Schizophonics 

Gregory Whitehead writes, "schizophonics have lost all feeling for the difference between the living and the dead" (60). The ubiquity of recorded language creates this condition, ultimately encouraging the perception of "mass lingual necrosis"(60): "What our dead air amounts to, in the end, is a thriving population of partially decapitated and decayed remains from an infinity of public outerings and private mutterance. . . .How can we begin to figure out the nature and intent of such a teeming mass of wounded drifters, cut loose from the natural warmth of the human glottis and cast forth into the cold anti-nature of the schizophonic speech apparatus, left to decay, beyond all sense, inside a crackling inferno of garbled interference?"(60) The radio artist attempts to reinject the sense of the living body into the necrotic plenum of recorded matter, even though the attempt may be paradoxical. 

whitehead.rm