Arche-Aesthetics: from Heidegger to Derrida

“The rift does not let the opponents break apart; it brings what opposes measure and boundary to its common outline”- Heidegger

Where can we begin in understanding a work of art? It is to this question Martin Heidegger turns in his 1937 essay, seeking to bring the concepts he had developed in Being and Time to the aesthetic enquiry. 

Heidegger argues that from the first perception of the work, its entry upon the phenomenological horizon, humans bring their understanding to bear upon it as projection. An understanding that, he argues, is mired in the classical opposition between form and content. Heidegger's task is to begin a hermeneutic investigation into the work of art which would be free of the conceptual trappings of other attempts by virtue of his awareness of his own enterprise, “compelled to follow a circle”, in its propounding of aesthetic virtue, avoiding being drawn into the traditional "transcendental" study which preceded him which would ultimately refer to some empty concept such as "beauty". To think art, to do justice to it in situ, there is called for the study of aesthetics within its own unique concepts, along its own Being (Deleuze similarly makes the primary quality of art its rupturing of established signification in the becoming of the problem). We can find this primary Art located between the "essence of the work" and the "essence of the artist", as relationship between subject and object, and tracing this should reveal the place "from which and by which [art] is". 

Dismissive of  formulations that aim to explain the art merely as re-presentation of lived experience, Art is for Heidegger not the showing of an already known fact or even the presentation of new fact but the clearing of possibility for truth. As thrown-beings, we exist within the place into which we are thrown: the singular characteristic of Art (or poetry) is its ability to open this "clearing” wherein things are already truthful in their relationship to one another. As ground for his investigation, he offers three theories about the work of art: as substance, as sense perception and as formal matter. Taking the latter, he examines van Gogh's a Pair of Shoes:

But not directly. First, in order to teach the thingliness of the art he provides equipment as the most understandable kind of thing, "that which takes matter and form as guide achieves spatial dominance". Using the "example" of a pair of peasant's shoes, the Van Gogh painting is used to illustrate or "facilitate the visual representation of them". Art has been used to illustrate how this equipmental-being could be put to use to explain how the thinking of thingliness has been granted in Van Gogh's painting. Art which would exist as the clearing, as the "possibility of truth" has been put to use as re-presentation of the visible. Failing to articulate even the prefatory without putting art's being-work to work itself, this clearing of the concepts of thingliness is from the start mired in the contradictory.

Continuing, the task of art is framed as being-work, to “liberate the free space of the open region and to establish it in its structure” through navigating the complexities of artist creation from materials in themselves, the objects used in creation come to bear in their “earth-ness”, that which has a tenancy to “come forth and shelter” and “juts” into the openness of the “world”. The artist cannot create ex nihilo in the pure openness of a dimensionless creativity (the worldly-element) but neither is art strictly limited to its formative conditions, of representation and historical development (the earthly). What Heidegger characterises as "strife" is the interplay between these two forces in the formation of the work, the "jutting".

A propos the phenomenological distinction between the being of matter “[denying] us any penetration” and the being of man operates in the distinction between the opening and this setting back, Heidegger opens the theological "the setting up ... is the splendour that the god comes to presence", possibly though the “Greek temple” which “fits together” “surrounding paths into a unity”. Of course here it is possible to begin a deconstructive attack upon the use of such a theological disjunction, but the careful phraseology confines the efficacy of such a project to a mere question of word-usage: Heidegger's point is the articulation of the transcendental rather than its authentic belief. When Heidegger here adopts a religious timbre it is to articulate the wholeness of Being in its full dimension; art can "clear" for this. (Of course Derrida, aware of many of Heidegger's inconsistencies, is still open to such a "weak-theology" attack).

Having set the parameters of the work of art hermeneutically Heidegger then comes to a similar answer; the being-work of art is making-true to a community or receiver of the work, which is temporally and culturally indeterminate from the creation, the strife of being: “the work-being of the work consists in the mediation of the strife between world and earth”. What we may see in Art, if it should “clear” our particular being is the existential tension between the openness of the world as possibility and the closure that matter demands. Repeating the hermetic operation, Heidegger builds on Nietzsche by marking out truth as an empty signifier referring only to correctness which would then mean, in a “curious tangle”, truth again, which will have to “stand and fall with [the] unconcealment of beings”. Therefore “Truth [has] an impulse toward a work grounded in its very essence”.

