ACROSS THE EMPTY SEATS in the auditorium, and many rows away from Derrida, in an other clear area in the aisle by the door is a cluster of a a dozen or more people, men and women of various ages. In the middle is someone they want to see, touch, hear, and talk to. They are like pigeons around someone feeding them popcorn.
Inside the middle of the cluster, we are CLOSE UP with the man speaking, hemmed in by those in the inner ring of the cluster. He is middle-aged, wearing thick glasses. He is dressed slightly on the formal side among the people there, but in a comfortable way that suggests this is how he always dresses. He is comfortable being the pole of attention at the moment.
He is speaking English with a thick but pleasant French-accented, each syllable having a solid gravity of purpose and meaning:
"One sees that among the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, there is a variation in the versions of the stories, along certain criteria, and thus we say the myth itself is not one particular version---for how can it be?--but is the matrix of variations of the myth."*
At the end of the sentence, the merest break in his stride of speech, several people try to get his attention...
(Throughout, his name will be pronounced LEH-vee STROASE by some, including all the French characters and some of the others, and LEH-vee STRAUSS by some Anglophones and maybe others, and elsewise by certain other characters as may be appropriate for the story)
People are standing in the aisles and moving noisily through the seats. Derrida is standing in place amidst empty seats, his hands in his jacket pockets, lingering as others are moving around him. We don't see his colleagues.
He see two young Japanese women a couple rows away. They are talking to each other in semi-hushed volume in English.
Is that him? Him over there? Yes that's him. He's the one this conference is for. Everyone is here for him.
One of them points discretely and they both look. Derrida notices them pointing and examines them.
But they are looking not at Derrida but past him. Derrida, his hands still in his pocket, twists his torso to look in the direction they are looking. Twisted around, he grins broadly in satisfaction of what he sees.
Hardly an empty seat is visible amidst the rows of semi-formally dressed men and women who are, almost universally, silently giving their full and fresh attention to the unseen speaker, RICHARD MACKSEY.
MACKSEY (off camera): ...We are especially grateful to those of you who have traveled such a long distance, ideologically as well as geographically, to attend these meetings. tings. There are representatives among us from eight countries and at least as many formal disciplines, who by their presence have expressed a willingness to submit, provisionally, to the, perhaps, tendentiously pluralistic topic suggested by our dual title of our convention. . Some of our initial difficulties are clearly indicated by the fact that the symmetrical English and French titles are not, on close examination, identical. More significantly, many here would reject, even for the rhetoric of symposia programs, the seductive allure which the word "Sciences" borrows from fields alien to our endeavor. Further, I realize that others, in the wake of Foucault and Heideggerian revisionism, would question the legitimacy for this time of the word "Man" and the metaphysical pathos attached to it by humanistic conventions and titular sponsors such as a Humanities Center (however loosely defined operationally both its virtual center and effective circumference may be).
The faces in the crowd will include characters who have not yet been introduced or specified, so we will forgo including all of the ones who must be seen in this shot for the time being. At the point where he is talking about the differences between the French and English titles of the conference, let's see two FRENCHMEN, heretofore unknown to us, quietly and discretely whispering to each other, with one pointing to a a program in his hand, as if explaining the very point that Macksey had just been speaker of.
At some point, as we move through the crowd, CLOSE IN, on faces one by one as they look at the speaker, we encounter the familiar visages of the TWO COLLEAGUES of Derrida and finally DERRIDA himself. For symmetry breaking, they should not be sitting side-by-side, but staggered in adjacent rows, as if they had taken some of the last available seats.
Among all the faces we have seen, it is DERRIDA who is not staring straight ahead, in wrapt and placid attention, but is gazing around the room, his head moving only slightly, but his eyes moving more, as if he is sizing up the place.
Let us make sure we are seeing him in a CLOSE UP when Macksey says the word "Man".
