CREATIVE IMPLICATIONS OF DECONSTRUCTION: THE CASE OF JAZZ MUSIC, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND ARCHITECTURE

Francesco Paradiso

A thesis submitted to the University of New South Wales in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

School of Humanities & Languages Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences

March 2014

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ABSTRACT

The thesis investigates the connection between deconstruction and creativity with regard to three aesthetic fields, namely jazz music, photography, and architecture. The thesis consists of three chapters.

Chapter 1 focuses on deconstruction and jazz music. First, the analysis draws a comparison between the linguistic sign and the musical sign in the light of Derrida's analysis of signifier and signified. This supports an investigation of the supplementary character of writing in the specific case of jazz music. Second, the analysis draws an analogy between the deconstructive reading of texts and jazz improvisation to show the relevance that creativity has for both. This is followed by an examination of the similarities between Derrida's notion of différance and the musical figure of syncopation. The analysis is completed by an argument that the jazz event of the jam session is an encounter and creative 'dialogue', with features similar to Derrida's conception of hospitality.

Chapter 2 focuses on deconstruction and photography. First, the discussion explores the correlation between truth and photography. It will be argued that deconstruction challenges the logocentric organisation of photographs based on the prominence of what is immediately visible in images and fosters a more creative interpretation, which is based on the play between concealment and unconcealment within photographs. Second, it investigates the implications of Derrida's analysis of temporality for photography. This supports an investigation into how Derrida's notion of responsibility and the future to come can be applied to photography.

Chapter 3 focuses on deconstruction and architecture. First, the analysis establishes the links between architecture and language by outlining the creative and transformative outcome that the correlation between function and meaning in the light of deconstruction produces. Second, the investigation examines Bernard Tschumi's idea of architecture as event in Parc de La Villette. Tschumi's work is an example of how the deconstructive approach adopted by architects fosters creativity in users. Finally, the analysis focuses on the transformative and creative character of portable architecture by investigating the correlation between the creative character of deconstructive concepts such as freeplay, parergon, and the axiom of incompleteness, and the transformative features of tents.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis is the result of a long and personal journey that has changed my life. What I have learned goes well beyond concepts, notions, and philosophical technicalities. But what has been achieved would have not been possible without the help and support of many amazing people. I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Rosalyn Diprose. Words cannot express all my gratitude for her help and guidance. She is an amazing person, friend, and teacher. Her patience is limitless. She has always been present. She taught me how to master the complexities of Derrida's deconstruction. Without her help and support, I certainly would not have been able to accomplish the daunting task of writing a PhD thesis in philosophy, on deconstruction, and what is more, in another language. I would like to thank my co-supervisor Professor Paul Patton for his help and suggestions. I also thank all the people at the School of Humanities & Languages at UNSW for their support and assistance over the time of my candidature, especially Dr Simon Lumsden, Dr Stefania Bernini, Dr Geoffrey Nathan, and Sally Pearson. I would like to thank Professor John Sallis at Boston College in Boston, who supervised my work during the six months I spent at Boston College. His advice and suggestions have been crucial. I would like to thank my wife, Eleonora. Despite the huge distance that has kept us physically apart for more than two years, she has always been a comforting and supporting presence. Without her endless love, the loneliness and strain that this project has caused would have been unbearable. Also, her expertise has been crucial during the final revisions of this thesis. I would like to thank my parents, Tonia and Nicola. This work is dedicated to them. Without their teachings and infinite love and support, I would not have achieved any of my goals. They taught me how to face and overcome the difficulties of life. They have always encouraged me to pursue my dreams. They have always respected my choices, even the one that changed our lives four years ago, when I chose to move 12 000 miles away from home to pursue my research goals. iii The text of this thesis has been professionally copyedited and proofread only, following the Australian Standards for Editing Practice, by Dr Katy McDevitt AE, for such matters as expression, clarity, tone, grammar, and spelling.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Deconstruction and Creativity 2 1. Preliminary Remarks 2 2. Concept without Concept 4 3. Jazz Music, Photography, and Architecture 10 Chapter 1. Deconstruction and Jazz Music 15 1.1. Introduction 15 1.2. Of 'Musical' Grammatology 18 1.3. Double Reading and Improvisation 27 1.4. Différance and Syncopation 46 1.5. The Jam Session and Hospitality 56 Chapter 2. Deconstruction and Photography 67 2.1 Introduction 67 2.2 Photos/Ontos: Light and Shadow of a Scandal 68 2.2.1. First, a Scandal 76 2.2.2. Haunting Shadows 81 2.2.3. Haunting Words 87 2.3 Time and Photography 94 2.3.1. Coincidence of Points: A Puzzling Question 95 2.3.2. Expanding/Expanded Punctuality 103 2.3.3. From Inheritance to Responsibility 106 Chapter 3. Deconstruction, Architecture, and Incompleteness 110 3.1 Introduction 110 3.2 Architecture, Philosophy, Language, and the Unfinished Tower 111 3.2.1. Between Syntax and Semantics: Architecture and Textuality 111 3.2.2. The Tower of Babel: Incompleteness and Event 123 3.3. Deconstruction at Work: Parc de La Villette/Point de Folie – 128 Maintenant L'Architecture 3.4. Portability and Deconstruction: A Transformative Condition 138 3.4.1. Portability and Freeplay 139 3.4.2. Loosening the Borders 144 3.4.3. Portability and Creativity 153 Conclusion 157 1. Jazz Music: A Dialogue with the New 157 2. Photography: Between Concealment and Unconcealment 159 3. Architecture: Activating Space 160 4. Last Words 161 Bibliography 163

1 Introduction Deconstruction and Creativity

1. Preliminary Remarks

This study aims to investigate the connection between deconstruction and creativity, with regard to three aesthetic fields, namely jazz music, photography, and architecture. It will be argued that it is possible to establish a connection between the philosophical elements of deconstruction and the creative features of those disciplines. In the light of that connection, it will be argued that deconstruction fosters creativity. Let me clarify what I mean by creativity. Creativity is about the production of something new. The image that most exemplifies creativity, in this sense, is of artists engaged in the process of creating a new work of art. However, besides that common image, creativity has become also one of the most distinctive and valued human traits, which is currently in strong demand to face the ever-changing character of society. As Richard Florida points out,

The real driving force is the rise of human creativity as the key factor in our economy and society. Both at work and in other spheres of our lives, we value creativity more highly and cultivate it more intensely than we ever have before. The creative impulse – the attribute that distinguishes us, as humans, from other species – is now being unleashed on an unprecedented scale.1

Indeed, the features that have always been linked to the artists' creative activity, such as the exploration of new possibilities, forms, and meanings, the search for the unexpected and unpredictable, and the openness to difference and to the unknown are now valued as essential to innovation. Hence, in this study, the notion of creativity refers to those features mentioned above, which are connected with innovation. According to this characterisation of creativity, it might be argued that deconstruction certainly plays a crucial part in the development of a cultural environment that fosters and nurtures creativity, and that consequently stimulates a

1 Florida R., The Rise of the Creative Class, New York, Basic Books, 2012, p. 5 2 form of thinking that seeks innovation. One of the crucial aspects of deconstruction is a questioning process that challenges what is known, in order to open it up to what is unknown. It might be said that, in effect, in philosophical terms, deconstruction has functioned as a sort of 'engine of innovation', insofar as Jacques Derrida has inspired innovation in how we read philosophical texts, how we think of philosophical arguments, and more broadly how we engage with concepts and ideas. In short, this study begins from the assumption that Derrida has invited and encouraged us to be critical, creative, and innovative in our approach to tradition. As Michael Naas points out in his book Taking on the Tradition, we are always preceded, we always think, read, and write 'within a unique and irreplaceable tradition that exerts an almost unthinkable and inescapable influence over us'.2 At the same time, however, as he continues, 'there is a long tradition in philosophy of taking on the tradition';3 that is, there are many examples of philosophers who have called into question assumptions, theories, canons, and beliefs, and who have challenged our understanding of philosophy as it has been passed on to us. Derrida belongs to that group of philosophers, and perhaps more than anyone else, has challenged the way in which we approach philosophy itself, above all in the light of those concepts that are central to the Western philosophical tradition, such as bequeathing and inheriting, giving and receiving, teaching and learning, writing and reading.4 As Naas argues,

what has often gone unnoticed in the consideration of Derrida's work is the fact that these notions are not only assumed and contested by Derrida in a critical way but repeated and interrupted, performed and transformed, by Derrida as an inheritor, receiver, learner, or reader of the tradition. Anytime Derrida begins analyzing the notions of reception or legacy within a particular text in the tradition, he ends up, because of the very necessity of taking on the tradition, performing and interrupting these gestures in his own reading so as to make possible the coming of 'another gesture', one that is neither simply his nor the tradition's.5

2 Naas M., Taking on the Tradition, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. xvii 3 Ibid., p. xviii 4 Ibid., p. xix 5 Ibid. 3 It is within this frame of the 'other gesture', of seeking the new within the old, of opening up what is known to what is unknown, that this study will investigate the creative implications that characterise deconstruction. As Rosalyn Diprose says, 'receptivity to traditional ideas, initiates the present and simultaneously opens a future',6 and in the light of this opening, as she continues, innovation becomes a 'movement beyond oneself and what was'.7 It is in the light of this perspective that takes on the tradition and opens it up to the future that this study will move.

2. Concept without Concept

The first aspect of deconstruction that invites us to be creative is indeed linked to the understanding of what it is, or in other words, how it can be defined. The way in which deconstruction can be understood already implies an innovative operation that challenges the traditional way we define and understand concepts. I will begin with a contradictory claim, that the concept of deconstruction might be acknowledged as a 'concept without concept'. Let me explain what I mean by that. Our traditional understanding of concepts is organised around definitions, whose best example is represented by the formula 'X is Y', 'deconstruction is. . .', 'this is that'. This way of defining makes easy for us to understand concepts and words; in a way, it might be argued that it reassures us and spares us from the 'anxiety' that stems from the impossibility of understanding something. However, with deconstruction we face a completely different scenario, in which the traditional way of understanding concepts and words is itself challenged. Let us reflect for a moment on what definitions do. A definition might be understood as nothing but a fenced area that precludes the possibility of 'leakage' of meaning by enclosing it, together with the possibilities that the leakage would bring about. If I say, 'Philosophy is the study of the nature and meaning of the universe and of human life',8 as we read in the Oxford English Dictionary, I am enclosing the discipline of philosophy within a fenced area that excludes the possibilities that are actually connected to

6 Diprose R., 'Response to Panel on Rose Diprose's Work', discourse held at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference, University of Western Sydney, Parramatta, 5 December 2013 7 Ibid. 8 Hornby A. S., Turnbull J., Oxford English Advanced Learner's Dictionary, London, Oxford University ELT, 2011 4 philosophy and other disciplines. Similarly, dictionaries carry out the task of establishing borders and placing limits on the meaning of words. The point here is that the operation of defining according to the traditional formula 'X is Y' prevents changes in meaning, and above all the possibilities that changes in meaning bring about. This is not to suggest that we should get rid of dictionaries and promote the idea that there is no meaning. Nevertheless, when we deal with deconstruction we need to be aware that any attempt to enclose meaning, including that of the term 'deconstruction', within the borders of a definition would prevent us from understanding deconstruction properly. As Derrida explains in his essay 'Letter to a Japanese Friend',

All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X' a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction' is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third person present indicative: S is P.9

Let us focus on a crucial question, namely the fact that before coming to any possible definition, the question 'what is deconstruction?' appears to be wrong; it requires what Derrida calls a 'delimiting of ontology', which stems from the third-person present indicative: 'S is P'. In fact, it might be argued, first of all, that deconstruction concerns what cannot be thought only within the present,10 for it questions and challenges the 'is'. One of the main aspects of the Western philosophical tradition that we inherit, and which Derrida takes on in order to change it, is linked to what he calls 'metaphysics of presence', namely the fact that the 'matrix' that organises our philosophical tradition is the 'determination of Being as presence'.11 This question will be discussed in the next chapter. The point with regard to the problem of definitions is that definitions establish a form of meaning that 'is' present, actual, a centre that remains unchanged. As Derrida argues, such a centre aims to work as a 'fundamental

9 Derrida J., 'Letter to a Japanese Friend', in Wood D., Bernasconi R. (eds), Derrida and Différance, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 4 10 Royle N. (ed.), Deconstructions: A User's Guide, Houndmills and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, p. 7 11 Derrida J., 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', in Writing and Difference, London and New York, Routledge, 2005, p. 353 5 immobility and a reassuring certitude', according to which the anxiety that the unknown generates can be mastered.12 As will be discussed in the second chapter on deconstruction and photography, Derrida's view of temporality aims to challenge the usual understanding of the present as a 'punctual' occurrence detached from the past and the future. In critiquing this present, Derrida views it as an open temporal dimension that is linked to what has been and what is yet to come. In opening meaning to the future, deconstruction is creative in the sense of opening opportunities and possibilities. The third-person present indicative 'is' excludes the possibilities that 'what is not yet' implies, so that if I say 'S is P', I am making 'P' stuck in a present that will limit considerably my use of it. This is the first crucial aspect that we need to consider when we deal with deconstruction, and it is the reason why a dictionary definition misses the very core of deconstruction, namely the fact that it is open to change, or rather promotes change. A definition implies what can be formalised; a program; or what can be anticipated. If I define deconstruction as a 'method', as some dictionaries do,13 I am missing the point that Derrida makes when he defines deconstruction as the 'experience of the impossible',14 which refers to deconstruction as something that has to do with the unforeseeable, the incalculable, indeed the impossible.15 Hence, for the purpose of this investigation, we cannot use the traditional way of understanding deconstruction according to the formula 'deconstruction is'. Let us say, then, that deconstruction 'takes place'. As Derrida explains, deconstruction 'takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organisation of a subject'.16 By saying that, we are primarily challenging the traditional way of understanding meaning. At the same time, we are opening the term 'deconstruction' to new meanings that are not chained to the ontological implications of the use of the copula 'is'. Besides, we are not enclosing it within borders; if something 'takes place' it is engaged with the unpredictability of change. As Derrida makes clear,

12 Ibid., p. 352 13 Royle N. (ed.), Deconstructions, p. 1 14 Derrida J., 'Afterwords: Or, At Least, Less than a Letter about a Letter Less', in Royle N. (ed.), Afterwords, Tampere, Outside Books, 1992, p. 200 15 Royle N. (ed.), Deconstructions, p. 6 16 Derrida J., 'Letter to a Japanese Friend', p. 4 6 Deconstruction is neither a theory nor a philosophy. It is neither a school nor a method. It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice. It is what happens, what is happening today in what is called society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on and so forth.17

It is for that reason that Derrida writes that deconstruction acquires its value only from its use in a 'certain context', which is to say that it needs to be put to work and cannot be limited to the detached and transcendental sphere of dictionary definitions. Let me clarify here the sense of the word 'context', for Derrida is referring to all the different fields that deconstruction has affected and influenced since its appearance on the philosophical scene. These include but are certainly not confined to architecture, legal studies, nursing, computers and technology, poetry and fiction, ethics, hermeneutics, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, drugs, ghosts,18 and let me include, in the light of this study, jazz music and photography. Now, this study starts from the assumption that deconstruction 'takes place', for this conveys immediately the idea that we are talking about something that does not limit itself to theory and mere abstraction, but has a practical outcome; in short, it happens. In order to be linked to creativity and art, deconstruction needs first of all to be at work. From that assumption, indeed, we get the idea that deconstruction is 'performative'; that it implies an active approach, a gesture, an act that produces a concrete result, and does not limit itself to the expression of a theoretical concept. Crucially, the point emerges from Derrida's words: 'Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodical procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and leaves a trail.'19 As I said at the very beginning of this introduction, indeed, creativity has to do with the new, but above all let me say that creativity involves always a performance. Even if we are 'creating' only abstract ideas that will never be transformed in perceivable objects, the act of creating those ideas will make us engaged in a

17 Derrida J., 'Some Statements and Truisms about Neo-logisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other Small Seismisms', in Carroll D. (ed.), The States of 'Theory': History, Art and Critical Discourse, New York, Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 85 18 Royle N. (ed.), Deconstructions, p. 6 19 Derrida J., 'Psyche: Inventions of the Other', in Waters L., Godzich W. (eds), Reading de Man Reading, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 42 7 performance. This means that creativity involves activity; it needs a transformation of what is inherited. The link between deconstruction and creativity moves around this active performance that engages us in transforming what we inherit, and invites us to do that in a creative way. Deconstruction makes us face this active process of inheriting something and transforming it into something new. Therefore, the fact that I have introduced it by using the expression 'concept without concept' tends to support the idea that we can understand deconstruction only by analysing it as it happens, through a performance. As will be illustrated in the next chapters, this involves reading texts, observing photographs or 'activating' architectural space. In all these cases, it will be argued, when we approach deconstruction we become involved and engaged in an active process linked to inheriting and opening up to the new. It is the only way we have to understand how deconstruction works. At the end of autumn 1967, Derrida gave a seminar in Paris on 'the philosophical foundations of literary criticism' at Paul de Man's request, for a dozen American students from Cornell and Johns Hopkins universities;20 one of the participants, David Carroll, gives this account:

To put it in crude and hasty terms, Jacques presented those attending the seminar who were expecting something else, or who, like me, didn’t know what they were expecting, with something completely new: a double, and doubly critical, mode of questioning and type of analysis. He gave a class every week, a class that was simultaneously philosophical and literary, showing complex and contradictory relationship, both internal and external, between literature and philosophy. I was overwhelmed, we were all overwhelmed, by Derrida's style, by his way of reading, of asking questions, of analyzing texts. Everything was up for questioning, everything was up for discussion, and in a different way. And in order to do this, it was especially necessary to find another voice, another style, another writing. Nothing was the same as before.21

20 Carroll D., 'Jacques Derrida ou le Don d’Écriture – Quand quelque Chose se Passe', in Rue Descartes, Vol. 2, No. 48, 2005, quoted in Peeters B., Derrida: A Biography, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013, p. 181 21 Ibid., pp. 181–182 8 The way that American universities welcomed this new way of reading and understanding literary and philosophical texts illustrates the creative aspects linked to deconstruction, above all in the light of a discussion that involves inheriting and transforming. Benoît Peeters reports in his biography of Derrida that

At the start of the 1980s, many departments [in the American universities] had been won over by 'French Theory' and Derrida's thought. It had all started in French departments, then those of comparative literature. But architecture, aesthetics, anthropology, and law soon became receptive. The idea of deconstruction, which made it possible to create bridges between the disciplines, aroused immense enthusiasm.22

The result of the way deconstruction created those bridges between language and literary studies and other disciplines, such as architecture, for instance, as I will illustrate, was the beginning of a transformative process that would change them forever. Before moving on to introduce the chapters that will follow, I would like to close this discussion of the 'concept without concept' by quoting a passage which links deconstruction to the future, for I believe that the crucial aspect that emerges from a study on the creative implications of deconstruction is linked to the possibilities that the unpredictability of future generates, and to the responsibilities that it brings about. Deconstruction involves

the opening of the future itself, a future which does not allow itself to be modalized or modified into the form of the present, which allows itself neither to be fore-seen nor pro-grammed; it is thus also the opening to freedom, responsibility, decision, ethics and politics, so many terms that would therefore have to be withdrawn from the deconstructible logic of presence, conscience or intention.23

After having framed the traits of deconstruction, let me focus on the structure of this study and the three fields that it will take into account.

22 Ibid., p. 453 23 Derrida J., 'Afterwords', p. 200 9

3. Jazz Music, Photography, and Architecture

As I have stated, the purpose of this study is to investigate the creative implications of deconstruction in three aesthetic fields: jazz music, photography, and architecture. Given that deconstruction in academia has tended to deal primarily with texts, I need to make a clarification here, for in this study I will draw connections between deconstructive concepts conceived primarily for texts and creative practices that apparently have no links with texts, at least in the conventional sense in which our tradition intends it. Interestingly, Derrida himself has given indications about this matter, clarifying that to limit deconstruction to texts alone is in fact to completely misread and misunderstand it. As he puts it,

I would almost take the opposite stance. I would say that the most effective deconstruction is that which is not limited to discursive texts and certainly no to philosophical texts. . .the most effective deconstruction. . .is one that deals with the nondiscursive, or with discursive institutions that don't have the form of a written discourse. . .I would say that the idea that deconstruction should confine itself to the analysis of the discursive text is really either a gross misunderstanding or a political strategy designed to limit deconstruction to matters of language. Deconstruction starts with the deconstruction of logocentrism, and thus to want to confine it to linguistic phenomena is the most suspect of operations.24

Indeed, as my analysis will show, to a certain extent, the deconstructive discourse seems to manifest its properties even more appropriately when contextualised within creative practices such as music, photography, or architecture. The reason for that is certainly linked to the remarkable similarities between the creative and performative components that rule such practices, and the very functioning of deconstruction. That will underline that deconstruction works as a sort of generator of creativity and innovation.

24 Derrida J., 'The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida', in Brunette P., Wills D., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 14 10 One might wonder why I have selected jazz music, photography, and architecture. First of all, I have turned my interest to aesthetic fields rather than written texts because these best exemplify the relationship between deconstruction and creativity, even though it must be said that each of these disciplines could be the object of a single study involving creativity and deconstruction. However, the choice to put the three fields together is not casual. It stems from the intent to investigate deconstruction and creativity with regards to three forms of art that have significant influence on many aspects of our lives, encouraging us to take on the tradition and foster the development of the new. Let me introduce these three fields, then, and the aspects that will be examined in this study. First, jazz music. In his biography, Peeters tells us an interesting story about Derrida and jazz music:

The great American musician Ornette Coleman, a philosophy devotee, had long dreamed of meeting the father of deconstruction. When he came to Paris, at the end of June 1997, a meeting was organized and recorded by the magazine Les Inrockuptibles. The conversation was so cordial that Coleman invited Derrida to speak at a concert he was scheduled to give few days later at the jazz festival in La Villette. Derrida, touched and attracted by the proposal, immediately agreed. On the evening of 1 July, without having been introduced, Derrida suddenly appeared on stage, in front of a packed auditorium, and started reading, in jazzed-up rhythms, the text he had just written.25

This episode demonstrates a crucial aspect of deconstruction and jazz that I will examine, namely the attempt to translate the creative character of jazz into philosophy. The philosopher Derrida improvises a philosophical discourse during a live jazz performance. To my knowledge, such a circumstance is unprecedented both in jazz and philosophy. When we talk of improvised jazz music, we are talking primarily about creativity, performativity, and in some cases even of unpredictability – all elements that, as I will argue in my analysis, belong to Derrida's philosophy. After all,

25 Peeters B., Derrida, p. 483. In the first chapter I will return to this episode and discuss the analysis of it that David Wills does in the paper 'Notes Towards a Requiem: Or the Music of Memory'. See Wills D., 'Notes Towards a Requiem: Or the Music of Memory', in Mosaic, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2006, pp. 27-46 11 improvisation might be acknowledged as a creative performance that is opening up new lines in music. The first chapter, indeed, will focus on the creative implications of deconstruction that emerge from its analogy with jazz music. My analysis will investigate especially four aspects. First, I will set up a comparison between the linguistic sign and the musical sign, arguing that the latter supports and validates Derrida's criticism of the transcendental signified. That will lead to the discussion of the centrality of writing in music, which, as in language, defies the metaphysics of presence. In the second part, which is also the core of my analysis, I will investigate the similarity between a deconstructive reading of texts and jazz improvisation. Central to this aspect is the creative engagement that the deconstructive reading generates, which resembles the improvisatory character of a jazz musician. The third part of the analysis will focus on the analogy between the concept of différance and the musical figure of syncopation, which is crucial in jazz music. It will be argued that both rely on the creative tensions that stem from the dichotomy of regular/irregular, especially considering the fact that both rely on irregularity rather than regularity. The fourth part will explore the connections between Derrida's notion of hospitality and the jam session. It will be argued that the jam session, an informal jazz event where musicians gather together to improvise, is based on a play of unconditional and conditional hospitality that fosters a creative interchange between musicians. The second creative discipline to be explored is photography. As it has been argued, there is a tendency to support the idea that depiction, picturing and seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them.26 This tendency might be acknowledged as a 'logocentric' organisation of images that privileges presence over absence. The second chapter, indeed, will challenge the 'truth' of the idea that there is a correspondence between what is visible in photographs and what is true. It will be argued that a deconstructive approach fosters a 'reading' of images that does not rely solely on what is visible/present, but also takes into account what is not immediately visible. In other words, deconstruction privileges the understanding of images according to the play

26 Campbell N., 'Regarding Derrida: The Tasks of Visual Deconstruction', in Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2012, p. 108 12 between 'concealment' and 'unconcealment'. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first will focus on the analysis of the relationship between photos (light) and ontos (being), and it will be argued that, in the light of the deconstructive approach, the play between light and shadow and the absent traits of images, such as the context for instance, that the photographic commentary brings to light, challenge the logocentric organisation of photographs based on the correspondence between photos and ontos. This will lead me to argue that the deconstructive approach makes the observer creatively engaged in the interpretative process of photographs, enabling them to open images to new meanings and perspectives that are otherwise unattainable. The second part, instead, will investigate the temporal perspective that the deconstructive approach to photographs generates. It will be argued that deconstruction challenges the 'punctuality' of the photographic present and transforms photography into a medium that connects past, present, and future. Given that, it will be argued that through photographs we 'inherit' a past state of affairs that is open to the unpredictability of the future, which makes us actively responsible for the future to come. The third chapter will focus on the creative implications that emerge from the relationship between architecture and deconstruction. Traditionally, architecture has been understood as a discipline that is at human service, concerned primarily with building for the purpose of sheltering us, giving us a 'roof'.27 However, given the particular relationship between us and architectural structures and space – namely the fact that we inhabit them – architecture is a form of art particularly dense with philosophical implications. Framed within these terms, deconstruction will open up architecture to new perspectives, which I will argue make it a form of art that activates space, despite the stillness of architectural structures, by engaging users in a creative and transformative process. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part will discuss the linguistic links between architecture and deconstruction. This will lay the foundations on which the deconstructive discourse will operate within architecture. In particular, my analysis will examine the 'communicative' properties of architecture in the light of the connection between meaning, function, and form. It will be argued that

27 Derrida J., 'Point de Folie – Maintenant L'Architecture', in Leach N. (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A reader in Cultural Theory, London, Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005, p. 309 13 deconstruction operates as a rupture that challenges the traditional principle according to which architectural form follows function. Instead, deconstruction introduces the idea of architecture as event in relation to the so-called 'axiom of incompleteness' that Derrida discusses in his discourse on architecture.28 The second part will focus on the analysis of Bernard Tschumi's work Parc de La Villette, which is considered one of the most significant results of the influence of deconstruction on architecture. It will be argued that through Tschumi's work, the deconstructive intent of challenging the traditional understanding of architecture based on the principle form follows function is accomplished. In La Villette, indeed, the users/visitors are engaged in a creative process that 'activates' space, makes it performative, and converts architectural objects and architectural space into open projects that remain open to a constant transformation. In the light of these features, the last part of the chapter will attempt to contextualise deconstruction within portable architecture. It will be argued that the transformative character of portable structures responds to the deconstructive strategies that open meaning to dynamic and transformative outcomes. In this sense, portable architecture appears to be characterised even more evidently than permanent architecture by the creative and performative involvement of its users. In the context of the three chapters' themes, the thread that will join together my discourse is ascribable to three main motifs: performance, unpredictability, and transformation. The three chapters share these three motifs and they can be acknowledged ultimately as the three components that join together creativity and deconstruction. Performance, indeed, activates; unpredictability means opening to what cannot be foreseen; transformation implies receiving something in order to change it.

28 Derrida J., 'Generations of a City: Memory, Prophecy, Responsibilities', in Knechtel J. (ed.), Open City: Alphabet City 6, Toronto, House of Anansi Press, 1998, p. 16 14 Chapter 1 Deconstruction and Jazz Music

1.1. Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the creative implications of deconstruction with regard to jazz music. Before starting my analysis, I would like to outline three points that indicate some connection between deconstruction and jazz. First, while Derrida did not write anything specifically focused on jazz music, it is well known that he was a passionate fan of it.29 There is an interesting episode concerning Derrida himself and jazz, which can be retrospectively acknowledged as the only attempt to bring deconstruction and jazz together on the stage, during a jazz live performance. I am referring to the event I have already mentioned in the introduction, when the African American free jazz exponent Ornette Coleman30 invited Derrida to share the stage with him for an improvised jazz–text music duo during the jazz festival at La Villette in Paris, in July 1997.31 Second, there is some published discussion on the connection between deconstruction and jazz. Nevertheless, given the interesting aspects that are emerging, the topic demands further research. Third, the connection I will argue for emerges from the textual aspect of music. Hence, I shall limit my analysis, above all in the first part of the chapter, which focuses mainly on the 'textual' aspect of jazz, to that particular jazz tradition based on the practice of performing tunes known as 'jazz standards'. My analysis of the relationship between jazz music and deconstruction consists of four parts. The first part will take into account Derrida's analysis of the textual sign in Of Grammatology, which I will apply to the musical sign. I will look at the implications of the characterisation of the linguistic sign, as combination of signifier and signified,

29 Wills D., 'Notes Towards a Requiem: Or the Music of Memory', p. 31, 42 30 Ornette Coleman is an African-American exponent of Free jazz and Postmodern jazz, see Gioia T., The History of Jazz, New York, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 309–325 31 For more information on this encounter see Wills D., 'Notes Towards a Requiem: Or the Music of Memory'; Ramshaw S., 'Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation: Derrida and the Law of the Singular Event', in Critical Studies in improvisation, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2006, pp. 1–19; and Murphy T. S., 'The Other's Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman, 23 June 1997', in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2004, pp. 319–328 15 for the musical sign. I will also apply to music Derrida's criticism of Ferdinand de Saussure's theory for implying the signified understood as transcendental meaning, detached from the worldly sphere of the material signifier. This approach to the relation between language and music raises the question of musical meaning. Indeed, musical meaning has become a compelling topic for music scholars and philosophers above all over the past 30 years, and there is a range of views on the topic.32 My analysis, however, will touch on the matter only indirectly, insofar as it is limited to an introductory evaluation of the implications of Derrida's textual categories for jazz music and the potential that emerges from that evaluation in terms of creativity. As such, this study assumes that music, overall, is to be acknowledged as a form of language constituted by a system of sounds and written symbols, and that it presents several analogies with human language. If a form of meaning is conveyed through music, it must relate somehow to emotions, and a comprehensive analysis of that would require a direct and much more detailed scrutiny than that allowed by the space at my disposal in this chapter. Undoubtedly, the topic of music and meaning is part of the further research that the relationship between deconstruction and music requires, as new field of study of Derrida's legacy. The second part of the chapter will be dedicated to the analysis of the correlation between the so-called 'double reading' that characterises the deconstruction of texts and jazz improvisation. I will argue that there is a significant similarity between the deconstructive reading of texts and jazz musicians' reading and interpretation of scores, in terms of creativity. There is an interesting anecdote told by Paul F Berliner at the beginning of his book Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, which I would like to quote in this introduction, for it is useful to understand what I mean by double reading in jazz. It is about the practice that jazz musicians do in order to develop their technical skills, and shows how a form of double reading can be detected also in those apparently flat and boring exercises. Berliner writes:

32 There are four texts that offer, each from a different perspective, a comprehensive overview on the topic of music and meaning: Tarasti E. (ed.), Musical Signification: Essays in the Semiotic Theory and Analysis of Music, Berlin and New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1995; Almen B., Pearsall E. (eds), Approaches to Meaning in Music, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2006; Stock K. (ed.), Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007; and Patel A. D., Music, Language, and the Brain, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008 16 A trumpet player, who once accepted me as student, gave me a series of musical exercises to practice. Each time we met, he encouraged me to learn them more thoroughly. When I had finally developed the technical control to repeat them unerringly, he praised my efforts in a manner that seemed to say, 'That's fine and that's what I have to teach you'. The problem was that what I had learned did not sound like jazz to me. When he first sensed my disappointment, he seemed surprised. Then he picked up his instrument and added modestly, 'Well, of course, you have to throw in a little of this here and there'. To my ears, the lifeless exercises I had been practicing were transformed into a vibrant stream of imaginative variations that became progressively more ornate until I could barely recognize their relationship to the original models.33

The third part, instead, will take into account the analogy between the concept of différance and the musical figure of syncopation, in terms of their creative implications. It will be argued that both the concepts relate to irregularity rather than regularity. Especially from a rhythmic perspective, jazz, indeed, appears to privilege irregularity over regularity. The primary cause of that irregularity is to be found in the displacement of the regular beat that syncopation produces, so that in all the jazz styles, from swing to fusion, rhythm is characterised by the prevalence of irregular or 'weak' accents. Similarly, in philosophical terms, Derrida's concept of différance appears to be characterised by a sort of irregularity generated by the spatial and temporal implications that the two verbs 'to defer' and 'to differ' generate in terms of signification. My argument will investigate the creative implications that emerge from this similarity. The last section of this chapter will investigate the connection between the jam session and Derrida's concept of hospitality. The jam session is a musical event during which jazz musicians gather together and play music in a very unique way; that is, they are free from all the conventions that shape and control the commercial music context, where most of them usually earn their living. However, besides being a musical event, the jam session is also a social event, where people who often have

33 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 10 17 never met before find themselves on a stage improvising and creating. During that encounter, a creative relation takes place, a relation similar to the one that characterises the form of hospitality accounted by Derrida. In this light, it will be argued, the form of hospitality that takes place during the jam session is first of all a relation that relies on a form of interruption of the self and the opening to the other that musicians perform by playing together. The outcome of that opening is remarkably constructive in terms of creativity.

