In the episode “The ABC’s of Beth” of the post-modern-futuro-nihilist cartoon Rick and Morty, we witness the original Beth, Rick’s daughter, and her supposed clone ‘Space Beth’ meeting for the first time. Throughout the episode, the question of which Beth is the original is asked. None of the two Beth are able to find this out. Who is the clone? Distinction between the two copies of the same person is in some sense impossible and perhaps irrelevant as the two characters ultimately come to decide not to find out which of them is the ‘original’. It seems as though the only thing needed is a backup of a person’s consciousness and an appropriate vessel for this consciousness to exist within. In all effects, it is as if the essence of a character is contained not within the living body but in the mind.
Descartes reached his famous Cogito ergo sum ( I think therefore I am) after setting out on an epistemological quest to find an irrefutable basis on which the subject could build its relation to knowledge. By engaging with a systematic, methodological use of doubt Descartes was able to posit that it is thinking as such that relates to being. Thinking proves that one is. Further reflections in his Méditations only solidify what is already suggested in the Cartesian Cogito. The “question of being for ‘man’ is posed on the side of knowledge [reason, mind], while the body is on the side of having”. (J.A.Miller)[1]
Is this not what is at stake in the situation of The Abc’s of Beth ? The necessary precondition for this scenario to be possible is firstly that Mind and Body are seen as two separate entities and secondly that being, is contained within the Mind.
Rick and Morty mirrors in many ways our current situation within contemporary society : Cartesian Dualism and his Cogito have had a lasting effect on the way Western society organises the topography of mind and body. The fact that humans have a body, rather than are a body is a concept that is with us up to this day, in the chirurgical advancements of the 20th and 21st century, which have fragmented the ‘unified’ body into an assemblage of parts – synthetic skin, tissues, organs – replaceable ‘at will’, as well as with modern biology which turns the body into a ‘machine’ in which specific parts play determined roles in given bodily processes. The point can be made that it is precisely because ‘man’ is not his body that such conceptual and practical dissections may be operated unto it and thought of in the first place.
Whilst Descartes is father to the modern mainstream view of the mind-body topos, he was he himself ambiguous regarding how to understand the connection between my mind and my body. Our body remains “the only object within my abstract layer of experience to which I can assign a field of sensation that matches experience.” [2]. It is through our body that we come to know and experience the world. It is through the body that we feel pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst and a myriad of other tiny bodily impressions. It is also through and on the body that control is produced and received. Inevitably, it also through our body that we produce sounds in music. I wonder if the physicality within music making and especially improvisation can be repurposed if understood together with how social power and control are exercised over the body.
In early Capitalism, the body is subject to strict control. Power is exercised directly over it: the factory worker must wake up at specific times to reach the factory. His holidays, breaks and end time of shifts are timed precisely and the worker is watched by a supervisor, confined to a single space. The figure of power is clearly actualised into a person,the owner, the controller etc.. It is a society of bodily discipline. The body is constantly watched and under surveillance.
In today’s neoliberal driven dogma, we have transitioned into a society of control. We can move freely within certain bounds. External power and institution no longer organise strict bodily control. Instead, power and control are shifted to the subject, who is expected to enforce them unto her/himself. We become, in a sense, both our masters and our servants. social protests is harder to achieve because the source of power is harder to locate.
We are fully ‘free’ but it is precisely this freedom that shackles us as we exercise tight supervision on ourselves: we become the project of ourselves, always striving to be the best that we can. Is this not a typical neoliberal injunction? And is anorexia not an extreme, pathological result of this specific structure of control? In anorexia one can see a pathological development of the liberal, self-owning subject. The anorexic body is rejecting food, it is about self- control, an authoritarian relation to the body, it shows a pathological radicalisation of the internalisation of normative social control. Katherine Hayles denotes that “In taking the self-possession implied by liberal humanism to the extreme, the anoretic creates a physical image that, in its skeletal emaciation, serves as material testimony that the locus of the liberal humanist subject lies in the mind, not the body.”[3]
But the internalisation of power structures can also mean that power can be more readily subverted, turned around and externalised to the bounds between which we can move, act, create. For example, ethnic minorities have now been able to force states to address their colonial history and the point could be made that it is because power is now lying within ‘ourselves’. It pushes from the inside out rather than from the outside inwards.
How can we as musicians touch upon this form of empowerment? Can the Body be a road towards political and artistic alternatives, can it be a road to change? The case is strong for music where the Body has a central position in the production of sound. Even further, Improvisation is fundamentally a way of training of the Body to respond within contextualised situations. As a structure with which to create webs of knowledges and insights, the methodology of improvisation is an act of localisation. Our body is connecting the rational and the sensual to form a shape of practice that is informed by both. By acting as a porous membrane between what is outside and sensual and what is inside and rational the body is effectively the localising force behind the improvisative process. Localisation is, in a sense, clarification.
Much like the inscription of social power and norms within and unto our body, (ie.hair, jewelry, ways of speaking and walking), improvisation inscribes the Body with gestures and movements which are later on used to create something. Improvisation is intimately related to the raw productive possibility for action that lies within the body. Through these bodily inscriptions we are empowered to act in specific ways.
Improvisation and its relation to the body can feedback into a reflection on social and political change: How can cultural norms be subverted with music? How can various cultural and dogmatic inscriptions that have been repeatedly carved unto the strata of our body be internalised and used as a force for change? Can they be used as avenues of empowerment and liberation rather than tools of self-control? These are however no easy questions and at this moment I do not feel I have thought or know enough to give a definite opinion and answer.
But:
Improvisation as a structure with which to organise, distribute and channel flows of creative energy, whether artistic or political, seems to me so far, the structure most prepared to deal with the urging problems the world is facing today, especially at the level of subjectivity and perception. Additionally, it also seems that Improvisation (even only artistic) is eminently political in that it shows that the contingent is plausible. That alternatives at every instant in time are always in the realm of the possible.
Whether these possibilities are actualised and how, is only up to us.
[1] J.A.Miller, Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body, Translated from French by B.Fulks, digital version,
[2] .A.Miller, The Unconscious and the Speaking Body, Presentation of the theme for the Xth Congress of the WAP [world association of psychoanalysis] in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 – found at Asociación Mundial de Psicoanálisis (wapol.org)
[3] N.K. Hayles, 1999, How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Litterature and Informatics, pg.5 , Chicago, University of Chicago Press