Download Creativity and Health A Deleuzian Tautology?

A Sociology of Creativity
The Deleuzian Canvas
Nick Fox
University of Sheffield
Paper presented to the BSA Conference, LSE 2011.
http://www.shef.ac.uk/scharr/sections/ph/staff/profiles/nick_fox.html
Introduction
• Sociological Approaches to Creativity
• A Deleuzian Perspective on Creativity and
Health
• The Creativity Assemblage
• What Can a Creative Body Do?
• Case Study: Cezanne and Painting
Exhibits at the Royal Academy summer exhibition
What is Creativity?
I looked for an answer to this within:
• Psychology: a personality trait independent of
cognition
• Psychoanalysis: a sublimation of unconscious
desire, often sexual
• Anthropology: material culture
• Marxism: a representation of class interests
• Evolutionary theory: successful adaptation
Sociology and Creativity 1
Sociology tends to focus on the contexts of
creative production
‘ ... aesthetic and scientific practices connect
even in their most intimate moments of
genesis with concrete social and
institutional conditions ’ (De Fillippi et al
2007)
Sociology and Creativity 2
Creativity is a social process:
‘... anything that people can examine and
judge, including communicated ideas and
processes judged independently of the
outcomes they produce. ... a subjective
judgment made by members of the field
about the novelty and value of a product’
(Ford 1996)
What did I learn?
• Not a lot
• All the theories skirt around the question of
the creative process
• The missing body: need for an embodied
approach to creativity
Mark Rothko at work
A Deleuzian Perspective
• Gilles Deleuze: don’t ask what the body
is, but what (else) it can do.
• Positive desire is the productive, creative,
experimenting motivation of life.
• What (else) a body can do is influenced by
the body’s relations and affects (q.v.).
Relations and Affects
• Relations: the physical, psychological,
social, political and philosophical
connections with objects, ideas and
people.
• Affects: the things that affect a body or
are affected by it.
Assemblages
• Relations and affects together establish
‘machine-like’ assemblages, that set the
limits of what a body can do.
• Generally speaking, the more relations a
body has, the more it can do.
Duchamp: The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even (The
Large Glass), 1923 .
Deleuze and Creativity
• Creativity is the positive desire of the organism:
the capacity to engage ‘productively’.
• A body’s relations and affects determine the
creativity-assemblage, and the limits of a body’s
creative power.
• Creative products (artistic, crafts, science,
writing, cookery, sexuality, organisation etc) are
the ‘becoming-other’ of the body.
Jackson Pollock: Untitled no. 3
The Creativity Assemblage
• A body’s creativity is affected by
• Physical relations: eye-body co-ordination,
properties of art materials, skill;
• Psychological and emotional relations;
• Past experiences;
• The social context of ‘art’: norms and values;
• Relations of power (‘Royal’ or ‘Major’ art).
Marc Chagall: ‘I and the village’
Creative Assemblages
canvas –– paint –– implement – model
canvas - paint – implement – subject –
ideas – experience - technique
e.g.
canvas – paint – model – sexual desire –
belief about women – ideas of beauty
What can a creative body do?
• The free, creative expression in young
children may be stifled by ‘Major Art’.
• Creativity is universal, but the body may
need to be ‘freed’ to be able to create.
• We can read the limits of what a body can
do in the art products.
Exploring Creativity
• ‘Given a certain effect, what machine
[assemblage] is capable of producing it?’
• ‘And given a certain machine, what can it
be used for?’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 3)
Cezanne’s Body of Painting
• The youthful work
• The mid-life productions
• Later work
(P.S. Why is Cezanne always the case
study? Cf. Deleuze, Osborne ... )
Still Life with Leg of Mutton and Bread, 1865
The Lac D’Annecy,1896
Mont Sainte Victoire from Les Lauves, 1906
Conclusions
• The Deleuzian perspective offers a
theoretical underpinning for those working
on creativity.
• It provides a methodology for exploring the
embodied creation of art objects.
•
http://www.shef.ac.uk/scharr/sections/ph/staff/profiles/nick_fox.html