Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

publications beginning with The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). But whereas Innis focused on media in relation to the political and economic spheres, McLuhan, probably owing to his own interests and training, tended to focus on the effect of media on the social, cultural, and literary spheres. As a consequence of his intervention, McLuhan, together with his former student Walter Ong, would be given credit for articulating the theory that has come to be known as the Toronto School of Communication Theory, despite McLuhan's claim that he wrote Gutenberg as a “footnote of explanation” to Innis's pioneering work.¹⁷ Nor should Innis, Havelock, McLuhan, and Ong be regarded as mining new territory altogether or even working in isolation; rather, they pursued a line of inquiry into the cognitive and cultural influences of linguistic structures that was also of interest to the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf—whose work both Innis and McLuhan cited—as well as Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Claude Lévi-Strauss in Europe. These thinkers, though to degrees influenced by positivism, resisted the positivist assessment that historical events and cultural manifestations erupt free of causal factors. Instead, within their own disciplinary confines, they explored the extent to which linguistic, cultural, political, and economic forces might influence human behavior, expression, and organization.

From the perspective of the Toronto School, modes of communication such as speech, writing, printing, radio, film, television, and computer do more than simply relay information; they alter, influence, and to some degree determine forms of thought and cultural expression. Accordingly, were we to adequately appreciate any human artifact, such as a theatre performance or a theory of voice, we would have to recognize the modes of communication that inform it. I agree with critics Nellhaus and Sibylle Moser that the Toronto School seems to claim a privileged “technologically deterministic” role for media, and I also agree that other causal factors shape the degree to which any one medium may induce cognitive change.¹⁸ Nonetheless, I consider the Toronto School's communication theory a noteworthy theory of voice that surfaced in the twentieth century because it views communication technologies as refashioning the