Vocabulary, after Roland Barthes

Three gardens, quincuncial projections

Patrick Farmer
“Prose: one writes, or is written. (Barthes’s great subject: that our phrases exist so
extensively that an author merely arranges them).”

Guy Davenport

“It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel”

Roland Barthes
 ~ Introduction
~ Notation (haiku)
~ Gardens
~ Quincunx (projection)
~ Vocabulary
 ~ Introduction

A vocabulary is not a matter of explanation or interpretation, but

of resonance

Vocabulary is to attempt a ‘piece’ formed of the resonance in-between

the words, not the words themselves. To exist in the relations, not
in what they relate.

By abstracting a number of words from Roland Barthes’ vocabulary,

laying the so-called Barthesian elements out as a set of already open
or floating choices, the temporarily isolated words could here act
as exemplars of both composition and performance, manipulating
and manipulated by their binary dimensions of content and form.

I see this process as quietly pointing at a new or simply different

understanding of their inflections and reapplying their limits to a
conjoined compositional and performative field.

Entry into this score, through the Three Gardens, can be decided at random (a
process up to the performer), it is equally applicable to begin with a Notation with
which the performer feels a particular affinity or productive grievance.

The exit is essentially a matter of personal duration (depending on mediums and

materials) but should ideally rest upon the utilisation of at least 9 Notations.

Notations may be chosen as the performer sees fit, though they need to follow the
patterns of the quincunx and the descriptions of the Three Gardens in order to
create a projection which is then used to structure or guide a realisation.
Working with certain words prevalent in Barthes’ vocabulary
will hopefully provide us with a series of surfaces upon which
to communicate in different registers, just as they provided
compositional ideas and frames for the score itself.

Looking for the resonance around the conjunctions and the

prepositions, leaving the relationships between words, phrases,
images, and ideas, ambiguous. As if, tipping one of the words
from Barthes’ vocabulary onto the page, results in a notation, and
then, peeling the notation, would create the possibility of a third
position, a resonance, a nuance. Functioning by sliding over the
entire surface. I see this as akin to Barthes’ taking measure of how
things are, of literature’s ‘precious indirection’.

How to make something more extended and stretched and

continuous out of these intense capturings, these slivers of lived
experience?

Entry and exit are essentially misleading terms, they could all simply relate to
preparative nuances, different ways to slip.

Once mapped out, the chosen notations do not have to be followed in a linear
fashion. Feel free to move in all directions.

Notations cannot be repeated, but the performer does not need to spend an equal
amount of time with each.

The responses to this score can be in any medium and organised/arranged in

ways that suit the performer.
 ~ Notation (haiku)

“The handout that Barthes prepared for his students consisted of

63 haikus printed on the page, each poem effecting its own tiny
movement.”

Kate Briggs
63 Notations to provide tiny routes via the vocabulary into the
Gardens, to emphasise the enigma.

How might we pass from the Notations to the Gardens, to walk

into a projection?

Haiku = exemplary form of the notation of the present. For Barthes

it was a method of exposition, a method of speech.

How might one thing stand for another whilst retaining elements
of its prior identity? (Barthes concerned himself with haiku for
a short while so as to then be concerned with the novel – we
concern ourselves with the Notations so as to be concerned with
the projection.

How might we translate this into other mediums, or supplant it

from one medium only to plant it back there?

– Proxemic – to be locating
– Accord – to be according
– Drift – idiorrhythmy
– Name – parodic and elective affinities
– Neutral – the possibility of a third position
– Passer – to be passing
– Tact – to be tactful
 ~ Gardens

Three Gardens:

Worldly
Domestic
Wild

Each description has its own qualities and location within these
Gardens, which are themselves independent, yet no more than the
interstices of their neighbours. The borders may be treated like
ecotones, opportunities to exist in both locations at once.

– Name – undefined
– Accord – planted
– Passer – follow
– Neutral – centre path or gate
– Tact – hydrangeas, rhubarb
– Proxemic – carpet grass
– Drift – kitchen herbs and crates

These nomenclatures all fall within the potential reach of ‘Worldly’,

‘Domestic’ and ‘Wild’.
 ~ Quincunx (projection)

Making one’s way through words to gardens and back to words,

etc.

