Each Community is a singular world, a metamorphosing public. And each Self may be active in more than one Community, on a macro or micro level.
People participate in more than one public.[1]
Subject positions within Communities that characterise the lived realities of each Self are heterogeneous and unbounded. Each wandering through micro and macro Communities allows a space, a site of articulation of non-hegemonic models of identity formation, knowledge production and political performativity. A reclaiming of Self outside of (mis)representations by dominant social orders, hierarchies, institutions and histories.[2] In short, an interpellation of Self among Selves, against forced symbolic interpellation. A vanishing of the ideological mediator; the immediate Self knowingly participates in the gesture of subjectivisation.[3]
There are synchronous alternate Communities that are all ‘true’ to Self. ‘Truth’ does not reside in a single narrative of a consistent whole, but in the manner in which the alternate versions resonate among themselves, interpreting each other.[4]
Every Community is an alternative public, apart from cultural and societal hegemony that allows for internal absolute democracy. It is unified and plural.[5]
On the social plane, the understanding that identities are formed in open dialogue, unshaped by a predefined social script, has made the politics of equal recognition more central … equal recognition is not just the appropriate mode for a healthy democratic society. Its refusal can inflict damage on those who are denied it.[6]
[1] Charles Gayle, quoted in ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, by Nancy Fraser, in The Phantom Public Sphere, edited by Bruce Robbins (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 19.
[2] See: Ajay Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice (London: Routledge, 2013), 230-6.
[3] See: Slavoj Zizek, Absolute Recoil (London: Verso, 2015), 64.
[4] Ibid, 146-7.
[5] See: Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, translated by William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 373-4.
[6] Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 34-6.
public
In every Community exists micro Communities.
Every interaction between Selves creates Community.
In a trio improvisation, for example, there are four possible Communities. One on-going and three that ebb and flow.
Reading is easy because writing is hard.
Fuck that. I want you to try.
I want an exchange. A dialogue.
I can’t claim to have the answers.
I don’t no one does.
But we sure as hell won’t get anywhere if half of us take it easy.
Primacy of Self.
I grew up in … it was expected that you could do anything you wanted to do and that you should always hold in suspicion anybody who tells you that you can’t and that you should always hold in suspicion anyone that claims that your idea’s not valid … I have this, an intense desire to connect. Always … I want my musical output to be an experience for all involved, not just the musicians, but for everyone. I want us to kind of create a sort of womb together of… possibility; which doesn’t necessarily transfer to always being positive … it’s just creating kind of this moving organism together, this spontaneous way of connecting to strangers who are not really strangers[1]
Equality of Selves.
For reasons I don’t completely understand but it makes me incredibly happy – that people are able to go into a deeper part of themselves and connect the story I’m telling … to some story of their own … able to connect even though the history is different for them[2]
Music is the key to all verbal communication. How else would tonal languages function? Simply read the differences:
I didn’t say he stole my money.
I didn’t say he stole my money
I didn’t say he stole my money.
I didn’t say he stole my money.
I didn’t say he stole my money.
I didn’t say he stole my money.
I didn’t say he stole my money.
I didn’t say he stole my money.
Meaning in language is both internal and external and external only through its inherent music.[1] The illocutionary force of any utterance can be changed by its tone, emphasis and rhythm. Productivity that leads to meaning in communication cannot be understood through semantics alone.[2] Rhythm is language, language is rhythm.[3] What music has to say is simultaneously hidden and revealed.[4]
[1] F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, edited by C. Lommatzsch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1842), 633.
[2] Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 211.
[3] Eric Harland, ‘Eric Harland: Rhythms of Revolution’, YouTube, 2:54, uploaded by SFJazz, December 15 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX1MwaHP-CQ.
[4] T.W. Adorno, ‘Music and Language: A Fragment’, accessed May 31 2016, https://msu.edu/~sullivan/AdornoMusLangFrag.html.
all music
The newspaper of yesterday said that – inspired by these tales – a local blacksmith attempted to do the same. She only got as far as Schoenburg when suddenly she was struck by a difficulty in translating the libretto and ran into the woods stark raving mad. Some say she has joined a coven. Others that she now realises that it was all her doing. Others still that she simply need time to reflect upon herself. Be that as Echo or Narcissus, I cannot say.
wandering
A work-event is a world. The palpable Self is Existence, a continuum of inflected appearance.
