Derrida and Deconstruction

Heidegger meant by "the end of philosophy" the end of a philosophy rooted in metaphysics. He argued that the only real philosophical questions have to do with "being" (ontology) and that "transcendental" questions were meaningless. By the sixties, the notion of the "end of philosophy " had developed into the notion that philosophy was nothing other than the ideology of the western ethos. The liberal humanist tradition presented a de facto situation (its own pre-eminence) as a de jure situation (its truth). In other words, it presented its traditional privilege as a natural superiority. Such a position is ideological.

Derrida argued that Heidegger had not escaped transcendentalism, that his "Being" was as transcendental as any other "Transcendental Signified." He also argued that even if the charge against philosophy as ideology were true, the charge was levelled in the language of philosophy, which can not be escaped. All that was really being asked was that the dominant ideology (philosophy = the ideology of the western ethos) be replaced by another broader or at least different ideology such as Marxism (philosophy=discourse of the ruling class), Freudianism (philosophy =sexual symptom), anti-Freudianism (philosophy =phallocratic ideology). In the end, he argued, the order of reason is absolute, "since it is only to itself that an appeal against it can be brought, only in itself that a protest against it can be made; on its own terrain, it leaves us no other recourse than to stratagem and strategy."

Derrida did not quarrel with Heidegger's position that history, as perceived in the philosophic tradition was over; only that Heidegger himself had not escaped it. Derrida raised the question of what there was to say after philosophy was over (but ironically still in place, because reason is absolute and can only be questioned in its own terms). The strategy he chose was duplicity, the playing of a double game. He would operate in the language of reason, since there was no other, but try to lay traps for it by posing it problems it could not answer, exposing the inherent contradictions in apparently reasonable positions. He called this strategy deconstruction, after Heidegger's term destruktion.

For Heidegger, destruktion was essentially, the history of the inquiry into history. Dasein , the individual's being in the world, is often trapped by the everyday ordinariness of life into interpreting itself in terms of the world it knows and the tradition it inherits. This condition Heidegger calls fallenness, and the individuals who have fallen into it das man (the they). Anyone who wishes to live authentically must escape from the average everyday ordinariness of life and contemplate his/her own death (non-being, or nothingness). This is done through the agency of angst , a kind of generalized suffering caused by the fear of dying, and the intellectual exercise of destruktion. Destruktion, then is a combination of a negative analysis of "today," the average everyday world and a positive analysis of history that tries to achieve authenticity through the rigorous questioning of accepted authority. Often this means breaking a word into its component parts in order to trace its history.

Derrida's deconstruction is a more limited but even more rigorous form of interrogation. Since the "speaking subject," when he/she speaks, must speak the language of reason, there must exist some silent region where the double agent deconstructor can sort out his stratagem against the Logos, the rules of reason. In order for this to be possible, two conditions must maintain:
1. In order for the double game of duplicity to be played, the language of philosophy must already be full of duplicity (both in its sense of doubleness and its sense of hypocrisy or lying.)
2. The strategist (speaking subject, deconstructor) must resist the power of Logos (reason) by maintaining a indefensible position of empiricism, erasing the distinction between truths of fact and truths of reason. This will be accomplished through différance.

For Heidegger, difference was the result of temporality. Since history and language precede the self and help construct the self, the self can never step outside itself and see itself outside of history and language. The self (in Heidegger's language dasein) can only conceive an historically past self, different from the existential self experiencing the world in the present. In that sense, the self (as subject) is always different from the self (as object).

Derrida's concept la différance contains two notions: difference and deference, a separation of identity and a separation in time. Derrida came to his notion through an attempt to show the impossibility of Husserl's promise of a "phenomenology of history" by deconstructing the notion. He showed that a phenomenology of history would have to answer the question "how is a truth possible for us?" But if a truth is to be truth, it must be absolute, independent of any point of view(unless, of course, we are God, in which case the question is meaningless). Phenomenology seeks the origin of truth, and it locates this origin in an inaugural fact which by definition can only occur once.

The phenomenologist argues that only the present exists. The past is retained in the present through the present ruins of a civilization that is absent. The future is mooted, or predicted, but only in the present. But in order for the past to be retained in the present and the future to beannounced in the present, the present must not only be present. It must also be a present that is still to come (future) and a present that is already past (past). At this point difference appears. The present is not identical with itself.

This difference raises again the problem of the inaugural fact Suppose we have the trace of some inaugural event, say the stone foundations at L'Anse aux Meadows. Out of our present we may for ourselves assume these to be Viking remains, though we cannot with certainty know what meaning they had for their makers. We cannot make our meaning coincide with their meaning, yet we know that when that past was a present, it had all the properties of a present. That other must also be a same. Again, this failure of the past to coincide with itself is a source of différance.

If we are to develop a phenomenology of history we must posit what Husserl called "a principle of principles." This principle is that history is meaningful, and however confused or in need of mediation, it can be transmitted from generation to generation. It is univocal, even though it can never be articulated at any moment. Being and meaning can never coincide except at infinity, so meaning is always deferred. The de jure situation (what is right) and the de facto situation (what is fact) can also never coincide. The reason for this is that there is an originary difference between fact and right, being and meaning.

Another necessary but paradoxical concept is the idea of originary delay. Derrida argues that a first is only a first by consequence of a second that follows it. The first is only recognizable as a first and not merely a singular by the arrival of the second. The second is therefore the prerequisite of the first. It permits the first to be first by its delayed arrival. The first, recognizable only after the second, is in this respect a third. Origin, then is a kind of dress rehearsal, what Derrida calls la répétition d'une première, in terms of the theatre, a representation of the first public performance which has not yet occurred. The original, in that sense, is always a copy. In this way, Derrida deconstructs Husserl's principle of principles which always relied on being able to distinguish the original from later copies.

If we apply the same analysis to signs and things in the "real" world we come to the paradoxical situation that the sign precedes the referent. The sign "dog," precedes the four-legged barking creature because the creature is only recognizable as that after the sign "dog" has been applied to it. Derrida has shown that, contrary to Husserl's notion of a pure origin, consciousness never precedes language,, and we cannot see language as a representation of a silently lived through experience.

This is the core of deconstructive thinking. We can only understand the priority of the sign by an enquiry into writing. Earlier, we looked at graphemes (the units of writing) as a second-order sign system. Derrida sees the relationship between these signs as semiological. The graphic sign stands in for the phonemic sign. It is therefore "the sign of a sign," while the oral sign is the "sign of the thing." Writing is then supplementary. (Even the oral sign is supplementary, since it exists as supplement to the "real world." The graphic sign of writing is particularly supplemental since it is a supplement to a supplement, a sign of a sign.) In Off Grammatology Derrida argues that writing should not be subordinated to speech, and this subordination is nothing more than an historical prejudice. He argues further that to define a graphic sign is to define any sign. Every sign is a signifier whose signified is another signifier. Think of looking up signifiers in a dictionary. What you get is a list of other signifiers. Meaning is always deferred.

The idea of the supplement raises some interesting questions. We can think of the origin as a place where there is no originary, only a supplement in the place of a deficient originary. It is deficient for this reason. We can think of the supplement as a surplus, something extra added to the whole and outside of it. But if the whole is really the whole, then nothing can be added to it. If the supplement is something and not nothing, then it must expose the defect of the whole, since something that can accomodate the addition of a supplement must be lacking something within itself. Derrida calls this "the logic of the supplement."

In the same way, the present is only present on the condition that it allude to the absence from which it distinguishes itself. Metaphysics, Derrida argues, is the act of erasing this distinguishing mark, the trace of the absent. We may now define trace as the sign left by the absent thing, after it has passed on the scene of its former presence. Every present, in order to know itself as present, bears the trace of an absent which defines it. It follows then that an originary present must bear an originary trace, the present trace of a past which never took place, an absolute past. In this way, Derrida believes, he achieves a position beyond absolute knowledge.

Derrida distinguishes between a meditating on presence, which he defines as philosophy, and the possibility of meditating on non-presence. How can these two kinds of thinking, one of which takes issue with the other co-exist? Derrida argues that philosophy is always already there (not that it has always been.) Philosophy can only be a thinking of presence, since experience is lived and tested in the present. The other kind of thinking which is not philosophical cannot therefore appeal to individual empirical experience. Instead it appeals to a general experience.
At the level of text, then, the appeal is to writing in general. Every text is a double text. It is philosophical and and understood by classical interpretation at one level of its reading. But it also contains traces and contradictions, indications of the second text which a classical reading can never uncover. No synthesis is possible. The second text is not an opposite which can be reconciled. It is what Derrida calls its counterpart, slightly phased. It requires a deconstructive reading of the difference (what Derrida calls a double science or double séance).

The meditation on non-presence is a meditation on the self as other. Every metaphysical text is separated from itself by what Derrida calls a "scarcely perceptible veil." A slight displacement in the reading of the text is sufficient to collapse one into the other, to make comedy wisdom or vice versa. Derrida's duplicity splits the metaphysical text in two, revealing its inherent contradictions. Derrida's analysis insists on the undecidability of words, their unresolvable contradictions.

One of the most important concepts in Derrida's analysis is the idea of "sous rature," (under erasure.) Heidegger often crossed out the word Being (Being) and let both the word and its erasure stand. He felt the Being was prior to and beyond signification or meaning, and hence to signify it was inadequate, though there existed no alternative. Derrida extends this practise to all signs. Since any signifier has as its signified another signifier, it always defers meaning and it always carries traces of other meanings. It must therefore be studied as defective, incomplete, under erasure.

A few (over-simplified) definitions:

Grammatology: The science of writing. Derrida proposes to move beyond traditional models of writing that describe its history and evolution to develop a theory of writing, to apply that theory and to move in the direction of a new writing. The difficult in doing so is the result of the relationship between writing and metaphysics.

The metaphysics of presence. The assumption that the physical presence of a speaker authenticates his speech. Speaking would then precede writing (the sign of a sign), since the writer is not present at the reading of his text to authenticate it. Spoken language is assumed to be directly related to thought, writing a supplement to spoken language, standing in for it. This is the result of phonocentrism the valorization of speech over writing.

Logocentrism: "In the beginning was the word." Logocentrism is the belief that knowledge is rooted in a primeval language(now lost) given by God to humans. God (or some other transcendental signifier: the Idea, the Great Spirit, the Self, etc;) acts a foundation for all our thought, language and action. He is the truth whose manifestation is the world. He is the foundation for the binaries by which we think: God/Man, spiritual/physical, man/woman, good/evil. The first term of the binary is valorized, and a chain of binaries constitutes a hierarchy.

Binary Oppositions: The hierarchical relation of elements that results from logocentrism. Derrida is interested more in the margins, the supplements, than in the centre.

The supplement: Derrida takes this term from Rousseau, who saw a supplement as "an inessential extra added to something complete in itself." Derrida argues that what is complete in itself cannot be added to, and so a supplement can only occur where there is an originary lack. In any binary set of terms, the second can be argued to exist in order to fill in an originary lack in the first. This relationship, in which one term secretly resides in another, Derrida calls invagination.

Originary lack: Some absence in a thing that permits it to be supplemented.

Metonymic chain: Derrida argues with Saussure's notion that signs are binary. (signifier, signified) The signified, he says, is always a signifier in another system. As a result, meaning cannot be in a sign, since it is always dispersed, deferred and delayed. (dictionary analogy). In terms of a text, then, all signifiers must be seen as defective. A signifier always contains traces of other signifiers.