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218
The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London
Originally published, 1970, as The Languages of
Criticism and the Sciences of Man
Johns Hopkins paperback edition, 1972
Second printing, 1975
Third printing, 1977
Fourth printing, 1979
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-95789
ISBN 0-8018-1047-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 0-8018-1381 -6 (paperback)
From the preface:
The papers and discussions collected in this volume constitute the proceedings of the international symposium entitled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," ["Les Langages Critiques et les Sciences de l'Homme"] enabled by a grant from the Ford Foundation. The sessions were convened under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center, during the week of October 18-21, 1966, when over one hundred humanists and social scientists from the United States and eight other countries gathered in Baltimore. The symposium inaugurated a two-year program of seminars and colloquia which sought to explore the impact of contemporary "structuralist" thought on critical methods in humanistic and social studies. The general title emphasized both the pluralism of the existing modes of discourse and the interaction of disciplines not entirely limited to the conventional rubric of the "humanities."
Inside the cab, with Derrida, who is contemplating his colleague's reaction after reading the manuscript, we hear the voice over begin, in flat American tones:
During the cab ride reflection montage, perhaps when the driver is talking about Spiro Agnew, and his colleague is scrunched against the window on his side in order to get enough light to read the manuscript, we should see, from Derrida's point of view, a Detour sign reflected in such a way as to suggest it was in front of the cab and then came into the reflection as the cab turned to the opposite side from which Derrida is sitting.
One of the things that Derrida (and we) should see during his Baltimore cab-ride montage is an election sign for Spiro Agnew's campaign in the upcoming Maryland gubernatorial election, which was just three weeks away. His slogan was "Your Kind of Man." (see this photo taken Nov. 1, 1966 for an example)
Agnew was born in Baltimore to a Greek immigrant father and Virginia-born mother. He briefly attended Johns Hopkins University, started at the University of Baltimore law school... After military service in World War II (and later Korea), Agnew completed his legal studies, settled in the Towson area, where he became involved in community organizations, and was appointed to the county zoning board...
Switching his registration from Democrat to Republican, Agnew in 1962, taking advantage of a split in Baltimore County’s Democratic organization, was elected county executive. His record in Baltimore County was moderate and at times progressive, even in civil rights (though he was unhappy with integration protests at Gwynn Oak amusement park).
With re-election in Baltimore County unlikely with a unified Democratic Party, Agnew ran for governor in 1966. Again, the Democrats divided, nominating perennial candidate George P. Mahoney, who ran on the anti-open housing slogan “Your Home is Your Castle.” Thus, Agnew became the “liberal” candidate in the race, gaining support from white progressives and African-Americans, en route to being elected Maryland’s fifth GOP governor. Once again, Agnew governed as a moderate, working with the (always) Democratic General Assembly. (link)
The cab driver can see the sign and talk about Agnew as a local politician. He can say the slogan out loud, He can reference the protests at Gwynn Oak amusement park, which were three years in the past. "It was all over the news." says the driver to Derrida (the colleague is absorbed in reading the manuscript while coping with the starting and stopping of traffic). "Couldn't turn on the t.v without seeing it."
We could see Mahoney's sign and slogan, “Your Home is Your Castle”, as well, but only see it, without hearing it said out loud. Sometime later in the story we should see a castle or building that looks like a castle.
Possible epilogue text: On Nov. 8, Baltimore County executive Spiro Agnew was elected Governor of Maryland, winning with 49.5% of the vote over two other candidates. He took office in January 1967. A year and a half later at the Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida, he was selected by Richard Nixon to be his vice presidential running mate for the 1968 presidential election.
Spiro Agnew (1918-1996)
The fallout shelter sign, ubiquitous in that era, should make an experience somewhere in the movie as well, but not during the cab ride. Maybe in the next group of scenes...
We are outside at the curbside. A cab is parked. The trunk is open. Derrida is standing with his bag on the ground with the driver by the open trunk. The French has opened the other back door and is taking off his overcoat. In the background of the street, amidst other traffic is a parked Baltimore police cruiser .