Finally, Heidegger gives us three characteristics of a work of art. One: the creativeness of the work's being transfixes the strife into the figure which sutures the earth and the world. Two: the creativeness of art is part of the created work so that “unconcealment has happened”. Three: the work of art has a willing un-closedness preparing the clearing for entry of the human being. Heidegger's reading is finally to be an attempt to remove his own initial posit of the thingliness of the art to authorise the final grandiose statement “The origin of the work of art, is art”. By subjecting art to his existential criteria Heidegger obfuscates the clarity of his own initial posit of art fundamentally as object. When he removes the “thingliness” posit he must also concede the central tenet of his argument; the strange ontological "clarity" of being under Heidegger's reading is not sufficient. 

Jacques Derrida, responds in Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing to Heidegger's essay. He provocatively opens with a definition - the French pointure meaning “1. an old synonym of prick. 2. A point, used to fix the page.” We might say that he brings the archaic form to bear with acuity upon Heidegger's text, which, along the failings I have outlined above he chastises as “ridiculous and lamentable”. 

The Origin of the Work of Art begun with "the matter/form couple and the concept of thing" which have "long dominated every theory of art and aesthetics". What this posit broaches is the question of whether this distinction is located within the being-work or being-product of a being. The case has been argued that it does not, that through being claimed by the silence or opening of the being-work of the work we can arrive at what Heidegger would describe in the Letter on Humanism as the "unusual character of the simple". We cannot however reach this unusual character as of yet, at least through the given reasoning. The example used in Origin is the peasant shoes, but these shoes are not "as" peasant shoes, they are rather as shoes-as-product rather than the simpleness of Being; everywhere the thing or product or work supervenes upon the clarity of Being. The Origin has been a study of "The Manifestation of the being-product" (Derrida), despite the vitriol with which the author attacks the "sphere of familiarity and connoisseurship" of the art industry. Heidegger was unable to break the cycle of interpretation to emerge at Being - perhaps this is unsuprisoing when we recall that the shoes were given without "pictorial or aesthetic reference" - that is, without having been "cleared" so as to exist in their openness. In trying to articulate the silent for-itself of art Heidegger has arrived at a "schema, in a barely displaced Kantian sense" (Derrida).

Derrida's criticism lead's us to an impasse where, refusing to accept the weight of traditional interpretations or pursue the uncomfortable progress of Heidegger's argument, we founder.

The comment in Origin that "everybody knows what belongs to shoes" can be used to enact a deconstructive reconfiguration of the argument at its own origin. Heidegger's use of a product has not enshrined it as paradigmatic or transcendental; he could have produced another example and the track which he takes is reproachable only in its specificity; the discourse would still have functioned: the peculiar phenomenological classifications of the world, the earth etc. would still have been reachable. Therefore the truth must be abandoned in this specific context but may be recovered as "further away from the matter-form couple, further away than even 'a distinction between the two'" or "à côté de ses pompes". The possibility of the origin is always problematic because through enunciating it we, as Heidegger does, must fix ourselves to a deterministic ontological terrain which would then determine it's eventual form of solution.

Praising instead Magritte's art, Derrida's arche-aesthetics would escape the phenomenological trap of remaining metaphysically bound by formulating itself around "seires and citationality" or the "affirmation of the loss of origin" remarked of in Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. As in Philosophy of the Boudoir (above), the notion of belonging, as feet may "belong to a subject", ensures aesthetics remains attached to its historical metaphysical roots. Margrite, identifying the shoes with the partial object of psychoanalytic desire provides an alternate: we cannot take the object (Art) as belonging, even to a function of unconcealing, but rather as an articulation within a disjointed discursive economy. Even when this art must "make the expert speak", there should remain a preservation of this disconcerting sense of the absent arbiter of meaning. The "this is that predication" of the art scholar will no longer do. Therefore as we are thrown again not into being but into the questions of the possibility of our own perspective, we are able to reconstitute and thereby reinstate Heidegger. Even if "the step backwards from, a truth of adequation to a truth of unveiling, can leave one practically disarmed in the face of the ingenious, the precritical, the dogmatic" the opening upon our (ideological) selves has occured. Ironically Heidegger best articulated the ability of Art as being-work to make-speak though the form rather than the content of his essay: art in its silence has a being-work as making-speak, and the unbroken silence with which the art reflects our own projection reveals elements of our human strife to reach answers.

Sources:

1. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ in Basic Writings of Martin Heidegger, trans Albert Hofstadter (London: Routledge, 1993)

2. Jacques Derrida, ‘Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,’ in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)