Sunday 5 October 2014

Dead Celebrity Chat Show with Jacques Derrida

C: So, we haven't done this for a while but I am delighted to be back with the Dead Celebrity Chat Show. Tonight’s special guest, summoned from the higher spheres of the kabbalah’s Tree of Life, is Jewish mystic Jacques Derrida. Good evening, Jackie boy.

JD: Bon soir. And may I say how enchanted I am to be back. Enchanted… enchained… enabled… enlisted.

C: And this is a special show tonight, because you requested to be called up as soon as you heard the subject of the debate…

JD: Yes, the so-called work in progress. I've noticed it has become quite a thing of late.

C:Indeed. Now, your work has always been concerned with unravelling the apparent coherence of definitions: it was this that led to you being pegged, so to speak, as a nihilist by some philosophers.

JD: My approach may appear idiosyncratic, but I can assure you it has roots in the dialogues of Plato. Indeed, I imagined the father of philosopher writing a series of postcards… and his approach to pharmacy inspired both my work and that song by The Prodigy.

C:We’ll come back to your antecedents later, but let’s begin with the work in progress. I believe you have identified it as an emerging genre?

JD: Mais oui. I have always been troubled by the Aristotelian tradition which claims a proto-scientific observational methodology but is actually more about – how would you say – putting stuff in boxes. And ticking them. The fashion for works to be named in this way suggests that a new box is being designed. I must deconstruct it.

C: So the designation itself is the problem.

JD: D’accord. In a real sense, every work is in progress. The nature of performance, its location in a physical and temporal location ensures that when it is being performed, it is in progress. To extend this, the notion of the performance, both in expectation and after-thought, continues the work’s progress.

C: So you question the validity of the term? It is so large that it is useless?

JD: Bien sur, it applies to all performance… as we can say that the event is reconfigured at different points on the hermeneutical spiral, it is always in progress.

C:Er, you mean, no play ever really finished because it exists in the mind of the audience, who keep on interpreting it, making it new.

JD: It is a platitude, but yes. The final meaning – the end of progress – to an event is always deferred and any reading is partial and tentative. Even the reviews of the critics on The Daily Mail.

C:And so it becomes a broad and meaningless statement, since it applies to everything?

JD: Exactement. But that is not my concern here. It is obvious and easy. What sort of a post-modernist would I be to offer so tawdry a truth?

C:Please, go on.

JD: My worry is that the designation ‘work in progress’ has come to mean a particular attitude to performance, and one that I do not care to promote. It is used most often in devised theatre, in live art – all categories that bear the finger-prints of the criminal Aristotle and would not bear my scrutiny – to denote a performance that is not yet complete in the sense of a product ready for the market.

C: I notice you are using a commercial term here…

JD: Bouf, times drive us to hard uses. The language of neo-liberalism has infected us all. If we had time, I would perhaps argue for a correct form of government, based on the triumph of the rational, but… since money changes hand, we must speak the language of the bad daemon.

C:So the work in progress is a form of public rehearsal, perhaps?

JD: That will suffice as a working definition, mon ami. And this public rehearsal is all too acceptable.

C: Something you find objectionable?

JD: The job of the philosophe is not to condemn the artist, although there are grounds to run them out of the city-state. However, there is a duty of care, to assess the artists’ social consequence.

C: And the work in progress is morally suspect?

JD: If it is not offered at a reduced price, or incorporates some form of audience dialogue – even the humble and mind-bendingly boring post-show conversation – very much so. I am concerned that it is used as a defence, a strategy to confound the process of critics… if they complain about the show’s quality, why, then, it is merely in progress.

C: Some critics review anyway… one example got five stars…

JD: And here the critic is morally culpable. To tell an audience that an incomplete drama is perfect is to undermine public trust, and deceive the artist.

C:This is a difficult question with devised work. With a script, it is possible to get closer to a definitive version…

JD: D’accord, the complete version is elusive. The atmosphere, the temporal peculiarities, the spatial variations…
C: The date and the place it happens…

JD: But this is not unique to the work in progress. That is not the question… the question is what a culture of works in progress would mean… a kind of mimesis of theatre, a series of rehearsals that perform the idea of performance…

C:Getting further and further from the pure form…

JD: Exactement.

C: Of course, mimesis itself is suspect.

JD: Oui, as we see in the parable of the mime who tickles himself to death.

C:You are not Derrida, are you?

JD: Mon ami, c’est incroyable…

C:Let’s go back to a few things you have said… ‘in a real sense’. Your distaste for mimesis just now, and the dismissal of Aristotle. The mention of the city-state… don't you get enough time already on the blog?

JD: Derrida agreed with me when we met in kether… he lent me his beret and these black tobacco cigarettes.

C:That’s kether on the Jewish Tree of Life?

JD:I influenced their mystics.

C:So, is this work in progress thing just another attempt to defeat Aristotle?

JD:No. I think that it is confusing audiences. They ought to get cheap tickets if they are part of the creative process.

C:I think they always are…


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