Barthes Presentation Questions & Music

Questions to Consider:

1) Is there an objective way of listening? Is there an objective way of communicating what you’ve heard?

2) On page 284, Barthes mentions that Panzera “sang with his entire body— full-throatedly… to kill everything bad, depressed, anguished in his head… with the naked voice” (284). What does it mean to sing with the naked voice?

3) On page 284, Barthes writes that music is, to Panzera’s art, “a quality of language” (284). What does this meaning in context of Barthes’s argument?

4) How would you read this question aloud to make it sound like the speaker is
Stupid
A Cool Hipster
Hyper-intelligent
Seductive
  What did you do to your voice in order to convey these things?

5) “In the unspoken appears pleasure, tenderness, delicacy, fulfillment, all the values of the most delicate image-repertoire. Music is both what is expressed and what is implicit in the text: what is pronounced (submitted to inflections) but is not articulated: what is at once outside meaning and non-meaning, fulfilled in that signifying [signifiance], which the theory of the text today seeks to postulate and to situate. Music, like signifying, derives from no metalanguage but only from a discourse of value, of praise: from a lover’s discourse: every “successful” relation— successful in that it manages to say the implicit without articulating it, to pass over articulation without falling into the censorship of desire or the sublimation of the unspeakable—such a relation can rightly be called musical. Perhaps a thing is valid only by its metaphoric power; perhaps that is the value of music, then: to be a good metaphor” (284-285). How do you characterize the relationship/s between signifying, meaning, pronunciation and articulation?

Music to Consider: