Encyclopédie de la parole

Affinity | Occurs when one form of speech contaminates another. Affinity refers to ways of speaking, intonation, accents, or turns of phrase that are transmitted and propagated from one speaker to another.

The singularity of a person’s way of speaking is not only determined by the physical particularities of their voice. In terms as diverse as intonation, accentuation, rhythm, or even timbre, it is also modeled by the words of others, through which a person learns how to speak or modify their own speech.

Affinity can be witnessed when the words of speaker A borrow characteristics from the speech of speaker B, whether said speaker is present or not. This last parameter (presence/absence) will allow us to distinguish between two categories of affinity: affinity in absentia and affinity in praesentia.

Affinity in absentia

Affinity in absentia takes place when speaker B is absent but still identifiable. Family influence or reinforced proximity are its most paradigmatic examples. Jean Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen speak with the utmost fluency and in flagrant affinity with their respective fathers. Cases where affinity is the object of a game or a more or less conscious modification are very different, however: take actor Éric Ruf’s theatre performance reinterpreting a Michel Foucault interview, or an autistic person’s soliloquy whose gibberish is inspired by the Général De Gaulle’s particular phrasing, for example. In other cases, affinity can be used as a cut or fold for giving life to an absent person’s words within a given discourse: such is the case with these imitations of Antonin Artaud and Winston Churchill.

These cases imply that speaker B’s way of speaking is known beforehand by as many people as possible—in other words that B belongs to the category of “famous speakers.” But B can also be a fictional character, like the wolf and horn in the fable of The Brave Little Goat of Monsieur Seguin read by Fernandel. In other cases, B could be a type or universal abstraction. The “guy who speaks like this” in a Dieudonné skit can be compared to a young conservative politician parodying an opponent, or to the contrast between distinguished and common language in a cinematographic plea.

Affinity in praesentia

Affinity in praesentia takes place when A and B are taking part in the same speech act—in which case contamination can be seen in action.

Particularly visible examples of this process can be found in situations where simultaneous translation is taking place: as in this English-language sermon by David Ogan, followed by its German translation by an interpreter, made with very similar forms of intonation. When Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles perform sound poetry, they jointly build tonal, rhythmic, and syntactic continuity into one flow. A very similar example can be found in the tonal curves of farmers’ speech, shown in the film Biquefarre by Georges Rouquier: here, we see how a community’s closeness can reach all the way into its manner of speaking.

This form of affinity is very common in learning situations, whether it be the rehearsal of a Stravinsky lied or a class at the Star Academy, where a trainee singer modulates part of a Stevie Wonder song based on his teacher’s more confident performance of the piece (see also Fortissimo). To get her daughter to recite the alphabet, this mother uses a question and answer game where each player challenges the other to continue speaking at their rate (see also Si! No!). In this special case, a dog is taught by his owner to say “I love you” or “Eric Clapton”: affinity becomes a form of projection by B on A (B’s desire spoken by A). In this comical scene from the film The Pink Panther, however, affinity takes shape in negative terms, through the repeated failure of the learning process.

Though less obvious at first glance, affinity can also happen during a conversation, almost inadvertently, giving us a good example of how porous certain ways of speaking can be. In its most minimal manifestation, affinity can even take the form of supporting someone: a continuous bass of saying “yes,” “hmm,” through which speaker B encourages speaker A to keep producing their discourse.

Here, two speakers take up the same high-pitched intonation; here, a lexical proposition is immediately recycled by an interlocutor (see Chick, chick or Étrange étrange étrange). Here as well, speakers occasionally talking simultaneously validate their words through repetition or shared laughter. In this meeting of Alain Finkielkraut and Fabrice Lucchini, the pair’s intellectual understanding reaches such a point that the latter’s famous exuberance visibly rubs off onto the former’s words. When asking Tom Waits about the guidelines he gives his band during rehearsals, television host Jimmy Fallon shows affinity for both his guest’s answer, accentuating certain words in a similar manner, and for forms heard earlier and identified for the audience as being typical of the singer’s manner of speaking (the timbre of his voice, the incongruous nature of his statements).

Contamination can become playful through mimics or momentum, as in this video game, in this scene from the subway, or in this excerpt from the film Je sais rien mais je dirai tout.

In the case of a large group, the use of marks of affinity can lead to the construction of a complex form of polyphony (see Chauffe-eau or Le soufflé). In the entrance to an auditorium, individuals are both united by a shared activity—waiting for the beginning of the show—and separate. Conversations are centered around their own topics of discussion (commenting on a friend, talking about previous shows, etc.) all while adjusting themselves, particularly through volume, to the hubbub taking shape around them.

Alternation | Occurs when a speaker alternates between two or several styles, registers, forms of speech, or linguistic. Alternation enables to deal with contexts of multiactivity, to take into account several partners, to switch between specific ranges of action.