Trace: The indications of an absence that define a presence. (The present is known as the present only through the evidence of a past that once was a present.) The traces of other signifiers in any signifier means that it must always be read under erasure.(sur rasure).

Erasure: The decision to read a signifier or a text as if its meaning were clear, with the understanding that this is only a strategy.

Difference (Différance) A pun on difference and deference. Any signifier (or chain of signification, ie. text) must infinitely defer its meaning because of the nature of the sign (the signified is composed of signifiers). At the same time, meaning must be kept under erasure because any text is always out of phase with itself, doubled, in an argument with itself that can be glimpsed through the aporias it generates.
Deconstruction: an attempt to dismantle the binary oppositions which govern a text by focussing on the aporias or impasses of meaning. A deconstructive reading will identify the logocentric assumptions of a text and the binaries and hierarchies it contains. It will demonstrate how a logocentric text always undercuts its own assumptions, its own system of logic. It will do this largely through an examination of the traces, supplements, and invaginations in the text.

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Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

BYLINE: BY MITCHELL STEPHENS; Mitchell Stephens is chairman of the journalism and mass-communication department at New York University.

Jacques Derrida has death on his mind. He often does. But the death in question at this moment is one that holds little terror for him: the reported death of deconstruction -- the "theory" or "method" (he prefers "experience") to which Derrida gave birth.

"The structure of the statement 'It is dead' is an interesting one," mused the French philosopher and writer during an extended visit to New York this fall. "It claims to describe a fact, but in a number of cases it is a form of wishful thinking. You say something is dead in order for it to die."

Many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction's demise -- if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it. This is, after all, a subject that has a reputation for being rather difficult.

Derrida has tried to explain -- many times, in many ways, not always with success. He hazarded a characteristically hesitant definition in a paper he presented recently at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York: "Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible."

This may provide a start. To deconstruct a "text" (a term defined broadly enough to include the Declaration of Independence and a Van Gogh painting) means to pick it apart, in search of ways in which it fails to make the points it seems to be trying to make. Why would someone want to "read" (defined equally broadly) like that? In order to experience the impossibility of anyone writing or saying (or painting) something that is perfectly clear, the impossibility of constructing a theory or method of inquiry that will answer all questions or the impossibility of fully comprehending weighty matters, like death. Deconstruction, in other words, guards against the belief -- a belief that has led to much violence -- that the world is simple and can be known with certainty. It confronts us with the limits of what it is possible for human thought to accomplish.

This experience was widely sought after in American graduate schools in the 1970's and 1980's. In fact, no intellectual movement in the last third of this century created more of a fuss on the campuses than deconstruction (not "deconstructionism," a term that makes it sound too much like an ideology), and no thinker had as much influence and caused as much controversy there as Jacques Derrida. (By 1990 his name had appeared in the title of at least 54 books.) But now arbiters of academic fashion, with a finality usually reserved for tie widths, have taken to pronouncing deconstruction "dead."

Derrida is not convinced. "If one were to analyze the signs," he asserts, "the number of publications that mention deconstruction, the number of conferences that are being held, the number of people who are referring to it, if only to say that it is dead, one could draw exactly the opposite conclusion."

In the past few years, however, most of the academic journals and hiring committees that were once enamored of deconstruction have clearly lost their ardor. And anxious assistant professors have been searching for a new theory, method or experience to which they might consecrate themselves.

"It is not like it was in the 1970's," Derrida does admit. "A certain fashion has probably waned. But," he adds, taking another tack, "psychoanalysis has taught that the dead -- a dead parent, for example -- can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts."

There is no doubt that deconstruction continues to haunt large numbers of students and faculty. They have packed auditoriums and lecture halls at New York University, the Cardozo School of Law and the New School for Social Research in which Derrida has been speaking during his annual monthlong stay in New York.

And off campus the name and spirit of deconstruction continue to be invoked -- with varying degrees of reverence and understanding -- in architecture, art, literature, criticism and even fashion. Thomas Keenan, who teaches English at Princeton, calls all this "the subversive afterlife of deconstruction."

"Deconstruction is dead in the same way that Freudianism is dead," declares Stanley Fish, a literary theorist at Duke, who is far from a Derrida disciple. "It is everywhere."

JACQUES DERRIDA occupies a distinguished position in the cultural world. "He is the French philosopher," says Annie Cohen-Solal, author of a biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and a distant cousin of Derrida's. "He is the last of a line that includes Sartre, [Michel] Foucault and [Roland] Barthes." But, she notes, Derrida has never fit comfortably into that role.

Derrida was, to begin with, an outsider. He grew up not in Paris, or even the provinces, but in Algeria, as a Jew. Even now Derrida writes and lives in the suburbs -- how un-Sartre-like -- with his wife of 36 years, Marguerite. He commutes by car to his office at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris.

For the past two decades Derrida has also -- in another uncharacteristic move for the French philosopher -- been "commuting" back and forth between France and the United States. He's here for a couple of months each year, giving seminars, participating in numerous conferences and presenting his still formidable legions of American fans and friends with new texts to puzzle over. More than 20 of his books have been published in English translations.

"It's not like he goes to America as a Roman Catholic missionary goes to Japan," notes Anselm Haverkamp, director of the Poetics Institute at New York University. "He loves it here." New York in particular. "When I first arrive here each time, I experience a kind of jubilation," Derrida reports.

While in New York, Derrida teaches a graduate seminar at N.Y.U., the subject of which, for the past two years, has been "the secret." Derrida is trying to help his students experience what is "impossible" about secrets -- the way, for example, they have to be revealable in order to be concealed. The reading list for this seminar includes, as Derrida's reading lists often do, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, but the class has also been discussing the story "Bartleby the Scrivener," by Herman Melville. Derrida's romance with America now extends to its literature.

Bartleby -- an "inscrutable scrivener," Melville calls him -- is a clerk who when asked to perform certain expected tasks replies, simply, "I would prefer not to." Derrida -- whose dense, experimental, paradox-laced writings have made him appear something of an "inscrutable scrivener" himself -- loves this phrase. Why does Bartleby "prefer not to"? Melville's character never says.

Bartleby, Derrida tells his students, "was an expert in secrets." Their teacher has learned quite a bit about them, too.

Derrida recently wrote an autobiographical essay, focused on his mother's death, in which he remembers himself as "a child about whom people used to say 'he cries for nothing.' " For nothing? Derrida was born in 1930. About 10 months earlier, an older brother had died in infancy. About 10 years later, a younger brother got sick and died. Derrida makes clear that his mother, "whose anxiety I perceived each time I was ill," made sure these lessons on the frailty of life sunk in. Derrida's first secret may have been a precocious awareness of mortality.

The formidable world of Parisian intellectuals certainly held its secrets, when this young man from Algeria attempted to find a place in it. Knowl- edge of them came at a price. There were scenes of failed or uncompleted examinations and even nervous collapse before Derrida succeeded in gaining entrance to, graduating from and eventually teaching at France's most prestigious college, the Ecole Normale Superieure.

Inspired by the anti-institutional spirit of 1968, the man who was already establishing himself as the French philosopher preferred not to defend a doctoral dissertation until 1980 -- when he turned 50. Inspired by what he calls an attachment to "the image of the non-image," he had preferred not to be photographed for publication until 1979. Even his appearance became something of a secret.

At the end of one of Derrida's N.Y.U. classes, a student asks him where his discussion of secrets is heading. Derrida stares at a point above the crowd packed three or four deep around the seminar table. "What is really at stake in this seminar," he states, seeming for a moment every bit the Gallic philosopher, "is the death of the other or my own death."

Derrida's students, though they're politely nodding their heads, look perplexed. However, this portentous statement is not as impenetrable as it may seem. For Derrida, death -- because it is impossible for us to understand fully, because something singular and impossible to share dies with us -- is wrapped up in secrets.

DERRIDA IS EASY TO SPOT at a conference. His buoyant, almost pure-white hair grabs more than its share of the available light. "The Lenny Bernstein look" is what Naomi Schor, a professor of romance literature at Duke University, calls it. Derrida's halo of hair is set off by dark, Mediterranean skin -- not "the clammy white skin of the library bound" in which novelists, John Updike in this instance, tend to encase characters who practice deconstruction.

In fact, Derrida is usually the most elegant man in the room. As he steps to the podium to deliver the keynote address at a recent Cardozo conference, he wears a well-tailored, soft-blue suit and a patterned light gray tie that carries on a complicated dialogue with his hair. Derrida's body is compact and trim, his face square and handsome -- though he is also now, at age 63, often one of the oldest people in the room. He begins his talk by suggesting, "I deserve less than ever to give a 'keynote address,' because I want to recall that a 'key' can always get lost and an 'address' always fail to reach its 'address.' "

Such plays on words are serious business for Derrida. Although he is often accused of being an apostle of meaninglessness, what is truly disturbing about Derrida is that he finds too much meaning lurking in the roots, etymologies, connotations and sounds of words. His readings focus on these excesses of meaning and the ways the points we are trying to make invariably get tangled up in them, leading to contradictions and misunderstandings -- statements that reach the wrong addresses or fail to open the proper locks.

And an odd thing happens when our culture is read with an eye for such tangles: "Hierarchies" that had been taken for granted -- that speech is more central than writing, to choose an example that has been crucial for Derrida -- get upended. These hierarchies are tripped up by the swarms of meanings that circle around the words used to support them. The now classic example, pounced upon in Derrida's book "Dissemination," is a declaration Plato once made. Attempting to state the advantages speech has over writing, Plato proclaimed that oral discourse "is written in the soul of the listener." Written? Yes. This is only a metaphor, but Plato's reliance upon it, Derrida argues, demonstrates the essential impossibility of the distinction he is trying to make.

This is the sort of aggressive, contradiction-uncovering reading for which deconstruction is known. It has imbued some philosophers with a new humility, made many literature professors wary of expounding on such things as an author's intent, alerted some law professors to cracks in the foundations of law and inspired groups of architects, artists and fashion designers to create works that display and make a virtue of contradictions in the way they were constructed.

This sort of reading, however, is now supposed to be dead.

"It had a problem," notes Leo Damrosch, the chairman of Harvard's English department. "It's hard to do it well. What it wants is a kind of intense struggle with a text to dig out things the text doesn't know it's saying. People with average imaginations and no particular fascination with literature couldn't do it. You have to be really smart."

It helps, too, if you know your way around Western culture. Derrida's address at Cardozo includes references to Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Husserl, G. W. F. Hegel and, of course, Heidegger. In the audience is a graduate student who has traveled down from Yale -- once the center of deconstruction in the United States. When Derrida's talk ends, the student confesses to the person sitting next to him, "I understood maybe 10 percent of what he was saying." That's a common reaction.

Cynthia Chase, an old friend of Derrida's who teaches English and comparative literature at Cornell, is one of the more accomplished of deconstruction's practitioners. Her half brother is a successful movie star and a failed talk-show host. "The kinds of things she's written," Chevy Chase told an interviewer last summer, "I just can't understand." Derrida and his friends and disciples have produced works, rich and important as they may be, that cannot easily be understood by every "reader of nice perceptions," to borrow another phrase from Melville. You have to do some homework.

In 1987 it was discovered that Paul de Man, an English professor at Yale and one of deconstruction's foremost American proponents, had written a series of articles as a young man for two collaborationist newspapers in wartime Belgium. Despite the fact that Derrida was himself a victim of anti-Semitism during the Nazi era and did not conceive of deconstruction until decades later, these revelations made it easier for some academics to dismiss the movement.

