For More Than One Voice is a book written by Adriana Cavarero, an Italian philosopher with many writings on voice and feminism. Although her speech nature is politically and philosophically focused on the feminist voice, she has also discussed general ideas on the politics of voice, which are essential to the means of my essay.
In this book, Adriana Cavarero discusses the definition of voice and its position on contemporary philosophy, deconstructing ontological schools of thought that have deteriorated its core meaning so far. She begins by quoting the Italian writer Italo Calvino: “A voice means this: there is a living person, throat, chest, feelings, who send into the air this voice, different from all other voices”, and by this, she reflects on the uniqueness that voice has apart from speech. Speech relates to linguistics, the science that studies the human language. However, Cavarero agrees with Paul Zumthor that the prior is far more connected to orality than vocality, “the whole of the activities and values that belong to the voice as such, independently of language”.
With this book, I pretend to evaluate a Giacometti quote.
We shouldn’t criticise the way these people sing because this is the best way they know how to express themselves. I’m also interested in understanding whether such an evaluation would apply to the case study I am working on. My central inquiry is: Does the subject’s voice have a deeper meaning in Giacometti’s recordings? What perspectives can be introduced to help understand the tapes?
In fact, Giacometti’s subjects are not expressing tormenting experiences during the ongoing dictatorship. Instead, they are singing and telling stories at work and recreationally through distinct forms of Portuguese traditional music and customs. Empirically, the people who sing are indeed singing. However, ontologically, and according to Adriana Cavarero, voice “is not at all a thinking that expresses itself out loud, nor is it merely vocalised thought, nor is it an acoustic substitute for think.”(Cavarero, 2005). Additionally, Cavarero also differentiates the act of communicating and speaking, whereas the voice uniqueness is noticed before the intention of transmitting information to another. In this way, Giacometti’s intentions, apart from recording different forms of folk music and locating them in a context of oppression, can be analysed under this new philosophy of voice ontology.
References:
Cavarero, A., 2005. For More than One Voice. 1st ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.173-182.