On Barthes

Roland Barthes' essay, "Listening," begins by dividing the act of listening into three different types. "The first listening," he explains, "might be called an alert. The second is a deciphering," and the third (the least easily summarized) is "a general 'signifying' no longer conceivable without the determination of the unconscious." (245-6) While I can't claim, as of now, to have grasped what Barthes may mean with any sure grip, I nonetheless greatly enjoy his writings. Even his most academic and scientific essays have moments where Barthes' poetic nature overtakes him and he begins to write in the most colorful mixtures of the scholarly and the sentimental. The final paragraph of the first section in "Listening" is one such moment:

Morphologically, on the species level, the ear seems made for this capture of the fleeting index: it is motionless, fixed, poised like that of an animal on the alert; like a funnel leading to the interior, it receives the greatest possible number of impressions and channels them toward a supervisory center of selection and decision; the folds and detours of its shell seem eager to multiply the individual's contact with the world yet to reduce this very multiplicity by submitting it to a filtering trajectory; for it is essential--and this is the role of such initial listening--that what was confused and undifferentiated become distinct and pertinent--that all nature assume the special form of danger or prey; listening is the very operation of this metamorphosis. (248)

The passage begins clinically enough, positing Barthes' attention as being the 'morphology' of the human ear, "on the species level." However, even before the first sentence has run its course, this jargon-laden diction gives way to something more in tune with the writings of Baudelaire. In describing the physical body of the ear, Barthes' activates two similes in immediate succession, the innocuous semicolon between the two functioning as a metamorphic fulcrum between the scientific and the sublime (an oscillation which persists throughout the paragraph). First, the ear is compared to "that of an animal on the alert," recalling and reiterating the 'species level' engagement Barthes has with the subject. In the second instance, Barthes describes the ear as "like a funnel leading to the interior... the folds and detours of its shell seem eager to multiply the individual's contact with the world yet to reduce this very multiplicity by submitting it to a filtering trajectory." The physical structure of the ear leads in the first to a comparison between the ears of various species, but in the second becomes the gateway to the field of metaphors and colorful investigations of the human psyche, towards which Barthes has a certain disposition.

The dual-natured way in which Barthes handles this passage is representative of the overall theme of his writing. He mixes the rigorous exactitude of a laboratory chemist with the interpretive freedom of a literary critic, producing theories and opinions that are delightfully scintillating from a number of intellectual perspectives.


My questions concerning Barthes' view on music are concerned at the utmost with how he regards the relationship between music and language. To what degree is music nonrepresentational? Are Barthes' reproaches against the use of adjectives to describe music tenable? Coherent? A vestigial reminder of Barthes' native French?