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That blanket of molecules constitutes the medium of sound. A vibrating object sets the molecules into motion in waves of greater or lesser magnitude, at intervals of greater of lesser frequency. The vast majority of the mobile organisms that humankind knows as animals possess receptors sensitive to those waves of air molecules. Unlike the infinite reaches of space across which light energy can travel, the medium of sound is finite. Air exemplifies the indestructibility of matter. It is always there, in the same volume.

Usually precipitated in circumstances of an imminent loss of personal and collective identity, its echoic poetics is both tactical and profoundly political. The pleasure principle to which Vygotsky’s inner speech is tied need not be regressive or antisocial (Kozulin 1986: xxxvi). Refusing to submit to a reality principle whose communicational goal is mutual intelligibility, those who act on what they hear insist on the erotic basis of communication. Instead of a monologue à deux, from which ambiguity is removed, on the principle that “meeting is for strangers” (Eliot 1969: 337), they enact a dialogue in which differences make a difference.

The dramaturgist’s Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and Auditory Space 49 adorable calculations produce “a double body, doubly membered” (Artaud 1993: 89). As in Bororo society, so in Balinese shadow puppetry: it is literally through the other that one comes to exist—only the “one” is always doubled, that is, an echo constructed mimetically. Further, the cultural value of the meaning thus produced resides in the fact that it does not mimic the clear, straightforward communication preferred in our modern, rationalistic society.