WHAT

To describe the systemic apparatus developed in this text, I define it as Lingua Membra. The name joins lingua, tongue or language, to membra, members in all the senses on which this work depends: bodily, collective, civic, and relational. The second term is not ornamental: it answers Saʿdi’s own word aʿzā, the plural of ʿuḍw, Persian ozv, in the phrase aʿzā-ye yekdigarand, “members of one another”. The title therefore names a formal language of somatic membership: a language of voice, body, and membered relation. Like a lingua franca, it allows bodies that do not share a spoken language, cultural code, or aesthetic tradition to enter a common operational field.

The English term member is retained throughout not as a stylistic preference, but as a structural necessity. It preserves the double register on which the project depends: the civic and associative register of participation and membership in a collective, and the older anatomical register of a limb or part of the body. “Limb” would preserve the bodily sense but lose the civic and associative one. “Participant” would preserve the social sense but lose the woundable body. “Organ” would return the metaphor too easily to hierarchy, function, and vital centrality. “Part” would be too weak, since a part may be detachable without implying belonging. “Member⁠” keeps the pressure of belonging and embodiment in the same word.

The same double register remains audible in French membre, and it is also the word through which the KJV renders Paul’s formula, “members one of another”, where anatomical and communal senses meet in early modern English. The civic and associative register remains visible in expressions such as “member country” and “member state”, where a political body is named through its belonging to a larger collective. The survival of the bodily meaning in words such as “dismemberment” is equally crucial. To dismember is not simply to damage a body; it is to tear a member from the body to which it belongs. The violence is therefore anatomical and communal at once. Lingua Membra depends on precisely this overlap: a member is not an abstract citizen, not a mere audience, not a representative unit, but a body exposed to other bodies through vulnerability, resonance, and response.

Lingua Membra is neither a natural language nor a private idiolect. Lingua Membra is a public system of execution containing a univocal numerical code; each Wound⁠ is a singular execution of that system, while what wounds the subject is never exhausted by what the code makes decipherable. Its shared rules, as learned, enacted, and sustained in practice, allow it to function as a public language-game in which singular acts become recognisable, repeatable, and transmissible. In this limited respect, the system is analogous to a langue, while each Wound is analogous to an act of parole: a situated execution by a Fibre,⁠ Member, Circle,⁠ or other formation. The analogy does not turn Lingua Membra into a natural language. Its digits are conventional numerical signs whose values are defined within the code, while its separators mark determinate operations of breath and movement. These elements can be learned, repeated, checked, and retrospectively deciphered with little ambiguity, even when their vocal, silent, visual, or tactile execution is adapted to different bodies. What the code makes legible is the formal structure of the execution, its count, chronology, divisions, and operations, not the totality of the Pain⁠ or trauma from which the Wound arises. Lingua Membra gives that rupture a repeatable public form without translating or exhausting it as narrative meaning.

Although this text uses the Latinate term Lingua Membra to name the systemic apparatus, this nomenclature should not become a linguistic imposition. It functions as a structural placeholder for the relation between voice, language, and member. If the Latin roots do not resonate within a given linguistic or cultural context, a local member can translate the term into her own language. The local formulation preserves the dual axis of the apparatus: tongue, voice, or language on the one hand, and member, limb, or constituent body-part on the other. Possible equivalents might therefore be formed through pairings such as Latin lingua and membrum, Persian zabān and ozv, French langue and membre, or Arabic lisān and ʿuḍw. By re-rooting the term in the local language, the assembly ensures that Lingua Membra is not an externalised structure imposed from above, but a structural extension of the local culture itself.

Within this architecture, the term Wound functions simultaneously as a structural noun and an active verb. The specific somatic execution performed by a Fibre,⁠ a Member,⁠ or a Circle⁠ is called a Wound. In ordinary usage, trauma is often used to name the traumatic event itself. In the stricter distinction adopted here, however, trauma, from the Greek traûma, denotes the wound or injury produced by the catastrophe: it is not the event itself, but the rupture, alteration, or enduring disturbance left within the living body. This architecture therefore maintains that distinction. The event is the external catastrophe; trauma is the wound it leaves in the organism; the Wound is the structured response that gives that rupture a formal body without translating it into narrative. It marks the point at which Pain⁠ enters the architecture of Lingua Membra.