Being is a category of that which constitutes any world, whereas Existence is a category of appearing in a determined world[1]
Community creates not only the gestures of Self exploration in space, but the world-space itself. Worlds of Community commit to embodied ontology and perceptual and interactive networks. Every path taken is a wander line.[2] Every musical movement is a movement through the singular improvised world; every movement is a wandering of Self. It is a means of Being which directly constitutes Existence. Since any Existence in improvised worlds is provisional on Self movement, on wandering, each world is directly related to the realness of the composite dynamics of that present social reality. Worlds begat worlds begat worlds. Each kills the progenitor and takes up its mantle.[3]
To wander: to travel for travel’s sake … to be a vagabond … to occur here and there fleetingly, on various objects, with a smile[4]
Musical mobility through improvised worlds. Emancipatory musical mobility identity. Self-defined Self in wandering through the world of singular improvisation. Wandering movement that are expressions of beyond: beyond plan, beyond language, beyond discourse.
To wander is to transgress. Every wandering obeys only the Self in essence to the matrix of Community, a fullness. Self becomes a truly autonomous vagabond.
Vagabond: a person who wanders from place to place without a job.
It is both a role apart from profit hegemony, from interpellated fear and consumption. Negative connotations could just as well be hermetic, ritualistic, a dedication. An Ascension.
One wanders through the world, the improvised field, with its own contingencies and cultural delineations:
a separate social universe having its own laws of functioning[5]
Clear from dictated paths, Self reclaims movement as a means of interrogating and defying entire linguistic, ontological and interpellatory edifications and structures of being and thinking, representations of social organisation.[6] Within the expression of Self is the surexpression of Self.
Wander lines? Are they paths? With carefully traced paths, we will come back. Right now, they are life rafts, three maps escorting an event: the transhumance of the herd…When the wander line manages to DO, it would seem, thanks to use, to its handling, to the handling of drift, the ink line wants to brush up against it. Thus, wander lines are not – when maps are rafts – transcribed journeys, traces. They are ways of being in the search for that which, coming from us, allows.[7]
where-you-are.com
[1] Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, translated by Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 9.
[2] David Lewin, Musical Form and Transformation: Four Analytic Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Paul Churchland, Plato’s Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).
[3] See: Anthony Braxton, Tri-axium Writings 3 (Synthesis Music, 1985), 1.
[4] Rousseau, quoted in Fernand Deligny, Cahiers da l’Immuable/1, reprinted in Fernand Deligny, Œuvres (Paris: Éditions L’Arachnéen, 2007), 811.
[5] Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 162.
[6] See: Guillauma Logé, ‘The surexpression of wander lines’, July 9 2013, accessed May 30 2016, http://en.forumviesmobiles.org/guillaume-loge/blog/2013/07/09/surexpression-wander-lines-1071.
[7] Deligny, Cahiers de l’Immuable/3, reprinted in Fernand Deligny, Œuvres (Paris: Éditions L’Arachnéen, 2007), 912.
intimacy
Self. Community. Reciprocal determinism. Look to the music and you will find it.
Call and response. A dialogic sharing of Self.
Jazz Worlds/World Jazz.[1] Africa Speaks/America Answers.[2]
Improvisation is a contact space of Self exploration. A personal, immediate transculturation.[3]
Sharing an idea of sound, sharing an idea of who they are[4]
This sharing is a point of contact, an intimacy. An act that enables and allows intimacy between strangers and friends. Improvisation fosters the possibility of intimacy. It is not unique in this way, but offers a clarity of expression.
That intimacy is a particularisation of that performance in that space within the psycho-geography of Self.
Each person builds intimacy in their own way, located in their immediates.[5]
Improvisation is a sharing of Self – the most intimate of all possible intimacies.
[1] Philip Bohlman and Goffredo Plastino, eds., Jazz Worlds/World Jazz, edited by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
[2] Robin Kelley, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[3] Mary Louise Pratt: ‘I use this term [contact space] to refer to social spaces where cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today’, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession (1991): 34; Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation (Oxon: Routledge, 2008).
[4] Philip Bohlman, interview with author, June 16 2016. Launch event for Jazz Worlds/World Jazz.
[5] This idea I owe partly to Goffredo Plastino, ibid.
