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Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art

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Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art transcultural studies 13 (2017) 99-118 brill.com/ts Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art Jason Tuckwell University of Western Sydney [email protected] Abstract There are two ancient formulations of the problem art presents to us: poiesis under- stands 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 confla- tion 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 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/23751606-01302001Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 03:25:20AM via free access <UN> 100 Tuckwell Introduction: Poiesis and techné There are two ancient formulations of the problem art presents to us; poie- sis 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 ulti- mately determine thinking about art, techné remained for the Greeks an irre- ducible 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 ex- pression. 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 uni- versals) 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, ratio- nal 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 transculturalDownloaded studies from 13Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 99-118 03:25:20AM via free access <UN> Productive and Creative Poiesis and the Work of Art 101 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 think- ing 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 per- sisting as the skill necessary to organise rational thought. The work of art does not simply resolve between sense-perception and the ideas, rendering it indis- tinguishably 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 deduc- tion 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. transcultural studies 13 (2017) 99-118 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 03:25:20AM via free access <UN> 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 be- ing 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.
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