Rée, Jonathan. I See a Voice: Deafness, Language, and the Senses.
In this philosophical history, Rée provides a genealogy of the assumptions, prejudices, and ideas that we (along with the thinkers and pedagogues before us) have intuited about perception and the senses. The book’s second half explains the ramifications of these assumptions on Deaf education and the Deaf community more generally. Rée investigates voice not as an object, an “unhistorical thing-in-itself,” but rather as a phenomenon, as “made of nothing but layer upon layer of more or less intelligent experiences” (7). He deems “inane” (6) the endless debates between “the friends and enemies of the voice” (Heidegger, Hegel, and Ong being in the former category, Derrida and the French structuralists of the 1960s in the latter). Friends and enemies alike, he claims, find their ideas rooted in “shadowy metaphysical prejudices” about the voice, the senses, and language, prejudices that Jonathan Sterne will later critique in his “audiovisual litany.” For Rée, these metaphysical prejudices are not just benign intellectual mistakes; our flawed philosophies of the voice, he argues in his book’s second section, have greatly affected the lives, treatment, and education of the deaf community. Rée provides a history of Deaf education, ranging from Abbé de l’Épée’s development of sign language to the oralist/gesturalist debate of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In doing so, he illustrates how prejudices (like the inherent spirituality of hearing or the voice’s tie to interiority) caused various (and often unjust) approaches and attitudes towards the Deaf.
Rée is one of the few scholars to satisfactorily critique both “sides” of the Ong-Derrida debate briefly outlined in my review essay. This argument is rotten, he says, because it has grown from rotten seed—problematic assumptions about the senses and language that have also perpetuated the Deaf’s marginalization in the Western world. Rée’s, then, is for me an informative text about the history of deaf education, but also—in its investigation of philosophical prejudices—a set of warnings about how not to talk about the voice and hearing in my own writing.
