Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art

transcultural studies 13 (2017) 99-118

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Jason Tuckwell University of Western Sydney [email protected]

Abstract

There are two ancient formulations of the problem art presents to us: poiesis understands art as a generic ontological problem and techné treats art as a particular kind of work—a skilful, intentional practice to deviate processes of becoming. Arguably, this distinction leads to very different procedures for determining the ‘work of art’; poiesis considers artistic praxis as resolved into the artefact while techné considers it as a problem in-itself. This tension is evident in the generic designation of the ‘work of art’ which tends to conflate process with what this process produces. This conflation about the work of art can be illuminated via a return to Aristotle’s concept of techné. This is because techné (the kind of work art performs) remains irreducible to both poiesis (to make) and praxis (deliberative action). Where poiesis and praxis are constructive activities differentiated by their intentional ends, techné remains a more foundational power to work upon processes of material causation. What these Aristo- telian distinctions clarify is that the work of art is neither resolvable in the terms of its productions (poiesis) or the terms of its practices (praxis, deliberative actions); rather, art works by deviating these productive processes in the midst of their becoming, by bringing unprecedented differences into being. As such, the work of art apprehended by Aristotelian techné is not reducible to any poiesis; it works upon and divides poiesis into another workflow—a creative poiesis. The work of art thus appears as a creative, causal power counter-posed to all production.

Keywords poiesis – techné – aesthetics – Aristotle – Benjamin

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Introduction: Poiesis and techné

There are two ancient formulations of the problem art presents to us; poiesis understands art as a generic ontological problem and techné treats art as a particular kind of work—a skilful, intentional practice to deviate processes of becoming. Although Plato considered the universality of poiesis to ultimately determine thinking about art, techné remained for the Greeks an irreducible problem. This is largely because, despite the exclusion of techné from episteme—a knowledge of universals—it was quite clear that reason had to have its own sort of techné, a skilful discernment or calculative process (logis- tikós) sufficient to produce sophia: the skill of reasoning with universals.1 As such, poiesis—with its universalising aspiration to think how ‘anything what- ever passes from non-being into being’—cannot be obviously resolved without putting techné to work.2 If this is an enduring obstacle for philosophical and ontological approaches to the problem of art, it is because their own coming to being relies upon putting techné to work. This precludes techné’s appearance as a proper object for poiesis, insofar as any element taken as axiomatic in the construction of a model, remains outside its explanatory powers.3

1 It is particularly with Aristotle, that the complexity of Greek thought about σοφίᾱ (sophia) and its complications with questions of skill (techné, broadly speaking) find a systematic expression. There are the famous passages in Book vi of the Nicomeachean Ethics (specifically, EN1141a9), but the discussion of skilfulness permeates Aristotle’s divisions of knowledge, from the ubiquity of logos (evident in ‘beasts’), through aisthēsis (the ubiquity of sense- perception) up into the higher, exclusively human, rational faculties; poiesis (specific to ‘making’) and praxis (action, that is, specifically of a deliberative kind; political and ethical). 2 Plato, The Republic, 1961: 205c. 3 Aristotle can be understood to anticipate this logical limit, that was not formalised until Gödel (1931). ‘Now induction supplies a first principle or universal, deduction works from universals; therefore there are first principles from which deduction starts, which cannot be proved by deduction; therefore they are reached by induction.’ (en, vi. iii. 2–4 [EN1139b14–36]) This logical limit upon the explanatory powers of any ideal system finds a formal presen- tation in Godel; ‘Hence a consistency proof for the system S can be carried out only by means of modes of inference that are not formalized in the system S itself, and analogous results hold for other formal systems as well.’ (Gödel, On Formally Undecidable Proposi- tions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems i, pp. 596). As such, even at the limit of the rational intuition upon which episteme (knowledge of universals) rests and which is thought to be beyond any form of rational deliberation, there remains the potentially difficult complications with skill. In the case of first principles, rational thought acquires its apprehension of universals via an inductive encounter or by other modes of inference—that is, via the work of techné (that is, via logistikós [calculation] and

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To put this another way, not only does ‘the work of art’ remain inscrutable to ontological models, it is more profoundly what is put to work in order to for- mulate a poiesis. What this essay will attempt to show is that if techné cannot be reduced to poiesis, it is not only because it is the immanent mechanism that processes production, but most importantly because it divides poiesis into a counter-oriented, creative workflow. It is arguably this latter deviation into a counter-oriented creative poiesis that has always made the work of art possible in its artisanal sense, the technical skill to shape clay or stone, words or sounds, paint or pixels, and so on. Yet, if we are to reconsider techné in its Aristotelian breadth—as that distinctly rational process that links aisthēsis (sense- perception) to a power to re-shape nature (phusis) on its own terms—then techné only begins by governing the transition from embodied sense to thinking subjects. That is first to say, techné problematises the domain of aesthetics within which the work of art is frequently restricted. Techné certainly performs this medial process that works between the hand that shapes the bowl and the eye of the craftsperson, but it does not resolve into the percept, but rather persisting as the skill necessary to organise rational thought. The work of art does not simply resolve between sense-perception and the ideas, rendering it indistinguishably from the appearance of the artefact; techné prolongs in the world of ideas, carrying out the work through which our highest conceptions are forged into being. Thus, techné is not simply to shape the form of the bowl—it is also at work in the shaping of formal ideas, what inheres in the process of cogitation that organises artefacts and aesthetic ideas into a model of poiesis. Wherever this work of art is ontologically reduced to a relation between the artefact and the aesthetic idea, this complex of skilful work-flows has been ex- changed with an ideal-object; without this preliminary reduction, the problem of art cannot be rendered comprehensible in terms of poiesis. If this is particularly problematic for the work of art, it is more importantly so because this cleaves the distinctive work-flow of Aristotelian techné into two disconnected processes. This is to separate the productivity of aisthēsis from the secondary process that announces the uniqueness of techné: the power to re-problematise causal processes, via a unique efficient cause. The problem of

