I. Vital Signs

‘Air has largely been unaired; breath, moreover, barely spoken of’

(Allen 2020, 76)

Breath in Western culture is often neglected, sometimes devalued and nearly always forgotten. As Tim Ingold points out in a special issue on ‘Breath, Body and Earth’ in Body & Society, breath is typically considered an ‘unproductive gap’ in speech, an inconvenient interruption to the “proper” activity of articulation and seamless thought (2020, 164). However, in the context of a respiratory pandemic, breath has taken on new significance: a source of fear and distrust, in the early days of the pandemic many of us held our breath when passing others in the street, aware of the potential danger that our respiration might pose to others. Amongst airborne viruses, air pollution and the awareness that every exhalation contributes to the carbon cycle which threatens the very conditions of our life on earth, breath can no longer be backgrounded or indeed taken for granted.

Breath is biologically, phenomenologically and semantically a great connecter, rendering it hopeful as well as threatening. Breath is one of the vital signs of our bodies; that is, it is one of its essential functions for sustaining life. In the absence of live, in-person assembly, we might think of it as having become a different, more metaphorical kind of vital sign: in a recording when we hear the sharp in-take of oxygen or a stutter in the voice or an extended exhalation we are (re)connected to life out there, beyond the physically-distanced bubbles that we have had to sustain, in order to protect ourselves and others. Breath signifies that life endures, more obviously vulnerable, maybe, given the respiratory threat we have been facing but with rhythmic regularity (breathe in, breathe out).

II. The Voice’s Intimacy

‘The life of the body, its lived experience . . . cannot be contained in Euclidean space and linear time. They must be topologically described’

(Massumi 2002, 205)

The voice exists at the interplay between semantic and affective communication, between sound and sense. Listening to audio recordings of voices folds the two into each other, rendering them topological; less like two sides of the same coin and more like in a moebius strip in which they continually run into each other. In this, recorded voices create a strange sort of intimacy which complicates any neat division of presence and absence, proximity and distance: the voice is carried across time and space, conveys a ghostly message to the listener since the addressee must remain speculative, deferred into a possible future. And yet, listening to the voice is an intensely embodied experience: the rhythm of the breath manifests the trace-presence of an other, their vital signs are encoded into data and fed back into our ears. We are enthralled to the whisper in our ear as it enters a deeply intimate, orifical space. Intimacy here is propelled across physical distance as we experience what Roland Barthes terms the grain of the voice, that is the ‘individual thrill’ of ‘the encounter between a language and a voice’ (1977, 181), the radically singular, embodied qualities (sonority, rhythm, timbre….) of the voice at the edge of signification that signals to us across time and space.

III. Remembering Air

‘Who now could deny that to be a body at all is to be bound up with other living creatures, with surfaces, and the elements, including the air that belongs to no one and everyone?’

(Butler 2021)

In the absence of synchronous live performance—an absence that is marked by the presence of recorded voice performance in the context of the pandemic—we may become more precisely attuned to the ways in which we remain connected; a connection that is as corporeal as it is cultural. Attending to breath and voice might then be a practice of remembering air since air’s conductive qualities are what allow voices to float as wave and particle between orifices and recording instruments. And it is air that sustains us as we breathe. Yet, as, as Luce Irigaray has so vividly theorised, air is easily forgotten despite our immersion in it, since it mostly eludes conscious thought and affective sensation. And still, air is both manifestly and metaphorically the condition for ‘the whole of our habitation as mortals’ (1999, 8). For this reason, Irigaray urges us to recognise it as ‘arch-mediation’ (12), asking what it means to think about the medium that makes thought, speech, communication, embodiment possible in the first place. The forgetting of air, that Irigaray accuses Western thought of, figures the wider forgetting of our dependence on matter, nature, environment. If at the cusp of late modernism Antonin Artaud thought that theatre would ‘signal through the flames’ (1958, 13), more anguished feeling than encoded message, we might now be witnessing a turn toward a different elemental condition. As live performance dissipated into the void, the recorded voice has continued to travel to us, signalling along air waves, filling the increased space between our bodies.

–C.B.

List of references:

Allen, I. (2020). “Thinking with a Feminist Political Ecology of Air-and-Breathing-Bodies.” Body & Society, 26.2, pp. 79–105. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1357034X19900526

Artaud, A. (1958) The Theatre and its Double. Trans Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press.

Barthes, R (1977). ‘The Grain of the Voice’ in Image Music Text. Trans Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. 179-189.

Butler, J. (2021) ‘Creating an Inhabitable World for Humans Means Dismantling Rigid Forms of Individuality’, Time. Available at https://time.com/5953396/judith-butler-safe-world-individuality/ (accessed on 17/10/2021)

Irigaray, L. (1999) The Forgetting of Air. Trans. Mary Beth Marder. London: Athlone Press.

Massumi, B. (2002) ‘Strange Horizon’ in Parables for the Virtual. Durham: Duke University Press. 177-208.

Ingold, T. (2020) “On Breath and Breathing: A Concluding Comment.” Body & Society, 26.2. pp. 158–167. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X20916001