School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemCreativity and power: creativity as strategy and value in modern discourse( 1996)In this thesis I develop a discussion based on the view that creativity constantly finds, loses and reconstructs itself through historical conflicts over who knows what it is and who can authoritatively practise it. My thesis is that creativity exists as a discourse—with all the instabilities that this entails. The thesis is composed of six main chapters, each discussing moments of annexation, rupture and conflict over modem understandings of creativity: * Psychoanalysis claimed a new understanding of creativity. Much of Freud's writing depended upon literary sources, but at the same time his ideas and projects aimed to replace the insights of artists with the interpretations of the analyst. This discussion follows the tensions, contradictions and disruptions over the understanding of creativity in Freud's writing and later in analytic practice. * Surrealism took flight in France inspired by Freud's insights but dismissive of his understanding of creativity as a manifestation of neurosis. My argument is that Surrealism claimed for itself a version of the creative self as both Freudian and monstrously anti-Freudian. Though apparently reclaiming creative freedom from Freudian inhibitions, Surrealism remained in awe of notions of creativity as an ideally 'feminine' arena occupied by men. Thus Surrealism, like psychoanalysis, was a discourse of both revolution and restriction. * Jacques Lacan sought creative freedom within a calcifying psychoanalytic movement and attempted a reconciliation between Surrealism and psychoanalysis. This involved him in the strange poetics of the short analytic session and in the contorted prose of his lectures on Borromean knots and elephant excrement. His discourse embodied contradictions and dilemmas in modem understandings of creativity. * The heavy use of alcohol by (mainly male) American writers and artists in the 1930s and 40s can be understood as one resistant and ambivalent response to the new understandings of creativity, in particular creativity's relation to a Freudian unconscious and to Freudian-Surrealist notions of the artist as mad or ill. * In each of these chapters the presence of the author has been weakened, threatened or made more complex. Recent debates over the place of the author in relation to creative works are extended here to show how the problem of origin is replicated in critical and theoretical writing. The elusive problem of origin in our experience of creativity recurs in the very texts which set out to explicate these problems.