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well, my position about this stuff is complicated...i have no problem with the fact--in my experience anyway--that in certain types of directed activities, what seems like intersubjective communication that happens too fast to be explained rationally can and does happen. almost any collective improvisation will show you that. but i dont believe in esp--that this sort of thing can be understood as a double of intentionality, directed onto the world, used to manipulate objects, etc.
these two positions actually reinforce each other: in my experience, this trans-subjective work is bounded by a shared project, immersion in a type of activity/medium and disposition. in other words, the environment within which this sort of phenomenon unfolds is tightly bounded, and you could see it as a result of a sustained engagement with improvisation as a type of practice.
listening--and most other sensory zones, work quite a bit faster and in a more open manner than you'd think---improvisation is a temporal activity, while language tends to stabilize relations to and amongst elements encountered in time...if you think about this distinction, it's pretty clear that the transition from temporal practice to statements about temporal practice involve some shearing off of possibilities that may remain open and usable in the context of temporal practices.
i tend to think of improvisation as a space of coupled oscillators, generating and working within a complex dynamic system.
so i don't see it as a particularly extraordinary activity--i think we do this sort of thing all the time, but we also operate within a conceptual framework that has no way of either accounting for or talking coherently about not just improvisation but temporal processes in general.
improvisation on a musical instrument is just extending this space, training yourself to think through the development of structures rather than through the movement of sentences.
but it's a tightly bounded space, musical improvisation, the possibilities of which are--to my mind--a function of working with your instrument. so while this may rely on capacities that everyone has but may or may not have the occaison to extend and work as a discrete type of activity, fact is that what happens in a collective improvisation--how things come together, how they alter, where the capacity of a group of people who may not even know each other to stop and start, change directions, develop structures and dissolve them---is a function of training yourself, directly and indirectly.
the problem with notions like esp, it seems to me, is that they abstract this practical engagement with materials/a medium and make it into the duplicate of directing your attention at an object in your visual field. it ain't like that, i dont think.
but there's another problem: if i am right about the above (it corresponds to my experience, but also to how i understand my experience) then it would be pretty much impossible to separate these communicative possibilities from the practical interactions that condition them, that make them possible, that enable them to move or develop. scientific proofs presuppose discrete objects of analysis, or discrete relational systems. making this discrete is a problem--so i would imagine that scientific investigations of this sort of capacity would also turn it into esp.
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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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