In the middle voice of to write, the distance between scriptor and language diminishes asymptotically. We could even say that it is the writings of subjectivity, such as romantic writing, which are active, for in them the agent is not interior but anterior to the process of writing: here the one who writes does not write for himself, but as if by proxy, for an exterior and antecedent person (even if both bear the same name), while, in the modern verb of middle voice to write, the subject is constituted as immediately contemporary with the writing, being effected and affected by it: this is the exemplary case of the Proustean narrator, who exists only by writing, despite the references to a pseudo-memory" (Barthes 19; H. White 48-9).
In the transcript of the discussions that followed that conference where Barthes presented his essay, J. P. Vernant explains to Barthes how the sense of the ancient middle voice was lost as the Greeks formulated a vocabulary of the will and a philosophy that insisted that agents are the source of actions. When he wonders, then, if Barthes expects a "reappearance of the middle voice in the linguistic domain," Barthes answers that an author "cannot invent new tenses. He has enough trouble inventing new words; he is reproached for every one that he invents. Yet when he passes beyond the sentence or discourse, he finds again a certain freedom for resistance and for violence. That is all I can say for the moment" (Macksey 152). Surely he is thinking of James Joyce as one of the few authors who did violence to language on the linguistic level. Most authors must continue to use the old language--but in new ways that deconstruct the old ways of thinking. And that is pretty much all that Barthes did say about the middle voice.
But to use the middle voice as a heuristic, one must first cast around for familiar expressions that seem to express the ancient forms even if they do not reproduce its syntax. For instance, the bumper sticker "Stuff Happens" comprises a subject-verb sentence in the active voice, but the sense of the statement is that of the ancient middle voice.
To retrieve the middle voice Hans Kellner improvises on a Barry Manilow song: Active: "I Write the songs." Passive: "I am written by the songs." Middle voice. "I am the song and it (I) is (am) writing me (it). " Kellner defends this last example as a reasonable expression of Heidegger's aphorism "language speaks," which "throws attention on the being of the agent (subject, object) and their mutual involvement in the historical moment of writing" (133), which is yet another gloss on Derrida's aphorism, language languages.
Charles E. Scott, a philosopher who uses the middle voice to do violence to the boundaries of metaphysical thinking, distinguishes between the middle voice of transitive and intransitive verbs with examples taken from Sanskrit: The middle voice is used when the subject is in some way specifically implicated in the result of the action, but is neither the active subject nor the passive object of the action. Pacati, in the active voice, means "(the cook) cooks (something) for another." In the case of the intransitive verb,...the middle voice of 'die' (mriyate) we translate "dying occurs (of itself)." Or in the case of 'born' (ayate) "birthing occurs (of itself)." This middle voiced intransivity is also found in the Greek middle perfect form,...geogonesthai, 'to become becoming" (746).
In a footnote Scott suggests that "I was born," though it looks passive, comprises a middle voiced statement. He also cites some other common expressions: "I was caught," "the dishes are dried," "this reads like a novel," and "the cup broke." Once constituted, he applies this heuristic to problems in metaphysics, specifically applying it to a work by Nietzsche.
Eric Charles White in his *Kaironomia* begins a dazzling set of variation on the relation of the middle voice to the subjective self by considering Freud's use of the term to compose his grammar of erotics, where the active voice describes the position of the sadist; the passive, the position of the masochist. As desire seeks to extinguish itself by procuring the object that incited its beginning, the sadist and the masochist achieve a unity in which subject and object disappear, and this blissful state Freud calls the middle voice, which he associates with the modern reflexive form. His conjugation of the erotic transaction would, then, I suppose, go like this: Active: I do you. Passive: I am done. Reflexive-middle: We do ourselves together.
E. C. White finds Freud's reflexive middle voice too subjective and too stable for his postmodern project and, just as Eric Scott conceives of the intransitive middle voice as a way to reconceptualize the boundaries of metaphysics, so E.C. White recommends the intransitive middle voice as a tool for understanding the unstable and dynamic nature of the self that constantly reinvents itself: "Foregoing the reassuring illusion of finality, in the middle voice the self would serve only as a provisionally privileged center of pleasure. Such a self would lead a fugitive existence, always on the move from one newly constituted version of itself to another" (White 52).
Though Nietzsche certainly had encountered the middle-voice as he studied ancient languages, he never uses the term; nevertheless, he seems to describe the sense of the lost grammatical form in a number of passages in which he deconstructs the notion of a stable self. The great dramatist, as Nietzsche describes him in *The Birth of Tragedy*, seems to write in the middle voice since he loses his self in the Dionysian process and expresses a dream image from the primal oneness. Thus, "his 'subjectivity' in the sense used by modern aestheticians is a falsehood' (29). The ancient poet is different from us modern individuals, whom N. calls "knowing subjects" (32). He is, rather, a fairy tale creature "at once subject and object, at once poet, actor and audience" (32), which is to say that his expressions are middle-voiced.
Nietzsche develops this theme further in *The Gay Science* where he describes how we should contradict ourselves just as snakes must shed their skin to maintain their health. The change comes about in the context of "your new life not your reason." In his view, then, as we express these new opinion, we do so in the middle voice, to the extent that our opinions are formed outside of a stable self.
He expresses this theme in terms *Beyond Good and Evil* to attack what he calls the "superstitions of logicians" that they think their thoughts: "A thought comes when 'it' wishes, and not when 'I' wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject 'I' is the condition of the predicate 'think.' " Nietzsche suggests that even the pronoun "it" implies more agency than is justified, a vestige of our modern, deceptively transitive grammar which assumes, "Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent." He imagines a future in which metaphysics can utter itself in the middle-voice: "we shall accustom ourselves, including the logicians, to get along without the little "it" (24).
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. *Roland Barthes.* New York: Hill & Wang, 1977.
Key(less)terms in this entry, for possible links to forthcoming entries:
Nietzsche
Rhetoric
The seminar E5352: "Fred Nietzsche
and Rhetorical Theory"
Nietzsche Project at UTA
Syllabus, description of the project