The Unsung, Unhuman Hysteria of Arca: Barthes and the Limit of Language

In "Music, Voice, Language," Roland Barthes chides that  "...clarity is not innocent...it involves the singer in a highly ideological art of expressivity...in the arts of articulation, language, poorly understood as a theater, as a staging of meaning...explodes into the music." (283) This is ideological because the singer is expressing something internal, as opposed to arranging their singing to the appropriate nature of the music. This Barthes previously describes as the French language, hence his arrival that music is "a quality of language." (284) It would do well to understand what articulation implies: a bringing together of things that had not been together in order to force them to function. It joins signs and thus obeys a necessary coercive act that is not truly musical.

Arca is a Brazilian producer. His music relies heavily on electronic synthesis of sound and the sampling of real instruments or real voices. As such, his perhaps excessively modern music relies on an articulation of sound, or more appropriately it is an appropriation of sound and voice. It does so in order to build new soundscapes and press the limits of auditory sensation, but not without aesthetic value at play. It does not forego expression, because then it would not be art, but it does so on the limits of language that Barthes arrives at, as he says "in the unspoken appears pleasure, tenderness, delicacy, fulfillment..." (284) I believe listnening to Arca allows one to feel these things and to sense them in the unspoken manner. I also think Arca's music challenges the orthodox evaluation of sound Barthes arrives at. Much of his music proceeds by mis- pronouncing or affecting the inflection of language. Undoubtedly, this is ideological music at its heart because it forefronts a sense of distortion that aligns with what Barthes may even call hysteria. I highly encourage every listener to listen to the entire &&&&& tape, but this song "DM True" demonstrates the point well enough that playing with language as such can still allow music to approach the unspoken. And at the same time, Arca is never singing, except, perhaps, through these inflections. Yet the music is also unclear. At the nexus of a lack of clarity (what is unspoken) and hysteria (the lack of grounding one typically finds in language) Arca manages to approach the limit Barthes identifies in music of acting beyond mere expressive capacity. Although Barthes claims this must be metaphorical, it is unclear why this is anything other than his own ideological preference, informed by a limited history that favors French, a Western form that Arca is obviously challenging as a queer Brazilian. I mean to suggest that despite the ideology at play in these songs, beauty and music are to be found without needing to metaphorize the psyche of Arca because the ideology plays out in the aesthetic challenge to the form itself.


PS Barthes focuses heavily on the human, doing work to elevate the human and to distinguish it from the animal. Mythology aside, he does point out some interesting connections, but I challenge Barthes' assertion that imitating a sound pattern, or rhythm, constitutes signification. Or not challenge, but to question what would it mean for dancing to be expression? Because dancing is to take music and move beyond listening to something far more expressive, yet distinct from the music. It is at beast an accompaniment. This is only a question at this point, but I do think dancing might be as cultural as music in the tradition Barthes is describing, and dancing also coincides with the elevated capacity for listening beyond the passive indexing of what we hear, which is his first stage of listening.
My second question is why is this not exactly what we have known since Schopenhauer, which is that the pure subject of knowledge becomes, as Barthes puts it, part of a relationship of "ideal inter-subjectivity." ("Listening," 252-253) This appears different because Schopenhauer considers music an object to which the pure subject of knowledge attunes herself, but the description of listening as a touching seems to imply only a rearticulation of the same, automatic circuit between listener and music we see in Schopenhauer. Barthes' addition to this is the unconscious, or the subjectivity of the listener, which is the thing Schopenhauer absolutely does not believe matters to listening. I am interested in this as a problematic more broadly...how does one use the unconscious in analysis? Isn't that a contradiction? Is not consciously bringing the unconscious forward negating the unconscious, bringing it away from its hidden place?