An Ear obstinate to Knowing (or An Ear determined to know)

Aural Bliss and Affect in Lod’s The Attendants’ Gallery – Stories of Europe

Pieter Verstraete

Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Theatre Studies, University of Amsterdam,

The Netherlands

Paper for the ASCA International Workshop ‘Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing

Methodologies, Imagining Alternatives’, 28-30 March 2007

The recent multidisciplinary performance The Attendants’ Gallery – Stories of Europe

(2006-2007) by the Ghent-based music theatre company Het Muziek Lod in Belgium
artistically embodies a nexus of ideas that are at issue in this conference. The
performance is staged as a ‘living museum’ of objects, images, stories, ideas
presented by actors coming from different countries in the margins of Europe:
Slovenia, Lappland, Portugal, Romania and Ireland. Dressed as gallery attendants
they appear to claim their marginal status within the museum space – a space that
epitomizes Western culture’s saturation of images – and from that position they speak
up to give their point of view on European history. As the performance unfolds into a
more casual museum night, these gallery attendants leave their invisible places from
where they safeguard the art works to add their personal stories to the objects, as they
have lived these récits across borders that are slowly dissolving.
Integral to the performance is the music (composed by Dick van der Harst)
and the traditional songs that the actors contributed together with their stories. The
music seems to tell thereby a different story in a non-verbal language, but also adds an
affective layer at times by freezing the narrative. In this way, the performance
stimulates me to discuss how the encounter with the ‘other’ can raise critical questions
about the limitations to knowing the other and ‘otherness’ through the act of listening
and our senses.
My main concern is therefore the ear with its different epistemological modes
of listening as it tries to ‘read’ what it hears, ‘hunting’ for information. Though The
Attentants’ Gallery as theatrical ‘spectacle’ appeals to a Cartesian disembodied eye
eager to know, it also calls for an embodied way of listening as discursive and self-
conscious act that falters and fails in its encounter with the ‘otherness’ by its own act.
I will discuss this failure in light of Le Plaisir du texte (1973), in which Roland
Barthes discusses a similar stratagem in an encounter with narrative and image
leading to moments of pleasure and bliss. Accordingly, in the performance each story
and song by the attendants is accompanied by images. I will discuss to what extent

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Barthes’ ‘bliss’ is a useful concept to conceptualize affective and discursive listening,
without treating them as opposing categories. I am particularly interested to see how
in the performance the ‘failure’ (or collapse) in the encounter with the other leads to
knowledge about listening in music theatre, and about affect and narrative in general.
For this purpose, I will engage with the theatre production as a work of art and
a text that embodies knowledge in its hybridity towards the senses. As the
programme brochure states, the hybrid relations between music, image and
narrative/words should call for an experience in which one has to ‘submit to’ the
impressions of the different cultures in their heterogeneity and alterity rather than
understanding every word of it. This however asks for a critical appraisal, for which I
will read Barthes’ seminal text through Derek Attridge’s article on otherness in the act
of writing. This enables me to regard listening and sensing in terms of co-creating
signification and relating to the other, which are intrinsically connected. As to the ear
and its epistemological modes in this co-creative act, I will further refer to ideas by
Steven Connor, Michel Chion and Arthur Kroker about the insufficiency and
instability of listening, guided by the question: what do these theories and concepts do
to my reading of the performance; and conversely, how does the performance respond
to them in its specific economy of pleasure between knowing and not-knowing?

Inside an ear
The text of The Attendants’ Gallery – Stories of Europe consists of the stories by the
performers themselves and some short texts by Pieter De Buysser, in which he gives a
literal embodied account of Europe by focussing on one organ (resp. a heart, an ear
and knees). The text of the ear is particularly interesting as it functions literally as an
ear-opener. In my opinion, this ear both epitomizes an ‘ever-growing ear of European
civilisation’ and stimulates a self-reflexive mode of perception. The Slovenian actress
Damjana Černe (born in Croatia 1963) performs the text as if it were her own personal
story:

I have to confess something. I was alone. For a very long time. The nights were
getting longer and colder and I got lonelier. I found an ear. In Baudelaire. The beauty
of Sophocles consoled me. I found a listening ear in Shakespeare and Voltaire. I read
them and I spoke with them. They understood me. They listened to me. Dostoyevsky
and Camus embraced and saw into my soul. The lonelier I was, the more I cried and
complained, the bigger the ear came growing out of my bookshelf. […] At first I could
lay my arm in it, and soon also my leg and after a short while, a second leg. The ear
kept on growing. And I was happy! Never had I felt so understood, felt such an
attention, such an understanding, such an attentive ear that was given to me. Me! […]