1.2. Of 'Musical' Grammatology

In this first section, I will argue that the characteristics of the musical sign and the function that writing has in jazz support Derrida's criticism of phonocentrism. Certainly, my goals assume that an analogy between language and music exists, most evidently in the fact that a written and an acoustic form characterise both of them. As in language texts rely on written signs coming from the alphabet, scores rely on written signs coming from the musical notation system. In the same way, as in language speech relies on uttered sounds coming from the phonetic alphabet, in music melodies, harmonies, and rhythms rely on sounds arranged in scales and modes. However, when we look at the characteristics of the musical sign, despite the apparent conformity between the dyadic character of the linguistic sign and the character of the musical sign, an interesting contrast emerges. I will begin by comparing the characteristics of the linguistic and musical sign, and after that, I will move to the analysis of the function that musical writing has in jazz. As Derrida writes, recalling the Swiss linguist de Saussure,34 the notion of sign 'always implies within itself the distinction between a signifier and a signified'35; that is, the distinction between the materiality of a physical sign, the signifier, and the ideality of meaning, the signified. According to Derrida, such a distinction marks the differentiation between the sensible and the intelligible – the most crucial aspect of metaphysics. As I mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, Derrida has analysed and criticised the philosophical implications of that distinction by challenging the idea

34 The mentioned distinction has been operated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. See de Saussure F., Course in General Linguistics, London, Duckworth, 1983, p. 67 35 Derrida J., Of Grammatology, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 11 18 of the transcendental signified, which is the cause, he argues, of the prevalence of what he calls logocentrism or a 'metaphysics of presence' in the Western philosophical tradition. Logocentrism, according to Derrida, becomes also phonocentrism, namely the prevalence of the voice (phoné) and spoken word over writing and graphic signs, and marks the coincidence of Being and presence. In this light, the signifier is reduced to a secondary element, mere exteriority, subject to the primacy of the meaning/signified, which remains transcendental and untouched by the influence of material signs. Derrida offers an alternative approach to this classical metaphysical understanding of the linguistic sign, asserting that there is no ideal or transcendental signified, but rather only a chain of signifiers. In other words, every time we try to understand the meaning of a word we are referred not to a fixed concept, but to other words. The clearest example of that can be found looking at dictionaries, where the meaning of each word, physical sign or signifier is defined by means of other signifiers, physical signs or words. In dictionaries, as John Caputo writes,

the meaning of a word is defined differentially, relative to the meaning of other words. What you will never find in the dictionary is a word that detaches itself from these internal relationships and sends you sailing right out of the dictionary into a mythical, mystical thing in itself 'outside' of language, wistfully called the 'transcendental signified'. A serious dictionary is a good sober example of the 'play of differences', of the differential spacing within which, by means of which all the users of the language make what sense they are able to make.36

There is some correlation between this and how signification operates in music. As David Wills argues in his essay 'Jasz Annotations: Negotiating a Discursive Limit', from a Derridean perspective, music 'constitutes itself as writing'.37 Given that it can be notated, indeed, music 'gives rise to an inscription',38 and similarly to the case of the linguistic sign, in musical writing we find a 'spacing' that, as Wills says, 'is by definition

36 Caputo J. D., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, New York, Fordham University Press, 1997, pp. 100–101 37 Wills D., 'Jasz Annotations: Negotiating a Discursive Limit', in Paragraph, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1998, p. 134 38 Ibid. 19 differential; it breaks with the possibility of any homogenous continuity in favour of effects of otherness'.39 Broadly speaking, in music, regardless of its style, one finds a series of sounds organised in scales according to their pitch, and a notation system based on written signs that graphically represent those sounds. Those signs are based on a particular conceptualisation of pitch, which originates in the music theory of Greek antiquity. Since then, the most crucial developments in music notation occurred in the ninth and eleventh centuries, when the 'final shaping' of the Gregorian chant dialect and the invention of 'neumatic' notation, the chief precursor to the current five-line staff notation, secured a more accurate transmission of the traditional and sacred melodies, as well as a more disciplined and uniform performance of them. David E Coehn provides a particularly cogent account of the graphic connotations of notes in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory:

The basis of most musical instruction, thought, and activity in the Western world is a particular conceptualization of pitch. We understand musical pitches as distinct sonic entities, specifiable by name, and we mentally represent them as a series of points occupying higher or lower, intervallically defined positions on an imaginary, quasi-spatial, vertically aligned two- dimensional continuum – or basic 'pitch space'. . .The pitches, or as I shall usually call them, 'notes', constitute a system defined by various intervallic and other relationships and comprising a multitude of specific structures, including our familiar major, minor, and chromatic scales.40

In this light, on the one hand, we have 'distinct sonic entities', which differ from each other according to their different frequencies;41 on the other hand, we have written signs, the notes, which translate each sound into a graphic sign. By translating this character of the musical sign into the dyadic form of the conventional notion of the sign, prior to Derrida's critique, we would have the following: as in language each signifier supposedly conveys a signified (concept or meaning), in music each written note as signifier wants to express its related sound, or

39 Ibid. 40 Cohen D. E., 'Notes, Scales, and Modes in the Earlier Middle Ages', in Christensen T. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 307 41 Frequency is the property of sound that determines pitch. For more information see Patel A. D., Music, Language, and the Brain, pp. 12,13, 87. 20 signified. However, if investigated more thoroughly, what at a first glance looks like a match between the linguistic and musical sign raises a philosophical issue. Although apparently characterised by the same linguistic dyadic form, the musical sign appears to be characterised by two material and worldly elements, two signifiers: the written sign and its related sound. At first glance, there is no trace of a pure, ideal, and intelligible meaning. As Eero Tarasti states at the very beginning of his essay Musical Signification,42 sound is itself a signifier, and no signified can be related to it, at least in terms of referential meaning. According to Christopher Norris, instead, in music 'we encounter the paradigm case of an "empty" sign whose structure and meaning can only be grasped allegorically since it resists all attempts to specify its content in naively referential mode'.43 If I have understood Norris's claim, 'allegorically' refers to the absence of any specific referential meaning, as we understand it in conventional linguistic terms. Although it might be acknowledged that sound is the signified of the written note, at the same time sound turns to be a signifier itself. I argue, then, that we are in presence of a self-referentiality of sound, the result of which is that the only possible signified of the acoustic sign, sound, is sound itself. In this light, we can draw the conclusion that, although it is characterised by a dyadic form, the musical sign does not contain any transcendental signified and is characterised only by two signifiers that are contextualised in the worldly sphere: while it would be possible to think of the pitch of the note G, for example, without the physical production of the acoustic form of G, we would never know what G means in musical terms. Therefore, G will never be an absolute and ideal substance detached from time and space; rather, as physical phenomenon, it will always be contingent and dependent upon factors such as, for example, whether the instrument is tuned; the atmospheric factors that can influence the diffusion of sound through air and, consequently, our perception of it; the musician's ability to perform it; as well as the timbre of instruments or voice. Different instruments or voices will produce different acoustic characterisations of the same note. This means, basically, that if we play the

42 Tarasti E. (ed.), Musical Signification: Essays in the Semiotic Theory and Analysis of Music, p. v 43 Norris C., 'Deconstruction, Musicology and Analysis: Some Recent Approaches in Critical Review', in Thesis Eleven, Vol. 56, No. 1, 1999, pp. 107–118 21 same note G on different instruments, or if different people sing the note, we will obtain each time different characterisations, known as 'tone colours', so that a G played on a piano will sound different than a G played on a trumpet. Besides that, when we look at jazz, we find out an even more distinctive indication of the contingency of sound. Jazz musicians, indeed, try to acquire a very distinct and personal 'voice', sometimes by pushing the expression of sound, either vocal or instrumental, to its very limit. Talking of that, Peter Hollerbach in his paper '(Re)voicing Tradition: Improvising Aesthetics and Identity on Local Jazz Scenes',44 takes on the task of exploring the peculiarity of the musicians' search for their own unique voice, as one of the most important traits of jazz practice. He writes,

Jazz musicians often speak of developing a personal instrumental 'voice', a process informed by the interrelatedness of issues of style, 'sound' (timbre), vocabulary, technique, gesture, and performativity. 'Voice' informs identity, the projection of the self distinguished from other voices/selves.45

In the light of this account, the musical sign supports Derrida's criticism of the dyadic characterisation of sign and validates his alternative approach that challenges the traditional metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. In the case of the musical sign, indeed, both written and acoustic notes are expression of sensible signifiers. In music, then, we find that the self-referentiality of sound mirrors the Derridean chain of signifiers. From the perspective of Derrida's account of logocentrism and phonocentrism, the self-referential characteristics of the musical sign make it phonocentric and, as such, it expresses the primacy of sound over writing. The note G, indeed, in order to be understood, needs to be heard. However, following Derrida's criticism of the privilege of speech over writing, I will question the phonocentric character of the musical sign, and I will argue that the written sign in music is as important as sound, above all because of its creative implications. Let us delve deeper into the matter. In the case of language, Derrida criticises the tendency to privilege speech over writing, which he argues stems from the coincidence that has been accorded in the

44 Hollerbach P., '(Re)voicing Tradition: Improvising Aesthetics and Identity on Local Jazz Scenes', in Popular Music, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2004, pp. 155–171 45 Ibid., p. 161 22 Western philosophical tradition to phoné, or voice, and presence. What Derrida criticises is the fact that phoné has marked a privileged relationship between speech and truth since Aristotle's epoch, for the vocal signifier assures the essential and immediate proximity with the meaning, or the signified linked to the mental object, thought or state that we want to communicate. No mediation or intervention of external elements, such as a written sign, which, lacking the direct link with our mental experience, would affect and distort the purity of meaning. Unlike the written word, the spoken word supposedly ensures that the message, the meaning I want to communicate, is understood in its purity. Communication, indeed, is defined as the transport of meanings (signifieds) unaffected by the medium of transport (signifiers).46 On the other hand, the permanence of a written word in the absence of the thinker opens up meaning to misinterpretation by the reader that might contaminate and warp the purity of the intended meaning. As a consequence, the metaphysical tradition has seen the written word as secondary element of language. In the section titled 'The Signifier and Truth', in Of Grammatology, taking into account Aristotle words, Derrida writes:

If, for Aristotle, for example, 'spoken words (ta en te phone) are the symbols of mental experience (pathemata tes psyches) and written words are the symbols of spoken words' (De interpretatione, 1, 16a 3) it is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind. Producer of the first signifier, it is not just a simple signifier among others. It signifies 'mental experiences' which themselves reflect or mirror things by natural resemblance. Between being and mind, things and feelings, there would be a relationship of translation or natural signification; between mind and logos, a relationship of conventional symbolization. And the first convention, which would relate immediately to the order of natural and universal signification, would be produced as spoken language. Written language would establish the conventions, interlinking other conventions with them.47

46 Daylight R., What if Derrida Was Wrong about Saussure?, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, p. 64 47 Ibid. 23 Derrida's task, then, is to criticise this approach and illustrate how writing cannot be devaluated and reduced to mere secondary instrument of speech. In the chapter of Of Grammatology titled '. . .That Dangerous Supplement. . .',48 Derrida, discussing Jean J Rousseau's critique of writing, introduces the concept of supplement. Writing would become a necessary supplement able to win the transitory nature of speech, since the latter 'denies itself as it gives itself'.49 Spoken words are transient entities that exist only when they are uttered, which is to say in the present moment; after that, they become unable to keep their presence present. If that is the case, speech fails to 'protect' its presence, and requires the permanence of the written sign. Writing, then, becomes the supplement, which must be added to the word 'urgently'50 in order to make it more permanent. Conventionally understood, writing, says Derrida, is 'the addition of a technique, a sort of artificial and artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent'.51 But it is a necessary supplement. What would culture be without the necessary supplement of writing? The transient nature of speech in language, like the transitory nature of sounds in music, would not have left any trace of its existence, vanishing as the present moment vanishes. According to Derrida, in neither speech nor writing is meaning fully present. In the second chapter of Of Grammatology, he makes clear how 'historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing...Before being the object of a history – of an historical science – writing opens the field of history – of historical becoming'.52 By stating that, he is saying that historicity or becoming brings about a transformation of meaning, which is not fully self-present but remains open to change. Hence, the necessity of writing indicates a fundamental historicity of culture, which remains open to transformation and possibility. In other words, historicity indicates 'creativity'. Similarly, a criticism of the phonocentric character of music becomes necessary in order to affirm the relevance of musical writing above all in an oral tradition such as jazz music. What is then the function of writing in music? Derrida's point is that speech

48 Derrida J., Of Grammatology, pp. 141–164 49 Ibid., p. 142 50 Ibid., p. 144 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., p. 27 24 is actually 'writing', the meaning of which gets 'corrupted'.53 Similarly, sound is a kind of 'writing' that gets 'corrupted' by its transitory nature. Musical writing, then, is the necessary supplement that opens up music and especially jazz music to historical becoming, to new possibilities and transformations, to the influence of differences. In music, as in all the other fields of human knowledge, writing assures the transmission and development of all our musical knowledge. Without musical writing, we could not listen to music by Wolfgang A Mozart, Ludwig V Beethoven, or all the other composers who contribute to make music an extraordinary human experience. I would not be able to develop this study, given that I would not have any musical literature and, most likely, any possibility to look at the systematic classification of musical styles, which allows us to recognise jazz as different from classical, rock, and so on. In addition, despite its oral tradition, jazz has also been developed thanks to the fusion of many different traditions, including the 'written' European one. In this sense, writing becomes the essential trace that marks and catches the transitory nature of sound and opens it up to the possibilities of historicity and hence to becoming and transformation. The particular transitory nature of sound, bound to the presence of the performing musician in the present, requires writing as literally understood in order to survive the temporary and passing essence of its nature. It might even be argued that writing assures the existence of music as aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, could we consider music as an art, a discipline, and a subject of study without writing? Would any differentiation be possible between the aesthetic phenomenon of music and any other combination of sounds, such as those produced by machines, or nature, without musical signs? Besides the scholarly aspect linked to the development and transmission of musical heritage and its scholarly analysis that musical notation made possible, indeed, when we come to the creative aspect or compositive character, which I believe represents the highest expression of music as aesthetic experience, it becomes clear that writing has been as important as performance. Recall the importance of writing in the case of composers across all musical styles, from Mozart and Beethoven to George Gershwin, Keith Jarrett and many others. For many of them,

53 Ibid., pp. 46, 56–57 25 writing has been so important that they wrote music even without the assistance of any musical instrument, as if they were writing a paper. Despite its phonocentric constitution, then, writing in music becomes the necessary supplement able to overtake the ephemeral nature of sound. Derrida's deconstructive point is that in both writing and speech meaning is open to transformation, and jazz exemplifies this, in writing through jazz scores but, especially, as we will see later, in 'sound'; that is, through performance. As I will show in the next part of this chapter, writing ensures the repeatability of each standard jazz tune to some extent, but above all it allows the analysis and rearrangement of the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic line of each composition, making possible the distinction between interpretation and improvisation. An interesting analogy can be drawn here between what readers do with texts and what musicians do with tunes. This analogy is based on a sort of dialogue that readers and musicians establish respectively with texts and tunes. Arguably, writing in music as in language sets ideas in motion and activates a process that, from those written texts and scores, shapes new ideas through an interpretative process that relies on creativity and receptivity. In the introduction, I have discussed how 'taking on the tradition' means to open old ideas to new possibilities. Derrida's support for writing is also linked to the new possibilities that signs unlock in terms of meaning and understanding. In this sense, Berliner's54 astonishing work in transcribing some of the most significative solos of the history of jazz, performed by musicians of the calibre of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, 'Philly' Joe Jones, and many others, shows how texts become essential in an oral tradition such as jazz, where the ephemeral moment of improvisation and the solo does not allow the necessary musical analysis of melodies, harmonies, and technics that jazz improvisers use. In transcribing the solos, Berliner has considered many aspects of the performances, among which one finds even the subtle trumpet and saxophone 'timbral variations and pitch inflections',55 which have been caught and represented by means of particular notational symbols. It must be acknowledged that those variations and inflections, given the very personal

54 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, pp. 505–757 55 Ibid., p. 507 26 characterisation of sound each musician uses, make jazz practice very difficult to represent graphically. Besides their value in terms of musical scholarship and performance, those texts become crucial also for didactic purposes, and therefore to set new ideas in motion.

1.3. Double Reading and Improvisation

In this section, I focus on the correlation between what has become known as 'double reading', which refers to the deconstructive reading of texts and the practice of improvisation in jazz. It will be argued that deconstructive reading has in texts the same function that improvisation has in jazz standard tunes. This will bring the analysis to a discussion of the link between deconstruction, improvisation, and creativity. As I mentioned in the introduction, during his interview with Coleman, Derrida points out the link between writing, reading, and improvisation; he says: 'the very concept of improvisation verges upon reading, since what we often understand by improvisation is the creation of something new, yet something which doesn't exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible'.56 Without musical writing, indeed, we would not be able to distinguish the two practices that make jazz unique, namely interpretation and improvisation. With regard to interpretation, Derrida, in 'To Do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis', gives this account of a 'rule of hermeneutical method' in terms of deconstruction:

In a protocol that laid down certain reading positions. . .I recalled a rule of hermeneutical method that still seems to me valid for the historian of philosophy. . .namely the necessity of first ascertaining a surface or manifest meaning. . .the necessity of gaining a good understanding, in a quasi- scholastic way, philologically and grammatically, by taking into account the dominant and stable conventions, of what Descartes meant on the already so difficult surface of his texts, such as it is interpretable according to classical norms of reading: the necessity of gaining this understanding. . .before and in

56 Derrida J. quoted in Murphy T. S., 'The Other's Language', p. 322 27 order to destabilize, wherever this is possible and if it is necessary, the authority of canonical interpretations.57

Simon Critchley has explained the deconstructive approach to the 'hermeneutical method' in his book The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, where he gives a clear account of the deconstructive reading as double form of reading:

What takes place in deconstruction is reading, and I shall argue, what distinguishes deconstruction as textual practice is double reading. That is to say, a reading that interlaces at least two motifs or layers of reading, most often by first repeating what Derrida calls 'the dominant interpretation' of a text in the guise of a commentary and second, within and through this repetition, leaving the order of commentary and opening a text up to the blind spots or ellipses within the dominant interpretation.58

On the one hand, there is the repetition of the 'dominant interpretation' of a text that, in Of Grammatology, Derrida calls 'respectful doubling of commentary'.59 On the other hand, we find the destabilisation of that commentary through a form of reading that unveils the 'blind spots', the tensions, contradictions, and counter-forces that move within texts, and puts the ordinary understanding of that text into question. The act of reading no longer refers to an act that repeats or 'doubles' the commentary of a text, but aims primarily to question the text. In other words, we are in front of a form of reading that asks for an active involvement of the reader, who is encouraged to look beyond the ordinary understanding of a text and generate new approaches and understandings of it. As Judith Butler writes, Derrida has not only 'taught us how to read, but gave the act of reading a new significance and a new promise'.60 Let us understand better this double gesture that Derrida invites us to perform in our reading of texts. In order to proceed with the deconstructive reading we need to ascertain the manifest meaning of texts, based on the authorial elements, and the dominant and stable conventions we use when we read texts, such as grammatical

57 Derrida J., 'To Do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis', in Brault P., Naas M. (eds), The Work of Mourning, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. 84 58 Critchley S., The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, p. 23 59 Derrida J., Of Grammatology, p. 158 60 Butler J., 'Jacques Derrida', in London Review of Books, Vol. 26, No. 21, 2004, p. 32 28 rules, the corpus of an author as a whole, the philosophical, political, social, and historical context in which the text has been produced. All these elements belong to what one might call 'the deconstructive duty of scholarship', and reflect that 'minimal consensus' concerning the intelligibility of texts for a community of readers, which is the base for the understanding of a given text.61 As Derrida makes clear, no research is possible in a community (for example, academic) without the prior search for the minimal consensus.62 In other words, then, it might be said that the moment of the doubling of commentary refers to the reproducibility and stability of the dominant interpretation of a text. In the 'Afterword' to Limited Inc., Derrida gives some important clarifications regarding this; he says: 'the moment of what I called, perhaps clumsily, "doubling commentary"does not suppose the self-identity of "meaning", but a relative stability of the dominant interpretation of the text being commented upon'.63 It is important to clarify, at this point, that the doubling of commentary does not presume any unifying, fixed, and objective element that assures a univocal understanding of a text. If that was the case, indeed, the doubling of commentary would put into question the reason of being of the deconstructive reading itself, and perhaps, in a much broader perspective, would challenge the entire theoretical building of deconstruction. Such a unifying element, indeed, would assume that a transcendental form of meaning is possible, and its 'dominant' understanding would highlight that it is something fixed and shielded from any deconstructive incursion. As it will become clear in the case of jazz performance, every commentary that we ascertain in the double reading is, in reality, already a form of interpretation, for whenever we comment upon a given text, although in our commentary we are referring to the reproducibility and stability of the dominant interpretation, we are already adding and opening that text to our understanding. Critchley says:

Commentary is always already interpretation and Derrida does not believe in the possibility of a pure and simple repetition of a text. However, and this is a crucial caveat, there is an unavoidable need for a competence in reading and

61 Critchley S., Mooney T., 'Deconstruction and Derrida', in Kearney R. (ed.), Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, London and New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 367 62 Derrida J., Limited Inc., Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 146 63 Ibid., p. 143 29 writing such that the dominant interpretation of a text can be reconstructed as a necessary and indispensable layer or moment of reading. 'Otherwise', Derrida writes, echoing a sentence from Of Grammatology effectively ignored by many of its opponents and proponents alike, 'one could indeed say just anything at all and I have never accepted saying, or being encouraged to say, just anything at all'.64

Moving to the the deconstructive reading, it aims to involve the reader in an active form of reading that goes beyond the surface and seeks a 'point of otherness' that will destabilise the dominant interpretation and will open the understanding of the text to new perspectives. Critchley writes:

The goal of deconstruction, therefore, is to locate a point of otherness within philosophical or logocentric conceptuality and then to deconstruct this conceptuality from that position of alterity. . .The second moment [of reading] brings the text into contradiction with itself, opening its intended meaning, its vouloir-dire, onto an alterity which goes against what the text wants to say or mean.65

Let us linger on the 'point of otherness'. According to Derrida, Western philosophy has always been structured in terms of dichotomies and polarities, the most significant examples of which can be seen in the following oppositions: good vs. evil, being vs. nothingness, presence vs. absence, truth vs. error, identity vs. difference, mind vs. matter, man vs. woman, life vs. death, nature vs. culture, speech vs. writing, body vs. soul, and inside vs. outside. According to Derrida, the particularity of this philosophical arrangement is to be found in the fact that the second term is considered the negative and undesirable version of the first. As a consequence, the two terms are not simply opposed in their meanings, but they are arranged in a hierarchical order, which gives the first term priority, in both the temporal and the qualitative sense of the word, so that unity, identity, immediacy, and spatial and temporal presence are always privileged over distance, difference, deferment, and dissimulation.66 However, despite the privilege accorded to one of the terms of each dichotomy, the other term will

64 Critchley S., Mooney T., 'Deconstruction and Derrida', p. 367 65 Ibid., pp. 368–69 66 Derrida J., Dissemination, London, The Athlone Press, 1981, p. viii 30 always be there, as necessary difference, and as 'absent' term that justifies the presence of the privileged one. According to his analysis, we find the same hierarchical organisation in texts, where, despite the author's privilege given to one term over the other, due to the 'absent' presence of the other, or to put it another way, due to the trace of the one term within the other, the presence/absence of the 'other' will 'haunt' the text's meaning. The presence accorded to one of the two poles of the opposition will be, then, undermined by the constant 'menace' of this absent 'alterity', and consequently, texts' meaning will open up to a sort of adulteration that the author cannot prevent. In this sense, then, a point of otherness to the text is generated, and it will establish also a point of rupture that, despite the 'dominant' understanding, will invite the reader to engage with the 'other' aspect that emerges in the text. Hence, the deconstructive reading generates what Derrida calls 'signifying structure', which does not aim to point out the flaws or weaknesses of an author, but the 'necessity with which what [they] do see is systematically related to what [they] do not see'.67 As my analysis will show soon, this signifying structure presents some interesting analogies with the 'malleability' of forms that we find in jazz music. In fact, according to the account above, the point of otherness makes meaning a sort of malleable element that cannot be stable, for its 'other' will always haunt it. One of the most significant examples of this malleability of meaning that the deconstructive reading unveils can be seen at work in Rousseau's texts and moves around the word 'supplement'. In Of Grammatology, in his deconstructive reading of Rousseau, Derrida illustrates how the word 'supplement' 'harbours within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary',68 on the one hand, 'the supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude'69; on the other hand, the supplement 'supplements',70 which is to say, it replaces, or as Derrida puts it, 'It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-

67 Ibid., p. xv 68 Derrida J., Of Grammatology, p. 144 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 31 of.'71 The two meanings cannot be separated, they will necessary coexist and operate within Rousseau's text. Derrida writes:

We shall constantly have to confirm that both operate within Rousseau's texts. But the inflexion varies from moment to moment. Each of the two significations is by turns effaced or becomes discreetly vague in the presence of the other. But their common function is shown in this: whether it adds or substitutes itself, the supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it.72

The double meaning of the word carries the text's signifying possibilities beyond what could reasonably be attributed to Rousseau's intentions. Indeed, while Rousseau is using one of the meanings that refer to the word, the other meaning will always undermine its use and will open Rousseau's text to a different perspective. Therefore, this approach to reading will fracture the neatness of the metaphysical binary oppositions between the significations A and B of the word. As Derrida says in Dissemination, instead of 'A is opposed to B', we see how 'B is both added to A and replaces A'.73 A and B are no longer opposed, yet, at the same time they are not equivalent. Considering the specific case of jazz standard tunes, we can also frame two distinct forms of reading. On the one hand, a form of reading of the score that requires a 'common ground' of rules and knowledge that, as Derrida says in relation to texts in general, assures that something is readable and understandable. This ground is constituted by the knowledge of notes, harmony, and symbols; in short, all that is related to music theory. On the other hand, we find another form of reading that aims to do what the deconstructive reading does with texts, namely to question the 'common' understanding of the tune and unveil new approaches based on the point of otherness that the malleability of jazz forms generates. This will foster an improvised reading that is not written on the score, and that is produced by each musician

71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., p.145 73 Derrida J., Dissemination, p. xiii 32 according to their 'interpretations' of the score and the idiosyncrasies of performance. This is creativity. It might be argued that the practice of reading music does not belong to jazz, or at least it is not a requisite. It is well known how many jazz musicians, despite their skills and musical abilities, and despite their fame, do not know how to read or write one single note. The reason for that is ascribable to the fact they have developed their musical skills only by means of aural learning. However, although that habit was very common in the past, above all considering the fact that jazz music was born and developed mainly in the black American community, where initially there was no access to any kind of education, today it has become very unusual to find jazz musicians unable to read or write music. Consequently, my analysis reckons that the practice of reading music is as essential as the aural practice. Exclusive dependence on aural knowledge, indeed, as Berliner writes, 'eventually limits many performers, even those who acquire great skill in negotiating tunes aurally'.74 This condition is also consistent with the relevance that I have assigned to the musical writing in the previous section. I made clear in the introduction that my analysis looks especially at the jazz 'standard' tunes, which might be recognised as the most relevant textual collection of jazz compositions, and also as the foundation for the future development of jazz music. But before proceeding further, let us define what a jazz standard tune consists of. From now on, I shall refer to it simply as a 'standard'. A standard is based on the repetition of choruses. A chorus can be defined as 'one complete statement of the harmonic and metric progression';75 in other words, each chorus is characterised by a melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic uniformity that make it recognisable. Usually, the structure of a standard is based on the combination and repetition of two different choruses, usually identified on the score by the capital letters A and B. The harmonic progression, rhythmic pattern, and melodic line of the choruses provide the ground on which musicians perform their improvisation.76 Standards have been recognised, by now, as a crucial component of all the learning and training programs in jazz music.

74 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 159 75 Kernfeld B., What to Listen For in Jazz, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995, p. 41 76 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 63 33 There is the common belief among jazz musicians that once you learn a significant number of them, you also learn the entire melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic secrets that make up jazz music, and you become able to master your jazz skills in a very professional way. Indeed, it would be hard to find a jazz musician who does not know any of these tunes. Standards have been transcribed into scores and have become part of the equipment that jazz musicians carry with them wherever they perform. The most known collection of standards is known as The Real Book.77 There are many versions of it, and some are even considered illegal given that they have been reproduced and sold without regard to copyright. There is a fascinating 'underground' textual aspect of standards, proved by the fact that the scores you find in these collections seem to be the result of handwriting rather than printing, and in some cases that makes them very difficult to read and understand. As I have said, jazz musicians always keep one of these collections handy, and it is not unusual that, even during performances focused on original tunes, someone unexpectedly takes out The Real Book, picks one of the standards, and begins to play it to either honour a jazz musician or pay homage to the very origins of jazz. Now let us explore the two forms of reading that characterise the performance of standards and that show similarities with the deconstructive double reading. The first step will take into account the phase that might be acknowledged as the 'doubling' of jazz commentary. In the previous paragraph, I have accounted the structure of a standard, which Berliner describes interestingly when he outlines how the performance of a standard develops:

Composed pieces or tunes, consisting of a melody and an accompanying harmonic progression, have provided the structure for improvisations throughout most of the history of jazz. . .Performers commonly refer to the melody or theme as the head, and to the progression as chord changes. It has become the convention for musicians to perform the melody and its accompaniment at the opening and closing of a piece's performance. In between, they take turns improvising solos within the piece's cyclical

77 Sher C., Evergreen S., Dunlap L., The New Real Book: Jazz Classics, Choice Standards, Pop-Fusion Classics, Petaluma, Sher Music Co., 1988 34 rhythmic form. A solo can comprise a single pass through the cycle, known as a chorus, or it can be extended to include multiple choruses.78

What Berliner describes as the 'convention' for musicians to perform the theme and its accompaniment as opening and closing of a standard, is based on the reading of scores; or in other words, musicians perform the 'musical text'. In doing so, they are reproducing what has been written following all the rules linked to music theory; that is, notation system, chords, time signature, and so on. They are applying the dominant and stable conventions ruling musical writing and reading, which allow them to ascertain the 'surface or manifest meaning'79 of a musical text. The 'manifest meaning' is to be understood as the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic patterns that stem from the iterability of a written musical composition. In other words, the manifest meaning is given by the elements that, thanks to the score, are repeatable, assuring that the melody, harmony, and rhythm of a tune maintain a relative character of stability. I have used the adjective 'relative' because, despite the tune's iterability, these elements are subjected to an interpretative process when they are performed, which makes them different each time. The phase of musical performance that I have named as 'doubling' of jazz commentary, then, appears to be similar to what Critchley says about the doubling of commentary in Derrida, namely the fact that 'commentary is always already interpretation and Derrida does not believe in the possibility of a pure and simple repetition of a text'.80 Let us consider the example of two well-known standards: Autumn Leaves81 and The girl from Ipanema.82 The transcriptions of these two standards have assured that their melody, harmony, and rhythm remain iterable. That makes them recognisable, which is to say every time we listen to musicians performing them, thanks to the doubling of jazz commentary, we recognise the theme and the harmony, or in other words we acknowledge their 'manifest signification'. Signification, here, refers to the

78 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 63 79 Derrida J., 'To Do Justice to Freud', p. 84 80 Critchley S., Mooney T., 'Deconstruction and Derrida', p. 367 81 Composed originally by Joseph Kosma in 1945, whose American version I am considering, it has been revised by Johnny Mercer in 1947, becoming a jazz standard

82 Composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes in 1962 35 transposition from the written to the acoustic signifier, and does not take into account the emotional meaning that the tune might have. As in the case of texts, a musical composition, and in this particular case a standard, when composed and transcribed, becomes detached from its author. As a consequence, it becomes reproducible and, as such, it is subjected to performances and interpretations by other musicians, who, it might be argued, by 'iterating' the score, contribute to the creation of a dominant commentary or interpretation of that particular tune. It is evident that in performing a standard, although they are reproducing musical elements that have been 'fixed' on the score, musicians are always already interpreting what they are playing. Let me quote Berliner's words on this subject:

At the outset of a performance, players commonly restrict themselves to interpretation. . .Musicians take minor liberties when orienting themselves to a piece at this level of intensity, coloring it in numerous ways. They vary such subtleties as accentuation, vibrato, dynamics, rhythmic phrasing, and articulation or tonguing, striving to interpret the melody freshly, as if performing it for the first time.83

In this phase of 'doubling' or repeating what has been transcribed, musicians remain in a musical frame that relies mainly on the 'manifest signification' I have described above. Yet they are already carrying out a form of interpretation that confirms the 'relative' character of the stability that the score assures. In this light, the phase of doubling the jazz commentary is consistent with Derrida's belief that a pure and simple repetition of a text is not possible: commentary is always already interpretation.84 Let me list some factors that support my claim. The tune might be composed on piano and written for piano, yet we might listen to a version played on a guitar, saxophone, or trumpet. Also, each musician will play the tune according to his or her 'personal voice'; so, although playing the same instrument and reading the same score, the style of each musician will make each performance unique. Berliner says that musicians

83 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 67 84 Critchley S., Mooney T., 'Deconstruction and Derrida', p. 367 36 may venture into the arena of variation, transfiguring the melody more substantially by creating shapes that have greater personality but whose relationship to the original model remains clear. Lee Konitz 'displaces certain pitches in the melody' with pitches of his own, and saxophonist Lou Donaldson inserts 'different clusters of notes at different places' along its contour. Joe Giudice creates 'extensions of the melody by reaching out and grabbing neighbouring pitches, or by leaping to important chord tones and painting a picture of the harmonic segment of the piece', procedures he describes as 'natural ornamentation'. Common practices also include prefacing a phrase from the melody with a short introductory figure or extending it with a short cadential figure.85

Having discussed how 'interpretation' operates in jazz, I now turn to the other form of reading, namely improvisation. It might be argued that improvisation is a practice in which we are all involved on a daily basis. Indeed, every day we face new problems, situations, events, and consequently, we are forced to 'improvise' in order to solve, adapt, and live. Hence, the ability to improvise seems to be a natural component of human life. The jazz pianist Vijay Lyer also gave this answer during an interview recorded for the BBC program The Forum: A World of Ideas, when asked to define improvisation. He asserted that the process of improvising might be considered a sort of 'natural function' of human beings.86 On the other hand, improvisation is a complex process that, more obviously than interpretation, involves creativity. As Derrida says in the interview with Coleman, 'improvisation is the creation of the new'.87 In the case of jazz music, besides its aesthetic and creative elements, improvisation might also be acknowledged as the musician's response and adaptation to new and unpredictable musical ideas and scenarios occurring during a performance. As Lee B Brown writes,

The improviser is continuously faced with decisions that are forced upon him, not prescribed for him, and unrevisable once made. [They] find themselves in

85 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 70 86 Kendall B., 'Improvisation', in The Forum: A World of Ideas, see BBC World Service website, February 10, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p013zqpq, accessed March 2013 87 Derrida J. quoted in Murphy T. S., 'The Other's Language', p. 322 37 a feedback loop. [They] must produce on-the-spot responses to something unalterable, namely, the music already laid down; and [their] responses continually force further choices.88

