The Split Person: Speech Without Body

A new mode of speech has appeared: speech composed of short text (fragmented murmurs) and rough imagery (memes, images, and other visual media, distinct from long-form video such as “film” or “serial drama”); or, “speech without body,” a mode of speech from which gesture and facial language are absent.

People often accuse it of “lacking something.” They argue that what is absent alongside gesture and facial language is “warmth of communication,” “cadence of tone,” “bodily presence,” and other emotional detail, using this to distinguish it from “speech with the body present.”

We can pose several questions: what does “warmth” refer to here? Is it a phantasmal nostalgia, or does it refer to the composite of facial expression and gesture? To what extent can “bodily/vocal presence” alter speech? When the body is present, speech more closely resembles a performance. Its mode is theatrical: cues of singing and dance, writing overlaid with a “face,” and atmospheric suggestions transmitted through clothing. Here, text and symbols appear in simplified form, touching emotion in a more spare manner. One might say that speech with bodily presence is a dimensionally rich multimedia.

Yet for speech with the body present, the “effect” of the body is actually secondary. What is more significant is the noun itself: the presence of “body,” the presence of “person.” Bodily image repeatedly reminds both speaker and listener: I am here. I am present. It continually pulls people into reality, forcing the listener to notice this “body,” this “person.” What stands before you now is a living human being, an independent and particular individual, a face unlike any other. The external crystallizes into a fixed impression, and so when this person walks, blinks, opens their mouth, they carry the weight of their own presence, all of their experience, their signs and cultural codes, them. Here, “them” is not a pronoun but a someone who is truly here.

The counterpart is speech with the body absent, that is, “speech without body.” Today’s technology has expanded the possibilities of communication, allowing speech to occur without bodily presence. On the internet, a “user” (as opposed to a “person”) is an image assembled from an avatar, a username, a bio, or other data types. It abstracts human presence into a self-customizable membrane of information, one that can be freely shaped and altered, and that is also more easily invaded, surveilled, and killed.

The body has given way to text and the membrane on top of it. Once a conversation is sent, it begins to decay on a scale measured in forever. Text persists within the device (even if its active lifespan typically spans only days or weeks), blooming outward, exposing its diction, structure, puns, and allusions, existing in a more open, more saturated manner. Compared to voice, text is a more complex structure: texts can reference each other across a wider range, can be interpreted to a greater degree. One might even say that the meaning of text has never been fixed upon a single center. The speaker can construct text in contemplation; the listener can peel it apart in contemplation. A piece of text, unlike vocal inflection, can silently contain all forms of cadence and modulation. Through the layered refrain of text, an image is gradually sculpted, in any shape, any style. It rises from the flat surface, becoming a volume. This volume transmits suggestions similar to those of the body. It is a creation.

In today’s society, it is difficult to say whether this volume is illusory or real, because the human being is already undergoing virtual disappearance (disparition virtuelle). In Baudrillard’s words, the imagination of the human being is now accelerating its demise: “everything disappears through the excess of its own reality.” This is undeniably a radical speculation, but what cannot be denied is that the real of being human is being decomposed: a person can be data, a person can be an archive of text, a person can be a composite of a series of desires, a person can also be a piece of furnishing, a unit of productivity/labor. The aggregate person has now split into different organizational parts. One might say that today’s person is gradually becoming split, split in the schizoanalytic sense, not in the pathological sense. Subjectivity is undergoing an unprecedented decentering. Speech without body is the representative of this turn: it has brought the fission of identity and desire to an extremely high frequency.

Should this turn be condemned? Perhaps we can look at its positive side: it returns speech to text and image, enriches the image of the subject, and allows it to be more flexibly created, destroyed, altered. It opens a door belonging to both euphoria and emptiness. It is a complex, multiple assemblage that resists the manipulation of the desiring-machine and cultural power, deconstructs social morality, and endlessly nomadizes. The madness, liberation, and textual surges that accompany it are real. But it is difficult to say how significant its resistance is. What happens more often is that it generates a vortex that disintegrates everything about itself, over and over again. It too, inevitably and helplessly, embarks on the process of disappearing.

Cute, that’s your only redeeming quality. Your mind is mediocre and impoverished; your social circle is your whole society. In your eyes, our existence is nothing more than a faint, blurry spot of light. And so I am able to despise you. Even if you dance somewhere far beyond my reach, I can still like you in my heart. Why did you kill someone? The classroom, like a square box. I sit inside it, and in the glow of my phone screen, I suddenly notice your name flooding the ceaseless chatter of the internet. Twitter, news pages, documenting the fact of your arrest. ¹