Évelyne Grossman’s The Creativity of the Crisis, a concise yet wide-ranging examination of the interplay between crisis and creativity, traces the fluctuating notions of art, the artist, and interpretation in the wake of the Enlightenment. Grossman expounds on ideas put forth by Artaud, Barthes, Deleuze & Guattari, Beckett, Nietzsche, and others in her analysis, identifying the common anxieties and generative forces at play in many of their works. In doing so, she opposes the fixity and dogmatism that are antithetical to creativity, highlighting instead the qualities that are essential to the creation and reception of art—instability, fluidity, and experimentation. Such qualities, when present in a work of art, prompt us to “experience the imbalances they have created, this unstable and often poignant oscillation between anguish and joy: a creative crisis to be crossed again, by each of us, if one has the strength.”
—Mia Ruf
Mia Ruf: You remark that the creative crisis appears to have “weakened, civilized,” that the “pangs” associated with creative output have grown more discreet with time. What do you think has given rise to this? What is it about civilization that tempers such pangs, and how, in a world that prioritizes stability, can we regain the instability on which creation so depends? Is an “advanced” society antithetical to creative output?
Évelyne Grossman: I would simply point out that the mythical model of the “great creative crisis” on which Roland Barthes was already ironizing (physical or psychic collapse followed by rebirth in creation, the “pound of flesh” to be paid to be a “real” artist), if it ever existed, is no longer really relevant today. Maybe because the stakes of contemporary creation have been both downplayed and displaced. Fortunately, it has become difficult to believe in the heroic (not to say spermatic) scheme of the creative subject (a man, obviously) realizing his “anti-destiny” (André Malraux) through his work.
Thankfully, this binary schema opposing creation (male) and procreation (female) has lost its force of evidence, and with it the painful pattern of childbirth that was attached to it. At the same time, creation has lost its exceptional aura; it has been democratized, and the crisis with it, which is rather good news.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the desacralization of art, but rather an extension, a diversification of the domains of art, which in turn leads to a certain demystification of its exceptionality, of its rarity in the sense of a certain economic model of scarcity justifying the price of objects put up for sale. It seems to me that we no longer believe in the status of creativity as a rare resource to be preserved and distributed in an economy of scarcity. Moreover, I speak less of “creation” in the sense of a result than of “creativity” in the sense of potentiality and process. So it is not a question of fecundity versus sterility (abundance versus scarcity in the economic model), but of the vitality of a dynamic impulse that is not necessarily that of an individual subject, but can be collective. The Surrealists in France, for example, sought to do away with the notion of the individual creative subject (a supposedly bourgeois model), and instead focus on the unconscious or preconscious, collective processes of creativity. This was the sense of their collective games (cadavre exquis, automatic writing in groups).
MR: I’m especially interested in the idea of the traumatic foundational event that gives rise to artistic output, the “fertilization by nothingness.” What is it, would you say, about nothingness that proves such fertile ground for the artist? Is the return to a tabula rasa of sorts, a zeroing out, necessary for artistic breakthrough? And if it isn’t necessary, if this is just a foundational myth or narrative that artists have found useful in their self-narrativization and self-actualization, why do you think the idea of rupturing with one’s past, with all precedent, is so helpful in terms of creative activity?
ÉG: The few examples I give of writers who believed in the myth of the “fertile crisis” rightly mocked by Roland Barthes are intended to further deconstruct this myth. I suggest that it is indeed a consoling myth, aimed at justifying both the psychic collapses (psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing’s well-known “breakdown” as a potential “break-through”) and the devastating effects of the brutal industrial reconversions (the famous “creative destruction” defended in the wake of economist Joseph Schumpeter) of a certain capitalist model. Apart from the fact that these models are too simply mechanical and univocal, we must not underestimate their ultimately sadistic content, which simplistically links destruction or trauma with (re)creation. A bit like the biblical adage: “thou shalt bring forth children in pain,” or even the Christian myth of death and resurrection. What I’ve tried to show in this book is rather that we no longer believe—and fortunately no longer do—in this theologico-paternal model of creation, which is essentially masculine, or based on female procreation. This is why, for example, I have examined “the Deleuze-Guattari couple’s conception of a new mode of writing for two men but without author,” or the exploration of the creative energy inherent in language by Surrealist poets and artists in the 1920s (automatic writing, appeals to the world of dreams, collective creations) or research into the “creativity of language” celebrated by Chomskyan linguists in the 60s. In other words, anything that demystifies the individualistic myth of the Creative Subject (with a capital S). As Beckett suggests, after Freud, we also create through failing, which is indispensable to any creative process. The crisis is then no longer a failure (to be overcome eventually) but a living process.
“It seems to me that we no longer believe in the status of creativity as a rare resource to be preserved and distributed in an economy of scarcity.”
