The Work of Art as Paradigm: Giorgio Agamben and the Relationship between Knowledge
and the Creative Arts
Over the last several decades, universities have experienced a strong push from certain sections
of the academy to expand the definition of research—specifically to consider ways in which
works that have been traditionally deemed ‘creative’ might be included under the larger rubric of
research. The reasons for this reconsideration of research are, in many ways, practically
motivated: the last century has seen an exceptional growth in a variety of ‘creative arts’
programs at universities across the world in such diverse areas as creative writing, theatre, visual
arts, media arts, film, music, dance and many others.i Although these programs have, generally
speaking, flourished and proliferated in material terms, in other ways they still occupy a
somewhat awkward place within the structure of the modern university, since universities are
meant to be bodies that both produce and disseminate knowledge in the form of researchii and
teaching. Most traditional understandings of research contain ‘an implication that knowledge is
generalisable (that is, applicable to some other process or event than that which has been studied
in its production), and transferable (that is, can be understood and used by others in a manner
which is essentially congruent with that of the original)’ (Smith and Dean 3) and, under these
terms, the relationship between the creative arts and the broader imperative of universities to
produce research remains unclear. In this sense, despite the fact that they have been cohabitating
for decades (and, in many cases, longer), an implicit theoretical question—which has been raised
by the existence of creative arts practitioners in the modern university—remains unanswered:
what, if any, relationship does the creative work (and, by extension pedagogical instruction in the
production of creative work) bear towards the contemporary concept of knowledge, particularly
as it is enshrined in the concept of ‘research’?
Without a doubt, the most significant practical response to this question can be located in
the burgeoning field of ‘practice-led research,’iii which seeks to establish the often
unacknowledged links between creative processes and research, as well as to identify forms of
knowledge that have been excluded from traditional forms of research. Advocates of practice-led
research, then, suggest that the concept of research should not be approached ‘monolithically,’
but rather ‘across the spectrum of practice and research,’ and further argue that knowledge can
also be transmitted in ‘non-verbal and non-numerical terms’ that are available to the work of art
(Smith and Dean 4). While the concept of practice-led research is, without a doubt, becoming an
entrenched mode of research within the academy that is essential for incorporating creative-arts
practitioners into the research culture of the modern university, I would like to return to the
foundational question of the relationship between knowledge and the creative work itself, in
order to examine how these two categories might relate to each other, and why it is that they
have traditionally been understood as incompatible. In particular, I will suggest that
developments in thought in the Eighteenth Century not only saw notions of knowledge and the
work of art developing on different paths, but also understood the two categories in
contradistinction to each other, with the result that the division between art and knowledge is far
more significant than simply an institutional problem of classifying outputs in universities.
Moreover, I hope to present one potential solution to this traditional antagonism between art and
knowledge in the form of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the ‘paradigm,’ which could serve as
one possible model for understanding how the work of art might yet be recovered as a form of
knowledge.
1
The Eighteenth Century marks a decisive shift in the conception of the work of art, which
is essential for understanding the reasons why ‘creative works’ are not only omitted from the
broad category of empirical knowledge (construed in current terms within the modern academy
as ‘research’), but also defined in contradistinction to knowledge as such, with the result that
Giorgio Agamben is able to speak of the ‘scission . . . between poetry and philosophy, between
the poetic word and the word of thought . . . that has in modern times acquired a hegemonic
character’ (Stanzas xvi-xvii ). My argument is that the source of this scission can be traced to the
redefinition of the work of art during the Eighteenth Century in relation to two key, interrelated
terms: originality and genius. After the Eighteenth Century, these terms become synonymous
with the broader practice of cultural production in the fine arts, iv which itself is a term that was
created in this same era; the notion of the ‘fine arts’ resulted from a conscious attempt to unify a
disparate series of creative practice under the banner of a new monolithic cultural construct
(Woodmansee 13). In this sense, the fine arts are not just an adjunct of the theory of original
genius, but rather the notion of original genius provides the necessary philosophical ground
(albeit, as we shall see, a groundless ground) from which the great work of art springs. As Kant
states, ‘Genius is the talent (natural endowment) which gives the rule to art’ (Kant 136),
emphasizing that genius is the aesthetic concept that underpins this new category of ‘fine art’ as
such.
