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

to claim the superiority of the voice, but in the Republic, he advocates the eradication of the oral tradition altogether.⁶ In the two millennia that followed Plato, and especially after the introduction of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the text and the preference for the eye rose in prominence at the expense of the voice. Innis, Havelock, and others, who contributed to what came to be known as the Toronto School of Communication Theory (and to which I will return in a few pages), interpreted the media of writing and print as causal factors that served to shape the Western philosophic tradition, from Plato down to the twentieth century. Cavarero, conversely, positions the persistent presence of the voice as a recurring and sometimes formidable challenge to the visualist prejudice.

The voice resurfaced in the twentieth century, but the ancients continued to influence how we heard it. Two passages from Aristotle and Plato express notions of language, speech, and writing that still condition assumptions maintained today. They are worth revisiting given that they find frequent mention in the critical literature and likewise bear on the discussions of the following chapters. Aristotle prefaces his critique of language in De interpretatione with what appear to him as safely incontrovertible remarks:

Aristotle assumes, first, that all peoples around the world conceive the world in the same way, even though their languages, being conventional, may employ different spoken terms and types of written script. Although twentieth-century linguistics and neuroscience refuted this belief, the statement expresses a long-standing view of language in which spoken words reference concepts and things that we grasp initially in the mind in a nonverbal state. Despite the differences that exist between