Introduction: Voice Matters

“… the voice is there to be forgotten in its materiality; only at this cost does it fill its primary function.”
—Michel Chion
 

“Sound is a little piece of the vibrating world.”
—Jonathan Sterne

 
Voice plays a vital role in human ecology. Simultaneously tied to the body and entwined with the external environment, the voice exists in a complex interaction with multiple physical and sociocultural formations. Yet interest in studying the role of voice qua voice in cultural production is a fairly recent phenomenon. Even though a range of scholars from different disciplines such as anthropology, film studies, linguistics, literature, musicology, performance studies, and philosophy have commented on the constitution of the voice (including Dolar, Duncan, Eidsheim, Ochoa Gautier, Kreiman and Sidtis, Sundberg, LaBelle, Butler, Feldman, Davies, and Connor in Dumbstruck and Beyond Words) and the role of the vocal in culture and society (including Chion, Cavarero, Connor, Harkness, Hirschkind, Ong, and Weidman), and even though some of these writings have been influential in the humanities and social sciences (including those by Derrida, Dolar, and Chion), a cohesive field of Voice Studies or even a broad area of shared vocabulary has yet to coalesce. While debates about the materiality of sound and its impact on the cultural, social, and political spheres (including those by Attali, Goodman, and Sterne) have coalesced into the emergent field of Sound Studies—which has received attention recently—the same has not yet been true for discourse on voice. Nor have the exploration of vocality and the conditions of voicing become prominent topics within Sound Studies. This is a curious gap in academic debate. If human listening is indeed “vococentric” (6)—as film scholar Michel Chion, one of the eminent writers on voice, strongly claims—why has the wealth of scholarly contributions about voice failed to manifest in the more visible form of a field of study?
 
As paradoxical as it may sound, the rather elusive place of the voice in academic discourse might be an effect of its central role and complex function, shaped by the intersection of the material and the metaphorical, in Western culture and society. Thus, the fields that have examined the voice have generally tended to divide into two camps: the symbolic and the material. On the one hand, what may be considered material inquiry into the voice includes medicine (for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes); physiology (in order to understand its function within the body); and engineering (for example, to explain topics like tissue, vibration, and air flow). On the other hand, the particular figuration of the voice as a carrier of self in Western culture has turned it into an object of philosophical and theoretical inquiry, which has often done away with its materiality. We may call this effect the weight of the symbolic.
 
Traditionally, philosophical and theoretical works in Western culture have treated the voice as a predominantly symbolic phenomenon with metaphysical qualities.[1] Voice has been cast as a central metaphor in critiques of dominant regimes of representation—for instance, in the uses of the tropes of speech and voice versus silence, deployed to represent gendered and/or racialized relations of power. Yet the voice remains disembodied in such critiques. This disembodiment of the voice arises from what the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero aptly terms the “videocentric” character of Western thinking, an enterprise that “denies to the voice a meaning of its own” (13). Cavarero’s work is part of a recent critique of the dominance of the visual in Western culture, where the master discourse of philosophy has systematically represented modes of knowing and being through metaphors of vision that range from everyday terms, such as “insight,” to the philosophical notion of Enlightenment (Jay 1).
 
Even powerful critiques of logocentrism, such as Jacques Derrida’s examination of the metaphysical tradition of thought in Of Grammatology, cannot escape the “devocalization” of voice (Cavarero 14). For example, Derrida’s critical neologism phonocentrism––as he calls the privileging of speech as unmediated interiority, or the presence of pure thinking, over writing in the metaphysical tradition––approaches the vocal without fully acknowledging the material.  Derrida argues that voice has become the vehicle of self or identity, which expresses itself in the concept of writing as derivative of speech; while speech effaces the process of signification through the assumption of the voice’s relationship to self, feigning an “absolute proximity” that he calls “auto-affection” (20). Derrida renders the “effacement of the signifier in the voice” an “experience” of illusion, which has become “the condition of the very idea of truth” (20). Curiously, his uncovering of the Western subject’s illusion of self-presence recognizes—at least implicitly—the materiality of voice as a condition of speech, in order to erase it again.
 
Cavarero claims that speech in the Derridean critique of phonocentrism is exclusively figured as thought. She argues that the voice, associated with time, is represented as an acoustic signifier that is more or less collapsed with the signified, hence giving the illusion of presence, while writing appears subversive to Derrida because its spatial organization undermines the absolute identification of signifier and signified that voice seems to present (222). This privileging of writing ties Derrida’s treatment of the phone to a history of logocentrism-as-videocentrism.[2] In a similar vein, Fred Moten detects in Derrida’s writing “an occlusion (of sound) that occurs sometimes in the name of a deconstruction of phonocentrism and always within a tradition of logocentrism, which has at its heart a paradoxically phonocentric deafness” (185). Moreover, Derrida’s approach reduces the capacities of technologies of sound re/production, like that of the phonograph, and their disruption of the presence of the subject in speech, to the sphere of mere signification.
 
Derrida’s treatment of the voice stands as just one example of a range of influential humanities discourses that engage with the voice as metaphor or theorize vocal acts in order to address wider social, political, or cultural questions, but ignore the sonic aspect of the voice. Further examples of devocalization can be found in Althusser’s notion of interpellation; Foucault’s deployment of the confession or of parrhesia; and in feminist arguments about gendered power relations that equate the voice with agency and authority, and silence with powerlessness, such as Spivak’s or Showalter’s. Such works indicate the relevance to the humanities of the question of the voice as medium, but they also quickly phase out the material voice, thereby maintaining the linguistic as the paradigm for thinking speech.
 
