Techne Theory

A New Language for Art

Henry Staten

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781472592910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Only since the Romantic period has art been understood in terms of an ineffable aesthetic quality of things like poems, paintings, and sculptures, and the art-maker as endowed with an inexplicable power of creation. From the Greeks to the 18th century, art was conceived as techne-- the skill and know-how by which things and states of affairs are ordered. Techne Theory shows how to use this concept to cut through the Romantic notion of art as a kind of magic by returning to the original sense of art as techne, the standpoint of the person who actually knows how to make a work of art. Understood as techne, art-making, like all other cultural accomplishments, is a form of work performed by an artisan who has inherited the know-how of previous generations of artisans. Along the way, Techne Theory cuts through the humanist-structuralist impasse over the question of artistic agency and explains what 'form' really means.

PART ONE

Fundamentals

CHAPTER ONE

The techne standpoint

Artists don’t think about art the way non-artists do. Critics and audiences view art as finished products, to be appreciated and interpreted; an artist sees a work by another artist through the eyes of a fellow art-maker, as a made thing, and tries to discern how it was made, how its materials were worked. Experiencing other people’s art is, for an artist, part of the endless quest to deepen her own knowledge of art-making – her own techne.

Non-artists’ view of art – the passive, consumer’s eye view – has spawned the pernicious concept of ‘an abstract capitalized Art’, as Raymond Williams called it.¹ Art with a capital A is the set of objects characterized by ‘an ineffable quality’ – a je ne sais quois or ‘aura’ – that does not ‘obey pre-established rules’, and which creates ‘a space of secular spirituality institutionalized by the museum’.² Larry Shiner has chronicled the rise of this new definition of art in the eighteenth century, showing how the ‘fine arts’ were first elevated into a sublime new category raised above the mere crafts.³ Before that time, there was no formal, hierarchical distinction – certainly not one expressible in money – between art and craft, as we see from the fact, cited by Shiner, that Leonardo was initially paid less for painting The Virgin of the Rocks than was Giacomo del Maino for carving the framework. Even in the eighteenth century, after the elite new classification of fine art had begun to take hold, fields such as mechanics, optics, watchmaking, surgery, engineering and landscape gardening could be included on the list of ‘fine arts’ (pp. 35, 81–2).

The emerging separation of a canonical set of fine arts from the rest of the crafts went hand in hand with a new, sublime conception of art-making and art-makers. In 1709 Dubos in his Poets and Painters still referred to his subjects as ‘artisans’, though he admitted he should have added the adjective ‘illustrious’; and Batteux, who defined the canonical set of so-called ‘fine’ arts, nevertheless maintained in 1746 that even geniuses ‘cannot properly create’, they can only ‘recognize where and how [something] is’ (p. 114) – a prescient definition that I propose to validate in this book. But the Romantic breeze was beginning to blow, and would soon replace the notion of the illustrious artisan and the non-creator genius with that of the genius creator. Now techne, the skill and knowledge of the artisan, was depreciated as merely ‘mechanical’ activity, and our modern concept of Art and the Artist took centre stage.

Perhaps previous ages were less enlightened than we are, and had not yet recognized the metaphysical specialness of certain arts and those who make them. If so, this failure extends all the way back to the classical Greeks, for so long viewed as the supreme art-makers of the West, who lacked even a word for what we mean by Art. Their word was the one I have adopted, techne, and it included the arts of fishing, carpentry, generalship, mathematics – all forms of skilful attaining of a goal. Techne is just practical know-how of any kind whatever, no matter how sophisticated. The Romans translated techne as ars, with the same meaning, and the equivalent modern European words up to the eighteenth century – art, arte, Kunst – still meant the same. Techne, then, is the original – I want to say, the proper – sense of our word art.

In its original use, then, art refers not to artworks but to the skill and know-how by means of which artworks – and everything else – are made or organized. On this understanding of the word, museums do not contain ‘art’; they contain works of art, things made by art. Because today most of the time, in most contexts, we hear ‘art’ as referring to art’s products, the question ‘what is art?’ (asked as one looks at a painting, or Duchamp’s urinal) has become an endlessly tantalizing riddle rooted in mystery. But you can’t understand art by staring at art products and repeating ‘Art! Art!’ to yourself; it’s the nature of their making that needs to be plumbed.

