Performance Criticism—only without the performance: Christopher Grobe (Yale University)

What does Barthes’s essay have to say to a performer? It seems to me (if I may wax polemical) not much. The performer is excluded from Barthes’s regime because human agency is itself excluded. Notice the metallic and mechanistic metaphors that dominate every positive description of voice in action: “phonic metal hardens” (183), consonants are “patinated” (184), and vowels are “electronic” (184). Even an organic image like the “single skin lin[ing] the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings” (181-2) quickly gives way to the fleshless interplay of semiotic systems. In one of the essays many eerie personifications “melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work” (182). Melody explores; it identifies. The performer is nowhere to be seen. Or rather, there is a propped-up carcass and there is a melody/language, but in between, Barthes allows only the metallic, the robotic, the cybernetic.

This blindspot in Barthes’s thinking reminds me of the anti-theatrical bias common among scholars in one of my own specialty fields: the performance of poetry. The poet-critic Charles Bernstein, in his influential book Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, coins the term “aurality” (defined as “the sounding of the writing” as opposed to “orality and its emphasis on breath, voice, and speech” [13]) precisely in order to allow authorize the critic’s direct access to the fleshless “performances” of text itself.

However different they may be in their particulars, the theories of Barthes and Bernstein both generally rely on creating a vast, excluded middle. There is nothing, for either of them, between the cellular materiality of the body and the rarefied play of language. Look at how Barthes's parallel between “deep down in the cavities” of the cantor’s body and “deep down in [his] Slavonic language” (182) erases everything more out-in-the-world than tonsils or more down-to-earth than language-as-such. (Bernstein-ian critics, much like Barthes, always profess an interest in the body, while only admitting the minimum amount of well-hidden flesh necessary to experience transcendent texts. That is, to hear them describe it, lung/larynx/tongue-cooperatives perform for ear/brain- combines. After all, anything more would risk “emotive modes” and “expressive reduction” [Barthes 183, 184].) It is a mindset born of listening to recordings—of hearing machines “perform,” and every time the same. I contend that the vast majority of performance studies, of theater studies, and of voice training lie somewhere in this excluded middle.

Knight powerfully critiques “neutrality” and “clarity” as tacit standards of voice training, and in doing so, he might seem to agree with Barthes’s disdain for pheno-typical conventions. I doubt, though, that Barthes would escape his criticism. The idea of “grain”—when it even refers to an actual body producing actual sound, rather than a "grain" producing “writing” [185]—smacks of the reductivism/minimalism that most worries Knight. If only, Barthes cries, we could strip away the drab conventions of “dramatic expressivity” and adjectival musicality, we might get down to the direct and orgasmic encounter between “inner flesh” and outermost “language." (And there's supposed to be "perversion" [187] somewhere in this coupling between the Father's “phallic stature” and the “mother tongue” [182]? All I see is a heterosexual, intramarital screw.) I can see Knight raising an eyebrow at Barthes. I paraphrase him here, with bracketed substitutions from Barthes:

To suggest, as [Roland Barthes] does, that [the grain of the voice “is directly the cantor’s body”] is to suggest that all [pheno-typical structure and meaning] would be released magically if only [the “adjectival” conventions of expression and interpretation] could be released. But released into what? (Knight 180)

Well, into writing. Ultimately, the imperatives of criticism guide Barthes’s theories—to the exclusion of performance. Granted, he may only mean to “check [our] attempts at expressive reduction” (184) and avoid “reducing [the voice] to a known coded emotion” (185)—i.e., to defer the rush to familiar meanings. Sure, "The Grain of the Voice" may be a grain of salt, but it tastes like a salt-lick to me. As I stop to taste my own argument, though, I wonder: perhaps this is just the price we pay for polemic. If so, I apologize for my own brine.