aisthēsis (sense-perception) to which techné is the most proximate faculty). If then, there is an unbridgeable incompossibility between the inductive or inferential functions governed by techné and any possible universal knowledge, there is no possibility of a universal deduction of techné. That is to say, there is no adequate method to ontologically reduce techné to an understanding of poiesis, so that the problem of the work of art is secured within a universal ontological model of how everything comes into being. A more thorough investigation of this problem is undertaken in Tuckwell, Creation and the Function of Art, 2017.

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102 Tuckwell art is thus not properly composed between the serial arrangements of artefacts and aesthetic ideas, but around the mechanism of intentional skill through which the contents of our higher faculties are made to affect real deviations upon what is already in being. If techné cannot be rendered in ontological terms—the apprehension of a unidirectional mode of becoming which sensi- bilises the artefact, together with how everything comes to be—it is precisely because the problem of art concerns a unique causal power, an action, that works upon this dominant flow. Techné cannot be understood in the terms of poiesis, because in setting to work upon it, techné divides poiesis, deviating the process into a recursive, counter-oriented workflow. That is to say, far from being unified within poiesis, techné causes it to differentiate. The problem of art therefore concerns the work upon poiesis that causes it to deviate into distinct work-flows: there remains poiesis in its orthodox terms, a dominant, ‘natural’, unidirectional flow of becoming I will term productive poiesis; and there are secondary, recursive and supplementary work-flows, I will collectively term creative poiesis.4 My primary proposition is that the problem of art pertains solely to this latter, creative work-flow and is comprehensible only within these terms. As such, the work of art concerns the functional activity whose broad task is to re-problematise the process of becoming, through which it brings the unprecedented into being. Techné is not only what makes the theorising of poiesis possible, but puts these theories to work by precipitating an active workflow that deviates material causes into another process of becoming. This is an unprecedented and emergent kind of work that initiates another causal operation, decoupled from dominant, material work-flows. As such, techné carries out two distinct kinds

4 This division at the work of art has a precedent in Aristotle, who explicitly differentiated art (techné), into two problematic workflows; one which works with material causation (what governs the use of products) the other with efficient causation (what directs production)— the intentional will to shape what is coming into being: For the arts make their material (some simply make it, others make it serviceable), and we use everything as if it was there for our sake. (We also are in a sense an end. ‘That for the sake of which’ may be taken in two ways, as we said in our work On Philosophy.) The arts, therefore, which govern the matter and have knowledge are two, namely the art which uses the product and the art which directs the production of it. That is why the using art also is in a sense directive; but it differs in that it knows the form, whereas the art which is directive as being concerned with production knows the matter. For the helmsman knows and prescribes what sort of form a helm should have, the other from what wood it should be made and by means of what operations. In the products of art, however, we make the material with a view to the function, whereas in the products of nature the matter is there all along. [emphasis added] Aristotle, Physics, 194a34–194b9.

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Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art 103 of work; on the one hand, it processes the primary productive poiesis via perception, delivering to ontological sense making its apprehensions of how ‘all comes to being’. And on the other, it initiates a separate, deviating and creative poiesis that operates upon the primary process and whose task is to contest telos—the ‘shape’ (morphé) of what comes into being. Only this latter kind of work, that exploits the process of creative poiesis to intentionally bring differences into being addresses what specifies the term, ‘the work of art’.5 In contrast, to pass over techné in favour of various resolute models of poiesis is arguably to pass over the problem of art by deferring it to other regimes of sense-making, thought more capable of determining it; sociological, cultural, psychoanalytical, political, philosophical, aesthetic, and so on. I by no means say this to delegitimise these approaches, nor to deny their profound implica- tions with art, but rather to argue that these approaches do not encounter the problem the work of art presents, but rather exemplifies some of the ways it may be put to work; it is to utilise techné’s governance of productive and creative work-flows in the service of epistemological sense-making, rather than to encounter it as a problem in its own right. This will be my mode of analysis in tracking the work of art into the modernist moment. What I have particularly in mind here, or rather in mind to contest, is Benjamin’s Marxist reappropriation of the ‘work of art’ into the service of politics, or more precisely, a political theory that had come to see

