In this essay, I want to attempt a kind of Rancièrean double movement: to reflect on the politics of improvisation as well as the improvisation of politics. The impetus behind this approach originates in what appears to me a correspondingly double lack. On the one hand, while political interpretations of improvised music are appearing with more frequency, Rancière's interventions into the notion of politics have not appeared in these conversations. On the other hand, while one of Rancière's central concerns involves showing the ‘contingency of any order’, his precise focus on the contingency of the police tends to obscure ‘smaller’ contingencies such as improvisation. The moments in history that rupture the sensible appear in Rancière as quasi-transcendental events, or, as Giuseppina Mecchia puts it, they occur ‘between historicity and event’. How these ruptures come into being has always been less of a concern for Rancière, and it is here that I think improvisation can raise productive questions. My goal is not so much to arrive at a better reading of Rancière (the notion of a ‘proper’ reading being anyway anti-egalitarian) as it is to better reflect on the relationships between agency, subjectivity and contingency within a police order.

The politics of improvisation

Rancière's interventions into the notion of politics challenge us to consider the efficacy of actions that take place as a function of an already established or given way of doing. Rancière's politics is opposed to the police, which is any pre-existing order of doing and being. In a given police order, people are organised into their ‘proper’ places according to the ‘logic’ of the system, and as such, controverting actions that take place as a function of that system do not constitute politics so much as they remain paths of dissent that are ‘appropriate’ to those dissenting. In their appropriateness, such methods can always be managed, mitigated or redirected. Politics, by contrast, occurs in the moments that ‘rupture the sensible’, redistributing not only the sense of what is and is not appropriate, but also the presupposition of the existence of appropriate positions. Locating politics in improvisation would thus involve locating a situation in which a given improvisation produced a redistribution of sense, through which new ways of doing or being would be allowed to emerge.