Ästhetische Praktiken der Improvisation

This article explores the intersection of the philosophy of art, everyday aesthetics, and existential aesthetics, focusing on the role of aesthetic habits in both artistic and everyday practices. Building on my previous work on the aesthetics of improvisation, the article challenges the idea that habits are rigid, uncreative routines. Instead, it argues that aesthetic habits play a crucial role in shaping artistic appreciation and participation, as well as in structuring our daily lives aesthetically. Besides discussing the aesthetic appeal of habitual routines and emphasizing the improvisational nature of habits, the article highlights how art is not separate from life but is deeply embedded in ordinary experiences, transforming and being transformed by habitual aesthetic sensibilities. To sum up, I propose that aesthetic habits, rather than limiting creativity, enable a dynamic, evolving engagement with both art and everyday life.

While the action movies of Ugandan film collective Wakaliwood resist description through the norms of classical Western aesthetics, nor can they be removed from the aesthetic sphere altogether and considered merely as projects for social inclusion. The question arises, therefore, of what interpretational framework can be brought to bear. Discussing Alessandro Bertinetto’s account of improvisation as distributed creativity, as well as the perspective of postcolonial theory, the paper observes that neither of these on its own succeeds in capturing what is distinctive about Wakaliwood’s films, but that in combination they may serve to introduce an ethical aspect into the philosophy of art that would otherwise be overlooked. This, the paper suggests, points towards a need to modify our understanding of aesthetic theory formation.

This article shows how Wolfram Lotz’s diaristic practice in ›Heilige Schrift I‹ represents an improvised form of writing. To this end, Lotz transfers his dialogic aesthetic for drama to diary writing: All external interruptions are immediately integrated into the text and serve as a welcome affordance for writing the unforeseen. In addition, when transferring loose notes into the overall digital document, the illegibility of his own handwriting becomes a disturbance that forces the author to deviate from what was originally written down. This doubly mediated writing procedure is coupled with a radically inclusive diaristic that aims for immediacy. The result is a complex media installation that proves to be a productive framework for improvised writing.

The text develops a concept of art beyond the difference between aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy. Here, art is understood as an improvisational practice. Drawing on the characteristic structure of impulse and reaction that defines improvisation, the relationship between artworks and non-aesthetic practices can be redefined: artworks emanate a wide range of impulses, which are taken up by other human practices (e.g. affective practices, movements, perceptions and linguistic articulations). By this, artworks are constitutively tied to the reactions these impulses generate. The autonomy of artistic impulses is thus always already linked to a heteronomy, in the sense of being dependent on reactions within other human practices. Art must be understood through its inseparable entanglement of autonomy and heteronomy.

In this paper I develop a concept of improvisation—both in its everyday and artistic form— that accentuates the importance of disruption, failure, and risk. I thereby differentiate improvisation from habitual action and practical knowledge while acknowledging important similarities. In the second part of the paper I explore to what extent theoretical writing can be improvisational. Drawing on texts by bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, I propose an emphasis on the situatedness of the writer and point out, here, too, the relevance of disruption and risk.

On the basis of a political cartoon from ›Le Monde‹, the text analyzes how improvisation intervenes in and shapes social structures. The cartoon quotes a fifteenth-century drawing that depicts a practice of polyphonic vocal improvisation, bringing together multiple layers of intertextual irony. In response to competitive mechanisms in international university rankings in 2020, the newspaper article highlights the precarious interaction between European traditions and insensitive evaluation standards. The cartoon goes far beyond this in the density of its allusions and the richness of its musical details: in the intertwining of improvisational logic as the basis of polyphonic music-making on the one hand and social processes on the other, aesthetic categories turn into political ones and vice versa. The turning point, however, is the media representation of artistic and social practice.

Many works of art today evoke issues of climate change. In this article, I want to highlight the emergence of a new kind of aesthetics in the wake of climate change, an aesthetics that merges culture, nature, history, science, activism and affects: an aesthetics of cold. With regards to the subject matter, cold, a comparison is made between images of cold from the 17th century, with its distinct paraphernalia and iconography, and contemporary works on the encounter with cold. Climate art grapples with climate phenomena at a wholistic and physical level: operating through sensations and integral forms of experience. As such, it is situated in an expanding field where aesthetics can be considered not only through its subject matter but also through its practices and its effects. Philosophical aesthetics may grasp such an expanding field through new perspectives and concepts.

Why has the idea prevailed that the eighteenth century produced no women who stood alongside men as equals? Because the assessment of these women perpetuates the structural violence that enabled the rise of bourgeois society. Margareta Klopstock (1728 –1758) left a corpus that includes letters and literary texts of various genres. Both her work and her persona were appropriated by her renowned husband, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, in the precarious edition titled ›Hinterlaßne Schriften von Margareta Klopstock‹, which remains uncritically accepted as a source for evaluating this author. However, in her letter on fashion, she reflects on the ethical foundation of an aesthetic feminism, which defines her unique position within the network of the European Enlightenment—a position of great significance due to Margareta Klopstock’s political claim.