Anyway, jazz improvisation has no clear definitions, for any attempt to define it is 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.89 In fact, whenever we try to define improvisation, we realise that something always escapes the limits of definition; even though, I think, that is also to be ascribed to the much broader and unsolved issue of defining jazz. When asked to answer the question what jazz is, indeed, Louis Armstrong purportedly replied: 'Man, if you have to ask, you'll never know.'90 The way in which jazz was born, its development, and especially its ever-evolving character make difficult to elaborate a stable definition. As Wills argues by questioning the very word 'jazz', the 'métissage of its linguistic beginnings is compounded by that of the racial milieu that it issued from. Not just an African-American or Creole music, but a music born of the impossibility of absolute racial definition'.91 One thing remains clear, however, improvisation is the most characteristic element of jazz. Like deconstruction, which, as we saw in the introduction, remains impossible to be defined in the traditional way and can be understood only according to the fact that it 'takes place', let me claim here that improvisation also 'takes place',92 and it potentially takes place wherever music takes place. Certainly, improvisation does not follow a defined structure. Each musician, indeed, will develop a unique approach to improvisation. Yet the common root is visible in the tendency to create new rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic patterns, which, although linked to the melody, harmony, and rhythm of a tune, develop new musical approaches to it. Rather than being only an alteration of the melody, which, as

88 Brown L. B., 'Feeling My Way: Jazz Improvisation and its Vicissitudes – A Plea for Imperfection', in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 58, No. 2, 2000, p. 114 89 Bailey D., Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, New York, Da Capo Press, 1992, p. ix 90 Armstrong L. quoted in Hyman P., The Reluctant Metrosexual: Dispatches from an Almost Hip Life, New York and Toronto, Villard, 2004, p. 3 91 Wills D., 'Jasz Annotations: Negotiating a Discursive Limit', p. 139 92 Wood D., Bernasconi R. (eds), Derrida and Différance, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 4 38 we saw, characterises the doubling of commentary/interpretation, the improvisative process appears to be more radical, often making a tune completely unrecognisable. This engages performers in an active and creative process. During the period between 1939 and 1941, the Bebop era, a phase of jazz development in which improvisation played the most important role in a jazz performance, all the rules governing jazz were deeply shaken, transforming forever the character of jazz. The attention moved from the controlled and structured performances of jazz bands in the early years of nineteenth century to the spontaneous elements of creation. What mattered was only the instinctive and uncontrolled flow of new notes, chords, and rhythm coming out from the instruments. During the performance of standards, every aspect of the original composition was subverted and subjected to a new creative force.93 During gatherings in Harlem venues, where musicians met after an evening of playing in swing bands and orchestras, they just began to play tunes, keeping going for hours, without stopping or even speaking.94 It is thanks to this revolutionary approach that improvisation has acquired a crucial role in jazz performance; and today, following the legacy of those musicians, improvisation characterises every jazz performance. Interestingly, it seems that jazz musicians, unlike musicians coming from other styles, gain the ability to break apart musical compositions and bring to the surface all the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic tensions that move within them. That ability comes from the fact that they develop a very particular and deep knowledge of harmony and rhythm, and as a consequence, they become able to analyse tunes in a way that shows musical elements otherwise invisible. In this sense, the improvisative process presents a marked similarity with the deconstructive form of reading texts, for it opens the tune to new musical possibilities. To support this point, let me give an example. It is not unusual to listen to jazz versions of classical pieces of music that, in line with what I have said, have been 'deconstructed' by the improvisative process. Let us consider here the tune titled Bud on Bach, performed by the pianist Bud Powell95 and based on the revised and

93 DeVeaux S., The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History, London, Picador, 1997, pp. 202, 377 94 Ibid., p. 203 95 Earl Rudolph 'Bud' Powell (1924–1966) was an American jazz pianist and a key player in the development of Bebop 39 improvised version of a short classical piece composed for piano by Carl P E Bach in the eighteenth century.96 In the performance, we recognise two distinct forms of reading: on the one hand, the 'doubling of commentary' that Powell does by playing the piece according to its classical structure, or in other words, as it is written on the score; on the other hand, his deconstructive reading of it that opens the piece to a completely new musical path, unveiling the blues and swing elements that move within the piece, and that engage him in creating a new piece from the old one. In which terms, then, can we explain the affinity between the deconstructive form of reading and improvisation? According to Derrida, the deconstructive reading must remain within the limits of textuality, for any attempt to find a signified outside of the text is illusory and would direct the reader to a transcendental meaning that does not exist. We need always to remember, indeed, Derrida's axial proposition in Of Grammatology, that 'there is nothing outside the text'.97 However, the primary goal of the deconstructive reading is to locate the point of otherness98 that, although from within the text, allows us to fracture the manifest and dominant meaning that we have ascertained in the doubling of commentary. We might say that the deconstructive reading uncovers the elements that can destabilise the stability of the dominant understanding of texts. In this light, the reader is engaged in creating new paths of meaning. As we saw in the case of Rousseau's texts, Derrida gives a new interpretation and understanding of them, based on the 'creative' trait that the double meaning of the words used by Rousseau generates. In the same way, within standards, musicians find a point of otherness in what might be called the 'malleability' of jazz forms,99 blurring the fixity of melody, chords, and rhythms written on the score and opening them to the deconstructive or improvisative process. So, musicians who have performed the reading/doubling of the commentary, although they operate within the score – the musical frame of the standard as written – find a point of exteriority in the malleable character of the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic elements, and begin to fracture the tune through

96 The tune is on Powell B., Bud! The Amazing Bud Powell (Vol. 3), Hackensack, Blue Note Records, 1957; the original piece is Bach C. P. E., Solfeggietto in C minor (H220, Wq 117:2), 1766 97 Derrida J., Of Grammatology, p. 163 98 Critchley S., Mooney T., 'Deconstruction and Derrida', p. 369 99 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 82 40 their improvisation. Let us delve into what happens during that process. I will analyse the malleability of rhythm, chords, and melody. Each chord and rhythmic pattern, although performed according to a determinate configuration, always holds a range of many different possibilities, so that there is always an 'other' possible configuration hidden within the composition. If we take chords, for example, despite the determinate configuration used in the composition and written on the score, they can be performed in many different ways. They could be 'inverted', for instance. The chord inversion alters the interval arrangements between the notes belonging to the chord; practically, it changes their order creating a different effect during the performance. Or different notes could be added to the chords, so that the latter would become altered. Or musicians may decide not to play all the notes making up the chord, but only some of them. Finally, a more drastic 'substitution' of chords could take place, which would change completely the chord the author had used.100 Berliner says that young people are very surprised when they find out that actual chords are subjected to variation, given that initially they learn the most basic forms of chords as immutable structures.101 The same can be said about rhythm, where the accents can shift in many different ways, or the beat can even stop for a while producing delay, sense of anticipation, and pauses; all elements that give rhythm a sort of 'elastic' character.102 As for the melody, instead, in jazz one finds always at stake what Sidney Finkelstein calls 'the interplay of opposites', characterised by the opposition between 'on-pitch' notes and 'blue-notes'; or between 'on-pitch notes and movements to surprising intervals and keys'.103 How do musicians use the 'malleability' of these forms in their improvisation? Let us begin by looking at rhythm. As Berliner says, perhaps 'the most fundamental approach to improvisation emphasises rhythm, commonly known in the jazz community as time or time-feel'.104 Basically, every tune has been composed according to a precise rhythmic structure, represented at the very beginning of a score by the

100 Ibid., p. 84 101 Ibid., p. 82 102 Ibid., pp. 147,149 103 Finkelstein S., Jazz: A People's Music, New York, The Citadel Press, 1948, p. 41 104 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 147 41 time signature, which identifies the number of beats that are in each measure and the note value that constitutes one beat. If there is a change of time during the piece, it will be indicated by another time signature, placed at the beginning of the bar where the change begins. As I have said, despite what is on the score, the rhythmic structure is subject to instability, which is to say that it can change and assume a completely different character during the improvisation, in which little or nothing of the initial and authorial intention remains. The crucial rhythmic pattern that makes jazz rhythm so unique is called syncopation, and this is the object of my investigation in the next part of this chapter. Syncopation is characterised by a marked irregularity that shifts the accents from the regular on-beat to the weaker and irregular up-beat, altering sensibly the flow of music. During a solo, this irregularity sparks a long series of incredible variations, which shape and reshape the flow of the performance according to the rhythmic tensions that the sense of anticipation and delay, at stake in syncopation, produces. In some cases, not only the accents but also the entire rhythmic style changes, from swing or blues to much more contaminated styles such as fusion, or Latin. Almost all solos display strong rhythmic momentum, rhythmic elasticity, bounce, and vitality,105 which are all essential aesthetic qualities produced by a combination of the 'rhythmic elements that make up improvised figures, the manner in which the figures are articulated, their placement within the piece's metric scheme, and their relationship to the surrounding figures of other band members'.106 It is not unusual to see how, over the span of a single phrase, musicians are able to produce shifts of accentuation between up-beats two and four, challenging the metric structure and generating rhythmic tension, and successively beats one and three, reinforcing the metric structure and resolving the rhythmic tension. Or they may throw different accents on the contour of a recurring gesture through rhythmic displacement; that is, by performing the gesture at different metric positions. Or they may play inside the time, yet doubling up or tripling up on the tempo, improvising patterns precisely twice or three times as fast as the beat. In this case, one would find superimposed metric frames, which create a sort of polymetric activity.

105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 42 There is an interesting and very indicative passage in Berliner's account of the rhythmic character of improvisation, which involves the two main musical influences in jazz, which is to say European and African-American music. In that passage one sees how when they started to meld, at the very beginning of jazz history, the rhythmic accents started to shift, affecting the original elements coming from Europe. Berliner writes:

When African Americans interpreted European pieces in light of their own values and performance practices and adopted their structures as vehicles for original composition, they commonly increased the music's rhythmic complexity by accenting the weaker upbeats or backbeats, that is, the second and fourth beats in a four-beat measure. As James Reese Europe explained in 1919, 'We play the music as it is written, only that we accent strongly in this manner the notes which originally would be without accent'. By imposing a contrasting rhythmic frame of reference upon that implicit in the music, listeners [by clapping their hands] and musicians create a dual accentuation scheme that exerts an alternating pull upon the music from one beat to the next and imbues performances with a rocking, swinging quality like the dynamic motion of a pendulum. 107

This account might also be understood as depiction of the point of exteriority I have discussed previously in the case of deconstructive reading. In this case, the regular beat of the European pieces finds its alterity in the shift to the irregular beat of the African-American version. Rhythm is the jazz form that presents the most evident malleability of its elements: a sudden pause, a delay, or anticipation, doubling or tripling of the time signature, or even the evolving into a completely different rhythmic style. As Berliner says, 'musicians create constant motion in their parts by mentally supplying and pursuing a movable model of the beat, which they stretch or compress as they improvise'.108 Moving on to chords, given that one finds a huge number of possible chord alterations, substitutions, and inversions, mastering the harmonic progressions is

107 Ibid., p. 148 108 Ibid., p. 158 43 perhaps the most difficult aspect of jazz improvisation. This happens also because the harmonic evolution conditions the melodic development of the solo, and even the smallest change, such as an altered ninth or seventh added to a chord, might open improvisation to a completely different melodic path. As I have mentioned earlier, young musicians are very surprised to learn that chords are not a fixed and stable element, but they can vary, contract, or expand, according to the knowledge and experience of musicians. In this sense, it is the case to underline the importance that the accompaniment section of a band has during improvisation, when the exchange occurring between the soloist and the accompaniment section is continuous. As Berliner stresses, soloists can stimulate their melodic ideas by envisioning various chord insertions as they perform, and by calling for an immediate answer from the accompaniment section.109 By adding, removing, inverting, or substituting chords, the harmonic structure of the original composition changes, evolves, and develops, bringing the original piece to a new musical identity. Talking about John Coltrane's improvisations, for instance, Berliner reports how substitutions are a recurrent component in his way of playing:

Coltrane's improvisations are exemplary in this regard. Instead of playing the same chord for two bars, 'Trane [Coltrane] might move through two, three, or four chords, just giving a beat or two to each, imbuing that portion of the progression with a different sound.110

Another possible harmonic change is given by the use of polychords or compound chords that mix triads with altered pitches and, in some instances, emphasise elements outside of the tonality of the original key. As a consequence of this malleability of the harmonic form, sometimes, even the most known tunes become almost unrecognisable during solos. But this is part of the very nature of improvisation, the purpose of which, as a creative moment that inherits the old form and generates a new one, differs from the mere reproduction of the original composition. Coming to the last form, melody, Lee Konitz explains how, in the context of a tune's delivery, players 'radically alter portions of the melody or replace its segments

109 Ibid., p. 161 110 Ibid. 44 with new creations bearing little, if any, relationship to the melody's shape'.111 Probably, the change in the melodic line is the first aspect that affects listeners. As the solo takes off, indeed, the recognisability of the melody is lost. And even though some players follow the pattern of the original melody, the general tendency is to create a new line, releasing the creative power of the subterranean forces moving within the composition. What occurs stems from the extensive range of possibilities coming from the scales used in jazz. These are strictly connected to chords, which means that each chord, or each group of chords, involves one or more scales, giving different possibilities for creating new melodic lines or alternatively variations of the original melody, depending on the case and the personal feelings of musicians. Berliner talks about the opportunities, in terms of musical knowledge, that the study of scales offers to learners:

For learners, the discovery of scales and their theoretical relationship to chords constitutes a major conceptual breakthrough with immediate application. They can construct a scale or mode that is compatible with each chord by filling in the diatonic pitches between its tones, increasing the chord's associated pitch collection from four to seven, and grouping optional tonal materials together as a string of neighbouring notes.112

The study of scales also offers a good way to develop the necessary technical skills that a good improviser should have in order to sustain the technical demand of improvisation. When I say 'technical', I mean the ability to articulate fingers, arms, voice, breath, and any other physical component involved in singing or in playing a musical instrument. Sometime scales are mastered through practicing them at an increasing rate of speed, through exercises that probe endless arrangements of diatonic intervals (alternating seconds, alternating thirds, and so on), triads, chords, and their various extensions. As Berliner says, 'from one drill to the next, musicians strive to 'exhaust all the possibilities' through the 'law of permutations', affecting the use of scales.113

111 Konitz L. quoted in Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 777 112 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 162 113 Ibid., p. 164 45 The key argument of my analysis has been that there is a strong similarity between the deconstructive double reading of texts and the double reading of standards in improvised and conventional performance of jazz music. Both practices, indeed, aim to engage the reader/musician in an active and creative process that relies on the malleability of meaning and musical forms and that opens up texts and tunes to new interpretations and new understandings. Writing, then, in both language and music, facilitates the location of the point of otherness from which the deconstructive reading and the improvisation take place.

1.4. Différance and Syncopation

In the previous section, I mentioned the importance of change through improvisation and discussed how the malleability of jazz forms facilitates and stimulates creativity. I pointed out, also, the centrality of rhythm in improvisation and in boosting and supporting its dynamic character. The rhythmic figure that can be acknowledged as mainly responsible for this is called syncopation, and it is also the most characteristic element of rhythm in jazz. In this section, I will explore the connections between this key figure in jazz and the concept of différance. There are some interesting similarities between the spatial and temporal aspects of the two concepts that make them surprisingly similar. The Harvard Dictionary of Music defines syncopation as a

momentary contradiction of the prevailing meter or pulse. This may take the form of a temporary transformation of the fundamental character of the meter, e.g., from double to triple or from 3/4 to 3/2, or it may be simply the contradiction of the regular succession of strong and weak beats within a measure or a group of measures whose metrical context nevertheless remains clearly defined by some part of the musical texture that does not itself participate in the syncopation.114

During my discussion, I will focus particularly on the second part of the definition, on the expression 'succession of strong and weak beats', for in philosophical terms the

114 Randel D. M. (ed.), The Harvard Dictionary of Music, Cambridge MA and London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 861 46 dichotomy of 'strong' and 'weak' is fecund. However, in order to explore this fecundity, I will correlate the concepts 'strong' and 'weak' with the concepts 'regular' and 'irregular', and 'stable' and 'unstable'. By doing so, we can observe that, in effect, the strong beat also marks the regular and the stable, whereas the weak beat marks the irregular and the unstable. Syncopation, by shifting the accent from the strong and regular beat to the weak and irregular one (or, as the mentioned definition says, by causing a 'momentary contradiction of the prevailing meter or pulse'), produces also the shift of the rhythmic cadence from the stable and expected beat to the unstable and unexpected one. So, let us start by exploring the temporal and spatial implications of syncopation, for the mentioned shift, by 'displacing' the regular rhythmic cadence, on the one hand brings about delay and anticipation, and on the other hand generates asymmetry. As I previously clarified, rhythm takes on a very particular significance in jazz music. The reason for that is to be ascribed to its African roots, the strongest component of which is prevalently based on rhythm and dance. That is why it is very hard to remain still while listening to jazz music: jazz rhythms are so involving that people tap their foot, clap their hands, or move parts of their body according to the flow of rhythm.115 In short, one may remain insensitive to the melody, or the harmonic elements of jazz tunes, but it is very rare to remain unresponsive to the rhythm of swing. Rhythm is also often indicated as the 'time' of a tune, which evokes an interesting philosophical comparison between the regular movement of the clock and the regular beat of rhythm, as well as the change caused by the passing of time. If we look at the definition of rhythm itself, we find out that it is defined as a 'temporal pattern of acoustic events, where the events occur with some repetitive structure',116 and in music these events are sounds, such as tones or percussive beats. Interestingly, according to William T Fitch and Andrew J Rosenfeld, rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns are 'superimposed' on what they call an 'underlying

115 For more information see Handel S., Listening: An Introduction to the Perception of Auditory Events, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1989 116 Desain P., Windsor L., 'Introduction: Multiple Perspectives on Rhythm Perception and Production', in Desain P., Windsor L. (eds), Rhythm: Perception and production, Lisse, Swets and Zeitlinger, 2000, pp. xi– xvi 47 metrical structure', organised around an 'abstract metrical structural framework consisting of strong (accented, or stressed) and weak (unaccented) events occurring at regularly spaced intervals'.117 I have understood the concept of 'underlying metrical structure' as the result of the regular temporal flow that is linked to the definition itself of music as sound organised in time and as the responsible for the cadence of rhythm on the regular and strong beat. In other words, it might be argued that this underlying metrical structure is a sort of 'ticking of the clock', which makes the regular and strong beat 'natural' in our perception of music. As Fitch and Rosenfeld explain, 'listeners tap naturally with the strong events or "on the beat"'.118 The most significant example comes from a device that is well known to musicians and used just to stress the strong and regular beat: the metronome. Arguably, compared to other genres, such as classic music for example, in the particular case of jazz, the relevance of this underlying metrical structure seems to fade. The constant shifting of the rhythmic accents that takes place during jazz performances tends to challenge all the structured and fixed rhythmic frameworks, so that the regular intervals lose their symmetric character and become asymmetric. The definition quoted above says that syncopation is a 'contradiction' of the prevailing meter of pulse. It might be argued that without syncopation jazz would not be what it is. Jazz is an 'off-beat' music. Unlike in a rhythmic pattern the strong accents of which coincide with the strong positions of the metrical structure, considered unsyncopated or, as musicians often say, 'with the beat', jazz (in which the rhythmically patterned strong accents coincide with the weak positions) could be called 'off beat'.119 Looking at the main difference between the jazz tradition of African Americans and the European musical tradition, I can refer back to Berliner's passage, quoted in the previous section, which takes into account the encounter between the 'regular' European rhythmic style and the 'irregular' African-American style. Berliner also stresses the 'relatively simple framework'120 of the European music composed in

117 Fitch W. T., Rosenfeld A. J., 'Perception and Production of Syncopated Rhythms', in Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2007, p. 43 118 Ibid., p. 45 119 Ibid., p. 43 120 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 148 48 'single meters',121 the regularity of which is marked by the motion of the conductor's baton during the performances that emphasises the strong beats of the meter. According to Berliner, this orientation 'reflects the value that Europeans and their American counterparts generally attach to rhythmic congruity and uniformity in the organisation of musical parts'.122 When the African Americans interpreted the same compositions, the rhythmic congruity and uniformity were challenged by the completely different approach of the African-American music. As Berliner says, they 'increased the music's rhythmic complexity by accenting the weaker up-beats or backbeats'.123 Derrida's concept of différance does much to indicate the deconstructive features of syncopation. Derrida argued that it is 'because of différance that the movement of signification is possible'.124 Différance, which points to the temporal and spatial aspects of meaning, is derived from the two meanings of the French verb différer, which in English corresponds to the verb 'to defer', in its temporal meaning of delaying, postponing; and the verb 'to differ', in its spatial meaning of being different, differentiating. These two different aspects are crucial for the movement of signification that différance generates, according to Derrida, when we are in front of signs. In the first part of this chapter, talking about the musical sign and analysing the Saussurean dyadic character of the linguistic sign, we saw how it is a combination of signifier and signified. Derrida says that 'the sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, "thing" here standing equally for meaning or referent'.125 Thereby, the sign, Derrida continues, 'represents the present in its absence',126 which means that the sign takes the place of what cannot be presented in its presence, namely meaning. But in Derrida's view, the sign implies always a deferring or temporal detour, namely it defers to the presence of something that is not present. In other words, when we understand signs, we are involved in a temporal deferring that marks the difference between the sign we see and the meaning that we attach to it. At the same time, and because of this deferring, the sign differs from itself, which is to say that besides the

121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Derrida J., 'Différance', in Margins of Philosophy, Brighton, The Harvester Press, 1982, p. 13 125 Ibid., p. 9 126 Ibid. 49 temporal detour that stems from the deferring, we find that the spatial differentiation derives from the differing between the sign and its meaning. In this light, as Derrida argues, the movement of signification involves 'simultaneously spacing and temporization'.127 Now, looking at the temporal aspect of the matter, it takes into account the temporal dimension of the present, which, in order to produce signification, undergoes a division, becoming a 'nonsimple synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions and protentions'.128 Derrida says:

It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called 'present' element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what is not...129

Temporality takes on a peculiar character in Derrida's philosophy, and it will be the object of my analysis in the next chapter of this thesis, where it will be analysed in the light of photography. Here, let me focus on the irregular character that the temporal division that the present undergoes gives to the movement of signification. Différance illustrates how our way of understanding signs involves a complex mechanism that cannot rely only on a regular correspondence between the word and its meaning, but also implies an 'irregular' mechanism that takes into account the retentions; that is, the past meanings that are linked to the word, and the protentions that are linked to the context where the word will be used. If we consider the word 'love', for example, we can individuate the retentions in the meanings that are linked to the word, namely affection, passion, sex, and so on, and the protentions in the context where I will be using the word, as in 'I love you, Mum'. Interestingly, this irregularity, which is involved in the movement of signification, might be acknowledged as a creative process, insofar as it opens words to different meanings.

127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid. 50 We can see this in poetry or literature, where words are caught in that constant movement of spacing and temporisation that involves context and interpretation. In addition, the irregularity that displaces the immediate correspondence between words and meanings fosters our creative thinking, insofar as we are encouraged to find the proper meaning that fits into the context. This is well evident in metaphors, for example, where the correspondence between words and meanings is linked to the active and creative involvement of readers or listeners. Let us return to the case of jazz. Arguably, this irregular character that marks the movement of signification finds a parallel in the movement that syncopation produces in jazz. As I showed earlier in this chapter, the present, in musical terms, is the fundamental temporal dimension where sound takes place. However, when we approach the matter from a rhythmic perspective, as I am doing in the case of syncopation, things assume a different appearance. Derrida, in the quote above, offered a 'nonsimple' character of the present, by arguing that what occurs during the present is connected to what has happened in the past and what is going to happen in the future. As it will become clear in the next chapter, this circumstance 'deconstructs' the simple character of the present as dis-connected and isolated from past and future – in other words, as a 'punctual' temporal event – and opens it up to 'what it is not',130 which links it to future. If I attempt to apply this notion to the rhythmic/temporal structure of syncopation, I can say that the present/strong/regular beat acquires a displaced character, which allows it to 'swing' from what is to what has been, and what is not yet. The two crucial factors of this swinging temporal movement are delay and anticipation, which, in musical rhythmic terms, are destabilising elements. The present loses its pivotal role based on the ticking clock–like structure and becomes displaced by the delayed and anticipated accents, so that the jazz rhythmic configuration cannot rely any more on the underlying metrical structure I mentioned before. In other words, it is as if the clock begins to delay and anticipate its beats so that, using an onomatopoeic formula, from the regular and symmetric 'ta-ta-ta-ta' we would have the syncopated one 'ta-a-tata-a-tata-a', etc. Or, to put it another way, past and future,

130 Ibid., p. 13 51 through their retention (delay/ta-a) and protention (anticipation/tata), contaminate and fade the punctuality of the present. Looking at the spatial implications, in Derridean terms, the division of the present marks a differentiation between what is and what has already occurred, or what is to occur soon. There is a movement that transforms the temporal division of the present in asymmetric spatial differentiation. Going back to the movement of signification, and to the spatial element characterising différance, Derrida talks of an 'interval'. He says:

An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the subject. In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing, the becoming- space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization).131

In the case of syncopation, the asymmetric spatial differentiation is evident in the shift from the symmetry of regular beats to the asymmetry of delayed and anticipated beats. Going back to the example of the ticking of the clock, in spatial terms, the 'ta-ta- ta-ta' representation is characterised by regular and symmetric intervals that occur between the beats. But when we introduce syncopation the representation changes and becomes 'ta-a-tata-ta-a-tata', displacing the symmetric occurrence of the interval. The asymmetric character becomes also 'spatially' visible in the graphic representation of syncopation, where it is possible to see how syncopation marks the disruption of the regular linearity of the musical phrases by introducing irregular elements such as a triplet, which plays three notes in a rhythmic space structured only for two; or by adding in rapid succession rests and notes; or by changing the duration of notes by joining them together with a tie; or by alternating dotted notes and regular notes. The following figures show the written representation first of an unsyncopated rhythmic phrase, and then of a syncopated one:

131 Ibid. 52 As one can notice, in the case of an unsyncopated phrase there is a symmetric order between the beats, and their regular cadence is perceivable. Let us move on to the case of the syncopated version of the same two bars on a 4/4 time signature:

The aspect is completely different, and the representation has lost the symmetric order of the previous example. The much more complex combination of beats makes the irregular cadence perceptible. The movement of signification accounted by Derrida might find its musical equivalent in what might be named 'movement of creation', which comes from the temporising and spacing in syncopation. Certainly, my assertion might appear to be deceptive, insofar as it seems to assert that syncopation is the necessary element of musical creation, but this is not what I mean. Rather, considering the similarities between différance and syncopation, the tension deriving from the rhythmic delay and anticipation releases a powerful creative energy that is particularly obvious during improvisation. In concluding this section, I will look briefly at the style of the Israeli musician Avishai Cohen, who has made the use of syncopation his musical signature, developing a personal jazz style that makes him unique in the contemporary world jazz scene.132 That I have chosen to analyse the case of a bass player is not casual. The bass, as instrument, places itself on a sort of borderline between melody and rhythm. It is involved in both aspects and plays a unique role in the context of a jazz band, for it mediates between the absolutely rhythmic character of percussion and the absolutely melodic character of all the other instruments. It is right in the middle, joining together rhythm and melody. Now, Cohen's musical roots spread from the folkloric traditions of his native Israel, to hardcore New York Bebop, to Latin music, rock, reggae, and beyond.133 However, looking at his musical background, one understands that what has made the difference in his developing such a peculiar approach to rhythm is the study of Latin jazz. In fact, in Latin music, syncopation plays an even more crucial role,

132 Cohen was born in 1970 near Jerusalem, but during his twenties he moved to New York, becoming one of the most famous bass player and jazz composer on the current jazz world scene. He played with Chick Corea, and Danilo Pérez, before becoming a bandleader himself. 133 Goldsby J., 'Global Player: Avishai Cohen', in Bass Player, Vol. 21, No. 7, 2010, p. 28 53 and anticipation and delay characterise all the percussion and bass lines. In his interview with John Goldsby, reported in the music magazine Bass Player, Cohen says, 'It was the rhythmic challenge of Latin music that made me into the bassist that I wanted to be. Once you can hang with those cats, you can really hang with anybody.'134 Cohen's collaboration in the 1990s with Chick Corea and Danilo Pérez, two of the most important exponents of the current jazz fusion and Latin jazz scene, whose peculiar style challenges constantly rhythms and forms, cleared his way towards a truly personal and challenging musical style. In short, in Cohen's work one finds the practical realisation of all the theoretical discussion I carried out previously on syncopation. My analysis will take into account two albums, namely As Is. . .Live at The Blue Note135 and Gently Disturbed.136 Basically, it could be argued that Cohen's style is a constant exploration of the possibilities that syncopation brings about, both rhythmically and melodically. In the first album mentioned, a live performance culled from two nights at The Blue Note club in New York in 2006, the constant rhythmic tension stemming from the shifting of accents from regular to irregular becomes a means of exploration of what might be called 'the musical unexpected'. Rhythm, harmony, and melody follow unexpected paths, and are constantly subject to change. Pauses, as well as anticipated and delayed beats transform the performance in an exploration of new rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic perspectives. In the particular case of that live recording, besides irregularity and asymmetry, the unpredictability of improvisation adds to the creative power of syncopation a sort of occurrence of what rhythmically and harmonically cannot be foreseen. Looking at the rhythmic structure of Cohen's music, Goldsby writes:

The rhythmic aspect of Cohen's writing and playing is a strong trademark. His compositions often rely on subdivisions of meter - a throwback to his experience with Latin music in New York, and to his middle-Eastern roots. Cohen likes to use groupings of three bars of 4/4, floating over an underlying

134 Ibid., p. 29 135 Cohen A., As Is. . .Live at The Blue Note, Razdaz Records, 2007 136 Cohen A., Gently Disturbed, Razdaz Records, 2008 54 feeling of 6/4. Says Cohen, 'I love the feeling of two against three, or playing things in six. I love the influence'.137

Let us talk of the simple and particular case of the instability and asymmetry that the playing of 'two against three' produces. In musical terms, this expression means that we find three notes in a space structured only for two. It is like accommodating three people in two seats. Certainly, such a circumstance would produce instability, insofar as all the three people would be subject to the uncomfortable and unpredictable outcome that the situation produces. Similarly, in musical terms, if we play three measures in a bar structured only for two, the effects that the third measure produces will destabilise the entire structure. That is the kind of rhythmic situation we find in Cohen's music. Mark Guiliana, Cohen's drummer, in Goldsby’s article quoted above, comments on some rhythmic figures used in the tunes of Gently Disturbed: 'The A section of "Chutzpan" is two bars of 5/16 followed by a bar of 6/4. The groupings of the 16-notes within the 6/4 bar are 5, 5, 6, 5, 3.'138 Certainly, to understand the language that the drummer is using in this passage one needs to be familiar with music theory. Nevertheless, it is not particularly difficult to understand that those numbers present some sort of non-linear and irregular rhythmic pattern, or in other words, they lack the regular and symmetric division that we are used to understand in a typical 4/4 division of a ballad, where the measures in each bar respect the time signature. In fact, in jazz terms those time signatures are known as 'odd-meters'. In an interview with Richard Johnston, Cohen tries to explain his particular approach to complex time signatures in this way:

My thing with odd meters is very natural, I never really think of it. I never have an intention to play in odd meters; I don't fancy playing music for the sake of complexity. But I hear odd rhythms that groove in some way. I come up with things that I naturally hear, and then I say, okay, this is three to five to six or whatever, and it's interesting to see what comes out of it

137 Goldsby J., 'Global Player', p. 30 138 Guiliana M. quoted in Goldsby J., 'Global Player', p. 34 55 mathematically. For me an odd rhythm is just like a regular rhythm but. . .not. It carries a melody that brings you in.139

In conclusion, then, this section has drawn a connection between the temporal and spatial character of différance and the rhythmic characteristics of syncopation. In the light of the odd-meters that Cohen uses in his music, which are the expression of his exploration of syncopated rhythmic structures, the temporal character of syncopation based on anticipation and delay, and its asymmetric spatial character can be acknowledged as elements of what I have named 'movement of creation'.

