I turn now to a sketch of a non-hylomorphic conception of artifacts that will capture the uses of artifactuality as a major resource of artistic meaningfulness. As I noted in an initial post of this first draft, one of my major polemical targets would be hylomorphic conceptions of meaning in art. As I understand it, a hylomorphic conception of artistic meaning has at least the following characteristics: (a) There is such a thing as distinctively artistic meaning that (b) consists in a fusion of two conceptually distinct strata of meaningfulness, and (c) where one stratum is identical consists of meanings that artworks also share with non-artistic artifacts and (d) the other stratum contains elements distinctive of the manner of presentation of the artwork. From among the many dualisms invoked to describe and explain artistic meaning (e.g. form/content and sound/sense), perhaps the most prominent is the ‘what’ and the ‘how’; the ‘what’ (the ‘content’, ‘subject’, ‘message’, etc.) is conceptually identical in artworks and in non-artworks such as ordinary prose, quotidian utterances, advertising signs, or political slogans, while the ‘how’ (the ‘medium’, the ‘mode of presentation’, the ‘format’, etc.) is distinctive of the particular artwork qua material or embodied in some communicative medium. I have already indicated how Michael Podro’s account of artistic meaning as ‘sustaining recognition’ dispenses with the hylomorphic model. How might we likewise expel hylomorphism from what commonsensically seems to be its homeland, in our very conception of artifacts?
Already in the mid-1930s the philosopher Martin Heidegger had called attention both to the dominance of the hylomorphic model in thinking about artworks as artifacts, and also to its inappropriateness. Heidegger noted that the “distinction of matter and form is the conceptual schema which is used, in the greatest variety of ways, quite generally for all art theory and aesthetics” (p. 27, italics in original), and goes on to urge that the hylomorphic model is superficial and/or inappropriate both for an account of things generally and artworks in particular; Heidegger famously characterizes artworks as ‘the happening of truth’ (p. 38) (alternately, “the setting-into-work of truth” (p. 77)) wherein there is a “conflict of world and earth” (p. 62). Evidently these formulations demand (and have received) a great deal of interpretation and explication, but it cannot be said that they have been taken up outside of the academic hothouse of Heidegger scholarship. And so, as indicated at the end of my previous post, I instead turn to what seems to me the two most illuminating philosophical re-conceptualizations and analyses of artifactuality in the post-WWII period, Gilbert Simondon’s account of brick-making and Tim Ingold’s explication of making a basket.
Recall that Simondon’s basic critical point with regard to hylomorphism is that it leaves the actual process whereby form combines with (or unites with, is imposed upon, elicits and actualizes potentials from, etc.) matter in a ‘dark zone’. Aristotle and his hylomorphism starts from a thing that is already constituted, an individual that is already one thing with a nature that makes it what it is, and in the service of explanation abstracts from it a conception of its form and a conception of its matter. Explicitly opposing hylomorphism, Simondon from what he calls a ‘metastabile’ system within which there is a process of individuation, of becoming-an-individual. The individual that Aristotle treats as ontologically basic is for Simondon a phase of a process of individuation that he calls its ‘genesis’. (Remarkably, some recent work in Anglo-American philosophy of biology proceeds in a closely analogous way; see, for example, the influential work of John Dupre.) An artifact is individuated not by an imposition of a form on a passive and undetermined matter (p. 35), but rather when two distinct chains of preliminary operations are brought together. What does this mean?
