Derrida's Deconstruction Imprisoned in Performance Poetry

Journal of Teaching English as a Foreign Language and Literature,
Islamic Azad University, North Tehran Branch, 2(3), 123-136, Spring 2010
Derrida’s Deconstruction Imprisoned in
Performance Poetry
Mahdi Shafieyan
Imam Sadiq University, Tehran, Iran
Jalal Sokhanvar
Islamic Azad University, North Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran
ABSTRACT: Jacques Derrida‟s (1930-2004) point in his controversial
argument, called “deconstruction”, is that “writing” represents the essence of
language, which is absence, and speech contains the same essence. Performance
poetry, as a postmodern poetics, is where metric literature meets metaphysics of
presence, and paradoxically undermines the Derridean discourse in many aspects.
Playing a crucial role, timing has ever been existing with poetry: rhythm, meter,
or generally musical structures, thematic matters, as well as readings, recordings,
and rehearsals speak loudly of the tight concatenation between the two sides.
Moreover, what is practical does not seem only and simply to be the general
concept of time, but sound, as an essential compartment of poetry, necessitates
the presence, physical being, as well as the present, the time being. This study
poses different embodiments of performance poetry as a young subgenre, and,
second, investigates where and how they become relevant to Derrida‟s ideas.
Then, it comes to examine both parties theoretically to see which one overweighs
the other at the time of colliding. The findings confirm the presumption that
performance poetry in so many places diverges from deconstructive stances.
Keywords: deconstruction, Jacque Derrida, performance poetry, postmodern
poetry
Metaphysics of presence, although denoting time and its pertinent issues,
connotes the generic philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Poetry is the literary
genre which takes the lion‟s share in time, since it recruits temporal
features in its structure, themes, and presentation. Not only does Tom
Konyves (2011) describe videopoetry, a perfomative sort, as time-based,
but also poetry overall due to rhythm is tense-timed. In performance,
except the rhythm in the poem, the sound, among many other factors,
doubles rhythm. Charles Bernstein (2004), the contemporary performance

Shafieyan and Sokhanvar
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poet, exhibits the connection in a lecture, called What makes a poem a
poem, as follows:
[Poetry] is not rhyming words at the end of line, it‟s not form, it‟s not
structure, it‟s not loneliness, it‟s not location, … it‟s not love, … it‟s not
the feeling, it‟s not the meter, … it‟s not the subject matter, … it‟s not the
words, it‟s not the things between the words, it‟s the timing.
In other words, he sees rhythm, the fundamental aspect of English
verse, as a part of a greater paradigm which is time, since it is described as
the particular structure or order of tones in time. Zuckerkandl (1973)
constantly asserts the priority of rhythm over meter in poetry by
commenting, “musical meter is not born in the beats at all, but in the
empty intervals between the beats, in the places where „time merely
elapses‟” (p. 169). He elsewhere sews time and poetry into a piece of
clothes that needs to be worn by a present physical being: “Meter is the
repetition of the identical; rhythm is return of the similar” (p. 170). A
present physical being is essential because no one knows the details of
time, that is, the exact beats and intervals. Simply put, because of the life-
linked nature of rhythm, as it can be found in everyday life, each piece
although similar to its predecessors differs from any other work; in this
sense, the presence of one to experience a new thing is obligatory.
Poetical themes also deal with time in nature; they may be concerned
with present, past, or future, yet they make all of them present through
nostalgia, imagery, and prophecy. Among themes, the most frequent ones
are “carpe diem” (Horace, 1896, I.xi) meaning neither past nor future but
present, as well as its cousins “memento mori” (Tertullian, 1953, p. 78) to
signify “remember that you will die”, “tempus fugit” (Virgil, 1905, p. 123)
implying “time flies”, and “ars longa, vita brevis” (Hippocrates, 1822, I.1)
to suggest “art is long, life is short”. After posing such an interrelationship,
the present article treats the places where performance poetry and
Derrida‟s ideas make junctions at which they diverge before colliding,
although this does not mean that the two never converge.
Literature Review
We could not find any book, essay, or dissertation concerning the contrast
between deconstruction and performance poetry. Even according to
Bernstein, nothing noteworthy has been done on performance of poetry
alone:

TEFLL, IAU-NTB, 2(3), 123-136, Summer 2010
125
even full-length studies of a poet‟s work routinely ignore the audio-text,
and readings---no matter how well attended---are never reviewed by
newspapers or magazines … A large archive of audio and video
documents, dating back to an early recording of Tennyson‟s almost
inaudible voice, awaits serious study and interpretation. (1999, p. 280)
Only, during the process of research, we came across P. Beasley‟s
essay, Vive la difference! Performance poetry (1994), which focuses on
the features of the genre that makes difference between the marginal
author and the central community as well as between “page poetry” and
“stage poetry”. However, the “difference” in the essay does not concern
the deconstructive technical jargon, but it emphasizes the oral and aural
aspects of the genre that were neglected in modernist poetry. In addition, it
discusses the difference between the genre‟s “situational rather than
abstract [setting], invoking an existential [one]” (Beasley, 1994, p. 30),
which is germane to the issues in metaphysics of presence.
Argument
One of the reasons that poetic performances are so important in
contemporary poetry is that the full effect of a piece could not be
experienced until it is loudly heard, preferably by a large audience where
responses can be shared and discussed among the listeners, often with the
poet him/herself. In this sense, poetry is considered to be a “happening”
and contemporary poetry may seem akin to musical concerts in that it is
one thing to be heard, although music, the art of tone, “speaks by means of
mere sensations without concepts, and so does not, like poetry, leave
behind it any food, for reflection” (Kant, 2007, p. 156). As another reason
suggesting the significance, in the age of audio books and visual books
(vooks), people more likely prefer to see and listen rather than read and
write. As a public “event”, poetry in performance formalizes the piece as
an artistic, sometimes political, occasion. In all aspects, there exists
presence and the present, without which and whom the image of poetry
and its performance is blurred. Just as photography freed painting from its
customary function of graphically picturing the external reality, the
invention of recording technologies has transformed the poetry reading
into a potential public meeting. The aural or visual recording of a reading
is just as significant as a permanent print of a poem. Listening or watching
whenever necessary or pleasant does not make the piece independent of its
author, but reminds us of the perpetual presence of poetic properties, such
as sound and the mind behind its creation. Simply put, sounds have always

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been there, but recording techniques have succored to free poets in order to
become more engaged in experimenting with it, just as painters were aided
by photography to get free with image, color, and form (Piombino, 1998).
Unlike Derrida who saw ecriture as primary by saying that there is
“writing in speech” (2002, p. 247), not the other way round, in
performance poetry the emphasis moves to orality not script; for instance,
in some of Amiri Baraka‟s vibrantly performance poems, such as Afro-
American lyric, the text can seem secondary, as if the text with its minted
typography has turned merely into a score for the performance. Concurring
with this in an interview, Baraka says, “[the text] is less important to me”
(as cited in Harris, 1985, p. 147).
In a primary oral culture, Ong (2002) says, to solve effectively the
problem of retaining and retrieving a carefully-articulated thought, one has
to do his/her thinking in mnemonic patterns; it might as well be heavily
rhythmic, balanced, repetitious, antithetical, alliterative, assonantal,
epithetic, proverbial, or benefit from other formulary expressions in
standard thematic settings (p. 34). In postmodern poetry, the musical
elements little by little faded because it increasingly relied on writing, but
rhythm never disappeared; that is why it is an essential aspect of English
poetry (Wolosky, 2001). Derrida‟s statement, “writing in speech”, again
comes untrue, since the oral element, rhythm, has been remaining even in
postmodern written poetry.
The significance of giving moment to orality comes to the fore by its
conveyance of meaning. If the poet reads a piece aloud, his/her presence
causes us to perceive his/her intonation and thereby the intention
(Shafieyan, 2011). In speech, stress can set emphasis in ways remaining
indeterminate to writing without adding subsidiary discourse or diacritical
marks. The poetic scansion mainly and mostly rejects different readings,
and the metric norm in a performance suggested by the scansion is sensed
as an implicit understructure of pulses (Abrams, 1999).
Transcribed “[s]pelling”, for example, “always lags behind
pronunciation” (Saussure, 1966, p. 28), as in almost all languages we can
see that some words‟ pronunciations do not match the letters and
phonological rules, words such as colonel, corps, prayer, and a quite long
list beside. In poetry, off-rhyming can be taken as exact rhyming and vice
versa, the option that gives importance to the role of speech and reading; in
essence, the way a poem is read more smoothly bears significance over
how it has been written. Listening for semantic connections between
sounds, Gerald Manly Hopkins made lists of similar words, as “drill, trill,