5 Indeed, the only credible contemporary residuum of the idea that techné uniquely opposes or works upon phusis (the poiesis of how all comes to being), persists in theories of technology. What for art only lingers in the fallen spectre of Romanticism (the problems of the will, artistic intentionality and creative autonomy, shackled inseparably to illegitimate principles of theological transcendence), finds a very different expression in the transformative powers of industrial technology. Moreover, it is only with technology that the unique efficient cause of techné—the directing of human intention against the dominant, natural order— overcomes its Aristotelian impoverishment. It is under these conditions that techné’s alterity from the natural (its artifice and artificiality)—its confrontation with nature—can no longer be ignored; it is only when techné is adequate to the levelling of mountains, the de-forestation of continents, and the destabilisation of the planetary climate, that techné’s unique transformative powers are taken seriously. Yet even here, the thought that technology evidences our power to reshape the world after our own designs, is far from uncontroversial; that is, precipi- tated by a unique efficient cause a really creative, ‘higher-order’ work, distinguishable from chance. Gilbert Simondon’s problematisation of technology constitutes an ambitious and highly innovative attempt to re-establish a unidirectional poiesis from techné’s confrontation with natural becoming. For Simondon, it is precisely the second, intentional functionality of techné (that is the ‘design’ or ‘will’ of intentional agents) that is explicitly downgraded within a general ontology within which this natural/artificial opposition is overcome (Simondon, passim, but specifically, 2017 and 2009).

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Figure 1 Schematisation of Aristotle’s doctrine of four causes. itself as a scientific discipline—one that has arguably forgotten the generative role techné plays in the very constitution of the political. If this procedure is particularly instructive, it is because Benjamin moves to not only resolve the work of art into a political poiesis, but does so via a reduction of modernist art to its technological processes of production. In contrast, I will try to argue that rather than evidencing a necessary transition from ritualistic to political functions, modernist art practices show that techné is forcing itself onto the scene by demonstrating the work of art’s counter-orientation to all possible processes of production.

Aristotelian techné: Creativity and Efficient Causation

In order to do so, I’ll try to clarify these claims by returning to Aristotle; perhaps he is an unlikely figure to bring forward into modernist or contemporary aesthetic problems, but he is arguably the most sophisticated thinker of techné. If this immediately resets the terms of thinking about the work of art via poiesis, it is because Aristotle makes absolutely clear that art is not a problem about ontology, but rather about causation. Let us begin with a schematisation of Aristotle’s famous model of the four orders of causation. (Figure 1) For Aristotle, the four causes engage in complex inter-relations that make their categorization far from simple.6 Fundamentally, the four kinds of cause are predicated upon sets of distinctions between the universal and particular, the potential and actual, the immutable and

6 This particular discussion is dealt with in Aristotle, Physics: 195a15–26. A more complete discussion of this complexity is the subject of the third subchapter, Book ii of Physics: 194b16–195b30.

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changeable, and into which they form two dynamic groupings or inter-related tensions: the universal pair of the formal and final, and the particular pair of the material and efficient. In what are arguably secondary distinctions, the causes are otherwise differentiated by their relative positions and their direc- tionality or orientation. In this sense, the formal and material are paired as the hylomorphic properties that determine the essential nature of beings. In contrast, efficient and final causes comprise a second pairing, responsible for the purpose (telos) that brings beings into appearance, accounting for both the transcendental unity across all being (final) and the particular differences manifest within actual beings (efficient). What then orders all of causation into a coherent whole, is the unidirectionality of becoming, that almost exclusively operates from universal to universal through the medial particulars—that is, being naturally becomes through the progression, formal→material→efficie nt→final. What finally then distinguishes techné in this metaphysical model, is its unique manifestation of an efficient cause that instigates a recursive, or counter-oriented flow to the unidirectionality of natural becoming. Thus it is the uniqueness of techné that introduces a deviation into causation, giving the directional scheme, formal→material ⇌ efficient→final. If what counts as natural causation is therefore far less determining in Aris- totle, it is because art is defined by the power to deviate poiesis, the process of natural becoming. Moreover, that this type of cause is specific to the human does not obviously derive from its essential form (that is, from the essence of human nature).7 Aristotle rather deduces that techné must be a rational faculty,

7 The reason for this difficulty resides in the metaphysical divisions upon which Aristotelian causation is founded. For Aristotle, there is certainly an eternal, concrete essence from which each human being is commonly drawn, but where this essence is defined by consistency and immutability, it cannot admit of properties responsible for change and impermanence. That is to say, techné—the agent responsible for generating differences in being—cannot ema- nate from the pairing of the formal and final, in which a universal human nature would be inscribed. This much is further evident in Aristotle’s qualification of skillful techné as an efficient cause; that is, those kinds of causes that generate the secondary, actualised differences endemic to existential being. What is entirely innovative then in Aristotle, is this: he conceives of a crucial distinction of human beings, that cannot be derived from a universal essence or common nature (see particularly Aristotle, Posterior Analytics: 100a5–100b4). Rather, techné would appear to acquire its unique specificity from an adaptation of, or a working upon the more common manifestation of efficient causes; accidents, chance and aleatory events. It is arguably the capacity for memory that potentiates knowledge of a universal kind that is a more obvious candidate for the essence of universal human nature, upon which a new kind of efficient causation becomes possible; that is, once the innate capacity to apprehend universals is paired with a capacity to learn (memory), then the affection of efficient causes can develop from the merely accidental to the intentional.

