Plato, Heidegger, Kant & Habermas Play Pass the Parcel: Poiesis and the Philosophy of Art-Creation | Essay — Samuel Stolton

Samuel Stolton

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The most imprudent of all terms that can be applied to a work of art is to say that it has been ‘created.’ Such an affirmation suggests that a presence has been formed in a subjective totalization that affords one the ability to ‘create,’ undiscriminated by the status of previous forms. Perhaps this is why the terms ‘creator’ and ‘to create’ had no place in ancient Greek terminology. The ambiguous history of artistic creation relies on the discipline of ‘making,’ what the Greeks termed, poiesis. The operation of this act is dependent on a bifurcation between ‘presence’ and ‘materiality,’ representing a theoretical division delineated by ancient and modern conceptions of poiesis. In the following, I will examine how this conceptual junction animates the enterprise of ‘creation’ through ‘making’, in relating to an oscillating cycle of communicable ‘forth-bringing’, whilst I shall also identify how the magnificent authority of poiesis in presencing art, has the capability to actuate itself upon a universal transmissible communicability.

In order to castigate the capacious division between materiality and presence that so severely informs the art making process, my first course of action will be to trace the original contours that afford poiesis a viable agency in applying the distinction. For Plato, it is the “emotional force” that ‘making’ invokes by advocating a domain upon which we are in the “presence of an aesthetic experience.”{{i}}[[i]]Julius A. Elias, Plato’s Defence of Poetry (New York: SUNY Press, 1984), 226.[[i]] Such a communion is composed upon the act of producing an item, opposed to the modern conception of poiesis as reliant on the resonance that an item has in its final form. The modern conception was perpetuated, as William Watkin observes, by the nominalistic theories attributable to thinkers such as Nietzsche.{{ii}}[[ii]] As evidenced in: William Watkin, The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis (London and New York: Continuum Publishing, 2010).[[ii]] This can be noticed in his concept of the Will to Power as Art, as a common purposiveness that bids the ‘will’ duty in creation, ex nihilo.{{iii}}[[iii]]Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House Inc, 1973), 76.[[iii]] The Will, driven by the force of supposed ontological functionalities, offers a direct path to the final presencing of a work. Nonetheless, subsequent thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo have appropriated Nietzsche’s ‘Will’, upon a more diluted theorisation, calling it, as Vattimo does, the pensiero debole – meaning “weak thought.”{{iv}}[[iv]]Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, ed. Franca D’Agostini. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 113.[[iv]] Vattimo’s postulations were met with wide criticism, his definition of weak thought as “a way to encounter being once more as trace, recall, a Being used up and weakened,” was judged as a detrimental outlook on the authoritative power of driving forces.{{v}}[[v]]Gianni Vattimo, Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography, trans. William McCuaig. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 87.[[v]] Nonetheless, in analysing the statement, a Being used up and weakened, it begs us to question how a ‘Being’ is firstly animated, and subsequently exhausted.

Giorgio Agamben

It is important here to review Agamben’s addressing of Plato’s conception of poiesis as a dramatization of form that serves to ‘bring something into existence that was not there before.”{{vi}}[[vi]]Plato, The Symposium (Middlesex: Penguin Classics, 1971), 43.[[vi]] Agamben delineates the substance of existence by which poiesis dispenses its authority, relative to the availability of a pro-duction into presence. He speaks of the “energetic status of a work” receding amid art’s setting-up as an aestheticised model.{{vii}}[[vii]] Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content (California: Stanford University Press, 1999), 66.[[vii]] The Heideggerian ‘being-at-work’ is “erased to make room for its characters as a stimulant of the aesthetic sentiment.”{{viii}}[[viii]]ibid.[[viii]] Subsequently, ‘making’s’ materialistic virtues are informed by the ‘stimulant’ of praxis, which is the action of doing, and techne, which represents, as Watkins observes, the “skilled knowing through doing.”{{ix}}[[ix]]Watkin, The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis, 75.[[ix]] Nevertheless, the operation of praxis in the modern age has become all too comfortably associated in applying an insurance that the “transformation of all human intentional activity” may profess to result into “some mode of making”;{{x}}[[x]] Gyorgy Markus, “Praxis and Poiesis: Beyond the Dichotomy,” Thesis Eleven 15, no. 30 (Jan 1986): 30.[[x]] a making that may very well achieve a state of existence, but nevertheless, in order to inject a certain ‘being,’ the participatory union of an active condition of ‘being’ is required; as such, it is possible for the ‘being’ of creative thought to legitimise the capabilities of a being-presence in art.

