"Creativity" [The following was stimulated by a discussion with a friend in Brooklyn. I had told him I would be going to New Mexico to help build a house for one of my sons, and he felt this was another way of being creative, similar to playing music.]

Our short discussion about creativity the other night has led me to elaborate what I was saying, so I’m grateful for the opening to think about this. It has taken me far afield from our starting point, so the disagreement was only a point of departure. What I write below should not be taken as an argument against what you were saying but an opening for more discussion that might be shared with others:

I see creativity as a word that suffers from overuse, that has expanded its meaning and lost precision partly out of democratic exuberance. That is, if everyone is equal at least in potential then everyone has a right to be considered equally creative. That's not a problem; to rank the more and the less creative would be a silly game. But if everyone is creative then so is every human activity. When creativity extends to building a house according to someone else’s plan and orders, with nails every six inches here but twelve inches there, then why not include all purposeful activity? This ends in saying, for instance, that what one does in a moment on stage, lost in sound, or writing a poem, engages the same awareness and mental space as the most unconscious of our daily habits (not to mention the differences between what is constrained by time, like a performance, and what is unconstrained, like writing). To distinguish various kinds of activity is confused with ranking them as more or less valued. On the contrary, distinguishing without ranking can mean respecting all activity for what it is. Creative work, or meditation, for instance, is different but not superior to picking up a piece of paper off the floor, sitting down to a meal, or as the Zen people say, stirring the oatmeal. Seeing these as parallel rather than competing for value we can invest the whole of life with reverence, mindfulness, care appropriate to each activity. But I will hopefully not be creative when I’m driving a car or a nail, nor mechanically rule-following when playing music.

This expansion of interest in creativity beyond the so-called “gifted” iconic artist and scientist is a major cultural change in the west, one considered positive. It relates to the desire—which didn’t exist before the sixties at the earliest--to have a life and be a person one can call creative, that extends beyond the moments of actual playing on stage, or writing a poem, or painting. This is a pervasive ethos, especially in DIY America and the cultural left. What do you think is behind this? Today we see the most complete triumph in history of competitive, commercial culture, when monetary success—or just comfortable survival—is the highest value, where the market determines as never before in history who is respected as most “truly creative”. Does the desire for a creative life merge with this or is it a reaction against it? How is it different from the desire to be recognized (successful) as an artist?

If we look at the first half of the 20th c. we find no pervasive desire for a life of creativity, rather that life was inseparable from being an artist, which was generally scorned as useless and even harmful. To desire to become an artist was to expect a life outside social acceptance. Almost invariably those who became artists were obedient middle class children who first studied law, or engineering, or medicine. The majority either lived on family support, if they had not completely alienated their fathers, or had mundane work lives, and thought of their creative life as completely separate: Kafka, Ives, Pessoa, and on and on. Despite the overloaded art and music schools today the reality is not much different; how many poets, writers, composers, improvisers, visual artists finance their lives exclusively from their creative work, unadulterated by teaching or the dilution of their projects by the marketplace? The teacher might, in line with the current ethos, consider teaching creative, but privately she will curse the hours she is denied for her writing project. So a creative life has never realistically meant what it seems to imply.

“Creativity” implies a creator fashioning a thing created, a duality that separates the God-Artist from matter, which is elevated to sacred status by His touch. Things created exist as objects apart from their making, to be judged, interpreted, ranked. Improvisers should be especially cautious of this since improvisation merely yields sound in someone’s basement that is gone in an instant; recordings, critical analysis, ranking of players is another matter, far from the intimacy of experience. Improvisation holds the lowest rank of any creative object; to the art-world it barely exists. In my opinion “creativity” should be abandoned in order to focus instead on those moments of full immersion and concentration imbued with a sense of freedom to shape something at the same time as being shaped by it. Something like riding a horse, which you should never imagine you could completely master, as does the divine Creator. Whether this results in something valued by others, whether it even reaches the take-off stage of acceptance to be considered “art”, is another matter.

