Hello everyone, I am welcoming the summer school participants and many thanks to the organizers of the school for the invitation.
I am going to talk about topics which are nearing the intersection between history and gender studies
but I will be doing it from the point of view of the discourse analysis in which I specialize.
My today's lecture is about ideology, voice and intonation, relations
about speaking patterns which help us to think how a person could resonate and act in the context of power relations in history.
I will begin with a small video.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
On the 10th of March 2020, (quite recently but it seems like a long time ago) during one of the meetings of the Russian State Duma,
the first female astronaut Valentina Tereshkova initiated a ‘nullification’ of the terms of the presidency of Vladimir Putin.
Сertainly, Soviet cosmonauts in general, and the first woman in space in particular, were inscribed not only in the Soviet symbolic order,
but also in the order of direct interaction with the authorities, acting as mediators of a special kind.
Сertainly they were more and more favored by the regime.
In a way, they themselves took that place, that position from which power is launched and executed, and if not a social, then a symbolic order is produced.
In this sense the meeting of the bearer of this symbolic order of the times of the USSR with the modern Russian authorities does not seem an accident.
While commenting and criticizing, ridiculing this initiative, users of Russian social networks drew attention to various remarkable details that related primarily to the content of speech.
They discussed how the Soviet cosmos meets in it with Russian cosmism, the appeal to eternity, the way how different kinds of temporalities intersect, access to symbolic resources.
On this parody poster, on this "billboard", which does not exist anywhere except social networks, the symbolic reality of different social orders is combined.
This, of course, is a parody of the famous poster by Irakli Toidze "Motherland Calls" (1941).
On the "billboard" we see Valentina Tereshkova as the Motherland, the inscription "For the Tsar", the OMON (Special Purpose Police Unit) and RosGuard officers, who are popularly called "astronauts".
Monarchy, patriotism, family and the eternity.
In this sense in this meme, we see on one hand the return of one of the classic figures of Soviet mobilization.
But on the other hand here one cannot but notice, especially while looking how this image is mobilised today, how gender is the main agent of this mobilization.
In my lecture, I will not talk about WHAT Tereshkova said, not about her initiative, not about where she was talking from.
I will talk about HOW she did it, how it was said, and how is it connected with gender.
On the slide you see those fragments of Tereshkova’s speech in which the intonation changed: (the words “who will take the RESPONSIBILITY”, “was near”, “HONESTLY, publicly”, “WE MUST”, etc.).
Please pay attention, not to the meaning of these words, but to the manner of speaking.
So in this lecture I am asking you to pay attention to the specific interaction of the speaker and symbolic order.
This example shows well that sometimes ideology can appear not in the text of speech, not in the specifics of its grammar or syntax, not in semantic games,  but in the intonation of speech, and we should pay attention to it.
As soon as we are looking at the intonation, we are returning the voice to the politics
and then we have to talk about how this voice is embodied, how it is related to gender.
And in this case, even researchers such as myself, who do not concentrate on the gender agenda, cannot ignore it.
When analyzing the manner of speaking, one cannot ignore who speaks and how. And here we come to a discussion about the female voice, female vocal role
within the ideological matrix in which we exist and which we partially inherit from the Soviet era.
This female speech, the roots of which lay in the Soviet era, is inherited by us and at the same time is played out in a new, modern context, and is built into the new order of expression.
My lecture today will have several parts that are important for me.
First of all, I want to figure out, with what method, with what conceptual framework we can analyze the voice in speech.
I will give a few more examples that can be interesting to analyze from the same point of view.
I will end with a small epistemological commentary.
I can already say some spoilers.
At the end of the lecture I will try to ponder how a person who is used to work with sources without a voice,
can work with the voice, with which instruments, and which complexities can appear in the process.
So let us continue.
Once again, the situation with the initiative of Valentina Tereshkova interests me first of all as speech, expressed in a voice in the context of contemporary Russian politics, in which Tereshkova is involved in a special way.
Working with this case, we cannot ignore a number of classic texts that allow us to think about the intersection between the subject, ideology, action and different forms of involvement.
Here it is impossible not to recall Louis Althusser with his idea of a hail.
For Althusser the program of beginning of the subjectivity is inseparable from the  authorities.
It is this appeal, the hail, that embeds the subject in the space where real social processes and relations are mediated by the imaginary order of existence.
Ideology is described as an inseparable symbolic medium, which ensures our interaction with society.
Today we can ask all kinds of questions to Althusser's ideas, as we often do with other classical authors.
I am personally interested in understanding how effectively the Althusser’s hail works, and how subject can avoid it.
Today I will be talking, however, about different aspects.
