Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Volume 1 Volume 1 (2003) Article 5

2003

Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting-Be

Derek H. Whitehead Ph.D.
[email protected]

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Whitehead, Derek H. Ph.D. (2003) "Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting-Be," Contemporary Aesthetics
(Journal Archive): Vol. 1 , Article 5.
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 Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting-Be

  Derek H. Whitehead
About CA
Abstract
Journal This article is both philosophical and practical in its intent. It
endeavours to bring into focus an idea with an Ancient Greek
Contact CA lineage, poiesis, and determine whether it may revitalise our
thinking about the 'making' of art. The art-making considered
Links in this paper will concentrate exclusively on Western art and its
historical and contemporary manifestations. I suggest that
Submissions poiesis - that which "pro-duces or leads (a thing) into being'" -
may enable practitioners in the varying art forms, and
Search Journal aestheticians who reflect upon them, to come to a deeper
Enter search terms sense of how artworks work: that they realize themselves
inter-dependently of the formative conditions of their inception.
Search One question I raise, among others, is: What is the relation
between poiesis and the sensory embodiments of art making?
Here I evoke the notion of the poietic act, something which has
Editorial Board the potential to reinvigorate the artist's creative energies in
and for our times. At a philosophical level I argue that poiesis
Permission to Reprint
may be seen as a liberating force which seeks to engage the
Privacy multiple conditions of contemporary aesthetic reflection, and at
a practical level I argue that the poietic act may be seen in
Site Map those undercurrents of artistic activity that impel us toward a
space of 'unitary multiplicity,' wherein the artist, the artwork,
Publisher
and the receiver of such a work are brought forward in all the
Webmaster features of their self-presentation.

Key Words
Poiesis, praxis, being, art, creativity, expression

1. Introduction

Some opening remarks by way of proceeding. My principal

focus in this article is on Western art and aesthetic practice,
more particularly from a Continental philosophical perspective.
Some may find the Continental tradition indefensibly 'abstract'
in nature. I make no apologies for it here. It seems to me to be
an adequate basis for a foundational examination of the artistic
and philosophic issues I raise in this context. I am conscious
that there are Anglo-American, Eastern, and African
approaches to aesthetic phenomena and artistic practice that
have their stories to tell as well. The present format does not
permit their proper evaluation here. I am aware, then, that in
concentrating on the Western story of art and its philosophy
from a Continental standpoint, only a part of what would
otherwise be a more complete picture is being revealed. Other
contexts and occasions are needed for the necessary
articulation of the Anglo-American, Eastern, and African
positions.

What I am offering is not some formulaic response or solution

to any supposed problem in postmodern or contemporary
aesthetic theory. I simply want to show that poiesis is not
something abstracted from human thought or artistic activity.
Nor is poiesis, in this context, intended to account for the
complex expressions of contemporary art forms such as
performance art, interactive art, and demonstrable
'happenings' of one kind or another. Not every art-form is
poietic or disposed to articulate the poietic. Yet in one sense
every art form is performative: it has its own essential being
before any pronouncement, its own mode of address and
articulation. It is open to further investigation whether poietic
traces are to be found in those conditions which favour the
many and divergent forms of contemporary art practice which
we know today. Though poiesis may have conceptual and
empirical implications for such practice, insofar as it is
consciously evoked by the artist, I intuit their possibilities here
rather than argue for any verifying status in their regard.

I submit that poiesis is something very much 'in process'

contemporaneously, that it remains an 'undercurrent' striving
toward the light of day. As such it is likely to surface in rather
surprising forms, not least in 'found objects,' 'ready-mades,'
'assemblages,' or 'installations' where the artist's intuitive
faculty - in the selection and compositional arrangement of
freely chosen elements - appears uppermost. Here I attempt to
highlight the presence of a poietic dynamic in the activities of
contemporary art practice from the perspectives of painting,
poetry, and music.

