Hui Shi’s Thesis #8: Connected Rings Can Be Separated

I throw around a lot of capital letters in this text. They’re hardly ahistorical capitalisations, either, most of them enmeshed in some way in the quagmire of the language games that constitute philosophy. So, an explicit clarification of that which is implicit elsewhere. In an attempt to make this section not just a glorified footnote, I’ll come at it hermeneutically through the American Congressional Record. Go go gadget academia.

In September 1987, United States Congress passed a resolution designating that jazz was ‘a rare and valuable national American treasure’.[1] The implicit fallout of the resolution was approval from official arbiters of cultural taste and prestige. No longer did jazz ‘put the sin in syncopation’, but actively encouraged by the State Department as a significant ‘part of [America’s] cultural and intellectual heritage’.[2] This resolution raised difficult questions about the ownership of jazz as strictly an American art-form as well as holding questionable implications for broader concerns of cultural hierarchy and legitimation, but here we are more concerned with the resolution itself:[3]

(1) [jazz] makes evident to the world an outstanding artistic model of individual expression and democratic cooperation within the creative process, thus fulfilling the highest ideals and aspirations of our republic

(2) is a unifying force, bridging cultural, religious, ethnic, and age differences in our diverse society,

(3) is a true music of the people, finding its inspiration in the cultures and most personal experiences of the diverse peoples that constitute our nation

(4) has evolved into a multifaceted art form which continues to birth and nurture new stylistic idioms and cultural fusions[4]

Congress appears to have embraced a contradiction. To them, jazz is both an outstanding means of individual expression, yet a unifying force; a music of the people, yet an art form; individual yet democratic. Jazz is together and alone all at once. Or, Self in Community. So what do I mean by Self and Community?

When we encounter a Self (or any derivative) in this text, what we must read is the sense of ‘I’. The singular subjectivity of an individual at that precise moment in time. Perhaps this does not help matters. Much of the Western philosophy of subjectivity has been concerned with deducing what sits behind this ‘I’, from Idealists, to Romantics, to Postmodernists… These views are summarised by the belief that any ‘immediacy’ experienced by ‘I’ only reaches its meaning and truth through conceptual mediation. For this text, however, such concerns are irrelevant – we take the less travelled path and believe that an immediacy is vital to the mere possibility of aesthetic experience.[5] For us, Self in not an object. Self is an action, a process of becoming itself that will never be completed. Subjectivity is messy and ever-changing; Self is fragmented and malleable.[6] Conceptions interrogating the ‘I’ are abstractions of the action of Self, an act of craving.[7] German philosophical traditions especially do not interrogate the ‘I’ but water board it, finding within it certain uncertain things. Consequently, invocations of ‘I’ often maintain a redundant duality of comprehended self and immediate self. If we were to understand Self through an essential ‘I’, Self would also be no-Self, since the vagaries of context and diachronic interaction dictate an infinite amount of constant change. Self, for us, is more related to the Japanese principle of esho-funi, two-but-not-two.[8] In pedagogically ideological terms: there is no unique and monolithic indivisible Self of disembodiment, duality and pragmatism; a subject whose incorporeal nature is reified into ego ‘thus reproducing the instrumental [institutional] logic of colonizing western thought’.[9] Nichiren:[10] ‘Without the body, no shadow can exist, and without life, no environment. In the same way, life is shaped by its environment’.[11]

We approach Community.[12] At its most simple, Community is an interaction of Selves, a ‘forum for coexistence’.[13] A synthesis of multiple immediate self-consciousnesses. An exposure to new definitions of Self and experiences by engagement with other Selves, through which Self is able to explore itself by abstracting from other Selves and reflecting upon Self via other Selves.[14]

One cannot define Self without Other, but ‘within Community, the Other to Self is simply another Self’.[15] ‘Only when there is an Other can you know who you are … and there is no identity … without the dialogic relationship to the Other’.[16]

A Community is a horizontal collection of Selves, interacting. Kant suggests that one participates in the ‘public’ realm as a ‘private’ ‘I’, combining ‘I’ with symbolic ‘public’ order. For us, though, distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ are outmoded, since ‘private’ Self is already-always adapting and shifting in relation to ‘public’ context.[17] It is a continuous, flowing exchange. ‘Public’ is the arabesque ‘private’ To co-opt the rhetoric of Second Wave Feminism, the personal is the political.

