Theorizing Gender, Culture, and Music

Callas Listening

What is it about the "modern condition" that favors narratives of loss and falls from grace? No matter how different their approaches, the most influential philosophies and histories of knowledge of the last half-century agree that at some point in the past the process of making art and making meaning in the Western world was holistic, unified, free of anxiety or stratification; where they differ is on exactly when the Edenic coexistence between self and other, mind and body, knowledge and culture came to an end. Foucault famously located the Fall in the seventeenth century; for Adorno the golden age lasted a little longer, until the advent of Kantian philosophy, with its emphasis on rational understanding and systematic organization of information. Splitting the difference between Foucault and Adorno is one of the dominant narratives of feminist theory, where the villain is Descartes and his mind-body split. Behind all of this, perhaps, lies the psychoanalytic notion that the individual self is also formed by a sort of Fall, the passage from a stage of perfect union with the mother's body to a realization of difference, independence, isolation.

The version of this narrative that Adriana Cavarero outlines in her A più voci. Filosofia dell'espressione vocale (In Many Voices: A Philosophy of Vocal Expression) is unusual both in being less gloomy, less obsessed with fragmentation and rupture than most and in locating the moment of loss far earlier, around 380 BC. For Cavarero, the crucial watershed is the "devocalization of logos"—the divorce of verbal meaning from the speaking voice—that began when the oral tradition of epic was supplanted by written poetry. She looks back regretfully to the Edenic state of Homeric epic, when "poet" and "singer" were considered synonymous and when the sound and the metrical possibilities of words mattered more than their semantic meaning. But it is not only the poetic (or musical) potential of such a union that Cavarero laments; her real concern is the epistemological fallout from this shift, the hardening and fixing of thought processes that began with the literate tradition. She analyzes the Platonic corpus to show how the shift from an aural basis for thought to a visual one originates with Plato, as does the idea of the silent voice of the soul, the privileging of an unvoiced dialogue within the self as the voice of conscience, and thus the subordination of conversational sociability to silent, isolated thought.

Once these epistemological and poetic paths diverged so decisively the less prestigious side of the opposition "naturally" became equated with the feminine principle, and it is one of the strengths of A più voci that Cavarero traces this process in concrete terms via detailed readings of Homer, Ovid, and others. A principal victim of the change was the figure of the Siren, who suffered a drastic reinterpretation and reduction of power after Homer. From possessing a mastery of both logos and voice that began to seem threatening to androcentric traditions, the Siren was denatured: she was gradually stripped of verbal powers and figured instead as "pure voice, inarticulate song, mere acoustic vibration, cry" (118).¹ After Homer Sirens continue to sing but no longer narrate.

Despite recounting one such story of disempowerment after another, A più voci comes across as unusually upbeat, perhaps because Cavarero's is a genuine project of recovery. She not only recuperates a philosophy and theory of language that predate the split between word and voice; in a substantial final section she addresses recent literary and philosophical initiatives that aim to rejoin the severed elements. This contemporary dimension of Cavarero's project centers on the power of voice as a relational force and as the most complete embodiment of the uniqueness of the individual. These considerable claims for the importance of voice proceed from Rousseauian and Saussurean notions that language is forever consigned to convention and to arbitrariness, while voice might have some hope of escaping or exceeding these...