To be and not to be…

The gap between self-experienced identity and symbolic identity that constitutes public image is symbolic castration. ‘Symbolic castration’ occurs when the gap between a symbolic identity and ‘what I really am’ is experienced by the subject, therein making the subject sit as a signifier within the symbolic order.[1] ‘You are what you are in relation to others; you yourself are self and other.’[2] Improvised music allows a space for these two identities to coalesce and, in some sense, to bypass the act of symbolic castration by enacting it communally so that the Self (‘what I really am’) and the symbolic identity merge in the event of performance. Improvising music is an event of Self transformation, rooted in the social sphere of community.[3] An alternative to neo-liberal ideologies of capitalist value-judgements (the commodification of use-value and labour-value, cultural mechanism of consumption) and individualism, embedded in a social creative act.[4] As Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli have noted, improvised music, emerging as it does from non-Capitalist and non-Western epistemological and ontological formats, ‘does not belong in the history of Western arts’ despite its ‘economic colonisation’ through capitalism means of consumption.[5]

Albert Ayler once told a reporter that he had ‘lived more than can be expressed in bop terms. Why should I hold back the feeling of my life…?’.[6] Moreover, Ayler was a fierce advocate of the socially transformative nature of improvised musics.[7] Such a position is not a contradictory disjunction, but rather emphasises the power of subjective agency in the act of communal creation. ‘The substance of what one decides in that moment … the enactment of agency that has social-justice implications. All such actions [in the sphere of improvised musics] are profoundly interconnected’ and communal.[8]

Sonny Rollins: ‘Jazz music is not just entertainment; jazz took the next step to being a need for our community and our people'.[9]

This is enabled by Lacan’s observation – there is no meta-language (il n’y a pas de métalangue); there is no Other of the Other.[10] The position of Selfness is no longer relativized by means of an external point; in improvisation, the discernible horizon of self-realisation feeds back through other Selves. It is a loop of mutually enabled symbolic representation, a paradox that relies on its own inconsistency: a subject endeavours to adequately represent itself on its own terms, fails, but becomes a subject through this failure – a Self can only transcend its own limitation when mediated or co-opted through other Selves. In essence, each Self is the Other to another Self; the recognition of Self relies on a decentring of itself and recognition that it shares the central space of expression (music) with other Selves inconsistent to its own.[11] A similar paradox has existed in Western Classical music ‘at least since 1500, [it] has been organised in terms of a symmetrical correspondence and even a reciprocal difference between the largest aspects of form and the smallest detail. A lack of correspondence is either a sign of the composers’ incompetence, or else a source of expression.’[12]

One can look to the images of M.C. Escher for a powerful visual representation of this idea. ‘Drawing Hands’ [fig.1.], for example depicts the paradoxical act of two hands drawing each other into existence. ‘Drawing Hands’ presents an impossible image but one that the viewer does not attempt to rationalise. One enjoys the contradictions on their own terms. Similarly, with many of Escher’s drawings [fig.2], one could try to comprehend the picture through its discrete forms. But wherever one’s gaze begins, and thus establishes an internal logic, it is quickly shattered elsewhere.[13] The rules of one section do not apply to the rules of its neighbours, yet all the figures in the image hold overall value in relation to what they are not. Alone, each figure what be an unremarkable, representative picture of an indistinct figure. Amalgamated into one image, however, each figure becomes defined through the others and fosters various teleological levels within the lithograph. The collective, cohesive whole signifies something beyond the representational; a systematic chaos of interacting Selves creating a unity of an explored Community – free of race, gender, class and other arbitrary relational distinctions. All of this logical movement is located in the viewer.

Viewer, artist, musician and listener – all partake in the work-event. A conceptual non-loop, in which the Self cycles through Others in returning to itself.  Douglas Hofstadter explores the similar notion of a strange loop

an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop[14]

My application of the idea is, however, slightly different: there is no hierarchy, implied or otherwise, in the Self exploring through other Selves. Each autonomous Self progresses through others in a mutual transference. It is this mutual transference of experiential positioning – and thus transcendence/development of Self – that we call ‘trust’.[1] Ron Carter: ‘in order for [the music] to succeed each guy has to trust the other guy’s sense of it all’.[2] It is a distinct example of the seemingly insurmountable barriers inherent in the communicative resources of linguistic semantics in accommodating concepts.[3] Music as an improvised act ensures an egalitarian playing field, in which all contributions are equal. Instead, the movement away from and toward the self occurs on the same plane of musical and subjective influence. Improvisation is, in Brown’s words, ‘first person experience told collectively in the musical 3^rd person’ wherein ‘mind and body are unified through [the] music.’[4]

As we have seen, these ideas abound in far more than music, but find clear articulation in the interaction of subjectivities in improvised music. ‘Each … world somehow engenders one of the others. The Platonic world … engenders the physical world. The physical world … engenders the mental world. And the mental world … engenders the Platonic world.’[1] So it is for a musical Self, improvising with others, all relying on subjective sensual, musical and epistemological networks of experience yet creating a Communal whole.[2] And despite being an ephemeral community drawn out of discrete subjectivities, the Community is one free from geo-political and ideological barriers (of race, gender, class...).[3]

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