Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives 9781441146946, 1441146946

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN GERMAN STUDIES

Vol. 1

Series Editor:

Imke Meyer

Editorial Board: Katherine Arens, Roswitha Burwick, Richard Eldridge, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Catriona MacLeod, Jens Rieckmann, Stephan Schindler, Heidi Schlipphacke, Ulrich Schönherr, Silke-Maria Weineck, David Wellbery, Sabine Wilke, John Zilcosky.

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Improvisation as Art Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives

Edgar Landgraf

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The Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2011 Edgar Landgraf All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-4694-6 Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound in the United States of America

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For Angela, Allan, and Alexander

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: On Conceptualizing Improvisation 1 Performance, Inventiveness and Improvisation: Theoretical Contentions 1.1 Derrida’s Inventiveness 1.2 Calculating Incalculability: The Neocybernetic Alternative 1.3 From Iteration to Improvisation 2 Indescribability, Perfection, Unpredictability: Improvisation and Aesthetic Autonomy 2.1 Instrumentalizing Improvisation? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 2.2 Improvisation and Aesthetic Autonomy 2.3 Improvisation and Aesthetic Perfection: Karl Philipp Moritz 2.4 Improvisation and the Artist-Genius

ix 1 14 19 29 33 42 47 57 59 73

3 Staged Improvisation: The Generative Principles of Romantic Irony 3.1 Reframing the Space of the Theater 3.2 Staged Improvisation 3.3 Romantic Principles of Artistic Production 3.4 Social Bearings

84 87 91 96 102

4 Improvisation, Agency, Autonomy: Heinrich von Kleist and the Modern Predicament 4.1 Facilitating Prohibitions

109 111

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4.2 Improvisation as Political Practice 4.3 The Incalculability of Calculation 4.4 Kleist’s Pedagogical Program

115 126 132

Conclusion: Experiencing Improvisation as Art

141

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Works Cited

153

Index

163

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Acknowledgments

As writing this book took its time, I am indebted to many scholars, colleagues, and friends for their input and support along the way. Indelible for my intellectual development were Bianca Theisen, who I hold in dear memory, and whose academic and personal integrity continue to inspire me; and David Wellbery, who has taught me the virtues of clarity and precision, and how to relate close textual analysis to bigger picture questions — while avoiding unnecessary academic pathos. Small pointers can go a long way. More specifically to the topic at hand, I have to thank Alexander Schlutz for inviting me to contribute a theoretical perspective on improvisation for a special issue of parapluie, which got the project started. I am grateful for Bruce Clarke’s continued support. His invitation to present on the topic at the 3rd SLS European Conference in Paris in 2004 and his feedback on the longer article that spun from the talk encouraged me to pursue a book-length study on the topic and to commit to the neocybernetic approach for it. Furthermore, I want to thank the participants of the panel on “Improvisation and Late Eighteenth Century Aesthetics” I organized for the ASECS conference 2005 in Las Vegas: Jocelyn Holland, Angela Esterhammer, Anthony Krupp, and Jennifer Milam; and Jocelyn Holland and Sydney Levy for inviting me in 2006 to speak at the Interdisciplinary Seminar on Improvisation at UC Santa Barbara. I received important input and direction at the conference on “Improvisieren. Unvorhersehbares Tun,” sponsored by the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft of the FU Berlin in 2008. In particular, I need to thank the organizers and generous hosts Hans-Friedrich Bormann, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Annemarie Matzke as well as Georg Bertram, Roland Borgards, and Sandro Zanetti: their presentations as well as our subsequent discussions helped shape this book. I also want to thank the DAAD and the University of Chicago for sponsoring, and David Wellbery for organizing, the summer seminar on “Narratives of Modernity: From Lessing to Luhmann” in 2009. The seminar helped sharpen the theoretical focus as well as the historical narrative of this study; and left sufficient time to explore Chicago’s vibrant jazz, Improv theater, and art scene.

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x Acknowledgments I owe special gratitude to Birgit Zinner for her generosity in providing images of her work for the cover of this book; and for a memorable lunch and afternoon in her Vienna studio in the summer of 2008. Discussing the use of improvisation in the production of her image-objects confirmed that theoretical reflections are not necessarily antithetical to matters of praxis. Jocelyn Holland supported this project through many stages, providing valuable feedback on content and ever-astute stylistic suggestions. Thanks for being a wonderful friend. Finally I want to thank my family for their unwavering support, especially my late father for introducing his sons early to jazz, and my brother Wilbert, for continuing to share in this tradition (and for a many cheerful evenings, phone calls, and emails on the matter). Most of all, I need to thank my wonderful wife Angela and our two boys, Allan and Alexander, for their patience, support, and love during this timeconsuming process.

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Introduction: On Conceptualizing Improvisation

Improvisation enjoys the curious distinction of being both the most widely practiced of all musical activities and the least acknowledged and understood. While it is today present in almost every area of music, there is an almost total absence of information about it. Perhaps this is inevitable, even appropriate. Improvisation is always changing and adjusting, never fixed, too elusive for analysis and precise description; essentially non-academic. (Derek Bailey, Improvisation, ix) Many studies of improvisation begin by lamenting the difficulties the conceptualization of improvisation poses. For the British musician, editor, author, and documentarian Derek Bailey (1930–2005), the transitory nature of improvisation prohibits any precise analysis. He outright questions the appropriateness, even the possibility, of an academic description of improvisation, and instead insists that a “meaningful consideration of improvisation” can only come “from a practical and personal view point” (Improvisation, x).1 Although arriving at the opposite conclusion, Jacques Derrida’s famous claim about the impossibility of improvisation represents but a different version of Bailey’s concern regarding improvisation’s comprehensibility. Derrida also juxtaposes the fleetingness of improvisation with the fixity of text, but rather than questioning

1

Model writings on improvisation from a “practical and personal view point” are Keith Johnstone’s Impro. Improvisation and the Theater (1979) and Stephen Nachmanovitch’s Free Play. Improvisation in Life and Art (1990). While I am critical of the first-person narrative approach to the study of improvisation (which, despite a recent influx of academic works on the subject continue to make up the majority of works on improvisation), it is not to deny that these books contain a wealth of interesting observations on improvisation. Nachmonovitch, for example, already notes (but does not expand on) one of the main theses that this book wants to substantiate, namely that “in a sense, all art is improvisation” (Free Play, 6).

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the appropriateness of academic description, he denies credence to improvisation because it appears to be irreconcilable with the structural properties of text. Gary Peters’ 2009 book The Philosophy of Improvisation continues this tradition when he questions the appropriateness of theories of improvisation. Unlike a philosophy of improvisation that “(re-)locates this practice within the productive movement of philosophical thought itself,” any such theory would separate itself from improvisatory practice and subject itself to “the dubious openness of discussion and theoretical disputation” (147).2 Despite such fundamental concerns, however, our understanding of improvisation in and beyond music has advanced greatly since Bailey’s book. Inadequacies derive less from the subject matter and more from an unwillingness to put the aesthetic categories used in witness accounts and the descriptions of practitioners in their proper cultural and historical context. The worst cases amount to little more than the replication of stereotypes about improvisation, about the non-improvised arts, art in general, and even about academic approaches to matters of praxis; more often, it is simply a matter of falling short in grasping the complexity, challenges, and reach of improvised doings. When Bailey, as in the quote above, delineates improvisation from its description, drawing on the distinction between the transitory and the fixed, he oversimplifies the matter on both accounts. Neither can improvisation fully escape “fixity” (structure, repetition, planning, practice, experience), nor would descriptions ever fully escape the transitory. Moreover, any attempt to understand improvisation has to draw on categories, codes, concepts, and values that are neither purely practical, nor purely personal, in the sense employed by Bailey; they always already reflect a culturally and historically formed viewpoint that defines not only the evaluation, but the basic conceptualization of improvisation on which “personal” assessments, propositions, and arguably the experience of an improvised performance itself are based. This is a problem affecting all considerations of improvisation from “a practical and personal point of view” and includes the idea that “[i]mprovisation is always changing and adjusting, never fixed, too elusive for analysis and precise description; essentially non-academic.” The problem is not merely that there is an element of self-contradiction when such statements are followed by extensive and by all means useful descriptions of the improvising process in different cultures and musical genres. The 2

Christopher Dell argues similarly that “writing about matters of praxis are always deficient” and conceives of his book as an “improvisation about improvisation, an attempt about an attempt. Through this method, theory becomes part of the praxis it addresses” (Prinzip Improvisation, 7–8; unless indicated otherwise, all translations from German primary and secondary sources in this book are mine).

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Introduction

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more salient problem is that the statement itself implies a quite precise description and knowledge of the phenomenon it contests it cannot describe. This problem applies to any claims about the elusiveness, the indescribability or incommunicability of the phenomenon of improvisation: they are caught in a circle of self-contradiction; they fix, describe, and communicate the meaning of improvisation as transitory, indescribable, or incommunicable. Furthermore, such statements construct what they observe as unobservable around distinctions (such as those between fixed/transitory, describable/indescribable, practice/theory) that have their particular descriptive value and place in an aesthetic tradition that one does not escape simply by reversing the valuation or hierarchies this discourse suggests. There is no way around it: any description, any conceptualization, any understanding of improvisation, be it by practitioners or not, will draw on aesthetic categories and value distinctions that will not only define, but also constitute the object they observe — even when that object is thought to be elusive, indescribable, incommunicable. Against such claims of the impossibility or indescribability of improvisation, the present study takes the stance of asserting both the possibility and usefulness of an academic and theoretically refined consideration of improvisation. The point of recognizing that proclamations of indescribability are still descriptions is precisely not to confuse the description with the practice, but rather to acknowledge fully their heterogeneity. One of the primary lessons of twentieth-century critical thought was to debunk the belief that, as Richard Rorty put it, “the object that the proposition is about imposes the proposition’s truth” (Mirror of Nature, 157). Surely, the description of an improvisation is not the same as what it purports to describe. Nevertheless, as with the description of a chair or anything else — I am tempted to ask, which one is more fleeting, the chair or its description? — there is ample room to discuss and theorize the validity of certain descriptions or claims over others. For, if it is not the object that imposes a proposition’s truth, it must be other propositions. To make the case, this study will revisit the pertinent theoretical and aesthetic debates that have challenged (but also helped to expand) the academic interest in improvisation in recent years; as well as revisit aesthetic thought, especially as it evolved in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and continues to define (at the very least as a foil) our contemporary understanding of art, agency, and creativity.3 3

I am using the term “creativity” throughout this study, mindful, though, that it became popular only in the second half of the twentieth century, mediated by psychological concerns; and that the term, although it “helped to universalize, deontologize, and take away from the nobility of older ideas of genial productivity” (Blamberger, Geheimnis, 29), continues to be indebted to notions of intentionality and subjectivity that this study wants to review critically.

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The goal is to examine more closely the theoretical contentions that surround improvisation, in order to question, sharpen, and expand the categories, concepts, and distinctions used for the analysis of improvisation in art; and to review these categories in the context of the emergence of our modern (Western) understanding of art. With regard to the latter, this book hopes to advance, not so much a cultural, but a conceptual history of improvisation that seeks to connect the contemporary debates surrounding the practice and performance of improvisation and their cultural significance to the beginnings of modern aesthetics. The idea that art is indescribable, for example, has a long history and acquires new significance in the context of the eighteenth-century aesthetics of autonomy. Put differently, this study proposes to examine the lens that informs personal accounts by practitioners or witnesses of improvised performances. For academics and artists alike, this lens has been polished by the aesthetics of autonomy, that is, in very general terms, by an understanding of art that has gained broad acceptance since the late eighteenth century and that acknowledges that art constitutes its own mode of expression, has its own history, defines its own conditions of membership, and can take many different forms (dance, literature, music, painting, sculpture, theater, and so on). The structure of this book reflects its two-pronged approach to improvisation. The first chapter examines more closely the contentions raised by poststructuralist thought concerning improvisation and its ties to inventiveness and categories of the performative. Taking as a starting point Judith Butler’s famous definition of gender as a “practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (Undoing Gender, 1), the chapter narrows the scope of the investigation and hones in on the most contentious conceptual challenges faced by performance studies in general and by improvisation in particular. These challenges include the question of agency, the privileging of live performances over mediated forms of artistic presentation, and what is often seen as the inherent limit of improvisation: its ties to repetition. Turning to Derrida’s work, we will focus on two texts that address these questions most succinctly. The first is “Play — The First Name: 1 July 1997,” a short script on improvisation that Derrida read during a live performance with the father of Free Jazz, Ornette Coleman. The second is the essay “Psyche. Inventions of the Other,” which develops in more detail the ideas articulated in Derrida’s performance script. I show how the questions of performative immediacy and inventiveness are both linked to the problem of iterability. Derrida demonstrates how performativity and really all notions of singularity, originality, or immediacy are always already tied to repetition (otherwise, these notions cannot be communicated, understood, or even recognized). From Derrida’s vantage point, then, it is impossible to conceive of improvisation as a doing that would be inventive, original, or immediate in any pure sense.

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Derrida embeds the failure of “true” inventiveness in a larger narrative of modernity. Modernity for Derrida hinges on inventiveness, and yet denies it its inventive force, a force that would not merely “discover” a pre-existing order, but “allow for the advent” of something new, truly incalculable, truly unpredictable. As part of this historical narrative, Derrida frames his own work, the labor that is deconstruction, as confronting the need to “reinvent invention itself” (“Psyche,” 60). This labor seems most “inventive” precisely where it continues to reflect the impossibility of its own project. This is where I suggest we turn to an alternative take on the problem of invention, one that can easily be related to Derrida’s argument, while offering an outside perspective on it. First published in 1984 (one year before Derrida’s essay), Heinz von Foerster’s now classic “Disorder/Order: Discovery or Invention?” analyzes the very distinction that drives Derrida’s argument concerning changes in the semantics of invention. What distinguishes von Foerster’s neocybernetic argument from its counterpoint in deconstruction is a different bias toward calculation. When von Foerster understands disorder (and with it unpredictability, chance, and noise) as a product of the very language used to describe it, and subsequently draws on mathematics to calculate incalculability, he operates within the blind spot that enables Derrida’s argument condemning modernity for its “programmatics of chance” (that is for its attempts since Leibniz to make the incalculable calculable). Von Foerster challenges the rigid distinction between the calculable and the incalculable, suggesting and mathematically demonstrating that calculation is not antithetical to the incalculable, but rather that both are products of calculations. The incalculable, too, is an artifact of the particular language employed to describe it. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s work, I expand von Foerster’s argument and demonstrate that neocybernetic thought fundamentally changes how we should envision improvisation. It asks us to observe the language that constructs inventiveness and assumes that variation and innovation are necessary and quite ordinary in emerging systems. The conceptualization of improvisation, then, need not concern itself so much with the advent of Otherness, but rather with the mechanisms that promote variation and lend stability and connectivity to innovation. From this vantage point, improvisation is not about the absence of rules and structures, nor about the advent of a true Otherness, but rather can be understood as a selforganizing process that relies on and stages the particular constraints that encourage the emergence of something new and inventive. The chosen methodology will allow us to appreciate the paradoxes post-structuralist thought recognizes with regard to improvisation, yet conceptualize them, not as hindrances, but as motors of improvised doings. I am also drawing on systems theory to contextualize socio-historically — that is, embed in a general theory of modernity

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— the structural and philosophical issues inevitably raised by a closer examination of improvised doings. This is an important step and one often ignored by studies that look at improvisation across cultural and historical lines. While they tend to focus on variations in the techniques employed and on differences in the cultural significance attributed to improvisation, they rarely ask how their own assessments of these practices are informed by a particularly modern understanding of improvisation in the first place. As Western society’s understanding of art changed fundamentally in the second half of the eighteenth century, the meaning and expectations for improvisation also changed. Central, of course, is the modern emphasis on inventiveness. Before the eighteenth century, inventiveness was not a major concern, neither for art in general, nor for improvisation in particular. Adorno’s famous (and rather grumpy) responses to jazz and jazz improvisation demonstrate how much the criterion becomes the deciding factor for the recognition of art in modernity. Contrary to popular belief, at its base, I would argue, is not the commercialization and consumerism that jazz supposedly supports more than “true art” should; rather, Adorno wants to protect the consumer from what he perceives to be the lack of originality in jazz. Jazz, Adorno claims, “serves to betray the consumer. The betrayal here consists in always offering the same thing” (Essays, 307).4 That Adorno’s assessment is disingenuous (to say the least) is hardly meliorated by the fact that his essays on jazz were written before the advent of bebop. While bebop put increased emphasis on individualized, inventive improvisation that led to jazz gaining wider recognition as an art form, it continues to rely on the use of patterns and schemas. Whatever other cultural stereotypes about jazz and the practice of improvisation might have fed Adorno’s ire, his unwillingness to recognize jazz’s inventiveness points toward a conceptual problem, namely his insistence on a rigid separation between inventiveness and repetition and the inability to derive inventiveness from repetition. I will return to this conceptual challenge in more detail 4

A few paragraphs later in the same essay “On the Fetish-Character in Music,” Adorno again denies jazz its inventive force, declaring the “jazz amateur” to be “the real jazz subject: his improvisations come from the pattern, and he navigates the pattern, cigarette in mouth, as nonchalantly as if he had invented it himself” (310). Ulrich Bielefeld notes, however, that despite his aversion to jazz, Adorno uses improvisation as a technique of composition in his own writing (“Form der Freiheit,” 72). For Gary Peters, too, Adorno’s problem is the “language of self-promotion” that surrounds improvisation “rather than improvisation itself or the principle of free individuality . . . In a sense improvisors are betrayed by this language, which, in short-circuiting the immanent dialectical work necessary to establish and recognize the aporia of subjectivity, leaves them with little more than a stock of clichés, offering no real insight into the complexity or potential of their own practice” (Philosophy of Improvisation, 78).

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later, arguing that neocybernetics and contemporary systems theory offer a vocabulary that allows us to overcome this impasse. How much the association of improvisation with inventiveness is not only a modern, but also a Western, expectation a quick comparison with a non-Western tradition such as the Indian raga elicits. In Indian music, improvisation is recognized as an art form of the highest artistic value. Yet, inventiveness is neither its goal, nor its main focus. As Roland Kurt points out, from our Western vantage point, Indian musicians are neither original nor creative (“Komposition,” 29).5 The Indian example also shows how the expectations for inventiveness in the modern, Western tradition are closely linked to concepts of agency and expressivity that originate from eighteenth-century notions of subjectivity and genius. A central vanishing point of this investigation will be to revisit such notions of agency and genius as they emerge in late eighteenth-century aesthetics and see how they inform our understanding of improvisation and its recognition as art. While improvisation is a cross-cultural phenomenon presumably as old as humankind, this study will focus on the particular function, conceptual challenges, and expectations its practice presents for the modern, Western understanding of art. The subsequent chapters of this book are dedicated to the exploration of precisely these changes in the conceptualization of improvisation as they accompany the emerging aesthetic and anthropological discourses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this time period, we can witness how the practice of improvisation on stage (within the Commedia dell’arte and related theatrical traditions) and in music is, for the most part, banished from “high art.” As a victim of the distinction between “high” and “low” art — a distinction that relies heavily on separating the eternal from the transitory, the fixed from the fleeting, the ideal and general from the actual and particular — improvisation is suppressed from “official” aesthetic considerations. This does not mean that improvisation would have disappeared altogether. In Europe’s theaters, for example, improvisation did not lose much of its popularity even at the pinnacle of the Enlightenment era, despite its official extrication from the stage and despite state-sponsored censorship. My concern, though, is less with the continuation of improvisational traditions throughout Europe during that period (a topic covered in depth by Angela Esterhammer’s comprehensive study of the representation of improvisation in European Romanticism) than it is with its reception and initial suppression by modern aesthetics. This suppression must surprise if we consider that in the eighteenth century, aesthetics comes

5

Honoring the importance of improvisation in Indian culture, Bailey puts its analysis at the beginning of his book (Improvisation, 1–11).

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to reject rule-governedness and the mimesis postulate and thus puts all emphasis on newness, originality, and immediacy, making it all but impossible to plan art. In a strict sense, the modern artist finds herself in a position of improvisio in the Latin sense of the term: she cannot foresee or otherwise know the artwork before its completion. It is, then, as a conceptual problem — how to conceive of the art-creating process as something that does not follow a plan or rule, but must seem unforeseen and unforeseeable — that improvisation leaves its mark on the emerging aesthetic discourse and specifically on the aesthetics of genius. The proximity of improvisation to the aesthetics of genius can be gauged by the first-hand accounts of improvisational performances we find in the writings of such notables as Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–93) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832); or in the celebratory identification of both in Carl Ludwig Fernow’s “Über die Improvisatoren” from 1801, the first book-length study of improvisation published in German. A closer examination of the underlying aesthetics will reveal that with notions of genius, of active unconscious drives, and of nature speaking through the artist, the late eighteenth century attempts to recuperate agency and the teleology of the creative process under the conditions of aesthetic autonomy. Put more provocatively, the concept of the artistgenius is used, I argue, to hide how the idea of aesthetic autonomy condemns the modern artist (publicly or not) to draw on improvisational techniques during the creative process. The third chapter of this book investigates how the perceived impossibility to intend art receives a different treatment in German Romanticism, where improvisation is rediscovered thematically and subsequently explored explicitly as a generative principle. The main focus will be the writings of the influential literary critic, publicist, and Romantic theorist Adam Müller (1779–1829) who models his theory of a “universal comedy” after the improvisational theater. Müller’s writings provide a unique opportunity to examine the Romantic rediscovery (and reinvention) of improvisation in the context of early German Romantic theory. His elaborations on the universal comedy read like an explication of Friedrich Schlegel’s famous Lyceum fragment No. 42 from 1797, where Schlegel defines Romantic irony with reference to the Commedia dell’arte as a “truly transcendental buffoonery” (Philosophical Fragments, 6). Early German Romanticism is known as a period of intense theoretization, reaching a level of reflexivity that for the most part is only matched again in (late) twentieth-century post-structuralist thought (hence the continued interest in German Romanticism). With regard to Romanticism’s rediscovery of improvisation, this is evident in a number of areas. By staging improvisation, the Romantic comedy presents an immediate challenge to the distinction between the transitory nature of a performance and the presumed stasis of textual

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prescription, a challenge that with regard to Schlegel’s concept of irony is not seen as contradictory to the performative, but rather as unlocking its full poetic potential. Furthermore, early German Romantic theory no longer anchors artistic creativity in the special abilities of the artist, but rather attempts to understand the fashioning of art as autopoietic. This presents a radical break from the aesthetics of genius, a break that surprisingly is in tune with contemporary analyses of improvisation (most notably with R. Keith Sawyer’s analysis of the structure and dynamics of improvised dialogues as they are performed on contemporary Improv theater stages).6 Adam Müller points toward the dialogical structure of the improvisational theater to articulate how a work of art can emerge from a self-guiding, self-reflexive process that creates original, unpredictable, and unforeseen artistic performances that go beyond what the participants in the process could have planned or otherwise envisioned in advance. Finally, early German Romantic theory, in its attempt to poetize “real life,” also expands the significance of improvised doings beyond its narrowly defined practice in poetry, theater, and music. Improvisation becomes the model for how the novelistic (anti-)heroes of the Romantic era relate to their social surroundings and their own future. While in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship improvisation still appears to figure as a transitional stage in the educational program that is the novel, the Romantics recognize the problem of unpredictability as irresolvable and the ability to improvise as crucial for what in German is known as Lebenskunst (literally: the art of living).7 The last chapter focuses on the writings of Adam Müller’s publishing partner and more famous friend, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811). Deeply engaged with the philosophy and politics of his time, Kleist’s writings frame improvisation as a central aesthetic principle and a means for the assertion of agency and autonomy. I take as my starting point a short but highly reflexive anecdote by Kleist that describes the actor Unzelmann improvising (in response to a horse on stage accidentally dropping dung) by citing the very law that prohibited him from doing so (he turns to the horse and says: “Were you not forbidden to improvise?”). Kleist’s anecdote not only asserts the theater’s autonomy while critically referencing Kantian models of aesthetic production (of the genius’s ability to let nature — here: dung — give art its rule), but also dissolves the antithesis between law/rule and improvisation, recognizing the former as a structurally necessary component for the 6 7

I will expand on and historically contextualize Sawyer’s descriptions of improvised performances in terms of self-organizing processes in Chapter 3. In German, Lebenskunst carries not only the sense of knowing how to enjoy life and the good things in life (as with the French term savoir vivre), but also retains the artistic ideal, the ability to turn your life into a work of art.

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latter. In fact, Kleist’s anecdote demonstrates one of the central theses of this study: how the very laws and ideals that prohibit improvisation still in the early nineteenth-century simultaneously enable the inventive reintegration of improvisation into the modern art system. Kleist’s figurations of improvised doings, however, go beyond their artistic uses. Kleist expands the understanding of improvisation as a particular mode of engaging and (up-)staging rules and laws to address fundamental political, pedagogical, and social concerns of his time. Most famously, Kleist explains the beginning of Europe’s modern political order, the French Revolution, as the result of an improvised speech. While Kleist’s description of Mirabeau’s speech is somewhat unique in its reach, the political and legal paradoxes it cites reappear frequently in Kleist’s literary texts and even mark his pedagogical writings. The latter reveal how his preference for improvisation over premeditation is motivated by an anthropology that is critical of the Enlightenment’s grounding of ethical ideals within a universalized notion of human nature. For Kleist, agency, inventiveness, and even human freedom are not grounded in nature, the “perfectible predispositions” (Rousseau, Kant) that form the basis of the philanthropic and the neo-humanistic pedagogical schools of his time; but rather, in Kleist such qualities emerge from combative and competitive forms of social interaction. More precisely, for Kleist, it is only in one’s spontaneous interactions with others — in a process of constant improvisation — that the self can assert itself, however provisional such assertions might be. If Kleist’s figurations of improvised doings anticipate late twentieth and early twenty-first century figurations of agency (e.g. Judith Butler’s definition of gender as “improvisation within a scene of constraint”), it is, I contend, because he recognizes the anthropological predicament a highly structured society creates that nevertheless emphasizes inventiveness and autonomy and defines itself in terms of an open future. Although it will take another century until improvisation is recognized again as a legitimate form of artistic production and presentation, the historical considerations of this study end with Kleist. As indicated, the aim of this book is not to provide a more or less complete history of improvisation in art, but rather to engage the conceptual challenges presented by improvisation and rethink contemporary assertions about improvisation alongside the evolving aesthetics of autonomy. By focusing on the aesthetics of genius, on Romantic theory, and on Kleist’s writings, this book covers three major responses to the conceptual challenges improvisation poses to modern art, moving from a subjectcentered aesthetic theory that hopes to rescue agency and teleology, to one emphasizing collaborative doings that necessarily exceed the purview of the individual, to models of agonality where agency is conceived as the effect rather than source of improvisation. The analysis of the

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theoretical contentions surrounding improvisation and their historical context lead this study to pursue three major theses that can be summarized as follows: ●

●

●

improvisation cannot be decoupled from structure and repetition; rather than being the expression of unbridled freedom, improvisation must be seen as a mode of engaging existing structures and constraints; improvisation is best understood as a particular mode of staging art that shares properties common to various individual arts and fulfills many of the expectations we have for the arts in general; improvisation cannot be viewed independently of the social and cultural context of its articulation. For our modern, Western culture, the expectations we hold for its practice as much as its significance and recognition as art are linked to aesthetic categories that take hold in the late eighteenth century and continue to inform our basic understanding of art.

This book’s broader claims regarding the aesthetic and social significance of improvisation within Western culture should not be diminished by the fact that its historical argument focuses primarily on the German aesthetic tradition. Aesthetic thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a European and, by extension, Western phenomenon that takes place as part of an intense debate between writers from different schools of thought from a variety of countries. The importance of authors such as Voltaire or Shaftesbury on German aesthetics is well established; so is the tremendous reach that the aesthetic writings of Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Kant, Schiller, or Hegel have had (and continue to have until this day), giving direction to much of the debates that surround Western society’s understanding of art since this time period. That the German tradition has been highly influential on contemporary aesthetic thought (and hence continues to command a high degree of familiarity) is in large part due to the fact that it is here that the concept of aesthetic autonomy, as it is adopted throughout the West, finds its first comprehensive articulations. It is, however, not only the high degree of familiarity that German aesthetic thought commands internationally that justifies the focus on this particular tradition. In Early German Romanticism and in Heinrich von Kleist’s writings, we also find alternatives to the aesthetics of expressivity and genius that continue to dominate much of improvisation’s popular reception, especially in the English-speaking world. In particular the Romantic shift from a subject-centered to a (for lack of a better word) systems-centered theory of creativity allows us to approach improvisation from a new and productive angle that can overcome some of the dichotomies and structural

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impasses that have haunted many studies of improvisation over the last few decades. As Gary Peters points out, one such dichotomy, expressive of opposing trajectories in the (popular) reception of improvisation over the last 50 years, concerns the opposition between, on the one hand, improvisation seen as a highly individualistic practice, one of “brash and virtuosic exhibitionism that excited performers and audiences alike before the 1960s” and, on the other, improvisation becoming “increasingly submerged in a collective language of care and enabling, of dialogue and participation, a pure, aesthetically cleansed language of communal love” (Philosophy of Improvisation, 24). It is noteworthy that improvisation seemingly can accommodate both delectations, an increased focus on difference, singularity, and originality as much as celebrations of sameness, universality, and community.8 The question — which Peters’ book leaves unanswered — is whether both tendencies cannot be related to each other. That would imply thinking the differential aspects of improvisation, its ties to inventiveness, alterity, and newness, also as a communal, or maybe, to use a more neutral term, as a social phenomenon. This is where early German Romanticism, for example, in Adam Müller’s Theory of Contradiction (Schriften, 193–248) anticipates conceptual options that I will expand on by drawing on contemporary systems theory. For if we take dialogue and the dynamics of communication rather than “community” as a model of improvisational practice, we do not have to think of it in terms of overcoming contradiction and differences, but rather as improvisation exploring the productivity and inventiveness of contentious social processes that supersede the purview of the individual. Finally, I want to comment briefly on the methodological choices for this study. While at first glance it might seem like a somewhat eclectic juxtaposing of concepts and insights taken from different schools of thought (primarily performance studies, deconstruction, and systems theory), there is a set of common assumptions that these methodologies share and that allow us to put them in what I would hope is a productive dialogue with each other that opens genuinely new perspectives on the conceptualization of improvisation. The common ground of these theories is formed by the high degree of reflexivity they afford; their tendency to question individualized notions of authorship and agency; their ability to conceptualize phenomena that elude simple either/or categorizations (e.g. fixed v transitory, repetitive v singular, structured v free); as well as the fact that all of these methodologies encourage us to be reflective of what I earlier called the “lens,” the language, concepts, 8

For more recent elaborations on the sense of community created by improvisation, see the collection of essays The Other Side of Nowhere, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble.

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and distinctions used to describe and construct the phenomenon under consideration. In this regard, this book follows one of the basic tenets of neocybernetic thought, namely its demand to include the observer into the descriptive system. To focus primarily on the language, concepts, and distinctions used to describe, observe, and understand improvisation, while not intended to serve as a practical guide, need not come at the expense of one’s appreciation of improvisation as a performance art. Whether as practitioners, observers, theoreticians, or simple admirers of improvisation, be it in jazz, theater, poetry, dance, or another art form; improvisation to be appreciated, understood, and ultimately experienced as art must draw on concepts and ideas that allow you to distinguish this particular artistic practice from other practices. Theoretical reflection of these concepts can make us more conscious observers of its practice. This, in turn, will have implications on how we experience, and for some, perhaps, even how they practice improvisation as art.

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1. Performance, Inventiveness and Improvisation: Theoretical Contentions

Jazz is not just: “Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.” It’s a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study. (Wynton Marsalis)1 Whereas in the arts (music, theater, dance, performance art) and in the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, management theory, even pedagogy)2 the practice of improvisation has been studied for decades quite extensively now, improvisation only recently caught the broader attention of the humanities.3 An increased willingness to engage interdisciplinary topics (one of the most challenging, yet also most rewarding aspects of any study of improvisation) and what we can call the humani-

1 2

3

Quoted in Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 63. For anthropology, see Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, edited by Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold. Angela Esterhammer understands the “distinct late-twentieth-century improvisational turn” as “evident above all in the postmodern sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau” (Romanticism and Improvisation, 152). For explorations of improvisation serving as a model in organizational theory, see Organizational Improvisation, edited by Ken N. Kamoche, Miguel Pina e Cunha, and João Vieira da Cunha and therein, with regard to management theories, see especially Marc Crossan and Marc Sorrenti, “Making Sense of Improvisation.” Most relevant for our study are Gary Peters’ The Philosophy of Improvisation (2009), Angela Esterhammer’s Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 (2008) and the collection of essays edited by Hans-Friedrich Bormann, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Annemarie Matzke: Improvisieren. Paradoxien des Unvorhersehbaren. Kunst — Medien — Praxis (2010).

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ties’ own “performative turn”4 contributed to the rediscovery and reassessment of improvisation, its history, its use as an inventive as well as a compositional tool, and the exploration of its cultural significance inside and outside Western traditions. Erika Fischer-Lichte notes how in the 1990s, three decades after the performative turn in art, a change emerges toward an understanding of culture as performance (rather than text) that makes the academic pursuit of performance art and of performative aspects within art possible (Transformative Power, 26–9). As the humanities discovered the ubiquity of the preference for performance over text in pre-modern and non-Western cultural traditions, they also began to notice how our own contemporary culture constitutes itself increasingly in theatrical acts and staged performances (Fischer-Lichte, “Theatralität und Inszenierung,” 11). Post-structuralist thought (initiated by Derrida’s work) helped facilitate this change in perspective, recognizing the applicability of the concept of the performative to non-artistic practices. It is within this theoretical context that performativity is used today to conceptualize the fashioning of agency and the constitution of social, cultural, legal, and even gender identity. Judith Butler’s work is most readily identified with expanding the significance of performativity to include as far-reaching a question as the social construction of gender. In the introduction to Undoing Gender (2004), Butler links the “doing” of gender specifically to improvisation: If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not “do” one’s gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary. What I call my “own” gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own. But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself). (1) Challenging the distinction between mechanical activity and intentional acts, Butler employs the concept of improvisation to renegotiate the 4

With “performative turn,” Fischer-Lichte describes the common tendency of different art forms in the 1960s to realize themselves in their performance rather than as works “detached from and independent of its creator and recipient” (Transformative Power, 22). Fischer-Lichte’s work plays an important role in ringing in the turn toward the performative in a wide array of academic disciplines.

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line dividing on the one hand what as constraint is perceived to belong to the social sphere, limiting, restricting, oppressing what on the other hand is seen as a self-sufficient, self-authoring “I” seeking to express its (gender-specific) identity against what one perceives as forms of social resistance. That is, Butler draws on the concept of improvisation to describe a person’s practice of enacting his or her identity in terms of a complex interaction between individual doing and societal constraint. She contends that gender identity — and more generally, agency — cannot be presupposed, but rather emerges where individual “doing” intersects with the particular social constraints it engages. Likening the construction of gender to improvisation, Butler conceives of gender — and by extension, the construction of the most fundamental tenets of a person’s identity, his or her being-in-the-world, the way you relate to yourself and your environment — as resulting from a continuing and continually changing performance. Gender is an act (not a biological fact), a continually performed act that does not follow a particular blueprint, but is equated with the practice of improvisation. What then is improvisation? Butler’s use of the term improvisation encompasses two of its most common definitions. In music, improvisation marks the simultaneous conception and presentation of art. 5 Analogously, we need to conceive of gender as existing in the manner of its simultaneous conception and presentation, as the product of a continued labor. Butler also invokes the sense implied by the literal meaning of the term derived from Latin, defining improvisation as an unforeseen, unforeseeable, and unplanned activity that is inventive, as any creative “doing” that, voluntarily or involuntarily, unfolds without following a predetermined plan. Within this broader definition, the quoted passage brings to light two aspects of improvisation that are crucial for the conceptualization of the relation between the individual and the social. Butler understands improvisation as a “practice” and she sees improvisation as being embedded within and hence defined (limited and fashioned) by a “scene of constraint.” The word “practice” underscores that improvisation, while not following a particular plan, nevertheless is an activity that relies on experience and repetition. Far from being the expression of unbridled freedom, improvisation marks a process that acquires a degree of consistency by connecting to — repeating and altering — what has come before. In art this is maybe more obvious than in other circumstances. In jazz, for example, improvisation not only requires extensive practice but is often described as a “doing” that looks back as it moves forward creatively, responding to, rephrasing,

5

See, for example, Ludwig Finscher’s Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, which offers a lengthy entry on the history of improvisation in music.

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changing and rejecting what has been played before. Paul Berliner quotes the drummer Max Roach, who compares playing a solo with having a conversation with oneself: “After you initiate the solo, one phrase determines what the next is going to be. From the first note that you hear, you are responding to what you’ve just played: you just said this on your instrument, and now that’s a constant. What follows from that? And then the next phrase is a constant. What follows from that? And so on and so forth. And finally, let’s wrap it up so that everybody understands that that’s what you’re doing. It’s like language: you’re talking, you’re speaking, you’re responding to yourself. When I play, it’s like having a conversation with myself” (Thinking in Jazz, 193). This is only one of many examples in Berliner’s book where jazz improvisers describe their doing as a simultaneous reiteration and alteration process. Along these lines, Ted Gioia distinguishes two creative methods. While traditional art follows what Gioia calls the blueprint method (i.e. plans ahead), improvisation uses the “retrospective method.” According to the latter, “the artist can start his work with an almost random maneuver — a brush stroke on a canvas, an opening line, a musical motif — and then adapt his later moves to this initial gambit” (Imperfect Art, 60).6 The idea of improvisation retrospectively developing and building on its own history allows us to understand better Butler’s use of the term to describe something as seemingly consistent and “fixed” as a person’s gender identity. Conceptualized as a process of reiteration and alteration, improvisation (whether in jazz or as an everyday practice) reveals itself as not necessarily antithetical to stability and continuity. Butler conceives of improvisation also in terms of its location as anything but the expression of unbridled freedom. The performance of gender is enveloped by constraint. These constraints do not merely limit or negate agency, but rather enable the “performance” of gender in the first place. Paul Johnson notes that Butler’s explanation of gender as a “practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” responds to critics who claim that her concept of performativity ignores the social limitations put on the enactment of gender (“Improvisation and Constraint,” 758). Highlighting the constitutive role of constraint, again, is not counterintuitive to the role constraint plays in artistic improvisation or even as practiced in everyday situations when proper tools, information, or plans are missing and, faced with the unexpected (e.g. the car breaks down, the computer crashes, one runs into a person one was not prepared to meet), you are forced to improvise, that is, solve a problem with limited

6

See also Keith Johnstone describing the narrative skills needed in theater improvisation: “The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future” (Impro, 116).

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and limiting temporal and material means (tools, excuses, and so on).7 Although in art we may find examples that include the opposite tendency, improvisation typically aims at creating recognizable patterns, forms, works, or other things out of more or less random perturbations. The classic Italian improviser as much as today’s Improv theater actor develops storylines, characters, and poetry based on unforeseen input provided by the audience or by other actors. Although the ability to engage constraints — they may be temporal, material, technical, genrespecific, linguistic, cultural, or societal — has traditionally led to the celebration of the improviser as a model of free agency, self-sufficiency, and unrestrained creativity, Butler reverses the causal link between doer and deed, giving primacy to the “doing” rather than the doer. She asks us to conceive of agency (or, more precisely, of the mere appearance of agency) as the result, not the source, of a continued, improvised practice. In this regard, improvisation’s object of invention — the “thing” created — is the improviser herself; for Butler, improvisation marks the simultaneous composition and performance of the “doer.” The question of agency and its relation to creativity — a term, as indicated in the introduction, I use with reservations — will be of concern throughout this book. Butler’s reference to improvisation serves as a good starting point for this chapter on the theoretical contentions surrounding improvisation for two reasons. First, because she explores the performance aspect of gender, Butler allows us to address improvisation not only with regard to particular artistic practices associated with this term and their reception in aesthetics, but also to approach it as an activity that concerns the fashioning of agency more generally. It is with this expanded notion of improvisation in mind that this study will return to the time period where, arguably, our modern notions of agency first emerged, and see what role improvisation (and its repression) played conceptually in the articulation of what summarily we might want to call “modern subjectivity.” Second, Butler invites a structurally intricate understanding of improvisation. Rather than locating in improvisation a celebration of personal freedom, authorship, and community (tags that continue to dominate the popular image of improvisation), Butler links those notions from the outset to constraint. Thus, improvisation serves as a model to elicit the complex relations and interdependencies between oppositional poles, such as those between freedom and constraint, between the personal and the societal, and more generally between the particular and the general. These distinctions and the hierarchies they 7

The first chapter of Gary Peters’ Philosophy of Improvisation approaches accidental situations that force improvisation under the heading “Scrap Yard Challenge — Junkyard Wars”: “The scrap yard challenge of the improvisor is to create something new within the decaying site of the old” (16).

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express are as important for the contemporary contentions regarding the structure of the performative as they are central to the emerging aesthetic and anthropological discourses of the time period under consideration in the subsequent chapters of this book.

1.1 Derrida’s Inventiveness Turning now to the theoretical tradition that informs Butler’s work, I want to focus on two conceptual challenges raised by improvisation, namely on the question of performative immediacy and on the problem of inventiveness itself. Both are central markers that drive important debates surrounding improvisation and performance studies in general. The question of performative immediacy concerns the general privileging of live performances over mediated forms of artistic presentation, be they text-based or in the form of (digital) reproductions of an event (a DVD, a webcast, etc.). In its ad hoc delivery, improvisation highlights the uniqueness of the “event” that is its performance. Yet, the immediacy of the compositional process has always also raised concerns regarding the quality and originality of improvisation. The forced temporality of a live performance can be seen either as enabling inventiveness or, confirming an old suspicion, as inviting repetitiveness. If in the following, I am turning to Jacques Derrida’s work, it is to focus on this key point of contention surrounding the aesthetics of performative immediacy as well as to show how the question of immediacy in (and beyond) improvisation is intricately linked to the question of inventiveness. In an unpublished interview from 1982, Derrida, who was known to have liked jazz, makes the following ambivalent statement: “And so I believe in improvisation, and I fight for improvisation, but always with the belief that it is impossible.”8 Despite his belief in its impossibility, though, in 1997 Derrida actively participated in an improvisational

8

See Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s film Derrida, Jane Doe Films, 2002. The full excerpt of the unpublished interview from 1982 reads: “It’s not easy to improvise. It’s the most difficult thing to do. Even when one improvises in front of a camera or a microphone, one ventriloquizes or leaves another to speak in one’s place, the schemas and languages that are already there. There are already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and our culture. All the names are already preprogrammed. It’s already the names that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One can’t say whatever one wants; one is obliged, more or less, to reproduce the stereotypical discourse. And so I believe in improvisation, and I fight for improvisation, but always with the belief that it is impossible. And there, where there is improvisation, I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself. And it is what I will see — no, I won’t see it, it is for others to see. The one who has improvised here, no, I won’t ever see him.” (http://video.google.com/ videoplay?docid=-7347615341871798222; the reading of the quote starts at 58:57.)