Simondon’s chief example of an artifact is a clay brick, and his analysis (pp. 22-32) seems to me one of the great revelatory examples in twentieth-century philosophy, along with Heidegger’s broken hammer, Sartre’s voyeur at the keyhole, or Wittgenstein’s builders. What could better lend itself to hylomorphic analysis than putting some homogeneous, featureless clay into a mold to form a brick? But no: the making of the brick is a fundamentally dynamic operation wherein (i) the clay is packed (ii) a fabricated mold. For the clay to admit of being so packed, it must have been prepared: the clay in the marsh or the quarry must be extracted, and then submitted to operations that make it homogenous. Likewise, the mold is not some pre-given geometric form, but rather a concrete material mold that must have been constructed and then prepared so that the humid clay won’t stick to the mold. (i) and (ii) are not ‘matter’ and ‘form’, but rather what Simondon calls “two half-trains of transformation that encounter one another” (p. 24) The ‘form’, the understanding of which had always caused Aristotle’s readers perplexities, is drained of its mystery: in brick-making it is what limits and stabilizes the prepared clay, and it as it were already ‘contains’ actions as its potential uses (p. 25). The ‘matter’ is something that has essentially already become, and exists as a phase with a capacity for further becoming.
In the influential essay ‘On Weaving a Basket’ of the year 2000, the anthropologist Tim Ingold analyzes basket-making in a manner that largely overlaps with Simondon’s analysis of brick-making, and indeed in a later book Making (2013) he recapitulates his initial analysis and explicitly adds support from Simondon. Ingold starts from the idea that instead of thinking of weaving as a kind of making, one might think of making generally on the model of weaving. Following points that Franz Boas had already made in his canonical Primitive Art (1927), Ingold focuses upon the manufacture of a basket made, or rather built up from, coils of clay. The maker rolls the clay into long tubes (Ingold starts a step later than Simondon, since in Ingold’s example the clay is already homogeneous) then lays the coil in a roughly circular manner, placing the coil progressively upon itself in order to build an initial shape. Ingold acknowledges that the maker may well have a precise conception of the intended finished shape, but that, as for Simondon, nothing corresponds to the imposition of a form upon some matter. Rather, “the form of the basket is the result of a play of forces, both internal and external to the material that makes it up” (p. 342). And following Boas, Ingold notes the temporalization of making that is internal to artifactuality: an artifact “is the crystallization of activity within a relational field, its regularities of form embodying the regularities of movement that gave rise to it” (p. 345).
What do we gain for the understanding of artistic meaning by replacing the Aristotelean-cum-commonsensical hylomorphic conception of artifacts with Simondon’s and Ingold’s conceptions? Neither Simondon nor Ingold offer accounts of artistic meaning, and indeed I cannot see that either introduces anything like the conceptual tools that would permit its comprehension (of course, they did not intend to). The superiority of their accounts for my purposes turns on two salient points: First, they make plausible the difficult thought that there is a sense of the temporality of making that is internal to the experience of artifacts, and so some sense of that temporality can be mobilized in the service of artistic meaning. The idea that artists recruit under some conception the manner in which their works are made into the meaning of their works has been proposed countless times, but the hylomorphic conception left that idea, along with the process of making itself, in the dark zone. Second, both accounts note the further sense of some background (in Simondon the ‘metastable system’ out of which individuation occurs; in Ingold the relational field of a play of forces) within which the artifact arises, and so as with the temporality of making is available as a resource of artistic meaning. Later in the book, in analyses of the sense of rhythm in ornamentation, of the tendency towards cosmic representations in art, and of the materiality of artistic mediums, I shall show how these accounts can be put to use in making sense of kinds of artistic meaning that have been overlooked or have seemed intractable under traditional conceptions.
With the resources that I’ve introduced so far, I can in my next post turn to a consideration of what I call proto-art, especially as conceptualized through the recently developed concept of ‘artifaction’, and thereafter consider the final great general resource of artistic meaningfulness, language.
References and Works Consulted:
Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927)
Gilles Deleuze, ‘On Gilbert Simondon’, in Desert islands and other texts, 1953-1974 (2004)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)
John Dupre, Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (2012)
Montgomery Furth, Substance, Form, and Psyche: An Aristotelean Metaphysics (1988)
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
Tim Ingold, ‘On Weaving a Basket’, in The Perception of the Environment (2000)
--Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (2013)
Carl Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy (1994)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
Beth Preston, A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind (2013)
Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017)
-- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020)
--Imagination and Invention (2022)
--‘Sciences de la nature et sciences de l’homme’, in Sur la philosophie (1950-1980) (2004)