During her appearance on French television station TF1’s Carré VIIIP in 2011, Afida Turner gave a fellow contestant a specular, bare bones masterclass on how to behave as a pop star on stage. Her frame of reference clearly being the Anglo-Saxon entertainment machine, she punctuated her explanations and feigned gestures with incantatory English-language catch phrases. She alternated. Although difficult to explain with certainty, this alternation can at least be described as a resource for enlivening her simulations, all while asserting a certain skill (at least that of belonging to the category of “international singers”). Alternation refers to this act of shifting from one form of language to another. Means of alternation are as diverse as the actions they help accomplish.

Alternation forms a continuum running from functional distribution between clearly demarcated situations (speaking Russian in the fields, French at the court), to shifts that are more entangled in the conversation itself. A great variety of cases arise from alternation’s porous nature, which opens the process to underlying knowledge, strategies, or even accidents. If we were to unpack: alternating for, with, over, between—these prepositions do not exclude one another, but rather function, in this context, as vectors.

Alternation often takes place within a community (family, coworkers, etc.) that it helps define (alternating with). One can be in the habit (and share this habit with one’s partners) of shifting, seemingly out of the blue, between French, English, and Spanish over the course of dinner. This pliability of alternation needs no justification when it takes place: it is simply how things are done. We can make the hypothesis that such an alternation implies that at least one conversation partner is capable of understanding one or more of these linguistic varieties (see also En grec avec ma mère en italien avec mon père). Alternation would thus play a minimal role here, that of forming a network of presences which would manifest itself through regular forms of validation that participants could pick up by chance (see also Coraggio).

In this sense, it is quite distinct from the learning process, as can be heard in this excerpt from a German class with Michel Thomas. Here, alternation is an end in and of itself: like a step toward bilingualism, alternation expresses itself in attempts and jump-starts, as in this excerpt of an English-speaking teenager trying her hand at different varieties of French in front of her camera. Comments on her failed attempts are made as much in her mother tongue as in the language she is studying. At various levels of mastery, alternation can thus reflect a distinction between tasks, as in this excerpt of a class at the Lycée Français of San Francisco (see also You see the difference?).

Continuing in this didactic vein, alternation can be a planned mode used to explain or comment by insertion. This excerpt shows us how a speaker can deliberately establish a contrasting position between two forms—or in other words, how, rather than giving us two forms alternating in equal ways (alternating between), we can be given one form alternating over another. Another example of this can be found in the scene from Pierrot le Fou in which Raymond Devos sings “Est-ce que vous m’aimez?” The song alternates over his disastrous love story by punctuation, or punctum (in Barthes’ sense of the term—that which pricks us from within the frame), and eventually by saturation. Alternation works partly through affinity in this case (see the entry on Affinity, even if in this case the affinity is built from a speech-music relation and not from a speech-to-speech relation), as the actor relies on a melody played by a piano that he expressly points to, on stage. Finally, in certain situations, one form can almost come to another’s aid (alternating for), as in this interview excerpt (see also I’m sorry that I’m a girl).

Very different things can be found among alternation’s degrees of depth or complexity, whether seen in pragmatic terms, as in this example from Échaudé gâteau petit chou chaud, or in lexical-syntactic terms (see also Like you were talking). When an English speaker, living between Paris and Naples, endeavors to include both Italian and French-speaking participants, the mixing process becomes highly dense and almost reaches an inner conflict, caught as it is between Italian indexicals, French presentative forms, and English pronunciation. One can also hear examples that just barely borrow from another domain, as in this excerpt where English-language forms function as advertising dictates, in the manner of pop-ups or other surreptitious images (not to be confused with certain English-language items that can “belong” to a linguistic variety, as might be the case in Votre dernier mot en français). One can hear an almost coquettish version of Hitchcock illustrate this idea of borrowing when, speaking with film critic André Labarthe, he concludes his explanation of a film passage in French, in the manner of the popular use of the term “voilà.”

In this excerpt of a television show about the stock exchange, the commentator alternates between a hunter’s voice (“hunting around”) and one that is more enamored, more emotionally pronounced. Such an alternation between vocal modes can also be found in this radio show host’s voice, who breaks out into song while presenting the show, as if elliptically avoiding being too longwinded–a song is worth more than a lengthy speech. This process of vocal switching can incidentally overtake the speaker’s control, as in this example of a teenage guest on a television show, or this woman having her senses triggered.

children’s games, one can also hear alternation functioning like polyphony, where a story is told for oneself as well as one’s projected self—a process that sits somewhere between dramaturgical routines and emerging forms of creativity. Not only does the child alternate between voices in this excerpt, she also depicts bodily activities such as walking or opening a door.

As in the last example, alternation can be used to organize and share a complex activity made up of and for multiple semiotic resources (like singing while walking vs. singing and walking). It is common to hear orchestra rehearsals where conductors comment, speak the rhythm, sing, etc.—in short, where participants oscillate between conversational regimes and instrumental ones.

From very regular to (supposedly) completely random forms, alternation is much richer than a simple shift from one form of speech to another, firstly, because the shift can be very pronounced or semi-accidental (dialectic, embraced, or intertwined), and secondly because, for all that we may detect them, we are regularly (daily) taken by, and invited into, these adjustments. Give it a nudge and say hello.

