Un/Voicing the Self: Vocal Pedagogy and the Discourse-Practices of Subjectivation

Voice Work, a “Proper Object” of Study?

“There are times in life when the question of knowing whether one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.”  –Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (8)

As the rise of the audiobook and the success of spoken word performances, such as poetry slams, indicate, vocal performance has become a popular aesthetic practice and form of entertainment in a culture deemed dominated by the visual. The renewed interest in the voice is also evidenced by the popularity of styles of vocal training referred to as “voice work.” Voice work has a roughly one-hundred-fifty-year-long history in Britain; different approaches to voice training have become integrated into actor training in the US since the late 1970s, and have recently received heightened attention in theater circles and beyond. Several collections examine the role of the voice and its training in acting, and in 2010 the theater magazine American Theater published its first issue on voice training, featuring some of the pillars of vocal pedagogy in Britain and the US, such as Arthur Lessac, Cecily Berry, Catherine Fitzmaurice, Patsy Rodenburg, and Kristin Linklater (“Special Issue”). Moreover, voice training has become a rather popular activity beyond the boundaries of drama schools, theater, and film.^[1] Training manuals abound, and the expertise of voice teachers is sought in areas as varied as therapy, business, and politics. The popular books of voice teacher Patsy Rodenburg, for instance, among them The Right to Speak and The Second Circle, have been described as “manifestos and workbooks” that entered “self-help territory” (Gener 216).[2] The Linklater Center for Voice and Language in New York, a for-profit school of voice training started by Kristin Linklater, Professor of Theater Arts at Columbia University, teaches her highly popular method to “performers and professionals, writers and teachers, public speakers and individuals who want free, clear, and strong voices” (Haring). Its website lists as corporate clients members of the Columbia Senior Executive Training Program, of Columbia University’s School of Business, and of The World Economic Forum’s Global Fellows Program (Linklater, “Linklater Corporate”).[3]
 
Contemporary voice work can be regarded as a continuation or reactivation of oratory and elocutionary practices as they were taught in the US in the nineteenth century inside and outside the institution of the theater,[4] but the discontinuities between the traditional and the new vocal pedagogies are equally important to notice. While the older forms of training aimed predominantly at a technically perfect delivery of speech and deployed various drills, current models of instruction with their focus on voice as embodied language might even be situated in opposition to elocutionary training. Emphasizing the physio-psychological constitution of the voice, they are – in the widest sense – interested in a (re)discovery of authentic selfhood through access to a true voice, which, according to Rodenburg, is “what we came into the world with at birth” (Right 19). As the story of the new voice work goes, individuals in a sociocultural environment such as ours have developed physical and emotional blocks that inhibit full access to the “natural voice,” so that the removal of such blockages through voice training is necessary. Realizing the culturally dominant notion of the voice as an originally authentic expression of the voicing subject, the training promises to liberate the self along with and through “the natural voice” in order to enable efficient and truthful communication with others.
 
In contrast to the traditional vocal pedagogies of elocution, which prepared actors for vocal performances in the theater as well as on sites of public readings, the recent cultural phenomenon of voice work fuses elements from actors’ training with principles from somatics[5] and movement practices and from self-help. Pedagogical techniques differ, but teachers generally use a series of breathing, vocal, and physical exercises to prepare students for vocal performances of dramatic texts. These aspects of the training are derived from various traditions of Yoga or the internal martial arts, such as Qi Gong or Tai Chi, or from a range of somatic practices, e.g., the Feldenkrais Method or Alexander Technique, in order to “repattern” both physical and mental behaviors and to arrive at one’s “unique expression of ‘the self’” (Rodenburg Right 19). In the promise of the liberation of the self in the service of communication, relevant on and off stage, the principles and techniques of self-help intersect with essentials of actors’ training that are also characterized by an investment in the authentic. As theater scholar Joe Roach explains, the contradiction between authenticity and control shaped the history of actors’ training up to the current approach to Method acting:
 

…before an actor can learn to act, to use his bodily instrument expressively in vital characterization, he must himself learn to move and feel and live anew because in growing up he has disordered his musculature, misshapen his bones and dulled his sensitivities. The goal at the end of a training program in acting today is natural expressiveness; its enemy is inhibition. (218)

Thus, voice work offers a model of self-discovery that blends claims to functionality and authenticity. Appealing to populations inside and outside the theater, it has become marketable to a broad customer base interested in self-improvement, be it for the purpose of more efficient business presentations or political speeches, or for what, in therapeutic culture in the widest sense, is referred to as personal “growth.”
 
