Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation: Derrida and the Law of the Singular Event
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taking as its point of departure the improvised jazz-text collaboration between Ornette Coleman and Jacques Derrida at the 1997 Paris La Villette jazz festival, this article critiques the dominant positioning of Western law and jazz as that which is either completely devoid of improvisation (law) or founded solely upon such (jazz). By reading Derrida’s texts on law and justice in tandem with his views on invention, the impromptu nature of improvisation is confronted and its relation to both jazz and law is interrogated. In his work on law and invention, Derrida probes the problematic relation between the singular and the general in order to challenge the supposed uniqueness of invention, along with the universality, which is said to propel occidental law. These observations, when applied to the critical study of improvisation, disrupt the prevailing understanding of the “extempore” and illustrate how improvisation so defined can be neither total in jazz nor totally absent in law. Instead, the singular (extempore) event exists solely as aporia in both fields. This unpacking of the aporetic nature of singularity reveals not only the inevitability of legal invention, but also the necessity of the “jazz form”. Beyond this, however, and perhaps shedding some light on Derrida’s participation in the “improvised” event described above, there exists an openly responsive dimension to the both jazz and law. This dimension, although never complete or absolute, glances towards the singular other and keeps alive the possibility of creativity, ethics, democracy and justice in Western law and society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".