Out of your mouth: children's voices as a political challenge to the acoustics of public spaces

Abstract

The voice as a set of sounds emitted by the larynx with the air coming out of the lungs is rarely thought of in political terms. The text proposes a reflection on the political agency of children based on the relevance of the acoustics of the voice, stating that the political relevance of intervention in public spaces cannot be understood without also considering the sound of their voices. Thus, children's voices emerge as a device for critically thinking about the way we subject ourselves politically and an index for questioning the politics of public spaces in which any voice can be uttered. The text is crossed by the interventions of a girl and a boy - Rafaella and Rafael - whose words, spoken in a philosophical activity at their schools, challenge us to think of the voice as something that is made and that can (re)signify everything. We go through the Aristotelian split between phoné and logos as a mark of political agency and, with Agamben, we recover childhood as the inaugural fact of the political experience. This brings us to the voice as a political difference and, with Adriana Cavarero and Anna Pagés, we take on the phonetics of voices as fundamental to rethinking the public space beyond the discursiveness that the humanist and liberal tradition has established as the mark of the (autonomous, rational, discursive) citizen.

Keywords:
Voice; Childhood; Children's voices; Political agency; Philosophy with children.