he teaching of the speaking voice has received relatively little scholarly attention in cultural studies.[6] Maybe this lack can be explained by a hesitation to engage with yet another discourse that deals in forms of authenticity, a tendency that critical work in the humanities has already identified as a ruse of a humanist discourse in late capitalism.[7] Voice work can be understood as one of the many forms of practice that tend to the “somatic individual,” as Nikolas Rose names the recent production of the self through corporeal techniques: “for experimental individuals the corporeal existence and vitality of the self have become the privileged site of experiments with subjectivity” (81). Indeed, the various popular teachings of the embodied voice can be understood as such experimentation with subjectivity through the body, and voice work might exemplify exactly what can go wrong with a humanist understanding of voice and its utilization in the neoliberal marketplace, be it the resonances of phonocentrism in the identification of voice and self, or the problem of a pedagogy that, unaware of its own disciplinary function, promises liberation through authentic vocality. The function of a natural voice as a new form of cultural capital in the current marketplace of techniques of self-improvement might raise even more eyebrows. How should we interpret a set of theories of the voice and vocal training that allows for a seamless transition between “self-discovery” in the liberation of the natural voice and the advertising of corporate workshops under the title “Freeing the Executive Voice”? An understanding of the discourse-practices of voice work[8] and their effects calls for a denaturalizing critique of an ideology of vocality that is highly invested in the production of the natural-voice–as–self and its appeal to the consumer culture of late capitalism.
 
And yet, such a critique is not enough to capture the effects of embodied practices. Therefore, my critical reading, which has been shaped through the complimentary, even contradictory, intellectual and experiential forces provided by both my academic and vocal training in the new vocal pedagogy, will take a double perspective by moving inside and outside the field it investigates. From the “outside,” I read a range of manuals on vocal pedagogy; from the “inside,” I rely on my participation in a series of voice workshops in the Linklater method and my observations of and conversations with other participants to provide another approach to the production of knowledge about voice work. While I have always been invested in intellectual work that challenges the limitations of the authority of experience, such as feminist, queer, and poststructuralist theories, my ongoing engagement in embodied discourse-practices, which include voice work, led me to the conclusion that the conversation between academic discourses in cultural studies and critical theory, on the one hand, and the field of voice work, on the other, can be beneficial to two fields that tend to avoid this form of contact.[9]
 
My project is inspired by Michel Foucault’s striking reflection on thinking as a living practice, or, as he calls it, the practice of “philosophical activity” as “the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself,” and it should be read as a humble, localized attempt to explore how a particular kind of thinking might change “through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it” (Use 9). With the objective of promoting an intellectual and embodied understanding of the body/mind relationship, the discourse-practices of voice work share with critical theory, cultural studies, and queer and feminist discourses a critique of body/mind dualism, and yet they might remain ultimately foreign to academic practices of knowing. In a critical reflection on the role of somatics in recent philosophical writing, dance scholar Isabelle Ginot argues that these are indeed incompatible forms of knowledge production. She writes that
 

somatic discourses must be read as performative discourses, situated in a precise context and targeting thereby an equally precise efficacy. In this regard, somatic discourses do not stand apart from the practices that engender them. Their value is not universal but isolated, and their validity can only be measured by the effect they produce on a given subject, in his/her encounter with a given context. (18)

As a set of techniques affecting specific bodies, voice work like somatics has to be regarded as a performative discourse that is not exactly compatible with the more universal truth claims we often find in humanities disciplines. Rather than forcing the idea of compatibility on the different ways of knowing, I will posit a cultural analysis next to an experiential form of study as two different critical perspectives.
 
I suggest that we understand voice as an assemblage in a sense suggested by Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term, as a multiplicity that pulls together heterogeneous elements that together create some kind of an effect. In the case of the voice, this effect is a material, sonic, aesthetic production.[10] The assemblage named “voice” merges material and ideational aspects, such as somatic and corporeal, technological, environmental, linguistic, and textual elements that have as their outcome a specific vocal performance in speaking or singing as well as its reception.[11] In the following, I examine the arrangement of such elements in the Linklater Method, a popular form of vocal pedagogy, which has been developed by the former Shakespeare actress and voice teacher Kristin Linklater. Her approach offers itself as a paradigmatic object of study that allows for an examination of the major characteristics of contemporary voice work. By focusing on Linklater’s system of voice work, I do not mean to reduce the multiplicity of the vocal assemblages currently taught or minimize the different effects on thinking and doing voice.[12] Since approaches to voice work show some variations, e.g., in their understanding of the most efficient physical production of sound, their different techniques might produce different effects in the body/mind systems of the students of voice. However, I do not assess the efficacy of vocal pedagogies for the work of the actor, nor am I interested in synthesizing different approaches to develop a general theory of voice and self. Instead, I explore the discourse-practices of voice work according to Foucault’s notion of subjectivation as the effect of a “power which makes individuals subjects,” considering the different significations of the term subject extrapolated by Foucault: “subject to someone else by control and dependence and tied to his [!] identity by conscience or self-knowledge” (“Subject” 331). I propose that Linklater’s system of vocal pedagogy functions as a disciplinary system that produces forms of identity through a notion of authentic selfhood in conjunction with the ideal of the natural voice. And yet, a student’s engagement with her embodied voice can also create a different relation to, maybe even a new understanding or knowledge of the self, one that is not rendered in terms of the natural and authentic. In other words, I am interested in reading the ideology of voice work against itself. The object of analysis will consist of Linklater’s writings on voice work supplemented by a brief account of my own training in this technique by a certified Linklater teacher.

