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

voice in some manner. And given its continuing utility for understanding all cultural artifacts despite the revision it inevitably must undergo, I engage it in order to help explain the competing views of the human voice in twentieth-century thought and performance. Therefore, I premise this book upon the observation that the rise of electronic forms of communication within the unique material and social environments of Western Europe and the United States in the twentieth century created the cognitive conditions within which thinkers and performers began to conceive of and use the voice in novel ways.

Theatre History and Mediation

Nellhaus and Bruce McConachie are two theatre scholars who have applied to theatre history revised versions of communication theory reminiscent of the Toronto School. Rather than interpreting specific modes of communication as singularly determinant of cultural manifestations, both recognize that modes of communication exert degrees of causal pressure in relation to other causal factors in the social realm, such as economics and gender. Nellhaus writes, “Modes of communication derive their significance neither solely from their technical natures nor strictly from their social relations, but from the historically conditioned conjunction of the two,” and “to a crucial extent, the social conditions and methods of a technology's use shape the powers that it actually exerts, to what extent, and in what manner.”¹⁹ In their analyses of theatre history, McConachie and Nellhaus tend not to overemphasize one particular communication technology at the expense of others, noting that many technologies coexist within different cultures to varying degrees of influence, if any. Most people in a literate society spend a good deal of time talking, for example, and therefore live to some degree in an oral environment. But because much of their education and information exchange transpires textually, their dominant cognitive dynamics reflect the conditioning of print. Nellhaus, therefore, speaks of “communication frameworks” to express the multimodal nature of communications within a social group, and he admits the difficulty of observing the causal effects of any one medium.²⁰