Towards a psychopathology of opera

Abstract

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 thepunctum: any point of unrepresentability that will punctuate or pierce the smoothness of thestudium(art marked out by completeness, by total visibility). Thepunctum, by its wounding quality, would be a signifier pointing to something outside representation, outside thestudium, 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, whatpunctumcould 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.

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