Ummon asked: ‘The world is such a wide world, why do you answer a bell and don ceremonial robes?’

Like Mingus and Roach, Yusef Lateef disliked the term ‘jazz’, instead coining and minting ‘autophysiopsychic music’: ‘music that comes from the physical, mental, spiritual and intellectual self’.[1] Like Mingus and Roach, Lateef understood ‘jazz’ as a term of division, an enforced otherness, a cultural condescension that particularly applied to the black community.[2] Evidently, Lateef was deeply familiar with the semantic and etymological implications of language at the point of social usage. We must bear this in mind when reading Lateef’s didactic manifesto Method on How to Improvise Soul Music.

‘The soul is the genesis of human life’, Lateef avers.[3] ‘Pure, individual, creative expression’ – improvised music – thus relies on the balance between mind, body and soul.[4] To evoke such a trinity is to encourage a potential minefield of semantic dissonance. Perhaps, Lateef’s position is a counterpart Freud’s ego, superego and id? Perhaps to the Christian trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit?

But these glib, pseudo-analytical positions hold little water when examined closely. Lateef is eager to stress individual expression, pure and thus free from scientific or religious conditions. This does not, however, define improvised musics as ‘mechanical, emotional [dispensations]’.[5] Rather it is an escape from the analytical, rational languages which often hold creative expression as a primitivist (and primitive) ‘manifestation of emotion’.[6] What Lateef emphasises instead is the communicative, social power of improvisation. If the improviser’s ‘soul [is] attuned to other souls he is capable of giving far reaching experiences. If the improviser is in harmony with himself and fellowmen, he too, will reach great spiritual heights’.[7] The placement of ‘soul’ in Lateef’s discourse becomes clearer here, as he invokes a – albeit patriarchal – Community. Could it not be that by ‘soul’ Lateef means what we call Self? Lateef’s point could well be rephrased: if a Self becomes open to and mutually explores other examples of Self, a Community, a transcendental subjectivity can be reached. It is through the ‘soul’, after all, that the improviser must filter the ‘profoundest sensations’ of their ‘emotion memory’ to reconstitute in performance.[8] Could the mind/body/soul trinity not be synonymous with the memory/environment/feeling notion of Self in Brown and others?

There is, however, another dimension to this apparent disconnect between Self and soul other than the failure of language to adequately articulate concepts beyond the representative horizon. To find our answer we must look to Lateef’s other writings. In particular, ‘The Constitution of Aesthetics, the Declaration of Genius and the Aesthetic Address’, an encomium of Charlie Parker’s ‘spiritual enunciation’.[9] Lateef closes the text in a rephrasing of the Gettysburg Address:

What we emblematically state here, but it can never forget what Parker did play here, rather it is for us the living to be admiringly cognizant of his compelling music which is a living force, an organic substance nobly advanced. It is for us to be dedicated here to the great aesthetic task which remains before us – that from his cogent musical science, we take increased devotion to that which is beautiful and sublime within nature and the soul – that he will not have died in vain – that the worlds under God shall have a new birth of souls – and that the souls of the people, by love, for God, shall not abstain from love.[10]

In this excerpt one can find what before has only been implicit: the inherent religiosity of Lateef’s ‘soul’. ‘God’, here, is not a Christian God of the Trinity, but a Muslim god of community, Allah.[11] Through this lens, we are able to resolve the gap experienced between ‘soul’ and Self. Put simply, Lateef’s ‘soul’ has an external grounding beyond all discourse, a true Other – a deity. Thus, Lateef is able to triangulate the ‘soul’ through the spiritual, aesthetic and political spheres: all explorations of ‘soul’ through itself and others can be located into a definition stemming from the matrix of Other (Allah). Such a clarification of ‘soul’ also assists us in understanding improvised music’s power to reach ‘greater spiritual heights’, implicitly those closer to the big Other.[12] All ‘souls’ participating in the environment of improvisation inscribe themselves to a universal – and not momentary – symbolic order.[13] God, the radical alterity, will always-already be unassimilable to all ‘souls’ and therein mediate all relationships between subjects (‘souls’).[14] Improvised music is thus part of the ‘unconscious discourse of the Other’, the locus of all meaning.[15] Improvisation can thus be seen to maintain a teleological drive. A ‘new birth of souls’ equates to those in the improvisational environment who then place themselves into that symbolic order.