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event with none other than the father of Free Jazz, Ornette Coleman. Coleman, one of the twentieth century’s most ardent proponents of improvisation, had invited Derrida to join him on stage at one of his La Villette concerts in Paris, an invitation Derrida accepted on July 1, 1997, about a week after a private meeting between the two. The conversation they had during the initial meeting serves as a reference point for the text Derrida prepared for the occasion. Derrida, who was not properly introduced by Coleman and probably not recognized by many in the audience, was booed off stage about halfway through reading/performing his text.9 Ironically, the abrupt and unplanned end to Derrida’s performance underlines the very point from which Derrida’s text departs (it was published a few weeks later in the Les Inrockuptibles,10 a French pop-culture magazine). Derrida starts with a question that addresses the speaker’s (as well as the audience’s or reader’s) position of improvisio, of blindness toward the future: “Qu’est-ce qui arrive? What’s happening? What’s going to happen, Ornette, now, right now? . . . This chance frightens me, I have no idea what’s going to happen” (“Play,” 331–2).11 Acknowledging the unpredictability of the future (and how the future will come to define the present), the delivery of the speech plays 9

For an account of Derrida’s “performance,” see Nettelbeck, Dancing with de Beauvoir, 198–201. Nettelbeck notes the parallels between both icons of their respective fields: “Derrida’s conviction that all individual speech acts are bound to be a form of repetition within the context of existing verbal language coincides with Coleman’s belief that within the flux of musical language there is no fixed frontier between jazz improvisation and written composition. Coleman defends . . . an idea of the musical act as a form of discovery as well as of personal expression, a notion of invention that resists hierarchical distinctions between improvisation and inscription, but on the contrary highlights the dynamics of creativity inherent in the tension between composition and improvisation” (200). Nettelbeck, however, does not fully grasp the radical consequences of Derrida’s semio-ontology, when she locates “the essence of the affinity” between Derrida and Coleman in “the quest for an authenticity and uniqueness free of the trammels of power and commercialism” (199). As Sara Ramshaw argues in her highly elucidating article on Derrida’s understanding of jazz, law, and improvisation, Derrida’s observations fundamentally question the possibility of pure freedom and sheer spontaneity and “thereby challenge its exaltation in jazz and concurrent condemnation in law” (“Deconstructin[g],” 2). Roland Borgards’s interpretation of Derrida’s performance script expands on Derrida’s deconstruction of the medial opposition between music and text and associated hierarchies between time and space, breath and writing, ear and eye, performativity and textuality, noting how Derrida’s performance/reading demonstrates how “improvisation confirms the rule as it escapes it, needs the law it breaks” (“Gesetz,” 43). 10 In issue 115 (August 20 to September 2, 1997). More readily available is Timothy Murphy’s English translation of Derrida’s text, which I am quoting here. 11 Derrida mixed English and French in his text. The highlighted passages are in English in the original.

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with its own fallibility, its openness toward the advent of something unexpected, unplanned, unforeseen. Reflecting on the status of his performance (really on the performative aspect of any delivery of text), Derrida unsettles the distinction between a planned, textually prescribed act and improvised doings. The apparent reading of a text, a seemingly fixed, pre-composed, pre-articulated artifact, remains in a strict sense an improvisational exercise. The reader can neither fully control what is happening, nor foresee what will happen. The problem is not as abstract or marginal as it might seem at first glance. At least from the communicational perspective, Derrida indeed cannot fully plan or anticipate the event, for how and what defines the event hinges on various factors. The speaker’s ability to deliver the text artfully, comprehensibly, despite distractions, the speech’s reception by Ornette Coleman (will he answer Derrida’s address, and if so, how?), as well as the particular response of the audience/reader, are all involved in determining the meaning of the text and the performance as a whole. As Derrida knows better than anybody, these factors are beyond the control and beyond the purview of the speaker/author of a text. Derrida’s text does not only state such unpredictability, it also employs (and thus exposes) strategies that induce unpredictability. By opening up the text to dialogue, by including references to its reception, and through the process of self-application (the application of the concepts under investigation to the investigation itself), Derrida composes a text that playfully marks its openness. With these dialogical and self-referential gestures, Derrida’s text also pays tribute to important features that structure jazz improvisation. They address the text’s own process of composition, blurring the line between composition and presentation. But what does it mean to apply improvisational strategies to a text that nevertheless is presented in a seemingly un-improvised way (simply read out loud)? Derrida homes in on this very question when, paradoxically, he reads that he is improvising and claims that if it seems otherwise, if it seems that he is merely reading, we are deceiving ourselves: As all of you see, I have here a sort of written score, you think that I am not improvising, well, you are wrong. I am pretending not to improvise, I just pretend, I play at reading, but by improvising. (“Play,” 332) Derrida’s playful statement — playful and unpredictable because it questions its own pragmatic status — is not about him not reading (he authorized that the “written score” be published, and it is the written score that we are reading and citing here), but that he wants to be caught in a lie. What is said or read contradicts what must be apparent to the

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audience or reader. As Roland Borgards suspects, “the confession of the deception might be the actual deception” (“Gesetz,” 43). From the perceptual point of view, this creates a liar’s paradox. If he is lying, he is saying the truth (he is indeed reading); if, however, he is saying the truth, then what we perceive, namely Derrida reading a text, would indeed be a lie. The point of stating/staging such a paradox is, I would argue, to demonstrate how it is the reception of the performance that determines its meaning, a meaning, however, that cannot find certainty by referencing the intentions of the speaker. For the speaker himself cannot know how his performance will be perceived or how the created impasse will be decided by the audience or reader. Derrida thus creates a performance/ text whose meaning is unpredictable. For Derrida, the “fallibility” of a reading is, of course, not accidental, but rather is a structural mark of communication, a precondition for the possibility of communication in the first place. Communication works because the meaning of signs, words, text, and language can never be fully controlled or anticipated. The tension between repetition and alteration Derrida notes at the outset of “Play” elicits a central premise of Derrida’s thought, namely its focus on the question of iterability, on the necessary conditions for the possibility of communication to take place. In the essay “Signature Event Context,” Derrida works out most succinctly “the logic that ties repetition to alterity” (7) as a precondition for the communicative use of language and signs. Iterability necessitates that signs are repeatable independent of the intentions of the speaker or the presence of a specific referent or signified: [T]he possibility of disengagement and citational graft . . . belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written . . . Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written . . . can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable . . . This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could not even have a function called “normal.” (12) Signs entail an otherness, an alteration that separates the particular sign used from its previous instantiations and/or from the “general” case/ model that it cites in its use. In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida’s argument focuses on iterability being the mark not only of “writing,” but of all communication, including speech acts; that is, iterability also affects “the problematic of the performative” (13). A performance, too,

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must be recognizable and hence repeatable; it, too, is subject to the structure of iterability.12 Whereas in “Signature Event Context” Derrida emphasizes how the logic of the sign affects and undermines the proclaimed singularity of the performative event, he highlights in “Play” the other side of the same coin, tying the repetition that is the reading of a text to an alterity that also makes each reading a singular, unpredictable event, a performance in its own right. It is important to note that when Derrida deconstructs the dichotomy between text and performance positing “the general graphematic structure of every ‘communication,’” it is not to “draw the conclusion that there is no relative specificity of effects of consciousness, or of effects of speech (as opposed to writing in the traditional sense), that there is no performative effect, no effect of ordinary language, no effect of presence or of discursive event (speech act). It is simply that those effects do not exclude what is generally opposed to them, term by term; on the contrary, they presuppose it, in an asymmetrical way, as the general space of their possibility” (19).13 In other words, the uniqueness of a live performance, too, must be recognized as such, and qua its recognition is tied to the structure of iterability, is repeated and altered by the observer of the performance. Any recognition, understanding, even mere perception of an event as event, this is Derrida’s argument, is subject to the order of communication, and it is thus that the performative cannot escape the structure of iterability. Applied to the practice of improvisation, Derrida’s insight is not counterintuitive, but rather allows us to address a number of concerns expressed by practitioners and theoreticians alike. A performed improvisation, the moment it is recognized as such, is mediated by the cognitive structures and the (cultural) knowledge necessary for its identification as improvised doings. This is evident when we consider an uninformed audience that literally might not know what part of a performance is or is not improvised, an uncertainty that might itself be explored for improvisational purposes. During a skit that was part of Second City’s “America All Better,” for example, an actor interrupted the play, stepped out of his role, and, confessing his love for one of the actresses, turned a scripted proposal into a real proposal — or so it seemed — leaving unresolved whether the marriage proposal was sincere or merely a planned interruption that skillfully played with the expectations of a gullible

12 Derrida extends the structure of iterability to encompass all experience: “And I shall even extend this law to all ‘experience’ in general if it is conceded that there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks” (“Signature,” 10). 13 I will return to the question of how to conceptualize the “relative specificity” of performative effects without violating the law of iterability in the conclusion of this book.

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audience.14 But it is not only the layperson that may have difficulties clearly delineating improvised from non-improvised doings; experts and even performers themselves often note how they cannot determine with certainty how much of an improvisation was indeed improvised and how much was planned or repeated. There are practical limits to improvised performances (such as the impossibility of being radically inventive all the time); but equally important and closer to the implications of Derrida’s analysis is the problem that neither the audience, nor the artist, can assess the degree of inventiveness of an improvised performance without reference to the known, established, familiar, and planned from which improvisation needs to distinguish itself. Improvisation in art not only has to be recognizable, it also has to be recognizably inventive, that is, recognizably different from the known and predictable. Thus the known and predictable come to serve as a foil against which the performance can alone define itself as inventive. For artist and audience alike, then, the known and predictable define the conceptual horizon that limits and simultaneously enables the recognition of inventiveness in improvisation. It is in this sense that an improvised performance is always already mediated by the (cultural) knowledge that limits the space of its possibility. This does not mean that one cannot distinguish the experience of a live performance from the reading of a text or from watching it on DVD; merely that the differences one might want to observe around various modes of artistic presentation and consumption cannot be based on the distinction between immediate and mediated, singular and repetitious, totally free and completely fixed, absolutely spontaneous and fully rule-governed, and so on. The alternative is to think of it in terms of different modes of mediation, of different forms of presenting and staging art that affect how we “experience” art. A jazz concert performed in a concert hall will hold our attention differently, offer different acoustics, a different relationship between stage and audience, and also different forms of distractions (coughing, claustrophobia, etc.) than when we enjoy the same music in a jazz club, in the privacy of our home, or on our iPods. The correlation between the structure of iterability and improvisation that “Play” addresses rather playfully, Derrida explored in a more systematical and philosophically contextualized manner in “Psyche. Inventions of the Other.” This earlier (and longer) essay, which focuses on the (im)possibility of invention, starts with the same rhetorical gesture that marks the beginning of “Play,” namely with the suggestion of an improvised speech which links invention to improvisio, the unpredictability of the future: “What else am I going to be able to invent?” Derrida

14 I attended Second City’s “America All Better” in July 2009.

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again blends what the text does with what it describes when he asks his reader to imagine a lecture to begin with that question: What else am I going to be able to invent? Here perhaps we have an inventive incipit for a lecture. Imagine, if you will, a speaker daring to address his hosts in these terms. He thus seems to appear before them without knowing what he is going to say; he declares rather insolently that he is setting out to improvise. Obliged as he is to invent on the spot, he wonders again: “Just what am I going to have to invent?” But simultaneously he seems to be implying, not without presumptuousness, that the improvised speech will constantly remain unpredictable, that is to say, as usual, “still” new, original, unique — in a word, inventive. (“Psyche,” 25) The improviser’s promise is presumptuous because it ignores invention’s necessary susceptibility “to repetition, exploitation, reinscription” (28). Invention still adheres to the basic structure of language. Derrida explores at length the duplicities involved in invention: how, for example, it is bound to break and yet requires the law, how it must be singular and yet common to be recognizable, how at “the moment when it erupts, the inaugural invention ought to overflow, overlook, transgress, negate (or, at least — this is a supplementary complication — deny), the status that people would have wanted to assign to it or grant it in advance” (41) and yet how at the same time invention needs to conform to expectations, how it is in effect “essentially institutional” (43). In sum, Derrida argues that “every invention should make fun of the statutory, but without a prevailing statutory context there would be no invention” (45). Although Derrida relates invention and inventiveness to improvisation, I do not want to insinuate that both are identical. Inventiveness, however, is a central aspect of improvisation at least in modern art, and hence improvisation is susceptible to the same structural tension that Derrida notes with regard to invention and inventiveness.15 Both challenge and yet are shown by Derrida to be subject to the law of iterability that ties repetition to alterity and, vice versa, ties alterity, singularity, and uniqueness to the general, to rules, laws, and repetition. In “Psyche,” Derrida repeats this point specifically with regard to the problematic status of invention:

15 Sara Ramshaw expands on the shared qualities between invention and improvisation, pointing out that Derrida contests the understanding of both as events without precedent, as unique situations, or singularities (“Deconstructin[g],” 2).

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Improvisation as Art For there to be invention, the condition of a certain generality must be met, and the production of a certain objective ideality (or ideal objectivity) must occasion recurrent operations, thus a utilizable apparatus. If the act of invention can take place only once, the invented artifact must be essentially repeatable, transmissible, and transposable. The two extreme types of invented things, the mechanical apparatus on the one hand, the fictional or poetic narrative on the other, imply both a first time and every time, the inaugural event and iterability. (51)

The tension between the singular event and its simultaneous inscription in the always non-singular, repetitive structure of communication cannot be resolved. Invention and hence improvisation can never be absolute (absolutely free, singular, unique, or spontaneous), nor is it ever absolutely absent from the statutory, the rule, or the law. Based on this structural property, Sara Ramshaw can relate Derrida’s remarks on invention and improvisation to his writings on law and justice. In both cases, Ramshaw argues, Derrida explores the problematic relation between the singular and the general “in order to challenge the pure presence of singularity in invention, along with the universality, which is said to propel occidental law” (2). Ramshaw, though, notes opposite tendencies in the legal discourse as opposed to jazz when it comes to dealing with the nexus between the singular and the general, between the individual judicial act and the law it cites on the one hand and between the otherness and the musical structure with which a jazz improvisation engages on the other: “While bebop jazz, for example, must mask its structured elements in order to continue as a revolutionary and creative art form, the inverse is true for law: the inventive dimension of law must be subordinated to tradition and precedent in order to endure as authoritative and commanding in Western society” (4). The related yet differently oriented tension Ramshaw sees at work in jazz and in the legal system, Derrida understands as a central concern of modern philosophy, in fact, of modernity itself. Historically, modernity has tried to suppress, control, and make both calculable and foreseeable the “inventive dimension,” the singularity of each act. The treatment of inventiveness as a contaminant of sorts coincides with and presupposes an important semantic change that “stabilizes” at the dawn of modern philosophy. Derrida notes: [P]erhaps between Descartes and Leibniz, invention is no longer regarded as an unveiling discovery of what was already there (an existence or truth), but is more and more, if not solely the productive discovery of an apparatus that we can call technical in the

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broad sense, technoscientific or technopoetic. It is not simply that invention gets technologized. It was always tied to the intervention of a tekhnè, but in this tekhnè it is henceforth the production — and not the unveiling — of a relatively independent mechanical apparatus, which itself is capable of a certain self-reproductive recurrence and even of a certain reiterative simulation, that will dominate the use of the word “invention.” (“Psyche,” 48) It is “the advent of this regime of invention . . . that opens technoscientific or technoindustrial ‘modernity’” (54). Today, “in the domains of art or the fine arts as in the technoscientific domain,” Derrida argues, “[e]verywhere the enterprise of knowledge and research is first of all a programmatics of invention” (46). That is, Derrida associates the change from understanding invention as a mode of discovery to understanding invention as a mode of producing the singular and new as a central marker of a cultural change that is associated with modernity. If Derrida puts “modernity” in quotation marks, it is because modernity (scientifically as much as philosophically) fails to reinvent invention in a way that would signal a true departure from the cosmology that links invention to discovery. Invention continues to be seen as a supplementary tool, as a means to (re-)discover what already existed in a pre-determined (God-given) way. Derrida focuses specifically on the exclusion of chance, on the “aleatory margin” that has been suppressed or that one has tried to integrate into “programmatic calculations” from Leibniz to the governmental policies on modern science and culture and war (54–5). Modernity is still dealing with conceptions of chance that do “not contradict the principle of programmatic rationality or of the ars inveniendi as the enactment of the principle of reason, but illustrates its ‘new species of logic,’ the one that integrates the calculation of probabilities” (57).16 Derrida sees the same indebtedness to a programmatic rationality at work in the eighteenth century. Although the “rehabilitation of the transcendental imagination or the productive imagination from Kant to Schelling and Hegel” affects the status of invention, it does not liberate “philosophical inventiveness and the status of the invention from their subjection to an order of theological truth or to an order of infinite reason” (57). Even when Schelling turns Kant against Kant and calls for a philosophical poetics, proclaiming that a philosopher can be 16 Derrida’s argument is based specifically on Leibniz’s call for an examination of games of chance as potentially useful for perfecting the art of invention, as in games the human mind is thought to appear better than elsewhere. “The game here,” Derrida points out, “occupies the place of a psyche that would send back to man’s inventiveness the best image of his truth” (“Psyche,” 57).

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original — something, as Derrida points out, very new in the history of philosophy — he still views invention as “supplementary,” as “an addition that serves to complete a whole, to fill in where there is a gap and thus to carry out a program. A program that is still theological, still the program of an ‘original knowledge’ (Urwissen) that is also an ‘absolute knowledge,’ a total ‘organism’ that must articulate but also represent and reflect itself in all the regions of the world or of the encyclopedia” (58). Derrida thus sets up a narrative of modernity that understands “modernity” as denying inventiveness its inventive force, a force that would not merely discover a preexisting order, but allow for the advent of something new, truly incalculable, truly unpredictable. Derrida frames his own work, the labor that is deconstruction, as part of this historical narrative, as needing to “reinvent invention itself, another invention, or rather an invention of the other that would come, through the economy of the same, indeed while miming or repeating it” (60). Deconstruction needs to reinvent invention without subjecting it to programmatic calculations, yet while accepting and exploring the structure of iterability, of repetition and alteration, to which it is tied. For Derrida “the initiative or deconstructive inventiveness can consist only in opening, in uncloseting, destabilizing foreclusionary structures so as to allow for the passage toward the other” (60).17 As inventiveness “presupposes conventions and institutional rules,” deconstruction cannot invent ex nihilo or force invention; it needs to be more subtle, proceed “by bending these rules with respect for the rules themselves in order to allow the other to come or to announce its coming in the opening of this dehiscence” (59–60). The pollination metaphor recalls Romantic conceptions of creativity (Novalis entitled a collection of his fragments Blütenstaub, pollen dust). As we will explore in more detail in Chapter 3, Romantic poetic theories indeed confront a similar problem as Derrida, namely the perceived inability to intend poesy, which leads Novalis, for example, to call for a receptive stance toward the medium of poesy (language) allowing language to speak for itself. The insistence on Otherness and the “adventness” of invention lead Derrida to conclude his essay moving from Romantic to seemingly

17 Derrida’s essay “Signature Event Context” also ends on a highly self-reflective note concerning the goals and limits of the deconstructive framework; and with Derrida issuing an ethical imperative (note the “must” in the following quote) regarding his methodology: “Deconstruction cannot be restricted or immediately pass to a neutralization: it must, through a double gesture, a double science, a double writing — put into practice a reversal and a general displacement of the system. It is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it criticizes and that is also a field of nondiscursive forces” (21).

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religious reflections on the status of the other: “The other is indeed what is not inventible, and it is then the only invention in the world, the only invention of the world, our invention, the invention that invents us. For the other is always another origin of the world and we are (always) (still) to be invented. And the being of the we, and being itself. Beyond being” (61).18 Without stating it explicitly, these concluding lines of the essay “Psyche” return to the problem of improvisation that marked its beginning. If invention cannot be reduced to a singular moment, if it is by inventing invention that we invent ourselves, invention must take the form of a process, must be thought in terms of a doing that is “open” to the advent of an other that itself cannot be invoked or produced. Behind the sequential parenthesis “(always) (still),” we find the question that links the promise of invention to unpredictability, to the question “what else am I going to be able to invent” that is the “improvised speech act” with which Derrida’s essay started. The inventiveness of Derrida’s own discourse, then, is the paradox that completes his argument — by keeping it open, unresolved, unsolvable. Only by insisting on the impossibility of invention as the condition of its possibility, Derrida can account for singularity without negating iterability and yet without having to affirm some preexisting order that would reintegrate invention within a rationalistic cosmology. It is in this context that Derrida’s specific statement regarding the impossibility of improvisation must be viewed: “I believe in improvisation, and I fight for improvisation, but with the belief that it is impossible.”

1.2 Calculating Incalculability: The Neocybernetic Alternative So far, I have reconstructed Derrida’s argument, highlighting the structural intricacies of invention that impact our understanding of improvisation as well as the historical narrative that links changes in the semantics of invention to the advent of modernity. In the following, I want to look at an alternative take on the problem of invention, one that can easily be related to, yet also offers an outside perspective on, Derrida’s argument, possibly allowing us to avoid the celebration of improvisation’s impossibility without compromising the basic insight into its iterative structure. First published in 1984, at about the same time

18 I am tempted to call such reflections “religious,” not to take away from the complex structural analysis they entail, but because they attempt to speak about something that, by definition and their own admission, eludes signification; and because the exploration of this paradoxical structure, I suspect, serves the function of creating a sense of community, separating those that accept the unearthed paradoxicality and adhere to the ethics of a deconstructive reading from those that do not.

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that Derrida wrote his essay on invention, Heinz von Foerster’s now classic paper with the title “Disorder/Order: Discovery or Invention?” analyzes the very distinction that drives Derrida’s argument concerning changes in the semantics of invention. Associating unpredictability, chance, and noise with disorder on the one hand, and law, predictability, and necessity with order on the other hand, von Foerster sets out to demonstrate computationally how disorder and order are not self-sufficient states of affairs or pre-given natural facts that are merely discovered, but rather are produced by and depend on the chosen framework (language) used to observe them. Computationally, von Foerster can demonstrate how order, predictability, and necessity result from the reduction of a more complex term to a less complex term. Order is created, for example, when a series of numbers can be reduced to a mathematical equation that makes subsequent numbers of the series predictable. Disorder reflects the inability to find a description that would be able to reduce a complex term (series of numbers) so that the term remains unpredictable, contingent, a seeming expression of chance. Von Foerster’s observations follow a basic tenet, a basic observational directive of neocybernetics: to include the observer (language) into the descriptive system. If we follow this directive, we will discover that order and disorder are not facts of nature, but inventions, namely inventions of the language used (in science as much as elsewhere) to describe a phenomenon. Thus, the same series of numbers (von Foerster uses a phone number as an example) can appear to one observer as random, unpredictable, and unordered while, for example, when converted into a binary notation, it may show surprising regularity. From a few rather simple numerical examples, von Foerster derives a sweeping conclusion regarding the phenomenological status of order and disorder: “Since language is not something we discover — it is our choice, and it is we who invent it — disorder and order are our inventions” (“Disorder/Order,” 280). Von Foerster notes that for the hard sciences it can be determined quite precisely when the observer was included in this way for the first time. Around 1871/1872, Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann failed to explain entropy in purely molecular terms and subsequently “had to make an appeal to the cognitive functions of the observer” (277). For von Foerster, or for any constructivistic epistemology, observing the observer is to recognize and acknowledge that all that is observed is invented, that cognition, understanding, computation are not about the discovery or the uncovering of a preexisting order that could “exist” somehow independent of the operations employed to observe it, but rather that they are constructed by an “observer,” that is by the language used to describe them, be that language scientific, mathematical, or other. Derrida’s argument clearly follows the neocybernetic observational pattern. He also includes the observer (language) into the descriptive

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system. His understanding of “language,” though, is more sophisticated, as he looks at the structural properties that allow language or signs to be used communicatively.19 What distinguishes the neocybernetic (and by extension the constructivistic) from the deconstructivistic argument, however, is less their different accounts of the communicational medium, but a different bias toward calculation as well as a different treatment of the inclusion of the observer into the descriptive system. When von Foerster understands disorder (and with it unpredictability, chance, noise) as the product of the language used to describe it, and subsequently draws on mathematics to calculate incalculability, he operates within the blind spot that enables Derrida’s theoretical as well as his historical argument. For Derrida’s argument condemning modernity for its programmatics of chance, for its attempts to make the incalculable calculable, for developing a “species of logic . . . that integrates the calculation of probability” (“Psyche,” 57), rests on establishing a clear (and hierarchically ordered) distinction between the calculable and the incalculable. Despite also playing with the possibility of calculable incalculability (as in “Play”), Derrida insists on maintaining the notion of a true alterity of the incalculable, essentializing the difference between the calculable and the incalculable. Von Foerster’s argument challenges this distinction when he suggests and demonstrates the calculability of the incalculable. Calculation in von Foerster is not seen as antithetical to the incalculable, but rather as the means (i.e. as a possible language) of producing incalculability. Mathematically, incalculability can be created rather easily, for example, by including recursive functions, which turn trivial into non-trivial computational units (also called “machines” or black boxes), that is, into computational units that are unpredictable, as the same input can lead to different, irreconcilable outputs.20 Von Foerster also points toward the incalculability created by computations where the number of iterations required for solving an equation becomes “trans-computational.” (“That means, we can just forget about the whole thing, for we shall never see the end of it!”) (“Disorder/ Order,” 279). Such incalculability calculations are not attempts to make the incalculable and unpredictable calculable and predictable, attempts Derrida sees and condemns as part of the philosophical and scientific traditions he wants to challenge; rather, as calculations that produce the incalculable, von Foerster uses them to support a mathematico-scientific line of argumentation that ultimately serves as 19 Von Foerster also addresses the problem of iteration, albeit only by way of a brief reference to Recursive Function Theory. 20 For the cybernetic concept of the non-trivial machine or black box, see esp. von Foerster’s essays “Principles of Self-Organization” and “Perception of the Future.”

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a “computational metaphor” (280) that can be applied to all descriptive systems. Order and disorder, predictability and unpredictability, necessity and chance are always products of the language used to describe them, and hence, are inventions, products of the descriptive system, not discoveries. Von Foerster’s position on the calculability of the incalculable concerns a central epistemological question that distinguishes neocybernetic (i.e. “Foersterian”) theories from other iterations of cybernetics such as (certain strands of) chaos theory, of complexity science, or complex adaptive systems theory (CAS).21 It concerns the basic relationship between order and disorder, entropy and negentropy, system and environment: namely whether we understand order to be forming from disorder, structure from noise, systems within an autonomous environment and thereby assume that disorder, noise, and environment exist prior to and independent of the systems that form within them; or if we adopt an “openness-from-closure principle,”22 an order-from-noise-from-order principle as suggested by von Foerster’s argument on the invention of the disorder/order distinction. The latter requires that we conceptualize both sides of each distinction as interdependent, as mutually presupposing and constituting each other. Essentially, the question raised by von Foerster concerns our adoption of the idea of operational closure and subsequently how we think about a closed system’s relationship to its environment. This question has found one of its most advanced treatments in contemporary systems theory as developed by the German 21 Terms that, as Sören Brier points out, seem “to be more readily accepted to fit the received view of science” (“Applying Luhmann,” 31). The neocybernetic approach in this regard is also distinct from the use of a “systems approach” we find in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work, a work that in large part remains committed to psychological and psychologizing perspectives — where I hope to inquire into the constructedness of such categories. 22 As Bruce Clarke and Mark Hansen in their introduction to Emergence and Embodiment put it: “Some of the most important theoretical and critical conversations going on today in the cognitive sciences, chaos and complexity studies, and social systems theory stem from neocybernetic notions of self-organization, emergence, and autopoiesis” (Emergence and Embodiment, 5). The contribution that neocybernetics may provide to these debates hinges on a nuanced understanding of the paradoxical concept of “closure” it employs: “Once the paradigm shift is made from the physical to the life sciences, the order-from-noise principle in self-organizing systems gives way to the openness-from-closure principle in autopoietic systems . . . Thermodynamically, a system is either open or closed to energic exchange with its environment; by contrast, autopoietic systems are both environmentally open to energic exchange and operationally closed to informatic transfer. According to this understanding, operational closure — far from being simply opposed to openness — is in fact the precondition for openness, which is to say, for any cognitive capacity whatsoever” (ibid., 9–10).

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sociologist Niklas Luhmann. In systems theory, the distinction between system and environment replaces (or is a more advanced articulation of) the distinction between order and disorder, negentropy and entropy. While older iterations of systems theory saw systems operating in an environment that, in essence, was thought to exist independent of and prior to the formation of systems, one of Luhmann’s central theoretical incisions was to articulate a theory where the environment that a system operationally or observationally finds on its outside is understood as a product, as dependent on the operations (and observations) of the particular system. As Clarke and Hansen put it: in distinction to any naïve conception of closure or autonomy as the absolute self-sufficiency of a substantial subject, in second-order systems theory “a system is open to its environment in proportion to the complexity of its closure” (Emergence and Embodiment, 7). This means that any inquiry into the “nature” of the environment, any inquiry into what is conceived to exist as disorder, as unpredictable, as noise, or even as an Other in the Derridean sense, no matter how paradoxically defined, will have to look at the operations and observations of the system that — on its inside! — is capable of constructing such an outside.

1.3 From Iteration to Improvisation In “Psyche,” Derrida’s insistence on the incalculability of the incalculable allows him to construct the narrative of modernity as an age that fails to reinvent invention proper; and it is the focal point of the essay’s concluding reflections, reflections that ponder the elusiveness of an Other that can only be observed as unobservable because the “descriptive system,” language, is heterogeneous to its basic structure, because iterability necessarily ties alterity — and with it singularity, originality, authenticity — to repetition. Derrida’s inventiveness lies in his insistence on observing what he sees from the perspective of its iterability, as “existing” only with or as the structural properties necessary for its communication. This makes invention — but really all affirmations of singularity, originality, authenticity — in the traditional or pure sense highly elusive, because from the perspective of iterability, every concept will reveal itself as tied to repetition, to non-singularity, as affected by a basic generality, as belated, differed, and always already doubled. If Derrida is led to claim the impossibility of improvisation, it is because he presupposes an “absoluteness” (in terms of freedom, originality, authenticity, and singularity) of improvisation that is incompatible with the structure of iterability. Improvisation defined in such stringent terms cannot exist because it could not be communicated, shared, and hence neither recognized nor otherwise experienced. Gary Peters argues as much, pointing out that Derrida’s hesitations about improvisation — and those of other

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critics of its possibility — are based on unrealistic assumptions about it.23 The challenge is to think of innovation and subsequently improvisation not as an Other of, but as deriving from repetition and structure. Is it possible, in other words, to conceive of processes that can “calculate” the production of the incalculable? This is, I contend, what the neocybernetic approach and contemporary systems theory allows us to do. While the similarities and differences between Luhmann’s systems theory and Derridean deconstruction have received a considerable amount of attention over the last decade,24 there are few places where they are as evident as with regard to the question of innovation. For both, innovation is of central methodological concern; and both relate their reflections on innovation to a larger narrative of modernity. While Derrida embeds the increased emphasis on innovation in a narrative of (failed) rational progression, Luhmann’s narrative of modernity focuses on a fundamental change in social structure, the transition from stratification to functional differentiation. Consequently, Luhmann does not inquire into modernity’s “failure” to invite true inventiveness, but instead he wants to understand the mechanisms that led to the new emphasis on newness and innovation that we can observe as a particular feature of modernity where “stability itself becomes a dynamic principle” (Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 492).25 Both in Derrida’s and in Luhmann’s theories of modernity and innovation, then, we encounter comparable paradoxes. The primary difference between both schools of thought concerns their approach to the 23 “But perhaps it is Derrida’s rather limited model of improvisation that creates the difficulty here, relying, as it does, too heavily on strangely orthodox notions of pure instantaneity and creative novelty that could never stand up to deconstruction’s scrutiny. The suggestions here, however, is that it is possible to conceive of a model of improvisation that is itself knowingly situated within the very networks that would seem to preclude it. Not only does this make improvisation possible, in many respects it offers a way of understanding how Derrida himself improvises” (Peters, Philosophy of Improvisation, 96). 24 See esp. Günther Teubner’s article “Economics of Gift,” as well as Luhmann’s “Deconstruction as Second-Order Observing.” 25 Luhmann understands the change in social structure from stratification to functional differentiation as a long-term consequence of the invention of the printing press. The printing press led to a tremendous expansion and diversification of the available semantics, which invited a new preference for the new and innovative over the old and proven (Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 996). See also Luhmann’s essay on “Die Behandlung von Irritationen: Abweichung oder Neuheit” (The Treatment of Irritation: Aberration or Innovation), which explores in more detail how the seventeenth century comes to redefine irritation in terms of innovation rather than aberration, indicating a reevalution and new understanding of newness emerging that becomes central for modern society. I will return to this point in the following chapter.

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paradoxes they discover. While Derrida dwells on their irresolvability,26 Luhmann makes them part of the overall design of his theory. Indeed, the paradoxical simultaneity of innovation and repetition, transitoriness and stability, freedom and constraint, so central to the understanding of improvised doings, are at the heart of Luhmann’s conceptualization of a system. Systems are not, as a superficial understanding might have it, conceived to be stable entities or structures, but rather are thought to be sustained — and with every iteration subject to be changed — by the continued, recursive reproduction of their elements. With regard to the social system — that is, with regard to the system of communication — it is particularly apparent how systems must be thought to be in constant flux. Social systems use communication “as their particular mode of autopoietic reproduction” (Luhmann, “Autopoiesis,” 174).27 Luhmann conceives of communication, not as an act, not as the coded transmission of a message from a speaker to a recipient, but rather as the circular processing of three different selections, the synthesizing of utterance, information, and understanding.28 The synthesizing of utterance, information, and understanding implies that each individual event, that is, each communication, is constituted diacritically. Each event “exists” only by virtue of another event for which the same logic applies. For the communicational system, a single statement by a speaker is nothing until it is processed again by another speaker whose statement/response in turn must be processed, and so on. Thus Luhmann derives the stability of a system from the transitoriness of its elements. Challenging basic structuralist and post-structuralist assumptions, he notes that the only component of a system that can change is its structure. The elements, 26 Luhmann wonders if deconstruction’s insistence on irresolvability is not a sort of dance: “Deconstruction, then, is deconstruction of the ‘is’ and the ‘is-not’ . . . It is like dancing around the golden calf while knowing that an unqualifiable god has already been invented. Or, in systems terms, is deconstruction the selforganization of this dance, complaining about a lost tradition and becoming, by this very complaint, dependent upon this tradition, so that it cannot decide and need not decide whether such a center is or is not present?” (“Deconstruction,” 766). 27 My summary of Luhmann’s conception of the system of communication is based primarily on this essay, on chapter 4 (“Communication and Action”) of Social Systems, and on his essay “Was ist Kommunikation?” 28 What makes this model radical (and quite comparable to Derrida’s basic claims about communication) is that it defines understanding (including misunderstanding) as taking place independently of the (original) intentions of a speaker. It is a construction that occurs when communication is processed in this way, and fails when it is not. That does not preclude communication about speaker intentions or about feelings of being misunderstood, and so on. Such communication, however, will not lead outside of communication (e.g. into the depth of another person’s soul), it will merely lead to more communication.

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whose reproduction makes up the system, have no time. Like all events, they cannot change, as they disappear immediately.29 I want to suggest that we adopt this model and conceive of improvisation as an iterative and recursively operating process where dynamic structures emerge from the processing and reprocessing of elements. In neocybernetic discourses and in contemporary systems theory, the term “emergence” describes the arrival of something qualitatively new that was neither predictable, nor planned.30 For dynamic systems, such “arrivals” do not come from some outside, but rather are the result of the recursive process itself, where errors, interferences, disruptions, and so on lead to alterations that may (or may not) achieve a certain degree of stability (closure) which can form the basis for further operations (or not). For dynamic systems, change is rather ordinary, not something that would constitute some metaphysical Otherness.31 The advantage of this conceptual model is that it makes productive the noted tension between variation and stability/repetition. Rather than conceiving of innovation as radically antithetical to stability and hence as an impossible “Other,” it allows us to understand innovation as an inherent aspect of any dynamic stabilities that might or might not emerge from the processing of events. As with all systems, variation and innovation — the emergence of something qualitatively different and new — are the norm and even a precondition for the successful continuation of the reproduction of a system’s elements and hence for the stability of the system itself. The systems perspective is not as far-fetched — nor as far removed from our concern with improvisation — as the theoretical verbiage at first glance might suggest. We have quoted already Max Roach 29 Luhmann also uses the term “dynamic stability” with regard to his understanding of structure: “Within the theory of empirical systems, we can observe a similar [to deconstruction] trend to ‘temporalize’ problems of identity and stability, and to replace theories of structural stability with theories of dynamic stability. Structuralism presupposed that systems need structures to limit the range of possible changes. Structures, then, seem to differentiate between fast changes (short waves), slow changes (long waves), and destructive changes (catastrophes). But contrary to a hidden assumption of structuralism, the only component of a system that can change is its structure (“Deconstruction,” 771). 30 For a concise presentation of the concept of emergence and its migration from theories of (biological) evolution to chaos, complexity, and communication theory (Luhmann), and even aesthetics, see Thomas Wägenbaur’s article “Emergenz” (2000). For a discussion of the term in relation to Varela’s work and in counterdistinction to the term autopoiesis, see John Protevi’s 2009 essay “Beyond Autopoiesis.” 31 Luhmann draws on the neo-Darwinian distinction between variation, selection, and (re-)stabilization to describe the (non-teleological) evolution of systems and asks us “to remind ourselves how ordinary evolutionary variation is” (Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 462).

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describing what Gioia called the “retrospective method” that characterizes jazz improvisation. Berliner’s book describes in great detail the many possibilities jazz improvisers have in “responding to their own notes,” for example, “by pausing briefly after an initial statement, then repeating it, perhaps with minor changes such as rhythmic rephrasing. This also allows time for the player to conceive options for the subsequent phrase’s formulation . . . artists may ‘run’ the figure directly ‘into itself,’ perhaps through a slight extension or short connection pattern, treating the figure as a component within a longer phrase” (Thinking in Jazz, 193–4). I chose an image of the work of the Austrian artist Birgit Zinner for the cover of this book, as her work documents how individual pieces, series of works, and her work as a whole are intricately tied to iterative processes. Such iterative processes do not negate, but invite contingent input that can serve as a starting point, help redirect, and vary the process that produces new forms.32 Even the dynamics of an everyday conversation can be described as an iterative process where the back-and-forth between two or more speakers constantly changes the meaning of what was said before, forcing revisions, but also presenting opportunities to continue the conversation in new, unplanned, and unforeseen ways. Nothing kills a conversation more quickly than the sense of total agreement.33 For Luhmann, iterability in the Derridean sense, the process that ties repetition to alterity, then, is not a structural mark that would undermine inventiveness, but rather the condition of its possibility. This fundamentally changes how we ought to envision inventiveness for improvisation. If variation is a constant part and enabler of the basic operations of a system, inventiveness is not about the advent of Otherness from an outside, but rather about recursive processes that promote the emergence of something new, that is, of something that is perceivable as closed vis-à-vis its environment and hence is also distinct from what came before. If we conceive of improvisation along these lines, improvisation will not appear to be fundamentally different from other processes that can achieve a degree of operational closure, but different nevertheless: namely, different in terms of how improvised doings promote and stage the emergence of something new and original. To stay for the moment

32 Zinner describes her studio work as an artistic form of improvisation that wants to surprise itself. For a more detailed description of Zinner’s work, its play with the unity of distinctions, its complexity, and how it derives and invites the observer to derive forms from forms iteratively, see my introduction to her art catalogue “Formen aus Formen ausformen.” 33 A famous point of contention in the Luhmann–Habermas debate, with Luhmann arguing that if Habermas’s consensus-based “ideal speech situation” ever came to fruition, communication would cease.

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with the example of an open conversation: such a conversation may for the most part unfold in unplanned and unpredictable ways, gravitating more or less toward familiar patterns, thoughts, and argumentative lines. What distinguishes the average conversation from an improvised dialogue is that only the latter preselects parameters that promote variation and stage the unpredictability of their outcome (e.g. the actors pretend not to know who they are, accept random input, constrain their time). Especially with regard to art, it should be apparent that it is not inventiveness itself, but rather its staging that is central to improvisation. For the distinction between improvised and un-improvised creative acts cannot be based on categories surrounding the idea of inventiveness alone. At least since the eighteenth century, the expectation has been for every artwork to make apparent how it is inventive (new, original, unique, and different). Improvisation in modern art — and to count as art — must adhere to the same parameters. The difference to traditionally produced/performed art, then, is that the performance includes and foregrounds the parameters and acts that encourage and induce variation over stabilization in the art-creating process. What improvisations stage specifically are, of course, precisely the constraints that guide and limit the creative process. Typically, these include temporal and material constraints faced by the artist, elements of randomness at the beginning or for the continuation of the process, an openness to adapt the performance to external and internal contingencies (random input might come from the audience, the material settings of a performance, or a psychological state), and so on, that is, the kind of disturbances, perturbations, and “errors” that promote the system’s evolutionary variation and may lead to the emergence of something new. That such “emergence” can be promoted, but not fully predicted, entails the often-noted element of “risk” inherent to performed improvisation. And yet, that for skilled improvisers failure is rather rare, indicates that the incalculable in improvisation (and art) is the result of “calculation” in the broader sense, that is, not of the implementation of plans or rules, but of processes and strategies that, calculating incalculability, are able to construct unpredictable outcomes. As I will argue in more detail in the following chapters, modern art has to employ such procedures in any case, but they are staged and artificially enhanced in improvisational performances. Such constraints not only affect the unfolding of the performance itself, but also serve the function of making apparent to the audience how innovation is promoted over (but not at the complete expense of) repetition and stabilization. Luhmann’s systems theory brings together the logic of post-structuralism with an “organic” model that overcomes the dead end marked by Derrida’s thought. Following this conceptual frame, we can understand improvisation as a complex feedback process that continually responds

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(repeats and alters) to what it decides to recognize as worthwhile irritations. Conceived along these lines, improvisation reveals itself as a self-authoring, self-directing, and self-perpetuating process that does not deny repetition, but derives its inventive force from it. Erika Fischer-Lichte proposes that we understand the creation of a special relationship between actors and audience as the central function of performance art and the modern (post-1950s) openness toward contingency as expressive of an explicit interest to create a “feedback loop as a self-referential, autopoietic system enabling a fundamentally open, unpredictable process . . . as the defining principle of theatrical work. A shift in focus occurred from potentially controlling the system to inducing the specific modes of autopoiesis” in theater productions since the 1960s (Transformative Power, 39). The self-organization of (minimal) social systems is also a central topic of R. Keith Sawyer’s work on improvisation. Sawyer focuses on improvised dialogues, a subgenre of the Improv theater that has been part of Chicago’s progressive theater scene since the 1970s and which in the 1990s acquired great popularity on both sides of the Atlantic through TV shows such as Whose Line Is It Anyway. Sawyer observes how, in a very short amount of time, improvised dialogues can create characters, plot lines, context, and emotions that cannot be reduced to the intentions of the individual participants, or articulated in terms of psychological processes. Sawyer instead draws on the sociological studies of Erving Goffman and speaks of a process of “collaborative emergence” to describe how communicational frames develop that only retrospectively define the meaning and function of an utterance, the identity of a character, or the place and time of a particular speech act.34 Sawyer recognizes that we are dealing with recursive processes, which must be thought to define themselves as their definition cannot be attributed to the intentions or planning of any or even all of the participants. The response of the second speaker determines after the fact the (meaning of the) actions of the first speaker, whose subsequent response will again redefine the second speaker’s contribution and hence, at the moment of utterance, already entail its own redefinition, and so on, at 34 “Improvised dialogue results in the creation of a dramatic frame, which includes all aspects of the performance: the characters enacted by each actor, the motives of those characters, the relationship among those characters, the joint activity in which they are engaged, the location of the action, the time period and genre, the overall plot, and the relation of the current joint activity to that plot . . . The emergence of the frame cannot be reduced to actor’s intentions in individual turns, because in many cases an actor cannot know the meaning of his or her own turn until the other actors have responded . . . In improvised dialogues, many actions do not receive their full meaning until after the act has occurred; the complete meaning of a turn is dependent on the flow of the subsequent dialogue” (Sawyer, Improvised Dialogues, 41–3).

