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We should perhaps more clearly explicate the apparent contradiction within our basic coordinates of ontological space: how can an act that of pure Self be or reach toward universal absolutes? Surely it is a blatant dichotomy and thus logical flaw of this text?  

Except, here we can simultaneously resolve a potential question in the text (why will we have discussed a film?) by approaching this tension through Deleuze. For Deleuze’s conceptual edifice – as Manuel DeLanda has noted – relies on two mutually exclusive logics:

1 – sense logic - the fundamental tension between generative process and immaterial sense-effect.[1] That is ‘multiplicities, being incorporeal effects of material causes, are impassible or causally sterile entities. The time of pure becoming, always already passed and eternally yet to come, forms the temporal dimension of this impassibility or sterility of multiplicities’.[2]

2 – becoming logic – that is, Beings as resultant of becoming; becoming as the production of Beings. ‘The emergence of metric or extensive properties should be treated as a single process in which a continuous virtual spacetime progressively differentiates itself into actual discontinuous spatio-temporal structures’.[3]

Similarities in DeLanda’s rendering of Deleuze’s logics and our own understanding of Self should already be emerging: it is two but not two, to be and not to be, product and process. So far, however, such similarities are ostensibly superficial. We can push further, pursuing one coruscating observation of Deleuze’s logics by Žižek: ‘Being and Becoming relate as Actual and Virtual’.[4]

Is it any wonder that, given Deleuze’s sense logic, he wrote so often about film? Cinema is an ultimate sterility, an impassive image, yet an unequivocal effect of corporeal causes.[5] Any film image is a constant replay of surface becoming, sterile and fictional. Meaning grows out of the Virtual, but relies on procreant corpoReality. When analysing films, furthermore, Deleuze stresses the desubstantialisation of affects; namely, affects in/of a work of art are ‘no longer attributable to actual persons, but become a free-floating event’.[6] But, then, how can we relate bodies, persons, ourselves to the affect of the impersonal intensity? ‘Either this immaterial affect is generated by interacting bodies as a sterile surface of pure Becoming, or it is among those virtual intensities out of which bodies emerge through actualisation (the passage of Becoming to Being)’.[7] In other words, either one part of the exchange is entirely passive (the infinite virtuality being an immaterial effect of interaction or Selves emerge, actualised by the virtuality) or there is a mutual movement of Self through the sterility of the art. Do we not see our tension between Self and Community fossilise here, by replacing Deleuze’s term virtuality with Community? Being and Becoming here are always already on opposite sides, either/or the product of the other. Our reading of film is a practice of this idea, involving myself and yourself projecting onto and receiving from the ‘sterile’ ‘virtuality’ of the pseudo-autonomous effect of corporeal causality. We practice the parallax between the Sense-Event – flow of pure becoming – as the neutral, immaterial effect of intrication of bodily (material causes) or the flow of Becoming as production of positive bodily entities.[8] We use the term ‘procreant’ above keenly aware of the etymological shadows it casts: any and each creation through a Self, a body, one’s corpoReality, is, in some way, a reproduction of Self in another form.

Another term alteration with Deleuze solidifies the idea. To Deleuze there is an unambiguous affirmation of the Virtual as the site of production as well as the unambiguous statement that the virtual is produced out of the actual.[9] [Id est, to save you some effort: There is an unambiguous affirmation of Community as the site of production as well as the unambiguous statement that ‘Community is produced out of Self’.] How to assimilate these two statements? Simply, that virtuality and actual are kinds of potentiality, fulfilled through the other.[10] Yin and Yang. DeLanda explains

Multiplicities should not be conceived as possessing the capacity to actively interact with one another through these series. Deleuze thinks about them as endowed with only a mere capacity to be affected, since they are, in his words, ‘impassive entities – impassive results.’ The neutrality or sterility of multiplicities may be explained in the following way. Although their divergent universality makes them independent of any particular mechanism (the same multiplicity may be actualised by several causal mechanisms) they do depend on the empirical fact that some causal mechanism or another actually exists … Deleuze views multiplicities as incorporeal effects of corporeal causes, that is, as historical results of actual causes possessing no causal powers of their own[11]

To Deleuze, Becoming is both productive process and sterile effect.[12]

Jameson, reading Antigone, provides a clear case study of our topic, in suggesting that the antagonism between the human and divine laws be understood

not as a struggle between the state and the family or clan that tears society apart; but first and foremost as the division which brings society itself into being in the first place by articulating its first great differentiations, that of warrior versus priest, or of city versus clan, or even outside versus inside … each of these larval powers brings the other into being and reinforced the distinctiveness of its opposite number … the contradiction which ultimately tears the polis apart and destroys it … is the same opposition that brings it into being as a viable structure in the first place[13]

What here becomes clear is our differentiation with historicism, which views each moment as possessing a moment of maturity – of completion – before a period of decay. It should be clear, however, that we do not ascribe to such teleological drives, but follow the basic Hegelian intuition ‘that there is never a “proper” moment’ – things are together and apart, the same and separate, always already evolving and revolving once again.[14] ‘One should not begin with oneness and then pass to duality’, Hegel emphasised, and here we see why: oneness can only be reached through a passage to duality, through division.[15] Self is not and cannot be split through Community, and the lesson here is that any claim that it is represents a ‘retroactive ideological fantasy that obfuscates the fact that this original unity [of Self] never existed, that it is a retroactive projection generated by the process of the split – there never was a harmonious state’.[16]