The American is on the sidewalk Looking at Derrida, he says, as if giving him instructions, and confirming them at once, "So, to the hotel, ...then the university..."
Derrida gives thumbs up.
In the back of the cab, Derrida settles into the backseat beside the other Frenchman, who is already reading the manuscript again..
In the front of the cab is some small paraphernalia of the Baltimore Orioles, the baseball team. It should show the bird mascot. It should be a small pendant that hangs from the mirror, or something that can oscillate materially on the dashboard.
As the cab goes into motion, the French colleague takes out the manuscript and looks at it, as if he is absorbing it as quickly as possible. Derrida turns and looks out the window.
Derrida, looking out the window, asks him about the orange and black bird.
The driver says, "that was from the World Series. You know what the World Series is?
"Ah yes, the World Series. Brooklyn Dodgers," says Derrida
"Dodgers? No not the Dodgers. We beat the Dodgers. We swept 'em. Four games to nothing. Four to nothing. We're the Orioles, the Baltimore Orioles. You're in Baltimore. Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore won the World Series this year. Not the Dodgers. And not the Yankees either. You probably know them I beat. They're our rival. But we beat them this year, and we beat the Dodgers.
The montage should consist of what is reflected in the window of the City of Baltimore, while Derrida would be seeing it, during his way to his hotel. It should be like a many-hued primary color kaleidoscope of fragments, some coherent, sometimes too blurry, with too much velocity, to make sense, then settling into outlines of focus. The kaleidoscope need not be strictly realistic of what he would. It can be fantastical, and even imaginative, but should nevertheless remain in the ambiguous area where we cannot tell whether or not it is something in the physical world he is seeing.
Let's not specify all the things he should see yet. We can fill them in later. We will probably have ideas for this as the story goes on.
Emblems of autumn, to establish time of year of story. A stoplight changing from red to green (must see this). A yellow tow truck.
Like a carousel riding coming to its conclusion, the reflection montage should come to an end with a static image, on the exterior of a hospital, specifically n emergency ward entrance. An ambulance is parked. Orderlies open the rear door.. They go inside then they carry woman very pregnant on a gurney. A nurse comes up to the gurney and bends over the woman. All this happens very quickly, almost at once.
At that moment, and for just a few beats, we are suddenly inside Derrida's black and white memory, where we are in the waiting room of a French maternity ward, and with Derrida through the window we see infants in cradles. We see his wife with the baby, and Derrida in their presence. Derrida's wife's name is Marguerite.
Derrida's memory is interrupted by his colleague's voice, expressing joy and excitement, in giving his reaction to the manuscript, and tapping the paper with his fingers.
We are back inside the cab, which is stopped. Derrida is looking at his friend. His friend seizes his sleeve of his jacket with urgency.
"Oh--oooh" (or some equivalent exclamation a French person of that era would make)
In English, "They are going to like you...or not like you. Not like you very much.
You are going to hit the home run!"
He looks at the driver for quick confirmation of his use of the term. The driver nods his ascent. We see the Oriole oscillating.
At that moment, for a beat, while Derrida absorbs this in the cab, slackening in his joviality, perhaps now for the first time experiencing the gravity of the moment, we begin to hear a speaker's voice, beginning to address an audience in formal terms of an introduction... .
We see the three men now inside of a cozy diner. They are seated in the middle of the counter, side by side, unencumbered by anyone directly at either side of them. Their overcoats are off. They are all wearing jackets and ties. Derrida in the middle. The observation deck man is at his right and the newcomer, the third man, is to his left. Derrida is gesturing, his hands in the air as he speaks, animatedly talking to his colleague at his right.
Behind the counter is a waitress, and a short order cook with his back turned, occupied with tending the grill. In the background in the diner we see a Baltimore cop sitting at a table against the far wall. He is calmly minding is own business, facing the direction away from the men. A waitress is behind the counter by the cash register, somewhat off to the side of the group. She is punching buttons on the register.
