Abstract
In philosophy of education, improvisation is thought of as something the teacher does to improve their teaching or an activity the student does to improve their learning. However, in the light of Catherine Malabou's philosophy of plasticity and ethnomusicological theory, improvisation in education should more rightly be thought of as an ontological feature of education. This article illustrates this with examples from research on interdisciplinary education within the framework of ‘academic hospitality’.
Overture: Plasticity, Interdisciplinary Education and Improvisation
This article is a response to the invitation to ‘connect, bridge and define plasticity within and between various fields’ in this special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews exploring the concept of plasticity. The conception of plasticity that I will refer to throughout this article is borrowed from Catherine Malabou. Her concept of plasticity outlines a materialist ontology which involves humans, with bodies and all, who use language to understand the world and themselves. Malabou's plasticity is an ontological perspective that starts out from form and its fundamental feature mutability (James 2012; Malabou 2010). Because of the ontological orientation of this particular concept of plasticity, it appears less as a ‘bridge’ as mentioned in the call and more as the medium within which language, thinking and the body affect each other. In this article, plasticity is what provides shape to the article's other two key concepts: (Inter-)disciplinarity on the one hand and improvisation on the other.
The structure of this inquiry necessitates a deliberate and strategic approach. This article will start out by outlining a conception of disciplinarity as a deconstructionist concept capable of being ‘plasticised’, namely Derrida's notion of the archive (Derrida 1995). Construing the discipline as archive means emphasising the discipline as a developing epistemic repository and dwelling of the living, breathing academic over the mere epistemic and organisational partition between university subjects. However, Derrida's famous stance against traditional metaphysics involves dismissing the idea that the discipline can be understood as an entity which develops over time and in relation to other entities. He brings out this critique explicitly towards Malabou in his preface to her first book (Derrida 2005).
I believe that Derrida overestimates the risk of plasticity being or becoming an ossifying philosophy. Malabou's plasticity springs out from many diverse works and resists concise and neat summary. However, as an introductory note, plasticity can be said to be the meeting point of form, history, dialectics and temporality (Malabou 2005). Plasticity is form's fundamental changeability and continual differentiation of itself from itself, at the risk of annihilation (Malabou 2005; 2008). Malabou's plasticity implies the possibility to think the archive as dialectically relational to itself over time and to other disciplines.
I suggest that the combination of Derrida's notion of the archive and Malabou's plasticity provides a good foundation for construing disciplinarity as relating to the body, indebted to its history and continuously undergoing change. I agree with the philosopher of education Nick Peim that plasticity is central to understanding education of today (see, Peim 2021), and I would like to expand that notion to include the phenomenon of jazz improvisation. In this article, I will pull these together in an educational metaphor.
To activate this metaphor, I will suggest that a musician who improvises is in a certain sense the same as a member of a particular academic discipline, that is, someone skilled at their craft, engaged in a tradition and contributing with what one uniquely can. An academic engages with their tradition enough to be recognised as someone pertaining to a discipline, even when their contribution is a challenge which shakes the foundations of that discipline. They prove themselves as members of a discipline when they engage in the same discourse as their peers, asking questions and providing answers that their peers can understand well enough to appreciate, reject, agree or disagree with. A jazz improviser does the same. Contrary to common belief, jazz improvisation is not a matter of just playing something but a skilled performance that engages with a whole tradition, whether it conforms to it or challenges it. The ethnomusicologist Paul F. Berliner quotes the jazz bassist Calvin Hill: I used to think, How could jazz musicians pick notes out of thin air? I had no idea of the knowledge it took. It was like magic to me at the time (Berliner 1994, 1).
The first discourse construes improvisation as a task for the student. It is designed to teach the student something about themselves which they didn’t already know. However, seen from the angle of jazz improvisation, this discourse ignores that the teacher, too, constantly needs to improvise as the performance in the classroom progresses, changing the conditions for what goes on. In jazz improvisation, no participant – not even the audience, technicians, a long-dead composer – is positioned outside of the ongoing performance (I will return to this point, discussing Small 1998). The educational situation is constantly in motion, requiring that the teacher be skillfully, thoughtfully and emotionally in tune with what is going on in every moment, deviating from whatever they planned to do in their teaching whenever necessary. The teacher's improvisational skills or attitude is the focus for the second discourse, and conversely to the first, this discourse ignores that the student also must respond skillfully, thoughtfully and emotionally to the dynamics of the educational situation.
The main idea of this article is to propose the beginning of a third discourse which joins both of these aspects. Since improvisation is the skilful employment of what someone knows, both teacher and student can be said to improvise at the same time. While the usual interpretations of improvisation in education tend to describe them as a more or less isolated activity, the interpretation forwarded in this article emphasises – indeed, depends on – a collaborative and hospitable attitude which involves all performers, any observers, the history and future of the instrument, the genre and the discipline with which one engages and more. Improvisation is an ontological feature of teaching and learning.
