Adriana Cavarero’s For More Than One Voice and Patsy Rodenburg’s The Right to Speak: : Marlene Johnson (University of Alabama at Birmingham)

I have struggled in bringing myself to respond to these two books, but I am compelled to send something in to our blog. I struggle, and I think this struggle may be rooted in the dichotomy of our panel’s title. Some of the following may be meanderings:

I wish to point out for the record that Patsy Rodenburg’s book was written in 1993 and Cavarero’s in 2005. We are looking at one text which is 18 years old and the other six. One is primarily a practical working book or textbook, the other a philosophical treatise.

I worked with Patsy Rodenburg daily at the National Theatre in London for 3 weeks in 1995 and for a week at a time in NYC twice-- in 1995 and 1996. I have interacted with her in several other practical situations--both in groups and in private settings. I have used the Right to Speak in my Beginning Voice classes--as well as Acting I classes when teaching at schools that did not have voice classes as part of their curriculum--since 2000. I find that actors need to claim the basic rights she discusses in the first paragraph of the book: “The right to breathe, the right to be physically unashamed, to fully vocalize, to need, choose and make contact with a word, to release a word into space—the right to speak.” This is crucial before teaching them to “act.” But non-actors can also benefit greatly from her book; I often get “general” students in the Beginning Voice class as well as theatre majors. I use Rodenburg’s The Actor Speaks in my Intermediate Voice classes.

Rodenburg has honed her work over many years, continuing to clarify a subject with many complex layers to it. She has developed these methods to work quickly and practically with professional actors; as well, she has worked with a variety of other people--young school children, corporate CEO’s, doctors, professors and teachers, lawyers, and prisoners among many others. She has taught around the world in places like India, South Africa, and Japan. In many of the places she has taught, she has taught underserved or disadvantaged communities, even victims of torture in South Africa. She has sought to give voice to people and to cultures that for one reason or another have had their voices silenced. These silencings may have to do with political environments, with other life circumstances, or with one’s personal habits that interfere with an open voice that is capable of clarity, emotional and musical range, and expressivity. She has honed a highly nuanced way to work with the voice, sometimes in very sensitive situations, to get results over time. She has continued to develop these ideas and methods practicing them in dynamic environments.

I would say at the root of all her work lies the invitation that people may claim these rights to speak as individuals. She equally committed to revealing what physical, dynamic presence can allows us to do relationally and politically. She refers to this presence as Second Circle energy which she references in The Right to Speak where she addresses “Bluff” (Third Circle energy) and “Denial” (First Circle Energy.)

Both of these books emphasize embodying sound as a necessity for realizing the uniqueness of the speaker. Perhaps this embodiment needs to be addressed more as philosophy of voice studies move forward. We seem focused on the acts of speaking and voicing, yet the physical component is more and more a crucial part of voice training as well as major contributors to actor training overall. Many colleges, universities, and conservatories include such actor training methods as Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, Sensory Awareness, Authentic Movement, Laban, and other psychophysical reeducation techniques. These interweave with voice training. Many of these methodologies address habits of the performer; they might incur some of the same criticisms thrown at voice training. I haven’t heard any of these systems or methodologies, for example, referred to as “essentialist,” “primitivist,” “Freudian,” or “naturalist.”

Additionally, both Cavarero and Rodenburg champion in different ways the political ramifications of being able to speak as a unique “persona”—literally meaning “through the sound.”

I have referred in an earlier writing to Cavarero’s book—a fascinating investigation into the development of Western philosophical thought with its primacy in the visual as opposed to the auditory and into Plato’s insistence that thinking lies in the head and that historically in the philosophical tradition the “semantic” is superior to the “phonic,” I was most engaged with her writing in the chapters “When Thinking was Done with the Lungs…,” “The Rhapsodic Voice,”and “The Maternal Chora.”

