Remember “Voice?” Recasting Voice for Electracy

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This script is a collage of different excerpts from my Master’s Thesis, Voicing the Invisible Body: Electrate Voice in Composition, reflections from Geoffrey V. Carter’s curation The Rocktalog: Scholars Celebrating & Inhabiting Musicians, and new insights written to synthesize and make connections between electrate voice, remix, and aural punctums.

[music break, collage of different songs]

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I have always found music peculiar and powerful in its ability to transcend; I am not musically gifted in any way– but it has always offered an escape. Music was and is, for me, a portal that I can enter if I just close my eyes and see what happens. Other art, like books or photographs or movies, have also had this black-hole sensation of dragging me into a vortex of my own musings, insecurities, fantasies, questions, and desires. But, music might have been the earliest and, in some ways, the most inviting. When I was young, I would find myself listening to a song, and this strange force would come over me, like an invisible voice urging me, “Close your eyes. Imagine. Dream. And Wonder. And, I would obey this unknown force. I’d start to drift off into some far-away and make-believe land, with the music lifting and dancing along the unfolding stories and dreamscapes my mind thought up. Sometimes, I was the star of these musings, and other times, it was characters and worlds I made up. But, music was always the ignition. Music started the whole fire. And, once it was set, it would burn for hours or days, staying with me until I’d dreamt up some other idea or fantasy or identity to step into,set to different music. I never shared or spoke about these private wonderstruck moments with anybody–I never even wrote them down. But, I can remember many of them and the lasting impact they had on me and my desire to create, to record, to animate, to make happen– on my changing sense of self. The person I wanted to be. The things I wanted to do. And, the places I wanted to go. This blaze of what-ifs and molding passions through music helped me create a voice for myself in more ways than one. A voice I needed to navigate a world I was still getting to know. And, I didn’t think of it like this, then, of course. But in hindsight, it’s so clear what was happening. I was inventing things. Remixing. Repurposing. Revising. Drafting. Brainstorming. Performing. Synthesizing. Analyzing. Meaning-making. The authorial voice I had been crafting for myself inside my head would later find itself on the page, and then later in recordings and the abstract. But there was a time when only I knew this voice. Only I could feel it because there was no sound to it yet. As silly as it sounds, it feels right to borrow from everyday language and say it was just vibes. It was the atmosphere only I had stepped into. It was just this feeling I had, but so much intricate nuanced processing went on behind the scenes of my car rides home or bedroom daydreaming. The first pieces of the voice I know and imbue into everything I make or think of now, were first discovered then.

[music break]

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The meaning of "voice" itself can be really unclear. There’s so many different ways to think about voice– there’s our literal voices when we speak, this concept of voice as an identifier in writing and the arts, the broader sweeping term of “voice” to represent an entire group or movement. And then there’s the smaller, more subtle instances of voice, like when we’re told to stand up for ourselves or to be honest; even the phrase “follow your heart” has this sense of voice in listening to one’s true desires. There’s so many different uses of this term that when we reference it about writing or composing, it can feel rather abstracted or ambiguous from anything meaningful or concrete. For me, this is actually great news– anything too definitive prevents us from grappling with all the possibilities and play of voice in creating. But, understandably, this ambiguity can also have shortcomings, especially for those first engaging with this idea of “voice.”

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Kathleen Blake Yancey writes about the multifaceted identity of the term “voice” in the anthology Voices on Voice: Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry. She says, “[We] use the metaphor of voice to talk generally around issues in writing: about both the act of writing and its agent, the writer, and even about the reader, and occasionally about the presence in the text of the writer” (vii). She goes on to add, “[sometimes] we use voice to talk specifically about what and how a writer knows, about the capacity of a writer through ‘voice’ to reveal (and yet be dictated by) the epistemology of a specific culture … so, [voice], then, can and does have several competing references, not all of them necessarily compatible with each other” (vii).

