Improvising Improvisation

From Out of Philosophy, Music, Dance, and Literature

Gary Peters

• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226452760
• Argomento: Philosophie
• Categoria: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

There is an ever-increasing number of books on improvisation, ones that richly recount experiences in the heat of the creative moment, theorize on the essence of improvisation, and offer convincing arguments for improvisation's impact across a wide range of human activity. This book is nothing like that. In a provocative and at times moving experiment, Gary Peters takes a different approach, turning the philosophy of improvisation upside-down and inside-out.Guided by Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and especially Deleuze—and exploring a range of artists from Hendrix to Borges—Peters illuminates new fundamentals about what, as an experience, improvisation truly is. As he shows, improvisation isn't so much a genre, idiom, style, or technique—it's a predicament we are thrown into, one we find ourselves in. The predicament, he shows, is a complex entwinement of choice and decision. The performativity of choice during improvisation may happen "in the moment, " but it is already determined by an a priori mode of decision. In this way, improvisation happens both within and around the actual moment, negotiating a simultaneous past, present, and future. Examining these and other often ignored dimensions of spontaneous creativity, Peters proposes a consistently challenging and rigorously argued new perspective on improvisation across an extraordinary range of disciplines.

1

I’ve Started, so I’ll Begin: Heidegger’s Other Beginning and the Origin of Improvisation

I’ve Started, So I’ll Begin

The desire to improvise a book on improvisation is the same desire that is now searching for a way of completing this sentence: yes, it is that localized. Not the desire to impart knowledge about the many practices of improvisation, but the desire to begin something without knowing where it will end, or indeed if there is an end: it is that global. Which is to say, the desire to begin something for the sake of the beginning and not the end.

In the UK there is a very well known quiz show called Mastermind, which has run without a break since 1972. The program has five contestants who must answer questions over two rounds, the first on their specialist subject, and the second on general knowledge. All of this is irrelevant except for one detail: at the end of each timed round, where quicker answers mean more questions, a buzzer sounds to warn of the approaching end. At this moment, if the quizmaster has already started the question, he (it has always been a he) interrupts himself and announces: “I’ve started, so I’ll finish,” and then continues to the end. So this has become the catchphrase of the program, one that has subsequently entered British culture as an off-the-peg humorous interjection for a multitude of occasions that invite such a display of zaniness, of which there are many. To counter this catchphrase with “I’ve started, so I’ll begin,” might seem even more zany, but the intention is to raise two issues: first, the distinction between the start and the beginning, and, second, the irreversible teleological thrust of the question form.

“I’ve started, so I’ll begin” is an odd thing to say because it relies upon an unfamiliar disjuncture of starting and beginning, terms that are commonly used synonymously. True, but their separation makes possible an insight that points toward a significant difference between non-improvised and improvised work: namely, that non-improvised work erases the difference between the start and the beginning, while improvisation enacts, even dramatizes it. This is not to suggest for one moment that the writers/composers/choreographers of works are unaware of this difference; on the contrary, they are as aware of it as any improviser, probably more so, given their desire to destroy it. The point to make, however, is that the improvisatory process, the false starts, the trials and errors, the moments of aesthetic judgment and misjudgment, all necessary for a work to come into being, are all erased prior to the work’s eventual emergence as a finished work. It is only once this process of rendering simultaneous the start and the beginning, by erasing the difference between them, that the finished work can make its start. In other words, it must be finished before it can start. Compare this to an improvisation, where, instead of forgetting, obscuring, or secreting the above prehistory beneath the lustrous sheen of a pristine “work” and the pure virginity of its commencement, the start almost always precedes the beginning (if indeed there is a beginning).

Heidegger often speaks of the “other beginning,”1 which is often interpreted as the desire for a return to the pre-Socratics, prior to the re-origination of thought in the translation of Greek into Latin. But he intends much more than a historical reevaluation; the essential desire being for an ontological shift rather than a historical reversal, whereby a space of origination is illuminated now as another beginning within what has already started. As Heidegger affirms in the essay of the same name, the origin of the work of art is not in the past but now as that which is always to come.

Translating the above into our own quizmaster terms, and situating such thinking in the experience of improvisation, “I’ve started, so I’ll begin” is by no means intended to mystify or obfuscate the improvisatory act. On the contrary, the aim here is to be as true to the actual experience as possible; improvisers intuitively know when things “start to happen,” that is to say, begin. These are the moments to “get into,” already suggesting a space to be entered and occupied for as long as possible, although in reality such moments are usually quite fleeting. The common view of free improvisation in particular is that from out of nothing, something happens, a kind of “magic:”2 this is very far from being the case. Indeed, thankfully so, as such sorcery would rob us of what improvisation really does offer: the dramatization of the beginning and, with it, the enactment of the delay that separates the originary moment from the point when things simply get started.