In “When Thinking was Done with the Lungs,” I was drawn to her explanation of the idea of thumos—an aeriform substance in the lungs that sometimes is explained as “spirit” which “evokes not only the emotions, but also the intellectual functions, or thought.” The affinity between thought and speech—or better, the derivation of the first from the second situates the mind and intellectual activities in the respiratory apparatus and in the organs of phonation. It is so to speak, the phone that decides the physiology of thought. By the same token, beating one’s breast, the deep chest of breath from which the voice emerges, is “a direct gesture of the conscious I.’” This is an interesting idea as it relates to what I think many of us in voice practice are seeking to encourage—allowing the integration of the thinking, feeling self and in the case of actors, training them to recognize an impulse to which they can act on and give voice to. Cavarero sites how the insistence on logos has silenced voices. In speaking of thumos and “beating the breast” she says that many “archaic cultures are in agreement on the matter of finding consciousness and thought in the natural essence of the breast, in the blood and vapor that it exhales; name, breath.” (63)

“The Rhapsodic Voice”: “….In the language of literary criticism, voice, is today a technical term that indicates the peculiarity of the style of a poet, or more generally, of an author. This use is interesting above all for the way in which it recalls a vocal uniqueness that is implicitly understood to be removed from the acoustic sphere.”(89) The “chora” she speaks calls to mind Barthes’ term in speaking of the mysterious, individual “grain” of the voice. Much in this chapter resonates with ideas of Kristin Linklater, Cicely Berry, and Rodenburg in speaking of the sounds of the language in poetic texts. I said what I most wanted to say about Cavarero in my first posting.

I feel that the exercise we are called upon to do in writing these responses is reflective of the root of what Cavarero is discussing—that there is ultimately a preferencing of our written, semantic responses to her work and to Rodenburg’s which invites attempts at description that may or may not reflect the highly nuanced thoughts and intentions in each. I want to discuss both of these works “phonically,” “on voice” in the presence of other bodies and thinkers. My previous response to Barthes and to Knight was in some ways purposely “chatty” in style because my own preference is that with which I am at home. And within that lies my struggle. I said I “read aloud” the Barthes article because it made a different kind of sense when the molecules of meaning carried on pitch, tone, rhythm, in a space to another--breathed from one to another-- allows for a different meaning to arise out of Barthes’s text. Clearer? More nuanced? Reflecting an individual point of view, uniqueness? Perhaps in conversation at our panel?

Cavarero and Rodenburg: Marti Newland (Columbia University)

Reading Cavarero and Rodenburg in conversation reinforce how “voice in theory” and “voice in practice” are inextricable. Rodenburg explains the challenges of vocalization within Western aesthetic, psychological, health and political ideals as Cavarero outlines the historical and philosophical influences of these Western ideas. While Rodenburg provides suggestions to overcome the challenges she outlines, her pedagogical philosophy remains limited by a vocal epistemology informed by the pathologizing of (non-Western) bodies through the colonial era as well as an essentialist frame that I found myself correcting while reading. Where is performativity for Rodenburg? This pathologizing, led by medical scientists and subsumed by voice pedagogues, defines human physiology in a way that renders vocal practices “healthy” or “unhealthy,” and consequently “right”/“wrong,” “beautiful/ugly,” etc. Accordingly, one’s vocal acts should sound the same through one’s life—as the vocal technique Rodenburg offers can discipline age, illness, and injury, a goal she recommends to readers. Intent on telling readers how to achieve “healthy” vocalization binds Rodenburg to the very traditions (“habits” as she calls them) she works to frustrate in order to encourage access to one’s “right” to vocalize. The “healthy” vocalization she celebrates comes from a specific Western vocal ideal, an ideal she uncritically naturalizes in the book. This “one voice,” as Cavarero indexes it, leaves both philosophers and practitioners with concerns about individual agency (see the book titles). I read Cavarero’s argument for the imperative “vocalized logos” and Rodenburg’s argument for exercising one’s right to vocalize as calls to express selfhood. These calls, however, require both voice “theorists” and “practitioners” to reevaluate the epistemology from which these calls emerge and consider other approaches to expressing selfhood. Fortunately, Cavarero and Rodenburg give us a path to conduct this reevaluation: breathing.

