So,
first off, my alter ego, Professor Iguana, producer and host of the Dead Zone,
a weekly radio show on WRHU (Sundays, 6-8pm EST) documenting the live performances of the Grateful Dead, has to
make a cameo appearance and acknowledge that today marks the 19th
anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s passing.
RIP JGB.
Now,
acknowledging Jerry’s passing – coincidentally on one of the rare dates in the
365 day calendar the Dead did not ever
perform a show! – lead me back to a comment I made yesterday when I was
recalling my attendance at the 2004 INPE conference in Madrid. I said, during my recollection of writing in
the café on Calle Gran Via, a street I’m almost certain Hemingway mentions in The Sun Also Rises, that “ ...now that I'm sharing my
vivid recollection of that week in Madrid in August 2004, I’m tempted to write
about the Derrida interview I saw on Madrid tv hours after arriving…perhaps
tomorrow!” Today is yesterday’s
tomorrow, and I’d like to take the opportunity to briefly recall the Derrida on
Madrid television, and then share something I wrote last December when I was
considering attending a conference on sound at Stony Brook.
At the time when I saw it I could only make out that Derrida had
done something with Ornette Coleman. I’d
just arrived to my hotel after the red eye and decided to crash for a bit
before hitting the streets of Madrid. I
don’t remember if I threw on the tube before or after I took my siesta, and
something tells me it was after, and for that reason I wasn’t entirely coherent
to read the Spanish subtitles of the French interview program that I stumbled
across when I flipping channels. I was
also a bit surprised to encounter Derrida on television, sitting in an all
white set, I suppose to give off the impression he we in the clouds. The name “Ornette Coleman” and the words
“concierto” and “yo” is all I recall seeing, but somehow I gathered that
Derrida had done something with Ornette.
Anyway, the excitement of being back in Madrid had my mind racing and
heart pumping, so I wasn’t entirely focused on watching the program, and it
filed it away with the intention of one day coming back to it. Well that someday came nine years later when
I was working at the Drew University library, no doubt on that infamous chapter
for Tyson’s book (recounted in my commentary on OPM 161, July 25th)
still working out ‘music-making philosophy’ and somehow found myself reading
Jeremy Lane’s “Theorising performance, performing theory: Jacques Derrida and
Ornette Coleman at the Parc de la Villette,” French Cultural Studies 2013 24: 319. Lane offered me the details of the event that
Derrida was referring to when I saw him on Madrid tv, but his ‘reading’ of the
event was one I found much too apologetic of Derrida, and, at the same time,
much too critical, in a snobbish way, of the crowd at Ornette’s show that booed
Derrida from the stage. Here’s what I
wrote back on December 9, 2013, in response to Lane’s article, which is
proposal for a paper to be written some day…perhaps:
On July 1, 1997, in Paris, at the parc de la Villette,
Ornette Coleman was in the midst of a performance when French philosopher
Jacques Derrida joined him and his group on stage and began reading a piece he
had written for the occasion. As Derrida read, Coleman responded on his
sax. The two attempted a free jazz improvisation, but the
experiment imploded before it could get underway. As Jeremy Lane recounts
in his study of the event (Lane, 2013) the “audience’s reaction was immediate
and hostile, booing and jeering,” and forced Derrida to leave the stage after reading
only half of his piece. “Derrida’s presence on stage at a Coleman concert thus
challenged [the] conventional understanding of a free jazz performance; his
peroration, an unwelcome intrusion from the realm of academic philosophy,
threatened to undermine the improvisational spontaneity” of Coleman’s
performance. For Lane, the Coleman-Derrida experiment failed
because it did not meet the audience’s expectation of what a free jazz
performance should ‘sound’ like. And, for his part, Lane mounts his analysis
on judgment of the crowd’s boisterous response. Indeed, he
discounts the sounds of protest that forced Derrida to leave as expressions of
‘ethnocentric’ and ‘phonocentric’ assumptions underlying jazz audiences and
critics alike. Rather than explore that significant moment of the concert
as a contestation of sounds, Lane privileges Derrida’s prepared text,
which he published a month later. The outcome and related writing
by Derrida, to deconstruct the [unreflective] crowd response, which, he argues
an unquestioned expectation that jazz crowds have inherited from jazz critics.
In sum, Lane’s is an intervention on behalf of the ‘soundless’
composition, the written text, which, he contends, free jazz audiences discount
as anathema to the live, immediate and embodied productive of the music.