A True Self in a Natural Voice? Discourse–Practices of the Linklater Method

“Voice is identity. Your voice says, ‘I am.’” –Kristin Linklater, “The Importance of Daydreaming” (43)

The guiding principles of Linklater voice work result from the concept of the psycho-physiological character of vocality, which an actor has to utilize to achieve perfect communication with the audience, and from an understanding of sound as vibration inside and outside the body. Because of its complex relationship to body and language, voice cannot be trained in isolation from other aspects of embodied subjectivity but, as Linklater states, “must be rooted in neuro-physiological pathways of the body that are trained to pick up and transmit impulses of emotion, imagination, psyche, and intellect” (Freeing 90). In this context, the relevance of somatic and movement practices becomes clearer: Instead of training the student to project an aesthetically pleasant ideal, based on the hearing of her voice as sound only, the program aims at increasing her awareness of the vibrational resonances in the tissue so she will be able to sense the production of sound and to learn how to manage her body in order to control her vocal performance. Voice training becomes a kinesthetic project, since hearing oneself and responding vocally requires the ability to sense and work with internal and external movement. The kinesthetic aspect of the pedagogy emphasizes the importance of somatic learning; it suggests that rather than the projection of an idea of a self onto the voice, the work on physical matter impacts the voice and, consequently, the self.[13] In Linklater’s program, somatic learning is a precondition of an individual’s more attuned perception and potential transformation of the sound of her or his voice.
 
As a production of knowledge about voice and self, voice work functions across multiple sites, most prominently through the apparatus of teaching, but also through Linklater’s writing, interviews, and public speaking engagements. Her presence as teacher, the popular book-manual Freeing the Natural Voice, and her skillful use of other media, where she occasionally appears as interviewee and writer, have contributed to the success of voice work.  She is still teaching actively around the globe. But while organized around her person, the codification and institutionalization of the method no longer requires Linklater’s participation in the classroom. In her for-profit organization, the Linklater Center, a few selected senior teachers train future teachers of voice work according to her guidelines, while Linklater assumes the role of the founder and ultimate master teacher of the embodied practice, somewhat mystified through the workings of the system named after her.[14]
 
The curriculum implements four phases of learning, described as “working on personal growth and transforming your personal connection to your voice,” “observing and notating the work as a trainee,” “assistant teaching,” and “practice teaching the work and being observed as a teacher” (Linklater, “Linklater Designation”). Trainees fulfill such requirements through individual sessions with senior teachers, observation of classes, and participation in workshops at the Linklater Center or in Lenox, Massachusetts at the theater festival Shakespeare & Company, which Linklater cofounded. While these requirements seem fairly transparent, the Linklater Center website does not clarify the requisites necessary to receive the designation but rather refers to the founder’s personal judgment. The last mandatory class is “the final certification workshop with Kristin Linklater. (By invitation only.),” where students will be “observed teaching a 20 minute section of the progression, performing a monologue and a song, and an interview.” The description is followed by a caveat: “It is possible that even though you have completed the requirements that you will still not be invited to the certification workshop” (Linklater, “Linklater Designation”). Rather than making transparent the basis for the selection of the candidates or the final qualification, the website represents the last phase of the designation process as a rite of passage directed by the founder and master teacher, who guards the entry to the scene of Linklater work.
 
In the pedagogical matrix of Linklater voice work, the successful book Freeing the Natural Voice is a core document, providing an introduction to the theory of the voice and serving as a manual. It presents a comprehensive series of vocal exercises, which are also made available in college acting classes and in commercial workshops offered by the Linklater Center. Despite its central role, the status of the book is highly ambiguous. From the point of view of the author and her followers, it is precarious at best, harmful at worst. Not only does Linklater emphasize the strength of the oral “nature” of the pedagogy, which makes the book a “poor substitute” for the work in a class; she goes so far as to represent the teaching of voice through writing as a dangerous method, when she warns that it would “confine and define (the work) in printed word” (Freeing 10). Since the practitioners of the new vocal pedagogy understand voice as “action,” as Catherine Fitzmaurice puts it (247), instruction centers on student-teacher interaction, and benefits from a personal relationship, tactility, the teacher’s responses to the student, etc. While the dynamics of vocality lend themselves to live teaching, and participation in the practice is an indispensable aspect of the production of knowledge in voice work, the stark contrast Linklater draws between the qualities of a benign, emphatic oral practice of teaching and its suffocation through the written comes across as hyperbolic, if not vexing.[15]
 
Linklater’s radical representation of the dangers of the written, ironically communicated in writing, might be read as a symptom of a conflict. On the one hand, it indicates her anxiety about transgressing the laws of vocal pedagogy as laid down by her own master-teacher Iris Warren, a tribute to whom opens the book. As an attempt “to capture the work that Iris Warren said should never be written down” (10), Freeing the Natural Voice carries the burden of Linklater’s student-teacher relationship with the founder of the practice and explains her long resistance to writing the book. At the same time, Warren’s lingering presence legitimizes Linklater’s role as the natural heir of the work, which she restructured, supplemented, and published. On the other hand, Linklater’s writing of the book-manual has been crucial in the systematization of knowledge that made possible the transformation of a set of exercises into a method and guaranteed its dissemination to publics beyond the theater; published in its first edition before the age of the Internet, the book even laid the groundwork for turning the exercises into a brand. Considering the different dynamics of knowledge production in voice work, my study of the Linklater method will comprise an examination of Linklater’s writing as well as an account of my participation in a series of workshops and classes taught by a certified Linklater teacher.
 
