Embracing Indecision: Musical Improvisation as Political Ethics

Political responses to 9/11 have bolstered an approach to ethics that gives priority to the translation of abstract principles into concrete dilemmas, rather than one that sees ethics as a transient encounter. Yet both politics and ethics arise precisely from this encounter and the responsibility that emerges through it. Unlike applied ethics, an ethics of encounter must consider the unpredictability that arises out of political and social situations, each of which require unique interpretations of plural contexts. Traditional discourses of political theory struggle to think ethics and political action in these terms. In order to overcome these limits and think anew the ethics of encounter, this paper turns to an unlikely resource: musical improvisation. It argues that the principles and practices of radical improvisation in music provide new avenues for theorising contingency, alterity and potentiality. Musical improvisation embraces infinite contingency via an interactive dialogue that encompasses both the sonic and the corporeal. In so doing, it provides an idea and an instantiation of an ethics that is grounded in the encounter, and that might challenge hegemonic orders of practical ethics and the politics these produce.