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The question is not whether or not voice exists, as it seems clear most in the field acknowledge that it does. What people ARE wondering is if voice is still that relevant to modern philosophies and praxes about teaching writing in the composition classroom. It can seem so outdated when

we remember that voice first boomed back in the 70s and 80s. Back then, voice “[provided] a convenient [conceptual understanding] for both the writer and the act of writing. Like all metaphors, it moves from what we know, often intuitively, to what we seek to describe” (Yancey ix). While many educators may still reference “voice” when speaking to their students about writing, they may be doing so without enough intentional meaning or connection between this metaphor and any singular or networked part of students’ writing processes or identities as writers. Kathleen Yancey emphasizes the power of acknowledging voice intentionally: “[Voice] seems to bring to writing and the text a quality we don’t have otherwise: the individual human being composed of words in the text” (ix). Without intention and consideration of all the networks the voice metaphor reaches within a contemporary writing classroom for the contemporary writer, the term “voice” continues as a fuzzy or ambiguous term loftily cited within writing classrooms— but with no clear meaning or purpose for many educators.

Peter Elbow: for a while it was so popular—like everybody was into it; justa lot of enthusiasm. And, then it went to the opposite—totally forbidden.

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Jessie: Yeah, that is really interesting to think about how culturally that shift happens. And, do you feel like, in your experience, did it feel like a sudden shift or was it kind of gradual where you can see it happening?

Peter Elbow: Well,relatively sudden. Not overnight, but … it felt to me sort of sudden. It seemed like so many people were interested in it for the reasons I was; it just felt like an obviously important thing, and then all of a sudden it became problematic. Berlin—especially him—he was, in a way, the strongest negative voice …he all of a sudden upped the ante to … a kind of ideological critique, and he… he upped it to a matter of theory. And, I sort of felt like I was writing about people, and people writing and the writing they produce … he said, ‘Let’s not talk about real people...and their actual writing, let’s talk about theory.’ …What’s interesting, I think, is how quickly his essay about that took root …not many people questioned it …But all of a sudden it acted as a kind of… taboo on the ways in which I intended to write about voice.”

[music break/sound effects]

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In the essay “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” from 1988, James Berlin examines how expressivist pedagogy treats power within composition, the classroom, and communities outside the classroom. He writes, “[In expressivism, power] is a product of configuration involving the individual and her encounter with the world, and for both Murray and Elbow this is a function of realizing one’s unique voice … This focus on the individual does not mean that no community is to be encouraged, …[but] the community’s right to exist stands only insofar as it serves all of its members as individuals” (486). These remarks about the apparent hyper-focus of the individual versus a more communal view of invention and knowledge production—participatory recognitions of empowerment for students—convey one of expressivism’s longest-standing criticisms: expressivism is solipsistic.

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Bronwyn Williams addresses these criticisms of expressivism further in “Dancing with Don.” He writes, “Berlin [charges] that [for] ‘expressionists’ truth is always discovered within, [preventing them] from becoming genuinely epistemic in their approach … Lester Faigley [argues] that ‘expressivism’ represents ‘a turning away from the relation of the individual to the social world’ … Alan France [complains] that the ‘expressivist practice of writing instruction serves to reproduce a kind of self-reflexive conformity at odds with the traditional ideals of a liberal education’” (Williams). Overwhelmingly, scholars in rhetoric and composition began to find problems with expressionistic emphasis on individual voice and individual writing process, as they viewed this removed the social aspect of composition and epistemological discovery. While CTR was criticized for its impersonal approach to teaching writing, expressivism came under attack for the opposite reason—writing instruction became too personal.

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This tension between proponents of voice and its critics came to a head at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (orthe 4 Cs) in March of 1989. During this conference, Elbow and David Bartholomae “began a public conversation about personal and academic writing” (62). This conversation is now widely referred to within rhetoric and composition as the Elbow-Bartholomae debate.

