REBELIÓN DEL TRABAJO CONTRA EL CAPITAL Y EL ESTADO

A discourse of rights does important work to place voice within a development framework of speaking up and being heard to bring attention to the power imbalances which determine who can access, participate and determine the choices that affect people’s lives. And yet, a rights-based approach to voice can reinforce a dichotomy between

speakers-listeners precisely by shifting focus from speaking up to being heard, perpetuating or replicating binary models of power that sidestep more subtle considerations of how these conditions might produce other forms of voice poverty. For example, within a neoliberal framework which places high value on self-expression and individualism, a rights-based approach to voice might come to be understood simply in terms of giving people the space to speak up, to express themselves or tell their stories without requiring the other (person or institution) to engage in listening to or according them a form of recognition.

Further, an emphasis on what Noddings (2002) calls “rights talk” can potentially overshadow the needs that they arise from and protect. In developing a theory of care in relation to social justice, Noddings is hesitant to start from a perspective where people are bearers of certain rights. She instead urges to “dig beneath” the talk of rights to uncover and pursue a deeper understanding on the needs and desires that give rise to any particular set of rights (54). Without dismissing entirely the importance of rights-based approaches in addressing inequality, Noddings reorients her project to the sphere of relations between people, and encounters with others. Rights can be thought of as protecting needs. Nodding does however caution that a needs-based approach must be “approach[ed] carefully” because “rights protect needs” (Noddings, 2002: 156). Implicit in Noddings’ approach is the corollary idea that rights emerge from needs and rights demand to be met with

responsibilities. For rights to be realised, they must be acknowledged and fulfilled, but they

must also be respected and protected by others.

An emphasis on an individual bearer of rights can, according to Noddings, overshadow a community sense of, and responsibility for, one another. A needs-based approach for Noddings (2002: 57) operates within the relational paradigm that sets up a set of moral obligations towards others:

[…] when we acknowledge a need, we may be called upon to do something, to give up something or to respond to sympathetically and effectively to someone; whereas acknowledgement of a right often means leaving people alone, not interfering.

Nodding prompts the question about the extent to which people have an obligation to the needs of others. This relational paradigm connects back to the moral philosophy of MacIntyre (1984: 216) who situates the narrative of any one life in relation to “an

interlocking set of narratives”, connecting people through a web of ethical relationships. Following this formulation, the right to be heard can be reformulated as a fundamentally

relational right, one that arises in the space between people (and people and institutions). In

activating this set of relationships - whether it be through a needs-based approach to care or through the interdependent concept of narrative identity - it becomes clear that rights is a contentious concept filled with tension, yet it also emerges from a deeply social and humanist response to meet this challenge, apparent in conventional claims to voice. If voice poverty is approached beyond rights through a needs-based approach, it can be understood that a right to be heard emerges from a need for recognition; which could also be thought of as a desire to be seen in the face of another. However, even needs-based approaches are founded in relational claims to voice, highlighting the tension inherent in identity models of recognition described earlier.

I have introduced the notion of voice poverty as a framing concept to consider the limits and possibilities of placing voice within a rights-based framework as a way of addressing the differential distribution of voices that matter. These include a needs-based approach and attention to listening practices and the desire for recognition. However, as I will argue, conditions of voice poverty are more complex and dynamic than a gap between speaking up and being heard and in some cases can even be reproduced through a politics

of listening and recognition. In later chapters, I rethink the notion of voice poverty beyond theories of listening and recognition to suggest other ways that the concept might be put to work to address voice inequalities, particularly when the category of voice becomes attached to an object of values that dissolve current formulations of voice.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, I have unpacked the model of voice put forward by Couldry (2009) that connects speech, listening and recognition in interdependent relation. As I have shown, this historical arrangement of voice is connected to a particular moral economy; a relational ‘triad’. I have considered its attachment to a particular set of values and practices - rooted in moral and political philosophy and democratic theory in particular. The ethical framework that Couldry (2010) establishes in this formulation is put forward to address what he sees as a “crisis of voice”, described in the following chapter. This arrangement connects to democratic theories of citizenship that hold speaking and listening in

interdependent and dynamic relation (Bickford, 1996: 145) and draws into conversation a range of liberal, philosophical and rights-based traditions. While this economic

arrangement of voice continues to be the most culturally persuasive narrative - what might be thought of as the normative framework of voice - I have shown that it is built on a hierarchy of values and norms that regulate and condition not just the possibilities for voice, but most importantly - how we think about voice in the first place. Further, I have foregrounded some of the tensions that emerge from relational, liberal-democratic and rights-based to voice. These play out across the rest of the thesis.

