ABSTRACT

Performance Research Book’s book, Absolute Rhythm: Works for minor radio, collects ten of my radiophonic scripts written and broadcast in Australia mainly between 1986 and 1998. This article describes the cultural milieu in which they emerged. It argues that an upsurge of interest in a migrant writing that went ‘beyond the echo’ of Anglo-Australian writing coincided with a proliferation of historical ethnographical publications illuminating Aboriginal/white-settler linguistic transactions in early colonial Australia. It suggests that, common to both the new migrant writing and the old ethnolinguistic documentation was a ‘negative baroque’ style whose elaboration was in inverse proportion to the mutual understanding of the parties. The article illustrates the creative potential of these failed communications, and the constructions placed on them, arguing that the different economy of signification that springs up where there is no language in common articulates an alternative history of colonial relations. Embraced as the basis of a ‘migrant poetics’, it brings into focus performative features of communication that conventional textual analysis (and literary writing) repress. These features not only reside outside language in gesture and context but inside language in the power of echoic mimicry to endow ‘self-sufficient sounds’ with an ironic inflection that subverts the implicit goal of normative communication – the silencing of the other – giving the subaltern a speaking position that is radically different. A short account of a recent studio production of ‘Cooee Song’, one of the scripts printed in Absolute Rhythm, relates the cultural critique to a post-radiophonic studio praxis.

摘要

表演研究书，《绝对节奏：为小型广播工作》收集了我主要在1986年至1998年之间在澳大利亚编写和广播的十个无线电脚本。本文介绍了它们产生的文化环境。它认为，对移民著作的兴趣激增超出了英澳文学的回响，而与此同时，历史民族志出版物的激增也说明了澳大利亚早期殖民地的原住民/白人移民的语言交易。它表明，新移民文字和旧民族语言文献的共同点是“消极的巴洛克式”风格，其阐述与当事双方的相互理解成反比。本文说明了这些失败的交流的创新潜力以及在其上的构造，认为，在没有共同语言的地方涌现出的不同的象征意义经济，清楚地表明了殖民关系的另一种历史。作为“移民诗学”的基础，它将传统的语篇分析（和文学写作）所压制的交流的表演性特征作为焦点。这些功能不仅存在外语言手势和上下文，但里面的语言在回声模仿的强大功能与具有讽刺意味的拐点赋予“自给自足的声音”是颠覆规范通信的隐含目标-对方的沉默-给属下一个发言位置，也就是说，根本不同。简短地介绍了最近工作室制作的“ Cooee Song”（《绝对节奏》中的剧本之一），将文化评论与放射后的工作室实践联系起来。