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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