Even though the decisive turn towards the modern mystification of art was taken by the Romantic theory of genius, Romantic thought never entirely forgot about art in the traditional sense. Kant, who gave the Romantic theory its most influential form, tortuously reconciled the old value of art as maker’s knowledge, derived from previous models of art-making, with the ascendant value of genius. But the last vestiges of regard for art as techne were erased in the modern notion, purportedly inspired by Duchamp, that art is basically conceptual. This step was the final metamorphosis of the idea of genius. The idea that the ineffable quality of artness was a product of a mysterious creative faculty in the artist spawned the notion that the troublesome process of struggling with materials and techniques could be skipped altogether; the artist could bestow the name of art on an object, any object whatever, and it became art.

Duchamp’s opening up of the notion of art to admit ‘anything whatever’ was supposed to be counter-institutional, a step away from the monumentalization of the masterwork and its creator and towards the democratization of art. But it has not worked out that way; rather, the old, mystified value of the art object has not only survived but flourished, as the new kinds of objects defined as art are shown in the same exhibition spaces, with the same price tags, as the old ones. And the process of mystification at the level of theory, with its continued fetishization of the art object, goes on, now in combination with the evolution of the power of the art-market.

Among the most culturally pernicious effects of this mystification is what radical anthropological theorist Alfred Gell called the ‘mismatch’ between ‘the spectator’s internal awareness of his own powers as an agent’ and the conception the spectator forms of ‘the powers possessed by the artist’.⁴ No doubt we should be impressed by another human being’s know-how that exceeds our own; but the more the nature of a know-how is hidden behind a veil of mystification the more likely it is to stymie the spectator’s sense of her own agency, and the more serviceable it becomes to the power interests to which art is so easily wed. By contrast, to the degree that the spectator learns what art is – productive know-how that human beings learn as they learn any other social practice, and which, like any other social practice, some people are better at than others, in large part (but not entirely) thanks to a combination of hard work and favourable circumstances – the visible work loses its aura of mystery, and the cowing of the spectator by the feeling of mismatch correspondingly diminishes.

But if art is techne, are ‘artists’ no better than plumbers? The question is badly out of focus and only seems momentous to the Art-mystified eye. From the techne standpoint, the mystery, and the fascination, is primarily in the cunning by means of which Art and all other systematic, goal-oriented, knowledge-based forms of human activity are carried out – the cunning that organizes materials, methods and the artisans’ actions in the most effective way. When one shifts one’s focus from the product to the how and with what of making, the differences between painters and plumbers do indeed become less intriguing than the similarities, because the real mystery of art’s cunning is so much richer than anything having to do with the distinction between art and craft. Cunning is related to German können, which means both ‘to know’ and ‘to be able to’, and itself has had both meanings in the past; I mean to evoke both of them, as well as the sense of cunning as a ‘crafty’ kind of knowledge, one that can get around official obstacles. It takes a word like this to give a true sense of the suppleness and complexity of the kind of knowledge techne is – a know-how that is immensely far from ‘merely mechanical’, as the cliché since Kant has had it, a cliché today so deeply rooted that it seems like common sense.

The purpose of this book is to fight the fetishism of the art product by showing how much there is to know about the cunning behind the producing – the producing not only of what we think of as Art, but of everything that constitutes ordered human activity of all kinds, from language and the upright stance with which humans learn to walk, to poetry, rocket science, and shoelace-tying – all of human culture, in short. Obviously, there are deep differences among the technai, as there are among the kingdoms and phyla of the living world, but, like living things, technai all grow from the same root and have the same fundamental nature. They are systematic ways of organizing our world, the knowledge of which is universally inherited by human beings simply by virtue of being brought up in human societies. The crucial fact about techne, which makes it so unpalatable to Romantic-humanist ideas of Art, is that it is in the first instance a social-historical, not an individual-psychological, possession, a practical knowledge that before it migrates to an individual mind-body has been accumulated within and across cultures over generations, centuries, millennia. The individual’s power to make anything, whether a craft artefact or a fine artwork, or to be the agent of any goal-oriented act, is necessarily and always derived or delegated from techne.

