a politics of voice
Music: Marconi Union: [distance] (2006)
Hooray! I think I've finished reviewing Cavarero's book. The ending chapter is quite good, and despite her repetitive style, she did manage to bring things to a satisfying end. I'm not sure I buy her understanding of the political, and as someone who is not familiar with Jean-Luc Nancy's work on politics and voice, I cannot say I am in full trust (indeed, unlike reading Dolar or even Ong, I found myself distrustful of Cavarero's claims at many turns). But insofar as this is a "report" and not a gospel, I just put the words in her mouth. Anyhoo, that book was somewhat of a slog; the last one by Nass and Brave is "easy reading." This is a relief, insofar as I am outlining a chapter from Zizek's parallax stew this weekend for reading group.
I'm cooking gumbo tonight for guests, which must be prefaced with a house-cleaning and a lot of chopping, so I’m done from the screen for the day (I think). Here's the rest of my take on Cavarero:
Central to Cavarero's vocal ontology of uniqueness is Levinas' distinction between the Saying and the Said, which she argues foregrounds uniqueness as the precondition of any communicative encounter:
Saying is in fact understood by Levinas as "anterior to verbal signs, anterior to linguistic systems and to semantic reflections---preface to languages." Again, this is not the phonetic aspect of speech, not a voice that reverberates. Rather, Saying is here-at least in its simplest meaning-the act of speaking, the event by which human beings speak to each other one by one, without regard for what they say. This saying is distinguished by Levinas from a Said that is, at the same time, that which they say to one another and that which the entire knowledge of the west says. But the Said is above all the system that organizes speech."[1]
The Saying necessarily involves a someone who speaks, neither an "I" nor "thou"-since self- or other-awareness is a re-presentation and thus in the domain of the Said-but a uniqueness-in-relation that Cavarero says is best captured by the notion of voice. Although she briefly questions why Levinas has a "surprising tendency" to ground sonorous metaphors in the visual (e.g., "the face"), she takes from his thought the notion that ethics is not an epiphenomenon of self-consciousness (the Said), but a Saying better expressed in the voice beyond speech. In other words, for Cavarero the vocal ontology of uniqueness is the ethical. Alternately cast: there is no choice in hearing, only a kind of default, radical passivity.[2]
This default passivity signified by the mouth and ear is also necessarily a dependency, one that each of us encounters "on the scene of infancy," where it is "the mother who links the sphere of the voice to that of speech."[3] When the infant cries, it is the parent who must assign meaning to that phonetic excess; a scream requires another to hear it and register it as a demand (for food, for a diaper change, and other basic needs). After ruminating on the figures of the muses and sirens in Plato and Homer, the second part of Cavarero's book takes up the psychoanalytic work of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous (and while not explicit, there is a discernable murmur of Kaja Silverman's The Acoustic Mirror as well) focused specifically on the dependant relationality of voice. She is keyed to the "pre-Oedipal" relations of primary identification, which Freud suggests is initially with the mother by way of her breast.[4] Kristeva and Cixous, however, argue that prior to the breast is the voice:
[by] insisting on the libidinal register of the vocal, these thinkers trace vocality back to the pre-oedipal phase. That is, they trace it back to the originary scene in which the fusional relationship between mother and child also works to frustrate the category of the individual. From this perspective . . . the pleasure rooted in the acoustic sphere has above all a subversive function: that its, it destabilizes language as a system that produces the subject. Rather that stand in opposition to writing . . . voice stands in opposition to language-that is, to the disciplining codes of language, to grammar and syntax, to the "Law of the Father" that separates the child from the mother by consigning the child to the logic of individuality.[5]
Again, we read the influence of Jacques Lacan, who referred to the self-consciousness made possible by representation (language) as the intervention of the paternal metaphor or the "Law of the Father." The basic idea of primary identification is that there is an affective relation of immediacy-a primary mother-child dyad-that is eventually triangulated with onset of language represented culturally by "the father," who lays down the law ("no, you cannot have mommy to yourself"; "don't touch that or it will fall off," and so on).[6] Language is equivocated with "the law" because it is an order, a system of codes that begin with the simple command of "no!" Cavarero suggests that both Kristeva's conception of a preverbal chora in her Revolutions in Poetic Language and Cixous' powerfully poetic critique of phallogocentrism in Western thought articulate an ontology of voice that situates relationality before sexual difference. On this, the writerly and readerly side of language, voice nevertheless erupts. In language voice is gendered feminine and renders the originary Other as mother, "the source of language and its rhythm," and yet ultimately these "women who sing" remind us that voice as such exceeds the meaning of speech; although we cannot think it, voice is consequently without sex or gender.[7]
Finally, spring-boarding from the speech-centric philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, Cavarero closes her book with a third section devoted to the relation between an ontologico-ethical conception of voice and the domain of the political as conceived by Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy.[8] For Cavarero, a recognition of the preverbal, dependent relationality betokened by voice is also the core of the political, which she defines, following Arendt, as a plurality of individuals expressing their uniqueness. For Arendt, argues Cavarero,