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least until the actions, content, and intentions of the participating speakers acquire (or fail to acquire) a certain stability and coherence. Sawyer’s analysis of improvised dialogues does not take away from the skills needed for such performances to succeed or satisfy the expectations of performers and audience; it refocuses, however, our attention away from the purported freedom of choices by the participants, and instead on the emergence of a communicational frame that cannot be reduced to the intentions of the individual participants, but rather comes to structure and quickly becomes binding for the subsequent development of the dialogue, increasingly limiting the improvisers’ choices. Drawing on Luhmann’s understanding of communication, we can comprehend these findings as articulating a process of iteration, as a process35 where events mutually come to condition each other and dynamic structures emerge that achieve a degree of closure (decisions become binding) that is also the precondition for their openness, for new options and possibilities presenting themselves that enable the continuation of the performance. As in all communication, each selection conditions the preceding as well as the subsequent selections, only to be itself subject to further conditioning (or omission) by subsequent selections. This is where the systems theoretical approach departs not only from Derridean thought, but also from the aesthetic ontology that drives Gary Peters’ Philosophy of Improvisation. Peters is also seeking “a way of breaking with the still hegemonic humanism that, by getting entangled in the intentionalities of the subject and the dialogical aesthetics of intersubjectivity, has failed to arrive at a concept of improvisation that could lift it out of the anecdotal” (167). But by drawing primarily on Heidegger and those influenced by him (Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas, and even Adorno are featured prominently in his study), Peters is able to present his reader with a sophisticated aesthetic ontology that notes the liminal “being” of improvisation, the inseparability of inventiveness and performance from repetition and the statutory; he is unable, however, to account for the dynamics of poiesis itself and for the social and the communicational aspects of improvisation.36 By drawing on contemporary systems theory, we do not have to deny the structural intricacies of improvisation, nor do we need to essentialize art or cater to a “dialogical aesthetics of intersubjectity” that reduces dialogue to the ideal of consensus and intersubjectivity to a sense of community. Describing improvisation in terms of iterative, emergent, and self-directing processes instead, we can 35 Luhmann defines process as the “temporal linkage among a plurality of selective events through reciprocal conditioning” (Social Systems, 154–5). 36 Peters throws the baby out with the bathwater when he (rightfully) dismisses the communal celebrations of improvisation popular since the 1960s only to conclude that “improvisation has little or nothing to do with communication” (169).

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appreciate the social dynamics and the cultural and historical context within which improvisation unfolds without “getting entangled in the intentionalities of the subject.” If we take systems operations in this way as a model for improvisational doings, we also need to rethink how to distinguish performed improvisations from the improvisational activities in which an artist might engage while working in the privacy of her studio and from the “everyday practice” of improvisation that takes place in meaningful conversations, when out shopping, when writing a book, or when having to deal with other activities in life. The chosen methodology suggests that we understand artistic and consciously performed improvisation, not as fundamentally different from other social activities — and hence also not as particularly privileged for resistance to laws or as an “antidiscipline” in the sense Michel de Certeau links the practice of everyday life to improvised doings (Everyday Life, xv) — but simply as subjected to the particular codes of the modern system of art (i.e. be interesting, new, original, and inventive in relation to other art). The following chapters include a closer examination of these codes, their evolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, their effect on the conceptualization of the creative process, and the reassessment of improvisation as art they entail.

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2. Indescribability, Perfection, Unpredictability: Improvisation and Aesthetic Autonomy

All art rejects the thought of becoming. All wants to appear as improvisation, momentary wonder (temple as work of the gods, statue as the enchantment of a soul in stone). Likewise all music. In some music, artistic means (disorder) suggest this intended effect. (Friedrich Nietzsche)1 Belief in genius falsifies the conception of the genesis of the artwork . . . of the life of the artist, and also of the artist himself. (Friedrich Nietzsche)2 The banishment of improvisation from most of the big stages in the German-speaking world goes back to the mid-eighteenth century. As oral traditions are increasingly replaced by conventions and codes that rely on the practice of writing, improvisation, despite its long and venerable history in music, poetry, and theater, falls victim to the distinction between “high” and “low” art. In Germany, it is Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) who articulated the Enlightenment’s position

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“Alle Kunst weist den Gedanken an Werden ab. Alle will Improvisation scheinen, augenblickliches Wunder (Tempel als Götterwerk, Statue als Verzauberung einer Seele in Stein). So alle Musik. In gewisser Musik wird dieser beabsichtigte Effect durch Kunstmittel (Unordnung) nahe gelegt” (Nietzsche, Studienausgabe, 8: 385). “Der Glaube an den Genius fälscht die Vorstellung von der Entstehung des Kunstwerks . . . vom Leben des Künstlers, auch beim Künstler selbst” (Nietzsche, Studienausgabe, 8: 477). Both this and the previous quote are from Nietzsche’s notebooks from 1877. At the time, Nietzsche planed to write a book on aesthetics, which would have contained two chapters on improvisation entitled “6. Accumulation of Productive Force: Explanation of Improvisation” (“6. Anstauung der produktiven Kraft: Erklärung der Improvisation”) and “26. Overestimation of Improvisation” (“26. Überschätzung der Improvisation”) (ibid., 475–6).

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against improvisation (and other forms of “low art”) famously and forcefully already in 1730. In his Essay on a Critical Poetic Theory (Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen), Gottsched understands improvisation as a sign of laziness and ignorance, and the stock characters and masks it employs — Gottsched specifically targets the Commedia dell’arte and related traditions — as dispensable. Gottsched faults the improvisational theater for not following the model of nature and for failing to elevate because, he argues, improvisation does not pursue the universal, but instead clings to the particular.3 The concerns expressed by Gottsched as much as the general association of improvisation with the burlesque, which in and beyond the eighteenth century form the basis for state-sponsored censorship efforts, does not mean that improvisation would have disappeared altogether from the stage or even that it would have lost much of its popularity during the Enlightenment era;4 it does, however, lead to improvisation being positioned outside of the realm of art at the very moment when modern aesthetics emerges as a discipline and fundamentally rethinks the function and meaning of art. From today’s perspective, the rejection of improvisation in the eighteenth century is best understood in the context of the comprehensive social changes that reach a tipping point in this time period. The advancements in the sciences, philosophy, and politics (through the creation of a public sphere) as well as the increasing success of the rationality, values, and preferences expressed by the Enlightenment can be understood as a long-term effect of the invention of the printing press, which led to increased writing and reading habits and afforded society

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Gottsched claims that it was out of laziness and ignorance (Faulheit und Unwissenheit) that the comedians stopped memorizing and replaced conventional plays with “vulgar farces” (Werke, 6/2: 342). He sees harlequin-like characters such as “Hans Wurst” and “Pickelhering” as “creatures of a disturbed imagination that do not follow any examples from nature” (358), and wants to dispense with all the main character types from the Commedia dell’arte (he lists Scaramutz, Pantalon, Anselmo, Doctor, Capitain, Pierrot, and Mezetin) (359). See Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, and Müller-Kampel, Spaßtheater, on the continued popularity of improvisational theater practices throughout Europe. Roland Borgards argues that censorship in the eighteenth century sharpens the opposition between text and performance, leading to improvisation being associated with the breaking of laws and rules in the first place (“Improvisation, Verbot, Genie,” 260).

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a higher degree of complexity and reflexivity.5 The tensions between the rising middle class and the politically still dominant aristocracy are a symptom (rather than the root cause) of the fundamental restructuring of society that is taking place during that time period. Here, too, improvisation finds itself, so to speak, on the wrong side of history. The problem is not only that improvisation is often associated with the burlesque, but that its more reverent forms as practiced in the Commedia dell’arte and its French variant, the Comédie-Italienne, are closely linked to the stratified courtly culture and the duality of aristocracy and lower classes against which the bourgeoisie writes. In Germany, such class tensions are also cast in nationalistic terms, as the absolutistic political order was dominated by France and French culture. Many of the moral standards with which the Enlightenment operates — think, for example, of the competing paradigms of love that clash so productively in the eighteenth century epistolary novel where the bourgeois ideals of virtue and authenticity come to battle the perceived evils of courtly manners that emphasize gallantry and seduction — as much as bourgeois ideals of perfection and universality (such as Kant’s demand that the particular represent a general rule) are politically and culturally coded in this way. They are attempts to envision the arts outside of the existing, stratified social and cosmological order. While the shift toward written culture and the negation of the stratified social order help explain why improvisation was banished from “high art,” they also contain the seed for the rediscovery and reinvention of improvisation that we can witness at the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, the emphasis on newness and originality in art, which creates the expectation for art to be inventive, is a consequence of the media changes described above. Whereas oral cultures process and communicate information through repetition and the variation of familiar types and patterns, the ready availability of books reduces the need for such mnemonic aids and instead encourages newness, originality, and innovation, notions that are quickly adopted by the emerging aesthetic discourses. Here, too, improvisation finds itself on the wrong

5

The changes in communication media I am referencing also form the basis upon which Luhmann explains the transition from a stratified to a functionally differentiated society. Luhmann argues that it is not only the higher quantity of communications the printing press makes available, but also the increased complexity that society thus acquires that make it less and less possible to organize society in all of its aspects along strict hierarchical lines from top to bottom. Through the functional differentiation of subsystems, society is able to accommodate a higher degree of complexity. Luhmann dedicated four volumes to the study of the semantic changes that this societal restructuring invites in the West.

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side of history, at least if we consider its traditional use. In epic poetry and the ancient schools of rhetoric, that is, from Homer and the aoidos to the rhetorical writings of Alcidamas and Quintilian,6 improvisation had served the mnemonic, persuasive, and decorative needs of oral cultures. As a consequence, improvisation emphasized the repetition and variation of existing patterns and types, rather than innovation. This is still true for the Commedia dell’arte and the related theatrical traditions that inform the eighteenth century’s understanding of improvisation. These traditions are not about inventiveness, but about the variation of familiar character types, plot structures, and rhetorical figures.7 We need to remind ourselves of these traditions to appreciate how much the identification of improvisation in art with ideals of inventiveness, newness, alterity and so on is a modern development, a development that takes hold very late in the eighteenth century and continues to inform our understanding and expectations for art in general and the practice of improvisation in particular. Considering these contentious forces — improvisation’s traditional uses on the one hand and the simultaneous push toward originality and inventiveness on the other — it comes as no surprise that the reception of improvisation in the eighteenth century across Europe is quite varied and

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The improvisational quality of oral poetry is often mentioned in relation to Homer. Bernhard Zimmermann looks more closely at the (limited) evidence regarding the presentation of oral epic poetry in ancient Greece, noting how improvisation in ancient poetry must be thought to be about the repetition and rearrangement of templates of sorts (“Improvisation — Ritus — Literature,” 219f), not about innovation. Wolfram Ax analyzes Alcidamas’s and Quintilian’s writings on improvisation and describes how in most cases improvisation was restricted to the elocutio and only rarely extended to those aspects of a speech that belonged to the disposito or the inventio. Within the various ancient schools of rhetoric, it is clear that improvisation is viewed as a mechanical skill that is acquired through extensive practice (Ax, “Improvisation,” 75). On the Commedia dell’arte and its reception in the eighteenth century, see Walter Hinck’s classic study and, more recently, Robert Henke’s Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (2002) as well as Kenneth and Laura Richards, who note how many eighteenth-century commentators remark and lament the “ossification of improvised playing” (Richards and Richards, Commedia dell’Arte, 188). Against Maximilian Gröne who sees the decline of the Commedia dell’arte in the eighteenth century as the result of improvisational techniques having become petrified (“Improvisation und Repräsentation,” 105 [footnote 12]), I would argue that the perception of petrification and similar remarks by commentators of the eighteenth century say less about actual changes in the practice or quality of improvisation, but rather reflect how inventiveness becomes a primary factor for the assessment of art in this time period.

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not without inherent contradictions.8 In the German context, Gottsched’s rejection of improvisation is met with more moderate and somewhat ambivalent responses by such notables as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Karl Philipp Moritz; in contrast, Carl Ludwig Fernow’s About the Improvisators (Über die Improvisatoren), the first book-length study of the Italian improvisational tradition, published originally in 1801, is an outright celebration of improvisation as a true expression of artistic genius. In this chapter, I will assess the tensions surrounding improvisation in the late eighteenth century by focusing on the treatment it receives in Goethe’s and Moritz’s writings. Both authors are symptomatic for their time as they are simultaneously fascinated by improvisation, yet find its practice quite problematic. Furthermore, Goethe and Moritz allow us to read the reception of improvisation alongside the aesthetics of autonomy they both help articulate. My concern is primarily with how improvisation, though banished from the stage, still garners a niche within a modern aesthetics that rejects rule-governedness and mimesis, and puts all emphasis on newness, originality, and immediacy. It is striking that many of our contemporary concerns with improvisation, such as the idea of its indescribability, its fleetingness, and even the thought that the artwork/performance must remain unforeseen and unforeseeable, apply to autonomous art in general. The responses to improvisation we find in the late eighteenth century do not only help repress, but also appropriate and reinvent improvisation for modern aesthetics. In this regard, Goethe’s utilization of the improvisational tradition is particularly telling. Goethe, the key figure of “Weimar Classicism” and hence of literary and aesthetic ideals that at first glance must seem antithetical to improvisation, is not only familiar and quite fascinated with improvisation as a poetic and theatric practice, but in his own work draws on its arsenal of figures and strives to incorporate improvisation’s emphasis on the performative into his dramatic work. Goethe’s modernism lies in his recognition and resolute implementation of the ideals of the aesthetics of autonomy.9 While Goethe’s support for the actual practice of improvisation as an inventive or compositional tool is rather limited, he is interesting for our

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See again Esterhammer’s Romanticism and Improvisation for the to-date most comprehensive account of the reception and various representations of improvisation throughout Europe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. There is ample room to define Goethe’s modernism or “modernisms,” as Astrida Tantillo puts it in her recent book. As we will explore in more detail below, focusing on the aesthetics of autonomy will allow us to read and assess Goethe’s modernism, not merely in analogy to contemporary economic, political, and educational concerns, but in the context of a comprehensive, sociological theory of modernity.

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study as he reimagines its significance for modern aesthetics and more broadly for modernity.

2.1 Instrumentalizing Improvisation? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe In the eighteenth piece of his Hamburg Dramaturgy, Lessing mocks Caroline Neuber, who, under the auspices of Gottsched, publically expelled the Harlequin from the German stage during a performance in Leipzig in 1737. Lessing notes how the Harlequin should not be viewed as an individual but as a whole genre that knows “a thousand variations” and whose history extends not only to France and Italy but also to the Romans and ancient Greeks (Dramaturgie, 97–8).10 As Jocelyn Holland argues, Lessing’s critical review of the Harlequin’s public extradition from the German stage “brings to light many of the underlying themes which Goethe treats as well in his references to improvisation, including the problem of how to distinguish between the ‘national’ and the ‘foreign’ and the question to what degree improvisation may well be a tool which could serve reputable actors as well” (“Shipwrecks,” 21). In Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Calling (Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung) (1786), Goethe presents improvisation as a “school and testing ground for actors” (“Shipwrecks,” 22) and as a possible means for Germany to develop its own national theater. The tool metaphor suggests itself, not only with regard to Lessing and Goethe recommending improvisation as a suitable practice for aspiring actors, but also to describe how in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) (1795–6) improvisation is instrumentalized more broadly and presented as a necessary stage, not only in the training of the actor, but for the Bildung of the individual that forms the telos of Wilhelm’s travels and of the novel itself. As tempting as it might seem to subsume the improvisational exercise and its discussion in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship under the overall trajectory of the novel and read improvisation, with the words of the clergyman with whom Wilhelm discusses the utility of improvisation, as “the very best way to take people out of themselves and, by way of a detour, return them to themselves” (9: 67) (“die beste Art, die Menschen aus sich heraus und durch einen Umweg wieder in sich hinein zu

10 For a more extensive discussion of the banning and partial restitution of the Harlequin figure in the eighteenth century, see Walter Hinck, Das deutsche Lustspiel.

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führen”) (“FA,” 9: 472),11 a closer look at the context of this quote and the novel’s presentation of the improvisational scene in chapter 9 of the second book reveals that such a reading is not without problems. The scene is set on a riverboat where the group of actors Wilhelm accompanies decides spontaneously to spruce up their trip by extemporizing a play with everyone assuming a role thought to be appropriate for their character. Before the travelers start composing descriptive poems and extemporizing a comedy, a brief discussion is interjected, reflecting on the use of masks and its relation to grace and natural demeanor. Repeating in essence an observation Goethe made when he visited an extemporized play during his travels through Italy,12 the novel does not deem the artificiality associated with the use of masks as necessarily antithetical to ideals of natural expression — contradicting a central aspect of Gottsched’s critique of the improvisational theater — but rather presents the use of masks as unavoidable and even necessary for the possibility of grace and satisfaction (“Anmut und Zufriedenheit”) to occur in any social setting. Focusing on the use of masks, Angela Esterhammer reads the improvisational exercise Goethe describes as enacting “a self-conscious theatrical version of Bourdieusian habitus, revealing the extent to which a disposition towards certain behaviours has been inculcated in them by social institutions” (Romanticism and Improvisation, 137). That is, she integrates the scene into the teleology of the educational process that is the novel, namely as an important step of Wilhelm finding and forming his persona. The instrumentalization of improvisation for educational purposes can refer to the clergyman’s “detour” comment, as the mask appears to provide the opportunity to step outside of oneself only to be returned to oneself. But as Esterhammer notes, too, in the conversation between Wilhelm and the clergyman, “improvisation and deterministic Bildung are curiously superimposed: their actions seem to be at once extemporized and inevitable, Zufall and Schicksal, performative and 11 Translations from Goethe’s work are taken from the 12-volume Suhrkamp/Insel edition of Goethe’s Collected Work and referenced by volume and page numbers in the text. German quotations are taken from the “Frankfurter Ausgabe” of Sämtliche Werke published by the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag and are abbreviated in the text as “FA.” 12 October 4, 1786 Goethe writes in his Italian Journey about the extemporized play which “greatly delighted” him the night before. It is toward the end of the entry that he marvels how he had never seen “more natural acting than that done by these maskers, which can only be attained by rather long practice and with an especially fortunate natural disposition” (6: 67) (“Ich habe aber auch nicht leicht natürlicher agieren sehen, als jene Masken, so wie es nur bei einem ausgezeichnet glücklichen Naturell durch längere Übung erreicht werden kann”) (“FA,” 15/1: 84).

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essential” (139). This raises the question of what is left of improvisation once it is intrumentalized in this fashion. If we look at the scene more closely, the novel’s treatment of the improvisational practice gets even more curious. For one, it is not clear at all how much we should trust the clergyman to be the appropriate spokesperson for the improvising group of actors. The clergyman joins the group on the boat only late, is referred to as a stranger, and, unlike the rest of the group, does in a strict sense not play a role. That is, he plays himself, for he does not only look like a clergyman — this is why he is asked to play one — but, as we find out later in the novel, he indeed is a clergyman. While not apparent yet this early in the novel, the clergyman is also an anti-improvisational figure in as much as he is intricately involved in providing guidance, provisio in the literal sense, for Wilhelm. With the Abbey, what might appear as extemporized and coincidental from the limited perspective of Wilhelm turns out to be but the result of a staged performance that is part of a large master plan. There are more reasons to be suspicious about the clergyman’s proposed instrumentalization of improvisation. By the time Wilhelm and the clergyman discuss the merits of their extemporized play, the exercise has ended as the group has reached its destination for the day. The teleology, in other words, is constructed post factum. Moreover, in the process of its defense as an artistic practice and necessary detour, improvisation is increasingly limited in its scope, approaching the point of complete erasure. The crossing out begins already with the clergyman’s emphasis on utility and practice, two words Goethe highlights syntactically in the sentence that immediately precedes the “detour” quote.13 His recommendation that actors should perform an extemporized play once a month, “though the actors would have to prepare for this with several rehearsals” (9: 67), might well reflect traditional practices, but it runs counter to the ad hoc decision and emphasis on spontaneity that led the group to take up the exercise in the first place. In this regard, the clergyman is marked also intellectually as an outsider to the needs and desires of the performing actors. Wilhelm subsequently reduces the improvisational aspect of the exercise the clergyman recommends even further, envisioning that the play not be freely invented, but follow a plan, and that the composition of the play, too, describe an action and follow a preselected scene structure. This leaves only the presentation (Ausführung) to improvisation:

13 “I think this kind of exercise amongst actors, especially when in the company of friends or acquaintances, is extremely useful” (9: 67) “‘Ich finde diese Übung,’ sagte der Unbekannte, ‘unter Schauspielern, ja in Gesellschaft von Freunden und Bekannten, sehr nützlich.’” (“FA,” 9: 473 – emphases mine).

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Improvisation as Art “But an extemporized play should not be made up on the spur of the moment,” Wilhelm objected. “The general plan, action, and division of scenes should have been decided on, and the actors left to work out the presentation.” (9: 67)14

The clergyman is quick to restrict Wilhlem’s observation even further, allowing only that gestures and facial expressions be improvised, not the words themselves: “Not so much the verbal presentation, for the words must be the product of the author’s considered reflection, but the gestures, facial expressions, cries and the like, all that belongs to miming and what is partially articulated — an art which seems to be disappearing from our stage.” (9: 67)15 One might suspect that Goethe outs the clergyman here as trained in the art of rhetoric, applying the three officia oratoris: inventio, disposito and elocutio, to the staging of a play. In tune with antique recommendations for the use of improvisation in public speeches, the clergyman restricts improvisation to the elocutio, more precisely and more ironically, to the non-verbal aspects of the elocutio. In the end, all that is left to improvisation is the presentation style of the material, what in music, perhaps, would be referred to as the interpretation of a particular score. That is, we are left with aspects of artistic performance that exceed annotation and that, in the nineteenth century, more generally are discussed in terms of artistic virtuosity.16 One might well argue that doings that concern an actor’s or artist’s presentation style are inventive, too, and hence warrant the moniker

14 “Man dürfte sich,” versetzte Wilhelm, “ein extemporiertes Stück nicht als ein solches denken, das aus dem Stegreife sogleich komponiert würde, sondern als ein solches, wovon zwar Plan, Handlung und Szenen-Einteilung gegeben wären, dessen Ausführung aber dem Schauspieler überlassen bliebe” (“FA,” 9: 473). 15 “Nicht die Ausführung durch Worte, denn durch diese muss freilich der überlegende Schriftsteller seine Arbeit zieren, sondern die Ausführung durch Gebärden und Mienen, Ausrufungen und was dazu gehört; kurz das stumme, halblaute Spiel, welches nach und nach bei uns ganz verloren zu gehen scheint” (“FA,” 9: 473–4). 16 Susan Bernstein sees the thematization of virtuosity in the nineteenth century as nestled in the “experience of the limit of language’s capacity to signify something other than itself” (Virtuosity, 1–2). In her study of the term, she finds extensive affinities between its discussion in and around such authors as Heine, Baudelaire, Liszt and Wagner and the concerns of late twentieth-century post-structuralist theorists such as Adorno, Paul de Man, Werner Hamacher, Philippe LacoueLabarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

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improvisation in the modern sense. In this regard, the clergyman appears to point toward a niche that improvisation is able to occupy in “high art” during much of the nineteenth century, linking improvisation to virtuosity.17 Restricting improvisation in this manner, however, clearly runs counter to how its practice overall is introduced in this chapter of the novel. The chapter starts with a description of Wilhelm’s glum mood. Still plagued by the loss of Mariane, Wilhelm’s social life suffers. His dance and fencing lessons are unsuccessful and he is unable to make decisions concerning his business involvements with the theater group. In this period of indecision, the boat trip brings movement, but still does not answer the question of what to do next. It is only after everyone is situated on the boat and Philine asks: “So — what shall we do now?” (9: 66) that Laertes suggests the extemporization of a play. The suggestion lends at least two functions to the exercise that are missing from the clergyman’s assessment of improvisation. In this moment of indecision and aimlessness, that is, in the absence of a plan, improvisation is not reduced to the presentation of a preset play, but is employed both inventively and with regard to the compositional organization of the play. Furthermore, the extemporized play’s emphasis is on the moment, on the activity and performance itself that ought to provide entertainment for the boat ride. As a diversion and in terms of its circular structure, the trajectory of the boat ride does not fully align with the detour metaphor employed by the clergyman. The excursion is not a substitution for something that otherwise could be reached more directly, but, practically and symbolically, the improvisational exercise is introduced as a purpose in and for itself. In this regard, it is not only role-play, but the performance qua performance that matters. For the time being, it enables Wilhelm to forget the loss of Mariane. In this respect, the point of the performance seems to be for Wilhelm not to return to his former (unhappy) self. Finally, we also have to question the educational value of the exercise. There is no mention of Wilhelm becoming a better actor, person, or self at this point. He merely “learned” to enjoy a day that at the end of the chapter is said to have passed “most pleasantly in joking, singing, kissing and other sorts of light-hearted amusements” (9: 68). Taken as a whole, then, the chapter undercuts the presentation of improvisation as a useful practice and necessary “detour” for the sake of Wilhelm’s Bildung — what he learned or could have learned from a one-day exercise like this remains suspect in any case — and instead highlights the inventiveness it makes possible and the focus 17 Martin Pfleiderer notes how in music, improvisation remains an “obligatory component” of concerts until the middle of the nineteenth century, giving the soloists the opportunity to exhibit their virtuosity (“Improvisieren,” 84).

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improvisation puts on the present. The point that seems important to register is how the instrumentalization of improvisation that the clergyman recommends and its integration into the overall teleology of the novel is one that takes place after the fact and independent of the reasons and immediate effects of its practice. Put differently, Goethe’s novel grants improvisation its autonomy despite its subsequent utilization by the clergyman for educational purposes, and in the process recognizes improvisation as an inventive doing in its own right. Similar tensions surround improvisation in Goethe’s dramatic work. As a playwright and director, Goethe was not known for leaving much room for chance or improvisation. Yet, recent studies have shown that Goethe’s engagement with improvisation is lifelong and takes a variety of forms. Eric Hadley Denton, examining Goethe’s early play Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilen, finds in the play’s celebration of mixed media the roots of an aesthetics of performance — a surprising find due less, Denton argues, to Goethe’s creativity than his sensitivity to ubiquitous currents in theater tradition. Walter Hinck has noted how Goethe’s early farces adopt carnivalesque elements and even employ the German version of the Harlequin, Hanswurst, indicating a familiarity with improvisational techniques. This familiarity is not surprising, Hinck explains, as improvisation was part of the Weimar social circles Goethe frequented (Das deutsche Lustspiel, 359–61). Hinck even suggests that with characters reflecting on their roles and discussing the continuation of the play, Goethe’s Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (1777) anticipates Romantic adaptations of the Commedia dell’arte tradition. In his 2005 article on Goethe’s concept of the “born poet,” Walter Pape notes how Goethe in the fifth book of Poetry and Truth stylized himself (with regard to his beginnings as poet) as an improviser. Moreover, Pape argues “that there is no contradiction between Goethe’s lifelong sympathy for folk poetry, poets by nature (Naturdichter), and improvisation on the one hand and his often misleadingly labeled ‘classicistic theory of artistic education’ on the other” (“Immediacy,” 362). Pape reads Goethe as advocating that the ideals of immediacy in perception and presentation associated with folk poetry and improvisation be combined with knowledge (of the subject matter) and objectivity.18 For Pape, folk poetry and poetic improvisation “ultimately are judged not by their performative quality but by their aesthetic form and substance” (364). He concludes that “Goethe’s notion of improvisation thus seems to be a combination of the knowledge based Quintilianian and the Romantic variant of poetic immediacy” (366). The idea of a “combination” of 18 Esterhammer follows Pape’s assessment and confirms that “what attracts Goethe about improvised poetry . . . is immediacy and objectivity, not self-expression or even genius” (Romanticism and Improvisation, 45).

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opposites, I would argue, needs to be further refined. As we have seen in the discussion of improvisation’s use of masks in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship already, Goethe does not operate with a simple binary between immediate and mediated, authentic and masked, natural and artificial, but rather acknowledges that the appearance of immediacy, authenticity, and naturalness are the goal and products of artistic mediation. Thus, Goethe’s fascination with the improvised play he visited in Italy culminates precisely in acknowledging how “natural” the actors seem “under their masks,” a naturalness that speaks of talent, but also of extensive practice. Similarly, the passage from Goethe’s “Serbian Songs” that Pape cites as evidence of Goethe favoring aesthetic form and substance over the performative quality of poetry is more intricate than Pape’s reading would suggest. While Goethe stresses the importance of form and substance, he also draws a clear line between performed and written song, demanding that written poetry reproduce the effects of the performance and “engage mind and reason, imagination and remembrance and . . . bring forth to us the characteristics of primordial people in an unmediated significant tradition.”19 Goethe, in other words, recognizes the importance of the performance aspect of poetry, and asks that written poetry compensate for its medial shortcomings with form and substance. In the following, I want to turn to Goethe’s most important dramatic work, Faust, to strengthen the argument that Goethe’s interest in improvisation is not merely temporary, confined to his very early career as poet, and does not necessarily come at the expense of the performative, but rather is an integral part of his aesthetics. Though rarely noted, Faust involves elements of the improvisational theater, adapting them in ways that do not aim at some form of moderation, but rather explore on a much broader scale their significance for modern aesthetics. The drama raises the necessity of the tragedy to work as a performance prominently and explicitly in the “Prelude on the Stage” (Vorspiel auf dem Theater). Originally written for the reopening of Weimar’s renovated theater in 1798, Faust’s first prologue presents meta-dramatic reflections on the meaning of the theater and the constraints it has to face. The lofty aesthetic ideals expressed by the poet and the pragmatic (pecuniary) interests of the theater director are supplemented by the Player (lustige Person), a Harlequin-like figure who, true to the character’s traditional function, presents a counterpoint to both figures of authority:

19 Quoted after Pape, “Immediacy,” 364. In the original German, “in unmediated significant tradition” reads “in unmittelbar-gehaltvoller Ueberlieferung” (“FA,” 22: 124).

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Poet What glitters, lives but for the moment; What has real worth, survives for all posterity. Player Don’t talk about posterity to me! Suppose I chose to preach posterity, who’d entertain the present generation? Amusement’s what they want, and what they’ll get. A fine young fellow here and now is not, in my opinion, altogether worthless. If you know how to say your say and be relaxed, you aren’t embittered by the public’s whims — (2: 3–4)20 Goethe complements the ideal of art existing for posterity (the universal and lasting) with the need to create a performance that is made for the present, entertains, and engages the audience directly. That is, the universal and eternal is supplemented by an emphasis on geniality and wit that stress the importance of the more “fleeting” effects of a theatric performance.21 The performance aspect of the play relies on the comedic fracturing of the poet’s lofty ideals. In this first prologue to Faust, the “Player” himself performs the role of the “fine young fellow,” which he deems necessary for the play’s success. Subsequently, Mephistopheles

20 Dichter Was glänzt, ist für den Augenblick geboren, Das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren. Lustige Person Wenn ich nur nichts von Nachwelt hören sollte. Gesetzt, daß ich von Nachwelt reden wollte, Wer machte denn der Mitwelt Spaß? Den will sie doch und soll ihn haben. Die Gegenwart von einem braven Knaben Ist, dächt’ ich, immer auch schon was. Wer sich behaglich mitzuteilen weiß, Den wird des Volkes Laune nicht erbittern; (Goethe, “FA,” 7/1: 16) 21 The identification of wit with improvisation (and what is considered to be the birthplace and natural home of improvisation, Italy) is common in Goethe’s time. Angela Esterhammer documents how eighteenth-century writers frequently use the “touchstones of Augustan aesthetics — taste, wit, mental agility, adeptness with language — to evaluate extempore poetry, and they draw on genetic and climatological accounts of national character to describe improvisation as a phenomenon that is naturally and distinctively Italian” (Romanticism and Improvisation, 24).

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acquires this function for the course of the two-part tragedy.22 Read from the perspective of this first prologue, Mephistopheles appears as a modern “variation” (in the sense suggested by Lessing) of the Commedia dell’arte’s Harlequin figure. Mephistopheles is the “fine young fellow” that continually undermines the loftiness of Faust’s striving, exposing the contingency of his ideals and tying Faust’s actions back to the finitude of the here and now. The drama’s emphasis on the finitude of the human existence — as Mephistopheles puts it, that humans are “like those crickets with long legs/who won’t stop flying though they only hop, and promptly/sing the same old song down in the grass again” (2: 10) (“Wie eine der langbeinigen Zikaden/Die immer fliegt und fliegend springt/ Und gleich im Gras ihr altes Liedchen singt”) (“FA,” 7/1: 26) — relies heavily on the incorporation of the burlesque elements associated with the improvisational theater in the eighteenth century. The drinking scenes, sexual excesses during the Walpurgis night, raunchy jokes, word plays, and so on with which Mephisto exposes the all-too-human drives and sexual desires behind Faust’s idealistic striving, draw on a repertoire Goethe and his audience were most familiar with from performances associated with the “low art” traveling stages and the commoner’s comedy houses, which excelled in the practice of improvisation. David Wellbery reads Goethe’s Faust not only as a modern drama, but as “the drama of modernity, an exploration of how human life unfolds when it detaches itself from the ordinations of tradition and embarks on a project of energetic self-assertion and self-optimization” (Wellbery, “Faust,” 549). I want to suggest that in this context we assess what is particularly modern about the “variation” of the Harlequin figure that is Mephistopheles and about Goethe’s incorporation of performance aspects that are closely tied to the improvisational theater tradition. Comparing Mephisto to the function of the traditional Harlequin figure, we note three major conceptual shifts. Most apparent, perhaps, is that with Mephisto, Goethe individualizes the Harlequin character to the point where he is barely recognizable as the representation of a type. In turn, the individualization of the character is accompanied by what we might call a universalization of his cynical perspective. Questioning and mocking authority is part of the traditional Harlequin figure and an integral part of any comedic tradition; Mephistopheles, however, expands this critical viewpoint, making it an essential part of the modern existence. Likewise, while traditional comedic models are still recognizable in Faust, Mephistopheles’s critical viewpoint is no longer merely 22 In his commentary to the Frankfurter edition, Albrecht Schöne notes that in 1820, Karl Ernst Schubarth asked Goethe if he may present the “Player” in the robe of Mephistopheles; to which Goethe replied that this might capture the intentions of the poet quite well (“FA,” 7/2: 156–7).

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targeting particular character types and behavioral patterns (e.g. an old man falling in love with a young and inexperienced woman) or particular authoritative structures (the professor and his minions), but rather demonstrates how every motivation, every truth, and every value can be questioned. As a consequence, a sense of contingency comes to define what Wellbery calls “the structure of modern consciousness” (“Faust,” 549).23 While the traditional Harlequin and similar figures of the improvisational theater offer plenty of subversive counterpoints to the existing social order, they do not come to question this order’s overall stability and legitimacy the way Mephistopheles does when he proclaims: “since all that gains existence/is only fit to be destroyed” (2: 36) (“denn alles, was entsteht/Ist wert daß es zu Grunde geht”) (“FA,” 7/1: 65). The drama universalizes contingency also with regard to the teleology of Faust’s quest. At each step, his plans, hopes, and goals do not find full satisfaction. These failures are necessary: they facilitate the continuation of Faust’s striving. The necessary inability to reach the ultimate goal encapsulates the paradox of the Enlightenment’s teleology at large. For its continuation, the Enlightenment indeed may never reach its goal. One might suspect: were it to find a moment of perfection, it, too, would “gladly be destroyed” (2: 44). At the very least, it would lose its “soul,” its educational mission. Read in such a larger, cultural context, Goethe’s tragedy recognizes and affirms the particular and ephemeral as a necessary part of the modern drama, not as a part that would need to be transfigured and subsumed under the universal and eternal, but rather as one that refuses to be subsumed under the universal and thus constitutes one side of an essential and productive duality that drives the modern drama — and modern life — forward. The teleological quandary staged by the pairing of Faust with the Harlequinesque figure Mephistopheles posits improvisio, the inability to see ahead, as symptomatic for modernity. It is, of course, not the absence of plans, but their very presence that underlines this point so starkly. Throughout the drama, Faust and Mephistopheles are in the process of planning and orchestrating events which sooner or later unravel, leading to tragedy and destruction (most famously with the seduction of Gretchen that leads to child murder, insanity, and death). As indicated, in Faust these tragic and unpredictable endings are also the precondition for Faust’s continued striving and hence a necessary mark of his and the drama’s modernity. Like Werther’s relationship with Lotte, Faust would not be Faust — and Faust not the “drama of modernity” 23 The structure of modern consciousness entails the recognition of its own contingency. As Wellbery puts it: “Under the conditions of finitude, every love is also a seduction and betrayal, every creation implies destruction, every truth we aver is eventually belied” (“Faust,” 550).

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— were he and Gretchen to tie the knot. What is intriguing, though, is how plans in Faust unravel not despite, but because of extensive efforts to plan. That Faust uses Mephistopheles and his supernatural powers for his plans merely highlights the uncontrollability of actions and their consequences. In this regard, too, Goethe’s “fine young fellow” does not merely represent an inverted image and mockery of the aristocratic order in the sense projected by the traditional Harlequin figure, but rather with Mephistopheles, Goethe reveals the necessary openness and unpredictability that defines the modern, temporal imagination. The wager between Mephistopheles and God in the second prologue exposes already the inherent unforeseeability of the future. Obviously, the wager goes against any pre-modern cosmology where, at least from God’s perspective, all that is and will be is foreseen. With Faust, Goethe subscribes to a different cosmology, one that locates the conditio improvisio, the impossibility to foresee, plan, and fully control the future, at the center of its image of modern man. The point is that this future is not unforeseeable merely because of the inherent limits to human perception (as opposed to the unlimited divine perspective as Leibniz still had argued);24 but rather that improvisio is both a necessary precondition for the modern striving and it is its consequence. It is with regard to these fundamental cosmological and anthropological considerations that Goethe appropriates, adapts, and modernizes elements of the improvisational theater tradition in Faust and profiles the larger, cultural significance of improvisation for modern society.

2.2 Improvisation and Aesthetic Autonomy I will expand on the cosmological, anthropological, and aesthetic concerns raised by Goethe’s adaptation of the improvisational theater tradition in the discussion of German Romanticism (Chapter 3) and of Heinrich von Kleist (Chapter 4). My reading of Goethe illustrated how improvisation should not be seen as antithetical to the dominant artistic practices and aesthetic considerations of the time period, but rather is redefined and appropriated differently for art in the eighteenth century. In the following, I want to expand on this line of argument and address more specifically the “aesthetics of autonomy” that underlie Goethe’s and still much of our modern understanding of art. It should first be said that with the aesthetics of autonomy we are describing two concurrent developments. On the one hand, the term refers to aesthetics becoming a sub-discipline of philosophy dedicated to the study and theoretization of art (rather than 24 See, for example, sections 57 and 58 of Leibniz’s “Monadology” for an ingenious way of explaining how the multitude of limited human perspectives when taken together constitutes a more perfect image of the world (he uses a city as example) than any one preferred observational position might be able to grasp.

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perception in general — Kant still uses the term in this broader sense); on the other hand, the term designates a new (self-)understanding of art taking hold that affects the conception and creation of artworks and artistic performances. This includes the sense of unity (despite apparent differences) across media, that art can be realized on a theater stage as much as in literature, music, on a canvas, as dance, and so on, but also that whatever form it might take, art constitutes an autonomous sphere that in principle (although not always de facto) defines its own rules and conditions of membership, plays its own role in society, develops and draws on its own history, and communicates in its own ways. Both developments, aesthetics defining and artists insisting on autonomy, take place simultaneously and are interdependent. Autonomous art could not have prospered without a philosophical discipline conceptualizing it as such. At the same time, aesthetics gains its own autonomy as a philosophical discipline only as it begins to conceptualize art as autonomous and lets go of its normative function with which it tied art and itself to societal demands (articulated by the church, the courts, or private sponsors). We might, of course, disagree on how much art is or is not affected by economics, the media, fashions, personal matters, or other considerations and how much art should or should not engage political, pedagogical, or other social concerns. Aesthetic autonomy does not mean that such factors would not all be in play when it comes to the creation, recognition, and evaluation of art. Aesthetic autonomy merely means that we grant art that it follows its own rules, speaks its own language, makes its own contribution to society, and that non-artistic factors (be it the artwork’s economic success, its subject matter, or its political inclinations) no longer be used to distinguish art from non-art. Defined along these lines, the aesthetics of autonomy can serve as a gauge to assess the various (and often ambivalent) claims about improvisation. From the perspective of the aesthetics of autonomy, for example, the moral and pedagogical concerns expressed by the clergyman in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship — which are shared by many Enlightenment thinkers and form the basis for the censorship of improvisation in the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century — must be recognized as aesthetically suspect: the insistence on moral codes and pedagogical utility runs counter to the idea of art’s autonomy. On the other side of the evaluative spectrum, the celebratory association of improvisation with spontaneity and immediacy and the notion of genius must also seem suspect. Not only because such associations are structurally problematic (as we have seen in the previous chapter) and not in line with how improvisation was practiced and perceived historically, but also because they subscribe to hyperbolic notions of genius that, as we will discuss in more detail below (2.4), infringe on the idea of art’s autonomy. By focusing on the aesthetics of autonomy, we are also embedding

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our analysis in a comprehensive theory of modernity (Luhmann) that explains the broad institutional and semantic changes we can observe in the eighteenth century in terms of modern society’s transition from stratification to functional differentiation. It is in the context of these larger social changes that the art system is able to decouple itself at least in principle from the control of the church, the aristocracy, and other institutions of authority. I should reiterate here that functional differentiation does not mean that any particular subsystem would not have to deal with the pressures exerted by other social subsystems (e.g. science with religion, education and the law with politics and economics, art with the law, politics, and economics, and so on), but that since the eighteenth century, they do so, or at least tend to do so, on their own terms.25 What makes art particularly interesting for this theory of modernity and, vice versa, the theory productive as a context for late eighteenth-century aesthetics, is that the art system is among the first social subsystems that realizes and, through aesthetics, openly reflects on the consequences of its newly gained autonomy. Furthermore, by embedding the aesthetics of autonomy in a comprehensive theory of modernity, we can appreciate the continued relevance of the conceptual challenges that emerged at the time, and look for alternative options to address these challenges.

2.3 Improvisation and Aesthetic Perfection: Karl Philipp Moritz26 Karl Philipp Moritz is best known for his psychological novel Anton Reiser (1785–90) and has garnered renewed interest in recent years for having been chief editor and contributor to the Journal of Experiential Psychology (1783–93). But he also receives recognition — most famously, perhaps, by Tzvetan Todorov, who finds in Moritz “the seed of the entire aesthetic doctrine of romanticism” (Symbol, 147)27 — for a series of

25 As systems theory’s concept of autonomy and the idea of functional differentiation are often misunderstood, I might add that from this perspective the fact that social subsystems interpenetrate and constantly irritate each other does not threaten their autonomy; such irritations in fact help strengthen their autonomy, as the sensibility toward the specificity of what distinguishes, for example, education and science from religion increases with every attempt to infuse a religious agenda (such as the idea of “creationism”) into the educational or scientific system (or a scientific agenda into religion, for that matter). 26 Portions of the following two sections appeared in my article “The Psychology of Aesthetic Autonomy.” I am grateful to Rodopi for the permission to reuse. 27 Todorov identifies Moritz as pivotal for the change in focus from mimesis to productivity wherein he finds the basis for the modern emphasis on expressivity in art. While I generally agree with this assessment, we will revisit Moritz with an eye on the structural challenges his aesthetics encounter and read as a response to those his turn toward productivity and expressivity.