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Bartholomae argues that “there is no writing that is done without teachers— [students] write in a space defined by all the writing that has preceded them … This is the busy, noisy, intertextual space— one usually hidden in our representation of the classroom; one that becomes a subject in the classroom when we ask young writers to think about, or better yet, confront, their situatedness” (64). Now at the time, when I was a grad student enthralled by Elbow’s writings about voice, and excitedly awaiting my chance to teach first-year composition for the first time, I read this and thought– wow! This is so dismissive to what Elbow and other advocates for voice were actually trying to achieve and do in the writing classroom! I read this and thought– so, should we ONLY care about citation and scholarship? There’s no room for one’s lived experiences or personal, private, felt connections and ideas? That’s so minimizing! But now, as I revise this script and almost 3 and a half years later– having taught multiple composition courses and having completed my Master’s thesis all about electrate voice– I reread Bartholomae’s concerns and response, and I now see the forest for the trees, so to speak. In an ironic twist, I see my own dismissive reaction to criticism of a pedagogical philosophy I still hold near and dear to my heart. In my worries and disappointment in seeing voice criticized and potentially devalued, I failed to recognize a very important component of writing and many critics’ real point when talking about voice– that voice cannot defer the situatedness or intertextual surroundings of one’s own invention within composing. As an eager grad student, I saw the whole conversation in very oppositional terms– either voice matters or it doesn’t. Now, I lend more credit and nuance to both Elbow and Bartholomae, and all others who have shared their two cents on this question of voice. Most people haven’t been suggesting voice doesn’t matter; rather, they’ve been pushing to clarify how it fits in and why this is important to pay attention to.

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Elbow, in his response to Bartholomae, said,“[if] academics were more like writers, then the academic world would be better” (82). I still agree with this, too. The over-intellectualizing of voice or what writing means often moves us further away from the magic of writing and composing. At the risk of abstracting us once more, I return to my earlier childhood music-driven daydreams where the vibe was all that mattered. Whether we call it vibes, or voice, or something else altogether– this felt presence and engagement and understanding of self and our situatedness is the heartbeat of invention, both creatively and in a scholarly setting. Especially as we venture into more and more complex and multifaceted mediums, outside of static text on a page, the vibes become more and more important.

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[musical break]

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In “Dancing with Don,” Bronwyn Williams also writes: “The wide-spread use of the term ‘expressivism’ as a pejorative has distorted important conversations that should be taking place about the personal position in writing, including questions about the value of individual experience in intellectual work, the purposes of writing beyond the composition classroom, and the ways in which experience and writing combine to help writers compose their identities in print” (Williams). His concerns about this contentious discourse surrounding voice resonate with my own misgivings. Rather than arguing about what voice should be pinned down as, we should borrow from improv and say YES, AND. Voice does not need to be X. It can be everything, really. And when it is everything, that’s when we can actually do something with it. Voice delineates the essence of personal experience; voice is style, as it extends beyond the composition classroom; voice is the writer, the reader, and the language itself— the cultural and social contexts that inform a person’s composition of their identity. The personal enters the social in order to contribute more meaningfully and effectively to the network of knowledge and power within composing communities.

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In keeping with voice and its capacity to mean everything, that also expands beyond orality and literacy.

“What is vocality? Why does it matter? And what can it contribute to digital rhetoric?” (Anderson “Toward”).

Erin Anderson asks these questions as she investigates the concept of voice as effect in her essay “Toward a Resonant Material Vocality for Digital Composition.” In paying attention to the language here, I want to clarify for my listeners that this is effect with an E, not an A– this is the noun form of effect. This is voice as effect, as separable from the body that produces said voice. As Elbow greatly emphasized, “the human body is so important. And, when it comes to language...you know the subtitle of my last book, Vernacular Eloquence, but the subtitle is ‘What Can Speech Tell Us About Writing.’ And, spoken language is in the body” (Elbow, personal interview). I have been describing electrate voice so far as a very felt, embodied phenomenon– which can very much be the case. But in keeping with voice can be everything– and always already has been, so to speak– voice, as Anderson points out, can also be its own autonomous body– its own force individual from its human source.