“Sadly, the hostile reaction to Derrida’s appearance on stage at the parc de la
Villette suggests there is still a long way to go.” (Lane, 329)
This paper offers a
response to Lane’s criticism by reconstructing the ‘failed’ Coleman-Derrida
experiment as an exemplary free jazz event. The first move in the
reconstruction begins by recalling the ordinance of freedom in a free jazz
performance extends to all who are present, and is not a right reserved to
those on stage. If we take this seriously then we understand that
regardless of whether they are hospitable or hostile the emotional response of
a concert audience, expressed through the myriad of sounds (cheers, jeers,
howls, boos, yelps, screams, etc.), is an integral part of the social mediation
of the affect and sound of a show. In turn, Lane’s indictment of the
crowd is rendered moot, and the sounds of their hostility registered as a
legitimate component of that evening’s performance. The second move
in the paper responds to Lane’s critique of the misunderstanding of
the relationship between the prepared text/rehearsed composition and the
performance. Lane rejects as racist the claim that free jazz
improvisation is an emotional (versus rational) form of human expression.”
I then wrote a single fragmentary
sentence that was in bold and seems to be a note or perhaps the first line of
the first draft of the paper (I’ve yet to write):
Coleman believed that
jazz must be free.
All of this had almost nothing to do with the meditation I wrote
ten years today, but before I turn to that, I will share a link to my other
blog, the dormant 29 Sunset Drive,
where I have two posts on Ornette: http://29sunsetdrive.blogspot.com/
Well…perhaps there is a connection to be made between the
Ornette/Derrida debacle and the writing from 8/9/04. And perhaps the way to begin to make that
connection is to recall yesterday’s commentary when I signaled Thoreau’s
blindspot.
For all the talk of improvisation, and of hiding, what must be
underscored is that the event of appropriation as an event can not be romanticized, and, in fact, should be
understood within the full spectrum of its emotional impact, but also as a
disclosure of the limits of human action.
Put differently, there is a tragic and blues dimension to the event of
appropriation, such that when we are seized by the event we have lost control,
or are no longer fully in control. If we
understand the event from prior experience then we are prepared to have faith
in the sense of allowing ourselves undergo the effacement with whatever will be
shown to us. Experience with the event
prepares us, or should, for the kind of failure that Derrida experienced. If, as Ornette says, Jazz must be free, this
certainly doesn’t mean it won’t take us down dead end streets, or mean back
alleys, or throw us so far out of ourselves that we experience great anxiety or
even panic. To reiterate one of the
mantras of this project: Freedom is
something that possesses us.
The freedom named here is sheltered by peace in the sense that it
arises from it as its other, its otro. It’s interesting to note that a
straightforward dictionary definition of ‘peace’ describes it as the “freedom
from disturbance,” the “freedom from violence,” a state of tranquility,
etc. If peace is a form of freedom,
then how can it be said to shelter freedom?
This can be dismissed as a semantic play, but I don’t see it that
way. The peace that shelters freedom is
akin to the ground where the roots are sheltered, where growth begins. In this sense it is not a state of being, but
a location that sustains life, but also welcomes death as part of the cycle of
life. It is not beyond good and evil but
before it, underneath all cultural norms.
And this brings me to the full spectrum of freedom that is denoted
by Ornette when he says, Jazz must be
free. Freedom in this denotation,
the freedom sheltered by a peace that is before good and evil, is a freedom that
can not be co-opted by revolutionaries nor reactionaries, and is best
demonstrated by artists, especially musicians, and then, perhaps poets and
philosophers, but only those who are working under a blues sensibility,
thinkers like Nietzsche and DuBois who don’t shy away for one moment from the
tragic side of the freedom spectrum.
Freedom, understood to emerge through acts that appear on the complex
spectrum that runs from comedy to tragedy and back again, is always dependent
upon the openness of a ground that can sustain the entire gamut.