Chorality | The quality of speech being organized by multiple parties. Depending on whether its form is plural or unified, organized or spontaneous, chorality can either constitute subordination to a norm or the live creation of a subject for collective enunciation.

Our first example of chorality is paradoxical: it is an instance of collective prayer in an evangelical church. Alongside the steady hubbub of individuals brought together by a single activity (speaking to God), we can also hear people speaking or murmuring on their own. It is a minimal choral form, one in which individuals are separate and together all at once (see also Va y avoir du monde in the section on Affinity).

This collection will distinguish between two main types of chorality: unison, which can be produced in various ways; and distributed forms of speech, where one discourse is divided between several speakers. This distinction overlaps with another: preexisting collective discourses (ritualized or scripted) and those where choral speech spontaneously takes shape around a shared activity.

Unison

The most elementary form of chorality is certainly unison, where several individuals say the same thing at the same time. A simple way of producing unison is to request that a group imitate a main speaker setting the tone and example, like the head of the Pétainist youth with his disciples, an officiate with his flock, the leader of a group of fans, a school teacher with his students, or even a protester leading a chain of human amplification. Unison also takes root through custom and repetition, as in this ceremony held by a Californian cult.

Sometimes repetition is produced by training games rather than games of authority, as in this excerpt of Down by Law by Jim Jarmusch or in this wrestling scene. When the lead voice disappears or fades into the choral mass, the choir seems almost emancipated, as in the recitation of poetry or multiplication tables at school, in the “haka” chants of the All Blacks, or of course in certain theatrical performances.

A special case of chorality can be found in the example of a leader calling out to a group who responds with a different utterance. This can be heard at mass, in street protests, at the Guignol, in police shooting instruction sessions, in this witch hunt by the Monty Python.

A whole range of written modes of chorality can be heard in this action by the DurEs à Queer collective in Nantes in 2010: firstly, a form of unison (“Where are my rights”), then a form of speaking out, one by one, based on the same model (“I am a faggot where are my rights? I am a dyke where are my rights?”), followed by a collective response to a call (“What do we want? Equal rights!”).

Distributed chorality

Chorality can obviously take more subtle forms than unison. One very common mode is the distribution of a single discourse between two speakers. This is the case with comedy duos or troubadours, orators speaking with interpreters, hypnotists working in pairs, or even, more rarely, Jacques Rivette characters pretending to remember erotically shared childhood memories.

Dual composition seems most common in this kind of pre-established distribution (this is the case, incidentally, in prayer as we hear it, with a leader and a group that follows them). On the other hand, in freer, more everyday forms, distribution and ventilation can be shared between a highly variable number of speakers.

Emerging chorality

These forms of chorality are built on the present moment of speech: several people do the same thing together, each in their own way, while pushing what is being said in a shared direction, that is to say, while sharing an activity. In such cases, we can witness the emergence of a subject for collective enunciation.

These activities can be very diverse:

- learning or rehearsing, like these two-year-old children learning a poem with their parents; similarly, a collective of artists rehearsing a spoken-word choir, or even an actor and director recording a radio jingle (see also Tu me l’écris je peux p’têtre te dire).

- telling a story, like Marguerite Duras and Gérard Depardieu in Le Camion, or this couple recounting a vacation incident.

- observing or describing something, whether in the context of a safari, sports commentary, supervising dance rehearsals, or even in the preparation and simulation of stunts during patrol.

- answering someone else’s question together, like these old companions interviewed by a documentary filmmaker, the four members of Pink Floyd speaking in turn, filmmakers Straub and Huillet speaking in one voice, or these teenagers collectively building a definition of adolescence.

- improvising collective discourse, as in this performance by the W group, or even in this exchange between two babies.

- playing with listing synonyms, as in this excerpt of Masculin/Féminin by Jean-Luc Godard.

- defending or justifying one’s actions before an uncooperative worker, or in the face of a serious accusation that has allowed for the unified emergence of one’s girlfriends.
- thinking together, as in this meeting by the Encyclopédie de la parole.
- simply dining with friends to discuss a dish one may have cooked, or searching for descriptions and translations of ingredients.

Finally, a particularly elaborate representation of chorality which intertwines different speakers, texts, and languages: an excerpt from the play A-Ronne 2 by Luciano Berio.

Combination | Characteristic of speech that moves forward by recomposing and reorganizing its constituent elements. Both a form of repetition and variation, of resumption and declension, a scheme and a combinatorics, combination is as much a poetic resource as it is a rhetorical one. 

A classic example of combination is given to us by Molière, in this famous scene from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Monsieur Jourdain wants to write the words “beautiful Marchioness, your lovely eyes make me die of love” in a letter, but “turned stylishly, well-arranged as necessary”. He asks the master of philosophy to “tell me, just to see, the diverse ways they could be put”, all while insisting that he wants “only those words in the note”: the finite and exclusive aspect of the terms available gives the master of philosophy no other choice but to recombine them in (almost) every way possible. 

