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Ecstatic Voices and Ethical Responsibility
Joshua St. Pierre
I imagine Judith Butler was not thinking of voices like mine
when she wrote, “the ‘I’ is the moment of failure in every
narrative effort to give an account of oneself” (“Account” 37).
Perhaps she should have, for attending to the materiality and
vulnerability of the voice by way of the crip has much to offer
her account of agency and responsibility. This re-reading is
motivated by a related omission: Derrida obviously did not
weigh my crip voice in his censure that “the voice meets no
obstacle to its emission in the world precisely because it is
produced as pure auto-affection” (79). Crip voices snicker at
poststructuralist anxieties, for hearing ourselves speak is a
winding detour through the body. Our speech is différance.
The phonophobia springing from the Derridean tradition
underwrites Butler’s preoccupation with language, a
preoccupation coming at the expense of the sonorous voice in
her account of bodies and agency. This erasure not only fails to
hear non-normative voices, but further precludes a consideration
of their challenge to notions of agency that are bound up with
logocentricism. Re-reading voice, I argue it can be understood
as a sonorous and material field rather than a phallic projection.
Constituting an everted boundary of the materialized body (that
is, a boundary turned inside out), the voice is an ecstatic and
social phenomenon: “exposed to others, vulnerable by
definition” (Frames 33). Thinking this material account of the
voice together with Butler’s insistence that the inevitable failure
to give an account of ourselves grounds responsiveness and
therefore responsibility, I suggest that the voice can disclose and
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ground our ethical connection with others. This framing centres
non-normative voices in a discourse that has long excluded
them.
Equating the voice with agency has a long humanist and
metaphysical lineage. The ubiquitous locution “being heard”
invokes the democratic ideal of vox populi—the voice of the
people. Here, agency is grounded in a self-identical relation of
voice and identity. To speak and be heard in the midst of Others,
put otherwise, is to be recognized and counted as a subject
through the authentic self-presence of the voice. Equating voice
with self-identity with agency has the problematic effect of
excluding voices regarded as opaque. For example, Chris Eagle
notes that “from this vantage point it is easy to see how fluent
speech itself becomes politicized, as a measure of one’s political
agency.”
While these forms of exclusion persist and take on many forms,
as noted above, the Derridean response to the problematic
relation between agency and speech taken up by Butler and
others has not been to interrogate critically the phonetic register,
but to eschew the voice altogether. What is accordingly needed
is to pry some space between speech and voice such that the
voice can resonate on its own accord.
The conflation of speech with voice is emblematic of the
metaphysical tradition as a whole, since as Adrianna Cavarero
writes, “when the register of speech is totalized—for instance,
when it is identified with a language system of which the voice
would be a mere function—it is indeed inevitable that the vocal
emission not headed for speech is nothing but a remainder” (122
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13). Following Cavarero, if we consider that “the sphere of the
voice is constitutively broader than that of speech: it exceeds it”
(13), agency can be refigured around vulnerability and our
opaque relation to ourselves.
Starting from Cavarero’s insistence that the sphere of the voice
exceeds speech and signification, the voice gains a stubbornness
that can’t undermined quite so easily. Diverging even from those
like Mladlen Dolar who regard the voice as corporeal, yet
ephemeral, Musicologist Michelle Duncan argues that “voice
does not simply appear on stage and then disappear. Voice puts
matter into circulation, matter that is more or other than
language, more or other than even performative utterance”
(303). Attending to Duncan’s understanding of the voice, I
accordingly suggest, pace Dolar, yet with Don Ihde, that the
voice is topographically more akin to a field than a missile. The
matter put into motion is not a phallic projection, and does not
quietly dissipate with the phoneme. Rather, “the voice that
emanates from this body is one that carries remnants of the body
with it, remnants that gain, through propulsion, a weight of their
own” (Duncan 303). The voice is ecstatic—standing outside
ourselves—such that it everts and redefines the contours of the
body. That is, coming from “within,” yet perforating the
boundaries of bodies, the voice can be understood as an opening
onto the world, a bodily site of contact with others. This
conception of the voice resonates with Margrit Shildrick’s
suggestion that “To a greater or lesser extent, none of us is
entitled to claim a singular body” and that “our bodies do not
end at the skin” (2015). The voice as bodily is necessarily
public, characterized by unwilled proximity difficult to shut out
that leaves us exposed and vulnerable to others. Crip voices
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accentuate this aural spectacle, highlighting the “stickiness” of
the voice that weaves bodies together.
[Shifting to ethics] Turning the tables on the humanist logic that
equates coherency with personal and social responsibility, Butler
argues in “Giving an Account of Ourselves” that it is precisely
because the subject is not transparent to itself that we are
responsible to others. Any attempt to narrate our lives, and thus
produce a coherent “I” must be recognizable and intelligible.
This requisite disruption of the unity of my narrative means that
I am never identical to myself—divided and incoherent—and
that I am from the start always given over to, implicated with,
and constituted by the Other. Put in terms of ecstatic
constitution, “to the extent that [the ‘I’] agrees, from the start, to
narrate itself through [recognizable] norms, it agrees to circuit
its narration through an externality, and so to disorient itself in
the telling” (32). The humanist link immediately deriving
agency from self-presence is ruined by the impossible demand
of self-identity and complete coherence. I am always, already
opaque to myself.
If the “I” is the moment of failure in every effort to give an
account of oneself, the ecstatic movement constituting me
through and in others, and the impossibility of telling myself
straight, a robust kinship emerges with the voice—especially
cripped voices. Understood within the humanist logic that
collapses voice, self-identity, and agency into each other, crip
voices lose the foothold of immediate presence granting them
agency. Yet from our perspective these tables are easily turned.
The opaqueness of the self entails that “we are not precisely
bounded, not precisely separate” (39), but co-implicated with
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others in a matrix of reciprocal vulnerability and responsibility.
If we consider that it is precisely our co-implication—our
leakage—with others that grounds responsibility, then the voice
in its materiality, its stuttered movement through the world that
gets snagged on bodies and objects, can be reimagined as a site
not just of political contestation of who gets heard (though this
is also important) but as an ethical sphere of belonging and
becoming responsible to each other.
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