Cavarero’s dream of a philosophy stemming from a logos of vocal resonance rather than one of understanding and a politics based on a polyvocal song of unique voices is rightly complicated by Rodenburg’s practice of helping the natural and healthy voice emerge. With phenomena like pushing or devoicing, we can see how relationality begins with the individual voice and how Cavarero’s song could go a step further and take into consideration not just the unique timbre of each voice, but also what voices are louder than others, the subtle differences in articulation, as well as those whose voices shut down and go unheard. I have always found Cavarero remarkably naïve in her discussion of the “unique voice” as if subjecthood and vocal sound were stable entities. Rodenburg, though pointing toward a natural (otherwise known as healthy) voice, over and over explains the ways that a voice can get tied up in social situations that mold it in many directions, be it raising or lowering the pitch range of speaking due to gender roles (74-85) or utilizing urban glottal attacks (68). As she says, “we learn rather swiftly to stop pleasing ourselves and please others with the sounds we make” (39). So what does this mean for Cavarero’s desire to make a politics with the unique timbres of our voices? If we can trace those timbres back to biological, environmental, developmental, and socio-economic factors, our unique voices are still not on a level playing field – just as Levinas’s face-to-face with the other will always be colored by race and culture. How can we take into consideration that the fact that when some of Rodenburg’s students do finally speak in healthy and sustainable ways that they speak with what feels and sounds like a different voice?
Cavarero does engages the disconnect between voice and one conception of subjecthood (that based on thought and intent) when she states that “speaking is not at all a thinking that expresses itself out loud, nor is it merely vocalized thought, nor is it an acoustic substitute for thinking. The phenomenology of speaking possesses an autonomous status in which the relationality of mouths and ears come to the fore” (174). However the relation that she focuses in on is of a certain degree of intimacy: the voice on the phone that can say “It’s me” and you know who is talking. It is a voice that you already have an established relationship to (“[E]very voice is unique, and because it is unique, once it is known it can be recognized” [25; my emphasis]). It seems to me that the integral vocal period to politics is the introductory period, when the conversation is getting started and people are in the process of learning each other’s voices. This is the space where Rodenburg’s “vocal imperialism” (5) is particularly dangerous.
The idea of “vocal imperialism” also points to one essential point that both authors bring up: the fundamental place of listening in the dialogic configuration of vocal activity. Rodenburg mentions our need to re-educate our ears so that we do not interpret ‘high status’ voices as more informed than others, pointing to how with some voices we take responsibility for what is being said, while with other voices we blame the speaker. While Cavarero scolds philosophy for being bad listeners and conversationalists. One thing I often have to remind myself when writing about the voice is to not focus solely on the vocal object (I’m using the word object very loosely here – obviously that’s a whole other discussion) but also the intertwinement of the activity of listening.
I also find it fascinating how Rodenburg talks about the health of the voice and sincerity. (Bringing to mind a whole score of texts including Shoshana Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body and Mladen Dolars’s A Voice and Nothing More.) How much of philosophy is an extended and confused attempt to make sense of strained, insincere, and unhealthy voices. How do performances of awkward rhetoric or unimpassioned nonsense complicate knowledge formation? How can they be taken into account?
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