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One sentence would have sufficed:

I’m a fan of Susan Sontag.

My position practically screams out from this sentence. I am against the intellect’s revenge upon art which seeks to destroy any work and make it manageable.[1] But herein lies my insecurity. I wish for my analysis to as affective as it is effective, and so wish to speak colloquially and appeal to the erotic (As opposed to the hermeneutic, Sontag again). But, my insecurities: I am appealing to institutions built on hermeneutic, materialist and rational traditions. I feel the need to participate in dialogic forms which I call insufficient in order to gain the credence necessary to disavow myself from them. I am caught between standard analytical practice, what I want to say and the vast limitations of my own critical faculties; collecting passages of smarter people’s work an either agreeing or disagreeing. But then – to some degree – all philosophical and critical writing is the act of having an opinion in the hope that some people somewhere will either agree with you or pay for having these opinions.  

So I hope my opinions have reached a level of articulation through which they can be discussed fully – I don’t aim for accepted or rejected, just discussed. That, or surely my work becomes a mere validation of the work of others? But, as Evan Parker has already explained, involving oneself in dialogue or discourse with others means that the result is never your work, but a reaction to theirs. The pretence is that teachers know, that they take in the washing of teachers before them and the game is to synthesise it and repackage it. ‘When I drop Jacques Derrida or Alain de Botton into a conversation, I do so knowingly, able to laugh at my neediness and exalt in my intellect’.[2] The student’s game is to return it in the direction of the professor’s bias. An analysis subject will subconsciously notice what associations arouse the interest of the psychiatrist. And on sound whip-and-carrot principles, she will choose the maze run that contains the reward pellet. So I hope my work provokes a reaction.    

                A Repackaging of a Repackaging, from those who have chewed what I have only bitten.

In my Erotic struggles [intended], I move towards an explication of ‘felt meaning’, a non-linguistic, ineffable form of synaesthesia expressed linguistically.[3] It is a conceptual process as well as a perceptual one. ‘It is becoming clear that there are conceptual forms of synaesthesia’.[4]

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It is not possible to transcribe improvisation … [no] sort of technical description [is] adequate … An abstract description of improvisation can achieve, perhaps, a sighting. Close, technical analysis leads elsewhere[5]

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To draw it alongside more contemporary critical theory, I reach for an epistemic de-linking of the mind and knowledge.[6] A liberation of critical thought away from neo-liberal developments of ‘modernity’.[7] ‘That is a Totality that negates, exclude, occlude the difference and the possibilities of other totalities. Modern rationality is an engulfing and at the same time defensive and exclusionary’.[8] I wish for a move away from the imperial, colonising rhetoric of ‘the exclusively European phenomenon’ ‘modernity’ and towards an inter-epistemic communication.[9] To avoid the fallacy of a particular taken as a universal (for example, the intellectual white male of most western philosophical history), I grant no school of thought or idea primacy above another, and aim for theoretical pluri-versality as a universal project.[10] De-linking from the view of abstract universals that fit entire spectrums of class, race, societal matrices, I aim for a discourse necessarily inter-epistemic, ‘multi-informational’, and dialogical.[11] A positive intersectionality.[12]

The conception of fluid boundaries between the sonoric and the visual (and indeed also between the textual) is a closer reflection of artistic practices throughout history[13]

Our subject grew out of jazz, black music, black expression, which grew out of the reversal of the western dotted rhythm, the onbeat: ‘Nigger’ melody, the Scotch Snap

is the reverse of the ordinary dotted rhythm … It is a typical feature of Scottish folk tunes, of American Negro music and of jazz[14]

We aim to reverse ‘the accented position of western culture in social/political terms’.[15]

Our target is a transformational dynamics, ‘not limited to only the [constructed] reality particulars … but a subject connected to the composite spread of information dynamics’.[16] The view Braxton took of world creativity, a topic which requires as many contexts as possible ‘if we are to view the realness’ of creativity as a positive tool for change, we apply more broadly – just as the composite dynamic reality in any time cycle ‘comments on the total reality fabric of its progressionalism’.[17]

In other words, we reach toward an epistemic Community contingent of many schools of thought as Selves. ‘The metaphor of knowledge as a building [with singular foundations] is being replaced by that of a network. As we perceive reality as a network of relationships, our descriptions, too, form an interconnected network of concepts and models in which there are no foundations’.[18] Physics with Zen, Romanticism with cognitive science; a knowledge network. ‘Networks are by their very nature the fabric of most complex systems, and nodes and links deeply infuse all strategies aimed at approaching our interlocked universe’.[19] All of this applies to music.

