14. Reprise: Voice, Voices, and the Ethics of Voicing
In being identified with B, A is "substantially one" with a person other than [herself]. Yet at the same time [s]he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus [s]he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another.… A doctrine of consubstantiality, either explicit or implicit, may be necessary to any way of life. For substance, in the old philosophies, was an act; and a way of life is an acting-together; and in acting together, [people] have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial. (Burke, 1950, p. 21)
In all the years we have been working together, the authors of this work have never before been consubstantial—identified—in quite the way that we find ourselves to be after working through this chapter. What had been two distinct formative experiences—being a recording vocalist and being an ethnographer of rhetoric—have emerged as consubstantially unified in their ethical operations of vocal appropriation and editing. Of course, we imagine that anyone who has spent time thinking about what to do with the voices of others—all that they say and all that they invoke and occlude—has made friends with the idea of an emerging third voice, as we are calling it: the voice of the product of speaker and editor/author.
Whether we are editing our own works or the works of others, whether we are editing words or images, whether we are editing audio or video, whether we are editing to make amendments or deletions, whether we are editing to take chances or to make corrections, "editing" names an act that involves identifying choices and acting upon those choices in some way. And while Lon Bender (2007) described success in sound editing as making it all seem like it happened, it is clear that someone has clearly done something. Someone has acted. Someone has made some choices. And these choices matter. As Kenneth Burke (1984) reminded us, "Action is fundamentally ethical, since it involves preferences.… The ethical shapes our selection of means"; consequently, "all universe-building is ethical" (p. 250). If we can understand qualitative research as an act of universe-building, we must recognize the far-reaching implications of voice, voices, and ethics of voicing present in the sleights of ear we perform when speaking through the voices of others.
Rather than leave you with "our" final word, we will, instead, leave you with a familiar question and two versions of audiovisual storytelling. Each features the voice of Yixin Mei, a former Michigan State student from Shanghai, China. The first (Fig. 7) is told in the third voice: the voice that emerges from the consubstantiation of audiovisual media created by Mei and edited by Bump and Julie. The second (Fig. 8) is the unedited video from which most of the narrative in the composite piece was drawn.
We offer these for your consideration in order to invite your voices and possibly the voices of your students. You may wish to ask them to consider any/all of the following questions:
- What information from Fig. 8 was used to construct the film in Fig. 7? What was not?
- How was the information modified and by whom?
- For example, notice Mei's continuity edits at 2:27 and 2:29 of the film in Fig. 8: "… I just go with the life. [edit] I am wondering [edit], what if I stay here…"
- Notice that we have made some edits in the Fig. 7 version as well—the most obvious being the deletion from 2:03 until 2:18. You can hear that we brought together Mei's two references to magic in our edit at 3:39.
- What other differences can you detect?
- Whose voices do these differences help you hear?
- What other information was added?
- What is the role of that other information? That is, how do the "live action" pieces speak to and with the narrated parts?
- What is the overall theme of the film in Fig. 7? Is it the same as the overall theme in Fig. 8? If not, what seems to be responsible for shaping the difference(s)?
- What elements of Mei's Fig. 8 story are most accentuated by the inclusion of the additional footage in Fig. 7? What (all) may have influenced these choices?
In sum, we offer you Mei's voice and ours and ask you and your students to consider, "What does it mean to 'have' a voice?"
Fig. 7: "Yixin Mei Napa Valley Internship [Edited]." (Captioned, or read the transcript in the appendix.)
Fig. 8: "Yixin Mei: Napa Valley Internship [Original]." (Captioned, or read the transcript in the appendix.)