Sunday, July 3, 2011

[Untitled]: Andrew Kimbrough (University of Kentucky)

For me the story of the voice in the twentieth century—at least as heard in what we call, for better or worse, the “west”—may be summed up in the tensions Dudley Knight points to between the textual perspective of William Tilly and his ilk, and the perspective afforded the rest of us glued to our radios, TVs, and cell phones. At first glance we may find perverse the number of educators at the beginning of the last century who championed a correct way of speaking English that no group of English speakers actually employed. Or that such a fictitious manner of spoken English actually became a preferred manner of speech on respectable theatre stages. So while Knight makes a few passing gestures, I think a fuller exploration of the material factors that created this interesting and bizarre cultural artifact still could be teased out. Theatre critics and historians Bruce McConachie and Tobin Nellhaus have got us started with useful models of investigation in recent publications (see McConachie, American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War, 2006, and Nellhaus, Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism, 2010).


Both employ contemporary versions of what is known as the Toronto School of Communication Theory, which had its genesis in the 1940s with economist Harold Innis of the University of Toronto. Innis proposed that human forms of thought and expression are in some respects dictated by dominant media of language use, be they oral, written, printed, or electronic. Marshall McLuhan did most to give the theory traction in the 60s, but because McLuhan quickly came to be viewed publicly as a crank and a shameless self-promoter, the theory fell out of the limelight—though it still could be found here and there in popular and scholarly discourses (see Kristin Linklater’s Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice, for example). Bolstered in part by empirical studies in cognition, however, the theory is gaining in credence. It seems evidence exists to confidently propose that British and US societies at the end of the 1800s, after centuries of the cognitive conditioning afforded by writing and print, would actually envision, rather than hear, an idealized version of spoken English. Given the rapid incursion of electronic forms of communication in the twentieth century, however, the arch-textual perspective cultivated in the nineteenth century would give way to cognitive nodes of orality introduced through radio, telephone, records and cassette tapes, movies, and the computer. Thanks to electronics, the voice is making a comeback.


In discussing the voice Roland Barthes unwittingly skirts the textual/oral divide. Pheno-text derives from what can be studied optically: the verbal score and all that can be represented and dissected in writing. The geno-text, on the other hand, evades the discursive strategies indebted to the eye. The geo-text attends to the ear and those spaces of our psyche still attuned to the resonance of being communicated through sound. Along this line, Barthes completely misinterprets the impact of the phonograph and adopts instead the dread and negativity typical of pundits who value dated and cumbersome technologies as somehow superior to new and popular inventions (i.e., records and radio; see 184, 185, 187). He is unaware that electronic sound technologies have brought to his attention the existence of the geno-text in the first place. It would probably be blasphemous of me to suggest here that had Barthes been writing 70 years earlier he could easily have fallen in league with someone like Wm Tilly. But note his totally incongruous assertion, and non sequitur conclusion, that “what is produced at the level of the geno-text is finally writing” (185). Nothing of what he has written up to this point prepares for the leap of logic. Rather, Barthes relies on a truism of poststructural dogma that everything is textual, everything must be reducible to writing. Therefore, the argument must go, whatever we may think we perceive in the geno-text that resists language has to be a fiction; rather, as Barthes says later, something merely “shifts” in the “chain of the signifier” (187). For Barthes, the grain, that which should escape signification, is simply “the emergence of the text in the work” (188).


Fortunately we have approached a time in our (western) cultural history when the incursion of electronic forms of communication has greatly diminished the influence of textuality and encouraged new forms of expression, thought, and inquiry. We could not even discuss the voice outside of pedagogic concerns ten or twenty years ago because as a subject it was unnoted (notice the complete dearth of publications that theorize the voice compared to the plethora of speech manuals). Even Barthes ends his essay on an ambiguous note because, after all considerations of language and text, the body is still there. He ends up where Knight ends up, beckoning authentic voices. So at this point I am curious to know what is it about—for lack of a better term—the phenomenal dimension of the voice that they and others hanker after? Do we have a language with which we can discuss this dimension, or will it always resist language?

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