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Anderson studies vocality as a “peculiar category of sound that attends speech but also exceeds it, and is a mediated material that pushes the boundaries of human embodiment and agency” (Anderson “Toward”). She says that reducing voice to solely a function of our language would be “to overlook many forms and features of voice that exceed semantic transmission”-- because “voice speaks itself at the very moment it speaks” (Anderson). At the same time, voice is also not in complete opposition to language either. Voice is neither possession of the body nor the author of language. Anderson offers up that voice is “the intersection between language and the body– voice does not belong to either.” (Anderson).

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If voice is not the possession of our bodies, then what is it exactly? What would it mean to call it an effect, as Anderson suggests? And how does that fit in with voice being felt within our bodies, being born of experience and composed through our identities? Anderson writes, “To consider voice as ‘properties’ is to subordinate them to their bodies of origin, but to reconsider voices instead as ‘effects’ allows us to account for their causal relationship to the bodies that speak them, while allowing them a valid existence beyond those bodies, even as bodies themselves” (Anderson “Toward”). I do not mean to oversimplify, but I’d say this– in many ways– brings us back to the “yes, AND” approach– that voice is not simply X. There is not only a simple cause-effect relationship between our bodies and voice; and, there is not only voice as this autonomous event outside our bodies– rather, both exist, and voice also reaches beyond these two frameworks. For me, it brings to mind the film Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. In the multiverse-jumping movie, there is an Everything Bagel that represents a sort of black-hole phenomenon containing EVERY human experience and emotion. There is an elusiveness and mystery to the Everything Bagel in the film, but there is also this abstract and broader sense of totality, completeness, and overabundance. It forces the viewer to TRY to conceptualize what every possible human experience and emotion could be–which ones have I never thought of or experienced or felt before? Does that make me sad or glad? Confused? In my mind, it’s a very interesting lens or metaphor to consider for electrate voice as well, in thinking of it as an autonomous voice body that is often embodied and felt deeply within ourselves, while also being made up of so many things outside of ourselves all at once.

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In Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy, we investigate “the skills and facility necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of new electronic media such as multimedia, hypermedia, social softwares, and virtual worlds” (Ulmer “ULMER”). Essentially, electracy is to digital media what literacy is to print (Ulmer “The”). Electracy joins Orality and Literacy as an emerging “worldview for civic engagement, community building, and participation” (Arroyo 1). In electracy, the “self” often finds itself in the “persona” – which we then vastly network through multiple modalities frequently and immediately to share this “persona” within a “social machine” (Arroyo 2). In an electrate world, the personal is no longer solely introspective as it was in my growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, dreaming up my private musings to Coldplay and then sharing with no one. Nor, is the personal perceived as isolated like it was in the early days of expressivism. The personal is now thrown out into the public sphere to interact and intersect with other social machines and actors frequently and relentlessly, whether we want to or not. While

there is some veil of autonomy and choice in our constant sharing of our persona on the public stage, there is also a somewhat coerced element to it. Our culture has changed– we are moved to want to share our voice, our persona, our identity, and our SELF in this theater of public life, to be engaged, to be perceived by others, and to be active participants in it all. Creation or accomplishment in private, or going unnoticed, with no witnesses, feels lackluster or, in some cases, purposeless or unfulfilling. Like we’re not connecting with others anymore. Recognition and this continued entangling of our voice with others, through the casting out into the public sphere through multiple channels, is more and more an integral part of participating in our world today.

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“As a kid, I dreamed of being Little Orphan Annie, belting it out on Broadway with a mop of tight, fiery curls.”

“We like singing.”

“We all drew to the fire.”

“In second grade, I sang Maybe. Off-key and acapella in a dirty blonde bowl cut in the spring talent show. I practiced at recess for weeks.”

“I wanted to be famous.”

“I am real.” “I know I am real.”