But one day in the big ear I came across a painter. He wanted to catch reality in his
paint, but in a different way, a new way, and he made me fatally in love with reality

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 and I knew now I want to begin again. I wanted to forget and be able to begin again
under the sun. Just like that painter that saw black crows above a field that saw
sunflowers, that desperate painter that wanted to start all over again and wanted to
go, escaping his paint and his language and finally cuts off his ear to be able to
completely completely restart again and again In the same way again as he wanted to
start, I too took a knife and cut off my ear. It was gigantic. It covered nearly six
football fields. I cut one small piece and this I always carry with me.

What first appears as a confession (the actress is talking into a slit as in a confession
box) unfolds as a metaphorical story, which has significance for the whole
performance. The pleasure of the text and the question of otherness seem to
consolidate in the metaphor of the ever-growing ear. This ear creates a metonymic
space within the narrative imagination, incorporating the whole of European
civilization, culture, philosophy and literature (from Sophocles, through Shakespeare,
Voltaire, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky to Camus). The ear also presupposes receptivity
and openness to the other as the nameless woman finds consolidation in it. In
listening to this story, the listener can find a certain pleasure in listening to the
narrative and grasping its double intention, or in listening to the Slovenian accent of
the actor, which could create affective responses. I want to argue that there is a
double consciousness for otherness at stake here: on a narrative plane on the one hand,
and on an affective plane on the other.
At the narrative level, the actor performs both a narrator of and a character
within her story. But there is also the genuineness and straightforwardness of the
performer on a performative level. The story about the ear of European civilization
raises awareness for the otherness of the woman who feels misunderstood by society.
This seems to be played out in the performance in a way that can be understood as
‘free indirect discourse’. In narrative theory, free indirect discourse (in line with
Bakhtin’s definition) creates two inseparable but not fully realized subjects in a
heterogeneous system: a character in the first person and another subject (a narrator)
who brings him on the stage. Peter Rabinowitz (2004) states about this narrative
device: “[T]here is always some ambiguity about the precise location of the line
between the character and the narrator” (316). Monika Fludernik (2001) remarks in
The Literary Encyclopedia that in free indirect discourse there is often ambiguity
about whether it represents speech or an act of (internal) thought and about whom
might be the author. Since the authoritative voice behind the metonymic story of the
ear is suspended and since it is unclear whether the story is really the story of the
performer or the character played by the actor, a similar ambiguity seems to call
attention for the commutability of subjects. For Deleuze (1986), the use of free
indirect discourse in cinema points out the ‘Cogito in art’: “[T]here is no subject
which acts without another which watches it act, and which grasps it as acted, itself
assuming the freedom of which it deprives the former” (Deleuze 73). Although this is

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the basic mode of the theatrical contract between audience and performers, a similar
alertness for the disembodied spectator is called upon here by means of the free
indirect discourse in text and performance. The narrative mirrors the other on to us,
asking for an engagement: the other is marked and spotted by the ear in each and one
of us.
Conceptually, ‘being inside the ear’ could be understood as a mode of being
inside knowledge, privileging the one inside. Generally speaking, the ‘other’ is
always in a perverse way ‘privileged’ by being inside and having ‘inside knowledge’:
the one being inside has always more access to the truth by having the closest position
to situated knowledge, however problematic that position may be. The ear seems to
provide consolation and pleasure to the woman, who finally feels understood
completely by reading the literary canon of European civilization. This inside
position turns knowledge into ‘ac-knowledgement’. Painfully enough, this
comfortable position is an immobile space of immersion where she can forget about
herself, cut off from the outside world. But the story has a sudden twitch when it
flows by association into the story of the painter Vincent Van Gogh and his cut-off
ear. The act of cutting off the ear creates access to reality, caught in the image. This
destructive act seems to enable a new beginning, a cleansing of the self. Whereas the
feeling of being ‘completely understood’ inside the ear gives a sublime feeling of bliss
and ‘jouissance’ (similar to Barthes’ pleasure of the text), the sudden cut seems to
finally promise an opening up to an outside, to reality, reaching out to the other.
The story of the ear, though metonymic and surreal, has its own mythical logic
and suspense. Following Barthes’ understanding of narrative, the short story is
anecdotal and plot-driven, episodic and sequential, propelled by suspense. The plot
drives to that sudden ‘cut’ – epitomized by the ear of Vincent Van Gogh – that would
make us take flight from the text and give in-sight onto reality, which is a reality of
the other. The free indirect discourse, however, calls for a consciousness that the
other is always an act and an event rather than an invariable identity as it is related to
the self. In a similar way, Derek Attridge attests: “Otherness […] is produced in an
active or eventlike relation – we might call it a relating: the other as other to is always
and constitutively on the point of turning from the unknown into the known, from the
other into the same” (Attridge 22). In this way, the narrative makes us recognise the
familiar feelings of being misunderstood, the pleasure of the text that affects our
selfhood, and a desire for the ‘cut’ that would enable us to start anew. The story
connects us with the other and makes us aware of that connection, as ‘the other’
always presumes a relating. Through the narrative of the other, one comes to the self,
or in Barthes’ words: “Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin,
speaking one’s conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and
hatred?” (47)
The narrative, conversely, gets thickened with affect through the performance
of Damjana Černe. Particularly her Slovenian accent and intonation could be