Consequently, the Wound is not thematic content to be represented. It gives Pain a formal public execution without claiming that the trauma left by an event can be adequately captured in speech, image, or symbolic sequence. It marks the limit at which the linguistic network splits open. Although formally structured, the Wound remains non-narrative: it gives Pain public form without converting trauma into a coherent account or claiming to exhaust what has been ruptured.

Crucially, what language-bound systems often treat as failure, weakness, or shame is consciously embraced within this architecture. The inability to give an exhaustive account in articulate speech of a calamity or the trauma it leaves is not treated as a disability or cognitive deficit; this limit of articulation becomes a core postulate of the masterless structure. This work draws on the Lacanian distinction between discourse, speech, and language, not in order to psychoanalyse the participants, but to mark the point at which available symbolic coordinates prove insufficient to absorb the trauma left by an event. In Seminar XVII, Lacan’s discourse is not equivalent to langue or parole: it names a structure of social bond, address, position, and relation that may subsist without spoken words while still depending on language, the field of the Other, and signifying relations.⁠¹⁰⁷

Lingua Membra adapts this distinction differently. An outcry may arise before semantic speech, where speech is unavailable, or where speech proves structurally insufficient; it need not result from semantic speech breaking down. It is therefore not a deficient form of speech. Within the Wound, the non-lexical outcry enters a formal public address and a shared structure of resonance.

In this system, a Wound is a structured somatic response through which Pain is given public address without depending upon the failure or absence of speech. Fibres are not bound only to those within their immediate geography; they enter a wider field of relation among human bodies. A Fibre or Member may Wound when calamity strikes, whether across a street or across a border. Each execution is a Wound, and each Wound also wounds: it strikes its surroundings, summons response, and marks other Fibres and Members as potential sites of resonance. It requires no prior authorisation; it is a raw address of Pain that echoes the primal demands heard across historical demonstrations: ‘Be their voice!’ and ‘Be our voice!’

The human voice is produced within the living body, yet it becomes perceptible to another body only by leaving it. Breath pressure rises from the lungs; the vocal folds in the larynx interrupt and shape that airflow; the resonating cavities of the throat, mouth, and nose transform it into an acoustic event. At the precise moment of sounding, however, the voice crosses the somatic threshold and enters the exterior. As an address, it enters the field of the Other, no longer fully possessed by the body that produced it. The voice is therefore extimate not simply because an internal bodily production becomes external and audible, but because what is most intimate to the subject appears through it as exterior, foreign, and only partially assimilable. In Lingua Membra, this threshold is crucial. Trauma⁠ is the rupture left within the body; through voice, breath, hum, or the silent aperture of the opened mouth, the Wound gives Pain formal body and public address.

At this threshold, the voice is no longer treated as the transparent expression of a sovereign subject. This does not mean that the wounded subject is objectified. Rather, through voice, breath, hum, silence, aperture, trace, or public address, the Wound manifests its extimate structure: what is most intimate appears to the subject as exterior and foreign, while the Wound is held open, encircled, transmitted, and answered without being possessed.

Human distress, sorrow, fear, and pain can be spoken, written, painted, sculpted, or otherwise represented, but no such representation can guarantee universal understanding or universal affective force. Speech, writing, and visual signifiers remain bound to cultural codes, learned conventions, and symbolic systems that divide the species into separate interpretive communities. They may communicate powerfully within a given world, but they cannot by themselves compel the body of an unknown other to resonate. Moreover, these forms generally require learned symbolic decoding, even where that decoding is rapid. By forcing trauma into sequences of words, images, gestures, or signs, the raw biological urgency of the event is filtered through interpretation. When an event leaves trauma that cannot be fully absorbed by the available symbolic coordinates through which it might otherwise be narrated, the rupture may appear to the subject as exterior, foreign, exposed, or unassimilable. In this adapted sense, the Wound is extimate not because it is the trauma itself, but because it gives that rupture public form as an exterior address.⁠¹⁰⁸

When held within the formal perimeter of the outcry, this extimacy takes material form. To encircle the Wound is not to heal it, interpret it, or close it, but to hold open and mark the linguistic void at the limit of articulation. Adapting Lacan’s phrase, Lingua Membra treats the raw outcry as an extériorité jaculatoire, a “jaculatory exteriority”, and as collective somatic witness: a vocal event that strikes before semantic decoding has had time to domesticate it. The acoustic and neurophysiological grounds of this strike will be mapped in the subsequent sections; here, it is enough to establish the outcry as the point at which what is most intimate to the subject appears as exterior through the formal address of the Wound.