What follows from understanding improvisation in this way is the notion that all who are implicated in the educational situation should be thought of as active and unique contributors. In their own way, they contribute to the development of the situation at hand, as well as the development of their discipline, however small their contribution. This third discourse counteracts the first discourse's notion that the improvisation of the teacher is mainly a tool to regain authority over a chaotic situation, and the second discourse's notion that improvisation is a didactic tool that will improve the student in some way. Both the first and second discourse propose a particular power dynamic in the classroom: Improvisation is a tool that the teacher wields either to save themselves or the student. In the third discourse that this article forwards, improvisation is the main descriptor of the educational situation. It is how skilled people interact in and between disciplines, and as I construe it as an expression of the plastic archive: it is the movement through which disciplines develop.
Consequently, I suggest a conceptual relation between interdisciplinary education and improvisation. In a jazz band, each instrumentalist contributes on the basis of what they know, what they like and enjoy, what they have happened to have worked on and what they have ignored. All of this while adhering to, rejecting or challenging the confines of the group's common goal and debt to a tradition. A drummer's contribution is as indispensable as a trumpeter's, but their contributions are distinctly not the same. In interdisciplinarity, the same notion of epistemic difference between people with different backgrounds, academic interests and visions, can be approached as a case of improvisation. This notion will be developed throughout this article, drawing on philosophy, musicology and interview data from the Academic Hospitality in Interdisciplinary Education (AHIE) project.
A Note on AHIE and Academic Hospitality
This article is part of the research project on interdisciplinary education called AHIE. The project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council and does research on students, teachers, administrators and leaders who study or work with interdisciplinary education (see McCune et al. 2025).
The project conducts in-depth interviews with students, teachers, administrators and leaders involved in interdisciplinary study programmes in Australia, Ireland, Norway, Scotland and Sweden. The main focus for the interviews is the interviewees's experiences from their particular institution with regards to interdisciplinary education. Among the questions we ask are what they see as the positives and challenges of their unit or program, and what positive and negative experiences they have conducting or studying an interdisciplinary unit or program. A recurring theme is that they find interdisciplinary education valuable because it allows them to get a broader outlook on their own specialisation, and insight into what other academics are doing, how they do it and what interests them. Another recurring theme is that they find it difficult to synthesise the epistemic content of different disciplines because of significant epistemic divides.
A main concept in the project is ‘academic hospitality’. Central to this term is the guesting and hosting that academics and academic institutions perform as they travel, translate each other's texts, welcome different ideas, negotiate disagreements and visit each other's offices, cities and lecture halls (Phipps and Barnett 2007). There is no recipe for successful academic hospitality. It requires ongoing attention, negotiation, adjustment and attunement, intellectual and affective, towards the other, whether the other is an academic, an institution, an idea, agreement or disagreement. As Papastephanou (2025, 3) points out, when this process happens in interdisciplinary situations such as described in this article, its most prominent feature is epistemic hospitality, that is, the guesting, hosting and possible exclusion (cf. Derrida 2000) of ideas that differ from one's own. After all, interdisciplinarity necessarily entails epistemic otherness.
Papastephanou suggests that such epistemic hospitality ought to be understood in terms of ‘exaptation’, which she explains as the mechanism by which terms, ideas or other epistemes cross these borders to inhabit a new epistemic landscape. Exaptation is, briefly, what happens when something seems to fit somewhere it wasn’t made to fit, like a bird's feathers which at one point in natural history were a means of thermal insulation but happened to be useful for flying, too. The term ‘hospitality’ underwent a similar process, as a concept used in classical theory, theology and philosophy and now exapted into educational theory as academic hospitality (Papastephanou 2025, 5).
So with ‘plasticity’, which Malabou first finds in Hegel, who found it in the Classics with reference to the ‘plastic arts’ such as sculpture (Malabou 2005, 9). Later, the term would rise to popular prominence as a neuroscientific term and provide further depth to Malabou's philosophy by exaptation (Malabou 2008; 2016). In Malabou's philosophy, plasticity refers to the process that affords ‘form’ an accumulated and material history and potential for change. Things, in the broad sense of the word, can change from how they are, but never go back to how they were.
‘Improvisation’ equally. The Latin noun ‘improvisus’ which would translate to ‘something which has not been seen in advance’ was exapted into Italian as ‘improvisare’, meaning ‘to do something without preparation, to solve an unexpected situation’. Improvisation as we use it today was exapted from the Italian verb into several different epistemic contexts, including music and education (see Alterhaug 2004, 98).
I mention Papastephanou's theory of exaptation because it shows so vividly how organically these concepts move between epistemic contexts. The very process of their movements, exaptations and (we must assume) extinctions, is interdisciplinarity by way of epistemic hospitality, showing that interdisciplinarity is not only possible but proven throughout epistemic history. Concepts, disciplines, academics and so on exhibit plasticity to the degree that interdisciplinarity is possible and inevitable, limited by their resistive, that is, political potential (Papastephanou 2025).