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articles he published between 1785 and 1788 that propose the autonomy of art and ponder its consequences for the understanding of art and its production still a few years before Immanuel Kant offers his theory of aesthetic autonomy in the Critique of Judgment (1790). The full doctrine of aesthetic autonomy emerges in Moritz’s essay “On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful” (“Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen”), which was written with some help from Goethe, who later included a large part of the essay in his Italian Journey (published in 1816–7, 30 years after his travels). Moritz’s own Italian journey from 1777–8 coincided with Goethe’s, with the two for a period of time meeting each other regularly in Rome. At the same time that they were discussing their ideas on beauty, art, and aesthetic autonomy, Moritz frequently visited the performances of a Venetian improviser on Rome’s Piazza di Spagna. In one of the longer entries in his travel journal, dated October 11, 1787, Moritz provides us with a detailed account of the talented Venetian improvistore’s performances. The description of the performer and his craft contains a mixture of adoration and criticism that is typical for the time period. Moritz applauds the improviser’s broad “knowledge of history and mythology” and he praises the “true enthusiastic inclination, which leads the improvisators to pursue this profession” (“daß eine wirkliche enthusiastische Neigung die Improvisatoren zu diesem Geschäfte treibt”) (2: 681).28 He also cherishes the history behind these performances. Hearing the improviser sing his verses, Moritz finds himself returned to the “times of the oldest poetry” (“so daß man sich in die Zeiten ältester Dichtkunst zurück versetzt glaubte”) (2: 681). He is wary, however, about the purpose of this art, as the improviser merely performs for the short-lived applause of his audience; he also laments the fleetingness of this poetry, that many worthwhile “verses borne from the ever increasing inspiration” are not written down and subsequently “are lost to the wind” (“um manche Verse, die in der wachsenden Begeisterung sich bilden, ist es wirklich Schade, daß keine Hand sie aufschreibt, und daß der Wind sie verweht”) (2: 681–2). Yet, Moritz is also intrigued by the improviser’s disregard for the preservation of his poetry and more generally by his indifference toward social recognition and monetary rewards. Despite many requests to perform for the aristocracy, the Venetian improviser much rather moves “like Orpheus, the rawest minds and the wildest rabble” (“gleich einem Orpheus, die rohesten Gemüter und den wildesten Pöbel”) (2: 682). The journal entry ends with the recognition that the improviser’s performances seemingly 28 Quotations from Moritz’s work are taken from the two-volume Frankfurt edition Werke in zwei Bänden and referenced by volume and page numbers in the text. With the exception of the first part of the essay “On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful,” all translations of quotes from Moritz’s work are mine.

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manage to overcome social stratification: “it is pleasantly surprising to see in this circle the gruff Faquino (porter) standing next to the noble Abbate, listening, and see one like the other give applause during the most beautiful passages” (“es ist einem ein angenehm überraschender Anblick, wenn man in diesem Kreise, den groben Faquino [Sackträger] neben dem feinen Abbate lauschend stehen, und eben so wie jenen, bei den schönsten Stellen seinen Beifall bezeigen sieht”) (2: 682).29 Moritz’s travel journal entry on the Venetian improvisatore is a telling example for improvisation serving, in Angela Estherhammer’s words, “as both a model and a foil for an emerging Romantic aesthetics of genius, originality and inspiration” (Overflows, 9–10).30 Roland Borgards identifies in Moritz’s short text four principles of improvisation, which are adopted and inverted or moderated by the aesthetics of genius. Like the improviser, the genius does not follow rules, but (unlike the improviser) ought to posit them; the aesthetics of genius reverses improvisation’s preference for form over content, reeling in improvisation’s tendency toward playfulness and excess; like improvisation, autonomous art is thought to originate from a free act, an act, however, which for autonomous art needs to acquire paradigmatic significance; and finally, both improvisation and the aesthetics of genius entail a moment of contingency, a contingency that the genius, though, needs to transform into necessity. With regard to the adaption of these four principles of improvisation, Borgards reads the aesthetics of genius as a sublimation of sorts, as the incorporation and taming of improvisation after its prohibition.31 The proximity Esterhammer and Borgards register between improvisation and the aesthetics of genius I want to read against the backdrop of Moritz’s aesthetics of autonomy. Concerning his aesthetic theory, Moritz’s

29 Some of the duplicities noted with regard to the improviser also apply to Moritz’s travel journal. It integrates high and low cultural tidbits, flaunts extensive historical and mythological knowledge, unfolds short narratives and theoretical reflections whenever prompted by (more or less) random encounters with artworks, people, landscapes, and so on; and Moritz writes in a sophisticated yet accessible style that seeks as much the applause of educated experts as it caters to the interests of the more common reader of his time. 30 Esterhammer continues: “the Romantic concept of creative genius developed in the shadow of a much older Mediterranean tradition of performed poetic creativity” (Overflows, 10). 31 Borgards sees the genius’s appropriation of improvisation as having two effects: it rescues improvisation from the law and it relativizes improvisation through the production of texts and norms (“Improvisation, Verbot, Genie,” 266). Borgards, however, does not relate his reading of Moritz’s description of the Venetian improviser to the basic tenets of the aesthetics of autonomy that Moritz develops at the same time. Read against his aesthetic theory, the genius, I argue, hides rather than appropriates improvisation’s relevance for modern art.

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fascination with the Venetian improviser’s demonstrative “disinterestedness” in monetary rewards and social recognition is most important. Moritz raises the point at key moments in his description of the Venetian improviser, namely with regard to the performer’s “enthusiastic inclination,” the performance’s ontological status (its fleetingness, the “waste” of knowledge), and when describing the relationship of the artist to the audience and to his own work. When still in the same travel journey entry on the Venetian improvisatore’s performance Moritz notes with surprise that the improviser does not use his vast knowledge “more to his advantage and honor,” he nevertheless interprets this behavior as a sign of the performer’s “true enthusiastic inclination” (“eine wirkliche enthusiastische Neigung”) (2: 680). Similarly, that the performer seeks “the applause of the people first hand” and wants to “harvest the immediate rewards of his talent” (ibid.) he reads as a sign that the Venetian improviser is fully dedicated to his art, so much so that “he does not care much about everyday needs” (“so kümmert er sich nicht viel um die gemeinen Bedürfnisse des Lebens”) (2: 682). In this regard, the fleetingness of the performance that Moritz laments at the beginning of his entry reveals itself to be an asset, too. It prevents the commodification of art and thus supports the premise of disinterestedness that is so central to the aesthetics of autonomy. Already the opening paragraph of Moritz’s first publication on aesthetic autonomy, the “Attempt at a Unification of All of the Fine Arts and Sciences Under the Concept of That Which is Perfect Itself” (“Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten”), from 1785, reveals that Moritz’s interest in disinterestedness is not merely expressive of an ethical concern we might or might not share still today, but rather is about the aesthetics of autonomy’s basic conceptualization of the relationship between artist and artwork. In this essay, which develops major elements of the theory of aesthetic autonomy still before Moritz’s meetings with Goethe, Moritz counters the aesthetics of effects’ substitution of the Aristotelian mimesis postulate with the purpose of pleasure by demoting pleasure from the main purpose of art to an ancillary effect. This demotion is based on the argument that the principle of pleasure cannot be used to distinguish fine arts from “mechanical arts” as the products created by the mechanical arts are also pleasurable (because they are useful). In the subsequent discussion with an (imaginary) artist, Moritz returns repeatedly to the point that art is preferable over other sciences because it creates what we might call altruistic rather than egoistic pleasure. Egoistic pleasure derives solely from an object’s utility for the subject, while the pleasure created by beauty is more sublime: it derives from the recognition of the object’s perfection. The plausibility of this distinction aside — Nietzsche

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has a point when he mocks the idea of such disinterestedness in art32 — it raises the question of whether the introduction of such an ethical standard is not compromising the idea of artistic autonomy. A closer look, however, reveals that whatever protestant ethical impulses might drive Moritz’s (and soon Kant’s) argument,33 the semantic operation he performs with regard to the notion of utility is rather complex. Moritz questions the usefulness of the useful/useless distinction and finds in art that the useful is useless for artist and observer and only the useless is useful. This second-order perspective on the primary code of the aesthetics of effect — the interest in disinterestedness as a more sublime form of pleasure — both stipulates and supports the idea of aesthetic autonomy, namely by reinforcing the recognition that aesthetics and other sciences are separate orders of discourse where binaries such as the distinction between usefulness and uselessness do not live in predetermined harmony, but rather can function quite differently for each. As the demotion of pleasure from main purpose to ancillary effect helps establish the autonomy of the artwork, it also comes to define how we ought to envision the position of artist and spectator vis-à-vis the artwork. Moritz discusses this relationship first with regard to the enjoyment of art. Altruistic rather than egoistic pleasure derives from the recognition of art’s perfection, that art is its own end: When contemplating beauty, I move the purpose away from me and back into the object itself; I contemplate it as something that finds its completion not in me, but in itself. It constitutes a whole in itself and in its own right accords me pleasure. (2: 943)34 Tzvetan Todorov notes how Moritz’s understanding of art being its own end introduces to aesthetics an idea long reserved for God (Symbol, 156). This leads Martha Woodmansee to understand the whole theory of autonomous art, at least in its origin, as a “displaced theology” (“Disinterestedness,” 33). What is interesting here, however, is not only 32 “If our aestheticians never weary of asserting in Kant’s favor that, under the spell of beauty, one can even view undraped female statues ‘without interest,’ one may laugh a little at their expense: the experiences of artists on this ticklish point are more ‘interesting,’ and Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily an ‘unaesthetic man’” (Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 540). 33 Martha Woodmansee reads Moritz’s overall focus on self-sufficiency as taken from his pietistic upbringing (“Disinterestedness,” 31). 34 “Bei der Betrachtung des Schönen aber wälze ich den Zweck aus mir in den Gegenstand selbst zurück: ich betrachte ihn, als etwas, nicht in mir, sondern in sich selbst Vollendetes, das also in sich ein Ganzes ausmacht, und mir um sein selbst willen Vergnügen gewährt.”

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from where Moritz took his definition of autonomy, but how its displacement performs a paradoxical operation indicative of larger changes in the eighteenth century’s conception of art. When Moritz’s understanding of nature as the totality of all things and purposes becomes the model for his conceptualization of art, he not only displaces the theological model, but rather performs a paradoxical reentry of the whole into the whole. Moritz notes this from the perspective of nature, as nature doubling itself within itself as art: Thus from the real and complete beauty, that which can rarely develop itself immediately, nature created beings who could mediately reflect it and express nature so lifelike in the image that the image can again oppose itself to its own creation. – And thus, through its redoubled reflection of itself in itself, floating and fluttering above reality, nature has brought about an illusion which is even more attractive to the mortal eye than nature itself. (“Artistic Imitation,” 140)35 The mirror metaphor and the ideas of semblance and “illusion” should not distract us from the fact that what nature impresses on the artist is not representational, but rather takes the form of a stimulus (Reiz) and driving force (Tatkraft) which will not rest until it “has created its own world wherein nothing particular can any longer take place but where every thing has, according to its type, become a whole, existing for itself” (ibid.).36 In other words, Moritz sees nature doubled in art, not in its appearances, but in its totality, as art creating a “world on its own,” a self-sufficient, self-contained whole. I will return to Moritz’s analog splitting of the artist in a moment, but first want to note the implication of his conception of art as an autonomous whole (“ein für sich bestehendes Ganzes”). For a study of improvisation, concepts of completeness and perfection must raise questions regarding their applicability to what often is perceived as an “imperfect art.”37 Needless to say, improvisation always runs the risk of 35 “Von dem reelen und vollendeten Schönen also, was unmittelbar sich selten entwickeln kann, schuf die Natur doch mittelbar den Widerschein durch Wesen, in denen sich ihr Bild so lebhaft abdrückte, daß es sich ihr selber in ihre eigene Schöpfung wieder entgegenwarf – Und so brachte sie, durch diesen verdoppelten Widerschein sich in sich selbst spiegelnd, über ihrer Realität schwebend und gaukelnd, ein Blendwerk hervor, das für ein sterbliches Auge noch reizender, als sie selber ist” (2: 970). 36 “. . . bis sie [Tatkraft] eine eigne Welt sich schafft, worin gar nichts Einzelnes mehr statt findet, sondern jedes Ding in seiner Art ein für sich bestehendes Ganzes ist” (2: 970–1). 37 See Ted Gioia’s eponymous book (1988).

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being perceived as less than perfect. But so do artworks or performances that do not stage themselves as improvised — or we would not need critics. Improvisers might take on more risks and for that reason might appear to fail more often than artists that rely less on the public staging of improvisational doings and can discard their “failures” before they reach the eyes and ears of the public. But even Moritz takes little note of the possible imperfections he might have witnessed in the performance of the Venetian improviser. The question, in any case, is what is meant by perfection? And what would constitute a “mistake” or incompleteness in art? Moritz’s famous definition of beauty allows us to approach this question more succinctly. In his essay “On the Describability of Artworks” (“In wie fern Kunstwerke beschrieben werden können?”), Moritz defines beauty in terms of the artwork’s completeness: The essence of beauty, after all, is that one part becomes expressive and meaningful by virtue of another part and the whole by virtue of itself — that it explains itself — describes itself by itself — and thus merely needs a finger pointing to its content, but no additional explanation or description. (2: 994)38 Moritz defines the essence of beauty in terms of the artwork’s referential closure. Artworks are perfect in as much as they are self-referential, in as much as they best describe and explain themselves by themselves.39 Moritz unfolds the idea of a self-referential closure by distinguishing between parts and whole. The parts that make up the artwork give meaning to each other and the whole and the whole gives meaning to all of its parts. The ideas of completion and perfection thus would indicate that in the artwork everything serves equally as signifier and signified, making everything equally meaningful. As Moritz is primarily writing about the plastic arts, “meaning” here is not restricted to 38 “Denn darin besteht ja eben das Wesen des Schönen, daß ein Teil immer durch den andern und das Ganze durch sich selber, redend und bedeutend wird — daß es sich selbst erklärt — sich durch sich selbst beschreibt — und also außer dem bloß andeutenden Fingerzeige auf den Inhalt, keiner weitern Erklärung und Beschreibung mehr bedarf.” For Moritz, the signature of beauty applies both to nature and to art. 39 We might note that such descriptions of autonomy complicate claims that at the center of the Romantic understanding of art lie notions of expressivity and immediacy. When Todorov identifies Moritz with the Romantic shift toward the expressive rather than representative function of art and (poetic) language (Symbol, 172), he ignores Moritz’s definition of the artwork’s autonomy, of art speaking its own language, of art being expressive but of its own “perfection” as art.

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semantics, but must refer to the artwork creating a sense of coherence where parts and whole relate, supplement, and motivate each other in a way that is unique to the individual work. We may draw on an example from Goethe to elucidate Moritz’s concept of completion for art, an example that reminds us how the idea of perfection is articulated in the context of the rejection of the Aristotelian mimesis postulate. In an essay entitled “On Truth and Verisimilitude of Artworks” (Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke), from 1798, Goethe contemplates the idea of completeness with regard to the opera. Questioning the applicability of the Aristotelian mimesis postulate, Goethe attests that the opera is not and does not have to be a plausible representation of the world, but rather needs to express an “inner truth” (eine innere Wahrheit). This inner truth subsequently is defined as the opera’s ability (with the disclaimer added: if it is good) to create “a small world onto itself, where everything happens according to certain laws, and needs to be judged according to its own laws, and experienced [gefühlt] in accordance with its own characteristics” (“Wenn die Oper gut ist, macht sie freilich eine kleine Welt für sich aus, in der alles nach gewissen Gesetzen vorgeht, die nach ihren eignen Gesetzen beurteilt, nach ihren eigenen Eigenschaften gefühlt sein will”) (“FA,” 18: 504). While intuitively such descriptions of autonomy and perfection make sense still today, I want to introduce a more contemporary vocabulary to formalize the conceptual challenges Goethe and Moritz face, namely Niklas Luhmann’s concepts of “world art” (Weltkunst) and of “selfprogramming” (Selbstprogrammierung). While not particularly beautiful in and for themselves, these concepts allow us to discern and historically contextualize what Moritz’s definition of art and, more generally, what the creative process for the aesthetics of autonomy — and hence for modern art — mean. We have seen both Moritz and Goethe describe art as constituting their own “worlds.” In his 1990 essay “World Art,” Luhmann distinguishes object art (Objektkunst), which aims at representing existing or imagined objects, and world art (Weltkunst), which no longer represents a perceived or imagined world, but rather constructs its own world. While object art is in principle mimetic — Luhmann relates it to the cosmological worldview of pre-modern societies, which he distinguishes from the transcendental worldview that underlies modern society — world art posits. Such positing means that the artwork’s creation is no longer thought to be guided by something preexisting the artwork. The creative process must be self-guiding, or “self-programming” as Luhmann would later call it. In the “Weltkunst” essay, Luhmann draws on British mathematician George Spencer-Brown’s form calculus to describe the creative process in the abstract terminology of distinction theory. The appeal of Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form is its ability to conceive of art in pre-representational terms. In the strict

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sense employed by Spencer-Brown, distinctions are not signs that connote a preexisting reality, world, idea or thing; but rather the drawing of distinctions is seen as an operation used by (observing) systems to construct worlds, objects, ideas, things, and also signs.40 Spencer-Brown’s distinction between signs and distinctions aligns neatly with Luhmann’s distinction between object art and world art. While object art relies on signs and symbols, world art constructs its reality through the drawing of and operating with (confirming, condensing, canceling, reentering, etc.) distinctions. World art “works with the restrictions that it derives from its own operations” (Luhmann, “Weltkunst,” 23). In his book Art as a Social System (originally published in German in 1995), Luhmann builds on this model and suggests that we formalize art’s autonomy by distinguishing between code and program. In a nutshell, Luhmann argues that modern art emerges when the relation between code and program is realigned. Art always used codes (most importantly the codes beautiful/ugly and interesting/uninteresting) and programs. Programs are selection criteria, which govern what ensuing operations will be chosen during the production or the observation of art by deciding whether a particular selection belongs to the positive or the negative value of the code. Pre-modern art devised programs that existed outside and independently of individual artworks. Well into the eighteenth century, the artist was expected to follow more or less the rules and recommendations set forth by such “eternal” authorities as Aristotle, Horaz, or Opitz. It is, of course, debatable how much artists in fact adhered to such rules, or how much such rules might have served as a negative foil already prior to the eighteenth century; the point here is merely the overall belief that matters of beauty and perfection could be decided independently and prior to the production of the artwork. In the eighteenth century, Luhmann argues, code and program separate and begin to bring about the self-organization of art. Especially the demand for newness made it impossible to base one’s selection criteria on experience, rules, or existing art; now the artwork had to offer its own 40 As Varela put it: “By going deeper than truth, to indication and the laws of its form, [Spencer-Brown] has provided an account of the common ground in which both logic and the structure of any universe are cradled, thus providing a foundation for a genuine theory of general systems” (“Calculus of Self-Reference,” 6). The difference between truth claims and the form calculus is that statements about truth, the world, reality, and so on operate with signs that at some point must be understood as representing (or failing to represent) what they attempt to designate; while Spencer-Brown’s calculus, operating with distinction and indication, constructs what it observes (on this point, see also Fritz B. Simon, “Mathematik und Erkenntnis,” esp. 55f). For a more extensive discussion of the epistemological and ontological implications of Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form and a response to some of its critics, see Michael Schiltz’s “Space is the Place.”

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program. Luhmann calls the subsequent re-organization of the creative process the “self-programming” of modern art. Self-programming means that the artwork has to develop in the process of its creation the program that governs its construction. Put differently, the artwork itself must develop criteria, which can guide the selection process, criteria which will decide whether a particular selection is interesting or not, beautiful or not, necessary or not. In this sense, creating a work of art — according to one’s capabilities and one’s imagination — generates the freedom to make decisions on the basis of which one can continue one’s work. The freedoms and necessities one encounters are entirely the products of art itself; they are consequences of decisions made with the work. The “necessity” of certain consequences one experiences in one’s work or in the encounter with an artwork is not imposed by law but results from the fact that one began, and how. (Art, 203–4)41 If we understand aesthetic autonomy and perfection along these lines, we can distinguish the indescribability Moritz observes (as a consequence of the self-referential closure of the artwork) from popular articulations of speechlessness that follow a different tradition. The idea that art must leave us speechless has a long and venerable history. In the eighteenth century, the expression of awe in the encounter with art finds its most famous enunciation in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s effusions in front of the Apollo statue at the Belvedere. As his image (mein Bild) comes alive for him “like Pygmalion’s beauty,” Winckelmann can merely ask rhetorically: “how is it possible to paint or describe it? Art itself would have to advise me and guide my hand.”42 Of course, Winckelmann’s book is filled with detailed descriptions of the Apollo statue (his favorite) and other artworks. That is, when Winckelmann communicates incommunicability, he fails to contemplate the consequences of his claim for the aesthetic discourse. Thus, his incommunicability

41 I suspect that the recognition of the simultaneity of possibilities and necessities created by the self-programming of the artwork creates what contemporary psychologists register as the “experience of flow” (see Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity and Csikszentmihalyi and Rich, “Musical Improvisation”). I will return to alternative descriptions of the experiencing of art that are in tune with the idea of modern art’s self-programming in the conclusion of this book. 42 “[M]ein Bild scheint Leben und Bewegung zu bekommen, wie des Pygmalion Schönheit. Wie ist es möglich, es zu malen und zu beschreiben. Die Kunst selbst müßte mir raten und die Hand leiten” (Winckelmann, Geschichte, 365).

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communications remain a rhetorical gesture.43 The aesthetic implications of incommunicability, however, are precisely the point of Moritz’s “descriptions” of the same Apollo statue. Moritz does not merely cite the trope, does not merely revel, as Willi Winkler in his recent Moritz biography put it, in the “obligatory amazement” (Moritz, 97), only to continue and detail what he sees. The various entries in his travel log give the reader almost nothing in terms of a description of the statue; instead they reflect on the proclaimed indescribability of art and how it affects its definition. Descriptions, such as Winckelmann’s of the Apollo statue at the Belvedere, Moritz laments, “insult the work of art” as they dissect and “enumerate” one by one what ought to appear as a whole.44 To this day, the proclamation of indescribability and communications of incommunicability remain important tropes when it comes to describing our encounters with art. Dietrich Schwanitz notes (tongue-in-cheek) how “in the humanities, the discourse of the plastic arts is easiest to learn. One remains silent . . . The silence signifies deep emotions” (Bildung, 518). Schwanitz explains the mute response (and why museum visits are physically quite strenuous) also in terms of the artwork’s completeness, that “nothing is irrelevant, everything equally meaningful,” impairing our ability “to distinguish between foreground and background” (519). Schwanitz’s observation explains efficiently why modern art is thought to be indescribable. It is because of the presumption that nothing is irrelevant that descriptions and explanations necessarily compromise the artwork: they rely on selection processes, on the reduction of complexity, on foregrounding, and so on, and thus necessarily infringe on the law of artistic perfection: that everything is to be (viewed as) equally meaningful. In the introduction, I took issue with the indescribability claims that accompany many contemporary studies of improvisation (e.g. Derek Bailey, Christopher Dell). If they are to be more than rhetorical gestures or expressions of awe, I suggest we read them as acknowledging that improvisation today is granted the status of art in the very sense that is made explicit by the aesthetics of autonomy. This implies that we expect improvisation to adhere to the same codes as art: improvisation must be

43 Rhetorically, we are dealing with two tropes: a paraleipsis (a false omission that is part of an extensive description of what allegedly cannot be described), and a parasiopesis (a pretend silence that communicates emphatically the supposedly incommunicable effect: here, of the artwork on the observer). 44 “Who reads Winckelmann’s words . . . must enumerate to himself the beauty of the magnificent and simple artwork one by one, which is an insult to the artwork” (“Wer diese [Winckelmanns] Worte lieset . . . muß nach dieser Beschreibung sich die Schönheit des hohen und einfachen Kunstwerks, eine nach der anderen aufzählen, welches eine Beleidigung des Kunstwerks ist”) (2: 753–4).

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“perfect” in the sense defined by Moritz, that is, referentially closed, and consequently saturated with meaning. Luhmann’s distinction between code and program can help us here to understand how this does not mean that we have to exclude art or improvisational performances that aim at staging incoherence, incompletion, imperfection, or the utter absence of meaning, necessity, continuity, and so on; it merely means that such celebrations of contingency must be recognizable both as original and as necessary in the sense of them being part of an aesthetic program (or else, the artwork might appear to be merely a dirty bathtub that is in need of a good scrubbing — as happened, famously, to one of Joseph Beuys’s works). Since the beginning of the twentieth century (e.g. Dada’s time), much of improvisational and performance-oriented art has been thriving on this tension, on staging art’s ability not only to frame the necessary as contingent, but also to present the contingent as necessary for art. Against the backdrop of a more refined understanding of the aesthetics of autonomy’s idea of perfection, we may want to rethink another frequently repeated claim about improvisation, namely the idea that improvisers take on more risks than art forms or performances that do not rely on improvisation as an inventive and compositional tool. While it is certainly true that the self-imposed temporal frame of improvisation and the inability to discard failures present particular challenges to the performing artist, improvisers at the same time are able to compensate for those risks as they have the flexibility and are trained in the art of “error” correction. In this sense, improvisation is less prone to making “mistakes” than artistic performances that follow the blueprint model. For a “mistake” is only a mistake when the performance fails to give meaning to it subsequently, and this is harder to do for someone following a score or script — integration attempts will lead to more mistakes, that is, to further aberrations from the score — than for someone who focuses on and is trained in framing unplanned things, making them necessary. Moving forward by looking backward, improvisation is committed from the get-go to build on and relate previous parts and decisions to subsequent choices. There are numerous guides for improvisation in theater performances and music that explore strategies on how to give meaning, “integrate” into a performance, and move forward from what otherwise would represent an apparent mistake. In jazz, the mere repetition and continuation of the “mistake” might do the trick (see Paul Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz for ample examples). No doubt, in more recent explorations of improvisational arts (already in certain forms of Free Jazz), such coherence might be but an attempt to maintain a high degree of incoherence. But it is only where such attempts are recognizable as programmatic, that is, where the persistent incoherence is recognizable as aesthetically interesting that we can speak

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of improvisation as art in such instances. That the development and recognition of programs is central for the aesthetics of autonomy does not mean that every observer will be able (or willing) to recognize such a program for each work. Unlike with matters of taste, though, we are not dealing with a subjective category here either. We might acknowledge a performance as artistic and yet not like it. More importantly, we cannot ignore the evolving standards, history, and existing works that provide the background against which a new work would have to be assessed as more or less original, interesting, stimulating, thought-provoking, vexing, or pleasing; if one chose to ignore such factors, one’s assessment would quickly appear as irrelevant or obsolete. Another seemingly counterintuitive consequence that derives from the aesthetics of autonomy’s insistence on the perfection and indescribability of art is that it ties art intricately to the moment of its reception, supporting the idea that art cannot be separated from its “performance” in the broader sense. We have already seen how Moritz refines rather than overcomes the basic premise of the aesthetics of effect from which his theory departs. Sabine Schneider has argued that Moritz’s recognition of art as speaking its own language is radical because it dispenses of an object-reference as the tertium datur — the idea, natura naturata, or a transcendental signified (for Lessing et al.) — that would allow for the translation of the artwork into a different language. Accordingly, the artwork is tied to the medium of its realization, gaining its characteristics from its “surface” rather than its content, (symbolized) referent, or (deeper) meaning (“Kunstautonomie,” 167). Separating the artwork from its deeper meaning, however, raises the questions when, where, and how art is realized? Moritz’s lament about the indescribability of art links art’s realization to sensory perception. An artwork that cannot be described must be perceived or otherwise “experienced”45 in its presence.46 The emphasis Moritz puts on the sensual engagement with art is most apparent when he describes the making of art and the transition from premonition to reality (Wirklichkeit) in terms of an “everlasting, irresistible stimulus” (immerwährenden, unwiderstehlichen Reiz) driving the artist:

45 Experience understood in the empirical sense we find in use since 1775, that is, as Carsten Zelle differentiated, no longer as knowledge that designates “a finding rooted in time and memory,” but as knowledge “which one acquires merely by paying attention to a sensation” (“Experiment, Experience and Observation,” 93). 46 The requirement to be in the presence of the artwork would apply to the reading of a poem, novel, or play, too (as opposed to reading the Cliffs Notes). With regard to the latter, the implication, of course, is not that we should not differentiate between reading and watching a play, but merely that both modes of consumption can experience the work as art.

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Improvisation as Art From the vivid and dark premonition of the reflection’s power of action, through the differentiating power of thought, and the depicting power of imagination, to the clairvoyant eye and the distinctly hearing ear, the more complete and vivid the concepts become, in the lively process of mirroring, the more they also eclipse and exclude each other. – The place they exclude each other the least, and are most able to stand side by side, can only be where they are the most incomplete, where the mere beginnings and occasions come together, which, through their lack and incompleteness, produce the constant and irresistible stimulus which brings out their full effect. (“Artistic Imitation,” 141)47

The relationship between the degree of completion and the strength of Tatkraft is inversely proportional. The more the work of art is formed, the more a dark premonition is defined, conceived, and transformed into something perceptible, the weaker the force. And vice versa, the less completed the work of art is, the more stimuli and rewards (Reiz signifies both) it offers to the artist. The reduction of art to the experiencing of its Reiz and its effect (Wirkung) during the process of its creation threatens to exclude the observer from the realization of art. Moritz avoids this conclusion by defining Tatkraft not only as an active force, but also as something that determines the reception of art. Tatkraft entails both a “forming force” (Bildungskraft) and the “ability to enjoy” (Genußfähigkeit). Throughout Moritz’s aesthetic notes and essays, Genußfähigkeit is linked to the subconscious effects of art, effects that are thought to exceed comprehension and description. Thus the observer, too, albeit to a lesser extent, can partake in the artistic Reiz and experience the effect of art, the Wirkung of totality. This is the essence of Moritz’s famous last sentence of “On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful:” “And mortal lips cannot say anything more sublime about beauty than: it is!” (“Und von sterblichen Lippen, läßt sich kein erhabneres Wort vom Schönen sagen, als: es ist!”) (2: 991). The statement reiterates the indescribability of art, reducing

47 “Je lebhafter spiegelnd nun das Organ von der dunkelahndenden Thatkraft, durch die unterscheidende Denkkraft, und die darstellende Einbildungskraft, bis zu dem hellsehenden Auge, und dem deutlich vernehmenden Ohre, wird; um desto vollständiger und lebendiger werden zwar die Begriffe, aber um destomehr verdrängen sie sich auch, und schließen einander aus. – Wo sie sich also am wenigsten einander ausschließen, und ihrer am meisten nebeneinander bestehen können, das kann nur da sein, wo sie am unvollständigsten sind, wo bloß ihre Anfänge oder ersten Anlässe zusammentreffen, die eben durch ihr Mangelhaftes und Unvollständiges, in sich selber den immerwährenden, unwiderstehlichen Reiz bilden, der sie zur vollständigen Wirklichkeit bringt” (2: 971–2).

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art in principle to the sublime Reiz created by the recognition of its incomprehensibility.48 While the classicist aesthetics of the late eighteenth century might emphasize the universal reproducibility of this experience, it nevertheless defines the sublime moment of recognition as a moment that cannot be but fleeting as it is tied to the experience and immediate presence of the creative impetus. Clearly, the simultaneity of composition and performance that defines improvisation does not run counter to, but rather supports the idealization of this Reiz. Improvisation stages Tatkraft at work. It thrives on prolonging and hovering on the moment “where the mere beginnings and occasions come together, which, through their lack and incompleteness, produce the constant and irresistible stimulus which brings out their full effect” (“Artistic Imitation,” 141). Against this backdrop, we can understand more clearly Moritz’s fascination with the Venetian improviser. While the improviser’s verses might be “lost to the wind” (2: 681–2), the performance nevertheless must appear to the observer as a pure expression of Tatkraft. For his (limited) audience, the improviser strives for no more and achieves no less than the highest of aesthetic goals: the realization of his art, the moment where all that can and needs to be said is that “it is” (2: 991).

2.4 Improvisation and the Artist-Genius One of the most important consequences of the rejection of the Aristotelian mimesis postulate in the eighteenth century is that it moves the emphasis from representation to the production of art.49 In the process, art’s relationship to nature and nature itself are redefined. Art — and this is the argument at the center of the Moritz’s essay “On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful” — does not imitate the products of nature, rather, it emulates the productive force of nature. Nature, in turn, no longer reveals itself in its object, but as “drive” and stimulus (Reiz). Moritz’s reinterpretation of imitation (Nachahmung) and nature along these lines has been much discussed. What has received less attention, however, is the paradoxical situation in which the artist finds herself

48 Without wanting to conjure up the extensive discussion of the sublime here, we might note that in Kant, too, the limits of comprehension (and hence of what can be described) are linked to the experience of the sublime. In Moritz, however, the sublime is provoked by art and does not lead to the recognition of freedom — the “idea of humanity within ourselves” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, 114) — but rather to the recognition of “driving force” (“Tatkraft”), of the artist and art connoisseur participating in matters of natura naturans. 49 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) is generally credited as the first German aesthetic thinker who moved the emphasis away from the representation of art and toward its production (Costazza, Genie, 19).

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once nature no longer serves as a model in its objective manifestation. Simply put, if art can no longer follow rules or models or replicate something that preexists in or beyond nature, how is the artist to approach its production? The creative process remains in a literal sense improvisio, unforeseeable: the artist cannot know in advance what she will create if what she creates ought to be autonomous and equal to the self-contained perfection of nature. Put more paradoxically, the artist who wants to create art has to plan on not planning the artwork if the work indeed shall be autonomous. Moritz approaches the problem — which is structural, a problem faced by any attempt to intend autonomy — in terms of the special abilities of the creative genius and in particular with the notion of Tatkraft (driving force, active power). Before returning to Moritz’s Tatkraft and its conceptualization as an active force, I should note though that Moritz is indeed aware of the planning paradox. It first appears explicitly in the concluding paragraph of “Attempt at a Unification of All of the Fine Arts,” where Moritz refutes one more time the idea that pleasure could serve as the end of art, noting: What else is pleasure, or where else does it originate from, than from the contemplation of purposiveness? If there was something where pleasure itself was the only purpose: I could judge the purposeness of this thing only from the pleasure it arouses in me. My pleasure, however, has to origin from the judgment; it would have to exist prior to its existence. (2: 949)50 In this passage Moritz uses the paradox to refute the legitimacy of the aesthetics of effects’ emphasis on pleasure. When the same paradox reappears in “On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful,” it is not to refute anything, but rather to explain the creation of autonomous art guided by a “feeling,” a “dark premonition,” an excitement (Reiz) that can only derive from the recognition of the artwork’s perfection: But since those great relations in whose complete parameter beauty lies, do not fall into the field of the power of thought, the living concept of the creative imitation of nature can only take place in 50 “Was ist Vergnügen anders, oder woraus entsteht es anders, als aus dem Anschauen der Zweckmäßigkeit? Gäbe es nun etwas, wovon das Vergnügen selbst allein der Zweck wäre: so könnte ich die Zweckmäßigkeit dieses Dinges bloß aus dem Vergnügen beurteilen, welches mir daraus erwächst. Mein Vergnügen selbst aber muß ja erst aus dieser Beurteilung entstehen; es müßte also da sein, ehe es da wäre.”

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the feeling of active power, which evokes it in the first movement of its origination, where the work, already completed, through all degrees of its all-powerful becoming, steps all at once before the soul in dark premonition, and in this moment of the first generation it is also present in its true being. Through this the unnamable stimulus comes into existence which drives the creative Genius to continual creation. (“Artistic Imitation,” 142)51 Rüdiger Campe calls this the aesthetic paradox that comes to replace the negation of the mimesis postulate in the eighteenth century.52 Moritz recognizes that “perfection” cannot be planned, but emerges only in the process of its completion (“durch alle Grade seines allmählichen Werdens”), an insight which leads him to the famous proclamation: “The beautiful can thus not be recognized but must be brought out — or felt” (“Artistic Imitation,” 143) (“Das Schöne kann daher nicht erkannt, es muß hervorgebracht — oder empfunden werden”) (2: 974). I indicated in the introduction to this book that variants of this insight have become commonplace in much of the popular and the technically oriented literature on improvisation. For Moritz, the unintelligibility of beauty, however, does not imply — as it should! — that the artwork does not exist prior to its actual production; as “feeling,” “dark premonition,” Reiz, and Tatkraft the work of art is thought to preexist its existence. Moritz conceptualizes Tatkraft in terms of a “sense” and “organ” (Sinn, Organ) for the perception of highest beauty. As a subconscious sense, Tatkraft allows Moritz to circumvent the separation between art and artist, which autonomous art in a strict sense requires. Instead, Moritz uses “Tatkraft” to cast (what otherwise would have to be conceived as a

51 “Da nun aber jene Verhältnisse, in deren völligem Umfange eben das Schöne liegt, nicht mehr unter das Gebiet der Denkkraft fallen; so kann auch der lebendige Begriff von der bildenden Nachahmung des Schönen, nur im Gefühl der tätigen Kraft, die es hervorbringt, im ersten Augenblick der Entstehung statt finden, wo das Werk, als schon vollendet, durch alle Grade seines allmählichen Werdens, in dunkler Ahndung, auf einmal vor die Seele tritt, und in diesem Moment der ersten Erzeugung gleichsam vor seinem wirklichen Dasein, da ist; wodurch alsdann auch jener unnennbare Reiz entsteht, welcher das schaffende Genie zur immerwährenden Bildung treibt” (2: 973). 52 The paradox constructs, Campe continues, what could be called the moment of aesthetic perception. It does so, however, only in the modus of an “as if” (gleichsam) (Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit, 231). I see the “as if” in Moritz as indicative of his inability to conceptualize autonomy independent of an anthropocentric grounding. That moves the paradox to the artist where it is unfolded (or coveredup) by notions of geniality, subconscious drives, nature expressing itself through art, and so on.

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self-directing process) in terms of a mediation between realization and subconsciousness, and between artist and nature. The proximity of the structural problem is evident, for example, in the following quote, where Moritz comes quite close to conceiving artistic production in terms of a self-directing process: All those relationships of the great whole, merely felt in dark premonition, must necessarily be made visible in some way, audible or available to the power of the imagination; and for this the power of activity in which they slumber must form itself, according to itself, out of itself. (“Artistic Imitation,” 142)53 For Moritz, however, this “according to itself, out of itself” of the “great whole” still requires an external agent for its orchestration. That is, despite the impossibility to preconceive of beauty, Moritz remains committed to an anthropocentric grounding of the creative process. He puts the artist-genius in charge of directing the creative process, even though, in a strict sense, she cannot know what she is doing. Throughout his aesthetic writings, Moritz unfolds the planning paradox by distinguishing between a conscious and a subconscious sphere. Consciousness, defined by Moritz as reason (Denkkraft), imagination (Einbildungskraft), and perception (der äußre Sinn), cannot comprehend, imagine, or conceive of highest beauty as the harmonious formation of a perfect whole; subconsciously, however, “in dark premonition,” the artwork is thought to preexist its existence within the “soul” of the artist, directing the artist’s creation drive. Moritz assumes an “unconscious drive” (he continues to speak of the “active power in its dark premonition” and the “dark premonition of the reflection’s power of action”) (“Artistic Imitation,” 141) in order to link the idea of the autonomous artwork to subjective creativity. Thus Tatkraft, and more generally the productivity of nature, serve as media where artwork and artist remain linked to each other, allowing Moritz (and his time) to rescue agency and the teleology of the creative process. I am, of course, not the first to note the importance of Tatkraft in Moritz’s aesthetics.54 My point, though, is that Tatkraft is central for

53 “Alle die in der tätigen Kraft bloß dunkel geahndeten Verhältnisse jenes großen Ganzen, müssen notwendig auf irgend eine Weise entweder sichtbar, hörbar, oder doch der Einbildungskraft faßbar werden: und um dies zu werden, muß die Tatkraft, worin sie schlummern, sie nach sich selber, aus sich selber bilden” (2: 972). 54 Regarding the importance of “Tatkraft” for a “new tradition of aestheticism,” see Fohrmann, “‘Bildende Nachahmung,’” 183.

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Moritz’s explanation of artistic creativity because it allows for the mediation between an undefined non-representational impression or stimulus and the artistic objectification, the expression or communication of this stimulus. Until the very completion of the artwork, Tatkraft has to direct the artist’s representational capacity (vorstellende Kraft), which cannot conceive of beauty as the harmonious formation of the whole: But having a sense of the highest beauty in the harmonious structure of the whole, which the human power of representation does not compromise, lies in the power to act itself, which cannot rest before it has moved that which slumbers in it, towards at least one of the powers of representation. (“Artistic Imitation,” 140)55 By defining the artistic impetus as drive and not as idea, concept, or representation, the fashioning of autonomy can be equated with the artist-person who creates without being aware of the ends of his creation drive. What is surprising — or particularly modern — about this drive is not only, as Alessandro Costazza notes, that it reverses the Leibniz– Wolffian hierarchy of the faculties, valuing the dark and undefined over what is clear and distinct,56 but that it also attributes intentionality to the subconscious, that it envisions the subconscious to direct actively the higher faculties of the artist. This puts Moritz at the beginning of a cultural tradition that, from the Romantics to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and beyond, has countered the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the phenomenal, rational, and conscious with a valuation of the artistic, irrational, and subconscious as providing privileged access to nature and the self and as the true source of human agency.57 The inability to intend art consciously is also at the center of Kant’s conceptualization of the artist-genius. Most likely, Kant did not know Moritz’s essays on aesthetic autonomy when he was writing his Critique 55 “Der Sinn aber für das höchste Schöne in dem harmonischen Bau des Ganzen, das die vorstellende Kraft des Menschen nicht umfaßt, liegt unmittelbar in der Tatkraft selbst, die nicht ehr ruhen kann, bis sie das, was in ihr schlummert, wenigstens irgend einer der vorstellenden Kräfte genähert hat” (2: 970). 56 In his discussion of the relationship between Tatkraft and the other human drives, Costazza sees Moritz reverse main tenets of faculty psychology as taught from Leibniz to Wolf, Baumgarten, Meier, Mendelssohn and Sulzer, by giving preference to darkness and premonition over clarity and rationality (Genie, 26–8). 57 Thomas Saine reads Moritz in analogy to Nietzsche’s early aesthetics, as invoking “dangerous Dionysian powers” (Ästhetische Theodizee, 102). For Costazza, Moritz anticipates Nietzsche by turning art into “the true metaphysical activity” (Genie, 91).

