Abstract
Deborah Eicher-Catt has written a richly textured book, highlighting the loss of human voice in its embodied materiality as a result of our absorption into the screens, and the costs of ignoring the felt-presence of others— costs that are too high that we cannot afford to ignore: Increased levels of anxiety and depression especially among young adults in America, fragmented relationships, a sense of overall disenchantment with the world, and the loss of the heart of our relationality as human beings. Recovering the Voice in Our Techno-Social World: On the Phone has received two national awards in the USA: The 2021 Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship by the Media Ecology Association, and the 2021 Outstanding Book Award from the Philosophy of Communication Division of the National Communication Association.
David Whyte's poem, Start Close In, resonates with Eicher-Catt's brilliant book. Whyte (2012) writes:
Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
In her book, Eicher-Catt takes the first step that the poet highlights above—the one that most resist or forget— and skillfully sustains it through her in-depth exploration of the disheartened and disenchanted culture of distraction, weaving her analysis through the various levels of sign relations that Charles Sanders Peirce envisioned. Eicher-Catt reminds us that voice is immediate, embodied sound; it is an aesthetic experience of relational experience. The voice is an ‘existential calling that should not be dismissed’ (p. 12). We are called to give ear, yet it has become too easy to take that second step, and the third, as the poet warns us above. As Eicher-Catt explains, ‘being in the immediate auditory presence of others is a salient moment unlike others, an intense aesthetic experience. It is a moment in which our humanity is called into being by the other's voice in potentially unique and significant ways’ (p. 17).
The voice of the other, in its immediacy and intensity, opens up the possibility of self-expansion, empathy, and generosity. We discover who we are as human beings through the embodied, resonant voice of the other that carries the potential to wake us up to our humanity. The aesthetic qualities felt in the immediacy of listening and speaking with another including affect, tonality, and resonance are weakened or muted in digitalized experience, leading to an eclipse of the mysterious and ineffable qualities of life, and a sense of diminished self that is unable to get in touch with a deeper sense of humanity. In each chapter of her book, Eicher-Catt offers a rich discussion and analysis with a call towards a re-enchantment of human communication that is still possible in this moment of techno-culture. “Phone” refers to the sounding voice in Greek, and in her book Eicher-Catt uses the term as it refers to various text- and image-based media including smartphones, computers, e-readers, and notebooks. She states that while we are always on our phones, the sounding voice (phone) in its embodied, immediate, ear-to-ear form is being diminished in human communication.
In Chapter 1, Eicher-Catt draws upon the works of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, Lance Strate, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in discussing the implications of the new mediated environments and online habits of discourse on our quality of being and habits of relating as well as our existential positioning in the world. From a communicological perspective, Eicher-Catt explains, our awareness of the world and the meanings we derive from it are largely shaped by the cultural signs and code systems that we are part of. Cyberspace and the Internet, as powerful forms of electronic connectivity, shape our sensory experience through the dominance of video-centric and logo-centric forms of communication. The visual aspects of experience dominate the auditory in the digital landscape. Eicher-Catt further explains that sound and sounding voice are abstracted from the immediacy of their environment in the process of digitalization, which we have grown accustomed to. The diminishing of the sounding voice in our embodied, relational existence has a significant impact on our ways of being in the world and interpersonal relations.
Chapter 2 advances the discussion from the first chapter, underlining the cultural losses we suffer in a digital age of distraction and 24/7 electronic connectivity. In connection with the work of Maggie Jackson (2008), Eicher-Catt lists the various aspects of human relationality that we are sacrificing: mutual trust, the ability to think deeply, and a certain spirit of humanity characterized by a willingness and resourcefulness to connect with one another. Eicher-Catt warns that as we become more enchanted with digital devices and the virtual world of robotic interaction, our sensible world flattens, and we surf through our lives, not just on the Internet. The techno-social dilemma we are experiencing, as Eicher-Catt argues and demonstrates, is the lack of discernment regarding the deep, empathic, aesthetic levels of communicative engagement that serve and sustain our well-being, and the attractive yet flat electronic enhancements disguised as communication. Eicher-Catt calls us to be vigilant as our brains adapt to these new modes of electronic connectivity, and we get programmed into feeding on the never-ending stimulation, updates, and attractions, offered by technology companies.
