It might surprise many how the word creativity had entered English dictionaries in 1875. It begs the question of what was the significance of this word for ancient or prehistoric humans. Cave arts, primarily in the Paleolithic period, across the world suggest that in ancient times, creativity must have been a sort of an extempore figment of imagination.
For sure, these extempore figments of imagination must have won the genius’s communal recognition. But little did ordinary yokels know that the genius was himself a product of a few epistemic constraints generated by themselves. It is a heated debate in the quarters of post-structuralism that people are compelled to perform within the social norms because there is immense pressure on society to toe the line. Hence, we need to think about creativity differently than what we have been taught. Being creative has become a sort of intrinsic talent that ordinary people don’t have.
Mostly it is par for the course with us to think about creativity in an individualistic purview. Creativity refers to a process through which an extraordinary human removes the obfuscation from his mind which has prevented his mind from revealing a new truth possessing a radical acuity to transform an existing system of knowledge.
He undergoes a strenuous journey of exploration, disruption, and profound excavation of prevalent forms of knowledge to discover or invent a new truth. He begins to claim the exclusive ownership of this new truth and expects a plethora of accolades from all and sundry to recognise as well as appreciate him for carrying the day.
Per Foucault, the truth was always there to be known, but owing to a fortuitous set of complex obfuscations, it was prevented from being known.
Let us suppose he is Einestine or Mendel. People consider him adroit and genius. But are their inventions and discoveries merely the ultimate product of their labour or mind? Or are they inversions of existing systems of knowledge? This is the question that French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) asks in an intellectual debate with American linguist Naom Chomsky (1928).
Foucault maintains that the traditional history of sciences has granted maximum significance to the creativity of individuals. People like Newton or Copernicus after their establishment of new truths were immediately pigeonholed as creative geniuses.
Per Foucault, the truth was always there to be known, but owing to a fortuitous set of complex obfuscations and impediments entailed by a range of variables, it was prevented from being known. These obfuscations and impediments can be a system of knowledge (épistème) or economic and social models. However, the human mind is made to see the truth but a contingent obstacle incessantly prevents it. Ostensibly it seems that the new truth never existed and it was the genius who brought it into existence which might ring for many people as completely plausible.
Nevertheless, the undercurrents of this candid perspective are facile and at times untenable. Foucault argues that creativity is not individual but it is possible from a system of knowledge. Moreover, people are imbued with the quotidian perspective of genius as the creator and the saviour. He is eulogised for his inventions which people will imminently benefit from. Precisely here we brazenly subside the operations of epistemicide that suppress the existing methods of knowledge with which in the first place the creative process of the genius was possible.
Foucault avers: “I critique the notion of creativity – I mean that truth is not acquired as a sort of continuous and cumulative creation but a set of grids stacked on one another that hide old and reveal new knowledge.” He further expounds on this idea extensively that we should not think that creativity is an admixture of freedom and regularity because the former is only exercised against a background and a network of regularity.
His idea of creativity is complex and layered but thought-provoking and edifying as well. French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) writes in one of his trailblazing treatises namely the death of the author: ” literature is precisely the inventions of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin.” The word literature here can be positively interpreted as a text containing any significant set of ideas that possibly impacts humans. Similarly, whatever poems and stories written by French poet Charles Baudlaire (1821-1867) were an amalgamation of expressions of his age and as Barthes writes:” Baudlaire’s work is the failure of the man Baudlaire.”
The creative process is not the expression of an individual self or the radical removal of obfuscation that has prevented human access to a certain truth about an individual. However, it is an ambiguous spree of suppression, disruption, and reflection of a certain epoch. It is not to discount the worth of a creative genius or confiscate from him the title of the genius but to ensure that creativity is not as simple as often thought
When the British arrived in the subcontinent the maiden goal that they desired to execute was the brutal and detestable confiscation of the épistème which guided the mundane life of the people of the subcontinent. It introduced scientific truths which were alien to us but at the same time, it suppressed the local systems of knowledge. We remotely remember how was life under the erstwhile prevalent truths that informed the society of the subcontinent in the 17th century.
New truths invariably suppress and traduce the existing truths and this needs earnest analysis. Nonetheless, the fanfare and gaudy display of appreciation for genius and creative minds should be suspected and questioned. We need to cut the proverbial goridan knot to face dominant and asymmetrical systems of knowledge that are prone to suppressing and dismantling other possible forms of knowledge.
One cannot consider Newton or any other bureaucratic geek as shoddy but one needs to question him because of his apocryphal claim of ownership of a truth which comes into existence thanks to contingencies. The human mind and the systems of the knowledge that endlessly create it are susceptible to the vagaries of binary relations. It touts one thing preposterous, cheap and bleak while making another superior, great, and perfect.
Truth as a palpable outcome of a creative process is not an individual enterprise. It is often not as much salubrious as advertised. Rather it comes into existence like a system of grids that dismantles, suppresses and veils everything else which seems to be averse to it.
The writer is interested in philosophy and literature and is based in Islamabad.