Experiments in the field of cognitive neuroscience have identified a functional correlation between brain activity and such creative-making ‘thought’. This has been realized in electroencephalographic (EEG) research that analyses the “quantification or task – or event-related (de)synchronization of brain activity,” resulting in what Andreas Fink has discovered to be, a “cortical idling phenomenon.”{{xi}}[[xi]]Andreas Fink, “Creativity meets Neuroscience: Experimental Tasks for the Neuroscientific study of Creative Thinking,” Science Direct 42, no. 1 (Dec 2006): 75.[[xi]] That is to say, in the experiment, Fink recognized that when a participant was presented with a task-orientated creative opportunity, and such an opportunity was acted on, this resulted in the “reduced or lower activity level of the brain [of which] is needed to produce novel, original ideas.”{{xii}}[[xii]]ibid.[[xii]] Is this in fact what Vattimo meant when he spoke of man’s ‘weak thought’? Vattimo’s term essentially concerns itself with the philosophical “dissolution of theory,”{{xiii}}[[xiii]]Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, 89.[[xiii]] relating to the withdrawal in theorizations of knowledge, that is episteme, and the subsequent emphasis on the technical aspects of craft, techne, that exemplify the postmodern persuasion in ‘making’ art. Episteme relates to the absolute knowledge as a theoretical imperative that has the propensity to inform the operation of techne, as Heidegger says, episteme is “knowing in the widest sense…to understand and be expert.”{{xiv}}[[xiv]]Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays(New York: Garland Publishers, 1977), 13.[[xiv]] From the aforementioned scientific observations, it can be suggested that the subcerebellar functionality of the brain may pertain to a potentiality toward the abilities and actions of techne, in creative thought,as opposed to a direct force in the comprehension of compounding an ulterior source for knowledge. That is to say, in the process of making art, the brain moves towards an emphasis on technical design, potentiality, as opposed to the formulation of an epistemological outcome in the ‘product’ of the work, actuality, thus supporting Vattimo’s claims.

The differentiation between actuality and potentiality relates to the order in which techne is performed. Heidegger deems the natural articulation of presence in the “bringing forth of something out of itself”{{xv}}[[xv]]ibid., 11.[[xv]] as apparent in the cataclysmic energies that eternalize ‘being’, in such instances as the “bursting forth of a blossom into bloom, the birth of a baby or the ripening of fruit.”{{xvi}}[[xvi]]Barbara Bolt, Heidegger Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts(New York and London: I.B Tauris Publishing, 2011), 80.[[xvi]] On the other hand, techne’s abstractive, synergetic determination, readapts itself to form the process of the “bringing forth of art.”{{xvii}}[[xvii]]ibid.[[xvii]] This notion hybridizes the engagement of techne, upon an “oscillation between poiesis and enframing.”{{xviii}}[[xviii]] ibid.[[xviii]] When the process of techne provokes a bringing-forth as revealing, it is poietic, but conversely, when the mastery of its instrumentality compounds the work’s constitution as a made-thing, this represents merely a “controlling revealing.”{{xix}}[[xix]]ibid., 81.[[xix]] Techne’s completion results in the retrospective formality of potentiality, but the fashioning towards its completion, revertively constitutes the ‘being’ of its actuality. Techne’s purposing is therefore not to achieve an ‘end,’ but to attain a ‘means,’ the end result being merely subsidiary to the practice itself.

Martin Heidegger

The exercise of an absolute techne ability can never be comprehensively ‘total’, as it is impossible to appropriate an ubiquitous ‘controlling revealing’ to all realms and domains of craft, as humans, our attainment of episteme is restricted to the conditions of praxis. That is to say, we can only ‘know’ to the extent that we are able to ‘do,’ and we can only ‘do’ to the extent that we ‘know.’ We have not the authority to incite being in the crimson blush of a rose or the heavy sigh of a winter’s breeze. We are trapped within the harsh confines of our own ability, of our own equipmentality, of our own resources that afford us the aptitude toward our own perceptions.

This brings me onto a great difficulty I have in conceptualising the opportunity for creation. The issue is that we have an explicit inability to prognosticate a form that does not pertain to human sensory reception. There appears always a process taking place, an instrumental faculty, an inter-aesthetic ghost, presencing the possibility of presence itself. But nevertheless, objects appear to be exclusively sensually informed. What art do we not see, smell, touch, hear or taste? Can we ‘will’ an art, even in conceptual ‘thinking,’ that does not summon a sensory provocation? Agamben explores the emergence in seventeenth century culture of the “man of taste,” a rationalist essentialism that promulgated the “man who is endowed with a particular faculty, almost a sixth sense…which allows him to grasp the point de perfection that is characteristic of every work of art.”{{xx}}[[xx]]Agamben, The Man Without Content, 9.[[xx]] It is therefore possible to determine a communicative synthesis between art’s presencing of character, and man’s inheritance of such a presence, unbound from the physiological capacities of sense data, that permit a point de perfection to be realized. To explore this theory further, I must combine two concepts that in their amalgamation, support the notion that a poietical presencing is not exclusively reliant on a sensory referencing. The two theories of which I shall strive to coalesce are the Kantian sensus communis, and Jürgen Habermas’ communicative rationality.

