From my notes (lengthy, but very good):
Neven Jovanovic wrote:
what literary parallels there are for"Origin of the Work of Art" 1934-1935 Lecture by Gerald Bruns
comparing a work of art to a building/temple (Octavian's temple > the
Aeneid).
This is a painful essay; it hurts to read this essay. One must live with this essay and get corrupted by it. One reason why it is painful to read is that the essay is really therapeutic; that is, it is meant to cure us about our ideas about art; as if our ideas about art were an infection. What if all the things that seem so self-evidently true about the work of art, are ideas that we are infected with or addicted to and we had to be cured from. For example, the idea that the work of art is the work of an artist, the work of imagination, an expression of feeling, and expression of meaning. Or the idea that the work of art is an imitation or the representation of reality; that it is a revelation or a message a vision of some Ideal. And the idea that it is a thing of beauty; the idea that the work of art is a beautiful object, a perfectly shaped thing; or that the work of art is an object of our experience, it is something that we must experience, an aesthetic experience or a experience of pleasure or an imaginative experience. Something for us; an object of analysis or even a recreational object, some object that makes us feel better. One of the difficulties of this essay is that H. talks as if none of these ideas matter; as if they just got in the way of understanding what the work of art is. He doesn't so much try to refute these ideas, although he says some disagreeable things about them along the way, he just sort of drops them and goes on to talk about the work of art as if these ideas did not matter. And so, it is not surprizing that this thing should be so difficult to read. He asks about the origin about the work of art; essentially this is the same as asking what a work of art is. But his way of asking the question is "How is it with the work of art?" He wants to know what happens when something is a work of art. Because in one sense the question is a silly question. Works of art are in one sense the furniture of our world. They are all around us; at least they are in the Snite Museum. So there is no mystery about what they are; they are just part of the things we have around us. As if works of art are just ordinary and familiar. We can't really imagine being without them. We would recognize there absense. So it is very easy to think of the work of art as a thing, one of our possessions, something we have around, or have a place for. Now the first section is really an attempt to shake us loss from the idea that the work of art is a thing. But H. does it in a strange way. He does want us to think of the work of art as a sort of thing. But he says that we will not understand in what sense the work of art is a thing until we get out from under all the ideas we have about what a thing is. What a thing is--first section--what our ideas of what a thing is--a history of our ideas. Let us abstract one thing from this particular section; ignoring the peasant shoes that almost everyone focuses on. Passage that I put on the board from Nietzche. H. at this time was a close reader of N. Shortly after this leacture he began giving lectures on Nietzche. Among other things he took over or appropriated in his own fashion N's insight that in our culture there is an internal connection, a sort of natural connection between thought and violence, between knowledge and violence. And that is sort of summarized in this fragment, collected in the will to power found in N's desk drawer (he never assembled these fragments into a book). But the N. idea is that the whole point of knowledge is to enable us to get control of things. Not a non-controversial idea about knowledge. To know something means to be able to identify it conceptually, to conceptualize it, to bring it under conceptual control, to know what something is means to reduce it to a concept or a category of thought. And so knowledge is an act of violence. To summarize crudely, it seems to me, that from this text onward H. works out or defines something like a nonviolent way of thinking. His idea was that in order to think adequately about the work of art, one had to, among other things, think non-violently. Also his idea was that the work of art makes us think this way. It gets us into the mode of nonviolent thinking. What that means is not easy to say. We have to give up in order to get at what he means almost all that we think of when we think of thinking. Just consult all the metaphors that we use when we speak about what it is to mean something. They are always very aggressive--grasping something; getting mastery (who is the slave); all our metaphors for knowledge in this culture are just informed by tthe metaphors of control, possession, mastery, laying bare the deep structure of language (linguistics). N. calls this the "will to power." It is really no trouble to think of the whole edifice of teaching as teaching people how to get control. First you have to get control of yourself, then your life, then everyone around you, children. Pg. 31-32
"This fact is the reason why it is necessary to know about these thing-concepts, in order thereby to take heed of their derivation and their boundless presumption, but alos of ther semblance of self-evidence. This knowledge becomes all the more necessary when we risk the attempt to bring to view and express in words the thingly character of the thing, the equipmental character of equipment, and the workly character of the work. To this end, however, only one element is needful: to keep at a distance all the preconceptions and assaults of the above modes of thought, to leave thething to rest in its own self, for instance, in this thing-being. What seems easier than to let a being be just the being that it is? Or does this turn out to be the most difficult of tasks, particularly if such an intention--to let a being be as it is--represents the opposite of the indifference tha simply turns its back upon the being itself in favor of an unexamined concept of being? We ought to turn toward the being, think about it in regard to its being, but by means of this thinking at the same time let it rest upon itself in its very own being."