1.5. The Jam Session and Hospitality

The last section of this chapter investigates the connection between the jam session and Derrida's notion of hospitality. Besides being musical events during which jazz musicians gather and play together, jam sessions are also social occasions where people who often have never met before find themselves on a stage improvising and creating together. By 'jammin'', musicians experience their own interiority as players and performers, but, more significantly, they experience also the exteriority and interiority of the other musicians, a circumstance that in philosophical terms might be translated as the encounter between what is known and what is unknown, or the new, the other. The interrelation between interiority and exteriority that takes place during that dialogue encourages and fosters creativity. In this light, it will be argued that the jam session exemplifies the form of the play of unconditional and conditional hospitality that Derrida discusses and supports. Hospitality became a recurrent theme in Derrida's later philosophy. As Peeters says, that was because the principle of hospitality 'concentrated within itself the most concrete urgencies. Those most proper to articulate the ethical on the political'.140 My analysis here does not take into account the political aspects of the matter, even though a discourse on Derrida's analysis of hospitality requires a reference to political matters. The discourse, indeed, needs to start from the analysis of two different forms

139 Cohen A. quoted in Richardson J., 'Avishai Cohen: Finding the Odd Time Within', in Bass Player, Vol. 19, No. 11, 2008, p. 54 140 Peeters B., Derrida, p. 470 56 of hospitality: on the one hand, a form of conditional hospitality; and on the other hand, an unconditional one. It might be argued, with Mark Westmoreland, that 'operative between the self and the other, hospitality governs all human interaction (and perhaps interaction with animals as well)'.141 In this sense, we experience hospitality every day, for, as Derrida argues in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, hospitality is not removed from ethics, nor is it a specific area of ethics. Rather, it is the foundation, 'the whole and the principle of ethics'.142 Let us take into account two stories that outline two different approaches to hospitality, and that go back to the Greek mythology, precisely to Book 9 of Homer's Odyssey.143 The protagonists of the stories, Polyphemus and Alcinous, typify two opposite forms of hospitality given to Odysseus. The first story represents a form of hospitality that we all know, given that we hear of it every day, namely what might be acknowledged as a 'conditional' form of hospitality: Polyphemus will give hospitality to Odysseus on the condition that he says his name, that he presents himself and shows a document, for, as a stranger, he will not be trusted. Conditional hospitality refers to the culturally specific and traditional laws, and the customs that govern a welcome of others into one's life. These conditions may be explicit, as in the case of the passport we show at customs or in the case of the study of musical scores a musician needs to make before joining a band or orchestra. Or they may be implicit, stemming from the ideas and habits we have picked up by living in a determinate cultural context, which will certainly affect our interpretation of the other, whether and how we welcome them. The second story, instead, outlines an 'unconditional' form of hospitality: when Nausicaa, Alcinous' daughter, finds Odysseus washed ashore and brings him to her father’s palace, Alcinous welcomes him and invites him to eat, drink and restore himself without asking his name.144 By contextualising these two opposite forms of hospitality against the immigration policies around the world, we notice that the aspect that might be acknowledged as the most common is linked to a 'conditional' form of hospitality based on questioning

141 Westmoreland M. W., 'Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality', in Kritike, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2008, p. 3 142 Derrida J., Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 9 143 As discussed in Naas M., Taking on the Tradition, p. 156 144 Ibid. 57 the stranger who arrives at the border. This illustrates that the guest, as stranger, in order to be welcomed needs to accept those conditions. The alternative is refusal. Derrida's analysis of hospitality is marked by the 'play' between these two opposite forms of hospitality, which challenges the attitude that governs our common understanding of hospitality based only on the conditional form, and which makes us perceive strangers' unfamiliar and different cultures as unwelcome and potentially threatening. As Naas points out, Derrida invites us to reflect upon the fact that, although hospitality does not seem to be hospitality if what we are welcoming is not a stranger, a real guest, or someone with whom we are not familiar, in fact the stranger must be welcomed in a particular way, by means of particular conventions, within a particular language, and he or she must be identified. Yet such identification always implies the subjection of the stranger to the prejudices that his or her identity, language, and culture produce in the host.145 Hence, hospitality is caught in the play between the unconditional hospitality that should guide our reception of the others and that can never be pure, and its conditional form that stems from the explicit and implicit conditions I mentioned earlier. When asked whether hospitality consists in questioning the one who arrives, and first of all by asking the person his or her name, or whether it begins with the welcome that is without question,146 Derrida answers with these words:

the decision is taken from within what looks like an absurdity, like the impossible (an antinomy, a tension, between two laws that are equally imperative but not opposed). Pure hospitality consists in welcoming the new arrival before imposing conditions on them, before knowing and asking for anything at all, be it a name or an identity 'paper'. But it also assumes that you address them, individually, and thus that you call them something, and grant them a proper name: 'What are you called, you?' Hospitality consists in doing everything possible to address the other, to grant or ask them their name, while avoiding this question becoming a 'condition', a police inquisition, a registration of information, or a straightforward frontier

145 Ibid., p. 159 146 Ibid., p. 160 58 control. A difference both subtle and fundamental, a question that arises on threshold of 'home', and on the threshold between two inflections. An art and a poetics, but an entire politics depends on it, an entire ethics is decided by it.147

The point that we get from this quote is that one should try to be unconditional in the way he or she welcomes the stranger, even though this is impossible because it would assume that he or she can stand outside his or her culture. Hence, as Derrida suggests, although hospitality remains necessarily linked to the identification of the stranger, this process must remain within a reciprocal opening and welcoming, which need to move away from the idea that in receiving hospitality the guest must accept the host's conditions. Rather, the act of welcoming a stranger needs to be as unconditional as possible. It might be agreed, indeed, that the conditional form of hospitality subjects the guest to a form of violence that relies on the circumstance that in order to be welcomed they need to renounce who they are and become who the host wants them to be. This condition transforms the threshold, the border, and the place where the stranger arrives asking for hospitality into the place of renunciation, rejection, and violence. Arguably, we see all this in episodes of cultural and religious intolerance, or refugee issues, unfortunately reported in the news almost every day. As a consequence, a form of hospitality based only on 'conditions' will prevent any form of constructive relation between host and guest, and will generate only resentment and disappointment. Derrida points out that hospitality is in truth characterised by an aporetic tension. The word 'hospitality' derives from the Latin hospes, which is formed from hostis, meaning 'stranger', and pets (potis, pores, potential), meaning 'to have power'.148 The host, then, is both the one who gives hospitality insofar as he or she owns a property, and so 'has the power', but at the same time he or she is a stranger. Derrida puts the question in these terms:

147 Derrida J., 'The Principle of Hospitality', in Paper Machine, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 67 148 Caputo J. D., Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 110 59 the hote who receives (the host), the one who welcomes the invited or received the hote (the guest), the welcoming hote who considers himself the owner of the place, is in truth a hote received in his own home. He receives the hospitality that he offers in his own home; he receives it from his own home – which, in the end does not belong to him. The hote as host is a guest.149

The contradictory character of the word 'hospitality' is even more evident in the case of the French word hote as used by Derrida, which can identify the host and at the same time the guest.150 Although the account sounds paradoxical, the deconstructive reading that Derrida gives of the term opens it up to an intriguing perspective; that is to say, we are giving hospitality in a place where we primarily receive hospitality. In truth, the host has no power or control over his or her home, as such his or her position as master who dictates the rules of the welcome becomes redundant. In the light of this reading, then, the conditional form of hospitality is challenged and we must start from the assumption that we are two equal guests, who can occupy a place as equal individuals. The aporetic tension built into the concept of hospitality can open up our understanding of hospitality to a completely different perspective, which, as Westmoreland argues, acknowledges hospitality as a form of 'interruption'.151 And the way in which hospitality can be an interruption of conventions, prejudices and meanings requires an interruption of the self, which is to say that the host is in truth a guest. It is in the light of this interruption that hospitality turns out to be a moment during which the welcome of the stranger becomes a constructive encounter and, as I will illustrate in the case of the jam session, also a creative moment in which the inter-subjective relation generates new meanings. Hospitality, then, can only be understood as play of conditional hospitality, which stems from the impossibility to stand outside culture and history that characterises the host, and unconditional hospitality, which should guide the welcome between equals. The play of these two forms of hospitality becomes the play of what is known (conditional hospitality) and what is unknown (unconditional hospitality), and this

149 Derrida J., Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 41 150 Still J., 'Derrida: Guest and Host', in Paragraph, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2005, p. 96 151 Westmoreland M. W., 'Interruptions', p. 6 60 transforms hospitality in an encounter of open unpredictability. As Derrida says in Of Hospitality,

absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner, but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names.152

In this sense, hospitality is an encounter of differences that, by welcoming each other, establish an ongoing and dynamic process of transformation that affects meaning and being, and that is reciprocal. It might be argued that the aporetic tension transforms hospitality in an act of giving and receiving where the interruption of my self allows me to receive the other as much as possible. Derrida, talking about Levinas' Other and recalling his words, points out that

The welcome determines the 'receiving', the receptivity of receiving as the ethical relation. As we have already heard: 'To approach the Other in discourse is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I…One can apprehend or perceive the meaning of to receive only on the basis of the hospitable welcome, the welcome opened or offered to the other'.153

Moving to the case of the jam session, the act of giving and receiving that the accounted notion of hospitality entails might be acknowledged as what makes distinctive the dynamic that characterises the encounter between musicians. That is why hospitality might be acknowledged as the necessary condition for the jam session to take place. Hence, I argue, in a jam session Derrida's notion of hospitality, founded on the play of unconditional and conditional hospitality, finds its practical realisation. Despite the evolution that jazz music has undergone over the past century, the characteristics and purpose of the jam session remain the same. The jam session, or as it is also known 'cutting session', is a gathering of musicians, the main purpose of

152 Derrida J., Of Hospitality, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 25 153 Derrida J., Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 25–26 61 which, as William B Cameron claims, is to play the music they choose purely in 'accordance with their own aesthetic standards and without regard for the standards of the buying public or of any acknowledged organizational leader or critic'.154 Although we approach and study the jam session from many different perspectives, all of them converge on one crucial aspect, namely the fact that first of all the jam session generates encounters with the other and the unknown. Delving deeper into the discussion, during a jam session musicians meet their fellows in order to perform together, arguably, without any pre-structured plan or arrangement. In other musical genres, we usually find an established and fixed group of people who work together, usually for a long time, through the process of composing, practicing, and performing; but in jazz, jam session encounters are as important and valued to the musicians as their established bands. In fact, many times the jam session involves people who have never played together and, often, do not even know each other. Musicians find themselves in a state of pure encounter focused on the creative dialogue, where their only purpose is the expression of their own aesthetic feelings through improvisation. If we look at the places where the jam session occurs and at its duration, it can be said that a jam session can essentially take place anywhere and last for long time. There is no need for a stage or a large room that can accommodate a large number of people. On the contrary, the jam session is an intimate moment often open only to a bunch of lucky listeners. It is even possible that a jam session occurs spontaneously, in homes, streets, clubs, or even in a metro. The only criterion is the accessibility, as Cameron says, 'so long as the location is reasonably accessible, jazzmen will congregate'.155 As for the duration, during a jam session, musicians seem not to care at all about it. As Dana Gooley interestingly poses the question, 'the sense of time at a jam session is, like the sense of social boundaries, expansive and dilatory'.156 Each performance can go on for hours, without any pause. Unlike during the work on a stage, in front of a

154 Cameron W. B., 'Sociological Notes on the Jam Session', in Social Forces, Vol. 33, No. 2, 1954, pp. 177–178 155 Ibid., p. 178 156 Gooley D., 'The Outside of "Sitting In": Jazz Jam Sessions and the Politics of Participation', in Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2011, p. 43 62 paying audience, where musicians are constantly constrained by the limited time that controls live performances and recording sessions, during the jam session clock-time seems to disappear. Extended events at private house parties in Seattle lasted 'a few days at a time',157 Patti Bown remembers, and they held such popularity that club owners temporarily closed their own establishments to avoid competing for the same audience. Guests at the parties 'cooked food and ate, [then] sat down and played'.158 This suspension of clock-time and regular social routine appears to be important for the creative dimension of the jam session. As Bown continues, musicians

could really develop there. Sometimes they would really get a thing going, and they would keep on exploring an idea. You would go home and come back later, and it was still going on…Improvisers sometimes played a single tune for hours.159

All these features bring us to realise that the event of a jam session challenges the usual view of a musical performance as a form of arranged gathering of musicians that relies merely on commercial purposes or leisure activities and that involves people who know each other. Rather, the apparent chaos of a jam session of relative strangers suggests a moment during which there is an opening towards the unpredictable. By definition, 'jammin'' requires the gathering of at least two performers. This brings the discussion to focus on the peculiarities of the 'community' that develops during this encounter. As Cameron claims, during a jam session a musician 'must subordinate and integrate [his/her] musical personality, as expressed through [his/her] instrument, into the general group, and he must do this with no score or conductor to guide him[/her]'.160 Let us linger on this point. First of all, an integration of singularity into plurality takes place. The single musician becomes part of the plurality of a group of fellows playing together. But unlike in the case of a band that performs according to what has been pre-planned and rehearsed, and where musicians most of times know each other either musically and personally, this integration relies on the

157 Bown P. quoted in Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 42 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 Cameron W. B., 'Sociological Notes on the Jam Session', p. 179 63 unpredictability of what will come and is not known yet. In order to accomplish this integration, then, each musician during the passage from singularity to plurality needs to open up to the other, to receive the other as unconditionally as possible. The creative relation that constitutes the jam session is based on this receiving the other's performance so that the traits that constitute my and the other's musical style intermingle and develop together in a constant process of creation, which remains open to unpredictability. In this sense, the improvisation characterising the jam session is, as Wills says, a 'hospitable opening to what can arrive.'161 If we consider the case of a regular band's performance, where musician have arranged the repertoire, the duration of each tune, and the duration of each solo, we notice that although it is possible to recognise a form of hospitality that relies on the same integration of singularity into plurality, this appears to be much closer to a form of conditional hospitality, where my welcome of the other performers is conditional upon my role in the band and their role within the band. I open to your performance and musical style, but we cannot establish a relation that relies on our creativity. Instead, we need to stick to the 'rules' that condition the performance, such as the limited time accorded to solos, the part that I am playing and that the other musician is playing, and the impossibility of giving the performance a sense of 'unpredictability' that we find instead in a jam session. The conditional hospitality of usual musical performances is particularly obvious if we consider the example of the arrival of a new musician in a band that is already established, has a repertoire, and has a musical 'identity' made of a particular style, skills, and background. The integration of the new musician in the band will be conditional on his or her acceptance of all those elements and even more important is the fact that their acceptance will be conditional upon his or her musical skills. If he or she does not match up to the rest of the band, he or she will not be welcome. Berliner's analysis of jazz performance implies the play of conditional and unconditional hospitality in the musical context, insofar as he has highlighted the pedagogical value that the jam sessions have for jazz students. His analysis indicates jam sessions as a musical moment where the act of receiving the other is also an act of learning. The pedagogical aspect consists in musicians learning directly through

161 Wills D., 'Notes Towards a Requiem: Or the Music of Memory', p. 43 64 performance, often playing in jam sessions with famous musicians, by participating in one of the 'most venerable of the [jazz] community's institutions'.162 Hence, hospitality in the jam session involves 'learning otherness'; it involves a form of interruption of the self and welcoming of the stranger, the unfamiliar, the other that is also learning from the other, and the accomplished player. Equally, skilled musicians welcome young musicians, so that the preconceived idea that might be found in a different jazz context, where the skilled performers would hardly accept to play with unskilled ones, is overcome. The perspective, in fact, is not linked to the 'production' of a musical outcome that must reach an audience and its expectations. Rather, the approach is connected primarily with the musical dialogue of individualities characterised by differences. In the context of this different perspective, even skilled musicians can learn from the unskilled ones in terms of creativity and musical ideas. Hence, the jam session is a musical gathering that fosters the encounter with the other and the unpredictable, and relies on a form of hospitality that is as unconditional as possible, the purpose of which is to welcome the different and the new, rather than subject others to a questioning process that aims primarily to change and conform them to conditions. The idea is to respect others and to receive them as they are, in order to dialogue and learn from them. An exemplary level of creativity arises from the form of hospitality that takes place in the jam session. The open integration of singularity within plurality of the jam session, which evokes the unpredictability of the new, is thereby also a form of deconstruction. The jam session challenges the simple reproduction of musical scores, of what is pre-arranged, or has been rehearsed; rather, it forges a path between conditional and unconditional hospitality, and hence between what is known and what is unknown, between musical tradition and noise. I (the host) and the other (my guest) establish a creative relation that relies on the tensions that our differences generate and, in receiving the other's performance, I give him or her mine, opening up new musical paths that are, in essence, unpredictable. As Naas writes, neither 'host nor guest can know with any assurance what awaits them; that is the first condition of hospitality'.163

162 Berliner P. F., Thinking in Jazz, p. 41 163 Naas M., Taking on the Tradition, p. 164 65 Chapter 2 Deconstruction and Photography

2.1. Introduction

Because of its nature, photography is an aesthetic medium that is particularly suitable to account for in terms of deconstruction. There are two particular aspects that can be subjected to deconstruction in a way that opens the medium to creativity. First, the logocentric character of photographs, which stems from the primacy of the visible over the invisible; second, the ordinary understanding of temporality linked to photography, based on the 'punctual' character of the photographic present. In the light of the relationship between deconstruction and creativity, the key argument of this chapter is that the viewer of the photograph can be encouraged to approach images according to a perspective that is not limited to the mere understanding of what is immediately visible, but that also takes into account what is not. I will examine ways that the viewer can be engaged in an interpretative process that will dislocate what is immediately discernible through the image, and will bring to the fore traits concealed within the photograph. The chapter contains two parts. In the first part, I will examine the relationship between photos (light) and ontos (being), which lies behind the logocentric organisation of photographs. My argument will attempt to displace such an organisation from two perspectives. On the one hand, I will approach photography as art, exploring the role of the photographer as artist and the play of light and shadow, pointing out that the ability of the photographer to exploit such a play generates an opacity that puts into question the presence and visibility of the photographic referent. On the other hand, I will take into account the relationship between photographs and words, arguing that, contrary to the usual view that the commentary enlightens the meaning of the photo, the commentary is able to supplement and make opaque the obviousness of what is visible in the photographs. The second part will be dedicated to the study of the photographic present in the light of Derrida's view of the present-now. My analysis will focus first on the

66 comparison between Derrida's theory of the present-now and the photographic present, in the light of his criticism of the ordinary understanding of time as a linear succession of instants that he provides in 'Ousia and Grammê'.164 Second, I will look at the commentary of Jean-François Bonhomme's photographs, which Derrida provides in his essay Athens, Still Remains,165 as it supports a deconstructed approach to the present-now. Finally, I will discuss the concept of responsibility that this analysis of photography suggests.

2.2. Photos/Ontos: Light and Shadow of a Scandal

In this section, I will examine the relationship between photos (light) and ontos (being) in photography. It might be argued, indeed, that such a relationship is the centre around which photographs are organised: in order to be visible, to be 'present', in photographs, things must be in light, which means ultimately that only what is visible is true. It will be contended that this assumption generates a logocentric approach to photographs that excludes all that is in shadow, and all that is not immediately visible. By using a deconstructive approach, my purpose will be to question this logocentric character of realist photography, and examine the properties that are not immediately visible, but that move within the photographs. Thus, let us begin by discussing the relationship between photos and ontos. Unlike other means of representation, such as painting, for instance, photographs in fact represent what has truly existed in front of the camera and has been witnessed by the photographer.166 As Roland Barthes argues,

First of all I had to conceive, and therefore if possible express properly (even if it is a simple thing) how Photography's referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call 'photographic referent' not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing, which has been placed before the lens, without which there would

164 Derrida J., 'Ousia and Grammê: Note on a Note from Being and Time', in Margins of Philosophy, Brighton, The Harvester Press, 1982, pp. 29–68 165 Derrida J., Athens, Still Remains, New York, Fordham University Press, 2010 166 Walden S., 'Truth in Photography', in Walden S. (ed.), Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2008, p. 106 67 be no photograph..., in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there.167

Let me clarify that, bearing Barthes' words in mind, I will from now on use the expression 'photographic referent' to indicate the object that has been photographed. Now, according to the passage above, it might be argued, as Jerry L Thompson does, that 'photographers tend to talk a lot about truth'.168 This is particularly the case in photojournalism, or documentary photographs, where the documentation of people, things, or events requires that photographers capture as many details as they can, to reveal the truth of the photographic referent. Every detail in a photograph matters, and it must be well lit in order to be clearly visible. If something is not visible, partially visible, or concealed, it does not constitute a judicial proof, for its truth cannot be proven. Before going further with my analysis, let me clarify that the advent of digital technology has deeply affected photography. Images, indeed, can be now manipulated by means of software, and it is not unusual to see photographs whose photographic referent has been manifestly modified. Such a circumstance questions the very nature of realism and documentary by putting into question the validity of the assumption that the photographic referent has been portrayed as it was in front of the photographer's eye, without any manipulation.169 But let us leave aside this aspect, which would deserve a much more detailed analysis than space allows here. Instead, let us consider the proposition that what has been photographed has truly existed. The correlation between photos and ontos might be acknowledged as the primary cause of the logocentric character of photographs. As Norah Campbell argues, photographs are characterised by logocentrism in that they 'create meaning by appealing to a central, apparently undeconstructible system of authoritative truth that

167 Barthes R., Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, London, Fontana Paperbacks, 1984, p. 76 168 Thompson J. L., Truth and Photography: Notes on Looking and Photographing, Chicago, Ivan. R. Dee, 2003, p. 19 169 It seems that technology itself, by means of new software, is now able to distinguish authentic photographs from fake ones, so that the viewer can be aware ultimately that the image has been manipulated. For further information see Kee E., Farid H., 'A Perceptual Metric for Photo Retouching', in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 108, No. 50, 2011, pp. 19907–19912; the authors of this research have created a new software able to reveal whether a photograph has been digitally manipulated. Also, see Roxburgh M. (ed.), Light Relief (Part II), Ultimo, DAB DOCS, 2010, pp. 7–16. 68 makes thinking otherwise impossible or improbable'.170 The assumption that photographs just reproduce the way light shines on being supports the idea that no thought or interpretation is required to perceive the thing. As I argue below, if we look at the matter from a Derridean perspective, the metaphors of light and darkness are the elements that, as Derrida says, make the history of philosophy a 'photology'. In 'Force and Signification', indeed, Derrida argues that insofar as the 'metaphor of darkness and light (of self-revelation and self-concealment)' is 'the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as metaphysics...the entire history of our philosophy is a photology'.171 Light is what makes something visible and present, and as such, Western philosophy has conceived and organised Being as something present and clearly visible.172 Following this perspective, as Derrida says in his commentary to the photographs by Frédéric Brenner in Diaspora, the photographer is 'in his or her own way a Revelator'173; photography, then, becomes a form of revelation, 'the process of a development of truth'.174 We find that light is also the most significant natural element that, metaphorically, makes philosophy work. Light is the element that unveils, explains, shows, and even enlightens truth. Eduardo Cadava argues that there is a 'secret' relationship between photography and philosophy, sealed by light: for light is both a figure of knowledge and a figure of nature.175 On the one hand, we see light at work in the act of 'shedding light' on something, namely the act of clarifying and explaining something; on the other hand, we see light as natural element that separates day from night, and that makes things visible and present. The passage from shadow to light, as Cadava argues, might be also acknowledged as what characterises the act of writing.176 Whenever we write something, indeed, we translate our ideas from the shadow of abstractness to the light of what can be perceived as words and signs.

170 Campbell N., 'Regarding Derrida', p. 108 171 Derrida J., 'Force and Signification', in Writing and Difference, London and New York, Routledge, 2005, p. 31 172 Derrida J., 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', p. 353 173 Brenner F., Diaspora: Homelands in Exile. Voices Vol. 2, New York, HarperCollins, 2003, p. 17 174 Ibid. 175 Cadava E., Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 5 176 Ibid., p. xvii 69 Given this characterisation of light as a natural and philosophical element, the 'authoritative truth' that Campbell mentions corresponds to what is visible and as such fully 'in light'. Photos manifests ontos and assures an approach to the photograph that is founded on a centre, a logos that makes the image move around a 'coherent, non- contradictory and singularly authoritative meaning';177 that is, only what is present in light and visible is true. Consequently, this schema establishes a logocentric realm in which everything is organised and divided according to a system of hierarchical oppositions – such as light/shadow, presence/absence, true/false, visible/invisible – where the priority is accorded only to the first term. This brings me to discuss how Martin Heidegger has challenged this idea of truth by conceiving of the concept of truth in art. To do this, let us take into account Heidegger's essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art'.178 There are two ideas of the relationship between the work of art and truth. On the one hand, we find the ordinary approach that Heidegger will overturn, which relies on the view that truth means 'the conformity of knowledge with the matter'179; that is, the representational model based on the correspondence between the object represented and the 'real' thing. This idea of truth underscores realist photography. As Joseph J Kockelmans puts the question, the fact that 'the reproduction of what is, is in agreement with what is so reproduced, and agreement (adaequation, homoiosis) has long been taken to be the essence of truth'.180 On the other hand, we find a completely different approach to truth based on the view that the relationship between work of art and truth relies on the play between concealment and unconcealment. In Heidegger's view, indeed, the link between work of art and truth becomes the question concerning 'the coming-to- presence of Being'.181 In ways I outline below, this challenges the representational model of truth. In order to challenge the tendency to think of truth in terms of conformity, or correspondence, between representation and thing, Heidegger considers the example

177 Campbell N., 'Regarding Derrida', p. 109 178 Heidegger M., 'The Origin of the Work of Art', in Krell D. F. (ed.), Basic Writings, New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, pp. 139–212 179 Ibid., p. 176 180 Kockelmans J. J., Heidegger on Art and Art Works, Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985, p. 134 181 Ibid., p. 172 70 of the Greek temple of Neptune (Poseidon) in Paestum.182 As Kockelmans points out, he selects a temple 'because a temple portrays nothing and, thus, most certainly cannot be said to imitate something as it is in "reality"'.183 Nevertheless, the temple is the place where what is concealed, namely God, comes to presence; Heidegger says that the temple

portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple.184

There is no correspondence between the temple as work of art and what it represents in terms of experience for all the believers who will use it to experience God's presence. Hence, the relationship between the work of art and truth relies on the unconcealment of the physical structure of the temple and at the same time the concealment of God that remains invisible, but present. Arguably, this approach engages the viewer/user in a form of experience of the work of art that is active and creative, insofar as it does not rely on the passive observation of the correspondence between what exists and what has been represented, rather it prompts the viewer/user to bring to presence what is not visible, represented, or portrayed. In other words, Heidegger invites us to understand the work of art as work of truth that in its unconcealment, in its coming to presence, involves us in a creative way, through a sort of relation that engages us actively in the interpretation of the work of art. This approach becomes crucial in the case of photography, for as I mentioned earlier, photographers tend to talk a lot about truth. This approach will mark the analysis of photographs in the light of deconstruction, as the play between what is unconcealed and what remains concealed will challenge the representational model based on the logocentric organisation that characterises images and that establishes the 'authoritative truth' discussed above.

182 Ibid., p. 141 183 Ibid. 184 Heidegger M., 'The Origin of the Work of Art', p. 167 71 Photographs belong to those visual objects that Peter Brunette and Wills talk about in their interview with Derrida on the topic of deconstruction and the visual arts. They raise the question about the idea of 'thereness' of the visual object, or, as Brunette says, what might be called a 'feeling of presence',185 by recalling Derrida's discussion in The Truth in Painting of a painting as 'a stranger to all discourses doomed to the presumed mutism of the thing itself', which restores 'in authoritarian silence an order of presence'.186 A painting, an architectural work, a photograph, as visual objects appear in their visible presence, which is placed 'there', in a well-defined place. The viewer is overwhelmed by what is immediately visible and present, and so does not have to think, and the visual object does not get a say in how it is understood. This is a crucial point, for it invites us to think about the prominence of the visual in organising our understanding of reality, above all in the contemporary world, where everything seems to move around images. This leads to a situation where vision and the ways of knowing and experiencing the world are imagined to be inseparable.187 As Jenks argues, 'we daily experience and perpetuate the conflation of the "seen" with the "known" in conversation through the commonplace linguistic appendage of "do you see? " or "see what I mean? "',188 supporting the idea that depiction, picturing and seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them.189 This is particularly evident in the case of documentary photographs, where the link between 'seen' and 'known' finds its highest realisation, for the very character of witnessing and documenting aims to generate the incontrovertible 'authoritative truth' that what you see is what has truly been in front of the camera as you see it. In this light, then, the sheer presence of the object that has been photographed aims to generate a sort of 'mute' acceptance of what has been captured in the photograph.

185 Brunette P., 'The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida', in Brunette P., Wills D., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 12 186 Derrida J., The Truth in Painting, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 156 187 Campbell N., 'Regarding Derrida', p. 108 188 Jenks C., 'The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture', in Jenks C. (ed.), Visual Culture, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 3 189 Campbell N., 'Regarding Derrida', p. 108 72 As Barthes argues, in fact, in the photograph, 'the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation',190 circumstance that Derrida expresses in Copy, Archive, Signature when he explains that photographs remain conditioned by non-art, by what he calls 'hyperaesthetics'.191 Which is to say, in seeing a photograph we will always be conditioned by the circumstance that what we see has truly existed. That might be acknowledged as the very sublimity of photography, for one would be given over 'to an experience that fundamentally cannot be mastered'.192 The power of authentication of a photograph turns out to be puzzling: the 'hyperaesthetic' character of photographs makes it always difficult to say whether they are art or not. In other words, photographs are aesthetic objects characterised by opacity, by multiple gaps that stem from the constant play between authentication and representation. As Rancière points out:

The photo does not say whether it is art or not,...This game of multiple gaps perfectly illustrates what Kant designated under the name of aesthetic idea: a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept can be adequate...Photography is exemplarily an art of aesthetic ideas because it is exemplarily an art capable of enabling non-art to accomplish art by dispossessing it.193

The photographer's work will be only accomplished by portraying something or someone real, and not by means of imagination. Rancière's statement underlines how photography finds itself in a unique position as aesthetic medium, a position that might be acknowledged as 'on the edge' between what is art and what is not, such as in the case of documentary photography. In this sense, photographs will always foster thinking and ideas stemming from their component linked to non-art and, in this sense, will generate discourse. Derrida's answer to Brunette's question that I have mentioned above points out that there is always something that can be said that will 'supplement' what the camera

190 Barthes R., Camera Lucida, p. 89 191 Derrida J., Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 10 192 Ibid. 193 Rancière J., 'Notes on the Photographic Image', in Radical Philosophy, Vol. 156, 2009, p. 15 73 has captured. Derrida argues, indeed, that the mutism of visual objects, in fact, is to be acknowledged more as a form of 'taciturnity'; that is, as a silence of something that can speak, rather than a silence of something that is mute in the sense that it cannot speak at all.194 The reason is that, as he says, 'we can always receive them [visual objects], read them, or interpret them as potential discourse'.195 In this sense, as Derrida continues, '. . .these silent works are in fact already talkative, full of virtual discourses. . .'196 And that is the point here: despite the aim of capturing sheer presence, despite its aim of documenting and witnessing, despite the relation between photos and ontos, a photograph's scene can never be accepted as a mute object, for it will always be characterised by the absence of a potential discourse that will challenge the 'authoritative truth' that has been witnessed and make opaque what is clear. As Rancière argues, 'something happens in the photo that exceeds the task of providing information',197 and this something is what generates opacity, insofar as it makes us see the image in a different way. With that in mind, I will argue that when approached from a deconstructive point of view, the correspondence between photos and ontos is challenged from two different perspectives. On the one hand, I will consider the case of the play between light and shadow in art photography, where the creativity of the artist seems to be to conceal rather than show. On the other hand, I will look at the role of words, or photographic commentary as supplement that makes opaque what is apparently clear and well defined. These two aspects, indeed, can open the logocentric character of photographs to all that belongs to the invisible elements held by an image. As Rosemary Hawker argues, the strength of the photographic work lies not in what is shown, but in what is withheld.198 Rancière distinguishes three different types of photographic images.199 The naked image, an example of which is the documentary and witnessing photograph that, in its

194 Derrida J., 'The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida', p. 12 195 Ibid., p. 13 196 Ibid. 197 Rancière J., 'Notes on the Photographic Image', p. 13 198 Hawker R., 'The Idiom in Photography As the Truth in Painting', in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 3, 2002, p. 548 199 Rancière J., The Future of the Image, London and New York, Verso, 2007, p. 22 74 clarity, as Rancière explains, excludes the 'prestige of dissemblance and the rhetoric of exegeses'.200 This means that its purpose is to cast out any doubt about the occurrence of an event or the existence of the thing that the photo depicts; best exemplified in photojournalism, the purpose of which is to attest that something has truly happened. The primary purpose will be, then, to show, to give evidence. Second, we find the ostensive image, which although is characterised by what Rancière calls a 'sheer presence'201 of the photographic referent, this presence is altered by the generation of meaning, which is not directly linked to what is visible. The purpose of the ostensive image is to generate a subjective reaction in the observers, and it employs aesthetic means to produce an effect modeled on that of portraits, for instance. The purpose of a portrait, indeed, although linked to the visibility and clarity of the photographic referent, aims to involve the viewer in seeking also what is not immediately visible, such as traits of personality, etc. The third type of image is the metaphorical image, in which, as Rancière says, 'the labor of art involves playing on the ambiguity of resemblance and the instability of dissemblance',202 or, in other words, in which the viewer is actively engaged in seeking elements that involve what is visible and also what is not immediately visible. I will account for this when I examine Derrida's commentary of the photographs of a Japanese artist, Kishin Shinoyama. Using Rancière's characterisation, I will attempt to draw a line that separates the first type of photographic image, the naked image, the purpose of which is to be linked to social imagery,203 and which aims to produce visibility or clarity or, put it another way, to produce the evidence about something, from the other two types, ostensive and metaphoric images, the character of which belongs to the art world, and the aim of which is to produce concealment in order to stimulate imagination, rather than to produce evidence. In both cases, it will be argued, when we approach photographs from a deconstructive perspective, rather than absorbing the truthfulness of what has been represented, the primary purpose is to generate opacity, or at least ambiguity, in order to displace the logocentric presence of the photographic referent.

200 Ibid. 201 Ibid., p. 23 202 Ibid., p. 24 203 Ibid., p. 27 75 2.2.1. First, a Scandal

When we look at photography as art, the first question that arises concerns the role of the photographer as artist. In fact, in the art world, photography might be considered a sort of scandal. If we consider the relation between art and image, indeed, unlike painting, photography plays a paradoxical role, for the photographic referent, which is to say the object photographed, is not imagined, is not the result of an original act of creation, stemming from a form of active 'making' of an artist who uses a technique in order to create something. Rather, on the usual view photography relies on the capture of a natural element, namely light, and appears to be based on a passive act of a photographer, whose activity apparently is reduced to merely triggering the shutter of the camera. When experienced as work of arts, then, photographs are puzzling insofar as they appear to be always haunted by the documentary and witnessing character that characterises the medium, and that leaves less room for imagination. In this sense, our experience of photography as aesthetic medium is indissolubly linked to the experience of what is true, to the scene that has been witnessed by the photographer, and that seems to remain chained to the relationship photos/ontos. If, as Bazin argues, the aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in 'its power to lay bare the realities',204 then, when we consider photographs as works of art, it becomes interesting to reflect upon the significance that the opposition between physis/technê, which corresponds to the distinction between what belongs to nature and cannot be recognised as a work of art, and what, instead, is the result of an act of creation, of a technique that belongs to culture. The photographer as artist involves a very peculiar ability: rather than technê in the sense of making, photography as art involves concealing. It seems that, in the case of photography, the opposition nature/culture does not find its usual application. Let us examine this circumstance a little more. According to Derrida, the opposition between nature and art is central to the philosophical discourse. As he explains in his essay 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', since its birth, the opposition physis/nomos,

204 Bazin A., Gray H., 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image', in Film Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1960, p. 8 76 physis/technê, which appears to be even older than Plato, 'has been relayed to us by means of a whole historical chain which opposes "nature" to law, to education, to art, to technics'.205 As a consequence, philosophy has been organised according to that opposition, which in the case of art finds an example in the superiority that Hegel accords to the beauty of what has been created by human hands over the beauty of nature.206 We find the same opposition under scrutiny in Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. There he begins with the claim that 'if there is anything that distinguishes the work [of art] as work [of art], it is that the work has been created'.207 He continues:

The creation of a work requires craftsmanship. Great artists prize craftsmanship most highly. They are the first to call for its painstaking cultivation, based on complete mastery. They above all others constantly take pains to educate themselves ever anew in thorough craftsmanship. It has often enough been pointed out that the Greeks, who knew a few things about works of art, use the same word, technê, for craft and art and call the craftsman and the artist by the same name: technites.208

Yet technê is also involved in knowledge and truth, as we see in Heidegger's discussion of the philosophical aspects linked to the work of art: the work of art is a work not so much because it has been made, but rather because it brings about the Being of being.209 In this light, when we look at the opposition from the perspective of photography, we can see the remarkable difference between what painters or musicians do and what a photographer instead does. Unlike in other forms of art, the artistic qualities of a photograph involve a very peculiar ability, namely to depict the play between light and shadow, between what is unconcealed and what remains concealed. Hence, the photographer is particularly influenced by the connection between technê and knowledge and, unlike in other forms of art, is not immediately involved in 'making' something.

205 Derrida J., 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', p. 357 206 Hegel G. W. F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1988, p.2 207 Heidegger M., 'The Origin of the Work of Art', p. 181 208 Ibid., p. 183 209 Kockelmans J. J., Heidegger on Art and Art Works, p. 171 77 If we return for a moment to the very etymology of the word 'photography', we find that it relies on the combination of two Greek words photos and graphos, which is to say 'light' and 'writing'. So, photography has been acknowledged as the writing of light or, as Talbot called it, 'the pencil of nature', pointing out that all photographs are obtained by the mere action of light upon sensitive paper, without 'the aid of any one acquainted with the art of drawing'.210 According to Talbot, then, photographs are metaphorically impressed 'by Nature's hand'.211 As Derrida says, 'the laws of photography are in nature; they are physical laws; and to say this takes nothing away from the unheard-of event of this modern technique'.212 Physis is integrated into technê. The physical laws of light control the technical laws of photography. As such, photography seems to play the same deconstructive role in art, in displacing the opposition nature/culture. As Derrida explains by looking at Lévi-Strauss' work, there are cases in which the opposition is challenged and cannot stand. From the outset, Lévi-Strauss experienced the necessity of utilising the opposition nature/culture; yet at the same time he experienced the impossibility of accepting it. He distinguishes that which is universal and spontaneous and not dependent on any particular culture or on any determinate norm; that is, he differentiates that which belongs to nature from that which depends upon a system of norms belonging to culture.213 Once this dichotomy is delineated, however, Lévi- Strauss encounters what he calls a scandal, namely the incest prohibition. Insofar as, the incest prohibition is universal, it can be called natural, but at the same time it is also a prohibition, and in this sense it belongs to culture. Therefore, as Derrida argues:

By commencing his work with the factum of the incest prohibition, Lévi- Strauss thus places himself at the point at which this difference [nature/culture], which has always assumed to be self-evident, finds itself erased or questioned. For from the moment when the incest prohibition can no longer be conceived within the nature/culture opposition, it can no longer

210 Talbot W. H. F., The Pencil of Nature, New York, Da Capo Press, 1969, p. 2 211 Ibid. 212 Derrida J., 'Aletheia', in The Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2010, pp. 172 213 Ibid. 78 be said to be a scandalous fact, a nucleus of opacity within a network of transparent significations.214

Connecting this back to Talbot's commentary on photography, we see that photography produces a similar scandal. He directs the attention to the question of agency and distinguishes photography from the previous methods of image production: in the place of an individual artist with certain talents and aptitudes, nature now seems to inscribe itself, but does so by means of a culturally produced technological device.215 Unlike in painting, where the painter/agent plays an active role by creating something that is either real or unreal, the photographer will always remain an agent whose role is limited to the choice of the photographic referent and to the triggering the shutter of the camera, and whose imagination, apparently, finds no way to be expressed. We are in the presence, it would seem, of a form of art where the work is not the result of an act of making of an agent that uses a technê, but rather of a mechanical process that, as Walton argues, bypasses the beliefs the photographer has about the scene before him or her.216 Because of this mechanical aspect, Baudelaire made of photography the sinister instrument of the triumph of technical reproduction over artistic imagination; whereas, according to Benjamin, photography marks the advent of mechanical reproduction as a new paradigm of art.217 As Derrida puts the question, although he does not necessarily accept this position:

however artful the photographer may be, whatever his or her intervention or style, there is a point where the photographic act is not an artistic act, a point where it passively records, and this poignant passivity would be the chance of this relation with death; it captures a reality that is there, that will have been there, in an undecomposable now.218

214 Derrida J., 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', p. 358 215 Azoulay A., Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, London and New York, Verso, 2012, p. 11 216 Walton K. L., 'Transparent Pictures: On the Nature Of Photographic Realism', in Walden S. (ed.), Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 14– 49 217 Rancière J., 'Notes on the Photographic Image', p.8 218 Derrida J., Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, p. 9 79 Connecting this back to what has been said above, it might be argued, then, that allocating photography within the opposition between physis (nature) and technê (art) certainly the 'passivity', or 'absence', as Bazin calls it,219 of the photographer makes photography a sort of scandal that seems to bring a new perspective to the art world that, as we will see, involves the ability to conceal and unconceal.

2.2.2. Haunting Shadows

This aspect of photography emerges from Derrida's analysis of the work of the photographer Kishin Shinoyama and his model Shinobu Otake. Arguably, the concept of aletheia, which means truth, or unconcealment of what was concealed, is a concept that appears to be particularly significant both in philosophy and photography. Going back to Heidegger's discourse on the work of art, he takes it into account in the mentioned essay, retracing the Greek link between truth and unconcealment, as he says truth 'means the essence of the true',220 and he continues 'we think this essence in recollecting the Greek word aletheia, the unconcealment of beings'.221 The unconcealment of something that was concealed implies a sort of coming out from the shadow, from what was not previously visible. In this sense, arguably, it is light that allows things to come out from the concealment. Photos (light) would then unveil ontos (being). In his essay 'Aletheia', Derrida takes Shinoyama's photographic model as the allegorical figure of truth or aletheia, whose presence in the photographs is never fully visible, but instead remains always haunted by the absence of what is concealed in shadow.

219 Bazin A., 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image', in What is Cinema?, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 2005, p. 13 220 Heidegger M., 'The Origin of the Work of Art', p. 176 221 Ibid. 80

Shinobu Otake, photographed by Kishin Shinoyama222

At the very beginning of the essay, Derrida starts by saying something that seems to evoke a truth that comes from far: 'the photographer left; he told the truth. It is she.... It is (the) truth and she comes to us from Japan. "Light of the dark?" What does that mean? We wonder about this before opening the work.'223 These words, which maintain an enigmatic sense, immediately put us in front of an absence; that of the photographer who has witnessed something and is not present, is not part of what we see. It is as if Derrida is saying that truth is not linked to what is present, but rather is to be connected to what is not there, and at the same time presents it, introduces it. Also, this truth does not belong to our Western culture, but comes from the other side of the world, Japan, where truth may be different. Indeed, the original volume of Shinoyama's photographs published in 1993 bore an English title, Light of the Dark,224 which emphasises the enigmatic play between light and shadow, and as Jun'ichiro Tanizaki says, 'the Westerner has never pierced the enigma of the shadow'.225 Looking at Shinoyama's photographs, the observer seems to be directed towards what is concealed and not visible, rather than what appears clearly in light. Derrida seems to be showing how the Western notion of truth, which relies on the notion of unconcealment of Being as visible presence, is now questioned by a form of truth that comes from a culture, the Japanese, where light and shadow, presence and absence, visible and invisible, supplement and do not exclude each other.

222 Photo taken from Derrida's 'Aletheia', p. 183 223 Derrida J., 'Aletheia', p. 169 224 Ibid., see note 1, p. 188 225 Tanizaki J., In Praise of Shadows, Stony Creek, Leete's Island Books, 1977, p. 52 81 This brings us back to Heidegger's discussion of truth as play between what is visible and at the same time what is invisible, which challenges the ordinary understanding of truth based on the correspondence of Being as visible presence. As Derrida says, the woman/truth of Shinoyama's photograph 'divides and shares herself between night and day; she says without words the sharing of light and shade'.226 In some of the photographs, indeed, the model's body is half visible and half concealed by shade, in a sort of twilight that reminds us of the double side of a day. On the one hand, the clarity of the day, where everything is visible, clear, and understandable. On the other hand, says Derrida, there is the night, obscurity, invisibility, shadow, 'the dark continent of sex, the unknown of death, non-knowledge'.227 In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida discusses the importance of shadow in the origin of drawing, before photography, describing the Platonic skiagraphia as shadow writing.228 Derrida explains that by using the myth of Butades, the young Corinthian lover who bears the name of her father, a potter from Sicyon.229 Butades was deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, and she traced the profile of the shadow of her lover's face as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp. Upon seeing this, her father filled in the outline, compressing clay on the surface, and so made a face in relief, which he then hardened by fire along with other articles of pottery.230 As Butades draws by following the trace of the shadow on the wall, she uses the play between light and shadow to represent someone who is absent.231 Butades thereby portrays an image that has no face, a contour of a drawing that has no content. Something is unveiled or brought to presence, the silhouette of her lover, yet at the same time something else remains concealed in the shadow. In recalling this story, Derrida is highlighting the link between the origin of drawing and the absence or invisibility of the model,232 which requires an act of memory that brings the object being depicted into the light, and at the same time

226 Derrida J., 'Aletheia', p. 170 227 Ibid. 228 Derrida J., Memoirs of the Blind, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 49 229 Ibid. 230 Ayres P., 'The Origin of Modelling', in Kybernetes, Vol. 36, No. 9/10, 2007, pp. 1225–1237 231 Derrida J., Copy, Archive, Signature, p. 1 232 Derrida J., Memoirs of the Blind, p. 49 82 relies on blindness, for Butades is drawing without her lover; she is just drawing the trace of a border between light and shadow. As he writes,

it is as if seeing were forbidden in order to draw, as if one drew only on the condition of not seeing, as if the drawing were a declaration of love destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other. . .233

This condition of invisibility, or the play between visibility and invisibility, seems to belong to the photographs that Derrida is commenting on in his essay. It is as if the photographer goes back to the use of black and white, which can better mark the play between visibility and invisibility. In fact, in Shinoyama's photographs, the witnessing character of photography seems to fade away, as the picture of Shinobu Otake above shows. Although the photographic referent or the model's face, is indeed in front of the camera, without light, it would remain concealed and invisible. It is as if Shinoyama questions the prevalence of the power of authentication, which is to say the very character of 'truth' that photography holds, over the power of representation, which is linked to the imagination of the observer. The power of photography to capture what is 'authentic' or 'real' appears in this case to be overcome by the act of concealment that the photographer is doing. The partial visibility of the woman's body is first of all a visual challenge that affects the image of her face; we are able to see only one side, for the other remains hidden in the shadow. She is unrecognisable, her identity, her face, or the first part that we use to identify someone, remains concealed. The objective clarity of 'truth' of what has been photographed and should be in light is challenged by the imagination that the invisible details stimulate. In this sense, the photograph fosters the active involvement of the observer who tries to bring those details out of darkness, as if, Derrida argues, 'black gave birth to white'.234 Given that, then, the play between concealment and unconcealment brings about creativity. Let us draw a comparison with the photograph of our face in a passport. There are rules that photographers need to abide by when we need a photograph for our passport. The face must be visible, clear, and each trait must be well in light. The face

233 Ibid. 234 Derrida J., 'Aletheia', p. 171 83 must be unconcealed, for your face manifests your identity, your photograph must be truthful, in the sense of an identical reproduction of your actual face. Photos, light, identifies ontos, your being. You can be known only by means of your image, which is to say that your photo must say the truth about you. Shinoyama and Derrida, then, seem to put into question here the very character of aletheia as simply unconcealment of being, as present in its presence. In this case the being, or the presence of this woman is haunted by the absence of what remains concealed. Given her ghostly appearance, we might even doubt about her real presence in front of the lens. Derrida says:

Now it is also what, discreetly, in seeming to exhibit something else, the work shows and the allegory allows to be understood: light itself, the appearance or genesis of phos, light. This young woman is herself, certainly, unique and very singularly herself, but she is also light [la lumière]: (the light [légère] allegory of) light [lumière] hides itself, she holds herself in reserve, between parentheses, in something else, that is in shadow. She thus signifies.235

From this play between presence and absence, Derrida says that she 'signifies'. The reference to the movement of signification produced by the play of presence and absence in the concept of différance becomes clear. As we saw in the previous chapter, in his essay 'Différance', Derrida writes:

It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called 'present' element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not.236

Leaving aside for now the temporal aspect described in this quote, which I will discuss later in this chapter, the aspect that I want to point out here is linked to the play between presence and absence that we find in the movement of signification. Each

235 Ibid. 236 Derrida J., 'Différance', p. 13 84 word, in order to signify, is constantly caught in the play of the presence of the material sign, the signifier, and the absence of its signified, so that, despite the presence of the sign, the word never achieves a full signification. The photograph I have inserted above shows in fact how the photographic referent or the model's face, is caught in a very similar mechanism that relies also in this case on the play between the presence of what is visible and the absence of what is invisible, and that because of that challenges the objective and documentary character of the camera. To put it another way, considering Barthes' remark (quoted earlier) that in photography the power of authentication prevails over the power of representation, the photographer, by playing with light and shadow, produces an inversion so that in this case the power of representation prevails over the power of authentication. The movement of veiling and veiling that challenges the idea of truth as the unconcealment of the photographic referent, then, instead of validating the visual plenitude and truth that we usually associate with photography, favours its 'moments of representational inadequacy'.237 The correlation between photos, light, and ontos, being, appears in this case to be displaced. Aletheia, the truth as unconcealment of ontos, which corresponds to the representational model, according to which there is a correspondence between the object photographed and the 'real' thing, is challenged. On the contrary, the idea of truth is now founded on the possibilities, in terms of the creative involvement of the observer, that the play between what is unconcealed by light and what is concealed generates. If photography is chained to its documentary and witnessing character, the photographer as artist, then, becomes able to bend the objectivity stemming from the intervention of nature through light. As Derrida says:

And this young woman will also exhibit, as much as a (philosophical) story and history of modesty, of reserved nudity, an allegory of truth itself in its movement of veiling and unveiling: the origin of light, the visibility of the visible, that is, the black night, that which, letting things appear in the light [la clarté], by definition hides itself from view. That is what she does: she hides from view [se dérobe à la vue], she escapes from view by slowly exhibiting,

237 Hawker R., 'The Idiom in Photography As the Truth in Painting', p. 548 85 making you wait in imminence, the gesture by which she suggests the movement of disrobing.238

This takes me back to Rancière's account of the metaphorical image. The play of shadow and the unconcealing power of light seems to explain what Rancière calls the 'labor of art' of metaphoric images, which he characterises as the labour of the 'ambiguity of resemblances and the instability of dissemblances'239 that favours the rhetoric of exegeses,240 namely the possibility of generating interpretative meanings.

2.2.3. Haunting Words

In the previous part, I discussed the power of the play between shadow and light, and the movement of signification that the play between the presence of the visible and the absence of the concealed generates. In this section, the matter concerns the power of words, or put it another way the power of writing to unveil the potential meanings that move within a photograph. As I have explained earlier, photographs are characterised by a 'talkative' aspect that often generates opacity rather than clarity, and that can question and displace the obviousness of what is immediately visible. Let us explore the combination between photographs and words or commentary, for it might be argued that, in effect, the commentary tries to open the image to its alterity, to all that the camera has not been able to capture. As Ariella Azoulay argues, 'within the paradigm of visual culture, and particularly where photography is concerned, it is not possible to restrict that which is visible in the photograph to the original intentions of the photographer'.241 One reason for this is that, besides the referent that was the target of the photographer, the camera captures other details that become part of the image and that contribute to the development of meaning. In other words, in every photograph we find always a surplus of information that will exceed the main focus of the photographer. Everything becomes the object of photographic commentary that ultimately calls into question

238 Derrida J., 'Aletheia', p. 171 239 Rancière J., The Future of the Image, p. 24 240 Ibid., p. 22 241 Azoulay A., Civil Imagination, p. 57 86 the logocentric organisation of the image that moves around the primary photographic referent. Let us consider Eddie Adams' photograph 'Saigon Execution', taken in Saigon, Vietnam, during the Vietnamese War in 1968; the image won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.242

243 Adams E., 'Saigon Execution'

Let us suppose that the photograph is seen by someone who is not aware of the context in which it has been taken. They would organise their interpretation around an approach that privileges what is seen over what is not visible. Looking at the photographic referent, the scene being depicted, and focusing on what is visible and present in front of the camera, they would see two men, one on the left and the other on the right, who occupy the foreground of the picture; they would also see other men and secondary details of an urban area in the background. The man on the left holds a gun and points it at the head of the man on the right, whose terrible expression is prefiguring death. The pose suggests an act of violence, even though the image, in its stillness, does not show whether it will take place. Despite the title and the veracity that the scene suggests, the observer, unaware of what happened next, might think of a pose that the men have assumed in front of the camera, perhaps arranged by the photographer, who might have asked them to pose for him in that particular way. Let us translate the matter into logocentric terms. The observer will focus on what has been truly there in front of the camera, namely the facts that two 'real' men have

242 Robbins J. S., This Time We Win: Revisiting the TET Offensive, New York, Encounter Books, 2010, pp. 143–144 243 Adams E., 'Saigon Execution', see BBC website, September 20, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/3672428.stm, accessed October 2013 87 been photographed in a 'real' pose, in a 'real' location, and that one man is in pain and potentially close to death and the other has power over him. The real stems from the photos that captures and the ontos of a scene that is 'true'. Logocentrism, in this case, generates meaning by appealing to a centre; that is, the foreground of the image and the details in the background and also the viewer's culturally bound knowledge and assumptions. Logocentrism organises the understanding of what the observer sees around a system of authoritative truth that, as I have described earlier, makes it impossible or improbable to think otherwise. The interpretation of the photo would move around this correspondence: the 'photological' character of Being, of what is in the image, the 'thereness' as visible presence of the photographic referent, and as such the immediate reaction would be that of condemning the act of violence that a man with a uniform is carrying out towards someone who is apparently a civilian. Unaware of all the unexposed details, the observer's understanding would stop at the mere act of witness, captured by the photographer. As Campbell argues, what we see is 'comforting' us, in the sense that it excludes the anxiety that the 'other' invisible meanings would produce. She writes:

Logocentric thinking is comforting us; it works by establishing us in a knowable realm of ordering in which divisions can be made between subjects, objects, intelligence and sense, producing a pure and safe conceptual world, in which the second of these terms does not influence, impact or infect the former. It supposes a structure with a fixed center or point of origin that also censors. . .the self-errant tendencies in the text. In investigating an image, we often possess a logocentric vision, drawing it into convergence, making it coherent and giving it a non-contradictory and singularly authoritative meaning.244

Indeed, despite the historical circumstances behind the execution, the logocentric system that organises the image has been exploited by anti-war protesters, who used the picture in their anti-war protests in Vietnam. The sheer presence of the photographic referent organises the image in a non-contradictory way, showing that someone in a position of power, wearing a uniform and holding a gun, is in the act of

244 Campbell N., 'Regarding Derrida', p. 109 88 executing someone else, who, according to what is immediately visible, appears to be a civilian. This would doubtless bring us into the presence of a savage war crime. However, as soon as we add a short comment to the photograph that 'supplements' the image with other information, the perspective immediately changes. In the case of the photograph examined, the extra information includes the fact that it was taken in Saigon, during the war in 1968, and that the man on the left is a chief of police who is executing a Vietcong who was the leader of the Vietcong death squads, responsible for the killing of many Vietnamese police officers and their families. What was previously clear and non-contradictory becomes opaque and contradictory, insofar as the sheer presence that should manifest the truthfulness of what has been in front of the camera, and what would make us believe that we are in presence of a savage war crime is now contaminated with traces of meanings that are not immediately visible. In short, the meaning of the photo is now completely different. The correlation between photos and ontos is questioned, and meaning is organised in a different way. Therefore, writing becomes a necessary supplement that questions the sheer presence and the logocentric organisation of what we seem to see in a clear way, thanks to light. Let me recall here the double signification that Derrida identifies in the notion of the supplement, namely that, on the one hand, it 'adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude' and, on the other hand, it supplements. 'It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of. . .'245 Thus, it might be argued, in the case of photographs, the commentary is a necessary supplement that adds the information that stems from the historicity of what has been captured, and at the same time it replaces the meaning that the logocentric system that organises the image and that relies on the sheer presence of what is visible produces. The commentary, then, includes visible and present elements, but also what is not visible in the image. Presence and absence becomes both essential. On the one hand, the elements that the photographer's eye has captured and that are visible. On the other hand, we find extra information that, although not visible on the image, is part of it and engages the viewer actively in understanding the image. By adding a commentary,

245 Derrida J., Of Grammatology, p. 145 89 we are supplementing photographs that supposedly represent the truth with an alterity that undermines it. Derrida's notion of the other relies on the view that our relation to the other concerns the other person, but also the other meanings of a text, the other ways of seeing things, other races, other genders, and in this case the absent elements that although invisible are part of the photographs, which is to say the context, the time when the photo was taken; in short, other networks of elements that make photographs talkative. As Campbell argues, indeed, one of the fundamental strands of Derridean thought is that 'all versions of Western thinking have tried to hide away or trivialize the "other"',246 in the sense that it has attempted to eradicate contradiction, otherness and difference, presenting a clean, symmetrical, logical philosophical account.247 Derrida shows, in fact, that the relationship between what is present and what is absent is not dichotomous, but a complicit constitution.248 As Brunette and Wills clearly explain with reference to the opposition day/night, day needs an opposite, paradoxically, in order to exist, because it only has meaning insofar as it differs from something else. Daytime is thus a concept like any other, which contains both itself and its opposite and vice versa, but neither can stand alone.249 It is this dynamic that Derrida calls 'trace', which is to say a meaning or a 'shadow' of a meaning that is paradoxically present and absent at the same time.250 In the case of photographs, this dynamic presence/absence becomes the element that challenges constantly the movement of signification that vision produces. As I said earlier, in conjunction with the historical and cultural meanings we inherit, the visual organises our perception and understanding of reality and, given the current use of devices that have been created according to a purpose that privileges what we see, vision might be considered by now a sort of tyrannical form of knowledge. Therefore, the photographic commentary aims not to find a solution to the meaning of a photograph, but rather to complicate the obviousness of the image, by making what is

246 Campbell N., 'Regarding Derrida', p. 111 247 Roffe J., 'Ethics', in Reynolds J., Roffe J. (eds), Understanding Derrida, London, Continuum, 2004, p. 44 248 Campbell N., 'Regarding Derrida', p. 111 249 Brunette P., Wills D., Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 7 250 Derrida J., Of Grammatology, p. 70 90 clearly visible opaque, so that its taciturnity, its 'thereness' begins to talk, and the interpretation of the image is open to new possibilities and meanings. Going back to the particular case of the Vietnam War photo above, a deconstructive approach implies the beginning of a questioning process that aims paradoxically on the one hand, to make visible what is invisible; that is, the reasons behind the act, the context, the identity of the people involved, the place, the time; on the other hand, it aims to make invisible what is visible, the fact that the clothes and the situation generate a false belief. This approach will be crucial in the discussion of the responsibility to come that temporality in photography brings about, and that will be analysed in the next part. The deconstructive character of the photographic commentary can be seen at work in all the essays Derrida dedicated to the works of particular photographers. I took into account in the previous part the essay 'Aletheia', but the same approach can be found in Athens, Still Remains, dedicated to the work of Jean-François Bonhomme that will be examined in the next section, in his brief analysis of the photographs of Frédéric Brenner in Diaspora, and also in Right of inspection,251 dedicated to the work of Marie-Françoise Plissart. In all these works, Derrida develops commentaries that challenge what seems obvious in the photographs, and aims to make them opaque through the play between what has been captured and all the traces that remain absent and concealed, and that, once developed, generate a completely different approach to the photograph in the observer. If we look at the essay Right of Inspection, for instance, which Derrida writes as a 'lecture' (reading)252 on 284 photographs by Plissart, we see how the commentary from the images develops various themes, such us sexuality and violence, for instance. As the title suggests, what is a simple act of 'seeing' photographs, should be in fact an act of 'inspection'. The act of inspecting entails always a deep visual analysis that must aim to find something, to penetrate a private space in order to check, in order to overcome the appearance that might hides something illicit or illegal.253 It is what

251 Derrida J., Plissart M. F., Right of Inspection, New York, The Monacelli Press, 1998 252 Morris C., 'Derrida on Pornography: Putting (It) Up for Sale', in Derrida Today Vol. 6, No. 1, 2013, p. 98 253 Derrida J., Stiegler B., 'Right of Inspection', in Echographies of Television, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2002, p. 33 91 happens when we land in a new country, in order to leave the airport and have access to it, customs officers have the right to 'inspect', to check our luggage, and in order to do that they need to go behind the appearance, their gaze must not be a mere act of seeing, but they must inspect. The essay is written as a 'polylogue',254 a combination of more voices, as if Derrida wants to emphasise the fact that from a single photograph, many different interpretations can be developed. There is an openness of exegesis that the different voices involved in the commentary try to develop from what Derrida calls 'photo- novel'.255 Indeed, Derrida begins the essay by saying 'You [tu] will never know, nor will you [vous], all the stories I kept telling myself as I looked at these images'.256 Which is to say that we are in front of photographs, whose sheer presence and photological and obviousness of what we see is subjected to the questioning process that the 'inspective' look of the observer generates. In fact, a translation that leaves the plural of the original French title Droit de regards, into the English 'right of inspections', as Morris suggests, implies that 'any particular "regard" [inspection] automatically represses others and so is "authoritarian" insofar as it imposes a "single interpretation"'.257 As Derrida argues, 'it is to be assumed after all that they [the photographs] present something that can be seen or recognized, at the moment a plot that begins to unravel'.258 The visual is supplemented by the verbal, so that what is seen generates meaning, but a meaning that does not remain chained to the 'true' and visible character of the photographic referent, rather it opens up to the developing of a plot that relies on all the traces of the absent details that the right of inspection unveils. Sexuality, homosexuality, violence, infancy, pornography, are all 'discourses' that emerge from Plissart's photographs and seem to transform what is clearly visible, into something deeply and interestingly complicated. As Campbell argues when she explains how to deconstruct an image means primarily to look for the other,

254 Derrida J., Plissart M. F., Right of Inspection, p. xxx 255 Ibid., p. vii 256 Ibid., p. i 257 Morris C., 'Derrida on Pornography', p. 105 258 Derrida J., Plissart M. F., Right of Inspection, p. i 92 Deconstructing an image involves looking at what the image includes and excludes, detecting the social roles it creates and examining the hierarchies that appear natural in the image. Many of the implicit assumptions in image research are logocentric - focusing on what is there, as opposed to what is not there. However, visual representation works as much through what is not shown as what is shown, through feints and deceptions, the gaps and silences, the stated and unstated, or the not seen or said, allowing the other to come out and (into) play, leaving the reader with the distinct feeling that seemingly innocuous images are not to be taken for granted.259

It is in this perspective that the photographic commentary, as Derrida demonstrates, assumes the role of necessary supplement, insofar as it is able to unveil and unleash all that is absent, or to put it another way, the other that is invisible in photographs.

2.3. Time and Photography

The second part of this chapter looks at the relationship between time and photography. In particular, my purpose is to analyse the photographic present in the light of Derrida's notion of temporality. William Henry Fox Talbot claimed that the primary subject of every photograph is time itself.260 Indeed, it might be argued that the primary purpose of photography is to take time out of time. Certainly, if time is the primary subject of photography, it might be argued that it takes on the form of the present or 'now'261 and it seems that photography is the only technical and artistic means that allows us to isolate what cannot be isolated. In his study of the temporal properties of visual arts, Le Poidevin puts the point this way: visual arts 'offer a way of doing what we cannot do in perception: to freeze a moment of time'.262 The nature of the present, indeed, as Söderbäck claims, is to be 'negated in the same moment as it

259 Campbell N., 'Regarding Derrida', p. 112 260 As discussed by Batchen in Batchen G., Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1997, p. 92 261 Derrida J., Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays On Husserl's Theory of Signs, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 61 262 Le Poidevin R., The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 3 93 comes into being'263; that is, the complexity of the present is linked to the fact that as soon as it comes into being from what is not yet, it has already become what was, escaping the possibility of being captured and examined. The ordinary understanding of the instant relies on the figure of the point, the 'stigmê'.264 In photographic terms, this character as point marks the 'onceness'265 of the photographic present, which is to say that, as Derrida argues, 'photography seems to say (and to let this be dictated to itself): this took place, and it took place only once. It is the repetition of what has taken place only once'.266 In the light of this characterisation, my analysis will show that despite its supposed undecomposable simplicity that stems from its being understood as a point,267 the present-now captured in a photograph involves also past and future. I will argue that the photographic present is related to and supports Derrida's deconstruction of the undecomposable simplicity of the present-now, which displaces the 'ordinary'268 notion of time as succession of instants or presents-now. I have been particularly interested in the opening towards the future that the photographic present evokes. Therefore, I have paid particular attention to a recently published Derrida's book, titled Athens, Still Remains, a commentary focused on 34 black-and-white photographs of contemporary or late-twentieth-century Athens by French photographer Jean-François Bonhomme. My particular interest in the future trait that the photographic present contains has brought me to develop an interesting connection between photographs and the Derridean concept of 'responsibility' that is linked to the future to come, which will be articulated in the last section of this chapter.

2.3.1. Coincidence of Points: A Puzzling Question

First, let us look at the nature of the photographic present by drawing a link to Derrida's analysis of the present-now that he makes in 'Ousia and Grammê', for I will

263 Söderbäck F., 'Being in the Present: Derrida and Irigaray on the Metaphysics of Presence', in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2013, p. 253 264 Derrida J., Copy, Archive, Signature, p. 8 265 Ibid. 266 Ibid., p. 3 267 Ibid., p. 8 268 Derrida J., 'Ousia and Grammê', p. 39 94 argue that the photographic present as punctum temporis, which is to say as point/instant/now is characterised by the same aporetic nature of the present that Derrida discusses in that essay. It seems that despite the evident character of the 'frozen' instant, which suggests an analogy with the ordinary notion of time as succession of instants, the photographic present is characterised by the same nature of the present-now as part of a dynamic temporal line that cannot be split into parts, but is to be understood on the basis of its extremities.269 Looking at photographs, our first experience is linked to the understanding of them as frozen, isolated, and single instants of time, or as points captured somewhere on the infinite line that supposedly represents the passing of time. Let us consider the case of photographs that capture high-speed objects, as seen in Harold Edgerton's work. 270 Looking at his photographs of a flying bullet, for example, there is a strong tendency to experience the photograph as depicting the bullet at one of many points/instants that made up the trajectory that the bullet is following. Normally, given its speed, we would not see it; we would perceive only the moment when it is shot and the moment when it hits. If we put a succession of snapshots of the bullet, taken at quick intervals into a revolving drum so that each is visible for a very short period of time, we would see the event in motion.271 We can see the same thing in the old models of projectors used in cinemas, where the film is visibly made up of single images mounted in succession, we have the perception of a single flowing scene that unfolds in time, instead of a succession of instants isolated from each other. What this account of photographs supports is the ordinary conception of time as 'the number of movement following the before and the after',272 represented by using the spatial figure of a line made up of points, or parts, called grammê. Derrida argues that there is a tendency to assume that 'the essence of time can pass, intact and undamaged, into its linear representation, into the continuous, extended unfolding of

269 Ibid., p. 60 270 Harold Edgerton is an engineer who studies movement, and in order to understand how it works he has used photography, developing the modern electronic flash. See Kayafas J., Stopping Time: The Photographs of Harold Edgerton, New York, Harry N. Abrams Inc. Publishers, 1987 271 Gombrich E. H., 'Moment and Movement in Art', in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 27, 1964, p. 296 272 Derrida J., 'Ousia and Grammê', p. 58 95 punctuality'.273 We come in this way to the coincidence between the temporal instant and the spatial point. Our understanding of the photographic present as punctum temporis implies first of all the translation of the temporal question of the present- now into the spatial question of the point; that is, what we see is an instant/point photographed in the past. Thereby, the representation of time that we build is that of a line that is made up of infinite points that from the past moves towards the future. What we see in our present, while we are looking at a photograph is one of those points that has been captured and made repeatable. According to Derrida, the act of transforming temporality into spatiality stems from the necessity of making the essence of time a presence. In this sense, philosophers have consistently denied temporality for the sake of the presence implied by spatial forms.274 By visualising the abstract character of the present into a point, indeed, time becomes a presence/present; as Derrida argues, 'Nonpresence is always thought in the form of presence (it would suffice to say simply in the form), or as a modalization of presence'.275 And this is true, according to him, even for tenses such as past and future that, despite the fact that they identify by definition what is not present, insofar as the past was and is not and the future is yet to come, 'are always determined as past presents or as future presents'.276 In fact, the photographic present is considered as a past-present, one of the points that is now gone. However, such a representation of the present as a point, this transformation of time into space; in short, the operation of making the essence of time something visible into the point/now of the present, is marked by flaws and contradictions. Looking at the photographic present, we find an analogy between these contradictions and what photography suggests. First, as Derrida points out in discussing Aristotle's view of the essence of time in Physics IV, by considering the instant-now as a point that is present presence, we soon encounter an aporia, a contradiction that makes it inconsistent with the very purpose of making time presence, insofar as we must conclude that time is composed by nonbeings, and according to the metaphysical

273 Ibid., p. 59 274 Punday D., 'Derrida in the World: Space and Post-Deconstructive Textual Analysis', in Postmodern Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2000, p. 5 275 Derrida J., 'Ousia and Grammê', p. 34 276 Ibid. 96 tradition what is nonbeing cannot participate in presence, in substance; in short, it could not be thought. Derrida explains,

The nun [the instant/now] is the form from which time cannot ever depart, the form in which it cannot not be given; and yet the nun, in a certain sense, is not. If one thinks time on the basis of the now, one must conclude that it is not. The now is given simultaneously as that which is no longer and as that which is not yet. It is what it is not, and is not what it is. 'In one sense it has been and is no longer, and in another sense, it will be and is not yet'. Thereby time is composed of nonbeings.277

Time as instant/now needs to be defined as what becomes from what is not yet to what is no longer. The now negates itself, for if it did not become it would not be an instant but an eternal time without present past and future. In short, time as present presence appears to be soon constituted by the trace of its opposite, namely of what is not. This brings about the first point that will support the deconstruction of the ordinary understanding of time as a succession of instants. Indeed, the present-now appears to be always marked by the trace of what is not, a circumstance that challenges the spatial presence of the present as an intemporal kernel that remains an inalterable form of temporalisation.278 As Derrida argues, in order to be temporal, the now needs to 'become' temporal,

time is defined according to its relation to an elementary part, the now, which itself is affected - as if it were not already temporal - by a time which negates it in determining it as a past now or a future now. The nun, the element of time, in this sense is not in itself temporal. It is temporal only in becoming temporal, that is, in ceasing to be, in passing over to no-thingness in the form of being-past or being-future.279

The trace of this absence, of what is not, constitutes also the photographic referent, for if we consider the process of taking a photograph it implies that the very moment when the photographer activates the shutter, the present captured is marked by what

277 Ibid., p. 39 278 Ibid., p. 40 279 Ibid. 97 will be no longer present, in other words by nonbeing, by what is not. To put it another way, in order to be an instant that has been frozen, the instant must be divisible, it must be thought of something that is not marked by identity, but by difference, alterity. In order to be frozen and seen the instant presumes a present-other that is not its identical-present, but a present that is not yet. We can only see photographs because they have captured moments that can no longer be, a state of affairs that in its temporariness is marked by the change that will transform it into past. The division between the present that in order to be captured must be marked by the 'first and last time of the shot'.280 Therefore, in photography the punctuality of the photographic present assumes that what is present in front of the camera is marked by the absence of what is yet to come. Second, by approaching time from a spatial perspective, and saying that it is a linear succession of instant-points, we are generating another paradox, a line can be represented as an 'order of coexistences',281 whereas time is an 'order of successions'.282 That means that time can only be understood as succession of instants that in order to be must destroy each other, we could not have, indeed two instants that coincide, each now must destroy the previous one in order to come to existence as present. Derrida criticises the view according to which it is possible to understand time as a line made up of points that coexist together as singularities. As he explains,

The relationship of points between themselves cannot be the same as that of the nows between themselves. Points do not destroy each other reciprocally. But if the present now were not annulled by the following now, it would coexist with it, which is impossible. Even if it were annulled only by a now very distant from it, it would have to exist with all the intermediate nows, which are infinite (indeterminate: apeiros) in number; and this too is impossible. A now cannot coexist, as a current and present now, with another now as such.283

280 Derrida J., Copy, Archive, Signature, p. 8 281 Derrida J., 'Ousia and Grammê', p. 54 282 Ibid. 283 Ibid. 98 The photographic present confirms the second contradiction, insofar as each photograph is marked by 'onceness', namely by the fact that what is photographed cannot be taken twice. Even though it is possible to take two photographs in rapid succession, each of them represents a different state of affairs, for each click of the shutter annuls the previous one. Each photograph portrays an instant that represents an 'undecomposable simplicity'284 of what can be shot only one single time. In a split second, indeed, the light can change, and the referent might change. If we go back to the high-speed photograph of a bullet, each instant photographed will annul the previous, and the bullet will have each time a different position and exposure to light. Third, if we analyse the spatial characteristics of a line, we realise that each point gives the line its continuity and at the same time its limit. Each point is indeed a limited part of that line that has itself a beginning and an end. Therefore, each part of this line is a limited part. Now, if we understand the instant-now as a point that composes a linear representation of time, we are affirming that each instant-now in its limited character of part of that linear representation has a beginning and an end, and as such would mark time's origin and end. That would arrest the becoming of time, for each instant-now would be an arrested limit. As Derrida writes,

The line is a continuity of points. And each point is both an end and a beginning for each part. Thus, one could be led to believe that the now is to time what the point is to line. And that the essence of time can pass, intact and undamaged, into its linear representation, into the continuous, extended unfolding of punctuality. . .The spatial and linear representation, at least in this form, is inadequate.285

If the now was a limited point that remains limited within its spatial beginning and end, then, each photograph would be a limited part of time that would have no future. It would be as if the instant captured has no further development, but it remains self- contained within a present. Instead, the photographic present is marked by the trace of future that opens up the referent to what cannot be arrested and limited. The punctuality and the onceness must be understood indeed as attributes of a present

284 Derrida J., Copy, Archive, Signature, p. 8 285 Derrida J., 'Ousia and Grammê', p. 59 99 that does not arrest, limit, or fragment time, but that is marked by the becoming that the trace of what is not yet implies. This is evident in the work of a Hungarian photographer, Kerényi Zoltán.286 In his work 'Budapest, V. Váci utca 22, 1973-2013' below, we see two photographs of the same place taken in different moments, which have been juxtaposed.