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regarded in terms of Barthes’ preference for the sensuality of language, the
articulation of the body through the vocal organs, or what he calls vocal writing (67).
The actress’s pronunciation brings in ‘the other’ quite literally. ‘Otherness’ seems
therefore also to be constituted in the discursive act of listening on an affective plain,
raising awareness for how our ears relate to the other. Listening is both an event
(receptivity) and an act (agency). Following Attridge’s line of reasoning, the act of
listening could be understood as no pure volition, but no pure event either. In
listening I recognise the known in the new; I comply with discursive practices and
regimes of listening, but in my engagement to the ‘other’ I have to engage to “that
which beckons or commands from the fringes of my mental sphere as I engage in a
creative act” (Attridge 23). The affect in my discursive and ‘co-creative’ act of
listening seems then to catch my attention suddenly and disjoins my habitual regimes
of listening.
In the following I will discuss how this otherness in musical performance and
in, what we could call with Barthes’ notion, vocal writing is taken further on an
affective level. The ‘otherness’ seems to be that which escapes our modes of
understanding through listening, emphasizing the singularity and heterogeneity of
what is expressed, which could cause pleasure or ‘aural bliss’. Following Barthes, I
want to focus on how ‘bliss’ in listening functions affectively within the narrative but
manages to sidetrack it. Or as Murat Aydemir (2003) eloquently expresses about
narrative in relation to Barthes’ notion of bliss as affect: “Instead of the suspense of
narrative, Barthes privileges the suspension of narrative. This affective force arrests
narrative progression with a sudden stoppage, congealing or freezing its steady
course” (Aydemir 168). In The Attendants Gallery, this suspension of narrative
through affect is paramount in the discussion of the other. As discussed above,
narrative and affect should not be regarded as antithetical of one another, but they
follow different sensory tracks in their relation to significance, embodied experience,
and to what can be known to the epistemological, self-conscious ear.

Circuiting narrative with affect: Siding with looking or with listening?

After this thumbnail analysis of a first significant moment in which the ear is made
aware of itself in relation to the ‘other’, I want to draw on another highlight in the
performance: the lament by Åsa Simma1. She sings traditional Saami ‘jojks’, songs
that were taught to her clandestinely by her mother since they were forbidden by the
government in her childhood. In her performance she seems to sing about her family
in Swedish Lappland. Her story is not immediately legible though, as she sings in the
Saami language without any translation or supertitles. Rather, the story is represented

1
According to her biography, it is Åsa Simma’s life project to make her Saami-roots known to the
public through the singing of ‘jojks’. She is now artistic director of the Saami Theatre in Sweden.