I think a life that one expects to contain such moments is the most recent replacement for the life of religious experience, and I mean this in the positive sense of inner experience, not its institutionalized form. Art, as in that which is validated by the art-world, is more like the meaning religion had for the church; the moment of creative focus, on the other hand, is closer to what was meant by Spirit. People want to be seized by, immersed in, the spirit, to master and be mastered by it simultaneously, to enter fully into experience. Post-WWI a similar spirit was located in the modernist desire to "act", which brought art into the range of politics. After WWII, when political action was in disfavor, the magic word would have been "spontaneity".

The problem of spirit in any of these cases is when it meets up with practice, material form. "If you are serious about creativity then you must become an artist" is not far from “if you’re serious about your religious experience then you need to get into the Church”. That is, there is a felt pressure to have one's creative interest recognized, and this means to embody it not just in one's private activity but in what one produces that is available to others. If you want to have the life of spontaneity you must find some formula to produce it, repeat it, certify it, and enshrine it, such as Cage's chance techniques. Otherwise you're just fooling yourself, so the accusation goes….  ¶ 8:12 AM 0 comments

  violating the community Reading Alphonso Lingis, The Community Of Those Who Have Nothing In Common. p.107: “For Aristotle the virtue that transcends, that makes possible all the others is courage, without which no one can be truthful, or magnanimous, or be a friend. This means risk, of one’s job, reputation, isolation, of one’s life.” The effort to envision, encourage, and develop a community of any kind--of improvisers, of co-workers, of neighbors, or of people with a common political intention—aims at a strength no private individual could have. Strength comes not by way of interior reflection of the individual but by claiming and asserting bonds of identity among those counted within a particular sphere, and by dissolving bonds with those perceived as outside, as lacking that identity. Through unity comes strength is the principle of the polis as of a friendship: we have this in common, and what we have does not extend to all. Community, and its kind of strength, cannot be separated from the effort to reduce risk, and therefore the need for courage, the facing of fear and willingness to risk. Every community excludes, it cannot help but do so, and by so excluding creates itself as other to the other: we are not other to ourselves, it says, we have each other. Community makes things work, without it nothing at all will work, there is not even the word “work”. But since there is no absolute uniformity among humans it also creates as its bond and pledge an internal hierarchy of value and consequently of status. On some level it must deny, at least obscure or obfuscate, hierarchy and status in the interest of the communal identity and bond; this is no less true of the medieval corpus christianum, of the nation state, or today’s global neo-liberalism. This is its ruling contradiction, its hypocrisy. It must claim to value the individual, but not the individual act that violates the communal code. It chooses which individuals represent and defend the community and represent its code, and these will be considered the virtuous.

What is of highest communal value cannot be the kind of courage that contradicts the community and its code. Indeed for that kind of courage it can never be ascertained beforehand what is the content, what courage will assert or defend. It takes courage to speak what others of the community unanimously agree is pure stupidity, or to play a music that does not represent the agreed code, or to disrespect its icons. At best one can only say: “you belong in a different community, perhaps (scornfully) one of yourself alone.” Courage separates, it is the act that creates a moment of danger, when one stands in the breach between the accepted and the unaccepted. There can be no community that can include those with the courage to violate the sanctions of the community, only those who reinforce its coded beliefs. If we disobey and wish still to be included then we make apologies for our exception, in effect showing how it proves the rule. We will downplay our apparent uncompromising stance, reduce our risk as much as possible in order to communicate what the code will not allow, which is from the community’s standpoint incommunicable. Without some appeal to community, perhaps to its buried beliefs, we will be talking into the wind, an Aeolian harp whose harmonies are heard as the velleities of nature and not yet of human durability.

It is essential that a community regulate itself and its values. This regulation is internalized unconsciously; one suppresses perceptions, impulses, wandering thoughts and possibilities that do not find some place of approval. Of course, this can leave a wide range of activity, even the illusion of total freedom, which is only belied by watching the shift of values and the inclusion of previously alien ideas over time. Contrarians make their points often after their deaths, from underground. Those presently respected will be seen to represent the values of the community most highly; some will in fact bend all their efforts to do so.

Labels: violation of a community

  ¶ 10:28 AM 0 comments