Another feature of a poiesis 'in process' is its relationship with

the concept of praxis. I exemplify their relation from Greek
thought, and develop the idea that instead of seeing praxis as
the exercise of a practical or intentional will alone, we may
conceive its relation to poiesis as bringing about a transforming
encounter between the artist and his/her work in the unfolding
conditions of art-making itself. I go on to argue that in a
contemporary sense we need to re-engage what I call the
poietic act: with that which discloses us as the receivers of the
gift of art. This raises the issue of who or what gives the gift of
art, and I develop this in both aesthetic and artistic terms. And
I conclude that working with the raw materials of the
imagination (ideas, concepts, schemata) and those of the
material order (paint, clay, or stone), constitutes a means of
renegotiating our sense of 'place' with a renewed and placeful
place of poietic and non-exploitative encounter. I develop the
idea that poiesis may be seen in those undertones of creative
activity that drive us toward a space of 'unitary multiplicity,'
wherein the artist, the artwork, and the receiver of such a work
are brought forward in all the palpability of their self-
presentation.

Here I invite dialogue with those of this article's readers who

wish to engage these issues further - in a spirit of shared
exploration. But firstly, some remarks about the nature of
poiesis in the philosophical literature itself before we move on
to its resonances for Western historical and contemporary
artistic practice and aesthetic reflection.

2. Poiesis as 'leading into being'

It is commonly thought that aesthetic inquiry into works of art

reveals something of their appearances or representations,
those aspects of a work's perceptible qualities that 'show'
themselves to human perception and thus bring about a
response of aesthetic appreciation or aesthetic judgment. We
feel that an artwork tells us something about the mind that
created it, and that behind such a work are the wellsprings of
an active imagination. The acts of creative imagination may
take the form of objective works of art. Thus the creatively
imaginative individual is one who opens up new territories of
being for him/herself and for art's recipients, we who are its
observers and receivers.
The creative human being is concerned with the dynamics of
his or her daily 'working practice', with the rudimentary
dispositions of his or her own bodily being and expressive life.
Working practice is seen to emanate from an artist's psychic
and bodily being, and works of art are envisaged as the
product of an artist's creative will and intentionality. Here the
concept of poiesis - the sense that an artwork is something
pro-duced (or brought into being) - assumes vital significance.

Poiesis may be seen to engage and question what has been

called 'the metaphysics of the creative will' in the Western
aesthetical tradition. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, such
metaphysics is seen to penetrate our conception of art to such
a degree that even the most challenging critiques of aesthetics
have not questioned its guiding principle, the idea that art is
'the expression of the artist's creative will.' Such critiques
remain embedded within aesthetics, Agamben says, "since
they are only the extreme development of one of the two
polarities on which it founds its interpretation of the work of
art, the polarity of genius understood as will and creative
force."[1] In contrast to this force majeur, what the Ancient
Greeks intended by the term poiesis was very different: the
heart of poiesis had nothing to do with the exercise of a will
and everything to do with 'the production of aletheia,' with
'unveiling,' and with the opening of a world for humankind's
being and action.[2]

The Greeks drew a distinction between poiesis and praxis.

Praxis in the Greek sense had to do with the immediate sense
of 'an act', of a will that accomplishes or completes itself in
action. Poiesis was conceived as bringing something from
concealment into the full light and radiation of a created work.
Poiesis is not to be grasped in its features as a practical or
voluntary activity, as Agamben persuades us, but rather in its
being an 'unveiling,' a-letheia, a making known which pro-
duces or leads things into presence. The related idea of technē
(of 'an art' or 'trade') for the Greeks meant 'to cause to
appear,' and poiesis, 'to produce into presence.' Such pro-
duction becomes associated with gnosis, with 'knowing.' Poiesis
essentially characterises technē, production in its totality.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle interprets technē as 'art'

or 'technical skill', an artistic skilling that produces, but that is
qualitatively distinct from action. He says that art is, in
essence, 'a reasoned productive state,' and is the same in kind
as the production which is 'truly reasoned.' Indeed, "[e]very
art is concerned with bringing something into being, and the
practice of an art is the study of how to bring into being
something that is capable either of being or of not being, and
the [efficient] cause of which is in the producer and not in the
product."[3] Aristotle argues that since production is not the
same as action, in the sense that producing occasions things
differently from action, art must concern itself with production
and not with action. Art here is a state readily conducive to the
humanizing of production.

