la voix sacree

Previously, I cited a short passage from a book by Agamben, and expressed the hope that I might write more on it. What follows are some (frustrating) preliminary thoughts. But let me be clear that they issue not from a close and patient reading of Agamben’s book. They are the result of a petty burglary, a raid into the book, born of indolence and dilettantism.

Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language. In them la voix sacree de la terre ingénue (the sacred voice of the unknowing earth) – which Mallarme, hearing the chirp of a cricket, sets against the human voice as une and non-decompose (one and indivisible) – knows no breaks or interruptions. Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits his single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language

So: What implicit definition of language is in operation here? One thing is for sure, it predates and unseats the idea of an 'organised system of signs'. From the point of view of this new definition, the system of signs becomes not language itself but a falling away therefrom. (Be patient).

The chirp of the cricket – why is this is 'one and indivisible' (why is the human voice split?) how is it unbroken, uninterrupted (why is the human voice fractured, what interrupts it?). What is exactly is Mallarme’s interest in this ‘call of the earth’? Does Mallarme’s poetry, wherein the filaments of language, having forgotten nature, seem to be savouring their own vibrations, not stand at the extreme opposite end of the language spectrum. I’ll try and come back to this.

Meanwhile, Agamben quotes his own question:

Is there a human voice, a voice that is the voice of man as the chirp is the voice of the cricket or the bray is the voice of the donkey? And if it exists, is this voice language?

There may be a number of problems with that formulation as it stands. But let me bracket them off. Of course, we never hear ‘man’ as we hear a cricket etc. One response might be: we always hear, say, a person from Yorkshire, a middle-class person - the voice as social / cultural sign. The voice assigns you a position in an order which is not simply natural.

Another response, a familiar psychoanalytic one: The voice as that which bears signification before any precise content is articulated - yet again, I rely on a familiar distinction: we know that the voice signifies irrespective of what it happens to say. A demand is embedded in the very grain of the voice qua voice irrespective of the meaning it carries. And this distinction, this split between that and what, the animal world is innocent of - the voice and what it carries are always perfectly synonymous.

The ‘voice’ is here – when Agamben speaks of the chirp of the cricket - something like the signature note of the species. The song of the bird or the chirps of the cricket are the immediate manifestation of their species-being. The human voice is never simply this, but is always entangled in an arbitrary and culturally specific sign-system. Agamben links his reflections to Marx’s description of the animal as ‘immediately at one with his life activity’. To be at one (undivided, uninterrupted) with ‘life-activity’ means, in effect, not reflecting on it, not having it as an object. And presumably what separates Man from his life activity is this foreign symbolic medium which has to be learned, acquired, and mastered

Perhaps a key here lies in an early text of Agamben’s great mentor, Mr W.B. On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. Two passages are worth noting:

1. It is possible to talk about a language of music and of sculpture, about a language of justice that has nothing directly to do with those in which German or English legal judgments are couched.. language in such contexts means the tendency inherent in the subjects concerned.. toward the communication of mental meanings. To sum up: all communication of mental meanings is language, communication in words being only a particular case of human language… There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of all to communicate their mental meanings.

[After the fall]:

2. The word must communicate something (other than itself). That is really the Fall of language-mind. The word as it were externally communicating, as it were a parody by the expressly mediate word of the expressly immediate, the creative word of God, and the decay of the blissful, Adamite language-mind that stand between them.

The word must now bear a meaning external to itself; it must point beyond itself to a significance, a significance to which it has no necessary link. It signifies something as opposed to being that something. That signification has split from being, this is the sure mark of fallen human language.

And so back to Mallarme:

……what any reading of poetry like that of Mallarme's presupposes. It imposes the momentary belief in the evident power of words, in their material value.. One instinctively believes that in poetry language reveals its true essence, which lies completely in the power to evoke, to call forth mysteries that it cannot express, to do what it cannot say, to create emotions or states that can not be represented.. in a word to be linked to profound existence by doing it rather than saying it.'

When Blanchot speaks, in speaking of Mallarme, of the ‘evident power’ of words, I want to hear not just the obvious sense but, instead, a power of self-evidence, a power that evidences itself in words (rather than being represented by them). This power is embedded in the material of language and not in the signified of language. This is a language that immediately does something that cannot be done by some other material.

According to Clarence Brown, Mandelstam 'felt poetry to be immanent in nature, to be there in the silence, a presence with which he could be fused', and he could be fused with it because there was already 'black earth inside us'.



Now is there a connection between the ‘earth’ that Mallarme discovers in the bird’s cry and the ‘black earth’ of Mandelstam’s invocation? This is nature’s language, wherein meaning and presence are one, where there are no mere ‘representations’, where a thing is not just a token of some other unseen thing elsewhere.

In Mallarme, Poetry stages a war on ‘meaning’ so that, no longer meaning anything, all that remains is the irreducible presence of the Word – its rhythms, affects, and the aspiration to music running through it.

In a way these are opposites. On the one hand the free-sounding language of nature, pure manifestation of Earth and Creation; on the other the poetic ‘lace curtain’ – we are consumed in watching it consume itself, so that we no longer care what is ‘behind it’:

‘.....l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inegalites mobilises’

The initiative passes to words, and the force of their mobilised inequality (feel free to correct my attempt at translation)

In a way, just as Benjamin says there is a language of sculpture etc, so Mallarme is saying there is a language of (human) language. In other words, to say there is a language of sculpture, painting etc- what does this mean? It means there is an expressive logic immanent to the medium as such, immanent in the material as it were. And so to tap into the language of language is to align yourself with and make speak the expressive logic specific to a human language, that which is already given in the medium prior to any specific propositional content. This, this ‘pure language’ – or rather purified (of content) language speaks for itself.

And this is perhaps one devious way of returning to and old literary fantasy: The dream of a poetry that is no more than a cry – ie, that hasn't passed through the opacity of a foreign symbolic medium. The desire to hear the spontaneous music of the soul, without the 'interference' of a pre-existing symbolic system.

And this can take at least two forms. The elimination of representional language, of a language that is ‘about’ something. About Finnegan’s Wake, Samuel Beckett says ‘it is not about something, it is that something’. Typically this involves a retreat into the material of language, the language of language.

And then, there is the Mandelstam line, of the dark earth that we must simply ‘let breath’, let speak, as if language – human language – might be reduced to a pure openness, invisible and receptive.

Sometimes it is those who have an acute consiousness of Death who entertain this idea. Rilke, for example. Why? If you imagine one of the dead having some back to the world, granted leave, and the consequent gratitude, surprise, receptivity, nostalgia, sheer joy in the simplest of things – the ‘this’ and ‘that’ of the world in their pure state. He, the already dead, would sidle up to a rock, a flower, and these things would ‘impress’ themselves upon him as upon clay – not their mere names but themselves.

Because the language in which it might have been given me not only to write, but also to think, is neither Latin nor English nor Italian nor Spanish, but a language of which I do not know only one word, a language in which dumb things speak to me, and in which I may once, in my grave, have to account for myself before an unknown judge.

Hugo von Hoffmannstal, The Lord Chandos Letter.

(nb Thursday night - this is doubtless full of typos and errors, but I'll post now and correct later)