Restoring Art's Original Status: A Study of Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content

Vandana Sharma Ms. Department of English, Punjabi University, India
Sharanpal Singh Dr. Department of Distance Education, Punjabi University, Patiala, India

Abstract

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it explores Agamben’s theoretical concerns about the essence of art in the modern world in his most significant book about the nature and function of art entitled The Man Without Content (1970). Secondly, we seek to identify how his novel ideas and concepts about art and aesthetics blend in productive analysis of literature in general and the writings of Herman Melville and Franz Kafka in particular. We come to conclusion that Agamben’s persistent and rational exploration of art history, offers not only valuable insights on key issues such as free creative principle of the artist, aesthetic judgment, reproducibility vs. originality, transmissibility of culture and original structure of the work of art but also add new dimensions to our understanding of literature and contemporary culture.

Keywords: aesthetics, aesthetic judgment, creative principle, originality

The Creative Experience of the Artist and Sensible Apprehension of the Spectator

The publication of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life in 1995 gave Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b.1942), a global acknowledgment among the prominent contemporary thinkers. The Man Without Content is one of Agamben’s significant works, which was published in 1970. This inaugural publication of Agamben offers an insightful analysis of the history of art and aesthetics from the Greeks to the present times. In The Man Without Content, Agamben underlines the fact that art has become pure potentiality of negation in the present times and nihilism nestles in its depths. According to him, modern aesthetics has overshadowed art and thus a work of art remains no more original measure of man’s dwelling on earth. Agamben (1999, p. 6), therefore, wants artistic works to regain the original stature by articulating an urgency for “a destruction of aesthetics that would, by clearing away what is usually taken for granted, allow us to bring into question the very meaning of aesthetics as the science of the work of art.”

Agamben instigates his analysis with Immanuel Kant’s idea of disinterestedness expressed in Critique of Judgment. In late eighteenth century, when the focus in aesthetics shifted from sense perception in general to perception of the beautiful in particular, Kant added a new aspect of the selflessness or “disinterest” in an appreciation of pure beauty. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1967, p. 74) objected to Kant’s doctrine of disinterestedness by clarifying that Kant just considered art and beauty from the “position of ‘spectator’”, instead of viewing the aesthetic problem through the experiences of the artist. Agamben (1999, p. 3) sees in Nietzsche’s views a call to reverse the traditional aesthetic perception on the work of art, whereby, the sensible apprehension of the spectator is replaced by “the creative experience of the artist who sees in his work only une promesse de bonheur, a promise of happiness.”

The Split between Form and Meaning

Agamben (1999, p. 7-8) calls this present predicament “a paradox of terror” which crops up due to the difference between two kinds of writers i.e. Rhetoricians, who look for form and the Terrorists, who follow nothing but meaning. He states that in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the painter Frenhofer worked on his painting for ten years in search for absolute meaning but in the end this quest erased all meaning, allowing only signs and meaningless forms to survive.

Glimpse of Split between Genius and Taste in Literature

Agamben (1999, p. 9) locates a prevalence of duality in the entire domain of aesthetics since “the side that faces the artist is the living reality in which he reads his promise of happiness; but the other side, which faces the spectator, is an assemblage of lifeless elements that can only mirror itself in the aesthetic judgment’s reflection of it.” Kafka projects this duality in a slightly different but subtle form in The Metamorphosis. Similarly, Melville, in Moby-Dick, employs the symbol of white whale to highlight the fact that a comprehensive and precise view of life takes diverse meanings into consideration.

Manual and Intellectual Modes of Production in an Era of Modern Technology

Agamben notices that the mode of presence of the things produced by man has become double with the development of modern technology. Differentiating technics from art, Agamben (1999, p. 38) remarks that the essential status of the product of technics is reproducibility whereas the basic status of the work of art lies in its “originality.” According to him, originality of a work of art means that the work of art remains in the proximity to its origin and keeps its “origin alive by literally transforming it: putting it into new form.”

The Predicament of the Artist

Agamben considers the present predicament of art in our time a crisis of poetry i.e. of poiesis and praxis. He states that the Greeks made a clear distinction between “poiesis (poiein, ‘to pro-duce’ in the sense of bringing into being) and praxis (prattein, ‘to do’ in the sense of acting)” (Agamben, 1999, p. 42). According to Agamben (1999, p. 37-63), Plato considered everything including nature, which brings itself into presence, has the character of poiesis. Agamben argues that Aristotle assigned a higher position to poiesis than to praxis because the essential character of poiesis lies in its “being a mode of truth.”

The Original Structure of the Work of Art

According to Agamben (1999, p. 63), when Holderlin points towards a work of art as epoche and rhythm, he basically situates the original structure of the work of art in a dimension in which the very “structure of man’s being-in-the-world and his relationship with truth and history are at stake.” Agamben argues that rhythm introduces a split or a stop into the eternal flow of temporal dimension. In a similar way, the experience before a work of art enables us to feel a “stop” in time.

Transmissibility of Culture

In the last section of the book, Agamben takes up the issue of transmissibility of culture. In a traditional system, connection between past and present is maintained by transmission of traditional beliefs and notions. For him (1999, p. 66), the breaking of tradition means that the past has lost its transmissibility. Agamben (1999, p. 69) views Kafka, in the modern time, as the one author who has taken this mission of resolving the conflict between the old and the new by turning man’s inability to appropriate his own historical beliefs “into the very soil on which man might recover himself.”