For Martin Heidegger, the notion of technē and technites (or

'the artist-producer'), tends to reinforce poiesis as a principle
of origination, of a 'bringing forth' which seeks to be known by
being brought into the light (or the clearing) opened up by the
created work itself.[4] Here poiesis does not bring itself into
presence in the created work as praxis brings itself into
presence as an act. It is as if poiesis, in producing something
other than itself, concedes itself to that produced object or
thing which presences itself. That is to say, and as Agamben
submits, the artwork is, under the conditions of poiesis, "[no
longer] the result of a doing, not the actus of an agere [an
acting which 'puts to work'] but something substantially other
(heteron) than the principle that has pro-duced it into
presence". Accordingly, art's point of entry into the aesthetic
domain is only possible because "art itself has already left the
sphere of pro-duction, of poiesis, to enter that of praxis."[5] If
art has left the productive realm of poiesis and entered the
aesthetic domain of praxis, what follows for 'art making' is all
the more significant. Here it may be said that poiesis attempts
to found the conditions of art making's sacralization, that is, it
strives to found art's transforming potentialities in the
'instrumentality' of production.

The idea of linking technē and poiesis as 'authentic production'

is given additional weight by Michael Zimmerman, who says
that technē is the capacity for 'letting something be seen'; not
only known, but seen, or known through seeing. A noteworthy
sightfulness appears in our equation of technē and poiesis.
Technē involves, as Zimmerman believes, "letting [something]
come forth into its own . . . into the arena of accessibility, [of]
letting it lie forth as something established stably for itself."
Authentic production is not seen in terms of "an 'agent' using
'force' to push material together into a specific form." Instead,
such production "is [the] disclosure of entities for their own
sake."[6]

Zimmerman argues that the primary disclosure of what he calls

'the world-founding nature' of the work of art makes possible
this productive revelation of things in the world. For Greek
craftsmen, the luminous presencing or being of entities was a
phenomenon in which they lived and moved, so to speak. In
making something, an object for domestic or ritual use, for
example, the Greek artisan knew, in the responsibility of
ontological disclosure, that he was letting this thing be.[7]
Heidegger's view is that the most prominent figure in society is
the artist, not the artisan. The artist founds a world in which
producing takes its rightful place, whereas the artisan makes
useful things that do not of themselves have the capacity to
found a world. Heidegger draws a distinction between 'the
work' of an artist and 'the things' of an artisan, as between
works of art and handicraft. His main concern is with the
relation between art and poetry, and with striving toward a
reunification of the artistic and productive dimensions of social
life. Heidegger believed there was a greater chance of this
happening, of a renewal of society, under the aegis of the
poetic art.

The person who participates in world-founding poiesis is an

artist; whereas the individual who engages in producing things
is an artisan. Here poetry and pro-ducing have a common trait;
they are both modes of 'disclosure.' As Zimmerman writes,
"poetry discloses the gods needed to order and found the
world, [while] genuine producing discloses things respectfully,
in accordance with the vision of the poet."[8] This implies, and
as an elaboration of Heidegger's own stance, that a truly
visionary poet or artist has the capacity to bring forth things
that are in demonstrable accord with world-founding poiesis.
Thus artisanal things share something of the numinous quality
of created works, whether of art or poetry, insofar as they are
oriented toward the disclosure of being.

