Demetrio Stratos - Phonetics Research Studies - The Pre-eminence of The Signifier Over The Signified

The Pre-eminence of The Signifier Over The Signified

The pre-eminence of the signifier over the signified is an issue of which linguistics and pragmatics are fond of, and has brought to the turning point in both semantics and semiotics. The value of language is not to be researched in the connections among the signs or in the relation between the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié), but in the usage of the language in the context. For example, there is a metacommunicative meaning in a change in pitch, volume, timbre, or tone of the sound produced by the voice that can nullify the semantic value of a sentence (the words).

Stratos grasped the semantic increase produced by the voice. It is not only in function of the meanings but it is its own primal mode of body expression. The voice has a communicative meaning by itself which deserves to be listened to regardless of the meanings it may convey. The signifier “voice” becomes semiogenetic, that is producer of new signification when verifying it in its bare essence, in its “phoné”. The “magic” sound of voice is independent from meanings, so Stratos produces sounds without codified meanings, which yet create new possible worlds.

As the petrified Oread Echo, his research for this lost voice explores the human cry, the breath, the noise. It intends to go back to the corporeal reality, to the instinctive materiality, to the animal Dionysian base, suppressed by a codified objectiveness. The insistence on the “significant voice” takes value away from the subjective production of the signified. Stratos carries to a dissolving of “the I” by a creatively repetitive modulation in advantage of an intersubjective union of the sources of life.

The nomadic voice represents the liberation, it aspires to the body vocalization subtracted to the fixed inflections of the bel canto. In "Mirologhi I", "Mirologhi II" and "Criptomelodie Infantili" the voice tends to be declined plurally, it whispers, it moans, it imitates, it becomes diplophonia and triplophonia. It is a polyphonic vocalism without a subject, androgynous, where both genders, masculine and feminine, coexist.

Stratos sings the voice, mere appearance, pharmakon, poisonous, and curative, without anything else except the voice, a pure ludic act, only voice as voice itself. “By this way the subversive sovereignty of the voice as an event, pharmakon communication challenge leaves the subject in an ingenuous anthropolatry somewhere between unconditioned enjoyment and consumption.”

The praise of the voice signifier supports an epistemology of the perception, it states “the error of Descartes” who reduced reason to conceptual word. It's in line with the “Praktognosia” (practical knowledge) of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which sets the starting pointing the sensible perceptions of our bodies.