Post #7 (Amanda, Bethany, and Leanna)

Since our group (namely, Bethany) discusses Derrida’s ideas about freeplay below, I wanted to start out by walking through some of the conceptual moves that Derrida uses to approach the idea of freeplay, and to touch on a few of the conceptual underpinnings of his ideas.

Early in his essay, Derrida seems to be positing that all structures exist as various permutation, translations, and repetitions of a center—the core, defining signified. The center describes both the beginning and end point, and describes the totality of the structure. In the absence of a center or origin, everything becomes discourse, and the structure becomes infinite. Or, as Derrida himself put it, “the absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and interplay of signification ad infinitum” (2).

His mention of discourse here is interesting because it presents discourse itself as something that is not only fluid, but also as something that evolves in relation to--but is not, itself, strictly tied to--the signified. What is also worth noting is the way that he treats discourse as something that arises out of permutations and transformations of the conceptual center, which treats the structure as a closed system that doesn’t account for the introduction of new information or the overlap with other structures.

The closedness of the structure is then challenged by Derrida’s discussion of bricolage--the idea that things aren’t made from whole-cloth, but rather come out of the adaptation of other concepts, analytic tools, and so forth. From here, he examines the mythopoetic power of bricolage, and how mythic structures lack a single, identifiable point of origin, being a result of bricolage. When applied to ethnographic bricolage, he claims that “this function makes the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center appear as mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion” (9). That is to say that cultures and the discourse that surround them lack a single, transcendent signified at the center.

Derrida then presents the idea that, as long as culture is an ongoing, centerless process, it necessarily lacks totality.  Towards this end, he says that, “the totality of the myths of a people is of the order of the discourse. Provided that this people does not become physically or morally extinct, this totality is never closed” (10) From here, he makes a conceptual move towards freeplay by looking at the non-totalization of the structure and suggesting that freeplay enables us to have a structure that is finite but still lacks totality through infinite substitutions and permutations. Freeplay, then, is the ability to alter and permute concepts within a structure; to build off of and to change their meaning. (More on this later).

 While Spiller’s article provides so much to be unpacked--especially when she winks at, acknowledges, or calls on Derrida--I’m going to look at one of her foundational claims; that of ethnicity as still, a label, device or identity denied the freeplay of signification Derrida describes.

First and foremost, what is this ‘freeplay’ idea?

I think of freeplay as a carnivalesque (heyyyyy Bakhtin) whirring of signifiers around an unstable or ever-shifting signified. Before the “event” the center was stable: meaning (the signified) was mostly set. But after the rupture, the center was dissolved and the signifier/signified relationship was set into motion:

“...Structure—or rather the structurality of structure—although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure...but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure” (278)

“Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around” (294).

Freeplay is the possibility of absence and presence, and the implication that there is an infinite possibility of meaning, truth, concept, identity, etc. whatever. I think Spiller is identifying how “ethnicity” is used to halt that motion. There is no potential for meaning or identity or signified/signifier other than what is described in context. Citing the Moynihan report, Spiller identifies a “class of symbolic paradigms that 1) inscribe “ethnicity’ as a scene of negation and 2) confirm the human body as a metonymic figure for an entire repertoire of human and social arrangements” (66).

There is no potential for more, for humanity, for anything other than the inherent pathology that the ethnicity points out. “...In it's powerful stillness, “ethnicity” from the point of view of the Report, embodies nothing more than a mode of memorial time, as Roland Barthes outlines the dynamics of myth. As a signifier that has no movement in the field of signification, the use of “ethnicity” for the living becomes purely appreciative, although one would be unwise not to concede it's dangerous and fatal effects” (66).

And evidence of those fatal effects: “If “slave” is perceived as the essence of stillness (an early version of “ethnicity”), or of an undynamic human state, fixed in time and space, then the law articulates this impossibility as it's inherent feature: ‘Slaves shall be deemed, sold, taken, reputed and adjudged in law to be chattels personal, in the hands of their owners...to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever” (78).

So while we often think of Deconstruction as dissembling meaning, the halting of freeplay and fixing of meaning in this case is much more dangerous.

Even as ethnicity denies freeplay, Spillers traces out a simultaneous discourse (the discourse of slavery--perhaps it is the same discourse, actually…) where the female slave can be seen as absence and therefore holds the key to unraveling the “historical illusion.” Spillers opens her piece by noting the predominance of the father/son in Western European discourse in general. Not only a familial connection, the father/son relationship becomes entangled with ideas about inheritance and therefore, legitimacy. Thus, during the slave trade,this emphasis on the male carries over (even as familial relations are destroyed) and we get lots of ship records and letters about scary black males, but relatively minute information about the horrors done to female enslaved bodies. The black male later becomes the symbol of slave revolt; again, gaining prominence as the “center” of this discourse of enslavement, fear, and white supremacy.

A similar target, the family is the underlying threat to the slave economy and necessitated separation so the “mother” nor the “father” possess babies; they only belong to their masters. Some scholars try to reclaim kinship as a positive relation for dispossessed slaves, but Spillers points out that “We might choose to call this connectedness ‘family,’or ‘support structure,’ but that is a rather different case from the moves of a dominant symbolic order, pledged to maintain the supremacy of race. Itis that order that forces ‘family’ to modify itself when it does not mean family of the ‘master,’or dominant enclave.” (75) Kinship thus makes no appreciable difference in the legal or cultural sense.

So, Spillers turns to the absent figure of the mother in several texts (Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs) and points to its genderlessness-because the female slave is an object, a animal, or a property. Motherhood, probably one of the most defining aspects of “woman,” is also denied to the female slave as she is separated from her children. However, the denial of personhood and its corresponding gender makes the black female body radical, concomitant with the lack of a mother for enslaved young that creates a “social ambiguity” (76). For Douglass, he loses familial ties because without the presence of a mother, he lacks all genetic ties to a past or his present (he becomes estranged from his siblings). Thus, already, the black female demonstrates through its absence that it is integral to the discourse of slavery and its subjectivities.

Then in the Linda Brent/ Harriet Jacobs section, Spillers demonstrates how the ungendered black female body unravels the gendered discourse of slavery. The man as master holds the position of power over slaves...but also over his own family; he is the master of the domestic realm. However, it is Mrs. Flint who attempts to assume the Master position and invade Brent’s subject. In her nighttime terrorization of Brent, Mrs. Flint takes on a “male dominative mode” and actually attempts to become a kind of substitute for her husband-even if only to verify that he and Brent are having sexual relations (77). Mrs. Flint betrays the norms of her gender and her position, and, as a figure of madness, might be said to be unraveling herself. The discourse of slavery as the attempt to fix the identity of slaves as ethnic bodies and uphold white supremacy actually exposes the vulnerabilities of the culture by overlooking women/females/mothers. A greater attention to this “absence” can give us a more expansive idea of “history.”