Throughout her book-manual, Linklater organizes the central elements of her method’s discourse-practice into three different sections. The first part, “The Touch of Sound,” describes the idea of natural breathing and the notion of sound as vibration inside and between bodies as the foundation of the work, and presents exercises that emphasize the interrelation of posture, alignment, and breathing as conditions for sound production. After the introduction to the experience of vibrations produced by breathing, the second part, titled “The Resonating Ladder,” addresses the important topic of voice resonators, the bony cavities in which the voice’s sounds reverberate.  It works from the lower resonators of chest, mouth, and teeth through the sinuses, which produce the middle range, to the high ranges of the nasal cavity and the skull, providing exercises that teach how to “isolate resonating cavities throughout the body and increase the vibrations in those cavities” (Freeing 187). The section also introduces some of the linguistic elements of the assemblage in the form of consonants and vowels, but considers them strictly sonic materials. But of course, voice as an assemblage is not reducible or reduced to the body or to sonic elements per se. Rather, its complexity, and with it the structure of Linklater’s version of voice work, result from the interplay between the body and language. This interrelation is addressed in the third and last section of Linklater’s book, which finally presents “The Link to Text and Acting.” Activating her ideal of the natural voice through performative work with the text, Linklater emphasizes the importance of the sensory nature of words. She criticizes what she perceives as contemporary Western culture’s impoverished relationship to the word and aims at recreating a “visceral connection of words to the body” (Freeing 328). Her path to this connection leads her to the creation of emotional relations with words through “images that preceded the words” (Freeing 347).
 
For readers schooled in the diverse ways of critiquing the naturalizing tendencies of ideological formations in our culture, it might be unsurprising that Linklater’s method of actor training offers to produce a “natural” vocality that allegedly expresses an authentic self.  The “natural voice” that the program promises to liberate is its vocal ideal. Linklater contrasts the “natural” voice with the “familiar” voice, which she characterizes as inhibited, “blocked and distorted by physical tension; it suffers equally from emotional block, intellectual blocks and psychological blocks,” and ultimately produces a distortion of human communication. In contrast, the embodied “natural” voice, or “a built-in attribute of the body,” is in direct contact with emotional impulses, shaped by the intellect but not inhibited by it (Freeing 8). It serves “the freedom of human expression” (Freeing 7) as a voice that is freed from the corrupting influences of culture and is therefore understood as the condition of a truthful expression of an authentic and universally understood human self. As an embodied voice, the natural voice is produced through an elaborate corporeal dynamics. The laboring student is not supposed to focus on the sound of her or his own voice in the first place; rather it is expected that the sound of the natural voice will be the result of the individual’s physical engagement and her or his awareness training. Thus, Linklater never describes the specific sound of this natural voice. Neither did the teacher of the voice workshops I visited ever try to perform it. A general description of such a vocal sound would of course contradict Linklater’s principle of understanding the voice as an effect of a kinaesthetic production rather than a representative sound. In the logic of embodied voice work, the ideal of the natural voice needs to remain an empty space. However, such a blank also brings to the foreground the status of the teacher as the one endowed with the authority to discriminate the students’ “culturally distorted” voices from their “natural” voices, i.e., the vocal expression of their authentic selves.
 
In these brief descriptions, we can already perceive some of the problematic resonances of Linklater’s ideology of voice work, in particular an organicist language that, while signifying cultural practices, ultimately naturalizes and universalizes what the voice is supposed to be.  Linklater’s voice assemblage pits an innocent nature against a corrupted culture, which entails a whole range of problematic binaries, such as the hierarchies of the “truth” of a premodern Shakespearean past versus a corrupting modernity, intellect versus feeling (see Knowles), as well as live voice versus “dead” writing, and the body versus technology. Some of the naturalizing tendencies and their problematic implications for the theory and practice of acting in theater and performance have been critically addressed in the context of drama and performance studies.
 