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of Judgment (1790). Yet, he encounters the same conceptual challenges and offers “solutions” quite similar to those of Moritz. Kant, too, expands on the indescribability idea, noting that art cannot be comprehended. Interestingly, with regard to the artwork’s perfection, Kant suggests an openness-from-closure principle that was missing from Moritz’s account. Kant defines the “aesthetic idea” as that “presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e. no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it” (Critique of Judgment, 182). Kant’s aesthetic idea recognizes art’s indescribability to be the very reason why art can provoke an infinite amount of thoughts and, presumably, an infinite number of (always imperfect) descriptions. Like Moritz, Kant also grounds the necessity (or “purposiveness”) of art in nature while holding on to the anthropocentric grounding of the art creating process. He defines genius as the “innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art” (174 [§46]). While Kant famously stipulates that the genius does not follow, but rather sets new rules, he is nevertheless less willing than Goethe or Moritz to imagine rules and purposiveness to be the result rather than the chieforchestrator of the creative process. For Kant, the artwork merely may not seem intended, rule-governed, or construed: Therefore, even though the purposiveness in a product of fine art is intentional, it must still not seem intentional; i.e., fine art must have the look of nature even though we are conscious of it as art. And a product of art appears like nature if, though we find it to agree quite punctiliously with the rules that have to be followed for the product to become what it is intended to be, it does not do so painstakingly. In other words, the academic form must not show; there must be no hint that the rule was hovering before the artist’s eyes and putting fetters on his mental powers. (174 [§45]) Moritz comes much closer than Kant to conceding that for the creation of an autonomous work of art, the creative process can no longer follow the blueprint model.58 The empirically more plausible alternative is that we imagine the creation of the artwork as self-guiding, that is, as an incremental process where the space for decisions is defined only while working on the artwork. This process might start from a contingent beginning, where choices come to determine subsequent options and choices. For Luhmann, the concrete, step-by-step realization of the

58 See “Artistic Imitation,” 142 as quoted earlier.

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artwork is completed, and the artwork a “success and novelty” when the “program saturates, as it were, the individual work, tolerating no further productions of the same kind” (Art, 202). We may have reservations regarding Luhmann’s idea of a “complete” saturation when it comes to the provocations of twentieth-century and contemporary art; and I suspect that endings in art might not always be the result of a process of saturation, but might be chosen randomly, too, thus positing (the presumption of) completeness. Yet, I believe Luhmann’s description of the creative process can replace metaphysical notions of artistic-genius and of the artworks being subconscious expressions of nature in a way that is in tune with the idea of autonomy. This process is improvisational, not only in the sense that its outcome cannot be planned or otherwise foreseen, but also with regard of the simultaneity of conception and doing that is at the heart of performed improvisations. This is precisely what the idea of self-programming implies. If the program for each artwork can emerge only in the process of its completion, then conception and doing, planning and execution must coincide for all art that strives to be autonomous, whether this process is performed and perceived as improvised or not. Luhmann’s concept of self-programming also allows us to address (rather than avoid) the planning paradox that the anthropocentric viewpoint encounters with regard to the idea of aesthetic autonomy. This is not to say that the concept escapes the paradoxes created by the idea of autonomy; merely, that we are able to move them away from the artist and back onto the creative process. That is, we stipulate a paradoxical simultaneity between programming and execution: that the artwork emerge with and according to a plan it develops for itself only in the process of its creation. While this remains paradoxical in the chicken/egg kind of way, it can be pictured in terms of an artist moving forward by looking backward, of an artist accepting, rejecting, and building on the previous decisions and selections, until she succeeds or fails to establish coherence and uniqueness. It is important to note that we are dealing with a planning paradox, not with the utter absence of plans, intentions, preparations, and so on. Kant has good reason to be reluctant when it comes to banning all planning and all intentionality into the depths of the unconscious. Any artist or performer will intend to produce art (and not a car or garbage) and may well plan, predetermine, and find predetermined in advance a wide variety of parameters such as particular themes, topics, materials to be used, how to approach the process, and so on. Luhmann might also be overstating the case when he claims that since the eighteenth century, experience and other works of art can no longer serve as models and help guide the creative process. Artists employ not only their particular skills as a resource, they also always draw on their experience and their previous work as reference

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points for subsequent creations.59 There is, in other words, a lot of room for planning and predetermination when it comes to the creation of autonomous art as much as to the preparation for an improvisational performance. What cannot be planned in the age of aesthetic autonomy is what will emerge and make the artwork seem original, unique, and coherent. In other words, while the parameters or stage has to be set for art, the modern demands for inventiveness and originality require that something emerges that is recognizable as not being a representation of something that would exist independent of the artwork and that is more than the sum total of predetermined parameters. I approached this “more” in terms of the emergence of an “order” distinct from its less-ordered environment and, with Moritz, as a self-referentially closed whole that posits a world on its own. It is important that the artwork or performance makes apparent its closure, exhibits what Hans-Georg Gadamer (to draw on a different conceptual tradition) describes as the “qualitative leap between planning and making on the one hand and successful completion on the other.”60 Carl Ludwig Fernow’s book Über die Improvisatoren (1801) reveals how the belief in genius — to expand on the quote from Nietzsche I put at the beginning of this chapter — “falsifies” the conception of the genesis of the artwork as well as the “life of the artist, and also of the artist himself” (Nietzsche, Studienausgabe, 8: 477). Fernow reads the history of improvisation in Italy almost exclusively with regard to premises of the aesthetics of genius, finding in the Italian improviser a supreme expression of artistic genius. For Fernow, too, the genius is a conduit for nature. Nature, however, quickly reveals itself to be identical with long-standing German stereotypes about Italian culture and language. Fernow follows common practice when he draws “on genetic and climatological accounts of national character to describe improvisation as a phenomenon that is naturally and distinctively Italian” (Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 24). This is one of the dangers of assuming a subconscious expression of nature informing the art-creating process: 59 Although the term “work” has been out of favor for a while now, I am using it both to refer to individual works as well as to a body of work associated with one artist or a school. With regard to the latter, the unity or stylistic coherence of an artist’s work would have to be conceptualized in terms of the unity of iteration and alteration. I am also not averse to the term work as I take the implied sense of “closure” and completeness not as an opposite to, but as the condition for the possibility of openness. 60 “Es ist ein Sprung zwischen Planen und Machen einerseits und dem Gelingen” (Gadamer, Aktualität, 44). According to Gadamer, it is this Sprung (the German means leap, but also crack, split) between making and completion that distinguishes the artwork in its uniqueness and irreplaceability. Gadamer relates this leap to what Walter Benjamin called the aura of the artwork.

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it invites the replication and projection of cultural stereotypes onto both artist and artwork. Fernow cites as evidence for the “special disposition and receptiveness for the highest degree of poetic inspiration that is at the bottom of the talent for improvised poetry” (that is, for what makes the Italian improviser superior to improvisers from other European nations) “the physiological conditions of his nature . . . as he surpasses them [other European nations], as is well known, also in liveliness and in emotional depth, that is, also in affect and passion.”61 Aiding nature is the Italian language, which is beneficial for poetic improvisation since “in no language creating rhymes is as easy as in Italian because its words end in vowels and most carry the accent on the second-to-last or thirdto-last syllable.”62 Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy presents a more famous example of the projection of such stereotypes onto the “nature” of the improviser and the flexibility of this canvas. As Esterhammer points out: Corinne’s improvisational practice is a hybrid mode, a graft of Staël’s own ideal of French sociability onto Italian tradition . . . Staël’s Corinne makes ample use of the well-established identification between improvisation and Italianness, but the novel also suggests that a bicultural, cosmopolitan woman poet can improvise differently — and better. (91) Historically, the belief that art exceeds the providence of what can be planned and fully comprehended is rooted in a long tradition that has linked art to divine inspiration. Well into the eighteenth century, inspiration is understood in religious terms, as the expression of a higher voice (God or the Muses) that spoke through the artist.63 In the second half of

61 “Diese besondere Anlage und Empfänglichkeit für den hier beschriebenen höchsten Grad dichterischer Begeisterung, welche das Talent zur improvisierenden Dichtkunst begründet, scheint dem Italiener mehr als den übrigen Nazionen Europens eigen zu seyn . . . weil die fisischen Bedingungen seiner Natur sie vorzüglich begünstigen . . . wie er sie denn bekantlich auch an Lebhaftigkeit und Tiefe des Gefühls, also auch an Affekt und Leidenschaft übertrift” (Fernow, Improvisatoren, 406–7). 62 “[I]n keiner Sprache ist das Reimen so leicht, als in der italienischen, da in ihr die Wörter auf Vokalendungen ausgehen, und die meisten den Tonfal auf der vorletzten und vorvorletzten Silbe haben” (Fernow, “Improvisatoren,” 412). 63 The religious idea of inspiration (still popular in Pietism) played an important role in advancing the aesthetics of genius in the first half of the eighteenth century. Ulf-Michael Schneider establishes direct links between such inspirational speakers as Johann Friedrich Rock (1678–1749) and leading aesthetic thinkers such as Bodmer, Breitinger, Bräker, Shaftesbury, Jung-Stilling, Herder, and even Goethe.

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the eighteenth century, the idea of a divine intervention is internalized and the artist-genius endowed with godlike qualities.64 We saw Moritz use the term “inspiration” in his description of the Venetian improviser. Fernow’s book is full of such associations. In those and most examples from the period (and in most cases still today), it is the image of the inspired genius that is seen as enabling and as authenticating successful improvisation. This common tendency makes the entry on improvisation in Christoph Koch’s Musical Lexicon from 1802 stand out. Koch’s lexicon entry reverses the causal relationship between improvisation and genius, understanding improvisation as providing a source of inspiration for the genius rather than vice versa: “Improvisation for the composer can often be a means to stimulate the productivity of his genius, or to put him in the state of mind that is called inspiration” (“Improvisiren . . . kann sehr oft für den Tonsetzer ein Mittel werden, die Thätigkeit seines Genies zu reitzen, oder sich in denjenigen Zustand zu versetzen, den man die Begeisterung nennet”) (Musikalisches Lexikon, col. 778).65 Koch’s lexicon (in part, surely reflecting how improvisation received greater respect in music than in other artforms at the time) picks improvisation as that which gets the genius and the creative process (“inspiration”) going in the first place. I read Koch’s entry as confirming one of the central theses of this study: that modern aesthetics condemns the artist to improvise (publicly or not) as the demands for inventiveness and autonomy imply that the artist cannot know or otherwise foresee how to proceed, at least not until the process itself has started and a program begins to emerge that can give direction to the process as it unfolds. There is a long history of artists and improvisers describing their creative impetus in terms of inspiration. If we take the term to describe an artist’s sense that she is not fully in charge of the art-creating process, the term today need not invoke divine voices, Muses, or paradoxical notions of genius anymore; instead, we may locate the “inspirational” aspect in the attentiveness the artist lends to the emerging artwork, that the artist has a sense of the artwork coming together on its own and beyond what she could have intended. Such a receptive understanding of inspiration would make it possible to circumvent another short-coming of the notion of genius, namely its failure to capture art-creating processes that rely on the cooperation between participants; where the outcome is not planned, but conditions for the emergence of art are created that allow for and take 64 Helmut Müller-Sievers sees Herder as the pivotal figure in the transition from Hamann’s concept of “God as poet” to the “Poet as God” of the Genie-movement (“‘Gott als Schriftsteller,’” 329). For the association of inspiration (and its internalization) with the evolving concept of genius, see esp. Schmidt, Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens, and Schmidt-Dengler, Genius. 65 Quoted after Pfleiderer, “Improvisieren,” 82.

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advantage of multiple participants. To include such collaborative doings into our considerations of improvisation we do not have to venture into twentieth and twenty-first century sociological theories or contemporary Improv theater or jazz practices. As the following chapter will explore, alternatives to the aesthetics of genius are developed already in early German Romantic thought, alternatives that recognize the limits of the anthropocentric viewpoint and rediscover improvisational practices for their figurations of the creative process.

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3. Staged Improvisation: The Generative Principles of Romantic Irony1

There are ancient and modern poems that are pervaded by the divine breath of irony throughout and informed by a truly transcendental buffoonery. Internally: the mood that surveys everything and rises infinitely above all limitations, even above its own art, virtue, or genius; externally, in its execution: the mimic style of an averagely gifted Italian buffo. (Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 5–6)2 In his lecture “Irony, Comedy, Aristophanes” (“Ironie, Lustspiel, Aristophanes”) from 1806, Adam Müller drafts the theory of a universal comedy (“Universallustspiel”) that would triumph over the moralaesthetic premises of the Enlightenment — he names specifically Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779) — and learn “to engage life audaciously and willfully.” Drawing on Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of irony, Müller envisions that this universal comedy will “reveal humankind’s divine freedom” and lead to the “democratization of both theater and society.” To realize his ambitious project, Müller proposes a return to the improvisational theater: Yes, I can imagine a time, it might still arrive, when the real life in the auditorium and the idealistic life on stage will agree so much,

1

2

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in German in the volume Improvisieren. Paradoxien des Unvorhersehbaren, edited by Hans-Friedrich Borman, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Annemarie Matzke. I am grateful to Transcript Publishing for permission to reuse. “Es gibt alte und moderne Gedichte, die durchgängig im Ganzen und überall den göttlichen Hauch der Ironie atmen. Es lebt in ihnen eine wirklich transzendentale Buffonerie. Im Innern, die Stimmung, welche alles übersieht, und sich über alles Bedingte unendlich erhebt, auch über eigne Kunst, Tugend oder Genialität: im Äußeren, in der Ausführung die mimische Manier eines gewöhnlichen guten italiänischen Buffo” (Kritische Ausgabe, 2: 152).

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will be inspired so uniformly by the same spirit of irony, where one understands the other in a way, so that the actors merely set the tone for a great dialogue that is led between the auditorium and the stage, where, for example, improvising leaders among the audience with wit and grace engage the work of the poet, and other improvisators on stage artistically defend the work of the poet as if it was their fortress, where, at last, the real life in the auditorium and the idealistic life on stage, like king and jester in my explanation above, remain each unconquered and each crowned and the poets in the auditorium together with the poet on stage reveal to the whole house and to each actor and the audience the invisible presence of a higher poet, a spirit of poesy, a God. (Kritische Schriften, 1: 244–5)3 Müller also gives the example of the Viennese audience, which created and nurtured its own comedic characters, such as “Kasperl, Tadädl, Tinterl” (ibid.), with the hope that Germany might indeed be capable of producing such a universal comedy one day. Known for their emphasis on spontaneity and creativity, the plays and novels of the Romantic period consistently reference improvisation. They adopt characters, masks, costumes, and basic plot structures of the Commedia dell’arte and related traditions, describe situations that force fictional characters to improvise in the broader sense of the term (act spontaneously in unexpected circumstances), and even stage improvisation in order to create the appearance of spontaneity, pretending that the doings on stage are not following a script but are ad hoc reactions to unforeseen circumstances. Both of Müller’s lectures on comedy (apart from “Irony, Comedy, Aristophanes” there was a second, titled “Italian Theater, Masks, Extemporizing,” also written in 1806) provide a unique opportunity to examine the Romantic interest in improvisation in the context of early German Romantic theory. Müller’s adoption of the 3

“Ja, ich kann mir eine Zeit denken, sie kommt vielleicht noch, wo das wirkliche Leben im Parterre und das idealische Leben auf der Bühne so einig sind, von dem Geiste derselben Ironie so gleichmäßig beseelt, wo eines das andre so versteht, daß die Schauspieler nur die Tonangeber eines großen Dialogs sind, der zwischen dem Parterre und der Bühne geführt wird, wo z.B. improvisierende Wortführer des Publikums mit Witz und Grazie eingreifen in das Werk des Dichters und andere Improvisatoren auf der Bühne mit Kunst das Werk des Dichters wie ihre Festung verteidigen, wo endlich das wirkliche Leben im Parterre und das idealische Leben auf der Bühne, wie König und Narr in meiner obigen Darstellung, jedes unüberwunden und jedes gekrönt zurückbleibt und die Dichter im Parterre gemeinschaftlich mit dem Dichter auf der Bühne dem ganzen Hause und jedem Schauspieler und Zuschauer offenbaren die unsichtbare Gegenwart eines höheren Dichters, eines Geistes der Poesie, eines Gottes.”

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improvisational theater as a model for the universal comedy is built on his understanding of Schlegel’s concept of irony. Indeed, his two lectures on comedy and improvisation read like an explication of the famous Lyceum fragment 42 (1797), where Schlegel defines Romantic irony with reference to the Commedia dell’arte as a “truly transcendental buffoonery.”4 Müller elaborates in particular three aspects of the improvisational theater that appear to fulfill the ideals of transcendental poesy, namely the representational framework it establishes, its principles of artistic production, and its social function. In the following, I will focus on these aspects of Müller’s lectures on comedy and the early romantic theorems they adopt to assess the aesthetic background for the renewed interest in improvisation in German Romanticism. Müller’s writings suggest a conceptual bridge between the experimentations with improvisation we find in the early comedies of Clemens Brentano and Ludwig Tieck and the more comprehensive figurations of improvised doings that mark the writings of Heinrich von Kleist (who was both a publishing partner and friend of Adam Müller) and that will be the subject of the next chapter. I will deliberately focus on early German Romanticism rather than on Romanticism in the broader sense the term is used with in English (where it refers to a number of periods associated in German with the age of Goethe, an age that stretches from the Enlightenment to Sturm und Drang, neo-Classism, late-Romanticism, and such schools as Biedermeier and Junges Deutschland). Early German Romanticism reaches a level of reflexivity that, for the most part, is only matched again by late twentieth-century post-structuralist thought (hence the continued interest of the latter in the former). I am particularly interested in how the Romantics distance themselves from the aesthetics of genius and expressivity that continue to dominate the aesthetic discourse. For the purpose of developing a conceptual history of improvisation, the focus on German Romantic theory and poetology, I believe, presents an important and necessary supplement to the cultural history offered by Angela Esterhammer’s Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850. Esterhammer pays surprisingly little attention to early German Romantic theory and early Romantic comedy, especially considering her previous work on the subject. Although she elaborates on the Romantic use of masks (taken from the Commedia dell’arte) to explore problems of identity and 4

Bernhard Greiner notes that Schlegel does not promote a return to the Commedia dell’arte, but envisions a specific Romantic form of ironic saturation (Komödie, 262–3). Greiner’s comprehensive study of the history of comedy unfortunately does not address the topic of improvisation, neither in his chapter on the Commedia dell’arte nor in his analysis of Schlegel’s concept of irony and of Tieck’s comedies.

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modern subjectivity and recognizes the suggestion of an “alternative poetics rooted in sociability” (Romanticism and Improvisation, 58)5 she does not relate those findings to the core theoretical and philosophical concerns of the Romantics. The problem is that the poetological ambitions of the Romantics are not easily subsumed under a cultural history. Their reflections on improvisation rather anticipate the conceptual challenges we encountered in our discussion of twentieth-century critical thought (see Chapter 1). In particular, the Romantics problematize the distinction between text and performance; and they suggest alternative models of creativity, models that break with the anthropocentrism of the aesthetics of genius we explored in Chapter 2. Furthermore, German Romanticism marks the historical moment when improvisation is no longer repressed from the aesthetic discourse, but recognized for its potential of fulfilling many of its ideals. To put it more directly: the Romantics are first to recognize improvisation as art in the modern sense, allowing us to speak for the first time about improvisation with the expectation that it indeed adhere to the codes of the modern art system.

3.1 Reframing the Space of the Theater At the center of Müller’s description of the universal comedy is the dialogue between the auditorium and the stage. For Müller, this dialogue distinguishes the comedy from the “monological” tragedy: “in the comedy, everything is related directly to the audience, in the tragedy only indirectly . . . which is why the comedy possesses a more dialogical, democratic nature.”6 Dialogue defines the comedy’s temporality, orienting it toward the present; it also structures the creative process, redefining the relationship between artist and work by including input from the actors and the audience; finally, dialogue recodifies the theatrical space, allowing the auditorium to figure also as stage and the stage also as auditorium. All three features are interconnected, forging what Müller calls a union between real life and idealistic life. The structure of this “union” is emphatically dialogical, not dialectical, that is, it does not aim for a synthesis of the opposing parties, as one might witness in rituals or carnivals where, ideally, the distinction between performer and spectator dissolves. Rather, Müller describes the exchange between both auditorium and stage, real life and idealistic life as enforcing and affirming each side while lifting both up, “each unconquered and each

5

6

Esterhammer notes how “the improvisational turn in the later twentiethcentury study of social practice is foreshadowed in nineteenth-century fiction” (Romanticism and Improvisation, 159). “[I]m Lustspiel [wird] alles mit direkter Beziehung, im Trauerspiel hingegen mit indirekter Beziehung auf das Publikum gesagt [. . .], und so ist das Lustspiel mehr dialogischer, demokratischer Natur” (Schriften, 1: 244).

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crowned.” Dialogue and mutual elevation are not the ultimate goal of the universal comedy: they are seen as a precondition for the appearance of true poesy. The dialogue does not only figure as a transformative process, but, more importantly, is understood as enabling the emergence of something new, singular, and original that exists independent of its constitutive parts (stage and audience). It is in the coming-forth of the work itself, in the appearance of poeisis, a poeisis that cannot be planned or foreseen, and in this literal sense is improvisio, that the “spirit of poesy” has to reveal itself. It is important to note that the “spirit of poesy” Müller invokes is not a representational category, not even in the sense of a symbolic representation of something that in itself cannot be represented (what Kant in section 59 of the Critique of Judgment calls hypotyposis [226]), but rather concerns the appearance of artistic productivity itself. This is, of course, the point of improvisation and in line with the shift towards an aesthetics of production discussed in the previous chapter — as much as it is in line with performance art as we understand it today. Müller already anticipates what Erika Fischer-Lichte describes as an immanent feature of the “perfomative turn” in twentieth-century theater, when “theater was no longer conceived as a representation of a fictive world, which the audience, in turn, was expected to observe, interpret, and understand. Something was to occur between actors and the spectators and that constituted theatre” (Transformative Power, 20–1). The romantic comedy goes one step further. It explores what, as Gabrielle Brandstetter argues, any inquiry into performance entails, namely an inquiry into the object of representation. In performance art, “the object has become the category of representation itself: art as the representation of the act, as act of acts, as the staging of staging” (“Fälschung,” 424).7 Müller notes that the reframing of the theatrical space is a central element of the romantic comedy, an element that distinguishes it from older traditions of improvisational theater which might also include forms of dialogue between stage and audience. In particular, Müller singles out the Harlequin as the figure of the Commedia dell’arte who has always been seen as a representative of the audience on stage, a tradition whose evolution Müller observes in the comedies of Ludwig Tieck. Tieck does not only bring individual characters who represent the audience on to the stage, he even erects a whole second, smaller stage on the big stage, one that comes with its own smaller audience. Müller reads this as a “clever strategy by the poet to subtly make the audience part of the overall irony of the play” (Kritische Schriften, 1: 244). For

7

Brandstetter’s observations are made with reference to Marcel Duchamp’s questioning of more traditional conceptions of art.

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Müller, Tieck’s doubling of the stage/auditorium distinction on stage establishes the “transcendental standpoint” characteristic of Schlegel’s concept of irony.8 In a more contemporary vocabulary, we can describe this doubling as a “reentry” of the form of the theater.9 The form that defines the theater both materially and ideally is the distinction between stage and auditorium. Through its reentry, by copying and playing with the distinction between stage and auditorium, ideal and real world, and between character and actor on stage, the theater makes apparent its own form, the distinctions around which it constitutes itself. We encountered such a reentry figure already in Moritz’s aesthetics, when Moritz defined art as world art, as emulating the totality that is nature within nature. While Moritz does not fully spell out the paradox that derives from his definition of art, the reentry figure and the paradoxes it creates are a central feature of Romanticism that concerns not only the reframing of the theater, but of poesy in general. Niklas Luhmann describes the Romantics as being concerned with the difference it makes when within the real world one distinguishes again between the real and the fictional and addresses this distinction.10 The observational paradoxes provoked by the reflection of this reentry figure are a hallmark of German Romanticism and the transcendental philosophy it engages. Iterations of the paradox include Schlegel’s concept of parabasis (characters reflecting openly on their double-existence as actors and characters), an audience observing what simultaneously is and is not itself on stage, a character in a novel discovering within the novel the novel that tells his story (e.g. Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen). One might even see Fichte’s conception of the “I” as the unity of “I” and “Non-I,” positing “I” and posited “I,” as another figuration of this reentry paradox. Today, we have not only Romantic novels and plays, but a slew of movies that have explored the philosophical potential of this paradoxical figure in particular with regard to the

8

According to Ernst Behler, Schlegel’s most significant deed was his transferral of the transcendental viewpoint from philosophy to poetry and to the question of the process of artistic production (Klassische Ironie, 86). Müller adopts this insight and sees it realized in the improvisational theater. 9 See Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form. With form, Spencer-Brown designates the paradox unity of a distinction. Every observation (i.e. construction) of world employs the drawing of distinctions. A reentry takes place when the drawing of a distinction is repeated on one of its sides. We use this terminology because it allows us to formalize the various paradoxes of reflexivity early German Romanticism observes and account for figures of recursion independent of the involvement of consciousness or visual observation implicit in the notion of reflexivity. 10 “The ambivalent relationship of the work of art to ‘reality’ is nothing else but the effect of its form: it splits reality into real and fictional reality” (Luhmann, “Weltkunst,” 12).

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(fictional) status of reality and questions of personal identity (see, for example, Spike Jones’s Being John Malkovitch [1999] or Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor [1999]). Already for the Romantics, the reentry of the stage/audience distinction within the theater goes beyond simply representing the audience on stage; it makes visible the basic set of distinctions that constitute the theatric space: the distinction between stage and auditorium, between actor and role, and between real life and “idealistic” life. As Ruth Petzoldt puts it, the self-conscious attitude that is romantic irony is a “form of perspectivation of all positions in a play, which in the process becomes a play with the conditions of its possibilities” (Albernheit mit Hintersinn, 93). The potential for ironic gestures of reflection created by the dovetailing of different observational levels are apparent; they are a much discussed structural mark of the romantic comedy, which found its most emblematic and famous representation in Tieck’s Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots). Tieck himself reflects on the doubling of the stage in his comedy Die verkehrte Welt (The World on its Head), a comedy whose characters and their play with masks comprehensively cites the Commedia dell’arte tradition. Here, Tieck reenters the stage/audience distinction a third time, which Scävola (who leaves the stage at the very beginning of the play to become part of the audience, without ever relinquishing his role as jester), comments with the words: It is all too crazy. Look people, we are sitting here as the audience and watch a play; in this play, another audience sits and watches a play, and in that third play another play is staged for those actors. (Schriften, 5: 372)11 Clemens Brentano similarly expounds on the reentry of the theater’s form in “Reflections” (“Überlegungen”) that precede his comedy Ponce de Leon. “The appearance of the comical today,” he reasons, “requires that one take the audience and the play together and laugh about both.”12 Like Müller, Brentano explicitly cites and distances himself from the Harlequin tradition, presenting the Harlequin as a character that is no longer contemporary. His comedy was occasioned, he explains, when he watched an experienced Harlequin who suddenly froze on 11 “Es ist gar zu toll. Seht, Leute, wir sitzen hier als Zuschauer und sehn ein Stück; in jenem Stück sitzen wieder Zuschauer und sehn ein Stück, und in jenem dritten Stück wird jenen Akteurs wieder ein Stück vorgespielt.” 12 “[Das Auftreten des Komischen heute bedinge, dass man] sich den Zuschauer und das Schauspiel zusammen nimmt, um über Beydes zu lachen” (Sämtliche Werke, 12/1: 355).

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stage because “for the first time, he developed atheistic doubts about the existence of an audience.”13 The Harlequin appears to question the divine observational position of his audience — the idea that the audience can see more than the actors on stage while remaining invisible to the stage. Brentano draws the conclusion that the audience of his time could neither see the comical nor demand it from art any longer, because the audience itself was the only place where the comical was still to be found. For that reason, the comedy should really bring the audience on stage, but since the audience does not want to be on stage because they paid to be entertained, one has to imagine both together. Brentano is not only mocking the pathos of a bourgeois audience that derives its profundity from the profundity of a play’s content and the somberness of its staging; the atheistic doubts about the existence of an audience and the silence associated with this thought articulate a more fundamental critique of the conceptualization of the theatrical space according to the principles of a peep show (Guckkastenprinzip). In traditional theater, the “divinity” of the audience derives from a theater space structured so as to dictate that the audience see everything on stage; the stage, however, pretends not to perceive the existence of the audience in front of it. The Harlequin turns silent as he develops doubts about the audience’s divine observational position. This observational structure is not compatible with the Romantic demand that both be simultaneously observed — the stage and the audience.

3.2 Staged Improvisation Tieck’s doubling of the stage/audience distinction on stage has been described as implementing a fundamental change in perspective on the theater. The theater is no longer discussed primarily “as a place that centers around the production of meaning, but rather is recognized for its own reality” (Greiner, Komödie, 267). By marking the theatrical illusion as an illusion, the reentry emphasizes the reality of the performance itself over the reality that is represented on stage. David Roberts explores this form paradox with regard to the modern novel. He points out that these forms of romantic self-reflexivity — which he reads as demonstrations of the novel’s autonomy vis-à-vis the world — became possible only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries due to the fictionalization of literature. With reference to Bakhtin’s writings on the novel, Roberts understands specifically the “heroes of free improvisation” as precursors of the novel. The masks of comedy offer “for the exotopic narrative position of the novel author an evolutionary important model” (“Zur

13 “[weil er] zum ersten Mal atheistische Zweifel an dem Daseyn eines Publikums [bekommen habe]” (Sämtliche Werke, 12/1: 354).

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Genealogie der Literatur,” 306–7). Although focused on the novel, Roberts’s observations help explain the rediscovery and reintroduction of the mask and the masked improviser on the Romantic comedic stage. They no longer serve primarily as representations of preexisting character-types and pre-described behavioral patterns, but expose the theatrical illusion as illusion and thus highlight the theater’s own reality. The implementation of an exotopic observational position within the theater does not only disclose the autonomy of art from “real life,” but also allows the actors/characters to reflect on their roles as actors or characters, putting into dialogue “idealistic life” and “real life.” Whether merely staged or actually performed, improvisation directs the focus on the reality of the performance — its here and now — by making the play’s production process its central concern. Tieck’s Die verkehrte Welt is exemplary in this regard. It is a comedy about the creation of a comedy — a gesture also reflected in Tieck’s play Prologue, a comedy that unfolds as it discusses how its production is failing. Both comedies are descriptions of their own compositional process. They collapse the distinction between the ideality of their representational content and the reality of their composition.14 This does not only pertain to the narrative structure of the play as a whole, it also applies to individual roles, actors, plot sequences, and so on, which are “composed” as they discuss their own role, their characteristics, their needs and expectations. In these parabasic reflections, the comedy aims not only at making visible, as Peter Szondi put it, that the role’s existence is “subordinate to the requirements of dramaturgy,” and thus at realizing early Romanticism’s ironic relation to the world, the “union of ‘beingin-the-world’ and ‘standing-beyond-the-world’” (“Romantic Irony,” 71–2); but, as Werner Hamacher points out, parabasis is revealed to be a generative principle.15 Indeed, parabasis stages and performs the simultaneity of composition and performance that defines improvisation. In reflecting and breaking with its own form, the Romantic comedy is able to produce new forms, new plays, characters, narrative tensions, and so on. Whether geared toward the (impossible) representation of an 14 For Lisa Galaski, it is precisely that the comedy presents the process of its development that makes Tieck’s Die verkehrte Welt a romantic play (“Romantische Ironie,” 26). 15 “The parekbasis of the novel could thus be characterized as the form in which the interminable presentation of the absolute, as a generation of the unconditioned proposition, is under way before and beyond every reflection. Parekbasis is the act that is no longer merely performative but trans-formative and ex-formative; it is no longer even an act if every act is bound up with an already constituted subject. On the contrary, it is the event in which the project of an unconditioned, infinite proposition of positing propels itself forward” (“Position Exposed,” 250).

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absolute, as Hamacher suggests, or simply as a process that dovetails iteration with alteration, the Romantic comedy displays the paradoxical principles of auto-genesis, of theatric forms of self-production. The romantic exploration of improvisation as a generative principle for its aesthetic and poetological concerns challenges the distinction between “authentic” (performed) and staged improvisation. In both of his lectures on comedy, Müller does not clearly differentiate between Tieck’s comedies, which stage improvisation (if they were performed at all), and the Viennese people’s theater among other Commedia dell’arte venues, where improvisation and the dialogue between stage and auditorium are indeed practiced. At the very least, he understands the romantic comedy with its doubling of the stage/auditorium distinction on stage as an immediate precursor of a universal comedy. Read in the context of the transcendental poetology he cites, Müller’s failure to differentiate actual from staged improvisation is not accidental. It is an attempt to make productive the distinction between staged improvisation and the practice of improvisation, between “idealistic” and “real” performances. That would mean to highlight the “reality” of a staged performance as well as to signal that “true” spontaneity is also a form of stagecraft. The attempt to distinguish between both rigidly would in any case contradict the universal comedy’s attempt to implement a transcendental standpoint within the theater, a standpoint that would inspire actors and spectators with the same sense of irony. We addressed the structural problems faced by any attempt at a strict separation between improvisation and what is rule-governed in Chapter 1. The romantic framing of the theatrical space serves as a caveat that can be generalized and applied to any observation of improvised doings. Improvisation can always be staged, cited, faked. As we argued earlier with and against Derrida, it is impossible for any improvisation to mark with absolute certainty its authenticity as a completely unrehearsed, unplanned activity. Even if we trust that what we see on stage is improvised, it is still impossible to determine fully where improvisation starts and where it ends. This is not merely a problem for an audience watching a romantic comedy (or other performances that stage spontaneity) that might not be able to distinguish with certainty between pre-planned acts and “doings” that are improvised, unplanned, or ad hoc inventions. The problem runs deeper. To be recognizable and communicable (even as incommunicable), the performative is linked to what Derrida calls the structure of iterability that ties alterity to repetition. At the very least, improvisation is linked to the known and familiar in as much as the known and familiar must be recognized as that from which the improvisation has to distinguish itself. For that reason, performers themselves cannot completely determine where improvisation and where repetition, citation, or simple variation start and end.

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My argument is that the Romantic interest in staged improvisation needs to be read in this broader, theoretical context. Three aspects of Romantic theater bear directly on Derrida’s analysis. The first is the Romantic tendency to make spontaneity and authenticity products of a staging process. The doubling of stage and auditorium, parabasis, and other artificially arranged confusions aim at presenting actors who no longer seem to follow the script and make impromptu speeches. A character that refers to him- or herself as character or actor creates the impression that spontaneous reactions and actor idiosyncrasies are integral to the composition of the play. Tieck highlights this effect when he presents poets, authors, and directors in his comedies as seemingly helpless and dreamy figures that cannot assert their interests, not even against the wishes of the machinists. Ruth Petzold notes specifically with reference to Tieck’s Verkehrte Welt that the “self-thematization of language, of speaking, and of the speaker make the performative dimension of staging apparent for the audience, the participating recipient that finds its role doubled on the stage in front of it” (“Das Spiel,” 182).16 In “Play,” we witnessed Derrida employ the same means as the Romantics — self-reflexivity, and a parabasis of sorts — to stage spontaneity.17 The central point in both cases is to demonstrate how self-referentiality is not merely, as Fischer-Lichte put it, “one mark of the performative,” or simply used “to evoke especially strong physiological and emotional responses in the observer, allowing the observer to make an experience of intensity” (Ästhetische Erfahrung, 338); the Romantic comedy makes apparent that self-reflexivity is instead a central means for the framing and the construction of performative immediacy on stage. The Romantics demonstrate how notions of immediacy and authenticity derive from particular staging processes, originate in specific modes of mediation, rather than from being unmediated (how?) expressions of nature or genius.18 In this regard, the staging of improvisation in the Romantic comedy already reveals what Hans-Friedrich Bormann et al. have recognized as an important element of modernist traditions 16 Petzoldt continues: “The romantic comedy thus underlines its structure as a comprehensive model of communication between producer and recipient, who find themselves raised to higher power on stage” (“Das Spiel,” 182). 17 The authenticity of improvised doings might in any case be seen as an issue concerning its staging. With regard to the problem of staging authenticity, see the anthology Inszenierung von Authentizität, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, in particular the essays by Eleonore Kalisch and by Hans-Friedrich Bormann et al. 18 Eleonore Kalisch, discussing the actor−spectator relationship with which Karl Philipp Moritz transposes pietistic introspection onto the practice of selfobservation, shows how a representational moment is also a constitutive part of (pietistic) introspection and of the proclamation of their authenticity (“Aspekte,” 41).

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focusing on the mediality of aesthetic representations, where the opposition between authenticity and staging is a conceptual construction and staging must be understood as an “ineluctable precondition of perception, authenticity as its effect” (“Freeing the Voice,” 56). The second point important for the Romantic staging of improvisation is its insistence on improvisation being always already tied to what Derrida calls the statutory. Read in the context of Schlegel’s conception of irony and of Müller’s own Theory of Contradiction (Lehre vom Gegensatze), the improvisational theater cannot be simply opposed to the classic ideals of harmony, simplicity, and perfection as, for example, Walter Hinck’s study of the Romantic comedy and its relation to the Commedia dell’arte tradition still does.19 Instead, it must be acknowledged to incorporate such opposites and as making the tension they create productive. Müller does not read improvisation as a random disregard for rules, or as completely unplanned and chaotic, but rather as a playful, competitive dialogue much along the lines of Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry, which defines Romantic wit as “this artfully ordered confusion, this charming symmetry of contradictions.”20 As we saw above, it is the actors’ task to defend the work of the poet “as if it was their fortress” against the arbitrary intrusions from the audience. This aleatory-agonal structure

19 Hinck claims that improvisation renders absolute “the spontaneous artistic idea, disregarding any greater, organic connections” and that it “runs counter to the striving for harmony, completeness, and perfection and in this regard represents a romantic form of expression that represents the polar opposite to the ideals of classicism” (Das deutsche Lustspiel, 392). 20 “Here I find a great similarity with the marvelous wit of romantic poetry which does not manifest itself in individual conceptions but in the structure of the whole . . . Indeed, this artfully ordered confusion, this charming symmetry of contradictions, this wonderfully perennial alternation of enthusiasm and irony which lives even in the smallest parts of the whole, seem to me to be an indirect mythology themselves . . . For this is the beginning of all poetry, to cancel the progression and laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transplant us once again into the beautiful confusion of imagination, into the original chaos of human nature, for which I know as yet no more beautiful symbol than the motley throng of ancient gods” (Dialogue on Poetry, 86) (“Da finde ich nun eine große Ähnlichkeit mit jenem großen Witz der romantischen Poesie, der nicht in einzelnen Einfällen, sondern in der Konstruktion des Ganzen sich zeigt . . . Ja diese künstlich geordnete Verwirrung, diese reizende Symmetrie von Widersprüchen, dieser wunderbare ewige Wechsel von Enthusiasmus und Ironie, der selbst in den kleinsten Gliedern des Ganzen lebt, scheinen mir schon selbst eine indirekte Mythologie zu sein . . . Denn das ist der Anfang aller Poesie, den Gang und die Gesetze der vernünftig denkenden Vernunft aufzuheben und uns wieder in die schöne Verwirrung der Fantasie, in das ursprüngliche Chaos der menschlichen Natur zu versetzen, für das ich kein schöneres Symbol bis jetzt kenne, als das bunte Gewimmel der alten Götter”) (Kritische Ausgabe, 2: 318–19).

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points toward conceptions of improvised doings as we find them in Heinrich von Kleist’s writings. As I will explore extensively in the following chapter, in Kleist, the improvisational skills needed in situations of battle are seen as emblematic for how one ought to act in emergency situations as well as in conversations and in life in general. Improvisation lives up to the paradox and Romantic ideal of an “artfully ordered confusion” in as much as it explores the tension between what was planned and what was not planned, what is and what is not rule-governed, between order and disorder, enthusiasm and chaos, and so on. As indicated, in more general cognitive terms, this is apparent even without detour through post-structuralist theories. Anyone improvising or anyone who wants to observe and appreciate a doing as an improvisation must have at least an intuitive understanding of what is or would be recognized as rule-governed, planned, repeated, and old, and what therefore must be excluded from the improvisation (or must be varied, put in perspective, shown as a citation from which to depart, and so on). At the same time, such deliberate exclusion is also a kind of inclusion: what is excluded by virtue of being excluded helps fashion the improvisation. Once we adopt this second-order perspective and acknowledge the unity of such distinctions, it is clear that not only for the audience, but for artists, improvising performers, and theoreticians of improvisation alike it is impossible to distinguish fully improvised doings from the rule-governed, and hence to distinguish “authentic” (performed) improvisation fully from staged improvisation. This does not mean that we cannot or should not note differences between both; it means, however, that we should not essentialize such differences, but instead investigate how and what differences derive from different forms of staging improvisation.

3.3 Romantic Principles of Artistic Production The third point that shows the close proximity of Derrida’s analysis of inventiveness and the Romantic interest in improvisation concerns the creative process itself. Müller, too, ties improvisation as a principle of artistic production to the structure of language. In his conception of the creative process, Müller once again follows the templates provided by Friedrich Schlegel.21 Müller finds in Schlegel’s concept of irony “the whole secret of artistic life in its true and original form” (“das ganze Geheimnis des künstlerischen Lebens in seiner wahren ursprünglichen Gestalt”) and a “revelation of freedom of the artist and of humankind” (“Offenbarung der Freiheit des Künstlers oder des Menschen”) (Kritische Schriften, 1: 234). Subsequently, Müller specifies ironic freedom in terms

21 In Ernst Behler’s estimate, romantic irony finds in Müller’s work its most accessible account (Ironie, 103).

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of an observational position analog to the representational space that structures the theater, namely in terms of the distinction between presentation on the one hand and observation on the other. Irony requires that “while enjoying beauty one [can still] transcend beauty” ([dass man sich] “im Genuss des Schönen über das Schöne erheben” [kann]) (Kritische Schriften, 1: 235). Müller rejects the unreflected identification with what is presented, and calls for a critical audience, one that retains a distance to what it observes: “You shall not loose yourself!” (“Du sollst nicht versinken!”) (ibid.) Müller defines irony accordingly as the ability: to protest against all that you believe in with utmost certainty, against every experience, against every principle, but not with the base intention, not for the lowly satisfaction of your intellect or your power, that you can destroy such somber and sacred things, as it happened to a number of revolutionaries of this time, but with the intent of putting a higher belief, higher experiences, a higher principle, in short what is better in its place. (Kritische Schriften, 1: 242)22 Distancing oneself from what is represented on stage is merely the beginning of a process that replaces the most certain belief that was destroyed with something new and better. This includes the situation where the “better” thing that replaces the most certain belief itself will eventually be replaced again by something even better and that this process will continue ad infinitum. Regina Ogorek has shown how Müller uses the infinite regress of reflexive thought to establish contradiction as a universal explanatory principle. For Müller, there is “no appearance, no act, no motive, no value per se, all can be comprehended only when its opposite is considered, too” (“Gegensatzphilosophie,” 107).23

22 “gegen alles Bestimmteste, was du glaubst, gegen jede Erfahrung, gegen jeden Grundsatz zu protestieren, aber nicht in der gemeinen Absicht, nicht um die elende Satisfaktion deines Verstandes oder deiner Kraft, daß du so ernste, heilige Dinge zerstören kannst, wie es manchem Revolutionär dieser Zeit widerfahren, sondern in der Absicht, um höheren Glauben, höhere Erfahrungen, einen höheren Grundsatz, kurz das Bessere an ihre Stelle zu setzen.” 23 According to Ogorek, Müller’s theory of contradiction takes a pessimistic turn in Kleist. The difference between both thinkers, I would argue, can be specified in terms of their different treatment of recursiveness. Müller tries to contain the contingency produced by ironic perspectivation (that everything can be different, better) by embedding it in a narrative of progression, a teleology; in Kleist, recursion either leads to moments of undecidability or, where decided, to catastrophic events. I will approach this question from a slightly different angle again in the following chapter, emphasizing the asymmetry that underlies reflexive and dialogical processes in Kleist.

