Barthes’ “The Grain of the Voice” and Knight’s “Standard Speech: The Ongoing Debate”: Laura Dougherty (Winthrop University)

I’m taken with Barthes’ suggestion of the grain of the voice as a space, (the space of encounter), a generative and germinating space, for how spatializing the production of voice, of mapping the movement enacted in that “encounter between a language and a voice” can work to express the gravity of voice. As we on this panel are all (presumably) invested and interested in the voice as a subject of practice and/or theoretical investigation, I need not argue here for the notion of just how weighty a subject and practice voice and speech is. In my research and practice with voice and speech, I am interested in how the practice of voice and speech offers or excludes access to our USAmerican stages (using “stage” broadly—playing space, as if any one place in/on which a performance happens is someone made a stage). I grapple with the questions of which stories in what style can be told on our stages because of an expected and presumed “neutral” voice, and for whose consumption. In this I think about the texts we produce, the actors who can perform in them and the audiences who have access to our performances because of that space created by voice.

While I appreciate Knight’s attention to the intricate role class has played in the genealogy of the practice of voice and speech in the US, I take exception with his notion that a sought-after “neutrality” “is actually merely anonymous” (178). Thinking of voice, as Bathes suggests, as a place where “significance explodes”, there is nothing anonymous in this presumed neutrality. Whose “neutral”? I am struck with how deeply steeped in identity markers of race, class, education, economic status and regional affiliation and citizenship any presumed “neutrality” is.

As I approach and work with voice and speech in scholarship and practice, I then turn my thinking to how I teach voice and speech given the gravity of the grain, the generative space of encounter of the voice (mindful of the specific trajectory of voice and speech practice and pedagogy in the US). This is of particular significance now to me as I teach voice and speech in South Carolina (and hail from the Boston area)—place plays a huge role in pedagogy, given the tension around southern dialects. (I can draw from this experience if our conversation moves toward pedagogy; I mention it here just to foreground my current moment in thinking and practice.)