If it may be said that in truly poietic production productivity

exceeds the principle which has brought into being, then this
producing or leading into being of a created thing can only be
characteristic of some 'otherness' of skill difficult to name. In
this respect Emmanuel Levinas says that the skill involved in a
technical gesture is already delineated when directed toward a
particular goal. For "in the voice [we have] already the
delineation of a signifying language and the possibilities of
song and poem. Legs that can walk will already be able to
dance; [and] hands that can touch and hold, will be able to
feel, paint, [or] sculpt ... in the surprise of conforming to an
ideal never seen previously." These delineations may be found
in a prodigious or "original embodiment of thought, [or] a
birth, in all its diversity, of an artistic culture." Here
meaningfulness has its harmonies and disharmonies precisely
within the human, as Levinas rightly affirms, and such
meaningfulness nevertheless remains "in the extreme
exoticism of that [human] variety."[9] In the delight of
conforming to an ideal never previously realised or never fully
consummated, we have intimations of world-founding poiesis.
Human creativity in the conditions of world-founding poiesis
becomes the locus of an expressive temper of soul, and as
Levinas declares, "of the whole arrangement indispensable to
the manifestation of the Beautiful - to art and poetry."[10]

This ideal is the mobilising of something that precedes and

anticipates our existence. That is to say, poiesis prefigures and
orders what Schilling has called "that shapeless and dark
abyss, the 'hunger to be' that exists before any opposition and
without which nothing can come into existence." [11]
Shapeless, dark, and hungry to be; an intimation of an
empowering poiesis. What is required of artistic thinking and
making is a poiesis that liberates the wilfulness of a praxis that
wants only itself. But how do we in our times bring this kind of
poiesis about? And how is poiesis related to an artist's creative
intentionality: that fleshly production which solicits the
disclosure of things 'for their own sake'?

3. Creative intentionality and 'letting-be'

Firstly, we may speak of something called a 'schematised'

intentionality in our experience of the world, as 'creative'
intentionality stems in some ways from a schematised or more
generalised intentionality. Schematised intentionality,
according to Alphonso Lingis, takes the sense-impressions we
form of the world (our reception and synthesis of 'the data' of
experience) to mean something. Lingis says we identify the
sense-impressions we form of the world by "synthetically
taking them as signs of one and the same signification." That is
to say, schematised intentionality "makes impressions into
sensations, that is, givens of sense, of meaning."[12] What the
artist does with these impressions - by making them into lucid
sensations - is to take to a higher (compositional) order this
synthesis of signs and their signification. An artist's 'creative
intentionality' comes into play as his or her sense-impressions
become living sensations. Such sensations find their way into -
and transfuse - the work of creativity.

An artist's sensations, whether they be visual, aural, or tactile,

make up a superabundance, a field within which artworks find
expression through the conceptual tools and material forms of
their deployment. That is to say, such artworks begin to
assume a living reality - an evolving continuity in the space
and time of their articulation outside the formative grounds of
their inception. Here I evoke a particular actualization for
artworks, one in which the works themselves seem to take on
the decision of self-expression. Is this simply a beguiling
anthropomorphism, seeing in artworks the demeanour of self-
conscious beings?

Perhaps I can explain this intuition by way of a concrete

example, which is also a question: What is the relation
between poiesis and the sensory embodiments of art making?
Take a potter at his wheel. He is seated there in front of this
formless mound of clay. Literally, what is he to make of it? In
this clay's 'comportment toward being,' as Heidegger might
say, we see some thing emerging. The clay is thrown, its
essence kneaded into some tangible shape or form. This shape
is brought forth or 'led into being.' Thus we may speak of a
pot's thrownness, and its openness - the open of a vessel that
may yet be filled by the activity of hand or eye. In the
grammar of affect between a potter and his clay we witness
the working-out of a 'formative' intentionality.

The conceptual possibility that an artwork takes on the decision

of self-expression, which is somehow parallel to the artist's
creative will and intentionality, suggests that there is some
inter-connectedness between an artist's conscious guidance of
form and what we might describe as a work's own self-imposed
alliances or self-exploratory formations. We see something of
this in the compositional process. An artist, writer or musician
is at some pains to give a work 'its head,' so to speak; for a
work has a life of its own, as the abstract expressionist painter
Jackson Pollock once said, and the attempt is to try and let it
'come through.'