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This implied regress is a variation on the representational problem that builds the foundation of Müller’s theory of contradiction.24 According to this theory, a description is systematic only if it is able to include the viewpoint of the observer into the observation, which, however, again creates a new viewpoint that needs to be included into the next description, and so on. Müller subsequently articulates a position which understands that descriptions only lead to more descriptions, words to more words, not to an outside, not to a transcendental signified: The description is only correct in as much as in this way, the description and what is described are seen to confront each other in a complete, continued interplay, as it shows that the whole description is woven from prospection and retrospection. What actually is described, the description, of course, can never fully describe and reach, because it is transformed into a description by being described, which in turn is confronted with a higher description, that in the continued description become a higher order of the described for the continually ascending, unreachable description, and so on ad infinitum. (Kritische Schriften, 2: 202)25 The basis of Müller’s argument is an understanding of language no longer anchored in a non-linguistic reality, which would arrest the descriptive process. We find other instances in early German Romanticism which reflect this viewpoint and explore the autonomy of language also with 24 Jochen Marquardt sees in Müller’s Theory of Contradiction a “universal method that he — with multiple modifications — applied to the most diverse areas of life and knowledge with which he dealt in the course of his life” (“Vermittelnde Geschichte,” 39). Behind this (for Müller) so important figure of thought, Marquardt finds a particular understanding of synthesis: “Müller’s assumption is that synthesis does not imply the destruction of the antipodes; but that the lively interplay between the antipodes itself constitutes synthesis” (ibid., 46). I am avoiding the term synthesis because even when conceptualized as a continued interplay, the term makes it difficult to capture the generative principles that Müller’s theory recognizes, that is, the emergence of something new that would exist independent of the parts and actions that constitute it. 25 “Die Beschreibung aber ist nur insofern eine richtige, als auf diese Weise das Beschreibende und das Beschriebene in vollständiger, beständiger Wechselwirkung einander entgegenstehen, als die ganze Beschreibung aus Ansicht und Rücksicht gewoben erscheint. Das Beschreibende selbst wird freilich in der Beschreibung nie dargestellt und erreicht, weil es, indem es beschrieben wird, zum Beschriebenen wird, dem ein höheres Beschreibendes wieder entgegensteht, das in der fortgesetzten Beschreibung wieder zum höheren Beschriebenen für das immer weiter steigende, immer unerreichbare Beschreibende wird, und so ins Unendliche fort.”

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regard to its relation to the speaker. Novalis makes this point perhaps most famously in his “Soliloquy” (“Monolog”) when he recognizes the “particularity of language: that it is only concerned with itself” and that a true conversation “is a mere word game,” because language like mathematical formulas comprise a “world of their own.” Only independently of the intentions of the speaker, Novalis argues, can language be poetically effective and express a world that is particular to it.26 For both Novalis and Müller, the systemic closure of language has two important consequences. It places the site of poiesis within the workings of language itself; and it identifies a fundamental heteronomy between speaker/author and speech/artwork at the base — and as a precondition for the appearance — of the “spirit of poesy.” Müller establishes the separation between author and work most immediately in his second lecture on the comedy, entitled “Italian Theater, Masks, Extemporizing.” Focusing on the particular temporal structure of the comedy, Müller recognizes not only spontaneity, but more generally, comedy’s orientation toward the present as an important structural element that distinguishes it from the tragedy and enables the renegotiation of the dividing line between stage and auditorium in the first place. In tragedy, Müller argues, stage and audience are strictly separated because its content concerns the past, is historical. Accordingly, the temporal structure of tragedy is re-presentational in the sense of a narratologically given belatedness. In contrast, the main content of comedy is presentational, is “the future, and its essence therefore is the free play with the present, the free fashioning and refashioning of things.”27 For comedy to realize its temporal structure 26 “It’s quite a peculiar thing about speaking and writing: a proper conversation is a mere word game . . . No one realizes the very particularity of language: that it is only concerned with itself . . . If one could only make it clear to people that language is like mathematical formulas. Formulas comprise a world of their own: they play only with themselves, express nothing but their own wondrous nature and are for that very reason so expressive. For that very reason as well, the peculiar relational play of things reflects itself in them” (“Soliloquy,” 145–6) (“Es ist eigentlich um das Sprechen und Schreiben eine närrische Sache; das rechte Gespräch ist ein bloßes Wortspiel . . . Gerade das Eigenthümliche der Sprache, daß sie sich blos um sich selbst bekümmert, weiß keiner . . . Wenn man den Leuten nur begreiflich machen könnte, daß es mit der Sprache wie mit den mathematischen Formeln sei — Sie machen eine Welt für sich aus — Sie spielen nur mit sich selbst, drücken nichts als ihre wunderbare Natur aus, und eben darum sind sie so ausdrucksvoll — eben darum spiegelt sich in ihnen das seltsame Verhältnißspiel der Dinge”) (Schriften, 672–3). For a more extensive discussion of Novalis’s “Monolog” in relation to Schlegel’s concept of incomprehensibility, see my article “Comprehending Romantic Incomprehensibility.” 27 “[Der Hauptgegenstand des Lustspiels dagegen ist präsentierend, ist] die Zukunft, dessen Wesen daher freies Spiel mit der Gegenwart, freies Gestalten und Umgestalten der Dinge ist” (Kritische Schriften 1, 243–4).

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(its orientation toward the present) and to enter into a dialogue with the audience, the poet must leave room for improvisation: It is advantageous that the poet, who during the performance cannot be present or at least cannot be omnipresent, leave room for the actor to adapt his work to the moment and even more so to the mood of the moment. (Kritische Schriften, 1: 280)28 Comedy’s link to the present necessitates a radical break between the poet and his or her work, a break that not only questions classic conceptions of a “work” and its completeness, but at the same time dissolves any auctoriallinear connection between artist and artwork or between author and actor (without, however, equating the actor with the author). In this respect, the improvisational theater had acknowledged for centuries already a feature that the comedies of Tieck and Brentano highlight on stage, namely: authors, poets, and directors whose authority is questioned by the actors and the audience and whose “works” are no longer the products of planning and poetic inspiration, but seem to emerge from the more immediate technical needs of the staging process and in reaction to ad hoc articulated public expectations. A comedy that is the product of the exchange between stage and auditorium can no longer express the intentions of an author or document the expressive abilities of the actors; rather, it must emerge from the dialogical engagement with the audience. The romantic principles of artistic production run counter to the more common eighteenth-century comparison (critical or not) of the improvisers and their talents with the aesthetics of genius, an aesthetics that, as we have seen in the previous chapter, centers on the subject and tries to locate the divineness of art in the special abilities of the artist or her sub-consciousness. Read against this tradition, it becomes more apparent how radical Müller’s figuration of improvisation is. It departs from the customary glorification of artistic geniality and auctorial control that to this day characterizes much of the popular understanding of improvisation and instead declares the absence of the author to be a structural necessity for the appearance of poesy — that “to the whole house and to each actor and the audience the invisible presence of a higher poet, a spirit of poesy, a God” is revealed. Behind Müller’s inspired rhetoric, we find an aspect of the romantic understanding of art that allows for a very different assessment of improvisation. At stake are differing figurations 28 “es ist zweckmäßig, daß der Dichter, der bei der Aufführung nicht gegenwärtig oder wenigstens nicht allgegenwärtig sein kann, dem Schauspieler Raume lasse, sein Werk dem Augenblick und der Stimmung des Augenblicks noch mehr anzupassen.”

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of artistic productivity, what Winfried Menninghaus describes as a relocation of the “autopoiesis-theorems from the actor perspective to a systems perspective” and as the “decentralization of the genius’s productive force” (Unendliche Verdopplung, 225–6). In early German Romantic theory, artistic production is no longer anchored in the special abilities of the artist. Instead, attempts are made to understand the fashioning of the artwork as a self-directing process. In its dialogical structure, improvisation demonstrates how a work of art can emerge from a self-guiding, recursive process that creates original, unpredictable, and unforeseen works or performances that go beyond what the participants in the process could have planned or otherwise envisioned in advance. From a larger, socio-historical perspective we can recognize that changes in the assessment of improvisation at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century are expressive of two different reactions to the same conceptual challenge. While the aesthetics of genius reacts to the differentiation of the art system’s autonomy with paradoxical models of the human psyche, in early German Romanticism, it is irony and wordplay and other explorations of linguistic self-reference that respond to and enact the autonomy of the art system. Through irony and wordplay, the Romantic comedy implements the heteronomy between speaker and language and demonstrates, as Schlegel famously put it, “that words often understand themselves better than do those who use them” (“On Incomprehensibility,” 119). Specifically, the contextualized play with words demonstrates the proximity of wit and improvisation. Wit and word games presuppose spontaneity; they must surprise, seem unplanned and unpredictable.29 As Tieck states in the first paragraph of Die verkehrte Welt, if you bring too much intent and premeditation to them, you all too easily “will destroy true sincerity as much as true gaiety.”30 Romanticism thrives on exploring not only double entendres and wordplay, but more generally the fleetingness and unpredictability of the communicational medium where utterances can and need to be constantly re-contextualized and thus are made to mean something very different than the speaker might have intended. The mere repetition of individual words by different actors or even by the same person can provoke an alteration in meaning, can

29 André Jolles notes that dissolving the intentional aspect of language (he uses the word “Aufhebung,” the dissolution and simultaneous marking and containment of the “mitteilenden Absicht der Sprache”) is a primary characteristic of wordplay and a structural feature of the joke (Einfache Formen, 248). On changes in the understanding of German “witz” in the eighteenth century and the influence of French conceptions of esprit and English notions of wit in Germany, see Otto Best’s study Der Witz als Erkenntniskraft und Formprinzip. 30 “Trägt man zu viel Absicht und Vorsatz hinein, so ist es gar leicht um den wahren Ernst, so wie um die wahre Lustigkeit geschehen” (Schriften, 5: 285).

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produce irony, or otherwise question what might or might not have been the original intention of the speaker. In an essay on Schlegel’s poetology, David Wellbery relates the concept of Romantic irony to the structure of the linguistic sign as developed by Derrida. A necessary condition for irony is that linguistic signs can be repeated and cited. Each repetition, though, is tied to alterity, which expresses the sign’s independence from the “domination of the reflecting subject” (“Rhetorik und Literatur,” 172). In systems theoretical terms we can reformulate the problem to include a wider array of features and concerns of the Romantic period. From a systems theoretical perspective, Romantic poetics explore the dynamics of the system of communication, how utterances exist and thrive in communication independent of the intentions of the speaker. Both the Romantic comedy and the improvisational theater see a virtue in this communicational loss of control. They recognize and explore the inventive productivity of the linguistic medium that ties repetition to alterity and alterity to repetition. In short, the Romantic comedy stages how improvisation is tied to repetition and how repetition, how every utterance, every actualization of language, each communicational event in turn is subject to the properties of improvisation: every (re-)actualization constitutes a variation that in turn can be actualized again and so on, making the communication unpredictable, unforeseeable, and potentially inventive.

3.4 Social Bearings The shifting of the autopoiesis theorems from the actor perspective onto the systems perspective, which locates artistic productivity beyond what can be planned, intended, or foreseen, anticipates improvisational practices that are fully implemented only in the twentieth century. Earlier, I referenced R. Keith Sawyer’s investigation of improvised dialogues and his concept of “collaborative emergence” to describe how communicational frames develop that only retrospectively define the meaning and function of an utterance, the identity of a character, or the place and time of a particular speech act.31 With regard to Adam Müller’s theories of 31 “Improvised dialogue results in the creation of a dramatic frame, which includes all aspects of the performance: the characters enacted by each actor, the motives of those characters, the relationship among those characters, the joint activity in which they are engaged, the location of the action, the time period and genre, the overall plot, and the relation of the current joint activity to that plot . . . The emergence of the frame cannot be reduced to actor’s intentions in individual turns, because in many cases an actor cannot know the meaning of his or her own turn until the other actors have responded . . . In improvised dialogues, many actions do not receive their full meaning until after the act has occurred; the complete meaning of a turn is dependent on the flow of the subsequent dialogue” (Improvised Dialogues, 41–3).

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contradiction and the universal comedy, we can historically contextualize Sawyer’s observations on the dynamics of improvised dialogues. After all, Müller’s universal comedy, with its emphasis on the emergence of poesy as something autonomous, new, and unforeseen by the participants, is set up against an older tradition where the dialogue between stage and audience served a quite different function. The universal comedy, in any case, does not only want to please, educate, or entertain, but hopes to reveal the “divine freedom of humankind” (“göttliche Freiheit des Menschen”) and lead to no less than the “democratization of society” (Kritische Schriften, 1: 234). With regard to such ambitions, we need to distinguish Müller’s ideal of freedom from the jester’s license (Narrenfreiheit) of the Commedia dell’arte tradition. The Commedia dell’arte, a product of Renaissance culture, reacts to the stratification of society. Society’s increased focus on strictly defined behavioral patterns, role-play, and hierarchies were the product of the centralization of power at central European courts at the end of the Middle Ages.32 In Renaissance culture, the jester or Harlequin mimics and undermines the hierarchies and role-play that define courtly society; he does not, however, create new roles (as in contemporary Improv theater productions) and he does not question the deterministic worldview at the base of the culture he mimics. The mask expresses this paradigmatically. In the Commedia dell’arte, masks represent well-defined personality types and behavioral patterns with which the audience is familiar. The improvising actor’s art is to represent interesting variations of these characters and their traits. The Commedia dell’arte tradition is still based on a very different understanding of art, one that puts no premium on originality, but considers the “variation of the familiar as art” (Hink, Das deutsche Lustspiel, 6). This is still the case for the old Viennese people’s stage which Adam Müller references as evidence that Germany might indeed one day create a universal comedy as he had just described it. Beatrix Müller-Kampel, in her study of this tradition, presents extensive lists of recurring figures, masks, gestures, costumes, actions, and plots which the improvisational artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would access for their performances. Both traditions are children of Renaissance culture. Their use of masks aims to create parodies and travesties, forms of comedy that are based on mimesis and mimicry, on the reproduction and variation of existing roles, types, figures, and 32 Regarding the social changes alluded to here and their relation to the modern drama, see Dietrich Schwanitz, Die Wirklichkeit der Inszenierung, as well as chapter 4 of Systemtheorie und Literatur, where Schwanitz (following Norbert Elias’s studies on the process of civilization) links the emergence of the premodern theater to the stratification of society and the role play the formation of courtly structures necessitated.

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plot structures. Their critical potential lies in their ability to point out contradictions and blind spots in particular observational positions or discourses; they do so however, without questioning the contingency of the distinction or the existing social hierarchies themselves.33 With Bakhtin we could say that the Commedia dell’arte tradition is based on the distinction between official and popular culture, between authoritarian and “laughing” culture.34 As Müller-Kampel makes clear, one should not overestimate the critical potential of the pre-modern improvisational theater. Although the systematic transgressions of Harlequin-like figures such as Hanswurst or Bernardon create a counter image to the baroquearistocratic gestures, it is “precisely in that image that they reveal their baroque profile” (Spaßtheater, 177). As we have argued already with regard to the banishment of improvisation in the eighteenth century, with the emergence of modern society, improvised doings acquire a very different meaning than before. Improvisation is no longer about the variation of existing patterns; but is of interest now as a method of orchestrating and staging inventiveness. This is certainly what the Romantics pursue as they explore the productivity of self-reflection, of (contentious) collaborative exchanges, as well as the unpredictable dynamics of communication. With these categories in mind, the Romantics also extend the significance of improvisation beyond art. In his lectures on rhetoric, Müller attributes to conversation the same tension between necessity and play, planning and coincidence, illusion and reality that he attributes to the improvisational theater: If, among all enjoyments and all amusements in life, I put conversation in absolute first place, I am certain that I have the support of all voices in this honorable assembly. In all activities that humans oppose to the serious and necessary course of their lives and that they called play, we make room for coincidences, for destiny, in short for a certain unknown power: with this freely acknowledged coincidence, with this self-created mystery, man competes when playing; and it creates a certain pleasant tension between the player and this unknown being, an uplifting series of very different

33 Eckehard Catholy notes that Tieck no longer uses the mask as they were used by the Commedia dell’arte, namely to predetermine certain behavior and specific character identities (Das deutsche Lustspiel, 265). 34 Bakhtin explores how Renaissance courtly culture adopts a whole series of forms, symbols, and masks from the carnivalistic practices of the lower strata, but reads this adoption as leading to the “degeneration” of the popular festive forms, a degeneration that for Bakhtin entails the replacment of “invention and fantasy” with an emphasis on “narrow common sense” and a “sober bourgeois practical spirit” (Rabelais, 103).

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emotions, of hopes and worries, of deception and fulfillment, in which the soul takes pleasure, because it knows that the coincidence with which it plays depends on it, that it can put it on the thrown and demote it again at will. (Kritische Schriften, 1: 310)35 Recognizing its openness and acknowledging the role of coincidences, Müller likens conversation to the playing of a game, where rules exist, but chance, surprise, and competition create interest and draw the players in emotionally. The comparison with games highlights how conversations develop their own dynamics (are autonomous), for the duration define the character of the participants, and at once restrict and enable agency. The autonomy of this process — that it cannot be fully controlled — is not contradicted by Müller’s claim that part of the pleasure derives from the player’s ability to demote the role of the coincidental in this game. The distance between game and player expressed by the player’s ability to step away from it guarantees that the play is allowed to take its own course and that the players are able and willing to allow the play to define their persona and emotional state for the time being. In the Theory of Contradiction, Müller already used the structure of conversation as a starting point to redefine the relationship between subject and object as reversible positions that continually posit and depend on one another.36 Müller then transposes the dynamics of conversation onto the reception of art:

35 “Wenn ich unter allen Genüssen und Ergötzlichkeiten des Lebens dem Gespräch die unbedingt erste Stelle einräume, so habe ich gewiß alle Stimmen in dieser hochgeachteten Versammlung für mich. In allen den Beschäftigungen, die der Mensch dem ernsthaften und notwendigen Gange seines Lebens entgegensetzt und die er Spiele genannt hat, wird dem Zufall, dem Schicksal, kurz einer gewissen unbekannten Macht Raum gegeben: mit diesem freiwillig anerkannten Zufall, mit diesem selbst geschaffenen Geheimnis wetteifert der Mensch im Spiele, und es erzeugt sich eine gewisse wohltätige Spannung zwischen dem Spieler und jenem unbekannten Wesen, eine anmutige Reihe von sehr verschiedenartigen Gemütsbewegungen, von Hoffnungen und Besorgnissen, von Täuschungen und Erfüllungen, in denen sich die Seele wohlgefällt, weil sie weiß, daß der Zufall, mit welchem sie spielt, von ihr abhängig ist, daß sie ihn auf den Thron erheben und nach Belieben wieder absetzen kann.” 36 Jochen Marquardt points out that Müller redefines the relationship between subject and object. By taking the conversational setting as his starting point, Müller describes how “the positions of speaker and listener constantly change, precondition and posit each other in the communication setting” (Vermittelnde Geschichte, 33).

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[I]n the true observer lies the true sculptor, the true sculptor contains the true observer; as the active person the speculating, the speculating the acting; observing and doing, as begetting and giving birth, are one, not possible without the other. (Kritische Schriften, 2: 232)37 The similarities between improvisation and conversation have often been noted. It is not only a favorite comparison of jazz musicians (e.g. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz and his essay “Give and Take. The Collective Conversation of Jazz Performance”). What R. Keith Sawyer sees as a central structuring principle of the improvisational theater, Gundel Mattenklott acknowledges as a general mark of improvisation: “Improvisation is related to conversation — is created in the process of communication, is open for the unexpected, does not have one author; rather all involved create a common network of ideas, representations, stories. One thing leads to the next — as it is in improvisation” (Literarische Improvisation, 7). Müller’s elaborations demonstrate that the analogy can be reversed, too, that conversations indeed should share many of the properties of improvisation. The association of conversation with improvisation carries, I believe, important cultural implications that distinguishes the role of conversation in pre-modern societies from its practice today. As opposed to the highly stylized conversational patterns of pre-modern, aristocratic societies (where wit actually was a matter of rhetorical prescription),38 in modern times, even the most common conversation with a familiar person demands that the participants — if they indeed desire to converse rather than to agitate, manipulate, or coerce (e.g. pedagogically) — not be transparent to each other. Today, a conversation deserving of this name can emerge only if the participants are willing to act at least to some degree in an unpredicted, unprepared, and unforeseen manner. As I indicated in the introduction, the early nineteenth-century interest in conversation — in Adam Müller as much as in Heinrich von Kleist’s articulations of this phenomenon — is indeed a telling indicator for the time’s own perception of changes that affect the modes of social interaction on a profound level. Improvisation necessarily determines the social horizon of modernity — modernity understood as a social structure that defines itself through its open future and its ability to learn. Beyond the specific engagement with it in art and 37 “[I]n dem wahren Beschauer liegt der wahre Bildner, der wahre Bildner enthält den wahren Beschauer; wie der handelnde Mensch den spekulierenden, der spekulierende den handelnden; Betrachten und Handeln, wie Zeugen und Gebären, sind eins, ohne das andre nicht möglich.” 38 See Otto Best, Witz, again, for a detail description of changes in the semantics of wit and esprit in German Romanticism.

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aesthetics, improvisation comes to structure a variety of social orders, small or large, that are able to learn — and in this sense improvisation indeed is central in promoting what Müller calls the “divine freedom of humankind” and the “democratization of society.”39 I want to suggest that we reassess not only the Romantic comedy, but also its novelistic productions against this historical backdrop. The Romantic novel (think of such texts as Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Tieck’s Franz Sternbald’s Wanderungen, or Eichendorff’s Memoirs of a Good-For-Nothing [Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts]) in its attempt to poetize “real life,” also expands the significance of improvised doings beyond its narrowly defined practice in poetry, theater, and music.40 The Romantic novel presents improvisation as a model for how the novelistic (anti-)heroes of the era relate to their social surroundings and their own future. While in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship improvisation still figures as a (albeit, as I argued, autonomous) stage in the educational program that is the novel, the Romantics see the ability to improvise as crucial for the assertion of human freedom and for the art of living (Lebenskunst). If such figurations of improvisation are romantic in the broader sense of the term it is because they ignore how modernity, while demanding openness and improvisation, has come to structure life around plans, norms, repetition, and disciplinary measures (in the Foucauldian sense) that for the most part (that is, for most people for most of the time) leaves little room for artistry in these matters. Recognizing this tension, the aesthetic and social use of improvisation receives a more pointed treatment in Heinrich von Kleist’s writing, the focus of the next chapter of this book. Kleist allows us to expand on the anthropological predicament 39 One might view this as an evolutionary achievement. In his socio-theoretical study, Friedhelm Guttandin has shown how improvisation as a figure of thought and model for action can be traced back all the way to Homer. Guttandin sees the Odyssey as the birth of modern rationality and in Odysseus the first, modern improviser who in his struggles to survive improvises his way through life (Improvisationsgesellschaft, 14). With regard to Norbert Elias, Guttandin notes that only during the Renaissance did this form of rationality take hold in Europe. The stringency of the courtly social order demands that individuals are cunning and able to improvise to achieve their goals. Guttandin’s argument does not contradict, but rather helps explain how improvisation, as I claim, can both be shun and come to determine the social horizon of modernity, especially at a time that defines itself explicitly in contradistinction to the stringent aristocratic social order that precedes it. 40 In Eichendorff, though, the improvised life relies on a higher theological order that presents a counterweight to the progressive temporality of modernity with its utilitarian associations. The latter aspect led such notables as Adorno and Frederic Jameson to view Eichendorff’s “magical narratives” as an anti-bourgeois writing and the expression of a “political unconscious” (see Adorno, “Zum Gedächtnis,” 74; Jameson, Political Unconscious, 133–150).

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modern society creates and to reflect on the social constraints that, while infringing on Romantic freedoms, also invite or even force individuals to improvise.

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4. Improvisation, Agency, Autonomy: Heinrich von Kleist and the Modern Predicament

P . . . AND F . . . Suppose, your art succeeded, and you raised our youth Now to be men, like you: dear friends, to what avail? (Kleist, Werke, 1: 24)1 There should be a pedagogy that prepares the offspring who needs education for a future that remains unknown. The unknowability of the future is a resource, namely, the condition for the possibility of making decisions. As a consequence, learning and knowledge would have to be replaced by learning how to make decisions, that is, how to take advantage of not-knowing. (Luhmann, Erziehungssystem, 198) Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) is one of the most subversive writers of his time. His narratives, plays, and essayistic texts explore with uncompromising resoluteness the blind spots and inherent contradictions of the Enlightenment, whether with regard to its semiotic ideals, its epistemology, its repression of the body and the material, or the violence hidden behind its lofty rhetoric. Kleist does not oppose reason with emotion, objectivity with subjectivity, science with nature, and so on, as the stereotypical categorization of Romanticism often has it; he is better understood as thinking the rationality and values of the

1

“P . . . UND F . . . / Setzet, ihr trafts mit euerer Kunst, und erzögt uns die Jugend / Nun zu Männern, wie ihr: liebe Freunde, was wärs?” (translation mine). In his commentary, Helmut Sembdner holds that the initials P and F refer to the two Swiss educators Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg (Kleist, Werke, 1: 910); F might also refer to Fichte, though. Subsequent English translations of Kleist’s writings will follow David Constantine’s Selected Writings and Philip B. Miller’s An Abyss Deep Enough for those essays and anecdotes not included in the former.

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Enlightenment judiciously and passionately to their paradoxical end.2 A central target of Kleist’s critique is the Enlightenment’s trust in progress and education as well as its belief in the possibility and utility of planning, premeditation, and organization. Kleist instead affirms the need for improvisation (defined as inventive yet unforeseen, unforeseeable, and unplanned doings). His novellas and plays are filled with embattled protagonists who find themselves confronted with contingencies that force ad hoc action; and his essayistic writings never cease to produce arguments that assert the advantages of improvised over premeditated acts. For Kleist, beauty, art, and grace,3 but also happiness, love, justice — in fact, any authentic event — elude premeditation. In the absence of premeditation giving direction to action, Kleist presents the ability to (re-)act spontaneously to unforeseen circumstances, engage with contingent events (a rope hanging on the wall), and to take on material as well as temporal constraints (that a person has to speak here and now) as necessary preconditions for successful action. In this chapter, I will focus on the aesthetic and on the particular political and educational concerns Kleist raises with regard to improvisation. His writing suggests that the ability to improvise is essential for the assertion of agency in modern society. I read the importance Kleist attributes to improvisation as a consequence of his much discussed epistemological and linguistic skepticism — in a nutshell, the inherent instability and unreliability of our cognitive faculties and of language — and as a consequence of the observation that social dynamics supersede the purview and control of individual intentions. Kleist’s writings explore with unprecedented resoluteness the contentious, unpredictable, and never fully controllable dynamics of social interaction, recognizing the anthropological predicament — the particular social constraints — in which the self finds itself under the conditions of modernity. Kleist reveals how modern society, despite and because of its emphasis on planning and regulating, invites and forces individuals to improvise. 2

3

On Kleist’s critical review of Enlightenment ideology, see Heinrich von Kleist und die Aufklärung, edited by Tim Mehigan (and therein especially David Roberts’s article on Kleist’s narrative analysis of Kant’s notion of the sublime) as well as Helmut Schneider’s “Facts of Life” and such seminal essays as Paul de Man’s “Aesthetic Formalization” and Werner Hamacher’s “The Quaking of Presentation.” In “A Painter’s Letter to his Son,” the painter explains that in art, the most sublime effect cannot be achieved through planning and premeditation, but “may derive from the lowest and most unlikely cause” (Kleist, Abyss, 240). The rejection of premeditation as a creative principle finds its perhaps most radical articulation in Kleist’s famous essay “The Puppet Theater,” with its claim that the ends of the world meet, that the utter absence of consciousness is equal to infinite consciousness, equating the marionette with God.

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4. 1 Facilitating Prohibitions While Kleist’s texts are filled with depictions of improvised doings, there is only one text, the little discussed anecdote “KorrespondenzNachricht,” (News from Another City: Herr Unzelmann),4 which uses the term and comments on the art of improvisation directly. Mr. Unzelmann, who for some time now has been a guest performer at the theater in Königsberg, is reported to satisfy the public there completely, which is after all the main thing; but, as we also learn from the Königsberg papers, the critics, and the management as well, find something left to be desired. There is a story of how the Director forbade him to improvise. Herr Unzelmann, who detests obstinacy, complied with his orders, but when, to the horror of the audience, a horse having been led on stage during the performance suddenly began dropping manure all over the set, he suddenly wheeled about, interrupting his speech, and addressed the horse: “Were you not forbidden to improvise?” Whereupon even the Director is said to have laughed. (Abyss, 272)5 Kleist’s brief anecdote is revealing with regard to the cultural status of improvisation in the early nineteenth century. Historically, the Berliner actor Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Unzelmann (1753–1832) was indeed known for his inclination to improvise, and theater directorates — not only in Königsberg — were known to prohibit improvisation on stage. As we saw in Chapter 2, the banishment of improvisation from most big stages in the German-speaking world goes back to the mid eighteenth century. Despite Romantic efforts to the contrary, the early nineteenth

4

5

In the introduction to Improvisieren. Paradoxien des Unvorhersehbaren. Kunst – Medien – Praxis, the anecdote is briefly discussed as exemplifying the paradoxical relationship that improvisation maintains to the law that it needs for the “unpredictable to emerge in its aesthetic and emotional quality, as a spontaneous digression, surpassing, and breaking of the norm” (Bormann et al., “Improvisieren,” 9). My interpretation expands on these observations. “Herr Unzelmann, der, seit einiger Zeit, in Königsberg Gastrollen gibt, soll zwar, welches das Entscheidende ist, dem Publiko daselbst sehr gefallen: mit den Kritikern aber (wie man auch aus der Königsberger Zeitung ersieht) und mit der Direktion viel zu schaffen haben. Man erzählt, daß ihm die Direktion verboten, zu improvisieren. Herr Unzelmann der jede Widerspenstigkeit haßt, fügte sich diesem Befehl: als aber ein Pferd, das man, bei der Darstellung eines Stücks, auf die Bühne gebracht hatte, inmitten der Bretter, zur großen Bestürzung des Publikums, Mist fallen ließ: wandte er sich plötzlich, indem er die Rede unterbrach, zu dem Pferde und sprach: ‘Hat dir die Direktion nicht verboten, zu improvisieren?’ – Worüber selbst die Direktion, wie man versichert, gelacht haben soll” (Werke, 2: 270).

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century continues to associate improvisation with “low” art, which is thought to be morally corrupt and pedagogically dangerous. In 1810, the year the “Korrespondenz-Nachricht” was published, Kleist was actively engaged in a heated debate surrounding renewed efforts by the government to censor theatric performances on Berlin’s public and private stages. In a number of articles published that year, Kleist criticized the directorate of Berlin’s National Theater, the monopoly it held in terms of governmental support,6 as well as the extensive efforts that were being made to rid the stage from practices that were associated with low art and that were seen as a “danger to the moral hygiene of the social body” (Wild, Theater, 16).7 Police efforts focused in particular on the puppet theaters of Berlin. When censors once again began demanding transcripts of all plays performed in this manner, they targeted one of the essential aspects of the puppet theater, live improvisation.8 Kleist’s efforts in this regard were not without dangers for his own work. In fact, his articles led to the police prohibiting the Berliner Abendblätter to print any further pieces on the National Theater in early December of 1810, a move that took away one of the paper’s major subjects and contributed to the paper’s financial woes and premature demise. Against the backdrop of these historical developments, and more in the vein of the Romantics’ rediscovery and reinvention of improvisational themes and practices, Kleist’s anecdote exposes the hubris of externally imposed and morally motivated aesthetic standards. While the episode with the horse questions the possibility of purging the theater from the particular, material, and corporeal, Unzelmann’s improvised response simultaneously aims at asserting the theater’s autonomy. 6

7

8

In the early nineteenth century, Berlin had only two stages that were supported by the government, the royal opera and the royal national theater. In 1810, Kleist published two articles in the Berliner Abendblätter that engaged the national theater critically. In particular, Kleist noted that the theater’s success in ticket sales cannot serve as an indication of its quality as long as it holds an exclusive monopoly. Kleist asked for the “industry to be free” and for an “unrestricted competition among the stages” (“wo das Gewerbe frei, und eine uneingeschränkte Konkurrenz der Bühne eröffnet ist” (Werke, 2: 410). The autonomy of the theater is also at the heart of the “Korrespondenz-Nachricht.” Christopher Wild reads “The Puppet Theater” as commenting directly on the ongoing censorship campaign of 1810, as Kleist questioning not only the moral basis for the distinction between high and low art, but also the possibility of ascertaining the semiotic ideals of the Enlightenment, demonstrating the absurdity of wanting to make disappear the corporeality and the theatricality of the theater. See A. Weigel, “König,” 264. Weigel notes that the puppet theater is viewed as a counterpart to the established theater in the early nineteenth century, based on its repertoire, its improvisational performances, and its lively relation to the audience (257).

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What is particularly interesting about Unzelmann’s assertion of aesthetic autonomy is that it does not deny, but rather cites the law that threatens to constrain the actor’s performance. In doing so, Kleist invokes improvisation’s contentious relation to laws, rules, and regulation. This is expressed already in Kleist’s description of the actor Unzelmann, which contains an apparent contradiction: Unzelmann likes to improvise, yet detests obstinacy (Widerspenstigkeit). In fact, the whole anecdote enacts the paradoxical dovetailing of rules and laws on the one hand with spontaneity, transgression, and inventiveness on the other. It is important to note that, contrary to Unzelmann’s claim, it is Unzelmann, not the horse, that is improvising here. Improvisation is not about mere contingency, about unplanned manure (Mist) dropping on or off stage (the German word Mist literally means “dung,” and, like the English word “crap,” is frequently used figuratively as an exclamative to express one’s displeasure about the occurrence of unwanted accidents); rather, improvisation is about the creative response to contingent events. More precisely, Unzelmann succeeds in improvising because he is able to relate the contingent event on stage (the particular, as Kant would say) to a general law: not by subsuming the event under the law, however, but by citing the law to mark the event as its transgression. In this sense, it is not the absence of the law, but its very presence that allows Unzelmann to turn what otherwise would be mere “manure” into a self-reflexive and successful performance that finds the applause of the audience, including the directorate from Königsberg. Without law and without Unzelmann citing the law, there would be no improvisational act, but merely “Mist” interrupting the performance. Historical coincidence or not: that the anecdote places the Berliner actor Unzelmann’s performance in Königsberg invokes Königsberg’s most famous citizen, Immanuel Kant. Indeed, Unzelmann’s response to the “Mist” might be read as an ironic figuration of the Kantian notion of genius. It is ironic in two different ways. Unzelmann questions the law against improvisation by citing it, implying that improvisation, like “Mist,” is a fact of nature. That is, Unzelmann confronts the rule with the factuality of nature and gives nature precedence over the rule, in effect allowing nature to define the rule. In this regard, Unzelmann figures in Kleist’s text as a genius in the precise Kantian sense: it is through Unzelmann that nature (represented by the horse and its droppings) “gave the rule”9 to art. But by equating nature with horse manure — this is the second level of irony — Kleist also questions the Kantian “directive” the moment he cites it. In itself, the rule of nature,

9

The sentence in section 49 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment reads: “fine art is to that extent imitation, for which nature, through the genius, gave the rule” (187).

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which Unzelmann appears to promote, produces mere Mist. It is only in connecting it to the (artificial) law that prohibits improvisation that Unzelmann — and Kleist — can make something out of the Mist that is the accidental manure dropping on stage. There is another dimension to Kleist’s anecdote I want to raise, one that puts the performance framed by the text in close proximity to the Romantic interest in improvisation. Unzelmann’s improvised comment presents a parabasis in Schlegel’s sense: the actor interrupts his speech, steps outside of his role, and reflects on the rules that govern his act. As we saw in the previous chapter, this form of irony — this “transcendental buffoonery” — is central for Adam Müller’s conception of a universal comedy and for the staged improvisations we find in Brentano’s and Tieck’s early comedies, which explore and expand on the improvisational theater’s tradition to engage the audience and playfully reflect on their assigned roles and masks. Unzelmann, too, exploits the “union of ‘being-in-the-world’ and ‘standing-beyond-the-world’” (Szondi, “Romantic Irony,” 71–2). By addressing the horse and repeating the directorate’s order, Unzelmann doubles himself. He puts himself “above” his world by adopting the role and perspective of the directorate (which at this point also takes the place of the audience), yet also remains “in” the world; for when he addresses the horse, Unzelmann also addresses himself: the receiver of the directive prohibiting improvisation. The parabasis allows Unzelmann to reenter the distinction between stage and directorate (and/or audience), between fictional and “real” world, and between practice and law on stage. Unzelmann makes this reentry productive for his performance. It allows him to add something new to his act. And it helps him solve the dilemma that the directorate created for him (the actor who likes to improvise, but hates obstinacy). Reentering the distinction between stage and directorate/ audience on stage enables Unzelmann to identify with the law — to not be obstinate (widerspenstig) — while simultaneously exposing the contingency of the law that ought to govern his performance. In citing the law, then, the performance enacts art’s autonomy vis-à-vis the demands of the directorate. Unzelmann is not rejecting, nor merely subverting the law, but, through improvising, is able to make it productive, gaining artistic mastery over it, regaining agency and, “which is after all the main thing,” the affection of the audience. The autonomy Unzelmann gains for himself and his art hinges on the stage’s ability to redraw the distinction between theatrical inside and non-theatrical outside on its inside. In linguistic terms, it relies on the iterability of the law, that it can be cited in a different context, appropriated by different speakers, and applied to different circumstances. By reiterating the (outside) law on stage (inside the artistic performance), Unzelmann does not completely do away with the law, but rather

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makes it productive by confronting it with and subsuming it under the particular (rather than vice versa). Accordingly, Kleist’s anecdote reveals improvisation to be not about unbridled spontaneity, freedom, or the utter absence of rules, but about a certain mode of engaging, appropriating, and staging rules. Kleist thus challenges oppositions that continue to guide the observational practices of contemporary studies of improvisation, which (from Derek Bailey to Jacques Derrida, if we want to recall the two opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum we discussed in the introduction) understand improvisation in opposition to laws, rules, fixed structures, or repetition. For Kleist, this is not an either/or proposition, but rather it is the interchange of practice and law, performance and text, innovation and tradition, and, in more abstract terms, the interchange between the singular and the general that is of interest to his writing. It is important to note that Kleist’s anecdote not only explores the conceptual intricacies of improvisation, but also points toward the historical developments that led to changes in its understanding and practice, in particular to the association of improvisation with the breaking of rules. As discussed more extensively in Chapter 2, before its extrication from stage in the eighteenth century, improvisation was a common artistic practice that followed rules like other artistic practices. Improvisation was not about inventiveness, but about the (creative) variation of familiar patterns and characters whose familiarity on stage was underlined by the use of stock masks and costumes. Ironically, then, Kleist’s anecdote demonstrates how the very laws that prohibit improvisation also allow for its reinvention and inventive reintegration into the modern art system — where the expectation for newness and inventiveness requires that the artwork/performance break with existing rules and models. Furthermore, Kleist’s text indicates how the ideal of a subsumation of the particular under the general, so central to Enlightenment aesthetics, but also to its moral, pedagogical, and political programs, both contradicts and lends improvisation new significance for the affirmation of autonomy and agency. As we look more closely at other texts, we will recognize that Kleist applies this paradoxical logic — which connects freedom and agency to their prohibition — not only to art, but more generally to any mode of social interaction, and in particular to those institutions that are most central to the Enlightenment and modern society still, namely the law, politics, and education.

4.2 Improvisation as Political Practice In his theoretical and his literary writing, Kleist expands the applicability of improvisation to include all spheres of human interaction, presenting inventiveness and the ability to improvise as a basic requirement for the assertion of power and the formation of agency. Kleist derives

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his preference for improvisation over premeditation sociologically, as conditioned by the essential struggle within which the acting individual always already finds herself. In the short text “Reflection. A Paradox” (“Von der Überlegung. Eine Paradoxe”), Kleist appears to separate knowing from doing, theory from praxis,10 arguing that contemplation has its rightful place only after the fact, after actions are completed, and presents this thought as a basic principle of life: Life itself is a struggle with Fate; and in our actions it is much as it is in a wrestling match. The wrestler, having hold of his opponent, cannot possibly at that moment proceed otherwise than according to the promptings of the moment; and a man who tried to calculate which muscles he should employ and which limbs he should set in motion in order to win would inevitably be disadvantaged and defeated . . . A man must, like that wrestler, take hold of life and feel and sense with a thousand limbs how his opponent twists and turns, resists him, comes at him, evades him and reacts: or he will never get his way in a conversation, much less in a battle. (Selected Writings, 410)11 Conceived as a constant struggle, life does not allow for premeditation and planning; instead, it hinges on the individual’s ability to improvise. The performative contradiction, that the father that utters these words premeditates and plans to teach his son “one day” this lesson for life, puts a critical light on the speaker who is not following his own advice. The 10 Looking at the letters Kleist wrote while in Paris, Christian Moser reads the irreconcilability of knowing and doing as an existential problem that is only reinforced by Kleist’s engagement with Rousseau’s writings, leading Kleist to conclude that his decision on how to live his life “ideally would have to be spontaneous, as an act that is autonomous and without presupposition, legitimized alone by feeling and experience” (“Kontingenz,” 6). We might add that the irony of having to plan for such a spontaneous life is replicated by the short text. The reflections are presented in quotation marks, as something a father “one day” plans to tell his son. 11 “Das Leben selbst ist ein Kampf mit dem Schicksal; und es verhält sich auch mit dem Handeln wie mit dem Ringen. Der Athlet kann, in dem Augenblick, da er seinen Gegner umfaßt hält, schlechthin nach keiner anderen Rücksicht, als nach bloßen augenblicklichen Eingebungen verfahren; und derjenige, der berechnen wollte, welche Muskeln er anstrengen, und welche Glieder er in Bewegung setzen soll, um zu überwinden, würde unfehlbar den kürzeren ziehen, und unterliegen . . . Wer das Leben nicht, wie ein solcher Ringer, umfaßt hält, und tausendgliedrig, nach allen Windungen des Kampfs, nach allen Widerständen, Drücken, Ausweichungen und Reaktionen, empfindet und spürt: der wird, was er will, in keinem Gespräch, durchsetzen; vielweniger in einer Schlacht” (Werke, 2: 338).

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political and nationalistic subtext is rather obvious here as the speaker proclaims at the outset that reflection might be useful for “a Spaniard, an Italian or a Frenchman,” but, “since I am a German,” (ibid.), it is not what his son would need to hear. Kleist targets what he perceives to be the German’s lack of improvisational skills as the cause for their defeat at the hands of Napoleon’s army. As Wolf Kittler has shown, Kleist is deeply involved in propagating strategies of modern, asymmetrical warfare, that is, on employing tactics that rely less on extensive planning and the adherence to hierarchical power structures, but instead take advantage of the chaos and unpredictability of battle and lend increased autonomy, flexibility, and responsibility to those who are most immediately engaged in battle.12 The image of the wrestling match, of two athletes embracing each other, attempting to pin each other down, underlines that improvisation under these circumstances does not take place in the absence of rules and limitations, but rather unfolds within a scene of (extreme) social constraint. Agency itself emerges only within and as part of one’s engagement with these constraints. In this regard, the wrestling match recognizes improvisation also as a political practice13 that uses constraints and enmity strategically. For Kleist, the agonal structure of the wrestling match defines almost all human actions. (Only love seems to escape this basic tension on occasion, but then may lead to absurd forms of surrender and the utter loss of agency as with Käthchen von Heilbronn or Achilles in Penthesilea). Engaged in constant rivalry, improvisation comes to structure almost all human action (conceived by Kleist always in terms of interaction, interaction either between individuals or between individual and circumstances) and almost all effective modes of communication. While Kleist’s fascination with chance, accidents, coincidences, and

12 In close readings of Kleist’s various battle and war scenes, Kittler is able to establish how Kleist, in response to the French occupation of Prussia, draws on and propagates guerilla warfare tactics (terrorism) associated with the military theories of August Neidhardt von Gneisenau (1760–1831). Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), educated by and referencing the same historical events as Kleist, is most famous for the critique of methodological approaches in warfare. Friedhelm Guttandin notes that for Clausewitz, in situations of strong confusion and uncertainty (in terms of the availability and reliability of information), improvisation moves to the center of “strategic actions” (Improvisationsgesellschaft, 12). Less radical than Kleist, though, Clausewitz relies on notions of genius (see chapter 3 of the first book On War, entitled “The Bellicose Genius”) to rescue teleology and agency for the strategic use of improvisation in war. 13 I am following Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political, which seems especially apt for Kleist’s conceptualization of the agonal structure of human interaction, namely as a mode of observation that hinges on the friend–enemy distinction and the constant threat of war (see The Concept of the Political).