287 Zoltán K., '1973 - 2013 – Budapest'

In Zoltán's photograph, it is possible to see the becoming of the referent that a photographic work implies. The photo taken in the 70's is marked by the trace of the change, or the becoming that, as soon as the photo has been taken, already haunts the referent, in this case the particular location in Budapest. With this kind of photography, the ordinary model of time based on the linear succession of presents/points, or grammê, appears to be inadequate. The conceptualisation of the present as a point seems to deprive time of its dynamic flow, fragmenting it into three tenses, namely past, present, and future. Each tense appears to be a point-instant that in its fragmented and limited punctuality resembles the way we use time in language through the past, present, and future tense of verbs. Each tense, indeed, is marked by a singularity that fragments time into what was, is, and will

286 Kerényi Zoltán is an architect and photographer from Budapest, Hungary. He has created an online exhibition of photographs based on the juxtaposition of past and present. The exhibition is titled Ablak a múltra, an Hungarian expression that means 'window to the past.' See Zoltán K., Ablak a múltra, see http://ablakamultra.hu/, accessed August 2013 287 Photo taken from Jazlyn, 'Stunning Past Meets Present Photographs by Kerényi Zoltán', see The Photomag – Photography Magazine website, June 03, 2013, http://www.thephotomag.com/2013/06/stunning-past-meets-present-photographs.html, accessed August 2013 100 be, and seems to limit and contain the event in a temporal dimension that is constituted by a beginning and an end.288 We need a different characterisation of time, which accounts for dynamic becoming. Photography can do this if it shows heterogeneity that supposes a 'differing/deferring' and 'differentiated duration'289; that is, the present, which remains the main temporal dimension linked to consciousness and understanding, must be thought in relation to its other and to what it is differed and deferred, namely what is not; that is, the past and the future. This will be examined further in the next section through a discussion of the heterogeneity of the present. But first, let me take into account Derrida's answer to the contradictory character of the spatial representation of time, which is helpful to understand the differentiated duration of the present. Derrida argues that the points constituting the grammê cannot be understood as limited and arrested; rather they are part of a line that is characterized by an ongoing becoming.290 Let me recall his words,

What is rejected, then, is not the grammê as such, but the grammê as a series of points, as a composition of parts each of which would be an arrested limit. But if one considers now that the point, as limit, does not exist in act, is not (present), exists only potentially and by accident, takes only from the line in act, then it is not impossible to preserve the analogy of the grammê: on the condition that one does not take it as a series of potential limits, but as a line in act, as a line thought on the basis of its extremities (ta eskhata) and not of its parts.291

What appears to be wrong, then, is not the characterisation of time as a grammê, as a line, rather it is the characterisation of time as a line composed by instant-nows in act; that is, parts that are self-present, with a beginning and an end, which follow a telos, driven by a teleological determination, and which can be taken in their singularity as single parts, without affecting the whole. According to Derrida, the presence of each point is always to be deferred to the line as becoming, and which itself is not self-

288 Le Poidevin R., 'Egocentric and Objective Time', in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 99, 1999, pp. 19–36 289 Derrida J., Copy, Archive, Signature, p. 8 290 Punday D., 'Derrida in the World', p. 6 291 Derrida J., 'Ousia and Grammê', p. 60 101 present but potential and multiple. The line is not a finite form or act, it is potentiality or ongoing becoming. That is visible in the case of photographs, for, as I have said, in order to be seen, to be developed and iterable, the photographic present cannot be distinguished as single point that arrests time, but it defers to becoming; that is, to the moment of becoming-visible. In order to be captured, the instant must be divisible and must differentiate itself from what it is not; or in other words, each instant needs to be annulled by the successive instant, during which it will be seen. Such a characterisation of time makes it dynamic, insofar as it expands the present into the past and into the future; that is, into a dimension of time that is not.

2.3.2. Expanding/Expanded Punctuality

The essay Athens, Still Remains might be acknowledged as the most temporal of the writings that Derrida dedicated to photography.292 It is difficult to define this essay, whether as a commentary to the photographs of contemporary or late-twentieth- century Athens by Bonhomme, or as a philosophical essay that seems to translate Derrida's critique of the 'now theory'293 and his view of temporality, into the photographic portrayal of a city that remains one of the most significant symbols of philosophy. Bonhomme took the 34 photographs over a period of some fifteen years in Athens, and asked Derrida if he would write a preface to the book containing the photographs.294 Derrida agreed and then traveled to Greece and Athens in the summer 1996, accompanied by Bonhomme's photographs. As Naas remarks, instead of taking photographs of his own, Derrida traveled with photographs taken by another to guide him, 'knowing that was up to him to comment on and provide the words that would then accompany them into the future'.295 The essay that Derrida writes becomes an analysis of photography as a means of questioning the characterisation of the present as a point. Derrida begins with a single sentence that itself seems like a

292 Naas M., 'Now smile: Recent Developments in Jacques Derrida's Work on Photography', in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 110, No. 1, 2011, p. 206 293 Ibid. 294 Ibid., p. 207 295 Ibid. 102 snapshot. It takes him by surprise, like a flash that sheds light on something, namely Nous nous devons à la mort, 'We owe ourselves to death'.296 This sentence will be recalled throughout the essay. It bears the trace of a future that is already inscribed within the present photographed by Bonhomme, and within Derrida's present, as he visits the location of those photographs. In the light of that sentence, central to Derrida's analysis of the temporality of photography is its relation to death. According to Derrida each of Bonhomme's photographs 'signifies death without saying it',297 for each photograph recalls a death that, as he continues, 'has already occurred, or one that is promised or threatening'.298 Many places and people portrayed in Bonhomme's photographs have disappeared, or are threatened by the necessity of a future that cannot be avoided. In this sense, the book of photographs that Derrida is commenting upon, becomes, as he calls it, a book of 'epitaphs', which bears or wears 'mourning [porte le deuil] in photographic effigy'.299 The mourning inscribed within photography evokes the becoming that is inscribed in the unavoidable necessity of the future death. This means that the instant captured, despite its immobility, is already characterised by the movement towards what is not yet, which is to say the inevitable end. This movement cannot be arrested by the photographic present understood as point, or by the now that has been witnessed and shot by the photographer. Rather, it must be seen in the light of the three dimensions of past, present and future as coexistent parts that cannot be split in self-indentical singularities. In Athens, Still Remains, it is possible to perceive this constant connection between past, present, and future. Derrida highlights how in Bonhomme's photographs one finds recorded and archived three different but interconnected temporal frames of Athens. First, the 'mourning for an ancient, archeological, or mythological Athens,. . . and Athens that is gone and that shows the body of its ruins'.300 First, the past, then, the 'monumental signs of death'301 that the photographer witnesses during his present, and that are the traces of a past that was a

296 Derrida J., Athens, Still Remains, p. 1 297 Ibid., p. 2 298 Ibid. 299 Ibid. 300 Ibid., p. 27 301 Ibid., p. 6 103 present, which already bore the trace of the future-present, and of its becoming, when someone would have witnessed and recorded another present marked by the trace of that becoming. Second, we find the 'living'302 present that Bonhomme witnesses in front of the camera, and that by the time Derrida goes back to those places, and by the time of the book's publication have already disappeared. A present or a now that, in manifesting itself as a frozen part of the becoming, is already transited into what is not; that is, in its differentiated 'yet to come'. Third, the future or the sign of the 'anticipated mourning', which belongs to the photographs and is marked by the use of the expression 'will have to die'. Bonhomme's photographs, then, become the means that Derrida uses to show how the now, as a point that can be captured, isolated, archived, and repeated remains part of a temporal system that becomes, rather than a system composed by isolated points that arrest it. In this sense, the sentence 'we owe ourselves to death' brings about the concept of 'delay', which besides being a mechanism involved in photography, as the time lag that divides the moment of the click from the moment when the photograph will be seen, becomes also a philosophical concept that works as a connection between photography and différance. The temporal becoming in its entirety, indeed, is characterised by the fact that what will happen as future, being already inscribed in the 'living' present, is to be understood as delayed future, as something that is already part of temporality and that is only delayed. In Positions, Derrida affirms that first différance refers to 'the (active and passive) movement that consists in deferring by means of delay. . .',303 referring to the temporal delay coming from the verb 'to defer' that takes place during the movement of signification that différance produces, which I have discussed earlier. Let me recall here just how the meaning of a word is never immediately present, but is always deferred by a detour that comes from the trace that each word has of its opposite, as we saw in the case of the word 'supplement', which means 'to add', but also 'to take over' and 'to substitute'. Derrida takes into account the case of Socrates, a philosopher linked both to Athens and to delay, for Socrates wandered through some of the streets and public

302 Naas M., 'Now smile', p. 211 303 Derrida J., Positions, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 8 104 buildings of Athens photographed by Bonhomme, and he was also judged by Athenians and condemned to death. However, he was not immediately executed, but his death was delayed, for nothing other than chance: the sailing of a ship to Delos for a religious mission.304 Therefore, the symbol of philosophy becomes also the symbol of the delay of an announced death, a sentence that has been pronounced and is effective, but that has been delayed. Delay, then, is the concept that represents the unfolding of time. As I discussed earlier, Derrida highlights how Bonhomme's photographs are characterised by the temporality of différance, which, in its becoming, marks the present of the photographer with the trace of a city in which the streets and buildings are the signs of something that has passed; a city that has become a monumental ruin and that one day will disappear. Photographs contain these traces and, in their punctuality and static representation, also become the means that allows us to rethink time in the light of a present that would be constituted only by means of 'difference and deferral, by means of différance'305. In other words, photography seems to offer something essential about the very temporality of deconstruction.

2.3.3. From Inheritance to Responsibility

Derrida's approach to temporality in photography brings about the connection between photography and the concepts of 'inheritance' and 'responsibility'. Photographs, as the discussion of Bonhomme has shown, by embodying traces of past and future, can be viewed as inheriting a past in the form of images and scenes that have been witnessed and that speak of a past that is no longer. Because they involve the inheritance of a past, photographs also evoke a responsibility for what is yet to come. Moreover, by inheriting the past of a photograph we become part of the future that will emerge from that photograph. In her essay 'Derrida and the Extraordinary Responsibility of Inheriting the Future- to-come', Diprose discusses Derrida's concepts of inheritance and responsibility, taking into account what she calls the 'aporetic structure' of inheritance; that is, an inheritance that, although by definition is linked to what was or to the past, at the

304 As discussed in Naas M., 'Now smile', p. 215 305 Ibid., p. 218 105 same time is linked to the future and the responsibility that it brings about.306 This responsibility involves an active intervention, which is to say cannot be simply limited to a passive act of inheritance. Rather, it involves an active performance that aims to question our assumptions about what we are inheriting, and the link between that past and the future that is yet to come. Without considering the responsibility that is linked to the future and that requires active intervention, the past would simply repeat itself. Let me translate the matter in photographic terms by considering the case of the picture of a glacier that has disappeared. What we are inheriting is a particular state of affairs; that is, a scene portraying a glacier as part of a determined landscape. The photographer witnesses and documents a state of affairs, and at the same time he or she is passing on something. Viewers will 'inherit' the photograph and take on the 'responsibility' that stems from that scene and is linked to the future to come. As we look at the photograph, we are aware that the glacier has disappeared. Besides the photograph of the glacier, indeed, there is another photograph taken decades after the first one, which portrays the same place without the glacier. A brief commentary explains that the reason behind the disappearance is to be ascribed to the increased temperature that has hit the area. Through the photographs, viewers receive a form of inheritance concerning our environment. We 'learn' that a glacier was there, where now we see only rocks. This means that the photographer's act of witnessing implies an act of inheritance of the state of affairs that he or she has witnessed; that is, in a delayed future, the photograph will be seen and the photographic referent will be inherited, known, even though it no longer exists. This is particularly evident in documentary photography, where the intent is to show that something happened and that the photographer witnessed an event that deserves to be archived and known or, in other words, inherited. At the same time, however, the inheritance of the past, through the photographs, invites viewers to consider the future and, returning to the case of the glacier, the potential effects that the increased temperature will produce. In this sense, viewers take on responsibility, insofar as they are encouraged to question their assumptions about past, future, and

306 Diprose R., 'Derrida and the Extraordinary Responsibility of Inheriting the Future-to-come', in Social Semiotics, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2006, p. 436 106 the progress of human society. Hence, the past that they inherit encourages them to be active, to perform, and to be engaged with the future whose traces are inscribed within those photographs. As Diprose says, an experience is in the first place 'a passive enactment and reaffirmation of meanings we have inherited', but experience is also and equally an 'active' opening onto a different future; that is, a critique of those meanings we have inherited.307 In this sense, what has been photographed becomes for the viewer an experience of what the photographer experienced; which is to say that photographs become a passive reaffirmation of an event that someone else has witnessed in the past. At the same time and more importantly, through that passive reaffirmation, the viewer is engaged in an active process of questioning that generates new meanings. If we consider the conventional approach to temporality, which appears to rely on the spatial approach that Derrida has challenged, as discussed earlier, we realise that such an approach appears to be blind to the dynamic force of becoming. It seems that the relevance and centrality of the present as closed, limited, punctual temporal dimension that, in its self-identity, forgets to be part of a temporal system that involves an ongoing becoming. Hence, a present, which is self-indentical, remains blind and deaf to the active intervention that the responsibility inscribed within the inheritance of the past requires. Let us consider the case of the photographs taken in concentration camps during the Second World War. The documentary character and the act of witnessing that we experience when we see them imply an act of inheritance of the emotional, political, and social meanings that have been captured together with people and places. At the same time, this inheritance of meanings opens our present to the future that is inscribed in those photographs, and that makes us actively involved. Derrida writes that one's heritage

also demands reinterpretation, critique, displacement, that is, an active intervention, so that a transformation worthy of the name might take place:

307 Ibid. 107 so that something might happen, an event, some history [de l'histoire], an unforeseeable future-to-come.308

Therefore, the aporetic structure of inheritance that we see in photography consists of the projection that the past has on the future through the present of the viewer who, by inheriting the past, is invited to transform the future. As Diprose argues, experience is 'also temporal: a response, while reaffirming the past, also contains something unique, extraordinary, a transformation of meaning toward an unpredictable future'.309 Because of its very witnessing nature, a photograph is never just a harmless image that can be seen only as an aesthetic medium; rather, we should never forget that a photograph is subject to what Derrida calls 'hyperaesthetics',310 which is to say that, as I have discussed earlier in this chapter, art will always be conditioned by non-art, or by the witnessing power of the camera. This is particularly true when we look at photojournalism and documentary photographs, rather than artistic photography, for the witnessing character and the 'hyperaesthetic' elements captured in a photograph are more concerned with the dimensions of development and effects; that is, with the future. By inheriting the past portrayed in the photographs taken in Auschwitz and in many other Nazi camps, I become involved in a past that, although I have not experienced directly, maintains a connection with my present and, above all, warns me about my future, making me responsible for defending democracy, justice, and equality. If we are not alert, or if we do not take on the responsibility stemming from the inheritance of that past, the mistakes done by the Nazis might be done again. Therefore, what characterises responsibility, as Diprose says, is not 'certainty, but questioning',311 which is to say that, in its uncertainty and in its delayed occurrence, the future requires an active role that is not chained to what has been already decided, but remains open to all the possibilities that our responsibilities entail. The process of questioning a photograph is, in fact, an opening the photograph to all that it is not.

308 Derrida J., Roudinesco E., For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004, p. 4 309 Diprose R., 'Derrida and the Extraordinary Responsibility of Inheriting the Future-to-come', p. 437 310 Derrida J., Copy, Archive, Signature, p. 10 311 Diprose R., 'Derrida and the Extraordinary Responsibility of Inheriting the Future-to-come', p. 440 108 Chapter 3 Deconstruction, Architecture, and Incompleteness

3.1. Introduction

Architects take on a very peculiar role in the building of buildings. They perform a double task: on the one hand, they are committed to the creation of forms that will shape space in new ways; on the other hand, they are committed to the search for functionality. Given this double requirement, this chapter aims to enquire into the creative effects that deconstruction produces in architecture. As I have discussed at the very beginning of this thesis, in an interview with Brunette and Wills, Derrida explains that the deconstructive discourse is not limited to written, literary, or philosophical texts, rather it can be applied to 'non-discursive or discursive institutions'.312 Derrida continues by saying that, at its most effective, deconstruction deals with 'non-discursive' disciplines, such as architecture. Understood as visual art, architectural objects may be viewed as silent, characterised by self-referential and logocentric presence devoid of any textual, discursive, or communicative element. Derrida argues that we shall find the possibility of beginning a discourse that will challenge such a conception of still, motionless, and material monumentality, and instead foster performativity and transformation. The relationship between deconstruction and architecture is not new. Rather, it has been explored from both the philosophical and architectural sides. This study will take into account some of the relevant architectural works that are the result of the exchange between Derrida and some of the most known architects, such as Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind. As I am not an architect, I will limit the analysis to the philosophical side of the matter. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, the relationship between deconstruction, as it applies to texts, and a non-representational and non-discursive practice, such as architecture, requires an investigation into the similarities between language and architecture. This leads to an understanding of the communicative

312 Derrida J., 'The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida', p. 14 109 properties of architecture; that is, a 'textual' approach that will facilitate the translation of the deconstructive discourse into the architectural one. The first part will then conclude with a discussion of Derrida's 'axiom of incompleteness' and Tschumi's notion of 'architecture as event', two notions that will shift the analysis to the practical and creative outcomes fostered by deconstruction. The second part of the chapter will focus on the analysis and discussion of Tschumi's work Parc de La Villette in Paris, which Derrida analysed in the essay 'Point de Folie – Maintenant L'Architecture'. As Tschumi's project is considered one of the most important examples of deconstruction in architecture, it is worth consideration, despite its age (the project began in 1982 and was completed in 1998). Finally, this chapter focuses on the particular transformative and creative character of portable architecture, by investigating the correlation between the creative character of deconstructive concepts, such as 'freeplay', 'parergon', and the 'axiom of incompleteness', and the transformative features that can be ascribed specifically to tents. Tents will be analysed as a sort of architectural project that remains constantly open and is never accomplished, and that is linked to creativity, performance, and transformation. All these aspects will indeed be evident when tents are considered in the light of nomadic cultures, such as the African Gabra culture. In those cultures, indeed, we find at work a form of 'architectural narrative' that stems from the ritual of assembling, disassembling, and moving tents.

3.2. Architecture, Philosophy, Language, and the Unfinished Tower

3.2.1. Between Syntax and Semantics: Architecture and Textuality

In order to establish the relationship between architecture and language we need to take into account the unique relationship that we establish with architectural structures. Architecture marks, identifies, and establishes a place. It transforms space into a place, and it does this by framing space, encapsulating it, and differentiating the outside from the inside. 'What is architecture most fundamentally but the demarcation of an inside from an outside?' asks Karen Franck.313 From birth, our

313 Franck K. A., 'Inside, Outside, and Inside Out', in Franck K. A., Lepori R. B., Architecture from the Inside Out, Chichester, Wiley-Academy, 2007, p. 18 110 location in space seems to be always marked by our being inside or outside a place. In fact, birth is the first and most important passage from the inside of the maternal womb to the outside of the world. According to this view, it might be argued that the transformation of space into place is linked to the fact that we frame space and 'activate' it by dwelling in it, or anyway by performing actions within it. Lineu Castello, reviewing the mythical and religious Creation narratives involving the concept of place, suggests that there is a link between place and order, limit, border, something that can be differentiated from the limitless and indefinite space.314 Looking at Plato's Timaeus, we find the two categories of chora, understood as a space of indefinite extension or region, and topos, which identifies a definite place, a finite location. According to Derrida, chora is an enigmatic space, an emptiness that generates and can be activated. Chora is an immense and indeterminate spatial receptacle in which a 'home' for all things can be provided.315 Topos, then, or the definite place, stems from the 'activation' of the indefinite spatial receptacle that architecture generates. Derrida argues, indeed, that the question of architecture is in fact

that of the place, of the taking place in space. The establishing of a place which didn't exist until then and is in keeping with what will take place there one day that is a place...It is not at all natural. The setting up of a habitable place is an event and obviously the setting up is always something technical. It invents something which didn't exist beforehand...316

The activation of space and the relationship that we establish with architectural structures lead to the concept of function, which is a crucial element in both the relationship between architecture and language, and the deconstructive approach to architecture, for there is a correlation between function and meaning. In his essay 'Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture', Umberto Eco argues that if we consider semiotics as a science studying cultural phenomena as if they were systems of signs, and if a system of signs can be understood as a form of

314 Castello L., Rethinking the Meaning of Place: Conceiving Place in Architecture-Urbanism, Farnham, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2010, p. 75 315 Derrida J., 'Chora', in Kipnis J., Leeser T. (eds), Chora L Works, New York, Monacelli Press, 1997, pp. 15–32 316 Derrida J., 'Architecture Where the Desire May Live', in Leach N. (ed.), Rethinking Architecture, p. 302 111 communication, one of the fields in which 'it will undoubtedly find itself most challenged is that of architecture'.317 Let us consider a very basic but at the same time very indicative example, that of a Stone Age man and woman who, driven by cold and rain and following the example of some animals, take shelter in a cave. Sheltered from the wind and rain, as Eco says, they examine the cave by daylight or (let us assume that they have already discovered fire) by the light of a fire. They start to look at the architectural elements of the cave, such as the amplitude of the vault, understanding it as the limit of an outside space, which is cut off, and as the beginning of an inside space, which is likely to evoke in them some 'unclear nostalgia for the womb', or 'feelings of protection'.318 Changing the perspective and going outside the cave, they reconsider it from that different position, seeing the entrance as the passage between outside and inside. At that point, the image of the inside with its entrance, vault, and walls of rock will become distinct from the outside, and says Eco,

[an] idea of the cave takes shape, which is useful at least as mnemonic device, enabling them to think of the cave later on as possible objective in case of rain; but it also enables [them] to recognize in another cave the same possibility of shelter found in the first one.319

The taking shape of the idea – that is, the emerging model or concept of the 'cave', which allows the man and woman to recognise caves in their various appearances – although it still belongs to single individuals, can be communicated to others by means, for example, of graphic signs. Eco puts the question in these terms:

At this point the drawing of a cave or the image of a cave in the distance becomes the communication of a possible function, and such it remains, even when there is neither fulfillment of the function nor a wish to fulfil it. What has happened, then, is what Roland Barthes is speaking about when he says that 'as soon as there is a society, every usage is converted into a sign of itself'.320 To use a spoon to get food to one's mouth is still, of course, the

317 Eco U., 'Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture', in Leach N. (ed.), Rethinking Architecture, p. 174 318 Ibid. 319 Ibid., p. 175 320 For more information see Barthes R., Elements of Sociology, New York, Hill and Wang, 1968 112 fulfillment of a function, through the use of an artifact that allows and promotes that function; yet to say that it 'promotes' the function indicates that the artifact serves a communicative function as well: it communicates the function to be fulfilled. Moreover, the fact that someone uses a spoon becomes, in the eyes of the society that observes it, the communication of a conformity by him to certain usages (as opposed to certain others, such as eating with one's hands or sipping food directly from a dish).321

Let us establish the first crucial point that stems from the conversion of the objects into signs accounted by Eco, namely the fact that we are in presence of a unique kind of object that can be inhabited or used. On the one hand, we have the two architectural elements of form and function; that is, the form of the cave or the form of the spoon, and, respectively, the function of sheltering or eating. On the other hand, we notice that when we convert those objects into signs for the purpose of communication, the meaning is linked to its function. In other words, the key aspect of functionality of architecture is in the living/dwelling of it, not in the designing or building of it. Let us draw a link now between architectural elements and linguistic categories so that we can distinguish a syntactical form, a signifier, that is the form of the cave, or the spoon, and at the same time find a semantic, a signified or meaning, linked to its function; that is, sheltering in the case of the cave, and eating in the case of the spoon. With the link above in mind, let us look at the case of another object, closer to our everyday life: a stair. Quoting the technical architectural definition, the syntactical characteristics of that particular structure might be defined as:

[an] inclined progression of rigid horizontal surfaces upward in which the distance between successive surfaces in elevation, r, is set somewhere between 5 and 9 inches, in which the surfaces have a dimension in the direction of the progression in plan, t, set somewhere between 16 and 8 inches, and in which there is little or no distance between, or overlapping of, successive surfaces when projected orthographically on a horizontal plane,

321 Eco U., 'Function and Sign', p. 175 113 the sum total (or parts) falling somewhere between 17 and 48 degrees from horizontal.322

Such a form, identified by these structural characteristics, denotes the possibility of going up; in other words, the form or the syntax of a stair denotes the semantics, the meaning or function of a stair as a possibility of going up. As Eco argues, we can work out and recognise this code as operative even if no one is going up the stair at present and even though, in theory, no one might ever go up it again.323 Thereby, we can deduce that, despite its non-representational and non-discursive character, architecture is characterised by a communicative property that unveils an interesting link with language. First, indeed, we can locate a syntactical element in the architectural forms; second, we can discern a semantic element in the function linked to the behaviour that the form implies. This brings us to the conclusion that in architectural terms, there is a correspondence between meaning and function. The key point here is that the conversion of architecture into signs requires that we inhabit it; we transform it into places where the most important events of our lives take place. Heidegger's essay 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking', in this sense, explains that a building is a 'built thing', but not simply a 'thing' in the conventional sense of an 'unknown X to which perceptual properties are attached'.324 A building remains inseparable from its surrounding or its inhabitants. The act of building, according to Heidegger, is strictly connected with the act of dwelling.325 He also makes clear that man's relation to locations, and through locations to space, is indissolubly linked to its function of dwelling. As he says, the relationship between man and space is 'none other than dwelling'.326 This relationship makes the correspondence between meaning and function interestingly intricate. The activation of space, which we generate when we establish an architectural structure, opens the functional aspects of architecture to meanings

322 Ibid., p. 176 323 Ibid. 324 Heidegger M., 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking', in Poetry, Language, Thought, New York, Harper Colophon, 1971, pp. 152–153 325 Ibid., p. 149 326 Ibid., p. 157 114 that are linked to our inhabiting them. Diprose, in her analysis of Heidegger's essay, asserts that buildings provide

[an] anchor for the building of, first, the inhabitants' desires, aspirations, perceptions, and memories at a pre-reflective level, and, when the building recedes through habituation, it provides the ground for the emergence of more abstract capacities of measuring, valuing, and thinking. This is why loss of a building and things that have participated in the building of one's dwelling can strike at the core of one's being.327

In this sense, Diprose says, buildings make dwelling an 'open' function, in the sense that dwelling is a dynamic 'happening' or an 'event'; what she calls 'a double process of bringing to presence and concealment; an undetermined, open coming together and dispersal of various elements of mutual belonging'.328 This view becomes crucial in a deconstructive discourse, insofar as it opens the correspondence between function and meaning to a transformative perspective. In the light of this, let us compare the act of building with the act of writing. In Rethinking Architecture, Neil Leach introduces Derrida's essays about architecture by pointing out that Derrida sees architecture as 'a form of writing'.329 According to Derrida, indeed, architecture cannot be understood only about bricks and mortar, and despite having a character of discipline that brings forth and produces something by means of a techne, it cannot not stop at that. Rather, architecture is characterised by something else that resembles what takes place in the case of texts, where writer and reader intertwine in a way that, as we saw in the discussion of the deconstructive reading in jazz music, generates a plurality of interpretations, and challenges the view that the understanding of texts can be anchored to a fixed meaning. In the same way, architectural objects engage architects and dwellers in an interrelation that opens the function/meaning to new possibilities. According to the function of dwelling, architecture cannot be limited to the mere satisfaction of human needs, but involves also a transmission of meanings that transforms buildings into a 'text' that can be read.

327 Diprose R., 'Building and Belonging Amid the Plight of Dwelling', in Angelaki, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2011, p. 62 328 Ibid. 329 Leach N., 'Jacques Derrida', in Leach N. (ed.), Rethinking Architecture, p. 300 115 If we delve into the etymology of the term 'architecture', we find out that there is a close connection between the practices of building and writing. Arguably, there is a common root between the words 'architecture' and 'text'. Looking at the word 'architecture', the prefix 'arche-' delineates the first, primary, and foundational condition with regard to the word following the prefix, as in 'archetypical'.330 Further, there is an affinity between 'tecture' or 'texture', and the Greek term tekton, which means builder or carpenter, and which relates also to the term tekhne as art. Indeed, the words 'technical', 'tectonic', and 'texture' share the same root with the word 'text'.331 Architects, then, become the masters of a particular tekhne that deals with ideas, writing, and construction; as such, they are also a kind of mediator between ideas and their translation into physical constructs. We can see this connection between tekhne, tekton, and text in Plato's Republic. There, Plato sets up an opposition between the philosopher, who loves wisdom and has access to the world of ideas, and the tekton, the craftsman, who builds copies of those ideas.332 The builder, then, is able to translate ideas into material forms, as a writer is able to transform abstract ideas into graphic signs. While, according to the previous account, architects translate ideas from the abstract world of thinking into the physical world of architecture, the function of dwelling that their works take on fills the syntax of architectural forms with meanings that are generated by what Diprose calls the 'intertwining of the ontological and the concrete actuality of buildings',333 which, as I have discussed earlier, makes our experience of building different from other objects. This is the premise to a deconstructive discourse in architecture; a discourse that leads to the questioning of the relationship between form and meaning, or function of architectural objects, so that the traditional way of understanding them as forms that produce a predetermined function, and that communicate a predetermined meaning, will be challenged and exposed to the effects of the new and the unexpected that creativity generates.