The major arguments of the critics of Linklater’s model of voice training involve the tensions between her implicit claims to the neutrality of a “free” and “natural” voice and her privileging of canonical texts of Western culture, namely the plays of “Shakespeare” in the voice work. As Richard Paul Knowles argues, popular vocal pedagogies derive from very specific, i.e., British traditions of actor training, but at the same time actors’ bodies and voices are presented as “the neutral conduits through which ‘Shakespeare’ can speak directly, uncontaminated by accidentals of history” (95). Knowles claims that the disregard of a cultural and historical context of the playwright reflects the influence of method acting and a shift away from textual analysis to a psychological exploration of the emotional constitution of a character, and results in a “privileging of feeling over image and image over text” (100). According to the critic, Linklater promotes the notion that Shakespeare’s plays are transhistorical manifestations of universal values and that their characters represent “the universal human.” The natural voice trained to perform this dramatic program requires, as Diana M.F. Looser, drama teacher and practitioner of voice work, argues in her MA thesis “Freeing the Natural Voice? Performance, Gender, Society,”[16] a method that removes all cultural markers to produce a neutral voice, “an unadulterated impartial voice on to which a theatrical role may be imposed” (30). Obviously, such a voice is, as Looser rightly argues, as “politicized and constructed as any other voice” (31). Since that which claims to be unmarked and therefore universal usually creates space for the dominant, the removal of voice markers suggests that the natural voice would be a standardized voice, expressing norms of class, gender, and race.
 
Several critics in drama studies address problems of gender produced by the hidden exclusionary discourses of Linklater’s naturalization of voice. Sarah Weber argues that the approach undermines a feminist critique of the theatrical texts it uses since it claims representation of universally human characters, with whom the actor has to identify through corporeal and breath work. Looser provides an insightful discussion of the method’s implications for critical gender performances by female artists. Drawing on the examples of Karen Finley’s and  Laurie Anderson’s work, she shows that Linklater’s ideal of the “natural voice” presupposes a normative feminine voice, which cannot account for the vocal performances that aim at denaturalizing essentialist notions of gender. As she argues, Finley’s “transgressive speaking” in distorted voices, which often border on the vocality of hysteria or madness, or Anderson’s use of the vocoder to shift her voice into registers usually perceived as masculine, do not have room in a pedagogy that insists on authentic expression via the natural voice (109).
 
The subversion of gender binaries through sound machines, as performed by Anderson, also directs our attention to another blind spot in Linklater’s discourse-practices: the use of voice technologies. What is at stake in the artists’ deconstructive performances is not only a particularly gendered body but, more generally, the naturalization of the body as a ground of selfhood.[17] Drawing from method acting’s emphasis on the emotional and corporeal labor of identification with the characters, the ideal of the natural voice presupposes a natural body as the precondition for the objective of acting: true communication of the authentic essence of a character, which forbids the use of technological tools on the stage. Linklater’s methodology renders vocal performance as true communication with the audience, which technology can only take away from. Thus, amplification would be an obstacle “to the intensity, the heat–the largesse, if you want–that have to be generated to come through to the audience” (Linklater in Finkle). Given the contemporary scene of theater and performance inside and outside the US, such a negative view of technological mediation situates Linklater voice work inside the tradition of conventional bourgeois theater, demarcating it from the avant-garde as well as from popular theatrical productions. The realm of public speaking today is not even imaginable without the use of sound technologies.
 
These examples manifest some of the problematic aspects of Linklater’s naturalization of the voice. Voice workers, in particular vocal pedagogues, should be aware of the impact of its universalizing and normative character, and in particular of the idealization of a neutralized voice and its exclusionary effects. However, the critique of Linklater’s vocal ideology that tries to foreground the hidden ideological constituents of the practice also misses a most important point and thereby confirms Linklater’s worst fears regarding the codification of her pedagogy in writing: While dealing with an assemblage that includes detailed material, corporeal processes, most of the critics – with the exception of Looser – focus quite consciously on the relationship of voice and text and pay little attention to the role of bodies in voice work. This gap is curious insofar as corporeality in Linklater’s pedagogy of the embodied voice is one of the conditions, if not the condition, of possibility of vocal performance; the largest share of her manual promotes a wide range of somatic and vocal exercises as a precondition for the actor’s work with scripts. In contrast, the passages on the vocal presentation of dramatic texts take up only the last third of the book. The critics’ lack of attention to the non-textual aspects of Linklater’s work might serve as one example of a culture of suspicion in academia. At least, it is motivated by reservations about Linklater’s belief that, as Paul Knowles puts it, “unlike the culturally conditioned intellect, the body cannot lie” (10). While I share the critic’s skepticism towards the idealization of a naturalized body, I find that his critique of the ideological side of Linklater’s pedagogy reproduces a very common, reductive notion of voice as matter of signification only, eliminating the corporeal. It is here that I part ways with a critical approach makes it impossible to address the material aspects of corporeality significant to the discourse–practices of voice work. But how to address the role of the body without idealizing it as the ground of a truth of self; how to create space for the body to emerge into thinking without negating its discursive construction?
 
