Theorising performance,performing theory: Jacques Derrida and Ornette Coleman at the Parc de la Villette

Priceless gifts

In his work on the gift, Derrida identifies two characteristics of gift exchange that will prove central to our current concerns. As he points out, in its ideal or pure form a gift should represent a spontaneous expression of generosity, unconditioned by any thought of a possible return gift, of the bonds of debt and obligation to which the donor might be subjecting the gift’s recipient, or of the appearance of virtuous altruism that might attach to the donor through the act of giving. Yet any such pure gift is, in fact, an impossibility, a myth. In order to be recognised as a gift at all, whether by its donor or by its recipient, that gift must always already be caught up in a pre-existing network of conventions, forming part of a regulated economy of exchange, gift, debt, obligation and counter-gift. Yet by dint of being caught up in this pre-determined, regulated economy of gift and counter-gift, a gift, by its very existence, annuls itself as gift, as an expression of spontaneous generosity (Derrida, 1991: 38).

However, this impossibility of the pure gift does not justify the straightforward reduction of all gift exchange to its mercenary motivations, or to its objective social and economic logic (Derrida, 1991: 101). For although the pure gift is an impossibility, the promise of such purity continues to inhabit every actual instance of gift exchange. What this means is that even if no gift is possible outside a regulated circuit of exchange, there are different economies of gift-giving, some of which will come closer to realising the impossible ideal of the pure gift than others. When a friend or relative gives us a gift that betrays an exceptional level of care, a particular attentiveness to personal desires or tastes we may not even have fully realised we possess, then something unpredictable happens within the nonetheless highly regulated circuit of gift exchange. In such cases, something quite unexpected happens, something ‘beyond calculation: incalculable, unpredictable’, an ‘événement sans prix … ce qui à la fois échappe au calcul, au marché’, to use the terminology Derrida employs to describe both Coleman’s improvised jazz and the gift of Mrs Coleman’s first name he asks Coleman to communicate to him by means of his saxophone playing.

In this sense, some instances of gift exchange will come closer to constituting an ‘event’, an ‘unpredictable’ or ‘priceless event’. An ‘event’, in Derrida’s terms, is anything that happens that is not strictly reducible to its prior conditions of possibility. Like a pure gift, a pure event, something wholly undetermined by earlier traditions, conventions or prior conditions of possibility, is an impossibility. At the same time, if everything that happened were already absolutely pre-determined by its prior conditions of possibility, then nothing new, original or inaugural would ever happen at all. Like the pure gift, then, the pure event, ‘leaves a trace or a mark that can be seen as a promise of such inaugurality’, a promise that may inspire us to at least try to perform ‘something radically inventive’, to quote Geoffrey Bennington (2008: 8).

Written scores, improvised jazz

It should not require any detailed knowledge of the theory and practice of jazz performance to see that this scenario might be conceived as being strictly analogous to what happens in jazz improvisation. In its pure or ideal form, jazz improvisation would presumably define itself in terms of its absolute opposition to the wholly predictable forms of Western classical music, forms prescribed in advance by the written score on which classical musicians typically rely during their performances. In this sense, jazz improvisation would correspond to an unmediated expression of spontaneous emotion, which defined itself in opposition to the premeditated, restrictive, rational structures embodied in the written classical score. However, like the pure gift or the pure event, this notion of pure improvisation is a myth. Pure improvisation, in this sense, would be mere noise, total incoherence. In order to signify at all, in order to communicate meaning, evoke a mood, or elicit an emotion, in order to be even recognised as improvisation, it must always be improvisation within and against existing, recognisable, more or less conventional rhythmic, harmonic and melodic structures. Hence, in a manner analogous to gift exchange, in improvisation something unpredictable may emerge from within a predetermined, regulated set of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic structures.

Far from corresponding to a pure immediacy or spontaneity, jazz improvisation always takes place, therefore, within mediated structures of difference and deferral – of ‘différance’, to use the appropriate Derridean term. The fact that jazz musicians frequently dispense with written scores during their performances should not fool us in this respect. For in the absence of such tangible examples of written, hence pre-programmed text, the improvised performances of such musicians are nonetheless regulated by what Derrida would surely call ‘une archi-écriture’, comprising those pre-existing rhythmic, harmonic and melodic structures within, around and against which jazz musicians improvise. This is what the great jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus meant when he insisted: ‘You can’t improvise on nothing; you’ve got to improvise on something’ (in Kernfeld, 1995: 119). Paul Berliner’s ethno-musicological study of jazz musicians provides more detailed substantiation of Mingus’s point. As Berliner shows, jazz musicians do not create their improvisations ex nihilo; rather they dedicate years of training and reflection to perfecting their art, learning the solos of others, listening and responding to the performances of fellow musicians, and creating their own improvisations in response to pre-established conventions, structures and practices (Berliner, 1994).