Deconstruction had another problem: the widely held belief that reading in search of contradictions and misunderstandings is foolish, if not insidious. John Updike has attacked what he has called "deconstruction's fatiguing premise that art has no health in it." Critics on the right are outraged by the implication that there is something tangled or "impossible" about such important concepts as "reality" and "truth," which they are committed to extricating from the grip of quotation marks.

"Derrida's influence has been disastrous," Roger Kimball, a conservative critic and author of "Tenured Radicals," proclaims. "He has helped foster a sort of anemic nihilism, which has given imprimaturs to squads of imitators who no longer feel that what they are engaged in is a search for truth, who would find that notion risible."

Though Derrida considers himself a member of the democratic left, critics on the left haven't necessarily been any kinder. Some have charged that all this emphasis on the "impossible," on what we can't know, threatens to leave us paralyzed, "standing" -- like poor Bartleby -- "mute and solitary" before the world's injustices. Derrida's response -- "needless to say, one more time" -- is that if the world were as simple, untangled and uncontradictory as his critics on both the left and the right want it to be, political and ethical decisions would be so straightforward as to have no interest or meaning. Tangles, in other words, are the health of politics -- and the health of art, too, deconstructionists would argue.

CERTAINLY, DERRIDA himself has not been paralyzed. He was active, for example, in the struggle against apartheid as well as the struggle before 1989 to help dissident Czechoslovak intellectuals. Words like "responsibility," his critics might be surprised to learn, come up often in Derrida's talks. "Sometimes you have to do what you prefer not to," he says, smiling. "That is what is meant by a 'duty.' "

The latest fashion in literature departments -- "cultural studies" -- is, as Roger Kimball is quick to note, more overtly political than deconstruction is. Many of its practitioners admit to communing with the ghost of deconstruction, but their emphasis is on the relationship of works of literature to other, less elite, forms of culture and to social movements. Academic departments that in the 1980's might have been looking to recruit a specialist in deconstruction now might be trying to outbid one another for some well-credentialed expert in "gender studies" or "gay studies."

Derrida seems able, for the most part, to watch the turnings of academic fashion with equanimity. "The fact that other methods have appeared is simply normal," he says. "Why not? But" -- and this is the key point Derrida wants to make about the reported death of deconstruction -- "I don't think deconstruction can be reduced to simply a method or even a theory. I think there is some element in deconstruction that belongs to the structure of history or events. It started before the academic phenomenon of deconstruction, and it will continue with other names."

When Derrida looks at historical events, particularly after World War II, he sees contradictions and tangles popping up all over. He sees "hierarchies" -- European over non-European, male over female -- being "disturbed," if not overturned. He sees political and economic systems growing unstable -- being revealed as "impossible." And he sees scientific and technological change causing such "deconstructions" to occur at an accelerating rate.

"I was in Russia three years ago," Derrida recalls, "and some of my colleagues there told me that the best definition for perestroika, which was a way of dismantling and at the same time democratizing a previously rigid system, was 'deconstruction.' And, you know, such phenomena are today happening everywhere. The academic phenomenon -- what we call 'deconstruction' -- is only a symptom of this."

JACQUES HAS THE MOST extraordinary eyes I've ever seen!" exclaims Naomi Schor. "When he's really concentrating and serious, they're piercing." Enunciating sentences in front of Derrida, consequently, can seem a bit like placing a 1040 form in front of an I.R.S. agent; you wonder what contradictions he's going to spot. New acquaintances approach with a certain wariness.

But Derrida is known for being gracious and kind. That piercing gaze is aimed at himself more than others -- particularly on the frequent occasions when his thoughts turn to mortality. Peggy Kamuf, who has translated a number of Derrida's books into English, stresses that this preoccupation with death is not so much "a quirk of his psychological makeup" but a major philosophical concern.

But is it also a psychological quirk? "Probably," Kamuf concedes.

Once the word "quirk" is explained to Derrida -- his English is strong but not perfect -- he concurs: "It is true that I'm obsessed with death. I am at every minute attentive to the possibility that in the following hour I will be dead, and the person I am with will say, 'I was just in the room with him, and now he is dead.' This film is constantly in front of my eyes. Each time I drive back home, which is about once a day, I watch my car getting into an accident, as if I am at a movie theater, and I hear them say, 'He just left the crossroad, and then he. . . .' I can't avoid watching it.

"It is something in me," he says, with echoes of a young boy's voice faintly audible in his tentative, melodic English, "that I try to understand but I don't understand."

Is Derrida plagued by similar movies on the death of deconstruction?

"When I think of finitude, of the fact that it will all have an end -- and I have no illusions about that -- then deconstruction is not the thing the end of which makes me most anxious," he responds. "But I am wondering what shape all that will someday take in the view of historians of ideas." His eyes twinkle for a moment. "That is one of my movies."

The more personal of Derrida's mental movies about mortality cause him, he says, "deep anxiety." It would be unfair to suggest that all of deconstruction, with its many permutations, is a response to that anxiety, but it certainly has helped motivate Derrida's own explanations of the tangled and contradictory.

"All my writing is on death," he acknowledges. "If I don't reach the place where I can be reconciled with death, then I will have failed. If I have one goal, it is to accept death and dying."

Might that, for someone whose eyes see what Derrida's see, be impossible?

(another article by Mitchell Stephens on Jacques Derrida)

Selengkapnya....

Deconstruction: Derrida, Theology, and John of the Cross

[Yahweh Elohim] brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
Genesis 2:191

"But," he said, "you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live."
Exodus 33:20

The structuralism for which Jacques Derrida has written an epitaph is a movement in linguistics that insists on the division of sign into signifier and signified. The signifier is "the set of sounds, or written marks, that is taken to designate an idea or concept" (Jacobs 1991: 173), and the signified the idea of the concept itself; "shoe," for example. The connection between the signifier "shoe" (in English) and the signified (the thing itself) is wholly relative to culture. That is, "shoe" could instead be:

"Plox" if we so desired, as long as we kept two things in mind: (1) there would need to be general agreement within the linguistic community that "plox" indicated this concept, and (2) the signifier "plox" must be distinguishable from all other signifiers, for the meaning of any given signifiers lies only in its difference from others. (Ibid. 173-174).

It is from this point that Derrida has criticized Western philosophy. This criticism is an attempt to show the violation of its own rules that Western thinking commits, and thus to dismantle, or deconstruct, it.

It must first be acknowledged that "deconstruction as an intellectual movement in the American academy has not remained within Derrida's control or subject to his direction" (Ibid. 173). Likewise, there are, or have been, other leading proponents of deconstruction in Europe itself; for example, Lyotard and even Foucault. And certainly Derrida's own thought has developed to a degree since the publication of his first major work, Of Grammatology. Nonetheless, it is necessary to encounter Of Grammatology to begin an understanding of Derrida. From Derrida, then, will come an understanding of deconstruction. And in the midst of it all, American writers, and the Derrida of a 1984 interview, will aid our understanding and discussion.

Still, it must be stated that such a focus on one man and one of his earliest works will bring an awareness that is quite provisional, an outline, temporary. That granted, then, some basic analysis will be offered, followed by a mitigated integration.

* * *

. . . there the LORD confused the language of the whole world.
Genesis 11:9


Words are trivial
Pleasures remain
So does the pain
Words are meaningless
And forgettable
--Depeche Mode, "Enjoy the Silence"


In discussing Derrida, it is necessary to understand his terms. This endeavor can become like grasping water, for the deconstructionist uses language in the sparkling dance of play. The deconstructionist uses language to show its contradictions, to erode the confidence that words do indeed reveal the wor(l)d behind them. Understanding, then, comes by keeping one foot in the logic system being deconstructed and one foot in the maze. But since there is that connection with the system, there is the possibility of understanding.

The key terms to explore are: differance, sous rature, trace, and logocentrism. Though these each carry varying importance, and though other terms provide helpful insight into Derridean deconstruction, under our present limitations, we can only approach the most significant terms in the most basic way.

Differance is the key Derridean term. It is a play on the French, "an economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring" (Derrida 1976:23). In fact, it is "the source of linguistic value" (Ibid. 52). That is, a word means because it is different from other words, and that meaning only arises out of the difference. As a result the presence of meaning is pushed further along beyond the edges of definition.

The foundation for this is based in the contradictions in Western metaphysics. In spoken discourse, the speaker and the hearer are immediately present to one another. Meaning and understanding are facilitated by means of presence. When discourse becomes written, however, the speaker/author is no longer present, and meaning is then hindered by absence.

It would seem, therefore, that as long as speaker and listener could always be present to one another, meaningful discourse could occur. But Derrida will not even allow this. He wrote Of Grammatology to show that writing's entire theory and form (including its technical aspects) infects and found human speech from its very origins.2

There is, then, even in speech, a presence and an absence in a sign's meaning. "[M]eaning is not immediately present in a sign. Since the meaning of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not, its meaning is always in some sense absent from it too" (Eagleton 1983:128). That is "shoe" means shoe both because it has some culturally fixed reference to the thing itself, and because it does not mean, for instance, cat.

Since "the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or referrent" (Derrida 1976:69), words must be written sous rature, or "under erasure." For what meaning is present in them is present by its very absence. "There is no sign as such. Either the sign is considered a thing, and it is not a sign. Or it is a reference, and thus not itself" (Ibid. 204). "Differance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing it makes impossible" (Ibid. 143). This putting a word under erasure is designated thus: sign. It allows the presence of the sign at the same time that it forbids that presence. The meaning/being of the sign is not present, but that very absence calls to mind the presence we are assuming.

So there is left in the sign something called trace. Contained in our words is something other than what they "mean." Differance "makes the opposition of presence and absence possible" (Ibid. 84). Thus we have contained in a sign/word as much its absence of meaning as the presence of the other from which it differs/defers: the trace. But the "trace itself does not exist" (Ibid. 167), and is "the unity of a double movement of protention and retention" (Ibid. 84). For Derrida, Western metaphysics, as expressed in philosophy, has forgotten this. It has assumed that absence excludes presence: A is not non-A. Calling this overpowering assumption "logocentrism," he observes, "The logocentric longing par excellence is to distinguish one from the other" (Ibid. 167). What this distinguishing attempts is the location of meaning in the sign. This, then, subsumes/subverts all language under/by that exclusion. And Derrida questions that subversion.

* * *
I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of the devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone
--U2, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"


* * *

Since Derrida himself admits, "the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work" (1976:24), it would not seem amiss to expose its own problems. Given that Derrida denies that Western metaphysics has satisfied the yearning for the "Sign which will give meaning to all others--the 'transcendental signifier'--and for the anchoring, unquestionable meaning to which all our signs can be seen to point (the 'transcendental signified')" (Eagleton 1983:131)--nonetheless, Derrida does not attempt to destroy meaning per se. Rather, he asserts that meaning has not been found in Western thinking. Another locus, different from exclusionary presence, must be found, no matter how provisional. "Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness to the other" (Derrida 1984:124), and an attempt "to discover the non-place or non-lieu which would be [that] 'other' of philosophy" (Ibid. 112).

Meaning is "out there," it is simply that it is impossible for Western metaphysics to get around/behind textuality. "There is nothing outside of the text" (Derrida 1976:158). The sign does not allow the experience of the being/thing. "The play of the supplement is indefinite. References refer to references" (Ibid. 298). Transcendence has been put under erasure by immanence. A new center must be found if meaning and presence/absence are to be woven together.