What exaptation brings to the foreground is the character of life that underpins interdisciplinarity and improvisation. Like biological traits undergo exaptations, so do concepts and ideas. That is why I have chosen to bring in Jacques Derrida's notion of ‘archive fever’, which I interpret as a figuration of the discipline as a living, breathing thing, capable of having fever. His direct treatment of the archive is helpful because it focusses so strongly on epistemic life, and not in the metaphoric sense. However, the main shortcoming of this description is its reluctance towards the temporal dimension of the archive. That is why I bring in Malabou's ‘plasticity’, which allows me to construe the archive as a living thing which develops over time and according to its history, accident and intentions. Plasticity can absorb Derrida's archive and a notion of dialectical development balancing freedom and determinism. But I am getting ahead of myself. Before I get all the way there, let me say something about how I will incorporate interview material in this article.
A Note on the Use of Interview Quotes
Throughout this article, I will provide some quotations from the AHIE interviews. The quotations are prepared for legibility: Noises are removed and awkward phrasings adjusted, but only lightly. This choice is in line with what Daniel Oliver and colleagues call a ‘denaturalized’ approach to transcription, according to which ‘accuracy concerns the substance of the interview, that is, the meanings and perceptions created and shared during a conversation’ (Oliver et al., 2005, p. 1277). The aim of using quotations from the interviews is to render visible that students and teachers in interdisciplinary education already present reflections that can be understood in terms of improvisation.
The use and treatment of the quotations also inhabit the medium of Malabou's plasticity and two specific ontological assumptions that follow from it. The first is that language, perception and thinking are dialectically implicated in one another. The second is an adherence to Hegelian dialectics, which represents an ongoing, inevitable and historical change of content. This assumption implies that there is a ‘something’ that can change, that is, something, referred to as ‘form’ in Malabou's philosophy, that retains, rejects and accumulates history over time, yet remains open to change (Malabou 2005).
Together, the reading of Malabou's ontology of plasticity that I suggest in this article affirms the notion that there is no such thing as a neutral, objective or atheoretical transcription. Every utterance, observation and interpretation is always already contextual – ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ as Derrida puts it (Derrida 1995, 158). A quote from an interview is never simply a reflection of the utterer's intentions but a series of transformations. For instance, theory, presuppositions of any sort and sometimes just happenstance are transformed into a question from the interviewer. The interviewee receives and interprets that question, formulates a reaction or response that is meant to fit the question and the situation they both share. That response is converted into a digital recording, then transcribed into writing, then interpreted and coded as part of a data set, then interpreted and recontextualised into this very article, then intepreted by you, the reader – and so on. This process can be seen as a plastic process, which implies that the original is impossible to retain or re-establish. Only the plastic result, that is, the continually transformable form, is what is ‘present’ (Malabou 2010, 51; Shread, 2011).
As we shall see in the text, the quotations showcase students and teachers in interdisciplinary education who seem to be already engaged in improvisation although they might not have the language to describe it. This, I suggest, supports the need for a third discourse of improvisation in educational theory.
The symphony of improvisation in interdisciplinary education consists of several movements: An overture, the end of which we are soon to reach, a prima in which the first question, that of the discipline, is treated by way of Derrida's archive, a lively vivace where interdisciplinarity is discussed in terms of Malabou's plasticity, an ad libitum wherein improvisation is the subject, and finally a coda where the threads come together. Now the overture comes to a close, prima follows. Don’t applaud between the movements, please.
Prima: The Discipline as Archive
What is a discipline? Drawing attention to the plurality of the word, interdisciplinary theorists Barry and Born write that ‘Disciplines discipline disciples’. As a verb, to discipline is about the production of conformity through some sort of power relation; as a noun it is about the resulting behaviour. A disciple is someone who partake in this power relation as a subject (Barry and Born 2013, 1, 43). Said differently: Disciplines contain or organise people who are subject to the rules of the discipline.
While this could appear as a conformist definition, the emphasis on power relations reveals that Michel Foucault is a main inspiration for Barry and Born (2013, 5). This brings an optimistic perspective, not a defeatist one, to the discussion of the disciplinary power of disciplines. Foucault himself implores that the general analysis and critique of mechanisms of conditioning and repression must be accompanied with optimism (Foucault 2017, 398). In other words, to the extent that disciplines discipline disciples, it does so as a condition for the execution of power for everyone involved in the relation: Disciplines represent frameworks for the creative power that the disciple wields.
Furthermore, even though disciples means ‘followers’ in its Christian connotation (Barry and Born 2013, 43), belief, conviction and persuasion are not all that matters when it comes to which disciplinary paradigms prevail. It might in some cases be a question of who lives to carry the torch. Max Planck suggests the same: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it (Planck 1950, 33–34).
To emphasise the link between life and death – corporeality in a fundamental sense – and disciplines, I would like to draw the attention to Jacques Derrida's notion of the archive, from his text ‘Archive Fever’ (1995). The reason for this choice is Derrida's emphasis on the ‘fever’ of the archive, that is, its paradoxical tendency towards conservation as destruction of itself from within. This somatic and psychoanalytic metaphor lends itself to a plastic interpretation which sees the discipline in terms of life and the body, able to organise itself as well as to be receptive to the interplay with its outside such as with other disciplines. Let me go into a bit more detail to explain, beginning with Derrida's notion of the archive.
