2003
SAMLA
Improvisation
in Jazz Writing
Paul G. Beidler
Lenoir-Rhyne College
Do not cite without permission of author.
Jazz,
Amiri Baraka, and the Arbitrariness of the Sign
In January
2003, Amiri Baraka came to speak at our small college in Hickory, NC.
The occasion was MLK day-Mr. Baraka spoke in the morning, to kick off
the annual MLK Day peace march, and that evening he read from his work.
Baraka made it clear from the beginning that he had been more a supporter
of Malcom than of Martin, and so the atmosphere was charged from the beginning.
In fact, hate mail had already begun to arrive at the college, and extra
security extra security had been arranged to protect the speaker. In the
days following the reading, a spate of editorials in the local paper condemned
Baraka, the College for inviting him, and the paper for reporting accurately
what he had said.
I'll begin with a letter I sent to our local newspaper much later, this
past August, when we learned of the murder of the poet's daughter. The
letter was my belated response to what I perceived as the community's
hostile reception of the poet and the general feeling on campus that such
infelicities should be prevented in the future. (Doesn't the Patriot Act
cover things like this?) I wrote to my neighbors:
As we mourn
with Amiri Baraka the recent murder of his daughter Shani Baraka, I feel
called to reflect on the significance of the poet's visit here this past
January. I like writers like Baraka because the energy and violence of
their words cuts through the ignorance and complacency that characterize
most current discussions of race. Let me explain.
This morning, a friend showed me an article called "What's Different
about Being a Black Leader." It reviews a recent book on the pressures
and anxieties experienced by black managers in corporate America.
One response to the article could be this: people should be less prejudiced
and see blacks not as blacks but as individuals-they should be "color-blind."
Managers and executives, especially, should be objective, seeing not race
but accomplishments and contribution, because that would make the work
place more fair. This, I think, is the way most people that I know would
probably respond to the article.
This response, while understandable, is inadequate to the point of being
dangerous. Here's why.
1) It gives whites the message that they are ethically obliged to ignore
race. Whites wind up deciding that they must proceed as if the race problem
has been solved. If we all act as if the race problem has been solved
already, it will be solved, right? Wrong. Whites get the impression that
blindness is a virtue, which enhances their already formidable ignorance
and discomfort about race. Race becomes something to which the only response
is repression. The effect is that the repressed hatred (which is really
just fear) becomes less easily to control and therefore more powerful.
2) At the same time, it gives blacks the message that race and heritage
don't matter. They are to be left at the corporate door. Race, like religion,
is something you only have or do in the evenings and on weekends; you're
to pretend it's not a part of your life. Separating race, religion, or
any other core part of your self from your career path is unhealthy and
dangerous. Blacks are often treated as if their race is invisible (except
when it becomes profitable for the corporation to advertise its "diversity"),
but they must deal daily with well-meaning but ignorant whites who, though
they remain fearful and ignorant, feel they cannot address the issue.
Most people can handle this kind of pressure, but why should they have
to?
Amiri Baraka's art cuts through all this guilt, fear, and ignorance. He
gives our anger and fear a voice. His poetry gets it all out in the open:
you listen to him, and you stop repressing. You start to feel. Poetry
hurts no one, and its violence frees us from the kind of anxiety that
everyone these days seems to think is the correct way of dealing with
race. Baraka says, hey, I'm angry, people are angry, there's a lot to
be angry about-and then he cracks a joke. He says, hey, they want you
to go to Iraq to shoot Muslims, but you don't have to. He says hey, they
tell you everything's okay now, that the playing field is level now, but
you know it's not. He says hey, it's okay to rant and rave-he shows you
how to weave an intricate fabric of your rage. The world around you is
real, and real things happen in it. Don't swallow it all-the world is
not some bitter medicine you have to take every day. Don't believe the
hype that makes you into the tool of the government and the corporations.
Baraka says, your anger is beautiful, your anger is sacred.
And he doesn't just say it. With his jazz-poetry, he shows you that beauty.
He lets you feel it.
Mourn with me this week Amiri Barka's loss of a daughter, and remember
his gift to the Hickory community. Anger is not bad. Violence is not bad.
Murder and vandalism are illegal, but anger about things any reasonable
person would be angry about is good. It's precious. I think Baraka is
the greatest writer we've had through LR in the past four years. Baraka
showed me the beauty of literature as I had never been shown it before.
I have been studying, teaching, and writing about literature for fifteen
years, but Baraka taught me my craft. All grad school did was prepare
me to appreciate people like Baraka when they come along, and they don't
come along often.
The paper did not print my letter.
I'll play a little of Baraka's performance at our college. Baraka has
written several books on jazz, but his performances show that he is a
jazz poet-he references jazz, even alluding to specific melodies, but
more than that, he is a jazz performer, bringing jazz to the word.