For us, in our case, the Althusser’s understanding of interpellation is incredibly important for understanding how the society mobilization was carried out in the Soviet Union.
Soviet society and economic models were based on mobilization of the population, on specific forms of involvement, motivation of people to be active.
Here we can talk about a specific mobilized Soviet subject.
 
But how did this mobilization work? 
If we conceptualize ideology as something that involves us, “calls out” the subject, then it becomes clear.
In a way, Soviet mobilization can be described as nothing more than the policeman's hail, according to Althusser.
This hail requires a lot of activity in order to take the position of the subject in relation to the hail.
I don't want to go into details of how effective and ineffective the model of Soviet mobilization was.
As a person who studies Soviet scientific programs, I see what this mobilization in the field of scientific work or the implementation of long-term research projects turns out to be.
It is important for us here that in a situation of mobilization, the subjectivity of a person, his body becomes important.
And in particular I am interested in the question what role does the voice play in this mobilization, how it becomes a resource for such a mobilization.
Not only in the question according to what logic does this happen, but also how, all in all, can we find out how the voice works in this case.
And here I will need one more detail, another text, not so old, but also classic.
(Slavoj Žižek “The Sublime Object of Ideology”)
When Žižek talks about his understanding of ideology, comparing it with classical texts, he, coming from the side of psychoanalysis, brings us to the understanding that ideology is often sought out of place.
He writes that we must reconsider our semiotic, text-centric ideas about the functioning of ideology, we must turn to another space where ideology is realized.
Also Teun Adrianus van Dijk in his latest texts, says that we should look for ideology not in the text, but in the context.
Žižek makes another shift, proposes to pay attention not to the level of signs and symbols and their understanding, but to the level of action.
According to Žižek, we should seek the ideological phantasm not in the sphere of the symbolic, but in the action itself.
So, what is thus my idea and why am I taking you on these long detours?
I believe that in order to understand the work of the ideological today, we must analyze speech, covering more broadly how it is produced.
We must analyze how an ideology, which we can understand as an Althusser’s hail or Žižek’s phantasm, appears where we are not used to seeing it.
For example, in a voice.
How does voice become the resource used in a mobilization situation?
How is the mobilization of the speaker himself and his audience organized through the voice?
How does the usage of voice become action, social and political?
So the position of the voice in modern politics and social life is something both obvious and complex.
Withing the current critical political discourse the voice is something that is being discussed.
We demand that our voices be heard, we feel the existence of spheres of silence in the social space and understand their political meaning.
At the same time, when analyzing ideology, we lose the voice in its vocal entirety as an object and instrument of analysis.
To return to the situation with Valentina Tereshkova: no one was interested in analyzing how she makes her speech.
When we analyze the public speech, we think about who the author is, who makes the statement, but we think little about the voice itself.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
We need to understand how meaning is produced by the voice.
I suggest here a closer look at the intonation pattern, prosodic background and performance modes.
At the everyday level, we all understand these things very well.
In everyday life, interacting with people, we are often confused not only by what they say, but by the way they do it.
And here gender also plays an important role, for example, when it comes to expression, which becomes more important than the speaker’s words.
And I am proposing to transfer this understanding from the sphere of private life to the field of analysis of ideology, into research experience.
In this context, it is interesting to understand whether the manner of speaking can be reproduced not on an individual, but on an supra-individual level.
Individual speech could be (and was) analyzed in detail by linguists and specialists in the field of social analysis.
But how can we capture not only the individual characteristics, but the historical, cultural, social patterns of speech at the more general level.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I think we can try to answer this question, and here I am rendered among authors such as Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones. (authors of the book “Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture”, 1996)
They wrote that our concentration on the voice as an expression of political agency and subjectivity, bears the imprint of classical European rationalism, where the voice exists without a body.
Adriana Cavarero (the author of the book “For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression”, 2005) proposes to return to the voice in philosophy,
, and she accuses poststructuralist and postmodernist authors in that they work only with disembodied signs.
Annette Schlichter (see: “Do Voices Matter? Vocality, Materiality, Gender Performativity”, Body & Society, 2011) reproaches Judith Butler for the fact that in her theory of performativity
Butler is sensitive to the body, but completely insensitive to voice.
Subsequently, the word 'voice' appeared in later Butler’s texts, but this topic remains marginal for her.
In general, talking about the voice is always a criticism not only of the rationality we are used to, but also of the analytical tools that we use and reproduce.
What to do with these tools is still a question.
In each situation, it is important to clarify the situation in which a given researcher starts thinking about voice.
In what situations do we find such issues?
Thus I will briefly explain how I came to the discovery of this agenda.