This architecture therefore does not guarantee identical feelings in every body; no system can. What it does is place bodies in relation to a shared physiological strike. When a Fibre cries out, other Fibres and surrounding witnesses do not first receive a proposition to interpret, but an acoustic and somatic impact to endure. The collective field of bodies is placed under pressure without requiring prior belief, agreement, translation, or aesthetic judgement.

Saʿdi’s claim is that human beings are not isolated units, but mutually implicated members whose suffering cannot remain sealed within the wounded part. In this shared anatomy of response, outcries are among the most immediate and least culturally mediated manifestations of pain. The question, then, is how to devise a system that minimises dependence on language, culture, geography, or ideology, creating a pathway for members to signal their pain to one another, so that no member may remain at rest when another is afflicted. In the received form of the poem, this ethical imperative is extended even further: ‘If thou feel not for others’ misery, the name of human being belongeth not to thee.’⁠¹⁰⁹

It is common within contemporary art discourse to claim that an artist has developed their “own language”. An artist may originate an idiom, but cannot possess a language exclusively once others can recognise, learn, repeat, use, or answer it. If it remained radically private, it could not function for others as language. Entry into shared use does not, however, entail complete understanding or the intact transmission of an intended meaning. This is the limited but necessary point at which Saussure, the later Wittgenstein, and Lacan meet for the purposes of Lingua Membra, without being reduced to one another. For Saussure, langue is a social system of conventions, whereas parole is its individual execution.⁠¹¹⁰

Wittgenstein becomes indispensable where the discussion turns from the Wound⁠ as a public address through which what is most intimate appears exterior to the public grammar of pain; he approaches the public condition of meaning through criteria of use rather than through Saussure’s distinction between system and execution. Lacan, in turn, prevents this shared field from being mistaken for transparent communication. The speaking subject does not stand outside langage as its sovereign owner: the message comes to the subject from the Other in an inverted form, while discourse may subsist without spoken words through relations instituted in language.⁠¹¹¹ Lacan’s distinction between code and the differential field of signifiers also clarifies the structure developed here. Lingua Membra’s numerical layer is codic precisely because its designed correspondences are univocal; the Wound’s address, reception, and effects are by no means reducible to that code. Saussure and Wittgenstein thus establish, in different ways, the necessity of a shared system or practice; Lacan shows that sharedness never makes meaning fully possessed or transmitted intact.

It is not by accident that, in the sequence of remarks in Philosophical Investigations later known as ‘the private language argument’, Wittgenstein returns to pain. His imagined private diary makes the difficulty explicit: the diarist writes the sign “S” in a calendar on each day when he takes himself to have the sensation, but an inward act of attention supplies no independent criterion by which correct use can be distinguished from what merely seems correct. Pain⁠ becomes the exemplary case for the temptation to imagine a private language because it seems immediate, inward, innermost and radically mine. Yet Wittgenstein does not treat the word “pain” as the name of a private object. He asks how words refer to sensations, and answers through use, training, primitive expression, crying, and pain-behaviour. A child cries; adults speak to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach him new pain-behaviour. The verbal expression of pain does not describe crying; it replaces it. The question is therefore not how a private object receives a name, but how the word “pain” has a place in a language-game.⁠¹¹²

This distinction is decisive for Lingua Membra. The outcry is not approached as an inner object later translated into an outward sign. Nor is the scream treated as a picture of pain. Wittgenstein’s warning is exact: the image of pain may enter the language-game, but not as a picture; pain-behaviour can point to a painful place, but the subject of pain is the person who gives it expression. The Wound may have a site, but the outcry belongs to the expressive body. It is not a report sent from a sealed interior. It is an expression that already stands at the threshold of a form of life.

Screaming is therefore not in itself extraordinary. Many sentient beings scream, and the human species possesses a widespread capacity for the cry as one primitive expression of pain, fear, shock, or alarm, although not every human body can emit one. Nor is the introduction of screams into art new. The scream has long entered painting, theatre, music, performance, cinema, and protest. What Lingua Membra offers is not the aestheticisation of the scream, nor an anti-aesthetic negation of it, but the construction of a poetics of the scream: a way of bringing the cry into public address by giving its passage from inside to outside a grammar, a procedure, and a shared practice.