In Derrida's forcing apart of immanence and transcendence, deconstruction paves the way for a(n) a/theology which takes deconstructionism to its final end. "A/theology is, in large measure, a critique of the notion of the transcendent God . . ." (Taylor 1984:104). "The disappearance of the transcendental signified closes the theological age of the sign and makes possible the free play of a/theological writing" (Ibid. 106). That free play imprisons the incarnate word, and incarnation, then, "is not a once-and-for-all event, restricted to a specific time and space and limited to a specific individual" (Ibid. 104). Rather, Taylor goes on to draw this conclusion: "Radical christology is thoroughly incarnational. . . . The body of the incarnate word marks the negation of the transcendence that is characteristic of God, self, and history" (Ibid. 168).3

Clearly, then, Christianity stands to lose much if it, too, is bound to the Western metaphysics under deconstruction. If logic is, indeed, only metaphor after all; if everything in language is only arbitrary substitute (as per Derrida 1976:235); if, as Derrida asserts, the subject is imprisoned in language (see 1984:125), then truth is impossible of signification (see 1976:10). In fact, the search for a new center becomes the arena for the exercise of a fascist will to power as each provisional non-lieu makes way for its more powerful successor.

Also, Derrida's argument notwithstanding, an important distinction must be kept in mind: "For deconstruction to work, one must presume a uniform ignorance that blindly embraces the signifier as the signified, and vice versa. In short, the indissolubility of the signifier and signified must be presumed in order to separate them" (Zornado 1992:123). Likewise, Osborne acknowledges the gap between signifier and signified. Nonetheless, he questions "whether it is as insurmountable a gap as Derrida argues" (1991:385).4 He goes on to assert that given time, meaning can be reached in/by context (Ibid.).

Winquist, along similar lines, helps preserve meaning by pointing out: "It is always difficult to determine when we espouse a crisis of meaning whether we are referring to a relational deficiency or to our own inability to discern relationships in the linguistic transformation of the complex of events that are the original objects of thinking" (1986:4). That is, all our talking, even thinking, about an event, person, truth, etc., is derivative: therefore, "presence" will never be complete in human discourse. Or as he says (emphasis his): "Our problem is not the absence of God but the presence and reality of the concept of God" (Ibid. 7). The question then becomes, given a fallen language, given that meaning is "out there," is it possible for humans to enjoy the presence of the other, of meaning, no matter how imperfectly?

Even by deconstruction's own terms, by excluding transcendence, they open the door for it. Immanence cannot be thought without the trace of transcendence. Really, what deconstruction hath wrought, is a realization of language's fallenness, and thus an announcement of the provisionality of all our God-talk.

But if God-talk is provisional, are we not back where deconstruction left us, without any guides? Surprisingly, the answer is no. We do have guides, ancient though they may be.

* * *
Take the space between us
And fill it up some way
--The Police, "O My God"


* * *

Our help here will come from writing and thought which predates Derrida by centuries. It is often called apophatic or negative theology.

Apophatic theology, like poststructural notions of text, demonstrates a radical skepticism regarding metaphor, and it holds that nay truth claims relying on metaphor as a vehicle are, at best, provisional. The reader looking for truth . . . Should not confuse metaphor, iconography, symbolism, liturgy, and the like with the ineffable mystery they attempt to signify. (Zornado 1992:118)5

Winquist echoes:

The work of theology has usually been a web of meaningful connections and saying what can be said about the relationship of common events and foundational principles. What could not be said, the surplus of meaning in even the most rationalistic theologies, fell into spaces of silence within and between systems and thereby constituted a presence that is an absence, a mystery and shadow for theological understanding.

If we are to initiate a new excavation, it must choose as its terrain the silences of experience, those suspicious areas of unintelligibility that have haunted the theological achievements of past enlightenments. (1986:32).

Zornado adds: "Apophatic thought provides a kind of key to those moments of silence, not that we might fill them in but rather that we might more fully experience the gaps between vehicle and tenor, between signifier and signified, as a silence related to that which contemplative monks desire" (1992:119).

In light of that, it appears that there is one author in particular who can help us in this pursuit: St John of the Cross. His work Ascent of Mt Carmel deals specifically with approaching God in the suspension of the bodily senses.6

Book 2 of the Ascent is the formative section on St John's position relating human knowledge through experience and talk of God, with God's real essence. And chapter 8 of book 2 is the succinct summary of that position. Take, for example, these words: "Nothing in this life that could be imagined or received and understood by the intellect can be a proximate means of union with God. In our natural way of knowing, the intellect can grasp an object only through the forms and phantasms of things perceived by the bodily senses" (1991:175). In fact, he says it this bluntly: "[I]ntellectual comprehension of God through heavenly or earthly creatures is impossible; there is no proportion of likeness" (Ibid. 174). Therefore, if humans are to understand God and his ways, however imperfectly, he "must speak doctrine to them from his own mouth, and not theirs, and in a tongue other than theirs" (Ibid. 216).

This is not to say that St John of the Cross7 was a proto-deconstructionist. Zornado points out important differences between apophatic theology and deconstruction: apophatic theology is not an escape from orthodoxy (and thus from truth and meaning expressed in sign), and it is firmly grounded in Christ crucified (a recognition deconstruction does/can not share) (see Zornado 1991:122).

Nonetheless, given that deconstruction cannot be simply taken at face value, that Derrida indeed has a priori assumptions which he brings to his critique of metaphysics, yet his decentering of Western philosophy provides a helpful corrective to Christendom. Theology is expressed in fallen language. Philosophy can never attain complete knowledge. Therefore when it comes to God-talk, reverence and humility seem the safest attitudes. Theology needs always to be in encounter with the unsaid, even if only to contradict/correct the said. God is necessarily larger than our understanding of him--and certainly of our ability to speak accurately of him.

But in more practical terms, what are the areas affected by an affirmation of mitigated deconstruction? At least these three: the practice of unity, the empowerment of interpretation, and the union of theology and mysticism.

Since language is such an imperfect vehicle for God-talk, clearly only divinely inspired language can hold any power. That human language can carry meaning has not been disproved. But since it is so imperfect, an attitude of humility can be the only right one. Therefore, all divisions in Christianity, while not completely worthless, nonetheless cannot be held with any real passion. Such openness toward other provisional texts can do much to cultivate the unity for which God incarnate prayed.

Also, a mitigated deconstruction can reinstate the power of Christian allegorical interpretation to imprint the mind. A structured, channeled playfulness in the sacred can do much to bring about the desire for the text Derrida (1984) and Taylor (1984) both say deconstruction feeds.

Finally, though the insight is not new, theology, if humble, must necessarily be mystical. The absence of mysticism must always recall the presence of theology and vice versa. Radicalize either and the other can only be indeed lost. But both held in tension can provide renewal, each for each. It seems to me that this was the genius of the medieval Western church.

* * *

They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
Acts 2:3-4

. . . [W]e were eyewitnesses of his majesty. . . . We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.
2 Peter 1:16, 18


1 All Scripture citations are taken from The NIV Classic Reference Bible: New International Version, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988.

2 This is especially brought out in Of Grammatology's second part which deals with Rousseau and his understanding of language with its cultural origins. See especially Part II, chapters 2 and 4.

3 Though Taylor follows deconstruction past the point I'm willing to go, yet I found his Erring to be among the most beautifully written postmodern theologies I've encountered. Particularly his chapter 6, "Markings," on the self. Relating the Christian death of self to nihilism: "Nihilism becomes fully actual when death, or more precisely, the death of the self, is no longer passively suffered and reluctantly conceded but is actively affirmed and willingly embraced. . . . At this critical point, nihilism undergoes an unexpected reversal . . ." (1984:140).

4 John M. Ellis, in Against Deconstruction, argues along similar lines, as he tries to reinstate structuralism. I am not familiar enough with his book to intelligently evaluate his thesis. But I have at least two initial hesitancies. I do think Derrida's arguments indicate enough weaknesses in structuralism that it would be less than enticing to return to it. I also think that Derrida's decentering of Western philosophy is a good warning to Christendom not to tie faith with any one system.

5 Deconstruction asserts that even logic and mathematical formulae are indeed metaphor. Thus all language becomes metaphoric.

6 His companion work Dark Night of the Soul deals with the suspension of the spiritual senses. Night must always be held together with Ascent in any understanding of St John of the Cross, but for our purposes Night's similarities are not close enough to warrant reference.

7 I cannot but heartily recommend the little volume of collected works put out by the Institute for Carmelite Studies (see bibliography). The Kavanaugh/Rodriguez translations is incredibly accessible and portable. It should, of course, be weighed against the E. Allison Peers translations.
.


Bibliography of Sources Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976.

________. "Jacques Derrida." In Dialogues with contemporary Continental thinkers. Tr. and ed. by Richard Kearney. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Jacobs, Alan. "Deconstruction." In Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal. Ed. by Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St John of the Cross. Tr. by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington: ICS Publications, 1991.

Osborne, Grant R. The Hermeneutical Spiral. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1991.

Taylor, Mark C. Erring. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Winquist, Charles E. Epiphanies of Darkness: Deconstruction in Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986.

Zornado, Joseph. "Negative Writings: Flannery O'Connor, Apophatic Thought, and Christian Criticism." Christianity and Literature. Vol. 42, No. 1 (Autumn 1992):117-140



© 1994 Clifton D. Healy
http://www.geocities.com/chealy5/Deconstruction.htm

Selengkapnya....

Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation: Derrida and the Law of the Singular Event

Sara Ramshaw, Queen’s University Belfast

"It was the music. […] It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law."
Toni Morrison (Jazz 58)

"[E]very invention should make fun of the statutory."
Jacques Derrida (“Psyche” 45)

Paris, July 1997. Famed jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman has just invited French philosopher Jacques Derrida to share the stage with him at the Paris La Villette jazz festival for an improvised jazz-text collaboration (Nettelbeck 198). Coleman “blows” while Derrida “read[s]” 2 (Stein). The audience members, “intolerant of this unaccustomed form,” (Nettelbeck 198) drive Derrida off the stage before he can “get into his stride” (198). 3 His contribution to the event is “pathetically foreshortened” (198) and Derrida is left shaken by the “painful experience” (qtd. in Stein). 4

Of particular interest to this article is the willingness of Derrida to collaborate with Coleman in this manner – especially when his arguments against the possibility of “spontaneity, improvisation and unmediated expression” (Gartside, qtd. in O’Reilly) are often cited in order to critique jazz and jazz improvisation (O’Reilly). Coleman, in contrast, attempts everything Derrida says is impossible in relation to improvisation: “Breaking out of the prison bars of rigid meters and conventional harmonic or structural expectations” (Goldman); resisting “hierarchical distinctions between improvisation and inscription” (Nettelbeck 200). His “harmolodic” 5 (Goldman) musical form taunts the laws governing the system of Western tonal music, “encourag[ing] the improviser to be freer, and not obey a pre-conceived chord-pattern according to set ideas of ‘proper’ harmony and tonality” (Williams 3). Throughout his performances, “harmony becomes melody becomes harmony” (Goldman) and the division between the melodic and harmonic forms 6 is effectively ignored, transgressed. 7 As Coleman is quoted as saying in the liner notes of his Free Jazz album: “Let’s try to play the music and not the background” (qtd. in Williams 3). By “background,” Coleman is referring to the “general framework of jazz improvisation which had established itself soon after the birth of jazz as a more or less incontestable norm” (Jost 17). This “framework,” Jost claims, “consisted of a code of agreements which made up […] the ‘musically universal’ in jazz, and remained constant throughout the years of jazz evolution, while the ‘musically particular’ changed” (17).