Self becomes problematic within Lateef’s understanding of ‘soul’ through invocations of the big Other. The repercussions of the religiosity of Lateef’s view are clearer in his ‘Essays’. In them, Self all but disappears behind the big Other. ‘My creator causes me to weep’, he writes in ‘Meditation #9’.[16] In ‘A Sylogism’, a speaker pleads with the Other to ‘take from our minds the thorn-like thoughts … free us of withering’. And Lateef’s poem ‘The Heart’:  

O Allah alone, the Mighty, the Wise

Please -- never seal up my heart so that I should not hear

O Allah alone, the Mighty, the Wise

Please -- inoculate me against disease of the heart

O Allah alone, the Mighty, the Wise

Please -- let not my heart become hardened like stone

My point is not a clumsy, ad hominem attack of Lateef’s beliefs in the vein of Richard Dawkins, but rather to demonstrate that the agency of Self – and, thus, all explorations and developments of Self – are subsumed into the big Other. The lengthy anaphora makes this much clear, one must plead with Allah alone to change one’s status of Self. ‘Soul’ in Lateef’s manifesto becomes a didactic and teleological drive toward integration with the big Other. Similar examples can be found in other religious musicians’ work. Ornette Coleman: ‘When [a musician] tried to do the best he can his own way … he’s just showing [that] God exists’.[17]

In our reading, the appearance of any deity is a master-signifier that is simultaneously a barred subject ($). Master-signifiers are not the positive quilting point of an ideology, but cover the antagonism that the ideology does not wish to immediately confront.[18] In Lateef’s case, it is an irreconcilable antagonism that pertains to the loftiest nature of reality: why are we? How are we? Why is there something rather than nothing?[19] Following Hegel, Lacan and Žižek we can see this as the failure of ‘all’ to be ALL; the One (the master-signifier) is not ‘the encompassing unity which “mediates” and “sublates” all multiplicity, but … the One is in itself a “plus-One” … something that adds itself to what it unifies’.[20] However hard one pictures the Void, nothingness, there will always be something less than that Void or parallel to that nothing. There must always be a mediated pre-ontological X, an ur-correlationism. In religious terms, whatever one does to find ‘nothing’, the deity will always be sat below or above it; identity is a reflexive determination rooted in the One which is always also More-than-One.[21] For Lateef, this unspoken antagonism is existential and is solved by deferring the pre-ontological X through the Other of a deity. Cynically speaking, an absent ever-present master-signifier is reached for to resolve the unanswerable antagonism ‘why are we here’, ‘why do we exist within a cruel and random void’?

Lateef’s master-signifier is a clear example of the absolute recoil: ‘every entity … becomes what it is only through the “recoil” from itself, the symbolic order is directly this structure of recoiling as such’.[22] The symbolic order in Lateef’s writing, pivoting around the Other, can only occur in the lack of resolution between this recoil and subjectivisation. (Plus-)One exists in the gap (antagonism) caused by the recoil, experienced between the imaginary and the lived Real.

These are complex ideas and worth illustrating, in order to clarify them. Where else would one find a perfect example than in Shakespeare?

Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows,

Which shows like grief itself, but is not so;

For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears,

Divides one thing entire to many objects;

Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon

Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry

Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty,

Looking awry upon your lord’s departure,

Find shapes of grief, more than himself, to wail;

Which, look’d on as it is, is nought but shadows

Of what it is not.[23]

Grief, Bushy reassures the Queen, is reflexively determined through its lack.

One can also turn to current events to identify the principle of the master-signifier within existing social antagonisms. At the time of writing, the United Kingdom is preparing to vote to decide whether or not the country remains a member of the European Union. On both sides of the debate it has been ugly.[24] Viewing the political developments through the lens of the ‘Leave’ campaign, the master-signifier materialises.[25] Anti-Europe sentiment reifies the inherent social antagonism: lack of political agency, excessive top-down bureaucracy, imposed austerity and so on. It casts ‘Europe’ as the Thing which, from outside, imposes itself upon the social body and disturbs its balance. For anti-Europe campaigners, Europe is the master-signifier, an antagonism whose removal would act as a panacea and resort social harmony. Since it is a master-signifier, citizens of the United Kingdom are not caught up in the antagonism (as one may say of, for example, class struggle), but the antagonism is external to its societal implications. The logic follows: all we need to do is remove that external antagonism, thus ably avoiding the deeper ideological issues at stake: lack of social housing, oppressed job market and so on.[26] In his didactic texts, Lateef suggests implicitly that and exploration of Self (soul) is an exploration of the master-signifier, the big Other, since the Other mediates and – from his perspective – allows Self (soul) to exist at all.

