Gabble, Twitter and Hoot

Ian Hacking

• I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses by Jonathan Rée
  HarperCollins, 399 pp, £19.99, January 1999, ISBN 0 00 255793 2

Jonathan Rée takes some tomfoolery from Shakespeare for his title and uses it to create his own striking metaphor. The middle part of his book is about sign languages for the deaf: voices that one sees. The same trope served Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989), but there is more to it than that for Rée. The quotation is from Bottom’s burlesque of love at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The swain says, ‘I see a voice’ – his lover’s – and then goes to the chink in the wall, or rather in the actor, Wall, ‘To spy an I can hear my This be’s face.’ Is this inversion of sight and sound mere silliness, or a more thoughtful playfulness on Shakespeare’s part? The plays – as befits the stage – are full of plays on voice, and for Rée this play is perfect. Although his subtitle refers to the five senses, it is two that preoccupy him, sight and hearing, and sound more than light. He would invert their roles in epistemology, if he could; he can’t, but at least he combats the philosopher’s obsession with vision as the model for perception, and in the modern period, for any type of thought. He also subverts, with barely concealed contempt, the Post-Modern doctrine that the text’s the thing, the notion that writing is paramount and speaking mere air.