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By Root 753 0

of rock’n’roll. The Stones are the Nietzsche and Derrida of rock—by taking pop music to a new territory, colored by darker images and textures, and to an emotional and psychological landscape that had previously been explored only by blues artists, they are a musical repudiation of white mythology, of a cultural landscape that turns its back on the downtrodden and marginalized and facilitates an exploitation and denial of its cultural roots. They take the white mythology of pop and paint it black.

Flowers

In the midst of the “flower power” era, The Rolling Stones presented an unusual arrangement. In July of 1967 they released the album Flowers, which appears, on the surface, to be a collection of bright, colorful images. But these flowers evoke darkness and uncertainty, and leave us “standing in the shadows” with nothing but questions. They remind us that sunlight is followed by darkness: “while the sun is bright, or in the darkest night,” optimistic feelings can be overshadowed by darker emotions and loss. Some flowers must turn away from the sun, for they “can’t be chained, to a life where nothing’s gained and nothing’s lost, at such a cost” (“Ruby Tuesday”). Philosophers traditionally celebrate what is stable and unchanging, if only because it then becomes knowable if not more real. But this lyric moves us to wonder about the importance of change. If nothing is gained and nothing is lost, what is the cost? According to Nietzsche and Derrida, the cost may be the death of the living idea, which leaves us with conceptual stagnancy and dead flowers.

The heliotrope is a flower that always faces the sun. In popular music the sun usually represents happiness and hopefulness ; flowers signify affection, friendship or romantic love. Visual images of color and light are complemented by melodies that inspire joyous celebration: “she shoots her colors all around, like a sunset going down” (“She’s a Rainbow”). Darkness, night, rain and clouds, on the other hand, point to loneliness, heartache, pain, and despair.

While flowers, sunlight, clouds, darkness, and rainbows can be symbols in popular music, they can also give birth to concepts in philosophy. The heliotrope, then, has a double meaning. It can literally mean a flower that continually turns itself to face the sun, or it can mean a figure of speech or way of writing and thinking that orients toward a conceptual “sun.” Derrida sees traditional philosophy as a heliotrope that continually turns its attention to a particular sun, whether that sun is “truth,” “knowledge,” or “enlightenment.” The problem is that this creates what Derrida and other philosophers call the “metaphysics of presence.” This is the idea that philosophy privileges that which is, or that which appears as present. But it does so at the cost of neglecting or forgetting the conditions by which that which is or that which is present comes to be. In doing so, presence is itself privileged, and the absence of presence is taken to be a lack or privation and has no metaphysical reality.

For example, St. Augustine (354–430 C.E.) makes the case that evil is not something that has any metaphysical reality, but is merely a privation or absence of good.21 Just as darkness is not a thing in itself, but a privation or absence of light, evil is the absence of good, so it has no metaphysical reality. As the heliotrope always seeks the sun and turns away from the darkness, heliotropic philosophy seeks its conceptual sun (for example, the good) and turns away from and ignores its opposite—the shadows. For Nietzsche, this could not be more wrong. In his critique of what he calls “slave morality,” he argued that the very opposition of “good” and “evil” derives from the same source, and an investigation of the origins of these concepts will lead us “beyond good and evil.”22

Heliotropic music also turns away from its shadowy past and tries to deny its origins. Some early songs of The Stones can be seen as a critique of this musical “white mythology.” As they began their recording career, the Stones promoted traditional