330 Coyne R., Derrida for Architects, London and New York, Routledge, 2011, p. 3 331 Ibid., p. 34 332 Plato, The Republic of Plato, London, Oxford University Press, 1941, pp. 331–332 333 Diprose R., 'Building and Belonging Amid the Plight of Dwelling', p. 59 116 Although the concept of deconstruction, in architectural terms, evokes the disassembling of something that has been assembled, when we come to its sense in the architectural discourse, we need to refer to its constructive character. This resembles and evokes the sense we find in texts, where the deconstructive reading opens up meaning to new perspectives and new approaches, which involve the reader in creating new interpretative paths. Derrida argues that there is nothing more architectural than deconstruction, while also affirming that there is nothing less architectural. He writes:

Architectural thinking can only be deconstructive in the following sense: as an attempt to visualize that, which establishes the authority of the architectural concatenation in philosophy. From this point we can go back to what connects deconstruction with writing: its spatiality, thinking in terms of a path, of the opening up of a way which - without knowing where it will lead to - inscribes its traces...This writing is truly like a labyrinth since it has neither beginning nor end. One is always on the move.334

Let me consider the example of two architects whose works focus on the analogy between architecture and textuality: Eisenman and Libeskind. They operate by taking into consideration the textual aspect of architecture, and by putting at work in a very creative way a deconstructive approach that aims to question the correlation between form and function that traditionally has organised architecture. They try to open architectural objects to new meanings not necessarily linked to their forms. We saw earlier how architecture is characterised by a one-to-one correlation between form and function. We saw indeed that the form 'cave' denotes the function 'sheltering'. The correlation form/function, according to Eisenaman, is the ground which traditional architecture relies on. And, according to his opinion, this is also its very limit. Hence, relying on Derrida's approach to meaning, he tries to imitate, in architecture, what happens in terms of meaning in literature and poetry. When we read William Shakespeare, says Eisenman, we can enjoy his simple literary style, and we can experience a vast set of human emotions like compassion, pity, love, anger, and so on. To do this, we move beyond the literal meaning of words,

334 Derrida J., 'Architecture Where the Desire May Live', p. 303 117 creating a rupture between the sign and its meaning. If we consider the word 'wolf', for instance, it describes a particular type of animal, but we can use it to describe a person who chases women, as well. However, this latter description requires a rupture between the sign and its meaning. This is possible because language has a 'symbolic connotation'335 that does not rely on the same strong one-to-one correspondence existing in architecture. It is this connotation that makes 'opaque'336 the transparent relationship between sign and meaning, an opacity that allows language to open itself up to a plurality of meanings. As Eisenman says, 'When we read literature, like Shakespeare, we are not reading for clarity but rather for the possible opacity in the language.'337 Differently from language, in architecture sign and meaning/function appear to be an inseparable fusion that has produced a rigid system of interpretation, according to which, as we saw in Eco, we have a clear and immediate perception of the meaning/function just correlating it to the form of the architectural objects. It is for this reason, Eisenman argues, that architecture has always been understood as a 'service'.338 Thus, Eisenman pulls apart the relation between form and function/meaning, seeking what he calls a 'displacement'339. He suggests that a building must function, but it does not have to look functional,

a building has to stand up, but it does not have to look like it stands up. And when it does not look like it stands up, or it does not look like it functions, then it functions and stands differently.340

In his early works, particularly influenced by deconstruction, Eisenman deals with the house, which assumes an exemplar role in the question of space and place, as it is associated with the very functioning of architecture as service linked with comfort and shelter. He creates a series of numbered houses, from I to XIa, the purpose of which is to generate disorientation and displacement, so that the correlation between form and function is constantly challenged, and the resulting experience that dwellers face

335 Eisenman P., 'Strong Form, Weak Form', in Noever P., Architecture in Transition: Between Deconstruction and New Modernism, Munich, Prestel, 1991, p. 33 336 Ibid. 337 Ibid. 338 Ibid., p. 39 339 Ibid., p. 34 340 Ibid., p. 39 118 resembles that of interpreting a literary text. The houses look like rectilinear boxes, coolly rational, purposely generating anxiety and symbolising the societal alienation of human being. The extreme rationality wants to challenge human sensibilities of elegance, beauty, and comfort, traditionally associated with the figure of the house. At the same time, Eisenman wants to draw attention not only to the physical elements that are present as structure of the house, but also to the empty space that, in his view, is as crucial as the structure. Indeed, Eisenamn challenges not only our view of the inside of the houses, but the outside too. His houses have been built in different environmental contexts, so that one can see them in the country or in the city, but always experiencing a sense of spatial dislocation. In front of them, the dweller is encouraged to ask the questions: 'Is that a house? How can I inhabit such a house?' For instance, in House II, as the picture below illustrates, we can undoubtedly experience equally the presence of the solid columns and walls, and the absence that the void in the empty space, which becomes also an essential part of the building, generates. The house is situated in Hardwick, Vermont, on a 100-acre hilltop with panoramic views extending for 20 miles in three directions. The fragmentation of the space, through the alternation of solidity and emptiness, is an attempt to stimulate the presence of trees, which are non-existent on the barren site, and to provide a transition from the extroverted life of summer, symbolised by emptiness, to the introverted security of fireplace, symbolised by solidity of close spaces. The rural position of House II is due to its framed absence that could not find acceptance in the fullness of the city.

119

Eisenman P., 'House II', Hardwick, 1969-70. Photo by Norman McGrath 341

Moving on to Libeskind’s work, he compares architecture to James Joyce's texts. He says, in effect, that in his works he tries to emulate writers.342 A brief examination of his redesign of the Dresden Museum of Military History, in the picture below, completed in 2011, helps to reveal what he means by that.

Libeskind D., 'Museum of Military History', Dresden, 2011. Photo by Bitter Bredt343

341 Photo taken from Brillembourg C., 'Peter Eisenman', see Bombsite website, 2011, http://bombsite.com/issues/117/articles/5991, accessed September 2013 342 Libeskind D., 'Architecture is a Language', see TED website, September 8, 2012, http://www.tedxdublin.com/all-tedxdublin-2012-videos/, accessed July 2013 343 Photo taken from Studio Daniel Libeskind, 'Dresden's Military History Museum / Daniel Libeskind', see ArchDaily website, October 14, 2011, http://www.archdaily.com/?p=172407, accessed September 2013 120 The building was built as an armoury during the period 1873–1876 and became a museum in 1897. Since its foundation, the Dresden Museum of Military History has been a Saxon armoury and museum, a Nazi museum, a Soviet museum, and an East German museum. Today, it is the military history museum of a unified and democratic Germany, its location outside the historic centre of Dresden having allowed the building to survive the allied bombing campaign at the end of the Second World War.344 With Libeskind's intervention, the form of the old structure has been disrupted by a new structure that appears to be completely unrelated to the previous style and form. Libeskind achieves this by inscribing literally a sort of arrow pointing towards the area of the city where the bombing of the Second World War took place, creating a space for reflection and an anthropological consideration of the nature of violence and war and the human and societal impulses that give rise to them. Arguably, the disruption of the symmetry of the old neoclassical style emulates the disruption in the history of Germany both militarily and culturally speaking. Libeskind is not merely building a form, he is creating a space to prompt reflection. As a writer translates his ideas into words, the architect converts his ideas into forms that shape space, and besides having the function of housing people, in this case the visitors of the museum, they invite to be involved in the production of meaning. In this sense, then, a silent and monumental structure becomes a sort of 'talkative' object that, like a text, encourages a reflection, a discourse on how we experience and interpret it. Having outlined these connections between language and architecture, I will now delve deeper into the outcomes of deconstruction, in terms of creative engagement between architects, users, and architectural objects. I will do so by introducing a mythic architectural figure that joins together deconstruction and architecture, namely the Tower of Babel.

344 Studio Daniel Libeskind, 'Military History Museum', see Studio Daniel Libeskind website, October 2011, http://daniel-libeskind.com/projects/military-history-museum, accessed September 2013 121 3.2.2. The Tower of Babel: Incompleteness and Event

The Tower of Babel is an architectural figure characterised primarily by incompleteness. The Bible describes how, after the great flood, survivors who spoke a single language, and held the same values and culture came to the land of Shinar, where they resolved to build a city, including a tower with its top in the heavens. But God was upset about that and scattered them upon the face of the Earth, confusing their languages, so that they could not intercommunicate. 345 They stopped building the city, which was called Babel, and which now implies a state of confusion.346 The tower remained incomplete, and the failure of those who attempted to build it marks the birth of multiple languages and cultures. We have, then, an architectural figure, that of the tower, the function of which is to stand tall above all the other edifices and assure control over an area, so that no one can hide and no enemy can approach the fortress without being spotted. In this sense, the tower becomes the symbol of the imposition of a single language, a single culture; in short, the negation of plurality. The solid, tall, monumental presence of a tower resembles the logocentric truth that, as I already discussed throughout the previous chapters, is the target of Derrida's criticism of the Western metaphysical tradition. Logocentrism, the understanding of 'Being as presence',347 is analogous to what we experience in front of an architectural object, such as a tower. In fact, Derrida describes architecture as the 'last fortress of metaphysics',348 for in his view the monumental presence that marks architectural objects actualises Being as presence. According to this view, we might agree with the metaphoric representation reported by Mark Wigley, who says that philosophy might be acknowledged as the 'construction' of propositions that 'stand up'; the ability of its 'constructs' to stand is determined by the condition of the ground, its 'supporting' presence.349 In fact, the use of architectural metaphors is frequent in all the history of philosophy. However, the Tower of Babel is an unfinished architectural structure. It is the symbol of an incomplete architecture, and as such it becomes the architectural

345 Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version, New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 2007, p. 9 346 Derrida J., Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume I, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 192 347 Derrida J., 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', p. 353 348 Derrida J., 'Point de Folie – Maintenant L'Architecture', p. 309 349 Wigley M., The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1993, p. 9 122 metaphor that can designate the entrance of deconstruction in the architectural discourse, or to put it another way, the Tower of Babel can symbolise the architectural character of deconstruction.350 In the essay 'Des Tours de Babel', Derrida says that the tower of Babel does not merely figure the 'irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalising, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics'.351 The completion of the tower is forever deferred and the architectural project is never achieved; its unfinished character marks the victory of plurality over individualism or sameness, and this will make the metaphysical and logocentric truth impossible to be grasped. The 'edifice' – in other words, the architectural realisation of the original project, of the recovery of the original truth – is suspended in a 'scene of endless rebuilding'.352 As Wigley says, discussing the metaphoric use of the tower to represent philosophy, 'the building project of philosophy continues, but its completion is forever deferred'.353 Insofar as the presence of the tower is deferred, the Tower of Babel exemplifies how deconstruction generates the deferral of the function/meaning in architecture. As I will discuss in the next part, deconstructive architecture renders the 'meaning' of buildings 'incomplete'. Their functionality, their being founded on the principle 'form follows function', will be displaced and deferred. This will open architectural meaning to the contingency of a constant change, for the visitor, user, or observer will be directly involved in finishing, completing, and giving meaning and function to the incompleteness of the 'deconstructed' architectural structure. In this sense, as I will show in the case of Parc de La Villette, although the form or syntax of the structure appears to be completed, its function/meaning or semantics will remain open to unpredictability and transformation. In his reflection on the fate of the city of Prague after the fall of the Wall, Derrida says:

350 As Derrida explains in his 'Roundtable on translation', the Tower of Babel gives a good idea of what deconstruction is: 'an unfinished edifice whose half-completed structures are visible, letting one guess the scaffolding behind them.' See Derrida J., 'Roundtable on Translation', in McDonald C. V. (ed.), The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, New York, Schocken Books, 1985, p. 101 351 Derrida J., Psyche, p. 191 352 Wigley M., The Architecture of Deconstruction, p. 24 353 Ibid. 123 What makes possible the living community of the generations who live in and construct the city, who are permanently exposed to the stress of even projecting a city to be de- or re-constructed, is the paradoxical renunciation of the absolute tower, of the total city which reaches the sky: it is the acceptance of what a logician would perhaps call the axiom of incompleteness. A city is a set which must remain indefinitely and structurally non-saturable, open to its own transformation, to the augmentations which alter and displace as little as possible the memory of its patrimony. A city must remain open to what it knows about what it doesn't yet know about what it will be. It is necessary to inscribe, and to thematise, the respect for this non-knowledge in architectural and urbanistic science or know-how. Otherwise, what would one do other than apply programs, totalise, saturate, suture, asphyxiate?354

The axiom of incompleteness makes deconstructive architecture an open project that dislocates its monumental presence, by generating the possibility of change and of what is yet to come, the non-foreseeable completion that comes from the displacement of the closed and finished building, the function and meaning of which have been realised according to what had been planned. In other words, the axiom of incompleteness transforms architecture in event. Interestingly, in Negotiations, Derrida defines 'event' as 'that which comes [vient], comes to pass [advient], or supervenes [survient]',355 drawing the connection between event and the coming of the unpredictable, the future; this, as we saw in the discussion of temporality and photography, marks the coming of the other. In these terms, according to Derrida, an event is

another name for that which, in what arrives, one can neither reduce nor deny. It is another name for experience itself, which is always experience of the other. . .The coming of the event is what cannot and should not be prevented; it is another name for the future itself. . .One must think the event from the 'come [viens]', and not the reverse. . .Only if there is this

354 Derrida J., 'Generations of a City', p. 16 355 Derrida J., Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 94 124 'come' can there be an experience of the coming, of the event, of what arrives and therefore of what, because it comes from the other, cannot be anticipated.356

This horizon of unpredictability, which marks the notion of event, is also what opens architecture to the active engagement of users, dwellers, and observers who, in their experience of architectural objects, are actively engaged in the unpredictable outcome that the incompleteness generates. In his essay 'Spaces and Events',357 Tschumi focuses on the concept of 'program' as essential component of architectural projects. By 'program', Tschumi means the potential performances or events that can take place within the architectural space. He criticises architects who see their role as mere decorators, as such a role avoids their responsibilities related to the events and activities that take place in the spaces they design. He also criticises the critics who contribute to the understanding of architecture in terms that concentrate on surface readings, signs, metaphors, and others modes of presentation, to the exclusion of spatial or programmatic concerns.358 The axiom of incompleteness can be seen at work in Tschumi's notion of architecture as event, which became one of the crucial elements in his project Parc de La Villette. As he explains in an interview, the history of architecture is a very static history, based on structure, solidity, and stillness.359 However, according to Tschumi, architecture cannot be dissociated from the events that happen in it. Thereby, his interdisciplinary interest brought him to start a new approach to architecture, one based on the 'activation' of space: for him, activation of space is what architecture does.360 Hence, architecture in Tschumi's works becomes a sort of expanded field that associates it with the developing of an action, a performance, or an event. In his projects, Tschumi involves philosophers, writers, artists, and designers, with the intention to develop an eclectic context that gives architecture a sort of 'narrative in progress', where the visitors or the users become engaged with the development of

356 Ibid. 357 Tschumi B., 'Spaces and Events', in Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1994, pp. 139–149 358 Ibid., p. 140 359 Khan O., Hannah D., 'Performance/Architecture: An interview with Bernard Tschumi', in Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 61, No. 4, 2008, p. 52 360 Ibid., p. 53 125 that narrative, according to their own creativity. This approach mirrors Tschumi's pedagogical activities, based on the mixing of various disciplines together, often challenging the academic establishment, which he defines as an environment 'obsessed with concepts of disciplinary autonomy and self-referentiality'.361 His aim, instead, is to create a superimposition of ideas and perceptions, words and spaces, where the abstract concepts of literary works, for instance, would meet the immediate experience of architectural space. He gives an account of these projects in the following passage:

This dialectic between the verbal and the visual culminated in 1974 in a series of 'literary' projects organised in the studio, in which texts provided programs or events on which students were to develop architectural works. The role of the text was fundamental in that it underlined some aspect of the complementing of events and spaces. Some texts, like Italo Calvino's metaphorical descriptions of 'Invisible Cities', were so 'architectural' as to require going far beyond the mere illustration of the author's already powerful descriptions...362

The account continues with other literary works by Franz Kafka, Edgar A Poe, and Joyce, all characterised by a strong architectural character that the students put at work in their projects. The aim of these projects was the creation of a parallel path between the unfolding of events in the literary context and the unfolding of events in architecture. Tschumi uses this interdisciplinary approach in the Parc de La Villette project, which I will analyse for its particular deconstructive character. In this project, it is possible to see how the superimposition of narrative and space becomes the crucial element of architecture. In La Villette, architecture becomes event, a place where users are directly involved in an active approach to space, and collaborate with the architect in the production of meaning of that space, by developing their own understanding, creating their own paths within the park, and performing activities around and within the structures known as folies.

361 Tschumi B., 'Spaces and Events', p. 145 362 Ibid. 126 Thereby, according to the deconstructive approach in architecture, an architectural object will never be finished, for in the many potential 'events' that can take place within its space, it will be subject to change, permutations; in short, its function/meaning will never be a fixed and stable element that follows a plan established in advance. As with the Tower of Babel, the incompleteness that deconstruction generates marks the origin of the plurality, and the transformative relation between architectural objects and users, dwellers, and observers.

3.3. Deconstruction at Work: Parc de La Villette/Point de Folie – Maintenant L'Architecture

The second part of this chapter investigates the creative effects that deconstruction produces in terms of engagement between users and architectural objects. The collaboration between Derrida and Tschumi exemplifies the above discussion of the axiom of incompleteness and architecture as event. The collaboration is centred on an architectural project titled Parc de La Villette, realised in Paris.363 In this case, deconstruction moves from the abstract realm of philosophy to the physical and solid realm of architecture, in that an architect, Tschumi, transforms the abstract ideas of a philosopher's theory into material forms. Derrida, then, through his essay 'Point de Folie – Maintenant L'Architecture' renders that architectural work 'talkative' by developing a discourse that will transform architecture from silent to speaking art. Parc de La Villette has been described as 'the largest demonstration of deconstruction at work in architecture'364 and even today Tschumi's project and Derrida's essay remain two crucial elements in a philosophical analysis involving deconstruction and architecture. The project might be acknowledged as a huge, discontinuous building that, nevertheless, has a single structure and, unlike the traditional idea of park that privileges nature over culture, emphasises culture rather than nature.

363 Tschumi's project was selected from over 470 projects and won the 1st prize in an international competition that the French national government called at the beginning of the 1980s to redevelop some areas of Paris. 364 Broadbent G., 'Deconstruction in Action', in Glusberg J. (ed.), Deconstruction: A Student Guide, London, Academy Editions, 1991, p. 67 127 It started with an invitation. In 1985, Tschumi called Derrida. 'Architecture called on philosophy? For what?', Wingley wonders in the preface of his book The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt.365 The philosopher was asked to collaborate on the design of a section of Tschumi's project Parc de La Villette in Paris. The project was the winning design in an international architectural competition aimed to rehabilitate some areas of Paris. Tschumi, an architect, educator and theorist, had planned to bring together philosophers, artists, writers, and designers in a cultural exchange. The eclectic team was invited to design gardens that would have become part of the general structure of Tschumi's project. It is in this context that Derrida is introduced to architects, even though initially the philosopher was sceptical, asking Tschumi about the reason for his invitation, given that, as he claims, deconstruction is 'anti-form, anti-hierarchy, anti-structure – the opposite of all that architecture stands for'.366 Tschumi's reply was that he had approached Derrida 'precisely for this reason'.367 Then, the question of 'deconstruction and architecture' broke out, involving many names from both inside and outside the traditional institutional limits of architecture and philosophy. Conferences, exhibitions, essays, books, reviews, interviews, debates, architectural projects, interdisciplinary collaborations and academic appointments took place. The basic principle of the project is the superimposition of three autonomous ordering systems: points, lines, and surfaces. The system of points is established by a grid of 10-metre cubes called folies, from the French word folie (meaning 'madness'); the system of lines is a set of classical axes; and the system of surfaces is a set of geometric figures (circle, square, and triangle).368 Although each of these different systems relies on a traditional architectural mechanism of order, Tschumi superimposes and intersects them, producing interferences that result in the distortion of the purity of each system. Thereby, the ideals of purity, perfection, and order become sources of impurity, imperfection, and disorder.369

365 Wigley M., The Architecture of Deconstruction, p. xi 366 Coyne R., Derrida for Architects, p. 43 367 Ibid. 368 Johnson P., Wigley M., The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Deconstructivist Architecture, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1988 , p. 92 369 Ibid. 128

Graphic Representation of the three systems lines, points, and surfaces370

Looking at the figure above, the superimposition of the three systems, which appears as a sort of collision between them, denotes the attempt to overcome the traditional coherence and the reassuring stability of composition, promoting, instead, instability and programmatic madness.371 Even before the realisation of the project, indeed, its textual aspect regarding the drawing of the grid was even more indicative of the unconventional architect's task. Geoffrey Broadbent writes that

Tschumi and his colleagues were designing a Park but the grid was anti- nature; they had to fulfil a number of functions but the grid was anti- functional; they had to be realists but the grid was abstract; they had to respect the local context but the grid was anti-contextual; they had to be sensitive to site boundaries but the grid was infinite; they had to take into account political and economic indeterminacies but the grid was determinate; they had to acknowledge precedents in garden design but the grid had no origin, it opened to an endless recession into prior images and earlier signs.372

The most striking architectural figures of the project are the folies, the cubes, painted with bright red paint. Each folie is a 10-metre cube, divided three-by-three-by-three into 27 smaller cubes, each representing a particular stage in a geometric permutation, so that each cube could be left four-square as a frame or skeletal form or tilted

370 Figure taken from Broadbent G., 'The Architecture of Deconstruction', in Glusberg J. (ed.), Deconstruction, p. 18 371 Broadbent G., 'Deconstruction in Action', p. 70 372 Ibid. 129 diagonally. Some of the 'one-third' cubes are missing, and others have spiral staircases attached to the cube or passing through it.373 In short, as the pictures below illustrate, the cubes are aimed at depicting the disruption of the 'smooth coherence and reassuring stability of composition, promoting instability and programmatic madness'.374

Tschumi B., 'Folies', Parc de La Villette, Paris. Photo by Marie-Sophie Leturcq375

Tschumi B., 'Folies', Parc de La Villette, Paris. Photo by Sophie Chivet376

373 Ibid., p. 71 374 Ibid., p. 70 375 Photo taken from Leturcq M., 'Les Folies de la Villette', see Flickr website, June 16, 2013, http://www.flickr.com/photos/99032406@N07/12174791933/, accessed November 2013 376 Photo taken from Chivet S., 'Les Folies de la Villette', see Flickr website, November 24, 2008, http://www.flickr.com/photos/99032406@N07/12174795013/, accessed November 2013 130 The design and organisation of Parc de La Villette do not provide any indication of the way visitors need to navigate the park. The superimposition of the three mentioned systems creates disorder rather than order, and visitors are prompted to decide for themselves how to proceed. In this sense, they are directly involved in the architectural project by organising and 'designing' their own paths to navigate and explore the park. In La Villette, the functionality of architecture is no longer transparent, for the form and the structural order have been displaced and warped. Let us consider the habits and expectation of dwellers who enter a public park. They would expect to be guided through the park by walkways that have been planned by the designer/architect. They would need only to respect that plan. They would expect an architectural space that has been accomplished and completed. Instead, in La Villette, they find themselves in an architectural space that remains open and involves them in the completion of the plan. They need to decide how to proceed and how to use the spaces; in short, they find themselves in a kind of architecture that disrupts their habits and expectations. Tschumi's plan is to foster their creativity: they need to explore the park according to their own feelings and interpretations. In other words, they need to enter into a performance, in order to use the park. Let us focus now on how deconstruction is at work within the park. In his essay 'Point de Folie – Maintenant L'Architecture', Derrida uses Tschumi's park to conduct an investigation into architecture and how it can take advantage from the deconstructive approach. The title of the essay bears a double meaning: on the one hand, it indicates that the analysis focuses on the particular case of the folies; on the other hand, the second part of the title refers to the more programmatic and general aspect of the analysis as exploration of the practice of architecture. Derrida's analysis moves around the term maintenant, which remains untranslated in the text in order to resist any singular meaning stemming from a translation. The French word appears to be characterised by a semantic ambivalence: it can be translated as 'now', and at the same time as 'the hand that holds' [main tenant]. It is as if the word gives Derrida the opportunity to look at architecture from two perspectives: on the one hand, a 'current', a 'now' perspective,377 in which architecture is seen as a discipline that 'no

377 Derrida J., 'Point de Folie – Maintenant L'Architecture', p. 306 131 longer defines a domain',378 in the sense that it has lost its simple utilitarian function that links it to a techne, to the act of building that is connected with the traditional understanding of it as service, as discipline that provides humanity with a shelter. On the other hand, the idea of 'the hand that holds' [main tenant] wants to resist change, and keep architecture linked to its monumental presence, and to its original function. Derrida asserts that, when we examine architecture, we should not forget that because of our historical and cultural context, there is what he calls an 'architecture of architecture';379 that is, our understanding of architecture has been constructed historically on the basis that it has always been destined for habitation. There has always been a particular relationship, a unique connection between architecture and us. But also we have a unique connection to the architectural space, for we inhabit it; we inhabit the space that architecture encapsulates. This brings us back to Heidegger's words discussed in the first part of this chapter, which explain how the comprehension of architecture as practice that involves only building is not enough to understand it. Derrida outlines four factors that condition and limit our understanding of architecture, and that he will attempt to challenge through his analysis of Tschumi's architecture in Parc de La Villette. First, echoing Heidegger, Derrida talks of the 'dwelling' character of architecture, the idea of being housed, sheltered, and protected, that we link to architecture. It seems that we cannot get rid of the originally 'non-representational presence',380 which makes architecture's purpose destined only to shelter 'men and gods'.381 The house becomes a crucial architectural figure in such a perspective, as I will show, in that it becomes the place that differentiates the reassuring inside, which we know, from the distressing outside, which we do not know. We always find shelter in our house, or in the house of God, a church. The house is the first place we learn to recognise on a map, for it is the place where we shall always return; it is the centre from which all the distances will be measured. Second, we find a perpetual link to a certain historicism that inhabits architecture, which is to say the memories and appearances that architectural objects are imbued with. An example of what Derrida means by this might be observed in the ancient version of Rome, where

378 Ibid. 379 Ibid., p. 307 380 Ibid., p. 308 381 Ibid. 132 we find at work the 'always-hierarchizing nostalgia'382 in the strongly centred and hierarchised organisation that characterises its architecture, which aims to commemorate, mark, and remember myths, heroes, and gods. Let us consider the example of the Arch of Titus, an architectural structure built to commemorate the victories of the emperor Titus in 82 AD, located at the beginning of Via Sacra, in Rome.383 It will always remind us of an emperor, a hero, and all his victories. There is no other purpose than commemorating and celebrating, and that purpose will always hierarchise its stone, putting it above other architectural objects as monument to an emperor. Third, the previous points denote the rule of finality, the functional ends that always put architecture 'in service, and at service'.384 Fourth, we find the values of beauty, harmony, and totality that, says Derrida, organise and govern architecture. Derrida criticises the four assumptions that condition conventional architecture, challenging the ideas that they are invariables that traverse the whole history of architecture; that architecture 'must' have a meaning, and the 'signifying or symbolical value' of this meaning 'must direct the structure and syntax, the form and function of architecture'.385 As a consequence, in architecture, form will follow always function. This is the limit of architecture that deconstruction will try to overcome, and that, as we saw, Tschumi challenges in Parc de La Villette, where we find at work the disruption of this very principle. In La Villette, indeed, the syntax or form 'park' and its function of 'space where visitors stroll and do nothing' have been challenged by the active engagement that the architectural space requires. In his analysis of Tschumi's park, Derrida focuses particularly on the folies, the most peculiar architectural objects of the project, the purpose of which is to destabilise the link between form and function/meaning. The first point to be taken into account to explain this is the plural folies used by Tschumi. We are not talking of folie, la folie, which is to say 'madness', a word denoting the non-sense, the singular of a definition; rather, we are dealing with a series of folies, 'madnesses'. Despite the fact that the folies establish a common denominator of Tschumi's project, which is to say

382 Ibid. 383 For more information see MacDonald W. L., The Architecture of the Roman Empire: An Urban Appraisal, Yale, Yale University Press, 1986 384 Derrida J., 'Point de Folie – Maintenant L'Architecture', p. 309 385 Ibid., p. 308 133 they are characterised by the same unique purpose, namely the questioning of the link between form and function/meaning, the plurality of folies denotes how each folie 'remains divisible in turn, a point without a point, offered up in its articulated structure to substitutions or combinatory permutations',386 so that the single folie becomes many folies. Each cube is indeed an architectural structure that has no a single function, but rather is open to a plurality of functions and permutations, so that its semantics or function/meaning is detached from the syntax or form and is in constant change. One of the folies, for example, was changed from a restaurant to a gardening centre to an arts workshop; changes that were accommodated easily thanks to the permutations that can be operated on the structure.387 Therefore, while the syntactical element of each folie, its architectural structure and its location remain the same, its semantic element remains undefined. Hence, the form will be kept detached from its function. Tschumi rejects the idea that there is an immanent meaning in the structures and forms of his folies, a sort of idealised meaning that is strictly linked to the axiom 'form follows function'. As Broadbent interestingly puts the question, when he explains the connection between Tschumi's folies and Derrida's deconstruction, Tschumi

subverts the functional ideals of Modernism and, Derrida-like, also denies an 'obsession with presence'. For just as Derrida rejects the idea that meanings are immanent in words – inherent to them – so Tschumi rejects the idea that meaning are immanent in the structures and forms of his buildings, that his architecture has a direct capacity for signifying.388

Nevertheless, the displacement of the pair function/meaning does not prevent Tschumi from giving sense to his work. The visitor, although he or she is in the presence of a deconstructed semantics of the architectural object, is not left in a 'nihilistic'389 dimension, facing the 'unaesthetic, uninhabitable, unusable, a-symbolical and meaningless architecture'.390 Rather, he or she is engaged in a reconstructive operation, aiming to open up the structure to new meanings. To this end, the main

386 Ibid., p. 307 387 Broadbent G., 'Deconstruction in Action', p. 70 388 Ibid., p. 71 389 Derrida J., 'Point de Folie – Maintenant L'Architecture', p. 310 390 Ibid. 134 tenant, the resistance that stems from the solid presence of the architectural object, clashes with the maintenant, the 'now', of the permutation, the change, the reconstruction of meaning operated by the visitor. As Derrida argues,

The folies affirm and engage their affirmation beyond this ultimately annihilating, secretly nihilistic repetition of metaphysical architecture. They enter into the maintenant of which I speak; they maintain, renew and reinscribe architecture. They revive, perhaps, an energy which was infinitely anaesthetised, walled-in, buried in a common grave or sepulchral nostalgia.391

In this sense, there is a reference to the concept of 'event' I have discussed in the previous section, for the involvement of visitors in the generation of the semantics or function/meaning entails a performance, an engagement between individuals and architectural objects. Each folie invites visitors to perform an activity, according to their own creativity and feelings, so that it is possible to see people playing music, studying, reading, painting, or simply chatting. The purpose is to foster performance, to prompt events that activate the space and encourage creativity. In this light, Parc de La Villette is in constant change. The active involvement of visitors makes it an unfinished project that remains open to new possibilities. We find, then, the practical realisation of the idea that Derrida expressed in his axiom of incompleteness, of leaving architecture open to new possibilities, an ever-changing space. Yet, at the same time, we find at work the idea of event as opening to the future to come, to the unpredictable possibilities that creativity brings about. The chaotic deformation that the superimposition of the three systems mentioned before produces, makes the navigation of the park engaging, insofar as it lacks an easy logic that gives visitors a sort of 'right' path to navigate the park according to a pre-ordered, pre-structured plan. Instead, they are free to decide their own way of doing that; in short, they are invited to improvise. In his essay, Derrida talks of 'transarchitecture',392 namely a form of architecture that is mobilised, transformed, activated, and that no longer is at service of users, believers, dwellers,

391 Ibid. 392 Ibid., p. 311 135 contemplators, aesthetes, or consumers, but leaves opportunity for chance, formal invention, permutation, wandering. This is the idea of architecture that, according to Derrida, should be encouraged.

3.4. Portability and Deconstruction: A Transformative Condition

So far, my analysis has been focused on a type of architecture that privileges permanence over temporariness, aiming to last permanently in the location where it has been built. Given the transformative and creative implications that deconstruction fosters in architecture, it is interesting to investigate the outcomes of a deconstructive approach to the type of architecture that privileges temporariness over permanence; that is, those architectural objects that, being portable, can be constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, and moved to a different place. Arguably, the portability of such structures supports a form of connection between architecture, space, and us that relies on a constant transformative approach, with remarkable creative implications. Besides the case of nomadic cultures that rely on portable and temporary structures as shelters and other primary human needs, portable structures can be used for a wide range of events, from the one-day/one-time event to a month-long installation, to portable structures designed to stay at one site for several years, such as those used to shelter people in the aftermath of natural disasters. In the last part of the chapter, then, I will take into account three deconstructive aspects that can be connected to portable structures. First, I will explore the Derrida's notion of freeplay in the light of the most common portable structure, the tent. The argument will point out that there is an analogy between the transformative traits suggested by Derrida's freeplay and the transformative character of tents that supports a creative approach to the use of tents. Second, I will investigate Derrida's notion of parergon in the context of tents. It will be argued that the parergon, as a frame that generates the dichotomy of inside/outside, fosters the interrelation between inside and outside, generating transformative implications. Third, I will focus on the implications that the axiom of incompleteness has for temporary architecture, in the light of the 'narrative' aspect of an African nomadic culture.

136 Before proceeding, let me make some clarifications. First, portable architecture, and in particular tents, must not be automatically understood as a form of deconstructive architecture. It is well known, indeed, that many nomadic cultures that still rely on the use of tents as main form of shelter are quite reluctant to change their habits or modes of dwelling. This contrasts with the approach that Derrida promotes in architecture. Second, my analysis does not want to support any form of idealisation of tents as exemplar way of dwelling. It would be dangerous, indeed, to idealise a form of architecture and dwelling that is increasingly associated with some of the most vulnerable and dispossessed peoples on the planet.