Instead, we again share toasts with Deleuze, whose Virtuality is a continuous multiplicity, ‘virtual insofar as it is actualized, in the course of being actualized, it is inseparable from the movement of its actualization’.[17]

We can now understand the perceived tension in Community and Self as not a tension at all, but a perspective from a false epistemic centre that assumes an essential Self. Our crucial departure from Deleuze in applying his theories here is this: there can be no impassivity. The Event of improvisation in its occurrence locks in any Self present, immediately creating micro- and macro-level absolutes to which Selves contribute to automatically. They are each generative mechanisms of each other – always already altering and fluctuating within the subsequent Community. It is a rehabilitation of Lacan’s notion of representation: ‘a signifier represents the subject for another signifier’.[18]

Improvisation inhabits and unfolds the parallax between discourse and metadiscourse. All these concepts (monolithic Self, of Actual, Virtual, Being, Becoming, metadiscourse, immediacy, anarchistic universalism so on and so on…) are best encapsulated by one statement of Evan Parker, discussing composition and improvisation:

If the score represents some kind of ideal performance why does it ever have to be performed?[19]

To explain away the poetry of Parker’s statement: presuming Self and Ding an sich to be volatile and protean, all music – whether composed or improvised – on some level creates these mutual reciprocal relationships. And this is a tacit concession made in any performance of a composed work – why else would it be performed?[20] There will always be a gap between score and performance – and many composers are now attempting to manipulate this gap.[21] What results is not a freer, more open positioning of Western Art Music (WAM), but a total colonisation of Self.[22] While Marion Brown, for example, freely gives credit for his creation to the musicians who actualised it, WAM sees a shift of scores that must – by virtue of their creation – be mostly improvised still being credited to the composer, the score-maker. Regardless of what is performed, the performers Self is subsumed into the composer; it is an ultimate oppression – Self expression rejected as Self expression, instead being the expression of Other.

Composition is the use of ‘other people’s sensibilities, other people’s spontaneity’, other people’s Self – it is a game played by the ‘qualities of control’.[23]

Improvisation must be a part of all performances of any kind, because Self is involved. It is simply that we turn our attention to the freest kind, that in which Self is not colonised by conductor or composer beyond a suggestion. 

*    *    *   

If the score represents some kind of ideal performance why does it ever have to be performed?[24]

Self cannot be removed from performance. Infinitely so in improvisation. That is, improvised music is a part of the totality of Self – part of the world it forms and from which it grows. It is a literal part of life and it is thus ever transgressive against ‘modernity’ and the rhetoric of capitalism.

Kant was enraptured by the majestic spectacle of nature. This emotion produced in him a kind of “mental agitation,” which he called “sublime.” But this emotion is also the living experience of the dread that is sublimated through art, the petrification of the natural spectacle of the world. When art is an institution or a mere object— symbolic and separated from life—it is converted into a symbol of the process of reification. Sophisticated meta-art is nothing more than a symbol of the symbol, a reification of reification. This process sharpens the ideological mechanism of the reification of the subject itself, which, when commodified, alienates itself from reality and loses perspective … Art and life have been divided into two separate planes, without any real interconnection. This makes art an institution of the sublime, while life is the praxis of enslavement. Art has been the pressure release valve of alienation … Art becomes petrified in museums, in galleries, in salons and libraries, while existence continues to the rhythm of the minute hand that subjugates salaried work. There, beauty is suppressed, joy domesticated, pleasure enslaved, and peculiarity made uniform[25]

Improvisation is the tonic to the institutionalisation of art – ephemeral, personal, peculiar and singular.

*    *    *

Let us zoom out and return to our holistic tower of ivory: is it, then, any wonder that academics and writers in English have consistently failed to adequately account for music? For music is a form of expression whose entire ontological functionality is opposed to the pedagogical and philosophical tradition of the West. A dominant narrative of scientific conditions is too ready to dismiss the possibility of intrinsic teleologies, instead carving a history from a false seriatim teleology. We do not stand alone in our position here. As we will have seen, such ideas pertain to pluri-versality and acceptance of intrinsic teleologies – in our case relating to consciousness – are becoming more common.[26]

A total misunderstanding of improvisation (and musical value in general) is unsurprising: critical systems are attempting to account for forms which are entirely abject to their institutionalised reductionist materialism.[27] Hence, much of the music we discuss has been historically dismissed as primitive, recusantly Negro or framed as ‘noise’, rather than ‘music’.[28] Ideology rears its head again – for improvisation cannot fit into the hegemony of this ‘heroic triumph of ideological theory’ and an accepted, dogmatic dominance of the conceptual, theoretical and ideological contortions of neo-liberalism.[29] One cannot understand the music in the ‘unmusical’ wails of players like Ornette, Shepp or Ayler if one can only grasp tones that exist as concomitantly ‘musical’ as defined by these entrenched traditions.[30] In other words, there are entire historical, emotional and cultural metrics that are not just left unaccounted but are utterly unaccountable by traditional scholarship.  