Ontological Combinations

Language is combinatorial by essence: at heart, speaking consists of combining a finite number of elements, especially the vocabulary available at any given moment. It is only when, for various reasons, this set of elements finds itself limited to a small number that the phenomenon of combination becomes apparent. For example, when a person addresses a dog using only the instructions “lie down”, “sit”, and “stand up”.

But one can combine other elements than words. In this recording, two babies dialogue exclusively using the syllable “da”, which is affected by various rising and descending combined intonations. This intonative combination is what allows them to mimic the form of conversation.

In this other excerpt, a French child does not combine words, strictly speaking, but sounds inspired by what she imagines the English language to be: the combination of these sounds allows her to invent an original kind of gibberish, in almost the same way as the dadaist poet Raoul Hausmann in his day. 

Closed Combinations

The most striking examples of combination are those in which speech takes shape exclusively through the permutation of a very small number of elements. 

The most mathematical combinatory strategy consists of systematically exhausting every arrangement possible. This is what the poet Brion Gysin does, three centuries after Molière, in his Permutation poems, the first of which, “I am that I am”, is the most well-known: he combines the five words of this phrase from the Bible in every way possible, resulting in a poem of 5x4x3x2x1=120 lines (note that Gysin does not deduct the duplicates produced by the fact that the elements “I” and “am” are repeated in the initial phrase). 

The combination of a very small number of elements is sometimes used as a conceptual technique. It can be heard in this press conference by Donald Rumsfeld, during which the then-Secretary of Defense opposes the terms “known” and “unknown” to draft something like a personal epistemology: there is what we know we know; there is what we know we don’t know; and there is what we don’t know we don’t know (Rumsfeld does not run through the entire combination, as he neglects its fourth term, namely that which we know we know). 

Our collection contains other examples of this kind of closed permutation, though these show no will to exhaust every possibility; for reasons linked to the activity they are engaged in, the speaker in cases like these has access to a limited number of words whose usage depends on an external activity (see the entry on Indexations). Such is the case when having fun naming colors that appear onscreen in the game Guitar Hero; when playing the TV game Les Chiffres et les lettres, or when commenting a soccer game by naming the players, one by one, whenever they have the ball. 

Open Combinations

The most common combinations, however, are those in which a finite number of elements are redistributed while being mixed in with other suitable terms. The more the recurrence of identical terms is spaced out, the more open the combination will be. 

Among open yet tightly bound combinations, one can find situations in which the speaker’s discourse is primarily based on a small number of words or phrases that emerge regularly and in disorder: such is the case of these two people (Cherche chève, Allez poulette) who are once again addressing a dog (addressing animals is decidedly conducive to combinations). The same is true of this man having a panic attack in an airplane. 

In documents like Mer agitée des pluies, Nine seventy five, Calculer une intégrale, or I dupli u stranu, the speaker’s professional occupation (respectively: a shipping forecast presenter, an auctioneer, a mathematics professor, a gym coach) involves necessary recourse to a certain number of specialized terms that regularly return to delineate, punctuate, and pace their discourse. Natural language serves to unbind (in the culinary sense of the term) the necessary repetition of these terms. 

The combinatory effects mentioned in the examples above appear to be purely coincidental. But combinatorics can also serve as an intentional rhetorical resource. Such is the case of the documents Tapiner dans le 9.2, Des démons, Filles et femmes du monde entier, in which one can hear how the recurrence and combination of a small number of words allows for insistence, reformulation, conviction, or intimidation. An even more spectacular example can be found in Catalan soccer commentator Josep Maria Puyal celebrating a goal by Messi, improvising as if in a modernist poem. 

As noted regarding Brion Gysin, permutation is a technique commonly used in poetry by the avant-garde, especially in constructivism. Gertrude Stein is likely the poet to have most employed it, and most systematically. It can also be heard, even without speaking Arabic, in this poem recited by Mahmoud Darwich, or with Christophe Tarkos. 

These same effects and strategies are often used by hypnotists, whether in French or in English. The rhetorics of hypnotic induction are indeed primarily based on the rhythmic play of repetition-variation that allows for both dulling the patient’s vigilance and imperceptibly pushing the discourse forward. 

In certain special cases, combination takes place at the level of phonemes, syllables, vowels, and consonants, rather than words: such is the case of Raymond Devos with the syllables “sou” and “su”, of this tongue-twister which combines alliterations in “b”, of Gherasim Luca in his famous poem “Passionnément”, and of Raoul Hausmann. 

Orbital Combinations

In a certain number of open combinations, speech revolves around a single element that is repeated, declined, or conjugated with other terms. It functions as the point of reference around which all sorts of variations are combined. 

This often serves to insist upon something. Such is the case of this interview with Louis-Ferdinand Céline; the repetition of the terms “heavy” and “heaviness” occurs in a new arrangement each time, to boost it and give it new weight. In a similar way, this German personal development coach hinges his entire discourse on the term “problem”, making it by turns subject and predicate of his utterances. The same is true of the word “clochard” (bum) in this enlightened monologue on the metro.