Now we are close enough to hear their dialogue between Derrida and the man seated to his right. Derrida has picked up the coffee cup to take a sip. In a voice just loud enough for Derrida alone to hear, observation deck man says, in native French:
"Tu l'as--içi?" (Subtitle: "You have it--here?")
Derrida puts the coffee cup down in the saucer and pats his left vest pocket of his jacket in two quick taps. He gently moves the hand up with raised finger to say give me a second, and contorting himself in his counter seat, he reaches inside his jacket packet and carefully draws out a thin sheaf of papers, a manuscript, folded neatly down the middle the long way. The pages are somewhat rumpled, as if they have been handled already.
Derrida quickly unfolds the manuscript with bold hands, as if opening a book, while his colleague slides his own coffee cup out of the away on the counter,
In the cleared space, Derrida places the manuscript down face up and presses it firmly onto the countertop with the palm of his right hand, as if sealing it in wax. In the tight counter space between him and his colleague, he holds up both his hands, as if showing his palms, with all ten fingers out.
"Dix jours," (Subtitle: "Ten days.")
he says, bouncing his hands gently with the syllables of the word.
He is proud of himself. He looks for acknowledgment in the reaction of his colleague.
He pivots to the man on his left, who is leaning in to listen, and says to him, showing him his fingers in the same way,
"Ten days.
The man on his right is already scrutinizing the first page of the manuscript, while stirring his coffee.
As Derrida is frozen in that second with his hands raised, we see the waitress his standing right behind the counter from Derrida, looming over him. She's holding the order pad, looking straight at him, herself frozen, as if waiting for him to finish.
From down the corridor of the airport concourse we see Derrida with his bags walking from behind. The sun is reflecting off the walls and the polished floor. The man in the overcoat that we saw on the observation deck, arrives in a mild trot and greets Derrida from behind slapping his shoulder gently and the give a hearty handshake.
They exchange a few words. The colleague motions off to the side, as if inviting Derrida. Another figure comes in from that direction. A third man. Observation deck man introduces him to Derrida. There is more cordial handshake between Derrida and this third man.
Then the observation deck man shepherds the group off the to direction from which the second colleague arrived, and they depart from our view in that direction.
In the mid 1960s, the old terminal of Baltimore Friendship Airport had an observation deck on top We see someone waiting up there. A man wearing a tie and a black overcoat is at the railing looking out over the tarmac, and smoking a cigarette. The day is overcast, as if the world is readying for late autumn.
We see him looking an aircraft---Derrida's aircraft---while it is taxiing slowly towards the terminal off the runway. At some point (important) we see the control tower in back of the aircraft as it is movie horizontally.
Seeing the plane and noticing its colors, he looks at his watch, taps it gently five times rhythmically as if in thought. Then he springs into motion, flicking away his cigarette as if to give himself momentum and he turns and heads back to the door of the deck.
Now is a quickening of pace. We him do down flights of stairs in a mild but gentle hurry, moving around several people on the stairs who are going in both directions. We hear the conversations of people in the stairwell but we do not see their faces.
Who is he, this man? Evidently he's a colleague of Derrida, waiting for his Derrida's arrival on the plane. Which colleague?
For that we will need to dive into the history of the conference itself.
There are other characters in the movie. Who else is in the movie besides Derrida, and Baltimore? Some of the characters we can identify by name, from history. Other characters we will identity by their role in the story.
Near the start of the story we see Derrida arriving in his flight to Friendship Airport, as it was called back then.
Friendship International Airport was dedicated on June 24, 1950. The airport was renamed Baltimore Washington International in 1973.
This is what the airport looked like in 1967:
By Daniel Tanner - http://www.airliners.net/photo/United-Airlines/Douglas-DC-6B/2703580/L/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43576003
The arrival by airport of one of the main or supporting characters to open a movie is a classic story feature of that era. If we find out later that Derrida arrived some other way, and its important to the story, maybe we'll change the story, but for now we will go with this.
