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

cognitive byproduct of the causal effects of print. The integration of electronic media into the late nineteenth-century communication frameworks of Europe and the United States reintroduced the voice and what contemporary phenomenologist Don Ihde calls an “auditory dimension” to thought and language, which he considers missing from analytic philosophy and logical positivism.²⁴ Thinkers intuited the changes, and the schools of phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy, and speech act theory attempted to incorporate the sounds of the voice and embodied, auditory experience into synesthetically oriented epistemological systems (the OED dates the first use of the word synesthesia to 1891). Other disciplines, specifically the purportedly empirical disciplines of linguistics and anthropology, struggled with tensions generated by the different strategies of reasoning that the modes of communication advanced, and they continued to privilege the eye in their address of language. But even within these disciplines, the cognitive fissures caused by the voice found expression and compromised the visualist endeavor, as exemplified by the Prague linguists and their view of stage speech as autonomous from both text and language. They essentially anticipated Cavarero with their assessment of the communicative nature of the human voice as independent from a strictly linguistic realm.

The theories of voice generated in the philosophies and human sciences found their performative equivalents in experimental theatre practices of the twentieth century. These practices transpired in the shadows of the theatrical mainstream and, sometimes, in opposition to it; therefore, they resist critique not only according to the influences of dominant modes of communication but to competing modes as well. I agree with Nellhaus that the dominant realist genres of mainstream theatre in the twentieth century owe debts to cognitive structures conditioned by print and established in the nineteenth century.²⁵ I deliberately neglect the theories of voice that support realism, given that their theoretical bases predate my time frame.²⁶ Instead, in the following chapters, I posit that the vocal practices of twentieth-century experimental theatre sprang from the cognitive contest between electronics and print and