This raises the compelling idea of 'artistic meaning' - the

meaning an artist finds in his or her work - as distinct from a
work's causal beginnings. In this sense, as G. L. Hagberg
writes, the artist "discovers the meaning of [the] work in the
materials of the medium, rather than by infusing the materials
with significance through the embodiment of an artistic
intention."[13] Here the artist discovers the work within the
work, so to speak. The artistic meaning to be found - rather
than invested - in a work's particular medium is the reverse
side of what Hagberg calls 'emotive meaning,' in that an
artist's emotions have their own inarticulate intentionality that
seeks expression through his or her creative bodily being. In a
parallel way an artwork's impulse toward embodiment in a
specific medium, in paint, words, or music, is actualised
through an ardent exchange of form and that which is in
excess of form: a formless unknown which is not yet ready to
hand.

The artist him/herself has a body, and what is produced has an

embodied and performative character, whether it takes shape
as a pot, a painting, a poem, or a musical composition. For its
part, the discipline of phenomenology emphasises the
corporeality of the body: the body is an 'intentional subject' -
and occupies physical space. The phenomenologist speaks of
the intentionality of a human subject's consciousness. But an
artist's response to what might be called 'phenomenological
intentionality' must be to declare the arduous consciousness of
the 'creative act' itself. The creative act has its origins in the
givenness of consciousness. It may be intended (tendere, 'to
stretch out') but is intentional only in an optative, or
incomplete, but never a teleological sense. The creative act
spends or overreaches itself in allowing the disclosure of a
work for its own sake and is thus outside any endpoint.
Can a non-teleological intentionality be justified? What of the
'human skill' that is required to bring a thing into being? Is it
something learned or intentional? It might be argued that the
human skill necessary to create a work of art is either
controlled in its bodily processes and motivations, or
demonstrably corporeal in its abilities and kinesthesias, which
is to say, skills that were once learned and practiced eventually
become conscious [unconscious?] and automatic. The
demonstrable use of an artistic skill facilitates the passage of
an artwork from its origin in the artist to expressible sensibility
in the movement of a work from unconsciousness to formal
actuality.

We could say, then, that parallel to the artist's intentionality,

an artwork's essential features are given in one fundamental
operation, that a work makes itself tangible. As a poem seems
to write itself under the poet's hand - 'a poem should not
mean, but be,' said Archibald MacLeish - so does a work of
plastic or performing art compose itself under the artist's eye.
The body of an artwork, so to speak, is an agent of change in
and through the tangible world. And an artist brings perceptible
things in the form of artworks into their true iconic light. For
example, Claude Monet said that he did not want to paint
objects but rather 'the light suffusing them.' This is an
endorsement of perception from within where an artist stands,
the world of light suffusing the world of form.

The artist is one for whom the poverty of his or her materials is
all that remains in this unveiling of things. It is an inner
creative seeing that regathers the things of the world.
However, as Heidegger[14], has argued, the 'created work' is
not something adjunct or accidental to an artist's being; it is
integral to it. A work comes to be that it may be un-concealed
or brought into 'the clearing' in the light of aletheia, the
unveiling of truth. It is this unconcealedness which gives a
work of art its authenticity as a self-presencing thing. A work
of art comes into visual, aural or tactile view by invading the
spaces and textures of the sensible world, by becoming the
unveiling (or aletheic) reality it means itself to be.

An artist is not marginal to a work's expressive being. The

artist makes a work and is in turn made by it. Something takes
place in the exchange between artist and work, for artist and
work are instruments one to one another. What takes its place
originates in the work, and what is discovered of the work
happens through others' responses to it. Importantly, both
artist and work concede one another to the world from within
the world of their being. The direction of this being, whether
from 'world to work' or from 'work to world,' has diacritical
significance for the artist. It enables an interplay impelling him
or her toward a space of 'unitary multiplicity,' a poietical space
wherein the artist, the work, and the receiver of such a work
are brought forward in all the lineaments of their self-
presentation.

