Derrida and Music: Part I—an Introduction to Postmodernism

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.” 

Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland

Most introductions to Postmodernism are written by people with literature backgrounds. They usually lack a grounding in philosophy, and this is part of the reason they confabulate, with what sounds to most people like Alice in Wonderland postmodernist Humpty Dumpty speak where seemingly familiar words and neologisms alike are made to mean whatever Humpty Dumpty chooses them to mean. However, to quote Einstein: “if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” Instead of confabulating, and presenting you a postmodernist word-salad, I thought I would present you a readily comprehensible introduction, which starts with Kant and steadily builds up to Derrida.

In a future post, I would like to introduce the reader to how this might be relevant to discussions of music and musicology. In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida does touch on that subject in his discussion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his polemic with Jean-Philippe Rameau regarding musicology and music theory. However, rather than launch straight into it, and lose even the best read musicology and composition PhDs, I thought I would ease the reader into things starting with an introduction to postmodernism.

Immanuel Kant: the Thing-in-Itself is Unknowable

The simple version of Kant is that we see the world through magic coloured spectacles. We cannot see what the world “really” looks like “in itself”. We are only capable of perceiving the “apparent world”—the way the world looks through our magic coloured spectacles. If we took the spectacles off, to try to see the way the world “really looks”, we would instead see nothing at all.

Take for example colours. The idea of the sky being “blue” comes less from the sky, than it does from the person looking at the sky. In other words, “blue” is something that we impose on the sky, rather than being an absolute intrinsic property of the sky itself. If you were a fish, a frog, or a bird, and you looked at the sky, it might look totally different to you, because of a different way of interpreting and perceiving the sky. The blueness comes more from the magic coloured spectacles of our apparatus of perception than from the sensory stimulus itself.

In other words: the “thing-in-itself” is unknowable. We are only capable of perceiving the apparent world. Kant calls the apparent world, the “phenomenal” world. The “real” world, Kant calls the "noumenal" world. We live in the phenomenal world, and we cannot see the "noumenal" world. According to Kant, only God could see the noumenal world. Only God could see the thing-in-itself.

Kant took this far further and he thought that even time and space weren't intrinsic properties of the “thing-in-itself”, but were imposed by our apparatus of perception upon the perceived world. Time and space are the colouring imposed by our magic coloured spectacles. Time and space did not belong to the “thing-in-itself”. However, Kant argued that the way we imposed this colouring on the world was such that it got things mathematically correct e.g. equilateral triangles have equal sides. This allows us to make rational sense of the world we live in.

Because space and time are preconditions of perception, Kant calls them the a priori grounds of perception. Without us having these a priori grounds of cognition we would be blind. The a priori ground of perception is that magic coloured pair of spectacles, which we must priorly—a priori—wear in order to perceive anything. Without this a priori ground of perception we would see absolutely nothing.

Escher: Waterfall. Kant explains that optical illusions work by tricking our sensory apparatus, and the way the mind imposes its order and meaning onto incoming sensory data. In other words, illusions trick our magic coloured spectacles into seeing things that aren't really there. The way we perceive the world is the end product of how our mind processes information rather than being a direct look at how the world is "in-itself"

Jacques Derrida: the Transcendental Signified is Unknowable

Derrida brings his own terminology to the discussion. Instead of talking about the “thing-in-itself” he talks about the “transcendental signified”.

To understand this, we need to look at the concepts “signifier” and “signified”. We assume that a word like “blue” is a “signifier” that signifies something definite and knowable: the “signified.” The trouble is that the thing-in-itself is unknowable. There is no such a thing as the ideal shade of blue which represents what blue really is in-itself. For a start, is it a navy blue or a sky blue etc? We assume that a “signifier” has a “transcendental signified” to which it has to be attached, but we can never perfectly define that "signified" because the thing-in-itself is unknowable. The signified always eludes our grasp. In other words, meaning is always elusive. Word meanings can never be absolutely nailed down to an absolute transcendental ground. You can never perfectly nail down what a word absolutely means "in-itself": there is always going to be some slippage in meaning.

