These are some follow-up notes I wrote for my 2020 Jazz History class, following a fruitful discussion around improvisation languages, their political valences, and some stimulating writings from Ingrid Monson and Garrett Michaelsen.
(1) Heteroglossia: centripetal and centrifugal forces in language
As we discussed, there is really no such thing as ‘a language’, but rather, there are only ‘languages’, constantly in motion, operating in endlessly differentiating and subtle ways depending on contexts, needs, wants, power relations, and much more. Garrett Michaelsen describes, for example, the semantic versus pragmatic aspects of how language works. In the first case (semantic), we have what we understand meaning to be. I say ‘jazz’ and we all understand more or less what I mean, with some wiggle room.
But on the other hand we have pragmatics, which is what we need language to do in a given situation. So an author like Ralph Ellison or Toni Morrison or Ishmael Reed might invoke jazz to invent a whole new semantic range that has to do with the pragmatic, in-the-moment, transformative uses to which language can be put when needed. Artfully improvising in a way that is always stretching language’s capacity into new areas, new combinations, new meanings.
(This has always been the purview of poetry and rap, by the way.)
Furthermore, the really interesting and important transformative uses to which language is put tend to take place within what we might call ‘minoritarian’ communities; what theorist/poet Fred Moten calls the ‘undercommons’. Minoritarian communities are often ethnic, racial or religious minority communities, but not always—any community big or small that finds itself operating at the margins of mainstream/dominant thought is constantly taking language and making it do things that it might not have been designed to do. And importantly, the language it is taking and playing with—improvising with—is precisely that mainstream/dominant language, which the community recasts on its own terms.
So we end up with torsions, patois, dialects, jargons, coded insider languages, layers of proliferating meanings. This is what heteroglossia means: ‘many tongues’; all variations on a theme.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s centripetal and centrifugal forces, then, refer to relationships between center and margin. Transformation happens at the margins, enacting new meanings and usages. But those new formulations end up getting folded back into the center. This is what happens with slang words, for example, and is why ‘cool’ words and phrases lose their impact when they become part of mainstream usage. (And also why it can be really uncomfortable or even deeply offensive when certain community-insider words are coopted and used by someone not in the community.)
(2) Double consciousness
So, the question we were trying to get at in class is: what does this have to do with W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness?
Double consciousness means understanding oneself—one’s subjectivity—from two simultaneous perspectives. Over-simply, one from ‘within’ and one from ‘without’. This is too simple though, as I’ll try to explain. Du Bois was theorizing African-American subjectivity in the early 20th-century US. In Du Bois’s theory, an African-American person sees themself as an autonomous subject with free will, desires, interests, passions, fears, worries, etc. etc. and at the very same time an anonymous black body, a product, an object, a cog in the wheel of a system that has been set in motion very specifically to prevent them from thriving. From a psychoanalytic perspective, double consciousness means that even while trying to thrive as vibrant human being, they are also experiencing—and therefore reproducing—a version of the set of perspectives that relegates them to objecthood, which is to say that denies them of their subjectivity. This is the key (and why the ‘within’ / ‘without’ binary is too simple): it’s not just that one understands that some dominant Other is oppressing them and perceiving them as an object rather than as a fully human subject; they are unconsciously participating in that very practice of objectifying. This is how the system works and how it is perpetuated: it is part of what contemporary theorists mean by ‘systemic racism’.
There are other important forms of double consciousness too, however; for example that which is enacted by what second-wave feminist theorists call the ‘male gaze’, through which women are seen as objects to be desired, which partially subsumes a given individual woman’s subjective self-awareness. Or more recently, that which has sometimes been re-theorized more broadly as the ‘capitalist gaze’, where we’re all regarded first of all as consumers.
All of this is fairly tacet in Ingrid Monson’s text, which is why it needs a bit of explication. The connection here, again over-simply, is that double consciousness puts a psychoanalytic spin on heteroglossia. Let me try to explain!