Driving this discussion is a deep scepticism, fuelled by Derrida, as to whether jazz improvisation can actually transgress or ignore the “background” of which Coleman speaks. Can it, borrowing from Haldar, “properly” (Haldar 7) escape jazz’s law, the law of jazz, which “hums in the background” (Haldar 1)? Or, far from “bring[ing] down the law” (5), is improvisation “nothing more than the law of law” (5), “nothing more than the repetition of man’s vertical aspirations?” (5). 8

Before attempting to answer these questions, I must briefly address a preliminary matter about which many readers may be curious, namely what is this “law of jazz” mentioned above? Or, more pointedly, what is “law”? Although the aim of this article is to locate it not as unity, but as “irresolution” (Fitzpatrick Mythology 2), law persists in the West as a unified subject, a subject that is “‘out there’, perfectly formed, complete and coherent, waiting to be discovered” (Douzinas et al x). It persists, at least in its generic sense, as “a body of rules of action or conduct prescribed by controlling authority, and having legal binding force” (Black 884). The ideal of the rule of law in Western democratic society means that “everyone is bound by the law” (Pue 17, emphasis omitted): “the very nature of law is that it applies to us all” (“Head-to-head”). Moreover, it is “presume[d] that before citizens’ liberties and freedoms are restricted, the full protection of constitutional rights and the political protections provided by our parliamentary system of government will be brought into play” (Pue 17, emphasis omitted). Determinations of what is and what is not lawful remain under the control of the democratically-elected legislature; police are employed to enforce these laws and courts adjudicate any alleged infractions or disputes over meaning (17).

In keeping with this dominant view, Western law must eschew all spontaneous or unpredictable elements. This can be starkly contrasted to the prevailing perception of jazz in the West as that which is founded solely upon pure spontaneous improvisation. Both conceptions are, when deconstructed, ultimately found wanting. This article therefore aims to critique the positioning of Western law and jazz in relation to improvisation by reading Derrida’s work on law and justice 9 in tandem with his views on invention 10 and then applying the consequent observations to the topic of jazz improvisation. While improvisation 11 and invention 12 are by no means identical, they do share certain qualities that become extremely relevant when explored through a deconstructive framework. 13 Both concepts describe “event[s] without precedent” (Derrida “Psyche” 43), “unique situation[s]” (60), which are constituted in their “singularity” (28). This singularity, albeit contested, can be starkly contrasted to the dominant conception of Western law, which privileges generality and universality over unpredictability and arbitrariness.

In his writings on law and invention, Derrida unpacks the “problematic relation between the singular and the general” (Attridge “Before the Law” 181) in order to challenge the pure presence of singularity in invention, along with the universality, which is said to propel occidental law. His observations, when applied to the critical study of jazz improvisation, confront the prevailing understanding of improvisation as sheer spontaneity and thereby challenge its exaltation in jazz and concurrent condemnation in law. A deconstructive reading reveals that improvisation so defined can be neither total in jazz nor totally absent in law. Instead, the singular event exists solely as aporia in both fields. This unpacking of the aporetic nature of singularity reveals not only the inevitability of legal invention, but also the necessity of the “jazz form” 14 (Finkelstein 71). Beyond this, however, and perhaps shedding some light on Derrida’s participation in the “improvised” event described above, there exists an openly responsive dimension to both jazz and law. This dimension, although never complete or absolute, glances towards the singular other 15 and keeps alive the possibility of creativity, ethics, democracy and justice in Western law and society.
Irresolution in Jazz and Law

When asked “What is jazz?” Louis Armstrong purportedly replied, “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never know” (qtd. in Hyman 3). 16 This celebrated response has become authority for the position that there is “no single workable definition of jazz, no single list of essential characteristics” (DeVeaux 6, emphasis in original; see also Townsend 162). Imagined here is a jazz that is “know”-able only to the extent that it has no definite or determinate meaning. It is music defined solely by its un-define-ability, by its inability to be tied down, contained or fixed in content. This understanding of jazz is undoubtedly linked to its supposed “deliberately improvisatory form” (Levinson and Balkin 1623; see also Hall 1599; Finkelstein 71; Hentoff “Jazz” 95): “Improvisation is always changing and adjusting, never fixed, too elusive for analysis and precise description” (Bailey ix). Any attempt to define or describe jazz improvisation is thus said to constitute “a misrepresentation, for there is something central to the spirit of voluntary improvisation which is opposed to the aims and contradicts the idea of documentation” (ix; see also Nachmanovitch 12). 17

To equate jazz so fully and inevitably with improvisation is not without its problems. Not the least of which is the impoverished view, dominating the West, regarding the techniques of improvisation. To the uninitiated, improvising jazz musicians “seem to be making all of it up as they go along” (Gabbard 315; see also Stewart 96; Demsey 788). This perception is not only decidedly incorrect it has “racist” (Derrida “Play” 332) undertones. Improvisation, in accordance with this understanding, is envisaged as “primitive” (Gilroy 294; Gabbard 300), “instinctive” (Townsend 8), “unconscious” (Finkelstein 17; Gabbard 301); “compensation for a deficiency (the inability to read written music), or […] a freakish kind of gift (the jazz musician as the spontaneous, innocent, ‘natural’ player)” (Townsend 8). Despite the enormous “skill and devotion, preparation, training and commitment” (Bailey xii), which go into jazz improvisation, listeners continue to regard the improviser as an “ego-driven mystic who is unable to describe his or her own creative process” (Lewis “Afterward” 170).

While attentive to this dilemma, it is also the case that certain types of jazz have, in the past, focused largely on improvisation, thereby contributing to this vision of jazz as “largely improvisational in nature” (Hall 1599). Take bebop for example. Developed between 1939 and 1941 in after-hours jam sessions at Monroe’s Uptown House and Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, bop adopted the improvisational focus of the jam session – “where the paramount concern was unbroken momentum” (DeVeaux 377) – and in so doing “radically revised the prevailing definition of jazz” (202; see also Jones 64). Musicians who gathered in these Harlem venues after an evening of playing in a large orchestral swing band would concentrate on “learn[ing] new techniques” (Belgrad 180) and practicing solo improvisation, a musical process that had little place in swing performances (180). This attentiveness to spontaneous invention greatly contributed to bebop’s standing as “an aggressive, esoteric music, difficult to understand or to play, and deliberately so” (Chevigny 45). Bop was labelled “mad, wild, frantic, crazy” (Hughes 118) and was lauded as “revolutionary” (Chevigny 45; Ross 257; Ellison 201; Green 39): a “music of revolt, revolt against big bands, arrangers, vertical harmonies, soggy rhythms, non-playing orchestra leaders and Tin Pan Alley; against commercialized music in general” (Allsop 33).

Many other factors contributed to bebop’s “wild” and “revolutionary” reputation. Perhaps the most significant was the “black character of the revolution” (DeVeaux 18): “black musicians [such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, to name a few] dominated bop in a way that they had not dominated other forms of jazz since the early days” (Collier 209). Many argue that bop was developed in order to prevent the parasitic appropriation and exploitation of jazz by white musicians, musicians who had, in the past, “stole” swing (and ragtime) and who were then offered all the best recording contracts and live performances (Allsop 33; Green 39; Hentoff “Race Prejudice” 73; Ellison 212; Hore). It has also been suggested that bop began as “a militant demonstration against ‘Uncle Tomism’” 18 (Allsop 33; see also Beyer 542) and was a “political” attempt to turn jazz into an art music (Green 39), to make it “a music meant for listening and not for dancing” (Belgrad 187).

No matter what the reason for bop’s emergence, in their refusal to cultivate a stage persona or to entertain (white) audiences, bebop musicians were met with much racial antagonism. As one observer remarked, having seen the Parker-Gillespie quintet perform:

That [bebop] sounded arrogant, uppity. […] [When I] saw Bird’s combo, what struck me even more than the music was the attitude coming off the bandstand – self-confident, aggressive. It was something I’d never seen from black musicians before. (qtd. in DeVeaux 435, emphasis in original)

Bebop was accordingly positioned in violation of not only the laws of melodious musicality, but also the rule of law in Western society. It was constituted either as “arrant foolishness, a farrago of nonsense syllables and noisy, incomprehensible music” (440) or as “an underground of drug users, antisocial deviants, and racial militants” (440; see also Allsop 34). “Both impressions,” notes DeVeaux, “were informed by racially grounded stereotypes” (440).

Another influential factor in the construction of bebop as “wild” and transgressive was its connection to the after-hours jam session, that seemingly lawless space, which brought bebop into being and gave it its improvisational focus. As a product of the jam session, bop was considered as “structure-less or chaotic” (Alterhaug 103) as the sessions themselves. The dominant perception of the jam session as eschewing all law is influenced to a large degree by the fact that it offers “few clues to the uncontexted outsider” (DeVeaux 203) regarding its nature and structure. No written music is evident and there is “certainly no rehearsal” (203). No stable or definitive “house band” exists and musicians “come and go as they please, even during the middle of the number” (203). The performances are without “frame” (203) and there are “no spoken introductions or attention-getting silences” (203): “Hardly a word is exchanged beyond a few cryptic phrases – ‘blues in B-flat,’ ‘rhythm changes,’ a quick countdown to set the tempo – and they are off, into a performance that may last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour” (203). All the musicians in the jam session seem to “know what to do without being told” (203) and “[t]he listener is left face to face with the mystery of improvisation – an alchemy that creates music out of nothingness” (203, emphasis added).

It is the “mystery of improvisation” (203), which best lends itself to the transgressive positioning of jazz within Western society. As unique and “unforeseen” 19 (Lewis “Improvised” 145), jazz improvisation is meant to eschew all law, convention, structure or form. It is constituted as “pure spontaneity” (148) to the exclusion of “history or memory” (147; see also Panish 120). Many musicologists and musicians criticize this understanding of improvisation. Wynton Marsalis, for instance, is quoted as saying: “Jazz is not just, ‘Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.’ It’s a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study” (qtd. in Berliner 63). 20 Improvisation is thus not simply “a process of creation that emphasizes freedom and spontaneity” (Panish 123). To improvise well requires an attention to “discipline” (Lewis “Improvised” 153), “technical knowledge” (153), as well as “background, history, and culture” (153).

A tension consequently exists between the “spontaneous” conception of jazz improvisation and the more context-driven model. This tension is intrinsic to jazz improvisation itself. Improvisation can be neither purely spontaneous nor completely determined by the musical structures with which it engages. It must be both responsive to otherness and have some stable or determined dimension in order to endure as jazz improvisation. Thus, quoting saxophonist Steve Lacy, improvisation sits “on the edge – in between the known and the unknown and you have to keep pushing it towards the unknown otherwise it and you die” (Bailey 54).

Western democratic law holds similar contradictions. The dominant, or what George Lewis calls the “Eurological” 21 (Lewis “Improvised” 133), view of improvisation positions it as utterly spontaneous in opposition to a stable and determinate set of laws and practices governing Western music. The same dichotomy underlies the conception of Western law. Following Hobbes (1651), Rousseau (1762) and, somewhat later, Freud (1913), the tale of law’s founding is almost always told in relation to a violent uncertainty or “state of nature” from which “we” allegedly escaped (Manderson “From Hunger to Love” 88). Unpredictability is thence constituted as something external to Western law, as that which must be reined in or controlled. Far from being improvised or unforeseen, law is said to furnish “us moderns” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 8) with “a haven of certainty in an uncertain world” (8). Asserted again and again is the idea that law “provided and provides an imperative certainty and predictability” (8), especially in relation to “transitions to modernity, and in the sustaining of modern economic relations in particular” (8). What is more, it is these “pre-announced rules that are clear and intelligible in themselves” (MacCormick 12), which “we most often expect from the law” (Deutscher 97).

