A
preview of an answer that might be forthcoming
Shortly
after Alien
Phenomenology
was publsihed, Darius Kazemi asked:
what's the difference between carpentry and art? Carpentry,
for the record, is my name for the philosophical practice of making
things, of which articles and books are but one example. I borrowed
and expanded the term from the ordinary sense of woodcraft and
adapted from Graham Harman and Alphonso Lingis, who use it to refer
to the way things mold one another.
Darius
wondered, why distinguish between the different uses of things? Isn't
this just a commission of the intentional fallacy? These are
reasonable questions.
As
it happens, I have an unpublished and probably unfinished paper that
answers this question, and which includes a good measure of carpentry
in so doing. But after a back and forth on Twitter on this topic, I
figured maybe I should offer a preview of that answer since it's been
almost a year since I wrote the paper and carpentered the
illustrations, and I still haven't done anything with them.
I
don't expect anybody will be satisfied with these answers yet, but I
offer them as a preview of more to come:
Anytime
art comes up we have a problem, because the twentieth century made it
such that anything can be art, whether you or I like it or not. So in
that sense, I guess Darius is right.
Carpentry
is a perspective on creative work that asks philosophical questions.
Or differently put, carpentry is what you call it when matter
(including art, why not) is used (at least) but especially fashioned
for philosophical use.
Carpentry
is the process of making things that help philosophers (which is just
to say, lovers of wisdom) pursue arguments and questions, not just
illustrations of ideas that "really" live in the discursive
realm.
Carpentry
it's not "just" art because it participates in the practice
of philosophy, just like a surgeon's scalpel isn't art because it
participates in the practice of medicine.
The
above notwithstanding, carpentry surely also has other uses and
interpretations beyond the ones I originally conceived.
Text
by Ian Bogost, March 19, 2013
