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|N(TER)PLAY: THE RHETORIC AND ECOLOGY OF
CREATIVITY

presented by

LYNN M. CHRENKA

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IN(TER)PLAY: THE RHETORIC AND ECOLOGY OF CREATIVITY
By

Lynn M. Chrenka

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2003

ABSTRACT
IN(TER)PLAY: THE RHETORIC AND ECOLOGY OF CREATIVITY
By
Lynn M. Chrenka
This inquiry unites the fields of cultural studies, critical studies, and
rhetoric in order to problematize the historical conception of creativity as a
characteristic (or cluster of characteristics) found in the “creative exemplar” who
embodies the Romantic and modernist ideology of the singular, exceptional,
isolated “genius” who solves a problem or produces a product labeled as
“creative.” It attempts to open a new conceptual space for creativity that
interrupts the repetition of this Romantic/modernist ideology by making visible its
indebtedness to power relationships invested in a disenfranchising “rhetoric of
exclusion" meant to contain its meaning, and it refigures creativity in light of the
postmodern view of humans as conditioned, situated subject positions, materially
and discursively constituted, each occupying different culturally-based sites of
meaning, employing different uses of language, and engaged in different social
practices. While it does not deny that individuals can be agents of creativity, it
suggests that creativity is a radically distributed effect of interactive ecological
factors of which individuals are a part, the function of an entire network of activity,
and it finds that recognition of products or behaviors as “creative” is always
contingent. It locates creativity not “in” individuals as an innate characteristic or
“in” contexts or "in” cultures, but in the complex interplay of the relationships

among multiple overlapping elements always in play.

Copyright by
LYNN M. CHRENKA
2003

To Allan, my first reader and critic, who gave me the precious gift of time and
space to write and never made me feel guilty for neglecting him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Because it reconstitutes and extends the thinking of many others, this
project is evidence of its own contention that new knowledge rarely emerges
from the thinking of a single, isolated individual. Thus, the preparation of this
manuscript and the ideas it contains would have been impossible without the
help of others I take this opportunity to thank. l benefited enormously from the
generous criticism and advice of Ed lngraham, Dean Rehberger, Jim Stalker,
and, especially, Diane Brunner who supported me in this work from its meager
beginnings, pushed my thinking to another level, and believed in my ability to
complete it when l was not so sure.

I will also be forever grateful to my good friend and colleague Tonya Perry,
a poet and master teacher, who introduced me to the notion of “seeing
crookedly.” She listened patiently to thinking aloud that bordered on obsession
and to countless, often incomprehensible drafts of chapters, and when she saw
the need, she gently challenged me to think again and to clarify my writing in
order to make it more accessible. . I am also grateful to another colleague and
fellow writer Marguerite Cotto who took time from her own project to help me
address the challenges of mine over our periodic “working” lunches, a favor I
hope to return. Finally, I thank my other friends and my family---especially Allan,
Scott, Chris, and Jason--—for their understanding support of my need to put this
project first at times, for their pride in my achievement, and for joyfully welcoming

me back from my long journey.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................. vii
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER ONE

The Problem of Creativity ........................................................................ 5
CHAPTER TWO

A History of Thinking about Creativity and ................................................. 41
The Emergence of the Creative Exemplar

CHAPTER THREE

Language and Rhetoric: Authorizing the ................................................... 94
Operation of Creativity

CHAPTER FOUR

The Difference Difference Makes ........................................................... 153
CHAPTER FIVE

Toward a Rhetoric and Ecology of Creativity ............................................ 192
WORKS CITED ................................................................................. 219

vi

LIST OF TABLES

TABLE 1
The Changing Locations and Sources of Creativity ...................................... 78

vii

INTRODUCTION

Looking at Creativity

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro,

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

0 thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light

Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving
The blackbird must be flying.

Xlll

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing

And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

~"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” bears a

particularly apt relationship to the inquiry I present here. It provides a vision of

what it means to see that which escapes knowing and yet is “involved” in
everything we know. The poem suggests a way of looking at a concept by
examining how it repeats itself, a repetition not of the same, but of difference that
co-constructs and extends its reality. It is a lesson in complementarity, the
unceasing juxtaposition of things as they are and as they may be that exhausts
the possibilities of language, reveals the limitations of the single perspective, and
suggests the futility of trying to fix meaning once and for all. Stevens builds one
image on another, suggesting that any description or definition is both
improvisational, depending on the “interplay” of elements, and provisional,
always "in play,” and, therefore, only theoretical, anticipating the responses of
others to fill in what is Iacking---the “counterpoint to what we have failed to see,”
as the poet Alison Deming says. So, Stevens’ poem is meant here as a playful
admission that things only exist in relationship to other things, as a connecting
thread among the parts of this work, and as a reminder of the nature of our
“seeing,” the slipperiness of concepts, and the power of the social imagination.

I have titled this work /n(ter)play: The Rhetoric and Ecology of Creativity to
take advantage of the double meaning it suggests. Not only does my study
argue that creativity is the effect of the “interplay” and interaction of many factors,
it also suggests that these factors are always “in play,” always evolving and
unfinished. The study itself also depends on the interplay of other elements I
regard as being in play: the fields of rhetoric, critical studies, and cultural studies.
And, finally, to some extent, in the way I have presented my work, I have allowed

its form to follow the function I have imagined for it.

Near Kamakura, an ancient capital of Japan about an hour southwest of
Tokyo by bus, there is a Buddhist temple known as Hasedera that overlooks both
the city and the Pacific Ocean. I mention the temple here because the grounds
are notable for the beautiful wind-swept gardens of delicate, deep-purple iris that
propagate themselves in the rich volcanic soil by developing the characteristic
horizontal “roots” that are not really roots at all. They possess buds, nodes, and
scale-like leaves with the potential to reach out and connect from many points
and to produce flowering shoots above the ground even in late December when I
saw them. I find this pattern repeated in Stevens’ poem, in Gregory Bateson’s
concept of “mind” as the complexity or intersection of individuals interacting with
others and their environment, and in the ten-foot high, carved wooden statue of
one of Japan’s most popular deities Juichimen---eleven-faced Kannon. Each
face represents a stage of enlightenment and allows the Kannon to cast an eye
in every direction, thus remaining eternally vigilant, open, and aware.

In the spirit of the Kannon and Steven’s poem, I have attempted to
construct a rhetoric of creativity, of productive knowledge, arranging the parts of
this work to juxtapose differing views across a variety of disciplines in order to
provide a different architecture for “seeing” that will position readers in the
in(ter)p|ay of its struggle to construct meaning and knowledge.

The first chapter introduces the problem of creativity and suggests how an
understanding of its nature has eluded us. It also suggests why this has
occurred, who may have been harmed as a result, and how a different

understanding of creativity might operate. Chapter Two traces the historical

construction of creativity as an object or phenomenon of study and suggests how
it became a “problem.” Chapter Three examines how language and rhetoric
work, particularly how concepts are formed and how this process may be related
to the problem of creativity. Chapter Four examines the crucial effect of
awareness of difference and its importance as “new information." It suggests
that creativity surfaces in the “play of difference,” and it argues that human
survival depends both on the transmission of certain “unslippable” concepts and
the play of difference that forces concepts to “slip.” Finally, Chapter Five takes
up the discussion of how ecological thinking works and how rhetoric re-
constituted as an art of productive knowledge might contribute to the operation of

an ecology capable of surfacing creativity.

CHAPTER ONE

The Problem of Creativity

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Creativity, like Wallace Stevens’ blackbird, seems poised on the boundary
between order and chaos. Following different avenues of inquiry, experts have
examined this phenomenon from a variety of perspectives for over a hundred
years. Since the first empirical study of human abilities by Francis Galton,
published in 1869, creativity research has continued in fits and starts up to the
present time, focusing at various times on the characteristics of creative people,
creative processes (conscious and unconscious), and environmental influences.
In general, studies of creativity have regarded it as a statistically infrequent or
'novel idea or product that adapts a commonly understood reality, as a process
occurring within a particular individual at a particular time, and as a personality
trait unevenly distributed among human beings. More recent approaches have
stressed the role of social, cultural, and environmental influences and the search
for ways to encourage it.1 While these inquiries have revealed certain features of
creativity and added to our knowledge of it, they have, however, merely marked
“the edge of one of many circles.” Hardly able to agree on a “name” for this
concept, neither have they been able to establish precisely what creativity is.

Moreover, they have often mistaken “the shadow of equipage for blackbirds.”

Creativity refuses to be fully known, yet it is “involved” in everything we
know. It is a recursive concept that attempts to describe a dynamic process
always in play, evolving, and unfinished and always in interaction with social,
cultural, and environmental components---a strange loop that, like Stevens’
blackbird, when examined folds back on itself, reintroduces itself from a different
perspective, and develops a new sense. Understanding this dynamic,
unpredictable, and apparently disorderly concept requires a different lens, one
that will grant another way of looking at the “blackbird."

This inquiry re-examines creativity through the lens of rhetoric. Although
rhetoric’s relationship with creativity may best be described as schizophrenic, the
fate of rhetoric has been linked historically with that of creativity. On the one
hand, reflecting particular regimes of truth, rhetoric has framed the commonplace
notion of creativity as the characteristic of a few exemplars this inquiry critiques
and has preServed the “tensions” that have troubled attempts to understand it for
more than a hundred years. Absence of critical inquiry, reflection, and analysis
that is both historically and socially contextualized has deterred alternate
understandings and obscured who has benefited from maintaining this view, thus
allowing “theory” to confirm and reify social ”realities” that have been constructed
and that can be re-constructed differently. On the other, figured differently,
rhetoric can also work against hegemony by evoking alternative possibilities and
can surface creativity.

Demonstrating the former link between rhetoric and creativity, in the

upsurge of research into creativity that occurred in the 19503, for example, few

studies questioned why women were only rarely acknowledged as “creative.”
Ravenna Helson’s studies of creativity in women found, “There was a naive use
of psychoanalysis and personality-trait concepts to ’blame the victim,’ with what
seems now a surprising blindness to the effects of cultural values, social roles,
and sexist thinking” (“Creativity” 46). She reported that there was among some
researchers a sense of puzzlement, but the prevailing “common sense” opinion
then was that women were generally unsuited to creative endeavors because
they lacked the necessary ambition, independence, and assertiveness. Helson
also found that there was general agreement that women “were---and should be-
-—more interested in their families than in fame or scientific advances” (46).
Unable to “see” through the influences of Cultural and social norms and move
beyond the boundaries this “rhetoric” had constructed, many researchers simply
believed that women lacked the originality necessary for creative thinking and the
ability to think abstractly. To borrow Ludwig Wittgenstein's words, they may have
thought they were “tracing the outline of nature,” but they were “merely tracing
around the frame through which [they] looked at her. . . and language seemed to

repeat it to [them] inexorably” (114-115).

Moreover, until recently who knew that Crick and Watson’s discovery of
the double helical structure of DNA depended heavily on the scientificwork of a
little known woman, chemist Rosalind Franklin? Franklin had made original and
critical contributions to the understanding of the structure of graphite and other
carbon compounds. And, using the process of X-ray crystallography, Franklin

was the first to discover that the sugar-phosphate backbone of DNA lies on the

outside of the molecule. She also explained the basic helical structure of the
“molecule. Unfortunately, however, her work data and her unpublished
conclusions were provided without her knowledge to Crick and Watson, and they
used her data (along with the data of other scientists) to build a detailed
description of DNA's structure that, in 1953, was finally correct. But, Franklin did
not share in the rewards of this achievement. The recent revelation of her key
contribution suggests that discursive practice, the role of the social order, and the
power relationships that sustain it play important roles in determining what counts

as creativity not only in science but in other fields as well.

Further reinforcing this point, the title of Linda Nochlin’s essay asked,
“Why Are There No Great Women Artists?” Considering this question led her to
conclude that failure to consider the influence of social conditions led to the
flawed conclusion that women lack the ability to make great art. Art historians
have argued in a wholly circular fashion, that if women had artistic genius, it
would reveal itself. Since, in their view, it has not revealed itself, they concluded
that women must lack artistic genius. Moreover, acceptance of this argument
precluded examination of other factors that may have contributed to this effect
such as access to role models and training (domain knowledge) and the impact
of social responsibilities historically imposed on women that may have resulted in
the lack of time, energy, and focus necessary to make “great art.”

It is important to point out that women did, of course, produce art (just as
they wrote and did mathematics and science), much of it in the form of crafts for

the home like quilts, crewel, and other stitchery projects, for example, but

evidently such work did not qualify as “great art” when measured against a
standard that does not include such work in the category.

The same arguments have been made, not only in reference to the
artworks women have created, but also in reference to various other creative
efforts socially and politically constructed standards have routinely excluded from
the category historically for a variety of reasons. Mary Helen Washington, in the
forward of the 1990 edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were
Watching God, notes that for thirty years after its first publication the book had
been unknown, having been rejected by the male literary establishment.
Washington cites one particular white reviewer who in 1937 could not believe
that a town both inhabited and run by Negroes could be real and further points
out that black male critics also rejected the work as “being out of step with the
more serious trends of the time” (x). That its fiftieth anniversary edition in 1987
was a bestseller illustrates the significance of social, political, and environmental
conditions in determining whose works get a “reading” and when. Currently, of
course, quilts (which most often are collective projects) and other home-made
crafts may sometimes be counted as “great” or “creative,” especially if they
represent a vision of something greater than the creative ability of the individuals
who had a hand in creating them.

The story of Sophie Germain is also instructive as it reflects the reported
experience of the few women who have managed to contribute significantly to
the field of mathematics in spite of strong opposition to their participation.

According to Simon Singh, the science historian and author of Fermat’s Enigma,

 

it had been common practice over the centuries to discourage women from
studying mathematics and other sciences. Reportedly, Sophie’s interest in
studying such an “unfeminine” subject as mathematics so alarmed her father that
he attempted to discourage her by Confiscating her candles and clothes and
refusing to heat her room. Nevertheless, she managed to obtain a secret supply
of candles, wrapped herself in blankets, and taught herself number theory and
calculus. Although her father eventually relented and supported her research,
that would only take her so far because she remained isolated from further
training and the latest ideas.

When no one else took her interest in mathematics seriously, in 1794, she
assumed the identity of Monsieur Antoine-August Le Blanc, an inept student who
had left the Ecole Polytechnic in Paris. This ruse worked until Joseph-Louis
Lagrange, the supervisor of the mathematics course who also happened to be
one of the finest mathematicians of the time, noticed a remarkable transformation
in the work of Monsieur Le Blanc and forced Germain to reveal her true identity.
Fortunately for the field of mathematics, Lagrange did not dismiss her but instead
became her mentor and her friend, thus allowing her to develop her skills and
confidence. Her work did not disappoint. In fact, she made significant
contributions to the field of mathematics (discovering the Germain primes) and to
the solution of the legendary Fermat theorem. Later, however, discrimination
and isolation led her to ultimately abandon the study of pure mathematics. It is
worth noting that institutionalized discrimination against women in mathematics

continued well into the twentieth century. Germain’s story suggests that one

10

. answer to a question of why there are so few great women mathematicians, then,
may have little to do with a perceived lack of ability in women and leads to me to
wonder what might have been accomplished had women been encouraged to
participate in the field over the centuries.

The preceding examples suggest that a theory of creativity that regards it
as an innate characteristic of only a few and that by its very focus rules out
complete examination of the complexities involved ignores the fact that
individuals are social beings, conditioned by their location in culture. It also fails
to adequately interrogate how the criteria for deciding what constitutes creativity
came into being historically and sidesteps the question of who and what
determines “standards” of “human greatness.” This theory, with its roots in the
Platonic idea of truth as accessible only to certain “gifted” individuals, has infused
Western thought and pedagogy, continued to frame thinking about the nature of
creativity, and gained credence through its continual circulation in the deep
discourse structures of regimes of truth imposed by dominant forces who want to
sustain their poWer by controlling cultural structures and practices and
authorizing what counts as knowledge. The claim that only certain people are
innately capable of creativity in art, literature, science, or any other field and that
others, a majority of the population, are not (because if they were, there would be
evidence) has thus been allowed to suppress alternative explanations. Further,
employed as the basis for public policy decisions, it has resulted in depriving the

“others” of experiences that might manifest creativity in a variety of fields.

11

However, as Jonathan Culler suggests, “The nature of theory is [also] to
undo, through a contesting of premises and postulates, what you thought you
knew . . . “ (Literary 17). As “a pugnacious critique of common-sense,” theory
can [also] open space for the critique of received belief systems and cultural
structures/practices in order to examine the unequal relationships in the
circulation of power and the knowledge it constructs, a primary aim of this inquiry.
No other examination of creativity In any discipline has considered it in this light.

A Rhetoric of Creativity

 

Aristotle defined rhetoric as ”an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the
available means of persuasion." According to translator George Kennedy, he
identified it as belonging to the genus dynamis, meaning “ability, capacity,
faculty” (On Rhetoric 36n) and recognized rhetoric’s potential as manifested not
in the actual oral or written text or even in persuasion itself, but in the “art of
seeing” how persuasion might be achieved. “To see,” Kennedy notes, meant “to
be an observer of” and “to grasp the meaning or utility of” and located in rhetoric
the ability to imagine other possibilities through “invention," a capacity akin to
creativity (36n).

Aristotle defined all art as the “reasoned capacity to make something”
(289). For him, “making” (art/techne) was distinct from acting (practice) and from
theorizing (philosophy). Rhetoric’s appropriate concern, according to Aristotle,
was the coming—into-being of something capable of either being or not being
(289), something whose origin could be found in the maker but not in the thing

made and whose “art” required both material at hand and an external mover. He

12

found its first principle, then, in a creator and its end in a user, suggesting the
necessity of social interaction. (Art here is not a product like a painting or a

sculpture; rather, it means the “shaping, constructing,” or “making”---
Aristotle’s own term---associated with the Conscious production of the elements
of any discipline, like the art of constructing a mathematical proof for example.)

Although Aristotle rejected Plato’s distinction between true and false art,
when he referred to rhetoric as the “counterpart" of dialectic, he reinforced Plato’s
view of it as a poor cousin unworthy of a seat at philosophy’s banquet table,
relegating it to the kitchen with the cooks (Gorgias 4650). Rhetoric’s fit in either
place has been the subject of continuing debate. Nevertheless, the suggestion
that rhetoric is modeled on philosophical method (dialectic) has tended to cover
over its significance as a way of “creating” productive knowledge.

For Plato, rhetoric constituted mere flattery, “not an art, but the occupation
of a shrewd and enterprising spirit” (Gorgias 463). Central to his argument was
the distinction he drew between philosophy’s project of episteme (knowledge)
and rhetoric’s project of effecting belief or doxa (opinion). He believed the search
for truth to be the process of recovering what the soul already knows, a solitary
introspective effort resulting in “a recollection of those things which our souls
beheld aforetime as they journeyed with their god, looking down upon the things
which now we suppose to be, and gazing up to that which truly is” (Phaedrus
249b). Truth “which truly is” Plato regarded as immutable, transcending the
contingencies of time and place: “Philosophy holds always to the same”

(Gorgias 482). And, he concluded that rhetoric, the art of discourse, "the art

13

which secures its effect through words,” employed by “one who goes chasing
after beliefs, instead of knowing the truth, will be a comical sort of art, in fact no
art at all” (Phaedrus 2620). Because he regarded rhetoric as “a creator of
conviction that is persuasive but not instructive about right and wrong” (Gorgias
455), he considered it an unreliable tool in the recovery of truth.

Plato also saw it as a resource for his competitors, the sophists, who he
believed used “imaginative” tricks to deceive and manipulate people and lead
them away from truth (Gorgias). The sophists, on the other hand, understood
rhetoric as a tool for social interaction (what, in their view, made people most
human), finding its highest purpose in public debate in the polls. The inventive
capabilities of rhetoric suggested to them the endless play of both the possibility
of truth and its impossibility.

Plato’s own rhetoric, voiced through Socrates, sought to contain its
potential and control it. He did not imagine Truth as accessible to everyone. He
regarded only individuals of certain standing (the guardian class), supposedly
endowed with superior skills and mental structures, able to fully “recall” it.
Moreover, he considered social interaction detrimental to this process; solitude
was for him the necessary precondition for the philosophic act. Invention, as he
conceived of it, then, was not invention in the sense of producing new or different
knowledge. Rather, he envisioned it as the process of great skill and effort
whereby privileged individuals attained Truth, a transcendent entity infinitely re-

circulating within a closed system. This conception of truth as accessible only to

14

certain “gifted” individuals has infused Western thought and pedagogy and
supported the notion of creativity as the “gift” of a privileged few.

In the early twentieth century, however, Mikhail Bakhtin rooted his
philosophy of language not in sophistic rhetoric or in Plato’s system, but in the
Socratic method of inquiry as he believed it operated before Plato distorted it to
serve his own ends. Sensing the underlying concept of the Socratic dialogues,
he wrote in the Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,

At the base of the genre [the novel] lies the Socratic notion of the

dialogic nature of truth, and the dialogic nature of human thinking

about truth. The dialogic means of seeking truth is counterposed to
official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth,
and it is also counterposed to the naive self-confidence of those
people who think . . . that they possess certain truths. Truth is not

born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person; it

is born between people collectively searching for the truth, in the

process of their dialogic interaction. Socrates . . . brought people

together and made them collide in quarrel, and as a result truth was

born; with respect to this emerging truth Socrates called himself a

‘midwife,’ since he assisted at the birth . . . (110).

Under Plato’s system, Bakhtin believed that the Socratic dialogue had
“degenerated completely into a question—and-answer form for training
neophytes (a catechism)” (110), becoming the “absolute word,” the one
logic and language of truth. However, he further reasoned that as this
word comes into contact with competing, different meanings for the same
things, it feels the force of dialogism: a fluidity, a slipping beyond
established boundaries that resists systematic efforts to fix or “centralize”
and close down the potential for different, new meanings. One

transgression beyond the apparent boundaries of the word can lead to

other transgressions and can threaten the entire system, forcing it open to

15

new potentialities that are relative, conditional, and context-full, and
dependence on context insures that a word spoken (or written) is
“heteroglot,” a mixture of many. Thus, its always and already existing
“novelty” can invade the space of privilege, “breaking through to its own
meaning . . . born in dialogue as a living rejoinder within it . . . shaped in
dialogic interaction . . . a concept of its own object in a dialogic way ” (The
Dialogic 279). Bakhtin considered rhetoric’s relationship with living human
beings, its internal orientation toward response from others, and its
potential for creating openings within systems as particularly significant.
He believed “truth” to be tentative at best, and he considered the effort of
Plato’s solitary individual trying to arrive at truth through introspective
contemplation tantamount to “trying to pull oneself up by one’s own hair”
(Toward 7).

In Rhetoric Reclaimed Janet Atwill suggests that rhetoric may _
actually belong to an alternative order of knowledge, a part of Aristotle’s
original system that fell into obscurity when the binary opposition of theory
and practice began to dominate Western thought. From ancient sources,
some more than a century prior to Aristotle, Atwill recovers rhetoric as an
art of “productive knowledge,” a context-full, processural model that
contains no stable disciplinary body of knowledge and takes as its concern
the specifically “human” capacity to intervene and invent (7). It was
associated with uncertainty and the transgression of boundaries and

limits, with the disruption of received knowledge, with the creation of new

16

subjectivities, and with the production of new possibilities---“a desire for
‘more’ that challenges or redefines relations of power” (7). She notes that
Aristotle consistently found in rhetoric features of this order of knowledge:
It does not belong “to a single defined genus of subject" it is “capable of
admitting two possibilities;” and it has the “capacity to be otherwise” (175).

Atwill’s inquiry also verifies that in Aristotle’s system the aim of
productive knowledge differed significantly from the aims of theoretical
and practical knowledge: Its purpose was not to “define an object of
study” or “formalize a method.” Rather, its aim was to make use of both
the “rational structuring” of the world and interruptions of that structuring
that render it uncertain, moments capable of transforming “what is” into
“what could be” (70).

Atwill argues that the most distinguishing feature of productive
knowledge was its different sense of time. Philosophy’s claims were
regarded as enduring and timeless in the sense of chronos or abstract
time. On the other hand, productive knowledge was thought to take
advantage of time in the sense of kairos, particular time or timeliness,

“seizing the moment” and unfolding within it (57). Atwill notes, Knowing
how’ and ‘knowing when’ are at the heart of kairos, distinguishing techne
from rule-governed activities that are less constrained by temporal

conditions” (59). Rule-governed activities have difficulty responding to

kairos precisely because they are rule-bound and cannot adjust flexibly or

17

quickly to change. Thus, the more activities are codified or formalized, the
less flexible and less responsive to change or difference they become.

Productive knowledge, on the other hand, is always contingent;
dependent not only on time, but also on context, on the status of existing
knowledge, and on those involved in it at the moment. In the
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle went so far as to exempt productive
knowledge from the laws of his logic (Nicomachean 1.3). He suggested
that it obeys a different logic, one in which something can both be and not
be, like a “rain” that is a “mist,” for example. Or, as Ahab proclaims in
Moby Dick, “You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can
you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to
settle these plain things.”

Rhetoric, as an art of productive knowledge, then, may be regarded
the “undecidable middle term” that deconstructs the binary of theory and
practice. In a 1990 interview in the Journal of Advanced Composition,
Gayatri Spivak (in reference to Paul de Man’s The Resistance to Theory)
describes rhetoric as the “residue of tactical indeterminacy” that resists
systematic logic and “escapes the system” despite attempts to contain it.
As neither theory nor practice, its fluid activity between them continuously
generates tension and dis-order (Spivak says “un-ease”) and is capable of
upsetting equilibrium and “bringing both into crisis.”

The rhetoric of productive knowledge is distinctively different from

rhetorics that reproduce knowledge imposed by dominant forces and

18

made to function as truth. It resonates against both knowledge as theory
and knowledge as practice to create an “awareness” of other possibilities,
and tireless in its critique, its tendency to act as a tool for developing that
awareness is to hold off closure, interrupt repetition and habituation, and
point toward other possibilities. Rather than reflecting received
knowledge, it challenges and informs static disciplinary models of
knowledge, recasting them as productive rhetorical transactions that open
them to alternative possibilities.

This potential for being a productive, generative intellectual process

I"

also links rhetoric to creativity. As an art of knowledge as production,’
not product. . . [of] invention and articulation, rather than representation
(Rhetoric 7), creativity manifests through rhetoric---through “seeing” the
available means of persuasion. I argue that creativity may be the
productive knowledge this rhetoric surfaces, knowledge that, as Atwill
suggests, is defined against every distinguishing feature of Western
culture and education. A dynamic “power,” never a static, normative body
of knowledge, it resists identification with a normative subject, “In Hesiod’s
Prometheus narratives, every exchange of a techne creates a different
order of power-«different subjectivities. As such, there are no well-defined
boundaries between subject and knowledge. Consequently, it is difficult, if
not impossible, to make techne conform to either Plato’s equation of

knowledge and virtue or to Quintilian’s vir bonus” (7) and, perhaps,

partially explains our failure to fully understand it.

19

Against the backdrop of existing knowledge, then, creativity emerges from
a complex of relationships between and among people and their social and
environmental contexts, a chaos that defies our attempts to bring it to order.
Rather than the mystical, mysterious experience Romantics found embodied in
autonomous individuals, I argue that creativity is, instead, the effect of the
persuasive interaction of individuals, environments, constraints, possibilities,
processes, and products with no singular, readily identifiable point of origin. Like
Bakhin’s description of the Rabelaisian grotesque body growing out of and giving
birth to itself, always exceeding its boundaries, it is “a body in the act of
becoming . . . never finished . . (Rabelais 317). Bakhtin noted Pinsky’s
description of the paradoxical nature of the grotesque, . . it brings together that
which is removed, combines elements that exclude each other, contradicts all
current conceptions. . . is related to the paradox in logic . . . contains great
potentialities” (32n). But, as Nobel chemist llya Prigogine and physicist Isabelle
Stengers suggest, because Western thought has trained us so thoroughly to
think in terms of origins and linear causality, large, complex, non-linear systems
seem “counterintuitive”---they do not act in the ways we think they should and so
escape our understanding.
An Ecology of Creativity

Prigogine and Stengers contend in Order Out of Chaos that such
complexities require us to see and think in new ways. They invite us to consider,
for example, far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures that appear to begin

spontaneously. Transforming apparent disorder (thermal chaos) into order, their

20

behavior reflects the interaction of the system with its surroundings, a kind of
“prebiological adaptive mechanism.” In these structures, chemical clocks
(periodic chemical processes) appear and behave in quite coherent and
rhythmical, but completely unexpected ways. For example, if we imagined some
of these molecules to be red and others blue, as Prigogine and Stengers
suggest, because of their chaotic motion, we would expect to see more red
molecules at one moment and then more blue molecules would appear, blending
with the red for a purple effect with sporadic flashes of red and blue. However,
this is not what occurs. First, the system is all red, and then, suddenly, it is all
blue, and the changes occur at regular intervals and reveal an orderly pattern
with all molecules changing their chemical identity simultaneously. To do this,
according to Prigogine and Stengers, the molecules would have to be
“communicating" in order to Change as a whole. In a state of dis—equilibrium, a
dissipative structure, thus, “perceives” differences in its surroundings and
responds accordingly.

In older, more mechanistic models of natural phenomena the fluctuations
and disturbances of dis-equilibrium meant trouble, a breakdown of the system,
decay, and eventual death. But, dissipative structures demonstrate instead the
capacity of living systems to respond to disorder with new life, to achieve order
out of chaos. The disorder resulting from the awareness of difference in
surroundings, instead of meaning trouble, is re-generative, a source for a new
and higher order, and once a higher order has been attained, it is irreversible. I

argue that “ecological” thinking, an approach derived from the study of structures

21

like the ones Prigogine and Stengers describe as well as from evolution and
chaos theory, is a way of understanding creativity as productive knowledge.

In complex adaptive systems, networks of independent agents act and
interact with each other while at the same time they react to and co-construct th
environment. Because they are so large, dynamic, and unpredictable, it is
difficult for us to “see” the pattern of their order and manage all the variables, so
they appear disorderly. Moreover, the slightest of disturbances in one part of th
resulting web of relationships comprising them has the potential to radically
transform not only the local system, but also the larger systems in which it may
be embedded. Thus, the significance of Einstein’s reform of the concept of
simultaneity and his theory of special relativity, beyond its impact on the
discipline of physics itself, was its fundamental violation or shattering of a
universally accepted principle of the physical world as people understood it.
Transforming the intellectual imagination and allowing people to see the world
differently-«it changed everything.

Ecological thinking posits a different model for creativity. Its domain is nc
just the inner workings of the consciousness of individuals; rather, it is embodie<
in the network of social action and the events of everyday life as well as in the
work of formal disciplines and in people engaged with others in a variety of
culturally constructed and natural systems made and remade continually. Thus
ecological thinking is dialogical in Bakhtin’s sense, stressing a line of inquiry tha
accounts for process, relationship, interaction, and integration within and among

networks that are constantly changing. As a kind of calculus that can account ft

22

the dynamics of interaction among disciplines, integrating different “languages,”
methods, and theories, ecological thinking may not only shape a different view of
creativity, but also help to make it operational.

In “Pathologies of Epistemolbgy” from Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
Gregory Bateson theorized mind as the perception of difference and response to
it transmitted in closed networks or systems. “Mind,” he wrote, is “a necessary,
an inevitable function of the appropriate complexity, wherever that complexity
occurs” (490). Thus, in considering whether or not a computer “thinks,” for
example, he concludes that it does not, “What ‘thinks’ and engages in ‘trial and
error is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between
man, computer, and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. . . [they are]
pathways along which information or difference is transmitted. . . .What thinks is
the total system. . (490—491).

Bateson further suggested that, if indeed this is so, “the unit of
evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind. . . . Ecology, in
the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of Ideas
and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits [my
emphasis]” (491 ). Bateson saw ecological thinking as necessary to the
continued existence of the human species. He believed the ability to recognize
threats to survival to be dependent on the development of a keener awareness of
and respect for difference in order to correct the potentially disastrous
epistemological errors deeply rooted in human habits of mind and to guard

against choosing the wrong unit of survival.

23

Ecological thinking works across traditional boundaries of the disciplines
to understand information, integrate ideas, and perceive patterns acting within
them that may also re-connect them to each other. Prigogine and Stengers
observe, in fact, that lessons learned in one discipline often inform work in
others. “The real lesson to be learned from the principle of complementarity,”
they note, “consists in emphasizing the wealth of reality, which overflows any
single language, any logical structure. Each language can express only part of
reality”(225).

As I imagine it, an open intellectual ecology among disciplines whose
distinct languages afford only partial views, would not necessarily attempt to unify
their diverse epistemologies, but rather, would re-integrate them in “apposition,” a
simple juxtaposition, that, while preserving differences, would connect them in a
liminoid interface, “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and
consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices,” to borrow Bakhtin’s
words, “spread out on a plane as an eternal harmony of unmerged voices or their
unceasing irreconcilable quarrel . . . one great communal performance”
(Problems 160). I have structured this study as an exercise in ecological thinking
that cuts across disciplines. As Culler has suggested, “Theory [itself] is
interdisciplinary” (15)---the effect of its discourse extending beyond the specific
discipline in which it originates. Noting lessons learned at a 1995 international
conference titled “Einstein Meets Magritte,” Brian P. Coppola and Douglas S.
Daniels suggest,

The students of Magritte [an artist of the surreal] can teach the
students of Einstein that ‘HZO’ is not, in fact, water, but only its

24

representation. The attachmentand derivation of meaning from

information is a feature in all intellectual activities . . . In our

chemistry course there is as much a place for Magritte’s La

Trahison des Images (“The Treachery of lmages”), with its

disarming message Ceci n’est pas une pipe, as there is for images

of gamboling, space-filling yet two-dimensional molecular

representations that are no more “molecules” than Magritte’s image

of a pipe is a pipe (13).

In a 1998 Atlantic Monthly article titled “Back from Chaos,” Edward O.
Wilson resurrected the term consilience from an 1840 work of William Whewell
who coined the term. Consilience, according to Wilson, literally means “the
‘jumping together’ of knowledge as a result of the linking of facts and fact-based
theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation” (48).
He suggests that the fragmentation of knowledge is an “artifact of scholarship”
that has produced “confusion,” and he believes that the arts, sciences, and other
disciplines ought to work together to re-integrate their thinking in “circuits” of
understanding. Ecological thinking encourages the “border crossing” that Wilson,
Prigogine, and Stengers see. as crucial to the further development of knowledge.