A phenomenon specific to these orbital combinations: speech is built around a single term that is modulated across its grammatical forms (called “polyptotons” in rhetorics). For example, this telephone message, in which the utterances “he called me”, “I’m going to call him back”, “I called him”, “I have to call him back”, “to call him back”, “thanks for having called me back” are combined. A similar use of polyptotons can be heard in this other poem by Christophe Tarkos, or with Allen Ginsberg.

Accidental Combinations

Sometimes involuntary combinations are produced by the lack of understanding or repeated errors of a participant. 

This can happen in the context of a dialogue. Such is the case of Fernand Raynaud, who, in this record released for his friends, takes a malicious pleasure in a certain Jacky Bernard’s inability to present his piece. We encounter almost exactly the same situation in this phone conversation in Estonia (minus the malice). 

In the style of Donald Rumsfeld’s aforementioned “political conceptualization”, though with less logical rigor, we have this excerpt of a speech by Nicolas Sarkozy.

That said, the comedian Pierre Repp remains the master and genius of this (false) clumsiness, vertiginously mixing and combining words, expressions, sounds, and syllables.

Compression | Practice that aims to reduce, shorten, compress, or contract speech. Compression allows one to save time or catch their breath. It creates impressions of speed, blurring, mush, or encryption.

Compression occurs when we hear an utterance that seems shorter than what we were expecting. Spoken language is filled with practices that aim to save time, avoid redundancy, and state things in short. This collection has chosen to distinguish between different types of compression not only in terms of processing methods but also in terms of the units of language, or scale of discourse, it acts upon.

Compression by output acceleration

This first level of compression is the simplest: speech is compressed to the extent that a speaker is talking much more quickly than the norm, whether for stylistic effect, as in double-time raps with certain American auctioneers, in response to a challenge, as in “speed-debates” held at American universities, when caught in the momentum of an explanation, as Michel Rocard is here, or because one has been overcome by a violent emotion (sic)—(see also Je bavarde toujours).

Articulatory compression

Output acceleration often goes hand in hand with distorting word pronunciation: such is the case in this excerpt of the film La BM du Seigneur by Jean-Charles Hue, or in this interview where Françoise Sagan personally explains that the typist must slow down the tape recorder’s speed to be able to understand the words that are coming from it. This same process of eating up one’s words can be heard in an excerpt of the film L’Esquive, where a scene from a Marivaux play is spoken at top speed by an actor whose shyness (desire to be heard as little as possible) gives us the impression that his syllables have been pressed together (see also La nécessité de vivre ensemble).

In this short excerpt from an interview with criminal Charles Manson, in this excerpt of the film Hibernatus starring Louis De Funès, or even in this Dario Fo performance, phoneme compression is so exaggerated that it makes each speaker’s words sound burlesque and parodic. Similarly, Jean Sas unnerves his interlocutor in this street interview by pretending to stammer before speeding through parts of his questions. The poet Jaap Blonk has stylized this process in an exemplary way by methodically removing vowels and diphthongs from a given expression.

Morphological compression

Morphological compression takes place when words or phrases are literally abridged. The most common forms of abridgment are syncopes (v’là, short for voilà), apocopes (ciné, short for cinéma), and aphereses (bus, short for autobus). This process can even be heard in a rap song by Seth Gueko, as well as in another scene from the film L’Esquive. Likewise when Patrick Modiano quotes Baudelaire’s famous line, “Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines” [“But the green paradise of childish love”]: either he considers this literary reference to be sufficiently well-known for his interlocutor to recognize it, or he is suddenly taken aback by the thought of repeating the root enfan- [child]—he removes the last two syllables from the word enfantines [childish].

This type of compression is also used as a rhetorical figure: when Jérôme Game reads his poems, utterances are arbitrarily truncated, often in the middle of words, forcing listeners to mentally rebuild the missing halves with all of the accompanying ambiguities such a process creates.

Other types of abridgment, very common in everyday speech, are acronyms or initialisms, as in this excerpt from a Grand Magasin show, in this interview parody with a financial analyst or, even more absurdly, in this video found on YouTube.

Syntactic compression

Another way of compressing discourse is to trim the very structure of what is being spoken: removing articles, pronouns, prepositions, even entire swaths of an utterance. Asyndeton, for example, is a rhetorical figure that cuts down an utterance by removing its logical connectors and conjunctions, like when journalist Jean-François Kahn gets carried away with himself. This kind of syntactic compression can also be used as a poetic technique, as can be heard in this reading by Olivier Cadiot.

Onomatopoeia is another very effective means of syntactic compression, as in this example of a witness to a car accident whose narrative mirrors the speed and brutality of the event being described. Poets and actors are masters at playing with an onomatopoeia’s power of ambiguity and evocation: : take futurist Marinetti’s poem Battaglia di Adrianopoli, for example, or Louis de Funès in another excerpt of Hibernatus, or Jacques Villeret in Jean Girault’s film La Soupe aux choux.

