INTRODUCTION TO "THE VOICE IN MODERNITY", AUTUMN TERM STAFF AND GRADUATE RESEARCH SEMINAR PROGRAMME
October 12, 2005
ROLAND BARTHES LESSON IN WRITING

"The voice is really what is at stake in modernity" (Barthes)

The essay from which the statement that prefaces this project is taken was originally published in Tel Quel in 1968.[i] The essay offers a description of the Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre as a challenge to the dualistic metaphysics of western theatre, posited upon the binary oppositions of animate/inanimate, inner/outer, revealed/concealed. Against textual writing as the progenitor of the 'sticky organicism' of western theatre, Barthes offers the dispersed, reflective and performative writing of gesture and voice in Bunraku.

The essay brings Barthes's interest in Brechtian theory into line with the increasingly anti-metaphysical turn in French post-structural thinking (Derrida's first three books outlining a deconstructive critique of western metaphysics were published the year before Barthes's essay; the terms écriture and voix figure prominently in the titles of two of these books).[ii]

The Barthesian punctum of the essay lies in the paragraph from which our quote is taken. Having identified the 'three separate writings' of Bunraku as 'the effected gesture [of the puppet], the effective gesture [of the manipulator] and the vocal gesture [of the vociferator]' Barthes makes a swerve into a passage that needs to be quoted in full:

"The voice is what is really at stake[iii] in modernity, the voice as specific substance of language everywhere triumphantly pushed forward. Modern society (as has been repeated often enough) believes itself to be ushering in a civilization of the image, but what it actually establishes overall, and particularly in its leisure activities which are massively spoken, is a civilization of speech [parole]."

The passage is problematic for a number of reasons. The syntax creates some ambiguities: is it the voice or language that is everywhere triumphantly pushed forward? Is Barthes making a distinction between voice ('at stake/risk') and language ('everywhere triumphantly pushed forward')? The slippage to 'parole' [spoken word] in the next sentence only compounds the uncertainty; is Barthes conflating voice and language in spoken word, or making a further distinction?

For an answer we have to consider some of Barthes's other writings on the voice - in particular 'The Grain of the Voice' of 1972. Here, writing about singing, Barthes makes a clear distinction between pheno-song ('all of the features which belong the structure of the language being sung... everything in the performance which is in the service of communication, expression, representation') and the geno-song ('the timbre of the voice...the diction of the language'), which foregrounds signifier over signified. [iv] Barthes offers a clear valorisation of the geno-song, lamenting that the French 'are abandoning their language ... as a space of pleasure, of thrill, a site where language works for nothing..."[v] To return to the passage from 'Lesson in Writing', we may conclude that the voice is 'at risk' from the prevalence of a speech-based culture based on linguistic communication, expression and representation. (In The Pleasure of the Text -1973 - Barthes does in fact make the connection between these two essays explicit in his closing pages. [vi])

We will return to that voice. But before that we need to resolve the second difficulty the passage presents: that Barthes gives no explanation of what he is actually referring to when he talks of the 'civilization of speech' in modern society. Is he referring to the increasingly widespread technologies of speech transmission such as telephone and radio - the technologies that have brought about what Walter Ong calls 'secondary orality' within modern culture? [vii] In our discussion we suggested that the, often unrecognised, verbosity of television might have been in Barthes's mind here; perhaps it is obtuse to foreground television in relation to notions of a speech-dominated culture, but by 1968 television was certainly taking over from radio as the dominant form of broadcasting. Barthes does indeed claim that he is referring in particular to modern leisure activities; but does he have in mind here commercial leisure activities (and if so, any other than tv or radio?), or those activities that people undertake between themselves (e.g. talking on the telephone?).

If we are left uncertain as to precisely what Barthes means by the 'civilization of speech', we are also uncertain as to the implications of this civilisation of speech. Can we draw any wider conclusions as to the significance of this suggestion that modern society is primarily oral rather than visual? Or should this paragraph be read more locally as part of Barthes's trajectory towards the jouissance of the textual signifier, which moves, via essays such as 'From Work to Text' (1971) and 'The Grain of the Voice' to a kind of fulfilment in The Pleasure of the Text, and for which 'the grain of the voice' serves primarily as a metonym for any foregrounding of the bodily signifier in communicative acts?

What we can say is that Barthes's essay seems ostensibly to be part of what Martin Jay calls the anti-ocular tendencies of French intellectual culture, developed in opposition to the 'scopic regimes' of modernity [viii]: in the 1960s alone, the Situationist critique of the Spectacle, Foucault's theories of panopticism, feminist critiques of the 'gaze', all indicative of attitudes to what de Certeau later called 'the cancerous growth of vision' [ix]. Barthes own suspicion of the visual is evident in his early analyses of the advertising image and in his late work on photography. But in this essay Barthes seems in fact to cast doubt on such theories of the dominance of the visual in modernity, leaving us to decide for ourselves upon what basis we might construct an alternative account of the dominance of orality in modernity, what the implications of such an account might be for our understanding of both modernity and the voice in modernity (would we, like Barthes, posit a 'voice' that is not subsumed within the general culture of communicative or expressive orality?), and whether, almost forty years on, orality would stand in the same relation to the modern/postmodern culture of today?

Any suggestions?