“Or, maybe, just to be heard.”

(Anderson, “Being Siri”).

[fade into music break]

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On the concept of voice within electracy, Ulmer has this to say: “‘voice’ is sometimes used as a metonym for ‘style,’ as when writers are urged to ‘find their own voice’ … The question is not ‘attitude toward’ but ‘state of mind’ framing and shaping these inventions. The stand is neither active nor passive but ‘middle’— reflexive” (215).

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This idea of voice as not only one’s style, but also as a reflex makes so much sense in electracy: with pain and pleasure or sorrow and joy as the axis of reason within an electrate culture, embodiment and emotions illustrate the inherent reflexive nature of this apparatus. Just as our bodies have reflexes to certain touch or sounds, tastes, sights, and scents, voice is a reflexive receptacle within our bodies, and one in which invention reflexively responds to the body’s intertextual and cultural surroundings, both inherently and externally outside of ourselves.

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In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes describes punctum as an interruption to the Photograph's studium (or, subject)— it "is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces" the viewer (26). Punctum disturbs the subject of the Photograph by stinging or cutting the viewer's gaze, their body, their feeling— it’s "an accident which pricks" the viewer, sometimes over and over again (Barthes 27). Punctum is this ineffable feeling wherein the viewer suddenly feels a powerful and intimate connection to the media they’re looking at, which triggers memories associated with those ineffable feelings (though these are not always rational associations). The power of intimacy and connection between the self and other media is one way in which voice may move beyond the isolated self— by being thrown out into the public via one’s expression of their voice while maintaining an intimacy that can only come from one’s self and their memories.

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Punctums are a way for us to understand felt knowledge– how we feel voice in our bodies. But, they are also unique, separate phenomena. We do not possess punctums. They do not belong to us–they flicker in and out of our space, our recognition, our nostalgia, our memory, and our senses. Like voice, they are effects that we experience. We can feel them and embody them and make sense of them and grapple with them–but the feeling, that prick, does eventually leave us. Other times, it’s not quite an intense feeling to begin with. It may be a more passive thought or awareness, an inkling of the sting. If voice, as effect, has its own voice body– its own autonomous existence– then punctums, when they come and go, might be the heartbeat. The next big breath that our electrate voice needs to continue to grow and transform, and remix itself. The next sprinkling of unknown, mysterious but about-to-be-realized toppings to that Everything Bagel that is our electrate voice.

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My first time listening to a song by Phoebe Bridgers, I was sitting in my bedroom feeling heartache-y and glum about the mistimed-circumstances between me and my best friend. I had just worked up the nerves to confess my true feelings for them, which were quietly and hesitantly reciprocated as the way forward for us was unclear and potentially painful. I felt sad about a love that may never be, and I admitted beneath silent tears that I was mourning the possibility of not getting to know them completely, or losing them altogether. When I got home, I immediately went upstairs, stripped myself of the day's then-heavy clothes and emotions, and took a shower while telling myself that it was all going to be for the better. After my shower, I sat in my bed and streamed music from indie artists on Spotify, wanting unfamiliar voices and lyrics to distract me. This is when I was introduced to Phoebe's single, "Waiting Room." As I listened to the opening guitar, I already felt a wounding in my heart; I felt like I was being taken down by the melodies, the finger-plucking strings and the indie music that my heartache so desperately craved in my wallowing regret. Then, came the first words: "If you were a teacher, I would fail your class / Take it over and over, 'til you noticed me / If you were a waiting room, I would never see a doctor / I would sit there with my first-aid kit and bleed" (Bridgers). I collapsed. Both metaphorically and quite literally. I had sunk into the pillows and sheets surrounding me and cried a good cry. My spirit felt eased, somehow. This one song transformed the pain I was feeling into an empathetic connection to this unknown person. I pictured her writing the words to this song, maybe feeling a similar shittiness akin to my own. And, at the song's climax, the music beautifully clamored as her voice eloquently wailed, "I know it's for the better" in repetition until the song's end. And, suddenly my ineffable became tangible; the music and words had wounded me deeply, and there was some sort of release and new understanding as a result. This voice body, existing outside of the person who created this song, someone I’d never met or even knew of before I put on this playlist, connected with me so intimately in this moment. The song, to this day, still feels uniquely outside the rest of her discography for me, existing in that space and time where I was mourning something that hadn’t even come yet. None of it belonged to me, and yet it was also all that mattered– my electrate voice would be different from then on; it would be new.