You’re going to see a fantastic sphere of music culture that no one on this planet, even today, could ever think would be. It would be more fantastic than any artist ever before, and it’s waiting for us to connect, you know. We have not connected for a lot of reasons, but I can say this, the beginning of creative music in America at the turn of the last century began to make that base and eventually it’s going to open up. It’s got to open up because we can’t stand still[20]

To some extent, de-linking is an inter-epistemological system of a return. Greek philosophy, the assumed foundation stone of Western ontology and epistemology, is itself traceable back to ancient Egyptian and other African sources – one of the great ‘exotic’ Others of neoliberal, ‘modern’ theory.[21] The Western tradition, in other words, is built on the under-acknowledged back of Othered cultures.

It is an ideology of connecting – of accepting all epistemic and ontological traditions on their own terms and applying them freely inter-actionally, expanding the horizon of experience and thought available to analysis beyond the hierarchical power differentials implicit in the notion of modernity and the First World, Second World, Third World, etc. An inter-epistemology against any hegemony of monotropic thought defined through dialectical alterity; a system no longer manipulated through oppositional exteriority, but an egalitarian appreciation of all epistemic forms.[22] ‘Decolonization of knowledge shall be understood in the constant double movement of unveiling the geo-political location of theology, secular philosophy and scientific reason and simultaneously affirming the modes and principles of knowledge that have been denied by the rhetoric of Christianization, civilization, progress, development, market democracy’.[23]

                I do not come with timeless truths.

                My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances.

                Toward a new humanism… To understand…[24]

Is this not precisely what we see when observing Wadada Leo Smith’s Ankhrasmation?

Ankhrasmation is a musical language as opposed to a musical notation system … The first part, Ankh, comes from the Egyptian cross. Ras comes from the Ethiopian head, meaning the leader. And Mas comes from mother … It could be referenced scientifically, according to nature or biology, or it can be referenced according to fantasy, imagination. So when all these components are connected, that guarantees the possibility of success[25]

I don’t care about whether they’re black, white, blue, red, or yellow. As long as they can play[26]

I believe, because of its inherently singular, social nature as non-representational expression, improvised musics provide an ideal lens through which to identify de-linked epistemology of Self. A passage from historically and culturally contingent means of understanding to social knowledge that is simultaneously synchronic and infinite, in meaning.

Improvisation is in the present, its effect may live on in the souls of the participants, both active and passive (ie audience), but in its concrete form it is gone forever from the moment that it occurs, nor did it have any previous existence before the moment that it occurred, so neither is there any historical reference available[27] 

Self and improvisation materially (and can only) live in the present, in existence itself. And here we can uncover the enacted ideology of improvisation: a gap experienced between Self and Jesús Sepúlveda’s ‘robotic cybernetic replicas’, that is, Selves interpellated by defeat, alienation and fear – endemic to late capitalism.[28] Improvised Real time allows Self to emerge from the entrapment of the ideological cocoon. Replicas

falsely perceive time, they understand it as a continuous line where past, present and future intersect simultaneously but in an unreal way. The notion of time is an authoritarian imposition of the social order that justifies itself with the false idea of progress, a model of legitimization of the dominant order: industrialization, imprisonment and territorial delimitation. Materially, we live in the present, in existence itself.

“Hic et nunc,” so goes the Latin refrain, here and now. Because of this, memory—always active and arbitrary, changing and selective—gives us a perception of our own experience. Experience amplifies peculiarity, a process distinct from history, this is to say from the standardization of the official. The only common factor to all the peculiarities there are on earth is tenderness. Affection is a primary necessity of human beings.[29]

Protest is always implicit in improvisation, then. Even if it features as an unknown Real expression of Self in existence, not tied to false teleologies or narratives of progress or inevitability.[30] Each improvisation is a utopia. Rejecting and destroying all taxonomies that entrench and justify the objectification of Self into reified categories (race, gender, class etc). A utopia that cannot be colonised or civilised, so integral is each utopia’s connection to singular, existing and experiential Self as part of its totality.[31] The totality is a perpetually revolving present, a rejection of ‘modernity’s’ conception of time as a unique and liner series of progression.[32] Ignoring totality to the fetish of reification can only breed ‘islands of abundance in the ocean of universal misery’.[33]

This is what is meant when we label improvisation as anti-capitalist. Indulging in Mignolo’s thesis, I believe that improvised music provides a tonic to Franco Berardi’s pessimistic view of late-capitalist subjectivity in relation to the big Other of capitalism: ‘the long-lasting neoliberal rule has eroded the cultural base of social civilisation, which was the progressive core of modernity. And this is irreversible’.[34] For does not improvised music epitomise – simultaneously on micro- and macro- levels – an attainable example of Berardi’s only consolation ‘self-reliant communities leaving the field of social competition’.[35] Certainly not the apotheosis of individual competition, a gift of the belligerent ideology of neo-liberalism.[36]

