ESTHESIC BECOMING AND ACTUALIZED WORK: An Artist’s Statement [2015] — IV. Conclusion: Definition of the Artistic Space

This post is the final part of a series which will make up the dissertation I wrote alongside a portfolio to complete my PhD in 2015. It is exactly that: an attempt at an account of where I was two years ago, and many things have changed. Still, it might be useful in understanding how and why I write music.

Read the Preface here.
Read Chapter 1 here.
Read Chapter 2 here.
Read Chapter 3 here.
See the bibliography here.

Find my work here, here, and here.

Agamben wades through the nihilism of Western art in order to find the artistic origin that has been destroyed. He focuses on the Greek concept of poiesis (ποίησις): “Every time that something is pro-duced, that is, brought from concealment and nonbeing into the light of presence, there is ποίησις, pro-duction, poetry. In this broad original sense of the word, every art — not only the verbal kind — is poetry, pro-duction into presence, and the activity of the craftsman who makes and object is ποίησις as well.”1 For Agamben, poiesis melded with praxis to encompass all willed activity, no matter how reproducible, and poiesis lost its special status as that which can unveil truth. In some sense, then, poiesis must be recovered. It would be nostalgic to pose this recovery as as a genuine return to a previous state. The “original” may not refer to the new, but it also does not refer to the old. We must reunite praxis with poiesis already knowing of their split, synthesizing something entirely different from anything previous.

we must interrogate the work, because it is in the work that ποίησις actualizes its power. What, then is the character of the work, in which the productive activity of man concretizes itself?

Aristotle employs a term he himself coined: ἐντελέχεια. That which enters into presence and remains in presence, gathering itself, in an end-directed way, into a shape in which it finds its fullness, its completeness. . . Ενέργεια, then, means being-at-work, ἐν ἒργον, since the work, ἒργον, is precisely entelechy, that which enters into presence and lasts by gathering itself into its own shape as into its own end.2

The original character of the work is being-at-work. For all involved to be-at-work, all involved must be involved in pro-ducing into presence. The goal which is in its infancy in amplifier, then, is to enable that being-at-work, that pro-duction into presence, for each performer, in equal measure with myself; perhaps even in equal measure with the listener who identifies with our persona. My enduring goal, then, in this portfolio and in the work I will undertake beyond it, is to make a music which can be a “continuous generation. . . the origin that holds together in presence.”3

Agamben then draws our attention to “rhythm,” to which he opposes the abstraction of a “number.” The experience of a set of impulses is surely truer than that given by the number which counts them. Rhythm, for Agamben, stops time, it “escapes the incessant flight of instants.”4 There is something in this originary state that I am after in both poiesis and esthesis: “We are as though held, arrested before something,” says Agamben.5

[Rhythm is] the principle of presence that opens and maintains the work of art in its original space. . . precisely because rhythm is that which causes the work of art to be what it is, it is also Measure and logos (ratio) in the Greek sense of that which gives everything its proper space in presence. Rhythm attains this essential dimension, and is Measure in this original meaning. . . It is only because rhythm situates itself in a dimension in which the very work of art is at stake that the work of art presents itself on the one hand as rational and necessary structure and on the other as pure, disinterested play, in a space in which calculation and play appear to blur into each other.6

Where we are held is that original space. Only because art has carved out a void in which one “experiences his being-in-the-world as his essential condition does a world open up for his action and his existence. . . [in which] he is a historical being, for whom, that is, at every instant his past and future are at stake.”7

This original space is where we can be radically open; where we can feel the echo chamber of the self resound; where we can conjoin vulnerability and empowerment.8 This space is my objective goal as an artist as I have described it here via hooks, Nancy, and Agamben. It is in service of working out the characteristics of this space — being as though arrested, experiencing transparency, making the familiar unfamiliar, enacting consensual masochistic vulnerability, and feeling actualized in one’s work — that I attempt to effect musical experience.

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1 Agamben, p. 59–60.

2 Ibid., p. 64–65.

3 Ibid., p. 80.

4 Ibid., p. 99.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., p. 98–99.

7 Ibid., p. 101.

8 hooks, of course, views the margin and radical openness as opposed to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, especially in the United States. I would argue that a space that truly has these characteristics is a space in which white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is rendered powerless. This space is currently beyond my grasp, and may always be. It is a model.