Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds

Introduction

ix u Introduction Anthony J. Cascardi and Leah Middlebrook The essays gathered in this volume respond to a single set of questions: how are we to understand poiesis in the early modern age, and how especially are we to understand poiesis in relation to the literature of early modern Spain and its larger European context? In posing these questions, however, we approach a conundrum that is at once central to Hispanic studies and to European and American studies more broadly: what thresholds and boundaries—conceptual , geographical, linguistic, and cultural—are implied in referring to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “early” modern? Many familiar accounts of modernity are at best schematic. We ourselves might argue that they are the products of a relatively narrow way of thinking, one that originates historically within parts of Western Europe with respect to which Spain appears relatively marginal, insofar as it appears at all. These accounts frequently turn on a narrative of “secularization,” or on the many reverberations of Hegel’s notion, articulated in his Lectures on Aesthetics, of a world that was itself ordered as prose. To give a schematic account of what are already schematic accounts, these frameworks suggest that the pre-modern cosmos was construed as a complex system of resemblances, often articulated poetically; modern reason and the scientific revolution exposed the error of these earlier modes of thought by x ANTHONY J. CASCARDI AND LEAH MIDDLEBROOK a turn toward the representation of the real. The characteristically “modern” relationship of human beings to the world came to privilege secure foundations of knowledge, in contrast to which all else seemed to be superstition or mere belief. And yet the modern conceptual mastery of the world and the disenchantment of its secrets often brought a sense of loss, if not a more powerful sense of destruction, which has been amply explored in branches of contemporary theory inspired by thinkers as diverse as Horkheimer and Heidegger. The distinction Heidegger draws in The Question Concerning Technology between techne or poiesis and the instrumentalist uses of nature that inform and are reinforced by modern technology affords one perspective that can inform discussions of the early modern age. Heidegger argued that the modern worldview amounted to the transformation of the world into a picture-like representation, that the modern world became an object-field subtended by the subject for his (or her) own aims. If one believes that poiesis in the archaic sense was a means of world-disclosure (as Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” suggests), then nothing would seem to lie farther from it than a world in which things have meaning, are determined to be true, or hold value only in relation to a subject who represents them. Our conviction in proposing to take up the question of poiesis and/in modernity is that this and similar accounts are potentially distorting, that modernity involved a re-encounter with the place of poetry and with the broad-gauged conception of poiesis, rather than their simple exclusion. These issues are further sharpened when the focal point is Spain. Despite implying a comprehensive scope (and notwithstanding the fact that Foucault’s Les mots et les choses begins by drawing on Don Quijote as an important example ), formulations of the foundations of modernity and discussions of the “legitimacy” of the modern age can appear stubbornly deaf to the centrality of Spain within early modern Europe. The contributions to this volume demonstrate that to set Spain at the center of a reconsideration of modernity is to cast new light on cultural production, not only in Spain but in Europe and the Americas, as well. To do so by raising the question of poiesis in relation to modernity nonetheless requires acknowledgment of the fact that the term poiesis was not itself a part of early modern vocabularies; we draw upon it as a way to reference its original Greek context, where its conceptual radius embraced the broad domain of “making”; the transformation by which poiesis was restricted to poetry followed substantially later. The discursive activity of the early modern age stands at the confluence of these two conceptions, broad and narrow, ancient and new, of poiesis and poetry. Indeed, the essays in this collection INTRODUCTION xi demonstrate that the remarkable range of imaginative and creative discursive activity in the early modern contexts virtually demands a term as capacious as “poiesis” if it is to be...