Derrida takes the complexity of the word ‘arkhē’ as his starting point, beginning with an examination of the etymological predecessor of the word ‘archive’: arkheion. The arkheion refers to the house which was at once the residence of the magistrates, or archons, and the depository for official documents. As such, the archive is several things. It is, first, the location that the material is stored, that is, the place from which any archival act commences. Second, it is the sum of the stored material, that is, all the prints and documents that are located in the arkheion. Third, it refers to the power that the people who live there have to decide over that material, or in other words their capacity for commanding over what is stored, how what is stored is interpreted and what is added to it. In this way, the archive represents both a ‘commencement’ and a ‘commandment’ – it is the place from which the development of the archive must start, and it is the power to guide this development. In other words, the archive is a place and a dwelling; it is the history of the place and the history that the material stored there represents; it is its current state of accumulation in terms of dwellers and material; and it is the inherent potential of the archive to change and cause change to its surroundings (Derrida 1995, 9–12).
The potential for change is not incidental but a feature of the archive itself. It is the death drive that the archive depends on. What provides the archive with its life energy is the acknowledgement that the archive is always in peril of death: being lost, destroyed, ignored or forgotten. Derrida writes: There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive (Derrida 1995, 19).
The archive exists precisely because it knows its mortality, the absolute limit for its existence.
The archive needs to fight effacement and oblivion. This feverish fight can only involve self-change over time, that is, to destroy itself from within. But this death drive should not be seen as a speculative logic, according to which the start and end points (birth and death, or origin and conclusion) are individually identifiable. Instead it inhabits the archive as an ‘in-finite’ tension between creation and destruction: This threat is in-finite, it sweeps away the logic of finitude and the simple factual limits, the transcendental aesthetics, one might say, the spatio-temporal conditions of conservation (Derrida 1995, 19).
However, even if the archive's fever is driven by a tension outside of time, according to Derrida, the archive itself is about futurity: The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. (…) It is a question of the future, the question of future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow (Derrida 1995, 27).
What I suggest we can learn from Derrida is that disciplines, understood as archives, is a dwelling for archons. The dwelling is where archons live, that is, the place that holds their person, their identity and sense of intellectual and affective belonging. It is a repository for the accumulated history, the disciplinary tensions and notions of futurity that the discipline entails.
This notion is reflected in the following quote from a teacher interviewed in the AHIE project, who identifies as a geography dweller even if their work involves interdisciplinary teaching: I think there are very few people who would describe themselves fully as interdisciplinary. I think I'm heading in that direction, but I don't think I'd like it if somebody said to me ‘you’re an interdisciplinary researcher’. I'd say, ‘yeah, I draw in interdisciplinary work, but I'm a geographer’.
Contrary to this, some don’t feel at home in the conventional disciplinary delineations and identify their own dwelling as an archive in-between the conventional ones. Another teacher interviewed: I work in an interdisciplinary manner. And so no matter what I’m doing, it is from an interdisciplinary perspective. I enact an interdisciplinary perspective or way of working. So for me, what happens in my mind is that all forms and perspectives around knowledge are equally valid. And it's my job in any conversation to try and understand all of that richness.
These two are examples of the archive's fever. The geographer shows the inherent destructive tendency of the archive by ‘heading in the direction’ of interdisciplinarity, implying that there is a point from which to travel and one to end up at; to dwell in. The interdisciplinary academic has already arrived at their interdisciplinary archive, where certain epistemic praxes rule: ‘it's my job (…) to try and understand’. What is common to these two is that they put words to the desire for an identity, tied to the epistemic assumptions and practices of one archive or another.
To expand on Derrida's archive, I suggest that the view that the discipline's relation to the future is only found in its ‘in-finite’ death drive is insufficient. The pithy phrase from Barry and Born ‘disciplines discipline disciples’ reminds us that the accumulated history that the discipline represents, conditions its dwellers to the extent that the past bears upon the future in at least some way – that there is a possibility ‘to see (what is) coming’ [voir venir], as Catherine Malabou calls it (Malabou 2005, 13).
Having read Malabou, Derrida rejects the possibility ‘to see (what is) coming’ as it reminds him of the notion of salvation, which he cannot accept: ‘to see (what is) coming’ (…) does it not come from the Absolute Other as much as death, which we see coming without ever seeing it come (…)? Time and the future as such, if this is possible, would have then to be seized from this ‘who’ is proper to the Absolute Other, from this Absolute Other to whom we say farewell, or even adieu, a farewell, an adieu or a salutation (…) which must begin by refusing all the assurances of salvation (Derrida 2005, xxxi–xxxii).
I believe that this perspective by Derrida underplays a primary feature of education which is that we do act as if there are some things that can be known. If we didn’t believe that there would be something to gain from education it would not exist. On the other hand, if we believed that we could control the outcome of education to the smallest detail, education would not be a human endeavour but a matter of strict production (see, Papastephanou 2017). Consequently, there are some things that we can ‘see coming’. At the very least, we live as if we can, and education only makes sense as a promise of and for the future. The philosopher John Dewey goes so far as to say that education is society's means of survival in the face of the individual's mortality (Dewey 1916, n.p.).
