Can Civic Jazz Resolve Our American Dilemma?
Last Monday’s post ended with a mention of Gregory Clark’s Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along. In today’s post, I’ll riff on some of the themes and insights found in this excellent work.
In Civic Jazz, rhetoric and jazz as forms of art enact the civic and civil potential of American democracy. For Burke, author of Permanence and Change; Attitudes Toward History; The Philosophy of Literary Form; Grammar of Motives; Counter-Statement; The Rhetoric of Religion; and Language as Symbolic Action, rhetoric extended beyond persuasive propositions to the aesthetic. As Albert Murray was fond of saying, he agreed with Burke that art is “equipment for living” as well as a basis for identity. Identity for Burke wasn’t static, it was a dynamic social and symbolic process and way of life. Rhetoric with such an artistic edge codifies a “pattern of experience” in the process of adapting and adopting a democratic identity.
In Kenneth Burke’s concept, the rhetorical and the aesthetic—argument and art—necessarily combine, and in America they combine in the project of shaping individuals in the image of interdependent independence that follows from the civic ideal of e pluribus unum. That so many Americans seem unwilling to claim that interdependence along with their independence, even to admit to it, has always been this nation’s basic civic problem.
—Gregory Clark, Civic Jazz (p. 26)
According to Clark, a University Professor of English at Brigham Young University, jazz is perhaps the quintessential democratic art, which creates human experiences of civic and civil democratic form in action, symbolic action. Form, in Burke’s theory, is not based on the shape and structural components of the artifact solely. An individual or audience of readers, listeners, viewers co-create the form by their experience of the art and artifact. The experience of art is cultural, intersubjective. Art contains the potential to move us from one state of mind and attitude to another as we engage in and with it. This is akin to the way we are carried along by the experience of a plot in a story or by the syncopated rhythms of jazz.
Clark relates his own experience in witnessing live jazz and listening deeply to recordings. He incorporates ideas from Duke Ellington, Marcus Roberts, Vijay Iyer, Wynton Marsalis and others to drive home his points. For instance, in the first of seven chapters, this statement from Professor Robert O’Meally is exemplary: “With its insistence on individuality of sound . . . and on the capacity to swing with and against one’s fellow players; its accents on improvisation and readiness for changes; and its connections with the comedy laced by tragedy that defines the blues, jazz is a musical language that reminds us what and where we are as US citizens.”
Kenneth Burke
In what Clark describes as Burke’s “profoundly rhetorical theory of aesthetic form that treats art as an assertion of influence,” an idiom such as jazz “is immersive, emotional as much as intellectual, even spiritual when it lets two or more people feel themselves transcending the differences that divide them for a moment or two.” This “feeling in form,” as Susanne Langer might have put it, is key for Burke’s style and strategy of rhetoric.
Feeling follows from experience and experiences are made aesthetically, with “aesthetic” understood as a design to bring a feeling into being through a sequence of encounters with perspective and attitude that culminates in a sense of oneself that is more or less different from before. That’s how Burke’s redefined rhetoric shifts the aim of influence from opinion to identity, and how his redefined aesthetic relocates art from the artifact to the experience of identity that an artifact provides.
—Gregory Clark, Civic Jazz (p. 38)
Democratic Vistas Through Art
Understandably, after the Civil War ended in 1865, Walt Whitman’s faith in the process of democracy through politics was shaken. Whitman, in “Democratic Vistas,” looked beyond political democracy to a “social, or esthetic democracy” for a “moral and artistic” identity. Whitman’s own poetry invited audiences into an experience of shared identity as Americans, but, arguably, only with the creation of jazz does one have the moral and aesthetic re-enactment of American democratic principles via collective improvisation, where the individual is respected and acknowledged in a group striving for that ensemble mindset flow called “swing.”
Clark agrees and extends the point even further:
Perhaps jazz is the music of democracy not so much because it so well melds individual and group, freedom and order, though that is crucial, but because it does so through joint acts of faith. Jazz musicians play the music upon the belief that something beyond themselves will be manifest there—something that expresses, in William James phrase, ‘immense elation and surrender, as the outlines of the confining self-hood melt down.’ (p. 76)
An American Civic Religion?
If the call for “joint acts of faith” has a religious ring, that’s fine. As Beth Eddy demonstrates in The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison, both Burke and one of his most perceptive interpreters, Ralph Ellison, were concerned with “religious traditions and experiences as naturally available to human beings without the attribution of any special supernatural powers to any human ideals.” As men of literature and the humanities, Burke and Ellison were like anthropologists of language, highlighting how humans—“symbol-using animals”—employ language to determine sacred and sacrificial meaning.
John Dewey
John Dewey, whose meditations on form in Art and Experience influenced Burke, once wrote that the primary tenet of an authentic American civic religion was “the continual disclosing of truth through directed cooperative endeavor.” Riffing on Dewey, Clark writes: “Religion is about transcendence, and e pluribis unum is an aspiration as transcendent as any . . . Religion is also about sacrifice, and jazz music can show us a kind of cooperation that demands a profound sacrifice of self, the kind in which a better self can sometimes be discovered.”
This is how jazz is intensely rhetorical in the very way religion is: its project is to prompt others to progress beyond selfishness by enabling then to comprehend in themselves a person whom joining with others might let them become. And like religion, jazz draws upon the resources of rhetoric and aesthetics to let those who experience it experience that self rationally and emotionally, systematically and intuitively, all at once. (p. 32)
Of course, the democratic pattern of experience and way of life as demonstrated in the art of jazz is far from easy. To play jazz well, one has to go deep in the shed of practice and performance with others; to be an American citizen living and embodying the constitutional principles found in our founding documents, we have to allow for the shedding of limiting identities and an embrace of a rooted cosmopolitanism. The pluralistic tensions of democratic life in a multi-ethnic open society, where one has to be willing to risk changes in identity as we engage with each other in linguistic and artistic communication, is a source of division in the United States.
Clark argues that we can learn from Burke and from jazz that the tension between the individual and the community can be constructive and generative. In an answer to the inquiry contained in the title of this post, resolving conflict is not the goal; rather, the “goal is to learn that sometimes we can understand opposition as interdependence.”
That’s “antagonistic cooperation” or what Burke called the “competitive use of the cooperative.” For the jazz musician, this typifies what Ellison called the “true jazz moment.”
Each true jazz moment springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: As individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it . . .
—Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
This is the mystery and frustration of the democratic process in the United States: striving to make e pluribis unum, “out of many, one,” a lived, egalitarian reality. What aspects of our current identities (e.g., racial) are we willing to lose in order to find a higher octave of shared identification? What parts are we willing to let die or be transformed into something different so we can co-create a shared American identity?
That, indeed, is the question.