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ok so...
this is a deceptive complicated matter in my view.
here's why...i do alot of collective improvisation, much of which involves sound spaces that turn on a dime--often quite radical changes of sonic direction without a score to set them up----so i KNOW that there are types of intersubjective alignment/communication--not only that but these routine..ordinary features of being-in-the world. improvisation simply works them--but indirectly (and i think that because we are marooned in language, that's the relation we are stuck with. there's nothing wrong with it, nothing to be done about it. it's just like that.) i have been doing this kind of work for 30 years (geez....) in one form or another, so there is no possibility of anyone telling me it doesnt happen.
but i also think that there is nothing particularly surprising about this, that it can be explained by way of complex dynamic systems model, through the notion of coupled oscillators.
so while the soundwork i do presupposes this kind of coupling, i dont think that there is "esp" nor do i think that any of the other discourses of mysticism apply or are necessary.
collective improvisation involves commonality of intent, physical proximity and closely related types of psycho-kinetic activity. there is also a common referencepoint in the sound formations that are being generated--but the complication there is that you cannot say that what all the players in a collective improvisation are doing is reacting, simply because the sound formations emerge and change too fast for that--and improvisation involves a particular type of awareness that in a sense bypasses the language-based structuring of being-in-the-world that constitutes what (for shorthand's sake) i'll call the platform across which we organize our regular experience.
again, there is nothing unusual about this bypassing--you do it all the time--think about the process of writing the sentences that make up the post that you might write in response to this. think about how you would describe that process in terms shaped by the sentences that result from it.
language structures lean on/generate a conception of causation that is primarily mechanical. this is obviously one type of causation, but is not causation tout court. that is a problem. that linguistic structures cannot account for everything is self-evident: they cant even account for the practices involved with using language itself without fundamentally altering the problems they purport to address (pace merleau-ponty on this one--the best essay on the problem of representing practice is "indirect speech and the voice of silence" in the collection "signs"--read it if you want to see how very rigorous philosophy bumps up against the question of practice---because that is what is at issue here, really, it seems to me.)
basically, i think that the category of esp is worthless.
i think it is based on a mis-mapping of ordinary forms of human activity that fall outside discourse, that it is a variant of older ways of talking about these capacities which were routed through the language of mysticism, which i also think worthless. (CAVEAT: worthless here extends in strange ways--it might mean only that i personally find them worthless in that they tell me nothing, they do not appeal to me aesthetically, i cannot use them to formalize or think about anything nor do they function to extend the working of improvisation--this to stick with the example that i introduced earlier---BUT i know folk for whom the above is not the case insofar as esp or mysticism are viable languages/terminologies for talking about this process, mostly because FOR THEM it enables a refinement and extension of the activities themselves...so it follows that to the extent that i think these languages are trying to talk about the same thing as i am in this post, i think they're wrong, useless--but that presupposes alot--at any rate, i evaluate these languages in terms of what they do in particular situations for these folk, whom i encounter in the context of soundwork---but transposed onto an analytic level, as devices that say something ABOUT what happens, i think they're useless. there is a difference between these claims--one is about functionality, the other about analytic power. these aren't the same. so the problem really is whether--to get back to the topic of the thread--esp names anything. i dont think it does.)
to the extent that esp names a process of register-crossing (you know, "bend the spoon") i think it useless. it seems to me that it misnames a feature of collective psycho-kinetic activity, fetishizes it, places it into a false position, imputes arbitrary operations to it and looks for arbitrary effects. it sets it up as a double of intentionality (the directing of attention toward objects in the world), which i think is false, simply because it maps onto a language-based structure an operation that is not containable within it. the idea of esp misstates everything about what it would purport to explain.
problem no. 1: we tend to impute causation to phenomena that occur in sequence. we do it even more strongly when phenomena unfold simultaneously---you see this all the time in social analysis---the assumption that amounts of zetigetist history--esp is a playground in which these limited notions of causation get mapped arbitrarily.
problem no. 2: verification. the mistake outlined just above explains the problems of verification. you are looking the wrong way, in the wrong place, for the wrong type of operations, when you invest in the category of esp. you are looking for the effects of the name "esp"---you create a false circle with the category.
this is probably confusing as a post, because i think it appears to be saying two different things---i dont see it that way, but i am not sure that i've explained myself well. we'll see.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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