Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives by Edgar Landgraf (review)

Edgar Landgraf’s Improvisation as Art is by all counts a theoretically nuanced and historically grounded book, remarkable not only for its level of lucidity and insight into eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century aesthetics and literature, but for its commitment to thinking through the paradoxes and complexities of aesthetic practices that are still flourishing in the twenty-first century. The book aims at more than a mere analysis of the intersection of art and improvisation. Rather, it takes up an important strand in a genealogy of modernity, describing how the new, the unexpected, and the inventive emerged as recognizable practices and values constitutive of the very concept of the modern.

The book’s most important contributions are both theoretical and historical in nature, and its merits should be assessed with regard to these dual trajectories. From a theoretical perspective, Improvisation as Art may be regarded as one of the most clear and compelling scholarly attempts to deploy Luhmann’s systems-theoretical framework to revise our understanding of aesthetics and retell the history of modernity, and is therefore comparable to recent interventions made along these lines by David Wellbery and Cary Wolfe.

To those unfamiliar with this theoretical approach, it may seem almost provocative to rethink a phenomenon as seemingly fluid as improvisation through the lens of systems. And yet, this would be to misunderstand the very concept of the system in Luhmann’s theory: a system is perpetually organizing itself in response to an environment exterior to it in a way that is decisive for its internal structure, finding pathways of connectivity in situations saturated with contingency, unpredictability, and complexity.

One of Landgraf’s central contentions consists in the argument that systems theory can account for improvisation in a way that is sensitive to the richness of the phenomenon while at the same time avoiding some of the pitfalls of other theoretical perspectives, above all Derridean deconstruction. Derrida argues that improvisation—as an activity that, in an absolute sense, entails the emergence of something wholly new or unexpected—is impossible precisely because its intelligibility depends upon preexistent practices against which something stands out as improvisational. For example, a jazz performer in a concert does not in fact bring something absolutely new into the world; such acts are interpreted in the light of previous similar instances and must be evaluated against a series of comparable events in order to have meaning. According to Derrida, improvisation therefore presupposes, and even reinforces—even if only through transgressing—the rule that it seeks to suspend.

Landgraf criticizes Derrida’s essentialization of planning, calculation, and structure as diametrically opposed to innovation. Indeed, precisely those elements that make improvisation impossible for Derrida are seen to enable it from a systems-theoretical perspective: stability, repetition, and variation constitute the conditions of possibility of improvised acts rather than their conditions of impossibility. This insight allows Landgraf to show how constraint (e.g., the “formulas” governing jazz music), techniques of staging and framing (the “venue” of the concert), and social and cultural expectations in processes of recognition (the “audience” for whom this situation is more or less intelligible) form an irreducible part of aesthetic practices claiming to be improvisational.

Much of the book is dedicated to a historical account of how improvisation functions not merely as a model for the emergence of novelty amidst constraints, but as a way in which artistic practices, beginning in the late eighteenth century, framed their practices as artistic practices in relation to improvisation. The historical narrative unfolds roughly along the following lines.

The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on didacticism and moral improvement, was, in general, suspicious of improvisation. The emergence of the notion of aesthetic autonomy in the late eighteenth century—or the way in which art distinguishes itself as art by referring to its own modes of production and reception rather than, for example, relying on civil society, church, or state as sources of normativity—then coincides with a...