Now we are surer on Lateef’s understanding of ‘soul’, we are able to transcritique our view of Self through it. The grounded ‘soul’ does not indicate an immanent lack in Self, requiring it to orbit the abyss in an endless regression in search of definition.[27] Any apparent lack in Self viewed through ‘soul’ rather indicates its strength. For in our understanding of Self, the self-reflexive circular notion of subjectivity is especially cogent. In essence, that, within Community, ‘the Other to Self is simply another Self’.[28] Through interaction of a work-event (improvised music), each Self defines itself in the experiential exposure to other Selves. We are able thus to bypass the problematic notion of universal artistic aims, appreciation and value implicit in a religious rooting of ‘soul’. In accepting the limitations of a religious metaphysics of ‘soul’, we are able to conduct a pre-conceptual identification that allows Selves to shift the arbitrary into the meaningful across mutual autonomy. Were we to develop Lateef’s ‘soul’ to its end, there would be no difference in taste, and ultimately a binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art would be reached. Further, art could not be seen as an ever singular work-event, but a means to an end.

Conversely, Self understanding in Community is self-sustaining and multifarious, a network. ‘A network is a self-generating, self-organising, self-sustaining system. It works through multiple feedback loops’.[29]  Groups of chaotic, never-fixed Selves interact in a way that suggests a post-metaphysical aesthetics, drawing on the interdependence of immediate self-consciousnesses. Rejecting the metaphysical dialectic, we embrace the inconsistencies of Selves in mutual self-definition.[30]  It becomes clear that our reading of Self relies more on ontic logics of secular universalism, or schools of thought beyond the Western philosophic tradition.[31] This need not be a desultory or revolutionary thought, either, for we can fruitfully approach each topic pluri-versally.[32]

Take Sima Tan’s lamentation of the ‘dialecticians’ ‘minute examination of trifling points in complicated and elaborate statements’.[33] Perhaps it is worthwhile to explore Lateef’s Method from this side of the parallax, drawing on Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi. Lateef’s trinity, from this perspective, could be seen to echo Zhuang Zi’s trinity of the empirical ego: the bodily, the psychological and the ji-xin (mechanistic mind).[34] Understood within this analytical language, Lateef’s ‘greater spiritual heights’ becomes an ontological affirmation of the dao – one’s innermost, authentic self – the ontological and transcendental ground ‘on which was based the equality of myriad things’.[35] The act of improvisation – a ‘noble’ life praxis – is ‘to reconstitute our empirical ego on the bodily, psychic and social levels’.[36] Or, to defer to our vernacular, to experientially explore Self through Community and environment. ‘Music is what unifies … by means of the unifying process, mutual respect is born’.[37] Shen connects dao with Husserl’s noemata, a transcendental subjectivity.[38] As such, following Zi, the act becomes a universality of transcendental Self, which ‘does not open another world, but is lived as immanence itself’.[39] Once again, the external grounding of a symbolic Other is circumvented by deferring the Other through other Selves and thus – indirectly – one’s own Self. 

Additionally, our position maintains a central tenet of Buddhism, that ‘life at each moment encompasses...both self and environment of all sentient beings in every condition of life as well as insentient beings’.[40] Self is always-already adapting and changing because of interactions with its environment. World encapsulates Self, Self encapsulates World.[41] Wen (‘cultural refinement’) lies within zhi (one’s ‘native substance’).[42] It is an interactionary humanism; not fuelled by empiricism or rationalism, but simply humanity as an interacting entity. For us, the ‘I’ is not a fixed absolute to be uncovered, by an ever-changing expression of being. There is no essential Self, but a mercurial and ever-changing Self reacting to its environment.[43] Our perspective has less in common with Cartesian or Spinozian dualism than it does with Confucius ‘overcoming the self’ or Lao Zi’s non-dualist, non-conceptual metaphysics of Dao as the immediate self-so-ness of nature itself.[44] A universal mythology, which Braxton searched for, is promoted, but it comes at the expense of a fixed self.[45]   

The authentic person of old did not know what it was to love life or to hate death. He did not rejoice in birth, nor strive to put off dissolution. Unconcerned he came and unconcerned he went. That was all.[46]

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