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Chapter Three: Productive Skills in the Arts Art is a process of production in which natural materials are re-shaped in a projection toward consummatory fulfillment through regulation of trains of events that occur in a less regulated way on lower levels of nature. (LW1 :8;EN:xix) Even technological arts, in their sum total, do something more than provide a number of separate conveniences and facilities. They shape collective occupations and thus determine direction of interest and attention, and hence affect desire and purpose. (LW1 0:347;AE:345) In the preceding chapter I presented Dewey's theory of inquiry as an account of the rhythms that permeate the interaction of human beings in and with their various experiences. As William James and Charles Peirce before him had done, Dewey isolated two types of experience: that stable phase in which union with an environing situation is enjoyed; and that motile phase in which loss of integration importunes, and recovery of harmony and balance is actively sought. But such an account indicates that experience at rest is also of two types between which inquiry is active: the old repetition of ceremony, tradition, institution, and the habitual; and the novelty of freshly solved problems, newly pregnant situations, and enjoyed recent successes. Experience alternates between the dully repetitious and the recently enriched, both of which are stable. When what is customary becomes enriched it is because of inquiry-or else by luck. And when recent successes become stale, or when luck runs out, inquiry is often called for. The medium of exchange between these differently stable poles, their common coin, is the activity of the productive skill we call inquiry. Dewey's account of inquiry, his logic, concerns itself with the means of reunification and reintegration that are sought when and for whatever reason what is repetitious becomes unstable or unsuitable. Productive Skills in the Arts 61 Such means are for Dewey characterizable as tools and as productive skills or techniques. On this reading, technology becomes a generic pattern identifiable as inquiry not only in its quotidian sense, but also in science, in logic, and in metaphysics. Technology, however, should not be regarded as a fixed and finished method or as a set of such methods, applicable without transformation to the indefinite number of novel situations on which it is brought to bear. "Productive skill," even though wonderfully concrete in its original sense of techne, is not rich enough in connotations and significance to exhaust contemporary methods of logic and science, any more than primitive hammers and chisels are sufficient to all aspects of modern woodworking, or any more than bent tree limbs are adequate to modern agriculture. Technology may thus be thought of as a family of methods and tools that evolves in response to the needs and goals that it is called upon to serve, and in response to the uses to which it is put. In this regard Dewey argued quite forcefully, for example, that major advances in productive skills had been achieved as a result of the expanded use of instrumentation that was an essential part of the rise of modern science and industry. For Dewey, however, in contradistinction to Heidegger, there is no radicai break between the productive skills that predated the rise of modern science and those that precipitated and attended it. Nowhere is his position on this matter laid out more clearly than in his works on aesthetic and artistic experience. For Dewey, productive skills that are prescientific and those that are scientific exist along a continuum of ever more complex and fruitful articulation of instrumentation in the broad sense of that term-including tools, methods, means, meanings, and even language, which he calls "the tool of tools." Inquiry into inquiry, or logic, is for Dewey a genetic account-a history-of the expansion and improvement of productive skill; it is a history of advancements in technical precision, of augmentation of exact instrumentation, of enrichment of working hypotheses, and of the sloughing off of old problems and issues that improved instruments have demonstrated to be irrelevant or inconsequential. II In chapter 9 of Experience and Nature, published in 1925, and in Art as Experience, published in 1934, Dewey expanded his analysis of inquiry as productive skill to include a more specific treatment of the experiences of making and enjoying artifacts that are commonly identified as "artistic." But because inquiry is a productive skill, and because art and productive skill have both ancient and contemporary connections...

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