[1] This work is the sediment of a quest, a wavering series of explorations, and not the presentation of a set of conclusions. Without diffidence, these texts openly parasitize Derrida's work. However, they are no more parasites than the host-texts they use since both inhabit host-texts, which themselves parasitically feed on their host-like willingness to receive them. The relationship between my texts - re-inscribed texts - and the so-called original texts is not that of patency and latency, but rather the relationship between two palimpsests. The 'original' texts themselves are the palimpsests of 'pre-texts'; any inscription is (only) a trace of former inscriptions. Referring to textual interpretation, Gayatri Spivak writes in her preface to Of Grammatology: 'The so-called secondary material is not simply adjunct to the so-called primary text. The latter inserts itself within the interstices of the former, filling holes that are always already there. Even as it adds itself to the text, criticism supplies a lack in the text and the gaps in the chain of criticism anterior to it' (Of Grammatology, p.lxxiv). [2] I re-read texts by Derrida and others and put them in a different context. Meanings of texts are brought forth through a process of re-reading, a process of re-creation, de- and re-contextualization. (Re-)reading is always caught up in a chain of proliferating meanings that can neither be halted, nor fully comprehended. In Rethinking Intellectual History, Dominick Lacapra calls it 'the worklike aspects' of a text. These aspects are critical and transformative. They deconstruct and reconstruct the given; repeating it, but also bringing into the world something that did not exist before in the significant alteration or transformation (cf. Lacapra, p.29-30). In other words, in rereading Derrida's texts, I will not merely take up a position of servant whose task it would be to elucidate his philosophy. Musical deconstruction - the topic of this study - is not an application of his philosophical lessons to music, but an exploration of textual logic in texts called music(al). [3] A parasite. My texts are parasitical. But parasites only abstract a part from their hosts. In attempting to introduce Derrida's work to music and the discourse on music, I have cut up his texts, mutilated them. However, as Derrida himself is fully aware, the publication of his texts as texts allows for such a mutilation. It is in fact unavoidable. Or, as Jonathan Culler writes, 'One is tempted to speak of an original practice of deconstruction in Derrida's writings and to set aside as derivative the imitations of his admirers, but in fact these repetitions, parodies, 'etiolations', or distortions are what bring a method into being and articulate, within Derrida's work itself, a practice of deconstruction' (Culler, p.120). To treat Derrida's writing as the original and other texts on deconstruction as modest imitations is to forget precisely what the strategy of deconstruction can teach us about the relation between meaning and iteration, mis-interpretations, and infelicities. Deconstruction persists not as a univocal set of instructions, but as a series of differences that can be charted on various axes. [4] I write five times around music. Around music. Using different approaches. Every musical phenomenon can potentially be examined from the point of view of all disciplines. This web-site is situated on the crossroads of philosophical, musicological and sociological texts read against musical practices that also function as texts. My analytic strategy will thus consist of reading theoretical texts with musical texts. I do not read post-structuralist theory and deconstruction as philosophers do; that is, primarily in relation to other philosophical texts. I am re-reading these theories in relation to texts of music, and vice versa. However, none of the sociological, musicological and philosophical texts function as a theoretical model to be tested against the empirical. Rather, my form of analysis can be understood as textual dialogue. For example, Gerd Zacher's Die Kunst einer Fuge is re-read, in part, against Derrida's Specters of Marx. But this is not a one-way reading. Derrida's work is also re-read against Zacher's text. Rather than invoke the traditional metaphors of surface and depth, according to which theory is said to lie at a deeper, more foundational level than empiricism or practice, I would say that both types of texts lie in the same intellectual space (cf. Moxley, p. xi). In line with these points of departure, moreover, is the assumption that all fields of knowledge that stand outside the history of music are considered to be equally potent with regard to their function within research around music, and not as borderline, 'sister', or auxiliary. But what does 'outside' mean? Derrida writes that any talk of meaning or structure is ineluctably caught up in a process that it does not control. To him, this signals the dissolution of absolute boundaries that mark off one text from another (cf. Norris, 1982, p.114). Intertextuality easily leads to, already assumes, a challenging of disciplinary boundaries; it has the power to estrange the familiar and to make people conceive of their own thinking and institutions in new ways. [5] Deconstruction in music. Derrida considers himself unqualified in the sphere of music. He wonders whether most philosophy might only be possible when it represses music (cf. Points, p.394). Univocality, conceivability, controllability, appropriation - ideas that inhabit most Western philosophy (perhaps the only exceptions would be post-structuralism and deconstruction) - are diametrically opposed to music in its quality of the experience of impossible appropriation and a multiplicity of voices (cf. Derrida's Ear) . The experience of impossible appropriation and a multiplicity of voices. Precisely two points Derrida constantly emphasizes in his own work: no text can escape from them although most philosophers try to avoid them. Do deconstruction and music touch on each other here? Are there in fact close similarities? Can the strategies of deconstruction and the workings of music teach us more or less the same lesson? Still, Derrida considers himself unqualified to write about or around music. So he does not. 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. [6] So the work of Derrida does not neatly map opportunities for tracing deconstruction at work in (the discourse on/of) music. But this should be regarded as something positive. It prompts an investigation of deconstruction in musical practices, which would be more closed off if his work did map it. It means that we can not only reread and rewrite Derrida's texts, but also embroider, develop and go beyond them. [7] 'Speaking Without Tongues' leads to the challenging thought that Derrida, despite all his professed incompetence in musical matters, has nonetheless provided musicology with unprecedented opportunities: 'Perhaps, instead of musicologists looking to linguistics for new paradigms and methodologies, it should be linguistics knocking on [their] doors' (Sweeney-Turner, 1995, p.186). Although challenging, I will not deal (solely) with the non-semantic and non-discursivity of music while elaborating how deconstruction is at work within musical practices. I hope to make clear that deconstruction in music surpasses this idea.
|