Here the work of poiesis is also the poiesis of work, the process
of making and the thing made. As the poet Juan Ramón
Jiménez has aptly said, 'let us think more with our hands.' It is
this thinking with our hands that communicates not just any
perceived intentionality on the artist's part, but a site or space
wherein a multiple and unified complementarity of idea and
raw material coincide in the fullest potential of their happening.
Working with the raw materials of the imagination (ideas,
concepts, schemata) and those of the material order (paint,
clay, or stone), constitutes for the artist and the artwork a
means of settling an Umwelt, 'a living environment,' a renewed
and placeful place of poietic and non-exploitative encounter.
This might be called an 'experimental poiesis,' in that the
passage of a created thing from its inception into inter-
dependent reality signifies a kinesthetic movement in time and
circumstance intended to meet and address a receiver.

4. An experimental poiesis for contemporary aesthetics?

How might such an experimental poiesis of artist, work and

receiver enrich contemporary aesthetic reflection? In an
emboldened way poiesis may be said to reveal and re-veil itself
in contemporary cultural production. At a practical level such
production seeks to revitalise praxis in its sensuous
relationship to 'the will.' Insofar as the activity of poiesis is, at
base, "vital force, drive and energetic tension [and] passion
[something that informs praxis]," as Agamben says, then
praxis enables man to produce universally.[15] That is, there is
a universal field construed by and for man as the locus of his
production. An experimental poiesis, one which gathers itself in
human skill, appears as the highest manifestation of creative
being, and thus tends to countermand any negative praxis of
the will.

But what are the implications for artworks conceived as the

exercise of a practical will? One thing is certain, according to
Zimmerman, that neither works of art nor natural objects need
a metaphysical ground on which to stand. The work of art is
not based on anything external to it, like a Platonic form, but
instead "[the artwork] provides the grounds and limits for
things within the world it founds". In opening up a world the
artwork does not serve a 'purpose' as such. And as
Zimmerman writes, "living things are not 'founded' either on
the will of [a] creator or on the principle of sufficient reason:
they are because they are."[16]

Living things are because they are. Here we have intimations

of a transmogrifying praxis in the sense that works of art
initiate the grounds and limits for things within the world they
found. If works of art do not require a metaphysical ground on
which to stand, they do nevertheless require or initiate some
kind of world-foundedness in which to be disclosed. Rather
than seeing poiesis as that which grounds the self-centred
world of the work of art, I would argue that poiesis is sensed in
the 'self-centering' of a work of art within the grounds of its
own world-foundedness. This self-centering (the present tense)
of a work implies a still-active and unfolding dynamic,
something that is crucial to the tri-partite presentation of
artist/work/receiver. A performative work of art, Pierre Boulez'
"Structures for Two Pianos," for example, takes on the features
of this world-foundedness of a work in the construction of an
improvisatory rhythm with the 'forcible insertion' into the music
of what Boulez calls 'a free dimension,' something distinct from
the governing control of ensemble playing. Such artworks are
autonomous and yet interdependent. They have their essential
solitude and their overt pronouncement through human agents
or performers. Their poiesis is made explicit in the spontaneity
of an unencumbered and free-flowing praxis.

In corresponding fashion contemporary art-making, whether

plastic, literary or performative, needs to re-engage with the
poietic act, for the 'act' of poiesis discloses us as the receivers
of the gift of art. What does this gift of art entail? The gift of
art is the most original gift, according to Agamben, because art
is "the gift of the original site of man." Here the artwork
permits man "to attain to his original status in history and time
in his encounter with it." Following Aristotle, art is
architectonic. Art or poiesis is the pro-duction of origin; that is
to say, "art is the gift of the original space of man,
architectonics par excellence."[17] In his experience of the
work of art, "man stands in the truth . . . [that is to say] in the
origin that has revealed itself to him in the poietic act." In this
engagement, artists and observers "recover their essential
solidarity and their common ground."[18] It is the poietic act in
the recovery of this shared solidarity that shows us to be the
receivers of the gift of art.

