A few months ago, I wrote a Music Mondays on Dave Brubeck where I reflected on a the link between temporality and selfhood. Well, today I want to revisit that basic idea but take it in a slightly different direction by thinking about the experience of disorientation that often accompanies the human condition.
When the Funky Four Plus One say “That’s the joint,” they are reminding us that “the joint” is where things are at. It is where things are working properly. It is when we have a grasp on the world and our place in it.
However, things do not always work so smoothly. Often “the joint” is merely an idealistic notion that illustrates the distance from where we are to where we wish we were. Accordingly . . .
“Time is out of joint,” or so says Hamlet.
Quoting Hamlet, Jacques Derrida adds: “‘The time is out of joint’: time is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down, deranged, both out of order, and mad.”
Hamlet’s statement is a matter of disorientation in response to circumstances that literally define the concept of tragedy.
For Derrida, Hamlet’s statement is not best understood as a singular expression of one person’s attempt to navigate difficult situations, but as a broader indication of the loss of stability when it comes to the predictability of the world and one’s place in it.
For both, “time” names more than the experience of sequential moments. It indicates the way that meaning seems to require some degree of fixity. We depend on the past not moving and we depend on the future as necessarily coming in order to live consciously in the present as the “moment” of articulate utterance.
Here we are. Where? Here. When? Now.
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