Cavarero reminds us of the role of breathing within a Western religious philosophy and shows how breathing is the mode through which humans relate to one another (Cavarero 2005: 21). “Nothing more than the act of breathing,” she says, “is able to testify to the proximity of human beings to one another”(ibid: 31). Relating to other humans requires speaking with oneself first since “interior discoursing is the condition of possibility for speaking to others”(ibid: 46). I take Cavarero very seriously here, that breathing is a “profound communication of oneself” (ibid: 31). Rodenburg describes how breathing can provide access to the self through repeated breathing exercises where “as the breath goes lower…it settles down into and disrupts a habitation untouched by intellect and rationality. When it does hit bottom it sometimes dislodges a vital clue to our being—the secret life held down under the deepest of breaths”(Rodenburg 1992: 88-89). While Cavarero addresses the external expression of self, and Rodenburg the internal search for self, both authors speak to the dangers of encountering the self through (deep) breathing in vocalization--“irrational,” “natural,” possibly even “unhealthy”(!) vocal sounds can make one vulnerable to an undesirable reception by the public. For example, one’s voice may be heard as male or female, White or non-White, educated or uneducated. And even worse—the potential for these mishearings to be an evaluation of one’s self... scary territory in the West.

These thoughts about breath from Cavarero and Rodenburg bring me to the question: How could we reconsider Barthes through a discussion of breathing? His reflection on “oratorical” language intrigues me (Barthes 1972: 186)—words necessitating vocalization in order to realize their meaning—Romantic French poetry was the example he gave of such language, but many languages are referential distinctly through sound (Mandarin Chinese, for example, as well as many regional dialects throughout the US). I understand “oratorical” language as similar to what Cavarero would call “vocalized logos.” So what, then, of deeply breathed vocalization, of self-full vocalized logos? Additionally, Barthes description of listening to a singer as erotic (ibid: 188) evokes Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1981) and connect the expression of selfhood with the vocalizing agency Cavarero and Rodenburg seek. To me, the task going forward would be to expand the episteme of vocalization through ethnographic research about breathing and vocality, at once in theory and in practice. I long for Rodenburg to pause with the “Black American gospel singer” she incessantly references: to listen carefully to her singing and ask her about how she understands vocal practice, philosophy (or not). I suspect she, along with many different types of singers, has a valuable vocal approach to add to this field of inquiry, an approach that could alter the epistemological axis around which voice theorists and practitioners often get stuck. On a different note, I found the writing style of both Cavarero (Kottman’s translation) and Rodenburg to be very speech-like in style. I look forward to talking about that.

Voice AND Logos: Christopher Grobe (Yale University)

For all the differences between their audiences and backgrounds, Rodenburg and Cavarero share much--not only philosophical presumptions but also rhetorical tactics. Both begin with evocations of the false voice, which is characterized as blandly aristocratic. (Compare Cavarero's opening treatment of the Calvino story to Rodenburg's biting description of the babbling London elite.) For both, however, the falsity of these voices is not an insidious trick, but a bald-faced lie; to the connoisseur of voice (a role they each claim), the voice can only tell the truth--even the truth of its own falsity. (For Rodenburg the voice is a "lie detector" [16]; for Cavarero, it cannot tell a lie [24]). For both, the true voice is arrived at through the body, especially the pre-linguistic body of the infant. And for both, the voice is not only "destined to speech" in general (as Cavarero often puts it), but destined to confessional, self-revelatory speech in particular. In fact, to hear Rodenburg tell it, she leaves a trail of weeping, confessing sex-crime survivors wherever she goes (see 87-8). These similarities should not, perhaps, be surprising. Although Rodenburg disavows it as the initial source for vocal work, they are both ultimately drawing on psychoanalytic thought--its hermeneutic of suspicion, its privileging of childhood experience, its confessionalism, etc.

