Preface: Vocal Turns

What kind of voices do we find and hear today? What modes of listening do we cherish and wish to foster for the future? In Civilization and its Discontents, in which Freud discusses the benefits of technological progress in overcoming human limitations, he also keeps us alert to its dangers. In his reflections on various modern inventions, including the gramophone and the telephone, Freud expressed his concerns about the future of humanity. These technological instruments indeed help us retain fleeting auditory echoes, and “to hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale” (Freud, 2001, p. 91). And yet these fantastic technologies, Freud concludes, fail to generate a happy human being. Freud's pessimism produced an image of the new human being, a mirror image to Nietzsche's Übermensch. For Freud, the modern human being has “become a kind of prosthetic God” (Freud, 2001, pp. 91-92). Both models of the new human have great power, and both are tied to the death of God, but how different they are! Whereas Nietzsche's Übermensch is an embodiment of exuberant vigor and life-affirmation, Freud's “prosthetic God” is a defective and vulnerable human being, suffering from chronic dissatisfaction. Freud's cultural analysis of the rapidly changing present, written in 1930, still speaks to us, even though his portrayal of the modern artificial-limbed divine being is, for the young generation of the 21st century, a kind of prehistoric human whose technological naivety itself seems to belong to a fairy tale. Yet in analyzing the human condition of his own time, Freud captures an essential dimension of the technological-human experience of our era: “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times” (Freud, 2001, p. 92).

Much of our vocal experience is completely dependent on auxiliary digital organs. Various communication gadgets

make our link