It has been twenty years since I have had to read Roland Barthes. A few key concepts arise for me in this reading, particularly his borrowed dichotomy between the “geno-text” and the “pheno-text”--what Cavarero in a somewhat clearer elaboration throughout her book calls the dichotomy between the “phonic” and the “semantic.” In seeking to articulate an idea that is, to use Barthes’ words, “ineffable”, i. e. the “grain” of the voice, he does not altogether clarify his meaning, but manages to obfuscate it. He is reduced to describing “grain” as “a space of encounter,” “a thrill,” “something directly in the cantor’s body,” “not original, yet individual,” something akin to the “geno-song” which “works at…the voluptuousness of its sound signifiers.” In contrast to this voice is the voice of the Culture—which according to Barthes requires its art to be clear, to translate an emotion, and to represent a meaning—“an art that inoculates pleasure (by reducing it to a known, coded emotion.)” A recent visit to a well-known Shakespeare Festival left me implicitly understanding this. The actors were precise, clear in their storytelling, and predictable. The show left me feeling bored and disengaged, even though it was fine professional work. Something deeper, something ineffable which could move and excite was lacking. The work did not seem to be connected to impulse or to flow from deep within the performer’s bodies.
This dichotomy between the moving phonic and the rule-governed semantic appears in Knight’s discussion of the history of William Tilley’s stranglehold on speech training (which did not truly include voice production) that came to be called first “World English” and later “Good Speech” with its sense of prescriptive, unchallenged superiority and a basis in “RP colonialism.” Knight lays out a model of a different kind of speech training that allows the performer to explore all kinds of sounds as opposed to the adjectival codes of “standard,” “cultivated,” “cultured,” “intelligent”--the codes of Good Speech—which Barthes might claim are lacking in depth and grain. Knight now regularly teaches this exploration model so that all sounds become available to the performer rather than only certain prescribed ones. The performer is then free to choose from a wide palette of sounds to create distinct dialects or characters.
The provoking question “Are we condemned to the adjective? Are we reduced to the dilemma of either the predicable or the ineffable?” is one that compels me. In many ways my teaching of voice and body work in Alexander Technique—as well as acting methodologies in general—is seeking to ask this same question while trying to articulate something that is essentially ineffable. How do we balance technique, methodologies with the subject matter that is in essence ineffable, impulsive, and alive to get to the embodied grain?
I have used the Knight article before when teaching classes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. I found it useful to give students a context for what they were studying. I read sections of the Barthes article aloud to my husband and both of us found Barthes to be murkier (there’s that adjective!) and seemingly purposely obscure. Since I don’t spend much time with Barthes, it is not surprising that I do not readily speak his language.
All of this raises for me other questions that are occurring while reading Cavarero’s dense and excellent account which pieces together from where and how this semantic preferencing has come into its insistent superiority over the practical, grained, embodied, “mother tongue.” I find it interesting that Barthes calls the lungs a stupid organ that gets no erection along with his degrading breath work in general. Compare his contentions concerning the lungs/breath with Cavarero’s points particularly in the chapter “When Lungs did the Vocalizing.” I am left to wonder how much breath work or impulse training Roland Barthes ever had. This to me points up some issues with theorizing—that too often the practical, the experiential, and the embodiment can get left out of the academic philosophical discussion of voicing and speaking.
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