<CD, track four: Baraka's jazz low-ku sequence>
Many members
of the public made clear their disdain for Baraka's performance in the
newspaper (one man suggesting that Baraka move to Iraq), as did many students
in class discussions. The first complaint to emerge was that Baraka's
refusal to take President Bush seriously was not to be tolerated. And
they didn't appreciate his portrayal of North Carolina as a politically
backward state. Further discussion revealed, however, that to many, Baraka
was racist: by which they meant that he's an angry black man who talks
about race. The logic, I think, was as follows: Baraka's poems and remarks
were racist because they seemed designed to make white people feel bad.
I don't mean to imply that everyone present responded this way. But the
only other interpretation I heard was the defense that it's important
that students at a liberal arts college be exposed occasionally to that
sort of unpleasantness-which, since it assumes and tolerates Baraka's
alleged racism, is just a defense of racism and cannot be taken seriously.
It certainly felt as though our community was not ready to talk about
Baraka as an artist. The question of his political incorrectness seemed
to dominate the discussion.
I'd like to bring a certain tradition of thinking about the structure
of the sign to bear, both on the form of Baraka's performance and on its
reception. The two seem related. In doing so I will sometimes use the
term "arbitrariness" in this paper to designate all three of
what are clearly essential qualities of the sign:
1) it is arbitrary: there is no natural connection between signifier and
signified (Saussure);
2) it is differential, existing only as the network of its differences
to other signs (Saussure); and
3) it is iterable: it only is to the extent to which, and by virtue of
the fact that, it can be copied, quoted, cited, or repeated (Derrida).
I suggest that what we witnessed during Baraka's visit to campus was an
interesting reversal of Saussure's familiar diagram of the structure of
the sign, and I'd diagram what happened this way:
Racist
Baraka signified
racism. Recall that in Saussure's diagram, of course, the signifier, "arbor,"
is on the bottom, and the signifier, the concept "tree" on the
top:
I want to suggest that in Hickory, the man was the signifier, the poorly-defined
concept the signified. It's not that the term "racist" connotes
some concept of people like Baraka, because it doesn't at all. No one,
prior to his visit, would have concretized the term "racist"
that way. (Things are not that bad yet, though there is no reason why
the term "racist" could not come to simply denote a black person.)
Rather, at least in Hickory this past January, as in New Jersey months
earlier, when Baraka first read "Somebody Blew Up America,"
the word-signifies-thing structure reversed: the image of Baraka was the
signifier, and "racist" the signified concept. This association
seemed to be quite general, despite the obvious fact that Baraka's purpose
was to fight racism, as he has been doing in America for 40 years.
At first glance, it might seem that a more ironic demonstration of the
arbitrariness of the sign would be difficult to find. The bar in this
diagram is of course meant by Saussure to signify the arbitrariness of
the signifier-signified association, but in this case the bar was crossed:
people followed the lead of New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey and
insisted that Baraka was a racist and would not back down. In "The
Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Jacques Lacan identifies
this "crossing of the bar" (Ecrits 164) as the structure of
metaphor:
f(S'/S)S ? S(+)s
He explains the formula as follows:
It is in the substitution of signifier for signifier that an effect of
signification is produced that is creative or poetic, in other words,
which is the advent of the signification in question. The sign + between
( ) represents here the crossing of the bar - and the constitutive value
of this crossing for the emergence of signification. (164)
The bar, or arbitrariness, is crossed, and the association becomes almost
an identity:
Racist||
The symptom
is a metaphor, Lacan says (175). This metaphor, angry black man ? racist,
seems to me a symptom of something deeply wrong with our society. Behind
the rhetorical "why can't we all just get along?", the crossed
bar signifies a lingering lie, the lie of white guilt, white resentment,
white aggression. I color this response white, though some blacks present
seem to have felt it, too.
What does all this have to do with jazz? As we've seen, Baraka weaves
his poems together in performance by singing jazz tunes. Baraka's own
semiotics of jazz has always been pretty simple. The harmonies and rhythms
of jazz and the blues hearken back to the slave plantations and thence
back to Africa, and presumably his invocations of jazz melodies and motifs
in performance are meant to ground his own work in that tradition by association.
There is no sense of arbitrariness in this conception of the jazz sign-in
fact, Baraka's purpose in writing Blues People and other early works was
to downplay the perceived arbitrariness of the sign that seemed to allow
white musicians to play jazz and write critics to judge it. So instead
of the arbitrariness, should we be talking about the whiteness of the
sign? I think so. The arbitrariness of the sign makes the signifier always
separable from the signified (i.e. there's nothing essentially African
about it), and iterabity, which constitutes all being, therefore authorizes
any and all repetition. Arbitrariness, therefore, comes to signify whiteness,
and Baraka's continuing project of grounding his semiosis in Black history
would then be not a backward denial of Saussurian linguistics but a savvy
forestalling of arbitrary and politically motivated interpretation and
exploitation of black art. Interpretation divides: one can base one's
interpretation on structure or history. In a white supremacist world largely
devoid of cultural meaning, white musicians would tap into traditions
of expression still laden with all the history of slavery and imperialism,
capitalizing on their energy. Conversely, in a world in which, thanks
to iterability, minority meaning is co-opted by the majority, it would
naturally seem necessary for the black artist to ground that meaning in
the historical provenance of the sign.
