Why Voice Matters

Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism

Nick Couldry

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781848606623, 9781848606616
• eBook ISBN: 9781446246740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

One of the best books I have read in years about what it means to engage neoliberalism through a critical framework that highlights those narratives and stories that affirm both our humanity and our longing for justice. It should be read by everyone concerned with what it might mean to not only dream about democracy but to engage it as a lived experience and political possibility.
- Henry Giroux, McMaster University

"An important and original book that offers a fresh critique of neoliberalism and its contribution to the contemporary crisis of 'voice'. Couldry's own voice is clear and impassioned - an urgent must-read."
- Rosalind Gill, King's College London

For more than thirty years neoliberalism has declared that market functioning trumps all other social, political and economic values. In this book, Nick Couldry passionately argues for voice, the effective opportunity for people to speak and be heard on what affects their lives, as the only value that can truly challenge neoliberal politics. But having voice is not enough: we need to know our voice matters. Insisting that the answer goes much deeper than simply calling for ?more voices?, whether on the streets or in the media, Couldry presents a dazzling range of analysis from the real world of Blair and Obama to the social theory of Judith Butler and Amartya Sen.

Why Voice Matters breaks open the contradictions in neoliberal thought and shows how the mainstream media not only fails to provide the means for people to give an account of themselves, but also reinforces neoliberal values. Moving beyond the despair common to much of today?s analysis, Couldry shows us a vision of a democracy based on social cooperation and offers the resources we need to build a new post-neoliberal politics.

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’.¹ 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.

Telling the story of this crisis is important, since one of its aspects is a loss of the connecting narratives that would help us to grasp many specific breakdowns as dimensions of the same problem. In countries such as the UK and the USA, we can easily miss the wider pattern: offers of voice are increasingly unsustainable; voice is persistently offered, but in important respects denied or rendered illusory; and at the root of these contradictions is a doctrine (neoliberalism) that denies voice matters. My aim in this book is to name that crisis and identify some resources for thinking beyond it.

That involves using the word ‘voice’ in a particular way. Two senses of the word ‘voice’ are familiar. First, we can mean the sound of a person speaking: yet while the sonic aspect of voice generates important insights (discussed in Chapter Five), this usage does not capture the range of ways, not necessarily involving sound, in which I can give an account of myself. Second, we have in the sphere of politics become accustomed to equating ‘voice’ with the expression of opinion or, more broadly, the expression of a distinctive perspective on the world that needs to be acknowledged. This political use of the word ‘voice’ continues to be useful, especially in contexts where long-entrenched inequalities of representation need to be addressed; it has been applied, for example, to media’s role in development settings.² But in other circumstances it is in danger of becoming banal – we all have ‘voice’, we all celebrate ‘voice’ – so how far can using the term in this sense take us?

I would like, however, to use the term ‘voice’ differently, in a way that distinguishes between two levels: voice as a process (already relatively familiar) and voice as a value. First, we need to get clearer on voice as a value. This dimension 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 favour 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.

Why should this distinction be important? What can the term ‘voice’, used in this special way, add to other terms, such as democracy or justice, in helping us think about political change? The reason lies in a historically specific situation. A particular discourse, neoliberalism, has come to dominate the contemporary world (formally, practically, culturally and imaginatively). That discourse operates with a view of economic life that does not value voice and imposes that view of economic life on to politics, via a reductive view of politics as the implementing of market functioning. In the process of imposing itself on politics and society, neoliberal discourse evacuates entirely the place of the social in politics and politics’ regulation of economics. These moves have been implemented in various ways in different countries, whether or not they are formal democracies and to greater or lesser degrees using the disguise of democracy. The result is the crisis of voice under neoliberalism.