3.0 (Friday, Portland, ME) The anniversary of Jerry's passing! I've been thinking a lot about parenting this summer, and trying to step back and allow from the third and final of my kids, Jaime, to be, just allowing him to be on his own journey, not alone, but not on "my" journey! Yesterday I wrote about the parent whose egomania gets the better of him, and ensares the whole family in his megalomania. I apprenticed under a master, and for too long I parented and for that matter taught as a professor in the matter that I learned. But as I reflect on Jerry's life, which was short in terms of the standards that we measure but long in terms of what he accomplished and his ongoing legacy that seems to grow each year, I think about the non-standard way he found his way to music and to becoming a musician. When it finally clicked for him he threw himself into music, and like so many greats practiced obsessively. But that happened after he had dropped out of art school and then the army. Sadly his father passed away during a family camping trip. And his father was a musician, so it's not clear if he would have picked up an instrument at an earlier age. His mom played and sang and the house was filled with music. My point is that perhaps the best way to parent is to love your child dearly and unequivocally and without reservation but also let them live, let them be, let them figure it out, let them live their lives. Trusting in the Holy Spirit is also helpful and relieves the burden (false bravado?!) of thinking you know it all! Be patient and let them be. Rest in peace Jerry!
ReplyDelete3.0b Last summer I finally wrote on the Ornette/Derrida encounter that I first learned about when I was in Madrid in 2004 and saw Derrida on TV recounting the event. It was the longest part of the writing for the rewritten Nancy paper. Unfortunately, it was too long and had to be removed from the final draft that is supposed to be published next year in Educational Theory. As I was writing this morning Derrida made a cameo appearance, along with one of the primary ideas of the work I did last summer: circulation. For the first time in some time I remembered that I wanted to return to that project after I completed the book I'm writing. I can now see how that might be possible! At any rate here is an extended fragment from my writing on the Ornette/Derrida encounter.
ReplyDelete3.0c - When Ornette Coleman broke the established mold with Free Jazz in 1961, he was allowing this form of music to happen anew. In doing so he was not a revolutionary artist, but a rather con-servative one in the sense that it was continuing what jazz, and before jazz, the blues, had always been inspired to do: express freedom. Ornette: “Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.” Derrida, not playing music but writing philosophy, describes différance similarly: “We provisionally give the name différance to this sameness which is not identical.” And, “deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all.” How does one (h)ear the difference/différance (the same note play/word written) between Free Jazz and deconstruction?
ReplyDeleteJuly 1, 1997, Parc de la Villette, Paris, legendary Free Jazz saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman invites Jacques Derrida to join him and pianist Joachim Kiihn on stage as their guest ‘soloist’ during the show. La Villette is a museum and performing arts complex north of the city that includes the august Paris Conservatory. Derrida’s performance was met with howls and jeers of disapproval. He was booed off the stage after reading just the opening of his prepared text, “Joue - Le Prenom,” which Timothy Murphy has translated as “Play -- the First Name.” Murphy notes the difficulty, thus the openness, of translating the title: “The first word, "joue," is at the same time the first-person singular, present indicative form of the verb "jouer," "to play," and the third-person singular, present indicative of that verb. In the absence of a specifying pronoun, the title is undecidable between first person (‘I play,’ suggesting the voice of Derrida the author/speaker) and third (‘he plays,’ suggesting Coleman, the privileged addressee).” The ambiguity of the title is resolved by the impossibility of the audience (h)earing Derrida’s spoken word ‘solo’ as music. Derrida offered a play on the musicality of language, but the poetics of the piece failed to circulate with the sound of Ornette’s horn. Derrida did not offer music. Ornette the host, and Derrida the hostis (both the guest and enemy). As hostis, Derrida was Ornette’s guest, and as hostis Derrida was also the enemy of the audience that did not welcome him.
“A singer or aëdos, as the Greeks called him, was always a welcome guest at a feast. There he sits against a tall column. His lyre hangs on a peg over his head. The feast has come to an end…The feasters have eaten; they have drunk their fill. Now they want to hear some singing. The aëdos takes his lyre, strikes its strings, and begins a great story…”
Derrida: “An act of hospitality can only be poetic.” Reversal: the guest must return the poetic gesture in kind. Otherwise, he becomes an enemy. This is the foreigner’s question, arriving with the guest who is arriving from elsewhere, both “the one who puts the first question, or the one whom you address the first question.” Derrida, arriving from the place where he professes as if he had the unconditional right to question everything, is put into question when he steps on stage and into Ornette’s performance. The moment he crosses the threshold from the university without condition he becomes l’étranger, “the being-in-question, the very question of being-in-question, the question-being or being-in-question of the question.” Derrida, the one who professes faith in unconditional questioning, is put into question by a situation that requests silence from l’étranger, the one without an instrument. If he is not making music then he must practice the poetics of silence. But the one who acts as if he had the right to profess anything and everything ignores the right to remain silent. The guest (Derrida) becomes the enemy of the host (Ornette).