"What is listened to here and there (chiefly in the field of art, whose function is often utopian) is not the advent of a signified, object o a recognition or of a deciphering, but the very dispersion, the shimmering of signifiers, ceaselessly restored to a listening which ceaselessly produces new ones from them without ever arresting their meaning: this phenomenon of shimmering is called signifying [signifiance], as distinct from signification: "listening" to a piece of classical music, the listener is called upon to "decipher" this piece, i.e., to recognize (by his culture, his application, his sensibility) its construction, quite as coded (predetermined) as that of a palace at a certain period; but "listening" to a composition (takingthe word here in its etymological sense by John Cage, it is each sound one after the next that I listen to, not in its syntagmatic extension, but in its raw and as though vertical signifying: by deconstructing itself, listening is externalized, it compels the subject to renounce his "inwardness." (Listening 259)
This long passage at the end of Barthes section on Listening was quite interesting because it seems by this that listening is obsolete except to bring pleasure and reaction with its "shimmering" line of signifiers. We 'listen' to these shimmering signifiers only to be pleased or to satisfy some other need, and then we shoot back some of our own shimmering signifiers for our own pleasure as well. In this way, anyone can be a music critic, and artists no longer need to worry about producing music with meaning. The listener will do with it what they will, and that is that.
Therefore, any song I attach to this post will be one that I have enjoyed, as a compilation of its notes and sounds, one after the other, and which gave me pleasure to listen to it. I like the strum of the guitar, the timber of the 'naked voice', i like the lyrics and their meaning, i like the cadence, and i like the band as a whole...
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