This inquiry, thus, unites the fields of cultural studies, critical studies, and
rhetoric in order to problematize the historical conception of creativity as a
characteristic (or cluster of Characteristics) found in the “creative exemplar” who
embodies the Romantic and moderniSt ideology of the singular, exceptional,
isolated “genius” who solves a problem or produces a product a culture labels
“creative.” In so doing, it attends to the following questions: How has rhetoric
historically framed the concept of creativity? What barriers has this thinking

constructed against the potential for creativity to be perceived and to operate

differently, especially in Schools? In what other ways might human creativity be

25

understood? How is it possible? It attempts to open a new conceptual space for
creativity that interrupts the repetition of the Romantic/modernist ideology
mentioned above by making visible its indebtedness to power relationships
invested in a disenfranchising “rhetoric of exclusion” meant to contain its
meaning.
fitter; of Taste and Value

Coupled with the eighteenth century birth of modern aesthetics and the
judgment of taste (Burke 1756; Kant 1790), this ideology sought to restrain
creativity and shape its definition according to the political and economic
interests of the dominant culture by deploying a “rhetoric of commodiflcation and
containment” that has pitted creativity against representation and meaning as
product against meaning as process (Graft 1979). In the conditions of
competition that ensued when economies based on capital began to emerge, the
evolving “individual” began to strive against others for a place in the world. The
“'udgment of taste” became the scene of discrimination and exclusion. Changes
in economic and social structures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led
to a notion of taste (and aesthetic experience) that defined it in terms of social
class. Pierre Bourdieu’s twentieth century empirical study, reported in
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, led him to conclude “that
all cultural practices . . . and preferences in literature, painting, music, are closely
linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling) and
secondarily to social origin,” predisposing “taste” to function as a marker of

“class” (1). Thus, the notion of taste as the “eye” or “ear” for recognizing worthy

26

or creative works of art, music, literature is a “product of history reproduced by
education” (3). Because shifting notions of “value” have always played a key
role, although often invisible, in a culture’s criteria for acknowledging certain
behaviors or products as “creative,” such aesthetic responses may be more
accurately regarded as “valuable” because they serve class interests.

But, not only did the notions of taste described above separate high
culture from low culture and by extension the bourgeoisie from the working class,
it also separated art from science. But, of course, science is also a cultural
system with its own conventional procedures and structures of belief, not
unrelated to the judgment of taste, making judgments about what is “creative” (or
“worthy” or “beautiful" or “elegant”). Despite their differences, how various social
and cultural systems create value in potentially creative acts and products---or
not--—is integral to understanding this phenonmenon.

Barbara Hernstein Smith argues in Contingencies of Value that no
judgment is “totally unaffected by particular social, institutional, and other
conditions of its production or totally immune to the (assumed) interests and
desires of its (assumed) audience” or unresponsive to them (102). However,
Smith also points out that it is a fallacy to argue that unless one judgment can be
shown to be more “valid” than another, all judgments must be regarded as
“equal.” She contends that the concept of validity understood as objective “truth-
value” is simply not available as a standard for making comparisons or
measurements among various judgments. While judgments can be “seen” as

“good” or “bad,” she says, “their value must be understood, evaluated, and

27

 

compared . . . as something other than truth-value or validity in the objective,
essentialist sense” (98)—--as old garage sale maxim suggests, “one person’s
treasure is another’s junk.” Noting that individuals routinely accept and reject
value judgments they are offered in light of their own experience and knowledge,
Smith points out that there is no way to be certain of the “validity” of this
knowledge, and there is “no end to the theoretically infinite regress . . . of
evaluating evaluations, just as there is none to that of justifying the justifications
of judgments or grounding the grounds of knowledge” (100).

However, according to Atwill, rhetoric as productive knowledge is more
likely to disrupt standards of value in cultural systems than to protect them and,
thus, may account for attempts by dominant forces in a culture to control its
operation. Igor Stavinsky, for example, broke new ground with The Rite of
Spring, writing in an unfamiliar complex rhythmic style and harmonic style, but on
the evening of May 29, 1913, public outcry reportedly transformed Paris' Theatre
des Champs-Elysees into a scene of pandemonium. The audience raged over
what it felt was a profane effort to destroy music, and critics roundly dismissed
the work. But, according to Howard Gardner, the “disconnections, disjunctions,
repetitions, and abandonments that had so strained the early listeners became
the essence of the work for a younger audience, which had its listening habits
nurtured by repeated performances. . . . The same lines of division determined
the initial reactions to works like Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, or
Picasso’s Portrait of Gertude Stein, Les demoise/les d’Avignon, and the early

cubist works” (Creating 207).

28

 

In another, perhaps more familiar example, the “too many notes”
complaint of Emperor Joseph ll made in reference to Mozart’s Abduction from
the Seraglio (dramatized in Peter Shaffer’s film Amadeus) was a widely shared
notion in the eighteenth century. Several of Mozart’s compositions were so far
beyond the musical understanding of those who lived in the eighteenth century
that many musicians of the time regarded them not only as incomprehensible but
also as unplayable. Yet today, musicians routinely play these works.

The Play of Difference

 

Creativity is a common feature of the ways of making and doing that come
into being between and among human beings as they interact with existing
knowledge, with each other, and with their social and physical environments. In
this sense, it is often the opposite of traditional (and often inconvenient) ways of
behaving. Moreover, it is an effect particularly marked by difference, new
information that interrupts the repetition of the same and threatens the status quo
and that is, consequently, both desired and feared. It is the capacity to transform
what is into a projection of what could be, revealing, as FouCault said in Madness
and Civilization, another order of consciousness, ”the end and the beginning of
everything” (281), which modernist notions of certainty, universal truth, binary
logic, and scientistic forms of knowing seek to contain within the order of the
same (288). A source of “energy” or disorder that tends to increase in unstable
or “non-equilibrium” situations, “awareness of difference” may establish enough

of an opening in a system to activate transformative possibilities.

29

Because human beings are capable of acts of imagination, intuition, and
insight, they are able to “see” and “grasp the meaning of’ possibilities beyond the
reach of a binary/mechanical logic. And, their responses to the concrete
historical and material conditions differ according to the particular Circumstances
of their lives. Each human being “sees" through different eyes and, thus, is a
source of alternative knowledge derived from different concrete experiences: We
depend on others for knowledge that we cannot “see” because of our distinct
locations and experiences in culture.

Indeed, the only thing “the same” about humans, beyond basic evolution
and physiology, is that they are all different. In the interplay of these differences
between and among human beings and among the multiple subject positions
they occupy (each marked by plurality and otherness of basic consciousness),
creativity surfaces and supports the emergence of new subjectivities. To borrow
from Bateson’s thinking, what is “creative” is the entire network of relationships.
So, creativity is “common,” even crucial, to human behavior, but it, nevertheless,
opposes the notion of a unified and autonomous, self-sufficient Cartesian ego
and refuses confirmation as an essential feature of a universal and transcendent
human nature.

My inquiry refigures creativity in light of the postmodern view of humans
as conditioned, situated subject positions, materially and discursively constituted,
each occupying different culturally-based “sites” of meaning, employing different
uses of language, and engaged in different social practices. It does not deny that

individuals can be agents of creativity; rather, it suggests that creativity extends

30

beyond the boundaries of individuals into the social collective as the prior
condition necessary to the apparent “genius” of individuals. In this sense,
creativity is a radically distributed effect of multiple interactions among
individuals, their particular social and environmental circumstances, and existing
knowledge. Surfacing creativity, then, requires a rhetoric capable of generating
ways of thinking that resist systematic efforts to normalize and contain the
heteroglossic forces of the social--—a rhetoric of productive knowledge that
recognizes creativity as social imagination, the ability to “see” a different world as
It seeks ethical alternatives in relationship to and in interaction with others.

What makes creativity such a slippery concept is that it may be an effect
of the “edge”---in ecology, the borderland between niches or territories where
they intersect, overlap, and bump up against each other’s differences; where
change is underway; and where “abrasion and enticement” is keenly felt and
acted out in the encounter with otherness, the “counterpoint to what we have
failed to see.” Such places, as poet Alison Deming says, are “rich in life forms
and survival strategies” (220).

Writing (particularly poetry), mathematics, and performance art are
certainly different “territories,” separate subcultural disciplines, composed of
diverse internal paradigms, that also “bump up against each others’ differences”
as intersecting, overlapping components of culture in general. I draw examples
from each of these disciplines to demonstrate the view of creativity emerging
from my work. In and through them, creativity may be seen surfacing, as Richard

Schechner suggests in The Future of Ritual, in “performed dreams . . . spoken,

31

danced, sung, and acted out . . . [on the] playfield betwixt and between the
ethological, the neurological, and the social” where "the continued encounter
between imagination and memory [is] translated into doable acts of the body”
(262-263).
Mg

In Phaedrus, the god Theuth claimed that writing would make people
wiser and that it was the key to memory. Plato recognized that a significantly
different mental operation was required to produce logos (spoken and written
discourse), enabled by the separation of language from the person producing i1
and he wanted to develop this innovation. However, in doing so, he risked
threatening the power of those who were invested in institutions the oral traditic
meant to preserve. That is, he was “caught” in the conflict between the older or
tradition and the new literacy the development of the Greek alphabet allowed.

In order for both Plato and his ideas to survive and thrive, he hadlto find
way to both appease those in power and at the same time enable the
development of this new mental operation. 80, in a rather ironic move, he use<
writing to condemn writing. In Phaedrus, he made the king in Socrates’ story
respond to Theuth’s claim in the following way, “If men learn this, it will implant
forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they re
on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within
themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is not
recipe for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer yo

disciples, but only its semblance. . . “ (275). Recognizing the fundamentally

32

conservative and political nature of Change, he could promote the thought
process enabled by the mental innovation while still appearing to “protect” the
traditional way of life. However, in so doing, he inscribed on Western thought the
rather pervasive idea that writing is speech’s inferior, a characterization that has
endured and proved somewhat problematic.

Centuries later, Rousseau, who also wrote, would, rather ironically, refer
to writing as “nothing but the representation of speech, . . . a bizarre case of
giving more care to the determining of the image than to the object.” Not only
was writing (as the development and subsequent use of alphabets to
communicate and to articulate one’s thoughts) a revolutionary invention itself, a
bifurcation In the scheme of orality that changed everything, it is also a prime
example of collective creativity, the cumulative effect of diverse individuals
working in diverse social and environmental contexts against an often resistant
backdrop of existing knowledge. Once it was apparent that literacy was an
irreversible phenomenon, however, dominant forces recognized, as Plato did,
that it represented a potential danger to its interests and moved to control it.
Mathematics

At the very heart of mathematics is the concept of mathematical proof, the
procedure through which a proposition can be accepted and established with
finality. The desire for proof has been the motivating force in mathematics for
more than 2500 years (Fermat’s 7). To arrive at proof, the mathematician begins
by writing down an initial set of assumptions or axioms he believes describes a

particular concept or “universe” of interest to him. Then, by means of logical

33

deduction from these initial axioms, if the logic is correct, he proceeds to
establish the “truth” of that concept. Once proven, it is established forever.
According to Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh in The Mathematical Experience,
however, beyond establishing this truth, the mathematician’s highest aspiration is
to achieve “a lasting work of art;” whether or not a proof is useful is not an issue
from a pure mathematical point of view---“utility is inferior to elegance and
profundity” (88).

In the Elements, Euclid listed five principles from which mathematicians
believed all truths about plane geometry can be deduced. These axioms were
regarded as ideal examples of rigorous proof, self-evident and accepted without
question as starting points in the search for truth. As such, mathematical proof
was alleged to represent knowledge that is more certain (because it is
independent of sense impressions, opinion, and prejudice) than that accumulated
by other disciplines. It should be no surprise, then, to find that mathematics
occupied a central place in Plato’s system of knowledge. For him, the truths of
geometry were changeless and universal truths, proof of the existence of the
realm of absolute eternal truths he regarded as the basis for knowledge of the
Good (The Mathematical 325).

As mathematics grew as a discipline, the fifth of Euclid’s five axioms, the
Parallel Postulate, however, proved especially problematic. Attempts to deduce
it from simpler assumptions failed, and mathematicians ultimately had to admit
that, whileintuition suggested that it was true, it could not be proven. Euclid’s

axioms evidently omitted many basic assumptions that he had unconsciously

34

used to. derive theorems following from them. Moreover, the nineteenth century
invention of non-Euclidean geometries implied a loss of certainty not only in
mathematics, but also in human knowledge in general. But, it was Kurt Godel’s
Incompleteness Theorem that forced mathematicians to reconsider what it
means to say that something is “true” in mathematics.

Godel’s Theorem says that in any axiomatic system that is sufficiently rich
to do elementary arithmetic, there will be some statements that are “true” but that
cannot be proven from the axioms. His Incompleteness Theorem, thus,
demonstrated to the horror of the mathematical community that there is a limit to
the knowledge mathematics can attain through deduction and separated the
mathematical proof from the idea of “truth.” Raymond Wilder in Mathematics as
a Cultural System suggests that proof in mathematics is actually culturally
determined. As mathematics has developed, each generation of mathematicians
has found it necessary to confirm or disconfirm the “hidden assumptions” of
previous generations (40). In this sense, then, proof is a “cultural artifact”
through which the part of the culture possessed by any one individual is
continuously linked to the parts possessed by others, past and present, through
communication and language. And, although the mathematician’s initial working
out of a proof (like a writer’s completion of a piece of writing) may appear to be a
solitary activity, he doesn’t begin from an entirely clean slate (tabula rasa).
Rather, he builds on work others have done before him and, then, depends on

others to confirm the validity of his proof.

35

In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi suggests that “seeing” a problem
in mathematics (or any other discipline for that matter) that is worth solving may
itself be creative, an irreversible heuristic act. As he points out, legendary
mathematical problems have passed from generation to generation unsolved, but
nevertheless, efforts to solve them have developed the field of mathematics in
other ways.

Polanyi further contends that creativity cannot be a strictly logical
performance in any discipline. He characterizes the obstacle to be overcome in
solving a problem as a “logical gap,” and he argues that “the width of this gap
[may be] the measure of creativity . . . the plunge by which we gain a foothold on
another shore of reality’ (120). The conventional rules of mathematical
deduction alone, for example, may provide “public paths for drawing conclusions
from existing knowledge” (my emphasis), but leaping across the logical gap to
new knowledge requires divergence from existing knowledge and conventional
processes of reasoning (120). The striving for strict formalization in mathematics
in an effort to eliminate ambiguities (like the striving for strict denotation and
transparency in language), thus, may be “Self-defeating” because creativity---
knowledge that is productive of “novelty”---is less likely to emerge from
procedures that are algorithmic.

Perfomance Art

In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Peggy Phelan observes, “The

question of belief always enters critical writing and perhaps never more urgently

than when one’s subject resists vision and may not be ‘really there’ at all (1).

36

Performance art is a mixed media avant-garde art form, originating in the Dada
performances and Surrealist spectacles of Modernism, in which performance
was the key element. It occurs entirely in the “present,” in real time and then
disappears---it cannot be repeated or reproduced, so it is entirely contingent.
While a particular work can be performed again, each performance is different as
artists interact differently with different audiences. While it can be recorded or
othenrvise documented, but what is “saved” is something other than performance,
“To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it
betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology [which] . . . is
nonreproductive” (146).

According to Coco Fusco in English ls Broken Here, Dadists dressed up
and danced as “Africans” and made primitive masks and sketches in their
performances. She cites Tristan Tzara’s declaration, “Thought is made in the
mouth,” as a performative parallel to Cubism referring directly to the Dadaist
belief that the tradition of Western art “could be subverted through the
appropriation of the perceived orality and performative nature of the ‘non-

!”

Western (45). However, the first instances of performance art may, in fact,
have been the events of the Gutai Art Association, founded in Japan in the early
19508, that reportedly symbolized the spirit of art as “action,” creating various
time-based works and set the stage for the “Happenings” of the 19603. John
Cage’s “4’ 33”” (four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence) performed in

1952 also challenged the standard notion of both time and content that have

come to characterize performance art.

37

The content of performance art is most often a commentary on society,
usually dealing with current philosophical and political issues and movements.
For example, in “Shoot” (1971) the artist Chris Burden actually allowed himself
to be shot in the arm, suggesting the helplessness of a country watching its youth
wasted in the Vietnam War and challenging the “value” of the war. In the post
Civil Rights era, performance artists have taken on feminist, gay, racial, and
ethnic issues that have challenged cultural hegemony, making it a dangerous as
well as provocative art form. Consequently, it receives a paucity of grant funding
and a high degree of censorship. But, the primary transgression of performance
art for which it is punished is its resistance to the “reproductive ideology of visible
representations." As Phelan points out, it is difficult to “find a theory of value for
that which is not ‘really’ there, that which cannot be surveyed within the
boundaries of the putative real” (1). Performance art, thus “Clogs the smooth
machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital”
(148), resists commodification (How does one collect the ephemeral?), and
pushes the limits of convention perhaps more than any other art form.

As Davis and Hersh suggest, “When scientists propose laws of wide
generality, they set forth rules of law in place of primeval chaos. When an artist
draws his line or a composer writes his measure, he separates out of the
infinitude of possible shapes and sounds one which he sets before us as
ordered, patterned, and meaningful” (The Mathematical 172). As one of my

colleagues once suggested, human beings are always trying to order things in

38

order to find comfort (or “beauty” or “elegance”) in a disorderly world, a hedge
against the perceived Chaos of the unknown.

As it considers the matters introduced above and develops another look at
creativity, this work is aimed at making the “open-ended commitment” Jonathan
Culler suggests is the “importance of theory.” Recognizing that my arguments
will be provisional and anticipating the responses of others to shape them further,
I argue that creativity emerges in the places where individuals, disciplinary
knowledge, and social and environmental conditions intersect in the complexity
(some might say “chaos”) of relationships, multiple elements in apposition and
always “in play.” Like the “the eye of the blackbird” in Wallace Stevens’ poem, it

may be “Among twenty snowy mountains/T he only moving thing.”

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Notes

1 Each of these views of creativity will be cited and more fully described in
Chapter Two. Their mention here is to emphasize generally the fact that,
although creativity is involved in everything we know and although it has been

studied for more than a hundred years, we still do not understand its nature.

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CHAPTER TWO

A History of Thinking about Creativity and
The Emergence of the Creative Exemplar

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know. _

As an occurrence of the unfamiliar, creativity has long been associated
with magic and the supernatural, evidence of the existence of another world
beyond conventional understanding. As the ability to bring something new into
existence, to create something out of nothing, it has also been associated with
the divine act of creation. But, because human beings have been regarded as
incapable of making something oUt of nothing, the human act of creation has
more often been regarded as inVOlving the re—shaping, re-construction, or re—
making of what has been given. A broad and all-encompassing concept,
creativity has referred to a wide variety of effects in human behavior, including
achievements in the both arts and the sciences. From the point of view of
Western philosophy, one parameter of this study, it has also been linked to the
human ability to imagine. According to Richard Kearney in The Wake of
Imagination, the ability to imagine has historically been regarded as either “a
representational faculty which reproduces images of some pre-existing reality” or
“a creative faculty which produces images which often lay claim to original status
in their own right” (15). However, although some 20th century investigators using

a we-know—it-when¥we-see-it approach have identified characteristics of people,

41

products, and processes as “creative,” creativity per se has escaped precise
definition.

Stephen Kosslyn in Image and Mind has suggested that, prior to an
inquiry, it may be unreasonable to expect a definition of something about which
so little is known (although it may have been widely investigated) and that “it is
not necessary to begin with a crisp definition of an entity in order to study it”
(469). Nevertheless, contemporary psychological studies of creativity often begin
with the following widely accepted “conceptual" definitions. Incorporating the key
elements of novelty and appropriateness, it is regarded as “that process which
results in novel work that is accepted as tenable or useful or satisfying by a group
at some point in time” (Stein cited in Amabile 37-38). It fulfills at least three
conditions: It is “a response or an idea that is novel; that is adaptive to, or of,
reality” (solving a problem or accomplishing a recognizable goal that is heuristic
rather than algorithmic); and that finds its “original insight” sustained and fully
developed. Creativity is, thus, “a process extended in time and characterized by
originality, adaptiveness, and realization” (MacKinnon 485). These definitions,
while not entirely unproblematic, frame a notion of creativity that spans every
domain of organized human activity and, perhaps, may allow this inquiry to
examine the discourse that has constructed it, note transformations of it that
have occurred at particular historical moments, and speak of it productively.

Every age has looked askance at those who act outside cultural
convention. Thus, cultures have often viewed creativity ambivalently, revering

and embracing it on the one hand and fearing and condemning it on the other.

42

Creative behavior that, either implicitly or explicitly, criticizes the dominant values
of a culture threatens it and may invoke a range of reactions: suspicion,
jealousy, and reactionary resistance (in the desire to preserve and consolidate
power). Moreover, educational instruction as usually developed by a dominant
culture invested in maintaining the status quo and reproducing its relations of
power has privileged conformity and normative discourse and punished non-
conformity. Order and conformity have been valued over curiosity that questions
cherished notions, and management of the group has been the primary aim.

Nevertheless, Paul Feyerabend in “Against Method” warns against the
tendency of pedagogy to disable the ability of students to think for themselves,
“Do not work with stable concepts. Do not eliminate counterinduction. Do not be
seduced into thinking that you have at last found the correct description of ‘the
facts’ when all that has happened is that some new categories have been
adapted to older forms of thought,“ which are so familiar that we take their
outlines to be the outlines of the world itself” (36).

So, writing against “noble accents and lucid, inescapable rhythms,” a
“counterinductive” history of thinking about creativity “introducing, elaborating,
and propagating hypotheses which are inconsistent either with well-established
theories or well-established facts” (26) might take the following suggestion as its
point of departure (with apologies to William Shakespeare): The first thing we do,
let’s ban all the poets.

Plato considered poets subversive and dangerous to the “well-ordered

state.” In Book X of The Republic he attacked art in general and poetry in

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particular because he considered the poet’s creations, like the painter’s, to
contain "an inferior degree of truth . . . concerned with an inferior part of the soul”
(paragraph 97), thrice removed from the eternal Idea he believed to be only
imperfectly reflected in an “unreal” world. He claimed that art (an ability to
“make,” “shape,” or “construct”) is a mimetic function of the lower order of human
existence that merely reproduces the world of images. And, he believed poetry
to be deceptive and harmful, diverting people from the truth, arousing their
passionate interest in trivial matters, unnecessarily exciting them, interfering with
their moral and intellectual development, and ultimately harming the good.

Poetry, he wrote, “feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them
up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever
to increase in happiness and virtue . . . [He] who listens to her, fearing for the
safety of the city which is within him, should be on his guard against her
seductions and make our words his law” (paragraph 104-109). He believed that
poetry aroused the emotions, in his view the most dangerous part of the human
psyche (associated with material “becoming”), and threatened the psychological
harmony and balance necessary to its attainment of virtue. Thus, Plato would
admit to his ideal state only the kind of poetry that praised gods and famous men.
Defenders of that other poetry would need to “speak in prose on her behalf” to
show “not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life”
(paragraph 108).

Plato’s primary concern in The Republic was the effect of poetry on the

development of the “ideal state,” the development of individuals, and the

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relationship between them. He aimed to discredit Homer, the exemplar of
traditional orality whose influence on Greek thought up to that time had been
significant, and thereby called into question the value of his language (poetry) in
the search for the truth.

In his Preface to Plato and elsewhere, Eric Havelock notes that everything
the Greeks knew at that time had been stored and retrieved using the rhythmic
language of the dominant oral tradition. Power thus accrued to men with
“superior memory and a superior sense of verbal rhythm.” Moreover, the poetic
tradition required learners’ uncritical acceptance in order to engage their
memory. “Acceptance and retention,” Havelock argues, were made
“psychologically possible by a mechanism of self-surrender to the poetic
performance, and of self-identification with the situations and the stories related
in the performance” (198).

Prior to Socrates, the dialectical question had functioned to interrupt a
speaker in such a performance, asking him to repeat a statement he had already
made and suggesting that it needed to be “rephrased” or made more
understandable or perhaps more memorable (198). But, interrupting the flow of
the poetic performance and repeating a statement meant using words that were
likely less poetic and more prosaic. Thus, as Havelock writes, the dialectical
question became in the last half of the fifth century B.C.E. “a weapon for arousing
the consciousness from its dream language and stimulating it to think abstractly”
(209). Plato argued that those who seek the truth must forsake the traditional

language of poetry (image and metaphor) and accept the language of philosophy

45

(calculation) instead. For him, philosophy was the appropriate method for
moving beyond myth to reason.

Because the oral, poetic tradition had served as the primary means of
educational instruction in ancient Greece for hundreds of years, however, the
“innovation” Plato presented through the persona of Socrates threatened the very
institutions the oral tradition meant to conserve. To some extent, then, Plato’s
attack on poetry may be regarded as a clever (some might say “creative”)
misdirection meant to conceal his more fervent attack on its use as a method of
educational instruction.

Indeed, the “crime” for which the Greeks condemned Socrates to death
was, according to Havelock, his actively expressed opinion that education ought
to “be professionalised, its context being no longer set by poetic tradition and by
practice but by the dialectical examination of ‘ideas,”’ a notion those in power
may have regarded as a threat to the way of life that supported their political and
social status (The Muse 5). Both Plato and Socrates played paradoxical roles in
this matter: Socrates never wrote. He was “an oralist,” but he used oralism, “as
a prosaic instrument for breaking the spell of the poetic tradition, substituting in
its place a conceptual vocabulary and syntax, which he as a conservative sought
to apply to the conventions governing behavior in an oral society in order to
rework them” (5). Doing so made him a flashpoint for conflict. On the other
hand, Plato did write, and, although he condemned them, he also cleverly
employed poetry and imagination, using the drama of Socrates’ dialogues

(fictions) and the myths Socrates recounts (certainly metaphorical in nature) to

46

make his argument. Unlike Socrates, however, he was successfully able to span
the old way of knowing and the new one. His attack on poetry “managed” the
perceived cultural crisis and effectively demonstrated that the evolution of ideas
is fundamentally conservative and political.-

Socratic dialectic, Havelock claims, originated in the conflict between the
older oral tradition and the new literacy allowed by the Greek alphabet. The
Greeks employed different words for these two distinct kinds of human
communication: epos as orally preserved speech and logos as both spoken and
written discourse, as the mental operation required to produce it and as a symbol
of the prosaic and literate activity it allowed (113), language separated from the
person who produced it. The “visual” separation of language from its source
gave rise to the human psyche and encouraged a new focus on the individual
and the “personality of the speaker,” a focus that provided a basis for Western
moral philosophy and founded the belief in individual identity and personal liberty
(120). Moreover, the individual became a key element in Plato’s process of
coming to truth. He believed that truth exists only in the mind in “ideal forms,”
once known but forgotten. While he regarded experience to be an illusion, he
believed that the ideal forms to be eternal and immutable, accessible by thought
alone. Thus, only through the process of “reason,” by looking inward to “re-call”
it, could individuals “know” the “truth.”

In The Republic Plato outlined a way to resolve the potential problems
associated with logos and the re-location of “knowledge” from the state to the

individual, from public collective memory to private thought, by proposing a

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“reform” of educational instruction. Havelock suggests that it was no accident,
for example, that the first discipline in Plato’s proposed curriculum was
arithmetic, thinking that required learners to solve problems, not merely
remember. Doing arithmetic meant separating from, rather than identifying with,
a series of phenomena in order to examine it “objectively and measure it." For
Plato arithmetical thinking was the equivalent of elementary dialectic, leading to
the “uncovering of ‘mental dilemma’ (aporia)” (Preface 210).

In the end, Plato had to conclude, however, that the ideal state he
described In The Republic could never exist, except perhaps in the minds of the
few capable of seeing it. Some scholars have suggested that leading his readers
to this conclusion was his larger purpose. Anticipating political resistance, Plato
incorporated in his description a constraint on the development of the newly
autonomous individual consciousness: It would be educated by the philosopher
and supervised by a guardian class. Plato further made it apparent that he did
not expect most people to achieve its full program of growth culminating in the
awareness of the ideal forms and realization of the truth. Because of their
“ignorance,” he believed that most individuals would, instead, have to be
persuaded of the “truth," relying on those who had achieved understanding and
who were, thus, in the best position to exercise control.

In Volume II of Paideia, Werner Jaeger argued that in writing The Republic
Plato meant to transcend the Greek ideal of participation in the polls as the locus
of education, redirecting its focus to the perfection of the “state” of the human

psyche or soul. He believed that only through the Socratic conflict could the

48

individual “be truly and wholly one with the ‘state’---the realm of the divine” and
only “by conscious, deliberate obedience to the law of the state within himself”
(my emphasis) find “true freedom,” an idea that would recur later in “the
European idea of free human personality, based not on any man-made law but
on knowledge of the eternal standards” (356-357). Janet Atwill in Rhetoric
Reclaimed suggests, however, that Plato’s description of his hierarchical state
with its careful attention to the details of internal as well as external order
“amounts to a prescription according to which subjects both acquiesce to and
reproduce the relations of power crafted by the guardians” (148), thereby
protecting his own position (and, astutely, that of the guardian class), maintaining
power and control, and also ensuring that philosophers would be only
“exceptional individuals” likely to emerge from, it. Havelock summarizes this
circumstance in the following way:

For the stage was now set for a genius . . . This genius was found,

and he in turn found another genius for his disciple, who could

correct and systematize the logic of his master’s discoveries. Their

joint efforts created ‘knowledge’ as an object and as the proper

content of an educational system; divided into the areas of ethics,

politics, physics, and metaphysics. Man’s experience of his

society, of himself and his environment was now given separate

organised existence in the abstract word” (Preface 305).
Some scholars argue that the apparent “genius” of Plato (and later that of
Aristotle) developed because the culture was “ready” for the changes it
promoted and encouraged it. Whether or not this circumstance could
have occurred a century earlier, however, is a matter of conjecture beyond

the scope of this study. Studies of creativity have long debated whether

individuals or cultures are its primary locus.

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Ironically, some would argue that Plato’s ability to persuade his
culture of the value of his thinking-—-his rhetoric---may be regarded as a
key element of his genius, in particular, and creative genius, in general.
Social psychologist Dean Simonton has suggested, for example, that both
in the origination of novel ideas and in the socio-cultural acceptance of
them, creativity may be the result of “chance processes” involving the
intersection, in a particular historical context, of a person, process,
product---the usual concerns of creativity studies-—-as well as persuasion
(“Creativity, leadership, and chance” 386-387). Thus, Simonton has
argued for the idea of “creativity as persuasion” (in lieu of the other usual
considerations) because he believes that individuals can “become
creative” only to the extent that they can convince others of the value of
their work, an idea that has particular significance for this study. In this
sense, Plato’s “genius” may be regarded as just such an instance of
creativity, a phenomenon requiring, if not magic, at least persuasion---a
sleight of hand.

D_i§pelling the Magic

Use of the term creativity to refer to novel behavior or new knowledge is

contemporary. Prior to the twentieth century, creativity was subsumed either in

the category of magic or in the category of genius. In a study of creativity

published in 1976, Silvano Arieti reported that beginning about 1550, the word

genio began to be used to refer to painter-writers like Leonardo, Vasari, and

Telesio. By 1700, the word genius had come to mean “an incomprehensible and

50

mysterious force animating certain human beings” and also referred to
individuals who exhibited this force (293). By the twentieth century, it referred to
human beings who had made extraordinarily creative contributions to the
knowledge base. Such people have been rare and, as Arieti noted, have
appeared in “clusters” at certain times in history, such as the Greek classical
period and the Renaissance, a pattern suggesting that the occurrence of
creativity may have more to do with ecology (an intersecting matrix of the
individual with socio-cultural-environmental circumstances) than isolated
individual greatness.

According to Arieti, anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Charles
Edward Gray both considered culture to be the principal factor in
creativity, perhaps revealing their anthropological bias. Kroeber
suggested that individual personalities are “inevitable mechanisms or
measures of cultural expression,” and Gray proposed an epicyclical theory
to explain the clusters of creativity evident sinCe antiquity. He found that
they corresponded to a historical series of concurrent economic, social,
and political cycles. Each of these cycles included four different stages of
development--—formative, developed, florescent, and degenerate---that
developed at different intervals, and he theorized that when the developed
and florescent stages of the three cycles coincided, clusters of creative
exemplars occurred. He confirmed his theory in a study of the history of
Western civilization that demonstrated a relationship between economic,

social, and political factors and the incidence of creativity. Gray’s theory,

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however, could not account for the relatively small number of creative
people shaped by these factors at peak times. Moreover, it did not end
the debate of whether the creativity of individuals results from cultural
change or is responsible for it.

Another anthropologist Leslie A. White argued, however, that “a
given cultural tradition does not affect all brains in a society equally” and
that creative exemplars are not peopleof exceptional capability, but rather
people in whom “a significant synthesis of cultural elements has occurred”
(cited in Arieti 301 ). Arieti’s own analysis of the relationships between
individuals and their cultures supported White’s argument and led him to
suggest that some cultures are “creativogenic,” enhancing individual and
collective creativity, while others are not, thus inhibiting it. He also
concluded that while the creative process may manifest to some extent
within individual psyches, long regarded as the repository of creativity, it
occurs as only one element of an “open system” in which cultural
elements interact with individuals at a given time and in a given place
favorable to creative production (312). The resulting relationships
“synthesize” within individuals who become agents of creativity, producing
something novel that at the same time also changes the culture itself.

Unfortunately, Arieti referred to this process as a “magic” synthesis,
further conflating creativity with magic, but he also pointed to nine factors
common to creativogenic cultures that have little to do with the mystical

art: the availability of cultural and physical means, openness to cultural

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stimuli, emphasis on becoming rather than being, free access without
discrimination to cultural media, freedom, exposure to different/contrasting
cultural stimuli, tolerance for and interest in divergent views, interaction of
significant persons, and promotion of incentives (324).
In Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind, Charles J.
Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson advanced another theory: The
mechanism of creativity might be a function of both biology and cultural
innovation, one acting upon and sustaining the development of the other,
Somehow the evolving species kindled a Promethean fire, a self-
sustaining reaction that carried humanity beyond previous limits of
biology. This largely unknown evolutionary process we have called
gene-culture coevolution: it is a complicated, fascinating interaction
in which culture is generated and shaped by biological imperatives
while biological traits are simultaneously altered by genetic
evolution in response to cultural innovation (cited in Deming 168).
How this “self-sustaining reaction,” perhaps the initial seed stock of creativity,
began is a mystery unlikely to be solved. Opportune innovation may simply have
ensured the survival of the species that then incorporated it into the knowledge
base of its developing culture where it would be “taught” and “learned” until it
was disconfirmed by the next innovation. Each successive generation, this
theory suggests, evaluates and builds upon the “creative” acts of the preceding
one. Then, novel behaviors mobilize new forms of practice and social and
mental habits that become “genetically encoded” in individuals over time and

“biologically” influence cultural development in a continuous and reciprocal

feedback loop.

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In “Generativity Theory and Creativity” Robert Epstein pointed out that
from a behavioral perspective, organisms develop an inventory of possible
behaviors that may serve as a foundation for novel behavior. When confronting
a problem, an organism first attempts to solve it by responding with a behavior
drawn from its existing inventory. If a behavior fails, it will over time drop out of
the organism’s inventory and be replaced by stronger and more appropriate one
drawn from behaviors that having worked in other Circumstances might also
successfully solve the problem at hand. Thus, an organism’s previous
experience provides a base from which “ongoing, novel” behavior may emerge.
Epstein refers to this process as the “principle of resurgence,” and his studies
suggest that the creative process may be a healthy, adaptive function of all living
organisms. In speaking of this process, however, Epstein deliberately avoids the
use of “the language of creativity” because he fears its “heavily value laden”
language will obscure understanding of the generative phenomena that he
argues is the basis of novel behavior. Further, he suggests that while action may
be regarded as “generative,” reaction may be “corrective and inhibiting,”
rendering the creative product itself a “poor index of the creative process”
because it is continuously edited and judged by the “behaving individual” reacting
“as an agent for a larger cultural entity” (139).

David Perkins in The Mind’s Best Work also argues for an evolutionary
perspective of creativity suggesting that its best mechanisms are, indeed,
generation, selection, and preservation. “Natural selection,” thus, applies as

much to the evolution of creative thought as to the evolution of species (150).

