Human Voice 11/1

I was particularly interested in the gendered dimension of Cavarero’s piece. It’s an interesting argument to use the historical tie of the masculine voice with logic and the feminine voice with body, to talk about the dichotomy between the semantic and vocal dimensions of the voice. Last semester I took a class on the gendered body on stage, and we talked a lot about the voice and how specifically the female voice is a site of a lot of cultural mythology. From the myth of the siren which colors the female voice as something dangerous and provocative to the idea of “the shrew” famously featured in Shakespeare as a shrill and crude woman. It’s notable that “shill” and “crude” as adjectives in themselves reflect fears of both the vocal and semantic power of the feminine voice. The idea of the gendered dimension of the voice demonstrates how important the tie between the voice and the body is. Cavarero talks about the grain as “the way the voice lies in the body—or the way the body lies in the voice”. And there is an inherently political dimension to grain, arguably more so than even the semantic quality of words. No body exists apolitically; they are littered with myths and cultural tags. In poststructuralist theory, “reality is textual” and the body is no exception. Gender is perhaps the most visible example of this at least in the reading, with the king being swayed to song by a feminine voice which Cavarero sees as either an homage or a playing into classical tropes around the persuasive quality of the female voice (notably voice not words). However, the body and thus the voice can be read beyond gendered lines. Accents carry with them cultural tags that refer to a person’s race and class. Even a person’s age is part of the cultural trace of their voice. I think this is part of Cavarero’s point about “multiple voices”; every voice is multivocal due to these associations even if we can only speak one word at a time.

       I think where Scanner kind of picks this up is in exploring what happens when these voices no longer have bodies. He speaks about voices as ghosts which to him seem to be a real phenomenon but the subtext of trying to record “ghosts” is that the ability to record is itself a creator of ghosts. For the first time in human history, we have been able to take the voice out of the body, to preserve one even after the death of the other. He talks about the implications of the private and public spheres in the context of listening technology which can “peel open virtually every zone of information”, and I think this also has ramifications on the disembodiment of the voice. The voice is in some ways the emissary between these spaces, allowing a bridge between that which is most internal to us and the wider world. What does it mean that we can now capture these moments even if the voice is unaware of it?  Where does the body private end and the body public begin if the voice no longer is ephemeral, but can be shared and preserved infinitely