Peters, Gary, Improvising Improvisation: From Out of Philosophy, Music, Dance and Literature. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 271pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45262-3. ISBN-10: 0-226-45262-X

Reviewed by

Ralph Yarrow

University of East Anglia

'To make something out of nothing – indeed, the felt obligation to make something out of nothing – is... the very heart of improvisation', writes Peters at the outset (vii). In enigmatic but piercingly precise support he quotes – here and elsewhere – Beckett's well-known orientation that this "obligation" co-exists with the recognition that '"there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express..."'. . The book attempts to engage, again and again, with the process of finding the point before 'existing things', and aims to be a series of sorties rather than a sequential argument composed of statements about improvisation. Of course it thus has to be both. Inevitably, once we have expressed, we are in the realm of the expressed (Beckett would say that we are 'fini') and what's done can't be undone. But undoing may be a key process in getting there in the first place, whatever that place (or indeeed that nothing, which Peters locates as a 'prior unknowingness') might be.

 

So the book is a set of quests for this condition, a sort of perpetual return to the beginning, or indeed the place before beginning, via many musical (jazz) and philosophical (phenomenology in various forms) traces. Because 'the beginning is not the start of the work but the choice of a way into [it]' (25). This is a subtle but crucial distinction.The blurb says: 'As [Peters] 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' (front cover).

 

Improvisation, he suggests, consists not so much of acts, as of an attitude, a commitment to operate in a certain way. It is what Tony Frost and I describe with reference to theatre and performance as disponibilité, the condition of being open and available to move in any direction via any modality, style or genre, at any given moment.[1] That, as we attempt to explicate for performance, is not irrelevant to the production of all the acts which make up our lives. Peters says that 'improvisation really does offer: the dramatization of the beginning' (9). And 'the beginning is not the start of a work, but the choice of a way... into [it]' (25): in other words, the decision to improvise which precedes the individual acts/events. I am reminded of Lawrence Sterne's opening of Tristram Shandy: 'I write the first word and trust to Almighty God for the rest'.

 

This decision/obligation speaks of aesthetic purpose, even rigour; so improvisation in this sense is a quality of distance, judgement, and not at all under the sway of imediate sensory/sensible reaction – in a sense, a kind of epoché. This drive towards the positionality of doing different, in a radical sense, of always discovering new beginings, as he explores via Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze ('philosophers of the event'), and at repeated junctures,  Beckett, is about returning to or rather situating oneself at the point of origination of form. This also however means that here the improviser isn't dependent on or open to 'others'/all immediate influences, so much as in that condition and moment pursuing an internal/solitary aesthetic drive towards the business of making new. The 'free' play which seems so central to much improvisatory activity is thus, for Peters, stage two and is predicated upon the choice to do so.

 

The book hones in on the fundamental reason to improvise.

·       It uses Lol Coxhill, Jimi Hendrix, Derek Bailey et al as exemplars of a para-improvisational or proto-improvisational practice; or a concern with what it's all about in the first place (or non-place).

·       It draws eruditely and compellingly on Beckett, Kant, Heidegger, Badiou, Deleuze and others to chart and negotiate the pitfalls of this encounter with the zone of that which is not yet, which may or may not exist in any ordinary sense, space, moment in time, but which is the precondition for the production of all forms, modes, thoughts, words, sounds and moves.

·       It keeps on bringing you back to square 0 (itself an impossible paradox, neither square nor round).

 

Its key foci revolve around Start-Beginning, Origin-Origination, Certitude-Certainty, Fixity-Unfixity, Decision-Choice, Difference-Diversity, Habit and a few other pairings (2-5). These concerns are revisited, or wrought through anew, throughout the twenty-three sections, so dipping in (but then sinking to the bottom and swimming up out again) will take the reader on a path which is the same and different in each part. Peters quotes Deleuze: 'I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them'. This also reminds me of Rilke : 'I am a beginner in my own circumstances' (would that it were true more often...).

 

As Peters admits (244), readers may not be able to judge whether what he says about Coxhill, Bailey et al is 'true' – and it is not essential that they do. For this reader, what he says about their practice invests it with a stature which is fairly extraordinary.  At any rate the underlying drive, which is to get us to think about how and why it could be extraordinary, is vibrant, vital, difficult and urgently necessary. (He writes his own ironic 'good review' on 244-5 .)

 

Choice and Certainty

 

Improvisation, for Peters, is 'the mechanism by which one form is chosen over another' ; it thus operates between specific instances and/or works, rather than within them; it is the assertion that 'there will be an improvisation, and on this occasion it's going to be like this' (14). So alongside or prior to any uncertainty and risk-taking in the content of an improvisation, there  is 'an extraordinary certainty of the improviser' (23), i.e. of the fact that improvisation is occurring and will continue to do so. So 'erring' (Heidegger) or 'trying something out' becomes a task that gains in consistency and intensity. This 'fixity' accompanies the detail of 'unfixing of fixed structures' which occurs within the work.

 

Habit

 

Much of what conventionally passes muster as 'improvisation' is actually quite structurally predictable - true especially perhaps for jazz musicians - Peters is one and knows a lot of them. Mostly when we try to improvise we soon fall into habit. Behaviour is not just mental: it is embodied. In so far as we are not Cartesian dyads, we internalise habit as cognitive and motoric patterning throughout our organism: habitus (Bourdieu) is psycho-physiological. It is about doing (or not doing). Art forms involve doing things above all. But it is also possible to learn in certain situations how not to do. Habits, says Peters, 'can be broken and changed again and again' , and 'we ... need to get into the habit of understanding habit as a form of transformation rather than, as is usually the case, mechanization, determination, and stagnation' (113-4).

