape recordings and circulations of Italian subaltern musical practices and folklore redefined historical methods and questioned the hegemony of writing as the arbiter of history. Together, I show how Bosio’s and Balestrini’s ideological investment in social reelism turned the author into a listener and editor, using tape recorders to construct the mass acoustics of a subaltern, collective.Chapter three loops Chilean history into the plot. As a counterpoint to Bosio, I investigate the musical and ethnographic work of Violeta Parra, who performed and collected folk songs from across Chile during the 50s and 60s, eventually recording her own original compositions inspired by them and inaugurating a genre, nueva canción, that would prove crucial to the rise of Allende and the Unidad Popular leftist political alliance that secured his presidential victory. For Parra, the use of tape facilitated a listening practice that encompassed both the musical performances and the surrounding conversation, audience, and environment that were inextricably linked to it, amplifying the intimate, the ambient, and the impromptu. After Pinochet’s coup, nueva canción recordings circulated clandestinely, especially with the proliferation of compact cassettes which were cheaper, easier to copy, to erase, and to hide. Under the dictatorship’s surveillance and censorship, Chilean artists improvised different means of expression and dissent. I trace the origins of Diamela Eltit’s subversive testimonio, El padre mío, from her early days as a member of the Colectivo Acciones de Arte, or CADA, to her theorizations and work with videotape, to her meeting of El Padre Mío himself, the vagabond whose fragmented speech she transcribes. What makes the text of El padre mío different from other testimonio is its refusal of enclosure—a trait that Eltit recognizes and reproduces rather than trying to cure or edit into coherence. Unlike canonical testimonio, a genre which claims to speak for a specific subaltern collectivity, El padre mìo is presented as the “voice” of the nation in pieces, a collective voice that has failed. Eltit’s choice to frame the text as testimonio, both through her methods and editorial voice, exposes the genre’s dependance on filtering out both silence and noise, despite their registration on tape, and offers a corrective to the insistence to hear subaltern speech as prescriptive.The fourth and final chapter connects to Colombia where I turn to a fictional representation of tape in Juan Cárdenas’ novel Zumbido to reflect on the possibilities of reading and listening beyond, or after, the voice. What if we listen not for a singular narrative voice, but for the changing background hum of elements and media in varying states of decomposition and disrepair? If Eltit’s literary project of El padre mío constituted an intervention into the discourse of testimonio at its peak, Zumbido is more like a séance, an exploration of the possible afterlives of tape and testimonio. It is a fictional response to the question of fidelity in testimonio, so reified and politicized during the culture wars of the Reagan years and baked into sonic discourses of reproduction. Eschewing an imitative approach to evoke the genre, Cárdenas instead weaves a narrative around the decompositional potentials of tape that are frequently ignored by testimonio: its inherent background noise, distortion, and exposure to the environment. I investigate the novel’s resonance with histories of subaltern and indigenous land reclamation, using Mónica Espinosa Arrango and Sheldon Wolin’s elaboration of elemental politics. But I also take the elemental literally, thinking of the agency of elements in indigenous philosophy as well as the elemental as a heuristic in the environmental humanities for thinking across material ecologies. I put this concept in conversation with Jacqueline Nova’s composition Creación de la tierra (Creation of the Earth, 1972), a work for magnetic tape that manipulates indigenous U’wa creation story chants. Creación de la tierra stages the incommensurability between Western and indigenous ontologies of sound and music—between the aesthetic contemplation of a musical composition and the historical documentation of a creation story. What does it mean in this context to hear voice as an element, or an element as a voice? Does voice remain a useful category? Nova uses tape as a methexic instrument rather than a mimetic medium, creating a composition that suggests the voice’s relation to the sounds of elements. It slows listening down, lingering at the place between history and wind. Taking inspiration from Zumbido and Nova’s tape composition, I propose the elemental ear as a companion to, or rethinking of, the magnetic voice that shifts our attention away from the position of human annunciation to the posture of reception: to listen differently, to untangle what seems lost, to not be so quick to throw away, and to perhaps embrace the inevitable decomposition of our stories.