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I have been reading Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art," as well as reaquainting myself with the poetry of John Ashbery, and the combination of both has me feeling excited about lots of overlaps and connections between the two. I've also been reading John Dewey's Art as Experience, which I've been enjoying, although I think it's fair to say that Dewey's emphasis on the substance and form distinction would be anathema to Heidegger, whose approach seems to view such an emphasis as deriving from a perspective that is too utilitarian and pragmatic. To speak of the artwork in the context of form and matter is to contextualize the artwork as equipment, according to Heidegger, and therefore as something useful, serviceable, and reliable. But there is a difference, Heidegger seems to be saying, between a hammer and a poem. What's the difference, and what is wrong anyways with the matter and form distinction as a way of talking about artworks?
Heidegger writes, "The distinction of matter and form is the conceptual scheme which is used, in the greatest variety of ways, quite generally for all art theory and aesthetics." (153, his italics) But yet, "Form and content are the most hackneyed concepts under which anything and everything may be subsumed." (153) How and why has the conceptual scheme used in the greatest variety of ways for thinking about artworks been misguided? Heidegger suggests that it was "the appropriation of Greek words by Roman-Latin thought" that served to fix a certain interpretation of things into existence. He writes,
Hypokeimenon becomes subjectum; hypostasis becomes substantia; symbebekos becomes accidens...Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally original experience of what they say, without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation. (149, his italics)
Heigger's claim is marvelously bold, if not seeming a bit preposterous, but he's right that the Roman translations suggest a conceptual framework that is distinct from the framework suggested by the Greek terms. To use a manner of description used by Hubert Dreyfus, we come across two different styles of world. I have no Greek or Latin, but from my (superficial) Google translating hypokeimenon means an underlying thing, something that persists through change, and therefore something ontological; and this ontological sense is not foremost in the meaning of subjectum, for which being is no longer a mystery, say, having replaced it with the notion of (a more secularized?) "subject matter" or "topic being discussed." Hypostasis also suggests a form of ontological foundationalism, which is somewhat lost - the beingness of the thing - through the concept of "substance" which can also suggest "matter" as well as a move presaging atomistic styles of thought close to Heidegger's notion of present-at-hand or occurrence. Finally, symbebekos, meaning some variety of "non-essential" loses something of the essential when it becomes "something belonging to a substance by chance," perhaps because of its association with substance as opposed to the underlying thing or being.
What we see when we look at these words is that one conceptual framework, related more to being, has been supplanted by another conceptual framework, related to, in some sense, a Cartesian mode of seeing, replete with subjects, objects, and substances. A world discloses reality, and we are presented with two different styles of world presenting different styles of reality. For we have moved from a preoccupation with the underlying thing to a preoccupation with the matter, the subject. This then suggests that, in Heidegger's terms, the "thing-concept" has changed, from a preoccupation with being to a preoccupation with equipment. And herein lies Heidegger's discomfort with the matter and form distinction for discussing artworks, as equipment suggests the useful, the serviceable, and the reliable, adjectives which Heidegger would not use to characterize artwork at all.
How would Heidegger characterize artwork? Heidegger hints at what his characterization might be when he writes what I find to be very movingly about "a pair of peasant shoes" painted by Van Gogh. He writes,
As long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the empty, unused shoes as they merely stand there in the picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of the equipment in truth is. From Van Gogh's painting we cannot even tell where these shoes stand. There is nothing surrounding this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong - only an undefined space. There are not even clods of soil from the field or the field-path sticking to them, which would at leaset hint at their use. A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet.
With the "and yet," Heidegger effects a kind of volta, and introduces us to the world they stand in front of and present, the "equipmental being of the equipment in truth":
From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles stretches the lonelinesss of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself. (159-160, his italics)
What happens in this description, and by implication in looking at the painting by Van Gogh, is that a world opens up. The equipment, the pair of shoes, is transformed. We are introduced to a kind of being that inheres in the painting, an "abundance of an essential Being of the equipment." (160) Therefore the artwork is not a matter of form and substance, which would reduce the artwork to equipment, but instead "lets us know what shoes are in truth." (161) What does this mean?
Truth is the style of the world that is currently the world; or, truth is the style of a world. But what is the/a world? Heidegger writes,
The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those utterly essential decisions of our history are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry there the world worlds. (170)
Poetry is constantly about the coming-into-being of a world, and therefore in the sense of a style of a world. Poems are not only about the coming-into-being of a world, but they perform or dramatize this coming-into-being through their unfolding, and more specifically, through the unparaphrasability of their unfolding. The strangeness causes us to brush up against the grain of our own conceptions, and to see them in their own particular configurations. (This is not unlike Richard Rorty's definition of edifying philosophy as "[helping]...readers, or society as a whole, break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes." (12)) Because the poem is strange, we can see the world that it instantiates more clearly, rather than it falling back into the familiar. Its strangeness makes it more conspicuous, makes its edges more palpable, its horizon more graspable.
Now, if a world is the background set of practices that show us how we see what we see - a "paradigm," to use a phrase from Thomas Kuhn that Dreyfus uses to discuss world in Heidegger - then poetry is constantly exploring and interrogating these background practices as a means of articulating and sharpening the world that we see and share. A poem brings a world about, and in doing so places our world in relief. Poetry can therefore articulate the paradigm of the world we live in, which is to say, show us who our gods are by holding them up to the light. It does this through its strangeness, which forces us to experience our preconceived ideas as preconceived and, in doing so, gives us a world that, like the world, is untranslatable, unparaphrasable, that is "more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home." Every attempt at interpreting poetry is bound to fail, just as, in Heideggerian terms, world is always conquered by earth. But interpreting a poem, like interpreting all great works of art, is a way of finding out where and who we are in history.
Another way of saying this is that poetry dramatizes the quarrel between abnormal and normal discourse, or world and earth. It does this by relentlessly resisting paraphrase, which is always the attempt of normal discourse, earth, and reason to usurp abnormal discourse, world, and imagination. By normal discourse, I mean, a la Rorty, "any discourse (scientific, political, theological, or whatever) which embodies agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement," and abnormal discourse as "any which lack such criteria." (11) Poetry lacks agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement because strangeness is interested in forms of sensemaking that elude what we are calling "criteria." Poetry weaves in and out of criteria, like a shadowboxer. This notion of abnormal discourse is an earlier version, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, of what Rorty makes plainer in Contingency, irony and solidarity, when he writes, "What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human fauclty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently [imagination], rather than for arguing well [reason], is the chief instrument of cultural change." (7) Poetry speaks differently, though it has no interest in arguing well, if arguing well means a form of conventional logic.
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