Therefore, and to emphasise plasticity as the medium of this inquiry, this is where I move towards Malabou's philosophy. I do this to formulate a conception of the archive in which the futurity of the archive plays an important though not primary role. Whereas Derrida's archive is useful for construing the discipline as much a corporeal entity as an intellectual one, both being aspects of each other, its creative drive is caused by its fever – its death drive – and not its will to change in some way or another. Malabou's concept of plasticity lets us continue the thread of the discipline as living matter, but adding the notion of change over time to it. This is paramount for both the thinking of education and of improvisation, as they rely on a notion of epistemic accumulation and the space for spontaneity and intention.
Vivace: The Plastic Archive
A plastic notion of the archive would, if we follow Catherine Malabou, pay attention to the result of the process that archive fever represents. Describing philosophy in terms reminiscent of how I discuss disciplines here, Malabou writes: The idea of a ‘structure of philosophy’ does not therefore refer to a paradigm, model or invariable; rather, it describes the result of the destruction and deconstruction of the paradigm, model or invariable in general. By ‘structure of philosophy’, I mean the form of philosophy after its destruction and deconstruction. This means that structure is not a starting point here but rather an outcome. Structure is the order and organization of philosophy once the concepts of order and organization have themselves been deconstructed. In other words, the structure of philosophy is metamorphosized metaphysics (Malabou 2010, 51, emphasis in original).
The outcome is not an invariable. The mutability of the outcome is plasticity.
The outcome is the plastic structure conditioned by its accumulated history, recognisable as what it is on the basis of what it has become but also what it is not. Its presence is its plasticity: I do not believe in the absence of form or in a possible beyond of form any more than I believe in transcendence or the absence of negativity. Form is the metamorphizable but immovable barrier of thought (Malabou 2010, 49).
In other words, what characterises a something (say, a discipline) is that it is recognisable on the basis of its form, and that its form is a result of its relations to other forms in the world (its non-transcendental receptivity to negativity). The plastic archive is thus what it has come to be, by way of its history, that is, the many meetings between the archive dwellers, the repository of texts and the additions and creations of the dwellers as a response to what goes on outside of the archive, as well as any accidents that might occur. But the plastic archive is primarily the archive's plasticity, that is, its mutability and receptivity to difference.
Malabou's plasticity is about form as the outcome, with plasticity as presence. A main feature of this presence, of plasticity, is its three aspects of change: donation, reception and annihilation. Plasticity entails form's ability to donate change by changing itself, like when form – say, an archive – causes itself to change through creative additions to the repository. Change can also be received from the outside, for instance when something happening in the world, or someone does something to you, which requires a response of some sort. Lastly, change might entail the destruction of the form in the same way that Derrida's archive risks oblivion (Malabou 2008; Reshe 2023).
Malabou first developed plasticity to use as an interpretative tool for Hegel's philosophy (Malabou 2005 [first published in French in 1996]), and later tied the term to the neurological concept ‘neuroplasticity’. In her 2004 polemic Que faire de notre cerveau ? [What should we do with our brain?], Malabou points out that plasticity seemed to be the current scientific paradigm already. A key insight from the neurological sciences was that brain matter was mutable to a degree philosophers were still unwilling to accept (Malabou 2004; English translation 2008). Contrary to previous conceptions of the brain as a static entity, the neurosciences of the 1970s onwards painted a picture of the brain as capable of changing with its environment and the choices of the individual: Effectively, the Cartesian dualism of brain and thought – matter and symbolism – was negated (Malabou 2008).
Because of this, the notion of form as outcome should be understood in its most concrete way: Form encompasses both its material and symbolic aspects, not one or the other. Because the form can be thought, it is being thought by a brain that has (taken) a shape that allows it to understand things like it, which is done in a process that encompasses sensation, cognition, symbolism, determinism and dialectics (Malabou 2007).
Construing, then, disciplines as archives, and archives as plastic forms, allows us to discuss the plastic archive as at once material and symbolic, fundamentally open to change. This change can stem from within the form, from other forms and upholds itself in the face of destruction. Open to change, the plastic archive is also aware of its own mortality, which is a visceral impetus for the plastic archive's inhabitants to contribute to it. The plastic archive is the result of a historical development and the starting point for something new to happen.
In higher education, disciplines as plastic archives are where researchers dwell, archive and create. This implies not only that disciplines are recognisable as something but also that their primary feature is their mutability. This mutability is expressed as the research of individual researchers and research groups, but it is also affected by outside forces such as changes in funding or other political influences, and even unexpected forces such as freak discoveries, nature disasters, serendipity or happenstance. Disciples fight for the survival of their discipline by developing its contents, its outreach and by responding in some way to the state of contemporary society, and by seeking and establishing their identity even in situations of interdisciplinarity.
Interdisciplinary education can thus be understood as meetings between students and teachers who are representatives of plastic archives. In this light, interdisciplinary education appears as a complex ontological matter going beyond any instrumental notion of interdisciplinarity as integration, for instance, as it requires the student to settle into the dwelling that a their own discipline represents, at the same time as they contribute to the development of that archive simply because they dwell there.