‘America got materialist-minded … advances – so-called advances - … that was cut off by Reagan … people are backing something that’s commercial rather than something that’s creative … my music’s not American, I’d say my music belongs to the world’.[37]

But, as we will have seen, improvised music is itself a microcosm for society/ies as a whole, a continually performative enacting of Self through Community. In other words, the example of improvised musics demonstrates the possibility to step out of the imposed freneticism and constant consumption imposed by capitalist interpolation. A move away from the spectacle diversion of neo-liberal, late capitalism; that is events on the physical plane that lack substantial validity and thus offer no substance to the essence continuum of any culture.[38] I do not use this terminology to flatly label certain pursuits or mediums less viable to humanity or culture, Raymond Williams having dismantled such a view comprehensively in the ‘50s, but relate improvisation to what WE (that is, Selves) are and can be.[39] ‘“Mighty Mouse” [as symbolic of the worst excesses of material capitalist individualism] can only be talked of then as a phenomenon that is interesting – or not interesting – but certainly not in accordance with the primary considerations we vibrate to’.[40] To clarify further, notions of worth, value, cultural impact etc of certain cultural forms are not my topic here: more the affect and lasting effect of engagement with these forms. We deliberate forms rather than hegemonic functions.

Berardi sees this gap between humanity’s cognitive and physical limitations and the frantic demands of capitalism’s symptomatically exponential dynamic as an unavoidable falling into the void.[41] Centrally, however, Berardi cannot see a way through a constitutive subjectivity without appealing to capitalist interpolation, suggesting there can be no harmonious relation between humanity and the capitalist Other.[42] What we suggest here, however, is a means of bypassing the symbolic Other of capitalism through the Community of Selves. Consequently, we are able to answer Berardi’s loaded questions of ‘what body, what mind is going through transformation and becoming?’ without resorting to the pessimism of interpolated depression and essentialism.[43]

A position of materialist subjectivity can be taken another way, however, as it is by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Hardt and Negri argue for a developing form of ‘cognitive capitalism’, in which the ‘mechanisms of cooperation necessary for production are contained in the labour itself’.[44] For Negri and Hardt, socialised, immaterial production – improvised musics being a perfect example – result in the products of that labour being social relations: economic production becomes political production, the creation of society. Immaterial labour being the production of not just goods, but social forms, interaction, communication; it is innately bio-political action, the production of social life.[45] All exchanges of Self in improvisation work horizontally, and ‘improvisation’s responsiveness to its environment puts the performance in a position to be directly influenced by the audience’.[46]

Our perspective here is contrasted heavily with Timothy Taylor’s view. In Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present, Taylor takes capitalism as the ‘most important site of cultural analysis’ for music.[47] Taylor accepts capitalism as though it is the logical finality of social teleological drive: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.[48] The argument Taylor puts forth is roughly that aesthetic choices are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish from marketing decisions; the former is subsumed by the latter. Here, Taylor draws on Jacques Attali in suggesting that music and capitalism are reciprocally determinate.[49] The problem can be identified as Taylor presupposing, as Berardi does, the interpolation against which we argue. For Taylor capitalism is a cultural force. Individuals and organisations must constantly renegotiate their positons within a cultural value system of capital. Historical readings of music with capitalism has read music through capitalism. We make camp on the other side of the transcritique, another parallax view.

From this perspective, Wynton Marsalis falls into the same trap as Berardi when attempting to demonstrate jazz’s cultural and aesthetic value.[50] Many have decried Marsalis’ writings on the subject of jazz’s worth as being elitist, fearful of development and authoritarian, but the dialogue is more nuanced.[51] Marsalis’ aim is to show that jazz music has artistic merit and requires great technical skill at time when it was primarily scorned as primitive and for this he should be lauded. Undoubtedly, jazz and improvisation has been dismissed as worth(-)less when historically compared to classical music. To do so, however, Marsalis appeals to hegemonic western forms, to bring a respectability to jazz that is reliant upon colonial epistemologies.[52] This is his mistake: he does not take jazz on its own terms, instead appealing to the rhetoric of Eurocentric hegemony. In trying to elevate jazz in the eyes of popular culture, he overlooks its endemic, independent value.[53]   