Did Derrida travel with his wife and child? Let's say he did not, for the time being. He was a last minute replacement speaker, after all. His wife and child will certainly become characters in the story, so add two more to the list dramatis personae, but let us suppose they did not come to Baltimore with him.
We see Derrida emerging from the aircraft. There are air hostesses at least two of them, on the plane and the tarmac. Also a gate attendant in the same hostess uniform is present he comes out into the airport itself, into the waiting area.
The air hostesses serve as another point of reference to cinema of that time, for nothing is more emblematic of those years than the crisply-attired flight attendants of the airlines that carried passengers between continents.
Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 -- October 9, 2004)
He was 36 years old in 1966. The photo here is obviously well after the time of the story.
Derrida was born in El Biar, French Algeria, into a Sephardic Jewish family (originally from Toledo) that became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the indigenous Arabic-speaking Jews of Algeria.
Following the (Algerian) war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was an assistant of Suzanne Bachelard(daughter of Gaston), Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term school of suspicion) and Jean Wahl.His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984.
We would see Derrida not only younger than the photo above, but also in the fashions of the time, when men's suits were tightly tailored and the neckties were thin. For those of us who remember that era, it's easy to see how much fashions changed very radically right after the time of the story.
Here's Jack Palance with Brigitte Bardot in Contempt in 1963:
If I had complete freedom to produce movie, television show, streaming series, etc., I'd certainly make one about the original three-day Baltimore conference in October 1966, where everyone agrees is where it all started. It was, Derrida himself called it, the évènement ("event").
The hero of the story is of course Derrida, the trickster, who comes into the conference as the unknown, a last-minute replacement speaker, and comes out as a rock star.
We would place other notables in the story as well. Many of course would be French, but also plenty of Americans as well.
Certain background and plot would be provided in flashbacks, perhaps tracing Derrida, and perhaps other characters, in the time before the conference. The story would need to foreshadow, and to some extent explicate, the importance that the "event" would take on in later years. At the end we should understand better how we got where we are today, partly because of what happened there.
The visuals of the movie would reflect the achingly gorgeous, crisp technicolor aesthetic of both Hollywood and foreign movies, recognizable to any film buff as characterizing the years roughly from 1962 to 1966. How could it be otherwise? Among other films, Contempt by Jean-Luc Goddard comes to mind. Perhaps one can find a way to make Brigitte Bardot, whose genius is perhaps most evident in that particular movie, a character in this story too.
This is one of my favorite segments in the course, from Lecture 9 on Structuralism. Fry explains the arc of this brief, intense period from 1964 to 1966, the magical mid Sixties, when Structuralism washed over the United States academic scene, in literary theory, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and other fields...until it all came to a sudden, cataclysmic end.
Video starts at 7:02. Watch to 8:37
"There was an incredible aura about Structuralism in the 1960s. It crashed on the shores of the United States from France in a way that stunned, amazed, transformed people's lives. People, like Kant reading Hume, woke up from their dogmatic slumbers, or at least they felt that's what they were doing...
...it was a phenomenon that was transformative intellectually for people in the academic and beyond the academic world, all over the country, and of course it led to, in all sort of ways, most of what's been going on in theory ever since.
The amazing thing about it is that as a flourishing and undisputed French contribution to literary theory, it lasted two years, because in 1966 at a famous conference Jacques Derrida...blew it out of the water."
"As Derrida would say, 'the center limits freeplay'."
Here Professor Fry gives a reading of what is surely one is favorite pieces of poetry, given the lucidity which he recites it, and his comments regarding Derrida. The recitation is meant to evoke, through poetry, the symbolism of the (perhaps imaginary) vertical axis in the paradigm of Structuralism. Brilliant.
"Here there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing
today the conception, the formation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with
a glance toward the business of childbearing-but also with a glance toward those who, in a
company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet
unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is
in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and
terrifying form of monstrosity."