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Further, Simonton’s “chance processes” theory, mentioned earlier, both for the
emergence of new ideas and for their acceptance by the culture in which they
occur, depends on some way of generating ideational variation, a consistent
selection process that eliminates all solutions except those featuring an “adaptive
fit” which, then, can be preserved and reproduced for later use.

The recurring theme of creativity as an intrinsic, “mystical” individual ability
has, however, significantly marked the history of its study. In the nineteenth
century creativity became'an object of Speculation and study, but the first studies
examining the phenomenon lacked the rigor of scientific research conducted later
and reflected a generalist perspective drawn from a variety of disciplines rather
than the heavily psychological perspective of the twentieth century. Conclusions,
often based on personal experience and observation, were questionable at best.
But, as Madelle Becker notes, the questions these studies attempted to answer
are remarkably similar to those of twentieth century investigations of creativity.

Definitions of creativity in the nineteenth century often blurred the
distinction between intellectual and creative genius. According to Becker,
George Washington Bethune (1805-1862) argued, for example, that “creative”
genius depended on a number of cognitive abilities like the power to combine
ideas, imagination, judgment, quick perception, perseverance and memory (220).
Bethune also argued that just because individuals had not demonstrated creative
genius at a particular point in time did not mean they never would. Further,
economist William S. Jevons (1877), who anticipated later studies by Guilford,

Torrance, and others, also regarded genius as “essentially creative,” consisting

55

of “divergence from the ordinary grooves of thought and action" (cited in Becker
221)

Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, studied the biographies and
autobiographies of eminent men in the first empirical study of human abilities,
reporting his “findings” in Hereditary Genius in 1869. They suggested that men
of “genius” were found at the upper level of a normal distribution of mental
abilities. He “tabulated the lineages” of the eminent people he had selected for
his study and argued for “eminence” as an adequate measure of natural ability,
linking all types of achievement to his measures of mental ability. Not surprising
for the historical period in which he lived, Galton also attempted to compare the
abilities of different races in the interest of developing a race of greater than
average ability. Although his interest in eugenics might raise questions about his
research today, his study, nevertheless, influenced later researchers who used
his methodology In their own attempts to determine the particular qualities of
intellect and personality that compose contemporary notions of genius and
creativity (221 ).

Walter Bagehot (1873) and later William James (1880) supported the
notion of creativity as a sociological phenomenon. According to Becker, Bagehot
believed that civilizations moved through one stage when permanence was
valued most and then through another when variability became more desirable.
Progress, he suggested, depended on a nation’s ability to maintain its permanent

structures while permitting variability. James, meanwhile, believed that favorable

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environmental conditions allowed people of high ability to lead their societies into
new eras.

Believing that Galton’s work and his own had confused “talent” with
“genius,” Cesare Lombroso (1891 ), a professor of legal medicine at Turin,
considered genius a manifestation of a “diseased” mind that exhibited
“degenerative” characteristics as “compensation for considerable development
and progress accomplished in other directions.” His work described the deviant
behavior of many historical geniuses although he eventually came to question
the reliability of historical reports. Nevertheless, his studies supported the early
association of creativity and genius with the pathology of insanity. Becker noted,
however, that later researchers found that intellectuals and artists of the
Romantic period might have deliberately adopted idiosyncratic behaviors in order
to distance themselves from those they believed to be less gifted, thus
contributing to the development of the stereotype of the “mad genius.”

Lombroso also argued that while almost no significant difference could be
attributed to gender in the heredity of insanity, “in the heredity of genius the
masculine sex prevails over the feminine in the proportion of 70 to 30”9(223).
The perceived lack of creativity in women continued well into the 20th century, as
I noted in Chapter One, supported by the work of researchers predisposed to this
theoretical bias.

Later, at the turn of the century, Alfred Binet in France and Charles
Spearmen in England established the basic principles for measuring human

intellectual abilities. At the request of the French government, Binet had

57

developed a test for identifying mentally retarded children, and after a series of
revisions, the familiar Stanford-Binet IQ test emerged. Becker notes that early
versions of this test included measures of what researchers would later call
“divergent thinking” that were evidently dropped in later versions. Nevertheless,
many studies used these tests as measures of both general intelligence and
creativity.

Meanwhile, Josiah Royce, addressing the annual meeting of the American
Psychological Association in 1897, according to Becker, identified “invention”
with new ideas or systems of ideas and suggested that they involved “intelligent
variations of habits already acquired and present in the individual." He believed
that all mental activity has the “element of novelty,” but regarded socially
significant inventions as involving “processes more complex, and more
mysteriously rational than this ordinary routine of variability will explain” (223).

Some of those who studied creativity in the nineteenth century also saw a
strong connection between the encouragement of individualism and democracy
and the creativity of a particular culture. Bethune, for example, Becker notes,
recognized that more creative individuals appeared in some historical periods .
than in others, concluding that some democratic cultures, therefore, were likely to
nurture creativity to a greater extent. But, Bagehot also later argued that the
cultivation of creativity was “incredibly difficult” because humans “are too fond of
their own life, too credulous of the completeness of their own ideas, too angry at
the pain of new thoughts, to be able to bear easily with a changing existence”

(cited in Becker 226). He also regarded educational institutions as “the asylums

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of the ideas and the tastes of the last great age” more likely to “pooh-pooh” new
ideas than to embrace them. Royce, meanwhile, argued against the “pathology
of genius” by suggesting that important inventions occur when individualism is
encouraged and “when independence, private enterprise, is favored by the social
environment" (cited- in Becker 227).

Theodule Ribot (1900) identified two types of creativity: aesthetic and
practical, and suggested that creativity was contingent on intellect, emotion, and
unconscious inspiration. He may have been the first to use the term incubation
to referto the unconscious work of problem-solving that he believed occurred in
the unaware individual. He also thought that the tendency of some creative
people to be dominated by their work was responsible for the “pathological theory
of genius” (225). Perhaps most important, Ribot suggested that invention might
result from the human desire to “live more comfortably,” and he believed that
creativity might originate in “needs, appetites, tendencies, and desires” common
to everyone. He also argued, however, that only a “few privileged individuals”
actually experienced the rare combination of circumstances from which it could
emerge (224).

As early as 1908, concerned with how unconscious impulses affect
creativity, Freud saw a relationship between the work of the artist, daydreaming,
and children’s play. But, in the 1930 work Civilization and Its Discontents, his
thinking also seems to reinforce Ribot’s argument by claiming the very possibility
of a culture and its developing civilization to be dependent on the “organic

repression” of individual freedom and self-satisfaction. His theory suggested that

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a biological imperative might be Operational in the interplay among “civilizing
forces”_(motivations socially/culturally encouraged but felt individually) and
individual desires. This interplay, he believed, exerts a modifying influence on
individual trajectories, attempting to divert and change them for the greater good
and normalizing them according to custom. Freud had theorized the superego
as the structure where social and cultural forces subdue the instinctive responses
of individual psyches. Some individual trajectories, however, will evidently not be
diverted. According to Freud, this conflict between the forces of civilization and
instinctive individual desires for freedom and self-satisfaction never ends.
Creativity may, thus, emerge from this dynamic as a manifestation of the basic
desire of Freud’s “ordinary man” to continually re-define the terms of his own
existence within the constraints of “civilizing” forces.

Beginning at the midpoint of the twentieth century, psychological studies
of creativity began to focus on empirical analysis of the creative person, the
creative process, and the creative product. An ovenrvhelming number of them
focused on the “creative person.” In fact, in his 1950 address to the American
Psychological Association J. P. Guilford defined creativity in terms of the “person”
and suggested “the psychologist’s problem is that of the creative personality . .
(cited in Amabile 21). But, not until Guilford’s address did anyone question what
tests routinely used by psychologists and education experts to measure
intelligence were actually measuring. He pointed out that each item on most of
these tests had only one pre-determined, correct answer, so they were testing for

“convergent” thinking. The tests not only disadvantaged imaginative, divergent

6O

and, quite possibly, “creative” thinkers, they also failed to identify them-—-a
serious failure, given the urgent interest in the wake of World War II to identify
creative'thinkers.

Extending Galton’s earlier work, some investigators took up the cause
Guilford had identified and continued to study the biographies and
autobiographies of recognized creative individuals in order to determine the
particular qualities of mind and personality that make them distinct. Others,
Donald MacKinnon and Frank Barron (1962) for example, studied the abilities of
individuals identified as “creative” in laboratory conditions over intensive
”weekends of formal interviews and personality and intelligence tests. Still others
studied individual differences, both cognitive and motivational, comparing those
who achieved high creativity scores tothose who did not. These studies have
resulted in many measures of personality that supposedly identify creative
individuals.

Teresa Amabile argues in Creativity in Context, however, that much of this
work was (and presumably still is) based on the assumption that “the important
characteristics of creative people are largely innate, . . . and that these
characteristics clearly and reliably separate creative people from noncreative
people” (5). The aim of such studies, she further suggests, beyond
distinguishing people who do well on creativity tests from those who do not, has
been to identify personality and Cognitive characteristics that appear to describe

creative people and to attempt to predict the occurrence of creative behavior.

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On the other hand, researchers focusing on the “creative process” have
attempted to distinguish patterns of thought or information-processing habits that
underlie creativity. Gestalt psychologists, for example, have studied the
mechanisms of insight. Others have taken an information theory approach that
regards creativity as a function of particular“set-breaking heuristics” and relates
it to computer-based notions of human intelligence. Margaret Boden’s work, for
example, has argued for the viability of a computational model of creativity, and
she has tested her theory against various artificial intelligence programs in an
attempt to model how human creativity may work.

Still other studies of human cognition have focused on problem-solving
and other common notions of creativity supported by empirical findings from
business and education. Amabile notes that Alex Osborn’s “brain-storming”
process is representative of this category of research. In this process, people
learn to use a set of heuristics to generate creative solutions to problems. The
ideas generated by people using this approach have been compared to those
generated by others to determine the efficacy of this approach in influencing the
occurrence of creative responses.

The “creative product,” however, has been regarded as the defining
evidence of creativity. In most definitions of creativity, novelty and
appropriateness of the resulting product are key elements. ln'his essay “The
Condition of Creativity,” for example, Jerome Bruner argued that a product is
“creative” if its novelty “surprises” an observer who at the same time finds it

“completely appropriate” (21 ). Subjective evaluations of creative products have,

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however, proved to be somewhat problematic. Researchers have had difficulty
determining exactly what judges mean when they call a product “creative.”
Moreover, it is not clear what features of a product lead judges to characterize it
as “creative.” According to Amabile, many subjective assessments fail to
distinguish creativity from other concepts such as “technical correctness” or
“aesthetic appeal,” for example. She also argues that cases where researchers
train judges to use definitions of creativity they provide or to agree with one
another prior to an assessment call the meaning of inter-rater reliability of
creativity assessment into question, and studies relying on measures of
eminence from historical sources are, she says, “contaminated by personal,
political, and other factors” (32).

Far fewer studies have examined the effects of social or physical
environments on creativity although Torrance’s work is notable in this category.
Amabile argues, in fact, that the dominant focus on individual differences in
psychological studies of creativity has occurred at the expense of other
potentially productive areas of inquiry, “There has been a concentration on the
creative person, to the exclusion of ‘creative situations’---i.e., circumstances
conducive to creativity. There has been a narrow focus on internal determinants
of creativity to the exclusion of external determinants. And, within studies of
Internal determinants, there has been an implicit concern with ‘genetic’ factors to
the exclusion of contributions from learning and the social environment” (5). Her
contention is that social and environmental factors significantly affect creative

performance.

63

Amabile’s Creativity in Context is a 1996 update of an earlier work The
Social Psychology of Creativity (1983) in which she argued that creativity is less
a personality trait or general ability than a behavior resulting from particular
constellations of personal characteristics, cognitive abilities, and social
environments. Her interactive model of creativity is based upon three major
components: mastery of knowledge in a particular field and the skills and talent to
produce the requisite behaviors within it, the cognitive and personality
characteristics traditionally viewed as underlying creative acts, and task
motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic factors). Using the model she has developed,
researchers have been able to measure the effects of environmental factors on
creative production, and much of her research has focused on how extrinsic
factors get in the way of creative production. Her findings demonstrate, for
example, that the expectation of evaluation can lower creative production and
that being able to choose whether and how to engage in a project can increase it.
Her work suggests that while the right kind of motivation can actively shape
creative work, the wrong kind can destroy it, a finding that has profound
implications for educational practice.

In the last twenty years, however, researchers and theorists have begun
to attend more closely to the other “ecological” factors (social, cultural, and
environmental) influencing creativity and to focus on the interaction between the
external and internal environments of individuals. Howard Gardner’s work is

notable in this regard. Nevertheless, the focus on creative persons and

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individual differences, even in Gardner’s work, remains dominant in the field of
creativity research.

Among Gardner’s works is Creating Minds (1993). This work builds upon
his earlier work in Frames of Mind where he developed his theory of multiple
intelligences, challenging the common notion that human intelligence is a distinct
entity human beings possess in varying degrees. Gardner initially identified
seven autonomous human intelligences---linguistic, musical, logical-
mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal
---and developed a cognitive profile for each of them (he has since identified an
eighth one-—-naturalist) . In his view, these intelligences, although rarely isolated,
are always expressed in “the context of specific tasks, domains, and disciplines”
which develop the criteria for assessing levels of competence attained within
them.

Gardner uses his theory of multiple intelligences, then, as the point of
departure for Creating Minds in which he examines seven extraordinary
individuals, each a representative example of one of the intelligences he has
theorized and each credited with revolutionizing a particular domain or field.

For him, general creativity, like general intelligence, is a myth. Detecting similar
patterns of behavior and circumstances among the representative individuals
whose lives he studied and among the elements common to their varied
achievements, he develops, somewhat predictably, a theory of “multiple
creativities” and, then, synthesizes the representative creator. In so doing, he

advances the idea that creativity exists only as a judgment or evaluation from

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within a Closed system, a particular domain (culture, community, or “competent
field”). That is, acts or products are creative to the extent that a particular
domain calls them “creative.” He claims that in absence of such a judgment,
there is no way to determine whether an act or a product “merits” this label.

Gardner’s theoretical bias, however, may have led him to look for
differences across certain domains of accomplishment (the intelligences he
identified in Frames of Mind) and, in my view, predisposed him to find just what
he found, “the distinctive character of activities” Characteristic of each of the
seven creative exemplars whose lives he examines. Moreover, although he
claims to have found no unusual biological or psychological factors exclusive to
their creative behaviors or beyond the normal functioning of any human being, he
nevertheless finds his seven models to be “extraordinary” because they seem to
“seek a degree of asynchrony” that is “more productive." He does admit,
however, that there is no empirical way to measure this phenomenon (Creating
383)

Finally, although he refers to the “representative creator” he describes in
the end as she, it is worth noting that he includes only one woman in his study
(ironically, as an example of bodily-kinesthetic intelligen'ce/creativity). Gardner’s
studies of extraordinary personalities, while they account to some extent for the
influence of important social and cultural issues like gender and race for
example, always come back to the notion of creativity as “something special” that
is “in” the representative creators he has studied or “in” the modern era he

privileges, issues of concern at the heart of this inquiry.

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Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, another relatively recently
published (1996) work, questions the “location” of creativity, using interviews with
more than ninety “creative” people well known in various fields. As Gardner
does, Csikszentmihalyi, a social psychologist, focuses on the relationship
between these individuals and the fields in which they work. But, he also
suggests that ideas and products called “creative” rarely come from the mind of
just one person, that it is. easier to manipulate environments to encourage
creativity than to try to make people “think more creatively,” and that creativity is
seldom the result of “sudden insight.”

Csikszentmihalyi suggests that creativity surfaces from the systematic
interaction of three components: a cultural domain or field containing “symbolic
rules,” a person who adapts these rules in a novel way or establishes new rules,
and the expert “gatekeepers” of the domain who acknowledge the novelty as
“creative.” In his view, it is impossible to define creativity in absence of this
recognition based on criteria that change from domain to domain. Thus, he
concludes that creativity is less an attribute of individuals than one of socially
constructed systems making judgments about them, and he suggests that
instead of asking what creativity is, the usual question of creativity research,
perhaps it is more germane to ask where it is. Csikszentmihalyi finds creativity
“in” the cultures or disciplines he refers to as domains. His study, however, does
not explain acts of creativity that may be found outside (and perhaps prior to) the
traditional disciplinary fields and domains of the closed systems he identifies. I

Since there is no recognized field of “nurturing,” for example, there is no way to

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assess creativity in nurturing although he admits that it is important to human
survival.

Csikszentmihalyi also distinguishes between Creativity (with a capital C)
that significantly changes some aspect of culture and personal creativity that he
suggests does not. However, just because no one was in the forest to “hear” the
“sound” of the falling tree, does not mean that it did not fall, nor does it mean that
the fall was insignificant to the culture. For a variety of reasons, cultures have
often historically failed to recognize creativity that, in retrospect, was rather
significant. As I mentioned in Chapter One, early twentieth century audiences,
for example, were not “ready” to hear Stravinky’s The Rite of Spring (Gardner
24). And, “irrational numbers” could not be used as a new resource for
mathematics until after the death of Pythagoras because of his power to “control”
mathematical thought.

Csikszentmihalyi does devote his final chapter to “prescribing” ways to
“enhance personal creativity,” a prescription he extrapolated from his interviews
of Creative people. While it may be helpful in some ways, like Gardner’s study of
“representative creators,” it perpetuates the myth of creativity that makes
ordinary people believe that they cannot be creative in ways that are “important"
to society and that Creativity is beyond them.

Where the various psychological approaches to the study of creativity
clearly differ, then, is in their regard for which factors are most significant to
creativity. However, Robert 8. Albert and Mark A. Runco, in their conclusion to

Theories of Creativity, suggest that, regardless of their point of view, those who

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study creativity must account for the influence of individual differences because
to fail to do so denies a fundamental characteristic of creative behavior—«its
divergence from “the prevailing consensus, pattern, style, or method” regardless
of whether or not it “is intentional and, on the part of the individual, deliberate or
statistical and environmentally generated” (264). Paradoxically, however, the
focus on “talented” individuals as exemplars of creativity, originating in
psychoanalysis, has significantly interfered with our ability to fully “know”
creativity and has restricted it to the exceptional few, a view that might be more
convincing if researchers were able to examine differences in the characteristics
of people before, rather than after, they were acknowledged as creative.

On the other hand, Albert and Runco also argue that creativity “is never
the private, hidden experience it was once believed---especially by the
Romantics or the analytically oriented--—but, rather, is an intricately shared
experience with no one identifiable moment of origin,” and they remind us that
cultures do dictate “what areas of performance will be appreciated,”
acknowledging and encouraging “different aspects of members or even different
members of that culture” (262) or failing to do so.

The history of thinking about creativity includes views not only from the
disciplines of psychology and social psychology, however, but also from thinkers
in other disciplines who are interested in human thought processes as well. In
the Art of Thought (1926) Graham Wallas, a political scientist, theorized creative
thought as a four-stage process: preparation, incubation, illumination, and

verification. He credited the German physicist Helmholtz with describing the first

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three stages while he added the fourth stage and provided the explanation. In
the “preparation” phase, creative people first investigate a problem and do the
preliminary work of searching, collecting, listening to others, and letting their
minds range freely in many directions. In the “incubation” phase, they do not
think consciously about the problem. The collected material remains “stored" in
mind for an indeterminate period of time. “Illumination” occurs when creative
people draw upon this collected material and “see” a solution to the problem.
This solution is then subjected to critical evaluation in the “verification" phase.
Many people who have studied creativity have either maintained this terminology
or modified it slightly, but the unanswered question has always been precisely
how the initial stages of preparation and incubation result in illumination.

In The Act of Creation (1964), Arthur Koestler, a novelist, took a
somewhat mystical view of creativity. Koestler called the key concept of his
theory bisociation---the simultaneous activation and interaction of two previously
unconnected concepts. The potential creator perceives “a situation or an event
in two habitually incompatible associative conteth.” Koestler provided examples
from humor, science, and the arts where bisociation, defined as the intersection
of disparate “matrices” (abilities, habits, or skills—-—any pattern of ordered
behavior---govemed by “codes” of fixed rules), occurs. The collision and fusion
of two concepts creates something new. Koestler, however, did not make it clear
precisely how this occurs except to say that it does.

David N. Perkins in The Mind’s Best Work (1981), mentioned earlier,

suggests that creativity actually depends on very ordinary human thought

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processes: noticing, directed remembering, realizing, problem-finding,
understanding, reasoning critically, and recognizing analogies. He believes that
these resources of the human mind enable, not creativity per se, but the process
of creating or selecting from among many possible alternatives. The more
“skillful” the selecting becomes the greater the “creative quality.” However,
Perkins also suggests that potential creators’ personal histories, the histories of
their cultures, and the physical world in which they live may “pre-select” to some
degree what skills they will develop and, therefore, what they will attempt.
Bourdieu’s work, as I explain in Chapter Three, supports this idea. Perkins does,
however, consider the process of creating accessible to all who are willing and
able (or perhaps enabled) to immerse themselves deliberately. and critically in a
problem, look broadly for connections or relationships, recognize the probability
of multiple alternatives, and actually imagine or “pilot” them.

In a relatively recent update of an earlier investigation, Notebooks of the
Mind (1996) by Vera John-Steiner explores thinking in general and creative
thinking in particular, as the subtitle suggests. A professor of linguistics and
education, she analyzes the thinking processes of artists, philosophers,
scientists, and others using information gathered from interviews,
autobiographies and biographies, letters, journals, and notebooks. She
foregrounds her approach in the theoretical work of Vygotsky and Bruner, taking
a social-historical view that understands creative behavior and the construction of
knowledge as social and that attempts to challenge the notion that cognition is a

purely individual process.

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John-Steiner focuses on the processes of thinking rather than on its
various products with an interest in exploring cultural, historical, and
developmental differences involved in how thinking works. She links them to the
choices individuals make among the many “languages of thought” or “inner
symbol systems” that may be available to them as a product of their cultural and
historical contexts. John-Steiner also finds thought “embedded in the structure of
the mind” itself (my emphasis) where end-products like musical compositions,
elegant mathematical proofs, dance movements, and writing require multiple
internal and external transformations which have not been fully explored. A
major concern of her work was to explore these transformations.

In the end, however, John-Steiner suggests that differences between
creative and ordinary thought processes may be found in the differences among
human beings in the varying degree of their willingness to sustain commitment to
the pursuit of an idea. A counterinductive account of creativity, however, might
suggest that human beings who, while they are not without sustained
commitment and a passion for an idea, may be thwarted by lived circumstances
and a culture’s unwillingness to invest in the possibility of their creative agency.
Beyond understanding creativity as a process of selection and pre-selection
(historical, social, and cultural) as Perkins and John-Steiner do, however, the
question that still remains is how and why the creative agency of only certain
members of a culture is enabled to respond to cultural prescriptions.

Douglas Hofstadter’s work is also notable for its exploration of the nature

of human thought as it relates to creativity and the ability of artificial intelligence

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to imitate it. In Metamagical Themes, he suggests that each new idea conceived
in the. human mind may actually begin life as a “compound” of previous ideas that
interact and are, thus, re-activated. As in metaphor and analogy, the mind
perceives one thing in terms of another and detects a “compelling mapping” of a
pattern present in both---the “magic beyond the magic,” Hofstadter calls It. But,
he is not referring to the inexplicable process Koestler and others have
described. Rather, according to Hofstadter, it is the consequence of the way
“conceptual molecules” form at every level of complexity. At the point of
“isomorphism,” he argues, deep emotion, identification with others, and a
different perception of reality converge to generate divergent or novel ideas. He
believes the continuous “acts of re-seeing” resulting in these perceptions to be of
key significance while the particular contexts in which they occur contribute the
unique and unexpected. Inherent in this process is a certain “fluidity of mind” that
blurs boundaries and produces a kind of “crooked awareness” (my interpretation
of Hofstadter’s notion of “slippability”) characterized by a willingness to
transgress previously established limits while still holding on to traditional,
deeply-held, “unslippable” concepts. Hofstatder suggests that the potential for
creativity permeates the mental processes of human beings. In his view, their
ideas are like living organisms: They breed, fuse, re-combine, evolve, and spin
out limitless variations.

Similarly, while his work does not address creativity per se, the concept of

creative potential is also central to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. This potential is

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realized through dialogism, an interactive process he believed is reflected in
human thought. In The Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics he wrote:

The idea lives not in one person’s isolated consciousness--—if it

remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to

live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal

expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into

genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of

others. Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea,

only under conditions of living contact with another and alien

thought, a thought embodied in someone else’s vOice, that is, in

someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At that

point of contact between voice—consciousnesses the idea is born

and lives (87-88).
Bakhtin saw ideas not as “individual-psychological” formations, but as “inter-
individual” and “inter—subjective”---their creative potential released as a the result
of dialogic communion between consciousnesses andithe lived lives they inform,
like every word which is profoundly,influenced by the anticipation of being heard,
understood, and answered by the voices of others with different perspectives.
He reasoned that “word” is a “two-sided act” that in its encounter with “otherness”
in a particular, never-to-be-repeated context results in something that would not
othenrvise have occurred. Life can, thus, never be “finalized.” It retains its
potential for novelty because it invites countless interpretations over time.

Significantly, I have found few studies of creativity in the humanities.
However, NCTE and ERIC, in a series of papers on issues in the teaching of
EngliSh, did publish Creativity in the English Program by Rodney P. Smith, Jr. in
1970. He attempted to establish working definitions of “creativity” and “English,”-

survey then current research in creativity which he considered “too sketchy for

complete exegesis,” and discuss the relationship between creativity and English

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studies. The study followed the usual paradigm of that period, examining Classic
creativity theory and its relationship to five predictable categories: the early
grades (elementary), literature, language, drama, and creative writing (but not
writing in general), providing a laundry list of activities meant to encourage
creativity in each category. Smith noted, however, “it is easier to anatomize
creativity than to summon it up at will in ourselves or cause it to appear at will in
those we teach” (4).

Ultimately, Smith had to admit that creativity eludes definition, but he
concluded that divergent thinking and creativity, based on research data
available then, appeared to be synonymous and that learning itself may be
considered a creative act. Of the relationship between creativity and English
studies, he also concluded that creativity could not be simply equated with
creative writing; rather, language production itself may be considered a creative
act.

Then, in 1971, Janet Emig in her examination of the composing processes
of twelfth graders characterized writing as “a species of creative behavior.” She
thought a connection might exist between the stages of creative thought that had
already been identified by others and the stages of the writing process.
However, her study focused primarily on describing the composing processes as
she observed them through think-aloud protocols based on the problematic
assumption that “a writer’s effort to externalize his process of composing
somehow reflects, if not parallels, his actual inner process” (40). She had to

admit, however, that composing aloud does not capture the act of revision, a

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rather significant feature of the composing processes of accomplished writers
and other creative artists. So, while her study broke new ground by describing
the composing processes of the students she observed and, thus, helped
teachers and others begin to understand the developmental dimensions of
writing, because of the limitations of her study, it could not account for students’
writing processes as necessarily creative acts.

Studies that followed Emig’s did, however, focus on the lack of opportunity
in school settings for creative expression. In a study of writing in the nation’s
secondary schools in 1981, Arthur Applebee reported that students were given
few opportunities to do writing that demanded more than summarizing, reporting,
or analyzing given information. Only 8.2 percent of the 182 ninth graders whose
writing he examined and only 7.2 percent of the 167 eleventh graders’ writing
involved any kind of “creative” expression that encouraged students to use their
imaginations or to take risks.

A similar study conducted by James Britton and his colleagues in England
had reported in 1975 that as students grew older, the number of academic
opportunities for creative expression decreased: 23 percent of eighth graders’
writing, 24 percent of tenth graders’ writing, but only 7 percent of twelfth graders’
writing included opportunities to write fiction, to “theorize," or to do the kind of
writing that demands commitment or revision or that encourages students to
experiment or to discover what they think.

Psychology, biology, cognitive theory, science, education, philosophy,

computer science, linguistics, and various other disciplines have contributed to

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the history of thinking about creativity. Perhaps that is what coming to a fuller
understanding of this illusive concept requires. Peter B. Medawar observed in
Induction and Intuition, “The analysis of creativity in all its forms is beyond the
competence of any one accepted discipline. . . psychologists, biologists,
philosophers, computer scientists, artists, and poets will all expect to have their
say. That ‘Creativity’ is beyond analysis is a romantic illusion we must now
outgrow. It cannot be learned perhaps, but it can certainly be encouraged and

abetted” (57).

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l have constructed the table below to provide a frame for the contents of

the prior section and to map the section that follows:

Table 1 - The Changing Locations and Sources of Creativity

 

Historical Period

Style of Life or
Culture of the Self

Location of
Creativity

Sources

 

Antiquity

Practice of civic
virtue in public
negotiation and
persuasion.

Recognition of self-
interested but
common human
nature.

Interest in
experience of the
individual, but no
concept of the
subject.

No concept of
creativity per se. The
individual search for
“truth,” but accessible
only to privileged few.

The divine demiurge
Muses

 

Medieval Period

Concern with
morality as a
function of Christian
revelation.

In the individual as
an instrument of and
in the imitation of
God.

God
God’s Grace
Magic

 

Modernity

Coherent, knowable,
universal subject.

Conscious, rational,
autonomous,
individual.

In the knowing
subject.

In products/behaviors
produced by
subjects.

The individual, a function
of an individual’s rational
cognition/innate abilities

Biology/genetics/evolution

 

 

Postmodernity

 

Multiple, fragmented,
heterogeneous, de—
centered subject
positions

Socially constructed

 

In multiple sites, but
still centered on the
“creative” individual.

 

Interactive social, cultural,
and environmental
conditions and processes

 

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The Emergence of the Creative Exemplar

According to the Greek myth, Prometheus (whose name means “fore-
sight”) stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, allowing him to warm himself,
to cook, to make tools, to devise arts, to invent language, and generally to enable
technology and learning---everything needed for a more comfortable life.
Mankind, thus, acquired the power to shape the world by transforming nature into
culture or “civilization.” For this grave transgression, however, Zeus chained
Prometheus to a rock and sent an eagle to devour his immortal liver every day
until the god took pity on his son and released him from bondage. This myth in
its several manifestations since antiquity has been associated with the
introduction of consciousness or mind in humankind and also with the rebellious
spirit it purportedly engendered.

In The Wake of Imagination, Richard Kearney points to the obvious
relationship between the Prometheus myth and the story of Adam’s fall: In both
narratives, the “hero" perpetrated an act of rebellion against the divine order, thus
causing a rift between the gods and man. This act unlawfully disrupts the
apparent “harmony of nature” by empowering humans to imitate the gods and to
substitute their own acts for the divine acts of creation (80). But, the message of
these stories is ambiguous. Although the rebellious act in each case was
regarded as an “offense against God,” it was also a necessary act for the
progress of human culture. In the classical mind (and later in the medieval
mind), then, creative imagination or consciousness could not escape its lawful

definition as a mere imitation of the divine act of creation. Its freedom was thus

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regarded as arbitrary, and its “originality” was conditional; it was regarded as
mere mimesis, an act of simulation. Conforming to the ambivalent model of
“pharmakos” where the sacrificial goat is neither innocent nor guilty but always
between, mimesis may, as Kearney observes, be regarded both as a “remedy”
because It enables future generations to recall human experience and as a
“poison” that deceives people into believing that a mere copy can be “original”
(83). In classical Greek culture, then, creative consciousness was never
regarded as an internal individual subjective power, but only always reduced to
the imitation of a power greater than itself.

In light of Plato’s view of philosophy as a shift from mythology to reason,
one could argue that it was reasonable for him to condemn creative imagination
to the lower order of existence as a mimetic function associated with the material
world and oppose it to reason associated with the attainment of the ideal forms of
pure being. The divine demiurge, the original source of truth, had created the
material world for humans to inhabit, and only through reason could they “return”
from it to Truth or “correct knowledge” and the “ideal state” of being. Reflecting
the world of the senses, creative consciousness (the origin of poetry and the
other arts) could only lead humankind away from this state. The “crime” of
Plato’s poet, then, was to dare to make the “invisible source of truth visible” in
metaphor and image, seeing “crookedly” (and encouraging others to do so),
transgressing the opposition of being and non-being, and calling into question the
other Platonic oppositions that found Western thought (95). According to

Kearney, creative consciousness is in this sense “the disobedient son who

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threatens to subvert the patriarchal law Of the metaphysical system---a law which
safeguards the rights of inheritance by outlawing the counterfeit claims of
imitators, pretenders, and imposters” (95).

A critical, creative mind is critical and creative on all fronts, open to the
play of comparison and difference. Plato, worried about this propensity,
regarding the “play” of imagination evident in the poetry and the other arts as a
threat to understanding the truth embodied in the ideal forms as fixed, timeless,
and self-identical. Therefore, in his view parents needed to strictly control it, “If
you control the way Children play, and the same children always play the same
games under the same rules and in the same conditions, and get pleasure from
the same toys, you’ll find the conventions of adult life are too left in peace without
alteration. . . . Change, except in something evil, is extremely dangerous” (cited
in Kearney 98). The play of creative consciousness introduces uncertainty and
ambivalence into our understanding of “the same.” Thus, according to Plato,
while reason has the capacity to unify the soul, a highly critical and creative
consciousness threatens to disperse it into the “play of contradiction” (97).
Having awakened critical consciousness in the newly autonomous individual,
Plato sought to prevent “dangerous” flights of imagination by placing it under the
supervision of reason’s rules. To capture the classical sense of creative
imagination Kearney refers to Benedetto Croce’s summary in Aesthetic, “Ancient
psychology knew fancy or imagination as a faculty midway between sense and
intellect, but always as conservative and reproductive . . . never properly as a

productive autonomous activity” (my emphasis) (112).

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In the medieval period between antiquity and modernity, creative
consciousness continued to be primarily regarded as mimetic activity at least one
remove from God. However, the writings of St. Augustine linked classical
concern for ontology, which privileged the “original truth of pure being” over the
process of “becoming,” with theology in the medieval model of “faith seeking
understanding.” Kearney notes that in Augustine’s system creative thought came
under further suspicion. He condemned the “profane imagination” as an ethical
transgression, a choice between good and evil rather than an attempt to subvert
fate. In the Christian view of this transgression, man (Adam) is further burdened
by the notion that he chooses to participate in “evil,” stealing knowledge
forbidden to him, while in the classical conception, Prometheus simply defies the
divinely pre-ordained plan. In Augustine’s view the role of creative
consciousness was to serve more Godly intellectual purposes. Throughout the
medieval period the search for truth was associated with its recovery in the
Classical sense from its traditional source rather than the discovery of something
new.

In Rescuing the Subject, Susan Miller notes that Augustine “overturned
the Ciceronian ‘good man’ in favor of the credibility of the Christian ‘Word,’ which
could be divorced from its human source and given credibility through the
sermonic ‘text”’ (8), effectively demonstrating that the preservation of dogma was
valued more than innovation. Moreover, as Daniel Boorstin points out in The
Discoverers, monks who served as scribes in this period took neither credit nor

blame for “original” texts. Names were not usually attached to manuscripts, but

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when they were, they did not necessarily establish “authorship” In the modern
sense (530). Bizzell and Herzberg suggest that medieval Scholasticism, a
hybrid of Aristotelian empiricism and Christian thought, “required the individual to
seek to know external reality ratherthan emphasizing the mind’s power to re-
imagine and shape reality” (465).

However, as Kearney further notes, creative consciousness played an
ambivalent role in the life of the medieval mind, both as necessary to reason and
as an obstacle to its highest aim of spiritual contemplation. The view of Richard
of St. Victor was, for example, that, "while it may function as a useful instrument
of re-presentation, imagination must not be confused with the original presence
of reason to itself” (cited in Keamey121). He also cautioned against the
confusion of reason with the sensory life of the body associated with imagination.
Imagination could “lawfully” mediate “between the inner mind and the outer
body,” preserving the strict opposition between spirit and matter, but Richard also
argued that the purpose of philosophy was “to justify the mind’s transcending this
world of sensation and imitation in search of a Supreme Being. . . God himself as
the Original Cause and creator of the universe” (122)---classical philosophy in the
service of Christian Revelation. But, he failed to address the question of how the

human mind could come to contemplate God’s self-identical” love except by
using Its imaginative powers and yet remain human (123).
St. Thomas Aquinas’ “metaphor of the storehouse,” however, serves best

as the classic model of the medieval imagination, “For the reception of sensible

forms the proper and common sense is appointed; but for the retention and

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preservation Of these forms, the phantasy or imagination is appointed, which are
the same, for phantasy or imagination is, as it were, a storehouse of forms
received through the senses” (cited in Kearney129). Thus, its mediational role
could be either positive, connecting the inner life of the mind to the outer life of
the body, or negative, deviating from the rules laid down by scripture. But, while
Aquinas believed that imagination was necessary to human understanding
precisely because it is human, truth (things-in-themselves) was regarded as the
privileged possession of God. In this sense, the medieval conception of creative
consciousness corresponded closely to the classical conception discussed
earlier.

This view, however, failed to account for the teeming imagination of the
popular folk culture expressed in celebrations of carnival, a significant subculture
opposed to the official Christian culture and fundamental to medieval life as it
was actually lived by the people. This counterculture accorded significance to
three taboos: magic, dreams, and the body. In so doing, it “fostered the notion
of a personal human consciousness. . . an integral part of human and natural
reality” (138). This notion would become significant later in Renaissance
humanism and in the appearance of the creative exemplar.

The autonomous consciousness creating truth out of itself emerged in the
moment of modernity when the anthropocentric model of the human mind
supplanted the onto-theological model that preceded it. This shift did not occur
suddenly, according to Kearney, but rather it can be traced to the subtle

contradictions suggested at first in part by the aforementioned marginalized

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popular folk culture and by the esoteric hermetic movements of Renaissance and
post-Renaissance mysticism. However, the seeds of this change also had
already been planted in the general culture of Renaissance humanism with its
insistence on human beings as the immediate source of all truth and on their
power to know and shape the world, thus recognizing the creative potential of
human consciousness and re-directing it to the service of human rather than
divine purposes (155).

Early Renaissance thinkers had already begun to look for a different
model of the human mind, one that, while it remained faithfully Christian, would
go beyond Scholasticism to also encourage the development of individuals.
Renaissance humanism thus would to some extent Challenge religious authority
and seek the revival of secular learning (finding it in Cicero’s humanitas---his
word for the Greek paedeia, perceived as the ideal format for education), but at
the same time it still reinforced Christian doctrine. Charles Trinkaus’, as cited by
Janet Atwill in Rhetoric Rec/aimed, described the Renaissance notion of
creativity in the following way: “The capacity of man to command and shape his
world was regarded as an emulation of divinity, since it was in this respect that
man was created in the image and likeness of God” (22). But, as Atwill further
observes, in the new world of Christian humanism man was evidently acting most
like God when he was fully developing his individual talents.

The invention of the printing press also influenced the changes afoot in

this period. Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

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notes that comparatively well-stocked bookshelves permitted more opportunities
to consult and compare data,

Contradictions became more visible; divergent traditions more

difficult to reconcile. The transmission of received opinion could not

proceed smoothly. . . Even while confidence in old theories

weakened, an enriched reading matter also encouraged the

developments of new intellectual combinations and permutations

. . . . Once old texts came together within the same study, diverse

systems of ideas and special disciplines could be combined. . . .

[creating] conditions that favored new combinations of old ideas at

first and then, later on, the creation of entirely new systems of

thought (74-75).

Print also made it easier to associate the names of particular authors with these
ideas. New forms of authorship and invention thus undermined older notions of
collective authority in all manner of texts and deeds.

Descartes’ philosophy (“I think therefore I am”) locating the source of truth
in human subjectivity, however, marked a significant break with medieval
Scholasticism. Although Descartes gave the human mind priority over objective
being, a nod to modernity, he nevertheless retained the pre-modem notion of
creative consciousness as merely mediating between the mind and the body.
Because he was committed to a rationalist perspective, he also viewed creative
imagination as a mimetic and refused to recognize it as anything more than “the
quasi-material residue of sensory experience which, in fact, obscures the self-
reflection of the cogito,” leaving intact the medieval suspicion of its contamination
by “errors of corporeal contingency” (cited in Kearney 161 ). Noting this
circumstance, Rousseau would remark later that Descartes’ philosophy had “cut

the throat of poetry.” Again. But as Kearney points out, this opposition to

creative consciousness was common to the rationalist philos0phers of the

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seventeenth century. Leibniz, for example, could find no role for it whatsoever
since it always fell “short of reason” and thus lacked “true being” (162).

Rationalism and logic defined the Enlightenment project in a seventeenth
century marked by revolutions. These revolutions changed everything previously
understood about the nature of truth, human beings, and the societies in which
they live. Science shifted to the experimental method and discovered a
mechanical universe based on laws of logic and mathematics, and philosophy
began to pay attention to the human psychological and cognitive processes of
perception, communication, and reflection in order to determine how the mind
works to uncoverthe truths of the physical world important to both scientific
progress and the universal aspects of human nature. And, the discovery of a
“common” human nature led to the drive for socio-political equality, the desire for
new forms of government recognizing this equality, and the emergence of market
economies.

The development of liberalism as a theory of society and government led
to the growth of individualism and encouraged both representative democracy
and the growth of market economies. By mandating fair and equal treatment of
all regardless of their position in society within a system of representative
democracy and market relations, liberalism tended to encourage creativity and to
strengthen the notion of creativity as an individual activity.

John Locke’s philosophy, characteristic of the time, however, re-
emphasized the division between reason and creative imagination as means of

arriving at truth. Echoing Plato’s earlier advice, he admonished parents who

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discovered the tendency to flights of imagination in their children to “stifle and
suppress it as much as may be” (cited in Kearney 164). But, at the same time,
David Hume’s skeptical account of empiricism was declaring both reason and the
reality it informed to be inventions of imagination which “makes us reason from
causes to effects, and . . . convinces us of the continued existence of external
objects” (An Enquiry 266). He argued that this perceived identity was nothing
more than a quality the human mind attributed to a unity of perceptions in its own
imagination.

Thus, as Kearney notes, acts of creative imagination no longer considered
merely mimetic became ends in themselves. The only truth the human mind
could know, according to Hume, was the one its sensible experiences suggested
to its owntimagination, and that meant no “truth” at all. Having reduced reason to
the imagination, he then referred to it as “inconsistent and fallacious” (265) and
the “dangerous” occasion of mistakes among philosophers (267). Hume found
himself trapped in a logical Circle, looking for reason in a different version of
imagination to rescue him.

Distressed by Hume’s conclusions, Kant resolved to rescue the
metaphysical project from both the rationalists and the empiricists, and in so
doing he established modernity’s conception of the productive imagination. He
argued in The Critique of Pure Reason that imagination is not simply a
reproductive or mimetic act of a passively received reality, but an a priori
condition for all that is possible for the human mind to know---the dynamic,

common “unknown root” of both sensible experience and the understanding,

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capable of “creating” its own truth and value. He argued that objectivity would be
incoherent without the understanding and the synthesis of sensible intuition upon
which it depends, “Thus, the order and regularity in the appearances which we
entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in
appearances, had not we ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them
there” (Pure 147). Sensory impressions supply the content of thought while the
understanding supplies the “form” by which the human mind can grasp it.
Moreover, Kant argued that while the imagination is to some extent
“reproductive,” connecting a preceding perception to a subsequent one, its
“productive” function governs which combinations of perceptions take
precedence over others in the autonomous act of synthesis. The human
imagination thus replaced “being” and God as the transcendent origin of all
meaning, a stark reversal (often referred to as Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”) of
classical and medieval thought, ensuring a primary role, Kearney notes, for
creative imagination in modern theories of knowledge, art, and aesthetics (157).
In the Critique of Judgment, however, Kant went a step further to suggest
that in aesthetic judgment the creative imagination closely connects with the
concept of freedom. The “beauty” of an object, he suggested, results from the
sense of freedom. the mind obtains from it, recognizing an “inner finality of form”
much like the element of complete appropriateness or satisfaction associated
with contemporary definitions of creativity. There are no rules or controlling
authorities for aesthetic judgment; people cannot be convinced of beauty, for

example, on the grounds of proof. Only in the “play of imagination,” freed from all

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external controls and following its own rules, does the human mind create its own
order and meaning, precluding any purpose outside itself---in Kant’s words,
“purposiveness without purpose.” Imagination, thus, produces its own activity-~-
not a reflected image, but a new creation, “a finality without end.”

However, Kant also seemed to retreat to an earlier position that something
exists “out there” beyond human imagination. He suggested that while
experience of the beautiful results from the freedom of the imagination to work
without limits, the experience of the sublime results from creative consciousness
coming up against its own perceived limitations and realizing that its potential is
greater still. But, Kearney argues that Kant may have been suggesting instead
that the experience of the sublime results from the attempt to further understand
the infinite depths of the imagination and, in so doing, produces a sense of “awe
precisely of the human power to frame ideas which cannot be intuited” 176).

While aesthetic judgment occurs in response to particular objects, Kant
argues that the judgment of “taste” is itself universal because every human being
has a creative imagination. The “harmonious activity” of the imagination derives
from the “universal communicability” of the judgment of taste. It is a capability
shared by everyone, not limited to a few extraordinary individuals. Kant had
argued that without the experience of the “beautiful" or the “sublime” rationality
remains incomplete. Only in aesthetic experience that is subjective and
universal-«an unfettered moment of shared affect, do human beings gain an
understanding of the relationship of their mind to the world. However, Kearney

also points out that Kant “admitted that the ‘harmonious interplay between

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imagination and understanding,’ which the products of art embody is something

”I

we cannot ‘conceptualize,’ but only ‘feel, and in a sense, he thus reduced
imagination to mere feeling and distinguished it, once again, from reason,
anticipating the split between science and art. Further, as Bourdieu points out in
The Logic of Practice, Nietzsche noted that Kant “like all philosophers,” had failed
to view the “aesthetic problem” from the point of view of the creator, considering
art and the beautiful only from the point of view of the observer, thus
unconsciously introducing “spectator” into the idea of the “beautiful” (34).
Nevertheless, Kant’s philosophy influenced both German idealism and
Romanticism. Arguing that human imagination rivaled that of God Himself, the
German idealists decisively broke with the notion of imagination as an imitation of
divine creation and also subsumed reason in its power. So, as Kearney notes,
Goethe could create a Faust, for example, as a “hero,” a new subjectivity, who
dared to overreach his mortal circumstances by making a pact with the devil.
The characteristics of “overreaching” or transgressing institutionalized limits,
creating new subjectivities, and altering relations of power (which can be traced
back to Aristotle’s conception of “productive knowledge") began to mark creative
consciousness and the imagination. The growing German middle class also
began to shape a new vision of “a universal order of free, equal autonomous
human subjects. . . . This bourgeois public sphere [would break] decisively with
the privilege and particularism of the ancien regime, installing the middle class, in
image if not in reality, as a truly universal subjeCt” (Eagleton 19). At stake, Terry

Eagleton argues, was the “production of an entirely new kind of human subject”

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who would be guided by the law within its own identity rather than by oppressive
external powers. But, Eagleton also contends that if in the 18th century the
aesthetic became particularly significant, “it is because the word is shorthand for
another whole project of hegemony, the massive introjection of abstract reason
by the life of the senses. What matters is . . . this process of refurbishing the
human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily
responses with this law that is not a law . . . as though it is we who freely fashion
the laws to which we subject ourselves” (42-43).

The Romantics found their validation in imagination’s endless play of
freedom. Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term ensemplastic to refer to the
power of creative consciousness to shape disparate elements into a unified
whole, a notion he borrowed from the German idealist conception of the
productive imagination, reformulating Kant’s transcendental imagination as
follows,

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and

prime agent of all human perception and as a repetition in

the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I

AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former,

coexisting with the conscious will, yet still identical with the

primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree

and in the mode of its operation (XIII).

Coleridge believed that the primary imagination captured the sensible objects of
nature in the autonomous act of synthesis while the “secondary” imagination, a
“synthetic and magical power,” was capable of overriding both the formal logic of

non-contradiction by “balancing and reconciling opposite or discordant qualities”

and natural perception by casting familiar objects in a new light. Given the

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potential of the human imagination as the Romantics understood it, nothing
seemed beyond human capability.

But, as science increasingly dominated nature and the promise of
bourgeois society dissipated into self-interested competition and the exploitation
associated with industrialization and expanding capitalism, Romanticism had to
find a way for the human subject to continue to be “creative” in spite of bleak
historical realities. So, in an act of defiance, Romanticism simply “negated” these
realities, radically splitting “nature” from “culture,” and “ending the relation to the
omnipotent diety which kept man in bondage, romanticism allowed the
transcendental imagination to exult in its own self-referential play” (Kearney 187-
188). In this new scenario, Adam and Prometheus became heroes, “liberated”
from the stigma of their former ethical and epistemological trangressions, new
models for the rest of humanity.

While the Romantic notion of human creative consciousness collapsed
under the weight of the “reality” of historical circumstances, it nevertheless has
remained alive in the persona of the creative exemplar who emerged from the
rubble. History knows him and his deeds by his name: Einstein’s Theory of
Relativity. Freud’s Theory of the Unconscious. Mozart. Picasso. The
Heisenberg Principle. He is the figure of a solitary autonomous, perhaps slightly
eccentric, individual who, in isolation from the rest of the world, creates out of his
own creative consciousness something “novel” yet “completely appropriate” for
the moment, an original invention or discovery widely recognized as “creative.”

Yet, every act of attempting to “measure” this creativity alters it.

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CHAPTER THREE

Language and Rhetoric: Authorizing the Operation of Creativity

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

Language is powerful. Not only is it a tool for expression, it also organizes
our experience and influences the meaning made of it. The power of language
manifests in the ways it is used to classify and arrange sensory impressions to
create order and meaning in a culture. Indeed, because of its shaping power,
control of language has been a bone of contention throughout much of history,
structuring the study of human science as Michel Foucault suggested in The
Order of Things. But, it is possible to break its containment. A rhetoric of
productive knowledge, capable of surfacing creativity, can work against
hegemony by evoking alternative possibilities.

Language “authorizes” what in a culture may be “thinkable,” and that plane
of reality, once confirmed, is then sustained by continual repetition and Circulation
in what Foucault refers to as “regimes of truth,” the discourses in a society of
those who, in effect, produce “proper” language, “who are charged with saying
what counts as true” (Power 131), serving and enforcing their vision of what
exists, what is good, and what is possible. Although it is important to point out
that control is rarelytotal (as the surfacing of creativity suggests), I argue that

these discourses, as they have attempted to constrain language, have also

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constrained the operation of creativity, perhaps to our detriment. They have
shaped current thought according to the political and economic interests of elite
cultural forces and controlled what counts as “new” knowledge. The significance
of the relationship that exists between language and the operation of creativity is
inescapable.

The development and operation of language has been instrumental in
human evolution. In order to develop language at all, the human brain had to
evolve in certain ways beyond that of its closest animal relative. In October
2001, the journal Nature reported that researchers in England had, in fact,
discovered a gene, subsequently labeled “FOXP2,” that may be required during
embryonic development for the formation of the brain regions associated with
speech and language. While FOXP2 is not exclusive to humans, differences in
its sequence or the way it works in humans may reveal how this ability evolved
and why they developed linguistic communication systems while other animals
did not.

A year later, in August 2002, Nature further reported that researchers at
the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology had compared human
FOXP2 with the same gene found in the chimpanzee, gorilla, rhesus macaque,
I and other animals and suspect that this gene evolved in the human population
within the last 200,000 years (coinciding with the historical emergence of V
"anatomically modern” humans) and increased chances for survival by helping
them communicate better. They found that key Changes in the DNA of human

FOXP2 appear to have affected the development of facial bone and muscular

9.5

structures and the ability to make the fine movements of the mouth and larynx
that allow speech to occur, and they speculate that these changes may have led
to the further development of the regions of the brain associated with language.
Language, then, as it developed allowed information to be passed more
efficiently from one generation to the next and may have led to the significant
expansion of the human population.

However, that the evolution of humans may be the result of certain pre-
linguistic advantages such as the development of the FOXP2 gene mentioned
above is not a new idea. In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi also contends
that man’s intellectual superiority to other animals may be almost entirely the
consequence of language development. Evidence he reviewed shows, for
example, that humans are only slightly better at solving the same kinds of
problems set for animals if linguistic clues are excluded in research experiments
(70). However, he further suggests that nearly undetectable tacit “inarticulate
faculties” may also account for language acquisition and the huge Increase in
human mental capacity that followed. Articulation inlanguage, Polanyi claims, is
always incomplete, relying on “mute acts of intelligence” common to both
humans and other animals. Defining language as any form of symbolic
representation (including mathematical notation), he argues further, however,
that both the process of linguistic representation itself and the operation of
language symbols support the process of thought in humans. He identifies three
stages through which a symbolic representation of experience may lead to new

information: (1) primary representation, (2) reorganization, and (3) interpretation

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of the result (80). Accordingly, for him, language development and its
subsequent operation require being able to establish signs, note their
appropriateness, and interpret the potential relationships arising from them.
Although other animals appear to be capable of each of these functions
separately, as Polanyi points out, they do not appear to be able to combine them
as humans can (82).

Polanyi findings, although they differ slightly, follow those of Lev Vygotsky.
Using the developmental approach pioneered by Piaget, Vygotsky found that the
development of thought in children does include both nonverbal thought
(Polanyi’s “mute acts of intelligence”) and pre—intellectual speech. But, perhaps
because he focused on the development of thought in children, he was also able
to observe that only when the developing curve of thought begins to overlap that
of speech in a close reciprocal relationship does thought become verbal and
speech rational (83). And, in his review of various comparative studies of
primates and humans, he noted, as Polanyi does, that while primates display
certain features of intelligence similar to that of humans and while their language
includes features of human language like emotional expression and social
meaningfulness, the important interfunctional relationship between nonverbal
thought and pre-intellectual speech, appears to be absent.

Vygotsky’s research, thus, suggests thatalthough language and thought
may issue from different “genetic roots,” as their operational functions overlap,
each assists the development of the other. He concludes that this relationship

allows the human child to deVelop the “inner speech” of thought, “[branching] off

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from the child’s external speech simultaneously with the differentiation of the
social and egocentric functions of speech . . . [becoming] the basic structures of
his thinking” (94). Thus, Vygotsky claims, “Thought development is determined
by language . . . by the linguistic tools of thought and the sociocultural experience
of the child” (94). Thought, then, according to Vygotsky, may be regarded as the
result of the “mediated” activity of human mental functioning within a socio-
cultural context. As Polanyi also argues, once ignited, this important reciprocal
relationship between the symbolic representation of experience and human
thought continues, constituting this mediation, and remains capable of leading to
novel thought.

In “The Origin of Speech,” Charles F. Hockett identifies thirteen design
features absent in animal communication systems, but characteristic of all human
languages. Perhaps most important among these, productivity allowed pre-
humans to use patterns of arrangement from old utterances to say things that
had never been said before and yet be understood by other speakers, thus
making language “productive” and allowing many possibilities for expression
(90). Productivity, Hockett contends, preceded and then promoted displacement,
the ability to talk about events remote in time and space allowing speakers to
make connections to them outside their presence (94). They could, for example,
communicate to others “survival” knowledge gained from what may have been at
the time merely fortuitous circumstances such as the use of a sharp stick to kill a

predator. This knowledge shared with others then may have led to the carrying

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of sharp sticks against future encounters, insuring the human population a better
rate of survival, thus reinforcing the social character of knowledge.

Another feature, total feedback, made it possible for humans to
“internalize” what was being communicated. They nearly simultaneously heard
as they understood what they were saying, reinforcing the “message” and
allowing “learning” and the adjustment of future conduct. Ernst von Glasersfeld
suggests that if such feedback is regarded as sufficient to lead to internal
repetition or thought in cognizing organisms, this activity may be recognized as
“inductive inference” constituting “the simplest and most general form of learning
and knowledge” (“Signs” 469).

Words themselves, released from duty as signs of one—to-one
correspondence to the events or situations they signified, thus, could become
symbols of concepts humans could use to re-present their experiences to
themselves, employing these symbols in purposive and intentional ways to
modify their knowledge of the world. And so, language developed as a system of
symbols that, according to Hockett, provided “certain patterns by which these
elementary signifying units [could] be combined into larger sequences and
conventions governing what sorts of meanings emerge from the arrangements”
(“Signs” 473).

However, what. is crucial for von Glasersfeld is not patterns or rules for
stringing symbols together themselves, but that language developed a
"syntactical dimension of meaning.” Emerging from the effective use of various

different combinations of the same words, this additional layer of potential

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meaning-making allowed language to go beyond its initial flexibility to generate
both more and different “combinatorial meanings,” further opening up the
language system and insuring its continuing productivity, making the potential for
modifying knowledge of the world limitless (473). And, it did so in the
fundamentally conservative way Characteristic of evolution that allowed emerging
human beings to reorganize themselves at higher levels of complexity while still
holding on to their primarily traditional ways of life. The initial productivity and the
syntactic patterning that provided for further flexibility and extension of human
language systems figures prominently in von Glasersfeld’s argument for the
radically constructive nature of language and human knowledge. This approach
to knowing and learning, based on von Glasersfeld’s engagement with the work
of Piaget, Vygotsky, and others, suggests that language organizes experience
and helps to “build up” knowledge. Understood in this way, knowledge, then,
cannot be “discovered” nor can it correspond to annalready existing ontological
reality. It is “built up” or “created.”

Although Piaget was not the first to suggest that humans “construct” their
concepts and thus their view of reality, he was the first to use a developmental
approach to explore this notion. In The Construction of Reality in the Child, he
presented a model of how the conceptual structure of objects, space, time, and
causality is constructed, and he suggested that this “scaffolding” operates as a
framework for building up a coherent “reality.” But, he also noted that what is
constructed is limited by the very concepts that established the scaffolding in the

first place. In his view, epistemology is, thus, concerned both with the formation

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of knowledge and its meaning or value and suggested that cognition is
instrumental, a tool humans use to fit themselves into the world of their
experience. Moreover, its value is a function of its process.

Following Piaget, von Glasersfeld argued for a radical rebuilding of the
concepts “knowledge” comprises (knowing, truth, understanding, meaning, and
communication) and for the “viability/’ of actions, concepts, and conceptual
operations as they “fit” particular purposes and contexts as an indication of
reality. In this approach “viability” in the domain of experience rather than “truth
correspondence” is the criterion for “knowing,” a concept von Glasersfeld refers
to as “mental operating,” and it is assisted by and dependent on the development
of language.

The co-development of human linguistic communication systems and
thought, then, supported and advanced other crucial evolutionary innovations like
the increased capacity for more complex nervous systems and for the
development of memory leading to a “central representation of space,” the ability
to recall what had been stored in memory and to reflect upon it-—-what some
might call consciousness or self-conscious reflection (Riedl 76). Moreover, it
also continued to provide the mechanisms for reinforcing whatever factors,
genetic or cultural, had made that survival possible through “teaching” and
“learning.” Hockett speculates, for example, that remote ancestors of human
beings may have lived in conditions “where a slightly more flexible
communication system, the incipient carrying and shaping of tools, and a slight

increase in the capacity for traditional transmission” converged to make it

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possible for some change to occur (96). These fortuitous circumstances may
have made just enough difference for human beings to survive in increasing
numbers and to develop behaviors that mobilized new mental and social habits
and practices.

Although other animals can distinguish and identify objects as well as act
on memory, their “knowledge” may be more associative than representational,
such as “knowing” that fire “burns” (by associating it with pain). The development
of representational language meant that humans could re-present their
experiences to themselves, recalling and synthesizing narratives of events, and
reflexively recognize them as “experiences.” They could know, for example, not
only that fire burns (in an experiential and associative sense like other animals),
but could also present fire and its characteristics to themselves outside of its
presence. They could also recognize that they “knew” it would burn and state the
grounds for that knowledge.

Moreover, being able to recall and re—present past experiences to
themselves and others made possible the ability to compare one experience to
another and note differences between them, suggest alternative possibilities, and
make choices among them---“mental operations” characteristicof humans that
allow them to organize and manage their experience. As Riedl points out, they
,could conduct “thought experiments” that transferred the risks of extinction from
themselves to their hypotheses, a rather significant evolutionary advance (76).
And, because processes of inference can operate through symbolic

representation without reference to actual things, the purely theoretical, as in

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mathematics for example, became possible. Thus, language, memory, and
consciousness are deeply implicated in the operation of “creativity” and the
generation of new knowledge. But, it is also important to recognize the socio-
political character of that knowledge and the part language systems play in it.
The flqnificance of Learning to Classify

In “On the Conventional Character of Knowledge,” sociologist Barry
Barnes argues for the “constitutively social character” of knowledge by examining
the linguistic act of classifying or learning to apply cOncepts. He assumes that
people learn as they interact with information from the complex physical
environments in which they live and that learning occurs within a social context,
so “to learn to Classify is to learn to employ the classifications of some community
or culture” (305).

According to Barnes, Classifying entails making judgments about degrees
of similarity and difference. The tensions behind each term (animal, for
example), representing a number of specific instances of it (dog, cat, cow, and so
on) and connecting it to the physical environment, and the tying together of terms
by generalizations, signaling expectations of experience, form a network of
_ transmissions about similarity and difference. An assertion of similarity, that is,
the application of a concept, confirms that similarities. outweigh differences, a
confirmation that, Barnes points out, does not issue from the “meaning” of a
concept itself, but rather from the routine, socially-situated operation of agents’

perceptions and cognition.

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The formation and application of concepts is, thus, a social activity that
derives from and develops the pattern of a particular category of classification,
“The pattern does not account for the activity; rather the activity accounts for the
pattern” (310). Usage, then, develops as a series ofjudgments adding particular
instances to the “tension” of aterm. So, as Barnes suggests, it would be
incorrect “to assume that usage is determined in advance by meaning, rules,
logic. . . . [Rather] agents develOp usage in ways which at all times relate to their
full complexity as social actors and biological organisms” (313). “Agreed upon”
usage thus becomes “proper” usage, convention reinforced by cultural practice.
The consensus from which proper usage arises, then, while a culture may regard
it as the discovery of “real meaning,” turns out to be merely successful
negofiafion.

Barnes claims that all “conventional” representations of the world,
regardless of their differences with those of other cultures or subcultures, are
“equally rationally held” in their relationship to the physical environment, “Reality
confers no privilege upon our methods of classification; they have no special
anthropological significance. And as for reality, so too for logic” (318). In all
cultures, inductive inference and proper usage in the application of concepts
exist as patterns of cultural practice that are “restricted.” The linguistic routines
within a culture, thus, tend to reinforce “shared theory,” a commonly understood
set of concepts and generalizations, a plane of reality. Such coherent, restricted
communal cognitions become social, cultural, and political “institutions.” These

institutions, then, become invested in their own survival and always move toward

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homeostasis sustained by their “authority” within the culture and its apparatus of
control, “authorizing” what counts as knowledge.

I contend, then, that the way a culture may understand and recognize
creativity and new or novel knowledge, then, is always contingent upon the
system of goals and interests of those who dominate it and upon the consequent
Circulation of power. Barnes discusses, for example, the potential effect of
attaching the XY chromosome to the concept of male in order to achieve the goal
of successfully predicting it more frequently and further refining perception, a
goal that on the surface may claim to be harmlessly “scientific.” But, claiming
that males are “really” XYs implies the inadequacy of the existing concept and, if
adopted, can make life more difficult for those who hold to a less precise concept
of male (and female). Thus, If a culture insists on using the XY chromosome as
a “test” for inclusion in the classification male, in order to insure the selection of
only “real” XY males for certain roles and to prevent those lacking the
chromosome from being selected, the effect would likely be not only to limit
opportunities for “different” others, but also to generally limit thought of what
constitutes the category male. It is reasonable to suggest, then, as I do here,
that the normalized application of the concept creativity in a culture could limit the
thOUght of what constitutes the concept to serve particular interests.

Moreover, the effect of classification and concept application in a culture
can be deadly. In Fermat’s Enigma, Simon Singh tells the story of Hippasus, a
young student of Pythagoras, the father of logic and mathematical method. In

the process of attempting to find a rational number equivalent to the square root

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of two, Hippasus came to realize that no such number existed and that the
square root of two was, therefore, an “irrational” number. But, because
Pythagoras defined the universe in terms of rational numbers, he refused to

accept the logic of Hippasus discovery.” It called into question the ideal that he
had long cherished and threatened to change the world as he understood it. So
rather than acknowledge this new category of numbers, he sentenced Hippasus
to death by drowning. Singh suggests that, if the story is true, Pythagoras’
reluctance to come to terms with irrational numbers was not only tragic for
Hippasus, it was also tragic for the development of Greek mathematics because
the matter of irrational numbers could not be taken up again until after the death
of Pythagoras, thus delaying attention to this new resource.

Polanyi suggests that the Laws of Poverty and Consistency govern the
operation of language and imply that, when humans use a word to refer to
something, they “perform” and at the same time “authorize” their performance of
the act of classification, and in so doing they anticipate its applicability to future
experiences. Thus, in ordinary everyday practice as well as in the way the
sciences develop theories relating to actual experiences, as long as the
classifications work, these expectations shape theories of the universe implied as
“true” in language (80). Polanyi notes, however, that it is also characteristic of
humans to want to continually refine their terminology in the effort to get closer to
the “reality” they observe---closer to the “truth.” So, to extend what Polanyi is

suggesting, each performance, in effect, “enacts” a sense of what is true (a

“belief”) at a particular time and in a particular context, and each subsequent

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“authorization” or confirmation of an act of classification is subject to change,
suggesting the significance of the continuously performative and, I maintain,
creative nature of language.

However, attempts by dominant forces in a culture to bring language
under strict control by fixing concepts, Polanyi argues, also closes down effective
operation of the system and likely reduces the benefits derived from casting
thought into language in the first place by interfering with its operational
principles and constraining the ability to build up new knowledge. He notes that
although modern systems of mathematics, science, and philosophy that have
today replaced systems of magic and superstition, they are just as capable of
leading to mistaken belief (although perhaps not as extreme). (Heisenberg
noted, however, that scientists cannot escape the human limitations of knowing.)
Polanyi’s view, however, Is that to the extent that humans benefit from the
apparently limitless potential of using language, they must also commit
themselves to the “risk of talking complete nonsense, if [they] are to say anything
at all within such systems” (94), and he reminds us of the significant gains in
mathematics, for example, that resulted from the speculative use of mathematical
notation. Negative, imaginary, irrational, and transfinite numbers first regarded
as meaningless (and, in some cases, threatening) were eventually accepted as
important new concepts. This circumstance reinforces his observation that “the
major fruitfulness of a formalism may be revealed in its entirely uncovenanted
functions, precisely at points where the peril seems greatest of its drifting into

absurdity” (94).

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In the systems of science and mathematics as well as those of ordinary
everyday experience, terms people learn to use imply generalizations signaling
expectations of experience that in turn imply a theory of the universe dependent
for its verification on “grammatical” rules in order to determine what constitutes
meaningful sentences. But, Polanyi points out that if this theory of the universe
proves to be true, “it will be found to anticipate, like other true theories, much
more knowledge [my emphasis] than was possessed or even surmised by its
originators” (94).

As Bakhtin does, Polanyi suggests that using language commits those
who use it to an “irreducible indeterminacy” because it relies on adherence to
recognized forms and the continuous re-consideration of those forms as they
relate to the actual lived experience of human beings in different contexts. I
agree with Polanyi’s further argument that, “Just as owing to the ultimately tacit
character of all knowledge, we remain unable to say all we know, so also in view
of the tacit character of meaning, we can never quite know what is implied in
what we say” (95) because language can only “get close” to describing what we
know.

Every use of language to describe experience applies it to unique
instances of differing contexts that can modify the meaning of a word and,
conceivably, the conceptual framework in which it occurs. Such modifications
are, in Polanyi’s words, “heuristic” and “irreVersible” and stand in contrast to
“routine” and “reversible” operations that merely assimilate new instances into

existing classifications, a distinction Piaget also makes. The difference between

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the heuristic operations and ones that are routine or algorithmic may be
analogous, for example, to the difference between constructing a new
mathematical proof and merely demonstrating one that has already been
established. Students who deduce the Pythagorean Theorem from Euclid’s
axioms, while they may demonstrate their understanding of knowledge that is
“new” to them, do not demonstrate new knowledge; they merely retrace the steps
of Pythagoras. Andrew Wiles’s solving of Fermat’s Theorem, on the other hand,
demonstrated not only his understanding and use of deductive logic to arrive at a
solution, but also the necessity of making unprecedented heuristic leaps onto
new ground---going where no one else has gone. Both the student and Wiles
followed the usual and expected logical steps, but constructing the new proof
required an “intuitive” step (or series of them) that would be logically verified by
others only later to gain the acceptance of the mathematical community.
Similarly, a piece of writing that is heuristic and that says something
“fresh” and “new” differs from one that is algorithmic, follows a formula, and
simply confirms or documents what has already been said. Phaedrus, Robert
Pirsig’s alter ego in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, observes, for
example, that if students in a typical college freshman composition course read
an essay or a story, discuss it, and then write an imitative little essay, their writing
often gets worse. He concludes that students in this situation seldom achieve
anything original or fresh as a result of what he calls “calculated mimicry” and
that “the real evil that [has] to be broken before real writing [can] be taught [is]

imitation” (156). The decision to try to imitate in writing things they have already

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heard is not, in his view, something children do naturally, so he suggests that
such behavior might be the result of school-based literacy (172). The dilemma
for students in contending with school-based literacy is to come up with a way to
repeat the content or gist of an essay or story in another way (rather than to
articulate their own ideas and experiences in meaningful ways) and to do it with
the finesse of the professional writer who is their model. They become paralyzed
in their effort to satisfy these perceived requirements. In her ground-breaking
analysis of the writing processes of twelfth graders, Janet Emig found, in fact,
that “the major kind of essay too many students have been taught to write in
American schools is algorithmic, or so mechanical that a computer could readily
be programmed to produce it: When a student is hurried or anxious, he simply
reverts or regresses to the only program he knows, as if inserting a card into his
brain” (53).

Phaedrus’ experience in teaching writing suggests to him that the bent
toward “calculated mimicry” becomes so sophisticated that students attempt to
imitate teachers in ways that convince them that they are not being imitated,
producing an effect that captures the fundamental nature or fOrmal aspects of
instruction while at the same time appearing to go beyond it. This effect tends to
earn the highest grades while, at the same time, work that does not conform to
teachers’ expectations or experience may go unrewarded even if it is “fresh” or
“original.” He confesses to feeling compelled by the “academic system” to force
students to conform to artificial forms and rules that he believes destroy their

creativity. But, he also notes that when students do go along with these rules,

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they are often, paradoxically, “condemned for their inability to be creative . . . ”
(187). The situation Phaedrus describes, however, is likely the result of
misunderstanding on the part of both students and teachers.

In Plato, Derrida, and Writing Jasper Neel points out that, when students
come to writing (an activity that requires them to reproduce the “same”), they
bring with them a culture that has built itself “largely on the repression of writing.”
To illustrate what he means, Neel refers to Plato’s Phaedrus where Plato (who
writes) compelled Socrates (who never wrote) to criticize writing as an invention
that can only “remind the reader of what he already knows,” thus characterizing
writing as poor imitation. Socrates further points out that while writing may be an
entertaining pastime, the path to true knowledge lies in words “written on the soul
of the hearer,” wisdom preferable to any written text or speech that “aims merely
at creating belief, without any instruction by question and answer.” Thus, for
Plato writing is “bad" because its truth is both unreliable and vulnerable to
manipulation by the reader. The view of writing Plato expressed became
authoritative in Western thought.

But, then, Neel also juxtaposes Plato’s view of writing with Derrida’s to
show that while Plato works to close down the possibilities of language (and thus
control its power), Derrida opens them up endlessly in the free play of
Signification that brings students to the brink of the abyss. In Of Grammato/ogy,
Derrida says, “Writing designates not so much a field of discovery or self-
discovery as ‘the place of unease,’ of the regulated incoherence within

conceptuality” (237-240). According to Derrida, writing reveals that no pure

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perception exists, “Indeed, anything that ‘becomes’ perceived, anything that
appears before consciousness has been ‘written down,’ has become a signifier
that operates, just as any written signifier must . . . with an endless, breaching
deferral” (132). So, as Neel suggests, from a Derridean perspective, in
attempting to write students find themselves in a situation where “presence is
onlyand always promised but never fulfilled” (145). Thus, students and their
teachers are left, with two possibilities for approaching writing: They can regard
it as an opportunity to engage in the endless search for truth, a solution Neel
suggests leads teachers to avoid teaching writing as much as possible and to
teach literature as a “dialectical journey toward truth.” Or, they can limit their
teaching of writing to a process of control, leading teachers to focus on writing as
a skill and students to produce papers just convincing enough to garner a good
grade.

Neel argues, and I agree, that both positions often lead students to
produce writing that simply refuses to participate and that may present itself
instead as a well-formed essay that says something like the following: “I am not
writing. I hold no position. I have nothing to do with discovery, communication,
or persuasion. I care nothing about truth. What I am is an essay. I announce
my beginning, my parts, my ending, and the links between them. I announce
myself as sentences correctly punctuated and words correctly spelled” (85). This
strategy may seem most prudent for students who sense a contradictory state of

affairs and, thus, may feel paralyzed and claim to have nothing to say.

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Indeed, in “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,”
James Berlin argues that “the dismay students display about writing is . . . at
least occasionally the result of teachers unconsciously offering contradictory
advice about composing---guidance grounded in assumptions that simply do not
square with each other” (Cross-Talk 235). They are often ambivalent about their
own experience and expectations. Moreover, Berlin also contends that the major
pedagogical theories of or approaches to writing (Neo-Aristotelian, Current-
Traditional, Expressivist, and New Rhetoric) are based on rhetorical theories that
differ not, as some have suggested, simply in the emphasis given to each of the
components (writer, audience, reality, language), but in the very way these
components “are conceived”---both separately and in relationship to each other
(234). So, in teaching writing, teachers, in effect, “are tacitly teaching a version
of reality and the student’s place and mode of operation in it” (235). I argue
further that, in'the effort to control the operation of language and the meanings
made of it, a conflict has arisen between the culture’s demand for “normalizing”
or “formalizing” the writing process as a means of documenting or representing
knowledge that exists (on the order of Plato’s path to ideal knowledge) and
writing’s generative or productive capacity, relying on multiple processes of
writing (and knowing) and capable of producing alternate knowledge. As Bakhtin
observed in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, “We have conjured up the ghost of
objective culture, and now we do not know how to lay it to rest” (55-56).

In an essay titled “How I Teach Writing: How to Teach Writing? To Teach

Writing?” appearing in the journal Pedagogy, Susan Miller says that in writing

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classes she has developed recently, her students first rehearse taking every
possible position toward topics and problems and, afterward, only then take on
what she regards as the most difficult work of writing, "discovering how to
position any one of these attitudes in the ongoing conversation that constitutes
any discourse, but especially academic exchange” (481 ). Her students do
“imitate” formal models in the categories of “personal,” “public,” and “academic”
writing, with an understanding based on “[envisioning] their participation, but not
from within a generic method of formal argumentation” (482). Rather, they
practice what it means to “position a side,” rather to “take one,” analyzing
professional models not for their content, but for ways of beginning, arranging,
and editing for style in order to “imitate” them and in order to discern, imagine,
and practice “how they themselves might write consequential texts” (483). This
kind of imitation provides a solid scaffolding from which students can launch their
own writing and engage in a composing process that recognizes writing as “a
nexus of cultural negotiation where convention, exigency, and individual meet"
(483).

A recent film may shed some further light on problem of distinguishing
between heuristic and algorithmic writing. In Finding Forrester (2000), officials of
an elite Manhatten prep school recruit Jamal Wallace, a bright, black student-
athlete from the Bronx on the basis of his high standardized test scores and his
ability to help the school to a basketball championship. At about the same time,
Jamal begins to develop a relationship with William Forrester, a reclusive author

who had won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel written years before but had published

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little since. On a dare, Jamal sneaked into Forrester’s apartment, and when he
got caught, in his hurry to escape he left behind his backpack containing
personal journals that reveal to Forrester an emerging ability to think and write in
powerful ways. When Forrester fully critiques the writing in the journals and
returns them to Jamal, it is the first time anyone has looked at his writing in this
way. Although Jamal does not yet know Forrester’s identity, he senses that this
man can help him develop his writing, a desire he has kept hidden in order to “fit
in” in his Bronx environment.

Although the film explores several dilemmas that arise in the course of this
relationship, the one that is most germane to the argument I am making here is
Forrester’s approach to helping Jamal develop his writing and what happens as a
result. To begin, Forrester rolls a piece of paper into an old typewriter and starts
typing, and he tells Jamal to start typing, too, on an adjacent typewriter.
Perplexed and mentally blocked, Jamal can only stare at the blank paper. When
he confesses that he is thinking, Forrester tells him, “No thinking. That comes
later. The first key to writing is to write, not think,” and he pulls out an old essay
that he had written some years before and suggests that Jamal begin by typing it,
saying, “Sometimes the simple rhythm of typing gets us from page one to page
tv'vo. When you begin to feel your own words, start typing them.” Jamal begins
typing and after a paragraph or so does begin to “feel his own words,” and he
uses them to extend beyond what Forrester has written. He spends a great deal
of time developing and revising this piece, and later, when Forrester critiques it,

he tells him, “You’ve taken something which was mine and made it yours.”

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Thus, Jamal begins to see “what it’s like” to write something (the way
Forrester has) and gains confidence in his ability to produce his own words. I
argue that this rather unorthodox kind of imitation is not that kind of imitation that
stifies students’ writing; rather it Is an act of co-creativity that recognizes the re-
combinative nature of language in the making of meaning. Thus, it can act as a
“scaffold,” in Vygotsky’s sense, to support students’ early struggles to “feel their
own words" and to find the confidence to use them. It is a way for students to
understand that words and ideas are always being extended and reconstituted to
make new meanings and create new understandings, making language and
writing “performative,” the servant, as Bakhtin says, “of participative thinking and
performed acts” (Toward 31). Thus, Jamal’s relationship with Forrester is
dialogical and co-creative occurring in the Vygotskian “zone of proximal
development” where Forrester uses his expert’s knowledge of writing to support
Jamal’s budding ability. Such relationships help students see what they do know
rather than showing them what they do not know.

Jamal’s writing improves so significantly, however, that it poses a problem
that has political implications and demonstrates the point Berlin makes about
teachers teaching particular versions of reality and the place of students In it. At
his new school English professor Robert Crawford simply cannot believe that a
black kid from the Bronx recruited to play basketball (“For God’s sake!”) is
capable of the kind of writing he has been producing, and he begins to press
Jamal for an explanation. Frustrated by Crawford’s implied assumptions about

him, Jamal is not free to explain because he has promised Forrester that he will

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keep their relationship secret. Noting Crawford’s own failure as a writer,
Forrester points out, “A lot of writers know the rules, but don’t know how to write.”
And, he cautions that bitterly disappointed teachers like Crawford can be “very
effective or very dangerous.” Jamal, nevertheless, challenges Crawford during
class on a point of English language usage. Instead of using the opportunity to
discuss language and the function of words in context, to learn from his student,
or to admit that he sometimes makes mistakes, the autocratic Crawford is
determined to show Jamal what he does not know (cannot know, given his
background and experience). In the exchange, Crawford is humiliated by
Jamal’s acute display of knowledge at his expense and shocked, I suspect, by
the obvious failure of the assumptions he has held about him.

As Forrester points out, “What people are most afraid of is what they don’t
understand, so they turn to their assumptions.” Crawford does not understand
how a black kid from the Bronx can write the way Jamal does. Indeed, the film
demonstrates that on Crawford’s plane of reality at the elite Maillor—Callow
School, black students from the Bronx may be able to jump, but they cannot write
(at least not as well as Jamal does), so to right a world turned upside-down, he
lodges a charge of plagiarism against Jamal-——the only way to explain his writing
prowess and take back control of the situation. As might be expected, Jamal is
vindicated in the end, but not before he denies those who run Maillor—Callow the
commodity they appear to value most from his scholarship, his skill on the
basketball court. He deliberately misses two free throws that would have given

the school its-coveted basketball championship (and Jamal a chance to attend

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the school the following year), determined instead to win on his own terms---a
happy Hollywood ending that occurs with much less regularity in “real” life where
education more often reproduces rather than changes relations of power.
Language as Power

“Every theory, as the word itself suggests,” Pierre Bourdieu says, is a
programme of perception” (Language 128). And, he further contends, “Even the
most strictly constative scientific description is always open to the possibility of
functioning in a prescriptive way, capable of contributing to its own verification by
exercising a theory effect through which it helps to bring about that which it
declares” (134). He argues in several of his works (Outline of a theory of
Practice, The Logic of Practice, Language as Symbolic Power, Distinction) that
language is inextricably linked to socio-cultural institutions, authorizing. proper or
normal usage that in turn “authors” what may be thought, Barnes’ sense of
“restricted cognition” or shared theory. Central to Bourdieu’s argument is the
notion that linguistic interactions express relations of power and that every
linguistic interaction carries “traces” of the social structures it both articulates and
reproduces. Schooling, of course, plays a primary role in carrying out these
imperatives.

Bourdieu regards linguistic interactions as forms of practice that are the
product of the relationship between the habitus, a set of acquired tendencies that
predispose individuals to act in certain ways, and the conditions of various
socially conditioned “markets” or “fields.” Habitus reflects the social conditions

under which it is acquired, and Bourdieu finds it literally inscribed on individuals’

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bodies (the bodily hexis), visible in the ways they walk, stand, gesture, and so on.
He claims that the habitus is acquired through a gradual process of inculcation
beginning in early childhood, generating practices, perceptions, and attitudes
implicitly regarded as “normal.” It is also “durable,” remaining “embodied” over
the course of individuals’ lives and, so, not easy for individuals to reflect upon Or
change.

“Linguistic habitus” is a subset of these tendencies acquired in learning to
use language. It governs linguistic practices and expectations of how they will be
valued in various fields or markets of social interaction. According to Bourdieu,
part of the practical competence of language users is to know “how” and “when”
and then to be able to produce highly valued expressions in particular contexts, a
skill not evenly distributed in a Culture. Different speakers, thus, obtain different
quantities of “linguistic capital" (like other forms of capital that define individuals
within a society) reflecting socially-situated differences of accent, usage, and
vocabulary, among other similar features of language use, differences Bourdieu
claims Saussure and, later, Chomsky ignored. Theirtendency, he argues, was
to think of the social nature of language in the abstract, how it operates ideally,
rather than acknowledging the concrete social and political conditions of
language and its use in specific contexts and, thus, failing to see language as a
complex practice shaped by forms of power and its unequal distribution in
societies.

Bourdieu further contends that positing a particular set of linguistic

practices as the “normative model” of correct usage creates the “illusion” of the

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existence of a common language and establishes it as “legitimate” (a
Circumstance Bakhtin characterizes as the “phenomenology of the Iie”), thereby
subordinating or eliminating other languages or dialects and, presumably the
alternative knowledge they may frame. He Claims,

“In emphasizing the linguistically pertinent constants at the expense

of the sociologically significant variations in order to construct that

artefact which is the ‘common’ language, the linguist proceeds as if

the ‘capacity to speak,’ which is virtually universal, could be

identified with the socially conditioned way of realizing this natural

capacity. . . [however,] the competence adequate to produce

sentences that are likely to be understood may be quite inadequate

to produce sentences that are likely to be listened to . . . Speakers

lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the

social domains in which this competence is required, or are

condemned to silence” (Language 55).
The more linguistic capital individuals accumulate within such a system, the more
they are able to exploit the system of differences to their advantage in order to
acquire power and the “profit of distinction.” Highly valued linguistic forms obtain
the most profit because the capacity to produce them is reciprocally “restricted”
by social conditions. Further, individuals’ own assessments of “market
conditions” (made under the influence of the habitus) and their anticipation of
how their language is likely to be valued (or not) in certain contexts may also
operate as internal constraints to silence them.

“In this sense,” Bourdieu suggests, “like the sociology of culture, the
sociology of language is logically inseparable from a sociology of education. . . .
the educational market is strictly dominated by the linguistic products of the

dominant class and tends to sanction pre-existing differences in capital” (62). He

discusses the particular example of working Class children (as well as children of

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the poor) who, because they are often not successful under the constraints of
school-based literacy, routinely exclude themselves from educational systems
earlier than middle and upper class children. They assume that their place in
established social hierarchies is “fixed.” In so doing, they reveal an unintentional
complicity with systems that work against their interests, a phenomenon
Bourdieu refers to as “symbolic power.” He contends that because symbolic
power is invisible, individuals fail to recognize it, and thus, also fail to see such
hierarchical relations of power as arbitrary constructions serving the interests of
some individuals within a culture to the detriment of others. And, because
tendencies “durably inculcated” by social conditions “engenderaspirations and
practices objectively compatible with those objective requirements, the most
improbable practices are excluded, totally without examination, as unthinkable

. . (Outline 77). From this perspective, it is all the more remarkable for the
fictional Jamal to think he could succeed at Maillor-Callow as a writer more than
as a basketball player. Without the scaffolding William Forrester provided, I
argue that he might not have been able to do so.

Symbolic power is, thus, rooted in shared belief, authorizing certain forms
of cognition in ways that compel those who benefit least from it to participate in
their own domination. And, it sustains the domination without overt force by
developing systems and institutions that differently enable individuals to obtain
different kinds and amounts of capital and that “fix” the value given to different
products and instill belief in that value at the same time (51). Again, he points to

educational systems as examples of how this process works. A kind of

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“violence,” he suggests, is an integral feature of such systems whereby formally
defined “qualifications” or criteria become the means for both creating and
sustaining inequalities (24). Jamal’s Maillor—Callow classmates, the “two-comma
kids ” as he refers to them, thus, acquire symbolic power by virtue of the fact that
they are the million-dollar babies of the dominant class (with all of the support
features that circumstance suggests), and, to further insure their expected future
success, they will graduate from one of the best prep schools in Manhatten.

Because the relationship between qualifications individuals may acquire
and the cultural capital they inherit from their social circumstances is invisible, the
system, in effect, sustains as well as justifies the established order. Acts of self—
exclusion, thus, make individuals complicit with conditions that make the
attainment of certain goals unlikely in the first place-—-“a double negation which
inclines them to make a virtue of necessity; that is, to refuse what is anyway
refused and to love the inevitable” (77). It continually re-establishes a doxic
relationship to the world---a limiting and self-limiting scheme of reality embedded
in beliefs/perceptions that activates mental and social habits and practices that
have been conditioned and that functions as the only available possibility.

This scheme is based on the relationship between a socially conditioned
system Of cognitive and motivating structures and socially structured situations
that “bring into play a whole body of wisdom, sayings, commonplaces, ethical
precepts (‘that’s not for the likes of us’) and, at a deeper level, the unconscious
principles of ethoslwhich, being the product of a learning process dominated by a

determinate type of Objective regularities, determines ‘reasonable’ and

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‘unreasonable’ conduct for every agent subjected to those regularities” that
represents the “improbable” as “unthinkable” (77). Thus, as Bourdieu contends,
although the habitus possesses an infinite capacity “to engender products---
thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions, [its] limits are set by the historically
and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional
freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is
from a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings” (95).

Mikhail Bakhtin reasons that any discursive practice is “ideological" if it
represents itself as “nature" rather than “culture” by concealing or denying its
socially constructed character, if it attempts to represent itself as the only
possible symbolic system, and if it presents itself as the objective reflection of
reality in order to fix meaning. For him, a dialogically agitated and tension—filled
environment of “alien words,” each with its own values and accents, exists
between words and objects and accounts for the ability of words to continually
generate new meanings: If words can continually generate new meanings (and
by extension novel thought), they cannot then be said to correspond in a one-to-
one relationship with the external world. Words can neither be autonomous nor
self-contained; rather, they can only be tentative links in an infinite “chain of
meaning,” the human attempt to get closer to the truth.

No such link can have meaning outside the chain, however. Each is the
result of specific historical and social conditions. But because language and
cognition are so closely allied, a word’s relationship to reality may, nevertheless,

lead individuals to regard their perceptions as self-evident and common-sensical.

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So, dominant forces in a culture (who want to maintain their position of power)
have a vested interest in systematizing language. They continually attempt to
centralize and fix meaning, universalize the sign, and institutionalize “theory
effect,” as Bourdieu has described it, helping “to bring about that which it
declares,” dividing the system of language from those speaking it and refusing
the creativity of social interaction. In effect, I argue, they attempt to control the
acquisition ”and flow of “creative capital” to insure that only sanctioned acts of
creativity are, quite literally, recognized. These forces of domination are
“centripetal,” working to unity and normalize the verbal-ideological world against
the “centrifugal” heteroglossic forces of the languages that are “alive and
developing,” open and full of creative potential.

The figure of a spiral may serve here as an apt metaphor for these
simultaneous forces acting within language. A spiral winds around a center, but
paradoxically, it appears to both approach and recede from that center at the
same time. Thus, the system of language and the culture it inscribes, the
“authoritative word,” represents itself as “the absolute word” and the one logic of
thought that insists on having the “last word,” the one that cannot be contested.

However, as Bakhtin further reasons, words can never exhaust their
internal dialogism, “Every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape
the profound influence of the answering word it anticipates” (280). Thus, an
apparently closed system of absolute meanings can always be agitated and
forced to “spiral out” to potential new meanings that are themselves tentative,

conditional, and context-full. Dependence on context means that at any moment

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there exists an unrepeatable set of circumstances ensuring that a word spoken
(or written) can mean something it will mean in no other circumstances so that
“when a member of a speaking collective comes upon a word, it is not the neutral
word of language . . . [her] own thought finds the word already inhabited”
(Problems 202), anticipating an answering word.

Bakhtin contends that only dialogically through the interplay of unmerged
voices and consciousnesses, the cacophony of polyphony, can individuals
become aware of the location of their own thought within an overdetermined
system of ideological practices. Individuals steer between the “authoritative”
word and their own internally persuasive word, marking the ideological process of
their coming to consciousness. Thus, “[internally persuasive discourse] is
gradually and slowly wrought of others’ words that have been acknowledged and
assimilated. . . “ (346n) and, I would add, extended. Jamal and Forrester share a
dialogical relationship, each man “learning” from the other. Jamal finds his own
words through Forrester’s, and Forrester, after years of self-imposed isolation,
leans on Jamal to Ieam to live in the world again. The relationship I share with
those who have guided me in this work, with the other resources I have used,
and with potential audiences is another example. As I write these words,
anticipation of response they may receive is shaping them and conditioning the
very words I am choosing. “Forming itself in the atmosphere of the already
spoken,” as Bakhtin says, “the word is at the same time determined by that which

has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the

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answering word” (280). Thus, no one ever gets the last word because every word
is always already someone else’s requiring yet another to complete it.

Creativity and Rhetoric as Tactics of an Antidiscipline

 

Building upon the work of both Bourdieu and Bakhtin, Michel de Certeau
in The Practice of Everyday Life investigated the ways dominated people in a
culture struggle with institutional structures by appearing to “comply” with them
while at the same time subverting them to their own desires. He argues that their
ways of using the products imposed by the dominant order (television, urban
development, education, goods, and services, for example) can constitute a
secondary kind of cultural production, an “art of consumption” that is hidden
because ”the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves
‘consumers’ any place in which they can indicate what they make or do with the
products of these systems” (xii). They are like the, indigenous Indians colonized
by the Spanish whose “success” in imposing their culture on them, as de Certeau
notes, was subverted from within,

Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians

nevertheless made of the rituals, representations, and laws . . .

something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind;

they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, butby using

them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system

they had no choice but to accept. They were other within the very

colonization that outwardly assimilated them; their use of the

dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the

means to challenge; they escaped it without leaving it (xiii).
Santeria, an Afro-Caribbean religion many practice today, for example,

developed in response to the introduction of Christianity to African slaves

brought to South and Central America by the Portuguese, Spanish, and

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French. lt blends African religious practice with some features of
Christianity. In an effort to insure the survival of at least a part of their own
culture, slaves depicted various African deities as Roman Catholic saints,
a syncretistic act meant to comply with the demands of conquerors while
at the same time turning them to their own uses.

De Certeau sees a similar irony in our societies in the creative uses
people make of the cultural systems “disseminated and imposed by the ‘elites’
producing the Ianguage”---that is, attempting to “normalize” the use of language
and the practices it sanctions. The unequal distribution of power and resources,
however, tends to “manage” or constrain creative activity according to the
interests of the dominant class within society. So, only authorized creativity (and
authorized language) can emerge from the ordering codes of institutions whose
currency is “cultural” or “symbolic” capital rather than “human” capital.

Standard psychological theories, such as those I discussed earlier in this
work (Chapter Two), fail to account for this effect and tend to reinforce the social
belief in creativity as “magic” and/or as the special gift of select people.
“Unauthorized” creativity is, nevertheless, pervasive and continuous, occurring
within the very institutions that produce the “mechanisms of discipline” that shape
culture; it is tactical in Character; and even if it is not officially recognized, it can
affect the culture in significant ways.

De Certeau carefully distinguishes tactic from strategy. He describes a
“strategy” as the “calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a

subject of will and power . . . can be isolated from an environment.” A strategy,

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then, is mastery over space in the manner of Foucault‘s notion of panoptic
practice and finds its “proper” place in institutions constructed according to
dominant political, economic, and scientific principles. A tactic, on the other
hand, “insinuates itself into the other’s place” in fragmentary ways without taking
it over completely. Having no “proper” place of its own, a tactic is a form of
resistance that, like rhetoric as an art of productive knowledge, uses the residual
resources of the system in order to escape it.

From 1920 t01990, for example, the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama,

made quilts for sale in a local co-op that managed their work employing the usual

designs that people want to buy-—-“wedding ring, log cabin, wild geese.”
These quilts could be duplicated through patterns and executed in colors and
sizes to a customer’s order (much like factory products). However, as intricately
beautiful as these quilts were, they pale in comparison to the quilts these women
created for their own families from leftover scraps from the co-op and outgrown
family clothing. The process of producing the patterned quilts for sale was
“routine” and “reversible” in Polanyi’s sense, and they stand in contrast to the
family quilts where the patterns rival the masterpieces of modernist abstract art in
their originality and powerful representation. For this reason, they have recently
been displayed in New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and will continue
to be displayed in similar venues across the country for the next two years.

The family quilts, precisely not produced for sale, did not have to be

constructed in such powerful ways in order to be warm (functional). I argue that

the “tactical” and improvisational process by which they were produced is

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“heuristic" and “irreversible” in Polanyi’s sense. That is, once the “knowledge”
they represent is “out there,” it cannot be “taken back.” Like the figure-ground
prints of M. C. Escher that appear to violate the laws of physics and reason while
at the same time obeying them, once the figure and ground separate (once birds
are distinguished from fish, for example), a new level of “seeing” is attained, and
there is no going back to “see” them in the old way. The steps cannot be
retraced in order to “discover” again what the prints (and the quilts) know; that
knowledge can only be confirmed in a routine, logical way. I further argue that
the impulse or process that produced them is the same impulse or process that
produces new knowledge in any discipline although scientists and
mathematicians often refuse this idea, and its logic is different from inductive and
deductive logic which, by themselves, are incapable of leading to new
knowledge.1

According to de Certeau, the power-less often employ tactics in ordinary
everyday practices like walking, talking, reading, sewing, and cooking (as well as
other “ways of operating”) in order to create their own trajectories and maintain
some sense of possibility in lives lived in spaces where they find themselves
always under someone else’s control, “As unrecognized producers, poets of their
own acts, silent discOverers of their own paths in a jungle of functionalist
rationality, consumers produce through their own signifying practices . . . like the
‘wandering lines’ (‘ligne d’erre’) drawn by the autistic children studied by F.
Deligny (17): ‘indirect’ or ‘errant’ trajectories obeying their own logic” (xviii). As

such, their tactics may be only as slightly rebellious as straying off an “official”

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sidewalk to create a new path or reading, a time during which readers make their
own interpretations “[slipping] into the author’s place,” as de Certeau says,
“poaching” upon an authorized place in order to make it “habitable like a rented
apartment” (xxi). He notes further that, like an imposed rhyme scheme for a
poet, “The ruling order [unwittingly] serves as a support for innumerable
productive activities, while at the same time blinding its proprietors to this
creativity (like those ‘bosses’ who simply can’t see what is being created within
their own enterprises)” (Xxii).

La perruque, for example, as de Certeau describes it, is a tactic workers
employ whereby they produce their own work under the guise of work for his or
her employer. Although workers may be accused of stealing, what they “steal” is
time, using scrap materials and/or machinery for their own ends to do “work that
is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit. . . .[they take] pleasure
in finding a way to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify
[their] own capabilities through [their] work” (25), like the family quilts created by
the women of Gee’s Bend. I am also indulging in la perruque as l compose and
store this work on my office computer, bringing it up periodically to work on it and
think about it during “breaks” in my work day.

The “dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals”
that originates in these ordinary activities of everyday life, according to de
Certeau, “compose the network [my emphasis] of an antidiscipline” capable of
disrupting the logic of the “proper” (xv). Contingent, dependent on time, like

rhetoric of productive knowledge, tactics seize opportunities “on the wing,”

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transforming institutionalized structures into spaces “borrowed [only] for a
moment,” and then disappearing---or at least appearing to do so. They are
“clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning,’
maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike”
that allow the weak to win fleeting victories over the strong whether the strength
of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order. . . . The weak
must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them” (xix).

I argue further that creativity (although it may not be “officially”
recognized) frequently marks the “work of anonymous anti-heroes constituting this
network in every discipline who continuously trouble both theory and practice by
surreptitiously appropriating their “official” places in order to use them as spaces
for unauthorized purposes. Graffiti artists, for example, engage in a discourse of
rebellion that makes statements defying the authority of the “proper” in its own
place, carving out of it a temporary space for their work. The works of these
artists have long been “recognized” by those who live their lives in the margins of
culture not only for the “messages” they convey, but also as significant works of
art. And, sometimes the force of that recognition spills over, creating
disequilibrium, a movement that compels the dominant order to recognize such
works as well, thus making an unexpected impact on the culture.

The students who occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, in 1989,
forced a similar confrontation between the official culture sanctioned by the
Communist Party and the student-led democracy movement. The re-creation of

Tiananmen Square had been a strategy of the communist regime meant to

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relocate the site of power, bringing it out from behind the walls of the Forbidden
City to the large open area in front of the gates and inferring that power in the
newly established order would be more democratic and “out in the open.” In a
decidedly tactical maneuver, students briefly co-opted this ceremonial place, the
public stage for current operations of the communist regime and the ritual focus
of Chinese history, turning it into a space for political street theater, performing a
discourse meant to challenge the government to live up to the promises it had
made and to displace official discourse. In The Future of Ritual, Richard
Schechner suggests that the struggle was not just between the rigid ritual
characteristic of usual events in Tiananmen Square and chaotic, rebellious
performance of “street theatre;” at stake was a matter of who would “author” (and
“authorize”) the script of China’s future and how it would “play" out. Thus, the
interplay of elements of theatre and ritual (both of which offer entertainment as
well as social critique, according to Schechner) deteriorated into a show of
military force when the official Chinese culture felt sufficiently threatened. The
students had, in his words, “acted up a carnival. . . a mood of fun, comradeship,
irony, and subversion . . . patterns as different as can be imagined from the rigid
rectangles and precise lines of official gatherings” (58). Although the resistance
was fleeting and although the communist regime regained control of the square
(at a significant cost of human life), it suffered considerable humiliation and loss
of face at home and abroad by having its principles called into question in such a
public way. The “knowledge” revealed was irreversible despite the official

culture’s move to repress it. The photograph of a single anonymous individual

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standing in the way of a column of tanks advancing on the crowd symbolized the
students’ discourse to a watching world. Schechner observes, “To allow people
to assemble in the streets is always to flirt with the possibility of improvisation. . .
Revolutions in their incipient period are carnivalesque, proposing “a free space to
satisfy desires . . . to enact social relations more freely” (47).

Like the trangressive activities associated with carnival as Bakhtin
described it in Rabelais and his World (the inversion of rank and privilege, the
exchanging of gender roles, the uncrowning of mock kings, the substitution of
urine and excrement for the wine and host of communion, and so on), such an
assembly has the capacity to agitate and push a cultural “system” toward dis-
equilibrium until it can no longer induce in the collective body of the people “fear
that developed in man during thousands of years; fear of the sacred, of
prohibitions, of the past, of power” (94). In the rhetoric of carnival, language is
not only performative, enacting a belief in a different kind of future, but also
transgressive, violating the sacrosanct in order to liberate human consciousness
and enable the imagination of new possibilities among people acting together,
perhaps uncovering knowledge unavailable to the isolated mind. Performance’s
subject, Schechner says, is “transformation: the startling ability of human beings
to create themselves, to change, to become--—for worse or better
—--what they ordinarily are not” (1 ). I argue that, just as the disorderly conduct of
Rabelais’ heroes upset the order of medieval theological and philosophical

systems, the disorderly conduct of the Chinese students disturbed the equilibrium

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of Chinese culture and challenged the official word of the communist regime,
piercing its logical circle and allowing people to think other-wise.

Julia Kristeva theorized a relationship between challenging linguistic
codes and challenging the law of the “proper.” The ambivalence and laughter of
the carnivalesque is capable of turning old hierarchies upside-down and
generating new potentialities by adhering to a logic different from “the logic of
codified discourse [that] fully comes into being only in the margins of recognized
culture” (“Word” 37). However, she argues that only by adopting a “dream logic,”
a logic that blurs and exceeds established boundaries (A and not-A, black and
white, and me and not-me), a logic of possibility rather than probability, can the
carnivalesque operate. In fact, this ‘transgression’ of linguistic, logical and social
codes within the carnivalesque “only exists and succeeds, of course, because it
accepts another law” (41). Following both Kristeva and Bakhtin, I contend that
creativity operates in this same way, bifurcating the containment of linguistic and
social “law” imposed by dominant cultural forces and the logical circle drawn to
contain it. It operates instead through a logic of “crooked awareness,” that is,
“seeing crookedly” (my terminology for-Aristotle’s notion of rhetoric as productive
knowledge and Hofstadter’s notion of the slippability of concepts), making the
familiar strange, seeing through the eyes of others, and, thus, allowing for the
possibility of divergent, rather than convergent, knowledge.

Because its logic is different, poetry is trangressive in this same sense
just as Plato feared when he banned it from his republic. Heterogeneous forces

of language, in Kristeva’s view, make it a productive and transgressive structure

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rather than one that is simply representative, . . thus poetic language making
free. with the language code; music, dancing, painting, reordering the psychic
drives which have not been harnessed by the dominant symbolization systems
. . . all seek out and make use of this heterogeneity and the ensuing fracture of a
symbolic code which can no longer 'hold' its (speaking) subjects" (“Word” 30).
She suggests that any binary logical system based on a “0 - 1” continuum is
unable to account for the operation of poetic language. In poetic language “1”
(as God, law, definition, or Aristotle’s logic) is not a limit. Rather, poetic language
is “dialogic,” at least double. That is, it makes use of “a logic of distance and
relationship between the different units of the sentence . . . indicating a becoming
. . . a logic of analogy and non-exclusive opposition . . . [and a logic] of the
‘transfinite’, a concept borrowed from Georg Cantorz, which . . . introduces a
second principle of formation: a poetic sequence is a ‘next-larger’ (not causally
deduced) to all preceding sequences of the Aristotelian chain," (42) breaking the
containment of binary logic, “overreaching” its boundaries to gain a new level of
understanding, another Copernican Revolution.

At the spring 2002 conference of the. Michigan Council of Teachers of
English at Michigan State University, the poetry of the Citywide Poets, black
teenagers from the schools of Detroit, demonstrated the both the performative
quality of language that actualizes what has been imagined, dreamed, or dared
to be thought and the particularly transgressive/transformational nature of poetic
language Kristeva theorizes. Syntactically complex, clever, powerful, both the

Written and the live performance---although no description of this experience

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could hope to reproduce it-—-“felt like jazz,” as the title of one of their publications
suggests, with its irreverence and its variations on the themes, contradictions,
and rhythms of their lives. The poems invited response beyond the proper but
enthusiastic applause, and in its absence, the poets responded to one another in
a subtle game of one-upsmanship. Like riffs, the brief repeated musical phrases
characteristic ofjazz, the themes of these poems (death and dying, escape,
entrapment, the perils of their lives, and the heroic power of language,
particularly poetry) reverberated among the poems shared that day, often
surfacing first as the figure (the main feature of the poem) and then as
background, alternating in the continuous improvisation of the experiences they

explicate. Some examples follow:

Nicolas Cage is Detroit in leather pants
In the drivers seat of a 95 Ford
Windsor toting around performance poet people
whining over spilled metaphors on soft cottonelle
toilet paper.
Nicolas Cage is Detroit on 3rd Ave. dancing to music
of the homeless man with gray eyes & sings
in the choir at New Baptist. His hands shake when he
claps. Nicolas Cage is Detroit singing spirituals on the people
mover, at COBO hall, he's volunteering at the soup kitchens,
paving broken roads, stabbing tools
with their own knives while stitching the bullet wounds
in their heads.
Nicolas Cage is Detroit hopped up on frooties & asthma
medicine. He burns the pictures of the prophet in all black that
keep turning up plastered on lamp posts. Can you see his eyes?
Dark brown, almost black, full of emptiness.
Nicolas Cage is Detroit. In blue
spandex & an I love New York shirt
He protects me from demons flying about
the four corners of the clock’s watch.
he ate the Mafia, he bought the bullets, he fired them into your
little handbook. He saved me. He mended my wounds, he
sang me the songs that kept them away, he saved me, he,
is, Detroit. He is my pair of leather pants.
~”Leather Pants,” Naidra Walls

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Crying aloud in green ink on Sunday mornings
His soul found him, nails dipped in pink polish.
It’s summer, 1957 when quality camshafts
became the thing of now
with Pachabel Cannon playing softly on the radio,
he sipped special reserve.
He had bare feet with veins bulging, electric blue toenails to
match the exterior paint of his ’55 Chevrolet with the
tricked out doors and chrome plated wheels.
He was sexy. He was on fire speeding down highway 75
ignoring flashing lights and screaming children.
We can all see him, smell the Crown Royal on his breath
and we are screaming, crying for his life
lost in a smokeless hell
wondering whether or not he’ll be able to crawl from
beneath the shards of glass
twisted metal and melting plastic. We are screaming at you
to help us drag the bright blue paint from the flames and breathe
for it. With our lips we press together and blow our life into his.
We don’t though, we watch, our eyes flooding with thick navy
blood, and with our heads lowered, we march away singing in unison
with the shackles scraping our ankles, Singing our prayer
to the fallen prophet.
~“Poet’s Teardrops,” Naidra Walls

He’s a choir boy
And she’s the town’s loose woman
Who has just walked
Down the aisle for altar call
Her mouth moves gospel
He feels as if his shirt is dirty
Soaked with the wetness
Was this sweat?
The flower in her hair begged him
This whiteness stuck
In brown-burned-straight naps
He could go on
For centuries in books
Lost in her ample bosom
Her hand movements
Almost touch him
There are stitches on her arms
Stretch marks
This beautiful lamenting rain gloried woman
Transfixed him
Brought him
To poetry.
~”Lamenting for Langston Hughes,” Melissa Draughn

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(-after Tyree Guyton’s “Caged Brain”)

Detroit is a city

of caged brains

of fogged eyes

that refuse to see

through a wall

where we want to go:

of singing mouths

that want to cry out

to the world about

the talents inside

our bodies, bodies

like wild horses

trying to be broken

of muscled arms

that want to wrap up entire libraries,

museums, & history.
Damfibadw
of skilled fingers
that manipulate
our imaginations
like we’re puppets
of rooted legs
that refuse to uproot
so we can climb
over hot iron walls
of hearts that pump
oxygen to those brains
so that if they get
big enough, maybe,
just maybe, we can
bust out of that cage
& grow to become
beautiful flowers.

~”Jailbreak,” Quincy Vanderbilt

The effect is often stream of consciousness like Joyce’s Ulysses, thoughts first
started, then interrupted, then re-started, repeated, and teased out. The words
are not new, but the poets’ playfulness (the “Cage” that protects and fires I
“bullets” into “little handbooks” in one poem but “cages” (contains) brains and
talent in another or “Pachabel Cannon” [sic]---the contrapuntal music of
Pachelbel’s Canon and the big gun---“playing softly”), and they suggest a
different logic, like the unlabeled metaphors of schizophrenics. The phrasing and

pace (and the lack of punctuation and the line breaks in the written form) create

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increasingly complex levels of meaning, seemingly unrehearsed, as if created on
the spot, through the vocal stress-alternating-with-release in the syncopated
rhythms of sermon-poems meant to startle and provoke: Your plane of reality is
not my plane of reality---welcome to my world. Naidra Walls, one of the poets,
told me later, “I write poetry because it’s more free and unrestricting than other
types of writing. But, performing poetry is what gives me the rush. It’s the meat
of the business. It’s all about being open to the world and watching them digest
you.” Tapping the performative nature of language in this instance, I argue,
allows her to take off her mask, or, as Diane Brunner has suggested, to exist for
a few moments in the liminal space “between the masks” she feels compelled to
wear. For the audience, it is also about acquiescing to the pre-performance
disclaimer of intent to offend, hearing the sermon-like emphasis and cadence of
the words, and, then, seeing eyes flash and coy smiles after for the work they
have done. Amen.

Indeed, Kristeva found both children and artists to be among the most
transgressive individuals. Performance artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo
Gomez Pena, for example, presented themselves in a “cage performance” on the
streets of several major cities in Europe and the United States as “Two
Undiscovered Amerindians.” F usco claims in English ls Broken Here that the
intent of their “reverse ethnography” was to create a satirical discourse on
Western notions of the exotic, primitive other by “performing” the identity of the
other for primarily white audiences (37) and to studythe responses their work

invoked. She and Pena created their performance within the context of the

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historical Western practice of putting on public display “aboriginal samples” of
people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas for aesthetic, scientific, and
entertainment purposes as “proof” of the natural superiority” of European
civilization. They wanted to call these ideas into question, forcing contradictory
knowledge into the open, and unsettle the white spectator as a “global consumer”
of exotic cultures (53).

But, ironically, many people in their audience “misinterpreted” what they
saw. They believed, instead, that Fusco and Pena actually were the exotic
others they were “performing.” Some people tried to feed them bananas while
others castigated those “in charge” of the exhibit for treating them inhumanely.
One of the “zoo guards” for the Chicago exhibit who knew intellectually that
Fusco and Pena were just “performing” was so disturbed by his own cognitive
dissonance that he had to leave the performance. In my recent correspondence
with her, Coco Fusco expressed the hope that her work could, nevertheless, be
considered rhetorical in the tactical, “productive” sense, for its transformation of
institutional structures, appropriating them momentarily for “unauthorized”
purposes, and then disappearing--—blocking to some extent promoters’
expectations of “profit.” But, as she wryly observed, “In the current political
climate it is difficult to find positive interpretations of the kind of cultural processes
lengagein."3

De Certeau suggests, however, that what is important is “the
transformation, and the invention of still unsuspected mechanisms that will allow

us to multiply the transformations” (152). Through such practices, people can

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manipulate and defy structuring codes and cultural institutions and, over time,
displace them. Thomas Kuhn tells us in The Copernican Revolution that science
itself is not immune to this process of transformation: It took more than a hundred
and fifty years after his death for Gallileo’s quiet assertion that, nevertheless, the
earth moves to transform Western thought. Over that time, under the domination
of the Catholic Church the common belief in an earth—centered universe was
“transformed from an essential sign of sanity to an index, first, of inflexible
conservatism, then of excessive parochialism, and finally of complete fanaticism”
(227).

Plato had worried about rhetoric’s tactical ability to play with and upon
language, “turning” it in order to manipulate the divinely established order to
alternative ends. Perhaps he was right to worry. Tropes, de Certeau notes,
allow ordinary language to recover the “ruses, displacements, ellipses, etc., that
scientific reason has attempted to eliminate from operational discourses in order
to constitute ‘proper’ meanings” (24). For him, rhetoric provides models for the
various types of tactics, maneuvers “related to the ways of changing (seducing,
persuading, making use of) the will of another,” and he particularly recognizes
the sophists for the way “their theories inscribe tactics in a long tradition of
reflection on the relationships between reason and particular actions and
situations” (xx). Because the power of the dominant culture operates
strategically, it is thus limited to. its “proper” place and, so, is open to subversion

through tactics that can occur anywhere.

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Thus, I see language operating on a “continuum of productivity,” so to
speak, from simple flexibility of expression to complex combinative syntactical
meanings to the rehearsal of constructed/performative stances to
transgressive/transformational awareness (crooked awareness) that emerges as
unprecedented knowledge. And, I argue that rhetoric, conceived as a “tactic”
capable of breaking the hegemonic enclosure and as an art of productive
knowledge---a rhetoric of creativity, can be the vehicle for moving language from
one end of this operational continuum to the other, changing “the [ideologic] ritual
of performance [that simply ‘mouths’ the ‘party line’],” as Diane Brunner
suggests, “into a transformative ritual,” (114), critique that is social, because it
depends for its development on responsesfrom others, and generative or
creative---capable of producing knowledge that is novel and sustainable. The
strategically deployed rhetoric of dominant cultural forces, on the other hand,
attempts to arrest the natural fluidity of language as it operates on this continuum
in order to control it and the meanings made of it.

Rhetoric as a Strategy of Power Relations

Rhetoric deployed in the service of reproducing a culture’s regimes of
truth, however, reflects a militaristic attitude that seeks to secure the “proper”
and, thus, privilege space over time (containment over contingency). As such, I
argue, rhetoric can be/has been “mis-placed” and stripped of its generative
potential, forced to fit another logic. and fulfill another purpose. Atwill notes that
rhetoric’s long-standing concern in the humanist tradition has been “the

production of a particular ‘kind’ of subject,” a properly disciplined “cultural hero”

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deliberately separated from evolving social and political contexts in order to
protect “specific lines of power and efface social and historical difference”
(Rhetoric 40). Thus, rhetoric itself can be/has been “turned” from the productive
(pOtentially creative but also potentially threatening) work of in(ter)vention and
made-over, molded into the disciplinary tool of dominating forces interested in
defending the “proper,” ensuring the production of a normative subject who
conforms to their values and expectations, represents a certain reality, and
maintains the system through a law that inscribes itself on bodies.

Indeed, Antonio Gramsci makes the rather convincing argument in his
Prison Notebooks that “willing consent” is every bit as important as any economic
or political constraint in securing the lines of power over the long term.
Hegemony depends on the ability of dominant elite to make its ideology appear
to coincide with the interests of dominated individuals by exploiting the
commonalities between them, thus making them think their interests are being
served and garnering their consent. And, as Gramsci also noted, “Every
relationship of ‘hegemony’ is an educational relationship” (350).

Plato, of course, used rhetoric in this way. In Phaedrus and Gorgias he
distinguished his rhetoric as “true” and contrary to the “false” rhetoric practiced by
his rivals the sophists. For him, true rhetoric was the use of the power of
discourse to attain ideal truth, not merely to persuade others of “probable “truth
in the manner of the sophists. Indeed, true rhetoric in Plato’s view allowed the

“virtuous” rhetor only two legitimate tasks: He could use “any available means”

to impart truth he had already attained to an ignorant audience as long as he

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kept their best interests in mind (a justifiable deception of others “for their own
good”). Or, he could “work out” the truth by talking the matter through with his
student, thereby correcting the student’s (and presumably his own) mistaken
beliefs.

The sophists, on the other hand, regarded truth as tentative, as a function
of kairos, of time and of social and historical contexts, and as accessible only
through discourse. For them, human perception was the only available source of
knowledge in any discipline, and language the vehicle for articulating it. Indeed,
some scholars consider sophistic thought crucial to the paradigm shift associated
with the "Greek Enlightenment.” However, Plato’s denunciation of the rhetoric
practiced by the sophists as “false” and as merely manipulative, according to
Bizzell and Herzberg, became “authoritative" in Western thought and was a likely
factor in the loss of sophistic texts (22).

The conflict between Plato and the sophists Protagoras and lsocrates,
according to Atwill, may be traced to the differences in their views of knowledge,
the knowing subject, and the attainment of excellence (virtue) (19). Despite what
some have understood, Protagoras’ claim that “man is the measure of all things”
may not be the origin of the humanism’s focus on man as the ultimate standard
of knowledge and value. Atwill’s research suggests that Protagoras was
referring, instead, to man-in-particular and a subjectivity contingent on a great
number of specific characteristics, including the nature of human perception itself
( 18). The sophists maintained that knowledge is limited by the physical and

perceptual abilities of humans and by their particular social and historical

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circumstances. Thus, a human being’s perception of the world is necessarily
human-—-absolute truth in any form is, in their view, simply unavailable. Bizzell
and Herzberg note that Dissoi Logoi, a short, anonymously written sophistic
treatise on cultural relativism, “does not argue that there is no difference in
meaning between good and bad, seeme and disgraceful, just and unjust, or
other value pairs. Rather, [it agues that] the assignment of a particular value
depends on social and historical circumstances. . . [The sophists] saw the
possibilities of communities uniting on grounds not of a common humanity but a
common recognition that humanity could express itself in many different ways,
not subject to ranking by an absolute standard that could mark some human
expressions or customs for annihilation” (23).

According to Susan Jarratt, the sophists may be credited with the
invention of teaching as a profession (82). They linked education with philosophy
by preparing men, not for the contemplative life Plato claimed to be necessary for
the attainment of ideal knowledge, but for an active life in the affairs of the polls,
learning to make wise decisions recognizing the limits of what is possible for
humans to know, thus reflecting the more “democratic” nature of the society they
imagined. lsocrates, for example, claimed to teach philosophy, but, unlike Plato,
he never claimed to impart wisdom to his students. He maintained that only
knowledge that took advantage of kairos, “overreaching” and “seizing the
advantage” to enable acts of social and political intervention, was worthy of the

title “philosophy.” Bizzell and Herzberg suggest that, in effect, his argument was

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that “the public business won’t wait while the philosopher pursues his abstruse
studies” (25).

Additionally, the instruction of lsocrates and his predecessor Protagoras
did not link knowledge to excellence as Plato did. As Atwill notes, they regarded
knowledge as neither “neutral” nor tied to a specific political or ethical ideal, and
although it was concerned with the production of Character, its ethos was “not
guided by a single model of the. subject orjudged by a single model of virtue”
(21). lsocrates purposefully aimed to teach the rhetoric of productive knowledge,
honing the ability to “overreach” received knowledge and “seize the advantage.”
He. wanted his students to learn to see in a particular moment of discourse “a
point of indeterminacy, [where they could] overreach a boundary, and intervene
in systems of classification and standards of value. . . “ (45). Atwill further notes,
“The lines of order that Plato’s aréte secures are the very boundaries that
productive knowledge will transgress” (44).

By the first century B. C. E., the Romans had completed a
“standardization” of educatiOn based on rhetoric for the children of privileged
classes, but they also embraced the productive nature of rhetoric as imaginatio,
stressing the importance of rhetorical invention. And, as a repository for the
classical sense of creative “potential,” invention remained one of five canons of
rhetoric until the Renaissance. But, in the turbulent and dangerous times in
which he lived, as a matter of prudence, Quintilian began to question rhetoric’s
status as a productive art, preferring survival instead, and to focus on character,

developing “the good man” and training him “to speak well.” Increasingly,

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rhetoric was regarded as a “neutral tool” for the management of ethics, politics,
and philosophy, and teachers instructed students in its proper or normal use.
The handbook tradition arose from Quintilian’s efforts and continues to this day

- (6). Rhetoric as an art of productive knowledge disappeared or, at the very least,
went underground. And, in the medieval period that followed, classical learning
as it had evolved from Quintilian’s educational project came to suit the mission of
scholasticism, and rhetoric was thus bound in service to Christian revelation
where adherence to the Law is of primary importance.

7 Renaissance humanism, however, was primarily responsible for
transforming rhetoric “from an art of social and political intervention into the
curricular content of a humanist education . . . acceptable,” Atwill suggests, “only
if one dismisses . . . alternative rhetorical traditions and overlooks the context in
which Quintilian’s art was formulated” (32). Emphasizing the quality of individual
performance instead, humanism viewed individuals as making history by
developing their particular talents within the constraints of their historical
contexts. Thus, as Bizzell and Herzberg observe, “individuality” was “both
historically constituted and an act of will. . . . [a] notion of self as performance
[giving] an aesthetic cast to humanist scholarship that attracted the interest of
aristocrats “ (468).

At the same time, rhetoric began to struggle with deductive logic for
recognition as the standard of intellectual inquiry. Peter Ramus attacked the
Classical rhetoric of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian and stripped it entirely of its

creative potential by identifying the canons of invention and arrangement as the

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rightful concerns of logic, separating them from rhetoric, and limiting rhetoric to
the consideration of style and delivery alone. With the rise of modern science,
however, inductive reason would supplant deductive logic as the new standard of
inquiry and overturn the Ramist doctrines. All five classical canons were then
restored to rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it never fully
recovered its generative epistemological sense. Enlightenment rhetorics such as
Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres further conflated rhetoric with
matters of style and delivery taking as their interest literary criticism, ornate
stylistic features, and matters of correctness and taste.

‘ Against this artistic/literary sense of rhetoric, the emerging positivistic
discourse of science shifted the generation of knowledge from rhetorical
invention to empirical research. Science rejected rhetoric as being concerned
with mere appearances and with artistic genres in which truth was “not crucial.”
Under assault from the Royal Society of London (established in 1660), rhetoric’s
“legitimate” concern became the transparent articulation of “proven” truth written
down in a plain, unambiguous style, more demonstrative than productive. Thus, I
suggest, the creative, generative role of rhetoric in intellectual processes was
allowed to atrophy. Rhetoric was devalued as a “mere skill,” a method no longer
valued in intellectual inquiry, meant only to convey the truth of hypotheses
already proven, like the practice mentioned earlier of having mathematics
students work out proofs that have already been solved. The shaping power of
language apparent in both popular and academic discourse was condemned,

and the role of rhetor once vital in the political life of the polls was reduced to that

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of a “technician” whose only concerns were clarity and correctness. The
pedagogical assumption that rhetoric is a mere skill and that disputes its creative
power continues today in many institutions.

Various scholars have linked the earlier disappearance of rhetoric as an
art of productive knowledge and the rejection of classical rhetoric in general to
the rise of modern science, the emergence of the middle class and market
economies, and the appearance of new rhetorical theories like empiricism in
science and notions of taste and aesthetics in philosophy. Under these
conditions, resistance to the idea of rhetoric as a generative political, social, and
communal act grew, reinforced by the doubt that humans could be persuaded to
act through interaction with each other. This doubt grew more powerful as the
humanistic and bourgeois subjectivity of the autonomous, rational individual who
knows itself through reason became entrenched in Western thought.

Bizzell and Herzberg suggest that the rise of science made culture-bound
knowledge seem “second rate.” Individuals “performed" by cOnforming to social
conventions, but these performances were merely “a facade that would allow one
to live comfortably or even profitably in a society in which conventions happened
to hold current. . . . Behind the facade of one’s performance, one remained alone
with one’s private thoughts, to test them for the presence of any knowledge that
Could be scientifically established . . . [a] moral climate [that] produced public
men who were consummate stylists but whose intellectual life seemed quite
divorced from their political functions” (478). Education, thus, became a matter

of teaching “general rules” within the humanist curriculum where a rhetoric of

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productive knowledge could have little currency. Atwill notes that the
“depoliticization” of rhetoric made it a far more effective instrument of social,
political, and economic control, “As long as the rhetorical paideia [of humanistic
education] promised to produce the normative subject, that subject would both
embody and reproduce existing lines of power. More philosophical traditions
would produce normative bodies of knowledge and normative descriptions of
social realities equally effective at naturalizing contingent social relations and
universalizing specific class values” (41 ). But, as Bourdieu argues it is precisely
at this point that “politics begins.” The perceived stability of the social order
depends on its imposition of “schemes of classification,” underlying a
fundamental adherence to the established order. But, I argue that a rhetoric of
productive knowledge---of creativity---is capable of intervening in the systems of
classification and standards of value protected by various socio-cultural
institutions, bringing them into “objective crisis,” and leading to “the denunciation
of this tacit contract of adherence to the established order which defines the
original doxa; in other words, political subversion presupposes cognitive

subversion, a conversion of the vision of the world” (Language 127-128).

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Notes

1 Writing about scientific method in Induction and Intuition, Peter Medawar
contends that it is unlikely that mathematical theorems are “discovered” merely
by using deductive reasoning. Most of them required something like “intuition” or
“inspiration” and were only laterjustified by logical derivation in “a rite of
discovery and a ritual of proof” (42). Medawar suggests, however, that
mathematicians and scientists have been loathe to admit that they rely on such
vague processes, “Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in
scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the
curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we
ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are

almost always different processes . . . (26).

2 In set theory, Cantor determined that if a set is infinite, the
corresponding cardinal number cannot be one of the finite cardinal numbers, so
he called it a “transfinite” (or infinite) cardinal number. He also showed that
infinity plus any division of it is also infinity and that infinity also comes in an
endless number of different levels. He found, for example, that the same number
of points existed in an inch as in an infinite line---from each point in infinite space

a line could be drawn to a unique point on a one-inch line.

3 As “difficult” as Fusco finds the current political climate, however, the
political climate in schools for teachers and students has always been

challenging. Schooling is the instrument the dominant culture uses to insure

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maintenance of the status quo and reproduce its relations of power, so
conformity and the production of “proper” language is valued over participative or
performative language that may challenge cherished notions. As such, then,
critical projects of schooling that attempt to tap the performative nature of
language and transgress the boundaries of conventional behavior and language
use are possible, but not without significant risk and sacrifice. Deviating from
expected “normal" sChool behavior may be regarded as a threat to power and

may be punished.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Difference Difference Makes

l was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

The act of classification or applying concepts, as Chapter Three
suggested, is an important and pervasive feature of human thought, one that has
proved crucial to human survival and evolution. The neocortex of the brain
constantly “filters” and “Chunks” the unwieldy amounts of sense data individuals
take in, making it manageable. So, as Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated, ‘
individuals see “circles” where the figures are actually incomplete. Instead of
laboriously processing each point on a figure separately, the human brain notes
the presence of certain features and “perceives” a circle. Thus, by being able to
quickly “decode" and classify phenomena (mentally completing the circle)
humans are able to function more efficiently in ways that serve their survival and
development. So, it is an important function. But, completing such “circles” does
not occur without the risk of error. As Barnes argued (Chapter Three), concepts
are learned from authoritative sources within particular physical and social
environments, but the validity of a particular concept is only partial at best
because, both naturally and as a result of conditioning (enculturation and formal
education), perception filters out certain aspects and channels the rest into a
single conceptual category. Language itself is an example par excellence of

classification---words and the categories to which they refer simplify and

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generalize the complex amounts of perceptual data human beings take in and
tend to make them see the categories as actual bodies of knowledge rather than
as the human constructions they are.

In the preface to The Order of Things, Michel Foucault refers to a
particular passage from Jorge Luis Borges. He claims to cite from “a certain
Chinese encyclopaedia” a taxonomy of animals from a different system of
thought that'contrasts with his own, one that upsets and threatens to collapse the
“age-old distinction between the Same and the Other,” and that, by stark
comparison, also suggests a limitation of Western thought (xv). The Chinese
encyclopaedia carefully distinguishes between the “real" animals (“stray dogs,”
“suckling pigs,” and “those that from a long way off look like flies”) and those that
are imaginary. But what most amuses Foucault is the juxtaposition and the
“narrowness” of distance separating the real animals from the imaginary ones,
marked only by a simple alphabetical series linking each category to the others,
in the same system of classification. A series can, by definition, proliferate, and
proliferation is always a threat to established order. Nevertheless, this startling
juxtaposition suggests to him “we shall never succeed in defining a stable
relation of contained to container between each of them and that which includes
them all” (xvii). This notion is repeated in mathematical set theory where defining
one subset of a given set implicitly defines another subset of the same set (the
part that is not included in the first subset), exhibiting a similar instability.

Georg Cantor defined sets (including words) as collections or distinct

objects of human cognition. Each member of Cantor’s “crisp” sets either belongs

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to a particular set or does not. Sets may be represented as circles that form
spheres of reference (like a Venn diagram) or, as Cantor suggested, universes of
discourse contained in particular contexts and separated from what does not
belong. But Cantor’s theory of crisp sets is troubled by paradoxes, like “the
paradox of the heap,” called “sorites” (McNeill and Freiberger 26). This paradox
asks when a heap of sand is no longer a “heap." After removing one grain?
Two? Ten? Cantor’s theory resolves this problem by simply deciding on an
arbitrary dividing point--—a certain number of grains make a heap, and that
number minus one is not a heap. For some thinkers, the vagueness of the
boundaries of the heap (and other similar paradoxes) make the assumptions of
Cantor’s sets problematic and call into question the “crisp” applications of all
concepts because they involve making contingent and revisable judgments that
similarities outweigh differences, a conviction that arises not from the concepts
themselves, but from operation of perception and cognition in human agents.
Foucault contends that the primary codes in everyculture that govern “its
language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values,
the hierarchy of its practices” establish for every person the proper order of
things (The Order xx). But, between these“ordering codes” and philosophical
interpretations of them, he searches for the “pure experience” of order itself, “the
inner law, the hidden network” that can connect a wide range of contradictory
taxonomies, observations, and interpretations. He detects that this underlying
invisible network establishes the conditions for the possibility of alternative

knowledge capable of calling all the codes of language, perception, practice, and

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theory into question. In the “non-space of language,” Foucault writes, unstated
relationships create a network Of irreducible alterity, and “in the blank spaces of
this grid . . . order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in
silence for the moment of its expression” (xx).

In Metamagical Themes, Douglas Hofstadter explores the internal
structure of concepts and how they form multiple “conceptual molecules" by
breaking down into sub-concepts, bonding with other concepts and sub-
concepts, and “spinning out” variations. Thus, concepts, in his view, have a way
of “slipping into" one another---any concept, “any static, frozen perception,” is
surrounded by an “’implicit sphere of hypothetical variations’” (247). Moreover,
differing contexts provide different angles from which to consider concepts and,
thus, contribute an element of the unexpected to the potential for variation.
Hofstadter contends that the “crux of creativity resides in the ability to
manufacture variations on a theme” (249), in proliferation. And, he deflects the
protest that such variations are somehow trivial compared to the “invention of the
theme itself” and that the cognitive acts of “geniuses” like Einstein and others
transcend those of ordinary individuals by pointing out that every idea in the
history of science has been built upon thousands of related ideas, thus echoing
Bateson’s contention that it is the network that “thinks”---the network that
surfaces creativity through human agents.

Hofstadter points out, for example, that Einstein did not begin with the idea
of simultaneity being non-absolute, but when he had to confront that possibility,

he was willing to let it “slip.” This “fluidity of mind,” guided by certainty about

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other concepts he considered “unslippable,” gave rise to the theory of special
relativity, shattering previous conceptions of how the universe works. Hofstadter
argUes that creativity resulting in “new” knowledge depends on this
“nonde/iberate yet nonaccidenta/ slippage [that] permeates our mental
processes, and is the very crux of fluid thought. . . . spinning out variations is
what comes naturally to the human mind” (259) and what codification,
formalization, and the in-scribed order of things Foucault examines wants to rule
out . The fluidity of mind Hofstadter believes is a key feature of creativity is
driven by what I have come to refer to as “crooked awareness” (a term borrowed
from a poetry lesson developed by my colleague Tonya Perry). I define “crooked
awareness” as the readiness to see what appears to be the “same” differently, to
see “sideways,” to rethink old codes, and to map from one set of entities to
another (think metaphorically). For Hofstadter, that ideas both extend and create
other ideas, that mapping from one to another is possible, and that compelling
mappings are perceptible to beings willing to look for them is enough to insure
that it will happen as the following narrative demonstrates.
Proving Fermat’s Last Theorem

Seventeenth century mathematician Pierre de Fermat wrote a note in the
margin of one of his books stating that he had discovered “a truly marvelous
proof" for a particular proposition---a variation on the Pythagorean theorem.
Most people above the age often are familiar with this theorem: In a right-angled
triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the

other two sides. Simon Singh notes in Fermat’s Enigma, however, that Fermat

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claimed to have a proof that the same equation could not be solved for any
exponent larger than two, but he left no record of it, only the tantalizing note in
the margin of one of his books that the margin was too small to contain it. Thus,
the theorem became known as Fermat’s Last Theorem and passed into
mathematical lore.

As a young boy in the mid twentieth century, Andrew Wiles came upon
this problem in a book from his local library. It captured his imagination because
it was familiar, because it looked simple, even to a ten-year—old, and because
lack of a proof for this theorem had become somewhat of a cause celebre in the
field of mathematics. Singh reports that, in his early teens, Wiles had first tried to
attack the problem as Fermat might have done so, figuring that he probably knew
as much math as Fermat would have known at that time. Then, he tried again
later in college using methods developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, but to no avail. When he entered graduate school, he was forced to
temporarily abandon this challenge because, as he observed, “The problem with
working on Fermat was that you could spend years getting nowhere. It’s fine to
work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the
way---even if you don’t solve it at the end of the day. The definition of a good
mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem
itself” (Singh 163). Serious mathematicians rarely risk wasting effort on a
problem that, beyond the challenge, is unlikely to lead to meaningful
mathematics. So, in 1975, in the interest of doing “meaningful research" in the

field of mathematics, he temporarily gave up on Fermat, and his advisor helped

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him find a new challenge in the study of elliptic curves, a prophetic move, it turns
out.

Wiles started thinking about Fermat again eleven years later when he
learned through casual conversation that a colleague had proved a link between
the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture (an idea respected in the field of mathematics
at that time but unproven) and Fermat’s Theorem. At that moment, he knew that
to prove Fermat, he had to prove this conjecture, and because proving
Taniyama-Shimura constituted a modern mathematics problem, he considered it
worthy of his attention.

Taniyama had discovered a relationship between modular forms and
elliptic equations, a finding that led to a revolution in number theory. (Further
evidence for this relationship had been compiled by Shimura after Taniyama’s
tragic suicide, but it, nevertheless, had remained unproven.) Singh notes that
this finding was profound because it suggested to Wiles an important relationship
between objects that were distant from each other in the field of mathematics. As
Singh points out, it hinted at an underlying “truth” that promised to enrich both
studies just as scientists originally studied electricity and magnetism as two
completely separate phenomena until they realized that electric currents
generated magnetic fields and that magnetic fields could generate electricity in
wires near them. These findings led to the creation of dynamos and electric
motors and also to the understanding that light itself results from the harmonic
oscillation of magnetic and electric fields (184). In the same way, Taniyama-

Shimura suggested a potential connection between two completely different

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mathematical worlds, allowing them to “speak” to one another, in the words of
mathematician Barry Mazur, allowing “simple intuitions in the modular world [to]
translate into deep truths in the elliptic world, and conversely” (191).

Although this task required seven years, Wiles did develop the proof and
Claimed the prize attached to it in 1994. The details of it are far beyond my
mathematical understanding and the scope of this paper, but there are several
points that can be drawn from Wiles’ achievement that supports the view of
creativity I have been developing. First, difference makes a difference---re-
seeing concepts with “crooked awareness,” with a readiness to make the familiar
strange and cast off usual ways of thinking, has the potential for surfacing
alternate knowledge and other possible worlds. Wiles tried to find patterns and
tried to do calculations that explained a little piece here and there and that fit in
with his previous conceptual understandings of some part of mathematics that
would clarify the problem, but ultimately he had to make an intuitive heuristic leap
onto new ground and, as Polanyi suggested, “risk talking complete nonsense.”
In Wiles’ own words reported in an online interview with Nova, “Sometimes [the
work] would involve . . . looking it up in a book to see how it’s done there.
Sometimes it was a question of modifying things a bit, doing a little extra
calculation. And, sometimes I realized that nothing that had ever been done
before was any use at all. Then I just had to find something completely new” (4).
In other words, Wiles had to be “crookedly” aware---to see sideways, and to be

willing to let some concepts “slip” even as he was certain about others.

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Second, although Wiles made a significant contribution and worked
relentlesSly and mostly in isolation to develop the proof, the completed proof was
actually the work of many people over 350 years as Singh’s history of the
problem suggests. Helen G. Grundman, associate professor of mathematics at
Bryn Mawr College, in an “Ask the Experts” segment of Scientific American, put it
this way, “The proof we now know required the development of an entire field of
mathematics that was unknown in Fermat’s time. The theorem itself is very easy
to state and so may seem deceptively simple; [while] you do not’need to know a
lot of mathematics to understand the problem . . . you do need to know a lot of
mathematics in order to solve it. It is still an open question whether there may be
a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem that involves only mathematics and methods
that were known in Fermat’s time” (1 ). So, although Wiles was the agent who
pulled together all of the work that had been done, his success in developing the
proof depended heavily on that previous work---the network of connections
among the best mathematical minds spanning three centuries: Euler, Gauss,
Germain, Lame, Lebesque, Fourier, Kummer, Dedekind, Taniyama, Shimura,
Well, Mazur, Frey, Ribet---to name just a few. Nevertheless, I also wonder if
constructing the proof would have taken seven years had Wiles not chosen to
work in isolation although he makes it clear that secrecy about such matters is
common practice in the field of mathematics.

Third, according to Singh, in unifying the elliptic and modular world
through the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, Wiles provided mathematics with a

shortcut to many other proofs as well, “Classic unsolved elliptical problems dating

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all the way back to the ancient Greeks could now be reexamined using all the
available modular tools and techniques” (282). His proof also stimulated others
to prove other conjectures bridging other areas of mathematical thought. In
effect, it transformed mathematics. Ken Ribet, the mathematician who made the
initial breakthrough on Taniyama-Shimura, said it this way, “There’s an important
psychological repercussion which is that people now are able to forge ahead on
other problems that they were too timid to work on before. The landscape is
different . . . “ (282). The opening Wiles’ proof provided made new dialogues
possible, changed the context, and created potential for further developments---
encouraging the willingness to let concepts “slip” and a readiness to re—see
things “crookedly” and to produce variations on other themes.

Potential as Hofstadter speaks of it is also central to Bakhtin’s thinking.
Bakhtin believed that the “potential” for going beyond or extending given
knowledge makes life “unfinalizable.” Through the co-creativity and innovation
that occurs in the encounter with otherness and difference, something results
that would not have occurred otherwise, “Something that never existed before,
something absolutely new and unrepeatable . . . [that] always has some relation
to value (the true, the good, the beautiful, and so forth) . . . is always created out
of something given (language, an observed phenomenon of reality, an
experienced feeling, the speaking subject himself, something finalized in his own
world, and so forth). What is given is completely transformed in what is created”
(Speech 119-120). Consisting of at least three components---two people and the

relationship between them, the dialogical encounter, thus, implies a different

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logic---not either/or, but both/and---interaction and relational thinking that results
not in the “containment” of meaning in synthesis as in Hegel’s dialectic, but in
something “different,” a whole that is more than the sum of its parts and accounts
for the relationships among them as well. The idea of word as a “two-sided act”
suggests that, over time, one conceptual viewpoint (or word) leads to another in
an infinite chain. In response to each other, the environment in which they find
themselves, and the resulting interrelational framework that develops, people
engage in constantly changing interactions and relationships that make possible
the creation of new complexities (as well as new identities). What Bakhtin refers
to as the “surplus of humanness,” inherent in the interrelationship between and
among people dialogically engaged with each other, makes these complexities
“real". The very nature of creativity, then, would seem to be dialogical. As
Bakhtin Wrote in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, “[Nothing] conclusive has yet
taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and. about the world has
not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future
and will always be in the future” (166).
Matisse Picasso

, This notion was aptly demonstrated for me in a recent exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art (alternate location in Queens, New York) of the works of
Henri Matisse shown in apposition with those of Pablo Picasso. Although
Matisse was several years older than Picasso, they were friends and rivals for
almost fifty years. The two men were reportedly very different: Matisse was

aloof and proper while Picasso was difficult and led a rather unconventional life.

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According to the exhibit program, as a consequence, art historians have more
often considered their work in opposition rather than in apposition. Matisse is
regarded as a colorist---the eye is drawn to the vibrant colors and color
combinations he used, and he created harmonious compositions. Picasso, on
the other hand, is regarded as more conceptual in expression, interested more in
form than color and more in tension than harmony.