I offer ‘voice’ here as a connecting term that interrupts neoliberalism’s view of economics and economic life, challenges neoliberalism’s claim that its view of politics as market functioning trumps all others, enables us to build an alternative view of politics that is at least partly oriented to valuing processes of voice, and includes within that view of politics a recognition of people’s capacities for social cooperation based on voice. I use one word – voice – to capture both the value that can enable these connections and the process which is that value’s key reference-point. The term ‘voice’, as used here, does not derive from a particular view of economic processes (consumer ‘voice’) or even mechanisms of political representation (political ‘voice’), but from a broader account of how human beings are. The value of voice articulates some basic aspects of human life that are relevant whatever our views on democracy or justice, so establishing common ground between contemporary frameworks for evaluating economic, social and political organization (for example, the varied work of philosophers Paul Ricoeur and Judith Butler, development economist Amartya Sen, social theorist Axel Honneth and political theorist Nancy Fraser); and it links our account of today’s crisis of voice to a variety of sociological analyses (from diagnoses of the contemporary workplace to accounts of particular groups’ long-term exclusion from effective voice). All are resources for addressing the contemporary crisis of voice and thinking beyond the neoliberal framework that did so much to cause it.

This book, then, attempts to work on multiple levels, each interacting with the others: first, there is the primary process of voice, the act of giving an account of oneself, and the immediate conditions and qualities of that process (more on this shortly); then there is the ‘second order’ value of voice (the commitment to voice that matters)which is defended throughout; third, there is the work of connecting the value of voice to other normative frameworks and uncovering their implicit appeal to a notion of voice (see Chapter Five); and finally, there is the work of uncovering the processes which obstruct voice, what Judith Butler calls the ‘materialization’ which allows some types of voice to emerge as possible and others not (see Chapters Six and Seven), and reflecting on how those processes might be resisted.

It is also worth commenting on the relation between ‘voice’, as I use the term here, and politics. The concept of ‘voice’ operates both within and beyond politics. It starts from an account of the process of voice which is not necessarily political at all. This is important if ‘voice’ is to be a broad enough value to connect with diverse normative frameworks and be applied in multiple contexts beyond formal politics: whether in the economic/political sphere (Amartya Sen’s work on development and freedom, discussed in Chapter Two) or in the social/political sphere (Axel Honneth’s work on recognition discussed in Chapter Three). The price of making these multiple connections is, inevitably, to shake each loose of the detailed philosophical traditions from which it emerged, but the benefit is to reveal a broader consensus around voice that can mount a combined challenge against the discourse of neoliberalism, and on terms that go beyond the exclusive domain of representative politics. The book’s argument remains, however, oriented all along to politics in a broader sense as the space where struggle and debate over ‘the authoritative allocation of goods, services and values’³ takes place. It argues for a rejection of neoliberalism’s reductive view of democratic politics and its replacement by a view of politics as broad mechanisms for social cooperation that can be traced back to the early twentieth-century US political theorist John Dewey. Free of the straitjacket of neoliberal thinking, we can even identify a broader consensus here, going beyond Dewey, Sen and Honneth, to include recent work on social production and social media (for example, Yochai Benkler’s work on networks and Hardt and Negri’s work on ‘the common’).

Admittedly, my use of the term ‘voice’ cuts across Aristotle’s well-known discussion in the Politics⁴ where he distinguishes mere ‘voice’ (phoné) from ‘speech’ (logos); for Aristotle only the latter is the medium of political deliberation and action, the former being the capacity that humans share with most animals of communicating basic sensations of pain and the like. But there is a reason for my emphasis on the word ‘voice’. The modern integration of lifeworld and system, intensified practically in the work regimes of the digital media age and ideologically by neoliberal doctrine, disrupts the basic space of voice/expression which Aristotle felt could safely be assumed ‘beneath’ political speech. Workers’ rights are not relatively, but absolutely, excluded by fundamentalist market logics; migrant workers are not relatively, but absolutely, excluded from membership of most territorially-based citizenships.⁵ The nature of social and political organization under neoliberalism requires us to focus on how the bare preconditions of speech are being challenged (a parallel with Giorgio Agamben’s work on ‘bare life’),⁶ and to reaffirm the need to meet those basic conditions of possibility. So this book is about the value not just of speech, but of something more basic and more fundamental: v...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Voice as Value
• 2 The Crisis of Neoliberal Economics
• 3 Neoliberal Democracy: An Oxymoron
• 4 Media and the Amplification of Neoliberal Values
• 5 Philosophies of Voice
• 6 Sociologies of Voice
• 7 Towards a Post-Neoliberal Politics
• Background Note
• References
• Index