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by black figures on transparent slides attached to a lit screen (as in a shadow play)2.
The actress stares right into the audience, which is sitting at eye-level around the
performance space, while some of the musicians and actors either put or take away a
slide one by one. As the slides are taken away, a culture appears to slowly dissolve.
According to the brochure, which one can read after the performance, the
stories are set during World War II. The first story is about some German soldiers
who climbed over the fence between Norway and Sweden to go to Lappland and to
trade their binoculars, helmets and a bag pack in change for deer meat. After that
follows the story of her father who had to go every year to the Swedish Lapp financial
controller to receive public funding for his village, but he always returned empty-
handed. When the financial controller after years of remorse came with a case of
money, her father said that it was ‘too late’. The narrative is however not delivered to
the audience in a straightforward way, as it is conveyed through the images (‘narrative
figuration’) and the song by a narrator-performer, who sings and speaks in her
language. This same procedure is also followed for the other stories: every actor was
appointed one visual artist from the FRÉMOK ensemble to tell their personal stories.
In this way, I want to regard how the story of Åsa Simma embodies both knowledge
about a different history of Europe and a type of knowledge about how narrative and
affect in conjunction with sound and image function within music theatre.
If we regard Åsa Simma’s performance as a way of ‘vocal writing’ in Barthes’
sense, ‘a writing aloud’ so to speak, her singing would become an encounter with a
text or the textuality of the work of art that performs the body rather than the meaning
of the words:

“Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not
phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of
emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents,
the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the
patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the
articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language. A certain art
of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing” (Barthes 66-7).

In the context of the performance, the Saami ‘jojks’ (based on old Shamanistic trance
songs) seem to affect the audience in a similar way, rather endowing them with pulses
of affect than with a clear storyline or delineable emotion. The music affects and
urges for an encounter with the other, leaving the listener with a feeling of not quite
understanding, of unknowability.

2
The slides are made by the ‘comics’ publishing house and ensemble FRÉMOK (Olivier Deprez,
Thierry Van Hasselt, Yvan Alagbé, Jean-Christophe Long, Dominique Goblet), based in Anderlecht
and Montreuil in Belgium (http://www.fremok.org/).

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 In my opinion, this unknowability could not only evoke ‘aural bliss’ but also a
great deal of sensory distress, resulting in an undecidibility whether one should focus
on the grains and affective impulses in the performance of the song or on the picture-
story telling. The distress stems from the illegibility and lack of language in the song
and its excess in terms of musical remainder. In effect, this distressing undecidibility
could therefore either call upon a floating ear or an embodied ear. Both concepts
occur in a rather throwaway remark by Arthur Kroker (1988):

“[T]he embodied ear struggles against the mirrored eye […] The floating ear may
signify an ‘empty, symbolic exchange’ that specializes in the spatializations of a
‘pure, image-system’; but the embodied ear privileges corporeality, verticality of
being, collective experience, and speech” (Kroker 93-4).

As the images appeal to the mirrored, optical eye and give in to the listener’s urge to
complete what is left unspoken in the song, the ‘vocal writing’ in the singing could
destabilize what is seen. A floating ear would then retreat the song into the
background as ambience, giving it a locus and a source body. It could then function
as an icon, or what Michel Chion (1994) has called an ‘ear-con’. An earcon is an
auditory reference that is often juxtaposed to narrative functions, regarded that
ambience is not necessarily imbued with narrativity but rather serves as ‘mood-
trigger’ in a direct, ‘unmediated’ way. As the icon to the eye, the earcon defines a
sound event as sign on the basis of a direct relationship to an image or particular
action, and implies an immediate affective response. In this way, the song affects the
listener, adding ambience to the story, such as a soundtrack to a cinematic image.
However, in interpreting the song as an earcon the musical excess and the
‘language lined with flesh’ (Barthes 66) are filtered out for the sake of meaningful
categories pre-existing to the experience. Embodied listening on the contrary would
bring the listener in touch with the ‘otherness’ in listening to the extent that it allows
the instability of that which continuously escapes the cogito, the grasp of the already-
known. An embodied ear holds therefore the promise of an encounter with the other
in Attridge’s sense of relating: turning the experience from the unknown into the
known (Attridge 22), but not without allowing the unknown in the first place.
Kroker’s notion of an embodied ear fits further well with Barthes’ idea of vocal
writing, privileging the corporeality, the physical dimension of the text or ‘speech’
without a legible tongue. Though the feeling of unknowability and undecidibility can
be quite stressful and the urge for coherence or closure remains, this sensory distress
can also cause pleasure: the pleasure of reading without really knowing.
In this way, the combination of the Saami song with the picture narrative can
be read by two systems of reading, according to Barthes: “one goes straight to the
articulations of the anecdote, it considers the extent of the text, ignores the play of
language […] the other reading skips nothing; it weighs, it sticks to the text, it reads,

