[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Simon Biggs]

The ELMCIP project is in part conceived as a riposte to the current
pressures being felt in the "institutions of creativity" (here I mean arts
organisations, educational institutions, research bodies, etc). However, it
could also be seen as an attempt to circumvent (or at least critically
reflect upon) these same instrumentalist and normalising forces at work on
individuals and (non-institutionalised) communities, whether conventionally
creative (eg: professional artists) or not (eg: hackers, etc). We formulated
the project to look at a range of creative communities.

The term "playbour" has come into vogue to describe the co-option of the
individual when they are in the midst of ludic revery, even when engaged in
forms of play that would seem resistant to this. The Facebook economy is
founded on this logic. Indolent, even vandalising, activities can have value
and if so then that value can be extracted and exchanged. However, this
depends on a certain type of value being ascribed to things such that they
become exchangeable, that they can become property (intellectual or
material). Central to the thesis we have sought to engage this month on
empyre is the idea that the value we associate with creativity is not to be
found in such an encapsulated, reductive and re-presentable form. Rather,
that creativity is not an outcome of an activity but the play of complex
elements and dynamics that comprise the activity in all its social relations
and that its value is not to be found in artefacts (although these might
stand as signifiers of value) but in new relations, even (in James's
language) "new people", that emerge (no matter how temporary in nature). The
big question then is whether social relations, even people, can be reduced
to the state of a sign, something that might be encapsulated and exchanged?

I guess an obvious example in this context could be graffiti (although I
could also propose computer viruses). It is widely regarded as vandalism.
However, some have found ways to extract value from it. Banksy murals are
chipped off walls and sold at auction (or simply faked to add cache to
place, as I saw the other day on the back wall of a posh café in Primose
Hill, London, that felt it needed a little urban chic). The market
recognises these scrawls and stencils as valuable art works, which they
might well be. However, where is the creativity in this? Whilst the art
market seeks aesthetic value in such "urban geo-markup" practices one could
also consider where the value is ascribed by those who are doing it. Are
they seeking access to the art market? Historically the answer would be no
and I suggest that overwhelmingly that remains the case. The graffitists
have a very different sense of where the value is in what they do - and it
is arguably not in the graffiti itself (or at least, not on it's own).
Graffiti is a system of signs produced by and for communities and
individuals to communicate within and across urban territories. It is a
means of exchange but also the declaration of territory and community
identity, of similarity and difference. It has its own instrumental value
within its sub-culture - but this is very different to how it becomes
instrumentalised in a wider culture, such as when appropriated by the art
market.

We all live in multiple cultures and participate in them employing multiple
modes of communication. In this regard the sort of research that has been
undertaken into creole cultures by sociologists like Ofelia Garcia can be
informative. To quote from "From biliteracy to pluriliteracies" by Garcia,
Bartlett and Kleifgen:

"...literacy entails much more than the ability to read and write, that
literacy practices are enmeshed within and influenced by social, cultural,
political, and economic factors, and that literacy learning and use varies
by situation and entails complex social interactions. If literacy is a
socially contested term, the situation that has, in the literature to date,
been dubbed ³biliteracy² is surely doubly contested, since the inclusion of
more than one language system clearly points to power differentials and
tensions about linguistic rights."

The central argument made in this paper is that individuals and communities
can function within highly multilingual environments where multiple
languages are employed in various contexts but that a central feature of
this model is that multiple languages are acquired at the same time but do
not necessarily have the same value. That is to say, different languages are
used for different purposes, in the family, at work, in the street or at
school. This is termed pluriliteracy. The same thing in one context can mean
something completely different in another whist something highly meaningful
in one context will have no significance in another.

Continuing:

"English has become both boon and threat to multilingualism, for English
also threatens to overwhelm national and regional languages, especially in
situations where language education policies privilege English over local or
national languages (as, for example, the case of Tanzania). And yet, the
prominence of English and the increased familiarity with multilingualism has
bent the rigid power of some national languages, allowing other languages
voice and power within society. This is best seen in the context of Latin
America where countries, such as Guatemala and Bolivia, have officialized
indigenous languages. It is seen worldwide, too, as immigrants use their
many languages not only in ethnolinguistic communities, but also in more
public spaces such as the web, and to communicate not only with their own
local community, but also with others who speak their languages worldwide,
and who do so, because of contact with other languages, in very different
ways. The increased presence in public domains, including the web, of
languages that had been previously relegated to private domains accentuates
the variability, hybridity, and sense­making processes of literacy practices
today."

I think something is touched on here that is at the core of what we have
been discussing, which is how communities of pluriliterate capacity come
into being; what, in the above quote, is referred to by the term
"sense-making". This is a profoundly creative activity which echoes James's
ideas about people making themselves and one another in their performative
relations. However, I think it is possible to assert that this process is
not one that is only evident in tribal or post-colonial cultures and
diasporas but within and across numerous cultures and communities and that
it is something that by its rhizomic and motile nature cannot be
encapsulated - or at least, not easily. Further to this, the technical
apparatus that has so rapidly been adopted by so many as their preferred
means of communication and representation, the internet and the web, would
seem to echo in its technical structures just these non-Euclidean and
non-Cartesian relations, what Tim Ingold (who I quoted earlier in the month)
refers to as "lines of becoming" and "a meshwork of interwoven lines of
growth and movement". We have to assume this mesh is composed as a dynamic
and ever-changing form.

So, it is this image of dynamic rhizomic relational meshes, perhaps layered
upon one another, as a palimpsest, within which and out of which people
become, that could be considered an image of creativity. I would like to
believe this is something which will resist, even disprove, the reductive
logic necessary in any attempt to instrumentalise something.

Best

Simon


Simon Biggs
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk  simon at littlepig.org.uk
Skype: simonbiggsuk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/

Research Professor  edinburgh college of art
http://www.eca.ac.uk/
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
http://www.elmcip.net/
Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts


> From: Scott Retberg <scott.rettberg at uib.no>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:08:01 +0200
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
> 
> I hope that Simon will provide an explanation of how the overall frame of this
> project is in many ways a reaction to the idea that the phrase "Creativity and
> Innovation" has largely been co-opted as a term of corporate parlance. 



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