Interested in the material aspects of performance, Looser offers a promising approach to the corporeal in voice work. Following Foucault’s well-known description of the production of “docile bodies” in the military, the factory, and the school, she reads Linklater’s method as a disciplinary regime of “psycho-physical training methods” that control “the whole organic mechanism of the body, with a focus, depth and specificity unprecedented in voice training” (43). According to Looser, the natural voice is a docile voice produced through conscripted forms of labor: “‘Freedom’ is achieved by forms of constraint and the method constructs as much as it deconstructs, resulting in docile bodies that speak with docile voices” (46). By capturing the pedagogical method as disciplinary action, Looser provides an important link between an ideological critique of the discourse-practices of Linklater’s work and the description of its effects on the embodied voice trained by this program. And yet her description of the work remains unsatisfying as a generalizing account of pedagogical principles because it tends to totalize the effects of the practice by representing a unified outcome: docile bodies, docile voices.[18]
 
Why should we assume the same outcome for different practitioners of voice work? Would not different conditions of training (e.g., acting classes in college, workshops or individual sessions with a private teacher) or different backgrounds and motivations of participants (e.g., those of acting students, businessmen, academics, or clients interested in therapeutic work on their voice and body) have an impact on the effects of the method? I am not claiming to answer these questions here but I propose them as possible avenues leading to examinations of the manifold conditions that constitute an experience of subjectivation without fully determining it. In the remainder of the essay, I read the Linklater practice against its ideology of the authentic self, using my intellectual formation in poststructuralist theory in conjunction with my training in various somatic practices and in Linklater voice work to reflect back on the theoretical assumptions.

Working on the Voice, Caring for the Self

“The objective of the practice of self is to free the self, by making it coincide with a nature which has never had the opportunity to manifest itself in it.”  –Michel Foucault (qtd.in Gros, “Course Context,” 536)

Even though the terminology of “the natural voice” used in the manual as well as in classes suggests otherwise, Linklater’s approach can be practiced as a form of cultural work that allows for the transformation of individual participants’ bodies and voices, and in conjunction, the production of an embodied sense of selfhood in a particular twenty-first-century context. A productive framework to describe such moments of transformation is offered by Foucault’s later writings, such as The Use of Pleasure, The Care of the Self, and The Hermeneutics of the Subject, which shift the focus of his work from an interrogation of the relationship of power, the body, and the self, and from the rather totalizing notion of disciplinary strategies and their production of docile bodies, to the question of subjectivation through techniques of the self. Through the example of sexuality, he examines the constitution of a specific experience: the way that Western men came to be understood as subjects of desire. It is important that “experience” here means not a self-explanatory origin of the truth of the self but rather something that is mediated through the discourse-practices of a specific historical time. Originating from a history of sexuality, Foucault’s interests in the changing techniques of self-care, which provide an ethics as well as an aesthetic of living, shift towards ascetic and spiritual practices, which he discusses in The Hermeneutics of the Subject.
 
As intellectual historian and media theorist Mark Poster states, this project, which is particularly interested in forms of care of self in the Hellenistic period, has to be understood as an examination of “the self-creation of the subject, his or her self-subjectivation, the complex ways in which the individual constitutes himself/herself through practices and enunciations” (165).[19] Self-subjectivation in ancient Greece is, as Poster explains, not to be confused or conflated with the current Western philosophical understanding of the self as an object of truth: “rather, Hellenistic care of self is a complex of lifelong practices in which the individual attempts to change himself/herself … through meditation, writing exercises, group meetings, and other practices. The direct goal was an art of living, an aesthetic of self-relation, an ethic of spiritual formation” (166).[20] Given the historical context Foucault chose for his later work, a current notion of the care of self needs to take on a different set of practices. Offering a current example, I will perform a reading of the psycho-physical form of voice training as one twenty-first-century example of Foucault’s care of the self. I propose that by accepting certain rules of conduct, students of the Linklater Method (if not completely focused on their career as actors, and maybe even then) enter into a specific, regulated practice of working on their selves. The following interpretation of the dynamics of self-management and the resulting production of a specific form of self-knowledge in voice work stems from my intellectual and corporeal experience in somatic and vocal learning.
 
I am still very much a beginning student of voice work, but I had already studied some of the practices relevant to Linklater’s method, such as Tai Chi and somatic work on the fascia, by the time my experiment of working with and on the voice began. I became familiar with voice work by studying the practice, i.e., before I was aware of Linklater’s publications. After I had written about the voice in theories of performativity and done some initial research on transgender voice training, I became interested in the experience of vocal pedagogy and its effects. I also wanted to have more vocal flexibility in my own classroom performance. A short voice workshop in Linklater training in Berlin in the summer of 2010 provided a very brief introduction to the work.  Motivated to search for Linklater voice teachers in Southern California, where I live, I found an experienced teacher in Los Angeles with a degree in theater and a certification by Kristin Linklater to teach her method.[21] In her studio, I participated in two full-length workshops (of about twenty-one hours each) in “Linklater Voice Work” and in a couple of private, hour-long sessions with the same teacher, who explained in more depth some of the exercises relevant to the use of my voice. The teacher also provided for-purchase-DVDs with so-called voice warm-ups, i.e., vocal exercises, of different lengths for the students’ everyday use, which I used on a regular basis several times a week for a few months.[22]
 
The regular workshops had nine participants each, most of them young actresses and some actors, who were seeking careers in Southern California’s entertainment industry. In both classes I was the only non-actor and academic.[23] In all the classes in which I participated, most of the participants were female. As the teacher claimed, the gender bias is common, and given the intense emotional investment the work requires from the participants, it is no surprise either, since an emotional “self-discovery” is a feminized practice that might appeal more directly to those culturally constructed as women.
 
