Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology: Authorship
thanks Davin, and of course all of this changes in worst case and best case scenarios. I am of course a fan of some great group projects and extablishments, Shirin Nashat, is critical of this in her own work, as she saw literal physical fights between poor woman trying to be extras in her film installation projects, it made her really question what this was all about, who was being served, what was participation. I do performance, and the question always comes up, what is the difference between performance and theater, the answers is. great performance and great theater are very much the same thing. terrible performance and terrible theater look very different. Chris. Quoting davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com: Chris, I really think this idea merits a closer examination: a guilt drive behind cultural inclusiveness. I think that inclusiveness can be used to many ends, especially within the context of neoliberalism and its various expressions. On the one hand, it provides a convenient cover for people who might feel anxiety about accusations about power, discourse, and authority. On the other hand, I think the fact that inclusiveness can be deployed to assuage one's guilt does not necessarily mean that it must be the case. You note that love relationships and family bonds are a powerful force. And I think inclusivity can stem from established love relationships, or at least an openness to forging new ones. To be selfishly inclusive is a strategic matter. But it is possible that inclusivity could be an earnest gesture towards the potential of each person. To a certain extent, there is a narcissism underlying speculations about the other, but I think there is something authentically hopeful when we participate in exchanges where we trust another to make a contribution, and we pledge ourselves to honor their contribution even if it wasn't the one we'd anticipated. This is love, right? It is the difference between the zero-sum-game logic of capitalism (where every relationship is instrumentalized and each interaction is subject to cost-benefit analysis) and the excessive character of love (where interaction is driven by desires that overshadow the costs). In this world, there is a powerful pressure to see everything through the lens of the zero-sum-game, such is the power of capitalism over consciousness that it proclaims the nonexistence of everything that cannot be mediated through a universal currency. But this impossible idea of art seems most potent precisely where it resists the idea of the zero-sum-game. To get back to your point, I think that our relationships are where love is experienced. But, the nature of our relationships change against a changing world. While I would never say that new media, in general, is necessarily going to be a positive force. I would say that there are many examples where networks designed for rather utilitarian purposes are being bent to serve human relationships. Does data visualization make it possible for us to love larger numbers of people? Not necessarily, but it could. It could convince us that people are like rats. But if we are committed to love, we could personalize it, identify with it, and abstract our experience from it... it could motivate shifts in policy. We could say, let's use the tools to identify connect with those who suffer, identify the causes of suffering, cooperate across borders to tackle this suffering. It could engender a concept of humanity that is less provincial, and more disposed to a solidarity that takes into account difference. I think much of new media art will go the way of all other art. Nice for now, but someday forgotten. But the stuff that sticks with us, will most likely be the pieces that say what few had the nerve, imagination, or critical vocabulary to state plainly. In retrospect, however, I think the implications of these works will be obvious. But for now, we are in the belly of the whale. Davin On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 5:40 PM, christopher sullivan csu...@saic.edu wrote: Hi David, and all, yes very much the reception (as I mentioned ) is the point of actualization. I do not argue that, but my perfect reader can be real or imagined ( I very much Like Umberto Eco's essay on the concreteness of the written word, and the notion of the perfect reader, in his lecture ,On over interpretation. And I am not afraid of collaboration. I do think that there is a guilt drive behind cultural inclusiveness, and collaboration, that is some times in collaborative processes, so I am suspect. what I mean by this is that you can go into a neighborhood and ask everyone to give you stories about your grandmothers, and say you have worked with that community. but did they pick the topic? will they get any social recognition fro their input? or are they just workers for an outsiders ideas. in regards to
[-empyre-] Creative writing programs and elit, and thanks
Hello everyone, On this last list day, I wanted to thank Simon and everyone for the opportunity to contribute to this discussion of creativity as a social ontology. I think the general approach to the cluster of issues is a very useful one, as we frame our approaches to contemporary creative practice and creative communities. I'm also grateful for the fact that this discussion has resulted in so many threads and angles of approach that we will be following further in the ELMCIP research project. I'd also like to finish my thought on the place of digital writing in contemporary creative writing programs. About six months back, I read Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and Rise of Creative Writing. The book is wide-ranging study of American fiction since 1945. McGurl claims that postwar American literature can profitably be described as the product of a system. McGurl's studies American fiction through the specific lens of the reality that the vast majority of contemporary literary American writers have some relationship to university writing programs, either as students, faculty or both, and that their relationship to that system and the roles they play within it has aesthetic effects on the writing that they produce. That is not to say that McGurl is arguing that those effects are necessarily negative. McGurl posits the writers within the university as inside outsiders and examines the somewhat carnivalesque role of the institutionalized creativity of creative writing programs with an increasingly corporatized and instrumentalist university. McGurl observes fairly complex relationships between writers who are both critiquing the sort of system the contemporary university represents, while living and producing within that system in a completely complicit way. He examines some common writing workshop dictums: Show, don't tell and Find your voice, for instance through the positioning of the writer as the excluded other within the system. McGurl's study I think quite fairly and usefully tracks the work of writers within their social and economic contexts within the American university. To assert that creative writers and their published output are products of a system is not to deny the writer's individuality or to systematically context the quality of their work. Indeed, McGurl seems to argue, the pursuit of excellence that purportedly frames the enterprise of the late American