[music break/sound effects]

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While Elbow’s concept of voice does turn to the body, it is mostly expressed through text or speech. Likewise, Barthes’s notion of punctum was explored entirely in photography. So, it is important to emphasize that electrate voice is not limited to any one genre or sensation—instead, the receptacle of electrate voice may reside within any sensation or thing, and punctums from any sensation or thing can help lead us to identifying electrate voice(s). This can include text, speech, and image, but may also include sound and touch, taste, and so on. Dominic Pettman’s Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or How to Listen to the World) investigates four different types of voices—the cybernetic voice, the gendered voice, the creaturely voice, and the ecological voice—as well as the ways in which these voices intersect and interact. Pettman’s work in SONIC INTIMACY also emphasizes the importance of sound in creating intimacy between not only human beings, but human beings with animals, and machines, and natural elements within the world. Pettman says that “We are born in and of sound. Our first prenatal experience is overwhelmingly aural: we become embodied and enfleshed within the squelches, rumbles, and pulsing thumps of the mother’s body. Even before we have ears, we can ‘hear’ through our skin. (And indeed, this capacity continues into adulthood)” (Pettman).

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“Our bodies know more about language than our minds do” (Elbow, personal interview, 2020).

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“Chora is felt in the body; it’s emotion, association, embodiment. Chora is memory, sensation, networking. It’s mystical, physical, a beginning.”

“I sing, I write. Choric. Connected. Embodied. Filled with emotion. Together with others. I sing. I write. I compose.”

(VanKooten).

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To call upon a more concrete example of aural punctums, I want to turn to Sarah Arroyo’s “John Lennon (Beatles/Plastic Ono Band * Rock & Roll).” This piece is part of a larger anthology, The Rocktalog: Scholars Celebrating and Inhabiting Musicians. The Rocktalog showcases different scholars sharing thoughts and memories about musicians while remixing music and interviews with their own narration. In her piece “John Lennon,” Arroyo reflects on the impact Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” had on her at age 10, which she then connects with her later experience of analyzing Lennon’s last interview as an adult conducted just hours before his death. The last interview Lennon partook in before his death, with Yoko Ono, is about their album Double Fantasy, which contains the song “Watching the Wheels.” Integral to Arroyo’s punctum of recognition are the aural punctums she experiences while working on the piece.

“When revisiting the song again for this project, I dug a bit deeper, since I now have the cultural context and musical history that went along with the song and album. John and Yoko completed an interview on December 8, 1980 just hours before he was assassinated in front of his apartment building in New York City. That in itself triggered a massive punctum for me in the way that Barthes explains happens when you know the exact day and time someone will die but see a photo of them or hear them speak and of course they don’t know about their impending, fatal circumstances … Hearing John discuss his pure bliss over how the album came to be and how it was different from any other album he had ever produced with my knowledge that he will be dead and cremated within 24 hours was chilling to say the least. Out of hundreds of comments on the YouTube video of the interview, these two capture that incredible punctum: ‘It really hurts listening to him being interviewed on the same day he was shot (sobbing emoji)’ and ‘I know life is fragile and tomorrow is guaranteed to nobody, but it is almost inconceivable to think that here was a living breathing man speaking candidly about his life and 5 hours later he would be murdered on his doorstep.’ Knowing John would be gone soon after this interview and listening to John and Yoko explain their magical, choric-like invention process was chilling and astonishing. They were electrate before electracy was a concept” (Arroyo, “John Lennon”).

