Why Do People Sing? on Voice by Scannell Paddy;

Author:Scannell, Paddy; [Scannell, Paddy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509529452
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2019-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

The talkative world

In many ways, this program retrospectively appears as a logical culmination of the communicative ethos of traditional broadcasting itself, and the blurring of the public–private divide. In a simple way, RTV served up global audiences to themselves as themselves. In doing so it significantly revised the public–private divide. Public life had hitherto never been universally available in the Athenian agora (the market place), politics itself, was the reserve of so-called free men. In what Hannah Adrendt calls “the open light of publicness,” men produced and reproduced the polis (government and nation), politics, and publicness as unintentionally but unavoidably exclusive. They performed themselves as citizens. It was then truly, as they used to say, a man’s world. The marginalized sphere of private life (inhabited by women, children, slaves) was world-less. It was purely natural, a closed space in which marginal figures behaved and interacted with each other naturally, like the infant and parent in P1.

It is not my argument that broadcasting singlehandedly changed this. Rather, I have tried to show in two cases (Britain and radio in the first half of the last century; America and television in the second half) how social change showed up on radio and television as a transformation of communicative ethos, by which I mean the manner and style (the fashion) in which people interacted with and understood their relations with each other. This transformation marked the decline of deference on all fronts. It involved the migration of the norms of the neglected universal private realm into the privileged, exclusive realm of public life. Things hitherto deemed unpolitical (things that mattered to women, for instance) now entered the public realm, and talk gradually emerged as a good in itself, a new form of entertainment, as members of the excluded majority now performed themselves as themselves for the global audiences from which they had emerged. I have been concerned to show the gradual loosening of tongues, the opening up of public life in two countries; the slow entry into the public realm not just of excluded voices but of the interests and enjoyments that came with them. It is not enough to note that the politics of recognition emerged first in the USA alongside and at the same time as television in the second half of the last century. This new politics was played out, in part, through that then new medium. It was the beginning of the end of deference – of students to professors, women to men, blacks to whites – and it was vocal. It made a noise. It went public. Subsequently, others found their tongue or were given a voice, notably non-heterosexuals, children, and mute animals who could not speak for themselves but had their rights and interests voiced by adult humans (for example, the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer).

Sincerity, authenticity, genuineness, truthfulness, and honesty (that galaxy of norms which orbit around the taken-for-granted virtue of truth-as-reality, reality-as-truth) became politically important in the second half of the twentieth century as they came to be invoked as the measure of public conduct.

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