Jefe del Área de Obras y Liquidaciones 1. Naturaleza:

This chapter investigates theories of voice currently offered by the discipline of

paleoanthropology--the study of human origins, embracing anthropology, archeology, biology, linguistics, neurology, paleontology, and sociology¹--in order to evaluate how scientific

approaches shed light on the subject of vocalized language and its position in human cognition, communication, and culture. Such a task confronts several timely concerns. First, despite the twentieth-century philosophies contesting the material view of language expressed in nineteenth century positivism, the natural sciences have continued to theorize upon the concrete

implications that might be drawn from the empirical studies of our linguistic origins. To open the conversation on language within the humanities to theorizing in the sciences therefore risks putting under interrogation the premises of contemporary linguistic philosophies, including those that place the voice and language under suspicion. Second, countering empiricism altogether, poststructuralism no longer holds tenable the scientific evaluation of such a touchstone issue as origins, since its pursuit, the theory argues, unwittingly conspires to privilege one relative position to the detriment of other interests. Therefore a consideration of paleoanthropological theories of voice and language also contends with the political mandate of poststructural theory.

In terms of performance, how the subject of the origins of voice and language may be conceived directly applies to long-held interpretations of the mythical, religious, communal, and critical roles of drama in both early and contemporary societies. The subject touches on issues

1 Of these disciplines, only two are solely concerned with the human fossil record: paleontology with fossilized human skeletons, and archeology with fossilized tools and artwork. The other disciplines are involved on a comparative basis, between present biological, cultural, linguistic, neurological, and social structures and those indicated or inferred by the fossil record.

that continue to be raised at the end of the twentieth century as essentialist notions of language and culture come under scrutiny. How might the paleoanthropological sciences contribute to a more informed discussion in theatre studies concerning the origins of performance and its role in individual expression and communal organization? In light of contemporary theoretical

problems, if the voice and the speaking subject have indeed come under critique, how might the view from evolutionary theory restore a sense of its agency, presence, and value? At stake in a consideration of the issues surrounding origins for theatre critics and practitioners are the very ontic principles that allow performance to take place in the first place.

In his concern with theatre and “ethology,” which he defines as “the application of evolutionary theory to behavior and culture” (PT 248), Richard Schechner may be the only critic who has broached paleoanthropology as a source of insight for theatre studies. Schechner does not specifically comment upon voice and language origins, since his interest in evolutionary theory focuses on the apparent performative continuum that seems to exist between the observations of primatologists and the anthropological studies of native tribal cultures, as

expressed in his collection of essays Performance Theory (1988). Nonetheless, Schechner offers theatre scholarship a toehold into the relevance of paleoanthropological theory, particularly his suggestion of the study of a “bio-aesthetic web,” one that has roots in the consideration of genetics, neurology, and anatomy as somehow contributing to the ways that we can and do express ourselves (PT 249). What might we stand to gain, or lose, were we to allow the sciences to inform our discussions of knowledge, culture, and performance? Given the contemporary preoccupation with the contested nature of discourse, can we actually speak of the human subject as epistemologically bound to instinct, nature, and biology?

Schechner’s interest in the evolutionary history of performance touches on the concern with language origins expressed throughout the twentieth century in linguistics and the

philosophies of language. In the first half of the century, linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf could justifiably assert that “the story of evolution in man is the story of man’s linguistic development”

(84), since language, through the studies of Pierce, Russell, and Frege, was coming to be accepted at the time as the one tool by which we conceive knowledge and construct culture.

Whorf posed the same questions of concern to linguists dating back to Vico, Condillac, Rousseau and Herder. What did the first languages sound like? For what were languages conceived and used? What is the relationship between language, thought, and reality? Yet without quantifiable tools of measurement, how were answers to be found? Even Merleau-Ponty, who recognized the relative nature of language while desiring to situate it within a phenomenology of perception, could only reiterate Vico and Condillac by interpreting language as erupting from gesture and onomatopoeia. More recently, from within the humanities Michael Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993) argues for a view of language as springing from the need to account for the world through mimesis, and, in a similar vein, Jerry Gill in such works as Mediated Transcendence: A Postmodern Reflection (1989) and Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor (1991) views the metaphoric and mediational aspects of language as “primordial.”