Rhetorical compression

Other possible examples of compression, albeit at a different scale, are processes where a word, sound, or phrase replace entire swaths of discourse. A building manager compresses the exasperation he feels about the occupants of the building he supervises into a whistling noise. One can also imagine that this whistling noise is replacing a word he cannot find or does not have the time to look for, as in this excerpt where a speaker produces a certain dramatic effect all while adequately illustrating what is being said by imitating the sound of an alarm. In this excerpt of a television show, a man’s long moan supplants his speech and serves as a response to the upsetting statement he has just heard.

In a certain way, pronouns (personal, demonstrative, relative) compress the utterances they stand for: they can be systematically decompressed on the condition of knowing the context they have been spoken in. A number of rhetorical strategies can be listed here. Another excerpt from a work by Olivier Cadiot shows us the ironic use he makes of the term “et cetera”: compressing an implicit whole presented as obvious but open, in reality, to a multitude of possible interpretations left to the listener’s imagination.

Conversely, a word or two can contain an entire formalized implicit statement within itself: such is the case when saying “I do” at a wedding, which is a compression of the whole matrimonial contract as it has just been uttered by a state or religious authority. In an excerpt of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer’s marriage ceremony, we can thus hear how the “I will” spoken by the spouses is charged with all that it represents for the British state, the English Monarchy, the Anglican Church, the Windsor family, and maybe the princely couple’s love as well. This moment can be compared to the one that follows it, where the contracting parties are made to repeat each word of the engagement they have just agreed to.

Another example of rhetorical compression can be found in certain slogans or catchphrases: when a group of women chant, “Yes, Dad; yes, Honey; yes, Boss—we’re sick of it!”a significant part of feminist discourse finds itself compressed into this ironic calling out of patriarchy.

Focalization | Occurs when speech plays with the focal point of its address. Focalization is a means of switching between interlocutors, of opening or limiting one’s target, of distributing one’s words among various recipients, or of speaking to multiple parties at once.

All speech is addressed to someone. It is hard to imagine speaking to no one at all: whether it be to oneself, to someone absent, to an abstraction, to an inanimate object or divinity, human speech only takes shape through the movement that leads it to another: it aims; it is a vector. The idea of focalization allows us to examine how a discourse’s aim can suddenly change, become more focused, or on the contrary more open, moving or distributing itself between various interlocutors.

In this excerpt of an Indochine concert, the singer speaks to his public using the pronoun tu [singular, familiar form of “you”], using a paradoxical form of address aimed both at the crowd and each of its members. Most of the time, however, focalization happens when one form of address shifts to another. There are five main categories of focalization.

Tightening

Often, a speaker addressing themselves to an entire gathering will suddenly focus on one of its members: here, Dominique de Villepin focuses his answer on François Hollande, or here Daniel Cohn-Bendit shouts at his counterpart Martin Schultz. In both cases, each speaker’s address asserts itself as it finds a focal point. Though more ordinary and thus more impassive in tone, the same tightening process can be heard in auctions, where auctioneers move from a form of open, inquiring address to one that is closed, focused on certain individuals, ratifying their offer when they bid.

In another context, Roland Barthes, beginning his lecture at the Collège de France, briefly focuses his discourse onto those of his auditors who are standing up, inviting them to come back another time. During a conference on Proust, François Bon illustrates his point by personally addressing one of his audience members. Likewise, in this excerpt of the film Entre les murs, the teacher first speaks to the entire class, then focuses his words on certain members, targeting his injunctions. A plowman does the same when giving instructions to each of his steers.

Distribution

The most systematic example of distributed address can be seen in this list of thanks taken from a Jane Birkin concert. Formal situations such as Jacques Chirac’s inaugural speech or this Jacques Vergès plea are also conducive to this kind of serial address, much like messages heard on television, spoken, however, in a much more relaxed way. In this excerpt of a Claudia Tagbo show, the comedian splits her public up by successively addressing herself to White, Arab, Black, and Asian women, and in this A Silver Mt. Zion concert, the singer speaks to his public by distributing its members into socio-professional categories.

Alternation

Perhaps the most spectacular instances of focalization are those where a speaker shifts their focus between two recipients with very different statuses: like when this man speaks in very contrasting terms to a journalist for France Culture and to his dog; or when this voice suddenly focuses on a plant; when this truck farmer moves from an aside back to the general public; when this singing coach moves between addressing her student and an imaginary public, or even in this famous excerpt of La Femme du boulanger, where the character played by Raimu transposes his speech full of reproaches to his wife into one aimed at the female cat that has just walked into the kitchen.

Sometimes a change in address happens more smoothly, as in this message from the ex-lead singer of Pantera about the death of guitarist Dimebag Darrel: we hear him go from “he” to “you,” transforming an apology to his family into a declaration of love. Many instances of alternating address can be found on radio and television, since speakers often pass from generic forms of address aimed at viewers or listeners to more concrete, focused forms of address, whether it be to a guest, as in this interview with Colette or Ségolène Royal, or to a co-host, as in this amateur radio show where we can hear two budding hosts prepare what they will be saying.