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more generally with contingency has received much attention over the years,14 his engagement with improvisation is generally mentioned only in passing.15 In part, this is due to Kleist’s reluctance of using the term improvisation itself and that he does not draw on the Commedia dell’arte’s arsenal of characters,16 masks, and plot-structures that are popular with his Romantic contemporaries. But the main cause for its neglect by the secondary literature is precisely the reason why Kleist is central for this study: Kleist treats improvisation as a conceptual matter that is of interest, not only in its traditional use on stage, but as a general political and everyday practice. In particular, Kleist links improvisation to the assertion of agency and autonomy (as demonstrated by Unzelmann) and explores its use with regard to legal, political, and pedagogical questions. This broader conceptual applicability of improvisation surfaces most forcefully in the 1805/6 essay “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking” (“Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden”) where Kleist explains en passant the beginnings of Europe’s modern political and social order as resulting from an improvised speech. Kleist’s text claims that Mirabeau, in his declaration from June 23, 1789, which led to the fall of the French monarchy, did not know yet what he would say when he first opened his mouth. (“I am certain that beginning thus humanely he had not yet thought of the bayonets with which he would finish.”) While at first, “he is not yet exactly sure what he intends,” in the process of fabricating his speech, “suddenly a course of colossal ideas is opened up to him,” ideas that launch him “there and then to the pitch of boldness,” asking for the dissolution of the Diet. Kleist concludes the description of the speech with the speculation that “it was perhaps 14 Two exemplary essays on Kleist’s use of chance, accidents, coincidences (Zufall), and contingency, namely David Wellbery’s essay “Contingency,” that focuses particularly on Kleist’s essay “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts,” and Werner Hamacher’s model analysis of the novella “The Chilean Earthquake,” both note how contingency in Kleist enters the level of representation and serves as a de-structuring principle that introduces “chance into the production of speech itself” (Wellbery, “Contingency,” 245). 15 One exception is Gabriele Brandstetter’s careful analysis of Kleist’s Amphitryon. Brandstetter notes how Sosias’s rehearsal of the message he is about to deliver to Alkmene emulates all the traits of the Romantic staging of the improvisational theater: it presents a play within the play, it is parabasic, breaks with the theater illusion, and it reflects the central question of Kleist’s remake of the comedy: the theater’s ability ‘to play with a person’s identity that simultaneously is a play about the possibility of the representation of identity’ (“Duell im Spiegel,” 120). Kleist receives no mention in Angela Esterhammer’s otherwise thorough study Romanticism and Improvisation. 16 With the exception, perhaps, of judge Adam in “The Broken Jug,” who resurrects the “Hanswurst” figure. By connecting Adam to Oedipus, however, Kleist gives the traditional jester and klutz a tragic spin (see Wellbery, “Krug,” 23).

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the twitching of an upper lip or an equivocal tugging at the cuffs that brought about the overthrow of the order of things in France” (Selected Writings, 406–7). Kleist’s text describes the emergence of something new, authentic, and of historic significance from a contingent beginning. After a period of disorientation, the speech takes an unplanned and unexpected direction, developing (seemingly unannounced to the author) its own dynamic, increasingly lending substance and necessity to itself, until the speech finally forms an original and now necessary — “That was what he needed!” (406) — proposition. Kleist crafts Mirabeau’s speech as an improvisational performance. The simultaneous presentation and composition of the speech derives its inventive force from the fact that it is unplanned, from the temporal constraints it confronts, and from the existing law that it challenges. This applies to all of the six improvised speeches that the text describes. They are all framed as performances, performances that take place in communicational settings that are fundamentally asymmetrical. Thus the letter itself begins with the author recalling a complex dispute on his desk that he hoped to solve by addressing his sister who he says, however, had no legal expertise at all, nor any other knowledge of the matters at hand; in the second example, Molière is said to have relied on the judgment of his maid for his own writing; Mirabeau’s speech is followed by a retelling of Lafontaine’s fable “Les animaux malades de la peste” which leads to the example of an enthusiastic speaker failing to express his (premeditated) thoughts comprehensibly in society, and finally to the public exam that concludes the essay invoking a scene of potential embarrassment for student and tester. In each episode, the asymmetry of the communicational set-up is striking. Unlike Adam Müller’s figurations of improvisation in the reflexive terms of Romantic irony, where improvisation is idealized as taking place between equal partners — each speaker outdoes the other, only to be outdone again herself — the addressees in Kleist’s text remain all but mute. In each case, the sheer physical presence and the gaze of the interlocutor(s) are what matter, not the particular contributions they would make.17 The asymmetry of the communicational frame emphasizes the performance aspect of the described improvised speeches. As in the improvisational theater, the speaker only takes cues from the interlocutors (the sister, Molière’s maid, the representative of the king, the animals, the social gathering, and a public observing an exam). The interlocutors take the place of an audience or of spectators. The primary effect of their presence is that 17 Jens Kapitzky notes how in all episodes of the essay and despite their asymmetries, we are still dealing with a communicational setting, especially if we do not reduce communication to the transmission of informational content, but understand it as a reciprocal control procedure (“Erfolglose Meditation,” 252).

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they “force” the speakers to perform and that they make the speakers self-aware. In each of Kleist’s scenes, the improvising speaker perceives himself as being put on the spot, as having to “deliver” here and now. The performance set-up thus creates a sense of urgency, increasing the speaker’s attentiveness to the contingencies of the moment (so that the presumably unconscious play with cufflinks can come to irritate Mirabeau’s speech). The temporal constraints also put the speakers at an ironic (in the Romantic sense) distance to their own speeches. The speakers find themselves simultaneously inside and outside of their own speeches. Observing their own performance, they react to their speech as it unfolds. In particular, Mirabeau’s speech, with its delay tactics, its stuttering, searching, and erring describes the improvised speech as entering a process of self-organization. Time and distance are needed to test and develop possibilities for the speech’s continuation until a coherent thought emerges. Kleist uses the rhetorical term “Periode” to describe the process that leads the improvised speech to move from a “confused idea” (verworrene Vorstellung) to “complete clarity” (zur völligen Deutlichkeit).18 The term implies that from the contingent beginnings and the subsequent meanderings, something must emerge that communicates a sense of completion. It puts the emphasis on finding or, more precisely, on positing an end that retroactively gives the whole — including the Mist, the stuttering, distractions, inability to speak that form the beginning of the period — its meaning. With its emphasis on innovation and on completion (Periode), Kleist’s account of the composition of an improvised speech is in line with at least two of the main principles of aesthetic autonomy. His description of the production process appears to be surprisingly close to what with Luhmann we tried to describe as the self-programming of modern art. As we discussed in more depth in Chapter 2, with “self-programming” Luhmann wants to replace metaphysical notions of geniality and inspiration with a term that enables us to give an empirical account of the production process of autonomous art. A work of art is autonomous in as much as it does not appear to follow an external, predefined plan or rule, but instead comes to posit its “law” in the course of its construction. I want to suggest that we read Kleist’s apparent preference for improvisation over premeditation in this context. As indicated, Unzelmann’s improvisational interlude uses improvisation to assert the stage’s autonomy. Similar concerns for autonomy drive the arguments of such famous texts as “Letter of a Painter to his Son,” “Letter of a Young Poet 18 See Selected Writings, 406 and Werke, 2: 320. As Nancy Nobile notes, drawing on Luhmann’s description of the educational setting, the “Periode” is an arbitrary selection of beginning and end that is a necessary structural component of the educational process.

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to a Young Painter,” and “The Puppet Theater;” texts that juxtapose and explore the inherent tension between imitation and inventiveness. What is particularly interesting about Mirabeau’s speech for our study is that it pinpoints the historical moment when comparable claims for newness and autonomy are instituted for the political system. The French Revolution rejects a political order whose laws are seen as grounded externally (in the divine order of things), where the king’s authority is based on the assumption and acceptance that he is the representative of God. Addressing the “Master of Ceremonies” who himself appears as the representative of an absent king, Mirabeau challenges this representational model both historically and as a model itself. Through the process of improvisation, Mirabeau arrives at the modern alternative to the existing model, a political order that insists on positing its laws for itself: “‘We are the representatives of the nation . . . The nation does not take orders, it gives them’” (Selected Writings, 406) (“‘Wir sind die Repräsentanten der Nation . . . Die Nation gibt Befehle und empfängt keine’”) (Werke, 2: 321). The representatives of the nation are also part of the nation. It is through their representatives that the nation gives itself its laws. Like Unzelmann, Kleist also fashions Mirabeau as a genius in Kant’s sense: he does not follow the rule, but instead installs a new one, serving as a conduit for the nation (which takes the role of nature in Kant’s concept of the artist-genius) to give itself its own rules. If we draw on Luhmann’s structural theory of modernity, which links the sweeping semantic and institutional changes we can witness in the eighteenth century to changes in social structure, that is, to the transition from a stratified to a functionally differentiated society, the parallels between the aesthetic and the political realm we note are neither coincidental, nor do they represent an illegitimate projection of aesthetic ideas onto the political sphere. Rather, they can be seen as indicative of Kleist exploring the paradoxes that emerge with the functional differentiation of society. Kleist recognizes and engages the conceptual problems that arise when in the political arena — as in art — inventiveness and autonomy become operative terms. Mirabeau’s “thunderbolt,” declaring the assembly to be representing the nation and to take its orders from the nation (not the king), cannot derive from a preset law, follow a predetermined rule, or find institutional legitimacy outside of its own assertion of such legitimacy. Accordingly, the speech is forced to give itself its own law, to develop a program that can motivate and legitimize subsequent decisions. In Kleist’s text, the inventive force derives from the adoption of the existing law, an adoption that does not identify with or internalize the law (in a Kantian sense), but rather mis-appropriates it by reentering the hierarchy it maintains on one of its sides, declaring those that are subject to the rule (of the king) to be also authoring the rule. The suspension of the old law and the simultaneous institution of a new one cannot avoid

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facing a moment of illegality or extra-legality, where the new law has not yet been implemented and hence cannot vouch for the legitimacy of its own instantiation. The paradox can also be put in temporal terms: the foundation of a new law has to anticipate itself and project its institutionalization into the future to gain acceptance. However, as the act itself demonstrates the openness of the future, it cannot guarantee its own institutionalization. The instantiation of the new law remains provisional until at some point in the future it retroactively finds its legitimization (or not). Recent Kleist scholarship has explored in more depth the legal and political paradoxes that emerge in a time when the political order of the West is subject to major transitions. David Roberts, in his analysis of the novella “The Chilean Earthquake,” draws on Luhmann and Marc Richir and reads Kleist (with Kant) as responding to a fundamental change in political representation, when the old, theological idea of political representation is replaced by the dictate of a modern form of politics that gives itself its laws (“Kleists Kritik der Urteilskraft,” 49). Christiane Frey and Andreas Gailus build on Georgio Agamben’s exploration of the legal paradox presented by the declarations of a “state of exception” (that has to suspend the very law on which it is based) in their reading of Kleist’s novella “Michael Kohlhaas.”19 Interesting for my particular concern with improvisation is how Kleist’s writing suggests improvisation to be the activity that enables the transition from the old to the new system. Mirabeau’s improvised speech allows him to distance himself from the previous “order of things” by citing it. Like Unzelmann, by citing the law he moves himself from the position of the receiver to the position of author of the law. By virtue of locating himself thus both at the authoring and the receiving end of the law, Mirabeau indeed projects a new order, a new rule, and most importantly, a new model of political representation to follow. In this regard, improvised doings and their inventive force are not only closely tied to temporal deferral and difference in Kleist, but also to (citational) repetition. Inventiveness results from the citation as well as the de- and re-contextualization of the law. De- and recontextualization, one might add, are processes that are inherent to art and literature. Art and literature de- and recontextualize distinctions, objects (e.g. Campbell soup cans), observations, and communications they find in their environment (society at large). As they reappropriate and repurpose the observations they find on the outside 19 See Christiane Frey, “Excess of Law,” 10ff and Andreas Gailus, Passion of the Sign, 116ff. I am using the politically less charged terms agency and autonomy to address issues in Kleist’s writings that revolve around paradoxes similar to those Georgio Agamben raises with regard to sovereignty and the social inclusion of the individual by virtue of its exclusion (see Homo Sacer, parts 1 and 2).

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on their inside, they make them “interesting,” inviting second-order observations of the observational patterns of society. Within his literary writings, Kleist explores the applicability of this process to the political sphere. His representation of Mirabeau’s speech suggests that in dovetailing repetition and alteration, improvisation can mediate between invention and institutionalization, between the moment of change on the one hand and its instantiation as a general rule on the other. As with Unzelmann, but unlike Derrida, for whom inventiveness and by extension improvisation can only appear in the metaphysical guise of an Otherness that is “not inventable,”20 Kleist does not cast the presence of rules and regulations as antithetical to inventiveness, but sees them as a potential motor for inventive doings. When Kleist homes in on the moment of decision that changes the “order of things” in France, Europe, and the Western world, he pinpoints improvisation as the act that opens up and simultaneously bridges the lacuna that separates the old from the implementation of the new. Despite the far-reaching implications of Mirabeau’s speech, we should note that Kleist does not romanticize the subversive power of improvisation as a tool for social resistance in the sense employed by Michel de Certeau, for example.21 As an inventive doing, improvisation might be just as effective in helping to maintain an existing order than in overturning it. This, at least, seems to be the implication of the fable that immediately follows the example of Mirabeau’s speech. In his rewriting of Lafontaine’s “Les animaux malades de la peste,” Kleist presents an alternative commentary on the French Revolution. In Kleist’s version of the fable, the fox’s improvised speech identifies the ass (Esel) as the most “bloodthirsty” of all animals (presumably for eating all the herbs). If read as a reference to the very king that was overthrown by Mirabeau’s improvised speech — the German word Esel also means blockhead — the fable notes the failure of the Revolution to get rid of the causes of the disease (the brutal rule of the lions). In this account, the Revolution merely sacrificed the ass/king to maintain the political status quo when circumstances inherently challenged the legitimacy of the existing order

20 See Derrida, “Psyche,” 61 and the more detailed discussion of Derrida’s stance in Chapter 1 of this book. 21 The power of citation, though, is also central to de Certeau’s concept of consumption. De Certeau mentions, for example, the natives of South America subverting the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them “not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept” (Everyday Life, xiii).

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of things.22 By juxtaposing Mirabeau with Lafontaine’s fable, Kleist underlines that what is created or “bridged” improvisationally retains the status of the provisional. After a brief period of unrest, the rule of the lions returns. While more or less stable orders may result or follow improvised doings — as is the case with the French Revolution — in the tumultuous worlds that Kleist’s writings explore, their stability is in no way guaranteed. Much akin to a wrestling match, the moments of “rest” in Kleist’s world are merely the result of a temporary equilibrium of forces which continually strive to unsettle each other.23 This does not undermine the apparent preference for improvisation over premeditation in Kleist. Rather, it indicates that to the extent that the stability of an order remains provisional, improvisation and the readiness for improvisation are needed constantly in Kleist’s world. As indicated earlier, I suggest we read the emphasis Kleist puts on improvisation — as much as the modern and post-modern appeal of Kleist’s work in general — as a reflection of conditions created by modern society. The inherent instability of the “new order of things” in Kleist has often been noted and explained socio-historically, as a reflection of the particular Prussian situation in the first decade of the nineteenth century, or with regard to the provisional nature and unreliability of cognitive and signification processes that underlie Kleist’s epistemological skepticism. The exploration of semantic and referential ambivalences, his logogryphic experiments, his play with narrative structures, genre expectations, and character development, as much as his so-called “Kant crisis,”24

22 Jochen Theisen points out how Kleist’s rewriting of Lafontaine’s fable suggests that the fox’s improvised speech is able to maintain and cement the existing order of things (“Wurf,” 731). 23 Kleist captures the idea of (temporary) stability and rest resulting from oppositional forces cancelling each other out most famously in the image of the arc that holds up because each of its stones wants to fall down simultaneously (see Werke, 2: 593 and 598). The image is also employed prominently in the 1807 novella The Chilean Earthquake). 24 See Kleist’s March 22, 1801 letter to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge, where he laments that if “people all had green lenses instead of eyes they would be bound to think that the things they see through them are green — and they would never be able to decide whether the eye shows them things as they are or whether it isn’t adding something to them belonging not to them but the eye” (Selected Writings, 421).

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have made Kleist a favorite of post-structuralist thought.25 Paul DeMan’s famous analysis of the essay “The Puppet Theater,” Helga Gallas’s groundbreaking Lacanian interpretation of the novella “Michael Kohlhaas,” the publications by Werner Hamacher, Carol Jacobs, Helmut J. Schneider, Erika Swales, or Bianca Theisen, to mention only a few, have explored in depth the deconstructive potential of Kleist’s writing. Drawing on this body of work, we can derive the need for improvised doings in Kleist from his general recognition of what above we called the iterative structure of signs and language. As the anecdotes of Unzelmann and Mirabeau indicate, Kleist’s exploitation of iterability is not merely about deconstructing representational paradigms, but also, and perhaps more importantly, about the exploration and invocation of autonomy and agency in a world of extreme constraint. This is where systems theory can provide a conceptual frame that allows us to link the much discussed semiotic and epistemological reflections of Kleist’s writing to the larger, socio-historical changes that mark the advent of modernity. In particular, I want to suggest that we link the recognition of the iterative structure of signs and language to the changes in dominant communication media and in the basic structure of society. Put simply, functional differentiation makes apparent (to a non-idealizing observer such as Kleist) the fragmentation and multiplication of meanings, values, and functions that signs, utterances, and actions (and even an individual’s identity) can acquire in different social circumstances. No longer held together by a binding, ontologically grounded cosmology that could serve to coordinate the “order of things” across various social settings and personal interactions, Kleist recognizes how the value of utterances is not secured referentially or grounded in the intentions of a speaker, but is dependent on the context of its communicational (re-)actualization. In Kleist’s works, it is perhaps the novella “Michael Kohlhaas” which goes furthest in dramatizing the social effects of utterances, acts, and even animals (horses again) acquiring a wide range of different 25 Considering that Kleist exhibits what today we might call post-modern features in the early nineteenth century, I suggest we follow Lyotard’s and Luhmann’s suggestion and read the “post-modern” aspects of Kleist’s writing, and in particular his acceptance of what we might describe as “the contingency of all criteria and of all possible observer positions” (Luhmann, Mass Media, 119), not as a repudiation of modernity, but rather as the recognition of its implications and underlying paradoxes. In this regard, Lyotard’s and Luhmann’s understanding of the “postmodern condition” are much closer to each other than Lyotard’s critique of systems theory — at least as articulated in The Postmodern Condition (see especially 11–13 and 63–4) — might make it seem. Lyotard’s critique of systems theory is based on an insufficiently refined conception of “system” that does not take into account the operational constructivism and openness-from-closure principles that are central to Luhmann’s use of the term.

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meanings for different social subsystems. The dynamics and interferences between personal, legal, economic, and political systems come to demonstrate how agency and power are constituted temporarily only. This leads to the perception of fragmentation, a fragmentation enacted in the novella by the various degrees of power Kohlhaas acquires and loses again, and in the end by his decapitation. How much the assertion of agency depends on the dynamics of particular, uncontrollable, and unpredictable social interactions is most apparent with regard to the constantly changing characters that acquire power over Kohlhaas and his affairs in the course of the narrative. Thus, power slides from the minor authority of a border guard through the various ranks of the legal and political systems all the way to Martin Luther and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, only to circle back to Kohlhaas again, who in the end is empowered by a little note from a soothsayer, a note that promises no less than the arrest of these uncertainties by virtue of foretelling the future of the throne of Saxony. Kohlhaas, however, does not use the note to rescue himself from execution, rather, the novella ends with a last, unforeseen twist. In an improvised, public performance, Kohlhaas, who was told only moments before that the prince-elect wants to rob him of his note once he is dead, decides to devour the note right in front of the one who so much desires to know its content. The improvisational act enables Kohlhaas to make productive the (extreme) social constraints he is under, turning the very moment of absolute constraint — facing execution — into an assertion of agency and autonomy. What makes Kohlhaas’s act at the end of the novella even more interesting for our investigation is that Kleist does not only present improvisation as a response to the instabilities he perceives as inherent to modern society; this particular improvised act also inaugurates a modern temporal order. By devouring the note that supposedly foretells the future of Saxony, Kohlhaas demonstratively marks the future as improvisio, as unforeseeable. The political impact of Kohlhaas’s act can hardly be overestimated. By making visible the invisibility and unpredictability of the future, Kohlhaas robs the pre-modern social order of its perceived stability. And in as much as the pre-modern order’s stability is founded on the eternal order of the divine, Kohlhaas’s improvised act also robs the stratified order of its legitimacy.

4.3 The Incalculability of Calculation In all of Kleist’s narratives, we find exposed the provisional nature of cognitive and semiotic processes that render the world unreliable, the future unpredictable, and, as a result, demand improvisation. Characters and often the reader, too, are led to question what they see, hear, and read and sometimes even to doubt their own memories and sincerest feelings. The joint necessity and impossibility of seeing ahead is dramatized

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nowhere more starkly than in the novella “Betrothal in Santa Domingo” from 1811. Kleist’s novella revisits the slave revolt on the island of Haiti and relates it to the French Revolution, namely to the “reckless measures of the National Convention” (Selected Writings, 324) in 1794, when the assembly had granted the black population living on the island freedom and emancipation, which led to the overthrow of the colonial power by the population it had enslaved (a first in history). Situated in the chaos of an ongoing revolution, the novella creates a world that appears to be resolutely defined by the politics of racial warfare. For the novella’s protagonist, Gustav Strömli, things could not be any clearer. He is traversing the island with his family in an attempt to reach Port au Prince, the last holdout where the French army is evacuating the remaining European occupants of the island. For him and his family, the color black means certain death, and only the color white holds the hope for rescue.26 And yet, this determinism is undermined the moment Gustav, “in all the darkness of a night of wind and rain” (325), knocks on the back door of a plantation whose new owner, Congo Hoango, is a freed slave who killed the former owner the moment the uprising began. He is absent and his housekeeper, Babekan, answers the door instead. Gustav, who seeks certainty about his destiny, asking Babekan “are you a negress?” (325) is denied not only an answer to his question, but also the perceptual evidence that would allow him to decide for himself: the two women who invite him inside turn out to be neither black nor white, but are described as being “yellow” — Babekan is said to be a mulatto, her daughter Toni a mestizo. While the reader at first appears to know more than Gustav — we read that Hoango has instructed Babekan and Toni to invite and delay white travelers who might seek refuge in the plantation so he can kill them upon his return — the novella soon takes enough turns that the outcome of the story becomes unpredictable for the reader, too. Subsequently, the reader finds herself in the position of Gustav: seeking clues that would allow us to decide whether Gustav has walked into a trap or if indeed he can hope to find help for himself and his family in the plantation. For Gustav, safety hinges on the ability to mistrust the signs he sees and the utterances he hears. Gustav’s life is at no point in more danger than when he finds his “will to know” (S. Weigel, “Körper,” 206) satisfied and he ceases to be skeptical about the meaning of what is going on around him. The story juxtaposes two such moments of certainty (from Gustav’s perspective). The first results from what Gustav interprets as their betrothal, when Toni is overcome by a “human feeling” (Selected Writings, 335) and the two embrace. While Gustav appears to read the embrace as certain proof 26 With Gustav, Kleist very much stages Agamben’s thesis that “not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element” (Homo Sacer, 88).

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“that he was saved,” the text indirectly cautions the reader by distancing itself from Gustav, calling him “stranger,” pointing out that “he could not tell where the thing he had done would lead” (ibid.). Toni, of course, knows better. She understands that the danger of his situation has not diminished, and that his sense of security only threatens to increase Babekan’s suspicion. The second moment of certainty reverses Gustav’s initial assessment and leads to the tragic end of the story. Toni, upon the surprising return of Congo Hoango, ties Gustav to his bed to prevent him from engaging in what she knows would be a hopeless fight leading to his certain death. Toni’s plan indeed works, but Gustav, unable to recognize that her “betrayal” rescued him, shoots her and, once he discovers his mistake, also shoots himself. The climactic scene of Toni’s rescue-by-betrayal attempt warrants further attention for our investigation. For it is during the night of Hoango’s unexpected return to the plantation that Kleist dramatizes both the need for improvisational skills as well as the inherent limits of planning in contentious social settings. The dramatic turning point of the story is preceded by a moment of calm and reflection. Toni, who sneaked into Gustav’s bedroom with the intention of informing him (finally) about the extent of the danger he faces in her home, delays her confession because she finds him sleeping and herself unable “to wrench him out of the lovely heaven of his imagination down into the depths of a mean and wretched reality” (Selected Writings, 341) (“sie konnte sich nicht entschließen, ihn aus dem Himmel lieblicher Einbildung in die Tiefe einer gemeinen und elenden Wirklichkeit herabzureißen”) (Werke, 2: 184). As she kneels before him waiting, Hoango and his men enter the courtyard of the plantation, forcing her to act quickly: For a moment she thought of waking the stranger; but in the first place, since the yard was occupied, he had no chance of flight; and in the second she foresaw that he would reach for his weapons and, the blacks so outnumbering him, to be done to death would be his certain fate. Then of all things she was bound to consider the most terrible was this: the unhappy man, if he found her by his bedside at that juncture, would believe she had betrayed him and instead of listening to her advice would in the madness of so desperate a delusion dash without the least pause for thought into the very arms of Black Hoango. In this unspeakable dread she caught sight of a length of rope which, heaven knows by what chance, was hanging from a beam in the wall. God Himself, she thought, tearing it down, had placed it there to be the salvation of herself and her friend. She entwined the young man with it at hands and feet with many loops and knots; and when, though he woke and struggled, she had drawn the ends tight and fastened them around the bedstead then, in her happiness at having got command

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of the situation, she pressed a kiss upon his lips and hurried to confront the negro Hoango already rattling on the stairs. (Selected Writings, 343)27 The scene dovetails improvisation with anticipation in a peculiar manner. While Toni tries to anticipate what will happen next, the actions she envisions are less oriented toward creating a plan for the future than towards preventing a predictable outcome from happening. That is, while her improvised act allows her to master the moment, her calculations make the otherwise predictable future incalculable. The predictable outcome, the death of Gustav, turns into general unpredictability, an unpredictability that alone carries the hope (but not certainty) that she can rescue Gustav. In Chapter 2, I argued that Goethe’s Faust recognizes as part of the modern predicament that planning fails to negate unpredictability and can even contribute to it. In Kleist’s rescue-by-betrayal scene this predicament comes to a head. Kleist does not only tear down God — the ambivalence of the pronoun “indem sie ihn [the rope? God?] herabriss” is lost in translation — and the cosmological stability God underwrites, but also fundamentally perverts the temporal imagination of the Enlightenment. Whereas the Enlightenment counters the unpredictability of the future with teleological models that rely on reasoning, planning, careful preparation, and education, Toni’s actions reveal the underlying paradox behind such attempts. By reacting to what she anticipates will happen, Toni makes the future unpredictable again. The problem is not merely that one might not be able to anticipate or calculate fully what will happen because the particular situation is too complex or because there is not enough information available to make a prediction; rather, the problem is that under these circumstances the prediction itself

27 “Sie dachte einen Augenblick daran, den Fremden zu wecken; doch teils war, wegen der Besetzung des Hofraums, keine Flucht für ihn möglich, teils auch sah sie voraus, daß er zu den Waffen greifen, und somit bei der Überlegenheit der Neger, Zubodenstreckung unmittelbar sein Los sein würde. Ja, die entsetzlichste Rücksicht, die sie zu nehmen genötigt war, war diese, daß der Unglückliche sie selbst, wenn er sie in dieser Stunde bei seinem Bette fände, für eine Verräterin halten, und, statt auf ihren Rat zu hören, in der Raserei eines so heillosen Wahns dem Neger Hoango völlig sinnlos in die Arme laufen würde. In dieser unaussprechlichen Angst fiel ihr ein Strick in die Augen, welcher, der Himmel weiß durch welchen Zufall, an dem Riegel der Wand hing. Gott selbst, meinte sie, indem sie ihn herabriß, hätte ihn zu ihrer und des Freundes Rettung dahin geführt. Sie umschlang den Jüngling, vielfache Knoten schürzend, an Händen und Füßen damit; und nachdem sie, ohne darauf zu achten, daß er sich rührte und sträubte, die Enden angezogen und an das Gestell des Bettes festgebunden hatte: drückte sie, froh des Augenblicks mächtig geworden zu sein, einen Kuß auf seine Lippen, und eilte dem Neger Hoango, der schon auf der Treppe klirrte, entgegen” (Werke, 2: 185).

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changes the present which now is confronted with a new (vision of the) future to which the present again should be adapted, and so on. Toni encounters what Elena Esposito calls the paradox that underlies the “fiction of a probable future:”28 how the very act of pro-visio (“she foresaw”) contributes to the future’s unpredictability by creating a feedback loop of sorts. By letting the (fiction of a) future determine present actions, the anticipated future will change. The new (fiction of the) future — the outcome of the first calculation — has to be reentered into the calculation, creating a second outcome, that in turn will have to be reentered into the calculation, and so on. Thus, under the conditions of sufficient complexity and insufficient information — which is to say under conditions inherent to modern society — any attempt to let a vision of the future affect present actions will create a feedback loop in which foresight and planning only help to ensure the unpredictability of the future. Kleist not only recognizes this paradox, but with Toni’s actions envisions improvisation as a means of taking advantage of the indeterminacy of the future. Kleist clearly departs from a pre-modern cosmology where invention would remain linked to the “discovery” of a rationalistic, predetermined order. Toni’s act (tying Gustav to his bed) indeed challenges what Derrida identified as modernity’s “programmatics of invention,” the attempt from Leibniz to the governmental policies on modern science and culture and war to suppress the “aleatory margin” by integrating it into “programmatic calculations.”29 Kleist shows how such calculations are doomed to fail, not because they fail to acknowledge the advent of a truly unpredictable Otherness, but because calculations and rationalizations are shown to produce incalculability. This is reflected already on the plot level. Toni uses her “calculations” not so much to prepare for a particular outcome, but rather to gain time and avoid what otherwise appears to be unavoidable. That is, Toni’s actions are designed to make the future incalculable again, giving her time and room to improvise in the hope of attaining Gustav’s and her own rescue. 28 The starting point of Esposito’s book is precisely the observation that the calculus of probability and the genre of the novel emerge almost exactly at the same time, namely in the second half of the seventeenth century. Also drawing on Luhmann’s theory of modernity, Esposito reads both developments as responding to the modernization of society and as indicative of a fundamentally new understanding of reality emerging where “fiction becomes a mirror in which society reflects its own contingency, the normality of a world that no longer can be unambiguously devised and determined” (Fiktion, 18). For a more extensive study of the “probability revolution” from Pascal to Kleist, and its relation to the emergence of the genre of the novel, as well as its contribution to our modern understanding of society and nature, see Rüdiger Campe’s comprehensive study, Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit. 29 See Derrida, “Psyche,” 54–5 and the more detailed discussion of Derrida’s narrative of modernity in Chapter 1.

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Kleist’s storytelling thrives on his ability to make extreme, even absurd and impossible events (only think of the Marquise von O’s unknown pregnancy) appear plausible — appear as the result, rather than the absence of calculation. In his narrative construction of incalculable events and surprising turns, Kleist builds on an inherent feature of his preferred genre, the novella. Since the Renaissance era, the genre of the novella played with the expectations of the reader. The novella’s traditional inclusion of a turning point made unpredictability the (predictable) sign of this genre. Bianca Theisen has shown that since Boccaccio, the novella has confronted the closed cosmology of the Middle Ages “with an increasingly complex world of possibilities” (“Strange News,” 83). Kleist’s innovation is that he extends the novella’s narrative structure by serializing its turning points. In “The Betrothal,” we have three major turning points: Gustav’s presumed rescue through Toni’s embrace, the second rescue — Toni’s rescue-by-betrayal — and finally the tragic end, when Gustav, unable to read her betrayal as rescue, shoots Toni and then himself. Kleist’s serialization of the turning point is no longer merely about the creation of a world of complex possibilities, but of a world that is inherently unstable and unpredictable, where the meaning of signs, utterances, actions, and intentions, remain ever open for further revision. In “The Duel,” Kleist’s last novella, Kleist links this finding more immediately to modern notions of history replacing the (presumably) stable order of a pre-modern cosmology. Here, the surprising outcome of the duel, where the apparently innocent person appears to lose, is miraculously reversed again at the end of the story. This leads the emperor to amend the statutes regulating trial by ordeals, adding to the assertion of immediate evidence the disclaimer “‘if it is God’s will’” (Selected Writings, 400). Kleist’s novella reveals how historization makes God’s will unreadable, not because what has happened before, but because what will happen in the future might change (the meaning of) the present.30 Put differently, by serializing its turning point, Kleist’s 30 The aforementioned end to Michael Kohlhaas also replaces the pre-modern, predetermined order with the open-endedness of historization when in the concluding remarks the narrator announces that “what followed can be read about in history” (Selected Writings, 280). Historically, it is only following Leibniz that a “philosophy of history” comes to replace the idea of a divine (i.e. predetermined and perfect) cosmological order. Odo Marquard argues that the “optimism crisis” that follows Leibniz (historically motivated also by the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon) produced a modern philosophy of history, a “sort of post-theistic Theodizee with a futurized over-optimism” (“Krise des Optimismus,” 93). Kleist, I would argue, continues the tradition of skeptical thought that in Marquard’s assessment led to the birth of the philosophy of history, but draws out how historical thought is at the bottom of modernity’s profound sense of contingency and the reason for its skepticism (rather than its antithesis).

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novellas show in dramatic fashion how the present is contingent on a future it can neither foresee nor control. 31 At the same time, attempts “to protect oneself against contingency by reducing indeterminacy as much as possible and by seeking a sense of security from such indeterminacy reductions” (Esposito, Fiktion, 64)32 run up against a paradox: the very attempt to adjust to what appears to be predictable makes the predictable unpredictable again. As the absence of a predictable and controllable future is recognized to produce an inherently contingent present, the practice of improvisation acquires new significance. It offers an alternative mode for acting within a future that is recognized as indeterminable. Rather than following plans and preset rules or programs, improvisation draws on the unknown future as a resource for present decisions. At the very least, the practice of improvisation in Kleist’s writing is presented as advantageous, as it offers a greater preparedness and flexibility when the unpredictable (predictably) happens.

4.4 Kleist’s Pedagogical Program Kleist’s preference for improvisation over premeditation is also central to his critical commentary on the pedagogical practices and ideals of the Enlightenment. And it is in this context that Kleist articulates most clearly the anthropological grounds for this preference. The significance the Enlightenment attributes to education (from Rousseau to Kant, Pestalozzi and beyond) — and hence the central tenets of the emerging anthropological discourse that continue to define our understanding of our (modern) selves — is best understood in the context of the social changes alluded to above. Countering the political prerogatives of the aristocracy, but also reacting to the inherent needs of a functionally differentiated society, the Enlightenment no longer defines one’s identity by one’s past, the “inherent nature” representative of one’s lineage and social standing; instead, a concept of childhood is employed that perceives one’s identity as defined by one’s open and unknown future. I 31 In reference to Kleist’s anecdote of anecdotal writing entitled “Improbable Realities,” Rüdiger Campe makes the important observation that it is due to the repetitive structure inherent to the modern scientific experiment that the singular becomes recognizable as contingent, as something that may occur in this way, or another way, or not at all (Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit, 430). 32 In the twentieth century, Esposito recognizes a “postmodern alternative” emerging that does not attempt to secure itself against contingency and indeterminacy, but rather “works with it and tries to derive clues [Anhaltspunkte] from it. Although those are only provisional, they are no less precise. They can be observed, discussed, and they, too, represent real facts” (64). Kleist’s preference for improvisation over premeditation suggests as much: his texts intimate taking advantage of indeterminacy and recognize its factual status when it comes to the decision-making process and the affirmation of agency.

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have suggested elsewhere33 that especially in Kant it is apparent how the new pedagogical discourse copies a societal problem onto the distinction between childhood and adulthood. Social indeterminacy — the idea of an open future on which the Enlightenment’s belief in progress and perfectibility and hence its political prerogatives and its fundamental legitimacy rest — is projected onto the child. With the (at the time still rather new) notion of childhood being a distinct period in a person’s life, future indeterminancy is pulled into the present where, supposedly, it can be controlled through education. Subsequently, education becomes the primary means with which to plan, prepare for, and determine the future — not only of the individual, but of society as a whole. Kleist’s preference for improvisation over premeditation challenges central tenets of the Enlightenment’s educational program. Indeed, from the novella “The Foundling” to the provocative essay “The Very Last Word in Modern Educational Theory” (“Allerneuster Erziehungsplan”),34 Kleist questions the pedagogical procedures and ideals of his time as well as their underlying anthropological assumptions. In the essay “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts,” the particular political question discussed above is itself framed by a more general, pedagogical concern. The essay starts by asking about the possibility of instructing oneself merely by speaking; in the middle of the text stands the aforementioned fable with its educational lesson on the French Revolution; the essay ends by conjuring the scene of a public exam and a student failing to produce the answers to such seemingly simple (yet politically potent) questions as “what is the state?” or “what is property?” The student’s failure to answer these simple questions also entails a moment of protest. Unable to answer, the student does not subscribe to the social order in which he is about to be inducted. If the student is said to pass the exam despite stumbling over these questions (as an aggressive posture in front of a public might put the examiner in danger of revealing his own ineptness), Kleist exposes how a highly structured communicational setting such as the exam, where expectations are narrowly defined and studying (premeditation) might seem essential for success, does not escape the performative dynamics of improvisation. No amount of knowledge or preparation can substitute for the dynamics which emerge in the social sphere of communication. In the example, agency and even the identity of the participants (Will the student graduate? Will the “expert” expose his ineptness?) are not pregiven, nor do they derive from the acquisition of knowledge or a sense of maturity and responsibility (i.e. they do not 33 See my article “The Education of Humankind.” 34 Nancy Nobile underlines the appropriateness of Philip B. Miller’s nonliteral translation, as the text “offers a pedagogical critique which attempts to obviate the need for further critique” (School of Days, 73).

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derive from Bildung in the neo-humanistic sense), but rather emerge from the unpredictable dynamics of the particular (asymmetrical) social setting and thus are open to perpetual redefinition, renegotiation, and reconstruction. The grounding of education in the unpredictable dynamics of social interaction is also at the center of the provocative pedagogical program Kleist articulates in the essay “The Very Last Word in Modern Educational Theory” from 1810, an essay which mirrors “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking,” both in structure and content. The “Modern Educational Theory” comes in the form of an editorial submitted by C. J. Levanus (supposedly an assistant principal). The name invokes Jean Paul’s pedagogical text Levana, or the Doctrine of Education from 1806, implying that the essay will promote a neohumanistic concept of education as an alternative to the philanthropists Basedow and Campe that Levanus cites later in the text.35 In his editorial, Levanus suggests we apply the laws of physics to the moral world. In particular (and refining an example Kleist already employed with regard to Mirabeau’s speech in the “Gradual Production” essay), the text refers to the law of electricity, according to which in a neutral body all the latent electricity “rushes away to its furthest extremity,” readying itself to assume the “electrical excess with which the positively charged body is, so to speak, diseased,” and vice versa, when exposed to a negative charge, the neutral body collects its latent electricity, waiting “for the moment when it can supply the electrical deficiencies that discomfort the first” (Abyss, 223). Once both bodies are moved “within striking distance,” sparks are said to fly, upon which an equilibrium is established where “both bodies are completely similar electrically, and balance has been restored” (ibid.). Levanus subsequently runs through a number of examples that are supposed to demonstrate the validity of this “law of contradiction” in the social realm. He describes a person who swears that someone is slim simply because another observer asserted the opposite; he tells the story of a husband who, despite painful losses the previous night that make him want to stay at home that day, wants to play cards again once his wife suggests as an alternative spending the evening with her; and he references the story of the captain of a ship who rescinds his order to blow up the ship once he sees his order being executed; finally, Levanus turns to himself, suggesting that his generous sister turned stingy upon witnessing his looseness with money. After considering these examples from the social realm, designed to demonstrate the 35 Nancy Nobile expands on Kleist’s Levanius being modeled after Jean Paul’s Levana, noting how Jean Paul’s text already stresses the “precariousness and uncertainties of education [and] that the endeavor to discern and liberate a child’s ‘Eigentümlichkeit’ . . . is a process always subject to error” (School of Days, 61).

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“law of contradiction,” the text finally turns to the educational matter announced in its title. Invoking the philanthropists Johann Bernhard Basedow and Joachim Heinrich Campe as witnesses for the pedagogical efficacy of exposing students to bad mores, he holds that a pedagogy targeting “moral development” faces a fundamental problem: How carefully we must qualify the old saw about bad company corrupting good morals! For have not renowned educators like Basedow and Campe, neither of them otherwise venturesome in the plying or their trade, already suggested that the young be exposed to evil example in order to deter them from vice forever? And verily, comparing good society with bad, in respect to the possibility of moral development, one hardly knows which to prefer — for in the good we see a mere imitation of virtue; while in the bad, virtue remains something to be discovered through the mysterious powers of the human heart. (Abyss, 225)36 In all of its irony, the passage notes a fundamental paradox of moral education. The “good society” for which education should prepare young people cannot support the educational process it sees as the condition for its possibility. The problem lies not with society’s potential lack of integrity, but with the fact that society has to fail to the degree that it might indeed be exemplary. Focusing on the question of agency, Levanus can argue that (moral) exemplarity condemns students to imitation, prohibiting the development of the very virtues — freedom, inventiveness, responsibility — that are the telos of the neo-humanistic educational ideal and form the foundation of a “good society.” While for the philanthropists, the bad example only serves as a deterrent, the assistant principal understands the exposure to bad mores as an enabling device: it facilitates an educational process that, “through the mysterious powers of the human heart,” is “inventive,” fashioning agency by allowing students to fashion their mores (“durch eine eigentümliche Kraft des

36 “Wie vielen Einschränkungen ist der Satz unterworfen: daß schlechte Gesellschaften gute Sitten verderben; da doch schon Männer, wie Basedow und Campe, die doch sonst, in ihrem Erziehungshandwerk, wenig gegensätzisch verfuhren, angeraten haben, jungen Leuten zuweilen den Anblick böser Beispiele zu verschaffen, um sie von dem Laster abzuschrecken. Und wahrlich, wenn man die gute Gesellschaft, mit der schlechten, in Hinsicht auf das Vermögen, die Sitte zu entwickeln vergleicht, so weiß man nicht, für welche man sich entscheiden soll, da, in der guten, die Sitte nur nachgeahmt werden kann, in der schlechten hingegen, durch eine eigentümliche Kraft des Herzens erfunden werden muß” (Werke, 2: 332).