Such thinking, however, while serving to restore to language a sense of communicative traction in the face of deconstruction, does not radically depart from observations Aristotle offers in Poetics and Rhetoric in reference to nominalist and metaphorical uses of language in the interpretation of reality.

Twentieth-century theatre practitioners share the concern with origins. Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski staked their careers on the assurance of the existence of primordial forms of

expression, and the radical theatres of the United States bolstered revolutionary thinking with the essentialist theories of Artaud. Critics of various ethnic and cross-cultural theatre forms, such as Schechner, Phillip Zarilli, and Dwight Conquergood, may view their research with one eye on the caution afforded by poststructuralism, but their arguments also restore to their subjects an autonomy based on the exigencies of nature and tradition. For as theorists and dramatists like Brecht and Yeats attest, the incredibly rich and tradition-steeped performances of India,

Indonesia, China, and Japan do not simply spring from one individual’s creative imagination, but flow from the confluence of a particular culture’s mythology, religious sentiment, language, taboo, art, physical and emotional discipline, aesthetics, history, and communal subconscious, which cannot be duplicated elsewhere. How do we unravel the cultural tapestry to be found in performance? And in the face of deconstruction, can all of the signifying elements of such complex performative traditions really be reduced to a system of signs that have no referent?

Much theatre theory implies that a view towards our collective origins somehow grants the human species an organic privilege previously afforded by theology and logocentric thought. But the problem remains: how to prove it?

Both contemporary philosophers of language and theatre scholars betray a surprising lack of reference to the empirical investigations into the roots and origins of language and speech as presented in paleontology, archeology, and related disciplines. From the hindsight of the turn of a new century, most twentieth-century thinkers suffered the disadvantage of a lack of substantive empirical evidence that could have enhanced or modified their views.² Admittedly, the scientific literature on the origin of language only recently broke free of the constraints of

2Merleau-Ponty and Derrida at least refer to the theoretical work of Mauss and Levi-Strauss on the structures of non-industrialized societies, and Derrida in Of Grammatology acknowledges the then current (from the vantage of the early 1960s) paleoanthropology of Andre Leroi-Gourhan.

century methods, aided in the past few decades by new fossil discoveries and advanced systems of quantification. But in the past thirty to forty years that paleoanthropology has flourished, the humanities have yet to cross the disciplinary divide that separates them.³

In all fairness, philosophers, scientists, and lay people alike recognize that the origin of language in the human ancestry will never be known with assurance, since the first spoken languages and the soft tissues used in voice production do not survive in the fossil record.

Despite their technological advances, scientists must still approach the fossil record with a great deal of interpretive imagination. For their part, linguists can only speculate as to the forms and sounds of the “proto-languages” that preceded the transcriptions of ancient languages only six thousand years ago. Challenging questions persist. How might researchers credibly reconstruct language as it may have existed one or two million years ago? How might they distinguish the development of the anatomical properties of the voice from the cognitive mechanisms that make language possible, and their eventual combination in speech? Given the scant fossil evidence, how to justifiably conceive of human life-worlds in which spoken language took place prior to any historical record? Finally, were those tasks accomplished, would the conclusions then corroborate the theories embraced by theatre scholars and practitioners?