And how this issue gained on actuality after some time.
Some time ago, I taught discourse analysis class at the European Humanities University, which, due to political circumstances, had to move from Minsk to Vilnius.
Then my Vilnius students suggested a video for analysis, which we then discussed for a long time in our course.
It was 2011.
On December 19, 2010, the presidential election in Belarus was held.
There were protests in the country, there were numerous arrests, and international sanctions were imposed on Belarus.
And then the Belarusian Republican Youth Union, a kind of new Belarusian Komsomol, recorded an appeal to the international community.
They urged the international community to abandon double standards, recognize that the world is unfair everywhere, and stop the sanctions.
This statement was unprofessionally made, it was rather trivial, but actually quite interesting.
I will not describe it in detail, I will only say that in the video about ten people with varying degrees of training and willingness, read a text that was clearly not written by them.
So what did this video teach me, and what I was thinking from the Spring 2011?
While analyzing these plots, decoding the cues, we with students realized that the text was not written by the Belorussian Konsomoltsy.
Moreover,  not all of them could normally read it.
 
At the same time, everyone expressed this text in different ways, in different ways, to the extent of their own understanding of how this should be done and how important all this is.
Some participants in the video frowned, others waved their fists, some tried to be serious, especially in the places that seemed to them most important, others grinned.
In this situation, it became clear that in order to understand the meaning that the video participants put into it, it was necessary to analyze not the text (it did not belong to the speakers), but the manner of their expression.
From that moment I began to think about how to analyze the expression of ideology.
And to think about how can the ideology be analyzed as performing art.
There are some difficulties here, to which I will return at the end of the lecture, but for now I want to show the first fragment of this video for you.
It is interesting that when editing these hardly compatible fragments of the video, the creator of the video, the editor decided to put this strict girl ifirst.
Two things interested me in this fragment.
First: The manner of performance of this girl was radically different from the manner of everyone else in the video.
The girl was better prepared than other speakers, but this is not the only point.
In her speech there was something very recognizable for me.
In Valery Todorovsky’s musical “Stilyagi” (2008), Evgenia Brik plays the role of the Komsomol organizer Katya.
In her interviews, the actress talks about the specific experience that she had on the set.
In her own words, she speaks about the Althusser’s hail in the speech of the Komsomol organizer, about the special energy that she felt while standing on the podium and making a speech.
She noted that the form of such a statement was interesting.
I even wrote to Eugenia, I really wanted to talk with her about this experience, but I did not get any answer. Therefore, I refer to her published interviews.
So what should we here pay attention to?
Nina Eidsteim suggests not only to think about the intonation, the “chopped” speech, a high metal voice.
Here, the behavior of the body, which complements the voice, is also important:
for instance a straightened back, rapid gestures, or controlled facial expression.
Remembering the musical of Todorovsky, I realized that the speech of the Belarusian girl reminds me of staged scenes of articulation of ideological speech,
where the speaker (and this is always a female) is both hailing and hailed.
This specific dual mobilization figure manifested in the voice, requires further analysis.
But how to describe this figure in detail, how to code this features of the speech in order to make an analysis? How to fix this specificity? How to describe these patterns?
I have been working with this topic for several years,  I gave students and colleagues these different videos to listen to in an attempt to understand whether they feel this similarity between them.
In general, I think it is important to trust your ear and follow the similarities that it recognizes.
Recently, Russian philologist Ilya Kukulin published a post on his Facebook page in which he drew attention to how the performance of a Chinese children’s choir is similar to some kind of contemporary Russian choir performing songs on the Day of the Police.
Or, a couple of years ago, I heard a wonderful presentation by a colleague from the University of Tartu about how the manner of performance of the Moscow Art Theater was imposed throughout the Soviet empire as part of a universal “culture”.
The specificity of voice performance in the theater turned out to be part of imperialist politics.
So I want to say, that one can find a great number of such remarks in our current scholarly landscape. But how to deal with them if you do not use professional prosody analysis?
I would advise reading Boris Gasparov with his old text “О некоторых тенденциях развития мелодики русской речи”  (“On Some Trends in the Development of the Melody of Russian Speech”, 1979).
Gasparov shows in this text that the change of the pre-revolutionary language norms in the USSR is also manifested in the sphere of intonation.
Gasparov’s reasoning resembles the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, who reflected on intonation as a part of the cultural heritage.
Earlier, I raised a question about how we, as researchers, can analyze the vocalization patterns that are detected by our ears - in a speech that is in reality a female speech.
Here I will move on to the third case of this lecture, to another similarity in this chain of associations.
The association run from Belorussian Konsomoltsy to “Stilyagi”  at the beginning.
