Derrida's Deconstruction Imprisoned in Performance Poetry

Journal of Teaching English as a Foreign Language and Literature,

Islamic Azad University, North Tehran Branch, 2(3), 123-136, Spring 2010

Derrida’s Deconstruction Imprisoned in

Performance Poetry

Mahdi Shafieyan

Imam Sadiq University, Tehran, Iran

Jalal Sokhanvar

Islamic Azad University, North Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran

ABSTRACT: Jacques Derrida‟s (1930-2004) point in his controversial

argument, called “deconstruction”, is that “writing” represents the essence of

language, which is absence, and speech contains the same essence. Performance

poetry, as a postmodern poetics, is where metric literature meets metaphysics of

presence, and paradoxically undermines the Derridean discourse in many aspects.

Playing a crucial role, timing has ever been existing with poetry: rhythm, meter,

or generally musical structures, thematic matters, as well as readings, recordings,

and rehearsals speak loudly of the tight concatenation between the two sides.

Moreover, what is practical does not seem only and simply to be the general

concept of time, but sound, as an essential compartment of poetry, necessitates

the presence, physical being, as well as the present, the time being. This study

poses different embodiments of performance poetry as a young subgenre, and,

second, investigates where and how they become relevant to Derrida‟s ideas.

Then, it comes to examine both parties theoretically to see which one overweighs

the other at the time of colliding. The findings confirm the presumption that

performance poetry in so many places diverges from deconstructive stances.

Keywords: deconstruction, Jacque Derrida, performance poetry, postmodern

poetry

Metaphysics of presence, although denoting time and its pertinent issues,

connotes the generic philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Poetry is the literary

genre which takes the lion‟s share in time, since it recruits temporal

features in its structure, themes, and presentation. Not only does Tom

Konyves (2011) describe videopoetry, a perfomative sort, as time-based,

but also poetry overall due to rhythm is tense-timed. In performance,

except the rhythm in the poem, the sound, among many other factors,

doubles rhythm. Charles Bernstein (2004), the contemporary performance

Shafieyan and Sokhanvar

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poet, exhibits the connection in a lecture, called What makes a poem a

poem, as follows: [Poetry] is not rhyming words at the end of line, it‟s not form, it‟s not

structure, it‟s not loneliness, it‟s not location, … it‟s not love, … it‟s not

the feeling, it‟s not the meter, … it‟s not the subject matter, … it‟s not the

words, it‟s not the things between the words, it‟s the timing.

In other words, he sees rhythm, the fundamental aspect of English

verse, as a part of a greater paradigm which is time, since it is described as

the particular structure or order of tones in time. Zuckerkandl (1973)

constantly asserts the priority of rhythm over meter in poetry by

commenting, “musical meter is not born in the beats at all, but in the

empty intervals between the beats, in the places where „time merely

elapses‟” (p. 169). He elsewhere sews time and poetry into a piece of

clothes that needs to be worn by a present physical being: “Meter is the

repetition of the identical; rhythm is return of the similar” (p. 170). A

present physical being is essential because no one knows the details of

time, that is, the exact beats and intervals. Simply put, because of the life-

linked nature of rhythm, as it can be found in everyday life, each piece

although similar to its predecessors differs from any other work; in this

sense, the presence of one to experience a new thing is obligatory.

Poetical themes also deal with time in nature; they may be concerned

with present, past, or future, yet they make all of them present through

nostalgia, imagery, and prophecy. Among themes, the most frequent ones

are “carpe diem” (Horace, 1896, I.xi) meaning neither past nor future but

present, as well as its cousins “memento mori” (Tertullian, 1953, p. 78) to

signify “remember that you will die”, “tempus fugit” (Virgil, 1905, p. 123)

implying “time flies”, and “ars longa, vita brevis” (Hippocrates, 1822, I.1)

to suggest “art is long, life is short”. After posing such an interrelationship,

the present article treats the places where performance poetry and

Derrida‟s ideas make junctions at which they diverge before colliding,

although this does not mean that the two never converge.

