HABITUS-ART TALK

Speaker

ALESSANDRO BERTINETTO - UNIVERSITY OF TURIN, DFE

Improvisation is often described as the paradigm of non-anticipatory action. To improvise seems, by definition, to suspend foresight: improvisers do not “see in advance” what will come next, but respond to what happens here and now. This apparent opposition between improvisation and anticipation, however, rests on an overly narrow conception of anticipation as explicit prediction or planning. In this paper, I argue that improvisation—even in its most radical forms—is not the negation of anticipation, but rather draws on a specific kind of anticipatory resource.

The central claim is that improvisatory practices function thanks to habits. Far from being rigid routines that constrain creativity, habits operate as enabling conditions for improvisation. They sediment embodied skills, perceptual sensitivities, and normative orientations that allow agents to respond creatively to unforeseen situations. Recent work has emphasized this point by describing habits as providing provisos (Bergamin 2024): dispositional resources that do not determine future actions in advance, but sustain improvisation by incorporating possibilities of future creative action.

Building on an aesthetics of improvisation (Bertinetto 2022) and a phenomenological– pragmatist–enactive account of habit (Bertinetto 2024), I show that improvisatory anticipation is neither predictive nor representational. It is a form of embodied, situated anticipation that unfolds in action itself. In improvisation, the future is not foreseen but prepared: habits anticipate without prefiguring, by opening a space of responsiveness in which novel sensemaking can emerge. Improvisatory action thus exemplifies a distinctive temporal structure in which past habits, present contingencies, and future possibilities are dynamically intertwined.

Alessandro Bertinetto is a Full Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Turin. He has been visiting scholar at numerous institutions, including the FU Berlin and the Universities of Toulouse, Luxembourg, Kanazawa, Belo Horizonte, Murcia, Madrid (Complutense & Autonoma). Among his published works: Pensée des Sons (2017), Eseguire l’inatteso (2016), Aesthetics of Improvisation (2022), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts (ed. with M. Ruta, 2022), Estetica (2025), Filosofia della musica (2026), The Infinite Form (with S. Furlani, 2026). He is Chair of the Philosophy Degree Program, PI of the FIS-Project HABITUS and Director of ART (www.art.unito.it).