A foray through the correspondence of names and things. The

resulting map of the performance and its resonance.

The two hand-drawn projections included as examples in this

score are interpretations of Roland Barthes’ description of his
childhood garden and a model of a phalanx by Charles Fourier.
They stand in for a composite of lexical notations. There are also
examples given in the form of an indicatric quincunx, a Roman
calendar, Barthes’ tuberculosis records and a map of potential ley
lines by Arthur Walker. They are all examples of ways to project
routes through the quincunx.

Whilst projecting, we need to wait for the correspondences to

stop pitching about, momentarily, as if to reveal the next step, a
Notation.

– Co ordinate
– Smell (wet with nard)
– Word
– Thing
– Connotation
– Action
– Fragment of meaning
– Copy
– Fetishisation
 ~ Vocabulary

No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.

These words are only a few, initial, and primarily rhetorical traces
of their eventual interpretation and application.

If we try and consider them as morphological (perhaps not, perhaps

organic) models, we might consider how such an index of semantic
personality and preference could create both a sense of motion
through the borders of the composition as they are performed and
yet also conflate them by destabilising their identity through the
very act of their performing.

~ Proxemic

Barthes notes that proxemics is defined as the interrelated

observations and theories of human’s use of space as a specialised
elaboration of culture. In How We Live Together he restricts its use
to the localised space of the subject’s immediate surroundings, in
other words, the space of objects that can be easily reached, the
field of the performers vision, smell, hearing, etc.

~ Name

Barthes says that the name is where the proper novel resides, and
that he hasn’t written a novel partly because he wouldn’t be able to
invent proper names. I feel this can be stretched or reappropriated
into the field of composition by thinking of the names relationship
to the novel like sounds relationship to performance, as an approach
that tries to leave the field open, which slips in front of you as it
falls behind you, creating room for things to come and go like a
series of events set in motion, moving upon the stratified nature of
a performance.

~ Accord

The attraction felt for certain words. What they produce in me is

a certain hebetude; something more like an internal agitation, an
excitement, a certain labour too, the pressure of the unspeakable
which wants to be spoken.

I should like to know what there is in it that sets me off.

A series, or a solo, of people attempting to undergo two actions at the same time,
each pertaining to its so-called opposite. The idea of which, is to arrive at a
situation where these opposites begin to lose their edges and co-exist. Drawn
with a line down the middle (so danceable, so truly thin), to denote the initial
dualism, as then the lines slowly start to plane.

~ Drift

They drift between the shores of perception, between sign and

image, without ever approaching either. In this glum desert,
suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and
I animate it. The word animates me, that is what creates every
adventure.

~ Neutral

The task of conjuring third spaces or the incessant need to

categorise. Language as a use value of communication between
things. These scores attempt to make a place where all such things,
such questions, can be held side by side, presuming a flow between
what you can learn about the culture by writing about the self and
what you can learn about the self by writing about the culture.

~ Passer

A word left to shimmer at the end of a sentence, whose meaning

is not yet altogether determined by the syntax, nor indeed by the
object of the sentence.

~ Tact

An art of attending to all the small differences. The example

Barthes offers comes from The Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo. In
the Tang and Sung dynasties, Barthes quotes, a special attendant
was detailed to wait upon each flower and to wash its leaves with
soft brushes made of rabbit hair. It has been written that the peony
should be bathed by a handsome maiden in full costume, that a
winter plum should be watered by a pale, slender monk.

To each flower its own special attendant.

Tact requires the punctilious elimination of repetition, tact

is scared, it is hurt by repetition. In principle, it is unexpected,
unsystematisable, unparadigmatisable.
 The incoherence is preferable to a distorting order

The world encircled by the mandala

The rope used by the sandal makers

The dim grocery shop

The wax of the old wood

The airless staircases

Spanish oil

The dust in the municipal library

(where I learned about sexuality from Suetonius and

Martial)

The glue of pianos being repaired at Bossière’s shop

A certain aroma of chocolate