In Wittgenstein’s terms, this means giving the outcry a place within a language-game: a shared practice in which language is woven into action. In Lingua Membra, the outcry is placed within a public field of Members,⁠ Fibres,⁠ Wounds, Circles,⁠ breaths, separations, repetitions, and responses. Other people may often know that I am in pain, but my own relation to pain is not ordinarily one of knowledge founded upon criteria or evidence. The grammatical asymmetry between first-person expression and third-person attribution therefore remains even when the expression of what is inward enters a public field of criteria, use, training, correction, and transmissible form. The scream is made public not as spectacle, not as beauty, not as ugliness, but as grammar: a shared procedure through which Pain, without becoming a private object or a pictorial representation, can acquire a place in a common form of life. The outcry does not transfer the sensation itself, but scars this public field through a grammar of exposure and a procedure that calls other bodies to respond while indifference, belief, translation, and aesthetic judgement are still organising its reception.

Lingua Membra structures the Wound through two interacting temporalities. In execution, when the core numerical-outcry sequence, whose single unit is later notated by ⭘, is performed in public, witnesses are not first asked to decipher a proposition. The rough outcry can place them under somatic pressure while interpretation is still taking shape. This first temporality is exposure: the witness encounters an acoustic and bodily strike before learning what the sequence records.

Alongside and after that impact, a second temporality becomes available through the code. Repetition, numerical count, chronological segmentation, breath, movement, and documentation make the formal execution retrospectively decipherable. At the numerical level, the correspondences are univocal: the digits and separators have stable code-values and corresponding operations, even though different bodies may realise them through safe and accessible vocal, silent, visual, or tactile forms. What can be deciphered with little ambiguity is not the Pain itself, but the execution’s structure: the encoded temporal sequence, counts, divisions, and operations. The Wound is therefore formally legible without being semantically exhausted. Its code can be learned, checked, repeated, and transmitted; what wounds the subject is neither transferred intact to witnesses nor reduced to the information the code conveys. The somatic strike and the later deciphering may overlap, but neither replaces the other. Without the first, the code would become mere information; without the second, the outcry would risk dissolving into an event without a transmissible public form.

The inquiry into Lingua Membra’s collective outcry led me to a question that the arts and humanities could not answer on their own: when danger, catastrophe, pain, or grief gives rise to a scream, what can science establish about what we share as a species? Neuroscience and bioacoustics are not my fields. I therefore claim no scientific authority here; that belongs to the researchers cited below. Their findings remain subject to continuing scrutiny and debate within their disciplines. I draw from their work only the limited conclusions needed to test the bodily assumptions behind the procedure through which Lingua Membra seeks to enact the desideratum.

The scientific path begins beyond the human. Many animals produce distinct calls in response to threat, separation, or attack, and other animals respond to features of those calls. Among primates, screams can vary with the caller’s role in a conflict, the severity of the attack, the opponent’s rank, and which other group members are present; listeners can distinguish some of these variants and respond according to the social information they convey.⁠¹¹³ Human screams retain features of this older field of urgent vocal signalling, while also serving a wider range of emotional and social situations.

This evolutionary continuity does not make every human scream transparent or give it one fixed meaning. One study of nonverbal emotional vocalisations begins from a distinction central to Lingua Membra: words and sentences depend upon a shared lexical code, whereas some affective signals may cross linguistic and cultural borders without one. The authors also note that infants are sensitive to vocal cues from the beginning of life, while their visual system is still relatively immature. The researchers compared native English speakers with seminomadic Himba participants who had not been exposed to the affective signals of individuals from cultural groups other than their own. The two populations were therefore treated as “maximally different in language and culture”. Recognition was bidirectional. English and Himba listeners reliably identified anger, fear, disgust, amusement, sadness, and surprise in vocalisations produced by members of the other group. The role of the scream is especially important for the text at hand: the English fear stimuli were screams, and Himba listeners recognised the fear they conveyed, while English listeners likewise recognised fear in Himba nonverbal vocalisations. Recognition was nevertheless stronger for vocalisations produced within the listener’s own culture, and three additional positive emotions, achievement, sensual pleasure, and relief, were not recognised bidirectionally across the two groups. The finding thus places the scream at a threshold central to Lingua Membra: it is not a language in itself, yet it can carry recognisable affect between bodies that share neither a spoken language nor a cultural code. Such recognition can cross a profound linguistic and cultural divide without erasing cultural difference or ambiguity.⁠¹¹⁴

