Muse >Commodity

Greek and Middle Ages philosophers positioned the deified Muse as the locus of authority ,the wellspring of means by which the artist structures chaos into creation. In the Renaissance, inspiration shifts from the Muse to the creator-genius’s un-deified authority.  ('intuition' is replaced by reason?)Thus the Renaissance and the subsequent modern era give birth to individualism (which originally meant the opposite of what we take it to mean today: “individual” was man undivided from God,(turned into "the word"(reason)?) so that Muses and saints were not necessary), and so creativity became a matter of man’s faith in his power to create without support from (or even existence of) God. The artist became God, the great producer. And curiously, the absence of God itself became holy, became the myth. The modern era is replete with myths of progress, productivity, inspiration, originality, purity, and more. And then, another turning point: the mythically holy creator sinks into indifference about the value of originality, of individualism, of the unique. This is the post-modern epoch, which grapples with consensual reality. Where modernism applauded the eternally new, the novel, continuous creativity, the surprising, post-modernism reconceptualises creativity and looks to imitation as both creative and rebellious against beliefs in authenticity. Post-modernism repositions originality and novelty by emphasizing appropriation, collage, and juxtaposition of meaning. Of course, there is no sharp border between historical periods.

282If we accept that the formation of a paradigm is related to the context in which it emerges, I believe that both modernist and post-modernist discourses of creativity have been responsive to the needs of capitalism as a system of nomadic power and of constant de/reterritorialization. Today, the process of commodification plays a vital role in the construction and experience of contemporary subjectivity as well as the notion of creativity subjecting people to free-floating and nomadic forms of control.

The creator cuts chaos, sieves it, lets a certain form of actualization of the virtual happen. The Deleuzian world is a state of flux, a constant differentiation. Creation, in such a world, is driven by differentiation. The only way to affirm these underlying processes of differentiation is in “creative becoming.” Hence, creation is a becoming event. It forms in chaos, but this does not mean it is based in anarchy. Becoming is an expression for a structure in constant change; a structure without fixed structure. Becoming is the undetermined set of relations among actualized (which becomes consequently determined) movements and processes. This means every creative act combines an affirmation of chaos and multiplicity, and at the same time of univocality. Creativity, in fact, takes place on the plane of immanence which sifts together chaos and multiplicity.

When it is held that possibilities have no reality till they are realized, a hierarchy of power emerges. Possibilities have values that are realized. But in Deleuze’s theory the virtual is already real, so actualities are also real. None transcend another, but each differs from each. Deleuze’s theory of differentiation escapes binary opposition and thus hierarchies of power.

Teaching Contingencies Deleuze, Creativity Discourses, and Art

by Soodabeh Salehi PHd Thesis