Voice In Theory Research Articles

Living the Theory: The Complexity of Being Both a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist and a Mother

Psychodynamic psychotherapists through their vocational training, and especially through developmental and psychoanalytic theories, are exposed to intense discursive and theoretical models of ideal motherhood and child development that they use to inform their therapeutic practice. In this article, nine psychodynamic psychotherapist-mothers are interviewed to examine how the identities of psychotherapist and mother shape, enrich, and conflict with one another. The results of these interviews suggest that the identity shifts involved in becoming a mother are continuous and that—alongside the negotiation of the relational demands of an infant—, psychotherapist-mothers experience transitions in their relationships to theory. The voice of theory was found to act as both an analytic and/or anti-analytic third. The experience appears to be one of the constantly evolving re-integration. Overall, the challenge for psychotherapist-mothers is to reflect on their relationships to theory, in order to acknowledge and explore those aspects that feel punitive and those that feel helpful.

Conversion Tables

Derrida invites us to the table: to read on and with it—but also, perhaps, to join him in turning wildly upon its worn-down surface, like some untameable animal. In this essay, which conjures forth two (or more) tables of reading from The Beast and the Sovereign: Volume I and Spectres of Marx, we will see how a piece of furniture leaps up on its four feet and dances, turns into a kind of heraldic dog: a subjectile summons an elephant's spectre, or a lump of living-dead flesh: tables spin by themselves, they telephone each other and tell stories that have little or no relation to the human animal or to anthropocentric thinking. Derrida lets them turn and speak, not in the name or voice of theory, philosophy or rhetoric, but rather in some new, inapparent and as-yet unheard of scene of conversion.

Audio-Visual: Disembodied Voices in Theory

After a survey of the major critical trends since the generalization of synchronized film sound, this bibliographical essay sets out to delineate the way film sound studies have developed around issues of taxonomy, meaning, and reception. Focusing on the treatment of the disembodied voice by various theorists, three trends can be identified: borrowing from semiology and narratology, an essentially descriptive approach first emerges that creates a new vocabulary to talk about sound and analyze the links between sound and image. A second approach emphasizes the possible meanings of the disembodied voice, a trend heavily influenced by Lacanian theories and their later adaptations by feminist film theorists. Finally, some researchers have opted for semio-pragmatic or cognitive approaches that take into account the experience of audiences. These different approaches underline the way film sound has evolved as an object of study, to be considered as a complex and flexible phenomenon. They also have developed tools that can be applied to other audiovisual media in which the role of sound and the voice should not be underestimated.

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (review)