But in order to better understand the difference between the two, let us return to the quizmaster’s actual interjection—“I’ve started, so I’ll finish”—and what was described earlier, rather grandly, as its irreversible teleological thrust. At issue here is not just the nature of the question form itself, which, in order to be meaningful and answerable, is required to be complete prior to any response; but also the widely held view that artworks are best understood as answers to questions. Hans Georg Gadamer encapsulates this perfectly when he asserts, “A work of art can only be understood if we assume its adequacy as an expression of the artistic idea. Here too we have to discover the question which it answers, if we are to understand it as an answer.”3 Conceived in these (highly questionable) terms, the artwork, at the moment of its emergence, already contains within it the completed form of the essential aesthetic question. While, no doubt, the number of “answers” to any such “questions” is infinite, nevertheless the essential form of the answer is, like the question, contingent but closed. In fact, formally speaking, even a so-called “open question” is closed, which, in secret recognition of this fact, explains why there is no such thing as an “open answer.” Anyway, the important point to make here is that, if we allow the artwork to be locked into the teleological logic of the question, then the start and the beginning of the work will always coincide, just as the start and beginning of an answer always coincide. “I’ve started, so I’ll begin” challenges this by introducing an alternative logic of delay, one without questions or answers, one much closer to the reality of art practice in general and improvisation in particular.

2

With What Must the Improvisation Begin? Kant and Hegel on Certainty

Beginnings: Kant and Hegel

In the famous “With What Must the Science Begin?” section of his Science of Logic,1 Hegel makes a distinction between two beginnings. As he conceives it, the logical beginning of the Science of Logic presupposes, and is thus mediated by, the sensuous beginning posited at the start (a word used advisedly) of the Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel describes the relation as follows:

Logic, then, has for its presupposition the science of manifested spirit [the Phenomenology], which contains and demonstrates the necessity, and so the truth, of the standpoint occupied by pure knowing and its mediation. In this science of manifested spirit the beginning is made from empirical, sensuous consciousness and this is immediate knowledge in the strict sense of the word. . . . In logic, the presupposition is that which has proved itself to be the result of that phenomenological consideration.2

So, when Hegel states in the Science of Logic that to begin, one must “simply take up what is there before us,”3 he is repeating at the level of pure knowing what is stated at the beginning of the Phenomenology in relation to immediate sensuous consciousness. What is more, this repetition is only possible once the phenomenological labor necessary for the revelation of knowledge is complete. To translate this into our current terminology: the Phenomenology must have started (and finished) before the Logic can begin. However, to complicate matters, and perhaps take some improvisatory liberties, the fact that, for Hegel, the starting point remains preserved as a moment of the end point, means that the sensuous immersion in the given, typical of immediate consciousness, is not transcended or overcome in pure knowing but remains as the limited and arbitrary substance from out of which absolute knowledge is revealed; whether fleetingly for non-Hegelians or absolutely for Hegelians. While the relevance of this to improvisation might seem obscure, it is actually quite straightforward: improvisation enacts and thus reveals what is inherent, but often concealed, in all art practice—the co-presence and interpenetration of immediate sensuous experience and a mediated pure logic of becoming. Unlike the Hegelian philosopher who, from the vantage point of the Absolute, is able to purify this logic of becoming, relieve it of its sensuous garb, and speak only of “being” and “nothing,”4 thankfully, the improviser remains “trapped” within the phenomenological limitations of immediate consciousness, where the aesthetic experience of and aesthetic pleasure associated with “taking up what is there before us” remains the primary task and purpose. And, as Hegel confirms, it is purpose that, as the prior phenomenological beginning, is responsible for the unfolding of concrete reality in a way that ultimately makes manifest the pure becoming of logical truth. This is how he articulates it in the Phenomenology, a complex passage that will need unpacking as it relates to improvisation. It begins by reiterating the essential identity of the beginning and the end, here described as the “result:”

The result [end] is the same as the beginning solely because the beginning is purpose. Stated otherwise, what is actual and concrete is the same as its inner principle or notion simply because the immediate qua purpose contains within it the self or pure actuality. The realized purpose, or concrete actuality, is movement and development unfolded. But this very unrest is the self; and it is one and the same with that immediacy and simplicity characteristic of the beginning just for the reason that it is the result, and has returned upon itself.5

Whether one goes with Kant, who famously describes art practice as being purposiveness without a purpose,6 or with Hegel, for whom it clearly does have a purpose, what both have in common is a recognition that it is purposiveness which dynamizes the instant, transforming it into a beginning by assuming an end. While the Hegelian philosopher, surveying all from the height of the Absolute, is able to witness the return of the end into the beginning (of pure knowing into sensuous experience), the improviser, without such philosophical privileges, must remain within the limited perspective of what is immediately given, armed only with a sense of purpose or, as we shall say later, obligation that is, by its very nature, in excess of and thus capable of problematizing immediate sensuous experience. Can this double sense—sensuousness and purposiveness—responsible for the “unfolding” of concrete reality begin to explain the proposed distinction between the start and the beginning of an improvisation? Would this mean, if it were true, that improvisation, situated as it is within the conditions and conditionality of particular phenomenological configurations of Mind or Spirit, would be unable to make the transition from the start to the beginning argued for at the outset? Put more positively: could the “freedom” associated with, for example, free improvisation be understood as a freeing-from the immediate experience and knowledge associated with the phenomenological in the name of an eventual ontology of improvisation?