The organization of the workshops reflected Linklater’s investment in the training of the body as preparation for individual performances. Two-thirds of each session were committed to breathing and yoga exercises, complemented by vocalizations of non-linguistic sounds.[24] The last part of the session was reserved for the vocal presentations of texts of the class and responses to the performance. Free to choose our own materials, most students worked on monologues for auditions or engagements in film, TV, and on the stage. When prompting actresses to read in class, the teacher mostly offered passages from Shakespeare’s plays. For my presentations, I worked with English and German poems as well as sections from an academic talk I had prepared at the time. As a follow-up to their vocal performances, students received feedback from both the group and the teacher; often this interaction resulted in a presenter’s emotional reaction and an open reflection on her response. In these moments of “sharing” the experiences of particular sensations, emotions, and self-interpretations, the situation took on the character of a support or self-help group session.
 
As a participant in and observer of a range of voice classes, I both experienced and witnessed some moments of personal transformation that are not fully contained by the theory of docile bodies and voices. Rather, some of the practical elements of voice work created openings within the discourse-practices of Linklater’s naturalizing approach onto unforeseen effects of the voice training. In the following, I focus on two practical applications of the voice work that produced significant shifts in the assemblage I call my voice: breathing exercises and the work with voice resonators. A deconstructive reading of the role of breathing in Linklater’s method will be complemented by a brief narrative of some moments of my workshop experience that prompted me to reconsider the concepts of freedom and authenticity that are so problematic to her thinking.

From Breath to Resonance: Freedom from Authenticity

“Before the technology of laryngeal contraction, one breathed for life.”  –David Applebaum (Voice, 39)

For Linklater, as for most vocal trainers, breathing is the corporeal metaphor and activity par excellence (Boston and Cook 13). Due to the role of breath as “the prima materia (of truthful communication)” (Linklater “Alchemy” 103), the exercises that aim at the student’s careful postural alignment and an intensification of the awareness of one’s breathing habits are foundational to the pedagogy. As the condition of further voice work, the student is taught to increase her awareness of breath flow and will, ideally, become able to relax what Linklater calls the “breathing muscles” of the diaphragm, the pelvic floor, and the intercostals.  Breathing freely is also the condition of “freeing the voice,” which can, in turn, vitalize the performance and lead to the discovery of one’s authentic self (“Alchemy” 103). In order to explore the notion of freedom in voice work, we need to approach the ambiguity inscribed in her notion of breathing.
 
The claims about the workings of the breath reflect the contradiction between authenticity and control that, as I argued above, characterizes actor training. Linklater’s discourse-practices are shaped by the difference between a generalized/naturalized breathing and a functional version of breathing. But if we look beyond the naturalizing language, the teaching of breathing and vocalization offers an avenue for self-transformation, especially in those moments when the breathing work leads to a relief of the voice from signification. While “proper breathing” aims at the performance of an effective, correct way of speaking, “breathing freely” – in Linklater’s theory, and beyond – refers to a vital flow that temporarily suspends the voice. As philosopher David Applebaum writes, “the breath disrupts the continuous progress of voluntary phonemic production” (29), while the retention of breath “demarcates the bounds of voluntary sound-production,” i.e., of speech (32). Applebaum locates the retention in the glottis, particularly in the practice of the glottal stop – a form of breath control, which makes meaningful vocalization possible, – and interprets it as a way to eliminate noise from thought and voice (an idea introduced into Western thinking by Aristotle).  He even characterizes “the glottis (as) the laryngeal sphincter” (32). This metaphor is less far-fetched than it seems, since the larynx and sphincter form two ends of an embryonal line that will later develop into the digestive channel. Maybe this is the reason that one of Linklater’s students, who comments on the changes that the early breathing exercises can produce in the body-mind, reports an unfamiliar sensation: “It’s sort of as though I breathe into my buttocks” (Linklater, Freeing 60). Whether the student’s experience is based on a correct anatomical fact or an imagined body does not matter much. It is more relevant that the removal of habitual blockages as a result of the physical and breathing exercises allows for a new perception of avenues of breath through the body and, eventually, a shift in an individual’s understanding of her own corporeality.
 
