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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural

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Rethinking the politics of voice

a
Nick Couldry
a
Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College,
University of London, London, UK

Version of record first published: 27 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Nick Couldry (2009): Rethinking the politics of voice, Continuum: Journal of
Media & Cultural Studies, 23:4, 579-582

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 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Vol. 23, No. 4, August 2009, 579–582

COMMENTARY
Rethinking the politics of voice
Nick Couldry*

Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, UK

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The project of cultural studies has, for some time, lacked a focus. The once critical idea of
paying attention to popular culture and its investments, now comfortably institutionalized,
has lost its critical edge; and, in my view at least, conjunctural analysis is by itself too
general a procedure to yield distinctive results. But a fuller engagement with the problems
of democracy still retains the bite of cultural studies’ earlier interventions. This is the type
of intervention that the Listening Project promises, bringing to mind both Raymond
Williams’ original urgent challenges to formal democratic culture and, in its cross-
disciplinary ambition, Williams’ protest that there was no specific discipline where he
could pose the questions that mattered to those whose voices he encountered in the process
of teaching (communicating about) culture (Williams 1961, 10).
The Listening Project is an exciting and genuinely new intervention. As the essays in
this special issue testify, it offers a searching and critical engagement with the languages
and practices of democracy; it promises a great deal, analytically, elaboratively,
methodologically, because it knows where it is heading. A virtue of the Listening Project
is the explicitness and directness of its normative foundations. In these closing comments
to this special issue, I want to reflect in a little more detail on what might be at stake here
and to add my thoughts on how exactly the binary of listening and speaking might be
refashioned.
For as the editors of this special issue make clear, the point is not to value listening at
the expense of speaking but to understand better the relationship between the two
practices, their ‘interdependency [and] the dynamic relation between them’ (Bickford
1996, 145). This is surely right: as Gayatri Spivak put it two decades ago, ‘“Who should
speak?” is less crucial than “who will listen?”’ (1990, 59), since only if there are listeners
will people’s voices be registered. But why exactly is this, and if this is relatively obvious,
why has it been so easy nonetheless to forget?
Listening matters for reasons other than the pleasures of aural attentiveness; of course,
we have the faculty of hearing and listening, and exercising it gives most people great
pleasure. But listening in the sense discussed here is not dependent literally on hearing; it
could just as easily be practised by people deprived of hearing, whether using sign
language or reading the words of others. Listening here is, first and foremost, the act of
recognizing what others have to say, recognizing that they have something to say or,

* Email: n.couldry@gold.ac.uk

ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online

q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304310903026594
http://www.informaworld.com
 580 N. Couldry

better, that they, like all human beings, have the capacity to give an account of their lives
that is reflexive and continuous, an ongoing, embodied process of reflection. As the articles
here bring out, the material conditions of listening are complex, and have been far too little
explored. But rather than go over that important ground here, I want to take a step back and
reflect on the normative framework that underlies it.
The reason we need to listen – and the reason why, arguably, depending on how we
want to frame things, we have an ‘obligation’ to listen – is that all human beings have the
capacity for voice, to give an account of their lives. This is an irreducible part of their
human agency. If to acknowledge this is humanism, so be it; it should be obvious it need
not rest on any simple notion of agency or on any complacent notion of the superiority of
human life over other forms of life, let alone a privileged attempt to ‘speak for’ humanity
from one site or another. This irreducible feature of human agency requires recognition, as
a feature of every human agent, and therefore as a feature mutually shared by any two or
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more humans who interact with each other. (The concept of recognition I derive here from
the work of the German social theorist Axel Honneth [Honneth 2007], but it could be
articulated from other foundations too [see, for example, Ricoeur 2007], nor are Honneth’s
exact formulations essential to my comments here.) So, a mere claim by particular
individuals or groups to ‘voice’, without any practice of listening, is contradictory, or at
best incomplete.
Does this mean that the ‘politics of voice’ is itself contradictory? The answer is no, if
by ‘voice’ we mean the implicitly linked practices of speaking and listening, based in a
practice of mutual recognition, as understood in the essays here. But the answer is yes, if
by the politics of voice we mean a claim to voice in isolation. So it is important to make
clear that by ‘voice’ here we mean not the simple claim to speak (or the simple act of
speaking in one’s own name, important, of course, though that is). By ‘voice’ –
necessarily – we mean something more: we mean the second-order value of voice that is
embodied in the process of mutually recognizing our claims on each other as reflexive
human agents, each with an account to give, an account of our lives that needs to be
registered and heard, our stories endlessly entangled in each others’ stories. As the late
Paul Ricoeur put it: ‘in our experience the life history of each of us is caught up in the
histories of others’ (1992, 161).
It is at this point that the mutual interweaving of the concepts of listening and voice
becomes clear. For it is through the process of listening that the value of voice is mutually
registered between us. The adjustments we make in order to listen better to others turn
precisely on finding better ways of taking account of the complexities, the processual
subtleties, of voice. So articulating the concept of listening, as the Listening Project does,
plays a crucial role in filling out our understanding of the meaning of voice, both as a
process in itself and as a second-order value.
But you might want to ask, why should any of this matter beyond perhaps a small
conceptual clarification? It matters because, for nearly three decades and in many places, a
very different politics has been dominant, a neoliberal discourse that reduces politics to
market functioning and so, at a basic level, erases the value of ‘voice’, not just particular
voices that might matter but the second-order principle that people’s ability to give an
account of their lives is an irreducible part of what must be taken into account in any form
of social, political or economic organization. Neoliberal discourse has spread from
economic thought to political doctrine, generating a ‘culture’ of neoliberalism so deeply
engrained that it would be naive in the extreme to expect it simply to evaporate, just
because a few slogans of market fundamentalism have become embarrassingly at odds
with the widely known facts of how global markets operate. As an embedded culture,
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 581