But more importantly, the concept of genius also registers the essential change in the
status of the work of art from a tradition of imitatio to a new paradigm of originality.v With the
conception of genius, the artist’s task is radically changed: unlike the master artist of the classical
tradition, the genius doesn’t require formal schooling or mastery of traditional techniques to
produce art. Indeed, genius defines itself precisely against such accumulation of erudition, which
Edward Young, in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), notes, saying ‘genius is
from heaven, learning from man’ (37). Erudition is almost inimical to genius since ‘what . . .
mean we by genius, but the power of accomplishing great things without the means generally
reputed necessary to that end?’ (Young 26). For the genius to rely too heavily on erudition would
require imitation, a practice that can never result in the production or original art. In the capacity
of the genius (at least under its modern definitionvi) to create original works rather imitative
ones, the genius then appears as a figure of the sacralisation of a profane, humanistic art; as
David Wellbury has noted, the genius takes on the figure of ‘a homo secundus deus, with the
decisive difference, however, that the secundus falls away . . . the genius is the figure who
displaces God by usurping his position’ (127). Here, the artist becomes—not just a conjuror or
illusionist—but a creator whose artistic creations are meant to rival, and even to surpass, the
creation of the world itself. The result of this fact is that the genius’s work becomes selfauthorizing, and the genius is both the ground and the vessel for the production of the great work
of art. In this sense, the relationship between genius and the work of art forms a tautology, since
genius underwrites the possibility of the great work of art, and the great work of art becomes the
proof of genius itself.
The result of the self-authorizing nature of the genius is that this radical capacity for
Godlike creation ex nihilo—a seeming triumph for the artist—actually comes at a significant
price: in its radical originality, the work of art ceases to be knowledge in any meaningful sense.
This is so because the genius’s ability to produce creative works is not a product of rational
understanding, but an innate faculty or talent for production that, by its nature exceeds discrete
definition. For this reason, the price of the genius’s creative power is that hevii cannot know the
source of meaning of his creative work. As Kant explains it in his Critique of Judgment, ‘no
2
Homer or Wieland can show how his ideas, so rich at once in fantasy and in thought, enter and
assemble themselves in his brain, for the good reason that he does not himself know, and so
cannot teach others’ (137). In this sense, the genius’s capacity for original creative work also
renders him unable to understand the work itself, rendering the genius as little more than a vessel
for the work, a situation that William Gaddis dramatized in his novel, The Recognitions (1955),
by asking ‘What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it
around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology?’ (95-6).
The result of the notion of original genius is that the creative work now presupposes an
informed spectator in the form of a knowledgeable critic, who—in a relationship not dissimilar
to that of the analysand and analyst—supplements the work of art through its explication. The
critic becomes necessary for decoding the work of art which the genius produced through a
natural facility for original creation that cannot possibly know itself. The result of this formation,
as Giorgio Agamben has described it, is a radical disconnect between theoretical knowledge and
creative act:
The scission of the word is construed to mean that poetry possesses its object without knowing it while
philosophy knows its object without possessing it. In the West, the word is thus divided between a word
that is unaware, as if fallen from the sky, and enjoys the object of knowledge by presenting it in beautiful
form, and a word that has all seriousness and consciousness for itself but does not enjoy its object because
it does not know how to represent it. (Stanzas, xvi-xvii )
In this sense, the creative work cannot constitute knowledge, or, by extension, research, because
the categories of knowledge and art are defined in a process of contradistinction as
supplementary discourses that require the existence of each other. From this point of view, the
work of art, in its most essential definition, is the opposite of knowledge, because the work of art
is precisely that which must be explained through a critical apparatus that produces knowledge—
and by extension the genius is, above all, a figure who does not understand what it is he is doing.
As I will argue, however, this traditional understanding of the necessary distinction
between art and knowledge also provides the possible means for its overcoming through the
figure that Giorgio Agamben has deemed the ‘paradigm.’viii Agamben’s motivation to explicate
this idea is based on the fact that, as he sees it, a variety of exemplary figures from his own work,
such as the ‘homo sacer’, have been consistently misinterpreted as having claim to a certain kind
of purely historical knowledge that he has not intended. The goal of defining the paradigm for
Agamben, then, is to articulate how these paradigmatic figures operate at the level of
methodology in his work, and thus to outline, in the most simple terms, how they can be
construed as knowledge. Before doing so, however, he seeks to clarify one essential point: the
concept of the paradigm Agamben is advancing, as he takes pains to emphasise, derives not from
the work of Thomas Kuhn, but rather that of Michel Foucault (who was also at pains to distance
his own notion of paradigm from Kuhn’s concept ((‘What Is a Paradigm?’ 13)). Perhaps the most
straightforward illustration of the paradigm can be located in Foucault’s conception of the
panopticon, which Agamben sees as a paradigmatic figure.
