[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[James Leach]

Hi everyone,

Thanks to Simon for inviting me on board. With so much said already, trying to cover all the points made so far will be too much for me. Forgive the late entry into the discussion (I was away all last week), and the partial nature of the response and these thoughts.

Euginio started us off last week with a welcome caution about the idea of creativity.

The idea of creating something from nothing, as he said, is necessarily outside human experience (by definition) in the Judeo-Christian mytho-poetic worldview. Simon generously cited some of my work on a small village on the Northern Coast of Papua New Guinea, where I divined a rather different place for ‘creativity’, stemming from a different mythically structured consciousness of the place of humans in their world. Creativity is not a distant and sought after ideal that can be turned, on appearance, into an individually attributed good, but is inherent in the actions of human beings as they make and remake their position as humans – that is, engage in acts that are consciously and explicitly geared to establishing gendered bodies (initiations) and resultant separations between kinsmen (and emergent named places in the landscape) so that (re)productive exchange is necessary.

In Reite novelty, innovation, invention etc. are not goal of human action. Creativity is not outside human experience, but part of its everyday reality. Creativity is inherent in what it is to be a human being because in myth, the actions referred to above, beginning with the acts which established gender, and thus the possibilities for human reproduction and kinship, were the actions of the first human beings constituting themselves as human and not something else. In their everyday lives of gardening, animal husbandry, hunting etc., these people are the same as those first creator beings, and thus are constantly partaking of the original ‘creativity’ as they also constitute their lives as human and not something else.

Most/all things Reite people do have an aesthetic dimension – their subsistence horticulture, for example, always involves ‘ritual’ forms of planting; things of symmetry and some beauty, that are there for the pragmatic purpose of drawing the correct relations between people, spirits, other people at a distance from the garden etc., at the heart of the garden space. They make fabulous objects for self-decoration, compose extraordinary music, and so forth, all as aspects of the processes of production, kinship, lifecycle changes, reproduction.

However, it seems to make little or no sense to call any of these things ‘art’, as they are not separated from everyday and prosaic acts – and those acts, as I have said, are the ones that reproduces the world (makes it appear over and again - Latour)  in the form recognisable as a human world, to Reite people. But unlike the world Latour describes, they are not in the business of consciously creating ‘the social’, or ‘society’ as an entity that can be discussed, analysed etc,

Maybe all I am doing here is concurring with the thread already established about Foucault, the artists, identity and copyright as dependent on a particular place for ‘creativity’ in western, and institutionalised, understandings of society.

But I thought to go somewhere else: and that is to talk about responsibility.

I noted in Euginio’s comments that despite suspicion with the term, it is very hard for any of us to avoid the positive moral valence of ‘creativity’. In his stimulating post, ‘constructively’, ‘common good’, ‘mutual trust’ etc. appeared.  My short description of Reite above could be read to speak of ‘constructive’ actions in the ‘common good’.  But I think that would be to mistake what is going on, deceived by the conceptual associations of our own understanding of creativity, and partaking of the kind of ‘constructionist’ view of the social world that Latour refers to.

In Reite, the acts that create the human world as it appears are also the acts that make death inevitable, competition and suspicion between people vying for control over the power to reproduce themselves through relationships to other, etc.

So everything for these people can be, and is, explained by the actions of other humans or their associated sentient beings in the land or forest. There are no accidents, no landforms, weather events – all the things we think are there beyond and outside human ‘creativity’ - that are not the responsibility of people. All illness and death there is the direct responsibility of other sentient beings, and mainly human ones. In other words, being creative of the world is also to be unavoidably responsible for its destruction.

That brings me on to say that to want to be creative is a very different thing from the kind of creative/destructive power that exists in Reite.

Having said all that, and given the underlying premise of all the above is that we, just as Reite people do, constitute our existences through the particular way we engage in relations to each other (social ontology), structured through certain key principles available in myths we tell ourselves about how we have got here and what our responsibilities as human being are -- what are we to make of the current idea that somehow the mediation of human relations through technological networks will make us more ‘creative’?

What is it about the speeding up of communication, the mediation of geographical and social distance, that makes us believe (and I use the word consciously) that we are going to be doing anything very different?

We are constantly telling ourselves that the world is changing rapidly, that things are speeding up, that technology is now the condition of our existence, its ongoing development and the consequences of that, outside human control.

But as Kriss points to in her comments, these images do political work. The faith and horror in technology is, as always, a projection of the faith and horror in the human ability (or lack of it) to change their circumstances. The personnel who may have control over that change seems to have shifted. And hence the hope in technologically mediated futures. But looking at the fine grain of the worlds and ‘communities’ created in this mediated space, many familiar themes emerge: exclusions, emergent hierarchies, control and secrecy etc.

 

Can we help but be creative?

What is it we are creating if we think of creativity as a social ontology?

Is it something we can dip in and out of, chose to do, or avoid?