Poiesis Sample Clauses

Poiesis. Vita Activa and Theories of Value Poiesis, though as a word almost impossible to translate, has proven exceptionally fertile for transplantation to many different disciplines. In Greek, it sketches the outlines of an idiosyncratic concept of craftsmanship—a craftsmanship engaged in production as a literally creative/creating act, neither necessarily material nor immaterial. In addition to tasks considered craftsmanlike today, Greeks also used poiesis to describe the arts of both poetry and legislation, thereby underscoring the deliberative technical and aesthetic aspects of these creative acts, each both fabrication and handicraft. A combination of formal rigor and attention to social context constrains (or seems to constrain) these arts, but is nevertheless accompanied by a necessity to reimagine those constraints in order to stimulate the production of new ideas (as in poetry), civic functions (as in legislation), and relationships (as in both, of course). Poiesis construes the act of creativity as an open-ended utility. This utility is not about the simple conversion of material into new objects, but denotes rather a type of creating act both aesthetic and mundane, producing new objects, relations, or ideas that would in turn produce other things themselves. Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx elucidates the sense of creativity and production that the concept of poiesis evoked: The Greeks, to whom we owe all the categories through which we judge ourselves and the reality around us, 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). As we shall see, central to praxis was the idea of the will that finds its immediate expression in an act, while, by contrast, central to poiesis was the experience of pro-duction into presence, the fact that something passed from nonbeing to being, from concealment into the full light of the work. The essential character of poiesis was not its aspect as a practical and voluntary process but its being a mode of truth understood as unveiling, ἀ-λήθεια. (Xxxxxxx, 1994, p. 42) Unveiling is itself a useful term, because although poiesis entails production, the unveiling process differs from the immediacy of action that Xxxxxxx ascribes to praxis. Unveiling is focused—teleological in a localized context—and yet opens outwards with an entropic, irreversible directionality. This directionality has an arc of unfolding; it requires some duration to in...