Furthermore, students are being asked to bring all of that into a situation where they meet other students who are in the same messy process themselves. Sometimes, this messy meeting can result in a failure of communication which then nullifies the intentions of interdisciplinary education efforts altogether. After attending a compulsory interdisciplinary unit along with students from other disciplines, an International Relations student we interviewed in the AHIE project explained this clearly: Our students are always good at communication, but the other people from other subjects or units – probably the computer science or mathematics – they are kind of isolated. Sorry, this is probably kind of like a stereotype, but in my experience, they are not really good at communication. It's always really difficult to connect with them.
How can we as educators make it easier to connect across archives? How do we facilitate the exchange between students as archons to allow for a creative, non-determinist and non-integrative co-development of the archives? In the following, I suggest that improvisation, specifically jazz improvisation, can be a useful metaphor for this exchange.
Ad Libitum: What is Improvisation?
The reason is that it provides a framework for meetings of representatives from different disciplines – say, instruments or instrument types – with a common goal. That is what happens, I suggest, in interdisciplinary education, too. A geographer dwells, commences and commands within the discipline of geography, with its epistemic and methodological characteristics. Similarly
I’m not the first to make the point that jazz improvisation is an epistemic and communicative model with a potential for exaptation outside of the jazz club or rehearsal room. The jazz bassist and musicologist Alterhaug argues in his article ‘Improvisation on a triple theme’ that improvisation is not really a special activity, exclusive to the trained few, but a mode of being that most humans engage in ‘most of the day’. Improvisation, spoken generally, is about making deliberate use of internalised skills and knowledge in a constantly changing world (Alterhaug 2004, 115). Alterhaug's position, I suggest, both highlights the educational import of the term and invites us to think beyond what I suggest are the two prevailing discourses of improvisation in educational theory. The first of them is that of the student as improviser and the second the teacher.
The First Discourse: The Improvising Student and Self-Alienation
The first discourse of improvisation in educational theory sees improvisation as a skill that should be taught to the student to achieve something else. One example of this is Rancière's descriptions of improvisation in an educational context. Rancière builds on the French teacher Joseph Jacotot (1770–1840) who promoted a method of learning that saw the teacher's job simply as facilitating learning. Ideally, the students would teach themselves without any support from the teacher, according to a method he called ‘universal teaching’ (Jacotot 1829, 1830; Rancière 1991, 15). Part of ‘universal teaching’ was a focus on improvisation as an ‘essential’ educational exercise which involved ‘to learn to speak on any subject, off the cuff, with a beginning, a development, and an ending’ (Rancière 1991, 64–65).
To Rancière, improvisation is not just an intellectual or academic exercise but an aesthetic and therefore social exercise: It is first of all the exercise of our intelligence's leading virtue: the poetic virtue. The impossibility of our saying the truth, even when we feel it, makes us speak as poets, makes us tell the story of our mind's adventures and verify that they are understood by other adventurers, makes us communicate our feelings and see them shared by other feeling beings. Improvisation is the exercise by which the human being knows himself and is confirmed in his nature as a reasonable man, that is to say, as an animal ‘who makes words, figures, and comparisons, to tell the story of what he thinks to those like him’ (Rancière 1991, 64–65, emphases original).
In this dense paragraph, Rancière ties improvisation to a range of social activities: aesthetic virtue, communication, community, emotion, empathy, taste, truth, reason, knowledge and creativity. In this light, Rancière's is in line with Alterhaug's conception, adding what I see as a crucial element: The element of surprise. Improvising as ‘the exercise by which the human being knows himself [sic]’ would be pointless unless this describes a process from not-knowing to knowing. Thus improvisation involves teaching oneself something one didn’t already know about themselves. Something that catches one by surprise.
This process of self-surprise and learning echoes another European educational concept from about the same time, namely the process of ‘self-alienation’ and ‘sublation’ as we know it from G. F. W. Hegel's (1770–1831) Bildung theory. Bildung is a German educational term with a long history and is most often taken to be an educational term emphasising education's socio-political side over quantitative notions of improvement or achievement (Horlacher 2016). Hegel is one of the central philosophers in this tradition (Gadamer 2013, 9–18).
In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes how the ‘spirit’ – roughly Hegel's name for human consciousness – develops through a dialectical process towards greater understanding. Hegel's philosophy is notoriously complex and nuanced, but as a very rough approximation this process consists of the spirit believing that it knows something to be true, only to realise that it can’t be when it learns something that contradicts, or ‘negates’ it. Negations, for Hegel, result in ‘sublation’, which ‘is at the same time a negating and a preserving’ (Hegel 2018, 49, §113). What is sublated disappears as what it is, but is preserved as something new. It is a sort of never-ending transformation (Malabou 2005) of one truth into another (see Hogstad 2024); form's differentiation of itself from itself.
At a certain point in its transformation, the spirit starts to lose confidence in its status as an independent and socially detached individual. Realising that what makes someone an individual is that other people recognise one as such, the spirit starts to acknowledge that the only way to be an individual is to be part of what Hegel calls the ‘substance’, meaning something like a society, with all of its politics, culture and other complexities from which subjects spring (Hegel 2018, 196; 329).