A mutual exchange of Self – inherent in any expression of Self, since it is a performative action – creates Community. But this is not a mediated occurrence, but – in our example of improvised musics – inherent in the act. ‘You are the music’; ‘the player exists within the sounds, is sustained and protected by the persistence and physical actuality of those sounds … as incontrovertible fact in that moment’.[18] Selves develop Community in semiosis through triadic reciprocal determinism.[19] While one Self can never know what was meant by another, the mere reception of any meaning instigates an environment in which Self influences and is influenced by Self and other Selves. Furthermore, Self influences and is influenced by the social context created through the mutual and autonomous directional influences. That is, the influences influence that which is influenced by the Self.[20] Community is Self as chicken-egg paradox of causality to other Selves – each Self, though, is both chicken and egg. Any improvised Event is an autocatalytic system.

Improvising thus embraces an othering of Self in order to reflect on Self. Self-transformation is immanent in Self expression.  Baraka writes of Sun Ra and Albert Ayler that ‘New Black Music is this: Find the self then kill it’.[21] Self is fractured and unfixed and the act of collaborative improvisation is the act of Self creation through Self destruction – a violent expression of immortality through suicide.[22]

Part of improvisation, of the act of improvising, playing with other people, has very much to do with survival strategy. You have, of course, all your expectations and plans destroyed the moment you play with other people. They all have their own ideas of how the musical world at that moment should be.[23]

To improvise is to become both the sacrificer and the victim, to make an ever-possible suicide the only possible form of death … to locate liberation not in a faraway future … but in the present[24]

Examples can be found throughout jazz history.[25] Mingus’ autobiography begins ‘In other words, I am three’.[26] Craig Harris claims ‘it’s about cutting yourself in half’.[27] Bukka White ceases singing to spur himself to ‘sing it, Bukka!’[28] Monk’s ‘Jackie-ing’ shows us that even an apparently fixed noun can be a verb, that to be Self is to engage in the provisional verb process.[29] John Gilmore recounts an anecdote of a gig with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers wherein, after a particularly inventive solo, trumpeter Lee Morgan turned to him and asked ‘is that you, Gilmore?’ Morgan then took a solo that exhorted the same response from Gilmore: ‘Lee, is that you?’[30] Our position allows to pertain to both collectivism and individualism in artistic othering, understanding one as a prerequisite for the other. We do not privilege group definition over self-expression, as recent has done one way or the other, but connect the two.[31] Individual Self expression assimilates and shifts the collective Community, refracts it and returns it.

Consequentially, Community is always-already a heterotopia: musical unity is felt through disunity of Selves, with none leading another. ‘Improvisation in this context should seek to breathe with respect to the composite mentality of [all] instrumentalists’.[32] The music thus takes on its own embodied form as an autonomous member of Community – it always-already manifests in the parallax between improvisers.[33] ‘We face each other and play at each other allowing the music to take place somewhere in the middle. This is very much an outwards process’.[34] Music is not a passive corollary of Community, but an active participle of the otherness between Selves. Difference (otherness) between Selves is influence. Influence is reciprocal. Now we have a means of understanding why Lester Young called the keys of his saxophone his people. After his sax got bent during a tour, Young reportedly exclaimed ‘Flip, my people won’t play!’[35]

Let difference surreptitiously replace conflict.[36]

This influence is manifested in the work-event. For ‘the experience of art is the experience of meaning’ and there is no such thing as ‘cultural enjoyment from a distance’.[37] In other words, one cannot remove either Self or context from the engagement in any work-event. As such, all improvisations – as expressions of Community – are singular work-events and innate exposures to otherness.[38] Owing to the maelstrom of Self and Community in its creation, each moment of any improvised musics will never mean one thing to more than one person. Even if the moment is recorded, when the same listener returns to it, their Self will have shifted and new meaning found in that moment.[39] As such, any work-event’s power lies in its excess of meaning. That is, that any Self can experience that one work for eternity and never once experience it in the same way twice. The work-event is thus limitless in meaning, resisting integration and interpolation into semantic fulfilment; to the Self it is both larger than itself (through other Selves) and a reflection of the larger actuality within itself (in Community).[40] Improvised musics ‘cannot be reduced into the ways in which it is conceptually mediated – including its being historically mediated by thinkers like Adorno – and can be played and heard by differing individuals in new contexts and novel ways’.[41]