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106 Tuckwell because art works by intervening upon the telos in phusis, the purposive shaping that determines the difference between beings brought into appearance. The famous example Aristotle deploys is the analysis of the bed; an acorn has a formal cause that shapes a subsequent material flow of causation—this governs how a seed begets the final appearance of a tree, unless an artist’s efficient cause intervenes.8 In this way, Aristotle thinks mimesis in a radically different way from Plato, because artistic intention does not imitate forms (as in classical representation) but telos, the causal process that shapes what is coming into being; this is how the work of art deviates a tree into a bed. As such for Aristotle, it is not the hypokeimenon—the problem of hylomorphism—that establishes the terms of art’s mimetic function. It is rather in the nature of telos—that for which things are done and into which they resolve—that the imitative relation depends and which differentiates poiesis from praxis. If this requires us to make a preliminary break with Aristotle, it is in order to pursue the problem of art in the prior and broader category of logis- tikós, the calculative activity that gives rationality its distinctive properties.9 For Aristotle, it is logistikós that divides into the fundamental practices of poiesis (making) and praxis (action). This will be to reposition the priority of techné: for what must be argued is that techné is not simply the activity of making via an imitation of natural becoming, but a more primordial faculty. First, let us clarify how the Aristotelian distinction between poiesis and praxis remains arguably decisive. To begin, both are proximate because they concern telos; not the final cause (the formal, eternal and universal directly apprehended by episteme), but rather those efficient causes concerning varia- tion. That is to say, poiesis and praxis are both efficient causes, functionally animated by the different kinds of ends they drive at. Poiesis, ‘to make’, has an end outside of itself, which is to say that it is a process of production whose purpose is to produce differences into being. This is why it is dominant in material craft and which establishes the orthodox philosophical determination that art is essentially ontological. On the other hand, praxis, ‘action’, is an end in itself, so it is a form of deliberation that is proper to moral and ethical concerns and whose highest expression is phrónēsis, concerning issues of leadership, good living, political action and so on.10

8 Aristotle, Physics: 193a13–16. 9 In this sense, logistikós pertains very broadly insofar as we consider Aristotle to propose a comprehensive vision of a rational universe, thereby instigating a rational or scientific worldview. The primitiveness of logistikós is profoundly evident in Aristotle, where he sees evidence of this even in plants. 10 This is exemplified in the task which praxis is allotted, namely the moral and ethical function of phrónēsis; that is, eudaimonia, happiness, the pursuit of a good life. (Aristotle, 1984:

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Now, techné’s relationship to these activities is more ambiguous than might originally appear, because in its Platonic formulation, ‘techné goes everywhere that epistasthai does,’ (Nussbaum, 2001: 444), where epistasthai is the closest term to our generic designation, ‘to know’ and where this explicitly concerns the sense of ‘knowing how’, in the form of ‘knowing how to do’.11 As such, techné is uncontroversially animate within poiesis (indeed, is frequently claimed to be a type or kind of poiesis), for it is only through a skilful deviation of efficient causation (a telos with an end outside itself) that poiesis ‘makes’; that is, as an imitation of natural production, through which it brings difference into being.12 And it is this Aristotelian distinction we have lost in the rather vague contemporary designations, the ‘work of art’ and ‘artistic praxis,’ where the process of artistic production tends to be indistinguishably collapsed into its product. For the telos animate within poiesis, and which distinguishes it from praxis, is that it does not have an end in itself; that is, it is distinguished by the irreducibility of means and ends, so that the process of production (the means, i.e. techné) should not be conflated with the product (the telos proper to poiesis, where ‘to make’ has its end in the appearance of an artefact).13 This is most

1140b5–7) That such an activity could have an end outside itself, would be a sort of nihilist absurdity. (Aristotle, 1984: 1048b25–27) That is, one would pursue the good life in order to resolve it, as though the goal of life was to have lived well, rather than virtue constituting a method of good living. 11 This distinction within the contemporary designation ‘to know’ is more latent within the continental tradition than in analytic philosophy, where it is a major topic addressing the distinction between cognition and thought, ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing what’. For a seminal and much discussed treatment, see Ryle (1949), however the above argument shares some closer affinities with Hetherington (2006). 12 Of course, techné is the exceptional case of an efficient cause, insofar as it is derived from the specifically intentional, rational activity of a thinking agent; the intention to deviate phusis, the process of natural becoming. Nevertheless for Aristotle, efficient causes remain largely accidental; chance or aleatory events that deviate the essential perfection of forms into the actualised variations in being. An oak tree has a universal and perfect form but this existence is eternal, unchanging and remains resolutely potential. In the process of it coming into being, to become an actually existing tree, this perfect, essential form will almost certainly encounter accidental processes—a termite infestation, a lack of nutrients or sunlight, a lightening, and so on—that will cause this perfect form to deviate in various ways, generating a deviation in the symmetry of the branches, lopsided- ness, a stunted aspect and so on. This identification of causality in nature—of a strongly determining, essential, formative process together with a supplementary deviating role for aleatory or chance events—has remained profoundly influential in accounting for the causal mechanisms of natural processes in much contemporary science. 13 For example: ‘where there are two things of which one is a means and the other an end, they have nothing in common except that the one receives what the other produces.

