Creativity, singularity and techné

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. The distinction here is between experience as Erlebnis (subjective experience) and experience as Erfahrung (total or whole experience). In another early essay, Benjamin writes of experience as a return to a childlike state (“Experience”). This can be understood as a strategic refutation of Kant's proposal that critical thinking in a political sense is characterised by a certain mature self-reflection, as a separation of thought from experience (What is Enlightenment?). Benjamin wants political thought to return to experience as the undoing of mature self-reflection. Throughout his career, Benjamin turns again and again to the experience of children as a way of thinking beyond self-reflection and grasping the world intuitively in terms of the absolute. See also Gasché (83ff.) for the distinction between the intuition of the absolute as transcendent (Kant) and grasping the world intuitively as an absolute (Benjamin).

2. See also Quadrio for a discussion of Benjamin's theory of experience as a surface of affect.

3. Benjamin extends linguistic expression to include all forms of expression (“On Language as Such” 62), thereby making it possible to reflect on experience in a range of visual and aural modes.

4. For Deleuze, extra-being is univocity, or that which is already given to be said and thus must be invoked “all at once” (the One-All) for thought to think at all (Difference and Repetition 35–37). Univocity must be immediately present, as an absolute outside but embedded in thought itself: “equal being [extra being] is immediately present in everything, without mediation, or intermediary … all things are absolute proximity” (37). In this paper I refer to this kind of thinking in a range of writings including those of Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy and Walter Benjamin, as the “thought of the absolute” (Nancy Hegel 23).

5. See Kant, Critique of Judgement 73ff.

6. See Stolnitz for the inculcation of an aesthetic sensibility of the moral good in eighteenth-century European civil society, especially through the ideas of Shaftsbury.

7. For a full discussion of the difference between Plato and Aristotle along these lines, see Alan Blum, Theorizing. Blum shows how Platonic argument is concerned with “how mind is grounded in that which it aspires to produce” (138), whereas Aristotle removes this “reflexivity” in favour of categorical schemes for determining Being. For Plato, Being concerns how specific instances (expressions) aspire to the Good, guided by eidos (pure ideas), whereas for Aristotle, Being concerns the adequacy of language to a community of experts. Platonic critique risks Being in its very activity, whereas Aristotelian science confirms Being as that which can be expressed rationally.

8. Here we must consider aesthetic judgement not simply as that of “good taste” but as the reconciliation of perception with form. Aesthetics always tries to overcome the gap between subjective experience and objective knowledge by a certain training that effaces singular experience in favour of a detachment or “disinterestedness.” Aesthetic judgements are statements of sense in the mode of reason. Creativity is inimical to aesthetic judgement because, in the latter, nothing is risked.

9. This is the project set out by Walter Benjamin, to invoke the experience of archaic time (Erfahrung), or time in which the differences between the past and the present are collapsed by an originary configuration of inscribed materiality apprehended as a lightning flash (“Theses on the Philosophy of History” 255). For configuration see Caygill (23, 84–85).

10. Jean-Luc Nancy refers to this as “abandoned being” (“Abandoned Being” 38).

11. Merleau-Ponty writes of a certain “sedimentation” harboured in speech that holds itself back in order to reproduce itself as a kind of cultural life (Signs 92). Later in this paper I identify this sedimentation as the gesture of the sign, its body as disposition, as that which withdraws itself in being seen.

12. The absolute is affirmed as an immanence within exigent experience; the difference retained in its differenciation, as the “restlessness of immanence” (Nancy, Hegel 5).

13. Materiality needs to be distinguished from the concrete. The knife is not concrete but material. Concreteness refers to a particular instance of an immaterial form, whereas materiality refers to the affect-medium in which objects endure (appear and fade away). Unlike concreteness, which always signifies the form of which it is a particular instance, materiality is always in a resistive mode to the form embedded in it. Material is the “plasticity” of the immanent force of the singular expression of an object, its difference from itself in appearing singular. For an elaboration of the distinction between concrete and materiality, see Jean-Luc Nancy's essay “Identity and Trembling” (22). For plasticity, see Nancy, “On Painting (and) Presence” (345); see also Rodowick (211–12 passim) for the plasticity of media in contemporary media contexts, and the need to develop an understanding of mediation as plastic material configured by immanent force.

14. The murderous filmic knife is thus attached to the figure of woman, as that which defines its limit; its fate in death as an absolute end, and the fascinating horror that comes from exploring its potential to this limit. The fact that the knife is nearly always wielded by a man returns this exploration to a patriarchal format, which it nevertheless traverses and exceeds in its manifestation (Repulsion is an exception. The woman kills the man with his own razor). To enter a film at the place where the knife is wielded is to be situated at a potentiality, where patriarchal power is at its most intense by also being at its most vulnerable (its extreme limit). In terms of the film, woman is fully affective when the knife appears.

15. A revealing or aletheia in Heidegger's terms (“The Question Concerning Technology” 12).

16. Techné or technique is defined by Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics in two different ways. One relates to the production of invariable things, which he defines in terms of scientific knowledge. The other concerns knowledge of variable things, which he calls practical wisdom (1140a: 25–35). Both forms of techné involve bringing things to their end by means of rational action or operation. Considered in this way, techné is the technique of applying means towards an end, an efficiency of thought and action.