Literature Review

We could not find any book, essay, or dissertation concerning the contrast

between deconstruction and performance poetry. Even according to

Bernstein, nothing noteworthy has been done on performance of poetry

alone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J72KqitfrIs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J72KqitfrIs

TEFLL, IAU-NTB, 2(3), 123-136, Summer 2010

125

even full-length studies of a poet‟s work routinely ignore the audio-text,

and readings---no matter how well attended---are never reviewed by

newspapers or magazines … A large archive of audio and video

documents, dating back to an early recording of Tennyson‟s almost

inaudible voice, awaits serious study and interpretation. (1999, p. 280)

Only, during the process of research, we came across P. Beasley‟s

essay, Vive la difference! Performance poetry (1994), which focuses on

the features of the genre that makes difference between the marginal

author and the central community as well as between “page poetry” and

“stage poetry”. However, the “difference” in the essay does not concern

the deconstructive technical jargon, but it emphasizes the oral and aural

aspects of the genre that were neglected in modernist poetry. In addition, it

discusses the difference between the genre‟s “situational rather than

abstract [setting], invoking an existential [one]” (Beasley, 1994, p. 30),

which is germane to the issues in metaphysics of presence.

Argument

One of the reasons that poetic performances are so important in

contemporary poetry is that the full effect of a piece could not be

experienced until it is loudly heard, preferably by a large audience where

responses can be shared and discussed among the listeners, often with the

poet him/herself. In this sense, poetry is considered to be a “happening”

and contemporary poetry may seem akin to musical concerts in that it is

one thing to be heard, although music, the art of tone, “speaks by means of

mere sensations without concepts, and so does not, like poetry, leave

behind it any food, for reflection” (Kant, 2007, p. 156). As another reason

suggesting the significance, in the age of audio books and visual books

(vooks), people more likely prefer to see and listen rather than read and

write. As a public “event”, poetry in performance formalizes the piece as

an artistic, sometimes political, occasion. In all aspects, there exists

presence and the present, without which and whom the image of poetry

and its performance is blurred. Just as photography freed painting from its

customary function of graphically picturing the external reality, the

invention of recording technologies has transformed the poetry reading

into a potential public meeting. The aural or visual recording of a reading

is just as significant as a permanent print of a poem. Listening or watching

whenever necessary or pleasant does not make the piece independent of its

author, but reminds us of the perpetual presence of poetic properties, such

as sound and the mind behind its creation. Simply put, sounds have always


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been there, but recording techniques have succored to free poets in order to

become more engaged in experimenting with it, just as painters were aided by photography to get free with image, color, and form (Piombino, 1998).

Unlike Derrida who saw ecriture as primary by saying that there is

“writing in speech” (2002, p. 247), not the other way round, in

performance poetry the emphasis moves to orality not script; for instance,

in some of Amiri Baraka‟s vibrantly performance poems, such as Afro-

American lyric, the text can seem secondary, as if the text with its minted

typography has turned merely into a score for the performance. Concurring

with this in an interview, Baraka says, “[the text] is less important to me”

(as cited in Harris, 1985, p. 147).

In a primary oral culture, Ong (2002) says, to solve effectively the

problem of retaining and retrieving a carefully-articulated thought, one has

to do his/her thinking in mnemonic patterns; it might as well be heavily

rhythmic, balanced, repetitious, antithetical, alliterative, assonantal,

epithetic, proverbial, or benefit from other formulary expressions in

standard thematic settings (p. 34). In postmodern poetry, the musical

elements little by little faded because it increasingly relied on writing, but

rhythm never disappeared; that is why it is an essential aspect of English

poetry (Wolosky, 2001). Derrida‟s statement, “writing in speech”, again

comes untrue, since the oral element, rhythm, has been remaining even in

postmodern written poetry.

The significance of giving moment to orality comes to the fore by its

conveyance of meaning. If the poet reads a piece aloud, his/her presence

causes us to perceive his/her intonation and thereby the intention

(Shafieyan, 2011). In speech, stress can set emphasis in ways remaining

indeterminate to writing without adding subsidiary discourse or diacritical

marks. The poetic scansion mainly and mostly rejects different readings,

and the metric norm in a performance suggested by the scansion is sensed

as an implicit understructure of pulses (Abrams, 1999).

Transcribed “[s]pelling”, for example, “always lags behind

pronunciation” (Saussure, 1966, p. 28), as in almost all languages we can

see that some words‟ pronunciations do not match the letters and

phonological rules, words such as colonel, corps, prayer, and a quite long

list beside. In poetry, off-rhyming can be taken as exact rhyming and vice

versa, the option that gives importance to the role of speech and reading; in

essence, the way a poem is read more smoothly bears significance over

how it has been written. Listening for semantic connections between

sounds, Gerald Manly Hopkins made lists of similar words, as “drill, trill,


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thrill, nostril”, and came to the point that the common idea among them is