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108 Tuckwell evident in the contemporary ambiguity of ‘the work of art,’ where the ‘work’ signifies this point of absolute convergence or indetermination between the process of production and what is produced, at the price of arguably foreclos- ing the specific problem of art. In Aristotelian terms, such a conflation breaks the distinction between poiesis and praxis, a difference maintained by the function telos performs. For Aristotelian poiesis, its telos functions to actualize, because ‘to make’ is to produce something, some resolution or outcome. As for praxis, when Aristotle says that it is an end in itself, he means that in this case, telos is a sort of inherence. What Aristotle distinguishes here is quite a different sort of function for telos. This is because, in praxis where telos is an end in itself, it is not at all the termi- nation into a product; praxis re-problematises what constitutes ‘work’, because telos consistently inheres within the action. Finally then, an ontological distinction is evident; for what also distinguishes praxis and poiesis is a displacement of originary causes, for good actions are an end in themselves, so their originary cause (entelechy) inheres within the active being, whereas artisanal poiesis—the activity of making specific to human beings—is impoverished because it has a cause outside of itself (that is, residing in the productive agent, or maker). All this is to say that, after the circulation through the efficient causes of poiesis and praxis, we will return to the judgement of a dominating episteme, and the re-instantiation or reifica- tion of this complex into a general aesthetic problem; that is, the abstraction of the causal activities of the work of art into the eternal, universal terms of the formal and final. Poiesis, ‘to make,’ with no access to the immutable and unchanging and animated only by a donated telos belonging to techné, is the most subordinate of the rational types. Next, praxis, manifest in its highest form of phrónēsis, has its deliberative power animated by the inherent telos of its own being, giving it an immanent access to the immutable and unchanging. Finally, there is episteme, the wisdom or understanding of what is unchanging and which is beyond rational deliberation, giving the thinker a direct access to the universal, formal and final causes.14 What is thereby established, besides Aristotle’s far more penetrating account of art making and its separation from

Such, for example, is the relation in which workmen and tools stand to their work; the house and the builder have nothing in common, but the art of the builder is for the sake of the house.’ Aristotle, Politics: 1328a27–35. 14 This is the definitive formulation of Aristotelian metaphysics, carried out by Heidegger (2008). They are like the moments of a unidirectional, transcendental ascension of the ontological model; becoming (poiesis), the ontic, es gibt (phrónēsis) and the infinitive or always, already, Being (episteme).

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Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art 109 deliberative action, is a succinct formula for the passage of the aesthetic object through its material production into the production of an object for thought. And if this formula remains today, it is insofar as this reduction of the work of art into a series of artefacts, broadly defines the field of art in the terms of an aesthetic relation whose task is to mediate between sense perception and thought. As a consequence, the problem of work is resolved into aesthetic ideas, to be judged, deliberated upon and categorised, by more epistemologi- cally capable disciplines. What then, about techné? We have already noted that techné is a source of great ambiguity for the Greeks, because for any rational deliberation a certain skill is required. Even when Aristotle considers sophia—the wisdom that marks the attainment of epistemological knowledge—he begins again by considering the technite; the master-craftsperson who possesses wisdom if only about the particular; it is only at the threshold of the universal that techné is explicitly denied access.15 And if this finally delivers us to the functional su- periority latent in Aristotle’s formulation, it is because techné is not attached to the more generic Platonic epistasthai, but arguably the broader and more primitive faculty of logistikós; the calculative rational computation that not only precipitates the activities of poiesis and praxis, but constitutes a very different encounter: it connects the inherent function of cogitation (rational, calculative cognition) to the fundamentally rational, calculative order that governs universal causation. As such, it must be argued that a mastery of techné is as specific to poiesis (to skilfully ‘make’) as it is to the highest praxis of phrónēsis; that is, the capacity to live well is equally in need of skilfulness, requisite for the arts of moral judgement and ethical deliberation. If techné does not seem to be immediately evident here, it is because like all telos proper to praxis, its end inheres within the process, rather than its more overt purpose in poiesis, where skill leads to a different, productive end (the artefact). In short, techné is the skilful faculty present in both making and rational action, arguably because it is the intentional power specific to techné that functionally re-purposes telos, from an end in itself (praxis) to one outside of it (poiesis). Let us return this appraisal of Aristotelian thought into the broad terms of the argument. Praxis and poiesis must retain their specific difference, but this is not a categorical difference, determined by formal or material, originary differences. It is rather an emergent difference at telos, the means and ends at work in becoming, that separate praxis from poiesis, action from making. That is why we cannot proceed with a simplistic conflation of art with poiesis which would

15 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: 1141a9–16.

