Derrida and Music: Part III—The Dispute Between Music and Words

In the field of literary criticism Jacques Derrida has been an enormous influence, yet his name is seldom if ever to be heard uttered in musicology circles. Musicologists do tend to be rather insular, and often seem oblivious to trends in the other arts. For that reason, I hope that the previous two sections of this series on Derrida and music have been enlightening to readers from a musicological background. Let me assure you that you would search far and wide to find an elucidation of Derrida's thoughts that was as readable as what you find here. Before reading on, please make sure you have read the previous two parts of this discussion:

Part I 

Part II

In this, the third and final part of the series, I thought I would go straight to the discussion found in Derrida's chef d'oeuvre, De la Grammatologie (translated by Spivak into English as Of Grammatology). on the querelle, the polemic, between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Lévi-Strauss

Overall, Derrida's key work should principally be read as a critique of the hidden philosophical assumptions and implications underlying the work of structuralist anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and before we go on to discussing the musicological part of the work, I should explain a little about Lévi-Strauss.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 – 2009)

The following is an excellent summary of structuralism, which has been described by Paul Ricoeur as a "Kantianism without a transcendental imperative" [i.e. a God]:

It is the symbolic orders that create the illusion of an external reality for human subjects, and the illusion of human subjects for whom the world has reality. Since we can only live within these symbolic orders, we can have no knowledge of anything beyond them. Naturalism and humanism express the twin fallacies that we can know a world independently of its symbolic representation and that we can know ourselves independently of the symbolism that constitutes a particular conception of ourselves. 

The claim of structuralism to have isolated symbolic orders as a privileged reality of which we can have direct knowledge depends on its ability to identify the meanings constituted by such orders independently of any particular subjective interpretation of these meanings. Structuralism seeks to discover the objective residue of meaning that remains when abstraction has been made from all such subjective interpretations. This objective meaning cannot be identified with any conscious meaning the symbolic order might have either for a particular participant in the order or for a particular analyst of it. This objective meaning can only be an unconscious meaning. Structuralism therefore directs our attention away from the illusions of consciousness to the unconscious substratum of meaning. It is the unconscious that mediates between us and the world, creating the twin illusions of reality and subjectivity.  

Simon Clarke: The Foundations of Structuralism: A Critique of Lévi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement (Harvester Studies in Philosophy) Kindle loc 233

If you read the first part of this series on Derrida and Music, the summary I gave of his thought follows similar lines. The trouble with Lévi-Strauss is that there are some methodological oddities in his system that often relate to the influence of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778)

Lévi-Strauss tends to romanticise and idealise so-called "primitive" people in pre-literate societies, in the same way that Rousseau, the original Back to Nature philosopher, romanticises "Natural Man" untouched by the "corruptions" of modern civilisation. Lévi-Strauss tends to think of writing as a monstrous artifice and corruption of the natural spontaneity of spoken and vocal language.

Rousseau vs. Rameau: the Querelle

Derrida's De la Grammatologie is in two parts, the first of which is a critique of Lévi-Strauss, but Derrida then goes on in the second part to a critique of Rousseau. It is a critique in which it is hard to distinguish with a critique of Lévi-Strauss himself. Included in this second part is also a passing discussion on the querelle between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Jean Philippe Rameau (1683 – 1764)

In essence, Rousseau claims that the vocal character of music, its mimesis of the spoken voice, is the authentic and uncorrupted nature of music in its untouched state. Derrida paraphrases Rousseau:

There is no music before language. Music is born of voice and not of sound. No prelinguistic sonority can, according to Rousseau, open the time of music. In the beginning is the song. This proposition is absolutely necessary within Rousseau's systematics. If music awakens in song, if it is initially uttered, vociferated, it is because, like all speech, it is born of passion. 

Derrida Of Grammatology, Spivak translation, p195.

On the other hand, Rousseau's arch-rival Rameau had published a treatise on musical harmony, claiming that the harmonic triad—in which he saw mathematical and structurally logical principles—forms the basis of music. This, for Rousseau was monstrous sophistry and a corruption of the essential nature of music by unnatural mathematical artifices. Of course, this parallels Lévi-Strauss' argument about writing as a corruption of a natural vocal speech—a corruption of the full presence of the voice in communication with the imminence of a public. Writing, including musical notation, becomes a dangerous violation of the Natural Order, and a painful absence of the immediate presence-of-voice communicating to its audience: to Lévi-Strauss writing is the essence of an unnaturally sophisticated and technological society. It is a corruption of the natural human state.