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so to speak, with application and transport, grasps at every point in the text the
asyndeton: it is not (logical) extension that captivates it, the winnowing out of truths,
but the layering of significance” (Barthes 12). Barthes essentially had in mind the
reading of texts in a language that we can understand, but as I want to argue here,
these two reading strategies could be extended to the listening act as well. The former
reading would favour the reading of the images in terms of the narrative; the latter
would read the asyndeton (parataxis without conjunctions) of sound and image,
opening up to the surplus and the possible tensions between the expression and the
performance in a pursuit to grasp without wanting to ‘winnow out the truth’.
This ‘alternative’ way of listening holds a productive contradiction to what is
most often presumed about the relationships of the eye and the ear (or ‘audiovision’).
The scene bears therefore epistemological knowledge about looking in conjunction
with listening in most music theatre. In an oversimplified distinction, the eye is
focused, stabilizes, dissects and delineates, whereas the ear is rather passive towards
the enveloping sound (physically not being able to shut the ear lobes). Theodor
Adorno (1952) makes a similar distinction when discussing Wagner’s emancipation
of the ear: “The eye is always the organ of effort, work, concentration; it apprehends
something specific in an unambiguous way. The ear, in contrast, is unconcentrated
and passive. Unlike the eye, it does not have to be opened” (Adorno 88-9). Such
simplifications would make even Adorno’s epistemological ears curl and should be
read in the context of his criticism on the technology of the senses in Wagner’s music
drama. Correspondingly the songs in The Attendants’ Gallery do not dramatize any
visual action, or allow you to sit back and absorb. Rather, the ear is active and asked
for its full attention for the relations between what can be seen and what can(not) be
understood acoustically. It is made aware of its discursive efforts and its inevitability
to not quite succeed.
According to Steven Connor (1997), listening is always insufficient. In this
way, he describes the modern auditory self in terms of deficit or lack: “The sense of
the insufficiency and insubstantiality of hearing makes the definition of the self
through it a problem. How can the modern psyche be said to be organized around an
ontology which is so regularly defined as the deficit of ontology?” (Connor 1997:
213). Read in the context of the performance, the deficit of the self’s ontology in
listening is quite relevant in relating to the other. The notion of ‘otherness’ could
create an impression of stability when referring to an existing human being in relation
to oneself, but as embodied listening proves here, this stability is only based on a
myth of ontology that is often nothing more than a deficit. As a consequence of
Connor’s statement, ‘otherness’ could be understood as being inscribed in the
listening act proper because of its insubstantiality and insufficiency, which makes it
dependent on the completion by the other senses (Connor 1997: 220). Elsewhere
Steven Connor (2005) refers to Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between looking and
listening: “We do not inhabit the world of vision because our acts of looking are

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constantly doing things to that world. Looking, as Merleau-Ponty has remarked, is a
kind of having. Listening can only approximate to this appropriative hand-eye
coordination” (Connor 2005: 51). Listening is therefore always in a relation with
‘otherness’, as it does not own and control its objects, but rather inhabits its space and
partakes in its significance.
As the picture story shows, looking could stabilize the song, provide it with a
context, helping the listener to comply with a certain discourse or frame, but the
images are not stable in themselves either and the narrative is not rendered in a one-
to-one relationship. Rather, the conjunction of image and sound holds a promise of
stability, which is necessarily destabilized through listening. In this context, Michel
Chion (1994) significantly states:

“But listening, for its art, explores, in a field of audition that is given or even imposed
on the ear; this aural field is much less limited or confined, its contours uncertain and
changing. […] There is always something about sound that overwhelms and surprises
us no matter what – especially when we refuse to lend it our conscious attention; and
thus sound interferes with our perception, affects it. Surely, our conscious perception
can valiantly work at submitting everything to its control, but, in the present cultural
state of things, sound more than image has the ability to saturate and short-circuit our
perception” (Chion 1994: 33).

Chion seems to hint here at sound’s propensity to affect and short-circuit our
perceptive system. The embodied ear equally carries the potential of unpredictable
shock through affect: a shock to narrative, or to thought. In this way, music theatre
often cultivates a certain experience of bliss in short-circuiting meanings through
thrilling shocks, impulses, goose bumps, etc.
But there is something highly problematic in Barthes’ notion of ‘bliss’ when it
comes to denote a subdued state of timed but continued gratification and ecstasy in
the encounter between the ‘text of bliss’ and its reader, rather than rapture as a
momentary ‘flash’ of joy taking you outside yourself. Barthes defines the ‘text of
bliss’ as “the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the
point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological
assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his
relation with language” (Barthes 14). Likewise, the Saami song unsettles the
listener’s relation to language. Barthes defines ‘bliss’ in terms of loss and collapse
against a consistency of selfhood. In this way, (aural) bliss can lead to a constant
repositioning and ‘relating’ between the self and the other, which could happen when
listening to the Saami song as a ‘text of bliss’. Aural bliss can confront the listener
with an outside to (narrative) cohesion. But there is a danger too of staying inside the
text of bliss in a desire for continuous satisfaction, much in line with the initial story
of the ear. The text of bliss, according to Barthes, is therefore an ‘untennable’,