neoliberal discourse uses market language to normalize the absence of the value of voice.
The result has been a crisis of voice (Couldry 2008; forthcoming) in economic, political
and cultural domains.
We see a crisis, not merely a deficit, of voice, at least in the political domain, since
political orders that require some level of democratic legitimacy require for their survival
some mechanisms of ‘voice’ in the basic, first-order sense; they have no choice but to offer
voice, even if the offer is elsewhere, and indirectly, retracted. One effective form of
retraction is exactly that pointed to by the Listening Project: to make no provision for
listening alongside apparent mechanisms for speaking.
The general principle is familiar enough from discussions of the apparent virtues of
‘interactivity’. An ‘interactive’ website is worth nothing, unless someone is listening to the
process of interaction, and as a result some impacts ensue. In a broader context, neoliberal
Britain provides some clear examples of the conflict between the claim to offer ‘voice’ in,
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say, public services – interactive consumer choice – and a complete failure to grasp what
listening, and the broader value of voice, might entail, beyond pure formalism (Couldry
Forthcoming, chap. 3). Let me give, as a brief example, the White Paper published by the
UK Department of Communities and Local Government in July 2008. This was written in
response to numerous recent critiques of UK citizens’ sense of lack of involvement in the
political system. Its title – Communities in Control: Real People, Real Power – sounds
encouraging, and in its 130 pages it contains proposals that are hard not to welcome – for
example more local negotiation of police crime-reduction priorities (Department of
Communities and Local Government 2008, 72), and many mechanisms prima facie for
involving local people in council decision making. But two gaps are striking. First, while it
contains much detail on how local decision making might be made more inclusive – ‘we
want formal democratic decision-making to be conducted as locally as possible’
(Department of Communities and Local Government 2008, 70) – no attention is given at
any point to how local government might connect or challenge with other levels of
government, whether national or regional. In a UK political system whose local
government many commentators from left and right consider extremely weak – indeed
weakened by nearly three decades of neoliberal policy – this is surely the essential point.
Second, the role that the White Paper imagines for local citizens is largely confined to that
of local services user: little attention is given to how local citizens might challenge local
policy, let alone debate national policy and the way it impinges on local decision making.
As a result, no consideration is given to how citizens might be better listened to as
contributors to the core political process (developing policy). The reason is obvious: the
New Labour government, quite consistently with the profound centralization of decision
making required to implement neoliberal marketization, is interested in offering voice
only at levels where policy and policy frameworks cannot be affected, but it is not
interested in a policy process that, when it matters, listens better to its citizens.
The articles in this special issue provide other fascinating examples of this crucial
tension between practices of listening and the formal offer of voice from political,
corporate and consumer life in Australia. The paradox – that voice can apparently be
offered, without any attention to whether it is matched by processes for listening to, and
registering, voice – is part of the banal oxymoron of neoliberal democracy. This
phenomenon crosses many countries even if, in Australia, it is overlaid by other historical
and cultural complexities.
The result displayed here of the work of the Listening Project is truly inspiring; its
lessons, and perhaps more important its questions, deserve to resonate widely. If they do,
then the practice of the project that until now we called ‘cultural studies’ will change quite
 582 N. Couldry

radically, and for the better. In the process, whether or not we retain the term ‘cultural
studies’, constructive thought about the future of our democracies will surely be enriched.

Notes on contributor
Nick Couldry is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of
London, where he is Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy
(www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/global_media_democracy/). He was a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg
School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, for the fall semester of 2008. He is the
author or editor of seven books, including, most recently, Listening beyond the Echoes: Media,
Ethics and Agency in an Uncertain World (Paradigm, 2006) and (with Sonia Livingstone and Tim
Markham) Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

References
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Bickford, S. 1996. The dissonance of democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Couldry, N. 2008. Media and the problem of voice. In Participation and media production: Critical
reflections on content creation, ed. N. Carpentier and B. De Cleen, 15 – 26. Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Press.
———. Forthcoming. Voice: Culture and politics beyond the horizon of neoliberalism. London:
Sage.
Department of Communities and Local Government [UK]. 2008. Communities in control: Real
people, real power. http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/communities/pdf/886045.pdf
(accessed 16 August 2008).
Honneth, A. 2007. Disrespect. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ricoeur, P. 1992. Oneself as another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2007. The course of recognition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Spivak, G. 1990. The postcolonial critic. London: Routledge.
Williams, R. 1961. The long revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin.