Lately, I've been working on sorting out, making connections between, and making arguments about the connections between the "analytic" work that I do and the "creative" work that I do. Of course, unlike the Miller blog that we read earlier this semester, analytic work always involves creativity and creativity, I believe, either consciously or subconsciously involves an element of critique/analysis (even if this is really implicit). Things that are beautiful and moving are also doing other kinds of work and things that are doing consciously analytical work still have "forms," no matter how seemingly neutral those forms are often taken to be by many people within our society.
Because I've been thinking a lot about these issues, I've been struggling with why people who do more "analytic" kinds of work don't acknowledge the forms they choose for doing this work and why people who do creative work don't like to talk explicitly about their work as doing something critical, especially something theoretical. Personally, I understand (for the most part, anyway) the histories of Western culture that have developed that allow us to believe that these two acts are divorced from one another. Distinctions between the mind and body where made early on in Greek societies and these examples can still be used to account for differences in how we treat texts that are beautiful and moving and those that engage us intellectually. I've seen very smart people rely upon these distinctions and even though I care deeply about combining these, folding them upon one another, I often find myself tempted to fall back upon these culturally prevalent age-old distinctions.
I believe that there is something immensely valuable from moving toward spaces where we recognize the convergences of these two kinds of seemingly separate work. This, then, is where I see the work on audience as so potentially valuable because analysis, like audience, isn't merely passive. Analysis is a form of creation, *is* creative, just as production also necessitates situating ones self as an audience member (thinking about how ones text will be received).
One interesting side effect of the split between analysis and production is that people who do analysis don't think very much about why they are able to create what they create. They often attribute their desire to participate and become a part of things with learning a series of textual conventions, entering into a discourse community, etc; however, creative work often privileges an inherent "drive" or creative impulses. Hence, this split between analysis and production has led to two very different ways of thinking about the impetus to create different kinds of texts. For creative works, we often don't see this drive framed as something explicit or explicitly political (although these texts certainly often have these effects or resonances). For analytic works, we often see explicitly stated political motives and agendas but little detail for how these works are crafted or shaped through process. That makes me wonder, what these two areas could say to one another if we looked, side-by-side at their ways to approaching creativity. How might we use approaches to audience to help bridge our thinking about textual production and analysis? Because audience studies--especially those for this week--tend to disrupt the idea that there is such a thing as "an" audience or people who merely consume or produce, it is a key idea that I hope to thread through these questions.
This week, I listened to this talk given by the author Elizabeth Gilbert, an author that I would probably never read. I listened to the lecture because it was recommended to me by a professor whom I very much respect and who claimed the lecture, even in its relative simplicity, was helpful for the ways she thought about creativity. In the lecture Gilbert argues that the notion of "a genius" removes the pressure from individuals who create and mitigates this pressure because of the ancient belief that a force, god, or deity is responsible for the production as well. Of course, for many reasons, this lecture goes against the sensibilities I've acquired in my training in sociology, linguistics and rhetoric and composition about creativity and notions of "genius" and responsibility; however, I'm wondering about how, when we are converging creative and analytic work (not in actuality as they are already entangled, but as they exist as fields) how we'll contend with interesting differences like notions of "creativity" as they arise. In terms of Gilbert's notion of "a genius" as an outside force that speaks to someone would be a useful construct; however, I question to extent to which this notion disrupts creativity as something that belongs ultimately still to an individual (after all, Gilbert claims that a dialogue with a genius (i.e. spirit of some sort) is a dialogue between that spirit and the author.) This notion of "a genius" along with the social baggage that it carries, is one that tends to prevent creators from being encouraged to think about their composing consciously, or state it explicitly.
It is true that I take issue with notions like Gilbert's but I also think that this notion of creativity does capture something that ideas of acquiring a discourse in composition, or learning to produce analysis, fails to recognize. And that is desire, and pleasure. I think that often we talk about acquiring discourses from institutional and social critique purposes; yet, we often fail to motivate students to engage in these processes of critique with enthusiasm (even when I succeed at this, I feel it is less of my doing than a students pre-realization of their situatedness and their preparation to engage in the work of critique. In that way, I wonder if the kinds of critique that happen in creative works are more available to students in some way...they certainly seem more engaged in this kind of work, even when it becomes co-opted by for-grade assignments in the classroom. So, I guess my final question here that I'd like to keep thinking about is how might a convergence of these notions of creativity offer us something richer? Is it possible for these to re-converge, to put these in dialogue? I hope so, and, for now, I'm going to keep trying.
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