As we will have established, improvised musics are a social process.[54] But to allow for full debate on hegemonic terms, below we shall treat it as a product, encapsulated by the recording. Still, however, Taylor’s view cannot stand. For, with the rapidly shifting means of production and consumption, music-as-product must only be understood as an information product: an infinitely replicable unit. Moreover, the finality of music-as-product is currently being questioned. Take Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, which was released, withdrawn, released again and regularly updated into different iterations.[55] Or Kendrick Lamar’s ‘asterisk’ untitled unmastered, understood to the edited off-cuts from To Pimp a Butterfly.[56] Even in strongly commercial and popular avenues, music-as-product is being challenged. We can infer from West and Lamar’s releases that, anathema to capitalist production, music is never finished, that even the producers of the music do not have the authority over it that a culture of ownership and copyright assumes; that the aim of capitalism is to turn the verb into a noun.[57] What we are witnessing is the inverse of what Attali observed in the 1980s, that is the ‘active’ nature of music entering the realm of commercial ‘exchange’.[58] Now, the ‘exchange’ wants to become ‘active’. And, as Paul Mason has shown, the economic value of information products is nigh on zero.[59] When improvised music – and music in general – is treated as a product, an object, in recorded artefacts, its economic worth is nothing. And, as an information product, music forms part of what Marx dubbed the ‘general intellect’, a state in which ‘general social knowledge has become a force of production’.[60] 

Mason discusses the rise of social production and non-market collaborative ventures in a network, information economy, the perfect example of which is improvised musics.[61] Hence the accelerated shift in the consumption of music, primarily to streaming services like Spotify and Tidal. Now, consumers do not pay for the product, but the access to the product. The social nature of music is undermined by a capitalist attempt to mediated the general intellect through the ‘cloud’, a reprivatisation of global spaces.[62] But, as an attempt to mediate an information product, such mediations will undoubtedly fail, as Mason has articulated, for they rely on an impossibility: monopolisation of the infinite.[63] Tidal’s unsteady launch as a brand demonstrates this point clearly.[64]

Arguably, what are witnessing now in the age of mass communication and information technology is the demystification of classical art forms’ ritualistic ‘aura’, as Benjamin prophesied.[65] Now all forms are freely available to all, through mass mediation and production (replication), aesthetic exclusivities and hierarchies are fading. Only now can we see that aesthetic aura is not being eclipsed by the potency of a mass-cultural image, but is slowly vanishing.[66] For, in an age of information goods, there can be no vain simulacra, no ‘irreality’ of replication – Lefebvre’s pessimistic ‘emptiness filled with signs’ isn’t possible: the copy now is the original, no longer lacking – since it never existed – the same time and space of the original.[67]

Not only is the ownership of music-as-product declining greatly, but ownership of the means of production is also becoming less important.[68] Take rapper Prince Harvey’s album PHATASS (Prince Harvey at the Apple Store: Soho), an album created entirely on a demonstration computer and a memory stick at an Apple shop. Or Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking – in which she discusses the constant karmic tampon circle. That is, when in need, if one asks, a sympathetic or empathetic person will help you out.

All of this assumes that these recorded artefacts hold some further use or value, which many argue against.

Documents such as tape recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as they preserve chiefly the form that something took and give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot convey any sense of time and place^[69]  

But what is all this to do with improvised musics? Simply, that improvised musics as we understand them epitomise exactly that which goes beyond Taylor and Berardi perceptions of social economy. Improvised musics demand the impossible of Taylor and Berardi’s standpoints by forcing them to recalibrate their central positions. Our position negates Adorno’s fears of the ‘total absorption of both musical production and consumption by the capitalistic process, the alienation of music from man has been complete’.[70] Instead, we identify improvised musics as a continual political process that, in relation to Marx’s universe of commodities and capital, actualises a kind of socio-transcendental a priori, a matrix which generates – albeit synchronically – the totality of social and political relations.[71] That is improvised musics acts a means through which one can identify the relationship between economy and politics as merely a point of perspective. Our view depends on an assumption of music’s universality of expression.[72] Like the well-known visual paradox, there is either a saxophonist or a face, at one point one has to decided what one sees. Here, we see a saxophonist, while Taylor et al. see a face.

Thus we are able to reconcile our understanding of improvisation as an exploration of Self in Community with wider conceptual meaning. In this way improvised musics do not become a subjectivisation of aesthetic value, but an ideological, and thus wider, symbolic act. Individual freedom expressed collectively. The unmediated and un- and disorganised nature of improvisation summarises its ideological weight.[73] We are able to explain how a singular work-event is able to express metaphysical truths that transcend context.[74] Self in Community is assimilated with Community. We embrace the circular arguments of metaphysics depending on the provisionality of relative, determinate expression and assertion; we do not require a totality of interconnecting expressions to give definitive meaning, because we shun the definitive at its base level of Self: we embrace finitude. As such we occupy the parallax of the rational/conceptual and irrational/intuitive in exploring Self.         

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