ABSTRACT
The textility of making has been progressively devalued, while the hylomorphic model has gained in strength. This chapter shows that contemporary discussions of art and technology, and of what it means to make things, continue to reproduce the underlying assumptions of the hylomorphic model, even as they seek to restore the balance between its terms. It explains that the ultimate aim, however, is more radical: with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, it is to overthrow the model itself, and to replace it with an ontology that assigns primacy to the processes of formation as against their final products, and to the flows and transformations of materials as against states of matter. The chapter argues that what Paul Klee said of art is true of skilled practice in general, namely that it is a question not of imposing preconceived forms on inert matter but of intervening in the fields of force and currents of material wherein forms are generated.
