Voice, Race, and the Problem with Vocal Ontology of Uniqueness: Toward a Theory of Voice as Intra-Action

This article examines the intersection of musicology and philosophy by building on Nina Sun Eidsheim’s critique of Adriana Cavarero’s vocal ontology of uniqueness, assessing its strengths and weaknesses while exploring the influence of Hannah Arendt on Cavarero’s thought, with insights from Sophie Loidolt on Arendtian plurality. While acknowledging the challenges inherent in a paradigm where voice reflects the human subject, I show that Eidsheim’s claims against Cavarero are not fully justified, despite Cavarero’s framework inadequately addressing racialized embodiment. To reconcile these perspectives, I reinterpret Eidsheim’s theory of voice as action in terms of Karen Barad’s intra-action. I propose a framework that views voice as a dynamic material-discursive phenomenon, capable of revealing and obscuring the uniqueness of embodied subjects through repeatable vocal scripts. I suggest that vocal uniqueness arises contextually not as a fixed point or an intersection of axes but as a moving topological knot, produced intra-actively in an act of agential cut. While the features of a person’s voice can be delineated in the act of observation, evoking a sense of uniqueness, such delineation does not reveal any kind of unmoving, unmistakable truth—either about the voice or the person who uses it.