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‘impossible text’ because it is “outside any imaginable finality” (51), “outside
pleasure, outside criticism, unless it is reached through another text of bliss: you
cannot speak ‘on’ such a text, you can only speak ‘in’ it, in its fashion, enter into a
desperate plagiarism, hysterically affirm the void of bliss (and no longer obsessively
repeat the letter of pleasure)” (22).
‘Bliss’ seems to face here its own untenable ‘other’ in its extreme form. It
poses an epistemological problem when it reaches a point beyond criticism. The
autonomy of affect poses a threat to the dialogue and the ‘relating’ with the other,
when it goes beyond rational communication. This could be a pose of the other in
order not to be judged. It could be part of a trauma structure in the ‘other’, where
there is no possibility to think outside of the trauma itself. As the first story of the ear
of civilization already brought to light, a knowledge that finds resonance inside the
ear can give a feeling of consolidation and understanding, but cannot communicate to
an outside if it cannot but be perceived from inside. This poses a limit to Åsa
Simma’s ‘jojks’ as an act of vocal writing too and this limitation concerns any
political reading of the personal stories and songs in this performance. If bliss is as an
effect of being aurally swept away through the circuiting of affect with narrative while
affect manages to sidetrack it, any affective and effective engagement with the other
is only possible when it escapes bliss. Instead of a collapse or loss of self, ‘otherness’
asks for a negotiation between the self and the other. In Åsa Simma’s performance,
the body politics and the picture narrative seem to create the possibility of creating an
otherness by relating to what we emotionally and semantically can relate to. In this
way awareness is created, as Attridge formulates: “not just that words consist of
sounds and shapes but also that these sounds and shapes are nexuses of meaning and
feeling and hence are deeply rooted in culture, history, and the varieties of human
experience” (Attridge 26-27). The story, the body gestures and images hold the key
to unlock the door to an outside, to an encounter with a different culture.

Rewriting history through narrative and embodied listening

The Attendants’ Gallery aims at a ‘rereading’ of European history, as the theatre
makers claim in the brochure. The motto is therefore fittingly by Oscar Wilde: “The
one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it”. Through the songs, music, visual works
of art and personal stories through the point of view of the marginalized minority, the
theatre makers attempt to give a different account of 20th century Europe, as a living
and embodied memory. The museum context stages the stories as a gallery of
memories and autobiographical memoirs. As I discussed above, in its engagement
with the other through narrative and musical affect, it is a self-conscious theatre and
through its performative mode of free indirect discourse, it triggers and tunes different
modes of looking and listening. Although it complies with certain conventions of
reading images and staging narratives through text projections, it also tends to
denaturalize these readings preposterously through music. The endeavour of

