Becoming a voice against narration

There is a history of dismissing narration in audio drama as a failure to recognize the potential of sound as a storytelling medium. This criticism has become relevant again due to the emergence of audio fiction, a new category of audio storytelling characterized by the reliance upon single-voice, documentary-style, reportage-like narration. I argue that narration is a form of anaesthesia and turn to the philosophies of Mladen Dolar and Adriana Cavarero to identify what is missing from the narrating voice. With Dolar, the voice is an articulation of becoming: an eruption formed through bodily processes that enable the being to be heard by others, without the necessity to represent an enduring self on account of its invisible, acousmatic nature. The foundation of the voice as essentially relational is asserted by Cavarero. The individual, isolated subject seeking connection with other beings is rejected by her and replaced with an ontology based upon the voice being an expression from one unique being that invokes another. For Cavarero, the narrating voice is a voice without a relation, and for Dolar, it is a form made commonplace that exists purely to describe and, therefore, has surrendered the possibility of being an expression of becoming. The proliferation of narration, I propose, is an effect of technocapitalism, the confluence of an instrumentalist attitude to technology with the capitalist drive to produce artworks as easily digestible commodities. One way to oppose this, I suggest, is to reject the worry behind narration – that content cannot be shown sonically – and to recognize the causal foundation of mimesis , since this opens the way for the formation of an ecological relationship between the becoming, relational voice and the audio mise en scène , thereby promoting sound as a mimetic, storytelling medium.