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thrill, nostril”, and came to the point that the common idea among them is
“piercing”. In the end, he concluded that there is no difference between
“sense” and “sound” (Stewart, 1998, p. 40).1
The poetic sound, further, is heard in a way identical to a promise,
metaphysically speaking; a promise as an action made by and in speech
will be always present: when I promise, I create an expectation, an
obligation, and a necessary condition for closure. Whether we are in the
presence of each other or not, whether the one who receives the promise
continues to exist or not, whether others may discontinue making,
fulfilling, remembering, deserving, or making sense of that promise, or
even if the word “promise” disappears, the promise exists and must be
fulfilled in time. A broken promise cannot be mended, but only might be
regretted or used to establish a new ground of demand. Albeit Austin
(1975) wrote, in How to do things with words, “declarations of intention
differ from undertakings”, and intending itself is a commissive (p. 158),
promises are intentions, and the declaration of an intention, a promise,
makes it commissive. He will be true, if one declares, I have in mind to
build a house; here, he/she is expressing his/her intention, yet does not
promise to build the house. However, if he/she says, I promise to erect an
edifice until the next year, he/she means to have an obligatory intention.
Performance and presence make the words into actions; words
become meaningful, actualized, and realized. When Baraka (2001) in
Somebody blew up America criticizes the heads of the U. S., he expresses
his opposition in the public to incite the audience to do so. It is here that
speech act theory becomes sequential. This stance is best illuminated in
one of his poems Black art (1966), which announces his uncompromising
poetics: “We want „poems that kill.‟ / Assassin poems, Poems that shoot /
guns” (Baraka & Vangelisti, 1995, p. 142). Nevertheless, print was the
major factor in the development of the sense of personal privacy that
marks a modern community. It converted books to booklets, making them
more portable than those common in the manuscript culture, and paved the
way psychologically for solo reading in a quiet corner, and ultimately for a
silent reading.
While the visual material of writing is remote from the author
spatially and temporally, sound poetry or, better to say, sound of poetry
consists of presenting, that is, bringing to being in a temporal and spatial
location of the performance. The fascination of hearing poetry read partly
resides in the resonant presence of the poet‟s self, as well as his/her

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apparent and apprehensible person in the work, which is as an aspect of the
piece available for the audience.
The foregrounding of the performative aspects of the material over the
linear, conventional logic of normative linguistic formulations is a
common feature of visual and sound poetry. Performance poems benefit
from elements appealing to the oral/aural, and not exclusively to the
visual, as in writing. This includes rhythm, recordings, music, imitations of
nonverbal sounds, and other perceptions of the senses (Grabner, 2008).
Now, there is a train of interrogations concerning writing: How could
music be contained in page poetry, when even musical scores seem
nonsense to a poetry reader? How could lights and colors be transmitted
out of presence? In the event that the poet gives performance guides on the
paper, as a dramatist does about stage directions, does it have the same
effect and tangibility as the performance itself?
The next issue is (on) non-referentiality, that is, words do not refer to
a referent outside themselves: “as regards the absence of the referent or the
transcendental signified. There is nothing outside of the text” (Derrida,
1976, p. 158). The contradiction in this statement, its relevancy to the “il
n‟y a pas de hors-texte”-argument (1976, p. 163), and the intentionality
behind its explanation apart,2
in concrete poetry we have a reference
within the text, as the words refer to the pattern. In the event that in a
concrete poem one tries to destroy the outside and claims that a word
refers to nothing, what would be the difference between language and
painting? In this case, we will have just black marks on the page without
any meaning (Morrison & Krobb, 1997), to later on speak of its “trace”, as
Derrida did. In such a work, the textual and lexical values, howsoever
different from the visual imprint of a shape, are read with a glance at the
latter, the referential frame of which inflects the entire text, technically
called the “form”. Even if a verbal work does not resemble the schematic
pictorial image, the terms will always be read in relation to that depiction
as a referent. Concretism, as Mahmudi (2008) believes, objectifying our
experience in poetry, flies against subjectivism in the recent thought.
Likewise, sometimes a performance poem is without any superadded
visual or audio text (subtitle or voiceover), which is called “poetry video”
(Konyves, 2011, p. 4); this kind as a more conceptual poem is like a novel
or play the narrative of which is made into a film. Even the text in
videopoems---an anti-narrative not predicated on the linear text poetry on
the page, although they should have an audio and/or visual text---is not
like that on the page. This is probably because the latter is a block, all

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together and visible in front of us, while in the former each word takes the
place of the previous one, disappearing in front of us, and makes the
meaning of presence bolder. One of the roles which repetition plays in
videopoems, along with emphasis, self-reflection, division, and the like, is
suspending time; that is to say, it does not go forward, but remains in the
present. Whether to have or not the two features, audio-video, a poem
added into a motion picture is named “kinetic poem” (Konyves, 2011, p.
4), which signifies the palpability of the text and stands for performance
poetry referentiality.
Wittgenstein on Egdon Heath (left) by Edwin Morgan (2011) is
another form of concrete poems in a different performance, which plays on
Wittgenstein‟s sentence in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. When one
highlights the poem (right), he/she understands that the words are written
completely on the left but they are white and invisible:
the world is everything that is the
case
case
case
case
the world is everything that is e
case
case
case
the world is everything that is
case
case
the world is everything that is
case h
case
case
case
case
case
case
case
case
case
case. … (p. 40)
First, “play” on the above words represents that writing is not
workable to give us the true text, let alone meaning. Probably, this

