ARISTOTLE’S TECHNÊ: OF POETICS AS THE GENERIC MODEL OF ALL ARTIFICIAL

KATERINA KOLOSOVA

The concept of technê, which is one of the central terms in Aristotle’s discussion of what the moderns call “art” today is an examination of the poetic technique, craft and craftsmanship. In our 21st century, predominantly post-idealist context, it might resonate as debasing to art—creation is reduced to craft, no different than that of any other skill of human creation, even the most banal one (plumbing, for example?)1. But did Aristotle think any form of technē as inferior to what can be put in proximity to philosophy, which, in Ancient Greece, was taken to be a form of fulfilled living (a life infused with the love for wisdom)? I argue the opposite: my examinations of his Rhetoric, The Organon, Metaphysics, necessary for a book I am co-authoring with two colleagues from the UK on the topic of materialism in philosophy, sciences and computing, show that “craft” is a term Aristotle uses to describe a valid logical or scientific (philosophical) reasoning. But it is also the other way around. In Poetics itself, Aristotle argues that in the craft of the arts, or for that matter in any form of craft, we see at work the ability to detect something we will tentatively call structure and, by doing so, abstract it from its material foundation. Having begun our discussion here with an examination of the status of technē in Aristotle’s treatise, I will argue that Aristotle’s Poetics is a purely formal execution of an argument, laying out the elements and the principles of how the poetic craft is crafted—how art comes to being. It comes to being as a structure in a way, an organizational unity which “comes to life” by the workings of its elements according to particular inherent laws. It “lives” as a living organism, it brings forth lively emotions (passions in the etymological sense or as Spinoza used the term)2 or contemplation, it moves the human psyche (or mind, if you will), and yet the coming to being of art— or tragedy, more specifically—is dismantled in order to study its mechanisms as the only way of explaining how it operates as an organic whole. The method resembles, I argue, Saussure’s approach to language whereby the utmost banal mechanicity (phonetic or otherwise) is not only in no contradiction with the organic self-development and branching out of language, and the sensation of it being naturally flowing in use, but rather explains these very possibilities3.

Aristotle’s core of the argument as to what constitutes tragedy, and thereof art/poesis in all its forms, does not lie in the dialectics of emotions (and morals) culminating in catharsis but in what he calls systasis—the ‘standing together”—of the elements of the tragedy that consist of movement and change (drama, in its etymological sense), i.e., of that which happens, of “events.” According to the classical interpretation of the Poetics, the essence of tragedy is catharsis (παθημάτων κάθαρσιν), and that section of the text 1449b21-28 is what is habitually treated as “the definition of tragedy.” On the other hand, thereis recurring reference to ἡ τῶν πραγμάτων σύστασις, or the “systasis of deeds” (or of things, elements) as the ousia, the true being, substance or essence of tragedy, namely in the following parts of the Poetics: 1450a15, a32, b22, 1452a19, 1453a3, 1453a23, 1453a31, 1453b2, 1454a14, 1454a34, 1459b21 и 1460а34. One of the leading classical philologists of what was then the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, Mihail Petrusevski, challenged the canonical interpretation by offering a dissident paleographic analysis of the original arguing that by medieval times an error in writing has appeared and the place which should read τῶν πραγμάτων σύστασις was erroneously reconstructed as παθημάτων κάθαρσιν. The dissident interpretation is presented in Petrusevski’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics into Macedonian following an elaboration of the discovery published in Macedonian at length and summarized in French in perhaps the most prestigious Yugoslav journal of classical philology of the time, Antiquité Vivante (1954).

The “definition” of tragedy according to which the essence of the tragic is catharsis was imposed as authoritative thanks to the canon of interpretation beginning with the Renaissance period and relying on a particular script or rather a copy (of an older scroll) of Poetics. The words “catharsis of passions” are misspelled on the damaged and illegible place in the text, according to Petrushevski5. The classical interpretative solution is at odds with the other parts of the text that define tragedy or the work of art as systasis or composition of the elements or things or events, Petrushevski claims. It is also at odds with Poetics’ basic intentions in attempting to respond to Plato’s Phaedrus 268 cd.

A work of art, conceived as systasis (rather than catharsis), is therefore a self-sustained, finite system, with a virtually infinite range of structural rearrangements and branching out. It operates as an automaton in the sense in which Jacques Lacan, in his structuralist rendition of psychoanalysis, uses the term claiming to have found its origin (and the sense in which he uses it) in the work of Aristotle’s Physics6 .

I argue that the signifying automaton—or the poetic systasis cannot exist either in Aristotle, or in Saussure, or in Lacan, or in what I identify as the automation of value production in Marx, without a material support, without being determined in the last instance as matter, even if its identity of the last instance (“identity” as idempotence, as per François Laruelle)7 is “real abstraction” (in Sohn-Rethel’s sense)8.

Endnotes

1 Cf. Amanda Beech, “Concept without Difference: The Promise of the Generic,” in Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, Suhail Malik (eds.) Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg Press with CCS Bard, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2015), 292.

2 Spinoza, Benedict de. 2003. The Ethics. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes. The Project Gutenberg Etext Publication, available at https://www. gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm, accessed on 7 October 2022.

3 Katerina Kolozova, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy (London UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 55-88.

4 Aristotle, ed. R. Kassel, Aristotle’s Ars Poetica (Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1966), available at Perseus Tufts Project URL http://www. perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0055, accessed on 30 September2022.

5 Antiquité Vivante/Živa Antika 4-2 (1954), 230, 234-235; Petrusevski’s argument draws on a prior analysis offered by Heinrich Otte, Kennt Aristoteles die sogenannte tragishe Katharsis (Berlin: Weidmann, 1912).

6 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 53–54.

7 François Laruelle, Theories of Identity, trans. by Alyosha Erdebi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016)

8 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. by Martin Sohn-Rethel (Haymarket Books, 2021).