Thus, hearing and thinking of the voice first and foremost as material practice does not free us from the burden of the symbolic—nor should it. In fact, the friction between the material and the metaphorical dimensions of the vocal should serve as the condition of possibility for a productive conversation about the voice. The weight of the symbolic on the vocal, and its close relationship to the self as interiority, potentially mark crucial differences between discourse about voice and a recently recognizable field of Sound Studies, which has emerged from an explicit interest in the sonic, that is, the materiality of sound and its technologies. This is not to say that sound per se lacks a symbolic dimension. On the contrary, Veit Erlmann’s inquiry into the history of notions of resonance is only one study that demonstrates the metaphorical richness of the phenomenon of resonance in Western culture, and the ways in which thought has been understood to exist in the absence of resonance are, in fact, not isolated. However, the study of sound has been conceived as a field by putting materiality first. Taking this cue, we approach questions of the voice via Sound Studies: i.e., we explicitly address the ways in which the symbolic, material, and cultural intermingle and co-produce.
 
Specifically, we have found that to maintain the productive dynamic consideration of voice as culturally produced material entity—and to avoid the separation of the material and the symbolic—we have to take a transdisciplinary approach.   Examples may be found in a combination of performative and experiential methodologies together with relevant theoretical frameworks (such as those of Bulut, Eidsheim, Marshall, Schlichter, and Kinney in this issue), and in the feeding of one type of listening into another domain—say, applying clinicians’ listening culture to practices that are commonly thought as aesthetic, for example, opera (Kasunic, in this issue).
 
Investing in a productive interaction and indeed tension between voice as sound and material and voice as symbol, the essays in this issue do not contest the discursive role of voice. Rather, they suggest that a notion of voice-as-discursivity is inseparable from vocality, pointing to the ways in which discourse is constitutive of and constituted by vocal performances. Also inseparable from vocality, these articles posit, is listening to the voice—whether in the form of auto-listening (Eidsheim); collective or communal listening (Eidsheim, Kasunic, Schlichter, Marshall, Bulut); pedagogical listening (Eidsheim, Kasunic, Schlichter, Marshall, Bulut), or mediating mass audience listening (Kinney)—which can also productively be understood as a type of “diagnostic listening,” as Kasunic puts it. Indeed, the diagnostic may not only address what produces such voices, but may also inquire into what produced the type of listening that could carry out such an assessment—what Eidsheim identifies as “listening to listening.” Addressing the way in which discursivity has been fashioned and maintained by a material relation to voice, the collection interweaves perspectives from different fields of study—including film and media studies, literary theory, musicology, critical theory, disability studies, psychoanalysis, composition studies and rhetoric, gender and queer studies, drama and performance studies, and cultural histories of sound and its technologies.
 
The question of the relationship of voice and the human body within a network of forces takes center stage in the essays’ examinations of different histories, ideologies, and epistemologies of voice in the West. As a singer and voice teacher, musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim considers not only the sound of the voice, but also the material, cultural practice of vocal timbral formation. Specifically, she is concerned with the politics that are carried out through listeners’ interpretation of voices and the attendant formal (voice lessons) and informal (recognition and acceptance) pedagogies that act out those interpretations. However, rather than a critique of the individuals who project racialized listening and materialize it by informally and formally training voices, she notes that it is broader notions of sound and voice that entrain and support a more general listening for difference, and suggests that, in order to combat these tendencies, developing knowledge regarding the micropolitics of vocal timbre requires inquiry into listening.
 
Considering a precarious moment in Paris, historical musicologist David Kasunic is also concerned with listening pedagogies. Through the introduction of Joseph Fourier’s mathematical theory of harmonic analysis, René Laënnec’s transcription of tubercular voices, and Manuel Garcia’s physiology of voice, the question of the location of singing is reexamined. By considering contemporaneous descriptions and cultural practices around the tubercular voice as performed through seemingly disparate practices—medicine, literature, musical transcription, vocal and instrumental writing—Kasunic paints a picture of mid-nineteenth century Paris’s “interconnected listening strategies”—specifically, the relevance of tubercular singing (as a symbol of death) for the meaning of listening in modernity.
 
By considering experimental music and deaf performance through the theoretical frameworks of disability studies and psychoanalysis, theorist and musicologist Zeynep Bulut brings to light new perspectives on the presumed limits of hearing and silence. Bulut examines the vocal compositions Phonophonie by Mauricio Kagel and Lecture on Nothing by John Cage. Examining these presumed limits through recent stagings of familiar twentieth-century art music repertoire, Bulut posits, can further point to expanded boundaries of voice and speech, while simultaneously demonstrating a performative language.
 
American studies and film scholar Katherine Kinney’s essay “The Resonance of Brando’s Voice” engages with the vocal body in the cinema. Using current theories of acting in film and on the stage, she examines the role of the voice in American acting by listening to Marlon Brando’s vernacular sound, from Stanley’s howl in A Streetcar Named Desire to the Godfather’s sotto voce rasp. For Kinney, Brando’s voice, which sounds so different from voices in Hollywood’s leading-man tradition, resonates with social and political meaning. She argues that his vocality both embodies the naturalist tendencies of “the Method” and foregrounds its own construction, exemplifying a central contradiction in male American acting—and the norms of masculinity—of his time.