Like the student quoted by Linklater, I had the opportunity to experience unfamiliar breath sensations during my participation in the workshop, which laid the groundwork for a process of re-experiencing and repatterning the assemblage called my voice. Following Linklater’s writings, the teacher of the workshop engaged the students in the construction of a vocal body that emerges from the interaction of the breathing apparatus, the vocal apparatus, and a set of images that motivates the corporeal production of sound as vibration. After relaxing the spine, students were instructed to “build” their properly aligned standing position from the ground up (being conscious of position of feet and leg bones, hips, spine, and skull) in order to experience the rhythm of their breath. Or we were lying on our backs, using gravity to relax the muscles. Encouraging us to sense the outgoing breath as “complete inner relaxation” and the incoming breath as an impulse, “which will happen automatically” (Linklater, Freeing 45), the teacher repeatedly addressed us with the phrase “Yield to the impulse!” For me, the exercise was very effective as the merging of the physical and the linguistic caused my body consciousness to surrender to the involuntary nervous system, so that I became aware of the movement of air entering and leaving different parts of my body. In particular, I sensed my breath as flow – in my nostrils, diaphragm, and, in contradistinction to the Linklater student quoted earlier, I experienced the flow entering not through the backside but through the pelvic floor.  Simultaneously, this awareness produced the realization that I had generally understood and practiced breathing as an effort, a form of striving to maintain myself. By “yielding to the impulse,” I allowed it to be less of an activity than a corporeal dynamics to be sensed and observed. This understanding and subsequent letting go of my habitual way of breathing as effort–at least temporarily–was a crucial early step in a longer process of physical and intellectual learning that altered my understanding of the relationship of voice, body, and mind.
 
I propose that practice of Linklater’s voice work, by re-training the voice for the purposes of linguistic performance, moves beyond – or rather, below the larynx into a somatic territory, where in moments of unintentional breathing, the production of the meaning of an “authentic self” in its relationship to the voice is being deferred. These moments are not defined by the utility of performance or utterance, not even within a pedagogy that aims to train the voice for the purposes of signification.  While “breathing for life,” as Applebaum calls it, the practitioner’s question “who am I?” is being suspended by the sensing of an “I am.” Such a state can be experienced as a form of freedom in the sense of the freedom from the burden of the authenticity of selfhood, an interruption of the bond between the expressivity of the voice and the meaning of the self. It is, as should be clear, not a “natural” voice that emerges as the free voice—unless we understand “nature” as Foucault presents it in his later writings, as an objective of the practice of the care of the self, a nature yet-to-come. Contrary to the suggestions of Linklater’s critics–and even to her own rhetoric—the self she promises to liberate does not necessarily have to be experienced as an essence expressed by a natural voice. Rather, my participation in breath and voice work at the Linklater workshops provided me with an embodied knowledge about the precarious connection between voice and selfhood.
 
A shifting sense of my own vocality emerged during the work with vocal resonators, which produced both a heightened awareness of some of my habits and the sensation of a new corporeal and vocal experience. In contrast to the more visible moments of transformation, work on resonators resembles a fine-tuning of the vocal apparatus. It allowed me to discover a voice that I had not heard emanate from my body before. Linklater’s exercises intend to make students aware of the range of their voice by producing vibrations in the various resonating cavities. They begin with the exploration of the lower resonators of chest, mouth, and teeth moving through the sinuses, which produce the middle range, to the high ranges of the nasal cavity and the skull. In the voice workshop, we practiced the sensing of the place and shape of our sinuses before we were asked to emit high sounds in order to feel them resonate in the cavities. After laboring on for a while, I sensed a light vibration in my cavities, while at the same time getting the idea of their role in vocality as true corporeal spaces that are a condition for resonance. Suddenly, my body emitted a voice that I heard as higher and felt as lighter and gentler than my regular speaking voice. This surprising self-difference in the act of voicing came about as a physically pleasant, even joyful but also bewildering discovery that raised the question: How to act, what to say in this voice? Not unlike Laurie Anderson’s speech, which was affected through the differently gendered voices she generated in cooperation with her vocoder, mine was impacted by a new, albeit non-technologized voice.
 
Against this backdrop of participatory voice work, I began to conceive of the practice of the Linklater method as a form of care of self that produces a series of moments of becoming: a becoming of something other than voice-as-linguistic-performance, a becoming of the-one-who-breathes as something other than a unified subject. By making such experiences possible, the work undermines its own ideology of the authentic self, expressed through the natural voice. It does not necessarily produce a self that carries its “essence-as-vocation,” to use Cressida Heyes’s descriptive term for the problematic, Western understanding of authenticity (2).[25] The training that educates students to produce and perceive minute changes in their breathing and vocal habits has at least the potential to undermine this notion of essence by distributing various familiar and unfamiliar aspects of the self across an assemblage called voice.  I am not suggesting that specific outcomes of students’ work on themselves are predictable, e.g., whether a person will develop a docile or a resistant voice, discover new aspects of corporeal processes or a formerly unknown component of her subjectivity, believe in the authenticity of her selfhood or her experience, become able to perceive ideological blind spots, etc.[26] Instead I have recuperated my corporeal and intellectual experience of the liberating force of the breath as flow, and of the resonances of vocal vibrations, as evidence of the transformational potential of Linklater’s voice work in order to suggest that her voice training manifests itself as a form of care of self that can reach beyond the limitations of a culturally dominant notion of the voice as an aural carrier of authentic selfhood. The account of my participatory research is offered as a supplement to academic forms of inquiry, which do not suffice to capture particular forms of subjectivation and their impact on our ways of knowing ourselves.