Voice, naming and unnaming in multi-species dialogue

Written by Dr Malaika Cunningham (Brunel University London)

‘Voice’ is a layered and complicated concept. It can be embodied and metaphorical. Revolutionary and ordinary. Empowering or patronising. It is often conceptualised within political and socially engaged artistic contexts in terms of how we make sure certain voices are heard. Often, when the term ‘voice’ is used in these contexts, we lean towards the revolutionary and metaphorical understanding of the term, evoked almost as a synonym for representation. For example, in verbatim performance, where the literal words (and often character and intonation) of participants directly represent the stories, feelings and opinions of a community within the artwork. Or in Boal’s Legislative Theatre, where stories, improvisations and discussions emerging from a theatre piece co-created with a community are ‘metabolised’ into policy (Boal, 2001). This kind of work aims to bring voices which may ordinarily be overlooked into political and policy-making spaces.

There is also a growing interest in how we hear the ‘voice’ of the more-than-human. In the context of global environmental crises, it is crucial that we try to tune into these voices and that these entities have a kind of representation within decision-making spaces. But how do we do that? And what role might the arts play in this task? In this short blog I will explore these questions, using the Freirean concept of ‘naming’ and an Ursula Le Guinn short story about ‘unnaming’.

I have written elsewhere on how art and storytelling might help us to change the ‘tone of voice’ of formal political and policy-making spaces (such as citizen assemblies). Together with artists Katy Rubin and Sarah Woods, I argue that formal political spaces have prioritised and valued a narrow understanding of the ‘rational’ voice and a didactic approach to discourse which excludes a range of people and communication styles from these spaces. We argue that storytelling and socially engaged performance practices can be used within formal political spaces to:

1. Allow us to shift away from ‘single-issue’ policy agendas into more holistic ‘systems-thinking’ approaches through using human stories as a starting point.
2. Use playfulness and humour to disrupt and challenge traditional hierarchies around whose voice is most important.

This work owes a lot of Paulo Freire whose radical pedagogies are still foundational to how we think about empowerment within education and in socially engaged arts practice (particularly via Augusto Boal). According to Freire, empowerment is dependent on those facing oppressions claiming autonomy over the naming of the world around them, as essential part of dialogue and change.

To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. (p.69, 1970, emphasis in original)

This idea of naming the world around us seems to marry both our metaphorical and embodied understandings of ‘voice’. It is both the literal action of vocalising – giving breath and sound to describe the world around us. It is also a reflective and metaphorical act which helps us to understand, define and interact with the world. For Freire, it is crucial to first name our oppressions to then seek the means by which to overcome them.

Our naming of the world around us is also foundational to our relationships with the more-than-human world. In naming, we acknowledge, notice and tune into the world around us. Jenny Odell (2019) speaks of how in beginning to recognise and name the birds in the local area, she heard bird song in a new, more nuanced way.

Figure 1: Understanding the flora of our city as empowerment in Hinterlands, 2022. Photo by Oliver Ibbotson

In Hinterlands, an arts and permaculture project I led with theatre and interactive arts company, The Bare Project, we spent more than year doing monthly ‘plant walks’ with local women from migrant backgrounds up and down the Sheffield-Tinsley Canal. Together, we got to know the local flora, their medicinal uses, their folklores and, of course, their names. This act of naming the world around us was rooting for us – by getting to know these plant neighbours we also felt more at home. Like the knowledge of and language for the land around us also gave us a bit of ownership over it. This was, in a small, ordinary way, empowering for us and the women we worked with.

Yet this also imposes our language and our names upon our more-than-human neighbours. Like naming our oppressions, it gives us a kind of power over it. That is the funny relationship between language and power. This ‘naming’ helps us to notice and understand the more-than-human, and this can help us to protect it, but also to own and use it. It is, literally and figuratively, on our own terms. How then, do we listen to the more-than-human without our human languages? What can we learn if we leave our names behind? As Freire himself puts it ‘How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart from others – mere “its” in whom I cannot recognise other “I”s?’ (p. 71).

Figure 2: Night walk in November 2024 at Wondelgemse Meersen as part of Midnight Marsh – a project exploring how we bring the ‘voice’ of contested derelict marshes around the edges of the city into the city centre.

This is a question grappled with by many environmentalists, activists and artists right now, including a number of the artists working with VOICE. For example, Marina Wainer’s Synocene, Invisible Flock’s Voyage or Jakob Kukula’s RiverSynth, all of whom are experimenting with new audio and/or digital technologies to help bridge the translation gap – decentring human perspectives and finding more embodied approaches to multi-species listening.

Ursula LeGuinn has a very beautiful short story called She Unnames Them (1985) which goes some way in answering these questions via a playful sequel to biblical creation myth of Adam & Eve. Acknowledging that the singular ‘I’ with a specific voice or viewpoint does not necessarily fit well with other species. In the story Eve decides to ‘unname’ the world, finally unnaming herself as “I could not now, in all conscience, make an exception for myself.” In the story, this act dissolves the barriers between species and objects of the world:

“None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm -- that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.”

The story offers us a sense of a more embodied response to our need to ‘give voice’ or listen to our more-than-human neighbours. As Eve says in the story, this is an acknowledgement “that talk was getting us nowhere”.

There is no single correct way to listen to the voices of the more-than-human, as the diverse scientific and artistic approaches which form VOICE attests to. At times, we will need to name the world around us to help us notice it and understand it. Naming is a key part of a dialogue, with across species. But perhaps we should try to hold these names lightly – ready to give them up so that we might acknowledge ill-defined “swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and crawling and tunnelling” whenever we get the chance.