Chapter 3 constructs the framework for a re-enchantment of human communication that offers a countermove to the techno-social dilemma that was introduced in the earlier chapters. Eicher-Catt offers a richly textured communicological analysis of enchantment as an embodied system of signs. Engaging Peirce's triadic relation of sign conditions (firstness, secondness, thirdness), Eicher-Catt examines enchantment as experienced at different levels of sign relations: As bodily sensory awareness (firstness) that powerfully connects human beings to each other and to the world; as perceptions and interpretations where distinctions and differences emerge (secondness); and at the level of linguistic cultural codes where the meaning of a sign is derived (thirdness). The discussion on the distinction between authentic and inauthentic enchantments is a crucial aspect of this chapter where Eicher-Catt shows that the authenticity of enchantments diminishes and weakens as we move from firstness to thirdness. Electronic forms of media produce inauthentic enchantments, Eicher-Catt argues, where the digitalized aesthetic based on strategic marketability offers a highly abstract, stimulating, and redundant experience of consuming information. Being immersed in enchantments that are inauthentic as a habitual way of being-in-the-world eventually leads to emotional emptiness, loss of interest and curiosity regarding the mystery of the other, and the joy of experiencing immediacy of experience. Drawing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eicher-Catt states that we lose connection to positive ‘existential ambiguity’ (p. 74).
Chapter 4 focuses on the disembodied, disenchanted voices that sound through cyberspace, the acousmatic voice. Eicher-Catt discusses that the immediacy and particularity of the voice mediated in cyberspace is diminished, and its temporal effect is weakened. The detachment of the voice from the immediacy of the body in the process of digitalization might initially be perceived as appealing due to its mysterious quality, however, Eicher-Catt contends that it leads to a loss of the empathic, charismatic, personal elements of the ear-to-ear voices and interactions. Habituating electronic connectivity and the voices that are disembodied from their speaker, we miss the nourishing qualities of feeling and relating that facilitate a sense of well-being. Eicher-Catt connects the rising statistics of adults and young adults experiencing serious depression and anxiety especially in the past ten years to the existential hollowness and dissonance that arise due to diminished healthy human relationality dominated by disembodied acousmatic voices and discourses in this historical moment.
Chapter 5 expands the discussion from the prior chapter, problematizing where and how we arrived in our cultural evolution regarding the willingness to dismiss the voice of immediacy to the point of de-voicing society through the shallow enchantments of the acousmatic voice and electronic habits of human relationality. Through a rich discussion connecting to multiple scholars including the works of Constance Classen, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Adriana Cavarero, Jacques Derrida, Mladen Dollar, and Michel Foucault, Eicher-Catt shows that silencing the sonorous voice in speaking and listening leads to the ‘murder of the phone’ (p. 138), that is, the aesthetic voice in excess of signification. As a result, we are left with, or stuck in, the ‘voice of articulation’ (p. 141) which is ‘a mediator of meaning through the symbolic’ (p. 141). The voice of articulation strives for competence through linguistic performance, and it is constrained by the symbolic parameters of discourse. The voice of articulation ignores the voice that exists outside of symbolic meaning in favor of intelligibility, including a sense of wonder, mystery, and positive ambiguity. Listening to the voice of articulation only leads to a diminished appreciation of the sensory richness of the auditory, and ‘results in not fully sensing the other’ (p. 145). Though a necessary function in shared human experience, the voice of articulation by itself is inadequate in offering a full understanding of voice, in attuning to the mystery and ambiguity of the not-yet articulated, and the enchantment of our auditory experience.