However, if any notion of improvisation as pure spontaneity or unmediated expression is nonsensical, this does not mean that there is nothing specific to jazz improvisation, and that nothing different or unpredictable happens in an improvised performance. Here again, it will prove instructive to return to the analogy Derrida suggests between improvisation and the gift. As we saw in the case of the gift, while Derrida argues that there is no pure gift, he nonetheless insists on the existence of different economies of gift-giving, some of which come closer to approaching the impossible promise of the pure gift than others. There may be no purely improvised music in the sense of an immediate spontaneous musical expression absolutely free of pre-programming or pre-meditation. Nonetheless, there are musical forms that approach that impossible purity more closely than others, musical forms that are hence more open to ‘the unpredictable event’. In suggesting an analogy between Coleman’s jazz and the gift of communicating his mother’s name, Derrida implies that the specificity of the former’s music lies precisely in its peculiar level of openness to the event, in its proximity to the impossible promise of pure improvisation.

Now, this may all seem unnecessarily complicated, an unnecessarily fine distinction between an impossibly pure improvisation and an improvisation that merely approaches such purity. However, this would be to overlook the high stakes of this distinction. As we have seen, at the simplest level, making such a distinction is necessary if we are to develop an account of jazz improvisation that accurately captures the reality of that practice. On a second level, to fail to acknowledge the fundamentally mediated nature of jazz improvisation would be to fall victim to the tendency characteristic of so much Western thought that Derrida terms ‘phonocentrism’. In De la grammatologie (1967), Derrida traces the recurrence of a phonocentric problematic in a range of thinkers, from Plato to Saussure. Phonocentrism, he argues, rests on the attempt to set up a binary opposition between speech and writing. According to such an opposition, the spoken word is taken to correspond to the immediate expression of an ideal core of meaning, a self-present truth. Writing, as an artificial medium of re-presentation, is then assumed to have contaminated such self-presence after the fact, by inserting the self-present ideality of the spoken word into a degraded structure of mediation, difference and deferral.

In the field of anthropology, Derrida demonstrates how such phonocentrism has generated recurring forms of ethnocentrism. In their anthropological studies, a range of thinkers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Claude Lévi-Strauss have designated the ‘exotic’ societies they study ‘societies without writing’, assuming that, in the absence of codified systems of graphic notation, such societies are the sites of some lost primal unity and harmony. That primal unity and harmony will then be taken to have been shattered by the intrusion of technologies of writing that such thinkers assume to be inherently Western in origin. Although destructive, such technologies are also taken to hold the key to all scientific and historical progress, all economic and social development. In this way, these thinkers at once romanticise so-called ‘societies without writing’ as sites of primitive harmony and denigrate them, by assuming that any change or progress can only come to them from outside, from the intrusion of technologies taken to be the exclusive property of the West. In De la grammatologie, Derrida thus sets out to demonstrate the falsity of these phonocentric and ethnocentric assumptions. First, he seeks to deconstruct the opposition between the spoken and the written, by showing that spoken language itself is always already caught up in structures of mediation, difference and deferral of meaning. So, for example, whether the signifier ‘bat’ is spoken or written, it can only signify by dint of its insertion in a system of differences, by means of its difference from ‘cat’, ‘mat’, or ‘hat’, among other things. He thus posits the existence of a more generalised structure of writing, prior to the invention or codification of systems of graphic notation, underpinning all signification, what he terms ‘une archi-écriture’. Second, he shows that the assumption that ‘societies without writing’ are the sites of some primal unity and harmony is the product of an ethnocentric projection; such societies are always already characterised by differences and divisions and are in no way reliant on the intrusion of essentially Western technological forms to change or develop (Derrida, 1967).