For all the obvious similarities, though, there is also a major (though subtle) difference between their work. We might uncover it simply by asking, what is the quintessential mode of voice for each? For Cavarero, it is the phatic vocalization--that sort of verbal "pinging" that uses language simply to establish a relation. For Rodenburg, it is the urgent act of speech--not a "speech act" in the philosophical sense, but an vocal act so filled with doing that its vocalization equals its meaning (e.g., yelling "Stop!" to someone about to get run over by a car). Both modes render secondary the precise words spoken, but whereas Cavarero's phatic vocalization is entirely indifferent to the words that sustain it, Rodenburg's urgent speech only ditches the words once their vocalization has so perfectly captured their intent as to make them superfluous. Rodenburg's "voice" is interactional; Cavarero's, merely relational. In reacting against the grapho-centrism of Derrida, Cavarero simply goes too far in shaming the text. After all, as Rodenburg reminds us, we can "Make Sound and Sense" (7).

Nowhere is this virtuous circle between sound and sense (voice and logos) more evident than in Cavarero's case-in- point: poetic language. Despite Cavarero's claim that poetic words are chosen for "their metric value rather than their meaning" (80), no poet faces so binary a choice. In fact, the best poetic language occurs when metric value (and sound and tone and rhythm and mouth-feel) contributes to (or colors, or contradicts, but always lives in relation to) its meaning, and vice versa. In poetry, voice and logos aren't glaring at each other from across the room; they're dancing together. Paying attention to voice means watching, performing, and even choreographing this dance. In other words, I disagree with Cavarero's suggestion that "written discourse is an orphan" (209)--not only as it applies to poetry, but even moreso as it applies to dramatic texts, which are obviously designed to evoke, license, and restrain voices in such a way that voice and text mutually infect or enforce. We can absorb Cavarero's wonderful notion of the rhythmic, embodied, and unique voice without accepting her stark contrast of voice with text.

Can You Hear Me Now?: On Rodenburg and Cavarero: Derek Miller (Stanford University)

I find these two texts extremely difficult to read together, perhaps due to the simple fact that one is, ultimately, a textbook, while the other is a series of philosophical essays. Surprisingly, both books struck me as extremely repetitive. While the extensive set of exercises in Rodenburg’s work are a necessary part of her teaching, her exordium on the “natural voice” could have been summarized in five pages. Cavarero’s argument, meanwhile, though inflected in subtly different ways by each philosopher or text it engages, boiled down to the following: Western philosophy ignores the voice, but if we pay attention to voice, we may recover a new form of politics as communication-among-speakers. Neither Rodenburg’s nor Cavarero’s work is banal, but the lengthy efforts of the former and the overly intricate readings of the latter seemed to lend both texts a kind of desperation, as though neither author, ultimately, really had that much to say about voice. That is, despite both authors’ best efforts, neither contributes much positive knowledge about voice, preferring instead to declare what voice is not. (Reductively: for Rodenburg, voice is not culture; for Cavarero, voice is not language or vision.)

I’m not sure I know what Rodenburg’s definition of voice is. But my biggest concern with Rodenburg is that she seems totally to reject the past--physical and psychological--in her notion of voice. She writes that “The natural voice [...] is quite simply an unblocked voice that is unhampered by debilitating habits” (19), and discusses throughout the book how past physical and emotional injuries can shape how we sound. Rodenburg seeks a voice that expresses what we might call a “vocal degree zero” (since Barthes is one of our interlocutors here). However, there is no such thing. There is no neutral voice, no voice prior to the body, which always already has a history. It is certainly true that babies use their voices with an ease that adults forget, but that forgetting is part of learning to be a human. (Or, better, of learning that voice’s “essential destination” (209), as Cavarero has it, is in speech, i.e., in culture.) Similarly, Rodenburg criticizes how “We instantly transform voices according to our audience” (72). But, again, this is merely human behavior, what it means to be a person in culture. Anyone who behaves exactly the same way in all circumstances and with all people is insane, not “natural.” I am, perhaps, reading Rodenburg rather stringently; my own experience with voice training actually had me nodding along at some of her assertions (against floor work; in favor of being “in the moment,” which means connected to your breathing). Yet I am bothered by a manifesto that imagines a pristine past voice to which it is desirable to return. There is no vocal degree zero, there is only being a speaking being.