The sign is arbitrary-arbitrariness is the most basic quality of the sign.
(Did Saussure choose the word "arbor" as his mnemonic example
precisely to make that point?) But to understand Baraka, we need to separate
the arbitrariness of the sign from the fact that arbitrariness can itself
be a sign. Whether as assimilation or as parody, arbitrariness has characterized
and even produced most American popular music for decades. The American
popular music scene has been and continues to be a site of cultural exchange,
of an artistic bricolage that the structure of the sign makes inevitable
and that Judith Butler shows also structures gender:
There is no self that is prior to the convergence or who maintains "integrity"
prior to the entrance into this conflicted cultural field. There is only
a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very "taking up"
is enabled by the tool lying there. (145)
But when most of the producers and consumers of this bricolage are white
Americans, the arbitrariness at play in the industry comes to signify
whiteness. Then one appeals to history. Black art must then define itself
against this arbitrariness-not denying arbitrariness as the most basic
fact of the sign, but distancing itself from arbitrariness as the most
basic paradigm of the arts in white America. The paradigm of Baraka's
black art, then, is not bricolage but philology-he emphasizes not the
arbitrariness of signs but the historical trajectories that produce them.
Baraka's fluid transitions from poem to jazz riff to gospel standard to
political satire seems at first like pastiche, but his pastiche is grounded
in an argument about the history of signs, not a performance of their
structure. One consequence is a disabling of the arbitrariness/whiteness
association.
My spouse often remembers how, when she first moved to the United States,
at age 25, there were few signifiers for her: every signifier was to her
a signified. She could speak fluent English, but she could not joke, laugh,
or dream because she didn't know what things meant. This has been my experience
in our travels to her native country, Greece: it is difficult to tell
the rich from the poor, the liberals from the conservatives, the happy
from the angry, etc. It was also, I think, the experience of many in the
audience at Baraka's reading: who is this guy, what's he doing, why am
I being made to feel this way? A world of meaningless signifieds is intolerable,
so they, like sovereign foreigners in their own country, (naturally?)
converted Baraka into a signifier, a metaphor for the first idea to enter
their heads: racism.
As Lacan shows, "the symptom is a metaphor" (Ecrits 175), "a
crossing of the bar" between signifier and signified in which "the
signifier enters the signified" (151). This is what happened on our
campus and up in New Jersey. The metaphor of Baraka as a racist is a symptom
of the psychosis that is American race relations.
Conversely, if symptom is metaphor, "desire is metonymy" (175)-desire
is "the maintenance of the bar" (164):
f (S . . . S') ? S(-)s
What this means is that
The signifier installs the lack-of-being in the object relation, using
the value of 'reference back' possessed by signification to invest it
with the desire aimed at the very lack it supports. The sign - placed
between the ( ) represents the maintenance of the bar - which . . . marked
the irreducibility in which, in the relations between signifier and signified,
the resistance of signification is constituted. (164)
In Baraka, the bar separating signifier (jazz) from signified (black history)
is crossed. Though symptom is metaphor, not all metaphor is symptom, and
in Baraka, poetry becomes black art and black history. The bar separating
arbitrariness from whiteness is metonymically maintained, protecting black
art from a reduction to parody.
Semiotics reveals a world of signifiers in which even the signifieds are
themselves other signifiers (Colapietro 81-83), an endless web of signification.
This is the world of Amiri Baraka, and of any serious artist-a world awash
with truth and significance, a world of language liberated from bondage
by the arbitrariness of the sign. But it happens also to be a world in
which that same liberating arbitrariness itself signifies whiteness. Meaning
is a consequence of the splitting of the sign, and Baraka severs arbitrariness
and whiteness, making a place in the world for black art.
I would argue further that the three major periods of Baraka's life correspond
to the three Lacanian phases of development. The early angry poems illustrate
what Lacan calls the need for satisfaction. Those of the middle, Marxist
period illustrate the demand for love: here Baraka complicates the race
picture by introducing the dynamics of social class and envisioning a
just world, a world in which justice is both demanded of the phallic other
and is itself the phallic Other. Baraka's later work, and in particular
his jazz-poetry performances, like the one I showed you, manifest desire,
which is medial in Lacan's structural topography but developmentally final
(Feminine Sexuality 81). Desire is when the splitting begun in the mirror
phase is complete and the subject is fully spoken by language.
Works Cited:
Baraka, Amiri. The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris.
New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge, 1990.
Colapietro , Vincent M. Glossary of Semiotics. New York: Paragon, 1993.
Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1988.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New
York: Norton, 1977.
--. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne.
Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York:
Norton, 1982.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally
and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle: Open Court, 1972.