In order to attempt a proper answer to these questions, we will first look more closely not only at the opening pages of the Phenomenology, where the immediacy necessary for improvisation is introduced by Hegel, but also as the account of the beginning of art as the “severe style” offered in his Aesthetics. Only then will it be possible to offer a more considered response to the above questions as well as a more fully articulated model of improvisation understood as the enactment and dramatization of the beginning. In order to do this, though, we must first draw out the significance of Kant’s model of aesthetic judgment as a way of demonstrating the deeper entwinement of his and Hegel’s thinking on art and their significance for our own discussion of improvisation.

Aesthetic Taste and Improvisation

We might begin by looking more closely at Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment, first as it relates to the creative act and then, more specifically, with regard to what it might bring to a discussion of improvisation. What is apparent from the outset is that Kant makes a clear distinction between the aesthetic judgment of taste and the creative act:

The artist, having practised and corrected his taste by a variety of examples from nature or art, controls his work and, after many, and often laborious, attempts to satisfy taste, finds the form which commends itself to him. Hence this form is not, as it were, a matter of inspiration . . . but rather a slow and even painful process of improvement, directed to making the form adequate to his thought . . .

Taste is, however, merely a critical, not a productive faculty; and what conforms to it is not, merely on that account, a work of fine art.7

This, the adequation of form and thought, offers considerable insight into the process whereby the cultivation of taste, while not productive in itself, is nonetheless responsible for the control and, indeed, the certainty we might expect of artists and their creative practice.

To explain, Kant’s whole aesthetic is rooted in the certainty of feeling, the certainty of pleasure that is immune to the judgments of others. One does not say: “I think this is beautiful” or “This is beautiful for me” (mere agreeableness), but simply “This is beautiful,” a judgment that is aesthetic to the extent that it demands universal agreement. It is for this reason that Kant claims that there cannot be a dialectic of taste,8 and that in matters of aesthetic judgment it is not a question of dispute but only of contention.9 What is of interest here is that a lack of taste during what might be called the developmental stage of an aesthetic practice, where an artist’s creative endeavors fail to “satisfy” aesthetic judgment, does not prevent the production of work. Indeed, a peculiarity of aesthetic judgment is that it is always certain of itself regardless of its relative development or undevelopment. Kant uses the example of a “youthful poet” to illustrate this:

Hence it is that a youthful poet refuses to allow himself to be dissuaded from the conviction that his poem is beautiful, even by the judgment of the public or his friends. . . . It is only in aftertime, when his judgment has been sharpened by exercise, that of his own free will and accord he deserts his former judgment.10

As regards improvisation, there are a number of things suggested by this distinction between tasteful critique and creative production. First, it is clear that the development of aesthetic taste does in fact include an essential improvisatory dimension, one that through a process of “practise and correction,” many “often laborious attempts,” and a “painful process of improvement” (who said improvisation was fun?) eventually arrives at a form that “feels” right and adequately communicates that feeling. In this view th...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1  I’ve Started, so I’ll Begin: Heidegger’s Other Beginning and the Origin of Improvisation
• 2  With What Must the Improvisation Begin? Kant and Hegel on Certainty
• 3  Memoir: Lol Coxhill (In Memoriam)
• 4  Case Study: The Recedents (Lol Coxhill, Roger Turner, and Mike Cooper)
• 5  Precision, Decision, and Accuracy: Heidegger and Arendt on Singularity and Solitude
• 6  Decentered Center/Displaced Periphery: A Deleuzian Perspective
• 7  Memoir: San Sebastian Jazz Festival, July 20–25, 1980
• 8  Case Study: Bernard “Pretty” Purdie
• 9  Fixing and Unfixing Idioms and Non-Idioms: Developing Derek Bailey’s Concept of Improvisation
• 10  A Different Sameness: Borges and Deleuze on Repetition
• 11  Memoir: Bluegrass in Cheltenham
• 12  Case Study: The Del McCoury Band
• 13  Virtuality and Actualization: Deleuze and Bluegrass
• 14  Deleuzian Improvisation
• 15  Improvisation and Habit
• 16  Case Study: Jurij Konjar and Steve Paxton: The Goldberg Variations
• 17  Habit and Event: Rehearsing, Practising, Improvising
• 18  Memoir: The Woburn Pop Festival, 1968
• 19  Case Study: Jimi Hendrix
• 20  Composition, Improvisation, and Obligation: Schoenberg and Beckett on Duty
• 21  Bits and Scraps: Derek Bailey and the Improvised Situation
• 22  Memoir: Miles Davis, Royal Festival Hall, July 1984
• 23  Case Study: Cyndi Lauper, “Time After Time”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index