This realisation happens through what Hegel calls a spell of ‘self-alienation’. By some experience, the spirit becomes foreign to itself. It takes itself by surprise and has to get to know itself all over again. Through this process of self-alienation and sublation, the spirit gradually acquires a more complex and complete conception of the world: It is therefore through [Bildung] that the individual here has validity and actuality. His [sic] true original nature and substance is the spirit of the alienation of natural Being. This estrangement is, therefore, both the purpose and the Being-there of the individual; it is at once the means or the transition, both of the substance from thought into actuality, and, conversely, of the determinate individuality into essentiality. This individuality cultivates itself into what it is in itself, and only by so doing is it in itself and has actual Being-there; it has as much actuality and power as it has [Bildung] (Hegel 2018, 196 Emphases original.)
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As we can see, self-alienation plays a fundamental role in Hegel's Bildung (Sørensen 2015). If having the students improvise can contribute to the students Bildung process, that is, their development of the self as a creative, yet fundamentally socially involved individual, we might want to welcome it. The first discourse, ‘student as improviser’ represents a fruitful and central aspect of education. In the next discourse, the focus is on the teacher as improviser.
The Second Discourse: The Teacher as Improviser, Negotiator and Anti-Hierarchon
The second discourse concentrates on improvisation as a tool for the teacher, with one of two aims. The first aim is to negotiate those unexpected and unwanted situations that inevitably occur during teaching, or simply as a technique to improve teaching. The music educationalist Holdhus and colleagues show that research on improvisation in education can be organised along with four lines. The first line emphasises the teacher's communication skills, which involves negotiating, organising and authorising the teaching situation in communication with the students. The second line focusses on educational improvisation as a structured and pre-planned activity. Third, the structure and plan comes into fruition when the teacher spontaneously draws on their own personal repertoire of internalised knowledge and skills. Fourth, the notion that improvisation is a skill that doesn’t necessarily transfer across domains or contexts (Holdhus et al. 2016). The historian of education Jarning provides a similar perspective discussing how the teacher's improvisational skills are similar to that of a jazz improviser's (Jarning 2010). Even though both of these examples point out the complexities of the dialogical nature of educational improvisation, they have in common the notion of improvisation as an activity set into motion and wielded by the teacher with the aim to improve the educational situation.
The second aim critiques the first. It encourages the teacher's use of improvisation to diminish the deleterious effects of the inherent skewed power relations of educational situations. Rancière's method described above is part of this discourse too, because of his emphasis on the teacher to support, not dictate, the students's learning (Rancière 1991). Säfström and Rytzler make an explicitly political argument for improvisation, suggesting it should be considered a teaching approach that foregrounds the students's creativity and interests instead of curricular predeterminations. Teacher improvisation thus runs counter to teleological notions of teaching, effectively supporting democratic and non-oppressive sides of education (Säfström and Rytzler 2023).
The shortcoming of this discourse is that it leaves aside the plasticity of the situation. Whenever the teacher improvises, the conditions for the student change. Therefore, the student, too, has to make deliberate use of internalised skills and knowledge in a constantly changing world, in other words improvise, as Alterhaug reasons above. Nobody can improvise in a vacuum. Therefore, a third discourse of improvisation in education is needed. I propose that this third discourse begin by discussing improvisation in education in light of jazz improvisation.
The Third Discourse: Improvisation as Education
Jazz improvisation is a musical activity, and as such it cannot be done in isolation. The musicologist Cristopher Small puts this point front and centre and suggests that ‘making music’ should be called ‘to music’ instead: To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing (Small 1998, 9).
This view on music expands the scope of music-making to include the conditions that allow us to appreciate the music at all. Even the audience contributes to the performance simply by listening.
An extreme example of this is the modernist composer John Cage's famous 1952 piece 4’33”, which by design expands the performance beyond playing notes. Remarkably, the sheet music has only three instructions: First, that the piece should be tacet (quiet). Second, that it ‘may be performed by an instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists’. Third, that it should last 4 minutes and 33 seconds, but may ‘last any length of time’ (Fetterman 2010, 79). In other words, it is a quiet piece of any duration which should be performed.
When it was first presented for an audience, the piece appeared as a radical break with the European tradition of classical music because it subverted the expectation that a concert is primarily about musicians playing notes. This piece seems not to be about that but about listening instead. David Tudor, the first to perform the piece (on the grand piano) said: It is (…) one of the most intense listening experiences one can have. You really listen. You're hearing everything there is. Audience noises play a part in it. It is cathartic – four minutes and thirty-three seconds of meditation, in effect (Schonberg 1960 quoted in Fetterman 2010, 74).
I bring this up to suggest, in line with the above discussions of the plastic archive and improvisation – and with Small's notion of music – that being part of an activity also makes someone a contributor to that activity. Improvisation in education is therefore not a question of ‘who improvises a solo?’ but ‘who are involved in the improvisation that is going on?’. Whether the teacher or the student is the improviser, both are necessarily involved in the improvisation.
To extend the metaphor, let us look at how the jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz listens intently to his colleagues to find inspiration in resistance and contrast: ‘The piano player might just independently do something as part of the rhythm section that is attention-getting, something he is just directing at me’, Lee Konitz points out. ‘If I hear the piano player play a figure, I’ll stop for a moment and then react to that. I’ll do something as a result of what he did. Or maybe the piano player does something that is a reaction to something I’ve just played. That's a surefire way of getting my attention’ (Berliner 1994, 359).