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Herzens erfunden”).37 Only after having been exposed to corruption can students take ownership of the development of their mores by becoming the source of their invention. The fashioning of agency is central to the neo-humanistic educational ideal and its underlying anthropology. Based on Kantian notions of Sittlichkeit (morality) and Mündigkeit (maturity), early nineteenthcentury ideals of Bildung and its man-making ambitions require that people are educated so they can act as agents of their own actions — agents, of course, who are not supposed to be widerspenstig, but who would “freely” and consciously subject themselves to the maxims that promise to support the greater good. Kleist’s editorial exposes and plays with the paradox at the base of the neo-humanistic educational ideal that aims at raising young people to be compatible with society and its mores. In a strict sense, the values of individualism, inventiveness, freedom, and autonomy cannot be taught, at least not in terms of exemplification and imitation, for exemplification and imitation contradict the very ideals they hope to promote. The Enlightenment is not unaware of this paradox. Kant’s lectures On Pedagogy, for example, address this paradox with regard to the notion of freedom. Kant understands that one of the “greatest problems in education is, how can subjection to lawful constraint be combined with the ability to make use of one’s freedom? For constraint is necessary. How shall I cultivate freedom under conditions of compulsion?” (Educational Theory, 131). Drawing on Rousseau, Kant invokes nature to unfold the paradox, defining human nature in terms of perfectible predispositions.38 The concept of perfectible predispositions enables Kant to project a prominent set of semantic poles onto each other: the distinctions between determinedness and indeterminedness, between constraint and freedom, and ultimately between nature and culture, allowing him to ground his educational telos within nature the very moment that the nature of man is no longer seen

37 Unfortunately, Miller translates “erfunden” with “discovered” rather than “invented,” erasing a historically important distinction (see Chapter 1 of this book). The translation of “eigentümlich” with “mysterious” also does not capture all the layers of the German term. Nobile, drawing on Gerhard Plumpe’s etymological research on the word “eigentümlich,” notes how the term comes to designate modern individuality and in Kleist’s period is closely associated with the discourse of creative geniality (School of Days, 69). Kleist’s juxtaposing of “imitation” and “invention” is also central to his “Letter from a Young Writer to a Young Painter,” which argues similarly that the (educational) practice of copying old masters is antithetical to “the mysteries of artistic creation [Erfindung] — that calling of the elect!” (Abyss, 238; Werke, 2: 336). 38 “There are germs in human nature, and it becomes our concern to develop the natural capacities proportionately, to unfold humanity from its seeds, and to see to it that man attains his destiny” (Educational Theory, 110–11).

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as pre-determined (by birth) but as free. By projecting the cultural ideals of the Enlightenment onto human nature, Kant is able to pay lip-service to the ideals of freedom and self-determination while simultaneously propagating a pedagogical program that is teleologically defined and rigidly disciplinary in its approach, dispensing of disciplinary measures and coercion only as much as it can presuppose that the child/student already knows how to act reasonably.39 While other pedagogical thinkers of the time (such as August Hermann Niemeyer or Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi) advocate less rigid educational programs than Kant and put more emphasis on self-determination and freedom, they still ground their educative ideals in similar assumptions about human nature. The problem with self-determination and freedom is, of course, not self-determination and freedom, but lies in the grounding of culturally specific ideals within universalized notions of human nature, and the subordination of such ideals under an educational program. Kleist sees through this conceptual structure. In Kleist’s writings, agency, inventiveness, freedom do not appear to be grounded in nature (at least not in terms of perfectible predispositions), and education is not presented as a process that would help nature in the development of these qualities. Instead, agency, inventiveness, and even freedom only emerge from combative and competitive forms of social interaction. It is through spontaneous interactions with others — in a process of constant improvisation — that the self can assert itself, however provisional such assertions of agency might be. The inability to take recourse to a reality external to the (moral) reality created by social interactions is what affects the position of the self, making it inherently unstable and a re-active rather than active agent. While idiosyncrasies and a person’s history (e.g. the husband’s gambling addiction, the loss of money the previous night, his relationship with his wife) might lend

39 For a more extensive discussion of Kant’s lectures On Pedagogy and the problematic grounding of the Enlightenment’s educational telos in human nature, see my article “The Education of Humankind.” See also Nancy Nobile on Kant’s reliance on discipline and coercion in moral education and Kleist’s personal suspicions about this procedure. Nobile provides further evidence on how Kleist’s reference to “what Kant calls the midwifery of thinking” (Selected Writings, 409) first has to instill mechanically and through the application of force the traits that the Socratic method then ought to deliver “naturally:” “Within Kant’s didactic methodology, all students, including those advanced enough to be taught through dialogue, were initially pupils indoctrinated through catechism. Knowledge can be likened to a baby the teacher helps deliver through the apparent reciprocity of Socratic dialogue only because this ‘baby’ has already been conceived through a method radically different from dialogue. In other words, the teacher is himself the father of the child which he later, as ‘midwife,’ helps to deliver” (School of Days, 109).

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the self a certain consistency, for the purposes of decision-making these are unreliable indicators. I take the reference to electricity at the outset of the “Modern Educational Theory” to imply as much: when exposed to an electric current, a body can acquire a positive or negative charge. The body’s polarity is not defined by any preexisting, natural quality, but depends on the interaction with another body and its charge. The various examples preceding the draft of the new educational program all aim at demonstrating how behavior and moral decisions are made in the spur of the moment, as reactions to the particular circumstances to which the decision-makers are exposed. It is important to keep in mind that all of Levanus’s examples are essentially bogus: not only do they fail to return the social world to the equilibrium of the physical world,40 they also insinuate alternative motivations for the actors’ behavior, motivations which contradict the initial claim that we are dealing merely with an automated re-action comparable to the laws of electricity. Kleist’s anthropology implies not indeterminacy, but overdeterminacy or inherent complexity as the reason for the unpredictability of a person’s behavior. In this regard, the examples fail as examples — but by failing may succeed in soliciting a reader response that is not imitative, that is not merely repeating the text’s claim, and thus actually enact the text’s central claim. This paradoxical logic — the exemplarity of failed exemplarity in promoting (re-)action — applies to the editorial as a whole. With its apparently outrageous claims, cloaked in irony, and its content refuted from the outset by the sarcastic comments of the editor, the educational program as a whole duplicates the argument of its parts: soliciting its negation, the text lures its reader to affirm its provocative thesis precisely by asking the reader to refute it.41 In this paradoxical way, the text, by actualizing the law of contradiction it proposes, indeed fulfills its educational program.42 The performative aspect of the text underlines its central argument: that the behavior of each of the agents in the examples, and the reader’s morality (Sittlichkeit), are not based on natural predispositions or on an inborn propensity for moral behavior; nor are they the product of irrational or malicious tendencies. Instead, they describe agency as resulting

40 See Moser, “Kontingenz,” 29 and already Nobile, School of Days, 66. 41 Blamberger describes the pragmatic paradox with which the text confronts its reader, namely that “the affirmation of the proposition would be its refutation and vice versa: contradicting the proposition means confirming the law it articulates” (“Agonalität,” 28). 42 I read the postscript of the essay, arguing that in the end the world (with regard to education) remains the same, as another anti-teleological conclusion, challenging the Enlightenment narrative of progression.

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from social interactions and thus as based on circumstances and on what today we might call the operational history of each participant.43 Put differently, Kleist questions Enlightenment anthropology not merely by confronting it with an image that champions “the inconsistencies and irresoluble contradictions of human nature” (Nobile, School of Days, 14), rather, Kleist fundamentally turns around Kant and his contemporaries’ reliance on grounding social ideals within human nature. Kleist grounds the “nature” of man in the contentious, unpredictable, and never fully controllable dynamics of social interaction. In this regard, my reading is in line with Günther Blamberger, who interprets the “dissociation of the subject” Kleist stages within a tradition of moral skepticism reaching from Niccollo Machiavelli and Baltasar Gracian to La Rochefoucauld and Montaigne, where self-representation is about prevailing in contentious social settings, not the representation of stability, psychological depth, and idealized character traits (“Agonalität,” 29).44 When Blamberger speculates that Kleist longs for a return to pre-modern “experiences of stability and unity” (39), he neglects, however, to address how the idea of self-preservation in Kleist’s writings is articulated from a very different perspective — and in response to very different social circumstances — than by the aforementioned skeptics. In Kleist’s view, the ability to dissimulate, role-play, and improvise is not merely used as a strategic ploy to enhance and/or cement one’s position of power; rather it is presented in a much more radical manner as a basic means for the affirmation of agency and even survival in a society that has become utterly unpredictable. For Kleist, inventiveness and agency do not precede, but rather emerge (or fail to emerge) when individuals are engaged socially and forced to improvise within what Judith Butler called a “scene of constraint” (Undoing Gender, 1). If Kleist adopts older forms of social behavior, including role-play and improvisation, he

43 In Chapter 1, we referred to the concept of the black box or non-trivial machine, a concept von Foerster discusses explicitly with regard to pedagogical practices that treat students as trivial machines, where the same input is expected to lead to always the same output (see “Perception of the Future”). With the concept of non-trivial machines, von Foerster suggests that educators should expect that the same input will lead to different output as the output depends on the constantly changing internal settings of the individual. The concept of a non-trivial machine includes the possibility of different input leading to the same result, as Kleist’s postscript to the “Modern Educational Theory” insinuates. 44 Tim Mehigan shows how the epistemological skepticism that pervades Kleist’s writing derives not only from his reception of Kant’s philosophy, but reaches back to Hume’s skepticism (in which Kant’s philosophy is anchored). See also Christian Moser’s “Angewandte Kontingenz” for Kleist’s debt to other eighteenth-century skeptics, especially Montaigne, as well as Bianca Theisen’s, “Der Bewunderer,” on the significance of Shakespeare’s skepticism for Kleist.

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does so within a new, and quite different, that is, modern, aesthetic and social context. In this chapter and throughout this book, there has been an emphasis on the link between the modern re-appropriation of improvised doings and comprehensive changes in social structure. Kleist’s figurations of improvised doings recognize the anthropological predicament of a society that describes itself in terms of an open future. The pedagogical discourse of Kleist’s time projected the indeterminacy of the future onto pre-adulthood and hoped to find in education the means to manage it. Unlike his contemporaries, Kleist suggests that improvisation is a means to engage indeterminacy and use the unknown future as a resource for inventiveness and the making of decisions. If there is an educational missive in Kleist’s writings, it would be that education has to acknowledge the unpredictability of the future and, “in a world as fallible and fragile as ours is” (Selected Writings, 311), focus on developing ad hoc decision-making strategies — that is, on education teaching students improvisation as art.

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Conclusion: Experiencing Improvisation as Art

This book set out to challenge the theoretical grounds and historical narratives that construct an essential opposition between improvisation on the one hand and more traditional forms of artistic production and presentation on the other. Historically, the codes and expectations for art that developed in the eighteenth century, while at first leading to the denunciation of improvisation as “low” or non-art, simultaneously paved the way for improvisation’s rediscovery and inventive reintegration into the modern art system. In the aesthetics of genius, early German Romanticism, and Heinrich von Kleist’s writings, we encountered three different responses to the conceptual challenges created by the aesthetics of autonomy, responses that affected the assessment and understanding of improvisation in this time period. In the broader sense, all three of these responses — the attempt to rescue agency and teleology through notions of genius or an active subconscious, the suggestion of collaborative doings as grounds for the emergence of art, and Kleist’s figurations of more contentious modes of social interaction creating the provisional space for autonomy, agency, and inventiveness — present models which continue to be used and against which we can assess how improvisation is understood today. Another important line of this book’s historical argument was to record how the aesthetics of autonomy, despite often-cited claims to the contrary, is not averse to emphasizing the performance aspects of art, aspects that generally are recognized as central to improvisation. The Romantics contested any stringent separation between “actual” and staged improvisation, demonstrating how notions of authenticity, immediacy, and spontaneity derive from particular staging processes. Challenging the opposition between text and performance and notions of performative immediacy was also a central tenet to the theoretical contentions this book discussed. Following basic assumptions of Derrida’s thought and expanding on them with concepts from neocybernetics and systems theory, this study has linked (rather than opposed) improvisation to the structural properties of text, to iterability, and even to the statutory. The goal has been to add theoretical depth as

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well as historical context to some of the prevailing assumptions about improvisation and its practice in and beyond art. The previous chapters have focused on the continuities and connections between the aesthetics of autonomy as it emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and contemporary assertions about the practice of improvisation as art. At the same time, the intent of this study has not been to deny the possibility of distinguishing improvisation from more traditional art forms or its practice and reception today from its use in the early nineteenth century. Clearly, improvisation has become more relevant, and even central, to art in the twentieth century. While I have argued that the increased interest in improvisation and the performative in general does not run counter to the parameters and expectations set by the aesthetics of autonomy, I have also shown that this does not mean that we should subsume improvisation fully under such parameters. It seems apparent that the inclusion and exploration of new media in art (including the importance of recordings for jazz, for example) has contributed greatly to the modern emphasis on the performative. The electronic media enable art not only to address different senses and to address the senses differently,1 they also allow it to arrest the “fleetingness” of improvisation, making it accessible for study (by critics as much as practitioners)2 and re-enjoyment, and thus they enable its broader reception, promotion, and economic success. But linking the contemporary success of improvisation to the possibilities of its electronic reproduction returns us to one of the central questions of this study, namely, how to distinguish between “authentic” improvisations that are performed in front of an audience and those that are staged, used as an inventive tool in the privacy of an artist’s studio, or merely accessed and enjoyed as a recording or live stream on the internet. My claim was not that there are no differences, but merely that one should not essentialize those differences around categories of authenticity, immediacy, and singularity. To that end, this study aligns with Derrida’s position when he writes that affirming “the general graphematic structure of every ‘communication,’” is not to “draw the conclusion that there is no relative specificity of effects of consciousness, or of effects of speech (as opposed

1

2

Roland Borgards finds that since the late nineteenth century, literary texts containing improvisation reliably take an “inter-medial turn” that sharpens the tension between the law and its transgression, between what is and what is not foreseeable, between norm, denormalization, and renormalization” as well as between performance and text (“Gesetz,” 61–2). Paul Berliner documents how recordings play an important part in jazz musicians learning how to improvise (Thinking in Jazz, 101–5). The quotes and observations Berliner assembled indicate that recordings were also important historically in promoting improvisation and the expectation for inventiveness in jazz.

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to writing in the traditional sense), that there is no performative effect, no effect of ordinary language, no effect of presence or of discursive event (speech act). It is simply that those effects do not exclude what is generally opposed to them, term by term; on the contrary, they presuppose it, in an asymmetrical way, as the general space of their possibility” (“Signature,” 19). We addressed a number of the “relative” differences concerning the creative process, such as the temporal constraints, the irreversibility of the process, the staging of the inclusion of temporal and material constraints, and other contingencies that, while central to improvised performances, are for the most part suppressed or remain hidden in more traditional presentations of art. Those differences have primarily concerned the circumstances of the production process of art. I want to conclude this book by addressing the same question with reference to the reception of art. To put it bluntly: How can we distinguish the effect or experience created by performance art in general and performed improvisations in particular from a classical concert, a visit to the museum, the reading of a novel, and so on? How are we to describe the differences between a live performance of an improvisational event, a jazz concert, a “happening,” an improvised dance or theater performance, and the recording and later reproduction of such events, without compromising our insights into the iterative structure of improvisation and the performative? How can we account for the increased sense of immediacy, what Erika Fischer-Lichte calls the “experience of intensity” (Ästhetische Erfahrung, 338) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht the “production of presence” (“Epiphany,” 4) that accompanies live performances and live improvisation in particular without denying that such a “production of presence” is a feature of all art that “succeeds,” of all art where one’s appreciation is best expressed with the words “it is” (to recall Karl Philipp Moritz’s conclusion)? To address this paradoxical question of a mediation of immediacy, I want to return briefly to the framing inherent to improvisational performances we noted especially in Chapter 3 and suggest an alternative way to conceptualize our cognitive engagement with art, drawing one more time on the neocybernetic vocabulary to avoid some of the conceptual impasses (such as falling back on categories of authenticity, immediacy, singularity, or subjectivity) that come with the use of more traditional aesthetic terminology. We first discussed the framing and staging of the production of art inherent to improvisation with reference to Derrida’s self-reflexive performance of his text “Play” and again when elaborating Romantic notions of irony and parabasis. The examples demonstrated how self-reflexivity and the breaking with the rules and distinctions that define the (theatrical) illusion can be exploited to create the effect of immediacy, of something unplanned and uncontrolled taking place, of actors reacting spontaneously to the situation at hand, and of events

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unfolding whose outcome was not predetermined. As a consequence, the performance as performance — that is, the performance’s own reality (as opposed to what the performance references or “means”) — takes center stage. This self-referential quality, where the performance points toward itself as performance, is central to performed improvisations. They must be clearly marked, be it by the event announcing its own doings as improvised or more structurally, as in bebop, where the standard repetition of the theme at the beginning is reliably followed by the improvisational sections until one returns to the theme, signaling the conclusion of the piece. This framing clearly serves the purpose of drawing the attention away from the melody or musical theme and toward the (performer ’s) improvisational performance. Similarly, Improv theater performances distinguish (and then sometimes play with the distinction) between a certain repertoire and the improvisational performances. In Chicago’s Second City, for example, the hour after the second break is reserved for improvisational performances, a break also marked by the solicitation of audience input. As Adam Müller noted in the early nineteenth century, improvisations frame not only the performance as performance, but the art-creating process itself, the (auto-)poiesis of new forms, figures, plot structures, characters, and so on. How does the framing of the performance as performance appear to be more apt to capture our attention and create a more “intense” experience, producing a sense of presence? In my article “Improvisation: Form and Event — A Spencer-Brownian Calculation,”3 I approached this question by building upon a 1999 essay by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, entitled “Epiphany of Form: On the Beauty of Team Sports.” The analogy of sports and art I drew was not based on the circumstance that in sports, too, we find improvisation in the sense of unplanned and unexpected actions; but rather on sport events sharing with improvisations the central characteristics of successful (noted and notable) performances, namely the focus they command on the here and now. The subsequent analysis of a sports event or a performed improvisation might be interesting, even intriguing, in terms of its mesmerizing effect, however, it will never compare to what people experience when they observe an actual artistic performance, a sports match, a live race, their team competing in a soccer tournament, and so on.4 As Gumbrecht and others have argued, hermeneutic approaches to such phenomena which 3 4

I am grateful to Duke University Press for granting permission to reuse portions of the article. Gumbrecht suggests that one compare this with Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysian experience. They seem to be able to breach at least temporarily the separation between subjects and the separation between subject and object world, between observer and observed (“Epiphany,” 366).

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search for meaning or symbolism in such events, as interesting as they might be, miss precisely this effect. Taking what he calls the “blind spot” of hermeneutics (that it always operates in the realm of representation) as his starting point, Gumbrecht locates the “Other of mimesis” in the production of presence. Gumbrecht defines presence not as something given or self-evident in the Husserlian sense of the word and as Derrida liked to deconstruct it, but rather as “form-as-event,” as “the convergence of an event-effect with an embodied form” (“Epiphany of Form,” 359). Gumbrecht defines “event” simply as a singular and contingent action, and “form” as twofold: on the one hand following the musicologist Carol Berger as a “movement whose directionality one wishes to see continued” (364), and on the other, following Spencer-Brown’s form concept as the unity of a distinction. By drawing on Spencer-Brown’s calculus, Gumbrecht escapes an ontological worldview, but also the danger of creating a presence-category that could be interpreted in terms of religious immanence, an accusation he refutes at length in his subsequent book on the Production of Presence (2004). As indicated previously, Spencer-Brown’s form concept is useful here, because it is not representational, but rather operational, letting complexity emerge from a simple and contingent beginning.5 Because of this pre-representational quality, the form concept lends itself to describing events that cannot be accounted for in terms of their representational properties. Luhmann uses Spencer-Brown accordingly to picture how world art — art that no longer follows preset rules or the Aristotelian mimesis postulate — is created. Similarly, Spencer-Brown allows us to describe the event-character of a sports match or of a performed improvisation: doings that are not about anything that would pre-exist the event itself. Instead, Gumbrecht suggests that the event is about its own emergence, about the original emerging of forms. Gumbrecht, who reads with Luhmann a strongly cognitive dimension into the form concept of Spencer-Brown, argues that this originating process captivates the attention of the audience by confronting the audience with forms in the Spencer-Brownian sense, that is, with the unity of distinctions. American football, for example, confronts the audience with a playing field that is first empty and then filled; with players who are at first frozen in place

5

See Michael Schiltz’s article for a more extensive discussion of the connection between operationalism and form. As Schiltz points out, Spencer-Brown’s operationalism allows us to account for self-referentially operating systems (in the Luhmanian sense) as “consisting of operations which take their own results as a base for further operations. These are forms that ‘in-form’ themselves” (“Space is the Place,” 165). The concept of “in-formation” as developed by Schiltz seems especially apt to describe the form finding/creating process that marks the selfprogramming of art and improvisation’s retrospective method.

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and then move, with situations where nothing happens but something is about to happen, where someone is here and then there, and so on. For team sports, the distinction between entropy and negentropy, chaos and order, is especially important. While defensive lines fight for order, the offense attempts to create chaos for the defense and hence has to act in an unforeseeable and surprising fashion, and vice versa. The tension, but also the excitement, for the audience is greatest when the offense is able to surprise through unforeseen and unprepared-for actions or when the defense is able to react to such a challenge successfully. Artistic improvisations aim in comparable ways to captivate the attention of the audience and to produce presence. Improvisations stage the emergence of new forms as a process where one moves from event to event, decision to decision, and retrospectively creates connections only to dissolve them again. Improvisations are successful when in the process a unique program emerges that lends the performance a sense of coherence, necessity, and even completion (with the modification, again, that such coherence or completion may well be found in the recognition of the performance’s incoherence or incompletion). The irreversibility of this process in improvisation heightens the tension. As in contentious sport matches, every moment counts, every decision is final, has immediate consequences, and is therefore of increased significance.6 Improvisations also create “forms” according to both of the definitions Gumbrecht uses. Corresponding to Carol Berger’s definition of form, improvisations create a movement whose direction we want to see continued. In art, such a desire for continuation can be explained in terms of a program (selection criteria) emerging that reduces subsequent options, but also opens up new possibilities, giving those attending (or listening) a sense of where and how the process ought to continue as well as a sense of surprise when such expectations are not met and new venues or options are actualized. For such programs, past selections decide which subsequent selections are desirable or not, possible or not. Jazz musicians have long had an eye for this effect. I quoted Paul Berliner before and Ted Gioia’s distinction between the blueprint method and the “retrospective method.” Such descriptions understand improvisation as a complex feedback process that builds forms out of contingent elements by relating present decisions to past ones. The improvisation responds to itself, repeating and altering, changing and rephrasing what has come 6

“The improviser makes a succession of choices in performance which cannot be erased, so everything (s)he does within the performance must be incorporated into the whole. This involves an attentiveness to the present moment, so that creativity is a response to the here and now, though the choices made by the improviser are inevitably influenced by past experience of improvising” (Smith and Dean, Improvisation, 26).

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before.7 Without drawing on the neocybernetic discourse, Berliner describes improvisation as a computation of complex forms through a self-referentially operating process. Improvisations draw, condense, confirm, cancel, and compensate for distinctions they themselves produce and reproduce, building complexity and relating structured and unstructured, prepared and unprepared, known and unknown elements to each other. In jazz, for example, improvisations often start or allude to, or culminate in known melodies or harmonies that soon after are decomposed again. The effect of surprise especially hinges on resorting to and then changing the familiar. Theatric improvisations similarly work with known elements, familiar quotes, characters, plots, situations, and so on — just to change them around again in each performance.8 This play with forms is able to draw our cognitive attention. The observer wants to know what will happen next, which distinctions will be condensed, confirmed, cancelled, or compensated. In art, it would seem, such expectations will be created and directed both by the general codes of the art system (for better or worse, we visit concerts or museums with different expectations than the dentist’s office) and by the program that the work of art or performance develops for itself. The latter presents a particular challenge that is distinct from the knowledge and experience needed when we watch a sports event. While the sports connoisseur has to learn the rules and parameters of a sport and know its major figures and internal dramas to be able to enjoy the game and get caught up “in the moment,” the process of “recognition” is more intricate in art. Here, the “rules” are not known in advance. Improvisations, and performance art in general, challenge the observer to recognize each time which program the artwork develops for itself. This might be, but does not necessarily have to be, an intellectual affair: most of us are able to enjoy (or reject) art or a performance even if we are not able to articulate what makes it so special (or so displeasing). The question is more whether an identification with the process/work takes place or whether the observer is merely bored, inattentive, or uninterested. I want to suggest that feelings of “embodiment” or “presence,” result from the recognition and identification with the self-programming of the artwork/performance

7 8

See Paul F. Berliner again for a detailed description of the many possibilities jazz improvisers have in “responding to their own notes” (Thinking in Jazz, 193–4). As we discussed earlier, Erika Fischer-Lichte proposes that we understand the creation of a special relationship between actors and audience as the central function of performance art and the modern (post-1950s) openness toward contingency as expressive of an explicit interest to create a “feedback loop as a self-referential, autopoietic system enabling a fundamentally open, unpredictable process . . . as the defining principle of theatrical work” (Transformative Power, 39).

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that is observed. This recognition might be more or less conscious (it either seems “right” and interesting, or not). The recognition of the program as it emerges with the artwork also gives the observer (and artist) a sense of direction, what Gumbrecht with Berger describes as “movement whose directionality one wishes to see continued.” In jazz, such forms of embodiment are commonly referred to as “feeling it” or as “getting into the groove,” as states of affectedness which compel both artist and audience to identify with the ongoing performance. The experience is intensified: tension is created and attention drawn by the performance playing with expectations it builds for itself and by the recognition (or not) of uniqueness and coherence. It is important to underscore the fact that the ability to appreciate and experience art, and really all performances, is acquired. A person who has never listened to jazz before will not be able to appreciate the subtleties and innovativeness (or lack thereof) of a particular performance. Nor will she be able to embody the self-programming of the emerging work or a particular improvisation and “feel it.” As indicated above, even team sports require a considerable amount of pre-knowledge (rules, characters, and narratives) for the event to be “lived.” Because of its self-programming, art requires, I would argue, a higher degree of readiness and a more refined form of expertise. Yet, even when fully prepared and familiar with a particular art form, cognitive identification with the process might be momentary and sporadic and can by no means be guaranteed.9 I make this point to emphasize that we need to conceive of any “presence” as a construct that results from the cognitive engagement of an observer with art or a performance that, as Derrida demonstrated so aptly, cannot fully be determined by the performance, let alone by the intentions of the artist. At the same time, though, I want to argue that the production of presence and the intensity of the moment associated with performance art need not be thought to exist only on the conscious, intellectual, or hermeneutic plane. This is where a cognitive application of Spencer-Brown’s form concept in association with basic systems theoretical considerations (that is, the recognition of the nerve, psychic, and social systems as constituting independently operating, yet

9

Despite considerable expertise regarding jazz performances, Gioia nevertheless believes that it “seems scarcely undeniable” that “much — if not most — jazz is boring” (The Imperfect, 109) — a statement that, I suspect, speaks more to the difficulty of psychic systems to sustain the experience of presence without distraction than to the intricacies of jazz as an art form.

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structurally coupled systems)10 is most useful. It allows us to describe the observational modes of systems without having to presuppose (or exclude for that matter) meaning or intellect in the observational process. In this regard, Spencer-Brown’s form concept presents an alternative or the possibility to “unpack” recently redefined conceptions of “materiality” or “embodiment” that are based on existentialistic or ontological definitions of the human body and our being-in-the-world and that are often employed to approach an aesthetics of the performative. Erika Fischer-Lichte, for example, finds the term embodiment central for her aesthetics of the performative, but defines embodiment in rather existentialistic terms. Following the anthropologist Thomas J. Csordas, she wants to “grant the body a comparably paradigmatic position as is granted to text.” The term embodiment “opens a new methodological field with the phenomenal body at its center, and takes the bodily beingin-the-world of humankind as the condition for any cultural production” (Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, 89–90). In an article from 1996, Gumbrecht explicitly rejects the form-withoutmatter concept proposed by Luhmann’s and Dirk Baecker’s reading of Spencer-Brown, arguing that “forms which are events, forms which are ‘being born to presence’ . . . cannot occur without matter or substance — nor be analyzed without concepts of matter and substance” (“Form without Matter,” 587). Gumbrecht’s most recent book on the subject, Production of Presence — What Meaning Cannot Convey, completely omits Spencer-Brown’s and Luhmann’s conception of form and instead draws upon Heidegger (among other writers) and on semiotic considerations (esp. of transubstantiation) to explore moments of presence where our “being-in-the-world” is non-interpretive, not primarily based on meaning, and in this regard seems to overcome, albeit only temporarily, the separation between thought and being that defines our Western, metaphysical culture. Such attempts to define materiality and presence in art in semi-existentialist or ontological terms, hope to find an alternative to the culture of thought that dominates (academic) Western culture 10 Structural coupling refers to the interpenetration of systems, that systems can react to and use perturbations from their environment, without the environment (where a system might find other systems), however, being able to determine the particular operations of the system. Thus, the psychic system uses communications for the reproduction of its elements (thoughts and feelings) and vice versa, the communication system draws on thoughts and feelings for the reproduction of its elements, communications. Yet, any particular communication (e.g. “I love you”) is not and does not carry the feeling or thought (e.g. “I hate you”) that might have led to the utterance — another psychic system, however, might be led to produce its own feeling or thoughts (e.g. “I couldn’t care less”) in response to the utterance it perceives. For a more extensive elaboration of this concept, see esp. Luhmann’s essay “How Can the Mind Participate in Communication.”

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by grounding the authenticity of human experience in the materiality of the human body.11 Desires for such an outside of thought, however, raise questions about the “authenticity” and singularity of experience (Derrida), and about how the human body is constituted and how it can be thought to constitute experience independent of thought. I want to suggest that the neocybernetic discourse allows us to understand the “experience” created by a person’s cognitive engagement with art without having to assume a representational or an interpretive stance toward the work of art or performance; and thus allows us to move beyond the perceived division between materiality and body on the one hand, and a culture of thought on the other. By approaching the “authenticity” of human experience in terms of different systems (nerve, psychic, communication) observing (that is, constructing rather than representing or “thinking”) their environment and irritating each other, we can redefine cognition beyond the traditional subject/object distinction and without linking it to the production of meaning, replacing the former with the system/environment distinction and the latter with Spencer-Brown’s form concept. With the help of such conceptual substitutions, we can comprehend the psychic and the nervous system as observing and relating to their environment long before comprehension mediated through language and abstraction is initiated and yet, without having to ignore the laws of iterability or the idea that “experience” is necessary for the appreciation of art. To make the argument more accessible, we may think of it in terms of expectations that guide the psychic system when it engages a performance. Expectations create tensions, resolutions, surprises, disappointments, and so on, and thus structure our attention in particular ways, engaging us not only intellectually, but also emotionally. In addition, expectations are a helpful concept in describing experience, because they do not have to be conscious — they may be “felt” (“gefühlt”) as in Chapter 2 we saw both Moritz and Goethe put it — and yet they are acquired (that is, subject to the laws of iterability). The nervous system, for example, might have been trained to “expect” a certain stimulus (smell, sound, light, and so on) upon entering a room, but only react or notice its own expectations when they are not met. Performances therefore focus attention and create events by addressing and creating expectations of which one might or might not be aware. The performance or appreciation of a jazz improvisation surely does not require — for the moment of its performance might even prohibit — the careful analysis of the creative process; yet a high level of “expertise” 11 For an excellent historical account of notions of body and embodiment in anthropological theory, see Csordas’s 1999 essay “Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology.”

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entailing numerous of conscious and unconscious expectations for what may or may not count as innovative, interesting, coherent, and so on, will be in play. Today, the cognitive sciences can explain the creation of unconscious expectations as resulting from the acquisition of specific cultural skills through the formation of neural networks.12 As Dreyfus and Dreyfus remark, neural networks “provide a model of how the past can affect present perception and action without the brain needing to store specific memories at all” (“The Challenge,” 115). While understanding may help us in recognizing, processing, and in acquiring more differentiated experiences, it is ultimately through repetition and practice that processes are embodied, that is, can be performed without conscious or thoughtful involvement.13 Two important points follow from these considerations. For one, the conceptual models used here prevent us from hypostasizing notions of “presence,” “materiality,” or “embodiment” as, I believe, Gumbrecht and many others are in danger of doing when they rely on notions of materiality and substance (rather than distinction and indication) as preconditions for the possibility of experience and observation. Such notions make it difficult to account for the expertise required both for the creation and the appreciation of art. The neocybernetic discourse encourages us instead to acknowledge the high degree of prior knowledge and exposure needed for the “production of presence” (even in ritualistic cultures, I would argue, “preparation” for the event is needed) without having to assume that this experience is based (solely) on conscious calculations and hermeneutic forms of understanding. This is not to overlook the difference between the experience created by a live performance and the experience of reading a book or a musical score (with Adorno, famously, preferring the latter over the former).14 The

12 Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus analyze Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodiment drawing on the model of neural networks: “According to these models, memories of specific situations are not stored. Rather, the connections between ‘neurons’ are modified by successful behavior in such a way that the same or similar input will produce the same or similar output” (“The Challenge,” 115). With Derrida we might say that Dreyfus and Dreyfus graft the law of iterability onto the neural system. As Gumbrecht, they also relate the acquisition of expertise to the experience described by athletes: “When everyday coping is going well, one experiences something like what athletes call flow, or playing out of their heads. One’s activity is completely geared into the demands of the situation” (111). 13 Dreyfus and Dreyfus distinguish various stages of skill acquisition from the novice to the expert. Experts — they mention chess players, drivers, pilots as examples — no longer need to think through complex decision making processes but expect and act intuitively. 14 Discussing the “thinghood of art,” Adorno finds that “musical scores are almost invariably better than the performances based on them” (Aesthetic Theory, 146).

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difference, however, is perhaps less one of quality than of quantity. In the performing arts and in improvisations, the play with conscious and unconscious expectations will take place on multiple levels simultaneously. Performances create not only an immediate confrontation with forms and force special attention because of the singularity and irreversibility of the process, performances also “surround” the psychic and nervous systems, irritating them on multiple levels. This creates situations that cannot be replicated by books, museums, lectures, or even by virtual realities where eyes, ears, and maybe even our directional senses are stimulated in a predetermined fashion. The role of the body’s presence, then, would be defined and limited by the totality of observations and expectations it can elicit. Systems theory and Spencer-Brown’s form concept could help us analyze in more detail the complex of possible irritations of the nervous, psychic, and social systems and the embodiment and experiences of presence made possible through their interaction. Each system has its own operational history that will affect how a performance or art in general are received. Individual sensibilities as much as one’s state of mind — one’s ability and willingness to be attentive — might make you more or less prepared to deal with a lengthy opera, a piercing rock concert, or the formal subtleties and richness of an artist’s complex image-objects. Likewise, the system of communication matters in terms of the distinction, ideals, and expectations it offers for the encounter with art. And communication (culture) prepares (or prevents) us to experience improvised doings (such as jazz, for example) as art in the first place. All three systems interact without, however, being able to determine the operations of each other. Through what systems theory calls “structural coupling,” systems are thought to be able to increase their internal complexity based on what the system recognizes (on its inside) as external irritations. Put more simply, a culture helps determine what is perceived and experienced as art in as much as the psychic system draws on the distinctions offered by the system of communication to appreciate a performance, increasing also the sensual sensibilities it may develop for a particular art form. From a systems theoretical perspective, that is, acknowledging both the autonomy and structural coupling of the nerve, psychic, and communicational systems, we can move beyond the separation of intellect and body, form and materiality, mediation and immediacy, and so on, and instead try to understand how society (communication) offers possibilities (distinctions) that an individual (consciousness) might involve and, through repetition, also come to embody (nerve system) in the re-cognition, experiencing, and enjoyment of improvisation as art.

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Index

Adorno, W. Theodor 6, 40, 50n. 16, 107n. 40, 151 aesthetic autonomy 8, 11, 42, 57–60, 62–3, 68, 77, 79–80, 113, 120 Agamben, Georgio 122, 127n. 26 Aristotle 67 see also mimesis postulate autopoiesis 32n. 22, 35, 36n. 30, 39, 101–2 Bailey, Derek 1–2, 7n. 5, 69, 115 Bakhtin, Michail 91, 104 bebop 6, 26, 144 Berliner, Paul 14n. 1, 17, 37, 70, 106, 142n. 2, 146, 147 Bourdieu, Pierre 14n. 2, 48 Brentano, Clemens 86, 90–1, 100, 114 burlesque 43–4, 55 Butler, Judith 4, 10, 15–19 passim, 139 Campe, Rüdiger 75, 130n. 28, 132n. 31 Certeau, Michel de 14n. 2, 41, 123 Coleman, Ornette 4, 20–1 Comédie-Italienne 44 Commedia dell’arte 7–8, 43–5, 52, 55, 85–6, 88, 90, 93, 95, 103–4, 118

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creative process 8, 38, 41, 66, 68, 74, 76, 78–9, 82–3, 87, 96, 143, 150 creativity 3, 9, 11, 18, 20n. 9, 28, 52, 61n. 30, 76–7, 85, 87, 146n. 6 Critique of Judgment 60, 73n. 48, 77–8, 88, 113n. 9 see also Kant, Immanuel Csordas, Thomas J. 149, 150n. 11 Dada 70 deconstruction 5, 12, 20n. 9, 28, 34, 35n. 26, 36n. 29 see also Derrida, Jacques Dell, Christopher 2n. 2, 69 Derrida, Jacques 1, 4, 5, 15, 19–35 passim, 38, 40, 93–6, 102, 115, 123, 130, 141–3, 145, 148, 150, 151n. 12 disinterestedness 62–3 embodiment 147–52 passim emergence 4–5, 32n. 22, 36–40 passim, 80, 82, 88, 98n. 24, 102–4, 119, 130n. 28, 141, 145–6 collaborative 39, 102 see also Sawyer, R. Keith Esposito, Elena 130, 132 Esterhammer, Angela 7, 14n. 2–3, 43n. 4, 46n. 8, 48, 52n. 18, 54n. 21, 61, 80–1, 86, 87n. 5, 118n. 15

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Index

Faust 53–7 passim, 129 Fernow, Carl Ludwig 8, 46, 80–2 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 15, 39, 88, 94, 143, 147n. 8, 149 flow 39n. 34, 68n. 41, 102n. 31, 151n. 12 Foerster, Heinz von 5, 30–2 passim, 139n. 43 functional differentiation 34, 44n. 5, 59, 121, 125, 132 see also Luhmann, Niklas genius 7–11, 42, 46, 52n. 18, 58, 61, 73–83 passim, 84, 94, 101, 113, 117n. 12, 121, 141 aesthetics of 8–10, 61, 80, 81n. 63, 83, 86–7, 100–1, 141 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 8, 9, 11, 46, 47–57 passim, 60, 62, 66, 78, 81n. 63, 86, 107, 129, 150 see also Faust; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship; Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Calling Gottsched, Johann Christoph 42–3, 46–8 Gioia, Ted 17, 37, 64n. 37, 146, 148n. 9 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 143–51 passim Hamacher, Werner 50n. 16, 92–3, 110n. 2, 118n. 14, 125 Hardenberg, Georg Friedrich Philipp von see Novalis Harlequin 43n. 3, 47, 52–3, 55–7, 88, 90–1, 103–4 Improv theater 9, 18, 39, 83, 103, 144 inspiration 60–1, 81–2, 100, 120

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inventiveness 4–7, 10, 12, 14, 19–40 passim, 45, 51, 80, 82, 96, 104, 113, 115, 121–3, 135–7, 139–42 ars inveniendi 27 iterability 4, 22–37 passim, 93, 114, 125, 141, 150, 151n. 12 jazz 4, 6, 13, 14, 16–17, 19–21, 24, 26, 37, 70, 83, 106, 142–3, 146–8, 150, 152 see also bebop Free Jazz 4, 20, 70 Johnstone, Keith 1n. 1, 17n. 6 Kant, Immanuel 9–11, 27, 44, 58, 60, 63, 73n. 48, 77–9, 88, 110n. 2, 113, 121–2, 124, 132–3, 136–7, 139 see also Critique of Judgment Kleist, Heinrich von 9–11, 57, 86, 96, 97n. 23, 106–7, 109–40 passim, 141 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 5, 26–7, 57, 77, 130, 131n. 30 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 11, 46–7, 55, 71 Luhmann, Niklas 5, 33–41 passim, 122, 149 on art 66–70 passim, 78–9, 120, 145 on autopoiesis 35 on communication 35, 40, 149n. 10 on deconstruction 34–6 on functional differentiation 44n. 5 on modernity 34, 59, 66, 121, 125n. 25, 130 on pedagogy 109, 120n. 18 on Romanticism 89 on self-programming 66–8, 78–9, 120 on systems 33–6

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Index Marsalis, Wynton 14 mimesis postulate 8, 62, 66, 73, 75, 145 modernity 5–6, 26–9, 31, 34, 46n. 9, 47, 55–6, 59, 106–7, 110, 121, 125, 130, 131n. 30 narrative of 5, 28, 33–4, 130n. 29 Moritz, Karl Philipp 8, 46, 59–80 passim, 82, 89, 94n. 18, 143, 150 Müller, Adam 8–9, 12, 84–108 passim, 114, 119, 144 neocybernetics 7, 30, 32n. 22, 141 see also systems theory Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 42, 62–3, 77, 80, 144n. 4 noise 5, 30–3 order-from-noise principle 32 Novalis 28, 89, 99, 107 parabasis 89, 92, 94, 114, 143 performance art 13–15, 39, 88, 143, 147–8 performative 4, 9, 15, 19, 21–3, 46, 48, 52–3, 92n. 15, 93–4, 116, 133, 138, 142–3, 149 performative immediacy 4, 19, 94, 141 performative turn 15 performativity 4, 15, 17, 20n. 9 Peters, Gary 2, 6n. 4, 12, 14n. 3, 18n. 7, 33–4, 40 planning paradox 74, 76, 79 Quintilian 45, 52 raga, Indian 7 Ramshaw, Sara 20n. 9, 25n. 15, 26 Roach, Max 17, 36

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Roberts, David 91–2, 110n. 2, 122 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 10, 116n. 10, 132, 136 Sawyer, R. Keith 9, 39–40, 102–3, 106 Schlegel, Friedrich 8–9, 84, 86, 89, 95–6, 99n. 26, 101–2, 114 Schwanitz, Dietrich 69, 103n. 32 Second City 23–4, 144 self-programming 66, 68, 79, 120, 147–8 Spencer-Brown, George 66–7, 89n. 9, 144–5, 148–50, 152 Staël, Germaine de 81 Sulzer, Johann Georg 77n. 56, 84 systems theory 5, 7, 12, 32–41 passim, 59n. 25, 125, 141, 152 see also neocybernetics Tieck, Ludwig 86, 88–94 passim, 100–1, 104n. 33, 107, 114 Todorov, Tzvetan 59, 63, 65n. 39 virtuosity 50–1 Wellbery, David 55–6, 102, 118n. 14, 118n. 16 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 9, 47–53 passim, 58, 107 Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Calling 47 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 68–9 wit 54, 85, 95, 101, 106 world art 66–7, 89, 145 Zinner, Birgit 37

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