Not indifference, not not caring, not not taking an interest, on the contrary, one should have care for things. "This exertion of though seems to meet with its greates resistance in defining the thingness of the thing; for where else could the cause lie of the falilure of the efforts mentioned? The unpretentious thing evades thought most stubbornly." the thing resists our conceptualizations. The minute we try to fix them so that they don't get away from us, they get away from us. They withdraw. The thing is like this, so is the work of art. This withdrawl of the thing from our efforts to grasp it with our minds or in works or in propositions or in thoery, maybe this self-refusal is of the essence of the thing. It is this that the work of art has common with the thing. "Must not this strange and uncommunicative feature of the nature of the thing become intimately familiar to thought that tries to think the thing? If so, then we should not force our way to its thingly character." We should take a step back. This idea of letting a thing thing--our idiom does not have a place for this type of thinking. H. later says that we should let things thing, thinging. It is not an object but an event, something that happens. We don't usually think of things as events. But this is what H. gets into. We think we live in a world of objects but H. begins speaking as if we really live in a world of events; everything gets temporalized in his thinking. And so also with the work of art. Just the word word--this ambiguity--what happens when the work works. Here our idiom does work. Take work not as an object but as the work that it does, so that one can then begin talking aobut the consequences, about what happens, so that when you think of the work not as a substance but as something temporal, then you begin asking about the work of art. This is what he gets into in the second section; the work of art. Passage of the Greek Temple pg. 41. Painting for him are not good examples of works of arts because they are so obviously meant for us to look at them and they are so easily to put away in things like museums, wants to cure us of our museaum piece theory of works of arts, as if the work of art is something to be put away in the museum and looked at. If you do that to the work of art then you are not allowing it to work. You are saying that about the only work it can do is to work on me. What he wants to do is to get us out of this sort of consumerism were we think that the work is there only to work on us. "A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing." (It doesn't imitate anything, really). Continues reading passage...reveals nothing." What is he saying about the work of art? To be a work is to open up a world, to set up a world. The work of art brings everything into the open, makes it appear, makes it exist. H's. thesis, in some fashion, is that the work of the work of art is to provide a world; it is foundational for the world, for everything around us, it first brings to light the light of day. It is a mystical notion; a transcendental notion. The event of the work of art, its orgin, is also the origin of the world. That is where our mind starts to hurt; we want to say, show us, we want to confirm by appeals to experience that this thing actually happens-H. says is not confirmable by experience. We want to say that man and animals are already there and that the work of art is set down in the middle. But H. says to think of it in the reverse order. That is where our mind hurts. Greek culture arranged itself around the Homeric Hymns. Stories tend to have this sort of task. We are the stories that we tell about ourselves. The recitation of the Homeric Hymns became the source of the self-identity, self-understanding of the Greeks. This is that sort of foundational nature of the stories we tell (Mormons). Someone belongs to a story. World-making theory of art. Not so off the wall as this. Basic romantic theory of art. Romantic poets all mythologize art in this way. To be a work means to set up a world. But now, a turn of the screw. The work of art opens up a world. Imagine a forest, the work of art opens up a clearing, a lighted place. But the work of art does not belong to the world it opens up. This is a crucial thing. This section is fascinating and mind boggling. Relationship between earth and world, world and earth. The work of art is made of something earthly. Unmistakenedly earthly. 46 "But why must this settingforth of the earth heappen is such a way that the work sets itself back into it? ...But while thisw heaviness exerts an opposing pressure upon us it denies us any penetration into it....Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself only when it remain undisclosed and unexplained. Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate into it. It causes every merely calculating importunity upon it to turn into a destruction. This destruction may herald itself under the appearance of mastery and of progress in the form of the technical-scientific objectivation of nature, but this mastery nevertheless remains an impotence of will. The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which is by nature undisclosable, that which shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up. All things of earth, and the earth itself as a whole, flow together into a reciprocal accord. But this confluence is not a blurring of their outlines. Here there flows the stream, restful within itself, of the setting of bounds, which delimits everything present within its presence. Thus in each of the self-secluding things there is the same not-knowing-of-one-another. The earth is essentially self-secluding. To set forth the earth means to bring it into the Open as the self-secluding." The world is governed by the metaphor of clearing, of openness. The work of art opens a world. The earth is closure, self-seclusion, the earth always hides itself. It is as if there is an open space and then there is a closure. We can broaden our horizons but there is always going to be a limit, an impenetrable insurpassable limit. But it is this event of closure, of seclusion, of hiddenness or remaining undisclosed, undivulged, this is the character of the earth. The thing is what if we follow out this thought. What begins to happen if we begin to think of this work of art as opening up a world but nevertheless belonging to the earth, as being of the earth. That you cannot extract the work of art from the earth in which it remains embedded. You can't take the sculpture out of the stone. It is just there. You can't take the poem out of its language. Which in fact we try to do we try to read the poem as if it were just a sentence from which we could extract a meaning and the meaning is perfectly invisible. Poem is a piece of langauge which does not give it self up in that way. Well. H. will go on to say that the work of art is structured as a conflict between earth and world. p. 48 "The world is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of an historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extend sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never seperated...." Earth and world belong together even though there is this rift between them. Work of art is the rift between earth and world, that which opens and that which closes. 3rd section. pg. 66 "The more solitarily the work, fixed in the figure, stands on its own and the more cleanly it seems to cut all ties to human beings, the more simply does the thrust come into the Open that such a work is, and the more essentially is the extraordinary thrust to the surface and the long-familiar thrust down. But his multiple thrusting is nothing violent, for the more purely the work is itself transported into the openness of biengs (here he is trying to get across to us that the work of art is not anything human--of course we are all humanists--we can't even think that the work of art isn't a human product a monument to the soul's magnificance (Yeats) it is solitary, it cuts all ties to human beings) "an openness opened by itself--the more simply does it transport us into this openness and thus at the same time transport us out of the realm of the ordinary. To submit to this displacement means to transform our accustomed ties to world and to earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening in the work. Only the restraint of this staying lets what is created be the work that it is." We can't really apply this idea. But this is the thematic center of this essay. "To submit to this displacement means to transform our accustomed ties to world and to earth and henceforth to restrain all ususal doing and prizing, knowing and looking,.... What is that restraint? He goes on to call it the preserving thework. But preserving is not anything like restoring it to its orginal condition. What is this restraint? To "restrain all usual doing and prizing"--being a connoisure of art, being an expert--thework of thework of art defies connoisureship==he misses the work of the work of art. The English professor is out of it too. He teaches people how to unpack the work of art, the poem, this is what people do. "Yet knowing does not consist in mere information and notions about something." "The resoluteness intended in Being and Time is not the deliberate action of a subject, but the opening up of human being, out of its captivity in that which is, to the openness of BEing" H. is a fantastic critique of all this machinery around us, the university study of literature and art, this whole effort, the whole point of this essay is to emancipate not us, but thework of art, from this