Displaced signs of captive behaviour are inscribed in the paradoxical act of listening to oneself and clearly hearing another. Heterotopias and notions of becoming unfold here.

Insects emit signs. Insects emerge as creatures characterised by their ability to last, to transform, to survive. Consider the periodic cicadas: their life cycle, their resurrection from the earth, their metamorphosis into winged form, and their voice.

The life of a cicada begins when an egg is laid in the bark of a tree. A nymph hatches, falls to the ground, and tunnels into the soil, where it lives underground for up to 17 years. On a warm night in the designated interval year, the instars tunnel to the surface and return to the tree. A split opens along the back of the nymph’s shell; it pushes itself out, leaving behind its exoskeleton (exuvia). Overnight, it completes moulting, and in its vulnerable, pale post-shedding form, it waits for its new body to harden and darken. The cicada then flies, sings, mates, and dies 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; a post-functional emergence of a trans-species with a long-lasting spectral voice. Where is its place in the phonosphere? Is it a somatic or immaterial voice?

Every voice echoes its somatic origins, yet this one ultimately escapes the confines of 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 may be called metaphysical not because it transcends the physical realm, but because it engages another materiality beyond that located in spatio-temporality. It follows its own material logic: a meta-physical corporeality associated with the seductive song of the Sirens – semi-human, semi-animal, semi-goddesses. The cicada carries the voice beyond time: mortal in its phenomenology, immortal in its sound[1]; a mourning of procrastination, a pro-vocation.

Species of (non)time. Taxonomies of (non)belonging. Phototaxis, phonotaxis, metamorphic trans-species in synchronous emergences, pulsating, chorusing attacks from a transcendental elsewhere. Strange coincidences, some call them synchronicities. The risk to an individual that remains synchronised is less than the risk to one that breaks synchrony. There is safety in numbers. There is a hybrid process that takes no place in chorusing: decentralised swarming in the mind, as if they know their audience lives online.

Toward an impossible search for stability, a return to a previous future era, a passage into co-existence; from captive behaviour to freedom; an opening of temporality and placelessness. Caught in cycles of extinction and reanimation, refugees from bodies and senses. In this perpetual, semi-spherical, semi-tonal, semi-embodied phase, where residues still meet, voices seek to register an open (dis)closure, externalising 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: Cambridge University Press, 2020, Chapter 3: “Cicadas: On the Voice,” pp. 79–106.