Voice as Value (Excerpt) PDF

# Chapter 1: Voice as Value Human beings can give an account of themselves and of their place in the world: "we have no idea," writes Paul Ricoeur, "what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things." Treating people as if they lack that capacity is to treat them...

# Chapter 1: Voice as Value Human beings can give an account of themselves and of their place in the world: "we have no idea," writes Paul Ricoeur, "what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things." Treating people as if they lack that capacity is to treat them as if they were not human; the past century provides many shameful examples of just this. Voice is one word for that capacity, but having a voice is never enough. I need to know that my voice matters; indeed, the offer of effective voice is crucial to the legitimacy of modern democracies, while across economic and cultural life voice is offered in various ways. Yet we have grown used to ways of organizing things that ignore voice, that assume voice does not matter. We are experiencing a contemporary crisis of voice, across political, economic and cultural domains, that has been growing for at least three decades. ## Why Voice Matters - Voice as a value is particularly important at times when a whole way of thinking about social political and cultural organization (neoliberalism) operates on the basis that for certain crucial purposes voice as a process does not matter. - By voice as a value, I shall refer to the act of valuing, and choosing to value, those frameworks for organizing human life and resources that themselves value voice (as a process). - Treating voice as a value means discriminating in favor of ways of organizing human life and resources that, through their choices, put the value of voice into practice, by respecting the multiple interlinked processes of voice and sustaining them, not undermining or denying them. - Treating voice as a value means discriminating against frameworks of social economic and political organization that deny or undermine voice, such as neoliberalism. - Valuing voice then involves particular attention to the conditions under which voice as a process is effective, and how broader forms of organization may subtly undermine or devalue voice as a process. - This reflexive concern with the conditions for voice as a process, including those that involve its devaluing, means that 'voice', as used here, is a value about values or what philosophers sometimes call a 'second order' value. ## The Neoliberal Context - Neoliberalism is a policy framework adopted voluntarily by many rich countries such as the USA and the UK. It is not just the Washington Consensus, but more broadly the range of policies that evolved internationally from the early 1980s to make market functioning (and the openness of national economies to global market forces) the overwhelming priority for social organization. - Neoliberalism did not start as a theory about politics, but as a new economic "policy regime" in Richard Peet's phrase. It took root as the rationale behind a particular interpretation of the 1970s global economic crisis and policy responses to it. - The elites and advisor circles involved in developing this new "rationality" of economic and political management were more than technical consultants; they were, in Peet's words, "centres of the creation of meaning." ## Voice as a Process - By voice as a process, I shall mean, as already suggested, the process of giving an account of one's life and its conditions: what philosopher Judith Butler calls "giving an account of oneself." - To give such an account means telling a story, providing a narrative. - It is not often, perhaps, that any of us sits down to tell a story with a formal beginning and end. - But at another more general level, narrative is a basic feature of human action. - This is because, as Charles Taylor put it, man is " a self-interpreting animal." - What we do - beyond a basic description of how our limbs move in space - already comes embedded in narrative, our own and that of others. - This is why to deny value to another's capacity for narrative - to deny her potential for voice - is to deny a basic dimension of human life. - A form of life that systematically denied voice would not only be intolerable, it would, as Paul Ricoeur noted in the quote at the start of this chapter, barely be a culture at all. - The aspect of voice which matters most then for voice as a value is people's practice of giving an account, implicitly or explicitly, of the world within which they act. ## Voice as a Value - Voice as a social process involves, from the start, both speaking and listening, that is, an act of attention that registers the uniqueness of the other's narrative. - Voice does not simply emerge from us without support. We saw earlier that voice requires social resources, but more than that it also requires a form: both are aspects of the materiality of voice. ## Countering Neoliberal Rationality - Neoliberalism insists that there is no other valid principle of human organization than market functioning. - Markets match inputs and outputs in regular ways at the level of individual transactions and at what the political economist Robert Lane calls the level of "species' benefits." - It is no part of market functioning that a particular individual's sequence of inputs and outputs match in a particular way, let alone in a way that matches with that individual's reflections on that sequence. - Markets do not therefore function to provide voice. - The value of market functioning is not explicitly, or implicitly, equivalent to the value of voice. ## Why Voice Matters - The consequence is to understand social and political organization, from the start, on terms that, without necessarily intending to do so, exclude the possibility that voice matters. - From one perspective this might seem puzzling: the 'freedom' that neoliberalism celebrates can sound rather like a celebration of voice since what we do as participants in markets can, under some circumstances, contribute to voice, whether individual (the type of clothes I buy, the food choices I make), collective (fan communities or user groups) or distributed (consumer boycotts or buycotts). - But, as we will see in Chapter Two, the notion of freedom underlying neoliberalism is abstracted from any understanding of the social processes that underpin "voice" in its full sense as an embodied process of effective speech. - Market populism, which claims markets as the privileged site of popular voice, is based on a category error, confusing market functioning with the sort of process that in itself can provide the conditions for sustaining voice. - As Thomas Frank points out, that error was ideologically motivated, since the rise of US market populism coincided with one of the most extreme periods of upwards wealth redistribution in democratic history. - The force of this transformation, Brown argues, is that it does not operate through force, or political rule, but through the internalization of rationality. ## The Value of Voice - The value of voice is offered here as part of such a counter-rationality. - Valuing voice means valuing something that neoliberal rationality fails to count; it can therefore contribute to a counter-rationality against neoliberalism. - To succeed, it must have relevance and scope across the multiple domains, where neoliberal rationality works. - "Voice" does more than value particular voices or acts of speaking; it values all human beings' ability to give an account of themselves; it values my and your status as 'narratable' selves" - Articulating voice -- as an inescapable aspect of human experience -- challenges the neoliberal logic that runs together economic, social, political and cultural domains, and describes them exclusively as manifestations of market processes. - It challenges any form of organization that ignores voice, and rejects, as a starting-point, apparent forms of voice (for example, practices of "self-branding" celebrated in recent marketing discourse) which offer only the opportunity to compete as a commodity. - Articulating voice means challenging the distance that neoliberal logic installs between subjects and a key dimension ("voice") of what gives their lives meaning. - It draws strength from thinkers who have worked to redefine the ends of contemporary economics or politics (the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen on the ends of economic life; social and political theorist Axel Honneth, echoing John Dewey, on the ends of democratic politics). - It connects also to a broader tradition across philosophy, literary theory and sociology that emphasizes the role of narrative in human life, as the embodied form of our actions and reasoning about the world.