a vocal ontology of uniqueness

Music: Moody Blues: On the Threshold of a Dream (1969)

I've been having a difficult time finishing up Adriana Cavarero's For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, and this in part because the book is starting to annoy me. Have you ever picked up a book and wanted to like it, but found yourself resisting the prose even though you agree with the argument? Cavarero's writing annoys me: she repeats herself, over and over again, and sometimes entire chapters read like a bunch of words signifying nothing---like a scratched record stuck on an aria that sounds good, then not, then not, then not, then not . . . . Well, anyway, I worry sometimes if I'm just plain grumpy and projecting that into the book.

Regardless, I managed to squeeze out a little more of the review. I now need to pick up some Hannah Arendt to properly finish Cavarero and move on to the last book. Between now and then, however, I must heave the packed boxes of two very important people. Anyhoo, here's some mo':

For Dolar the voice is ultimately "an opening to radical alterity" that Heidegger suggested issues "a call eluding self-appropriation and self-reflection."[i] In a qualified sense, Dolar advances an understanding of the human voice that provides an ontological basis for ethical being toward others:

The voice is the element which ties the subject and the Other together, without belonging to either, just as it formed the tie between body and language without being part of them. We can say that the subject and the Other coincide in their common lack embodied by the voice, and that "pure enunciation" can be taken as the red thread which connects the linguistic and ethical aspects of the voice.[ii]

In rhetorical studies Eric King Watts has underscored this binding tie and argues consequently that voice is "constitutive of ethical and emotional dimensions that make it an answerable phenomenon."[iii] Likewise, drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and his distinction between "the Saying" and "the Said," Diane Davis has argued for "a rhetoric of the saying-that is, an elaboration of rhetoric's explicitly nonhermeneutic, ethical dimension" that does not flatten human relations into text.[iv] What Dolar, Watts, and Davis tacitly point our attention to is that "pure enunciation" is an ontological nexus of individual uniqueness, voice, and speech that has important implications for communicative ethics. Adriana Cavarero's For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression endeavors to provide a book-length elaboration these ethical implications with a terminus in the political.

From multiple vantages, Cavarero advances a "vocal ontology" or "phenomenology of uniqueness" by beginning with the "simple truth of the vocal," which announces a number of

elementary givens of existence: uniqueness, relationality, sexual difference, and age-including the "change of voice" that, especially in men, signals the onset of puberty. There would therefore be any number of reasons for making voice a privileged theme of speculation on the problem of ontology. But, surprisingly, authoritative precedents for this kind of speculation is lacking.[v]

Cavarero endeavors to remedy this lack by investigating these givens in three themed sections: part one, titled "How Logos Lost Its Voice," is a philosophical history of voice and speech comprised of nine short chapters; part two, titled "Women Who Sing," takes up the centuries-long association of woman with embodiment, speech, and music in seven longer chapters; and part three, titled "A Politics of Voices," is comprised by four chapters that link voice to politics by way of Hannah Arendt's thought.

As evidenced in part one, whereas Ong and Dolar are largely concerned with a phenomenological approach to voice, speech, and language, Cavarero couples her theory with a philosophical history rooted in the thought of the ancient Greeks. Assuming that readers are familiar with Derrida's critique of logocentrism from the onset (and perhaps because her book never really engages that critique, Cavarero has added an appendix "Dedicated to Derrida"), the author opens For More Than One Voice by announcing she intends to trace the "devocalization of logos" in the history of philosophy in order to rethink "the relationship between voice and speech as one of uniqueness . . . ."[vi] In a number of the early chapters, Plato takes center stage in this respect, insofar as "it has been said that the entire history of philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato."[vii] For Cavarero, Plato inaugurated "videocentric thought" by subordinating speaking to thinking and cleaving voice from logos: "logos concerns itself with saying, but not with the human world of singular voices that, in speaking, communicate themselves to one another."[viii] Drawing on Plato's remarks in a number of dialogues, Cavarero argues that Plato

projects onto speech itself the visual mark of thought. The result is the firm belief that the more speech loses its phonetic component and consists in a pure chain of signifieds, the closer it gets to the realm of truth. The voice thus becomes the limit of speech-its imperfection, its dead weight. The voice becomes not only the reason for truth's ineffability, but also the acoustic filter that impedes the realm of signifieds from presenting itself to the noetic gaze.[ix]

Of course, this dead weight of philosophy presumes some kind of relationship to "speech." As with Dolar, voice represents a "sphere" that is "constitutively broader than that of speech: it exceeds it."[x] Voice is the sound that registers the singularity of every individual that has one, whereas speech concerns the domain of meaning and signification that is the "essential destination" of voice. Perhaps because their relation changes over time, Cavarero avoids any precise definitions of speech and voice. Forcefully and repeatedly like a broken record, however, she does argue that "logocentrism radically denies to the voice a meaning of its own that is not always already destined to speech."[xi] For Dolar, philosophy has sought to kill off voice in the name of God or Language because of its unstable ambivalence and threat to self-presence and transparency; for Cavarero, voice has been subjugated to the signifier because it interrupts and violates universal aspirations with the demand to recognize a particular, unique person with a "'throat, chest, feelings, who sends into the air this voice, different from all other voices . . . .'"[xii] In other words, voice is a dead weight because it betokens the singular uniqueness and meaninglessness of individual mortality.

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."[xiii]

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. There is no choice in hearing, only a kind of default, radical passivity.[xiv]

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."xv For Cavarero, a recognition of this dependency is the core of the political, which she defines, following Arendt, as . . . [more later].

Notes

[i] Dolar, A Voice, 102.
[ii] Dolar, A Voice, 103.
[iii] Eric King Watts, "'Voice' and 'Voicelessness' in Rhetorical Studies." Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 179.
[iv] Diane Davis, "Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation." Philosophy and Rhetoric 38 (2005): 194.
[v] Cavarero, For More, 8.
[vi] Cavarero, For More, 13.
[vii] Cavarero, For More, 42.
[viii] Cavarero, For More, 43.
[ix] Cavarero, For More, 42.
[x] Cavarero, For More, 13.
[xi] Cavarero, For More, 13.
[xii] Cavarero, For More, 4.
[xiii] Cavarero, For More, 28.
[xiv] 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 Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
[xv] Cavarero, For More, 179.