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110 Tuckwell extend into Aristotle’s categorical division between art and praxis. Rather in re-problematising art around techné and its proximity to the calculative faculty animating logistikós, art must be understood to necessarily engage Aristotelian poiesis and praxis, but in a way that preserves their purposive distinction. In order to bring this re-problematization of art forward from Aristotle, the nature of this division must therefore be questioned. Where it is introduced into the analysis of particular artefacts, it only there seems possible that poiesis—‘to make’—must make do with imitations of actions. As such, it must be argued that artistic praxis cannot be imitation.16 This is not to refute Ar- istotle’s distinction between poiesis and praxis, because art’s participation in action does not operate within poiesis, conceived as ‘to make’, but rather in the creative activity in which techné—the skilful practitioner—deviates poiesis in order to make difference; that is, to deviate natural becoming in order to bring something new into being. As such, poiesis continues to have a telos outside of itself (the product, object, or artefact) but artistic praxis still requires a reciprocal, counter-oriented active process; the intentional act of deviation proper to the rational faculty of techné, that precisely acquires its interventional force because it is animated by the inward turning or inherence of telos, and whose task is to intentionally deviate the process of poiesis. Artistic praxis thus requires the circulation of both processes, in which techné governs a transfor- mation of the telos. On the one hand, the ‘end’ is projected outside of itself in order to affect the process of production, and on the other, an interiorization

16 Aristotle’s concept of mimesis in the context of the problem of art, markedly differs from Platonic mimesis, which is dominant today. ‘A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action (πράξεως, praxis) that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself (τέλειος); in language…’ (Aristotle, Poetics: 1449b24–26) That action can only be imitated by art is because Aristotle conceives of praxis as a differentiated and ultimately superior rational faculty than poiesis. That is to say, what the poet imitates is the virtuous (but flawed) life of living human agents, which are then transposed within the drama, evident in the relation between a living being and a character. From a logical perspective, the imitation is necessitated because praxis and poiesis are categorically differentiated by the telos which animates phrónēsis and techné, respectively. On this point, it might be observed that a certain contradiction exists in the idea that poetry is the imitation of human actions by dint of its transposition into language, when scientific (episteme) and philosophical (sophia) pronouncements express direct (non-deliberative) expressions of truth (aletheia), but whose linguistic transposition (or abstraction) somehow escapes this exceptionality. That is to say, where Aristotle’s distinction between types of knowledge fundamentally concerns their animating telos (ends, purpose) and archē (beginning) relative to subjec- tive being, there remains a case to reconsider this in the necessity of a thinking subject, or subject of enunciation, necessary for any pronouncement, be it artistic, political, scientific, and so on.

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Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art 111 of the ‘end’ in-itself, is to actualize an intentional act, whose task is to deviate the form (morphē), and cause a different ‘shape’ to come into being. This complex, reciprocal work-flow must be reclaimed as the problematic field specific to the work of art. As such, in the immanent activity of what art labours to do, there is a break with a general poiesis because techné enacts another kind of workflow: something genuinely creative. And because Aristotle defines techné in terms of a different kind of cause, the efficient, this deviation is not only upon poiesis but initiates a secondary process that cannot be defined in primary, original terms; this secondary, counter-oriented process of efficient causation, of creative poiesis, not only offers a way to specify the work of art, it does so by demonstrating its counter-orientation to all modes of production—that is, to the possibility of a universally determining poiesis. This is a radical repudiation of Platonic poiesis and moreover of the poiesis of Platonism and its overturning that dominates the problem of art today. Where poiesis exemplifies a singular ontology where all becomes identically into being, Aristotelian techné proposes art as the definitive resistance to this unidirectional flow. Where a singular poiesis resolves the work of art as an ‘always-already’ production, techné re-problematises art as that which brings difference that was not in being before. It is true that Aristotle conceives this difference as impoverished, which is to say, that fails to attain the eternal force of a formal cause, but this deviating difference is nevertheless authentic. It is thus to interrogate what constitutes the work of art, that necessitates a return to techné as a unique problem, not already indentured to poiesis in its orthodox or general form. As is evident in Aristotle, techné is the interventional work of a ‘higher-order’ cause upon the general flow of productive poiesis. As such, techné does not simply assist or resolve what was already determined as coming into being, but deviates the material into a generative process that forces difference into being. This difference is not present in nature or the suite of material causes, but appears via the work of deviation itself. This is because what constitutes the work of art is rather this counter-causal kind of work that intervenes in these series of beings; the work of efficient causation that com- prises a transverse, creative workflow, or creative poiesis.