In short, the panopticon functions as a paradigm in the strict sense: it is a singular object that, standing
equally for all others of the same class, defines the intelligibility of the group of which it is a part and
which, at the same time, it constitutes. . . . the panopticon . . . performs a decisive strategic function for the
understanding of the disciplinary modality of power, but also . . . it becomes something like the
epistemological figure that, in defining the disciplinary universe of modernity, also marks the threshold
over which it passes into the societies of control. (‘What Is a Paradigm?’ 17)
As Agamben’s figure illustrates, the paradigm is a form of reference that employs a twofold
movement: 1) on the one hand, the paradigm is isolated or excepted from its everyday use to be
3
made exemplary (literally to be held up as an example) but 2) in its singularity as an example,
the paradigm also makes intelligible an entirely new class of family relations. In this sense, ‘the
paradigm is a singular case that is isolated from its context,’ but that ‘by exhibiting its own
singularity’ thus ‘makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes’
(‘What Is a Paradigm?’ 18).
The paradigm in Agamben’s sense operates in a virtually identical manner to the
linguistic conception of the grammatical paradigm. Agamben illustrates this point by considering
how Latin grammars employ specific nouns to illustrate the sequence of inflected endings that
constitute a declension, such as ‘rosa, ros-ae, ros-ae, ros-am’; here the word rose is pulled
outside of its everyday use precisely for the purposes of making intelligible a new category
called ‘feminine noun of the first declension’ (‘What Is a Paradigm’ 24). It’s worth keeping in
mind here that native speakers of a language rarely have recourse to theoretical grammatical
rules when employing language for daily use, which serves to emphasize the degree to which the
use of the word ‘rose’ as a grammatical paradigm actually creates a category that simultaneously
includes it as a member. Here, then, the exclusion of the paradigm from its everyday use enables
it to make intelligible a class or array to which it, itself, belongs.
The key result of the double status of the paradigm, which both belongs to and makes
intelligible an ensemble of relations, is that its method of relationship to both this class and the
other members of its class consists of a different manner of logical relation than those that are
typically considered to constitute knowledge. Unlike the processes of induction and deduction,
for example, the paradigm’s relation to its ensemble is not a relation of the particular to the
general or of the general to the particular, but rather a form of relation that proceeds ‘from the
particular to the particular’ (‘What Is a Paradigm?’ 19). The relationship that exists within the
concept of the paradigm, then, is radically different from the usual understanding of an example
that simply illustrates a rule, for the very reason that the paradigm itself contains both example
and rule. This is the essential element of the paradigm: the ‘rule’ is actually contained by the
paradigm, since the ‘paradigmatic group is never presupposed by the paradigms; rather, it is
immanent in them’ (‘What Is a Paradigm?’ 31). The relationship the paradigm makes intelligible
is actually an internal relation rather than a relation between the paradigm and either a rule or
another object, since the ‘paradigmatic relation does not merely occur between sensible objects
or between these objects and a general rule; it occurs instead between a singularity (which thus
becomes a paradigm) and its exposition (its intelligibility)’ (‘What Is a Paradigm?’ 23). It is in
this sense that the paradigm, as it operates for both Foucault and Agamben, presents a model of
knowledge that is radically different from traditional models that require a relation to be made
between general and particular. In point of fact, the notion of the paradigm ultimately serves as a
criticism of these traditional modes of defining knowledge: ‘the paradigm . . . calls into question
the dichotomous opposition between the particularity and the universal which we are used to
seeing as inseparable from procedures of knowing, and presents instead a singularity irreducible
to any of the dichotomy’s two terms’ (‘What Is a Paradigm?’ 19).
But the paradigmatic mode of knowledge is not without precedent. As Agamben notes,
the paradigm presents a form of knowledge that actually has as its model a mode of aesthetic
perception, noting that ‘[n]owhere, perhaps, is the paradoxical relation between paradigms and
generality as forcefully formulated’ as in Kant’s conception of the aesthetic judgment as ‘an
example for which it is impossible to state the rule’ (‘What Is a Paradigm?’ 20). It would seem
here, then, that the paradigm is based purely on the critical perception of the work of art, and that
the conception of the paradigm is similar to that of critical, aesthetic judgment. But this is not so.