As such, Community is an experience of a work-event trans-subjectively, in a ceaseless dialogic inter-pretation of experience and thus meaning. To provide a cognitive basis for such aesthetic experience requires an ontology of subjectivity or ontological grounding, according to German philosophical traditions. Our notion of Self and Community avoids such concerns, however, through continual synchronic mutual hermeneutics of Self. An experience in which one always participates beyond one’s Self; any meaning integrated into Self is synergetic and reciprocal. ‘Free group improvisation is our aim … getting us beyond ourselves and into the music’.[42]

There are further implications to our uses of the terms that can be illuminated, though. Since improvised musics is a work-event, the consequences are that Self surrenders to it and will always-already be a participant of meaning. Work-events here become a game, an act of playing, in which the players are means of the playing’s becoming. But one does not need to apprehend the intricacies of the game’s internal laws to appreciate it (no knowledge of music theory does not preclude one’s enjoyment): it is a communicative act that involves performer, audience, context and convention into one event.[43]

Work-events in Community are Gadamerian festivals, a Bahktinian carnivalesque to established hermeneutic functionalities: hierarchies are abolished and axioms are challenged, all demanding equal dialogic status.[44] The communal aspects of aesthetics experiences belong to a hermeneutic collective of past and future communities of meaning.

Where something is recognised it has liberated itself from the uniqueness and contingency of the circumstances in which it was encountered. It is a matter of neither of there and then, nor of here and now but it is encountered as the very self-same. Thereby it begins to rise to its permanent essence and is detached from anything like a chance encounter.[45] 

‘Improvisation is laden with risk, disquieting, an unstable challenging, an anarchic and ominous festival, like a Carnival with an unpredictable outcome’.[46] From this point, improvised musics become a presentational form of expression that can be seen to mediate the conflict between representational and non-representational semiotic systems. Excess is attained through the continual interaction in a Community of Selves beyond the presentational semantic field of improvised music that enables it, not the prescriptive representational fields.

We can here now appreciate what Derrida meant in saying ‘I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it’s impossible’.[47] For Derrida, improvisation is instead merely a ‘possibility’, which would require the complete blocking of all Self in order to truly manifest. Since one draws on emotional memory, context, environment, technique etc. when one improvises music, it cannot strictly be said to be improvised. Improvisation, for Derrida, must be ‘marked by the lack of self-presence’.[48] Its possibility is instead, ‘the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible approaches’.[49] Crucially, however, Derrida stresses that improvisation is no lesser because it can never truly be. Derrida’s improvisation is, for us, antinomic to our definitions of Self and Community.[50] We take the absence in Self to be complemented by the presence of another Self and vice-versa.

Thus, we can readily and without qualm dismiss the claims of those who suggest that improvisation depends entirely on tacit rules and implicit tradition.[51] We do not – nor can we – take improvisation as an expression of ‘a shared system of creative conventions … no one can create music without first internalising the rules and conventions of the domain’.[52] We take improvisation more to be the ‘discovery and invention of original music spontaneously, while performing it’.[53] Our conceptualisation of improvisation is drawn from within the Self. Certainly, a seasoned player may improvise and make use of pre-existing idioms or techniques, but they are but a means of expression and – potentially – to an audience completely original. Similarly, any one combination of any one idiom in improvisation will be unique. For improvisation to be a ‘shared system’, surely then only professional musicians would be able to either partake in it or engage with it as a listener? Our conception reaches further than Sawyer’s can claim to, understood not in terms of how the improvisation is created, but how it exists holistically as an action.

It is as if the improviser’s audience gains privileged access to a [performer’s] mind at the moment of musical creation[54]  

As has hopefully been made clear, there are two main schools of thought in perceiving improvisation. What the ‘impossible’ theory – championed by Sawyer and Derrida – misses, however, is the collective nature of any improvisation. Community is vital to improvisation, and inherent within it. Entire networks of interaction are summoned, dismissed and manipulated in improvising – ‘the collective character of artworlds’ cannot be satisfactorily encompassed by the ‘impossible’ theory.[55]

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