“piercing”. In the end, he concluded that there is no difference between

“sense” and “sound” (Stewart, 1998, p. 40).1

The poetic sound, further, is heard in a way identical to a promise,

metaphysically speaking; a promise as an action made by and in speech

will be always present: when I promise, I create an expectation, an

obligation, and a necessary condition for closure. Whether we are in the

presence of each other or not, whether the one who receives the promise

continues to exist or not, whether others may discontinue making,

fulfilling, remembering, deserving, or making sense of that promise, or

even if the word “promise” disappears, the promise exists and must be

fulfilled in time. A broken promise cannot be mended, but only might be

regretted or used to establish a new ground of demand. Albeit Austin

(1975) wrote, in How to do things with words, “declarations of intention

differ from undertakings”, and intending itself is a commissive (p. 158),

promises are intentions, and the declaration of an intention, a promise,

makes it commissive. He will be true, if one declares, I have in mind to

build a house; here, he/she is expressing his/her intention, yet does not

promise to build the house. However, if he/she says, I promise to erect an

edifice until the next year, he/she means to have an obligatory intention.

Performance and presence make the words into actions; words

become meaningful, actualized, and realized. When Baraka (2001) in

Somebody blew up America criticizes the heads of the U. S., he expresses

his opposition in the public to incite the audience to do so. It is here that

speech act theory becomes sequential. This stance is best illuminated in

one of his poems Black art (1966), which announces his uncompromising

poetics: “We want „poems that kill.‟ / Assassin poems, Poems that shoot /

guns” (Baraka & Vangelisti, 1995, p. 142). Nevertheless, print was the

major factor in the development of the sense of personal privacy that

marks a modern community. It converted books to booklets, making them

more portable than those common in the manuscript culture, and paved the

way psychologically for solo reading in a quiet corner, and ultimately for a

silent reading.

While the visual material of writing is remote from the author

spatially and temporally, sound poetry or, better to say, sound of poetry

consists of presenting, that is, bringing to being in a temporal and spatial

location of the performance. The fascination of hearing poetry read partly

resides in the resonant presence of the poet‟s self, as well as his/her


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apparent and apprehensible person in the work, which is as an aspect of the

piece available for the audience.

The foregrounding of the performative aspects of the material over the

linear, conventional logic of normative linguistic formulations is a

common feature of visual and sound poetry. Performance poems benefit

from elements appealing to the oral/aural, and not exclusively to the

visual, as in writing. This includes rhythm, recordings, music, imitations of

nonverbal sounds, and other perceptions of the senses (Grabner, 2008).

Now, there is a train of interrogations concerning writing: How could

music be contained in page poetry, when even musical scores seem

nonsense to a poetry reader? How could lights and colors be transmitted

out of presence? In the event that the poet gives performance guides on the

paper, as a dramatist does about stage directions, does it have the same

effect and tangibility as the performance itself?

The next issue is (on) non-referentiality, that is, words do not refer to

a referent outside themselves: “as regards the absence of the referent or the

transcendental signified. There is nothing outside of the text” (Derrida,

1976, p. 158). The contradiction in this statement, its relevancy to the “il

n‟y a pas de hors-texte”-argument (1976, p. 163), and the intentionality

behind its explanation apart,2 in concrete poetry we have a reference

within the text, as the words refer to the pattern. In the event that in a

concrete poem one tries to destroy the outside and claims that a word

refers to nothing, what would be the difference between language and

painting? In this case, we will have just black marks on the page without

any meaning (Morrison & Krobb, 1997), to later on speak of its “trace”, as

Derrida did. In such a work, the textual and lexical values, howsoever

different from the visual imprint of a shape, are read with a glance at the

latter, the referential frame of which inflects the entire text, technically

called the “form”. Even if a verbal work does not resemble the schematic

pictorial image, the terms will always be read in relation to that depiction

as a referent. Concretism, as Mahmudi (2008) believes, objectifying our

experience in poetry, flies against subjectivism in the recent thought.

Likewise, sometimes a performance poem is without any superadded

visual or audio text (subtitle or voiceover), which is called “poetry video”

(Konyves, 2011, p. 4); this kind as a more conceptual poem is like a novel

or play the narrative of which is made into a film. Even the text in

videopoems---an anti-narrative not predicated on the linear text poetry on

the page, although they should have an audio and/or visual text---is not

like that on the page. This is probably because the latter is a block, all


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together and visible in front of us, while in the former each word takes the

place of the previous one, disappearing in front of us, and makes the

meaning of presence bolder. One of the roles which repetition plays in

videopoems, along with emphasis, self-reflection, division, and the like, is

suspending time; that is to say, it does not go forward, but remains in the

present. Whether to have or not the two features, audio-video, a poem

added into a motion picture is named “kinetic poem” (Konyves, 2011, p.

