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Towards a psychopathology of opera

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Jeremy Tambling
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Extract

Roland Barthes discusses a postmodern condition in his last book, Camera Lucida: everything is signified and visible, and everything has the flatness of the photographic image; even death is rendered platitudinous, flat. If everything can be represented, nothing can be represented that would distinguish it from the mass of images already available; and if everything is for consumption in conditions of distraction, then difference disappears; we are left in a state Barthes calls ‘indifference’. Barthes then looks for the punctum: any point of unrepresentability that will punctuate or pierce the smoothness of the studium (art marked out by completeness, by total visibility). The punctum, by its wounding quality, would be a signifier pointing to something outside representation, outside the studium, and inasmuch as opera in the condition of postmodernism is likely to be a saturated medium, absorbed by viewers and listeners in conditions of distraction, the question arises, what punctum could it bear? There is, of course, nothing that could be isolated as such: it is, rather, that which by being outside representation appeals to what might be called–adapting Walter Benjamin's sense of photography as pointing to an ‘optical unconscious’ – an ‘aural unconscious’ just outside the text.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , November 1997 , pp. 263 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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