Critical Inquiry

Winter 2001
Volume 27, Number 2

Excerpt from
Even Until Death: Improvisation, Edging, and Enframement
by Dick Hebdige
The key to the generative logic of improvisation lies secreted in plain view somewhere in this paradox of "deliberate spontaneity" that, in its compound resistance to the self-evident logic of representation, takes us to the very edge of language (the word edge referring here to "the border or part nearest some limit; the commencement or early part; the beginning; as, the edge of a field; the edge of evening").5 Following Lao-tzu, Watts alluded to this paradox as "the law of reversed effort":
When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink you float. When you hold your breath you lose it--which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, "Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it." 6

Or as John Coltrane once put it in an interview, his choice of metaphor twice disrupting (though not demolishing) the figure of the frame:

Sometimes I was making jazz through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.7

The mix within that metaphor might give the reader pause. The primary disruption alluded to above--the one, no doubt, Coltrane himself intended--involves an inversion of the conventional scales of apprehended distance: the material--here the qualities of sound--gigantically expanded or reduced to miniscule proportions--a moving into or away from. (We might add in parenthesis that either scale's distortion might produce the same effects from the listener's point of view.) But the secondary disruption to the idea of the frame occurs inadvertently within the logic of the analogy itself. Which, after all, is the "wrong end" of a magnifying glass? Perhaps he meant a microscope. Either way, it really doesn't matter; anyone who's heard ten seconds of a Coltrane recording--let alone actually listened to it--will get exactly what heÕs driving at.

We should simply let it go.

In other words, while it is undoubtedly true that the ontological discrepancy between the defer-ential structurings of language and the unstoppable dynamics of becoming-unto-death make determinations of truth and beauty impossible to verify in any absolute sense, it is also true that nonetheless we make them all the time. If we just stop to take the time (and even if we don't) such absolute determinations get figured (out) moment by moment in the moment with or without our willed or conscious acquiescence (our collaboration in these temporal closures really is, for most of the time, quite beside the point).

5. Concise Oxford English Dictionary of Etymology, s.v. "edge."

6. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (New York, 1951), p. 9.

7. Nat Hentoff, "John Coltrane," in Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York, 1996), p. 623; hereafter abbreviated "JC."

Dick Hebdige teaches at CalArts in Valencia, California.

Editorial Office main page * Back Issues * Subscribe to CI