8 - Free Jazz, Critical Performativity, and 1968

Summary

In The Action Image of Society: On Cultural Politicisation (1970), Alfred Willener defined the uprisings of 1968 as a “process” that unites jazz musicians, poets, painters and political dissenters, each expressing “a revolutionary desire for social emancipation … the emancipation of the non-formal.” This chapter takes off from Willener’s observations to explore how propositions emerging across mid-century American avant-gardes might potentialize new models of community. It focuses upon Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (1960), as a means of framing performativity as the subject of study and its means, standing as both metaphor and enactment. Such aesthetic experimentation implicitly swarms outward to underscore the techniques of the 1968 uprisings, which are removed from established Third International forms of resistance. Its participants, as a consequence, are positioned on the edge of becoming otherwise, threatening the stability of given social codes and producing vital new modes of sociability and encounter.