On the one hand, the category of voice comes to occupy a privileged space where individual autonomy, agency and subjectivity are negotiated in relation to others within a particular moral economy where intersubjective and relational ethics circulate to connect speaking, listening and recognition. Redistribution, rights or recognition are put forward as ways to register voices that ‘matter’. On closer inspection, these values and norms are based on a series of distinctions that mark out an interdependent and relational space of encounter and exchange with others: value is created, circulated and exchanged between speakers and listeners and further regulated by a process of mutual recognition. It is through an appeal to this economic framework that a distinction is conventionally made: between a moral economy of voice and its intrinsic value, and the values of ‘the market’

and market-driven priorities. I examine this distinction further in the following chapter. Further, in the logic of this moral economy, conditions of voice poverty can be understood to result from a disparity between opportunities to speak and be heard, or a gap between those whose voices ‘matter’ and those whose voices don’t, where ‘the right to be heard’ is put forward as a moral claim as much as it is a political one.

On the other hand, the concept of voice becomes ‘sticky’ as categories of speech, listening and recognition form sticky attachments to ideas of voice which circulate

according to a set of relational and intersubjective ethics. I borrow the word ‘sticky’ from Sara Ahmed (2004: 89-90) who uses the term to think through how emotions become ‘stuck’ to certain objects and signs to produce specific affective economies. Ahmed’s concept of stickiness, a recurrent metaphor invoked through her work, can also be used to think through how voice works. This chapter has illustrated how the relational model of voice is constructed when speaking, listening and recognition are ‘stuck’ to each other in particular ways. Stickiness can be taken up as an orientation - towards connections, relationships and attachments - to theorise the way that the mechanisms of voice - as well as the category of voice itself - are conditioned through their attachment to a particular set of values and objects. These attachments are not fixed, and can instead be stretched and pulled in different directions, become unstuck, or re-stuck in different ways. This suggests that the charged connections and attachments Ahmed examines around emotions (such as hate, for instance) can be stretched or tightened to solidify or dissolve the intensity or affect of that emotion. It also suggests that the attachments that constitute the moral economy of voice are highly contingent and are not fixed to any kind of ‘natural’ order, but are socially and historically produced. Competing claims to voice - and seemingly

competing tendencies towards celebration and crisis - come into view when the category of voice forms particular kinds of sticky attachments. Thinking with the quality of stickiness helps to examine how things are stretched, pulled apart, and become unstuck. I follow this ‘stickiness’ in the following chapter to further consider how the category of voice is put to work and pulled in different directions by liberal, democratic and rights-based notions of the individual.

I began this chapter by unpacking Couldry’s relational notion of voice to situate it in a humanist tradition of intersubjectivity whereby the struggle for voice takes place in a relational domain. This humanist formulation locates the individual within a broader

meshwork of personal, institutional, social and political relationships to connect the practices of speaking, listening and recognition to broader questions of power, agency and justice via an ethic of socio-political relations. The struggle for voice in this sense is both a political and a philosophical one: over the way in which people’s voices are made to matter or not matter as well as the desire for some control over the accounts we give of our lives in relation to the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Yet whether through an appeal to rights-based frameworks (in the concept of voice poverty), attention to listening practices (the shift from ‘speaking up’ to ‘being heard’), or recourse to liberal discourses of empowerment, participation and inclusion - interventions into the differential distribution of voice based on a relational model also have their limits. These forms of critique and intervention are valuable, but potentially overlook the complex forces that simultaneously expand and contract the category of voice - where voice takes on new forms and meanings through new attachments that confound or don’t conform to neat formulations based on a set of pre-defined moral values. Before considering some examples which trouble these historical arrangements, in the following chapter I examine how competing claims to voice begin to expose some of the gaps and fault lines extant in recent debates and analyses based on prevailing frameworks.

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