jacque attali and the political economy of ‘amateur’ primacy and first brilliance, part 2 for DG, and for SG because i’ve always misunderstood as a deficit
i post excerpts here from a long essay the title of which has never been settled.”
Speak the Middle Tongue – Take the Forked Road: A Theory of the Voice
The voice is the sign of pain and pleasure…
Aristotle, Politics, 123a, 10-18.
right. aristotle that is.
way ahead of his time, needless and greatly needed, to say to say what has sill never been said – when ever anyone speaks, their voice conveys BOTH pleasure and pain.
do note though, those in the poststructuralist ken, that, the voice is a sign. expected. unexpected is what it’s a sign of in derridian terms. and, with nietzsche, we should, now, at least expect that pleasure and pain necessarily have NOTHING, as Gevirtz assumes, to do with some sort of californian new ageist fantasy she ultimately, believes in. gevirtz believes in the myths, not as metaphors, but as some kind of personal mythology in her own world, as though she were a greek seer in contemporary times. that’s a bit hubristic to say the least. she even hates peter sellars. i’ve not always thought that. i use to think she offered more. i’ve made attempts at that, thus what follows. and thought i was successful. but of late, i think she’s what she’s always thought she’s has always been – good at convincing others through persuasion of her own ‘significance’, but in the end, it’s a montecito fantasy as she has always known.
The grain of the voice, Barthes tell us, “is… the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly significance.” [182] To comprehend this definition, we must rigorously avoid a misunderstanding easily succumbed to; that to signify something is to communicate it. To ward off that misapprehension we must answer the following questions: How are we to understand materiality and significance, and their relation? What does the italicization of significance connote? Barthes’ use of materiality is straightforward; it refers to “the sonic effects of the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose;” [183] to the “body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.” [188] These embodied forces determine the diction of enunciation, which constitutes its ‘grain,’ that allows us to recognize the identity of a speaker when he/she speaks. We recognize voices as we recognize faces – through their embodiments. Barthes theoretically allies the grain with the geno-song, a biological, materialist concept he transposes to music from Kristeva’s linguistic analog – the geno-text – individual works of pheno- or species-text exemplified by genres like romance or science fiction texts. The geno-song is defined thus:
[it] is the volume of the singing and speaking voice, the space where significations germinate ‘from within language and in its very materiality’; it forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression; it is that apex (or that depth) of production where the melody really works at the language – not at what it says, but the voluptuousness of its sound-signifiers, or its letters – where melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work. [182]
Significance, then, is italicized to warn us against mistaking it for communication, representation, or expression. It is what works at language but not at its meaning. Meaning, for Barthes, is a product of the reductive forces of the pheno-text by which culture enforces limits to understanding, to significance, by “reconcil[ing] the subject to what in music can be said: what is said about it, predicatively, by Institution, Criticism, Opinion,” by which he means the codes of langue that always precede and police the voice. [185] Significance of the grain, Barthes acknowledges in a passing parenthetical allusion to another of his foundational texts, derives its value when the text emerges in the work.
In order for a voice to have grain, to have non-communicative significance, it must break the codes of works, of pheno-songs and pheno-texts, and emerge into the text of the geno-song through listening to the relation of the body of the speaker, singer, or player. The relation, he tells us, also transcends individualistic subjectivity because it is erotic and physiological – it is not a psychological subject who sings or listens, the voice is not an expression of any subject, but it’s dissolution, produced outside of the laws of culture, beyond the valuations of ‘I like’ or ‘I don’t like.’ [188]
a notebook of epic reflections by mark bartlett 