2.3 SOUNDING VOICE IN COMPOSITION 48
2.3.2 Voice as Mode 55
What I see as the second key approach to sounding voice in composition is one that hearkens back to a much earlier moment in the field’s pre-history: the classical rhetorical canon of
56 As Zoellner argues, “[W]ords are in many ways as plastic and artistic a medium as paint or clay, and
delivery. This approach—which essentially takes up voice as a mode of delivery—is part and parcel of a larger effort in the field to recover this long-disparaged canon for contemporary compositional practice. In “Writing Technologies, and the Fifth Canon,” her keynote address at the 2006 Computers and Writing conference, Andrea Lunsford situates this turn toward delivery within the broader context of what Walter Ong has called “secondary orality,” wherein developments in electronic media have fundamentally changed the means and modes of communication in our day-to-day lives. In an effort to keep up with the affordances (and, indeed, the requirements) of the current technological landscape, Lunsford proposes a parallel framework of “secondary literacy.” As she explains it, secondary literacy is “both highly inflected by oral forms, structures, and rhythms and highly aware of itself as writing, understood as variously organized and mediated systems of signification” (170), thus bringing together orality and writing into a new, mutually constitutive configuration of compositional modalities.
Certainly, there is a sense in which, under this framework, “writing,” “literacy,” and “signification” continue to hold privileged ground as the key terms of composing practice, suggesting a certain degree of consistency with the method-based approaches to voice that I have just outlined. Lunsford is clearly not interested here in unseating alphabetic writing as the primary means through which we make and communicate meaning—nor, for that matter, in moving beyond persuasion as the traditional function of writing practice.57 But neither is she interested in simply using orality as a methodological stepping stone toward rhetorical invention and stylistic refinement, only to slough it off once the objective of “good (alphabetic) writing” has been achieved. Instead, and in line with the broader discourses of multimodal composition,
57Indeed, in discussing her experience creating a new model for digital, multimodal, delivery-based
curriculum in undergraduate composition, Lunsford expresses anxiety around the possibility of moving too far from “persuasion” toward “production” in ways that privilege the media over the message (176).
Lunsford calls for “the inclusion of aural and visual elements” (176) alongside and in conversation with alphabetic writing practice—elements with the potential to infuse writing with their own sensory logics and effects. By drawing upon these additional modalities, and by attending to “the material conditions of production” out of which texts emerge (176), Lunsford argues that we might productively reimagine writing itself: “as epistemic, performative, multivocal, multimodal, and multimediated” (171).
While many scholars working in this area have tended to take up voice only indirectly and by implication, often within a broader framework of “orality” (speech) and “aurality” (sound),58 Lunsford’s work is notable for its explicit acknowledgement of voice as a distinctive modality in and of itself. In fact, for Lunsford, voice stands as one of the three primary modalities involved in the writing process, which she nicknames the “three v’s: vocal, visual, [and] verbal” (176). On one hand, it seems significant that the “vocal” is separated off from the “verbal” here, suggesting the possibility that voice-as-sound might be taken seriously apart from its traditionally perceived connection—and, indeed, conflation—with language. On the other hand, it is striking to note that (1) this is the only time that Lunsford makes mention of voice itself (aside from a fleeting reference to the “multivocal”) and (2) there is no room in this trio for the many other forms of sound, which do not coincide with the peculiar subcategory of human voice. With this in mind, one has to wonder if voice is being mobilized here either for the novelty of alliteration alone, when “aural” might in fact be a more fitting term, or precisely for its instrumental function as a carrier of language—or, as Lunsford calls it, a mode of “perform[ing] knowledge” (176)—with no sense of sound’s value beyond this purpose.
58 See Cynthia L. Selfe’s “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal
Composing” and Cheryl Ball and Byron Hawk’s 2006 Special Issue of Computers and Composition, “Sound in/as Compositional Space: A Next Step In Multiliteracies” for two prominent examples.
What is at stake here, I believe, is our understanding of “delivery” itself. At the root of Lunsford’s argument is a celebration of “the return of orality, performance, and delivery to the classroom” (170)—a notion that explicitly conjures the classical rhetorical context of live, embodied speech. However, as Lunsford attempts to map this context onto the realities of the present digital landscape, her express interest in embodiment shifts—subtly but significantly— from a productive framework of vocal and gestural performance to a receptive framework of the “visual and aural components” of textual design (170). This transformation of delivery—from embodied performance to multimodal design—is, according to Ben McCorkle, the central feature of the contemporary move to recover delivery for digital rhetoric. As McCorkle explains, amidst the “explosion” of digital writing technologies, “delivery no longer means simply the physical and vocal characteristics of embodied speaking but also the formal, aesthetic, and logical elements of a given medium of communication” (32).59 In this context, viewed from the perspective of reception, the “vocal” might in fact fit neatly into the category of the “aural,” on one hand, as a sound-among-sounds, which is taken up by the audience through the ear, or the “verbal,” on the other, as a sound whose primary function it is to transmit semantic meaning.