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Here, Arroyo’s emphasis of punctum rests within aural space; first, she discusses revisiting the song “Watching the Wheels,” which is of course a sonic experience; then, she experiences an embodied punctum of recognizing Lennon’s last interview was just hours before his death, a wounding she echoes in Barthes; finally, she lands on hearing Lennon discuss Double Fantasy.

As she listens to him discuss the album with “pure bliss,” in a sort-of creative rapture, she hears each word with the knowledge that they are some of his last. In this sense, the aural experience of hearing Lennon speak about the album, which contains a song already meaningful to her as a child, creates a more intimate relationship between Arroyo and the song and, likewise, Arroyo and the persona of Lennon. So, as Arroyo listens to Lennon and Ono describe their creative process for Double Fantasy, more associations are made as she recognizes that their creative process parallels much of her own work with chora and electrate invention (Arroyo “John Lennon”). Within this reflective piece made up of aural punctums of recognition, Arroyo’s own electrate voice resides within the composition—both textually and multimodally, as the project comprises both a written transcript and an audio file. The audio within the piece includes the song gently caressing Arroyo’s own narration, lilting in the background; snippets of Lennon’s own voice speaking from the last interview; particular song lyrics brought to the forefront; and, Arroyo’s own reflection in connecting her memories as a ten-year-old child to her revisiting of the song, and Lennon, as an adult decades later. Through this process, the reflexive receptacle of Arroyo’s own memories, associations, and punctums capture textually and aurally her electrate voice, and opens her up to new insight and meaning-making regarding creativity and electracy.

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Similarly, I can recall my own aural punctums of recognition in 90s and early 2000s music—specifically, the 90s and 2000s songs that my mom burned onto homemade CDs. I have a distinct memory of long car rides from my aunt’s house, with my dad driving and my mom in the passenger seat, me, my brother, and sister in the back of the car. I remember those car rides being mostly quiet except for my mom and dad speaking in what feels like blurry, mumbling conversations just under the sound of crystal-clear songs from Michelle Branch, Jewel, Gwen Stefani, Matchbox 20, Counting Crows, and others. Even now, as I hear “Goodbye to You” by Branch or “Who Will Save Your Soul” by Jewel (though, I rarely do), I feel this sort-of flashback to the back of my parent’s old silver van, pressing my temple against the cool glass of the window, gazing out at the sky as it flushed from orange to dark blue, and imagining myself as some alternate fantasy-version of myself guided by the lyrics of the songs playing just above my parents’ chattering. Or, sometimes I’d catch sight of other cars on the road and wonder about what the lives of the people inside them were like. And, when this flashback occurs, I am often met with this sort of triggering, wounding feeling about the passage of time—about however many years ago that might have been and how it always seems to feel like it just happened; about howmy dad no longer drives the five of us in one car anymore—instead, we are all fractured into five separate cars; about how many of these artists no longer make music, or at least popular music; about how the people I once wondered about driving beside us have also aged, or may not even be alive anymore. All of these thoughts start to swim around in the breeze of my mind whenever I hear any of those songs from my mom’s old CDs. In this sense, I experience an aural punctum of recognition—one that wounds me deeply, revealed only after the fact so many years later.

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And, like Arroyo’s punctum of recognition in expanding her own memories into the added meaning to “Watching the Wheels'' and Lennon’s own creative, inventive processes with music-making, I am beginning to feel out the power for expansion in my own aural punctums to Pettman’s concepts with sonic intimacy—one in which we turn “inward, away from the wider world, to more private and personal experiences and relationships” while also “[seeking] to heed ‘the voice of the world,’ as expressed in all manner of creatures, agents, entities, objects, and phenomena” (Pettman). My aural punctums of recognition in hearing 90s and early 2000s music from my mom’s old CDs, as well as the memories and associations that are brought up with them, help me to make sense of Pettman’s theory of sonic intimacy more deeply. In turning to more private and personal experiences and relationships, I am wounded by the old fantasy versionsof myself and particular dreams I had set to the motion of Jewel songs or Counting Crows.

