Preface: Vocal Turns

• Published in: American imago Vol. 79; no. 3; pp. 369 - 377
• Main Author: Kenaan, Vered Lev
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.10.2022
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; English literature; Forster, E M (1879-1970); Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939); Music; Ontology; Plato (427-347 BC); Prostheses; Smartphones; Social networks; Text messaging; Verbal communication
• ISSN: 0065-860X; 1085-7931; 1085-7931
• DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0019

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). 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. While the chained inhabitants of Plato's cave know nothing of the existence of the world outside, Forster's subterranean inhabitants belong to a society that gave up life on Earth a long time ago. Cavarero presents the human voice in contrast to "the various ontologies of fictitious entities that the philosophical tradition, over the course of its historical development, designates with names like 'man,' 'subject,' 'individual'" (p. 173).