Jazz and Communication: Towards a Creolization of the Philosophy of Language
The panel intends to challenge a seeming truism, most influential in 20th century theory of language, which equates communication with the exchange of information, by a phenomenon that has become an American cultural trademark: Jazz music.
Historically, Jazz music has emerged from a mixture of peoples with different linguistic backgrounds, mostly Creoles and black people gathering at the Condo Square in New Orleans, devising a collective language in the medium of performed music.
Intended as a conceptual model, Jazz improvisation provides a powerful example of the temporal-spatial embedment of the communicating gesture, way beyond restricted conceptions of communication as the mere application of an abstract linguistic system. A Jazz-oriented approach to language brings into scrutiny elements of performed and ‘embodied meaning’ as opposed to more cerebral, systemic and structural conceptions. The Jazz improvisation provides a symbolic place of constant exchange between the participants – in terms of the musical material that is being elaborated at the time of the performance, and in terms of the very rules of the improvisatory game, in perpetual re-invention. Close studies of the Miles Davis Quintet production have for instance demonstrated a rich and instable production of ‘signs’: gestural, visual, musical cues between the musicians, immediately prompting a change in the piece’s direction.
The panel welcomes contributions from the fields of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies as well as Philosophy and Musicology, emphasizing the materiality of literary and musical language, bearing on their performative dimension, and reassessing the body’s fundamental role in expressing and receiving aesthetic meaning.