Abstract

This book is a reflection on contemporary arts and techniques, with the purpose of rethinking the terms in which they are thought and presented in philosophical contexts, with the art of dance as the plumb line by which theorizations are evaluated. The approach is based on the thesis that the artistic is directly anchored in action and interagency. The aim is to think of works of art no longer as objects, but rather as triggers of action and interaction that require, above all, active and cooperative agents. The main criticism of the philosophies of art concerns the apprehension of works of art under the concept of aesthetic object and semantic object by which the artistic is reduced to a property or relation of static and inactive particular objects and artifacts. The positive thesis consists in thinking of the arts and techniques as modulations of agency with potential for ontological transformation. Arts and techniques would indicate ways in which the human completes himself in what he is, by differentiating himself in relation to nature. All arts and techniques, the mastery of which requires attention to materials and rules, free us from nature and emancipate us for artefactual life. The main theoretical review consists in the affirmation of ontological pluralism applied to technical and artistic artifacts, in the sense that arts and techniques belong to different categories of action and technical and artistic artifacts to different ontological categories. Works of art and technique do not belong to a single category and neither do they belong to a single story. As with languages, there is a diversity of arts and techniques and a plurality of histories and ramifications. Since the arts and techniques are at the base of the establishment of the world, ontological pluralism focuses on the human being himself. Arts and techniques are forms of action and agency; the works are agents that trigger effects; artistic and technical actions are performative interagencies through which worlds are established in which the agents themselves are constituted in their form of existence and way of being. In addition to aesthetic and semantic, formal and material effects, the arts and techniques, as acts and artifacts, establish effects of reality and thus have anthropological and ontological efficacy.