Although I have long appreciated the works of both artists, until I
experienced this exhibit I did not understand how Matisse’s work informed and
influenced Picasso’s and vice versa. I am, of course, aware that artists in certain
periods, schools, and movements of art exhibit similar characteristics, and they
likely shared ideas and influenced each other, but beyond this understanding I
have imagined that artists, like mathematicians, work alone, producing work that
is “original” in the sense of the meaning it projects-—-that is, in the sense of what it
knows---and In the way that meaning is represented. Seeing the works of
Matisse and Picasso together, one responding and relating to the other while yet
producing “something else," further reinforced for me the dialogic nature of
meaning and what human beings can know if they are willing to attend closely
and with care to an-other. As Picasso said of Matisse, “No one has ever looked
at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more
carefully than he” (Matisse Picasso).

One of my favorite pairings of paintings by the two artists is Matisse’s
Goldfish and Palette beside Picasso’s Harlequin. Both paintings are Cubist

conceptions and include in their content representations of the artists as artists,

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the palette, easel, and painting in the context of the studio. Matisse’s painting is
composed of large, bold geometric shapes in blue, black, and shaded white with,
as its focal point, a carefully rendered still life---an orange with two goldfish in a
bowl---a painting within the painting in process on the easel. Matisse’s thumb is
clearly visible in the pallet in the painting and a faint outline of his arm extends
back from it into space outside the painting itself where I imagine him standing.
Picasso’s painting is also composed of simple large geometric shapes in
black, brown, gray, and shades of tan. The exhibit program notes that a year
earlier Picasso had begun to add flat pieces of newspaper and other materials to
his compositions, giving them a sculptural dimension in the manner of a collage.
The only detailed part of the painting is the red and green geometry of the
costumed harlequin figure whose black, one-eyed head is flattened like an
Egyptian hieroglyph and barely visible against the black background. It has no
other distinguishing feature save what looks like a waggling tongue. It occupies
the space on the easel, another painting within a painting, and appears to be
holding onto the palette, a rather interesting self-referential statement: Who is the
“trickster" here? I had the distinct feeling that Picasso himself was also there in
the painting dressed all in black (I have seen many photographs of him dressed
this way), but invisible against the black background perhaps engaged in a tug-
of-war over the palette with the harlequin figure he was in the process of painting.
According to the program, Matisse saw Picasso’s Harlequin in the gallery
of Leonce Rosenberg, thought that it was one of the best works he had produced

and playfully observed, as Rosenberg reported, “that ‘his goldfish’ had led

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Picasso to the harlequin” (Matisse Picasso). But, as the program also noted,
Matisse’s Goldfish and Palette itself had already been influenced by Picasso. Its
flat geometric shapes mimicked the collage elements Picasso had begun to add
to his paintings a year earlier. Matisse’s decision to make use of this effect also
foreshadowed the “cut out” works he would produce near the end of his life.

The paintings I have described above are just one example of the
apparent rapport that existed between the works of these artists. Matisse is
reported to have said to Picasso, “We must talk to each other as much as we
can. When one of us dies, there will be some things that the other will never be
able to talk of with anyone else” (Matisse Picasso). Indeed, when Matisse died in
1954, leaving Picasso his odalisques (paintings of Arab dancers), within two
months he began to paint a series of paintings depicting them in a harem---
variations on a painting by Delacroix both artists had admired. The exhibit
program notes that late in their lives they had often spoken of how the “great
Chain” of artists continued when another artist kept a predecessor alive in his
work. Clearly, in Bakhtin’s sense of the two-sided act, each artist responded to
and extended the work of the other to produce something new in his own work
without, nevertheless, sacrificing his own point of view. Bakhtin wrote of this act
of “aesthetic love" or “aesthetic seeing” in Toward a Philosophy of the Act,

In my emotional-volitional consciousness the other is in his own

place, insofar as I love him as another, and not as myself. The

other’s love of me sounds emotionally in an entirely different way to

me . . . than the same love of me sounds to him, and it obligates

him and me to entirely different things (46). . . . The valued

manifoldness of Being as human . . . can present itself only to a

loving contemplation. Only love is capable of holding and making
fast all this multiformity and diversity, without losing and dissipating

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it. . . . Only un-self—interested love . . . only lovingly interested

attention, is capable of generating a sufficiently intent power to

encompass and retain the concrete manifoldness of Being, without

impoverishing and schematizing it (64).
Aesthetic love, then, is born of respect for another and entails taking the time to
attend closely to the concrete particulars of his or her life, that is, “knowing” or re-
cognizing others, although and because they are different, as always already a
part of oneself and thereby avoiding fixing or finalizing (and essentializing) them
in the “difference between”---in the binary opposition of self/other and closing
down the potential for something new. In his examination of trust in dialogical
communities, John Shotter cites Vico and John Dewey in support of Bakhtin to
suggest that rather than acting “out of” any individual plans of their own, people
so engaged act “into” each other and their surroundings, and they act because
they sense the activity being “called out” of them or “required of them” by the
relational nature of the circumstance, as if it were itself a “living agency” (3).
Bakhtin calls this obligation to engage with the other “answerability” (Toward 42),
and he further says, “The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are
determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou). . . .
Not that which takes place within, but that which takes place on the boundary
between one’s own and someone else’s consciousness, on the threshold. . . .
The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion.
To be means to communicate . . . To be means to be for another, and through
the other, for oneself” (Problems 287). But, because humans have been

conditioned to simplify and categorize (to essentialize), to apply concepts and

reduce people and ideas to a fixed order, they tend to close down the operation

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of their own curiosity, the opportunity to “know” difference and to allow it to make
a difference in the surfacing of new knowledge,

Monologism, at its extreme, denies the existence outside itself of

another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities,

another I with equal rights (thou) . . . another person remains wholly

and merely an object of consciousness, not another consciousness.

No response is expected from it that could change anything in the

world of my consciousness. . . . Monologue manages without the

other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality.

. . . It closes down the represented world and represented persons

(The Dialogical 293).

Normative conceptual systems produce a kind of truth (Foucault calls such
systems “regimes of truth”), that separates the “normal” from the “different” and
encourages the fear and repression of difference. Further, it discourages healthy
curiosity about people who are perceived as different and about what they know
from their experience and location in culture. Laura Mulvey, whom Diane
Brunner cites in Between the Masks, distinguishes between curiosity as the
transgressive desire to know difference and fetishism which she says is “born out
of the refusal to see, a refusal to know, and a refusal to accept . . . difference”
(10). The threat of difference, of being forced to consider alternatives to the
established order imposed by the “deep regimes of discourse and practice”
Foucault examined, challenges social, economic, and political identities and can
be profoundly disturbing because it opens up space for countless other
alternatives and disrupts the relative comfort humans find in “certain” knowledge.
The Play of Difference

Jacques-Derrida's neologism differance suggests that the principle of

difference underlies language and the way language constructs the "real" world

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and the proper place of individuals in it by determining what can be perceived (or
not) and what counts as meaning (or not). Thus, as the discussion in chapter
three suggests, language is at the center of the interplay between individuals and
the word, the law that says, "Give me your body, and I will give you meaning and
a word in my discourse" (de Certeau 139). Language, as de Certeau suggests,
wants to continually transform individuals into units of meaning "eager to have or
be a name," eager to "tell the code" (148-149). Much of the bizarre behavior of
individuals common today and reported in other eras as well may be the result of
the desire of people to escape being objects of generalization, to escape the lie
embedded in the subject-object structure of language where each word is a
separate conceptual category that forces people, in the very act of perceiving, to
separate themselves, to draw distinctions between themselves and others
(us/them), and to "measure up." As Heisenberg noted, however, the very act of
measuring (or measuring up) always alters that which is measured.

Derrida saw within the familiar philosophical oppositions "a violent
hierarchy," an act of perception in which one of the two terms wants to control the
other. Derrida believed that it is "not enough simply to neutralize" them. To
deconstrUct is to "fight violence with violence" by first reversing the presiding
hierarchy and then displacing it, overthrowing it, as Gayatri Spivak writes in the
translator‘s preface to Of Grammatology, "in order to reconstitute what is already
inscribed" in another way (lxxvi). I think here again of Escher’s figure-ground
drawings where birds and fish merge and alternately become background fOr

each other. In orderto see the birds we must, it seems, block out the fish and

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privilege the birds and vice versa. Douglas Hofstadter suggested that, indeed,
the humans might be conditioned in a way that makes it difficult for them to hold
concepts in mind that appear to cancel each other out. What they may come to
perceive, however, if they look long enough, is a "shifting" (tessellation) back and
forth continuously between birds and fish that privileges neither. Once a
hierarchy is overturned neither perception is "in control." Each may be
continually subject to displacement and to an "irreducible alterity" that cannot be
essentialized.

Gayatri Spivak situates deconstruction in the context of Derrida's
suggestion that what motivates it may actually be the "desire to reappropriate [a]
text" and "to show [a] text what it 'does not know,” and to forget that, beneath
any re-reading of a text (itself subject to "erasure"), an earlier, imperfectly erased
reading/interpretation (a trace) remains. At the same time, by opening up a text
indefinitely, "placing it in the abyss" (“mettre en abime”), permitting it to fall freely,
deconstruction tries to help us find "a way out of the closure of knowledge" by
disrupting the notion that it is bounded and "out there." In Spivak's words, our
desire is aroused as we become "intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting
bottom . . . [as] a further deconstruction deconstructs deconstruction" (lxxvii).
Paradoxically, then, humans search for a stable "foundation" in the order of the
same while simultaneously desiring difference---the free fall of the abyss. Desire
is, thus, the tool for any deconstruction, Spivak says, because it is "itself a
deconstructive . . . structure that forever differs from (we only desire what is not

ourselves) and defers (desire is never fulfilled) the text of ourselves . . . We must

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do a thing and its opposite, and indeed we [desire] to do both, and so on
indefinitely. . . [It is] a perpetually self-deconstructing movement that is inhabited
by difference" (lxxviii) and, according to Derrida, it is an inevitable operation of all
acts of language.

Difference, thus, is always unstable and beyond control in a way that is at
once tantalizing and maddening (which may explain why people sometimes react
with such rage to the vague uneasiness it produces). It is always one step
removed, just beyond the fingertips. It is meaning never found in the presence of
a single term, but always only in relationship to terms not present, and it finds the
absent term always in play, even if it is never mentioned. The absent term is still
necessary within the system to establish meaning. Thus, meaning is always
deferred or put off because it relies on what is absent. It always points to an-
other, not present but, nevertheless, needed to establish its claim. As Derrida
puts it, "one is only the other deferred, the one differing from other." Although he
argues that neither the word speech nor the word writing is adequate to describe
the play of difference (in that the play of difference inhabits both), in his work
writing becomes a metaphor for difference, an attempt to represent without
"naming" what in language has no name (difference is not an "official" word in the
French lexicon). In describing difference as writing, he is able to reveal the
systematic nature of language that relies on other elements within itself to
represent itself while, at the same time, it “differs from” what it is supposed to
represent and continually “defers" its meaning. As he wrote, “In the play of

representation . . . there are things like reflecting pools and images and infinite

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references from one to the other, but no longer a source, or spring.” Writing, in
Derrida’s view, is unconstrained, play-full, and a powerful metaphor for his
argument that all concepts are subject to deconstruction, leaving the writer of this
work wary of answering questions that ask “what is . . . " and accounting for the
“slipperiness” of an answer to the question of what creativity is.
Thorght as Difference

Why, indeed, does it happen that human thought channels a set of
independent elements into a single concept? At the beginning of the Discourse
on Method, Descartes wrote, “Good sense is the most evenly distributed thing in
the world . . . the power ofjudging well and of distinguishing the true from the
false (which is, properly speaking, what people call ‘Common sense’ or ‘reason,’
is naturally equal in all men . . . ” (1). Like Plato before him, Descartes believed
that thought was naturally inclined toward ideal truth. Writing in Difference and
Repetition, Gilles Deleuze refers to this notion as the “image of thought," defining
“what it means to be and to think” (130). He believes that thought itself is
covered over by “the image of thought” constituted by claims that distort both the
origin and operation of representation,

The ‘sameness’ of the Platonic Idea which serves as the model and

is guaranteed by the Good gives way to the identity of the originary

concept grounded in the thinking subject. The thinking subject
brings to the concept its subjective concomitants: memory,

recognition, and self-consciOusness. . . . When difference is
subordinated by the thinking subject to the identity of the concept
. . . difference in thought disappears. . . . what disappears is that

difference that thinking makes in thought, that genitality of thinking,
that profound fracture of the l . . . (265-266).

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He suggests that the idea that “what everybody knows, and no one can deny”
(common knowledge) has, thus, become the image of thought, tacitly taking the
form of representation and lodging in its discourse. In his view, this traditional
Western philosophical image has “crushed” thought itself under an image of “the
Same and Similar in representation” and betrayed “what it means to think” by
failing to deal with the true nature of difference and repetition (167). Deleuze’s
aim is to open up the possibility of difference being accepted as its own concept
rather than being understood in reference to the same which makes difference a
“difference between,” a negative “not-this.” Instead, he argues that difference
“unfolds” within the Idea as pure horizontal movement (rather than vertical or
hierarchical) and creates a dynamic time and space that corresponds to the Idea
(23). Difference, in other words, forces thought to see “sideways" or, as Bakhtin
put it, “spread out on a plane . . . as an eternal harmony of unmerged voices or
their unceasing and irreconcilable quarrel” (Problems 30). Similarly, Deleuze
sees the horizontal movement of thought-as-difference as a single substance
expressed in multiple ways---“a single voice [raising] the clamour of being”
(Difference 35).

Following Nietzsche, Deleuze suggests that thought, then, does not relate
to truth at all, but is a creative act (Nietzsche xiv), an act of force on other forces,
while truth, rather than the natural disposition Plato and Descartes supposed, is a
part of the regimes of force and a matter of value to be assessed and judged
(Difference 108). As he says, “Beneath the platitude of the negative lies the

world of ‘disparateness’" (267). Deleuze argues, then, that difference is not

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reducible to a difference between concepts---it is “one of a kind” existing between
the conservative order of representation Foucault examines in The Order of
Things---the consensus---what everybody knows--—and “creative disorder or
inspired chaos that can only ever coincide with a historical moment but never be
confused with it” (54). Thus, he repudiates Hegel’s dialectic, insisting that,
“History progresses not by negation . . . but by deciding problems and affirming
differences” (268).

Deleuze argues for thought “sensed” as an encounter with otherness, as
“something in the world [that] forces us to think” (139). This sensed encounter
“perplexes” and forces us to pose a problem . . . to enter into a “discordant playf’
(140). He points out that in the Republic Plato defined this encounter (“that
which is essentially encountered”) as “the object of a ‘contradictory perception’”
(141), and as such, this “recognition" measures and limits otherness by
subsuming it under something else and interrupting its “becoming.” Deleuze
argues that the source of this “illusion” is the process of dialectical interrogation
where the questioner tries to lead the respondent into contradiction, “which within
the framework of a community, dismembers problems and questions, and
reconstitutes them in accordance with the propositions of the common empirical
consciousness---in other words, according to the probable truths of a simple
doxa [that which is assumed and for which there is no apparent alternative]
(157)---Bakhtin described this effect as a misuse of Socratic dialogue, a
catechism for training neophytes (Chapter One). Deleuze points out that

Aristotle, “in the grip of the philosophical illusion . . . made the truth of problems

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depend on the common places---in other words, upon the logical possibility of
finding a solution . . . “ (160), the common-sense convergence of thought. He
suggests that we are thus led to believe that “thinking,” the path to truth, begins
with the search for solutions to problems rather than for the problems
(differences) themselves. But, in his view, learning refigured could be “the true
transcendental structure which [could unite] difference to difference, dissimilarity
to dissimilarity, without mediating between them [my emphasis]. . . " (167).
Learning occurring in relationship to an encounter with otherness and difference
thus brings into play the necessity for thought to improvise---to create.
Trained lncapacities

That human thought has been conditioned (some might say “high-jacked”)
by the traditional Western philosophical image of thought and, thus, rendered
unable to think difference (that is, to allow difference as a pure concept to unfold
within it as Deleuze suggests) may amount to what Kenneth Burke refers to in
Permanence and Change as a “trained incapacity,” a phrase he borrows from
Thorstein Veblen that is remarkably similar to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus.
Veblen suggested that past education (training and enculturation) can guide
humans to respond to information (difference)in a way that defeats their
interests---“whereby one’s very abilities can function as blindnesses” (14). That
is, “orientations”, those implicitjudgments that govern the application of
concepts, can go wrong. “Seeing,” Burke points out, “is also a way of not seeing
. . . “(70). Perhaps, it may be too simplistic or too obvious, but, following

Bourdieu, Deleuze, and now Burke, one could argue thatjust as thought and

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“seeing “ has been disabled, so has creativity. It has become a “trained
incapacfiy”

If, as Burke contends, the purpose of acts of language is to produce
“practical simplifications” of “reality” that are further acted upon in daily practices
and embodied in socio-cultural structures, actively determining the selection and
organization of sense data that constitutes them, then, “Not only does the nature
of our terms effect the nature of our observations . . . many of the ‘observations’
are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the
observations are made---so that much of what we presume to be observations
about the wOrld may be no more than the spinning out of possibilities implicit in
our particular choice of terms” (52). He suggests further that the impulse to
extend the application of concepts to “different” experiences may result in
extensions or linguistic inventions not sanctioned by “common sense,” forcing an
“over-simplication” that reflects the interest of a particular regime of truth and the
reduction of thought to a common denominator. I argue, and I think Burke would
agree, that creativity (productive knowledge) surfaces not in the convergence
with common sense, but “complexly” in intersections among diverse knowledges
where it is possible to “see” things from wholly different perspectives and, thus,
co-construct and extend theory by taking what has been learned in one and
applying it in the other-"that is, by making it “more complex” rather than
simplifying. Burke’s thought, thus, prefigures Thomas Kuhn’s observations in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (as well as Deleuze’s notion of how

thought itself has been conditioned) that methods and patterns of inquiry often

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shape both the questions that get asked, that is, the problems that are posed,
and, in advance, their answers, thus controlling what is allowed to surface. As
Polanyi has suggested (Chapter One), “seeing” or finding a problem worth
considering in any discipline may constitute irreversible heuristic act that surfaces
creativity (Personal 120).

Indeed, Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of Mind argues that much
of what humans believe and their knowledge of how the world works is mistaken.
Nevertheless, they get along just fine, carrying on traditional ways of being and
doing in the face of change, until the inadequacy of their perception pushes them
to the brink of destruction. Because it powerfully influences thinking, language
perpetuates the basic errors in their habits of mind making them difficult to
overturn and reinforcing them through the mechanism of total feedback until the
error of thought become so automatic that people fail to question them. And,
failing to question them, because they do not recognize them as errors, can lead
to more serious errors in action, especially in an increasingly technological world.
Moreover, the more complex the world becomes, the more people want to turn
over their thinking (and, thus, their responsibility) to scientists, politicians, priests,
and philosophers.

To overcome the limitations of “trained incapacity,” Burke proposes that
we make our way of “not seeing” into a way of “seeing” using “perspective by
incongruity,” a practice derived from Nietzche’s use of metaphor (his constant
juxtaposition of incongruous words) enabling “a kind of vision got by seeing one

order in terms of another” (Counter-Statement 216) thereby creating counter-

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intuitive possibilities, a process similar to the constant reordering of categories
occurring in Shakespeare’s metaphors (Permanence 136). Burke points out that,
although Nietzsche’s work demonstrated this technique stylistically, Bergson
came nearest to making incongruity a system by deliberately cultivating
contradictory concepts (125). Bergson’s system works by creating a “deliberate
misfit” and by “exemplifying relationships between objects which our customary
rational vocabulary has ignored” (119), going so far as to combine ostensibly
antithetical words like “space-time” or “mind-body” that have evolved into
common use in the postmodern era.

Deliberate training for perspective by incongruity as way of seeing
something in terms of another or one order in terms of another could begin to
refigure thought as “attention to difference” and generate ecological thinking. In
thinking ecologically, attention to difference marks the point of departure as it
operates “with and upon differences” and consists of the “pathways along which
differences and transforms of differences shall be transmitted” (Bateson 482).
The whole, then, is much more than the sum of its parts---it is the sums of its
parts plus the relational framework that connects them.

What keeps us from adopting different thought processes like perspective
by incongruity, as Burke has suggested, or ecological thinking is that we are so
conditioned to waiting to see what the universe tells us instead of questioning it
that “we have psychotically made the corresponding readjustment of assuming
that the universe itself will abide by our rules of discussion and give us

revelations in a cogent matter. Our notion of causality as a succession of pushes

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from behind is thus a disguised way of insisting that experience abide by the
conventions of a good argument” (Permenence131) or by its theoretical
inscnpfion.

In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin writes against this tendency
and attacks the disciplines for splitting themselves from life (and from each
other), inhabiting the abstract realm of theory that generalizes a whole by
isolating the elements of life into discrete categories. They treat the categories
they have created as if they are concrete and material entities, encouraging
individuals to turn over their thinking (and thus their answerability) to them.
However, Bakhtin argues that in this process they omit the most important aspect
of human activity---its “eventness”-—-which is always distinct and unable to be
reduced to an essence. Thus, as Bakhtin writes, “The validity of theoretical
positing . . . does not go beyond the bounds of the theoretical world, and it
possesses sense and validity only within that world . . (10). . . . Once-occurrent
uniqueness or singularity [thus] cannot be thought of, it can only be participatively
experienced or lived through. “ (13). It is in acting that individuals may transcend
knowledge that is given, “from the performed act (and not from the theoretical
transcription of it) is there a way out into meaningful content” (12). Bakhtin’s
tentative, meaningful architectonic whole (the sum of its parts plus the A
relationships among them) defies generalization and reduction and operates and
finds validation only “in the contraposition of l and the other” (74).

Burke, Bateson, and Bakhtin suggest, and I agree, that we need to disrupt

the habitual logic of what it currently means to think and know, by engaging

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dialogically, adopting the logic of perspective by incongruity, and thinking
ecologically so that “a given classification [can] cut across other classifications on
the bias, and each new mode of classification [can] produce new alignments
incongruous with the alignments flowing from other modes of classification”
(135). Just as Polanyi and Hofstadter note, Burke observes that such
Classifications can be heuristic, suggesting new conceptual groupings, “hence
new discoveries” (136). But, if the operation of creativity has been closed down
by the image of thought and by its theoretical inscription, then it needs to be re-
opened by attending to the multitude of possibilities marked by difference.
Unfortunately, difference, like creativity, is both revered and feared because it
consciously disrupts the established boundaries with which people become
comfortable.
The Effect of Schooling

For over thirty years, I have harbored the nagging suspicion that the
conventional practices of schooling inhibit the natural curiosity and creativity of
children who then grow into adults whose ability to think productively, instead of
re-productively, and thus whose creativity, has been incapacitated. They come
to believe that creativity is an innate characteristic of only the few “greats” who
have been identified as such (without noticing that this identification is made only
after the fact) and doubt their own capacity. Generative research has shown, for
example, that fourth-graders can, on average, routinely come up with six times
more uses for a common object than high school seniors or adults. Citing the

work of Osborn (1963), Parnes (1967), and Parnes, Noller, and Biondi (1977), E.

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Paul Torrance in The Search for Satori and Creativity points out that, indeed, the
more alternatives people produce and consider, the more viable and “original”
the alternatives will be, and the more successful people will be in both seeing
and solving problems (24 and 45). Moreover, Torrance argues that “no creative
thinking . . . is likely to occur until there is a recognition or awareness of a
problem [a recognition of difference] . . . some definition of [it] and commitment to
deal with it” (13). However, in school students’ perceived need to conform to
pre-existing conceptions and rules meant to “manage” their behavior more often
than not constrains their ability to consider multiple alternatives, keeps them
oriented toward producing solutions rather than posing problems, and trains their
incapacity for developing different ways of “seeing.”

Education in a system of discipline is the means by which socio-cultural
orders reproduce themselves and make function the particular deep discourse
structures of the regimes of truth Foucault examines. Its purpose is to insure
Conformity with the recognized standard. Thus, making individuals “both objects
and instruments of the exercise of power” (Discipline 170), locations from which
to manage moral instruction, classification, division, and hierarchization. As
power becomes more invisible and functional, those on whom it is exercised
become more strongly“individualized.” Rewarding as well as punishing, it works
on those who violate its dictates from the “inside,” by uniting the forces of the
“normal” against the “abnormal.” Thus, schooling “selects and sorts” and
measures and groups students as a way of “institutionalizing” norms, separating

the “normal” from the “deviant” and “disciplining the body;” it functions like a

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machine to produce power which in turn produces willing bodies, “reality,”
“domains of objects,” and “rituals of truth” (194), and it intervenes and regulates
severely any departure from the norm. Any reward or punishment then occurs
within its parameters, thus strictly controlling the possibility of creative agency.
Aldous Huxley wondered aloud in a 1963 interview why “so many boys and girls
leave school with blunted perceptions and a closed mind?" No wonder. And,
Einstein speaking of his own formal education noted, “This coercion had such a
deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found
consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year . . . It
is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have
not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. . . And, more recently, in
Jefferson’s Children, Leon Botstein observed, “If curiosity'is a natural state in
children, then as they grow up and go on to school they lose it. We seem to
depress the love of learning or fail to nurture it . . . “ (41).

Foucault has pointed out that each society has “a regime of truth, its
‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and
makes function as true [my emphasis]; the mechanisms and instances which
enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is
sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of
truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true”
(Power 131). So, dominant forces are more interested in the convergence of that
truth in “common” knowledge than in encouraging “un-common” knowledge and

training the incapacity for divergent knowledge and creative agency. Jacob

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Bronowski noted in The Ascent of Man that the convergence of knowledge in
certainty ends inquiry, and it disguises the need for problematizing the tensions
among differing views of the same phenomena. In its desire for certainty, our
society discourages playful curiosity and experimentation and insists on the
existence of THE right answer, denying the importance of risk-taking, chance,
and play in learning. Indeed, Torrance observes, “Children sometimes so
accustomed to the one correct or best answer are reluctant to think of other
possibilities or even build a pool of ideas for later evaluation” (48).

The difference between the performance of the fourth graders and the
high school seniors I mentioned earlier may turn out to be that “play” (the kind of
thinking it generates) becomes in the later years of schooling a “ritualized”
performance, a way of doing things without really paying attention so prescribed
that it short-circuits thinking and makes it mind-less. Thus, for example, writing
which begins among young children as a “playful” performance of sketching and
drafting not answerable to conventional rules becomes an algorithmic, ritualized
performance almost entirely dependent on rules and on students’ being able to
recall what has already been said or written rather than seeing anew for
themselves.

Play and Rituals of Performance

In her interpretation of Victor Turner’s insistence that play breaks with
ritualized behavior, DianeBrunner suggests, however, that play that “can disrupt
the ritualized performances of schooling as well as the essentialized

methodologies that tend to guide ‘common sense’ understandings of identity”

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(Between 113) and, thus, “can change the ritual of performance into
transformative ritual” (114) creating new habits of mind. It, then, we think of the
standardized version of the writing process (which habitually separates the
creative and imaginative from commonplace forms of writing) as ritualized
performance, the challenge may be, as Peggy Phelan suggests in Unmarked, “to
discover a way for performative utterances, rather than constative utterances . . .
to remark again the performative possibilities of writing itself” (148)—--making
language once again, as Bakhtin suggested, “the servant of participative thinking
and performed acts” (Toward 31 ), more about performance and presentation (as
the occasion for “enacting” something new) than representation.

In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga defines play as “a voluntary activity . . .
executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely
accepted, but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a
feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary’
life” (28). He further points out that a child at play makes an image “of something
different [my emphasis], something more beautiful, or more sublime, more
dangerous than what he usually is. . . . The child is usually quite literally ‘beside
himself’ with delight . . .His [sic] representation is not so much a sham-reality, as
a realization in appearance: ‘imagination’ in the original sense of the word” (13).
Victor Turner cOntends that ritual and play are interconnected, both including
elements of learning, exploration, communication, memory, negotiation of time-

space, and creative behavior. Huizinga suggests that ritual is actually a form of

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play (19). Both would agree that they are, at the very least, corresponding
practices.

For Turner, play occurring in ritual contexts is more akin to performance: It
is “freewheeling” and “out of mesh with the serious . . . can be everywhere and
nowhere, imitate anything, yet be identified with nothing . . . the supreme
bricoleur of trail transient constructions. . . composed of a potpourri of apparently
incongruous elements. . . . Passages of seemingly wholly ratiOnal thought jostle
in a Joycean or surrealist manner with passages filleted of all syntactical
connectedness” (“Body" 233-4). Thus, it opens the way to imagine other
possible worlds and, so, is the transformative component of ritual.

Turner defines ritual itself as “the declaration of form over indeterminacy”
(From Ritual 75), the “prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to
technical routine, having reference to belief in invisible beings or powers
regarded as the first and final causes of all effects” (79), and he believes it is part
of a society’s code for communicating messages, a symbolic use of bodily
movement and gesture to express and articulate meaning. And, it has the
capacity to maintain the structure of society as well as subvert it. It is this feature
of ritual that most interests Turner.

His interest can be traced to Arnold van Gennep’s notion of the liminal
(from the Latin Iimen, meaning threshold) to describe the changes people go
through in performing rituals in tribal societies. Van Gennep noted that
participants emerged from rituals transformed after participating in a period Of

liminal activity, going beyond the threshold of traditional/conventional behavior

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embodied in the normative social structure before being re—integrated into it. In
liminality, participants are allowed to “’play’ with the elements of the familiar and
defamiliarize them” (27), recombining them in unprecedented ways.

Turner, however, extends van Gennep’s notion of Iiminality to distinguish
between it and the “liminoid” activity that emerged after the industrial revolution
as a result of the separation of work and play. He describes it as a less ritualized
performative practice, communally more voluntary than obligatory and more
playful, from which novelty and innovation can emerge. From his work with
liminal/liminoid activity within ritual, Turner was able to pose two models for
human interrelationships that exist in alternating tension with one another:
structure and antistructure. The former term refers to a differentiated,
hierarchical socio-cultural system, “structuring” and “norming” human behavior
institutionally. The later refers to the dissolution of normative social structures
with its concommitant subjectivities, rules, and the formation of “communitas,” a
feeling of solidarity shared by equals (a “communion” of individuals more than a
community). Turner’s contention is that societies require both structure and
antistructure. The liminal/liminoid activities associated with antistructure produce
a realm of “pure possibility” generated by play with difference or otherness that
makes possible some change and the surfacing of creativity while structure
conserves vital cultural knowledge (deep “inslippable” concepts).

Brian Sutton-Smith’s findings in his experimental studies of child and adult
games in tribal as well as industrial societies supports Turner’s notion of

antistructure as a condition important for the survival and growth of cultural

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knowledge. “The normative structure,” he writes, “represents the working
equilibrium, the ‘antistructure‘ represents the latent system of potential
alternatives from which novelties will arise when contingencies of the normative
system require it. We might call this second system the protostructural system
because it is the purcursor of innovative normative forms. It is the source of new
culture” (Cited in From Ritual 28). Thus, as Turner argues, ritual is not entirely a
mechanism for maintaining the static in a culture; it is also dynamic, filled with
potential for surfacing creativity. Antistructural activities push the “working
equilibrium” of structural system toward disequilibrium (the chaos and disorder of
the unknown), a state where learning and reorganization is more likely to occur.
Again, it is worth noting how analogous this ritual activity is to Prigogine’s
dissipative structures, how more complex structures arise from simpler ones.
Indeed, Sutton-Smith suggests that “we may be disorderly in games [ritual and
play] either because we have an overdose of order, and want to let off steam, or
we have something to learn from being disorderly” (28).

Turner found in Sutton-Smith’s view of antistructure support for the
understanding of liminal/liminoid situations as the “seedbeds of cultural creativity”
from which new symbols and constructions can feed back into the structural
system, “free or ‘ludic’ recombination in any and every possible pattern” making
more likely the creation of new goals, aspirations, and structural models (28). On
the other hand, structure encroaches on antistructure. Turner notes that
children’s games and play, for example, are permitted a (degree of freedom from

the norming process only up to a point because, until then, they appear to “not

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matter.” However, when children enter school, their “free play” is gradually
curtailed and their behavior is comes under stricter control. Their games are no
longer “pediarchic,” in the service of growth and development, but become
“pedagogic,” limiting divergent behavior and expecting conformity and inscribing
certain subjectivities (29). At about the fourth grade, this situation becomes more
pronounced as opportunities for “play-full,” potentially transformative
performance decrease in favor of a more regimented, ritual of performance.

Vygotsky notes in Mind in Society that young Children develop by
performing, learning language and other social skills by imitating the others
around them, in his words, “perform[ing] a head taller than they are” (102) to
reach beyond their current stage of development. Thus, they appropriate the
conceptual understandings of their culture, as they must. But, the “freewheeling”
activity of play is an important feature of being able to imagine (to “see”) other
possible worlds that also ought to be encouraged beyond the onset of
adolescence. Just as human survival depends on the transmission of certain
“unslippable” concepts---on equilibrium, so it also depends on risking the Chaos
of disequilibrium by letting concepts slip (by “playing” with them) in order to
evolve. Difference is the primary resource for this development and a
mechanism for “correcting” epistemological error.

Because poetic language is, as Kristeva argues, metaphoric and dialogic it
can exceed the limits of linear logic, making use of the logic of distance (a
component of difference) to overreach established boundaries in order to see

“something else,” as the performance of the Detroit Citywide Poets aptly

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demonstrates (Chapter Three). And, art, particularly the avant-garde,
Schechner points out, exhibits “the twin tendency to make something new that Is
also in opposition to prevailing thought” (The Future 7). When Coco Fusco and
Guillermo Gomez Pena presented their “cage performance,” for example, their
purpose was to examine both Western history and its discourse of the exotic,
primitive other as well as the history of art in order “to excavate and to play with
the symptomatic absences and stereotypes, creating a counter history of
negative images and teasing out hidden stories” (33).

Writing in English Is Broken Here, Fusco suggests, as does de Certeau,
that syncretistic acts that take elements of the regimes of truth imposed by a
culture and “throw them back with a different set of meanings” are not only the
tactics of guerilla warfare; “the tactics of reversal, recycling, and subversive
montage are aesthetics that form the basis of many twentieth century avant-
gardes,” enable “different forms of belief or practice [of] disempowered groups to
maintain their outlawed or marginalized traditions,” and paves the way for “old
icons to be infused with new meanings,” and provides a critical space for
symbolic action in which the politically disenfranchised can define themselves
(34). She cites Henry Louis Gates analyses of African American signifyin’that
found in this practice a “creative defense” of slaves against their masters and one
of the many ways “oppressed people have developed to take their identity back”
(35). Her cage performance with Gomez Pena invited their audiences to step

into the role of colonizers, “only to find themselves uncomfortable with the

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implications of the game,” leaving many of them with an uneasy understanding
and wondering who was really “caged.”

The play of difference and the chaos/complexity it produces upsets the
“natural” order of things and makes people feel uncomfortable. As multiple
perceptions perturb the consciousness of individuals, they apprehend
"otherness" or difference, but if nothing in the perception of experience disturbs
the way they “see” things, they remain unaware. Consciousness, however,
notices difference as new information---information capable of disturbing the
order they desire and interrupting its repetition. Difference, then, threatens the
foundation of "essential" or "core" truths undergirding their desire for certainty, a
hedge against the unknown. In the words of the poet Yeats, “Things fall apart
the center cannot hold/ Mere chaos is loosed upon the world.”