4), which signifies the palpability of the text and stands for performance

poetry referentiality.

Wittgenstein on Egdon Heath (left) by Edwin Morgan (2011) is

another form of concrete poems in a different performance, which plays on

Wittgenstein‟s sentence in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. When one

highlights the poem (right), he/she understands that the words are written

completely on the left but they are white and invisible:

the world is everything that is the

case


case


case


case

the world is everything that is e

case


case


case

the world is everything that is

case


case

the world is everything that is

case h


case


case


case


case


case


case


case


case


case


case. … (p. 40)

First, “play” on the above words represents that writing is not

workable to give us the true text, let alone meaning. Probably, this


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approves of Derrida‟s words, insisting on the betrayal of language, yet we

attract the readers‟ attention to his statement related to legibility: “A

writing that was not structurally legible – iterable – beyond the death of the

addressee would not be writing” (1982, p. 315). The key question here is

the meaning of “legible”; if it signifies “readable”, the above text will not

be considered an ecriture, yet it is a collection of signs. Derrida referred to

the condition of every sign‟s possibility as that of “writing” in general,

what he sometimes called the “arche-trace” (Lucy, 2004, p. 125). The

same case applies to sound poetry, which is not legible, but is counted as a

system of signs. On the other hand, if the meaning is, as expressed

appositively, “iterable”, the sentence in the performance is repeated, but

exactly not differently, although not seen. Derrida was of the opinion that

iterability is based on differance: each thing is unique and inherently

different from other things (Miller, 1982)3, yet video technology, the

necessary means for performance poetry, has made it possible to replay a

tape or Blueray repeatedly without any change and difference. This

meaning of repeatability, exact iterability, does not fulfill Derrida‟s opinion

on the concept. This is to show that letters could be written but not read;

that is to say, to be written only does not bring meaning; what is read or

said provides meaning, and these two need presence.

Among other features of a written work, as it is cast into an

autonomous form, it is always at a remove from the writer and

independent of the author‟s presence, Johanna Drucker (1998) presumes.

In fact, there is every possibility of concealing, eclipsing, disguising, or

effacing the creator through writing. Another feature of writing, whether

hand-written or print, has been its capacity for concealing gender and other

dimensions of physically apparent identity, the characteristics contributing

to the auratic whole of the poet as a persona in a real-life performance.

Therefore, the visual performance of a written work, along with being

about the presence of a poem, is concerned with the presence of the author.

Emitted from a living body, the spoken word appears to be closer to an

originating thought or consciousness than a written word (Selden,

Widdowson, & Brooker, 2005). Nonetheless, a poet is present in his/her

writing by having a signature, that is, his/her style, school, beliefs, and so

forth. Even if he/she does try to postmodernly cloak the parameters or

undergo changes in subjectivity, still an underlying line of thought could

be found in his/her works (Holland, 1975). This counterpoises Derrida‟s

concept of “textuality”, according to which no text whether a foreign one,

its translation, or the first print is an original semantic unity in the interest


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of the editorial changes in the layout of the document far beyond the

author‟s control (Benjamin, 1992).

This controversy over the plurality in presence is of considerable

significance for poetry. The presence of the performance inside the text but

equally the presence of the text within the performance means that there

are at any moment in time two irreducible modes of being present; in other

words, presence becomes the site of irreducibility (Benjamin, 1992).

Furthermore, in oral cultures, having no dictionaries and few semantic

discrepancies, the meaning of a word is controlled by what Goody and

Watt (2005) name “direct semantic ratification”, the real-life, here-and-

now conditions in which the word is used, or simply put the context that

stands for presence (p. 29). If Derrida called reliability of history into

question, whether for its ruptures (1999), lack of originality (1999), or its

story-like narration through language (1999; 1992), so the past context, we

should depend on present.

Print encourages a sense of closure, that is, whatever found in a text

has been finalized and brought to a state of completion. A correlative of

this feature fostered by print was the fixed point of view, McLuhan (2011)

pointed out. Before print, writing itself by isolating thought on a written

surface, detached from any interlocutor, and making utterance in this sense

autonomous and indifferent to any attack encouraged some sense of noetic

closure, against the presumption that thinks writing is not autonomous, for

it is far from the author. Manuscripts, by contrast, with their marginal

comments or glosses, which often are worked into the text in subsequent

copies, were in dialog with the world outside and remained closer to the

give-and-take economy of the oral expression (Ong, 2002).