The Irreducibility of Creative poiesis to Ritualistic and Political Functions in the Modernist Work of Art

In order to test this re-problematisation of techné, I will now turn towards the work of modernist art practices and some theoretical frames contemporary

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112 Tuckwell with them. This will be to return to my introductory claim that the dissonance between creative and productive poiesis becomes particularly evident where the technological object was worked upon by early modernist art experiments. Let us consider again Duchamp’s Bottle-Rack (1921): what I’d like to draw attention to is how the ‘readymade’ problematises conflating the work of art with the artefact, insofar as the former fundamentally defies participation in the process of production. Rather, what the readymade shows is that not only is creative poiesis differentiated from the process of production (productive poiesis), it operates across another kind of workflow, by going to work after the production has been completed. Moreover, Duchamp demonstrates quite precisely the function of the work of art, which intentionally intervenes by resuscitating the process of production from its collapse into the object. That is, where techné governs telos in the work of art, so that the process with an end outside itself (production), becomes an end in itself through the intentional activity (praxis) of efficient causation. This intentional activity of techné is precisely what inheres in the force of shaping specific to the work of art, so that something unprecedented comes into being. This is not the same as productive poiesis, ‘to make’; this is another kind of skilful activity that forces what is in being to become other than what it is.17 As such, the bottle-rack no longer simply appears as the product of a technical production, but becomes circulated into a new process of becoming. The readymade is further instructive, because we are told the modernist work of art is unapproachable outside of some kind of theoretical gestalt, necessary to render its figure discernible.18 It has been observed that the sig- nificance of the readymade lies in effacing the object to draw our attention to

17 Moreover, the distinction of a supplementary term ‘creative poiesis’ has the additonal ad- vantage of grounding a rigorous, de-theologised method for defining creativity: a more thorough examination of this definition of creativity and its irreducibility to originality, can be found in Tuckwell (2017: 62). 18 A potential corrective to this contingency might be deduced from Adorno, where the aesthetic object remains an epistemological, cultural and socio-political ‘negative’, an empty square or unknowable function that stimulates these systems into various productive responses (see Adorno 2002). As such, the current discussion shares a degree of conso- nance with Adorno’s thesis, while remaining skeptical about aesthetic theory’s ability to approach the work of art as a unique problematic. That is to say, even in Adorno’s superior formulation, the terms of the negative cannot give us an insight about the nature of the work of art vis à vis a distinctly creative problem, because it remains focused upon the ef- fects this creative work induces in other disciplinary structures, considering this work to be inarticulable in itself.

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Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art 113 context—this is not simply its immanent framing (the gallery and the gallery context), but more importantly, is thought to lead us back to a supportive epistemological context; what Arthur Danto argued to require a ‘certain theory of art’.19 Thus, the subtraction of a productive labour (the ‘work’ or art) is meant to unveil that art is always a kind of semiotic play, in which meaning and sense are infinitely exchangeable about an object. Yet, it is not the art that works to produce for us this realisation of a historical or theoretical gestalt in which it circulates (even if Duchamp—as a thinking subject—also, intends to draw our attention to this). That is to say, what produces for thinking subjects a rather jolting recognition of their process of epistemological sense making, does not at all define how the art functions. This is rather an effect; for the art has already gone to work to deviate the ‘end’ of a productive process (in this case, industrial mass production), in which the technical object had been considered complete. That is to say, the art does not intentionally work to deviate the art-object into a new resolution between itself and the space, or between the canon and the expectation of a viewing public. The work of art concerns the intention to progressively deviate the process of production in order to overcome its reduction to the object, artefact or the relation, altogether. That is to say that what Kandinsky apprehends in Cézanne is common to all art: ‘He raised the “nature morte” to a height where the exteri- orly “dead” object becomes inwardly alive’. (Kandinsky, 1911: 31–32). By the time of Danto’s survey, the view of modernist experimentation is de- cidedly ‘grey on grey’; the work of art and its technicalities have been largely resolved into semiotic artefacts between philosophical and socio-cultural theories. What must be objected to is Danto’s claim, that this represents an epistemological necessity responding to modernist experimentation; rather, it is more simply another incarnation of the same resolute foreclosure of techné in favour of a governing poiesis—all that has changed is the analytic frame of intelligibility which might otherwise have been aesthetic, historical, psycho- analytic, and so on. As such, it is proposed that it is rather the problem of techné prior to its resolution within poiesis that is animate within modernist praxis. Arguably, Walter Benjamin carries out the seminal apprehension of this situation, when he approaches art through the frames of historical materialism and technological processes in The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility. Benjamin’s unidirectional poiesis is Marxist, and the discussion of modernist art practices takes place within the terms of a materialist and correspondingly

19 Danto (1964).

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114 Tuckwell political mode of production.20 It is significant that this poiesis proceeds by first delegitimising the explicit function of creativity, which is thought to be overcome by constraining it within the origins of production.21 This grounds Benjamin’s innovative use of historicism to differentiate art into modes of material production.22 Here the ‘aura’ of the original in which the authenticity of the work of art resides, is contrasted with the mechanical reproduction of the work, through the labour of technology.23 For Benjamin, this is a critical codex for understanding the difference between the modern and pre-modern work of art. The argument elaborates upon differences between an ‘original’, ‘authentic’ work of art and the work of mechanical reproduction; let us consider differing productions of images, between a painting and a photograph. It is because for Benjamin, the fundamental concept of ‘work’ makes all processes of production unidirectional, that the discussion of what here constitutes the ‘work of art’, is made exchangeable with its modes of material production. As