The rule of law in Western society thereby demands that any inventive or unpredictable qualities be strictly managed or denied. As the argument goes, if law could simply be invented in “each act of decision” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 87), it would hold “no set and enduring truth” (87). Any invention of law by judges or others must be determinately contained or restricted through, inter alia, the device of legal precedent or stare decisis. 22 Precedent, in its reliance on past legal decisions, assures that “like cases will be treated alike, and that similarly situated individuals are subject to the same legal consequences” ( Rehnquist 347). As a guard against the “arbitrary and capricious” (Nitta 798), precedent “provides certainty in the law” (797) and “allows citizens to arrange and conduct their affairs with stability and predictability” (798).

This seemingly straightforward account of precedent nonetheless belies the rather complex relationship of law to invention. For every lawyer or legal theorist who condemns judge-made law or judicial activism (Bork), there are others, such as legal realists (Frank) or critical legal theorists (see, for example, Bucholtz; Margulies; and Silbey and Ewick), who applaud any inventive techniques in law. This lack of consensus as to the role invention plays actually flows from the very nature of the legal decision. Every judicial act is, in “a trivial sense” (Dworkin 6), a species of invention. As no two actions can be exactly the same, judges “make new law” (qtd. 6) every time they are asked to decide a case. Law can thus neither dispense with, nor be completely determined by, the device of precedent (Deutscher 98). The legal decision instead lies on the “horizon” (Fitzpatrick “Breaking the Unity” 58), the border between “what it is” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 89) and what it otherwise could be (89). While bebop jazz, for example, must mask its structured elements 23 in order to continue as a revolutionary and creative art form, the inverse is true for law: the inventive dimension of law must be subordinated to tradition and precedent in order to endure as authoritative and commanding in Western society. The “most popular opinion” (Dworkin 8) thereby remains that judges should simply find or discover the law that “already is” (6) and those who invent or “make new law” (qtd. 6) are viewed to be “bad judges, the usurpers, destroyers of democracy” (8; see also Cohen 25).
Derrida and Music

The conceptualisation offered above envisages an improvisation that is venerated in jazz, an invention degraded in law, but neither being able to subsist solely “as such” in either field. An irresolution thus exists as to the role of improvisation and invention in law and jazz, one that is simply confirmed by the dissident voices rising up from both disciplines. In order to fully understand this irresolution, Derrida’s work on law and invention becomes most instructive. As a prerequisite to this discussion, though, I must engage briefly with the question of whether Derrida’s thoughts can in fact be applied to the musical genre of jazz. The philosopher himself is of little assistance here for, despite being an avid jazz fan (O’Reilly; Stein), nowhere in his discussions on invention does Derrida mention jazz or jazz improvisation (or any form of musical invention to be exact). 24 This omission does not necessarily negate the possibility of deconstructing music. In fact, Derrida himself reportedly endorsed the attempt, remarking to Rose Subotnik that he “would be interested to see what resulted” (Subotnik 39) from her deconstruction of a Chopin prelude (39-147). Notwithstanding this endorsement, however, a brief exploration into whether one can apply a deconstructive framework to the topic of jazz improvisation needs to be undertaken.

For this inquiry, we return to Paris. This time the exact date is unknown. 25 Pop star, Green Gartside, lead singer and composer for the pop band, Scritti Politti, has just been invited to meet with the philosopher after writing a song entitled “Jacques Derrida” (Rough Trade Records 1982), which Derrida’s students played for him (O’Reilly). When Gartside was asked years later what he and Derrida spoke about at that meeting, he answered with the following:

Oh, music! […] As I remember, he likes jazz, which was pretty neat ‘cause I had it in me to ask him some things. Half-jokingly, I said, “Well, isn’t it true that jazz is valued for its spontaneity and improvisation, the idea that it represents the moment of self-present expression and meaning? But isn’t that all somewhat suspect?” (qtd. in Chang)

Derrida’s reply to this query remains undocumented. However, Gartside plays an important role in this discussion for, despite being well-versed in deconstructive theory, he remains convinced that there is something unique to music, which positions it “outside the limits of language and logocentrism” (qtd. in Hoskyns). Its “meaning or its sense,” in other words, is not “determined by language” and cannot be found “innately residing within four beats to the bar” (qtd. in Hoskyns).

Gartside is nevertheless not blind to the metaphysical limits of music: “no one musical phenomenon is ever going to transcend beat or repetition, nor is it ever going to transcend the history of criticism and the industry” (qtd. in Hoskyns). Despite this admission, however, he does believe that “[i]t is possible, but again only in a metaphysical way, to think and talk about music as something that undoes” (qtd. in Toop, emphasis in original). Quoting Gartside:

When I met Derrida he said that what I was doing was part of the same project of undoing and unsettling that he’s engaged in. He’s written that what sets the musician apart is the possibility of meaninglessness. That unsettling has always been my experience of pop, from the earliest moments – pop is the abuse of language. (qtd. in Reynolds)

Musicologist Marcel Cobussen disagrees with Gartside’s assertion that music is meaningless: “Of course (pop) music has meaning; it has political, economic, social, cultural and psychological meaning (and I am not only referring to its lyrics here). In this sense, we can approach music through language, through all kinds of discourses on music” (Cobussen “Scritti Politti” para. 5). However, he admits that Gartside “points to something, a non-localizable place, where music transgresses the power of language” (para. 5). Cobussen writes:

We cannot understand music the same way we understand language. Music is a language, music is text, but it is not the same as a spoken or written language. Because something in music always escapes comprehension, understanding. Language fails to make music completely transparent. Music appeals to something that exceeds the semantic part of language; it appeals to non-discursive sonority. (Para. 5)

Unfortunately, we are unable to look to Derrida for answers to this dilemma. As noted above, he never really engaged with the topic of music in his work. 26 When asked by Gartside why he never wrote a book expressly on the subject, Derrida replied that to do so was “the most difficult thing” (qtd. in O’Reilly). Instead, his “loftiest aim” was to give his texts “the condition of musicality” (qtd. in O’Reilly; see also Roberts). In one interview he is quoted as saying: “music is the object of my strongest desire, and yet at the same time it remains completely forbidden. I don’t have the competence. […] I am even more afraid of speaking nonsense in this area than in any other” (Brunette and Wills 21).

Derrida’s refusal to write on the topic of music cannot be relied upon as evidence of its inability to signify. However, his silence on the subject has led some theorists to argue that he simply “stays closely connected to the philosophers he criticizes” (Cobussen “Derrida’s Ear” para. 4) and that “[h]is deconstructive practices do not reach the sonorous domain, the domain of music” (para. 4). Musicologists such as Cobussen, however, defend the deconstruct-ability of music and argue that Derrida touches on the idea of sonority in his treatment of “words,” which he likens to “non-discursive sonority” (Cobussen “Justification” para. 6). As Derrida asserts in an interview with Brunette and Wills:

And if I love words it is also because of their ability to escape their proper form, whether they interest me as visible things, letters representing the spatial visibility of the word, or as something musical or audible. That is to say, I am also interested in words, paradoxically, to the extent that they are nondiscursive, for that’s how they can be used to explode discourse. (Brunette and Wills 20)

Although Derrida does not go so far as to call this non-discursive sonority music(al), according to Cobussen, his treatment of “words” in this manner “opens a way to connect Derrida’s thoughts to music” (Cobussen “Justification” para. 6).

This is a debate to which I, a lawyer, have nothing personally to add. 27 Instead, I defer to Cobussen and insist on the possibility of a Derridean critique of jazz improvisation. My deference may irritate some musicologists. Ingrid Monson, for instance, has held that deconstruction “may make sense in the context of debates in Western philosophy” (Monson 209), but “it has done considerable damage to understanding the ways in which music as a sonic phenomenon and human agency participate in the construction of social and cultural meaning” (209). While ever mindful of the limitations of deconstructive theory, especially in relation to the Western metaphysical tradition within which it operates, I find myself unconvinced by her argument. Deconstruction is found wanting by Monson in that it “values writing over speech and grounds the decentering of the subject” (209). What her interpretation ignores, however, is that, for Derrida, no concept can ever be so fully secured with determinate meaning such that it could become so privileged. Moreover, while Derrida may have “no interest in defining subjectivity” (Morgan), he does not “want merely to get rid of the subject in a nihilistic fashion” (Morgan). Thus, not having been persuaded to the contrary, I align myself with those who regard the application of Derrida’s thought to music as a viable and promising endeavour (see, for example, Subotnik) and I proceed to critique, deconstructively, the established conception of improvisation as “the essence of” (Collier 25) jazz and the nemesis of law. 28
The “Mystical Foundation” of Jazz Improvisation 29

"When you’re just learning jazz, everything is mystical."
Wynton Marsalis (qtd. in Berliner 2)

Unpacking the “mystical” founding of improvisation requires, perhaps surprisingly, an initial attentiveness to Derrida’s work on law and justice. Of particular relevance is the consideration given in both “Before the Law” and “Force of Law” to the “difficult and unstable distinction between justice and law” (Derrida “Force” 250), which can be likened to the “problematic relation between the singular and the general” (Attridge “Before the Law” 181; see also Derrida “Before the Law” 187) or the “antinomy between the general and the particular” (Belay 125). In a move that mirrors their dominant conceptualization in Western society, Derrida positions justice as singularity in opposition to a more generalized law. For Derrida, “justice” – “infinite, incalculable, rebellious to rule and foreign to symmetry, heterogeneous and heterotropic” (Derrida “Force” 250) – “always addresses itself to singularity, to the singularity of the other, despite or even because it pretends to universality” (248). Phrased slightly differently, as “[e]ach case is other, each decision is different” (251), justice “requires an absolutely unique interpretation, which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely” (251). Law, in contrast, is described as “a system of regulated and coded prescriptions” (250, emphasis added). It is constituted solely in terms of its “generality” (245) and “universality” (245), as that which always follows pre-existent and “given” (253) rules. For Derrida, the issue then becomes how to reconcile the “event” or “act of justice” (245) with the rules, norms or imperatives that “necessarily have a general form, even if this generality prescribes a singular application in each case” (245).

Upon setting up the dichotomy between law and justice, Derrida proceeds to dismantle it: “Everything would still be simple if this distinction between justice and law were a true distinction” (“Force” 250). He makes evident that not only does law claim to “exercise itself in the name of justice” (251), but “justice demands for itself that it be established in the name of a law” (251). Justice, as “unlimited responsiveness to the other” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4), exists solely as “an experience of the impossible” (Derrida “Force” 244). It can only be made “possible, in the sense of becoming existent, and given operative force” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4) through law. The aporia of justice “demands decision” (Beardsworth 5). Each judicial act of deciding thereby “cuts into and enacts justice, even whilst denying justice as illimitably responsive” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4; see also Fitzpatrick “Dominions” 144). Justice, in other words, is “dependent on the determinate presence effected by the legal decision” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4). As Derrida explains: “No justice is exercised, no justice is rendered, no justice becomes effective nor does it determine itself in the form of law, without a decision that cuts and divides” (Derrida “Force” 252).

Not only is law “necessary for justice” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4), so too is justice, as the “undecideable” (Derrida “Force” 253), “necessary for law” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4): “The undecideable remains caught, lodged, as a ghost at least, but an essential ghost, in every decision, in every event of decision” (Derrida “Force” 253, emphasis added). Peter Fitzpatrick 30 explains. Law, he writes, “cannot be […] enduringly ordered and predictable” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 8). If it were, “there could be no call for decision, for determination, for law” (9). Instead, for law to endure, it requires a simultaneous “responsiveness” (9), an “attunement and attentiveness to what is beyond” (9). Law, argues Fitzpatrick, must be able to “change and adapt to such other things as ‘society,’ or ‘history’” (9; see also Fitzpatrick “In the End” 464). And this responsiveness to the other of law is “essential for law” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 9, emphasis added).