In older, mechanical models of the universe, chaos and disequilibrium
meant trouble, entropy--—the beginning of decay and death. But, Prigogine’s
dissipative structures do not respond to the disorder difference triggers by
decaying and dying; rather, they reorganize themselves at a’higher level of
complexity. Their activity demonstrates that, far from being harmful, chaos can
be the source of regeneration and new life. Organisms learn from difference.
Thus, the potential for humans to continue to survive and create new knowledge
likely lies within their willingness to resist reducing difference to the same. As
Burke writes, “In [the] staggering disproportion between man and no-man, there

is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or forforgetting that men build

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their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquatious, at the edge of the

abyss” (Permanence 351 ).

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CHAPTER FIVE

Toward a Rhetoric and Ecology of Creativity

The river is moving
The blackbird must be flying.

The mythology that supports the theory of creativity as an innate
_ characteristic of only a few exemplars is powerful: Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan”
one afternoon after dreaming it up in an opium-altered state of consciousness.
Kekule discovered the structure of the benzene ring in a dream of a snake biting
its tail. Galois worked out his mathematical group theory the night before he was
killed in a duel. Newton came up with the notion of gravity when an apple fell on
his head. And, the familiar legend valorized in the film Amadeus, Mozart
composed musical masterpieces perfectly in the first draft, making no-
corrections, additions, or deletions. Many other examples contribute to the lore.
Closer examination of these remarkable reports, however, reveals that
they have little relation to the truth. What the mythology does not reveal is that,
while Mozart, for example, was a child prodigy whose adult accomplishments
were regarded as “creative,” factors other than “innate creativity” may explain his
achievements. In his response to a 1998 article in the journal Behavior and Brain
Sciences by Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson, and John A. Sloboda (titled
“Innate Talents: Reality or Myth?”), Robert W. Weisberg notes that not only did
Mozart benefit from years of extensive training under the tutelage of his father,
his first seven works as a composer of concerti for piano and orchestra were not

works by Mozart at all, but rather arrangements of works by several other

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composers and, thus, “visible manifestations” of both the positive effect of
practice and, I would argue, of learning through scaffolding in Vygotsky’s sense
of the term. Moreover, Weisberg points out that of the concerti directly
attributable to Mozart alone, it was not until No. 9 (K. 271) that his work was
acknowledged as a masterwork. By that time Mozart was twenty-one, had been
immersed in music for at least sixteen years, and'had worked in this particular
genre for ten (430). Weisberg concludes, then, “In Mozart’s case, the
preparation years were filled with learning from practice, in the sense of
immersion in the works of others, rather than the simple outflowing of innate
talent” (430). The mythology that surrounds the acknowledged creativity of many
exemplars COVers over their extensive preparation, makes their “gifts” seem
magical or more unusual than they are, and diminishes the confidence most
people have in the possibilities of their own creative agency.

Weisberg’s conclusions were among those supporting Howe et al in their
contention that empirical evidence does not support idea that achievements
regarded as creative (the so-called “talent account”) arethe consequence of
possessing unique innate “gifts” or “talent." The available evidence suggested to
them, instead, that such achievements are more likely the result of opportunity,
support and encouragement, training, motivation, and practice—«in short, social
and cultural conditioning as it intersects with the willing agency of an individual.
Moreover, the evidence further suggests that attempts to predict who will likely
achieve at high levels or not and to make policy decisions based on predictions

that categorize “some children as innately talented is discriminatory . . . unfair

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and wasteful, preventing young people from pursuing a goal because of the
unjustified conviction of teachers or parents that certain children would not
benefit from the superior opportunities given to those who are deemed to be
talented” (405). Their findings counter the widespread belief that only special
people possessing innate potential can reach such heights of achievement.
Howe et al also point out that the discourse supporting this notion of creative
achievement are often wholly circular: She plays the violin well because she has
a talent. How do we know? Because she plays so well. Or, as Howard Gardner
suggested in his assessment of the exceptional music performance attained by
children trained in the Suzuki method, since the talent did not manifest itself
before the training and since the fact that they perform so well demonstrates they
must have talent, then the talent must have potentially existed (Frames 368).
Such arguments enforce a particular regime of truth and appeal to conventional
wisdom. However, the view that acknowledges “talented” or “creative”
individuals as exemplars who have “something special” might be even more
convincing if researchers were able to examine this hypothesis before rather than
after the creativity had been acknowledged, but there is no satisfactory way to do
so.

Csikszentmihalyi’s response to the same article by Howe et al is worth
noting in this regard. While he agrees that they are right in arguing that “talent” is
essentially “a social construction (that we label as such performances that at
some historical moment we happen to value),” he wants to claim that talent may,

nevertheless, manifest itself in some children’s ability to learn more, given equal

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opportunities to do so. However, opportunities are only rarely equal. In his view,
the evidence does not support either the “talent” or “no-talent" account, but he
also admits that there is currently no conceivable way to know if innate talent is a
factor, in his words, “It would be quite a challenge to design an experiment that
would resolve this issue once and for all. In fact, given the interactive nature of
the phenomenon. I am not sure one could even imagine in principle how such an
experiment should be designed, let alone carried out" (411). Nevertheless, while
we wait for a resolution to this conundrum, Csikzentmihalyi suggests that it
makes more sense, “given limited resources . . . to provide training opportunities
first to those children who, for whatever reason, show interest and ability in a
given domain [my emphasis]” (411). It is an old argument. I contend that it is
just this kind of pervasive scarcity mentality that produces the rhetoric that
justifies the “select and sort” mechanisms employed in schools and diminishes
the possibility of creative agency in a variety of domains for the vast majority of
people.

Thus, while admitting that acknowledged creativity is the consequence of
the interplay of interactive ecological factors, this rhetoric, nevertheless, appeals
to the “common-sense” impracticality of distributing limited resources that, in
Csikszentmihalyi’s words, “the Lord knows there always are” (411). Under this
“logic,” those whose social conditions may already provide the opportunities and
resources of a favorable ecology for creativity, thus, receive additional available
resources. Moreover, this thinking completely discounts the ayailable evidence

that Howe et al present of latent human development and the influence of

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learning. The children of parents who can provide them with Suzuki violins in
graduated sizes as they grow up, ballet lessons, coaches, and extra-curricular
opportunities to develop various interests (or of those who have political clout)
get “tagged” for the “honors” and “gifted and talented” programs in schools
because “common sense” suggests there are not enough resources to offer them
to everyone. And, in both public and private schools, they get the best teachers
who use the most innovative methods in well-equipped classrooms, thereby
increasing the gap. l have observed the operation of this system'in my own
community and wondered why the same methods are not extended to every
child. It is a machine, a closed system with a long history.

School in the U. S.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault analyzed the school as a function of the
larger project to gain knowledge of and control over populations in the 17th and
18th centuries. Fundamental to this system was the development of the
examination, a mechanism that Foucault suggests linked the exercise of power
to knowledge. Combining “the technique Of an observing hierarchy and those of
a normalizing judgment," he noted that the examination placed individuals “in a
field of surveillance” and situated them “in a network of writing,” records
containing information about their aptitudes and abilities and the uses that might
be made of them. It acted as

a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that made it possible to. qualify,

to classify, and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility

through which one differentiates them and judges them . . . why, in

all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized
. . . [combining] the ceremony of power and the form of the

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experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth
(184-185).

Informed by the work of Foucault, Bourdieu, and Gramsci, James Collins’ study
of the historical development of public education and the related ideologies of literacy,
notes that this process extended into the development of mass schooling and the
entrenchment of the test paradigm in England and the U. S. in the nineteenth century.
While Collins main cOncem is the development of standards of literacy, his study
suggests that the shaping of literacy was integral to the development of “elite—controlled”
mass education and the preparation of workers for the new industrial order, tracing a
progression from no formalized schooling, perceived as “social disorder,” to formal
schooling, meant to be “the inculcation of moral order as well as the transmitter of
useful, control/able knowledge [my emphasis]” (231 ). His work reveals the ways
discursive practice has shaped education as a method of social control and how
standardized practices have led to the limitation of educational opportunities for lower
class students. Collins also cites Raymond Williams who noted that the very naming of
language” as V‘standard,’ with the implication no longer of a common but of a model
language [my emphasis] represents the full coming to consciousness of a new concept
of class speech: now no longer merely the functional convenience of a metropolitan
class, but the means and emphasis of social distinction” (249n).

Further, as Collins points out, while the examination as it has evolved may
have arisen from a fundamental desire for a scientific, objective method of
evaluation, increased interest in test development has tended to coincide

historically with certain changes (the success of the Civil Rights Movement of the

19605, for example, or the current demographics of public school populations).

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These changes threatened to upset the status quo, and their coincidence with
increased interest in test development suggest a baser desire to manipulate and
exclude newly mobile populations. It appears that the bar on tests is raised
whenever disenfranchised groups become more competent, a case of putting a
new sorting mechanism in place to prevent formerly disenfranchised populations
from competing for the “scarce” betterjobs and admissions to elite colleges and
universities.

Since the early 1980s in this country, some particularly powerful voices
have been attacking the public schools. Never mind that just a few years before
the publication of A Nation at Risk the same people were debating the
predicament of the “overeducated” American. So, how over-education became a
“rising tide of mediocrity” is particularly puzzling. Having been a teacher for over
thirty years, however, I argue that the current crisis in public schools requiring the
more “effective” parceling out of scarce resources, like those to which
Csikszentmihalyi referred, has actually been invited by budget cuts over at least
the last three decades, instructional materials inadequate to the task of educating
students in an increasingly complex society, general neglect, and the attempt to
divert more resources to those who are already privileged.

The cynic in me suspects that the real motives for school reform may have
more to do with advancing the political and economic goals of the conservative
agenda than changing schools to “leave no child behind.” The scarcity mentality,
the fear that there are not enough resources for everyone to be successful or

creative, reflected in the discourse of “experts” like Csikszentmihalyi, drives the

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desire of dominant forces to give their own children a “leg up” and invokes a fear
of losing ground in the middle class where school has always been regarded as
key to a better life. The reforms---the litany of vouchers, charter schools,
achievement tests¥--thus mask the real attempt to “select and sort” and work in
favor of those who are likely to succeed anyway, leaving the others to “serve"
(work minimum wage jobs) and limiting the possibilities for their creative agency.
I suspect that the real motivation for current reforms may be the corporate need
for new outcomes for education: graduates whose education prepares them for
the narrow needs of a society in the throes of late capitalism, those who can be
“team" players, their bodies both “inscribed by the code” and “collaborating” with
it, and who can adjust to lower wages, routine tasks, and frequent job changes in
a volatile economy. The corporate tendency has been to reduce people to the
lowest common denominator, train them, and finalize their identities as “good
workers” for the economic machine, complying with the Law that says, “Give me
your body, and I will give you meaning and a word in my discourse” (de Certeau
139). And, finally, it convinces them that meaningful creative agency is beyond
their capabilities, as Bourdieu’s studies suggest.

In a 1987 essay appearing in PRE/T EXT , James Berlin noted that a
rhetoric can serve, in Althusser’s terms, as “an important ideological state
apparatus.” Berlin wrote,

The ability to read, write, and speak in accordance with the code

sanctioned by a culture’s ruling class is the main work of education,

and this is true whether we are discussing ancient Athens or

modern Detroit. These rules are of course inscribed in a rhetoric, a

systematic designation of who can speak, when and where they
can speak, and how they can and must speak. Educational

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institutions inculcate these rules, determining who is fit to learn
them and who has finally done so---in other words, who is
authorized to be heard. A rhetoric codifies these rules for the
members of a society. . . . It designates who may have access to
power and who may not, doing so in a way even more effective
than legal sanctions with all of their punitive devices. . . . It affirms
economic, social, political, and cultural‘arrangements, doing so in
the name of passing on to the young the ‘natural’ rules that govern
discursive and, more important, non-discursive practices (52).
Berlin’s discussion of the role of a rhetoric bears out the earlier
conclusions drawn from Foucault, Barnes, and Bourdieu that the linguistic
routines of a culture tend to reinforce “shared theory,” the common-sense
understandings developed from a set of “negotiated” concepts and
generalizations, denoting a certain plane of reality. These coherent,
restricted communal cognitions are lodged within the social, cultural, and
political institutions that authorize what counts as knowledge and by
extension what counts as creativity. But, in the same essay, Berlin also
contends, “There are always competing rhetorics at any historical moment
because there are always competing ideologies. . . and these conflicts
are what he believes ought to be taught in schools---“our only hope in not
being able to know everything . . . is to know as many versions of the
whole as we can, as many conceptual systems in their concrete
application as possible” (59), the thrust of his later work Rhetorics,
Poetics, and Cultures. I agree that there will always be competing
rhetorics, and I also argue that a rhetoric capable of surfacing creativity

ought to be as much a linguistic routine of school as a rhetoric of

reproduction.

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A Dynamic Pattern

The tension or dynamic between competing rhetorics that Berlin
believes ought to be taught in schools seems to me the same tension that
exists between Aristotle’s rhetoric as it was classically “reconstructed,”
according to Janet Atwill, to servephilosophy and to function as a medium
of reproduction and her reclamation of it as an art of productive
knowledge, as an alternative order of knowledge capable of affecting who
people are engaging in the world, of intervening in “what is,” and of
inventing “what could be." As a medium of reproduction, rhetoric reflects
what Robert Pirsig refers to as the “static patterns of value” embodied in
the stabilizing institutions of a culture. As an art of productive knowledge,
it reflects what he refers to as the “dynamic patterns of value” associated
with uncertainty, the transgression of official boundaries or limits, the
disruption of given knowledge, the creation of new subjectivities, and the
production of new possibilities. The rhetoric of productive knowledge, that
is, points toward “a desire for ‘more’ that Challenges or redefines relations
of power” (Atwill 7) rather than the desire to maintain the status quo.

In Lila, Pirsig extends the discussion of the “metaphysics of quality”
he had begun in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to take up the
question of why, if “quality” or “value” is a constant, people’s opinions
about it vary so much, a question related to the nature of creativity as well.
He argues that “quality” or value exists in two kinds: dynamic (continuous

and always on the cutting edge) and static (memories, customs, patterns

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of nature, and so on). The static patterns of value are different for every
person because each one of them has a different static pattern of life
history (related to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Bakhtin’s notion of
humans as “value centers”). Everyone’s judgment, then, is affected by
both static patterns of value and those that are dynamic. Thus, people
agree sometimes, and sometimes they do not. Pirsig’s metaphysics of
quality suggest, then, there can be many competing truths out there, but it
is the sense of value, influenced by accumulated static patterns including
language, that decides among them. Following Pirsig and Turner, I argue
that both dynamic and static patterns of value, antistructural and structural
activities, are necessary. The former makes productive change possible
while the latter conserves vital cultural knowledge. The problem is that
static patterns compose the deep discourse structures of the regimes of
truth that are entrenched, strategic, resistant to the dynamic patterns
characteristic of creativity, and bent on protecting the “proper” at the
expense of productive knowledge.

Creativity, it seems to me, is analogous to both Atwill’s “productive
knowledge” and Pirsig’s “dynamic quality.” As dynamic quality, productive
knowledge or creativity is not “valued” consistently by everyOne,
accounting for the varied acknowledgement of creative products and
behaviors. Dynamic patterns of value surface when the mind (composed
of individuals plus their environment), that is, the network is “fluid.” Thus,

as Douglas Hofstadter explained, Einstein arrived at his theory of relativity

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through a “fluidity of mind” that made him willing to let certain concepts
“slip” while at the same time he was guided by other concepts he
considered “unslippable.” That is, the surfacing of creativity depends on
what Hofstadter refers to as “nondeliberate yet nonaccidental slippage”
that permeates the mind (and here I think of Bateson’s notion of mind as
“a necessary, an inevitable function of the appropriate complexity,
wherever that complexity occurs”), what I have referred to as “crooked
awareness,” the willingness to look “sideways” and to be influenced by
dynamic patterns of value.
An Ecological Effect

Much of the research over the last hundred years has tried to study
creativity as if it were a closed system, its cause-and-effect processes traceable
to initial conditions. Creativity operates, however, as an effect of systems that
are complex and adaptive, open and ecological, contingent upon an
indeterminate number of variables: It surfaces in the interaction of multiple
realities and identities, out of “playful" and experimental combinations, and out of
the recognition of differences and contradictions. It unfolds or emerges over the
course of time, it is unpredictable, and the “dissipation” of its energy is generative
rather than degenerative. Wiles’ solving of Fermat’s Last Theorem, described in
Chapter Four, for example, required him to link ideas from the Pythagorean
foundation of mathematics to the most complex mathematical ideas of the
twentieth century, drew heavily upon the work of other mathematicians, and

eventually led to a new openness and optimism in the field of mathematics,

203

making yet other new dialogues and solutions possible. So, although Wiles was
an agent of creativity, the creativity was not “innate” in him. Rather, it manifests
as a radically distributed “ecological” effect that emerges from the interactions of
individuals in particular social and environmental contexts against a backdrop of
existing knowledge.

Failure to understand creativity in these terms, however, is tied to a
rhetoric that wants to perceive it as the purview of the select few or those whose
products/behaviors it privileges. If, as Aristotle conceived of it, rhetoric is “an
ability, in each case to see the available means of persuasion” and thus located
in it the ability to imagine other possibilities, then rhetorics of reproduction have
been blinding. Rhetoric as an art of productive knowledge---of creativity---
requires a different architecture for seeing. However, the “seeing” that would
make productive knowledge of “the available means” is always to some extent
bound by what has already been conceptualized and is thus “available,” as the
following account demonstrates.

Stephen Jay Gould in “Darwin’s Middle Way” (3 chapter of The Panda’s
Thumb) discusses the contradiction between Charles Danrvin’s autobiographical
account of how he arrived at his theory of evolution and a series of his notebooks
found after the centennial of The Origin of Species in 1959. According to
Darwin’s own account, which Gould says was written as a lesson in morality for
his children and not for publication and which misled historians of his work for
many years, he claimed to work within "true Baconian principles” and “without

any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale” (61 ). The pervasive influence of

204

inductive logic in the practice of science evidently compelled Darwin to describe
his accomplishment in its terms, thus covering over the nature of his creative
agency.

‘ Danrvin’s account focuses on the five years he spent aboard the Beagle
and how his understanding grew as he saw in succession the bones of giant
South American mammal fossils, the turtles and finches of the Galapagos, and
the marsupial fauna of Australia. Thus, he claimed to arrive at his theory of
evolution and natural selection gradually “as he sifted facts in a sieve of utter
objectivity” (61). In fact, however, according to Gould, the notebooks reveal that,
although he found the finches, he didn’t recognize them as variants of a common
stock or even record the island of their discovery. He evidently “reconstructed”
the discovery according to inductive principles only after he returned to London
and was able to consult with an ornithologist of the British Museum.

Gould acknowledges that Danrvin’s voyage on the Beagle was pivotal
because it gave him the opportunity, freedom, and endless time to think
independently, that is, a favorable ecology, and he also notes that the things he
saw provoked in him “the crucial attitude of doubt” which Gould refers to as the
“midwife of all creativity.” However, he also points out that, despite popular lore,
Danrvin returned to England without a theory of evolution.

The notebooks. also reveal that in the next two years Darwin tested and
rejected many theories, and in the meantime, read philosophers, poets, and

economists. Gould says that he arrived at his theory of natural selection after

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reading Malthus, not through induction, nor as a blinding flash of insight triggered
by his subconscious.

Gould’s reading of two biographies, one by Howard E. Gruber and the
other by Silvan S. Schweber, led him to observe that Danrvin’s theory “emerged
instead as a result of a conscious and productive search, proceeding in a
ramifying but ordered manner, and utilizing both the facts of natural history and
an astonishingly broad range of insights from disparate disciplines far from his
own” (65). Perhaps most remarkable, Gould found a surprising lack of influence
on the theory from Danrvin’s own field of biology and concluded that the sheer
breadth of his interests and his ability to construct productive analogies between
fields were responsible for its eventual formulation. He characterized the theory
of natural selection as “a creative transfer to biOlogy of Adam Smith’s basic
argument for a rational economy . . . “ (67), and further concluded that such
creativity “demands breadth,” that “analogy is a profound source of insight,” and
that “great thinkers cannot be divorced from their social background.” He argued
finally that “Darwin was lucky to be born rich, lucky to be on the Beagle, lucky to
live amidst the ideas of his age, lucky to trip over Parson Malthus---essentially
little more than a man in the right place at the right time” (68). He hastened to
add, however, that Darwin’s struggle to arrive at understanding does seem to
affirm Pasteur’s suggestion that “chance favors the prepared mind.’ I would
argue further that the “prepared mind” requires a rhetoric that is capable of
generating ways of thinking that resist systematic efforts to normalize and contain

knowledge as well as an ecology in which it can occur.

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A New Architecture for “Seeing:

Two hundred years ago the Romantic poet William Blake wrote, “May God
keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleepl” He rejected Isaac Newton’s
mechanisticview of the universe and the way it carried over into every aspect of
life, and he spent his life creating art that denied this single vision, the realization
of Descartes’ dream of the worldas a machine. The Newtonian view of the
universe, however, was very seductive. People took comfort in its regularity and
predictability. It allowed them to think about things they could not previously have
imagined. Enlightened, they broke with nature and embraced Newton’s vision,
no longer needing the Catholic Church to tell them how the world functioned.
They saw the universe in the metaphor of a great clock ticking on predictably,
creating a sense of solidity and safety and a strong sense of autonomous
individual identity. They saw a world in which every event was determined by
initial conditions, in which chance played no role, where time was reversible
(processes could be traced back to initial conditions), and where all of the pieces
fit precisely together.

The metaphor of the world as a machine was easy to visualize, and once
visualized, embedded in language, and stored in the collective consciousness, it
permeated everything. Newton’s “new science,” concerned as it was with closed
circuits and linear relationships where an action introduced at any point would
have a predictable effect, reduced plants, animals, and humans to objects of

study, collections of “cogs, wheels,” “levers,” and “gears” to be taken apart,

analyzed, and understood. In other words, it reduced complexly determined

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matters to simple deterministic expressions. Thus, what had begun as a
theoretical model then passed into conventional wisdom. The rise of science, the
industrial revolution, the age of machines, and the birth of the factory (for work
and for school) would affirm the rightness of this model, despite an undercurrent
of criticism. Indeed, as Gregoire Nicolis and llya Prigogine note, “There were
moments when the program of classical science seemed near completion: a
fundamental level, which would be the carrier of deterministic and reversible
laws, seemed in sight. However, at each such moment something invariably did
not work out as anticipated” (2).

The founding of thermodynamics early in the nineteenth century, however,
Challenged the notion of the universe as a machine and introduced doubt. The
Second Law of Thermodynamics suggested that if the world was a machine, then
it was losing energy, becoming disorderly, and running down toward “heat death”
and out of time. It suggested that time is unidirectional: No one moment can be
like the last; events cannot “replay” themselves nor is it possible to travel back in
time (except in fiction and films). And, as the revelations of the Second Law
became more evident, it took the “blame” for disintegrating societies, economic
decay, the perceived breakdown of civility (Glieck 308). It suggested that
decadence is “natural” and, thus, unaffected by human in(ter)vention. Then,
Einstein’s revelations in the early twentieth century about the role of the
observer, the nature of simultaneity, and relativity dealt the machine model
another significant blow. Nevertheless, as often happens with cherished

notions, the idea of the universe as a machine has hung around in language and

208

in conventional wisdom because, as Prigogine and Stengers point out, this
paradigm does hold up for the relatively few parts of the universe that operate
like machines.

Most of the universe, however, is composed of complex adaptive systems
that are open, dynamically interacting with their environment, and are, thus,
ecological. Both biological and social systems are ecological, affected by an
indeterminate number of variables. The patterns such systems reveal, because
they occur over time and on such a large scale, are difficult to apprehend
because they move in and out of different states over time: sometimes orderly
and repetitious, sometimes disorderly and chaotic, and sometimes completely
new---“jumping up” to more complex order. To try to understand systems that
are ecological in terms of closed mechanical systems is futile. Ecological
systems are constantly in process of becoming, and the occurrence of their
various states in such systems is unpredictable. In biology, for example,
evolution proceeds from simple to more complex forms of life and from
undifferentiated to differentiated organisms, but this progression is only
noticeable in hindsight and the reasons for it so complexly determined as to be
indecipherable.

Prigogine and Stengers argue that the continual fluctuatiOn characteristic
of open systems ‘makes them sensitive to “singular moments” or “bifurcation
points,” revolutionary moments impossible to predict, when “positive feedback,”
like the surfacing of productive knowledge or dynamic patterns of value, breaks

through so powerfully that it shatters the pre-existing organization. Einstein’s

209

theory of relativity had this effect: It transformed the collective intellectual
imagination and allowed people to see the world differently---it changed
everything. At these moments, ecological systems either disintegrate or leap to
a higher, more differentiated, and more complex order. But, in these far-from-
equilibrium, non—linear, self-organizing systems, order and organization can
emerge from the seeming disorder and chaos, and very small changes in
fluctuations can make very big differences. That is, as I argued in the last
Chapter, difference makes a difference. It is the new information that establishes
enough of an opening in the system to interrupt the rhythm of order and repetition
and bring the system into the “crisis,” making way for the new, more complex
order. It is this increasing complexity open systems achieve that allows them to
generate new order out of chaos and disorder. The more heavily structured and
rule-governed such systems are, however, the more vulnerable they are to failure
because they cannot readily adapt to changing conditions. Ecological systems
always exist on the boundary between order and chaos, displaying
characteristics of both. Thus, “complexity theorY’ as it deals with the
“revolutionary” events that occur on the “edge,” on this boundary between order
and chaos, in the relationships between and among both open and closed
systems, provides a better model for understanding the operation of creativity.
An Ecology of Creativity

If creativity is an effect of complex adaptive systems, as l have suggested,
an open intellectual ecology among the disciplines whose distinct languages

afford only partial views, could evoke different perspectives of reality that would

210

“complement” one another dialogically, “filling out” a picture of reality by “mutually
supplying each other’s lack" (Merriam Webster Online). Engaging dialogically,
adopting the logic of perspective by incongruity, developing “crooked awareness”
and, thus, thinking ecologically would allow “a given classification [to] cut across
other classifications on the bias,” as Burke suggested, producing “new
alignments incongruous with alignments flowing from other modes of
classification” (Permanence 135) and an opening for productive knowledge. A
formal attempt to develop such an ecology occurred in 1995.

An international interdisciplinary conference titled “Einstein Meets
Magritte” convened that year to explore just such a possibility although the stated
mission went mLIch further. Over a five-day period, scientists, academicians, and
artists delivered a variety of works in sessions ranging from theoretical physics to
poetry, dance, and music in order to see whether any basis for a unified view of
the world might exist. Later, the proceedings of the conference were published in
eight volumes named after the colors of the rainbow and white, a synthesis of
them all. The purpose of the conference was to merge the attitudes, methods,
and understandings of science and the humanities, as represented by the works
of Albert Einstein and Rene Magritte, and to open the way for dialogue. Some
have argued that this proposed integration should actually have been regarded
as an attempt to re-integrate what had once been whole---what disciplinarity, “the
fragmentation of knowledge," had divided (Wilson 48). In any case, I argue that
is was an attempt to invite “consilience,” Whewell’s notion of “the jumping

together of knowledge as a result of the linking of facts and fact-based theory

211

across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation,” mentioned in
Chapter One. The current common phrase to describe this endeavor is the
“integration of knowledge bases,” an idea embodied in the operation of the
lntemet and the conception of the “Semantic Web." Thus, in the same way that
Danrvin’s observations coupled with his reading across various disciplines outside
his own led to his theory of natural selection, the integration of knowledge bases
helps create a favorable ecology for surfacing creativity. The idea of
complementarity (an extension of Heisenberg’s notion of uncertainty), then, can
be extended beyond a lesson in quantum physics where it begins and may prove
productive for understanding the nature of creativity.

Complementarity in physics refers to the possible ways of describing an
atomic electron. One way describes precisely the energy of an electron and
applies the concepts of conservation of energy to it while another description
involves a space-time account of the motion of the electron inside the atom,
performs a measurement of position, and excludes the previous energy
conservation description. Both descriptions are possible, but not at the same
time, so, the two descriptions are regarded as “complementary.” It is not
possible, then, to speak of a quantum object as existing independently. In fact,
no single description in classical terms can exhaust all of the knowable features
of quantum phenomena because they demonstrate a richness and complexity
beyond the ability of language to describe it. Thus, as Prigogine and Stengers
suggested, the “real” lesson to be learned from complementarity is that “reality”

(or truth) is not reducible to a single perspective. It renders impossible “a divine

212

point of view from which the whole of reality is visible. . . . Each language can
express only part of reality” (225). The suggestion that different, seemingly
incompatible or contradictory descriptions can all be correct runs counter to
traditions in Western thought that suggest a single, unambiguous description of
“reality” or “truth” is possible. Thus, a quantum loophole exists that is analogous
to Bakhtin’s “word with a sideward glance,” a paradox that retains “the possibility
for altering the 'ultimate, final meaning of one’s own words. . . . This potential
other meaning, that is, the loophole left open, accompanies the word like a
shadow” (Problems 233), complementing it.

I extend the idea of complementarity to the operation of an intellectual
ecology I have imagined as forming among the disciplines to support the
surfacing of creativity. I argue that such an ecology would resist the conceptual
habits that enforce limits on in(ter)vention and imagination, not necessarily by
unifying their diverse epistemologies or seeking consensus or synthesis as the
mission of the conference suggested, but rather, by re-integrating them side-by-
side in apposition, a rhetorical structure in which one parallel word or word group
placed beside another “complements” it, modifying and extending it without
replacing it. Apposition, thus, could preserve differences but also connect them
in “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a
genuine polyphony. . . spread out on a plane as an eternal harmony . . . or
unceasing irreconcilable quarrel,” Bakhtin’s notion of “one great communal
performance” (160). It would encourage the examination of alternative

perceptions of the same phenomena and the tentative construction of knowledge

213

and invite transformation, employing the logic embedded in the notions of re-
turning, re-seeing, re-interpreting, and re-constructing othenrvise. Thus, such an
ecology make way for the productive “bifurcation” and the imagination of “what
could be” rather than simply calling “what is” into question or replacing one
conception of reality with another. In his paper “Subjects, Objects, Data and
Variables, presented at the conference I mention above, Robert Pirsig notes,
“Science and art are just two complementary ways of looking at the same thing.
In the largest sense it is really unnecessary to create a meeting of the arts and
sciences because in actual practice, at the most immediate level they have never
been separated. They have always been different aspects of the same human
purpose” (18). As he explains further, “Science explores the Conceptually
Unknown in order to develop a theory that will cover measurable patterns
emerging from the unknown. The arts explore the Conceptually Unknown in
other ways to create patterns such as music, literature, painting, that reveal the
Dynamic Quality that produced them” (18). I argue that the dynamic quality he
speaks of is creativity.

Examined in this light, Rudolf Arnheim’s plea in his essay “A Plea for
Visual Thinking” may be regarded a plea for a different architecture for seeing in
schools. He notes that in the long history of Western thought, perception and
reasoning—--opposite sides of the same cognitive coin---have been separated.
Reason has been privileged over mere perception. Nevertheless, he argues,
productive thought, the ability to structure and re-structure experience, as he

defines it, depends on “visualization,” a technique that belongs primarily to the

214

perceptual domain (although he readily admits that some problems can be
solved in entirely non-visual ways). He points out that trees in nature, for
example, appear to be a jumble of branches and foliage, a kind of chaos. But, by
“visualizing” their structure a child can “see” the fundamental order produced by
the vertical trunk and the branches protruding from it at clear angles to form the
base for the leaves. Such intelligent perceiving, Arnheim suggests, is “the child’s
principal way of finding order in a bewildering world” (144).

Arnheim’s argument for more emphasis on the development of perception
in all Ieaming and a central role for studio art in the school and university
curriculum that cuts across disciplinary borders is rooted in the observation that
perception is ‘not a mechanical recording of the stimuli imposed by the physical
world upon the receptor organs of man . . . but the eminently active and creative
grasping of structure. . . . Together, intuition [cognition through perceptual field
processes] and the intellect [reason] produce thinking, which is inseparable from
perception in the sciences as well as in the arts” (x-xi). “Seeing" the “available
means” to surface productive knowledge, then, may depend as much on
perceptual intuition as it does on reason, as art already knows and can help the
other disciplines to “see.”

Implications

 

E. Paul Torrance and David Perkins both agree that human agency for
creativity depends on very ordinary human thought processes like problem-
finding and problem-solving, noticing difference, persisting, reasoning critically,

considering alternatives (divergent thinking), recognizing analogies, and thinking

215

metaphorically. While Perkins does not believe that “creativity” can be taught per
se, he does believe that deliberately enhancing the habits of mind mentioned
above creates a favorable climate for the process of surfacing creativity and that
this process is accessible to all under the right conditions. Torrance, on the other
hand, is convinced that skills linked to Creative agency, like problem-finding and
persistence, can be taught although, perhaps to no one’s surprise, he has found
little support for this contention in the U. S. The widespread belief is that people
either possess these “skills” or they do not and that there is little the education
process can do about developing them. Nevertheless, he presents a program for
enhancing each of them because he believes that they ought to be as “basic” as
reading, writing, and arithmetic and that our survival as a species may depend on
it. I argue further that it depends on engaging as many people as possible in the
process both to tap into the diverse knowledges they possess and to enhance
the potential for creative agency.

If humans construct their knowledge, as Von Glasersfeld and others have
argued, if the experiential world acts as a testing ground for ideas, then they
need to encourage a rhetoric of creativity that examines both knowledge as
theory and knowledge as practice, resonating against them to challenge static
disciplinary models, hold off closure and habituation, and create an awareness of
other possibilities. And, the charge to those who teach ought to be to help
students become active, critical inquirers, so that when they fail to find the
meanings they seek, they are not discouraged and do not give up hope, but

realize instead that, as Paul Watzlawick suggests, “They have not yet looked in

216

the right place . . . [and] there are “an infinite number of ‘right’ places” (The
Invented 326). That inquiry itself may be a matter of “seeing” crookedly, looking
sideways to get another “complementary” view in order to adjust for “fit,” supports
both a constructivist and a Bakhtinian view of creative potential.

I argue further that teachers need to encourage students to question the
hidden and often dangerous assumptions supporting systems of belief that may
keep them from becoming knowing subjects in the world, coaching them in the
process of knowledge construction to become aware, deliberate, and responsible
participants. They need to help students develop a comfort with uncertainty in
order for them to thrive and not merely survive in a world where the only certainty
is change. What may be most difficult for students to understand, I think, given
our culture’s desire for certainty, is that knowledge is not the end of inquiry, found
in its convergence with conventional wisdom and common sense, but rather the
beginning: a process of divergence, of noticing critical differences, and of
learning from the knowledge others possess that at its best results in un-
conventional wisdom and un-common sense that is the nature of creativity.

A rhetoric that encourages an appositional stance, rather than one that is
oppositional, that develops “crooked awareness,” the willingness to make the
familiar strange and to look “sideways” to see what else may be re-tums to
rhetoric its “poetic” operation, the “making” impulse that looks for openings,
motivates what in normalized language alludes us, and extends theperception of

reality. Such a rhetoric is capable of surfacing creativity, the productive

217

knowledge of social imagination that seeks ethical alternatives in relationship to

and in interaction with others and “sees" a world othenNise.

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing

And it was going to snow.
The blackbird set

In the cedar limbs.

218

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