Can You Hear Me Now?: On Rodenburg and Cavarero: Derek Miller (Stanford University)

I find these two texts extremely difficult to read together, perhaps due to the simple fact that one is, ultimately, a textbook, while the other is a series of philosophical essays. Surprisingly, both books struck me as extremely repetitive. While the extensive set of exercises in Rodenburg’s work are a necessary part of her teaching, her exordium on the “natural voice” could have been summarized in five pages. Cavarero’s argument, meanwhile, though inflected in subtly different ways by each philosopher or text it engages, boiled down to the following: Western philosophy ignores the voice, but if we pay attention to voice, we may recover a new form of politics as communication-among-speakers. Neither Rodenburg’s nor Cavarero’s work is banal, but the lengthy efforts of the former and the overly intricate readings of the latter seemed to lend both texts a kind of desperation, as though neither author, ultimately, really had that much to say about voice. That is, despite both authors’ best efforts, neither contributes much positive knowledge about voice, preferring instead to declare what voice is not. (Reductively: for Rodenburg, voice is not culture; for Cavarero, voice is not language or vision.)

I’m not sure I know what Rodenburg’s definition of voice is. But my biggest concern with Rodenburg is that she seems totally to reject the past--physical and psychological--in her notion of voice. She writes that “The natural voice [...] is quite simply an unblocked voice that is unhampered by debilitating habits” (19), and discusses throughout the book how past physical and emotional injuries can shape how we sound. Rodenburg seeks a voice that expresses what we might call a “vocal degree zero” (since Barthes is one of our interlocutors here). However, there is no such thing. There is no neutral voice, no voice prior to the body, which always already has a history. It is certainly true that babies use their voices with an ease that adults forget, but that forgetting is part of learning to be a human. (Or, better, of learning that voice’s “essential destination” (209), as Cavarero has it, is in speech, i.e., in culture.) Similarly, Rodenburg criticizes how “We instantly transform voices according to our audience” (72). But, again, this is merely human behavior, what it means to be a person in culture. Anyone who behaves exactly the same way in all circumstances and with all people is insane, not “natural.” I am, perhaps, reading Rodenburg rather stringently; my own experience with voice training actually had me nodding along at some of her assertions (against floor work; in favor of being “in the moment,” which means connected to your breathing). Yet I am bothered by a manifesto that imagines a pristine past voice to which it is desirable to return. There is no vocal degree zero, there is only being a speaking being.

Cavarero’s book, it strikes me, is only nominally about voice. Cavarero uses her critique of Western metaphysics’ rejection of voice to index the metaphysical rejection of uniqueness, which, in turn, is that which Cavarero wishes to restore to politics. In other words, this is fundamentally a book of political philosophy that, much like Plato’s Republic, gets around to the body politic by discussing the body human. Thus, to criticize Cavarero for having little to say about voice is to criticize her for not having written a different book. (Though her embarrassingly text-oriented reading of the balcony scene deserves scorn in its own right. The sheer number of absurd statements here [“The spectator, like Juliet, does not see Romeo’s face” (238)] would make me question her readings of Plato, if it weren’t so abundantly clear how dismissive Plato is of voice.) For what it is, namely a series of close readings that permit Cavarero to meditate on all the different ways in which metaphysics refuses to engage voice, Cavarero’s book is well executed.

However, and this ties back to my problem with Rodenburg, Cavarero treats voice as a singular presence: “the voice manifests the unique being of each human being” (173). I think voice is absolutely not singular. I think we have many voices, that we are always polyvocal. This is clearest to me in the oft-noted but under-theorized fact that the way we hear ourselves when we speak and the way others hear us is not the same. (The invention of sound recording takes on new philosophical importance in this light, as Jonathan Sterne has tentatively explored in his Audible Past. Veit Erlmann’s uneven Reason and Resonance is also useful here.) Cavarero calls voice “sonorous materiality” or “phonic substance” (1). But if voice is supposed to be a physical carrier of our corporeal identity, the disjuncture between my sonorous materiality as I hear it and my phonic substance as you perceive it is a serious philosophical problem, to which Cavarero gives typically short shrift. Like Rodenburg, Cavarero wishes voice to testify not only to presence, but to an essential presence that avoids culture and history, and thus can speak as a unique political subject: “The protagonist of this politics is a speaker who, leaving aside his or her belonging to this or that identity group, this or that language, communicates him- or herself first of all as voice” (209). But there is no political voice without language--the very musicality of our speech is a function of the language we speak, our upbringing, the patterns of our thought, our audience, etc. At the risk of repeating myself, I hope we can attend to this vocal degree zero that underlies these two books. Not only do I think it does not exist, but I think it undermines voice’s true political and philosophical potential: namely, to insert us fully into a community because we depend on them to hear us on our behalf.