Music is...a lost thing finding itself. It's like a man with no place of his own. He wanders the world and he's a stranger wherever he is; he's a stranger right in the place where he was born. But then something happens to him and he finds a place, his place.[1]
Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952, Oil on Canvas. He felt this kind of intensity in his own spontaneity and It occurred to me that Jackson was almost performing his paintings.[1]
[1] Earle Brown, quoted in Improvisation: In Nature and in Practice by Derek Bailey (Dorchester: Dorset Press, 1992) 62.
close enough for
We are discussing improvisation. Various terms are used to suggest or allude to improvisation – one of the key labels being ‘jazz’. Some may scoff at such a glib eliding between nebulous ideas, but I say let them. We are keen to avoid the binary discrimination between ‘jazz’ and ‘free improvisation’.
The legacy of jazz is a recorded one, ‘so much of which is improvised’.[1] Since we are interested in improvisation, it only seems fitting to mention jazz, because it knows one thing above all else: ‘don’t depend on a text!’[2]
But who is jazz?[3] For the sake of this text, we identify it as an approach – and not just a musical one.[4]
Jazz photography, jazz poetry, jazz comedy, jazz sports...[5]
It’s just a feeling – if you want to call it jazz you can call it jazz. Anything you want to call it, but it’s a spirit … a cohesion … joint effort[6]
[X]? Well, that’s what they’re calling it this year; and it’s a good enough name. But it goes back to something just as old – and as natural – as the circulation of blood. It belongs to everybody … Take a melody … turn it inside out; wrap your own ideas around it; vary the tempos. Now see what happens.[7]
[1] Brad Mehldau, ‘Back at the Vanguard’, accessed June 16 2016, http://www.bradmehldau.com/excerpt-vanguard.
[2] Ibid.
[3] A question posed by George Lewis in the preface to Jazz Worlds/World Jazz, edited by Philip Bohlman and Goffredo Plastino (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
[4] This idea is not new. See: Robert Walser, Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) for similar ideas put forward by Jelly Roll Morton and Dizzy Gillespie, among others.
[5] Benjamin Cawthra, Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Meta DuEwa Jones, The Music is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2011); I refer of course to Franklyn Ajaye, ‘The Jazz Comedian’; Utah Jazz and New Orleans Jazz, to name two teams. See also Marion Brown reflection on basketball as parallel to jazz: Views and Reviews: Notes to Afternoon of a Georgia Faun (NIA Music, 1973), 17-8.
[6] Elvin Jones, ‘Playing the Truth’, interview by Ira Girtler, Down Beat 36/20 (1969): 12-3, 30.
[7] Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington, ‘Music is “TOPS” to You and Me… and Swing is a Part of It’, Tops 1938, 14-18. Reprinted in Walser 106-11. Duke is waxing lyrical about ‘swing’, but if we understand it – as is clear here – as a means of access to improvisation, Self is clear is his argument, as is the trouble with definition.
It is a memorial
there is no funeral
it is a memorial
Community falls away
Bra’ Zim Ngqawana keeps blowing
no words are said
no words are meant
feeling does not need semantics
here is the universal
EVERYONE KNOWS what the blowing means
a face
slipping away from itself
perfect
I was once sitting in an extremely expensive restaurant and enjoying some quite awful dinner when I was introduced to a once-almost-famous violist. He had, he said, once recorded that perfect sonata with the perfect instrument perfectly. His story goes that as he listened to the recording himself while driving home he suddenly lost consciousness and careered off the road. The resultant crash rendered him totally crippled. The tapes of the recording were also ruined irreparably in the crash. When he heard this however he could not help but laugh and, were he able, would have leapt for joy. Such a reaction to a definitive loss of renown and success was, naturally, baffling. But he later told me in confidence ah, but could you imagine – I would have cursed despite my fame to play only that piece forever! Could you imagine.
art
Not so very long ago a community of people came together and, after a lengthy and luxurious dinner, after which the group found their prepared topics of conversation too incendiary, fetid or dull to suit the evening, decided to invent Art. During the protracted debates that followed, according to the comprehensive minutes of the gathering, Art’s proportions and dispensations were agreed upon: Art was to have no place within quotidian daily life or public policy; it was to be devoid of both educational merit or impetus; it was to arouse emotion but never too strikingly; and was to be deemed the final topic of conversation at dinner, after its natural locutory progenitors science and politics. Feeling pleased, the group dispersed.
