Preface:Vocal Turns Vered Lev Kenaan (bio) What kind of voices do we find and hear today? What modes of listening do we cherish and wish to foster for the future? In Civilization and its Discontents, in which Freud discusses the benefits of technological progress in overcoming human limitations, he also keeps us alert to its dangers. In his reflections on various modern inventions, including the gramophone and the telephone, Freud expressed his concerns about the future of humanity. These technological instruments indeed help us retain fleeting auditory echoes, and "to hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale" (Freud, 2001, p. 91). And yet these fantastic technologies, Freud concludes, fail to generate a happy human being. Freud's pessimism produced an image of the new human being, a mirror image to Nietzsche's Übermensch. For Freud, the modern human being has "become a kind of prosthetic God" (Freud, 2001, pp. 91–92). Both models of the new human have great power, and both are tied to the death of God, but how different they are! Whereas Nietzsche's Übermensch is an embodiment of exuberant vigor and life-affirmation, Freud's "prosthetic God" is a defective and vulnerable human being, suffering from chronic dissatisfaction. Freud's cultural analysis of the rapidly changing present, written in 1930, still speaks to us, even though his portrayal of the modern artificial-limbed divine being is, for the young generation of the 21st century, a kind of prehistoric human whose technological naivety itself seems to belong to a fairy tale. Yet in analyzing the human condition of his own time, Freud captures an essential dimension of the technological–human experience of our era: "When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times" (Freud, 2001, p. 92). Much of our vocal experience is completely dependent on auxiliary digital organs. Various communication gadgets [End Page 369] make our links to others—by voice, vision, and text—rapid. We can split our attention and be in different conversations simultaneously, while everyday communication is reducible to a chain of icons (emojis) or so-called "audio memes," which obfuscate emotional complexities and create new forms of misunderstandings. A man is walking alone in the street; he wears earbuds. From a distance it is evident that something infuriates him. Occasionally he shouts, then falls silent for a few seconds, then again. Or this young couple, dressed elegantly for a date in a nice restaurant. Each holds a smartphone, head bent downward, eyes fixed on the screen. They are texting (talking?) to someone else. Each is engaged in a conversation that separates them from the other. In the psychoanalytic consulting room, a woman is crying. She tries to explain to her therapist how offended she is. From a handbag's cellular pocket she produces an iPhone to share with the therapist a recorded voice message received from a friend just before the session began. The small "i" of the Apple smartphone seems to overshadow the pronoun "I," a takeover reminding us that we oscillate between being "truly magnificent" prosthetic gods and human machines. Increasingly, automatic sounds and voices guide and talk to us, manage our routine, direct our driving, answer our inquiries at the bank or in digitized health services. Talking and texting are often today taken to be one and the same thing. When I ask: "Did you talk to her?" you confirmed. But I'm not sure whether you had a face-to-face conversation or a written exchange via SMS. How do these contemporary technologies enhance or undermine trust and intimacy? How do these voices mediated by our digital prostheses affect our talking and listening capacities? Surprisingly, these questions had already surfaced in the dystopian world of E.M. Forster's 1909 short story The Machine Stops, which confronts technological developments at the turn of the 20th century. Forster's scientific fantasy not only predicted the era of social media, but also stages an uncanny prefiguration of the recent lockdowns and quarantines of the COVID-19 period. The story begins with...
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Dec 19, 2022
A.V Dayneko + 1
Open Access