Creativity and HealthA Deleuzian Tautology?

Nick FoxUniversity of SheffieldPaper presented to the BSA Medical Sociology Conference, Durham 2010

Introduction

• What is Creativity?

• Sociological Approaches to Creativity

• Is Creativity Good for Our Health?

• A Deleuzian Perspective on Creativity and Health

• Creativity and the Body without Organs

What is Creativity?

I looked for an answer to this within:• Psychology: a personality trait independent

of cognition

• Psychoanalysis: a sublimation of unconscious desire, usually sexual

• Marxism: a representation of class interests

• Evolutionary theory: successful adaptation

Mark Rothko at work

Sociology and Creativity 1

Sociology tends to focus on the contexts of creative production

‘ ... aesthetic and scientific practices connect even in their most intimate moments of genesis with concrete social and institutional conditions ‘ (De Fillippi et al 2007)

Sociology and Creativity 2

Creativity is a social process:

‘... anything that people can examine and judge, including communicated ideas and processes judged independently of the outcomes they produce. ... a subjective judgment made by members of the field about the novelty and value of a product (Ford 1996)

Exhibits at the Royal Academy summer exhibition

What have we learnt?

• Not a lot

• All the theories skirt around the question of the creative process

• The missing body: need for an embodied approach to creativity

• Can the relationship between creativity and health help?

Is Creativity Good for Us?

• Liberal humanist view that high art is good for the soul, morality and social order

• Popular view that the arts contribute to the quality of life

• Art and music therapy

• Arts and health movements (e.g. writers, artists in residence): under-theorised

Assumptions of the Arts and Health Movement

• Creativity can be therapeutic

• Creative products can ‘humanise’ modern institutions such as hospitals and schools

• Creative products improve the health of those in their vicinity

• BUT ...

Is this True?

• Thomas Chatterton

• Vincent Van Gogh

• Amadeo Modigliani

Edvard Munch: ‘The Scream’

Wallis: ‘The Death of Chatterton’, 1856

A Deleuzian Perspective

• Gilles Deleuze: influenced by Nietzschean concept of ‘the will to power’

• Embodied conception of positive desire that motivates organisms

• The ‘body-without-organs’ describes what a body can do and what it can become: its relations and affects

Relations and Affects

• The sum of psychological, emotional and physical connections that a body has: with family and friends, with colleagues, with objects or activities, or with abstract ideas and social constructs.

• These establish the limits of the Body-Without-Organs

Deleuze and Creativity

• From this perspective:• Creativity is the positive desire of the organism:

the capacity to engage ‘productively’

• Creative products (artistic, crafts, science, writing, cookery, sexuality etc) are the ‘becoming-other’ of the body

• Creativity reflects the relations and affects of the producer

Jackson Pollock: Untitled no. 3

Deleuze and ‘Health’

• From this perspective:

• Health is also a reflection of what a body can do: its capacity to become other

• The sum of the BwO’s relations and affects define its health

Implications

• It would not be surprising to find a relation between creativity and health

• The two concepts are both aspects of the capacity of a body to become other

• The arts and health movement may assess how creative processes may contribute to well-being: of producers or recipients

Conclusions

• The Deleuzian perspective offers a theoretical underpinning for those working on creativity and health

• There is a need for empirical studies using these theoretical tools, to learn more about creativity production and reception and health and sickness