(It is worth perhaps parenthetically noting that the following morning the host of the party – nursing a fiercely raging headache – found and read over the proposal prior to its distribution. After a while he discovered he disagreed with the entire document and, throwing into the fire, rewrote it entirely. Since this was all done in secret and because his friends are that particular type of people, he stills receives no credit whatsoever in the publication of the document.)
ghosts
It was only after reading some particularly bad poetry that this young woman was able to mourn her parents’ respective deaths. Suddenly, she later reported to a friend, she had hit upon the realisation it was her who was, in fact, the ghost, her parents now secure in the world. It was said that she did not cry upon the realisation, but she also did not smile. The reports vary.
Either way, now she has a few sentences.
all music
There was a man of uncertain origin and fortune who recently completed his lifelong task to listen to all music. His wife then reported, faithfully and with enthusiasm, that he was taking some much-deserved time off and hoped he would soon find a new dalliance, since she enjoyed his being relaxed and present as of old. It has been rumoured that he hasn’t spoken since, but as I say his fortunes are uncertain.
garden of particularities
the individual tends to see him or herself as an individual subject. this is to say, as an indivisible being, unique and monolithic. this vision has generated a false consciousness of the being that justifies pragmatic individualism as much as the cartesian disembodiment of the self: “cogito ergo sum,” mind over body, the virtual world, personal space, etc. the institutional propaganda of school and the authoritarianism of the expert scientific voice have impelled civilized populations to internalize the notion of the monolithic subject whose incorporeal identity reifies itself into an expansive ego, thus reproducing the instrumental logic of colonizing western thought. the expansive “i” turns itself into a unique and indivisible individual, thus negating its own multiplicity, plurality and flexibility, all that constitutes its own peculiarity. thus, while the monolithic identity negates multiplicity, disembodiment rejects reality. so, the indivisible identity reifies itself through the disembodied consciousness of the “i” and this consciousness is nurtured and forms itself through the standardizing mechanizations of taxonomic knowledge.
the individual is not a being apart from its totality, nor is it fragmented between body and consciousness. the individual is a part of its totality, and its body interacts with reality. denying this is justifying alienation. to feel the wind, for example, that crosses our pores when we stop at night to look at the stars, is sufficient proof that this totality exists. to believe the opposite is to be sadly alienated.
poetry and art prevent the standardization of peculiarity artistic language suggests, instead of describing comprehensively, the immediate presence of being. art and poetry dismantle the reduction driven by intellectual control, allowing its practitioners to become a part of totality. this transformation is called authenticity or one’s own voice, that is, the genuine that exists in everyone.
this authenticity is nothing more than the peculiarity of every being: that which opposes standardization expressed by—among other things— the reification of the “i.” to think, for example, that one is an image projected in a mirror, or to believe in the formal and pictorial combination of a portrait, or in a mechanically reproduced image—photography, video or film— represents an alienating distance between the reality of a being and the reifying cartesian consciousness to which the civilized world submits. images as mediating ideological constructs of human relationships constitute what guy debord early on called “the society of the spectacle.” since then, the world has conglomerated like a swarm of bees around panoptical centers of domestication: television, hollywood, the cult of celebrity. this is without even taking into consideration surveillance and control. images massively lead individuals to see themselves as individual subjects, that is, as indivisible beings, unique and monolithic, thus ignoring their flexibility, plurality and mulitiplicity. this final trilogy is the stuff of which the innate peculiarity of the self is made.[1]
self is actualised through the utopian community of improvisation. sepúlveda talks of art. physical art can only be experienced by the viewer retrospectively. it is consumed instantaneously as a whole. improvisation is consumed as it is experienced, itself becoming part of the totality it constantly recreates. surely, then, it is the ideal form of self swimming in innate peculiarity and multiplicity?
community is a garden of peculiarities within gardens of peculiarities.
reality is a garden of peculiarities forged from a constellation of other peculiarities, which at the same time disperse themselves in their own universe to the rhythm of the sap that flows and flowers.[2]
[1] Jesús Sepúlveda, ‘ The Garden of Particularities’, riginally published in Spanish in 2002 as ‘El jardin de las peculiaridades’, retrieved March 4 2015, accessed June 10 2016, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jesus-sepulveda-the-garden-of-peculiarities#toc4.
[2] Ibid.