[Of course, this is not to say that we should abandon all work done prior to this text – such a claim would require a sheer arrogance that I hope I will never be able to muster – but that we should reframe our current situational understanding. Although based on flawed premises, much of what many critics and theorists in any school posit is extremely valuable, we need merely to recuperate them. To truly change minds, too, one must be based in tradition; the familiar is a vital stepping stone to the new.]   

And here we see why our passage through Deleuze was particularly instructive – for the Virtual is real but not concrete, an intangible concrete existence. The virtual is an ‘almost-so’, or ‘almost-there’. Why is this? A few basic definitions would be useful. ‘Virtual’:

That is such in essence, potentiality, or effect, although not in form or actuality.[31]

That may be so called for practical purposes, although not according to strict definition; very near, almost absolute.[32]

Morally virtuous. Obs.[33]

Producing, or capable of producing, a particular result; effective. Obs.[34]

What results – and what we are getting at here – is that the idea of the virtual exists as fixed and real but lacking a proper ontology.[35] As such the virtual is, in a sense, transgressive, existing without paying dues to hegemonic logic systems. It only does not exist in the sense that it cannot be incorporated into the systems against which it transgresses. That is: it is precisely not the Real in its reality.[36] The ‘ontology’ it lacks is only one as defined by dominant forms.

Semantics is not the only problem.[37] Music – improvisation in particular – is like language, both postulating something beyond itself, always necessarily symbolic.[38] A grounded Real is not what is revealed in the act.

Improvised music embraces its evanescence, as we will have seen, and consequentially falls into this ontological lack of ‘proper’ identity. Nothing is fixed or completed, but the act is itself whole. Its sheer immediacy place it as non-Object, since it does not exist on a spacio-temporal spectrum other than the simultaneous now-and-just-then. This vast openness appeals to a paradoxical duality of infinity and finality: all is possibility, yet we glimpse a firm enframed aspect of that possibility. The performance is a relief of the potential, albeit fleeting. As a non-Object, improvisation (and Community) is an opening to Self, to solidarity.[39] It cannot be mapped by linguistics – it is a non-Object, a virtuality.[40] The timelessness within which improvisation exists is not a striving or a drive toward Self, but a repose, ‘the remains of a movement that has already taken place’.[41] Of course, each repose is itself synchronic and here we face the problem of a virtual, a non-object once again. Enabled in Community is thus

the more elemental desire to exit from temporality altogether, by finding some kind of permanent resolution. Music, in its forever non‑discursive state, promises to answer that desire … We get a taste of something permanent far just a moment, and it’s strangely sweet. Music repeatedly suggests that while we run from death, we also solicit it in a number of ways[42]   

For Mehldau, as is becoming more and more clear, the statement ‘nothing can be said of music’ is actually ‘nothing should be said about music’: in order for the freedom of musical autonomy to sustain itself, it must remain a wordless non-object, a virtuality. Or, ‘to speak of music is a folly’.[43] There is, of course, one key difference in our approach, compared to Mehldau’s. Namely, Mehldau frames his discussion around Kant, Freud and Foucault – advocates (in various degrees and guises) of the very ontology and false teleology we claim to be insufficient. Much of what Mehldau argues is worth dwelling on, but we start from irreconcilable theoretical perspectives.

Given this mysterious relationship between music and language, nonetheless, why single out music and improvisation as the clearest form of Self exploration?[44] As we will have seen, music’s potentiality and provisionality is the source of its strength, for it is unencumbered by the deferred spheres of meaning, the quagmire of différance, which is language’s unresolvable internal conflict. To crudely simplify the argument, its essential reliance upon ‘now-and-just-then’ means that music’s essence must be grasped immediately or not at all. Improvisation is our main focus, because it is pure Self, unmediated through composer or conductor. Perhaps it is best to reiterate: improvisation is certainly not unique in what it achieves in this way, but is our study and a firm crystallisation of these ideas.

For a case study, Esperanza Spalding’s take on the subject:

We have such an ingrained connection with the human voice, that however I open my mouth and sing, it’s going to have some symbolism or meaning for the listener—because it’s a voice. The way I breathe, the way I enunciate, even if I’m not singing lyrics, and then when you add lyrics—okay, so then it’s not abstract at all. I’m actually telling you what I’m talking about, what I’m emoting about … there’s a certain freedom in the abstraction.[45]

Community and Self in improvised worlds are ‘virtual’ only in the eyes of dominant discourses. This very idea is expressed concisely by Boal:

The dominant art will always be that of the dominant class, since it is the only class that possesses the means to disseminate it[46]

Improvisation falls outside of hegemonic semantics and dialogues, disseminated and read through rigid individualism and profit. ‘Discourse reaches the finish line, and music waits on the other side … being forever beyond discourse, [music] supplies a preliminary, immediate resolution, but also points outward to something that (magnificently) never finds an end’.[47]