Reviewed by: Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global Christian Moraru Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 250 pp. Although risky business, prophecies are nonetheless tempting. So here is one: looking back on the past two decades, the literary-cultural historians of the future—a future not too remote from us, I would think—will in all likelihood see those years as a sort of epistemological intermezzo, a moment of transition from one paradigm to another across the humanities, inside and outside the U.S. It seems to me that a gradual shift has been underway in the human sciences over the last twenty-five years. Concomitant and analogous to recent reorientations in literature, the arts, and geopolitical arrangements, this shift has touched off the progressive albeit uneven legitimizing and academic-intellectual institutionalization of something that might be viewed as a new episteme, a new way of looking at the surrounding world and of producing knowledge about this world. A good number of influential voices in theory, criticism, and cultural studies, in comparative analysis (especially in “new comparatism”), in philosophy (chiefly in ethics), in psychoanalysis (primarily among the “Champ lacanien” group members), in political science, economics, sociology (principally in risk sociology), and in geography have been in the avant-garde of this sea change, having variously anticipated it from the beginning of their careers (Jean-Luc Nancy, Sylviane Agacinski, Guy Scarpetta, Paul Gilroy, Marc C. Taylor, David Hollinger). Others joined this transformative trend a bit later (Jacques Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov, Jürgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva) as they turned to cosmopolitan, “postnational,” global, planetary, and “other” (“alterity”-focused) questions years prior to the historical watershed of this transitional interval, the official end of the Cold War. Similarly, many scholars have been associated with older directions such as postmodernism (Jean Baudrillard), postcolonialism (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, K. Anthony Appiah), poststructuralism, and deconstruction (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, J. Hillis Miller). Still others took the lead right before and after 1989 in fields such as comparative and translation scholarship (Henry Sussman, [End Page 179] Timothy J. Reiss, Eugene Eoyang, Rey Chow, Yunte Huang, Zhang Longxi, Emily Apter, Lawrence Venuti, Michael Cronin); cosmopolitanism, world governance, sovereignty, and human rights (Bruce Robbins, Pheng Cheah, Danilo Zolo, Derek Heater, Seyla Benhabib, Will Kymlicka, Daniele Archibugi, José María Rosales, María José Fariñas Dulce, Timothy Brennan, Amanda Anderson, Kok-Chor Tan, Volker Heins, Camilla Fojas, and many more); “cosmocultural,” “geocritical,” “ecocritical,” and “planetary” analysis (Franco Moretti, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gérard Raulet, Bertrand Westphal, Wai Chee Dimock, Lawrence Buell); global, world-system, “network society,” and “empire” studies of various persuasions and foci (Manuel Castells, Arjun Appadurai, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Steven Shaviro, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Amy Kaplan, Roland Robertson, Martin Albrow, David Held, Frederick Buell). Further, some of these are, I suspect, relatively comfortable with the disciplinary tags usually attached to their interventions: Ulrich Beck and Jacques Demorgon (sociology), Peter Singer and Appiah again (ethics). Others, such as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Georgio Agamben, await, perhaps in vain, classifications less nebulous than “philosophy.” Additionally, critics like Charles Taylor, Hollinger, Werner Sollors, Benedict Anderson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Charles Johnson, Stuart Hall, Aiwa Ong, John Carlos Rowe, James Clifford, and Giles Gunn, who broke new ground in race, ethnicity, citizenship, community, ethnography, and multicultural studies ten or twenty years ago, in hindsight appear even more forward-looking. Finally, issues such as those intensely addressed by virtually all of the above have rekindled interest in a number of classics, ancient and modern, in philosophy (Stoicism, Spinoza, Husserl, Buber, Levinas), hermeneutics (Gadamer and Ricoeur), psychoanalysis (Lacan), sociology (Tönnies and Simmel), the history of ideas and ideologies (Benda and, more recently, George Steiner, Stephen Toulmin, and Peter Coulmas), anthropology (Clifford Geertz), literary-cultural and discourse studies (Bakhtin), justice theory (Rawls and his “law of people”), history and political economy (Immanuel Wallerstein and, via his work, Braudel and the Annales). Such wide-ranging scholarship revolves systematically and characteristically around the concept of connectedness, of being in, and thus being...

White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory

orn in Flames, a feminist science fiction film set ten years after a Social-Democratic revolution in the U.S., provides an abrupt reminder of the place of theory in the context of social change. Toward the end of the film, with the women's takeover of New York communications channels in progress, the voice of theory is heard over the image, insisting that women also need to take over the production of language. Although the film gives credence to the voice of theory (a white female British-accented voice), it is clear that the militant Women's Emergency Brigade and the martyred Black lesbian leader are carrying the revolutionary moment. What strikes me about the juxtaposition images of women hot-wiring U-Haul trucks and the voice of theory urging women to take control of their own images is that the voice sounds so crisply detached and arid.' What I want to discuss is not so much the scene as the tenor of the

White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory

orn in Flames, a feminist science fiction film set ten years after a Social-Democratic revolution in the U.S., provides an abrupt reminder of the place of theory in the context of social change. Toward the end of the film, with the women's takeover of New York communications channels in progress, the voice of theory is heard over the image, insisting that women also need to take over the production of language. Although the film gives credence to the voice of theory (a white female British-accented voice), it is clear that the militant Women's Emergency Brigade and the martyred Black lesbian leader are carrying the revolutionary moment. What strikes me about the juxtaposition images of women hot-wiring U-Haul trucks and the voice of theory urging women to take control of their own images is that the voice sounds so crisply detached and arid.' What I want to discuss is not so much the scene as the tenor of the