A similar irresolution exists in relation to invention. In “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” Derrida critiques the “traditional and dominant value of invention” (44), which must, “by definition” (Derrida “Psyche” 41), “break with convention” (41); it must “overflow, overlook, transgress, negate” (41) that from which it comes. So too must it “transgress” (41) or break with law. As Derrida writes: “every invention should make fun of the statutory” (45) and every invention “always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract” (25). However, “true” invention, or what Derrida calls the “invention of the other” (55), is impossible because there can be no invention “without a prevailing statutory context” (45). Stated differently, invention exists solely on the condition that it transgresses the “status” (41) with which it is supposed to comply. This “status,” like law, is constituted as “stable, established, and legitimated by a social or symbolic order in an institutionalizable code, discourse, or text” (45).

Returning to the “problematic between the singular and the general” (Attridge “Before the Law” 181), the singular “event” of invention demands its simultaneous capture within a “system” of conventions that will ensure its position more generally in culture and society ( Derrida “Psyche” 28). Thus, whilst the event of invention “can take place only once” (51), invention more generally must be “essentially repeatable, transmissible, and transposable” (51); “to take place as an event, it must already compromise its singularity with the conditions of recognisability that take the form of structures of repeatability or iterability” (Bennington “Double Tounging,” emphasis in original). It is therefore a paradox or aporia that “invention is constituted by its originality […] and yet wholly dependent on recognition and legitimation (and therefore subject to codes and laws)” (Attridge “Psyche” 310). It remains forever captured within the “order of the calculable” (Derrida “Psyche” 55), the “order of the same” (55), which is, for Derrida, the order of law (Derrida “Force” 244). To be otherwise would make its recognition as invention impossible.

Invention thus needs to be with law in order to be inventive. Its originality can only be “display[ed]” (Derrida “Psyche” 27), can only be brought into presence or made present, through law, through the “values of form and composition” (27); and law is “necessary not only for it to be recognized, identified, legitimized, institutionalized as invention (to be patented, we might say), but for invention even to occur, or, let us say, for it to come about” (44, emphasis in original).

Just as invention needs law, so too does law need invention in order to remain properly commanding in Western society. As revealed by Derrida in “Force of Law”:

To be just, the decision of the judge, for example, must not only follow a rule of law or a general law [loi] but must also assume it, approve it, confirm its value, by a reinstituting act of interpretation, as if, at the limit, the law [loi] did not exist previously – as if the judge himself invented it in each case. Each exercise of justice as law can be just only if it is a “fresh judgment”. (Derrida “Force” 251, emphasis added)

The impossible but “utter responsiveness” (Fitzpatrick “Law Like Poetry” 287) of invention consequently becomes the “undecideable” (Derrida “Force” 253), which haunts the legal decision and ensures that law never becomes completely or “perfectly stilled” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 9; Fitzpatrick “Breaking the Unity” 58). In its concern for the other, invention effectively sustains the need for decision, sustains the need for law (Fitzpatrick “Access” 9; Fitzpatrick “Breaking the Unity” 58).

The “undecideable relation between the general and the singular” (Beardsworth 25), “between universality and singularity” (25), subsequently demands that law and invention exist solely as “aporia” (Derrida “Force” 244). The aporetic nature of invention, for instance, rests on the fact that “true” invention would “appear” only “in terms of an entirely open responsiveness to the other” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 3), which would of course be impossible. To exist in such singularity (Derrida “Force” 248) would mean that it would have to stand “opposite the universal [law] in its completeness” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 63). If this were so we would “be deprived of all relation with it” (Nancy 60) and could not know it as invention. Equally, if law’s content was completely non-inventive or “perfectly stilled” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 9) “it would cease to rule the situation that would inexorably change around it” (9). Law can thus not be “merely or fixedly determinant” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 6); it must instead remain “responsive to historical change, or to the needs of the nation, or to the development of society” (Fitzpatrick “No Higher Duty” 236). In stark contrast to its purported fixity and stability, law “will have accommodated changing facts, all coming from beyond it” (236).

In their deconstruction of “absolute singularity” (Derrida Deconstruction Engaged 90), Derrida’s writings on law and invention become extremely relevant to this study of improvisation – for it is the “ideal of singularity” (Maras), which most often activates notions of improvisation in Western society. A deconstructive reading of jazz improvisation thus exposes the “social repressiveness of the traditional concept” (Attridge “Psyche” 310) and reads improvisation likewise as aporia. To help explain: the singularity of the improvised act must be an “inaugural event” (Derrida “Psyche” 28), a “first time ever” (qtd. 28). Yet, this “first time,” in order to be a completely original and “unique moment” (29), must also be a “last time” (29; see also Derrida “Shibboleth” 2). It must be singular, complete and containable. To be so “totally present” (Birmingham 131), however, would make it “not the same” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 43) and “completely different to us” (43). If this were the case “there would be no possibility of adequate relation to it in order for us to know it” (43). The “singularity” of improvisation must thus be understood as “original repetition” (Birmingham 131), as “iterability” (Derrida “Psyche” 51), in which the “instituting act” (Birmingham 131) only gains meaning through “the repetition of an origin with which it cannot coincide, since it is of the very essence of the origin to be pure anteriority” (131). The “singular, creative event” (131) is accordingly “marked by the lack of self-presence” (131) and it is this “repetition” (Derrida “Psyche” 51), as the “law of the singular event” (Derrida “Last Interview” 8), which makes the originality of improvisation possible in the first place (Birmingham 131).

Law and jazz thus coalesce in the irresolution of the improvised act. The “aporetic relation between (the failure of) generality and (the failure of) singularity” (Beardsworth 43), “between the law and the singular” (41), requires “some subsisting relation and thence some commonality” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 59) between the responsiveness that is privileged in jazz and the determinacy deemed essential to law. Law cannot subsist without jazz’s responsive “opening onto all that lies beyond” (59) just as jazz requires “some” determinacy in order to endure as a “contained, distinct being” (59), to endure as jazz. It is therefore “the necessity yet impossibility” (Fitzpatrick “Cause of Law” 464) of both pure determinacy (law) and pure responsiveness (jazz), which “iteratively impel[s]” (464) both law and jazz “into existence” (464). The “originary repetition” (Beardsworth 32) of improvisation becomes its law (32, 35) and without such improvisation could not exist.
The Necessity of Improvisation’s Impossibility 31

Revisiting the Coleman-Derrida collaborative engagement, if jazz music, even that as “radically improvisational” (Soules 270) as Ornette Coleman’s, can never be truly inventive or properly escape the “clammy grasp of law” (Haldar 7), what so moved Derrida to join Coleman on stage at the 1997 Paris Jazz Festival? Expressed more generally, “why, exactly, does improvisation matter” (Heble “Editorial” 1) to deconstruction and, by extension, to law and jazz? The answer to all these queries lies, I believe, in différance, 32 in the “formal play of differences” (Derrida Positions 26), “of traces” (26), which “forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself” (26, emphasis in original). Improvisation “of some inaugurality” (Derrida Monolingualism 66) may be “the impossible itself” (66), but the différance of improvisation ensures that its impossibility is “not the opposite of the possible” (Beardsworth 26, emphasis in original). Instead, it “supports” (Derrida Paper Machine 91) and “releases the possible” (Beardsworth 26, emphasis in original).

It follows then that Derrida is “not against the impossible” (Caputo 20), not against improvisation. Quite the opposite. As he stated in one interview: “I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it’s impossible” (Derrida “Unpublished Interview”). Improvisation, as Derrida posits in relation to deconstruction, “loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible” (Derrida “Psyche” 36). It is instead “possibility” which hinders and constrains – for possibility contains “the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible approaches” (36). It contains the danger, if you will, of becoming fully determined law. It is thus the impossibility of improvisation (Derrida Monolingualism 66), which gives it “hope and possibility” (Fischlin and Heble 11). For if improvisation were truly possible, in the sense of being wholly improvised or original, there would be no call for spontaneous invention or, by analogy, for jazz. It is therefore “the attempt at such an improvisation, necessarily failing,” (Bennington “Double Tounging”), which “leaves a trace or a mark that can be seen as a promise of such an inaugurality” (Bennington “Double Tounging”, emphasis in original). In its failure, improvisation survives. “Affirmez la survie”. 33

Improvisation thus matters to Derrida because “[d]econstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all” (Derrida “Psyche” 42); and it is “not just inventive, it is called by the other” (Bernasconi 118). The “‘inventive’ side to Derrida’s philosophy” (Beardsworth xiv) thereby aims to “reinvent invention” (Derrida “Psyche” 44) in order to “make a space for an inventiveness open to the wholly other” (Attridge “Psyche” 310). This openness of improvisation towards the other, “towards the unknown” (Bailey 54), not only sustains jazz as a creative art form, it also nurtures the possibility of “improvised musicking” 34 (Fischlin and Heble “Other Side” 26; see also Fischlin 10) as that which links jazz to ethics (Heble Landing 200), resistance (Siddall 10; Fischlin and Heble “Other Side” 2, 4; Fischlin and Heble Rebel Musics) and democracy (Beyer 552).

Similarly, the responsively open dimension of improvisation matters to Western law for, without such, “we might not associate a legal decision with justice, even if it were fully in conformity with the law” (Deutscher 98). The openness, which accompanies any invention in law, “protects the possibility of radical transformation within an existing legal system” (Cornell 167) and enables us to “resist or rise up against an iniquitous law” (Bennington “Derridabase” 194). It ensures, in other words, that “law cannot inevitably shut out its challengers and prevent transformation” (Cornell 165, emphasis in original). As Bennington writes: “In this opening of the other (toward the other, called by the other), without which the same would not be, there is a chance of something happening” (Bennington “Derridabase” 14-15, emphasis added). This openness to the other thus becomes an “openness to transformation” (Cornell 166) within law, within society.

Such is the promise of the “law of the singular event”: “endless revolution” (Derrida “Last Interview” 8) and hope of reform, “otherwise determined” (8).
Acknowledgements

This article owes much to the support, guidance and intellectual inspiration of Professor Peter Fitzpatrick. Deep appreciation must also be conveyed to Bhaljit Dhadda, Andrew Laking, George Laking, Sundhya Pahuja and my colleagues at the Birkbeck School of Law Postgraduate Student Conference 2005, all of whom were invaluable in their feedback and encouragement. Lastly, this work would not have been possible without the stimulating comments and direction offered by the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal.
Notes

1 This title gestures towards Henry Louis Gates’ concept of “Signifyin(g)” as a model of improvisation that is “‘nothing more’ than repetition and revision” (Gates 63-64). Placing Gates and Derrida in close proximity is purposeful and hints at potential parallels between Gates’ theory and Derrida’s understanding of improvisation as “iterability” (Derrida “Psyche” 51), as the “invention of a law of the singular event” (Derrida “Last Interview” 8). This “law of the singular event” arises out of Derrida’s last interview (Le Monde, 19 August 2004) in which he is quoted as saying: “If I had invented a writing it would have been as an endless revolution. Each situation demands the creation of a suitable mode of exposition, the invention of a law of the singular event…” (8, emphasis added) [“Si j’avais inventé mon écriture, je l’aurais fait comme une révolution interminable. Dans chaque situation, il faut créer un mode d’exposition approprié, inventer la loi de l’événement singulier…” (21)].