4
In point of fact, as The Critique of Judgment bears out, this exemplary relationship—which
Agamben holds as the ‘perhaps’ the most ‘forcefully formulated’ conception of the paradigm—
does not just apply to aesthetic judgments, but to the very creation of the work of art itself:
Seeing, then, that the natural endowment of art (as fine art) must furnish the rule, what kind of rule must
this be? It cannot be one set down in a formula and serving as a precept—for then the judgment upon the
beautiful would be determinable according to concepts. Rather must the rule be gathered from the
execution, i.e. from the product, which others may use to put their own talent to the test, so as to let it serve
as a model, not for imitation, but for following. (Kant 138-9)
In this sense, the work of art becomes the model for the paradigm, since the work of art is
precisely that singularity assembled according to no rule (except, of course, the groundless
ground of genius), which nonetheless, in its ‘execution’ constitutes the creation of an ensemble,
or ‘a model . . . for following.’ Essentially, this ‘model’ produced by the work of art does not just
extend forward into the future to serve as a model for other artists, as Kant presumes, but into the
past as well; Borges noted precisely this ability of the work of art to constitute an ensemble
(without forming a rule) that extends into past prior to the creation of the work itself in his essay
‘Kafka and His Precursors,’ wherein he considers three pieces of writing that ‘resemble Kafka,’
even though ‘not all of them resemble each other’ (365). Borges’s conclusion is that Kafka has
manufactured ‘his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will
modify the future’ (365). But this only serves as a model explication of a paradigm: Kafka’s
work becomes a paradigm that makes intelligible an ensemble (the Kafkaesque), and this relation
moves from particular to particular without forming a rule that can be abstracted, since all three
pieces that Borges considers resemble Kafka but ‘not all of them resemble each other.’
But, more importantly, Agamben’s notion of the paradigm also provides a critique of
Kant’s Critique that enables the possibility for the work of art to be construed as a form of
paradigmatic knowledge. This is so because the paradigm is a form of knowledge that ‘implies
the total abandonment of the particular-general couple as the model of logical inference’ (‘What
Is a Paradigm?’ 21). With the abandonment of this relation, and the embracing of a new logical
relationship that is internal to the paradigm itself (between the paradigm’s own singularity and
intelligibility), the work of art can be considered to be both a singular event that provides its own
rule and the instigator of its own intelligibility. The figure of the paradigm thus offers a means
by which the work of art can overcome the problem of genius being unintelligible to itself by
claiming for art a paradigmatic relationship: viewed as a paradigm, the work of art can be both
instance and explication, since the work of art that functions as a paradigm re-unifies the
singularity with the understanding of the singularity. In this gesture, then, the work of art—in the
spirit of the paradigm—can claim the status of knowledge that Kant denied it.ix And it is fitting,
given this claim, that throughout Agamben’s own writing, works of art are given a privileged
position and are repeatedly shown to constitute a paradigmatic form of knowledge in their own
right. Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’x and The Trialxi prove to be exactly such figures, as does
Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’xii among many others. Indeed, Agamben fittingly
ends his consideration of the paradigm by noting that, ‘I know of no better definition of [the
paradigm] than the one contained in a poem by Wallace Stevens,’ which Agamben goes on to
quote: ‘The sun is an example. What it seems/It is and in such seeming all things are’ (‘What is a
Paradigm?’ 32). The paradigmatic expression of the paradigm is itself a work of art.
But having explained how Agamben’s concept of the paradigm enables the possibility of
the work of art to claim the status of knowledge, rather than simply being an expression of the
natural—but inexplicable—talent of genius, several issues remain to be addressed. The first of
5
which is to note that while the work of art can be claimed as a paradigmatic instance of
knowledge, it does not follow from this claim that all art attains such status, or even that a
successful work of art necessarily should attain such status. In this sense, while the notion of the
paradigm enables a potentiality for the work of art to lay a claim to the status of knowledge, the
exact means by which it can make this claim, and how such a claim might be made for some
works of art but not others, would require a significant level of consideration that lays beyond
the scope of this essay.
Of equal significance—to return to the opening concerns of this article—it remains
unlikely that the concept of the work of art as paradigm will present a practical solution to
resolving the internal bureaucratic disputes about the classification of creative works as research
within the modern institution of the university. This is so because such classification requires
precisely the exercise of a relation between a general rule (that is to say the definition of research
as outlined by institutions such as the Australian Research Council) and a particular instance (the
work that seeks to be classified as research), which the very notion of the paradigm opposes. In
this sense, the primary value of the paradigm’s (and, by extension, the work of art’s) claim to be
recognized as a from of knowledge is precisely its critical function of questioning the rules by
which we currently construe knowledge, and how such rules may obscure other legitimate modes
of knowing and communicating knowledge. In this sense, the paradigm’s practical use consists
in the way that it encourages the questioning of the foundational principles of knowledge and
serves as a strong reminder that one of the key functions of research is to question the means by
which we can claim to know things, and that the determination of what is construed as
knowledge, itself, is intimately affected not just by its content, but by its form.
WORKS CITED
Agamben, Giorgio. ‘Bartleby.’ The Coming Community. Trans., Hardt, Michael. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993, 35-8.
Agamben, Giorgio. ‘Bartleby, or on Contingency.’ Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1999, 243-74.
