Langage (saussurelment)

»Review«

Music has a profound influence on our psychological well-being. Rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, dynamics, and form “carry us away and stir something within us.” For many people, the lyrical content of songs in languages other than their native tongue often doesn’t matter, due to limited or nonexistent foreign language skills. For me, however, beyond these musical elements, it’s frequently song titles that serve as triggers, drawing me deeper into engagement with a song’s content.

“Langage (saussurelment)” takes as its starting point the song “langage” by Zaho de Sagazan. The title immediately transported me back to a first-semester lecture on Ferdinand de Saussure during my linguistics studies in the early 1980s. In Saussure’s tripartite distinction—”langage” (language in its broadest sense), “langue” (the language system), and “parole” (language use)—he regards “langage” as an unwieldy totality, one that resists scientific analysis.

And that is precisely what Sagazan makes the subject of her song: all that is vague, individual, and nearly impossible to systematize—whereas Saussure more or less sets the topic aside scientifically. She engages with the deeply personal “language”—the visual and emotional idiom—of another human being, one that cannot truly be reduced to a system. At its core, “Langage” is about emotional communication within a romantic relationship—and the difficulty of truly understanding another person. It is a song about the longing to understand someone on a deeper, nonverbal level—even when that person warns you away from themselves.

“Langage (saussurelment)” is an attempt to transform this song into visual language. It is based on a photograph of a couple in a heterosexual relationship caught in a moment of communication. The scene has been deconstructed: the protagonists isolated, their depiction defamiliarized, and the heterosexual dynamic “updated.” S/he replays the past few days in their mind, conjuring images of him before their mind’s eye. S/he summons an inner calendar in their head—one in which s/he has attached dates to images and added emotional annotations.