it ‘a form of ventriloquism’ whereby the speaker throws not only their voice, but also human form into the addressee, ‘turning its silence into mute responsiveness’.[6]
Olivia’s spoken performance is directed – intently, exaggeratedly – towards me, the mutely responsive viewer. But, in her room, my proxy is a technological assemblage, a camera plus binaural microphone. And so there is something simultaneously voyeuristic and thingified about this position. I am looking out from the position of the thing Olivia once addressed as though it were a person, a human being with a face. Here a curious doubling takes place: a thing is being addressed as if it were a person, and via the mediation of a screen, a digital interface, a person (me) can experience this address from the position of the thing. This might explain what I feel to be an odd displacement of my personhood, I am being addressed as if I were a person, but my position, my viewpoint, is that of a thing.
6.
Why is this so nice, the feeling of this uncertain status between personhood and objecthood? Could it be that it offers a relief from a certain kind of personhood? Projecting oneself outwards into space, into social space, can be exhausting, perhaps increasingly so in the performance-driven economy of late capitalism, where the kind of work to which we are encouraged to aspire is not that which produces material goods, but that which delivers services and creates and maintains social networks.[7][1] Against this backdrop, it might well be that the embodied social acts of projecting one’s ‘self’ out towards others – smiling, speaking, comporting one’s body in relation to others, turning one’s face to the world – feel increasingly like work.
Is this what, for me, makes the address of the ASMR role play restful, relieving, over and above those real-life caring encounters it imitates?[2] At the doctor, the spa, I may be granted a degree of anonymity (these professional carers do not know me), but I am still taxed with the effort of acting like a person, projecting some coherent image of myself. But here, with Olivia, who promises me, amongst other things, a peel-off mask, a loose personhood is projected on to me by someone who cannot even see my face. This intervenes in the projecting of a coherent, bounded, personness outwards into the world; here is someone projecting a neutral and impersonal personhood (as in, human shape, human form) on to me.