So if we try to say that “a is x” or “b is y”, instead of x and y being perfect signifieds, they turn out to be more signifiers, that in turn signify something else, which signifies something else and so on ad infinitum. You never end up perfectly pinning down the transcendental signified, instead you turn up more and more signifiers. In fact, you never ever manage to reach that final signified. The notion that you can grasp the transcendental signified is like saying that the thing-in-itself is knowable, and that you see with the eye of God.

Just as Kant identifies the thing-in-itself with God, so too does Derrida identify the transcendental signified with God. This is why Derrida calls thinking that assumes that the ultimate signified is knowable or known, “onto-theology”.

Whereas Kant concentrated on the a priori grounds of perception in time and space, Derrida talks about language. Language is what allows us to think and communicate. Language is the a priori ground of thought. The trouble is that language consists of signifiers that are never perfectly grounded on unshifting and perfect signifieds given a priori: the transcendental signified is unknowable. The idea that word meanings are perfectly anchored to an eternal metaphysical ground is just dogmatic onto-theological absolutism. Instead, words—or signifiers—are grounded on other signifiers, which are in turn grounded on other signifiers etc ad infinitum:

Anything which determines something else to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, this interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum....From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs. 

p50 Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida (translated by Spivak; my emphasis)

Derrida makes an oblique reference to Kant's thing-in-itself in Of Grammatology p 49 when he talks about the “thing itself”:

The so-called “thing itself” is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move.

In other words, you can never nail down that eternally elusive transcendental signified, otherwise known as the thing-in-itself. You should now be able to make a good guess at the gist of the meaning of dreadful neologisms like “representamen” and “interpretant”*.

The Abolishment of the Noumenal World: the Death of God

Derrida then follows Nietzsche in proposing to get rid of the notion of a metaphysical “real” world lurking behind the “apparent” world. If the thing-in-itself is unknowable, why bother even talking about it? The noumenal world might as well be a complete fiction that should be killed off—like God:

I have identified logocentrism and metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irreducible desire for such a [transcendental] signified. 

p49 Of Grammatology (my addition in squared brackets)

In any case, the whole Kantian distinction between noumenal and phenomenal worlds is itself a by-product of language. Or to quote Nietzsche:

we find ourselves in the midst of a crudely fundamental fetish, if we look at the basic requirements for language-metaphysics [Sprach-Metaphysik], or put plainly: to bring reason to consciousness. It is this which everywhere sees doer and deed...

I fear that we will never get rid of God because we still believe in grammar... 

wir kommen in ein grobes Fetischwesen hinein, wenn wir uns die Grundvoraussetzungen der Sprach-Metaphysik, auf deutsch: der Vernunft, zum Bewußtsein bringen. Das sieht überall Täter und Tun... 

Ich fürchte, wir werden Gott nicht los, weil wir noch an die Grammatik glauben... 

Die »Vernunft« in der Philosophie: Götzen-Dämmerung  Nietzsche-Werke Bd. 2, 960-959 (my translation, and added words, emphases)

And you can see now why the title of Derrida's most famous work is entitled Of Grammatology. It is called “grammatology” because words like “noumenal” and “phenomenal” are themselves signifiers. Metaphysics is grounded upon language that creates such dualism between “real/noumenal” vs “apparent/phenomenal”,  “earthly vs “celestial”, “body” vs “soul” “this-worldly” vs “other-worldly”, “doer” vs “deed”, “cause” vs “effect”, “subject” vs “object”, “signifier” vs “signified” etc.

You should now be able to make sense of Derrida's own words in Of Grammatology p 50 (admittedly convoluted though they are):

There is no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing[-in-itself] signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity [i.e. noumenality] of its [transcendental] presence. 

This helps us finally understand Derrida's concept of "infinite play" (of each signifier passing on “ad infinitum” to another signifier):

One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of onto-theology and the metaphysics of presence [i.e. noumenal presence of the thing-in-itself]. 

p49 Of Grammatology (my emphasis and addition in squared brackets) 

This represents a rejection of that division between reality and appearance, noumenal and phenomenal—but also between sensation and perception etc along with other dualisms that constitute the essence of metaphysical language (Sprach-Metaphysik to use Nietzsche's own term). However, that too comes from Nietzsche:

We have abolished the real world: what world was left? the apparent world perhaps? ... But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent one! 