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approves of Derrida‟s words, insisting on the betrayal of language, yet we
attract the readers‟ attention to his statement related to legibility: “A
writing that was not structurally legible – iterable – beyond the death of the
addressee would not be writing” (1982, p. 315). The key question here is
the meaning of “legible”; if it signifies “readable”, the above text will not
be considered an ecriture, yet it is a collection of signs. Derrida referred to
the condition of every sign‟s possibility as that of “writing” in general,
what he sometimes called the “arche-trace” (Lucy, 2004, p. 125). The
same case applies to sound poetry, which is not legible, but is counted as a
system of signs. On the other hand, if the meaning is, as expressed
appositively, “iterable”, the sentence in the performance is repeated, but
exactly not differently, although not seen. Derrida was of the opinion that
iterability is based on differance: each thing is unique and inherently
different from other things (Miller, 1982)3
, yet video technology, the
necessary means for performance poetry, has made it possible to replay a
tape or Blueray repeatedly without any change and difference. This
meaning of repeatability, exact iterability, does not fulfill Derrida‟s opinion
on the concept. This is to show that letters could be written but not read;
that is to say, to be written only does not bring meaning; what is read or
said provides meaning, and these two need presence.
Among other features of a written work, as it is cast into an
autonomous form, it is always at a remove from the writer and
independent of the author‟s presence, Johanna Drucker (1998) presumes.
In fact, there is every possibility of concealing, eclipsing, disguising, or
effacing the creator through writing. Another feature of writing, whether
hand-written or print, has been its capacity for concealing gender and other
dimensions of physically apparent identity, the characteristics contributing
to the auratic whole of the poet as a persona in a real-life performance.
Therefore, the visual performance of a written work, along with being
about the presence of a poem, is concerned with the presence of the author.
Emitted from a living body, the spoken word appears to be closer to an
originating thought or consciousness than a written word (Selden,
Widdowson, & Brooker, 2005). Nonetheless, a poet is present in his/her
writing by having a signature, that is, his/her style, school, beliefs, and so
forth. Even if he/she does try to postmodernly cloak the parameters or
undergo changes in subjectivity, still an underlying line of thought could
be found in his/her works (Holland, 1975). This counterpoises Derrida‟s
concept of “textuality”, according to which no text whether a foreign one,
its translation, or the first print is an original semantic unity in the interest

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of the editorial changes in the layout of the document far beyond the
author‟s control (Benjamin, 1992).
This controversy over the plurality in presence is of considerable
significance for poetry. The presence of the performance inside the text but
equally the presence of the text within the performance means that there
are at any moment in time two irreducible modes of being present; in other
words, presence becomes the site of irreducibility (Benjamin, 1992).
Furthermore, in oral cultures, having no dictionaries and few semantic
discrepancies, the meaning of a word is controlled by what Goody and
Watt (2005) name “direct semantic ratification”, the real-life, here-and-
now conditions in which the word is used, or simply put the context that
stands for presence (p. 29). If Derrida called reliability of history into
question, whether for its ruptures (1999), lack of originality (1999), or its
story-like narration through language (1999; 1992), so the past context, we
should depend on present.
Print encourages a sense of closure, that is, whatever found in a text
has been finalized and brought to a state of completion. A correlative of
this feature fostered by print was the fixed point of view, McLuhan (2011)
pointed out. Before print, writing itself by isolating thought on a written
surface, detached from any interlocutor, and making utterance in this sense
autonomous and indifferent to any attack encouraged some sense of noetic
closure, against the presumption that thinks writing is not autonomous, for
it is far from the author. Manuscripts, by contrast, with their marginal
comments or glosses, which often are worked into the text in subsequent
copies, were in dialog with the world outside and remained closer to the
give-and-take economy of the oral expression (Ong, 2002).
Concerning closure, the problem is double-edged in performance
poetry: The first layer bears similarity to the above-paragraph respect of
writing and is portrayed by Stewart (1998), who believes that although we
might not to have closure of meaning in, say, sound poetry, it nevertheless
does stop; sounds follow and precede other sounds in a relationship. Yet,
closure is not determined by form and structure; it is obvious that in every
kind and genre of work there will be a finish line, but what informs us of
presence or absence of closure is the continuity of content at the end of the
piece. When in performance poetry the speaker utilizes irony, paradox, to
mean the opposite, final questions embodied in Charles Bukowski‟s
Bluebird (1991), and other figurative tools, open-endedness is born,
although it terminates. Thylia Moss‟s Hypnosis at the bird factory (2010)