17. Martin Heidegger identifies this tendency in modernity as the age of the “world picture [in which] the world [is] conceived and grasped as picture” (“The Age of the World Picture” 129). To experience life as a world picture is to be subject to a distancing effect that simultaneously makes things appear close at hand: intimate distance.

18. Stiegler is following Heidegger on this point. The originary flaw, in its primariness, necessarily comes last-but-most-recent, as coming-to-presence: “All coming to presence, not only modern technology, keeps itself everywhere concealed to the last” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 327). Originariness is thus a matter of access from wherever one happens to be, and not a return to an original state.

19. This exposed terrain is not the technological medium as a functional operation or a “means to an end” but the “nothing” from which the object has been made: the after-affect which paradoxically precedes the object in its material presence, as that which makes the object visible in the first place. This terrain is the “filmness” of the film in its capacity to make a knife float across its surface; a mode of apprehending and exploiting spectral objects in their close proximity to the material in which they are embedded; a way of dissolving them into pure affect as singular to this or that particular event.

20. In his lecture series over the period 1810–25 “Turner returned again and again to a number of fundamental problems … the development of habits of perception, and the relationship, often contradictory, between vision and measurable truth; the elemental nature of geometrical forms and of the ‘will to form’ in art” (Gage 108). The problem emerging for Turner was the relation between colour as sensation on one hand, and form and perspective on the other. In the latter stages of the lecture series, Turner was able to “discuss colour in its own right” (109), thereby breaking away from the subordination of colour to form in academic art practice.

21. Turner wrote of his own practice in terms of chromatic reflections that “evade every attempt to reduce them to anything like rule or practicality. What seems one day to be governed by one cause is destroyed the next by a different atmosphere” (quoted in Kemp 83). Even at an early stage, Turner's art practice was characterised by experimentation, for instance by switching between watercolour and oil painting, so that one became an expression of the other (Gage 27).

22. In a well-known anecdote, Turner is said to have leant out of the window of a speeding train to have the direct experience of rushing air against his body, in preparation for painting Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (Lindsay 150).

23. Turner's work thus prefigures that of the French impressionists by some decades (but see Serres). The work of John Constable, a contemporary of Turner, is also of note here. See my article “In the Absence of the Human” for further discussion of Constable and the production of modern art objects along the lines I am suggesting here.

24. See Jonathan Crary's discussion of Goethe's theory of colours (67–74).

25. In “Painting, or Signs and Marks,” Benjamin proposes the distinction between signs and marks through the example of painting on a white canvas. The sign is a graphic line drawn on a surface that becomes its background: “the background is conjoined to the line” (83). The sign-as-line acts as a signifier, thereby conferring meaning or identity to the background (where the background is the reference to which the sign is aimed). But in this process the surface ceases to be visible, becoming hidden in the background. Benjamin wants us to consider the persistence in perception of the surface-as-hidden, which he describes as a “surge of white waves” (the residual effect of the white canvas).

26. In a similar move, Merleau-Ponty writes of “an original stain” (quoted in Visker 105).

27. See Gelikman for a discussion of Benjamin's concept of aura in terms of historical perception embedded in differentiated modes of technologically produced imagery.

28. For a discussion of competing techniques in the development of photography in the nineteenth century and the effects of this on the perceptual regime, see Harris.

29. Alan Sekula has pointed to the doubled nature of the photographic portrait in the nineteenth century as potentially honorific and repressive, providing both a ceremonial view of the bourgeois self and a forensic record of the criminal body (6–7). He argues that the archival system of identification introduced in France by Bertillon late in the nineteenth century makes visible a criminal body that “expresses nothing” (30). The mug shot is thus the portrait photograph reduced to its minimum level of expression, its aesthetics neutralised into an identity-sign.

30. For a discussion of Gardner's role in the photographic documentation of the American Civil War, see Davis (138ff.).

31. It should be noted here that these photographic sessions were subject to patenting (Davis 165). The photographer won the right to take photographs of important events over competitors, thereby enhancing his reputation as well as making money in the bargain. The intertwining of commercial and state enterprises is important here, and concerns the production of images valued for their scarcity, not their abundance.

32. In the nineteenth century the art of photography and that of science were intertwined. Studio portraits such as those taken by Gardner of Paine would have been considered both aesthetic and factual, in the sense that the noble portrait represented the true character of a subject. In particular, photographs of the face were regarded as “evidence of good [or bad] character” (Hamilton and Hargreaves 34) and coincided with a need for “precise information” (Davis 152) as part of “a seamless integration of art and information” (Davis 171). Indeed, as Hamilton and Hargreaves point out, “early ‘scientific’ photography concerned with the face and the body … seemed indistinguishable from current ‘artistic’ or ‘social’ photography” (61).

33. In his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes reads this photograph in terms of what he calls the punctum, or the wound of time: an experience that collapses the distance between the subjectivity of the viewer and the objectivity of the image. However, against Barthes, I argue that the punctum effect can only occur because the photographic image is in essence a document of public gestures and not of private experiences. Photographs are gestural through and through, thereby opening the body out to disposition in temporal and spatial becoming. Rather than existential wound, the collapse of temporal distance produces a shuffling effect in which one pose can be seen as a transformation of another.

34. Gestures are tied to technique and the technical (Stiegler 152). One cannot gesture without invoking a technique for shaping the body as a pose.