Conclusion

A study of The Man Without Content reveals that Agamben blames modern aesthetic conception for creation of a series of evident splits — between artist and spectator, genius and taste and form and matter. These schisms have constrained art’s original stature in the modern time. Consequently, art remains no more the shared space in which all men, artists and non-artists come together in living unity. Agamben (1999, p. 71) finds the original status of the work of art as obscured because it is hidden in the abode of aesthetics and exhorts to burn this dwelling of aesthetics to render the “fundamental architectural problem” visible.

It may be stated that Agamben’s persistent and rational exploration of art history, offers valuable insights on key issues such as free creative principle of the artist, aesthetic judgment, reproducibility vs. originality, transmissibility of culture and original structure of the work of art. There remains no doubt that Agamben’s reasoned pursuit of fundamental truths and systematic study of issues not only seeks to provide rational methods of resolving conflicts by establishing standards of evidence but also creates novel techniques for evaluating ideas and arguments concerning art, aesthetics, literature, probity, science and humanities in general. A re-reading of literary works of Balzac, Diderot, Dostoevsky, Mann, Holderlin, Melville and Kafka in the light of Agamben’s insights, provides a rewarding understanding of these works although the present study limits itself to the works of Melville and Kafka.

Works Cited

  • Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The Man without Content. Trans. Georgia Albert. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif.
  • Aristotle. 2008. Physics. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford University Press, New York.
  • Balzac, Honore de. 2011. The Unknown Masterpiece and Other Stories. Dover Publications, New York.
  • Baudelaire, Charles. 2008. “Of the Essence of Laughter.” In: P. E. Charvet (Eds.), Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. University of Cambridge, New York, pp. 140-161.
  • Benjamin, Walter. 1926. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, New York.
  • Camus, Albert. 1991. The Myth of Sisyphus. Vintage Books, New York.
  • Croce, Benedetto. 1964. “Aesthetics.” In: Hofstadter, Albert., Kuhns, Richard. (Eds.), Philosophies of Art and Beauty, Selected Readings In Aesthetics From Plato to Heidegger. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 556-561.
  • Dali, Salvador. 2006. “The Most Uncanny Thing: A Methodological Analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s Ontology of Art.” The Art Syntropy Project. artsyntropy.org, August 25th.
  • Diderot, Denis. 1976. Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream. Trans. Leonard Tancock. Penguin Classics, New York.
  • Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. Columbia University Press, New York.
  • Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 2010. Devils. Wordsworth Editions Ltd., Hertfordshire.
  • Durantaye, Leland de la. 2009. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif.
  • Eikelboom, Lexi. 2009. “John Milbank and Giorgio Agamben on Ethical Poiesis.” Academia.Edu, May 13th.
  • Hegel, G. W. F. 1975. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford University Press, New York.
  • Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York.
  • Holderlin, Friedrich. 1988. “Remarks on ‘Oedipus.” In: Thomas Pfau. (Eds.), Essays and Letters on Theory. State University of New York Press, Albany, pp. 101.
  • Kafka, Franz. 1990. Letters to Friends, Family and Editors. Trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston. Schocken books Inc., New York.
  • Kafka, Franz. 1971. The Complete Stories. Schocken books Inc., New York.
  • Kafka, Franz. 2000. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Dover Publications, New York.
  • Kafka, Franz. 2011. The Trial. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, New York.
  • Kant, Immanuel. 1998. The Critique of Judgment. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  • Lee, A. Robert. 2006. “Melville’s World Readers.” In: Wyn Kelley. (Eds.), A Companion to Herman Melville. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Malden, pp. 35-51.
  • Maas, E.J.W.M. 2012. “Literature and Philosophy: Deleuze, Agamben and Ranciere reading Melville’s ‘Bartleby’.” Diss. University of Hawaii.
  • Mann, Thomas. 1996. The Magic Mountain. Trans. John E. Woods. Everyman’s Library, New York.
  • Maxwell, Jason. 2011. “Aesthetics.” In: Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte. (Eds.), The Agamben Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 20-22.
  • Melville, Herman. 2008. Billy Budd, Sailor. Penguin Classics, New York.
  • Melville, Herman. 1981. Moby-Dick. Bantam Classics, New York.
  • Melville, Herman. 1990. Benito Cereno. Dover Publications, New York.
  • Melville, Herman. 1966. Battle Pieces and Aspects of War. Harper & Brothers, New York.
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books, New York.
  • Nikolopoulou, Kalliopi. 2013. Tragically Speaking: On the Use and Abuse of Theory for Life. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
  • Plato. 1953. Republic. Trans. Paul Shorey. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
  • Tolstoy, Leo. 1971. “What is Art?” In: Hazard Adams. (Eds.), Critical Theory Since Plato. a. Trans. Aylmer Maude. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, pp. 679-690.
  • Vujanovic, Ana. 2010. “WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO WHEN WE … MAKE ART?” How To Do Things by Theory. Walking Theory (TkH) platform, May 13th.
  • Wimsatt, William, and Monroe C. Beardsley. 1954. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. University of Kentucky Press, Lexington.
  • Wilber, Ken. 2001. The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad. Shambhala, London.