Jazz criticism and the phonocentric problematic

It should now be clear why Derrida chooses to open ‘Joue – le prénom’ by complicating or seeking to deconstruct the opposition between improvisation and the written score. What is at stake in any attempt to construct an absolute opposition between the mediated structures of the written score and the spontaneous immediacy of jazz improvisation is a particularly pervasive form of racism or ethnocentrism. For any such binary opposition between the improvised and the written all too often underpins a series of ethnocentric assumptions, according to which African American musicians are simultaneously romanticised for their presumed ability spontaneously to express authentic emotions repressed in the rational West and demeaned for the untutored, illiterate simplicity such spontaneity is taken to express. In the course of the interview between Coleman and Derrida that preceded their joint appearance on stage at the Parc de la Villette, both men had discussed precisely these issues, debating the extent to which Coleman’s free jazz was, in fact, premeditated and pre-programmed. What emerged most clearly here was Coleman’s sense of resentment in the face of the assumption by many commentators that his improvisatory style, his free jazz, reflected some kind of spontaneous, immediate, unthought or unreflected expression of pure emotion. Against such assumptions, he was eager to stress the role played by written scores during his group’s rehearsals:

In his critical biography of Coleman, John Litweiler recounts an incident which makes still clearer why Coleman should resent the assumption that his playing is wholly spontaneous. This incident also indicates how well rooted such assumptions are in the field of jazz.

In 1984, [Coleman] told a curious story: NBC-TV news anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley ‘came to the Five Spot [jazz club] and asked me, “Can you read?” And I said, “Only the newspaper”, because even when I told people I could do things like read music, it never helped me. So after that, write-ups always picked up on that quote … I realised that my image was sort of “corn-poke musician”, this illiterate guy who just plays, so I started writing classical music.’ Shades of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, one of whose members had claimed, more than four decades earlier, ‘I don’t know how many pianists we tried before we found one who couldn’t read music.’ (Litweiler, 1992: 104–5)

As Litweiler makes clear in his remark about the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, there is a long tradition in jazz criticism of assuming that the inability to read music is a guarantee of a musician’s capacity to produce authentic jazz, characterised by the supposedly spontaneous immediacy of its improvised forms. ² In Derrida’s terms, such assumptions are both phonocentric and ethnocentric, relying upon, what he terms, in ‘Joue – le prénom’, ‘cette idée antique et naïve de l’improvisation … sa mise en œuvre métaphysique ou idéologique’. It was this idea of improvisation that Coleman had apparently judged to be ‘raciste’ (Derrida, 1997: 41).

As Michael Turnheim (2006) argues, such phonocentric and ethnocentric assumptions have been constitutive of jazz criticism from its inception to the present day. Justifying such a claim would require a more lengthy analysis than is possible in the space of the current article. We shall, therefore, focus purely on one text, Carles and Comolli’s Free Jazz, Black Power (2000), mentioned above. The reasons for selecting this text are twofold. First, Free Jazz, Black Power would appear to be as far from an ethnocentric analysis of jazz as it would be possible to imagine, given its authors’ stated commitments to radical anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle and their attempts to articulate free jazz to that struggle by interpreting the music as the direct expression of the US Black Power movement. Second, the authors claim that, in so doing, they have broken completely with the ‘ideological problematic’ they attribute to earlier critical approaches, approaches that have all been ‘liées à/et régies par le point de vue majeur de l’occidentalité’ (Carles and Comolli, 2000: 118). Yet, as we will see, for all its commitment to anti-racism, Carles and Comolli’s account remains within a fundamentally phonocentric, hence ethnocentric problematic of the most conventional kind.

Carles and Comolli’s founding assumption is that jazz is essentially a protest music that expresses the political and economic struggles of African Americans. Jazz’s essence as protest music is expressed in the fundamentally vocal, improvised forms of the blues, ‘ces chroniques de l’âme noire’, which, ‘par leur marginalité économique et leur altérité idéologique’, have resisted commercial exploitation and recuperation by the white music business (2000: 255). Across its various styles and currents, the blues remains the essential core of the music, ensuring its continued existence, representing its ‘vérité transtylistique’ (2000: 29, n. 1), a truth with which all authentic forms of jazz will attempt to reconnect (2000: 256). As Carles and Comolli put it:

le chant, en tant que forme d’expression individuelle, a assuré, par sa diversité et sa plasticité, la continuité de la musique noire (signification, rôle, témoignage au regard du contexte social). C’est cette résistance et cette permanence de la forme du blues, ou même de son seul esprit (dans le free par exemple), qui a permis à la musique noire de se développer … tout en résistant à sa colonisation culturelle et économique, sous le nom de jazz. (2000: 233)

