Coincidentally
– given yesterday’s musing on the l’affaire Ornette/Derrida -- the word
‘improvisation’ appears all over the meditation written this day a decade ago. And what was written offers yet another way of
approaching the l’affaire, especially if one is conceding the point that the
‘freedom’ in free jazz is one that arises with all who are present in the arrival of the jazz. Jazz, I am contending, arrives epiphanically
like a force through the music that
is made by musicians and witnessed by others.
Does this mean that the audience is only ever a passive observer, the
listeners who react to the music? Yes
and no. The music comes to them, yes,
but their response has to be understood as playing a role in the arrival of the
jazz. All this to say it is akin to a
Pentecostal congregational experience of the Spirit, where all are captured and
sometimes swept away. The point here is
that the reading of the l’affaire Ornette/Derrida as a demonstration of the
‘intolerant’ and ‘narrow-minded’ so-called ‘jazz audience’ is premised wrongly
on the idea that the audience is only ever and always a passive recipient as
opposed to an active participant, and, likewise, that the musicians (or
performers) are only ever and always the actors and dominant personae. It is just flat wrong to presume, and what’s
more, to insist that the audience should remain passive during the
performance. Put another way, it is just
flat wrong to presume the performers should not
listen and respond to the audience.
Here then is where the Buddhist concept that introduced yesterday
-- pratitya
samutpada “in dependence, things rise up” – is revelatory: the freedom disclosed in the arrival of the
jazz ‘rises up’ through the dependent relation between performers and
audience.
What this means is that the rising up of the freedom of jazz
happens through the improvisation received first and foremost through the event
of appropriation. Improvisation is the
expression of our being unexpectedly caught and possessed by freedom. And this is precisely why the crowd acted
spontaneously and with improvisation when it booed Derrida from the stage!
To this point the meditation from this day ten years ago: “The
other arrives with the spontaneity of the improvisational performance that is
not simply a ‘response’ to the giveness of the situation, but an extension, a
leaping forward into the beyond. If
improvisation were simply a ‘response’ or ‘reaction’ to the giveness of past
and present it would not convey the spontaneity of the improvisational, and
would not enact the actualization of the freedom that ful-fills the opening of
the open region…Improvisation appears from the shadow of imposition, bursting
forward from the unforeseen.”(8/10/04)
Improvisation is thus neither a reaction nor a revolution but an
event of poiesis: a spontaneous act
of making. Closer to what we might call
‘revolution’ because it bears the stamp of natality by breaking with the
repetition of chronological movment.
Something ‘new’ is made with improvisation that is not simply the next moment, but a qualitatively different moment. Ten years ago I insisted that if “learning
unfolds with spontaneity and improvisation it must be an authentically creative
moment, a moment that bears natality, the revolutionary alternative…” Ten years later, today, I am a bit more
cautious about using the terms ‘creative’ and ‘revolutionary,’ and not because
I’ve become more measured in my later years…hardly! Rather, I’ve experienced two important
philosophical shifts, both of them arriving from a deeper understanding of the
logic of the originary disclosed in Being
and Learning. Indeed, I can no
longer talk of ‘creation’ nor ‘revolution’ because both are remnants of the
humanist metaphysics I have turned away from.
As I wrote in my commentary on August 5th, OPM 172: “Improvisation
is the mimetic poiesis that imitates
Creation. Humans don’t create. We make.” Talk of revolution, or, for that matter,
reaction, is all humanist talk (regardless of whether or not it is expressed
from a religion based narrative), the aspirations and delusions of human
intentionality. And it is what I
learned today can be marked by the sign ‘Anthropocene’ Wiki def & Public Seminar
So there are some ‘revisions’
that I would have to make if I were to make a second edition of Being and Learning, and one that would
include the meditations that were not included in the book, such as the one
from today. Such revisions would have to
make clear the phenomenological positionality of the ‘improviser’ as one who
isn’t ‘creating’ and perhaps not even ‘responding’ but is, rather, documenting
and describing what is being disclosed (perceived, imagine, felt, etc.) in the
event of appropriation, when they are swept up by freedom. Again, this documentation and description
isn’t ‘neutral’ nor ‘objective’ and the fidelity is towards the experience
itself. Indeed, the documentation and
description is a moment of poiesis,
and this is why we can talk of music-making philosophy.
3.0 - (Saturday, Portland, ME) Humans don't create, we make. That was a line that produced the longest dialogue I've ever been part of between Sam Rocha, Troy Richardson and myself in Pittsburgh. It was/is a flow thesis, and also grounded in mimesis, which I "discovered" last summer in my forest when I noticed that all the species of trees were imitating the growth patterns of the white pines, e.g., Norway Maples growing up to 50 feet with only a twelve inch diameter?!? In this sense making is reproduction, so remaking. But the link between freedom and spontaneity, especially as it appears in free jazz, seems to tell another story, the one that Arendt tells and emphasizes with what she describes as the "fact of natality." She doesn't use the term "create" but rather "initiate" or "begin". Citing or paraphrasing Augustine she says we can begin because we are beginners. And our capacity to begin something happens through spontaneity, or being spontaneous, which the dictionary defines as an act "performed or occurring as a result of a sudden inner impulse or inclination and without premeditation or external stimulus." What's important here is that it is happening "without premeditation." So it is a break in continuity. Something "new" is beginning. And when we enact that we are acting with freedom. All of this seems to indicate that we can create insofar as we can bring something new into the world. From this day 20 years ago: “If improvisation were simply a ‘response’ or ‘reaction’ to the givenness of past and present it would not convey the spontaneity of the improvisational, and would not enact the actualization of the freedom that ful-fills the opening of the open region…Improvisation appears from the shadow of imposition, bursting forward from the unforeseen.”(8/10/04)
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