Structure, Agency, and Improvisation

Abstract

The improvised joint performances of small-group jazz ensembles, basketball squads, or partners in conversation pose interesting challenges for conceptualizing the relationship between agents and social structures. Contemporary approaches to the structure and agency debate can be divided into microfoundational and practice-theoretic. Heir to the individualist tradition, microfoundational approaches treat structures as continually re-created by the instrumentally rational choices of agents. Heir to the holist tradition, practice theory treats social structures as reproduced practices and agents as having dispositions to reproduce those patterns (e.g. Bourdieu’s habitus or Giddens’ practical consciousness). In this essay, a detailed discussion of jazz improvisation is the basis for a critique of both microfoundations and practice theory. Neither way of conceptualizing structure and agency can account for the way jazz musicians maintain improvised musical forms. This essay suggests an alternative conception of agency as ecological attunement. In order to maintain structures improvisationally, agents must be capable of a kind of mutual coordination which is not the product of planning or deliberate choice. The essay proposes a three-part analysis of the capacity for mutual coordination. The resulting conception of agency shares features of both dominant approaches. Like microfoundations, it treats social structures as continually created by agents, not as reproduced patterns. Like practice theory, it refrains from conceptualizing agents as deliberate choosers. Ultimately, to be an agent requires treating others as agents and responding to the joint possibilities for action provided by the environment.