 

'Ou sommes nous en-dehors d'où nous sommes', asks Philippe Sollers in his 'novel, entitled Drame (Sollers 1965), which seeks to trace the mental and physical locus of activation of what might be writing or any other form of production. What/where is the space 'before', 'outside' time, space, language, habit, structures; and how does one access it? These questions appear metaphysical, but they are also fundamental to the business of improvisation as Peters is describing it. He requires his exemplary performers to demonstrate this strictness in order to qualify for admission. The business he and they are undertaking is perhaps no less than to find the point at/the way in which we recreate ourselves, in spite of our ineluctable tendency to lapse into repeating ourselves.

 

The (diachronic, temporal, momentary) act is the insertion into, the realigning of the form. You can't do the act until you know the form; and until you are disposed (Peters would say 'dis-posed', putting yourself in another place or order) to undertake the realignment. So the act (note, move, word, mark) acknowledges that it is working with(in) the form (genre, mode). Yet its ability to recompose, alter – however marginally – indeed to enter in (again) without even changing (like Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ) is on the one hand predicated on 'mastery' of the means of so doing: you 'know the score', you are 'in the groove' (Peters), you 'speak the lingo', you can 'walk the walk'; so you acknowledge/under-stand the form/genus and you have the skill to contribute to it. You need to know enough to do the business. But you/the act also recognise(s) that the genus precedes the move/word etc. The act of chosing insertion and/or reconfiguration is also synchronic, initial and initiatory: the essence of all acts, more potently decisive, the virtuality of will and purpose. As such however it is not yet the diachronic, the specific. It could be anything (because it is as yet no-thing). It is multivalence. It is thus also irony (as Peters illustrates re. Coxhill) – awareness that it could be other; its status is transparent, replaceable, a kind of haunting. And this act which is not yet act, this proto-impulse, is also what Vedic linguistics (Patanjali) calls pashyanti: its locus is a condition of consciousness which has an incling but has not yet ascribed the contours of that twitch to any semiotic. The pause before; the hesitation before birth (Peters makes quite a lot of hesitation). The I which knows here is not that which possesses discrete knowledges. It is knowingness. I that can know. I can know that. I am also that (tatwa tam asi). Here there is no distinction between knower and knowing and known (Vedic thought's conjunction of rishi/devata/chhandas). In moving to the discrete act I not only reconfigure the form but also myself in and as it, my being is recomposed in and through my action.

 

Peters also refers to Heidegger's distinction between the 'sphere of accuracies' (science) and the 'zone of truth' (philosophical thinking/art/poetry) (46). Other writers might point out that 'truth'/knowledge/virtue arises from the location of this condition. It's not just about the objects (phenomena) but about equivalence with the 'beginning' of wisdom – being in/at/under-standing the dynamics of eventing/process/phenomenal existence from this ('still point') of askesis. It also suggests a dynamic view of 'self'. 'I' am always also that condition (Jimenez: 'I am not I/I am he who.../Composed, is silent when I speak'): I am energies in motion,  forms which shift, and I am also that which is aware of this. Not far too from Russell Hoban's re-membering, which is anagnorisis, the reconnection with oneself as the impetus to form, as the source of creative drives/will/energies, as that which precedes the dance of form, the playing of the strings, the putting together and the pulling or falling apart.

 

What are the psychophysical dimensions here? Rehearsal and practice, perhaps, Peters suggests? This would be the equivalent of practising a cultivation of a habit of body/mind, a disposition to create and an ability to play the whole range of forms because the technical mastery is already there and can be awakened/applied. It would also be consistent with Eastern modes of performance training, including music, and attitudes to improvisation, which is only seen as permissible or indeed possible once expertise has been established; also of Lecoq's, Grotowski's and others' investment in strict forms of practice in which anything which is 'not authentic', i.e. not at that moment fully located in and bound up with its own embodied production of the thing, is unceremoniously rejected: Lecoq's 'au suivant!', in response to any one of his class of student improvisers showing his/her work, uncompromisingly identifies any recourse to habitual behaviours. For Grotowski, the contract with the audience demands that the performer is utterly centred in the deployment of body, voice and all expressive capacity as that which is appropriate and required by the work, thus involving a complete 'sacrifice' of the ego. Something like this is, I suspect, also the requirement of performance artists like Abramovich. In all these situations then, the 'I' that is operating is not self-reflective but self-referential: it does not seek feedback or praise for its accomplishment or beauty, its intent is to maintain, 'strictly', the operational awareness of continual beginning, which is the quality of 'self' as coterminous with the productive force (Indians would see the initial point of the dance of Shiva and the play of Krishna).

 

In a sense then improvisation is mandatory: 'we have an obligation to improvise, as an act of fidelity to improvisation itself' (174); and: '[i]mprovisation is its own message' (199) (not what it says but what it is). Or we could say that the obligation is to get 'back where we started: improvising', as the Player puts it in in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Peters concludes by saying that 'improvisation is not the flame itself', but 'the "sparks" that fly around the burning "void", ... the trace of invisible and unheard-of presence' (246). His book gets pretty close to striking the sparks.