Agamben, Giorgio. ‘Genius.’ Profanations. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2007, 9-18.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Sanford UP, 1998.
Agamben, Giorgio ‘K.’ The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life. Trans., Heron, Nicholas. Edinburg:
Edinburg UP, 2008, 13-27.
Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993.
Agamben, Giorgio. ‘What Is a Paradigm?’ The Signature of All Things: On Method. Trans., D’Isanto, Luca and
Attell, Kevin. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2009, 9-32.
Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘Kafka and His Precursors.’ Selected Non-Fictions. Trans., Allen, Esther; Jill, Suzanne; and
Weinberger, Eliot. New York: Viking, 1999, 362-65.
De La Durantaye, Leland. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009.
Frieden, Ken. Genius and Monologue. Ithaca; London: Cornell UP, 1985.
Gaddis, William. The Recognitions. New York: Penguin, 1955.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, Trans., Meredith, James Creed. Ed. Walker, Nicholas. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2007).
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
2009.
Mills, Catherine. The Philosophy of Agamben. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.
Mottram, Judith. ‘Asking Questions of Art: Higher Education, Research and Creative Practice.’ Practice-led
Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009, 229-51.
Smith, Hazel and Dean, Roger T. ‘Introduction.’ Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009, 1-40.
6
Wellbery, David. The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1996.
Woodmansee, Martha. The Author, Art, and the Market. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Young, Edward. Conjectures on Original Composition. London: A. Millar; R. And J. Dodsley, 1759.
ENDNOTES
i
The expansion and development of these programs is as various as their subject matter, but, for an exemplary
history of one discipline (Creative Writing), see McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of
Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009.
ii
The Australian Research Council, for example, maintains the essential link between research and knowledge. See
‘Frequently Asked Questions: ERA 2012 Submission,’ Australian Research Council Website at
http://www.arc.gov.au/era/faq.htm: the ARC defines research as ‘the creation of new knowledge and/or the use of
existing knowledge in a new and creative way so as to generate new concepts, methodologies and understandings.
This could include synthesis and analysis of previous research to the extent that it is new and creative.’ The implied
relationship between creativity and research here is itself a testament to the changing conception of research within
the modern academy.
iii
For an excellent brief summarization of the development of the field of practice-led research, see Mottram, Judith.
‘Asking Questions of Art: Higher Education, Research and Creative Practice.’ Practice-led Research, Research-led
Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009, 230-38.
iv
See also, Wellbery, David. The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996, 121: ‘One need only think of Edward Young’s influential Conjectures on Original
Composition, of the Kantian dictum that “beautiful art is the art of the genius,” or of the first French copyright law,
proclaimed with revolutionary pathos by the National Assembly in its meeting of July 19, 1793, which based
intellectual-literary property in the “rights of genius.” From Addison’s 160 th Spectator article to the aesthetic theory
of Schopenhauer—that is, for more than a century—the term genius is ubiquitous in discourse on literature and art.
Moreover, with few exceptions its penumbra of associations remains constant throughout the period: genius is the
capacity of original artistic (or more broadly, cultural) production.’ For a good, brief summary of modern
development of the concept of genius, see Frieden, Ken. Genius and Monologue. Ithaca; London: Cornell UP, 1985,
66-83.
Kant offers an exemplary statement of this point: ‘Everyone is agreed on the point of the complete opposition
between genius and the spirit of imitation’ (137).
vi
Unsurprisingly, Agamben prefers to restore the concept of genius to its ancient meaning of a spirit of inspiration,
rather than its modern connotation of an innate natural facility for creation. See Agamben, Giorgio. ‘Genius.’
Profanations. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2007, 9-18.
vii
Following Martha Woodmansee, I have retained the gender-specific pronoun in relation to genius as a means of
indicating the fact that genius has traditional been inscribed within a masculine discourse (157 footnote 2).
viii
For a detailed examination of the figure of the paradigm in Agamben, see De La Durantaye, Leland. ‘The
Potential of Paradigms.’ Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009, 200-42.
v
‘Art, as human skill, is distinguished also from science (as ability from knowledge) . . .’ (Kant 133).
See Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Sanford UP, 1998, §4.1.
xi
Agamben, Giorgio. ‘K.’ The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life. Trans., Heron, Nicholas. Edinburg:
Edinburg UP, 2008, 13-27.
xii
Agamben, Giorgio. ‘Bartleby.’ The Coming Community. Trans. Hardt, Michael. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993. 35-8. See also, Agamben, Giorgio. ‘Bartleby, or on Contingency.’ Potentialities: Collected
Essays in Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999, 243-74.
ix
x
7