Displaced signs of captive behaviour, written in the paradoxical sense of listening to oneself, clearly hearing another. Heterotopias and notions of becoming.

Animals emit signs. Animals emerge as creatures characterised by their ability to last, to remain, to survive. Let us observe the periodic cicadas, their life cycle, their resurrection from the earth, their metamorphosis into a winged form and their voice. The life of a cicada begins with the laying of an egg in the bark of a tree. A nymph cicada hatches, falls to the ground and tunnels into the earth to live underground for up to 17 years. On a warm night in the designated year interval, all the instars tunnel to the surface and make their way back to the tree. A split opens along the back of the nymph's skeleton and it pushes itself out, leaving behind an exoskeleton known as exuvia. It completes the moulting process overnight, and in this vulnerable, whitish post-shedding form it will wait for its new body to harden and darken. The cicada will fly, sing, mate and die within a few weeks.
Bizarre transformations, prime-numbered intervals, non-existent forms, a phantom performance with a consistent voice. Physical pre-objects, non-objects, hyper-objects in a post-functional creation for a trans-biological long-lasting voice. Where is its place in the phonosphere? Is it a somatic or immaterial voice? Every voice echoes its somatic origins, but this one ultimately escapes the confines of the bodily form. The cicada embodies the paradox, the riddle of the voice, both a symptom of the body and a triumph over physical matter. It can be a meta-physical voice, not in the sense of being beyond the realm of the physical, but in the sense of involving another materiality, beyond or below that located in spatio-temporal reality. It is its own material logic, a meta-physical corporeality, associated with the seductive song of the Sirens, semi-human, semi-animal, semi-goddesses. The cicada represents the paradox of carrying the voice beyond death: mortal in its phenomenology, immortal in its sound [1], a mourning of procrastination.

Species of time, taxonomies of belonging, phototaxis, phonotaxis, metamorphic trans-species in synchronous emergences, pulsating chorusing attacks from the transcendental nowhere. Strange coincidences, some humans call them synchronicities. The risk to an individual who remains synchronised is less than the risk to one who breaks synchrony. There is safety in numbers; there is a hybrid process that takes no place in their chorusing, decentralised circling in the mind. As if they know that their audience lives online.

Towards an impossible search for an identity, a return to the previous future era, a passage to existence, a captive behaviour to freedom, an opening of temporality and placelessness. Caught in the cycles of extinction and reanimation, refugees from bodies and senses. In this perpetual, semi-spherical, semi-tonal, semi-embodied endgame, where residues still meet, organisms seek to form an open (dis)closure to externalise their interiority.

Co-existence continues in a non-present form in periodic phases.

 

[1] Pauline A. LeVen. Music and Metamorphosis in Greco-Roman Thought. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Chapter 3 - Cicadas: On the Voice p.79-106.