There is perhaps a peculiar honesty to the human voice which has nothing
to say - in the age of unspeakable horrors what truth is there of
suffering than the pain of its incommunicability? The message, the
content, which, under the weight of overdrivven fog, cannot even begin
to articulate itself without being smothered, was the genius of How to
Dress Well's Love Remains. But what is the result of content stripped of
any content? What remains of the voice in this instance is the
substrate of material suffering that Roland Barthes recognized as the
"grain of the voice" - not just the texture of the voice, but also the
material and historical body's instantiation and continuation as the
voice. The grain of the voice is the texture is the voice below the
level of semantic content (the "phenotext" versus the "genotext") and as
such is the body materializing itself in and as voice. Adorno has
located the material body, below the indentitarian perversions of
rationalization, as the true site of suffering. Then the grain of the
human voice - in its crying out as suffering - is the substrate of the
substrate of suffering. It is the material imprint of suffering that
will not even rise to the level of language's symbolic (and hence
dangerously instrumental) rationality.