There are two political trajectories at play here. The first is productive and subversive, the second reductive and insidious. The productive, subversive trajectory is the torsion of mainstream language that forces it, creatively and strategically, to do things other than what it was intended for. This has tremendous political force, but as I mentioned is always in danger of being folded back into mainstream thought, which robs it of its political valence and effectively neuters it. But all that means is that the original subversive act needs to be continually reenacted, on continually new grounds. It’s a process, not a product.
The reductive, insidious trajectory is that which makes an object of a subject, which refuses to recognize another as a full human. (See my article from Week 5 on the role of the voice and speech in all this.) Here the process–product terms are reversed. And because those objectifying forces are strong and pervasive (it’s built into the system, rather than a smattering of individual acts—see Robin DiAngelo’s recent book White Fragility), they work their way into everyone’s understanding of their own subjectivity, so members of the dominant class learn to act in ways that reinforce and reiterate their dominant status, and members of an oppressed class learn to act in ways that reinforce and reiterate their secondary status. Bakhtin was talking about language, but it turns out that language is just an illustration: we can think of literally every aspect of human existence in heteroglossic terms, and then can come to understand how the hierarchies built into that very heteroglossia get reproduced and reinforced through their very enactments.
(3) Heteroglossia, double consciousness and music
So, then, what does all this have to do with music? With jazz? Here’s one idea.
The process of learning to be a jazz musician involves negotiating two oppositional forces. The first is how one engages with tradition; the second how one develops a unique ‘voice’ as an improviser: a sound, a melodic vocabulary, a time-feel, and so on. These are both assumed to be necessary processes. But they are not necessarily fully compatible processes, and in some ways oppose one another, perhaps problematically.
Jazz’s musical vocabularies are essentially heteroglossic: as we have been discussing all semester, there is not one jazz history, and there are potentially infinite ways to be improvisationally expressive within jazz’s endlessly diverse soundscapes. So here is the first contradictory moment: what does it mean to attend to ‘the jazz tradition’ when there is no such such thing, at least as a singular, traceable phenomenon? The second contradiction follows: how does one attend to the ‘call’ from within jazz’s communities to attend to that tradition, the insistence that one is not properly a jazz musician until one has appropriately done so? This is the pull of ideology, which is exclusionary as much as it claims a way in. Because what it does is insist that there are ‘right’ ways to develop one’s own improvisational language and therefore express one’s individuality.
And that’s the third, most important, contradiction: the tension between, on one hand, the imperative to develop one’s own individual voice, and on the other, the insistence that one must do so within certain structure limitations. If one strays too far from the norm staked out by some particular sense of what ‘tradition’ means, then one doesn’t count within the community.
In double-consciousness terms, this plays out as a split in one’s subjectivity that we might again call, over-simply, inner and outer. (Note: by ‘subjectivity’ I mean the particular ways in which we are continually in ‘processes of becoming’ the human beings we are. This process is essentially ecological, in that it always and only occurs in the spaces, places, times, etc. that we find ourselves in, and collective, in that we become subjects in large part through the ways we interact with others.) The inner self is that which seeks individuality; in the case of jazz (or any) musicians, through the practice of developing one’s creative ‘voice’. The outer self is that which find itself limited by any number of factors; in the case of jazz (or any) musicians, factors that delimit what does or does not get to count as jazz, and that specify certain actions required to achieve entry into that community.
In other words, the (inner) insistence that one has the right to develop their own individual language is a political action, an insistence that one is a subject with that free will, those desires, etc. And the (outer) requirement that one conform to a predetermined set of norms is a form of objectification, an insistence that one can only be a subject in this particular way, which amounts to a form of alienation or decoupling of a subject from their true nature.
As I suggested in the article of mine we read a few weeks ago, there are certain more or less iconic jazz musicians who themselves exist outside jazz’s nominal structures, and which remain problematic for anyone trying to write a ‘clean’ history or develop a consistent pedagogical method. I mentioned Thelonious Monk, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders in that article. (It’s often said that Monk could never win the jazz composition that bears his name!) But we have now come across many others, including on our last couple of listening lists: Gato Barbieri, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman (NB this is the subtext of David Ake’s article), Roswell Rudd, Cecil Taylor, and on and on…
I hope this is helpful!