We reflect on the nature of art, the creative process, and the connection between art and philosophy

Mikki, Said

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Art, Philosophy, and CreativitySaid MikkiE-mail: said.m.mikki@gmail.comAbstract. We reflect on the nature of art, the creative process, and theconnection between art and philosophy.Aesthetic Theory is a branch of the philosophy of art: A philosophical endeavourto re-establish the essence of art while grounding itself in new forms of experiencelived by the intellect, not the senses. Contrary to Kant [1], the aesthetic doesnot need to be tied to the sensuous essence of the experiential. On the otherhand, abstract materialism, a movement within the philosophy of nature, aims atdestroying the Kantian dogma of Western aesthetic theory together with the latter’ssubsequent Hegelian reincarnation [2]. We find the entire academic problematic ofWestern aesthetics extremely disappointing and in the main moving along the wrongdirection. A totally new beginning is needed. One must push for re-connectingwith the primordial roots of constructive modes of being’s createdness-in-and-through-thinking [3,4]. To think is to create, but it is not the thinking of Hegelian Idealism [5]what we have in mind. Instead, for us thinking is the becoming other of the non-personal Idea in matter as such. The Material is the Real. Aesthetic Theory is abranch of art informed by ontology. You can have everything here, philosophy andpositive creative artistic works woven into each other while various subcurrents ofactive intellectual-artistic discourse are generously laid open, waiting for any availablecapable artist or philosopher to step in and participate.We advocate new artforms motivated solely by philosophical considerations, whichautomatically means, pace Guattari [6–8], that it is also political. Our art is differentfrom mainstream Western art or the many Global Underground Art movementsscattered around the world, from China, Japan, and Brazil to Siberia, Norway, andNewfoundland. My goal is to draw the full picture in advance so that philosophically-minded people can begin anew without the need to reinvent complex and detailedphilosophical guidebooks, for powerful programs had been already mapped out severaltimes by creative masterminds like Heidegger [9], Lem [10–12], and Guattari [13].What does this outline say about art? We have several options:(i) First, It is possible to avoid defining art locally or internally by instead directlylinking the artistic with a specific “external” component originally found inphilosophy, that which goes by the name ontology. Hence, I am not working withinany epistemological framework; even a minimal epistemic scheme is rejected rightfrom the beginning. Leave your brain, senses, intuitive essences, and above allpersonal cognition, all at the door, please.2(ii) Do not bring in psychoanalysis’ dirty laundry, for we are pure and clean andeven (at least nominally) Jungian. Real Art has nothing to do with theSexual Ego [14], Subject [15], Person [16], Cognition [17], Brain (sorry, Deleuze[18,19].) Art is that positive but non-affirmative peaceful action directed againstLogic, Concept, Reason, Mind, Order, State, Universals, Grammar, Convention,Tradition, Heritage, Past, Origins, and all such things.(iii) Approach art using philosophical tools, but while we started by linking the artisticwith the philosophical, and where art is being systematically constructed this way,the final objective is never espousing new philosophical views or systems. Art isfree of doxa and opinions. I create art by negating all conclusions and thought-forms and patterns. The Artistic in man is the anti-ideal, the non-ordered, theun-formed; in a nutshell, that elusive aleatory, wandering arrow pointing intonowhere and signifying nothing. It is pure, detached, self-floating Freedom.The creation of art happens then by means of an ontological apparatus differentfrom the mundane, down-to-earth, matrix of everyday toolkits, craftsmen’s skills, ortools of the trade. While the latter is important (it constitutes the naive materialfoundation of every creative art experience), the truth is more complex and subtle.Abstract materialism, not that famous mainstream naive variety, is what prevailsat the end of the day. The artist is a philosopher. He creates by (onto)-thinkingthe needed forms, all on his own, not by cognizing them or realizing their Platonictemplates; instead, matter as such is embodied thinking. Formative causation directsinner flows toward that onto-pathetic positive and negative constructive-destructionof banal forms, replacing them by rhizomes and webs of interlocked movement-formsthat are permanently unlocalized because they are inherently non-localizable, or –to follow Fichte [20] – Undeterminable (like the Jungian Unconscious collective asit was [21–23], majestically nonpersonal in and through yet fluid and self-moved,traversing throughout its genesis the full nonspatial span of the World’s perpetualflux of cosmic experience.)Art-forms are by design strange. The artistic is uncanny. The uncanny isprofound. The profound is against Depth. Depth belongs to Reason, Rationalism,Idealism, Order, Logic. Art, anti-Depth. But superficiality and shallowness are notin order. It is formal profundity-without-depth what I have in mind, somethingimpossible to define if you continue to base everything on persons, minds, brains,egos, or Lacanism [24]. You need to move forward. Forget traditional art. Study arthistory then wipe out from your memory everything internalized.One night Keith Jarrett [25–27] starts his major improvisation of the decade (orpossibly all time) by releasing strange non-musical machine-like notes “fabricated”on the spot from scratch, then he begins to arrange them in random dissonantsequences. Then suddenly a forceful, clear, and distinct Cartesian-Bachian harmonyemerges into the sonorous sphere [28], only to be swallowed by the anarchic ferocity ofpostharmonious dissonance [29], consummated by a return to classical resolution witha mesmerizing unordered global structuration of the Real manifested this time by acoda of harmonious tonal forms. Art is Jarrett, or Jarrett is the highest concentrationof Art in man since Leo Tolstoy and Thomas Mann: To bring out and define the deeplyburied false essence of Idealistic man through creative acts of constructive destructionaiming at nothing but the a-logical non-affirmation of the Real (the Heideggerianprocess of hesitating-withdrawing.). This is all done in and through aleatory forms,irrationally erupting at the moment, yet while the total process of artistic creation3remains globally coherent and ultimately satisfactory at all levels.1How does that happen without the participation of the audience? Because thereis no longer any need for a spectator in art. Our art, like postmodern mathematics(they are probably the same) is fundamentally private even if it remains foundationallynon-personal and anti-idealistic, revolting against Plato, Kant, Hegel. The artist is allalone, but this is now solitude in new style, for the idea is to unravel the ontologicalper se, neither the psychological nor the epistemological. When you know thereis no audience, then the mind relaxes and the free-floating artistic hand wandersunconstrained, hindered by neither State dogma nor Capitalistic rules. Art is not forart’s sake; creative art is done for ontology and ontology is best expressed via artworks.Art is also to be positively contrasted to technology. The relation between the twohas been a particularly thorny issue since Heidegger [30–32]. Can art be technological?Yes, but it must retain its own independence from the naive, direct material realm ofobjects touched and sensed. Art is not intellective abstraction, but it thrives on thedistancing-withdrawing process of disengaging the sensuous, eventually leading to totaldisenchanted presence that is pure thinking proper free of ideological commitmentsand narrative straightjackets. What does technology offer any way? A path towarda new future? An alternative existential mode of being there more akin to the artistthan anyone else? Art is the becoming self of the philosopher in creativity. It is aformula, even if art should never be formulaic. The Technological and Art find theircommon origin in the ancient term techne: The making-presence of unrealized objectsthrough the process of machination. Philosophy is this machination’s spiritualization,helping transporting the creator from the “technician’s” mode to the artist’s. Theartist is he who produces new images of his cosmically extended mind, a tappinginto the ubiquitous presence of the One-Whole integrating all aspects of the universefiltered through thinking and philosophizing, reflecting on structures, principles, ideas,formations, and discourses, tying up together various threads of experience andconsolidating for itself a unified perspective on all things and concepts.References[1] I. Kant, Critique of judgement. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.[2] G. Hegel, Aesthetics: lectures on fine art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.[3] M. Heidegger, What is called thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.[4] ——, Poetry, language, thought. New York: Perennical Classics, 2001.[5] G. Hegel, The science of logic. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.[6] F. Guattari, The anti-Oedipus papers. New York, NY Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext(e)Distributed by MIT Press, 2006.[7] ——, Schizoanalytic cartographies. London New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.[8] ——, The three ecologies. London New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.[9] R. Safranski, Martin Heidegg : between good and evil. Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press, 1998.[10] S. Lem, Imaginary magnitude. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.[11] R. Page and M. Raczynska, Eds., Lemistry: a celebration of the work of Stanisław Lem. GreatBritain: Comma Press, 2011.[12] P. Swirski, Ed., The art and science of Stanislaw Lem. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UniversityPress, 2006.[13] F. Bifo, Flix Guattari: thought, friendship, and visionary cartography. Palgrave Macmillan,2014.[14] S. Freud, Three essays on the theory of sexuality: the 1905 edition. London New York: Verso,2016.1The peak performance is Jarrett’s Paris Concert, a live solo piano improvisation, recorded onOctober 17, 1988 at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.4[15] R. Descartes, The philosophical writings of Descartes: Volume 2. Cambridge University Press,1985.[16] F. Schiller, On the aesthetic education of man, and, Letters to Prince Frederick Christian vonAugustenburg. London, UK: Penguin Books, 2016.[17] R. Arnheim, Visual thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.[18] G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986.[19] G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.[20] J. Fichte, Foundations of transcendental philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo(1796/99). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.[21] C. G. Jung, The red book. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2009.[22] ——, The archetypes and the collective unconscious. London: Routledge, 1990.[23] ——, The black books: notebooks of transformation (1913-1932). New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 2020.[24] J. Lacan, Ecrits: The first complete edition in English. New York: Norton, 2006.[25] P. Elsdon, Keith Jarrett’s the Koln concert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.[26] I. Carr, Keith Jarrett: the man and his music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.[27] W. Sandner, Keith Jarrett: a biography. Sheffield, UK Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2020.[28] D. Terefenko, Keith Jarrett’s transformation of standard tunes: theory, analysis, and pedagogy.Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, 2009.[29] T. Adorno, Philosophy of new music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.[30] M. Heidegger, The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2013.[31] ——, Mindfulness. London New York: Continuum, 2006.[32] ——, Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,2012.

Art, Philosophy, and Creativity

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Art, Philosophy, and Creativity

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