What makes a scream a scream rather than another form of human vocalisation? Persian makes this question more charged. In present-day Persian, dād and faryād name broader forms of loud crying out, whereas jīgh more specifically names a sharp, piercing scream. Yet jīgh has also been gendered and diminished. Dehkhodā associates it with the voices of women and children, while the colloquial expression jīgh o vīgh can dismiss such vocalisation as feminine clamour. A comparable hierarchy also appears in English. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary defined squall as screaming out “as a child or woman frighted”, while Webster’s 1828 dictionary described it as screaming violently “as a woman frightened, or a child in anger or distress”. The older figure of the scold likewise made disruptive speech by women into a gendered defect. The parallel is not exact, but these examples show how certain screams and forms of disruptive speech have been cast as feminine or childish and thereby relegated to the margins of legitimate public outcry, where they are heard as noise, excess, irrationality, or unwarranted complaint rather than as responses to injury or injustice that demand attention. Such dismissal is itself a gendered judgement about which voices are entitled to cry out and which sufferings are deemed worthy of public hearing. Lexical distinctions therefore carry a hierarchy of voices that Lingua Membra refuses. This lexical hierarchy should not, however, be confused with acoustic roughness, which is a measurable property of a vocal sound rather than of its linguistic signifiers.

In Lingua Membra, the scream does not first solicit attention and then convey a separate message explaining why another’s pain should matter; the message itself reaches the witness through the same acoustic force that captures attention. Among the scientific works I read, two proved pivotal to this attempt. Published a decade apart, they form a continuous inquiry: the first identifies the privileged acoustic niche of the human scream, while the second returns to that finding and develops its implications for salience, evolution, and survival.

The 2015 study by Arnal et al. begins from the proposition that screaming is among the human communication signals most relevant to survival. The authors conjectured that an efficient alarm signal should be acoustically segregated from ordinary communication, since loudness and high pitch occur in many utterances and are not sufficiently distinctive to prevent false alarms. Comparing screams with speech and singing, they found that screams made far greater use of rapid fluctuations occurring between approximately 30 and 150 times per second, perceived as roughness. In a simplified visual representation of changes in sound level over time, these rapid modulations appear as a dense succession of peaks and troughs. In separate experiments, filtering roughness from screams reduced perceived fear, while adding it to neutral vocalisations increased perceived fear and improved localisation. Neutral vocalisations made artificially rough were localised as efficiently as natural screams, and both were localised more efficiently than unaltered neutral vocalisations. Rougher screams also prompted faster responses. The researchers therefore concluded that human screams occupy a “privileged acoustic niche” within the communication soundscape.⁠¹¹⁵

A decade later, Arnal and Gonçalves placed this niche within a wider evolutionary account. Their review focuses on alarm and distress screams, excluding joyful or excited screams, and proposes that roughness may have been selected and conserved because it can exogenously “hijack” the brain’s salience system, thereby accelerating responses to danger and supporting survival. This is a hypothesis assembled from converging evidence, not a conclusion established by the 2015 experiments. The review further argues that rough sounds are very difficult to ignore and may receive priority over other inputs. It also notes that dependent human neonates rely upon loud utterances such as screams to capture their parents’ attention.⁠¹¹⁶

For Lingua Membra, salience is structural, whereas aversion is neither required nor uniform. Roughness may make a scream aversive, but the procedure does not depend upon every witness experiencing the same affective response. These works therefore clarify both the force and the boundary of the human scream. Roughness is not exclusive to it, since artificial alarms and the calls of other species can exploit comparable acoustic features. Lingua Membra is nevertheless bound to human beings and seeks its vocal means within the human repertoire rather than in devices or the calls of other species. The human scream joins rough acoustic force to the exertion and presence of a human body without requiring a device or shared words. It becomes the material of the collective outcry because it bears the acoustic force of a survival signal, is a bodily act, and can be answered by another human body. This acoustic force does not determine how a witness will understand or answer the scream; it supplies the somatic threshold upon which Lingua Membra builds its public procedure.

The preceding evidence explains why the core ⭘ execution is built around a rough alarm outcry, namely the scream, rather than melody, speech, chant, or lament. Its temporal modulations can place witnesses under acoustic pressure before semantic interpretation has fully organised the event, but they do not determine a uniform response or guarantee recognition, empathy, or action. The core outcry therefore supplies the shared bioacoustic threshold of the system, while the Free Score⁠ allows local histories, mourning practices, and vocal traditions to enter the work. The surrounding code gives the outcry a public and repeatable form.