When Olivia says, you have a beautiful scalp, very symmetrical, very smooth, and somewhere off-screen, her fingers find my hairline with a dry grassy sound which reminds me my skull is there, and also not there, I am her ‘you’, spoken into place. I hover between states. My body is imaginary (to Olivia) and irreducibly here (in my room, on my bed). I’m doubled, folded over and pleasantly displaced. This is how it feels, I think, to feel (and luxuriate in) what it is to be a ‘you’. No ‘you’ in particular, this given you, the one that happens to be the object – the much-prized object – of this occasion of address.
NOTES
↑ 1. Olivia’s Kissper ASMR, ‘CLOSE UP Medical DOCTOR Role Play: Binaural ASMR EXAMINATION with CRANIOSACRAL THERAPY for Migraines’, 11 February 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyz0TRPWEag.
↑ 2. Quoted in Joceline Andersen, ‘Now You’ve Got the Shiveries: Affect, Intimacy, and the ASMR Whisper Community’, Television & New Media 16, no. 8 (2015), 687; see also Chap. 15 of this volume.
↑ 3. Olivia’s Kissper ASMR, ‘1 Hour FACIAL Spa BLISS: Binaural ASMR Role Play with Sugar Scrub & Relaxation Music’, 12 June 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Viy8TRtAWQw.
↑ 4. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 90.
↑ 5. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2005), 31.
↑ 6. Barbara Johnson, ‘Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion’, in The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, ed. Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten and Keja Valens (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 218.
↑ 7. For more on this, see Michael Hardt, ‘Affective Labor’, Boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 89–100.
Emma Bennett performs, writes and makes recordings – working with language, voice, sound and objects. She is interested in figures of speech, obstacles and involuntary acts. She has recently performed at Santozeum Museum (Santorini, Greece), FIAC (Paris) and Wellcome Collection (London).
