A Sociology of CreativityThe Deleuzian Canvas

Nick FoxUniversity of SheffieldPaper 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