2 As a young man, Coleman was distressed about having to make his living playing in gaming houses and brothels (Nettelbeck 199). He told his mother that he no longer wanted to play jazz music as it was “adding to all that suffering” (Murphy 323). His mother’s response – “you want somebody to pay you for your soul?” (qtd. 323) – liberated him from the “world of commerce and corruption” (Nettelbeck 199) and led him to “make music with and for his soul” (199). This anecdote, recounted by Coleman before the concert (see Murphy), inspired Derrida to recite the following onstage:

Soul and the music of the soul, what is it? What does it mean? How do we recognise it, soul? Beyond all the psycho-theologico-spiritualist discourse? By the fact that it can’t be sold or turned into capital pre-emptively; it’s the failure of capital, it’s the ultimate revolution, it’s unsellable from birth, when it happens, when it’s created, and when it’s not calculated, and when it suddenly shifts its ground in a blast of saxotelephone of which neither the eye nor the ear had warning, even though so much work, as with Coleman, had gone into writing […]. (qtd. in Nettelbeck 200; for the full text, see Derrida “Play”)

3 Bruce King admits to being “a member of that audience booing Derrida to shut up” (King). He defends his actions by stating: “Derrida was not listed on the programme, he was not announced, and I paid my money to hear Coleman” (King).

4 Derrida recalls: “His [Coleman’s] fans were so unhappy they started booing. It was a very unhappy event. It was a very painful experience” (qtd. in Stein).

5 Harmolodics: “Harmony, Motion and Melody” (Lake). According to Steve Lake, writer for Wire magazine:

[…] harmolodics in practice means this: You solo all the time and you stay out of the other guy’s way. The source for this improvisation is of Ornette’s notating but the charts are only there as raw source material. You don’t necessarily play the note that’s written on your sheet music, Dewey Redman once said, you just have to hold in your mind the way in which Ornette might play it.

Once the head of the melody is negotiated, and that too may be placed quite approximately, the musician is free to play on any of the melody’s centres. A certain note sequence might set up its own momentum when explored more thoroughly. Or, more vaguely still, the player might choose to focus on what he considers the feeling of the melody. (Lake, emphasis in original)

6 For a critique of this division, see Chapter 3 of Derrida’s Of Grammatology.

7 The rigid dichotomy constructed as between Derrida and Coleman, while productive for this enquiry, is actually somewhat misleading. It is not Coleman, but those “on the outside” (Murphy 320), who view free jazz as music without law. In an interview with Derrida on 23 June 1997, Coleman explains:

[…] like when I was doing free jazz, most people thought that I just picked up my saxophone and played whatever was going through my head, without following any rule, but that wasn’t true.

[…]

What’s really shocking in improvised music is that despite its name, most musicians use a “framework [trame]” as a basis for improvising. […] it’s totally improvised, but at the same time it follows the laws and rules of European structure. And yet, when you hear it, it has a completely improvised feel [air]. (Murphy 320-21)

8 L’Amour Fou – “mad love” – is Haldar’s subject. This doctrine, which found its form in the 20th century surrealist technique of “automatic writing,” “forces us to think of a moment of pure passion as a literary experience that properly escapes the clammy grasp of law” (Haldar 7). Haldar questions whether we can actually say that automatic writing “brings down the law?” (5). His answer? “Clearly not. Indeed automatic writing fully expresses Bataille’s idea of an Icarus complex. That is, what looks like mad love, is nothing more than the law of law; it is nothing more than the repetition of man’s vertical aspirations” (5).

9 See, for example, “Before the Law” (1992) and “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” (2002). For the purposes of this article, all references to “Force of Law” will be from the Acts of Religion (2002) version, which revised the 1989 translation in order to “include the changes made in the latest French edition of the text, published in 1994” (Anidjar 229).

10 See Derrida “Psyche”.

11 According to The Oxford English Reference Dictionary (OERD), to “improvise” is to “compose or perform (music, verse, etc.) extempore” (OERD 710, emphasis added).

12 Invention is defined as the “creation of something which did not exist before” (Black 824).

13 The caution is now customary when positing a methodological orientation that is deconstructive in nature. Not only was Derrida extremely suspicious of the title “deconstruction” (Critchley 27), to call it a “framework”, “method”, “theory” or even a “reading” shamefully belittles the complexities of deconstructive thought (Beardsworth xv). Borrowing from Jacqueline Rose: “it would be a grave error to describe [deconstruction] as system or school of thought because it has seized schools and systems by their very nerve endings, leaving nothing as it was before” (Cixous and Derrida “The Language of Others” 1). One may be obliged to employ such words when describing deconstruction, but the spectre of this warning necessarily haunts each use.

14 The “jazz form” references an improvisation that is not “structure-less or chaotic” (Alterhaug 103), but instead requires some sort of framework or pre-determined form or structure (Murphy 321).

15 Cobusen explains the importance of the “other” to deconstructive theory:

Especially in his later works, Derrida often speaks of “l’invention de l’autre,” where “l’autre” (“the other”) may be regarded as that which remains unthought, that which escapes the grip of our concepts. The other is whatever resists, escapes definition whenever definition is put in place. Recognition of the other opens the ethical dimension of deconstruction which consists in opening, uncloseting, destabilizing foreclusionary structures so as to allow passage toward the other. No culturally based directive, but the other appealing to me very concretely. No laws of tolerance, hospitality or acceptance but my singular relationship to a singular other. Deconstruction can be thought of as a reading and writing strategy that takes notice of traces of the other, of the unthought, the invisible, the unheard without absorbing, assimilating or reducing it to the same (to the cognitive power of the knowing subject or self-consciousness). (Cobusen “Music, Deconstruction, and Ethics” para. 3)

16 Variations on this response have also been attributed to “Fats” Waller and Duke Ellington (Townsend 162).

17 Michael Jarret makes a similar argument:

The entire history of jazz can be heard as one colossal improvisation defining what improvisation can be: jazz is one answer to the question, What is improvisation? Getting this definition into words, however, or between the covers of a book requires either trickery or violence. When we write about improvisation, what are we really writing about? (Jarrett 321)

18 The “Uncle Tom” caricature, derived from the main character in Harriet Beecher Stowes’ novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), has become a “slur used to disparage a Black person who is humiliatingly subservient or deferential to White people” (Pilgrim).

19 The word “improvisation” is derived from the Latin improvisus, which “refers to the ‘unforeseen’ or that which occurs ‘on the spur of the moment’” (Alterhaug 98).

20 This sentiment is backed by musician Andrew Laking:

One question I thought of is: why are so many listeners being fooled? Probably because they don’t understand the music well enough (and who could blame them). Perhaps also because most people seem to think that jazz musicians are naturally talented, but certainly not hard working; it’s something you do for fun. This belief would make it hard for people to realise that it’s less about spontaneous creation and improvisation, but more about hard work and long term commitment. (Personal Communication, 20 June 2005)

21 Lewis adopts the terms “Eurological” and “Afrological” in order to “refer metaphorically to musical belief systems and behavior that […] exemplify particular kinds of musical ‘logic’” (Lewis “Improvised” 133). The “Eurological” view sees improvisation as “pure spontaneity” (148) unmediated by “history or memory” (147). This is compared to the “Afrological” approach, which emphasizes “personality” (156), “discipline” (153), “technical knowledge of music theory and of one’s instrument” (153) and a “thorough attention to the background, history, and culture of one’s music” (153).

22 Precedent, defined as an “adjudged case or decision of a court, considered as furnishing an example or authority for an identical or similar case afterwards arising from a similar question of law” (Black 1176), is by no means the only device utilised by law in order to control invention. However, it will be the sole focus here.

23 One way the “accomplished improviser” (Gabbard 315) can disguise the “jazz form” (Finkelstein 71) is by “learn[ing] the codes that connote freshness, looseness, and a feeling of spontaneity” (Gabbard 315, emphasis added). Such learned procedures can “create a pattern so complex that we get an illusion of randomness” (Nachmanovitch 27).

24 Derrida restricts his discussion of invention in “Psyche” to what he views as the “only two major types of authorized examples for invention” (Derrida “Psyche” 32, emphasis in original): invention of “stories (fictional or fabulous)” (32, emphasis in original) and invention of “machines, technical devices or mechanisms, in the broadest sense of the word” (32, emphasis in original).

25 The best estimate I can give is sometime between 1982, the year Scritti Politti released the song “Jacques Derrida,” and early 1988 when Gartside mentions in a 5 March 1988 interview in Melody Maker that he had “met Derrida” (Reynolds). No mention is made of this meeting in any interviews I have read prior to this date.

26 Writes Cobussen: “In spite of the fact that Derrida’s deconstruction of a text by Rousseau (in Of Grammatology) deals with the hierarchical relation between melody and harmony, this can by no means be called a musical deconstruction or a deconstruction in music” (Cobussen “Justification” para. 5).

27 For a view, which opposes Cobussen, see Jacques Attali’s Noise:

To my mind, the origin of music should not be sought in linguistic communication. Of course, the drum and song have long been carriers of linguistic meaning. But there is no convincing theory of music as language. The attempts that have been made in that direction are no more than camouflages for the lamest kind of naturalism or the most mundane kind of pedantry. The musical message has no meaning, even if one artificially assigns a (necessarily rudimentary) signification to certain sounds, a move that is almost always associated with a hierarchical discourse. (Attali 25)

28 For two engaging and insightful critiques of the opposition of law to music more generally, see Desmond Manderson’s Songs Without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice (2000) and Peter Goodrich’s “Operatic Hermeneutics: Harmony, Euphantasy, and Law in Rossini’s Semiramis” (1999).

29 Here I am borrowing from the title of Derrida’s pioneering article, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” which will be discussed in detail in this section.

30 Fitzpatrick adeptly captures the aporetic nature of Western law through his unpacking of the relation between the “responsive” and “determinate” dimensions of law in modernity. For quite a comprehensive and accessible summary of Fitzpatrick’s philosophy, see his interview with Jill Stauffer in The Believer (Fitzpatrick “In God We Trust”).

31 This is taken from Derrida’s essay “As If It Were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits’” in which he discusses the “Necessity of Impossibility” (Paper Machine 87).

32 Derrida takes a certain “revenge” (Bennington “Derridabase” 71) on speech through his “invention” (71) of the “witticism” (70, 71) différance, which inserts an “a” in place of the “e” in order to capture the “dual movement” (Smith 44) of difference and deferral (Attridge and Baldwin). Vengeance is unleashed in the fact that the difference between the two words is “only marked in writing” (Bennington “Derridabase” 70-71) (both différance and différence are pronounced the same way in French), obliging speech “to take its own written trace as its reference” (71) if it wants to “say this difference” (71, emphasis added).

33 This imperative, translated into English as “Affirm the survival”, was among the “few lines” (Butler 25) left by Derrida to be read by his son Pierre at his funeral in October 2004 (25).

34 The concept “musicking,” coined by Christopher Small and referenced in Fischlin and Heble, recognizes that improvisation is not necessarily or essentially ethical, resistant or democratic. Not all improvised music, in other words, aligns itself “with antihegemonic resistance or critical strategies of alternative community building” (Fischlin and Heble “Other Side” 2). However, there does exist an “identifiable and radical form of improvisational practices” (2), which activates “critical modes of resistance and dialogue” (2) and orients us towards the other, towards “the other side of nowhere” (Sun Ra, qtd. 1).
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