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rereading history through musical performance therefore opens up an encounter with
the other in the self and the otherness in listening. The latter reaches a level of self-
awareness in Åsa Simma’s song when one realizes that we create the ‘other’ through
our discursive acts of listening: thereby something of myself is created by the other in
a reciprocal relation (Attridge 22).
In the encounter with the other, we are confronted with what we can read and
what we can conceive of as text (or textuality). The Attendants’ Gallery specifically
aims at teasing out those moments of dense textuality by a ‘vocal writing’ that denies
an immediate reading. In this way, it gives both conscious and affective impulses to
the listener to discover what she or he does not or cannot know. Knowing that most
of it you cannot know is precisely the attraction, the pleasure and the desire in the
economies of bliss and distress between which this performance seeks its equilibrium.
Music seems in this the middle voice, either narrativizing (in terms of cohesion,
closure, stability) or causing shocks to narrative (instability, distress, bliss). The latter
creates a feeling of enchantment through the invisible, the incomprehensible, the
unknowable by suspending narrative and its compelling authoritative voice (through
free indirect discourse). In the act of rewriting a history of Europe through ‘vocal
writing’ and ‘embodied listening’, there is much recognition of the known as well as
estrangement of the unknown. If we want to regard narrative as a privileged way to
knowing, this performance demonstrates that narrative has to be regarded in
conjunction with affect. Narrative and affect are not in opposition of one another as
they both engage with signification sensually3. But what affect does to narrative, is
that it implies a possibility, not a necessity of signification. Affect therefore sides
with the concepts of ‘other’ and ‘otherness’: its autonomy makes it impenetrable to
what I can know conceptually, to my epistemological self.
Narrative and affect (especially ‘aural’ bliss) therefore create a split-subject, as
Barthes seems to confirm: “this subject is never anything but a ‘living contradiction’:
a split subject, who simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the consistency of his
selfhood and its collapse, its fall” (Barthes 21). The epistemological ear and the
embodied ear are in a same relation of interdependency. The epistemological ear
takes pleasure when the body pursues its own ideas.4 Embodied listening does not
imply a total absence of reading for signification either. The otherness in Åsa
Simma’s song – or whatever text that marks its ‘alterity’ in language – calls for a
pleasure of reading that embraces both, to the point of wonder for its unknowability.
Derek Attridge concludes: “Reading involves working against the mind’s tendency to
assimilate the other to the same, attending to that which can barely be heard,

3
In this sense, Roland Barthes remarks: “What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually
produced” (Barthes 61).
4
Barthes clarifies in this respect: “The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its
own ideas – for my body does not have the same ideas I do” (Barthes 17).

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registering what is unique about the shaping of language, thought, and feeling in a
particular work. Encountering the other in reading, the mind (understood in the
broadest sense) lets itself be carried to the borders of its accustomed terrain by the
text” (Attridge 25). It is perhaps in the encounter with the border of what can be
known, that ‘other’ and ‘self’ finally meet.

List of references

Adorno, Theodor. In Search of Wagner. Transl. Rodney Livingstone. With foreword by

Slavoj Žižek. Orig. Versuch über Wagner, 1952. London, New York: Verso 2005.

Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other”. PMLA Vol.114,
No.1, Special Topic: Ethics and Literary Study, (Jan.1999): 20-31.

Aydemir, Murat. “How to Come Differently: Barthes’ Bliss between Image and Narrative”.
Travelling Concepts III: Memory, Narrative, Image, ed. Nancy Pedri. Amsterdam: ASCA
Press 2003: 163-75.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. (Le Plaisir du texte, orgin.1973). Transl. Richard
Miller. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1990.

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Ed. & transl. Walter Murch & Claudia
Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press 1994.

Connor, Steven. “The Modern Auditory I”. Rewriting the Self: Histories from the
Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Roy Porter. London & New York: Routledge 1997: 203-23.

Connor, Steven. “Ears Have Walls: On Hearing Art”. Lecture given in the series Bodily
Knowledges: Challenging Ocularcentricity, Tate Modern, 21 Feb. 2003. FO(A)RM 4 (2005):
48-57.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Transl. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara
Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986.

Fludernik, Monika. “Free indirect discourse”. The Literary Encyclopedia. 20 Oct. 2001.
The Literary Dictionary Company. 2 February 2007. Online. Available FTP:
http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=444.

Kroker, Arthur & David Cook. The postmodern scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-
Aesthetics. London: MacMillan Education 1988.

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Rabinowitz, Peter J. “Music, Genre, and Narrative Theory”. Narrative across Media: The
Languages of Storytelling, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press 2004: 305-28.

Play list The Attendants’ Gallery: Stories of Europe

By LOD/Koen De Sutter & Dick van der Harst

Concept Dick van der Harst (composer) & Koen De Sutter (director)
Text Pieter De Buysser and actors
Image Frémok: Olivier Deprez, Thierry Van Hasselt, Yvan Alagbé, Jean-Christophe
Long, Dominique Goblet, assisted by Octave Staes
Performance Miles O’Shea, Åsa Simma, Paula Só, Levente Molnár, Damjana Černe
Music Jean-Philippe Poncin, Dick van der Harst, Wim Konink, Gilles Repond, Kurt
Budé
Dramaturgy Hans Van Dam

Still to be seen 5-6 May 2007 at Rotterdam Schouwburg; 8 May at Utrecht Schouwburg; 12
and 13 May at Amsterdam Schouwburg; and 15 May at Groningen Schouwburg

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