But who or what gives the gift of art? If the one addressed by a
work of art is the ultimate receiver of the gift, then it is
plausible to suggest that both the artist and the work give this
gift to the receiver. From a metaphysical or even a spiritual
standpoint, this gift of art, as the gift of both artist and work to
their recipients, is a demonstrable giving of a re-inaugurated
original space, of a poietical space which defines and
empowers human experience in the generosity of an art -
consider Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa - which is thematically
intelligent and emotionally arresting. For as Henri Focillon has
said, a work of art "must [eventually] renounce thought, must
become dimensional, must both measure and qualify space. It
is in this very turning outward that [a work's] inmost principle
resides"[19] I venture to say that a work's inmost principle is
defined by its particular poiesis. In its 'turning outward' a work
is made dimensional, measuring and qualifying the space about
it. This outward turn of a work is a turning toward the poietical
space of an artist and receiver in the interplay of their self-
interestedness, that is to say, in the sheer enjoyment to be
had from a work's undaunted expressive re-presentation in the
lives of artists and receivers.

Such encounters with the transforming power of art cannot be

reduced to a succession of sensate or pleasurable instants, nor
deprived of a reflexive situatedness in the responses of
aesthetic appreciation. Otherwise its essential traits and our
engagement with them fall prey to mere aestheticism. If artists
and receivers recover solidarity and common ground through
the origin revealed to them in the poietic act, as Agamben
maintains, what follows for aesthetics? If aesthetics is no
longer able to think art in its proper disposition, to attain the
essential structure of the artwork, because art is now at the
extreme end of a nihilistic metaphysical destiny, as Agamben
further argues, then 'the essence' of art, a true complexity for
aesthetic thought, remains closed to us.

A truly poietic aesthetics, as I now invoke it here, offers

something substantially different. For if the essence of art and
its practices are governed by the claims of the sensuous and
the particular, as Jay Bernstein believes, then can it be said
that art introduces an alternative conception of acting, one that
binds poiesis and praxis, making and doing together?[20] It
seems to me that a poiesis which heralds the gift of art to man
as its natural and embodied recipient goes some way to
reclaiming the essence of art for our contemporary historical
space. In this respect alone, perhaps, poiesis has the potential
to overcome what Agamben has called "the interminable
twilight that covers the terra aesthetica."[21] But how are
artists and receivers disposed to such a poiesis?

In human creativity the work of poiesis may be sensed as a

kinetic gesturing: the stroke of a brush, the shaping of a poem,
the dexterous skill of a musician. Such activities have a
determined symmetry of parts and a distinct temper of being.
Poietic activity signals the emergence of a figure or rhythm - a
transmissible figuration - from the hand of the painter, poet, or
musician. Genuine producing requires the work of 'the head'
and 'the hands.' Working with raw materials constitutes the
kind of producing which places itself in and through the created
thing that is let be. Poiesis here has its own reserve, so to
speak, wherein what is held back and handed over in works of
art is akin to the Greek epoche, 'epoch,' something given and
retained, secreted away from too ready availability, and thus
held simultaneously in the twofold flow of gift and reservation.

What would such a poiesis need to be, or become, for its

contemporaneity to be recognised? And how might it shape
contemporary artistic practice and aesthetic thought?

I return to the interchange between potter and clay, of the

ways in which he or she responds to the inchoate inclinations
of that clay kneaded and moulded under the fingers. I spoke of
this pot's poiesis, its thrownness and its openness; an
openness that may yet be filled by hand or eye in an unfurling
of its own form-full-ness, something continually shaped by the
invisibilities at the heart of production and in the
expansiveness of symbolic invention. Here the logos of the
aesthetic world brings into fuller existence the culture of an
artistic world, those ways in which 'things make themselves
things and the world makes itself world' (so Levinas) in the
poignant manifestations of a poiesis that faces us in the
making.