whole idea that this work of art exists for us to analyze, to adopt the knowing mode of analysis. Laying it bare, explicating it, throwing light on it. But that is our task, to find a place for the work of art in our world, to make sense of it, so that it has a place here. Because we don't want to give it us. Yes, we try to find a place for it in our world, but the work of art keeps pulling back as if it doesn't quite belong here, there is always the resistance of the work of art to our desire, and it is really a normal human desire to understand it, to know it, to make sense of it, to talk about it in ways that make it intelligible according to our dogmas that make sense of it. There is that worldly side of langauge that allows us to make sense as we speak but there is alsso this other side of langauge that people like James Joyce emphasizes in books like Finnegan's Wake. What makes works of arts like Joyce's impenetrable. Think of Williams, this grocery list; you can't tell a grocery list from a poem. As is a poem were hiding in the grocery list. H. goes against people like Bruns, being antithetical to literary professors who try to integrate the work of art into structures of knowledge. Begin thinking about the poet in terms of this idea. Think of H's essay on Holderlin. One can think of the poet as one inhabiting the realm between earth and world, but what H. is really talking about is the peculiar doubleness of the work of art. It opens a world, it does make sense to us, we can talk about it and make sense of it, in fact, poets think about themselves in relation to a world and an audience; but what is it they are doing? Why don't they speak in lucid propositions. H. deliberately and self-consciously excludes the artist from his talk about the work of art. Traditionally we talk about works of art in terms of the artist. It is like what Coleridge does. He asks a question: What is a poem? And it is the same, he says, as asking what is a poet? And you will understand a poem once you understand what goes on inside the mind of a poet, what produces a poem. So that in order to understand what a poem is, you need something like a theory of imagination. H. says, all of that really may be true, but it obtructs the work of the work of art. Thinking of thework of art in those terms, in subjectivist terms, in terms of the artist, is to think about it in terms of something else. Instead of thinking about the work, we think about the artist. So instead of having a theory about the art we have a theory of the artist. And essentially that is what our theories of imagination give us; they left the work of art behind. So H. is no way denying the fact that artists produce works of art but he is in no way interested in giving an account of that process of production because he says, that may well be all true, but don't tell me that that is an explanation of art, don't use that to explain away art. That is missing what he is trying to get at. H. is after something else. Don't reduce the work of art to the artisit. Doesn't want to mythologize the artist--a superhuman (Yeat's would like that idea). Most of our ideas about art are theories about the artist. Obviously poets write poems, but after you have acknowledged that, what does that explain (the expressive theory-in terms of the processes that produced it) But H. is trying to emancipate the work of art from that theory. Can art be living, like dancing? Who creates the dance? The dancer? The choreographer? Can we assign an artist to everything? What about a poem made up of quotations? Duchamp setting up and ax? Duchamp is disrupting that same idea of art--that it is the expression of the artist? Poet being created by the poem. You are not a poet until you write a poem. The work of art makes you exist as an artist. H. would finally would want to say that the artist is a part of an event. Instead of thinking of the work of art as an object produced by a subject, think of it as an event. Many things belong to this event: the poet, for one. In that event in which the work of art emerges, a whole world begins to appear. Earth vs. world. Take a poem. The words on a page mean something; one can interpret them, understand them but then there is a certain materiality that doesn't disappear. Another passage. 45. To work-being there belongs the setting up of a world
Language doesn't get used up. The poet always calling our attention to the materiality of language.
John P. Dwyer, Ph.D. (18th C. Brit. Lit.) 1111 Euclid Avenue Naples, FL 34110-1378
Home: (941) 594-5754 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Office: 1 Lely H. S. Boulevard, Lely High School, Naples, Florida 34113. Office phone (941) 417-4500; FAX: 417-4516 classroom C-227. Ph.D. in-field: 58,933 (2001-02).
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