the political lies entirely in the relational space between human beings who are unique and therefore plural. The faculty of speech is political because by speaking to one another in a relational space and communicating themselves, men at the same time communicate the political nature of this space. What they communicate-contents, signifieds, values-might be congruent with this space, however, it is secondary with respect to the political act of speaking. It is in fact the relational plurality of unique beings that constitutes the criterion on which the congruence of "what gets communicated" can be judged. . . . The political, the exclusively human sphere of the world, consists in the "in-between," in what relates and separates men at the same time, revealing their plural condition.[9]
Cavarero contrasts her understanding of Arendt on the political with Nancy's work on community to help characterize this "relational space" of communication. She asserts that Nancy substitutes relationality with the term "knot" and uniqueness with "singularity" in a way that foregrounds community as a scene of a "politics in the with, the among, the in . . . that is, in any particle that alludes to the original, ontological relation inscribed in the plurality of singular beings."[10] Politics is not, then, merely a space of judgment vis-à-vis the proper recognition of the singularity betokened by a voice; for Nancy, at least, politics is "the seizure of speech" or, as Anne Dufourmantelle has said elsewhere, a "pact with speech," a thirdness, a relational bond of utterance.[11]
In distinction from Ardent, Cavarero points out that for Nancy there is no "proper sphere to politics" because the political, as a register of knotting singularities, is always-already inscribed in any ontology. Despite the collapse of ethical and the ontological throughout the book, Nancy's conflation of ontology and politics is a move that she seems to oppose: without the communication and the interactive recognition of unique voices within a given community, suggests Cavarero, "uniqueness remains a mere ontological given-the given of an ontology that is not able to make itself political."12 Judgment and recognition seem central to Cavarero's politics. Perhaps it is in this respect that Cavarero chose to conclude For More Than One Voice by relating the story of a three-year-old child, without name and incapable of speech, discovered at Auschwitz after the liberation. Fellow survivors named him "Hurbinek," and he did attempt to speak and make sounds for his short life. The child had a voice that registered his uniqueness, recognized and named by others, a voice that mimed "the musicality of speech, the relational fabric of resonance, the echo that comes from the mouth for the ear of the other."[13] The inarticulate cries of Hurbinek implicate a politics in the recognition of a singular voice on its way toward speech (and death).
Cyborg Trouble
Cavarero reports that Aristotle's famous definition of the human in Politics, "zoon logon echon," has been wrongly and commonly mistranslated as "'rational animal,' but to the letter it means 'the living creature who has logos.'"[14] Coupled with Aristotle's insistence in the same volume that humans are the only animals who signify, Cavarero suggests it is better to understand the Father of Philosophy as having specified human being as the speaking animal. This is precisely the opening argument of Clifford Nass and Scott Brave's fascinating, empirically researched study, Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship. Although the authors unabashedly announce their interest in the commercial implications of their research---an ambition that drives their research and which some readers would find troublesome---Wired For Speech nevertheless lends empirical support to many of Ong, Dolar, and Cavarero's ontological claims. Cavarero helps us to contend with the ethical and political implications of an ontology of voice. Nass and Brave, however, modify Aristotle's definition with the aid of social science: human being is the speaking and listening animal because she is hardwired to be that way.
[more later, with hope, soon]
Notes
[1] Cavarero, For More, 28.
[2] Cavarero, For More, 30-31. For a book-length treatment of hearing-and, in a sense, a kind of counterpart to Cavarero's project, see Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Shocken Books, 1985); and Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
[3] Cavarero, For More, 179.
[4] Sigmund Freud, "An Outline of Psychoanalysis." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE) 23, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 141-208. For an lucid explication of primary identification see Diane Davis, "Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are" (unpublished manuscript, but hopefully not for long!)
[5] Cavarero, For More, 132.
[6] For Lacan, primary identification and the arrival of the Law of the Father (which thereby creates new object choices) are both prior to the Oedipus Complex in Freud, which represents sexual difference or what Lacan refers to as "sexuation." The reason primary identification is important to gender scholars is that it implies relationality is prior to sexual difference, which has important implications for ethics, social theory, and so forth. See Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000), esp. 115-151.
[7] Cavarero, For More, 145.
[8] Cavarero, For More, 174.
[9] Cavarero, For More, 192.
[10] Cavarero, For More, 193-194.
[11] Cavarero, For More, 194; Anne Dufourmantelle, "Invitation," in Derrida, Of Hospitality, 122. The related Lacanian term is the "paternal metaphor," which implies the pact was more or less a forced choice.
[12] Cavarero, For More, 196.
[13] Cavarero, For More, 211-212.
[14] Cavarero, For More, 34.