3.4.1. Portability and Freeplay

Many different architectural structures have been created to be portable and mobile. If we consider the first historical, even mythical, mobile architectural objects, we encounter a preindustrial world that is not bound to the idea of permanent, but is possessed by an ideology of itinerant and nomadic responses to permanence.393 Such a primitive form of portable and mobile architecture extends from the mythical ark that God told Noah to build in order to survive and relocate after the flood, to the many forms of tent made from taut animal skins and other natural elements. These are all characterised by their being durable, lightweight, flexible, and transportable by low-technology means. Some of these structures can still be seen in several African nomadic cultures. Robert Kronenburg identifies three main categories of portable architectural objects. The first and simplest is a structure that can be transported in one piece for instant use once it arrives at the location. Such structures may incorporate their transportation method into their structure and may be built on a chassis or a hull. They are generally restricted in size due to the limitations of transport. The second category relies on the assembling of elements transported as a partly complete package and then quickly assembled on site. The third relies on a system of modular parts that are easily transportable and then assembled on site.394

393 Siegal J. (ed.), Mobile: The Art of Portable Architecture, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, p. 17 394 Kronenburg R., Portable Architecture, Burlington, Elsevier/Architectural Press, 2003, p. 1 137 Today, mobile architecture, although still linked to these parameters, appears to have become more sophisticated. It employs much more complex materials and structures, which can be assembled and disassembled even in a few minutes. We find inflatable structures that can be moved and assembled everywhere, such as the Airquarium, created by Festo,395 a company that investigates the use of air in inflatable architecture; despite its size (it is 32 metres in diameter and 8 metres high) the Airquarium can be stored in two 6-metre containers.396 Or the Cocoon, another inflatable structure by Festo,397 but much smaller than the Airquarium. This is a lightweight, inflatable mini-tent, which can be inflated using a standard hand-pump or a supplied gas cartridge by one person. The tent can be used not only for leisure activities, such as sport and travel, but also in rescue situations and disaster areas. On a larger scale, we find the Carlos Moseley Music Pavilion, created by FTL Happold,398 a design and engineering services firm that focuses on lightweight and deployable constructions, prefabricated structures, and flexible interiors. The pavilion is a state-of- art performance facility designed for the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the City of New York's Departments of Cultural Affairs and Parks and Recreation for audiences of up to 100 000 people. Although huge, the structure is completely mobile, as six custom semitrailers carry the entire facility to any open performance site, and it has been designed to be set up in three hours with minimal impact on fragile park locations.399 Another interesting work is the Mobile Event City Architecture, designed by Office of Mobile Design (OMD),400 a firm that provides structures for multipurpose activities, to be relocated and adapted to varying site conditions. Four possible master-plan schemes assemble the campsite components into a four-tiered hierarchy, which can then be organised either around a central gathering space, along a linear corridor, or in a combination thereof. But the campsite, thanks to its mobility, can be assembled in many different ways.401

395 Ibid., p. 65 396 Siegal J. (ed.), Mobile, p. 35 397 Ibid., p. 38 398 Kronenburg R., Portable Architecture, p. 175 399 Siegal J. (ed.), Mobile, p. 54 400 Ibid., p. 121 401 Ibid., p. 120 138 If we compare all these portable structures to the permanent ones, in the light of deconstruction, we notice that, unlike the permanent structures where deconstruction affects the semantic of function/meaning of the architectural objects, in the case of portable structures it is possible to unveil implications that affect their syntax or form as well; that is, their physical presence. In this sense, the very monumental presence, in its fixed stillness (which, Derrida says, makes architecture 'the last fortress of metaphysics'402), would undergo the transformative process that the temporariness implies. Hence, the portable structure is transformed from a structure that generates inhabitable space into a portable object that presents little or nothing of its architectural structure, as in the case of the inflatable mini-tent mentioned earlier. Portability, then, implies transformativity: the components that constitute the portable structure appear to be characterised by a sort of incompleteness that requires a performance, a creative act that, by going back to Diprose's words, quoted in the first part of this chapter, generates an 'intertwining of the ontological and the concrete actuality of buildings'.403 Thus, in the case of portable architecture, dwelling opens up to the event to come. As Diprose says, echoing Heidegger, 'Dwelling is a dynamic "happening" or "event" (Ereignis), a double process of bringing to presence and concealment; an undetermined, open coming together and dispersal of various elements of mutual belonging'.404 In this sense, the presence of the architectural object linked to its syntax or form/structure is caught in a play between the concealed and the unconcealed that displaces the centre around which the structure is organised. In his essay 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', Derrida talks of a fixed centre, an origin, a point of presence that organises what he calls the 'structurality of structure',405 namely the metaphysical system around which all the Western philosophical tradition moves, and that, as we saw, identifies being as presence. As he argues:

the entire history of the concept of the concept of structure. . .must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of

402 Derrida J., 'Point de Folie – Maintenant L'Architecture', p. 309 403 Diprose R., 'Building and Belonging Amid the Plight of Dwelling', p. 59 404 Ibid., p. 62 405 Derrida J., 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', p. 352 139 determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms and or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the west, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix is the determination of Being as presence in all sense of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence.406

Such a centre, says Derrida, limits the freeplay of the structure, which is to say that it makes the philosophical thinking an activity that remains chained to the search for a truth, an ideal center that through the formula of definitions 'X is Y' generates a fixed and unchangeable meaning. Hence, the freeplay of the structure will always be limited by the fixity that such a centre will produce. Derrida challenges such an illusory point of origin by arguing that, instead of a fixed meaning, we are in presence of an infinite series of substitutions of signifiers that generates a freeplay of signification. As he argues:

Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the centre had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a centre or origin, everything became discourse – provided we can agree on this word – that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the freeplay of signification infinitely.407

Coming to the architectural discourse, then, arguably, the fixed and solid presence that the implanted foundations of permanent buildings assure would respond to such logic of structure organised around a fixed point of presence that Derrida criticises. His view of architecture as a fortress that protects the being of buildings through monumental

406 Ibid., p. 353 407 Ibid., pp. 353–354 140 presence confirms that and marks, in a way, the limit of the deconstructive discourse within architecture. Indeed, we saw that deconstruction affects the semantic perspective linked to function and meaning, but it does not seem to affect the syntax – the structure – of permanent architectural objects, which remains excluded by the implications of the axiom of incompleteness. In the case of portable architecture, the implications of deconstruction extend to the syntactical and structural component. If we consider tents, for example, we can see that a tent may be assembled and disassembled, constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. The components are folded into something portable, loaded onto an animal or another means of transport, and moved to another place. The temporariness of the tent's presence produces a dislocation of the very solid and durable character of its structure. There are no foundations; the bond between ground and architectural structure is only temporary. The structure is free from any permanent connection and can be moved. Also, there is a certain 'malleability' in the tent's form that challenges the idea of a permanent form or structure. The operation of assembling and disassembling of each tent, indeed, will generate a different structure each time: the ground will be different, perhaps different people will assemble the tent, or perhaps some of the components will be replaced. Let me explain in more detail what I mean by 'malleability'. As I said previously, the portability of tents requires that the structure can be transformed into an object that is transportable. This is a first 'malleable' trait of tents. In addition, each time a tent is assembled again its structure can vary according to the use and the characteristics of the place where it will be placed. New components can be added to make it bigger or stronger, for instance, or the same components can be assembled in a different form, such as in the case of tents used for military purposes, which need to be camouflaged according to the shape and the colours of the environment that surrounds them. Hence, the structure of tents appears as an unlikely permanent structure; it remains open to change and 'malleable'. This constant performative and transformative character makes the syntax or form of tents a component that is never totally accomplished, but remains open to the unpredictable possibilities that the temporariness of its duration and the freeplay of its structure generate.

141 Certainly, there are also political and cultural elements linked to tents and their performative and transformative character. For instance, the constant movement of the nomadic cultures often associated with the use of tents makes difficult to establish the set of rules and laws that they can be associated with, the borders of the land that they control, or whether governments and authorities organise their documentation, such as passports and so on. The question is complex and would deserve a separate research project, above all in the light of the cultural and political consequences of the nomadic character associated with tents. However, I need to limit my analysis to the themes pertinent to my discussion, and so I will move on to the analysis of another deconstructive concept that can be related to tents, namely the concept of parergon.

3.4.2. Loosening the Borders

A Parergon is usually defined as an embellishment (from the Greek parergos, which means 'beside the main subject'), but, as I will show, in Derrida's deconstructive discourse, it takes on a very peculiar philosophical trait. The concept of parergon, indeed, might be acknowledged as the architectural frame that differentiates inside from outside, and that in the case of tents fosters the interrelation between what is known (the inside), and what is unknown (the outside). It will be argued that this interrelation supports the deconstructive approach to architecture, based on performance and creativity. Let me start the analysis by talking of a Japanese artist, Tatzu Nishi,408 who uses architecture to literally encapsulate urban monuments into architectural structures that can be inhabited, such as hotel rooms or houses. His most recent work, titled Discovering Columbus, was installed in Manhattan, New York, from 20 September to 18 November 2012, and was focused on the historic statue of Christopher Columbus. The marble statue, designed by the Italian sculptor Gaetano Russo, was created in 1892 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage to the Americas. Despite its prominent public location in the heart of Manhattan, the statue itself is little known, visible only as a silhouette against the sky or at a distance from surrounding buildings. Nishi's project re-imagines the colossal, almost 4-metre-tall

408 Tatzu Nishi was born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1960 and currently lives and works in Berlin; he has performed his works in Europe, Australia, Singapore, and the United States 142 statue of Columbus standing in a fully furnished, modern living room. Featuring tables, chairs, couch, rug, and flatscreen television, the decor reflects the artist's interpretation of contemporary New York style. He even designed the room's wallpaper inspired by memories of American popular culture, having watched Hollywood movies and television as a child in Japan.409 Visitors can look at such an important and historic monument from a completely different perspective: they need only to climb six flights of stairs, enter the white windowed box that has been built around the figure, sit down, and contemplate something that until then was visible only from afar.410

New York, before Nishi's installation. Photo by Ira Joel Haber411

409 Baume N., 'Tatzu Nishi. Discovering Columbus', see Public Art Fund website, http://www.publicartfund.org/view/exhibitions/5495_discovering_columbus, accessed October 2013 410 Smith R., 'At His Penthouse, a Tête-à-Tête With Columbus', see New York Times website, September 21, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/arts/design/tatzu-nishis-discovering-columbus- installation.html?_r=0, accessed October 2013 411 Photo taken from Haber I. J., 'Tatzu Nishi Discovering Columbus', see Cinemagebooks website, October 25, 2012, http://wwwirajoelcinemagebooks.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/tatzu-nishi-discovering- columbus.html, accessed November 2013 143

New York, after Nishi's installation. Photo by Justin Lane412

In 2009, Nishi was in Sydney, where he developed his first Australian project at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, through his installation titled War and Peace and In Between, exhibited from 2 October 2009 to 14 February 2010,413 on the Art Gallery Road, under the portico, in front of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The installation involved the two heroic equestrian sculptures, The Offerings of War and The Offerings of Peace, realised in 1923 by the British sculptor Gilbert Bayes, which were encapsulated for the occasion in two different domestic spaces, so that visitors could look at them from a completely different perspective.414 As in the New York installation, we see the construction of a temporary architectural structure that encapsulates space and creates a frame that establishes an 'inside' and an 'outside'; in other words, what was outside is now encapsulated inside. Central to Nishi's art, indeed, is the interrelation between the inside and the outside that the construction of a temporary architectural structure creates. Nishi's work encourages to reflect on the dichotomy of inside/outside. The temporary inversion that he generates challenges the understanding of inside as opposed to outside, which is usually linked to the construction of a frame. It also generates an interrelation that puts constantly the inside in communication with the outside, so that the opposition is loosened. Visitors, indeed, although 'inside' the

412 Photo taken from Durkin E., 'Discovering Columbus Exhibit Opens', see Daily News website, September 19, 2012, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/discovering-columbus-exhibit-opens- article-1.1162963, accessed November 2013 413 http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/project-archive/tatzu-nishi-2009 414 Nicholls C., 'Resculpting The Past: Tatzu Nishi in Sydney', in World Sculpture News, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2010, pp. 28–32 144 structure, are constantly reminded of the 'outside' by the presence of the monument, which does not belong to that inside but is actually part of the outside world.

Sydney, before Nishi's installation. Photo by Wright C. and Palsson J.415

Sydney, after Nishi's installation. Photo by Wright C. and Palsson J.416

As I discussed at the very beginning of this analysis, architecture might be acknowledged as the art of 'framing', 'bordering' space, by establishing and differentiating an outside from an inside. The frame or border is common to all architectural constructions. Consider a road: although it is an open structure, we can always distinguish whether we are inside or outside the proper lane. Therefore, the

415 Photo taken from Art Gallery of New South Wales, 'Tatzu Nishi: War and Peace and in Between', see Flickr website, September 24, 2009, http://www.flickr.com/photos/artgalleryofnsw/3967763536/in/set- 72157622484151642, accessed November 2013 416 Photo taken from Art Gallery of New South Wales, 'Tatzu Nishi: War and Peace and in Between', see Flickr website, September 29, 2009, http://www.flickr.com/photos/artgalleryofnsw/3966981849/in/set- 72157622484151642, accessed November 2013 145 operation of constructing or building, relies on the establishing of a frame. Inside versus outside, or, to put it another way, sameness versus difference. Looking at Derrida's The Truth in Painting, we find an interesting essay titled 'Parergon', in which Derrida discusses the concept of frame in the work of art. Taken from earlier lectures, seminars, and essays, the chapter 'Parergon' is itself a set of detached fragments sutured together to form an essay in four parts.417 The subject of the essay is Immanuel Kant's concept of parergon in the Critique of Judgment. My aim here is not to examine all of Derrida's analysis of Kant's work, rather I want to focus on his invitation to consider the relevance and ambiguity of the notion of frame through the analysis of the term parergon. As I have said, indeed, the concept of frame is the main element in the architectural separation between inside and outside. It is particularly interesting to contextualise such a concept in the case of portable architectural objects, especially tents. In order to understand the meaning of the concept of parergon in Derrida's discourse, I need to introduce another term that Derrida takes into account: ergon. Both of these terms, in fact, are Kantian: ergon is a Greek word that Kant used to signify 'work', as we see in the expressions 'work of art', 'work of literature', 'work of music', and so on;418 while parergon might be acknowledged as what comes 'against, beside, and in addition'419 to the ergon, a sort of accessory element that, although necessary, remains secondary. In Derrida's work, the parergon becomes the element that marks the inside and the outside of a painting. When we consider the case of permanent architecture, we can talk of a solid and permanent frame that aims to last indefinitely, so that the permanent presence of the architectural object will mark also the permanent separation between the inside and the outside of the architectural structure. When we look at temporary structures, we see that their temporariness relies on a much less solidity of their structure. In this sense, the frame and the separation between the inside and the outside seem to blur. If we think of a painting, looking at Derrida's analysis, the parergon identifies the border that separates the work of art from the wall; in the same way, if we think of a

417 Richards K. M., Derrida Reframed, London, I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2008, p. 30 418 Ibid., p. 31 419 Derrida J., The Truth in Painting, p. 54 146 photograph, even if we do not put it in a frame, we still see its border, its limit, its frame, for we can easily distinguish what is part of the photograph and what is not. In the case of architectural objects, the structure itself – its walls and all the elements that are part of the facade of a building – can be acknowledged as a frame that separates the outside of the structure from its inside. According to Derrida, all the philosophical discourses on art and the meaning of art, from Plato to Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, 'presuppose a discourse on the limit between the inside and the outside of the art object, a discourse on the frame'.420 This claim appears to be particularly relevant to the visual arts, even though a frame can be recognised wherever there is a definition, wherever we draw a line that delimits something and creates an inside and an outside. Interestingly, Kevin M Richards has compared the Derridean parergon with a parasite, which is to say an organism that latches on to another organism, feeding off the host organism. Sometimes, the relationship between the parasite and the host organism can be mutually beneficial, as in the case of rhinos and oxpeckers,421 where the latter feeds on the biting flies that bother rhinos. In other cases, parasites can be lethal to the host, as in the case of malaria. Anyway, what is interesting according to Richards is that the parasite 'fits into a logic of both/and, instead of either/or',422 which is to say that the parasite is both an independent organism and at the same time an organism that depends on another organism. Similarly, the parergon or frame, says Derrida, is 'neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d'oeuvre], neither inside or outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work'.423 The frame is something that relies on a sort of permeability; it is independent, insofar as it is a structure, a limit, a border, yet at the same time it is part of something else, the painting, the architectural objects, and so on. It responds to the logic of ambivalence that deconstruction tries always to generate. The frame is indeed both inside and outside the work, a sort of in between that is both essential and inessential to the work. Derrida argues:

420 Ibid., p. 45 421 Oxpeckers are birds that usually live on the back of large mammals. 422 Richards K. M., Derrida Reframed, p. 31 423 Derrida J., The Truth in Painting, p. 9 147 Parerga have a thickness, a surface which separates them not only (as Kant would have it) from the integral inside, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the painting is hung, from the space in which statue or column is erected, then, step by step, from the whole field of historical, economic, political inscription in which the drive to signature is produced (an analogous problem we shall see further on). No 'theory', no 'practice', no 'theoretical practice' can intervene effectively in this field [the arts] if it does not weigh up and bear on the frame, which is the decisive structure of what is at stake, at the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning (put under shelter by the whole of hermeneuticist, semioticist, phenomenologicalist, and formalist tradtion) and (to) all the empiricism of the extrinsic which incapable of either seeing or reading, miss the question completely.424

In the light of the previous account, Derrida's idea of frame appears to be closer to a structure that, although it frames space and generates an inside and an outside, loses its solid definition and becomes a sort of blurred border. It puts the outside in communication with the inside, generating a constant interrelation between them. In the case of a painting, indeed, we become unable to define the frame as 'outside', and at the same time as 'inside'. It remains an undefined place, a sort of in-between, which displaces the sameness of the inside, opening it to the other, which is outside. Elizabeth Grosz argues that the space of the in-between is

the locus for social, cultural, and natural transformations: it is not simply a convenient space for movements and realignments but in fact is the only space – the place around identities, between identities - where becoming, openness to futurity, outstrips the conservational impetus to retain cohesion and unity.425

Coming to the case of architecture, in exploring the implications of applying Derrida's concept of parergon to an architectural structure, we unveil a significant difference between permanent and temporary structures. The best architectural example that

424 Ibid., pp. 60–61 425 Grosz E., Architectural from the outside, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2001, p. 92 148 joins together permanence, inside, and sameness is to be found in the house, our home. We feel safe inside our house, for we know every part of it; we know its location; we know that that location will never change. Once we cross the threshold, the door – once we get inside – we are safe. The house might be acknowledged as the architectural structure that marks the difference between the individual, the inside, and the collective, the agora, the polis, the outside. Once we get home, we close and lock the door, and by doing that our intent is primarily to isolate the inside from the outside. Doors and windows, although they are designed to generate the passage between the inside and the outside, once locked can be equated to the solid walls. In short, it seems that permanent buildings are primarily designed, and must function, to keep inside and outside separated. Although the frame keeps its ambiguous character and favours the interrelation between inside and outside, in this case, its ambiguity is not as intense as that of portable structures. In the case of temporary and portable structures, indeed, the frame appears to take on a trait that resembles much more Derrida's understanding of the parergon. Leaving aside the social and cultural aspects that link portable structures to vulnerability, let us consider once again the case of tents. Looking at their structure, we can notice how it favours and privileges the contact between what happens inside and what happens outside, so that there is a constant contact with the external space and what happens there. If we look at the site where a permanent structure will be built, there are environmental and structural requirements that need to be respected, such as the texture of the ground that must be able to accommodate the foundations of the buildings and assure their stability. If the land does not conform to those prerequisites, it must be modified with an operation of excavation or levelling, and so on. In short, in order to become receptacle of a place, space must be subjected to a form of violence; it must undergo a modification. Such a modification assures that the outside conforms to the necessities of the inside, and that the two spheres will remain detached. In the case of tents, there is the desire not to control but, rather, to maintain an exchange with the outside – in some cases with the natural environment – in order to find union with it. The tent will be integrated into the landscape without any form of

149 violence, it will remain for the temporary period and then it will be dismantled, leaving the ground without any permanent scar. The inside of a tent, which is the space framed by the velum, is often not detached from the outside. In many cases, indeed, the tent's structure remains open and in constant contact with the outside, so that it becomes very difficult to generate a clear and defined distinction between the inside and the outside. In fact, if we consider the case of a particular type of tent used in the organisation of events such as concerts, temporary markets, and exhibitions, often we notice that it is almost impossible to generate a clear distinction between what is outside and what is inside. The frame that separates the inside and the outside and that transforms space into place appears to resemble and support Derrida's account of the ambivalence of the parergon. The outside becomes part of the inside and the inside becomes part of the outside. Space is framed by the assembled architectural structure; a place has been established in space; a point can be located geographically on a map. However, the definition of this architectural place, as framed space that generates an inside and an outside, blurs. Unlike in permanent buildings, in which traditionally the frame is a defined, fixed, and recognisable frame marked by doors and windows, in the case of portable structures, the frame assumes the character of the parergon, as Derrida describes it. He says that, being 'neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d'oeuvre], neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work',426 or in this case to the locatedeness of a place within space. This circumstance brings us back to Grosz's analysis of the space of the in- between, which fosters social and cultural transformation. In my analysis of hospitality in jazz, in the first chapter of this thesis, it has been discussed how the opening up to the other or the unknown is one of the key factors that makes us creative and helps to develop our cultural and social awareness. This certainly requires a loosening of the borders, and fluidity between the inside and the outside, what is known and what is unknown; in other words, between sameness and difference. The case of tents appears to fulfil this requirement. The constant contact with the outside, indeed, and

426 Derrida J., The Truth in Painting, p. 9 150 above all the blurring of the threshold that locks out the unknown, certainly stimulates the opening to the other and consequently fosters transformation and change. Let me conclude by taking into account the question of the environment, which is a topic that touches us all. Here, I do not want to idealise any form of nomadic tradition; I do not belong to it and I am aware that, as I have said earlier, there are many problematic and controversial issues linked to nomadism. However, let me quote Labelle Prussin, who describes how the nomadic tradition embraces a different sensibility about the natural environment, one which has the intent not to oppose and endeavour to control nature, but rather to maintain a dialogue with the natural environment in order to find union with it. As Prussin says, only by doing so can the nomad survive.427 The constant movement in space of nomadic cultures hones the senses differently, and the unique sensibility of nomadic peoples is the product of a life that is in constant and complete integration with the landscape. Certainly, this is supported and favoured by the constant contact with the outside that a blurred frame such as that of a tent entails.

3.4.3. Portability and Creativity

In the first part of this chapter, I have taken into account Derrida's axiom of incompleteness and Tschumi's architecture as event. The two aspects, as I have explained later in the subsequent part dedicated to the discussion of Parc de La Villette, can be seen at work in Tschumi's architecture. The park, indeed, can be acknowledged, on the one hand, as an example of architecture understood in an 'expanded sense';428 that is, a type of architecture concerned not only with buildings and space, but also with all that happens in it, namely performances and events. On the other hand, the engagement of visitors in the active production of meaning and sense to be given to the project makes the park an open and unfinished architectural work, the meaning of which changes according to visitors' use. In the case of temporary architecture, it might be argued that performance is perhaps even more important than architecture itself. Assembling and disassembling are the crucial

427 Prussin L., African Nomadic Architecture, Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press and The National Museum of African Art, 1995, p. 188 428 Khan O., Hannah D., 'Performance/Architecture', p. 53 151 processes that make the people involved in it part of the architectural space and, even more importantly, the approach to the architectural space becomes active and creative. Once again, let us consider the case of tents. Each of us can become a potential architect and builder able to design and construct a tent in any place. Think of camping, for instance. In this section, I will examine the particular case of nomadic cultures, where incompleteness and event take on a creative and transformative character. As Prussin argues:

The essence of nomadic architecture lies in the process of creation, not the end product. Inherent in this process is the interface between transport technology, and the continuity in the process which involves labor, that is, the skills involved in its creation and perpetuation, and the behaviors, that is the rituals that bring it into being.429

Unlike permanent architecture, portable architecture requires a constant creativity, connected with the ground, surroundings, wind direction, sunlight, and all the other natural elements that characterise a particular place. Then, the same process will be repeated once the tent will be disassembled, folded, and moved to a different place. Apart from all the activities that will take place inside the tent and outside it, the performance linked to the process of constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing, unfolding, folding, and moving transforms temporary structures in a creative event. We find a 'programmatic' character in the rituality of the assembling and disassembling, which requires that space is 'activated' through the choice of the location where the tent will be erected, the 'designing' of the structure, and the physical labour of unfolding the components and assembling them. Prussin explains that, when a nomadic family arrives with their loaded camels at a new site,

there is no human imprint on the bare landscape. The house that arrives in one form, folded flat and fanlike on a camel's back, is transformed into another, a volumetric form. Space is transformed and retransformed with each move...In the case of a nomad's tent, the mounting, the striking, the loading and unloading involve a periodic deconstruction and reconstruction

429 Prussin L., African Nomadic Architecture, p. 44 152 of space, which in turn are conceptually linked via the loading and unloading process. The way in which an armature or tensile structure is transformed into a pack saddle and then back into a volumetric structure involves an inversion of space, turning space inside out.430

Let us return to Tschumi's pedagogical projects, illustrated earlier, which compelled his students to develop their projects not only by considering the technical and structural elements, but above all by taking into account the 'narrative' that would unfold within the projects. In this light, we can draw an interesting parallel with the case of nomadic cultures. There is, indeed, a primary form of narrative in the rituality that characterises the use of architecture in a nomadic community. Each performance linked to construction is repeated over and over again, for it is based on the relationship between humans and the cyclical character of natural events. Each event unfolds according to a narrative. For instance, it is through the performance of assembling, disassembling, and moving a tent that a 'story' about marriage unfolds. In the culture of the Gabra, an African nomadic tribe, a wedding is not a single, ceremonial event, but is rather based on slow and progressive stages that involve various places inside and outside the campsite. Besides the people, the other crucial component of the ritual is the tent. The marriage tent does not remain in the campsite throughout, but rather, every seven days in the course of a ceremony that lasts a lunar month, it is struck and loaded onto camels. The bride and her dismantled and folded tent are led in a circle around the campsite, through the open space outside the camp. When the people return to the campsite, they pitch the tent again within it, but now in a different location, which revolves within the circular form of the campsite. The liminality, the disorientation, that this constant movement of the marriage tent produces ends only after a lunar month, when the newly constituted family breaks camp and returns to the groom's encampment.431 In this light, the tent becomes part of a narrative about the establishment of a new family. The process of assembling the tent in a place, then disassembling it and moving it to another place – starting over again and again – marks the development of

430 Ibid., p. 188 431 Ibid., p. 62 153 a performance that involves the inside and the outside of the tent. It is based on the physical construction, deconstruction, folding, unfolding, and transportation of the tent. Space is 'activated' by the creative act of constructing and deconstructing the tent and by the generation of meaning that is linked to that action. The cyclical character of the performance generates the sense of a constant renovation that makes architectural space dynamic and transformative rather than static. Hence, in the light of the understanding of tents as 'event', we find that portable architecture is characterised by a constant sense of incompleteness, which the temporariness of its forms and function generates. Each structure will not remain permanently in the same place, and will not always have the same function/meaning; rather, it will remain open to a constant transformation. This circumstance makes it an 'incomplete' architectural project, the completion of which will always be deferred.

154 Conclusion

I began this study by discussing how deconstruction takes on the tradition and seeks what is new within it. The three chapters that I have developed have attempted to make evident how deconstruction is characterised by creative implications that emerge from three main factors: performance, unpredictability, and transformation. As this study has aimed to demonstrate, deconstruction takes place, and as such cannot be limited to mere theoretical discussions. Deconstruction happens in 'context'. Hence, it needs a performance, or active engagement. At the same time, this active engagement is not limited to the temporal dimension of the present. Instead, it opens up to unpredictability and to possibilities linked to the future, to what is yet to come. Finally, this performative character, which is open to possibilities, generates transformation, which ultimately leads to the creation of the new. These three interconnected aspects are present throughout the chapters that have been developed in this study; they are the components that link deconstruction to creativity and innovation. Although each chapter has approached them from different perspectives, we have traced the path that makes deconstruction creative, and which, leading from the premise of the necessary performative character of the deconstructive approach, brings us to the opening of the unpredictable, and ultimately leads to the transformation the new entails. While the three components are present in each chapter, I have emphasised one of them in each chapter. I started with the analysis of a discipline that relies on performance, namely jazz music; I then moved on to an analysis of photography and the unpredictable; I concluded with architecture and the idea of transformation that it brings about. In conclusion, I will draw out the creative implications that have been discussed in each chapter.

1. Jazz Music: A Dialogue with the New

The first chapter illustrated the creative implications of deconstruction by investigating four aspects that emerge from the relationship between deconstruction and jazz music. First, the analysis of the musical sign in the light of Derrida's criticism of the

155 transcendental signified indicated that the musical context is particularly receptive to the deconstruction of phonocentrism. By claiming that writing is a necessary supplement, Derrida invites us to consider the historical becoming that is linked to writing, in terms of creative possibilities that emerge from it. In music, and above all in an oral tradition such as jazz, writing becomes the necessary supplement, able to overtake the ephemeral nature of sound and to generate transformation. In this sense, given its character of musical style influenced by many different cultures, in jazz the creative and transformative implications that emerge from becoming are particularly evident. The second aspect illustrated the similarities between the deconstructive reading of texts and the improvisation that jazz musicians carry out during their performances. In both practices, it is possible to outline two phases. First, there is the phase of 'inheriting' a common ground of rules and general understanding that the reading of scores or texts entails. Then, there is the transformation of what has been inherited into something new, which is to say the creative part that takes on what has been inherited and opens it up to new and unpredictable possibilities, according to the reader/performer. The deconstructive reading/improvisation is not limited to receive and inherit a text/tune, but rather the reader/performer is involved in a creative process that generates new versions of it. Third, I examined the analogy between différance and the rhythmic figure of syncopation, one of the most characteristic elements of jazz. In the light of the dichotomy of regular/irregular, which has been linked to the two concepts, it has been argued that both privilege irregularity over regularity. The analysis has illustrated, then, that irregularity generates a tension that is creative both in musical and linguistic terms. It has been argued that the concept of différance relies on an 'irregular' movement of signification that relies on anticipation and delay and is based on asymmetry. The same characteristics can be found in syncopation, where anticipation, delay, and asymmetry generate a constant tension that opens up the performance to what I have called the 'movement of creation'. The last aspect has focused on the connections between Derrida's notion of hospitality and the jazz event of the jam session. It has been argued that during a jam session it is possible to frame a form of interrelation between musicians that relies on 156 the play of conditional and unconditional hospitality that Derrida analyses. It has been argued that during this interrelation musicians welcome and integrate with the other, the unfamiliar, and the different. Such an integration is particularly fertile in terms of creativity. The interrelation between musicians that characterises the jam session relies, indeed, on the tensions that differences generate. Hence, it has been argued that in receiving the other's performance, and in giving them theirs, musicians open up new musical paths that are always unpredictable.

2. Photography: Between Concealment and Unconcealment

The second chapter illustrated the creative implications that emerge from the relationship between deconstruction and photography. The analysis focused on two aspects, namely the creative engagement of the viewer that the deconstructive approach entails, and the 'active' responsibility for the future to come that Derrida's notion of 'now' generates in photography. First, I argued that deconstruction challenges the logocentric organisation of photographs, based on the conventional representational model according to which photos (light) manifests ontos (being). I contended that deconstruction engages the viewer in an interpretative process that does not stop to such a conventional and traditional way of 'reading' photographs, but that involves the interplay between unconcelament and concealment, between the visible and the invisible elements that are part of the scene. The analysis has illustrated that in art photography the mentioned interplay is generated by light and shadow, while in documentary photography it is linked to the commentary. In this light, I asserted that the deconstructive approach invites viewers to challenge what is predictable and expected and encourages them to be actively engaged in the search for the elements that remain concealed. In other words, the deconstructive approach invites viewers to be creative and generate new meanings. Second, the analysis focused on the temporal aspect linked to the relationship between deconstruction and photography. I argued that, by applying Derrida's understanding of the 'present-now' to photography, we can no longer understand the photographic present according to the conventional spatial image that sees it as

157 punctum temporis (point) that is self-present and belonging to a line made up of points. Rather, the photographic present becomes part of an ongoing becoming that links the present to past and future. Given such a characterisation, photographs become objects through which the viewer 'inherits' a state of affairs and takes on the 'responsibility' for the future that photographs signify. I asserted, then, that the viewer is involved in an active thinking that aims to question and critique his or her assumptions and meanings about what has been inherited through the photograph, and at the same time aims to open up to a different future.

3. Architecture: Activating Space

The third and last chapter examined the creative implications of deconstruction with regard to architecture, approaching the topic from three perspectives. First, I outlined the connection between language and architecture, focusing on the communicative properties linked to the function/meaning of architectural objects. In the light of the deconstructive approach, I argued that architecture is a form of writing, the meaning of which, however, remains open to performance and transformation, and is linked to the creative engagement of users. This argument led to the explanation of architectural objects as open and unfinished projects. Second, I explored the practical outcome of deconstruction in architecture by analysing Tschumi's work Parc de La Villette in Paris. I explained that Tschumi's work exemplifies in practical terms the argument developed in the first part of the chapter. In the park, the effects of deconstruction that challenge the relationship between form and function/meaning are particularly evident. Users are actively and creatively involved in the park. They can activate the architectural space and transform it into an 'event', according to their personal taste, necessities, and interpretation. Hence, the park remains open to a constant transformation. I argued, then, that deconstruction transforms the predictability that stems from a pre-arranged plan, into the unpredictability that stems from a plan whose completion will be always deferred. Third, I investigated the relationship between deconstruction and portable architecture. I contended that portable architecture manifests even more markedly than permanent architecture some of the effects that deconstruction generates in

158 architecture. The analysis has taken into account the analogies that characterise tents and Derrida's notions of freeplay, parergon, and the axiom of incompleteness. I asserted that, in the light of those analogies, portable architecture engages users in a constant creative, performative, and transformative process that activates space.

4. Last Words

Given the dynamic and evolving character of the current social, economic, and political context, we face many enormous challenges ahead. Certainly, one of the crucial consequences of such a scenario involves creativity and innovation. That is one of the aspects that, as I said at the very beginning of this study, engaged my interest in seeking the links between deconstruction and creativity. Perhaps, humankind is now facing problems and circumstances that have never been faced before. Arguably, now more than ever the search for the new and the unknown – in other words the search for creativity and innovation – is crucial, for the solutions to many of those problems may lay within the new perspectives, meanings, and possibilities that are linked to them. In this study, I have aimed to highlight that deconstruction cannot be limited to the mere discussion of abstract matters, but implies performance and active intervention. In engaging with artistic practices that appear to have significant impacts on issues beyond the mere aesthetic sphere and that touch on essential themes such as hospitality, the responsibility to come, and the activation of space, I have tried to emphasise the performative and active traits of deconstruction. I believe that performance, unpredictability, and transformation are three elements essential to our future and, in this sense, the creative implications that emerge from deconstruction can certainly help us face the challenges that lie ahead. Let me conclude this journey by quoting some of Derrida’s words that inspired this project and that in my opinion are crucial to the future of philosophy:

We should have philosophers trained as philosophers, as rigorously as possible, and at the same time audacious philosophers who cross the borders

159 and discover new connections, new fields, not only interdisciplinary researches but themes that are not even interdisciplinary.432

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