132
is another performance without closure, as we scan the deep shadow of
repetition, and the end is as the beginning.
The second stratum is that closure is not linked and limited to words
and their meanings only, as in sound poetry meaning does not primarily
matter. In other words, we may and may not have closure in sound poetry
beyond noticing words and structure: Threshold, the sound poem by
Hannah Silva (2009) presented in Ecopoetics, mimics the sound of water
dripping and dropping, and the needle goes on to the end. On the other
hand, Deconstruct by the band Epica, unlike its name, has a closure, since
the singer convinces her internal evil, at the start refusing to marry, to
unite as the clip closes. In reality, when at the end of musical tracks there
are undertones, repetitions, and refrains, the listener is instilled with lack
of closure.
Finally, a writer can subject the unconscious inspiration to greater
conscious control than the oral narrator, notwithstanding inspiration
continues to derive from unconscious sources. He/she finds his/her written
words accessible for reconsideration, revision, and other manipulations
until they are eventually released. Consciousness, taking the advantage of
presence, Derrida (1982) would say, shows up in ecriture much more
ostentatiously than in speech.
Conclusion
Meeting Derrida and performance poetry in a session revealing the
disagreements between the two brought about an argument which revolved
on the axes of poetry as a “happening” and existential presence, speech
and script, sound and sense, speech act and realization, concrete poetry,
referentiality as well as iterability, textuality or plurality in presence, along
with consciousness, all of which can be collected and considered under the
umbrella term “the metaphysics of presence”. Ferdinand de Saussure
(1966), explaining “difference” between two things, words, phonemes,
said that the difference between “b” and “p” makes meaning, as the former
is voiced and the latter voiceless (1966, p. 47); this could be inferred by
Derrida that one benefits from the presence of an element while the other
does not. Again, performance poetry negates such demonstration, since,
for instance, listening to audio files that have been recorded before lacks
three presences: one of the author, second of the audience, and third of
present time; indeed, we can conceive that presence is not part and parcel
of something by birth. This is just Derrida‟s reading that through the
history of Western philosophy one thing has been privileged, for the

133
reason that, we can find, as we did in this article, so many cases that refute
the presence “rule” in the way Derrida considered. Such samples lead one
to the point that still the French thinker‟s metaphysics of presence is open
to challenging discussions.
The Authors
Mahdi Shafieyan is an A.B.D. of English Literature at IAU, Tehran
Central Branch, and has published 7 books, one in the U.S. (Heaven the
Hero, accessible through Google Books) and six at Imam Sadiq University
Press as well as five international and two national articles. His area of
interest mainly includes philosophy of literature as well as American
poetry and short story. He has also presented four papers in international
conferences.
Jalal Sokhanvar, Professor and chairman of the Department of
Postgraduate Studies, Islamic Azad University, earned his M.A. from
Senate House University of London and his Ph.D. from Lille in France. He
is the author of some books such as A Compendious History of English
Literature, and Drama Interpretations: A Structural Approach to Modern
Drama. His reviews of new poetry and literary criticism appear in
scholarly magazines, and he is editor-in-chief of Critical Language &
Literary Studies.
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Poetry and the performed word (pp. 29-52). NY: Oxford University
Press.
Tertullian (1953). Apology. OrthodoxEbooks.
Virgil (1905). The georgics of Virgil (2nd ed.). London: Murray.
Wolosky, S. (2001). The art of poetry: How to read a poem. NY: Oxford
University Press.
Zuckerkandl, V. (1973). Sound and symbol: Music and the external world
(2nd ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

136
Notes
1. For a deliberate study on the functions of sound in language, generally, and poetry,
specifically, as well as its relationship with sense, see: D. I. Masson (1965), “sound”, in
A. Preminger (Ed.) Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics (Princeton: Princeton
University Press).
2. The theoretical argument on this matter has been posed elsewhere: M. Shafieyan
(2012), Metaphysics of presence and contemporary performance poetry, Diss., Islamic
Azad University, Tehran Central Campus.
3. Plato believed that the repeated unit does not lose its identity: the copy is a
facsimile of the original pattern, which could be compared with his “idea” or “pure form”
(Miller, 1982, p. 6).
Email: aliteraturist@yahoo.com
Email: jsoxanvar@hotmail.com

Derrida's Deconstruction Imprisoned in Performance Poetry

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