How the “real world” finally became a fable. Götzen-Dämmerung  Nietzsche-Werke Bd. 2, 963  (my translation)

Die wahre Welt haben wir abgeschafft: welche Welt blieb übrig? die scheinbare vielleicht?... Aber nein! mit der wahren Welt haben wir auch die scheinbare abgeschafft! 

Wie die »wahre Welt« endlich zur Fabel wurde. Götzen-Dämmerung  Nietzsche-Werke Bd. 2, 963

In other words, we don't just live in a phoney “apparent” world that is a pale simulacra of the nobler noumenal “real world” lurking underneath it. To Nietzsche it was unacceptable to denigrate our world as being a second rate, "fallen", copy of the higher "real" metaphysical world. Instead of this dualism, all we have is the “infinite play” of meaning granted a priori by language. This is the natural consequence of Nietzsche's famous “death of God”—with it the concept of there being a hidden noumenal and metaphysical shadow-world, where the transcendental signified dwells, is abolished. The existence of such a transcendental world is as impossible to prove as the existence of a God that creeps around behind the scenes in noumenal realms. The onto-theological concept of the noumenal world dies with God.

Nature Unveiling Herself to Science by Barrias. According to Derrida, the notion of the veil of appearances being cast off so that the transcendental essence of the “real” world can “glow finally” in its naked “luminosity” is a metaphysical way of thinking. Derrida calls this type of philosophical paradigm “onto-theology”

The onto-theologist is thus like a monkey that keeps peeling away each layer of “skin” of the onion hoping to find the kernel—the transcendental essence—that lies at the core, only to end up totally empty handed. In terms of textual interpretation, that means you cannot peel away the layers of apparent meaning in order to find the kernel of essential meaning, and essential signification based on the transcendental signified that the absolute textual meaning is unshakeably anchored to.

Postscript

To Goethe

That which is indestructible

Is but thy fable!*

God, the fallacious one,

Is poetic chicanery...

World-wheel, the spinning one

Wanders goal to goal:

Destiny—sayeth the grumbling one,

The jester dubs it—play…

World-play the ruling one

Mixes what Seems with Being: –

The eternally jesting one

Blends us—right in!....

An Goethe

Das Unvergängliche

Ist nur dein Gleichnis!*

Gott, der Verfängliche,

Ist Dichter-Erschleichnis...

Welt-Rad, das rollende,

Streift Ziel auf Ziel:

Not–nennt's der Grollende,

Der Narr nennt's—Spiel...

Welt-Spiel, das herrische

Mischt Sein und Schein: –

Das Ewig-Närrische

Mischt uns—hinein!...

From: Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (my own translation).
My emphasis on the words “play” and “world-play”!
The French for "play" is "joue"—the word used by Derrida

Note this is a parody of the final Chorus Mysticus from the finale of Part II of Goethe's Faust
*Gleichnis also means “likeness” or “semblance” i.e. the apparent (what Seems—Schein), as opposed to what really is (Being—Sein)

I sincerely hope you found that to be a perfectly enjoyable and painless introduction to Derrida, stripped of the usual Alice in Wonderland postmodernist babble. Or to reiterate what Einstein said: “if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough".  Most of those who want to show that they belong to the Postmodernist Club by speaking in a Humpty Dumpty language where words can mean whatever arbitrary thing you fancy them to, do so because they fail to understand it. The herd instinct nonetheless dictates that they put on airs by pretending to understand.

Nor are these Humpty Dumpty types doing themselves any favours. This is how you get the idea that “infinite play” merely means the license to write infinitely capricious nonsense, on the guise that meaning is perpetually indefinable anyway. Or to quote Richard Dawkins:

Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes. 

That's a bit harsh but these Alice in Wonderland confabulators have merely visited such scathing rebukes upon themselves. However, Derrida tells us that:

The established trail [trace] is “baseless” [immotivée] but not capricious. Like the word “arbitrary” in Saussure, it “should not give the idea that the signifier is dependent on the free choice of the speaker”. Simply put it has no “natural attachment” to the signified within reality.  

