Cavarero and Rodenburg: Marti Newland (Columbia University)

Reading Cavarero and Rodenburg in conversation reinforce how “voice in theory” and “voice in practice” are inextricable. Rodenburg explains the challenges of vocalization within Western aesthetic, psychological, health and political ideals as Cavarero outlines the historical and philosophical influences of these Western ideas. While Rodenburg provides suggestions to overcome the challenges she outlines, her pedagogical philosophy remains limited by a vocal epistemology informed by the pathologizing of (non-Western) bodies through the colonial era as well as an essentialist frame that I found myself correcting while reading. Where is performativity for Rodenburg? This pathologizing, led by medical scientists and subsumed by voice pedagogues, defines human physiology in a way that renders vocal practices “healthy” or “unhealthy,” and consequently “right”/“wrong,” “beautiful/ugly,” etc. Accordingly, one’s vocal acts should sound the same through one’s life—as the vocal technique Rodenburg offers can discipline age, illness, and injury, a goal she recommends to readers. Intent on telling readers how to achieve “healthy” vocalization binds Rodenburg to the very traditions (“habits” as she calls them) she works to frustrate in order to encourage access to one’s “right” to vocalize. The “healthy” vocalization she celebrates comes from a specific Western vocal ideal, an ideal she uncritically naturalizes in the book. This “one voice,” as Cavarero indexes it, leaves both philosophers and practitioners with concerns about individual agency (see the book titles). I read Cavarero’s argument for the imperative “vocalized logos” and Rodenburg’s argument for exercising one’s right to vocalize as calls to express selfhood. These calls, however, require both voice “theorists” and “practitioners” to reevaluate the epistemology from which these calls emerge and consider other approaches to expressing selfhood. Fortunately, Cavarero and Rodenburg give us a path to conduct this reevaluation: breathing.

Cavarero reminds us of the role of breathing within a Western religious philosophy and shows how breathing is the mode through which humans relate to one another (Cavarero 2005: 21). “Nothing more than the act of breathing,” she says, “is able to testify to the proximity of human beings to one another”(ibid: 31). Relating to other humans requires speaking with oneself first since “interior discoursing is the condition of possibility for speaking to others”(ibid: 46). I take Cavarero very seriously here, that breathing is a “profound communication of oneself” (ibid: 31). Rodenburg describes how breathing can provide access to the self through repeated breathing exercises where “as the breath goes lower…it settles down into and disrupts a habitation untouched by intellect and rationality. When it does hit bottom it sometimes dislodges a vital clue to our being—the secret life held down under the deepest of breaths”(Rodenburg 1992: 88-89). While Cavarero addresses the external expression of self, and Rodenburg the internal search for self, both authors speak to the dangers of encountering the self through (deep) breathing in vocalization--“irrational,” “natural,” possibly even “unhealthy”(!) vocal sounds can make one vulnerable to an undesirable reception by the public. For example, one’s voice may be heard as male or female, White or non-White, educated or uneducated. And even worse—the potential for these mishearings to be an evaluation of one’s self... scary territory in the West.

These thoughts about breath from Cavarero and Rodenburg bring me to the question: How could we reconsider Barthes through a discussion of breathing? His reflection on “oratorical” language intrigues me (Barthes 1972: 186)—words necessitating vocalization in order to realize their meaning—Romantic French poetry was the example he gave of such language, but many languages are referential distinctly through sound (Mandarin Chinese, for example, as well as many regional dialects throughout the US). I understand “oratorical” language as similar to what Cavarero would call “vocalized logos.” So what, then, of deeply breathed vocalization, of self-full vocalized logos? Additionally, Barthes description of listening to a singer as erotic (ibid: 188) evokes Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1981) and connect the expression of selfhood with the vocalizing agency Cavarero and Rodenburg seek. To me, the task going forward would be to expand the episteme of vocalization through ethnographic research about breathing and vocality, at once in theory and in practice. I long for Rodenburg to pause with the “Black American gospel singer” she incessantly references: to listen carefully to her singing and ask her about how she understands vocal practice, philosophy (or not). I suspect she, along with many different types of singers, has a valuable vocal approach to add to this field of inquiry, an approach that could alter the epistemological axis around which voice theorists and practitioners often get stuck. On a different note, I found the writing style of both Cavarero (Kottman’s translation) and Rodenburg to be very speech-like in style. I look forward to talking about that.