And then, my colleagues and I worked with a corpus of oral interviews about perestroika times, verified them with transcripts.
In working with these sources, I drew attention to an interview with Nina Andreeva.
Probably I would not be speaking today on this topic, if this lucky discovery would not have happened.
Nina Andreeva opposed perestroika, she was a professor at Leningrad University, a committed communist.
She also published an article in the newspaper “Советская России” (“Soviet Russia”), entitled “I Can't Give Up My Principles”, which became one of the symbols of resistance to the reformation of Soviet socialism.
I will not dwell on the political context, within which there was an interview with which I worked, and I will turn right to the voice.
So, what is interesting about this fragment? It’s from a biographical interview of Nina Andreeva about late socialism in the USSR.
The fragment is interesting for its heterogeneity, and I must say that I like this heterogeneiety.
In a very short time, intonation patterns change several times.
I tried to make it distinguishable through different colors, and you can see that calm discussion is suddenly replaced by a politically mobilized speech.
The change of regimes of vocalisation occurs when the position of the subject of the utterance and the degree of involvement of the narrator changes.
When Nina Andreeva tells, how they walk with her husband in the park (a miniature from the life of the Soviet intelligentsia), then she speaks in one way.
But this nice story is suddenly interrupted by the fiery politician’s speech, in which she reveals that the general secretary of the Party betrays the ideals of socialism.
There is a big difference between these modes of speech, and it is amazing how quickly the transition between them occurs, this choreography of speech.
So clearly the different position of the subject, is expressed through different forms of intonation.
So clearly the content changes, but so does also the form.
All this makes me think that we have here a specific form of “voice management”.
So the whole posture of political 'valkyrias" is a part of socialisation - both socialisation of intonation and of political socialisation.
Saying what is the "right" behavious if you fulfil a political and official function.
Suzanne G. Cusick wrote about the specific disciplinisation of vocalization that we all go through when we learn how the social order works
Cusick says that the female voice is more disciplined and lists the mandatory set of voice skills for women that they learn.
So what I want to understand is what happens when such a disciplined female voice is chosen to express ideology.
Because it is clear that prosodic skills matter here.
Monique Biemans writes that gender and sex differences in the voice performance of men and women are becoming regularly a topic of discussion, in the media, in the academia or in the everyday life.
For example, there are discussions about biological and evolutional difference in  vocal ranges and voice opportunities.
But here we are talking about social things, about how a person adapts to certain voice patterns when he or she expresses the ideology, and thus turns into a political subject.
Similar things, in my experience, happen to those who follow a teaching career. They experience a professional deformation.
From time to time they find themselves in ridiculous situations when they suddenly go into the 'lecturing mode' while being with friends at a party (and friends, of course, immediately notice this).
It happens to me too.
In general, I am very interested in vocal performances of social roles, including by women.
And in this very case I am interested in the question what happens to women when they are becoming involved and mobilised into the Soviet ideology.
I also worked with the archive of audiopedia, listened to the voices of Soviet people, from the Soviet radio and radio chronicle.
Of the one and a half thousand voices that can be heard in this archive, the female voices are the minority (about a tenth).
If you compare them with the male ones, it becomes quite obvious that it is in the female voices that this vocal specificity of ideological mobilization is more noticeable, it is more expressive.
It is as if a woman would be becoming an ideal medium of ideological message.
And here we can turn to the late Soviet cinema, which began to reflect on the results of such ideological mobilization of Soviet people.
In the “Office Romance” by Eldar Ryazanov (1977) we encounter Shura — a social activist from the local committee of the trade union organization.
As such, she acts as a permanent agent of micromobilization (in the video shown, Shura collects money to help the family with the newborn child).
Shura has a specific sharp hailing voice (in the video it annoys other heroes) and a recognizable specificity of vocalization.
Another example — one of the characters in the comedy “The Diamond Arm” by Leonid Gaidai (1969).
Nonna Mordyukova is also an activist, managing the house.
And importantly, in the movie her voice is also very particular.
Her role is to bring normative texts to other people, to clarify these texts, and to give them a particular intonation.
These texts are mobilizing (“attendance is obligatory” on the announcement of the event) or prohibiting (“Walking with dogs is forbidden”).
Anthropologist Nancy Ries (“Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika”, 1997), who was studying the Moscow conversations of the late 1980s and early 1990s,
remarks that those who controlled the speech of others in Russia at the end of the USSR and at the beginning of the post-Soviet period were elderly women.
However, Ries does not write anything about their voice; she is more interested in narratives and speech genres.
But I want to stress here that normativity is produced here through a specific and recognizable voice.
And this voice belongs to a woman.