The sensus communis translates literally as the English ‘common sense,’ which is a horridly ambiguous term in itself, and within Aristotelian theory, it originally referred to man’s ability to commune with an object through a preordained comprehension that facilitates the objective understanding upon the elemental dynamics of its ‘being’. That is to say, the unity of the sensus communis, as a concealed meditation, “allows the soul to distinguish between the proper objects of particular senses.”{{xxi}}[[xxi]]A.G Chern︠i︡akov, The Ontology of Time: Being and Time in the Philosophies of Aristotle, Husserl and Heidegger (New York: Springer Publishing, 2002), 73.[[xxi]] Kant viewed the sensus communis as something shared by us all, that is “a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else’s way of presenting, in order as it were to compare our own judgement with human reason in general.”{{xxii}}[[xxii]]Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 173.[[xxii]] The sensory judgmental casus belli of objects perform as per the demands towards the reasoning of human nature. We are able to reflect, judge, and think because the mode of such inquisitions is driven by this common sense. However, we have to ask ourselves, from what ontological division does the sensus communis derive? Here, I cannot merely concur with Kant in the delineation of its presencing as an a priori disposition, I would suggest however, that it originates from man’s communicative abilities. Communication, in the broadest sense of the term, facilities the movement of the sensus communis into an established perceptive prerequisite, interaction can be the only rationale that informs the continuing flux of ontological components. As Habermas states, the communicative rationality, is “orientated to achieving, sustaining and reviewing consensus.”{{xxiii}}[[xxiii]] Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 17.[[xxiii]] Together with the determinate existence of the sensus communis, communicative rationality adapts and frames a terrain of which inhabitants appropriate the fundamentals of both functionalities. That is to say, the sensus communis is actuated upon an engagement with communicative forces. Without communicative abilities, even in the most elementary operation, presentation, as an affectation of ‘everyone else’s way’ would recede into hybridized elements of which would have no outlet for a renegotiation that the sensus communis allows. Communicative rationality continuously evolves from this, striving for an intersubjectivity founded on the composite principles of human nature, communication and interaction build these, and the subliminal operation of the sensus communis fundamentally affirms them.

Jürgen Habermas via Wikipedia

Poiesis then, may be realized as a communicative presencing, it is ‘making’ from the faculty of the sensus communis, protruded by communicate rationality. It does not ‘create’ but it is the renewal and materialistic manifestation of a presencing. It is the redundant propensity, actuated upon various schema, through techne and praxis, that allows potentiality and reverts back to the only undeniable actuality, that is of the possibility of its being in the first place.

Perhaps then, the materialities of presence that dwell in the most barren and vacant pockets of the mind, awaiting upon an instance to be ‘brought-forth,’ perhaps these quiescent chapters of thought rely on poiesis to be discovered. These ‘presences’ are in constant renewal, dependent on interactive and communicative processes, and in each actuation into the fully material domain, recede from the original habitation of the maker, and, through the subjective translation in an exposure to their material ‘being,’ take up another residence, presencing in the mind of the recipient to the work. Resulting in a universal and continuous series of transmissible occurrences. A subject, therefore, has the propensity to delve into certain chambers of hidden thought, and bring forth such potentialities for making, that trigger the “transition from nonbeing to being [that] means taking on a form,”{{xxiv}}[[xxiv]]Agamben, The Man Without Content, 37.[[xxiv]] in order to manifest what Watkin has called “logopoiesis”.{{xxv}}[[xxv]] Watkin, The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis, 119.[[xxv]] The most coarse analogy which I can beckon to represent this is a worldwide, objective game of ‘pass the parcel’, except that everyone receives some form of a gift from the undertaking. This gift, although germinating as a mere potentiality, upon its possible actuation, is ‘used up’ as Vattimo said, but is vitally not weakened, but in fact strengthened upon a translation that conditions the essence of what Aristotle referred to as entelechy. That is the “inner urge” to be fully realized through various processes of natural design. As such, the operations of poiesis, provide a suitable, yet incredibly tragic substitute, in the search to make and actuate an immortality reflective of that of nature. As the extemporaneous cycles of nature – from blossoming to decay, are in continuous cultivation, man attempts, through the transmissible processes of presence-making, to reflect this unattainable naturality: immortality, through the contagious affair of poiesis.    

—Samuel Stolton

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Samuel Stolton is a writer living in London. He co-edits 3:AM Magazine and is the Founding Editor of the journal of philosophy, poetry and politics, Inky Needles.

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