On the basis of these assumptions about the blues, Carles and Comolli sketch a history of jazz that is essentially a history of the music’s alternating periods of submission to and resistance against the white music industry’s attempts to ‘colonise’ and ‘exploit’ the music for commercial gain. Symptomatically, Carles and Comolli identify technologies of writing or inscription, whether in the form of musical scores or early recording technologies, as representing the means by which such colonisation and exploitation are achieved. For example, they focus on the role played by written scores and complex orchestrations in the immense commercial success enjoyed by jazz big bands during the swing craze of the late 1930s. To imprison the originally fundamentally vocal blues forms of New Orleans jazz in written scores was both to domesticate the authenticity of that earlier form and to render it more easily reproducible and hence commercially exploitable. In the swing era, jazz thus became a mass-produced commodity and performance became analogous to working on an assembly line:

Alors que les musiciens venus de la Nouvelle-Orléans étaient souvent analphabètes, cette nouvelle génération de jazzmen savaient lire. Les danseurs avaient besoin de bons orchestres, de ces ‘machines à swing’ qui les feraient danser sur les rengaines à la mode: les chefs d’orchestre avaient donc besoin de machinistes qualifiés … À l’exception de quelques solistes, la plupart des musiciens ont l’impression, à l’instar des ouvriers d’usine, de travailler à la chaîne; le jazz devient mécanique et utilise une huile magique, le swing. (2000 : 271)

In the written, hence commercially exploitable arrangements of the swing big bands, the authenticity and improvised immediacy of the blues, that vocal form which constituted so many ‘chroniques de l’âme noire’, had been tamed and deformed by the ‘scénarios bien réglés des orchestres’ (2000: 275).

The be-bop movement of the 1940s is thus understood by Carles and Comolli as a reaction against the written, hence commercialised forms of swing in favour of a return to the blues form, to improvisation, and hence to an authentic expression of African American experience and political aspiration (2000: 295–6). Free jazz, in turn, is interpreted as a reaction against the written orchestrations and softer tonalities of Third Stream and Cool Jazz, respectively, two styles dominated by white musicians (2000: 319). Free jazz, they argue, involves a return to improvisation, to the blues, and hence to vocalisations that Carles and Comolli describe as follows:

les discours du free jazz … visent l’essentiel du blues: son discours et sa fonctionnalité, et rappellent plutôt, se libérant tout à fait des structures imposées du chanté, work songs ou dirty dozens, mais aussi pamphlets, pétitions, manifestes, plaintes des esclaves … Les mutations sonores du free jazz ont permis et préparé cette explosion vocale; l’exaspération des timbres, la vocalisation forcenée des instruments, l’apparition tolérée puis sollicitée de bruits parasites indiquaient l’imminence de ses cris. (2000 : 374–5)

The point here is not to deny that free jazz involves the use of vocalisations, squawks and grunts that resemble the human voice or animal cries; a passing familiarity with free jazz would confirm that this is so. The point is to question the interpretation Carles and Comolli place on such techniques, and their assumption that they correspond to a return to a mode of immediate self-present expression that stands diametrically opposed to the mediated structures of the Western written score.

In the Preface they wrote for the 2000 edition of Free Jazz. Black Power, Carles and Comolli emphasise still further the association between the improvised, vocalised forms of free jazz and the realm of unmediated nature. Here they contrast free jazz to the contemporary fashion for computer-programmed synthesised music. Free jazz is defined as being ‘une musique qui échappe au programme’, where the term ‘programme’ refers both to a computer programme and to the programmes ‘par lesquels s’exerce la domination sociale’ (2000: 14–15). Free jazz represents the return of the body and of the voice in opposition to the world of synthesised music: ‘Retour de la voix rebelle, retour du corps rebelle’ (2000: 20). Techno music, which places synthetic forms of mediation between the body, the voice and musical expression, is thus opposed to the spirit of all true music, which is figured as the immediate expression of body and voice, unmediated by any synthetic ‘prosthesis’:

Et tout le travail des musiciens, en jazz et hors jazz, revient à donner du corps à l’instrument fabriqué sur mesure et précisément calculé, à lester d’un poids de corps, de merde, de sueur, ce qui n’était pas prévu par le fournisseur. L’instrument de musique est le contraire de la prothèse. Il est là pour que ça aille moins bien. Point de pureté sans misère. Le son du monde comme un combat, le corps dans le monde contre le monde sans corps. (2000: 17)