university in general has resulted in a bountiful harvest of diverse American literature during the era he examines. Of course the graduate writing program also produces a number of casualties as well. Thousands of individuals are trained (insofar as a workshop constitutes training) as fiction writers and poets in graduate writing programs every year. Only a handful of them will become well known published authors, though many of them will publish. Some of them will become midlist authors, and teach in creative writing programs. Some will follow other paths and do other things (painting, wallpapering, technical writing). Many will spend many years as adjunct faculty in other creative writing programs or rhetoric and composition programs built around low-cost disposable teaching resources. McGurl also maps some relationships between particular writers and schools of writing as belong to specific nodes of the workshop system. I nearly laughed when he identified technomodernism as one of the threads of creative writing workshop, indentifying the Brown University literary arts program, with its MFA fellows in digital writing as a prime example of this node. I laughed not because I would deny the connections between the school of American writers formerly known as postmodernists and the practices of contemporary digital writing, but because Brown is the only example I can think of in the MFA creative writing ecosystem where digital writing is taught and practice in a sustained systematic way. There are a number of courses in digital writing taught in university's of course, and a great deal more courses taught in literature programs and other types of hybrid progams, such the digital culture program I teach in at the University of Bergen, but creative writing has largely shrugged off digital writing. I think this is a great loss, to some extent for electronic literature, but to an even greater extent to the creative writing system itself. I should explain that I spent a number of years in creative writing workshops myself. I think there are positive and negative apsects to learning and writing in these environments, but overall I value the approach a great deal. What I prized most about my experiences in undergraduate writing workshops at Coe College and graduate writing workshops at Illinois State University and the University of Cincinnati were not necessarily or primarily the
[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
So, we come to the end of the month of July and to the end of our discussion on the theme of creativity as a social ontology. During August empyre will take a break and return with a new theme in September. Of course, that doesn't mean the list is turned off and I hope my inbox will continue to receive interesting emails throughout the month. To remind us again of where we began: Creativity is often perceived as a product of individual, or group, creative activity. However, it might also be considered an emergent phenomenon of communities, driving change and facilitating individual and ensemble creativity. Expanded concepts of agency allow us to question who, or what, can be an active participant in creative social interactions, providing diverse models for authorship. How might we understand creativity as interaction, as sets of discursive relations? Creativity can be a performative activity released when engaged through and by a community. In this context the model of the solitary artist, who produces artefacts which embody creativity, can be questioned as an ideal for achieving creative outcomes. Creativity can be proposed as an activity of exchange that enables (creates) people and communities. This suggests it is possible to conceive of creativity as emergent from and innate to the interactions of people. Such an understanding functions to combat instrumentalist views of creativity that demand it have social (e.g.: economic) value. Creativity need not be valued as satisfying a perceived need nor need it be romantically situated as a supply-side blue skies ideal. An alternate model can be proposed where creativity is considered an emergent property of community; an ontology. Over the past month our invited guests and members of empyre have addressed these questions from a range of perspectives. I am not going to try to summarise the various viewpoints here as to do so would, I fear, lead to a very long email. The empyre archive is always accessible. I would, however, like to reflect on the tensions identified in the discussion about collaborative, distributed and collective modes of authorship. The original theme was carefully proposed not to be exclusivist. The first and second sentences of the introductory statement did not present an either/or situation. To quote, it (creativity) might also be considered an emergent phenomenon of communities. The adverb also is an important word here as it permits creativity as something that can be a property, condition, phenomena or activity that might be associated with individuals, groups or as emergent from general human interaction. Clearly our discussion has focused on the latter of these three possibilities but not to the exclusion of other conceptions. I fear at times that some of the protagonists in our debate have understood this argument as equivalent to the democratisation of creativity and the culture wars around high and low culture. However, that is a different argument concerning what can be considered creative outcomes of subsequent social value permitting them to be accepted as canonical. It is an argument about who can participate in cultural production and in what manner. At other points in the discussion there have been spirited arguments why creativity is (in some instances, apparently, must be) the outcome of individually internalised processes and activities. As an artist I have huge sympathy for this position. Most artists live their lives in fear that many people will not only not get their work but will actually be hostile to it and to the entire field in which they work. In such a context it is natural to go on the defensive and seek internalised value in what you do. At the very least you will always have one member of your fan club - yourself. If you are lucky you will carve out a niche for yourself in a small club of like minded practitioners. Scott's last post reflected on such aspects of the artist's condition, considering the career options open (or closed) to them and the price that will be paid to to concentrate on what you really want to do. It was sobering. However, neither the high/low culture debate or a fear of philistines are likely to facilitate the development of the theme originally proposed for this months discussion. To focus on either of these approaches, whilst generally valid, is to misconceive how creativity was being posited in the original outline of the theme. Nowhere in the statement was the word art employed. The word artist was used once, to distinguish between what they do as practice and the outcomes of that practice and where value is subsequently inscribed. It was used to differentiate what the word creativity meant in this context. The word creativity was then employed to indicate social interaction as a form of distributed agency (involving numerous agents, not all of them human). The outcome of this creative process was posited as people, which is to say not just people as individuated social