Concerning closure, the problem is double-edged in performance

poetry: The first layer bears similarity to the above-paragraph respect of

writing and is portrayed by Stewart (1998), who believes that although we

might not to have closure of meaning in, say, sound poetry, it nevertheless

does stop; sounds follow and precede other sounds in a relationship. Yet,

closure is not determined by form and structure; it is obvious that in every

kind and genre of work there will be a finish line, but what informs us of

presence or absence of closure is the continuity of content at the end of the

piece. When in performance poetry the speaker utilizes irony, paradox, to

mean the opposite, final questions embodied in Charles Bukowski‟s

Bluebird (1991), and other figurative tools, open-endedness is born,

although it terminates. Thylia Moss‟s Hypnosis at the bird factory (2010)


132

is another performance without closure, as we scan the deep shadow of

repetition, and the end is as the beginning.

The second stratum is that closure is not linked and limited to words

and their meanings only, as in sound poetry meaning does not primarily

matter. In other words, we may and may not have closure in sound poetry

beyond noticing words and structure: Threshold, the sound poem by

Hannah Silva (2009) presented in Ecopoetics, mimics the sound of water

dripping and dropping, and the needle goes on to the end. On the other

hand, Deconstruct by the band Epica, unlike its name, has a closure, since

the singer convinces her internal evil, at the start refusing to marry, to

unite as the clip closes. In reality, when at the end of musical tracks there

are undertones, repetitions, and refrains, the listener is instilled with lack

of closure.

Finally, a writer can subject the unconscious inspiration to greater

conscious control than the oral narrator, notwithstanding inspiration

continues to derive from unconscious sources. He/she finds his/her written

words accessible for reconsideration, revision, and other manipulations

until they are eventually released. Consciousness, taking the advantage of

presence, Derrida (1982) would say, shows up in ecriture much more

ostentatiously than in speech.

Conclusion

Meeting Derrida and performance poetry in a session revealing the

disagreements between the two brought about an argument which revolved

on the axes of poetry as a “happening” and existential presence, speech

and script, sound and sense, speech act and realization, concrete poetry,

referentiality as well as iterability, textuality or plurality in presence, along

with consciousness, all of which can be collected and considered under the

umbrella term “the metaphysics of presence”. Ferdinand de Saussure

(1966), explaining “difference” between two things, words, phonemes,

said that the difference between “b” and “p” makes meaning, as the former

is voiced and the latter voiceless (1966, p. 47); this could be inferred by

Derrida that one benefits from the presence of an element while the other

does not. Again, performance poetry negates such demonstration, since,

for instance, listening to audio files that have been recorded before lacks

three presences: one of the author, second of the audience, and third of

present time; indeed, we can conceive that presence is not part and parcel

of something by birth. This is just Derrida‟s reading that through the

history of Western philosophy one thing has been privileged, for the


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reason that, we can find, as we did in this article, so many cases that refute

the presence “rule” in the way Derrida considered. Such samples lead one

to the point that still the French thinker‟s metaphysics of presence is open

to challenging discussions.

The Authors

Mahdi Shafieyan is an A.B.D. of English Literature at IAU, Tehran

Central Branch, and has published 7 books, one in the U.S. (Heaven the

Hero, accessible through Google Books) and six at Imam Sadiq University

Press as well as five international and two national articles. His area of

interest mainly includes philosophy of literature as well as American

poetry and short story. He has also presented four papers in international

conferences.

Jalal Sokhanvar, Professor and chairman of the Department of

Postgraduate Studies, Islamic Azad University, earned his M.A. from

Senate House University of London and his Ph.D. from Lille in France. He

is the author of some books such as A Compendious History of English

Literature, and Drama Interpretations: A Structural Approach to Modern

Drama. His reviews of new poetry and literary criticism appear in

scholarly magazines, and he is editor-in-chief of Critical Language &

Literary Studies.

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Notes

1. For a deliberate study on the functions of sound in language, generally, and poetry,

specifically, as well as its relationship with sense, see: D. I. Masson (1965), “sound”, in

A. Preminger (Ed.) Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics (Princeton: Princeton

University Press).

2. The theoretical argument on this matter has been posed elsewhere: M. Shafieyan

(2012), Metaphysics of presence and contemporary performance poetry, Diss., Islamic

Azad University, Tehran Central Campus. 3. Plato believed that the repeated unit does not lose its identity: the copy is a

facsimile of the original pattern, which could be compared with his “idea” or “pure form”

(Miller, 1982, p. 6).

Email: [email protected]

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Documents

Derrida's Deconstruction Imprisoned in Performance Poetry