David Wills (1998: 137) has noted the tendency in jazz criticism ‘to perpetuate a naturalist view of the technology of musical production’, naturalising musical performance by denying the ‘prostheticity’ of all musical instruments. Carles and Comolli provide us with a striking example of this tendency. They explicitly deny the prostheticity of the musical instrument and its undeniable status as a technological supplement to the body’s natural functioning and unmediated self-present expression, in order precisely to re-naturalise musical performance and to claim it as a matter of the body, of sweat and shit, of elemental natural forces defined in strict opposition to the ‘synthetic’ force of programmed synthesised music.

The recurrence of this denial of prostheticity in Carles and Comolli’s work is symptomatic of the problematic within which they work and hence of their continued reliance on a series of phonocentric oppositions between nature and culture, body and reason, immediate, vocalised expression and programmed or written musical arrangements. For all their apparent commitment to anti-racism, Carles and Comolli thus rely on a series of now familiar phonocentric and ethnocentric oppositions between the spoken and the written, the spontaneous and the pre-programmed, self-present immediacy and mediated representation, the authentic and the commercialised, black and white, nature and culture. The first term of each of these oppositions is privileged, idealised as the site of some essential purity and authenticity that defines itself in opposition to a degraded Western rationality. Yet such idealisation remains profoundly ethnocentric in its assumption that all capacity for technology, mediation and reason is exclusively Western and in its implicit relegation of African American musicians to a realm of immediacy, unreflective spontaneity and unmediated nature.

To question Carles and Comolli’s continued reliance on such tropes is by no means to deny the fact that jazz has frequently been articulated to African Americans’ struggles against racial discrimination and inequality. It is rather to insist that those varied political articulations can only be done justice by elaborating an account of the music and of its improvised forms that deconstructs the phonocentric and ethnocentric oppositions that typically characterise even the most apparently benevolent forms of jazz criticism. This is precisely what Derrida seeks to do when, in ‘Joue – le prénom’, he complicates any simple opposition between improvisation and the written text or score from which he had planned to read. As we have noted, the various analogies he draws between Coleman’s free jazz and both the gift and the event represent his attempts to articulate a conception of improvisation that will acknowledge its specificity, without recourse to phonocentric and ethnocentric notions of spontaneous immediacy or untutored and unreflective simplicity. The nature of the gift that Derrida asks Coleman to communicate to him – his mother’s first name – and the means of communication he anticipates Coleman employing – ‘la saxotéléphonie’ – represent two final elements in his attempts to deconstruct any phonocentric approach to jazz.

Saxotelephony and improper proper names

In De la grammatologie, one of the examples of phonocentrism examined by Derrida turns on the question of the proper name, the last of the various central motifs of ‘Joue – le prénom’ we identified at the beginning of this article. In the passage of De la grammatologie in question, Derrida analyses a section in Tristes tropiques (1955) in which Lévi-Strauss describes observing the children of an Amazonian tribe at play. One young girl approaches the anthropologist and whispers the name of her rival into his ear. This, Lévi-Strauss explains, is a form of vengeance since it transgresses the interdiction among the tribespeople on the open use of proper names. The rival responds in kind by whispering the name of the first girl to Lévi-Strauss, who then, against his better judgement, encourages the children to tell him the names of all the tribe, adults included. In Lévi-Strauss’s account, his role in breaking the taboo surrounding the tribe’s proper names becomes an allegory or synecdoche for the intrusive, destructive role of any Western observer; he takes the secret of the proper names to be an index of the primal unity and harmony of the tribe that has now been ruptured and contaminated by the Western drive to know and record the truth.

