Ventriloquism

A piece of public ventriloquism is a conversation between two figures, voiced from outside their bodies, by people who have never been those figures and never will be. The figures are real. Their public utterances elsewhere are real. The conversation is invented, and the invention is performed by a third party — the public, the dramatist, the satirist, the prompt engineer, the child mimicking a politician at the dinner table — using the voices as ventriloquist's dummies. The dummies do not consent. The dummies are not asked. Their mouths are moved by the hand of whoever is staging the encounter.

This is what we do to public figures, and we have done it for as long as there have been public figures to do it to. The act precedes the medium. Plato did it to Socrates. Dostoevsky did it to Christ. Imagined dialogues between rivals, between predecessors and successors, between heroes and ghosts have been a stable form for two and a half thousand years. The novelty in the present is not the act but the volume — anyone with a phone can stage a piece of public ventriloquism in two minutes, and increasingly the dummy is voiced by a machine that has been trained on the dummy's published speech. The hand that moves the mouth has become an arm of statistics. The dummy has become more compliant.

The almost in this wing is structural. The conversation was never had because the figures were never in a room together, or were in a room and said nothing, or were in a room and said something else, or were seated at opposite ends of a state dinner and never met. Public figures speak in public, not to each other. Their speech is filtered, prepared, defended; even their unguarded moments are guarded. The conversation between two of them, if it had happened, would have been impoverished by its publicness. The ventriloquised conversation, by contrast, is not. It permits the figures to drop the protective register that a microphone enforces. The cost of the permission is that the figures are no longer the ones speaking.

The audience here is third in a different sense than the listener at any other conversation. The audience is also the writer. The conversation is between A and B; the listener is the public, which is neither A nor B and yet writes the dialogue both A and B are made to speak. When the public stages an imagined conversation, it is asking what A and B would say if they could speak past the public for a moment — and the public answers its own question, in A's voice and B's voice, both impersonated by the public's idea of how A and B sound when they are not paying attention to being public. The figures are robbed of the encounter the audience claims to be staging on their behalf. The robbery is the form.

A piece of ventriloquism is rare not because the underlying conversation could not have happened — many of them could have, and some nearly did — but because public figures rarely meet in the conditions that would let them speak as the public imagines them speaking. They meet at conferences. They meet at funerals. They meet at the front of a stage with a moderator. The format dilutes the encounter. The encounter the public actually wants is two figures alone in a room, or on a long walk, or at a kitchen table at three in the morning, with no microphone and no record. The format the public actually gets is the panel discussion. The ventriloquised conversation, in this wing, is what the panel discussion was not.

These are the conversations this wing holds. Each begins from the conditions of an imagined meeting — what room, what hour, what unrecorded interval — and walks down the branches that begin there. The reader, having heard these figures speak elsewhere, can hear which of the branches sounds most like them. Most of the time the figures sound like themselves. Sometimes they do not. The wing makes no apology for moving their mouths. The act of moving their mouths is, if anything, the wing's central honesty: it admits that this is what is being done.