A Sociology of Creativity The Deleuzian Canvas Nick Fox University of Sheffield Paper presented to the BSA Conference, LSE

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.