20 The unidirectional determination in which the work of art falls into line within a unidirectional Marxist process of production is well summarized in the introduction to Author as Producer; Here you have the catchword around which has long circled a debate familiar to you. Its familiarity tells you how unfruitful it has been, for it has not advanced beyond the monotonous reiteration of arguments for and against: on the one hand, the correct political line is demanded of the poet; on the other, one is justified in expecting his work to have quality. Such a formulation is of course unsatisfactory as long as the connection between the two factors, political line and quality, has not been perceived. Of course, the connection can be asserted dogmatically. You can declare: a work that shows the correct political tendency need show no other quality. You can also declare: a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality. This second formulation is not uninteresting, and, moreover, it is correct. I adopt it as my own. W. Benjamin, Author as Producer, pp. 79–80. 21 Benjamin argues that the new theses capable of responding to the technological compli- cation of art proceed from the following criteria: ‘They neutralize a number of traditional concepts—such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—which, used in an uncontrolled way (and controlling them is difficult today), allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of fascism.’ W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, pp. 20. 22 Benjamin’s historical materialism in locating the authentic origin of the work of art could be most profitably contrasted with T.S. Eliot’s processual temporality (1960), in which the critique of the ever distant object is contrasted to the living history of an immanent creative exchange. 23 ‘The here and now of the original underlines the concept of authenticity.’ W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, pp. 21.

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Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art 115 such, it is the value of the labour the painter invests in the production of the work from which its ‘aura’ and authenticity are derived. Each painting is an ‘original’ or singular work, and this is thought to fundamentally determine its value. In the case of the photograph, the way the technological apparatus reduces the distinctive labour of the work of art thereby destroys its pre-modern value. Techné is appealed to here in its most orthodox sense, for it is the unparalleled skill of the master artist that is contrasted with the ‘uncritical’ work of productive machines, through which originality is obliterated—that is, the process of mechanical reproduction progressively devalues the originality of the work of art, diffusing it across the reproduction of artefacts. There is something distinctly Platonic in this logic of productions and reproductions in which the authentic origin is ever distanced across the general workflow, and which the process of iteration, degrades and dilutes the value of subsequent particulars.24 But this unidirectional grounding in material production does not apprehend the problem of art at all; nor else the problem persisting from the technical clarification established by Aristotle. For the entire distinction between types of technites—the very problem of differentiating between art and craft—was precisely composed because the mode of production could not ad- equately determine there a difference. The power of Benjamin’s procedure in discussing the social upheaval heralded by processes of technical reproduction are enfeebled where they are purported to split the difference in the historical function of art;

for the first time in world history, technological reproducibility emanci- pates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual—to an ever- increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. …as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.25

Art is not detached from the ‘parasitic subservience to ritual’ through the advent of reproductive technologies, because art always worked upon the productive poiesis proximate to it. That is to say, creative poiesis was already

24 For discussion of ‘originality’, ‘authenticity’ and the technological tendency which opposes the ‘unique’ to the ‘mass’, Ibid., pp. 22. 25 Ibid., pp. 24–25.

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116 Tuckwell circulating long before magical practices were ritualised by putting art to work, or more pertinently, where the work of art was subdued into aesthetic productions to constrain its deviant nature. One cannot, as Benjamin argues, determine another epistemological end for the work of art—neither a social, religious, nor political function—because art is never any kind of productive process. And where the work of art is simply collapsed to any such mode of material production, one does so at the cost of losing all capacity to apprehend what makes it art, paving the way to its ideal degradation; all pronouncements and writing become poetic, every application of paint on a surface a painting, each tea cup and toilet bowl indistinguishable from sculpture. What is lacking in Benjamin’s analysis is what theorisation dominantly lacks—the accounting after a different kind of work through which processes of production become art. The point is not even to challenge the distinction between ‘authentic’, which is to say traditional methods of producing works of art with the work of technological reproduction, which has been exploded by the reality of contemporary art practices. Who could any longer suggest there is an inferior technical mastery in the production of photographic images? One need only consider the meticulously constructed self-portraits of Cindy Sher- man or the intricate digital constructivism in Andreas Gursky’s technological naturalism, or else mixtures of both in Geoffrey Crewdson’s cinematic images. It is rather to recognize that the work of art, is not commensurate with the process of production at all, whether it be by hand, celluloid or pixel. Ansell Adams had already dispelled this kind of mechanical or productive reduction of the work of art, by emphasising a different kind of work was required, even to ‘simply’ capture naturalistic images; ‘A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.’26 This is not an appeal to sentimentality; it is to draw upon a vast repertoire of functional information about how generative processes become and trans- form, one into another. That is to say, there is always an efficient cause with its counter-operation of creative poiesis, that is lost in the conflation of the work of art into the artefact.

26 Ansell Adams, A Personal Credo, (1943) 1981. pp. 378. Moreover; ‘It seems that one can define all the qualities of a work of art except that essence which is self-evident in the art itself, and which creates a resonance of thought and feeling beyond verbalization. I attempt in these books to suggest the importance of craft and its relation to creativity in photography. As for the creativity itself, I can only assert that it exists.’ Ansell Adams, The Camera, 2005. pp. 10.

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Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art 117

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