Following a schema that should now be familiar, Derrida questions the opposition on which Lévi-Strauss’s account rests – an opposition between the primal innocence of the ‘primitive’ society, on the one hand, and the violence inherent to an essentially Western desire for knowledge, on the other. Such an opposition, he argues, is symptomatic of the anthropologist’s tendency ‘de constituer l’autre en modèle de la bonté originelle et naturelle, de s’accuser et de s’humilier, d’exhiber son être inacceptable dans un miroir contre-ethnocentrique’ (Derrida, 1967: 168). As Derrida argues, the very act of giving its members proper names, regardless of whether those names were kept secret or not, was already an act of violence. Hence the assumption that the secret surrounding such names corresponded to a state of primal unity is a pure product of Lévi-Strauss’s ethnocentric projection. In its pure or ideal sense, a proper name should be absolutely unique, designating the absolute singularity of the individual it names and nothing else. Yet, in reality, in order to function at all as a name, that name cannot be, to quote Niall Lucy (2004: 104),

strictly my exclusive property. My ‘proper’ name, in other words, has been given to me from within a system of coded possibilities. If my name were truly proper, if it were truly mine exclusively, no one – including myself – would know how to say it, repeat it, to exchange it.

The revelation of proper names that Lévi-Strauss provokes is thus not an originary violence disturbing a state of unmediated unity: it is, rather, merely the revelation of the tribespeople’s prior inscription ‘dans un système de différences linguistico-sociales’, an inscription inherent to the initial act of naming itself (Derrida, 1967: 164). It is only by relying on a mythical conception of the propriety of the proper name that Lévi-Strauss is able to conceive, in ethnocentric fashion, of his role in the revelation of those names as a moment of originary violence and defilement of ‘un terrain d’innocence’ characterised by ‘la bonté naturelle’ (1967: 165).

It is in this precise sense that, for Derrida, the proper name is analogous to jazz improvisation, to the gift and to the event. To appeal to the ideality of the proper name is to be guilty of a phonocentrism that, in certain circumstances, serves to underpin an ethnocentrism. Nonetheless, if a purely proper name is impossible, just as is the case with the gift, improvisation, and the event, the proper name remains haunted by a trace or promise of absolute propriety, of uniqueness, of singularity. So when, in the course of ‘Joue – le prénom’, Derrida invites Coleman to give him a gift, the gift of his mother’s first name, a gift that will constitute a ‘priceless event’, he is drawing a series of analogies for his understanding of how improvised jazz performance works. What these analogies seek to evoke is a notion of jazz improvisation that will account for its specificity and relative unpredictability without recourse to the kinds of phonocentric and ethnocentric assumption that have bedevilled so much commentary on jazz music. Something unpredictable will happen in the course of Coleman’s performance, he suggests, but that unpredictability will emerge from a set of regulated, premeditated, written structures and should not be understood as the expression of some unmeditated, primitive spontaneity. By analogy, when we give a gift, we do so in the hope or on the promise that something unpredictable, something priceless, may yet emerge from the regulated circuit of gift exchange, just as when we use a proper name we evoke a certain singularity, even as we inevitably work within a coded system of linguistico-social differences.

Finally, the means by which Derrida invites Coleman to communicate his mother’s name to him upsets any simple opposition between the supposedly natural, authentic immediacy of improvised jazz performance, on the one hand, and the realm of degraded technological mediation, on the other. By asking Coleman to communicate that proper name to him via ‘saxotéléphonie’, Derrida refuses to engage in that denial of the prostheticity of musical instrumentation we identified in Carles and Comolli’s account of free jazz. A telephone call may give its recipient the impression that she is in the presence of her interlocutor; the telephone may provide the illusion of self-present or immediate communication with that interlocutor’s spoken words. Yet in reality, of course, a telephone is a complex technological mechanism of mediated communication. The analogy with Coleman’s improvised jazz performance should again be clear.

The points Derrida is attempting to make in ‘Joue – le prénom’ by means of such analogy may be allusive. Yet they will prove of vital importance if jazz criticism is to abandon its traditional reliance on phonocentric and ethnocentric assumptions. Sadly, the hostile reaction to Derrida’s appearance on stage at the Parc de la Villette suggests there is still some way to go. As he notes, the strength of that reaction betrayed ‘un purisme suspect – cela veut dire que le jazz rejette toute parole, toute analyse – et quasi raciste, anti-intellectuelle – les discours n’ont rien à faire là’. What Derrida terms the ‘non-événement’ of his appearance on stage reflected ‘une réaction anti-intellectualiste, anti-théoriciste, une manière de dire que le jazz doit être une expérience non-contaminée par le discours’. Where Derrida sought to deconstruct those stubborn oppositions between jazz and discourse, improvisation and writing, performance and theory, it appears that his audience was committed to keeping such ethnocentric oppositions in place and hence to shoring up ‘leur scénario … domestique’ (Coleman and Derrida, 1997: 28).