We see this same struggle—to reconcile the history of live delivery with its technological futures—in another of the key texts that positions voice as a mode: Heidi McKee’s “Sound Matters: Notes Toward the Analysis and Design of Sound in Multimodal Webtexts.” As the title indicates, this article is essentially interested in the question of design—the production and analysis of digital compositions. In this context, as it does for Lunsford, voice becomes one of a
59In his recent book, Rhetoric Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study, Ben
McCorkle situates his project as an extension of this recovery effort, which reimagines delivery as media or design. By setting out to demonstrate the fact that “this interaction between delivery and various technologies of communication occurs throughout the disciplinary history of rhetoric” (36), McCorkle fails to address the erasure of the body’s role in performing digital delivery in this context—a project that I believe is crucial to understanding digital voice as a compositional material.
series of discrete “elements” in the design of a multimodal text, which McKee frames as “vocal delivery” (337). The explicit use of the term “delivery” here is clearly evocative of the familiar notion of a singular, embodied, live speaker drawn from the tradition of classical oratory. And, indeed, McKee argues that “[a]s with any spoken performance, the qualities of vocal delivery in a web composition create tone and convey mood” (341). We hear in this statement an effort to both collapse the distance between spoken performance and web-based composition as two sides of the same coin, and to mobilize the familiar terms of metaphorical ‘voice’ in its attachment to contemporary writerly notions of “tone” and “mood.” By drawing on these idealized histories of voice—which privilege an authorial speaking (or writing) subject and their aural effects— McKee successfully asserts the value of voice on its own terms, but, in doing so, also glosses over all that separates the digitally mediated voice from both the live speaking body and its metaphorical counterpart.
In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that, in her discussion of multimodal voice, McKee draws most directly on the eighteenth century elocutionists—a movement that practiced and preached methods for the artful, embodied performance of printed texts. On one hand, the elocutionary tradition no doubt provides a valuable inroad into considering “the nonverbal aspects of vocal delivery,” demonstrating the fact that “meaning is carried not solely by the verbal content but, as oral performers and oral readers continually show, also by the vocal qualities” (340). At the same time, the strange marriage of body and text that characterizes the elocutionary performance is one that imagines the body first and foremost as a vehicle for transmitting a pre-given textual composition, not a material for compositional invention itself. As Ben McCorkle has suggested, elocution was not only a reaction against print technology— which was supposedly “incapable of dealing with the canon of delivery, at least as it was
classically defined” (92)—but also an active agent in the promulgation of print culture and print- based values, which it then “reinscribe[d] […] back upon oral processes of oral delivery” (108). Thus, voice here is necessarily confined to the role of a “representational mode” (McKee 337), valuable for what lies behind it, for the meanings it delivers—but meanings which ultimately inhere in the text itself.
Perhaps for obvious reasons, then, McKee’s approach to “vocal delivery” tends to assume what we might call an eloquent model of “clarity and seamlessness,” in which “the digital reproduction of the person speaking needs to be understood” (343). The idea that it is actually “the person speaking”—as opposed to the sound of a person’s voice—which is being reproduced in the process of digital audio recording is telling, and, I believe, is an inevitable consequence of any approach to voice that subscribes to either the classical ideal of the singularly embodied orator performing herself to a live audience or the metaphorical ideal of the singularly subjective writer revealing herself to a reader on the page. Whether understood as rhetorically constructed “ethos” or metaphysically intrinsic “presence,” the voice here becomes inextricably anchored to the values of both linguistic transmission and ethical personhood in ways that limit its potential to act and affect beyond print-based or oratorical conventions. While McKee does briefly, and productively, make a nod to the importance of “postmodern, disruptive approaches” (343) to voice—those made possible precisely through the interactive web-based interface—the model of “vocal delivery” on which she draws ultimately seems unable to account for the complexities of this disruptive potential.
Of course, one of the key complexities of mediated voice—and perhaps that which distances it most profoundly from the embodied performance of oratorical delivery—is its potential to sound beyond the time and space of its original utterance by a living, breathing,
speaking body. As Brenda Jo Brueggeman argues, the field of rhetoric has always approached the voice within a framework of intentionality, taking it as self-evident that “those who hoped to control the will of an audience had first to control their own voice and body” (19 emphasis added). Indeed, Demosthenes—as the poster boy for rhetorical delivery in the ancient world— was celebrated precisely for his ability to assert control over his incorrigible voice, which, in the act of stuttering, operated beyond his conscious intention and in excess of the semantic meaning he sought to deliver. In taking up the question of broken voices, disruptive utterances, and disobedient bodies, which operate beyond the control and intentionality of disabled orators, Brueggeman suggests that there might in fact be a certain power intrinsic to such a “voice that transgresses the boundaries of rhetorical propriety” (21)—or, as she puts it bluntly, “a voice we are drawn to but don’t much want to hear” (24). In a sense, then, what Brueggeman is proposing is that voice might have value not only for its ability to give “mood” or “tone” to the semantic meaning it seeks to “deliver,” but also precisely in its inability to transmit the sense and meaning that we have come to expect. In this context, at least some aspect of voice’s capacity for “nonverbal” performance emerges here as independent from both language and selfhood, suggesting alternative possibilities for voice to act and affect.
If it is true that “the Western rhetorical tradition that has insisted on interpreting selfhood in terms of speaking ability” (25), then the question arises: What happens when voice escapes or exceeds the conscious intention of the speaking subject? In Brueggeman’s case, this excess is a factor of human embodiment itself—namely, the potential of the disabled body to act beyond the mind’s control. However, I wonder if we might not also fruitfully apply this question to the context of vocal mediation. In her discussion of sign-language interpretation, Brueggeman effectively shifts her attention from the singular speaking body to a fundamentally mediated
form of communication, one that complicates the neat distribution of speaker-audience-topic in the classical rhetorical triangle (26). Here, the interpreter serves as “informational conduit,” on one hand, and “interactive participant,” on the other—“both one who affects the discourse as a full participant, and one who delivers it, impartially, like the U.S. Mail” (26). In response to this provocation, Brueggeman raises the question of “rhetorical complicity,” asking: “[W]ho is really ‘the speaker’ here?” (27). By shifting the question of embodiment from a framework of reception to a framework of production in this manner, Brueggeman is working to challenge the agency of the speaking subject. Thus, it is in this final approach to vocal delivery—ironically, the least “technological” and the most distant from traditional compositional practice—where we begin to approach the complexity of voice as a mediated material.