Given the problems empiricists face when confronting the fossil record in the quest for human origins, a strain of contemporary theory argues to the contrary. In this view, the endeavor

3 This is not to say that the humanities, and theatre in particular, have not looked to the sciences to aid its research. Archeology, anthropology, and linguistics have certainly aided in the

reconstruction of ancient performances and in the study of various cultural performances. Chaos theory has lately gained credence in literary studies, particularly in the dramatic criticism of William Demastes and Michael Vanden Heuvel. This chapter distinguishes itself for the concentration on the discipline of paleoanthropology and its attempt to account for the first instance of vocalized speech, and possibly performance, in the evolutionary record. In one instance, however, Graddol and Swann, in Gender Voices, use linguistic theory in their critique of the andro-centric cast of language (see the discussion below).

is not only impossible, but its valorization ultimately hinders the supposedly modernist task of revealing truths concerning the human condition. Derrida rejects the notion of an autonomous speaking subject based upon his belief that speakers are incapable of original speech, and that the operation of différance obscures the location of a foundational origin of language. Speakers, in his view, can only reiterate previous utterances, just as in Artaud’s view the Western theatre can only regurgitate secondhand dramatic texts. Foucault’s archeology of language, specifically the employment of language in institutionalized discourse, offers a sustained critique of the

foundational ideologies that find their validation in the presumed revelation of an originary episteme made manifest by reason. Under Foucaultian terms, the foregrounding of any academic discourse as an assumed source of objective insight confronts the problematic issues of authority, coercion, and the politics of competing discursive paradigms. Could a contemporary empirical study of origins escape the same faulty assumptions and prejudices concerning science and objectivity that have handicapped Western thinking from Socrates to Nietzsche? In light of the poststructural arguments inspired by Derrida and Foucault, the quest for origins through both empirical and rationalist pursuits has fallen into disrepute, exposed as yet another relative language game attempting to claim a monopoly on truth in service to oppressive hegemonic forces. Were we to indulge a discussion of origins, we might unwittingly promote essentialist notions of the sovereignty of man, a hierarchy of the races and sexes, and the superiority of Western thought and sciences over those of the East, thereby inflicting some form of injustice on peoples either excluded from the conversation or unwilling to take part.

Nonetheless, the paleoanthropological research into human origins continues under the modernist faith that scientific fact holds universal value, despite the theoretical misgivings. For poststructuralists to consider the empirical pursuits of the natural sciences as somehow

promoting unjust doctrinal impositions, they place undue emphasis on potential misapplications while ignoring the viability of the subjects under investigation. Christopher Norris argues that poststructuralists err when they conflate the relative truth claims of religious and secular belief systems, seemingly bestowed by divine or privileged authority, and a singular truth “arrived at through reasoned enquiry in the public sphere of open participant debate” (TEC 11-12). It is one thing, for example, for a Christian Scientist to refuse antibiotics for a viral infection on religious grounds, but it is another to take the Christian Scientist position as proof that antibiotics simply represent a differing interest position and therefore do not work. Christian Scientism may be relative, but pharmaceutical research in virology is not. Only were the patient forced to take medication against his or her will could the treatment be construed to violate civil liberties, which is another matter altogether. As Norris points out, echoing Habermas, poststructuralists inadvertently embrace the same oppressive strategies as the hegemonic forces they decry when they ignore reason and revert to “a pre-enlightenment ethos when faith was the arbiter of right thinking” (TEC 12). Rather, the same reason that gave birth to empiricism should be considered as the same reason that lifted rationalist discourse out of the quagmire of superstition and opinion, and even made poststructural thinking possible. The sciences do allow us to speak of empirical fact with objectivity, and paleoanthropologists, despite the formidable challenge presented by the fossil record, can successfully chip away at the monolith of our pre-historic past.

Two examples illustrate such a reasoned enquiry in the public sphere mentioned by Norris. In the first example, paleoanthropology has grown into a noisy and crowded field, and not all of the theorists considering the issue of language concur on a single interpretation of the data. The immense sweep of time to be accounted for and the relatively few fossils discovered to

date prohibit a unanimous consensus. As though verifying Foucault and Lyotard, theorists recognize the degree to which they greet the evidence with guesswork and wishful thinking, thereby moving the discussion from the supposed detachment of empiricism to the subjective realm of supposition. But rather than allow the difficulties of the discipline to suggest an inherent and invalidating relativism, the differing perspectives offered by paleoanthropology nonetheless converge upon a “single truth.” For, as this chapter argues, paleoanthropologists agree, despite their differences, that the empirical evidence attests to the central role of vocal language in the evolutionary maturity of modern human being. In the second example, David Graddol and Joan Swann in Gender Voices (1989) use linguistic theory to contest the assumptions Dale Spender makes in reference to the andro-centric cast of the English language in Man Made Language (1980). Whereas Spender echoes Foucault in her subjective view of the English language