Multi-focalization

But focalization is even more remarkable when it happens with three, four, even five different forms of address. Spectacular examples of multi-focalization can often be seen on television, as in this Evelyne Thomas show (successive addresses to Thomas, to the viewers, to the show’s guests); this fit of uncontrollable laughter by host Laurie Cholewa (the public, her colleagues, the viewers); this regional counselor (the president, the viewers, the guest, the orchestra); this cooking show about an eel matelote with Maïté (the viewer, Micheline, the eel); this televised appearance by Michel Sardou (you all, you, you, the guy saying “ooh”) or this one by Francis Lalanne (the viewers, the cameraman, the pen-pushers); this episode of Intervilles (the viewers, contestant 1, contestant 2, the crowd, Guy Lux); but also this radio show disrupted by an animal rights activist (Alexis Grüss, the young lady, the security staff, the listeners, Joël).

Sarcasm

Other interesting cases of focalization are those where a speaker addresses several categories of interlocutors all at once: in this Fernand Raynaud recording, the comedian’s instructions and corrections, aimed at his guest, are precisely what change the focal point of his address (as in Ashanti, incidentally). In Fernand Raynaud’s cruel utterances, we can hear how he is speaking both to Jacky Bernard and to a future listener (the recording was published as a single that Raynaud gave his friends): its aim is double.
Likewise, in this excerpt of L’Ecole des fans, Jacques Martin technically only addresses the audience (first level of discourse), but his speech contains a hidden address to Jean-Sébastien (second level), even though the host’s sarcasm will always be intended for the audience (third level).
Finally, in this recording of a man speaking to no one in particular on the subway, we can hear different forms of address, whether abstract or concrete, present or absent, which follow and melt into one another to such a point that it becomes unclear, in the end, who exactly is being spoken to.

Fold | Deviations in the course of speech that make use of digression, detour, parentheses, or citation, allowing one to play with a range of qualities and registers. Folds produce tacking movements that twist discursive threads without breaking them.

Speaking of folds implies viewing speech through the metaphor of a continuous line or thread (indeed, one often hears of narrative or discursive threads): one that is curved not straight, inflected, wavy, making detours and digressions, going through distinct forms of enunciation, making qualitative jumps between different levels of speech without ever resolving itself into any set form of continuity.

The fold’s light inflection

Folds can be recognized by the inflection they carve into someone’s intonation, marking the opening of temporary parentheses. We can thus hear Alain Robbe-Grillet’s descending intonation as he makes a didactic and illustrative digression on André Breton, and Jean-Marie Straub’s slightly sullen voice lighting up during the passing mention of a “childhood friend.”

Apart from the fact that they favor thematic digressions, folds also allow discourse to turn back on itself and anticipate its own becoming. In this excerpt of a Gilles Deleuze lecture on Leibniz, folding allows for the various points of a philosophical demonstration to be brought together over the course of several sessions. Such a reversal of time’s dimensions also allows actor Jean-Claude Van Damme to adequately theorize his particularly tortuous way of speaking.

The fold as delay

Some folds stretch out secondary levels of discourse ad infinitum, leading to a noticeable delay in reaching someone’s object of speech. The very beginning of Antonin Artaud’s Pour en finir avec le Jugement de Dieu delights itself in pushing back the object of the famous opening phrase “yesterday I learned.” A journalist charged with reading an AFP dispatch gives his listeners a moment of contrition whose underlying strategy is clear: to make them want the news. In this excerpt of Sacha Guitry’s film Assassins et voleurs, the character played by Darry Cowl avoids the confession demanded of him by the court through a series of successive folds. The comedic potential of this kind of situation can be heard with humorist Pierre Repp, where stuttering and spoonerisms create a number of false leads that are each more incongruous than the other.

Saturating/saturated folds

When the hierarchy of levels of discourse tends to come undone and peripheral elements begin to proliferate in excessive ways, folds can also be used to saturate speech (see the entry Saturation). Asked to justify his absence at a work meeting, a man is led to use phrases like “well, anyway” in order not to lose his initial train of thought. In an extended question asked by Marc Kravetz to novelist Eduardo Manet, a guest on France Culture’s show Matins, the multiple parentheses used are not so much digressions as they are elements that re-traverse the novel and complicate the problem. In a reverse example, we have this disproportionately long answer to the question “You’re never punished at school?” by a player in L’École des fans.

A young woman calls the hotel where she spent the night to know if anyone has found the lingerie she believes to have forgotten there: this story, simple at first glance, breaks down into pieces through the use of peripheral details. Saturation by folds reaches its peak when a rapid output is combined with incoherent remarks: asked about his ties to Claude Berri, Jean-Luc Delarue addresses his astounded listeners “without an unconscious,” his words borne by the digressions of his bubbling thoughts.

The fold as unrestrained drifting of the mind

Freed from the worries of having to maintain a steady discursive thread, folded speech can lose itself in an unrestrained drift, tacking a conversation miles from its original subject without appearing problematic in doing so. In this excerpt, we hear Françoise Sagan move without transition from racehorses to the sufferings of the unemployed. Elsewhere, Barbara’s desire to open herself to an audience leads only to the pleasure of her pretending to be lost in her remarks, and a word (“green”) becomes the basis for a series of disjointed word associations. When such an improvised drift is based entirely upon the emptiness of speaking for the sake of speaking, it can provoke an audience’s ire, and rightly so.