What I would call the field of practical poiesis becomes for the
artist a means of knowing when and how to incline or induce
the self-presencing of things, things let be of their own
innermost need. An artist will achieve this, in plastic, literary,
or performative terms, by a wide-eyed fidelity to what Paul
Klee has called the 'pre-creation,' 'creation,' and 'post-creation'
of the created thing[22]; that is to say, by faithfulness to an
artwork's conception, growth, and articulation. In a
contemporary way, aesthetic reflection will recognise that what
is pre-conscious in art-making works toward a more conscious
articulation in the created thing. And that which is post-
conscious in the fullest sense, a work of actualised creation,
will attest to a condensing and freeing of the tensions wrought
by a passionately engaged poiesis. Here we may expect to see
the gift of art through artist and work to receiver as the means
whereby both the autonomy of an artwork (the autonomy
given by the artist), and a work's own inter-dependence (its
enactment through human agents), to be two integral facets of
the same refining sensibility in the experience of poietic arousal
and of kinesthetic engagement.

5. Conclusion

I have argued that poiesis is something 'in process'

contemporaneously, that it remains a subjacent influence
striving toward realization. As such it is likely to surface in
forms wherein the artist's intuitive faculty appears paramount.
A corresponding feature of a poiesis 'in process' is its
relationship with praxis. Rather than seeing praxis as the
exercise of an intentional will alone, we may see its relation to
poiesis as bringing about a transforming encounter between
the artist and his or her work in the unfolding conditions of art-
making, which itself communicates a poietic world-view to art's
recipients.

Finally, I have said that we need to re-engage the poietic act in

a contemporary way as something that finds its own
unforeseen passage into those kinds of artistic production, in
the labors of the eye, hand and head, that remain poised and
receptive to its moods. And I have suggested that poiesis will
be sensed in those undercurrents of artistic activity that impel
us toward a place of 'unitary multiplicity,' wherein the artist,
the artwork, and the receiver enact themselves in the full
complementarity of their self-abandonment. I venture to hope
that the space that poiesis opens up to our sense of
questioning encounter with the diverse forms of art-making
today will yield new and surprising discoveries, and harness the
rich potential available to us in our experience of art and in
aesthetic reflection.

Endnotes

[1] Giorgio Agamben, "Poiesis and Praxis," in The Man Without

Content, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 72.

[2] Agamben, ibid., p. 72.

[3] Aristotle, "Art or Technical Skill (technē)," in The

Nicomachean Ethics, ed. J.A.K. Thomson (London: Penguin
Edition, 1977), p. 208.

[4] See Martin Heidegger's, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in

Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (London
and Toronto: Harper and Row, Perennial Library, 1935/1975),
especially Section One: "Thing and Work," pp. 17ff.

[5] Agamben, The Man Without Content, p. 73.

[6] Michael Zimmerman, "Authentic Producing as Technē and

Poiesis," in Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity:
Technology, Politics, and Art, (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 229-230.

[7] Zimmerman, ibid., p. 230.

[8] Ibid., p 231.

[9] Emmanuel Levinas, 1998, "The Philosophical Idea of the

Determination of Culture," in On Thinking-of-the-Other, entre
nous, trans. Michael B Smith and Barbara Harshav, (London:
The Athlone Press), p. 183.

[10] Levinas, ibid., p. 183.

[11] Cited in Agamben, The Man Without Content, pp. 76-77.

[12] Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies, (London and New York:

Routledge, 1994), p. 7.

[13] G.L. Hagberg, Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning,

and Aesthetic Theory, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1995), p. 3.

[14] Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, pp. 56ff.

[15] Agamben, The Man Without Content, p. 85.

[16] Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontations with Modernity,
p. 235.

[17] Agamben, The Man Without Content, pp. 100-101.

[18] Ibid., p. 102.

[19] Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Zone
Books, 1934/1992), p. 34.

[20] Jay M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation

from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park,
Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).

[21] Agamben, The Man Without Content, p. 103.

[22] Paul Klee, "Notebooks," Volume 2, in The Nature of

Nature, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans. Heinz Norden (London: Lund
Humphries, 1929/1973), pp. 259ff.

Derek H. Whitehead, Ph.D.

Sydney, Australia

[email protected]