Rameau, on the other hand, puts forth a theory of abstract composed music written out on paper and amenable to musicological analysis of harmonic triads. With it came the possibility of analysis of notated musical form and harmonic structure. Rameau characterised harmony in a Pythagorean manner as being a naturalistic and mathematical principle of nature and the cosmos. Curiously, this Pythagoreanism reduced Rousseau, the philosopher par excellence of the original Natural Man, into denouncing Rameau's harmonic theories as excessively naturalistic, rather than merely as an over-sophisticated intellectual monstrosity, as you would have expected. To find Rousseau reduced to using "naturalism" as an insult is most peculiar indeed!

For Rousseau, the true nature of music was akin to painting, in that rather that being a complete natural phenomenon unto itself governed by its own harmonic and structural principles, music was a mimesis of the voice, as painting was a mimesis of nature. The essence of this music was a melody as "imitation of the accents of the speaking or passionate voice" (Rousseau quoted in Derrida, Of Grammatology, p 196). The rise and falls of the tones paralleled those of the voice. True music imitated the vocality of the cries, moans, and sighs of the expressive full voice. Music was a mimesis of vocal expression. Derrida quotes Rousseau once again:

The melodious and appreciable tune, is only an artificial imitation of the accents in the speaking or passionate voice. We cry, we complain, without singing; but, in song, we imitate cries and laments; and as, of all imitations, the most interesting is that of the human passions  so of all the methods imitating, the most agreeable is the song. 

([Derrida's italics] Only the word song [chant] is italicised by Rousseau). Derrida,  Of Grammatology, p197

Derrida adds:

But the song must imitate cries and laments. This leads to a second polar determination of nature: it becomes the unity—as ideal unity—of the imitation and what is imitated, of voice and song. 

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p197

It is a Rousseauesque way of thinking when we talk today in instrumental music of cantabile, of espressivo, and of a singing quality in melodic lines. To Rousseau, music was only music in the full voiced presence of live performance and communication, in a directly vocal manner, before the imminent presence of a live audience. And to Derrida that meant that for Rousseau, music was only music as a fullness of a vocal presence, one that spoke to its imminent audience. Implicit within this was a metaphysic of concrete realism—a metaphysic that grasped at an absolutist and imminent transcendental presence in-itself.

Put another way, it is a metaphysic that denounced as illegitimate all that which is purely abstract and theoretical. It denounced whatever was vague and abstract as a ghostly simulacrum of the concrete full voice of an immediacy of a metaphysical presence. The publication in a written abstraction of thought, detached from the immediacy of presence of the full voice before its audience, was an illegitimate ghost and simulacrum that needed to be exorcised as a frightful spectre. Musical notation as a written abstraction of thought—as form, harmony and structure—is illegitimate and at best only an imperfect aide memoir to assist in the performance of a live music in full-voice. Written music is a fallen version of real music, which only becomes truly present, or "real", through live performance. Notated music is not "real" music. Any thought that valued the importance of a fallen form of notated music had to be exorcised for its dangerous corrupting influence on society.

The querelle occurred in the context of the rise of an increasingly complex pure instrumental music, and of its associated forms. Today we think of J.S. Bach as the epitome of the master of instrumental musical forms in this era. Rousseau and the Encyclopédistes, on the other hand, tended to "accuse" composers of writing a "sonata", a term they used polemically as an insult, implying an mathematically constructed artifice. Rousseau famously praised the opening movement of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater as "the most perfect and touching duet to come from the pen of any composer". However, music that lost its roots in the full vocal articulations of the simplicity of song, was to be condemned as degeneracy. Derrida summarises Rousseau's position:

This then is the story. For the history that follows the origin and is added to it is nothing but the story of the separation between song and speech. If we consider the difference which fractured the origin, it must be said that this history, which is decadence and degeneracy through and through, had no prehistory. Degeneration as separation, severing of voice and song, has always already begun. 

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p199

There is, of course, a simpler way of presenting the essential character of the querelle between Rameau and Rousseau: as the querelle between music and words. They themselves tended to phrase the querelle differently as one between harmony and melody. Derrida quotes Rousseau as saying:

Melody being forgotten and the attention of musicians being completely turned toward harmony, everything gradually came to be governed according to this new object.  

Derrida, p199.

However, although not mentioned by Derrida, but yet was observantly pointed out by Carl Dahlhaus, Rousseau was hardly any more sympathetic towards contrapuntally complex music, such as the music of Palestrina, which Rousseau dismissed as "Gothic barbarism" (Rousseau quoted in Dahlhaus: The Idea of Absolute Music). It will be remembered that such Renaissance polyphony became controversial within the church during Palestrina's time precisely because the increasing richness of the polyphony tended to obscure the liturgical significance of the word, and encouraged the listener to bath in the absolute dominance of an increasingly abstract and structurally complex music. Music become increasingly detached from the word. Derrida quotes Rousseau once again:

Composers, who originally were engaged by poets and worked only for them, under their direction so to speak, were becoming independent....Thus melody, originally an aspect of discourse, imperceptibly assumes a separate existence and music becomes more independent of speech. That is also when it stopped producing the marvels it had produced when it was merely the accent and harmony of poetry and gave to it the power over the passions that speech subsequently exercised only on reason. [Rousseau, Essay, pp 68-69]. 