Cavarero’s book, it strikes me, is only nominally about voice. Cavarero uses her critique of Western metaphysics’ rejection of voice to index the metaphysical rejection of uniqueness, which, in turn, is that which Cavarero wishes to restore to politics. In other words, this is fundamentally a book of political philosophy that, much like Plato’s Republic, gets around to the body politic by discussing the body human. Thus, to criticize Cavarero for having little to say about voice is to criticize her for not having written a different book. (Though her embarrassingly text-oriented reading of the balcony scene deserves scorn in its own right. The sheer number of absurd statements here [“The spectator, like Juliet, does not see Romeo’s face” (238)] would make me question her readings of Plato, if it weren’t so abundantly clear how dismissive Plato is of voice.) For what it is, namely a series of close readings that permit Cavarero to meditate on all the different ways in which metaphysics refuses to engage voice, Cavarero’s book is well executed.

However, and this ties back to my problem with Rodenburg, Cavarero treats voice as a singular presence: “the voice manifests the unique being of each human being” (173). I think voice is absolutely not singular. I think we have many voices, that we are always polyvocal. This is clearest to me in the oft-noted but under-theorized fact that the way we hear ourselves when we speak and the way others hear us is not the same. (The invention of sound recording takes on new philosophical importance in this light, as Jonathan Sterne has tentatively explored in his Audible Past. Veit Erlmann’s uneven Reason and Resonance is also useful here.) Cavarero calls voice “sonorous materiality” or “phonic substance” (1). But if voice is supposed to be a physical carrier of our corporeal identity, the disjuncture between my sonorous materiality as I hear it and my phonic substance as you perceive it is a serious philosophical problem, to which Cavarero gives typically short shrift. Like Rodenburg, Cavarero wishes voice to testify not only to presence, but to an essential presence that avoids culture and history, and thus can speak as a unique political subject: “The protagonist of this politics is a speaker who, leaving aside his or her belonging to this or that identity group, this or that language, communicates him- or herself first of all as voice” (209). But there is no political voice without language--the very musicality of our speech is a function of the language we speak, our upbringing, the patterns of our thought, our audience, etc. At the risk of repeating myself, I hope we can attend to this vocal degree zero that underlies these two books. Not only do I think it does not exist, but I think it undermines voice’s true political and philosophical potential: namely, to insert us fully into a community because we depend on them to hear us on our behalf.

Rodenburg’s The Right to Speak and Caverero’s For More Than One Voice: Laura Dougherty (Winthrop University)

I approached these two texts with these current projects on my mind: just this week I was given the final (purportedly) edits for a chapter I’ve contributed to the forthcoming book Playing With Theory in Theatre Practice. I was asked to contribute a case study on my work as a voice coach for a production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus. What I try to work through in the chapter is how I used post-colonial theories in my work as a voice coach. I am also considering the Voice and Movement class I currently teach—thinking at this time of syllabus preparation of my teaching methodology, and how and where in my approach I might engage with my material in ways that might be more effective, or how I might add additional perspective. I mention this to open only to acknowledge and articulate my current subject position. As a scholar and a voice and speech practitioner I spend a good amount of time navigating the theory/praxis divide. And this is exactly the space I find between these two works.

Going back to Rodenburg’s text, having had read it before and being familiar with her and her work, I am interested in her how she advocates for access; access to the healthful production of one’s voice, but also in the scope of the work, access to voice work. I appreciate how her work and approach is usable for practitioners of specific methodologies, as well as those who might practice a general mash-up of different practices. One of the most recognizable figures in the practice of voice and speech her project here is to advocate not necessarily for her methodology, but for the voice in general. I had heard her “God doesn’t mind a bum note” anecdote before I had heard of her or her work. I am fueled, for my teaching, to constantly address in my own approach, how to better advocate for the practice of voice and speech as a whole, but also to advocate for each actor and student’s own voice. Revisiting this text serves to reaffirm that advocacy. While her examples might be now outdated (I wonder how that would resonate with my undergrads), the simplicity of her advocacy for access has great staying power.