silencing women in its reflection of male bias, Graddol and Swan argue that empirical studies of language do not corroborate her conclusions. In an ironic twist, linguistic “fact” argues that the English language more than adequately serves to formulate feminist arguments, and that through reasoned inquiry, the andro-centrism of gendered nouns and pronouns can be changed.

Therefore, rather than privileging the recent vogue for Foucault and the silencing of the sciences before they have had a chance to speak, this study prefers to consider the many voices that have begun to weigh in on some aspect of voice production, and not only from the

perspective of the humanities. Given the overwhelming concern with language in the past

century, and the identification of a keystone issue such as origins, the conversation itself begs the input and commentary of competing disciplines. The value of this chapter resides in its embrace of paleoanthropology and in the attempt to illumine the conversation about the origins of speech and language within the humanities with an all too often overlooked view from the sciences. The

inclusion of this chapter within a larger work pertaining to the status of the voice in theory and performance stems from the observation that paleoanthropology at this moment offers the most sustained, rigorous, and lively debate concerning the origin of the voice and language in the human ancestry.

This chapter posits that the conclusions drawn from the empirical evidence of the pre-history of human being offers theatre scholarship fresh insight into the use-value of the voice, touching on questions of relevance such as the subjects of the first speech, the reasons for vocal discourse, the role of orality in human cognition and communication, the representational aspects of language and its uses in mapping and defining reality, and the ability of language to present the speaking subject. Were such insights given serious consideration, they could aid a renewed interest in several subjects of interest to theatre scholars and practitioners, such as voice

pedagogy and the role of vocal training from both anatomical and behavioral perspectives, acoustical considerations of theatre design, a semiotics of sound and voice, the recuperation of the speaking subject despite the arguments of poststructuralism, and a deeper investigation into the subject of orality already pioneered in the research of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong (see chapter six). Although an empirical exploration of the “bio-aesthetic web” could open theatre scholarship to further research into the evolutionary tenets of ritual and play, physical discipline, and aesthetic expression, the concern here shall be limited to a consideration of the role of the voice in human discourse. Particularly in terms of the scope of this study, this chapter argues that paleoanthropology counters the poststructural silencing of the voice by restoring to the speaking subject autonomy and a sense of agency that allows it to engage proactively and navigate successfully its social and physical environments.

This chapter investigates the methods scientists adopt when approaching the voice and language in the fossil record, and the issues such methods raise for the speaking subject. The chapter questions the degree to which the differing theories of the evolutionary history of voice and language resolve the problem of intentionality and agency in human discourse. Graham Richards in Human Evolution: An Introduction for the Behavioural Sciences (1987) suggests that the inquiry into linguistic origins falls within three parameters: first, whether some form of language occurred very early or rather late in the record, second, whether our present vocal languages evolved from a vocal or gestural base, and third, whether the selective pressures towards vocalized language stemmed from primarily cognitive or social challenges (272). All three areas hold significance for a consideration of the voice since they foreground and promote different aspects of voice use, and, by extension, emphasize different aspects of human

cognition, communication, and life.

In terms of this study, the evaluation of the agency afforded the speaking subject through the differing views of vocal evolution offers relevant insight into the problems of presence and subjectivity in contemporary theory and performance. If the voice developed early, then it indeed accounts for the unique quality of human being as cognitively and socially constituted. If it

In terms of this study, the evaluation of the agency afforded the speaking subject through the differing views of vocal evolution offers relevant insight into the problems of presence and subjectivity in contemporary theory and performance. If the voice developed early, then it indeed accounts for the unique quality of human being as cognitively and socially constituted. If it