Just as lonely, though not quite as indifferent to its surroundings, a soliloquy captured in the Parisian Metro threads together a series of disparate referents like pearls, the subway allowing for changes in focus favorable to temporarily leaving one’s main remarks aside.

Finally, in Benoît Jacquot’s film Télévision, Jacques Lacan’s words are represented as forming a continuous intellectual drift, though one that is largely under control. Here, folds are dramatized as the realization of words in actions, with Lacan arranging his eloquent pauses, interpolated clauses, authoritative quotes, his focalization, his contrasts in tone and intensity, etc., as needed.

Indexation | The quality of speech being linked to an external event that it follows, points to, comments, supports, or orders, and from which it draws its formal properties, notably rhythmic ones.

Speech is indexed to an external event to the extent that both share a certain duration, a course of action that the speaker is bound to in some way. Sports commentary is thus a form of speech whose form and existence are directly due to the event it comments. This is the case with c/node/9397 and soccer commentary: accelerating output, decreasing details at crucial moments, intensity: the more breathless the commentary, the more listeners will get the impression they are actually present at such race or such game (see also Medal wa mieta).

Indexation could also be described as follows: speaker A shares, represents, and transmits their speech over the course of action B, with speaker C present. Thus, the horse race (B) is related by a commentator (A) for spectators (C). The object of indexation thus takes shape through the movements of an inanimate object, the actions of a human or group of humans, the actions of a human on a horse, the horse itself, and the field streaming by because of humans carrying out their actions on horses which make up something of interest for spectators and commentators.

A typical example of indexation can be found in this excerpt of a “real-time” description of General De Gaulle’s trip and welcome to Québec. A great number of situations lend themselves to this kind of action, such as reports, reaction videos, auctions. We have also found this case of a controversial description of gestures for deaf and mute persons (see also Capturer un groupe de macque rhésus femelles, Le premier signal, Look at that big change, The best culinary magic trick, We call this a capitulation, and Attentat à Jerusalem).

Based on these typical cases, we can distinguish between several other cases that make up the collection:

Explanation

Occurs when A and B are mixed up—that is, when a speaker (A) describes an action (B) they are carrying out to a third person (C). I represent myself in action to a spectator through speech. Thus, in this excerpt of a documentary on Alfred Cortot, the great pianist shows a young lady the “dreamy” way that he believes Schumann’s piece The Poet Speaks should be played. Or, in this harmonic analysis, taken from a recording about learning how to play guitar, Valérie Duchâteau comments on a Bach score over her very own recording of the prelude.

Such is also the case in this excerpt of a cooking show, this dance class, this mathematics lesson, and this more domestic tutorial (see also Ocho cortado).

Instructions

Occur when B and C are mixed up, that is to say when the action described is carried out by the person speaker A is addressing: thus, in this recording, an owner (A) gives instructions (B) to his dog, who is the recipient (C) of his speech. The three orders “Lie down!” “Sit!” and “Stand!” depend upon the dog’s response. In this case, the indexation is reciprocal, because the recipient of the speech retroactively acts upon the speaker, like this boxing coach or this conductor (see also Nur der Fluß ist weg). This relationship to indexation can thus produce the impression that the event described is being mutually constructed, another example being this recording of a game of Pictionary or the turmoil of giving birth (see also Montre ce que tu sais faire, Vas-y Isabelle). In this family of cases, one can also find the example of propping someone up, of saying “repeat after me” (Un bon citoyen and I, Barack Hussein Obama).

Observation

When A and C are mixed up, that is to say when a speaker (A) describes and comments on an action (B) they are witnessing for themselves (C). In his Tentative de description de choses vues au carrefour Mabillon le 19 mai 1978, Georges Perec, standing in public, makes oral notes about “what happens when nothing is happening, apart from time, people, cars, and clouds.” This is also the case in a poem where Klaus Groh counts drops. The stating of each drop’s rank is indexed to the rhythm of its fall, leaving silence between each statement that cannot be mastered (see also Un pompon jaune, un pompon rouge, un pompon bleu).

Self-commentary

When A, B, and C are mixed up, that is to say when a speaker (A) comments on an action (B) they are carrying out for themselves (C). In this excerpt of the film Mesrine, for example, a police inspector (A) reads what he is typing (B) aloud for himself (C) (see also the borderline case of Ah-Hooooh).

This occurrence of writing while reading aloud, as if for oneself, is quite common—another example can be found in this scene from real life. But it seems clear that this kind of action, when carried out in public, takes its public nature into account. The excerpt just cited would thus be an example of the current sub-category but also a case of what we have called explanation. Indeed, the sub-categories described above are not mutually exclusive. A player in a game can both follow their own actions and those of other players; a composer telling a tale can both comment on what they are doing and describe it as an almost external action that has already taken place. Finally, one can see how observations for oneself and instructions to cameramen are intermingled in a stage control room, or how certain activities such as flying together require both concentration on oneself and concentration expressed to others.