Derrida: p65-66 De la Grammatologie (my own translation and emphasis). I have substituted “trail” for the French word trace retained as is in the Spivak English translation. The trail is the trail of signifiers leading into “infinite play.”

The fact that signifiers are “baseless” (immotivée) means that they are not inexorably grounded upon a transcendental signified—but this hardly means that meaning is made capricious, viciously subjective, and arbitrary. Or to put it another way:

That does not imply ... that [the signifier] can mean whatever we like: Humpty Dumpty is wrong to think that language is entirely subject to our whim. A purely private language does not permit dialogue, and so hardly qualifies as a language at all. But a specific instance of signifying practice can mean whatever the shared and public possibilities of those signifiers in that order will permit. 

Belsey: Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, p18 

In the next post in this series, I hope to relate this to the age old problem in musicology about absolute and programmatic music, particularly in terms of the polemic between Rousseau and Rameau that Derrida briefly touches upon in Of Grammatology. Unfortunately, Derrida's knowledge of musicology is rather superficial and he skates over it.

Notes

* Interpretant. I am going to hazard a guess at the meaning of this dreadful neologism. I'd imagine that the original French would probably be something like interprétant (I've got a copy of the French version of the Grammatology on order and will let you know if I'm right). This would come from the verb interpréter (to interpret). The present participle from this is interprétant, which literally means interpreting. So the word un interprétant means an interpreting.

To understand this you have to appreciate how Derrida uses the expression un étant (a be-ing) from être (to be). This is a translation of an old Idealist German philosophical expression. In German the verb to be is sein. From this you get the general concept of Being or das Sein. An entity is doing something—it is be-ing. Just as a runner is running, so an entity is doing something—it is be-ing. From Sein you get the term das Seiend (plural Seiende). The expression das Seiend comes from the present participle of sein, and literally means being (like running, walking, talking). This is often just translated as a being, but you can see how poorly it renders into English. Maybe a be-ing, would be better, though admittedly it looks awful. In French it's easier because you can render it as un étant.

In Being and Time, Heidegger even tells us the nature of a Seind (an entity or a be-ing) like a chair comes from chairing. I guess you could say the nature of a trumpet comes from trumpeting, that of a pencil comes from pencilling, and that of a record comes from recording.

With that, let's come back to the neologism un interprétant.  Derrida wants to say that the nature of a word is such that it is un interprétant. An entity—or be-ing, which is doing something—it is interpreting—is un interprétant. If any entity, or be-ing, is an interpretant, then its nature comes from interpreting other words, which interpret other words etc etc ad infinitum.

See, if you look carefully at the words and their origins in the history of philosophy, you can make remarkable sense of them. It's totally unnecessary to explain Derrida's neologisms by inventing new and even more confusing neologisms to explain them like the Humpty Dumpty crowd do. Derrida makes sense.

Further Reading

Part II of this series on Derrida and Music


Belsey: Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction
Impressively avoids poststructuralist Humpty Dumpty speak, and proves to be an engaging read. There are numerous books out there purporting to be "introductions" to Derrida, but these are mostly just Alice in Wonderland books which allow the author to showcase how much of the in-crowd they are. Keep in mind that I have read quite a few books by Derrida over the years. Unlike  the literature crowd I actually understand him, because I know the philosophical context out of which his discourse emerges. That said, this present post is probably making Derrida turn in his grave. Nietzsche said that there is one thing philosophers hate more than not being understood and that is actually being understood!

A contrarian view
The question of the existence of a transcendental reality is like the debate over the existence of God. To Searle, Derrida is a dreadful "atheist" on this issue, one who deserves to be burnt at the stake. Note, however, that Kant is an Enlightenment era thinker, and I have clearly shown how Derrida's ideas are just an outgrowth of Kant's. For Nietzsche, Kant was the murderer of God par excellence. The death of metaphysical transcendental realism and the death of God are thus inexorably linked for Nietzsche. So much for the rhetoric about Derrida being anti-Enlightenment. The counter argument is that Searle's thinking is more like an outgrowth of Medieval (neo-Platonist) onto-theology e.g. St Augustine.