Over the years I’ve made my way through books by Berry, Linklater, and Lessac, and even the articles Catherine Fitzmaurice has posted on her website, but I’ve never got through a book of Rodenburg’s. So this was my first exposure, and truth be told I found it tedious going. The repetition was excessive and I found myself turning unread pages often. The emphasis on what the psychological literature calls “folk psychology” might get a lot of sympathetic heads nodding in agreement, but the lack of citation, or any burden of proof besides her personal experience, had me losing my patience the first dozen or so pages in. But here’s the kicker—I was one of those sympathetic readers nodding in agreement! Yes, students come to acting with a lot of inhibitions, and yes, a lot of our expressivity is tied to the voice. But reading Rodenburg, I’m tempted to think she sees the voice teacher as one of analyst/therapist/life coach (granted, she offers many notes of caution in this regard). I bridle at this sort of thing, even with the caveats. The language of Freudian psychoanalysis had so infiltrated actor training in the US (and apparently the UK) by the end of the twentieth century that the two could have been confused as synonymous (the language is in Berry’s and Linklater’s books, too). The irony here is that when Stanislavsky first started trying to link psychological research to the actor’s process, he was trying to find ways of instilling psychological verisimilitude in characterization. A century later teachers don’t even bother with the research; without any credentials they go about addressing the psychological make-up of the actor. The question this raises for me is when or whether we will develop a tradition of voice pedagogy that breaks from early twentieth century theoretical models and complements contemporary research in speech pathology and linguistics.
I am a big fan of our second text, Cavarero’s book. I am not at all surprised that hers is only one of two books specifically dedicated to the sound of the human voice in the vast philosophical literature (the other is Don Ihde’s phenomenological study Listening and Voice. I’m not counting Mladen Doler’s A Voice and Nothing More). As she delightfully argues over and over, western philosophy has simply not been in a position to hear or discuss the voice, so why should there be more than two books? One of Cavarero’s many achievements lies in her critique of the theories that adopt degrees of hostility to an oral sensibility. Her take on Plato’s conception of language and logos, while not altogether unique (see Harold Innis and Eric Havelock), helps me to properly contextualize Plato’s ambiguous contribution to linguistic theory. Her dismantling of Derrida, who grossly distorted the lay philosopher’s understanding of western philosophy by calling it a phono-logocentic tradition, counts as one essential refutation of the poststructural enterprise. She does not refute Derrida on empirical grounds (which is easy to do); rather, she simply points out the misreadings revealed in his own writing.
In their first posts, a few of our panelists made allusions to some of the poststructuralists, and I am curious to hear others’ thoughts in this vein. I make no secret of my hostility to poststructuralism, and my initial research on the voice sprang from an early desire (1999) to challenge the wholesale embrace of poststructual linguistic theory, and especially the theories of voice expressed by Derrida and Lacan, in theatre scholarship. I found it perverse that critics regarded language and stage speech in a light diametrically opposed to practitioners, and I thought the critics were wrong.
Cavarero’s entire book is premised upon the tensions between writing and speaking, and she drives home the point that throughout the western tradition the scholars have always been hobbled by the perverse desire to reduce the aural dimension of human existence to sight, whereas the sound of a human voice always seems to “destabilize the rational register” (17). I believe this dichotomy holds true for theatre scholarship, too. Cavarero mentions two of the scholars associated with the Toronto School (Havelock and Walter Ong), but does not engage a discussion of the causal effects of language media. Nonetheless, the book anticipates a shift in the philosophical regard of language currently taking place under the influence of cognitive science. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when we can’t teach writing to save our lives but electronic media proficiency is the norm, we are seeing the philosophies move away from traditional rationalism and towards embodiment and synesthesia. This emergent body of literature begins to attend upon what Cavarero calls the “sonorous manifestation of an embodied uniqueness” (84) within human voices.
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