What if We Lost Our Voice a Long Time Ago?

And what would it look like, to find it?

Photo by Eduardo Soares on Unsplash

MY DAUGHTER, who is about to turn nine, loves to read. She reads the way that I used to read as a kid: she reads big thick books, whenever and wherever she can. She will spend hours of her weekend reading. She recently asked me if it’s possible to get a job where your primary task is reading books. I found myself walking her through a decaying professional landscape, describing jobs to her (like my own) that may not exist by the time she’s old enough to be employed.

I am proud of my kid. I love that she loves to read. And we connect over books. I will keep reading with her, before bedtime, until she tells me to stop. She’s old enough, now, for really good books. Reading together brings me joy. But I do sometimes wonder if it will be burdensome to her, in the world of the future, to be such a reader. I already felt a bit maladapted, to be a reader like that when I was growing up. We didn’t have a TV in my house until I was at least 10 or 11. That may be the primary reason I immersed myself so fully in books. While other kids were at home with their TV babysitter, I was hanging out with the living and the dead, in my books. We were all kids on our own, lost in some sort of media. But the other kids actually teased me because I didn’t get their cultural references, and I got an early lesson in what it feels like to be a bit of an outcast. Am I setting my kid up to be at odds with the future, like I am? Would this be a curse? Or a gift?

Questions like this—about our relationship to books and our relationship to the future—have been haunting me. But I’ve also been haunted by questions about the way that books situate us, in relation to the past. Books, we could argue, made us lose our voice.

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I’VE BEEN THINKING way too much about what’s happening to the institutions that have, for centuries, housed our intellectual life. I work in one of these institutions, and I depend upon networks of them for the work I do. Today, these institutions are where we learn to do things I love to do (reading and writing). I want new generations of people, like my own daughter, to have institutions like this in their lives: institutions that house books and information, that provide access to whatever sort you might want, that teach you how use and understand them, that help you make use of the esoteric and abstract knowledge within them.

So, of course, I feel anxiety about the many ways that educational institutions, especially public ones, are being actively eroded right now. I’m particularly concerned about how this is happening because of the race to develop AI. This feels personal to me because forms of AI like ChatGPT are having a direct impact on my work. I would like to believe that all of the current AI hype is just that: hype. But when I think about how dramatically my teaching has shifted over the last two years, in response to the new AI, it doesn’t feel like mere hype. It feels like a tide is either going out or coming in.

I’m drawn toward Luddite positions, in the face of these changes. I want to resist the tide. I want to protect the tradition that I come from, and the kind of labor that I believe is worth doing. And yet, I am also nevertheless so deeply resentful of our educational institutions. They are broken, they function badly. Some of this is due to underinvestment. But some of it is just the fact that they were built on bad foundations. They weren’t built for discovery and transformation. They were built to institute and maintain social hierarchies. We’ve been able to discover and transform despite, and maybe not because of, these foundations. There are moments when I understand why someone might want to burn it all down. So, my feelings about intellectual and educational institutions aren’t simply conservative; I want to see them change.

Because of this, I have moments when I stop and think about how troubling the whole infrastructure is, from at least one point of view: schools, books, reading, writing. People like David Abram have been arguing for decades now that something went very wrong in human life, when we became susceptible to the powers of alphabetic language. Abram (who is a writer) argued in his 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous that alphabetic writing systems (as opposed to iconic writing systems, which depend to some extent on pictographic characters) have reinforced a kind of sensible isolation. They cut us off from the rest of the earth.

Lost in the world of these alphabetic letters—made by people, for people—Abram argues that we’ve been cut off and isolated from the more-than-human world (which is still, albeit loosely, represented in more iconic writing styles). It may be the case that the earth, and the animals who communicate on it, helped give rise to our language and our music in the first place. But we don’t see the animate earth—or hear the songs of birds—in our words and language anymore. Rather, words and language have become technologies that sever us from this animate earth and redirect us towards a more purely human imaginative landscape.

From this point of view, perhaps, we humans lost our sense of place in the world, and our earth-bound voices, a long time ago.

I enjoy many things about Abram’s work, but this is one thing I’ve always comfortably dismissed. Even if it were true, what does an argument like that really do? I will admit, however, that books made me—from a young age—susceptible to abstract flights of fancy into other worlds. I loved this about them, and I still do. But they allowed me to isolate myself, socially, whenever and wherever I wanted to. I had a lot of practice cutting myself off from the physical world around me, and using the technology of the book to transport myself into an alternate world, long before my phone came into my life. Books primed me, perhaps, for the singular, devoted, antisocial focus I can offer my phone.

Even reading, itself, has gone through a series of cultural shifts that have made it more isolating, more private, less communal, and less explicitly embodied.

I remember being struck, as a grad student in Virginia Burrus’ course on Augustine’s Confessions, by his description of his mentor—the Bishop Ambrose—reading silently. “When he read his eyes would travel across the pages and his mind would explore the sense,” Augustine marveled, “but his voice and tongue were silent.” Perhaps, Augustine mused, it was a strategy for conserving his voice, which was “prone to hoarseness.” But, as Virginia emphasized for us, what we can infer from this commentary is just how rare it must have been, at this time, to read silently. Even for Augustine, who eventually wrote thousands of pages of text, it would have been strange to sit there and read it silently! Now, for me, reading aloud is something I only do as a performance. And it feels a little strange. My reading is stealth—almost undetectable.

I sometimes worry that if my students become too dependent on Large Language Models, they will lose not only their ability to think for themselves but also the skill or ability to somehow work the funk and flavor of their messy human voice into written form. I lament this loss. But many of us never learned to wrest that voice into writing, anyhow. And I wonder if someone like Augustine also lamented the way that monastic institutions must have grown so silent, as the practice reading of aloud faded away. As they lost their voice.

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PERHAPS THE HISTORY of human civilization is just a long lament for the loss of our voice, as we become more reliant on our technologies to speak for us. Then again, I was raised on deconstruction. Jacques Derrida taught me to be suspicious about the assumption that voice has to be correlated with a direct, unmediated, embodied and physical presence. There are voices in a book, even if we can’t really hear them directly with our ears. Perhaps nothing is really lost, it’s always just changing places. And yet, I still find myself feeling like something has been lost, and is being lost. I do want real, living, textured voices. I want to keep hearing real, living, human voices even (or maybe especially) in the texts I read.

Of course, I want the books with all their alphabetic letters, too.

Where there are still rituals for memorizing and performing the texts, we see a different sort of voice preserved. Despite the fact that Protestantism has done much to fuse religious sensibilities with the new world of print, I think it’s nevertheless the case that religious traditions (more clearly, perhaps, Judaism and Islam) still present us with a more living and embodied form of relation to the voices in text. Texts are sacred, they are studiously read, memorized, performed, embodied, lived out, tattooed onto bodies.

I’ve heard people argue, already, that as we move away from books, and as video and audio become much more ubiquitous in our lives, we are slowly making a transition back towards an oral culture and away from a text culture. I’m sure you’ve heard the arguments about our potentially post-literate society. This makes me anxious. But if pressed I’m willing to see a certain kind of justice in this, I suppose. Perhaps a transition back to an oral culture would be a way to find our voice again. And yet, I am ultimately a person of the book. There’s something, perhaps many things, in that world of text that I feel responsible for—that I feel compelled to protect. There are too many things that would crumble without them. I want to be able to hear the lost voices that books helped to silence in the world around us. But there’s something in the strange resistance of text—the difficult and solid and oddly ethereal object of the book—that I don’t want to lose, either. What would it look like to find our voice again, without letting that go?