We are, however, so inured to the idea that ‘fine art’, as opposed to craft work, requires a special, indefinable intervention on the part of the artist, that the definition of art as techne strikes us as leaving out precisely the most essential thing about art. We think: of course in art of the traditional kind the artist must have a certain acquired art-making knowledge, which she uses to hack away at the marble, but presiding over this skilled hacking-away there must be something that critical analysis can never pin down, a specialness that cannot be the product of mere techne. To this way of thinking, it seems self-evident that techne can produce only conventional, generic, ‘mechanical’ work.

In the past fifty years this Romantic-humanist theory of Art was submitted to a radical challenge from structuralism and post-structuralism. In its most polemical ‘death of the author’ phase structuralism theorized that artworks are produced by mechanical combinatories of pre-existing elements, a notion that had great appeal at the time for many of us who were sick of aesthetic mystery. The work done by the structuralists on the theory of art was, however, primarily negative; they did not produce a convincing new account. Structuralist ideas and techne theory overlap on some points, but none of the structuralists (I include here Foucault, Barthes and even Derrida) ever came close to understanding art as techne. Instead, they paved the way to a general loss of interest (in departments of literature, and to a considerable degree in departments of art and music as well) in the specificity of the work of art, so that the study of art in the 1980s and 1990s, and to a considerable degree still today, has been dominated by larger questions of culture and the political. For anyone interested in the question of art ‘as art’, whether as product or as production, and not in leaving it behind, the death of the author left the question of how art is made shrouded in deeper darkness than before. The question of art, in any sense of the term, whether as Art or as techne, is a question of value: either of where value resides in the art object, or, in the techne view, the radically different question of how, out of the infinity of forms that can be mechanically generated, a particular individual in a particular concrete situation makes judgments of better and worse resulting in a work that is a candidate for appreciation as art by the relevant valuing community.⁵ The structuralist combinatory generates an indiscriminate proliferation of forms; but how does an individual artist make the judgments of value that select the good ones out of this wilderness? Indiscriminate combinatorial play does not produce a pleasurable carnival of forms; well before structuralism, Jorge Luis Borges saw that the mechanical combinatory produces only the nightmare vision of the Library of Babel.⁶

That genius cannot be the whole picture was recognized by Kant in those same pages in which he argued that ‘beautiful art is possible only as a product of genius’.⁷ Even conscientious readers of Kant have had trouble recognizing just how fundamental, how shocking, is the limitation Kant then places on the sovereignty of genius: that genius as such does not and cannot produce the form of the finished art work, but only ‘rich material [Stoff] for products of art’; genius left to itself, in the absence of the ‘slow and painstaking’, mechanical pursuit of form, produces ‘nothing but nonsense’ (50; p. 197). I underline: Kant says that genius is not the source of aesthetic form; genius as such produces nothing but nonsense.⁸

Coming from the diametrically opposite position from Borges, Kant arrives at the same impasse. The ‘productive’ faculty, whether genius or the universal combinatory, cannot account for the crucial factor in art: the form of the individual work. Only techne, referred to here by Kant in terms of the faculty of taste, can bestow form:

To give . . . form to the product of beautiful art . . . requires merely taste, to which the artist, after he has practiced and corrected it by means of various examples of art or nature, holds up his work, and after many, often laborious attempts to satisfy it, finds the form that contents him; hence this is not a matter of inspiration or a free swing of the mental powers, but a slow and indeed painstaking improvement, in order to let it become adequate to the thought and yet not detrimental to the freedom in the play of the mental powers. (48; p. 191)

Despite his flight into the ineffable, Kant remains close enough to the classical tradition of art theory to think of Kunst primarily not as the products of art but as that by which these products are made; and he has enough of a sense of art as techne to set his account of production by mere ‘taste’ and artistic labour against the more unhinged, more properly Romantic, notions of genius that were influential in Germany at the time. From the standpoint of techne theory, Kant’s most radical and penetrating insight is the one concerning the limitation of the creative power of genius. An art object is given value by being given form, of whatever sort might be appropriate to the kind of art that it is; and an innate, natural faculty, no matter how ‘creative’ in some notional sense it might be, cannot be the effective origin of form in art. This insight points us towards the fundamental question that divides Romantic and humanistic accounts of art from techne-oriented or at least tec...