Subtraction Subtraction

The writer does not 'wrest' speech from silence, as we are told in pious literary hagiographies, but inversely, and how much more arduously, more cruelly and less gloriously, detaches a secondary language from the slime of primary languages afforded him by the world, history, his existence, in short by an intelligiblity which preexists him, for he comes into a world full of language, and there is no reality not already classified by men: to be born is nothing but to find this code ready-made and to be obliged to accomodate oneself to it. We often hear it said that it is the task of art to express the inexpressible; it is the contrary which must be said ...: the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world's languages, which is the poor and powerful language of the passions, another speech, an exact speech.

- Roland Barthes (via here)

And so, once more, art is this distance from the pre-inscribed Symbolic Order, the carving out of a space. And this space is not one’s ‘true voice’ if by that we mean something inertly given which the social Symbolic codes have papered over. It does not at all pre-exist those codes. But what does pre-exist those codes, presumably, is some capacity to negate them, some ‘force of the negative’ with no positive content, but which lives in the gaps and distortions it introduces into the codes received from Society and History.