The trumpeter Art Farmer does the same as he notices that to initiate a longer chain of events, a soloists sometimes performs ‘strong rhythmic patterns just to wake up the drummer’ and then ‘tries to respond to whatever’ the partner ‘does in reaction to that’ (Berliner 1994, 359).
This emphasises the idea that an improvisation, even when it is a solo feature, is never an isolated event. Like in Rancière's improvised stories, where communication is the goal, jazz improvisation is a matter of collaboration between all those who take part. It is a symbolic system. In the academic situation, a student improvises by taking part in the educational context, whether the teacher leads by taking the space to improvise or the student is left to improvise on a given theme – because improvisation is both the parts that are eminently evident and the parts we don’t immediately perceive that creatively and spontaneously support, provoke and give shape to the evident parts.
Improvisation in interdisciplinary education, thus, involves a great deal of listening and response, as well as the involvement of every implicated party. It is a dialectical and plastic process which involves initiative, response, resistance and development over time. In the AHIE project, we interviewed a university teacher who teaches at an interdisciplinary unit and shares this recognition. They recount their experience that their students, who came from different disciplines, learned a lot from navigating disciplinary differences through the act of listening and improvising – communicating, creating, risking, reacting and listening: Teacher: They definitely learned collaboration. For some, it was ‘collaboration’ in the sense of ‘I now know how to hand something on time’. For others, it was developing really good listening skills and being able to hear somebody say something that they didn't understand at first, but then see it in a context where it made sense. So, when they first met as these four or five completely different disciplinarians, looking at each other thinking, ‘where do we start?’ – it was almost as if they could see this epistemic idea being created because of the way that they were able to think through it. That took patience for them. I think that's definitely a great skill for them in the future to not just hold so tight to their own discipline knowledge, but to be ready to listen to others and be ready to take risks, be ready to try things out, to not have them work, and to learn from that as well.
In a particular sense, students from one discipline who meet students from another discipline are like musicians as they bring in their own unique perspective on the issue at hand. Like the trumpeter Art Farmer tries to ‘wake up the drummer’, the international relations student we met earlier might have to find a way to ‘wake up’ the computer science student so they can navigate their epistemic differences in a constructive way.
Coda: Improvisation as a Metaphor for Interdisciplinary Education
To finish, I’ll present an analogy pulling together the threads presented in this article. Imagine a group of academics in an interdisciplinary setting as a traditional quintet of jazz musicians à la the formative groups of Miles Davis: A drummer, a bassist, a pianist, a trumpeter and a saxophonist. Each of these musicians is archons in that they are trained in their own instrument and therefore guarding and developing their own traditions with their life. When they perform, they always commence from the traditions of that instrument – what they have rehearsed, learned and selected. They command the presence and therefore future of their instrument by playing something instead of something else. Since their previous experience and training condition what and how they play, but do not determine it, playing an instrument is an act of free expression made possible by the confines of the history of the form. In other words, playing an instrument is an expression of plasticity. And beyond that, the extended situation – for instance the possibility of playing in concert halls or clubs, or having to distribute their music outside of mainstream outlets – conditions and shapes the performance because ‘to music’ is more than making nice noise.
I imagine that our quintet asks ‘where do we start?’ They realise that the drummer has no significant melodic or harmonic import but can contribute with time, rhythm and accentuation. The bassist aids and expands the element of time and rhythm and provides a harmonic foundation for the band. The pianist can play several notes at the same time and thus shape the harmonic and rhythmic expression of the collaboration. The trumpeter can only play one note at the time but is an expert at manipulating their instrument to shout and scream. Also playing a single tone instrument, the saxophonist has developed a rasping tone almost such as the human voice, breathy, flexible and quick.
When the quintet then ‘think[s] through’ their differences, under the condition that they should do something together, it appears crucial to have a notion of what each brings to the situation as archons. To arrive at a form of interplay that allows every participant to draw on their strengths and thus learn from each other requires that each player knows something about the conditions of their own and the other players's contributions and plasticity. While a drummer needs to acknowledge that her contributions to a harmonic whole is limited, it helps her playing to know when a harmony increases in tension and releases, because she can then add to the music by adjusting the intensity of her playing to suit, or anticipate.
In the same way, it would perhaps help the international relations student to know something about the epistemic outlooks, research objects and methodological approaches that a computer science student cares about. Of course, to know this she would have to know a bit about where she stands herself in these issues, and to facilitate this, perhaps the teacher could act as a musical mediator, knowing their students well enough to facilitate their ‘think[ing] through’ their differences to create something new. By knowing the other and themselves, the teacher and student might be able to outline, accept and encourage the differences that bring out all of that richness.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the AHIE and HumStud research groups and to the Plasticity Team, and to the patient and thorough reviewers.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Norges Forskningsråd, (grant number 326088).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research has been conducted in accordance with Norwegian national guidelines for research ethics and laws concerning data protection.