How is the body considered in Cavarero’s text? I am interest in how this text works to complicate and celebrate the corporeality of voice. “Unlike thinking, speaking does not allow its protagonist to be an abstract subject” (175) as if voice is a somehow grounded theory for its very literalness—there is a body connected to, producing the voice. I am entrenched in opening up to my students the great weight of performativity—suggesting that something happens and is happening because of an utterance and how it is created and connected to their bodies in their moment. So if Cavarero works against a tradition in philosophy which removes or ignores the act of speaking from the idea of speech “[t]he basic strategy, which is the inaugural act of metaphysics, consists in a double gesture whereby speech is separated from speakers and finds its home in thought” (9), the practice of voice and speech necessarily answers that call, because it is, of course, necessarily rooted in the body.

More Scattered Thoughts on Voice: Gelsey Bell (New York University)

Cavarero’s dream of a philosophy stemming from a logos of vocal resonance rather than one of understanding and a politics based on a polyvocal song of unique voices is rightly complicated by Rodenburg’s practice of helping the natural and healthy voice emerge. With phenomena like pushing or devoicing, we can see how relationality begins with the individual voice and how Cavarero’s song could go a step further and take into consideration not just the unique timbre of each voice, but also what voices are louder than others, the subtle differences in articulation, as well as those whose voices shut down and go unheard. I have always found Cavarero remarkably naïve in her discussion of the “unique voice” as if subjecthood and vocal sound were stable entities. Rodenburg, though pointing toward a natural (otherwise known as healthy) voice, over and over explains the ways that a voice can get tied up in social situations that mold it in many directions, be it raising or lowering the pitch range of speaking due to gender roles (74-85) or utilizing urban glottal attacks (68). As she says, “we learn rather swiftly to stop pleasing ourselves and please others with the sounds we make” (39). So what does this mean for Cavarero’s desire to make a politics with the unique timbres of our voices? If we can trace those timbres back to biological, environmental, developmental, and socio-economic factors, our unique voices are still not on a level playing field – just as Levinas’s face-to-face with the other will always be colored by race and culture. How can we take into consideration that the fact that when some of Rodenburg’s students do finally speak in healthy and sustainable ways that they speak with what feels and sounds like a different voice?

Cavarero does engages the disconnect between voice and one conception of subjecthood (that based on thought and intent) when she states that “speaking is not at all a thinking that expresses itself out loud, nor is it merely vocalized thought, nor is it an acoustic substitute for thinking. The phenomenology of speaking possesses an autonomous status in which the relationality of mouths and ears come to the fore” (174). However the relation that she focuses in on is of a certain degree of intimacy: the voice on the phone that can say “It’s me” and you know who is talking. It is a voice that you already have an established relationship to (“[E]very voice is unique, and because it is unique, once it is known it can be recognized” [25; my emphasis]). It seems to me that the integral vocal period to politics is the introductory period, when the conversation is getting started and people are in the process of learning each other’s voices. This is the space where Rodenburg’s “vocal imperialism” (5) is particularly dangerous.

The idea of “vocal imperialism” also points to one essential point that both authors bring up: the fundamental place of listening in the dialogic configuration of vocal activity. Rodenburg mentions our need to re-educate our ears so that we do not interpret ‘high status’ voices as more informed than others, pointing to how with some voices we take responsibility for what is being said, while with other voices we blame the speaker. While Cavarero scolds philosophy for being bad listeners and conversationalists. One thing I often have to remind myself when writing about the voice is to not focus solely on the vocal object (I’m using the word object very loosely here – obviously that’s a whole other discussion) but also the intertwinement of the activity of listening.

I also find it fascinating how Rodenburg talks about the health of the voice and sincerity. (Bringing to mind a whole score of texts including Shoshana Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body and Mladen Dolars’s A Voice and Nothing More.) How much of philosophy is an extended and confused attempt to make sense of strained, insincere, and unhealthy voices. How do performances of awkward rhetoric or unimpassioned nonsense complicate knowledge formation? How can they be taken into account?

On Cavarero and Rodenburg: Andrew Kimborough (University of Kentucky)

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.