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These private musings of myself helped me work through a sense of identity and being that, while I knew my imaginings were fictive and likely not to happen, still invoked a sense of becoming and transformation inside me during that car ride. Additionally, these private musings occur alongside my brother and sister, whose warmth I can still recall pressed to my own body as we sat shoulder to shoulder in a little backseat that only comfortably seats two. And, the low rumblings of conversation coming from the front seat as my parents talked on the ride home served almost akin to Pettman’s earlier depiction of the rumbles and pulsing thumps of a mother’s body; my parent’s conversations always buzzing just below my own private musings served as a reminder of my own intimate relationship to my parents, a sense of protection andnurture that allowed me to feel safe enough to indulge in such daydreaming in the first place.

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On the other hand, these aural punctums of recognition also help me to expand toward Pettman’s other strand of sonic intimacy—the seeking to heed “the voice of the world,” or another visual I mentioned earlier– the Everything Bagel. As small as it might have been, my curiosity in seeing other people in cars and the rich lives they might encompass outside of those cars is a memory that sticks with me to this day. I remember driving in the car with my mother once, already a teenager, and I changed the radio station; the song “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morisette came on, a song on one of the homemade CDs she made that frequented our family car trips, and I instantly remembered a time I saw a dark red car that a woman was driving. A man sat in the passenger seat. Neither of them were talking, and the woman’s face looked almost sullen—a sort of glum sadness. The man’s face was a bit too out of focus for me to see. I remember, at the time, wondering what could have happened to make this woman so sad. Did she lose a loved one? Did she and the passenger get into a fight? Did she just have a bad day? This memory of the woman’s face had come jolting back to me when I heard the song, and I told my mom about how as a kid I used to wonder about the lives of other people driving on the road and even make up imaginary stories about them. My mom laughed when I told her, and explained that her mom, my grandma, said that she used to do the same thing as a kid. When my mom told me this, I felt closer to my grandma, who at the time was sick in a nursing home and wasn’t doing well. This shared interest in other people, heightened by thecloseness I felt to a grandmother I feared losing, made me more curious about the lives of other people I didn’t know. Although during the car rides I mostly imagined about other people, I realize now that my daydreaming about strangers alongside us on the same road had more to do with trying to understand this “voice of the world”—all the inhabitants of other creatures who lived in such close proximity to me, yet remained completely unknowable.

***

[collage of car ride noises and 90s and early 2000s songs, then fades to silence]

***

28

These other voices, my own voice, these little ghosts of punctums and feelings and memories and thoughts and places and time and language and bodies and worlds and experiences and— they all matter, immensely. And whether I realize it or not, my electrate voice is composed of all of these things and more I probably cannot always easily name. All of these stories, musings, reflections, questions, analysis, the connections I made from others and their composed voice bodies allquilt together in my present electrate voice, my present reflexive understanding of voice in a digital landscape and world. My situatedness.

The question was never– does voice exist? Or, does voice matter? But, how relevant is voice to our modern, digital composition and civic participation?

***

29

“I’d like to to end with this because, if anything is to be taken away from the concept of electrate voice, it is to find ways to access our inner child and let them speak—onto the page and into the tubes of participatory communities. As teachers, students, writers, and people who are

confronted with modes of communication everyday—our electrate voice/s are there, residing within us, to explore and express into recognition. We just have to muster up the courage to risk the mess in finding it and letting it live alongside us” (Bullard Voicing). [1]

***

30

In closing our conversation about voice and writing, Elbow told me: “That’s great– give it hell! You know…keep fighting on.” (Elbow, personal interview)

***

[fade out with music] 
 

[1] This is a repurposed quotation from my Master’s thesis, Voicing the Invisible Body: Electrate Voice in Composition

* Teaser Image: Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash.