Thinking and Art as Interplay between Creator and Audience

Much of the culture behind digital gardens is about thinking in public and exhibiting work that is in progress. I read a relevant excerpt in the preface of Castoriadis’ The Imaginary Institution of Society ¹:

This book may appear heterogeneous. In a sense, it is, and some explanation regarding the circumstances of its composition might be useful to the reader.

The first part is formed by the text “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory” published in Socialisme ou Barbarie from April 1964 to June 1965. This text was itself the never-ending development of a “Note on the Marxist philosophy and theory of history”, which accompanied “The revolutionary movement under modern capitalism” and was circulated along with it among the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (Spring 1959). When the publication of Socialisme ou Barbarie was suspended, the remaining part of “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory” yet unpublished, although for the most part already drafted, was left among my papers.

Written under the pressure of deadlines imposed by the publication of the journal, this part is itself not a completed work but a work in the-making. Contrary to all the rules of composition, the walls of the building are displayed one after the other as they are erected, sur­rounded by the remains of scaffolding, piles of sand and rocks, odds and ends of wooden supports and dirty trowels. Without making this into a thesis, I am assuming this presentation as my own, dictated at first by “external” factors. It should be merely a commonplace, recognized by everyone, that in the case of a work of reflection, removing the scaffolding and clean up the area around the building not only is no benefit to the reader, but deprives him of something essential. Unlike the work of art, there is no finished edifice here, nor an edifice to be finished; just as much, and even more with the results, what is important is the work of reflection and it is perhaps mostly this that an author can make us see, if he can make us see anything at all. Presenting the result as a systematic and polished totality, which in truth it never is; or even presenting the construction process — as is often the case, pedagogically but erroneously, in so many philosophical works — in the form of a well-ordered and wholly-mastered logical process, can only serve to reinforce in the reader the disastrous illusion towards which he, like all of us, is already naturally inclined, that the edifice was constructed for him and that he has only, if he so desires, to move in and live there. Thinking is not building cathedrals or composing symphonies. If the symphony exists, it is the reader who must create it in his own ears.

And then, I was reading an interview from Pantelis Rodostoglou ², a poet and musician who is the bassist and writer of the majority of lyrics for the Diafana Krina rock group, and he is saying something along the same lines with Castoriadis but regarding how the audience can creatively interact with and participate in a work of art. The relevant excerpt is freely translated from Greek:

Because of my involvement with Diafana Krina, with music and concerts, I came into contact — very early and very closely — with the people who love what I write. And there was always a mutual respect, a sincere exchange of thoughts and emotions, and in many cases a kind of communion born from the joy of meeting, which gave to the notion of human connection its true essence. It was something I had never imagined back when, still a teenager, I began to write—an attempt to release thoughts and emotions that weighed on me or that I could not understand. In time, I read, I learned, I realized that the human need to step out of one’s private space and approach one’s fellow beings has its roots in ancient instincts of self-preservation, with deep existential implications. And when existential questions arise, we inevitably find ourselves face to face with the Other, the Stranger. The great virtue of artistic creations is that they almost always constitute a place of meeting. Some primordial instinct of collectiveness drives us to approach others, to try to convey to them the quality and power of what we have felt. We attempt to persuade them to surrender to it as well. The reader (like the listener at a concert or the viewer of a painting), if not a passive receiver, interacts creatively and participates in the artistic work — his gaze influences it, his perception transforms it, revealing hidden aspects and meanings that perhaps even the author himself had not realized existed. Thus begins to develop a relationship of mutual interest — a kind of dialogue, if you will — that can often last for years. What is shared through this relationship are those as Neruda so beautifully calls them. Or, in the words of Manolis Pratikakis: “We are always the others, this dense multitude of strangers that shivers and is torn.

Footnotes

1. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Polity Press 1987), 1-2 ↩

2. Rodostoglou, interviewed by Marianna Vasileiou for Mic.gr (Sep 2022), http://www.mic.gr/synenteyxi/pantelis-rodostogloy-otan-tithentai-yparxiaka-erotimata-tha-vrethoyme-anapofeykta-mprosta ↩