Eicher-Catt offers an alternative conceptualization of the voice in Chapter 6 through a counterbalance to the voice of articulation: The voice of enunciation. This is the voice understood as a bodily event including its rich, sonorous qualities that resist the domination of the symbolic functions of discourse. The voice of enunciation ‘nourishes a deeper level of relationality than what is offered by the voice of articulation’ (p. 156). Drawing from the work of Jacques Lacan, Mladen Dolar, Adriana Cavarero, and Walter J. Ong, Eicher-Catt frames an understanding of the voice of enunciation which involves a visceral response to the world and engages the semiotic relation of firstness and secondness in Peirce's triadic framework. Drawing from the works of Charles Sanders Peirce and Walter J. Ong, Eicher-Catt underlines the ‘binding quality of sound’ (p. 163) and the sounding voice of enunciation, that has an effect of gathering, unifying, and bringing together rather than distracting and fragmenting. The enunciative voice serves to create an aesthetic sensibility toward self and others, and strengthen communicative bonds. A final, and sparkling quality Eicher-Catt describes regarding the voice of enunciation is its spontaneous, unpredictable, and untamed character that resonates with nature and a sense of the wild, offering a sense of surprise, wonder, and enchantment, beyond the taken-for-granted order of things in everyday experience. This ‘voice of excess’ (p. 183) expands the limits of signification and momentarily resounds outside its bounds, ‘re-invigorates our communicative relations’ (p. 183) and allows us to ‘discover our semiotic potentiality as phenomenological beings’ (p. 183).
Chapter 7 deepens the inquiry on the qualities and functions of the voice of enunciation by highlighting its role as ‘an existential pivot point within human experience’ (p. 188). Foregrounding the sonic elements in the voice of enunciation that connects one to the presence of a breathing-body-speaking, our traditional understanding of interpersonal communication that underlines the voice of articulation shifts to what Eicher-Catt refers as interper-sónal communication that acknowledges the aesthetic experience in immediate ear-to-ear relations. In connection with Mladen Dolar's work on the sonorous voice that binds language and the body, and its disruptive effects on taken-for-granted habits of discourse and actions, Eicher-Catt shows how the voice of enunciation can be seen as a political voice that provides an opening for differing voices to be expressed and responded to. Engaging Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1964) concept of ‘positive ambiguity’ (p. 5) that theorizes the possibility of a space for existential tension and discontinuity even temporarily, Eicher-Catt offers an understanding of the voice of enunciation as an enchanting voice that enlivens our imagination and activates authentic relational existence. The discussion of the ethical implications of the aesthetic-affective voice of enunciation in connection to semio-ethics stand out for scholarship in semiotic phenomenology, communicology, and communication studies that can be significantly enriched by this contribution.
The final chapter offers a poetically inspiring discussion of interper-sónal resonance at the heart of human relationality that enables the recovery of ‘a sense of our musicality as vibrant communicative creatures’ (Eicher-Catt, 2020: 222) in a saturated media environment. Eicher-Catt's use of terms in this chapter such as sonic vitality, vibrance, per-són, and vibrant communicative creatures facilitate a sense of liveliness and energy as part of her discussion of the praxis of communication beyond mere representational practices that the voice of enunciation facilitates. Resonance as an ‘embodied interper-sónal phenomenon, that is, an in-tense phenomenological experience between two interlocutors’ (p. 227) that emphasizes interconnected auditory qualities. Connecting with Jean-Luc Nancy's work on listening that highlights auditory tension, attention, and intention, Eicher-Catt states the importance of the felt sense of in-tense-ity in between the auditory interlocutors that places them as a relational pair. Throughout the chapter, musical metaphors of vibration, echo, tone, rhythm, timbre, pulsation serve to frame an understanding of an aesthetic of listening and speaking that underlines the existential musicality in heart-felt human communication. Attuning to this musicality of genuine interper-sónal relations facilitate the resiliency we need in the fast-paced, media-saturated environments that shape our sensory experience.
Eicher-Catt's book is an excellent contribution to studies in communication, communicology, semiotic phenomenology, media ecology, sociology, and a brilliant academic resource for students and scholars. Readers will not only be immersed in a deep intellectual journey, but also an enchanting one.