In Derrida, Of Grammatology, p201.

For Rousseau, music only gained its fullness of voice in the presence of the vocality of the simple songful of a music subservient to the poetry of words. The natural simplicity of song represented the uncorrupted purity of Natural Man. When music was a full voice that had a concrete immediacy of a communicative poetic programme that spoke to its audience, then it attained its full and simple presence and became something real. Derrida identifies the history of this yearning for the absolute in word that gave preference of the spoken word over the written as logocentrism—from “logos” meaning "truth," "reason" and "law." Derrida points to what Plato says in the Phaedrus:

Writing signifies forgetfulness, because it is a mediation and the departure of the logos from itself. Without writing, the λογος [logos] would remain in itself. Writing is the dissimulation of the natural, primary, and immediate presence of sense to the soul within the λογος. Its violence befalls the soul as unconsciousness.

In music, logocentrism would be the preference for songful immediacy in full-voice during a performance of live music, over the notated abstraction of a written score. The abstraction of instrumental music, especially one based on abstract forms and harmonic structure, divest of the full voice of an immediate presence, is, by comparison, a ghastly monstrosity, a disembodied ghost and simulacrum devoid of authentic presence.

Of course, any musically sophisticated reader will have seen in this querelle the basis of the debates about programmatic music versus absolute music. Derrida is not sophisticated enough a musicologist to enter into that debate. But the answer that Derrida might have given should already have been apparent in the previous parts of this series. The idea of a verbally articulated extra-musical programme being "concrete", because words themselves are supposedly signifiers that are inexorably anchored to concrete signifieds in their fullness of presence, is itself exceedingly problematic. Thus the idea that words and programmes are "concrete", and that pure or absolute music is, by contrast, "abstract", is simply a dualism whose metaphysical assumptions are extremely questionable. That is why it is further questionable to state that when one calls music a "language" it inevitably means that music is a system of signifiers that unerringly points to its corresponding signifieds.

Put yet another way, the idea of music as mimesis is questionable precisely because the notion of mimesis presumes a duality between the imitator and imitated, a dualism that parallels that between the signifier and signified. The ultimate implication of this is that the traditional debate between so-called programmatic music and absolute music is severely limited by the philosophical assumptions that underlie concepts such as "programmaticism" and "absoluteness". The reason why the programme vs. absolute music debate keeps going around and around is more because of the problematic fundamental metaphysical assumptions underlying the key terms in the debate. As long as these underlying assumptions continue unquestioned, the tired old debates and tedious arguments will keep going around and around seemingly ad infinitum. It is precisely these fundamental assumptions that Derrida fundamentally undermines—or moreover, "deconstructs".

In the querelle between Rameau and Rousseau we see the basis of one of the principal debates in musicology that has been ongoing since the nineteenth century—that between programme and absolute music. The basic ideas that underlie the polemic between our two French theorist was to later re-emerge in the debate about Schoenberg's music. Some argued that Schoenberg's music was "unnatural" and "artificial" in such a way as to be lacking in the immediacy of a songfully communicative vocal expression that spoke to the heart of Rousseau's Natural Man. It is perhaps not surprising that Rameau's modern heir apparent is Pierre Boulez, who interestingly has a degree in higher mathematics. Of course, his favourite poet, to whose texts he has often set music, is Stéphane Mallarmé: the father of poesie absolut. In Mallarmé's poetry, words lose all of their concrete associations with their signified and become totally abstract in their meanings. Poetry becomes itself a kind of absolute music without mimesis.



Further Reading:


Jacques Derrida: Of Grammatology. You may well find that you can actually read this book now skipping over the neologisms if you have carefully read the three posts in this series. You may want to run a quick Google search on Saussure and structural linguistics firsts, though.

Carl Dahlhaus: The Idea of Absolute Music. What a pity the English translation is so hard to read, but it is one of the great books on the philosophy of music. You will see I have drawn a great deal from it in this post, since the querelle between Rameau and Rousseau is central to the discussion.

For another view of how Derrida argues for the overvaluation of the spoken word over the written (he calls this logocentrism) see this essay:

http://newderrida.wordpress.com/category/derrida-and-saussure/

It is fairly readable, and certainly far more readable than most, although I could probably have done much better. I recommend reading the first part of my own series first.