MR: Your book prompted me to revisit Artaud, and much of his envisioned theater seems to evoke a murmur, arrived at by moving beyond language, even if language is used to iterate it: “Les mots parlent peu à l’esprit; l’étendue et les objets parlent; les images nouvelles parlent, même faites avec des mots. Mais l’espace tonnant d’images, gorgé de sons, parle aussi…” What are your thoughts on this recurring interest, seen in Artaud and elsewhere in theater and poetry, in channeling this new form of non-language and in conjuring new forms of communication through the interplay of image, sound, and object? What gives rise to such an impulse?
ÉG: The theatrical concepts developed by Artaud in the 1930s represented a radical departure from our conception of the work as a finished product divorced from its author. What he called “theater” was both much more and something quite different from what is usually understood by the term. His watchword? No longer equate performance with language (by which he means human language). What he sought to reinvent for the rest of his life, under the old name of theater, was precisely another stage on which what he called “the frozen words” of Western theater could breathe new life, where the “old magical efficacy” of language in act could be rediscovered. Theater, then, is both a bodily and a spiritual act. In his view, we must put an end to psychological theater, to Western theater, and establish what he calls a “Theater of Cruelty,” whose waves and vibrations are felt in the organism, in the depths of the flesh. What does cruelty mean? It’s not a banal sadism, but a vital energy beyond human rationality, a magical force of organic contagion. Words need to be heard in their physical and sonic aspects, perceived as bodily movements of the mind, and language on stage brought back to life.
What he seeks to invent is what he calls a new “language in space” that destabilizes the linear order of human language: vibrations, echoes of noise, the “spellbinding effectiveness” of incantatory rhythms, “poetry in space,” a bath of sound and light, a nervous path, poetic energy. We must stop assimilating representation (theatrical, pictorial) to the sole linguistic model of human language, which has lost its poetic power to invent worlds. Hence his research into Assyrian myths, the rituals of the ancient Mexican Indians and their power of creative incantation.
Personally, I find it fascinating that Artaud’s fervent attention to what is too quickly described as “primitive mentality” meets the current reappraisal by many anthropologists and researchers in the human sciences of worldviews other than that of the so-called “civilized” West. The work of Eduardo Kohn, Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Donna Haraway, for example, explores representational forms that go beyond language, other non-human forms of life that also represent the world. As Kohn puts it, all life is semiotic and all semiosis is alive; life thinks; thoughts are alive. In short, the question Artaud asked all his life (“what is a living sign?”) is being taken up again today in terms that raise the question of the creativity of the living world, and that displace our notion of a creative work.
MR: When Artaud laments the separation of culture and life, and argues that the inverse of this separation is “the burn,” the “animated body-sign” who “signal[s] through the flames,” the primary focus here is on the performer, the self-sacrificial artist; in your eyes, where does this leave the spectator, the recipient of the artist’s signal? What do you think would constitute a comparably vibrant and engaged audience member, in Artaud’s mind? A voyeur? A participatory audience? Given the artist’s self-sacrifice, his martyrdom of sorts, is there a burden of interpretation placed on the spectator?
ÉG: In fact, Artaud rejects the idea of separation between actor and spectator, stage and auditorium. Whether in the visual arts or theater, what he has always wanted to abolish is what he calls the culture of representation, that of the passive spectator and their dead gaze. In its place, he imagines a culture in action that reinvents a magical, living relationship between thing and word, text and performer [interprète] (in the double sense of actor and giver of meaning). For Artaud, the entire theatrical site (the indistinct space of stage and auditorium) is the magical place where a boundless, living body is articulated, a body that is entirely vibratile and erogenous, human and beyond human.
Interpretation, in the sense of making sense of what we see or read, is no longer an issue. For the person who no longer has to be a spectator at a distance, or a reader trying to grasp the meaning of what he or she reads, the question is no longer to understand, but to be an actor in the meaning we create. As Nietzsche also suggested, that’s what I’m reminding us in this book: free us from the certainties brandished by priests and teachers of thought, and we’ll have a chance, perhaps, of becoming creators. Interpretation has long been the exclusive domain of theologians, transforming texts into dogmas and precepts to be followed. We should instead imagine an interpretation that is constantly experimenting, with no certainty of finding the final word on meaning. In the Nietzschean sense, this would mean cultivating the art of interpretation as a power of instability, invention, and creativity.
“Words need to be heard in their physical and sonic aspects, perceived as bodily movements of the mind, and language on stage brought back to life.”
MR: I was struck by your identification of “the crisis of the humanist subject” within Barthes, his unrealizable desire to take the place of the author whom he knows to be dead. Do you notice this crisis—of the humanist subject or others—in other writers and artists?
ÉG: For Barthes, I believe, it was a paralyzing and potentially mortifying double bind. More broadly, this crisis of the humanist subject is the product of an era, structuralism (or post-structuralism, as you call it in the U.S.), that of Foucault, Barthes, and others who analyzed the death of the Author or the Subject. Nowadays, we might say that this was a battle between the white Western male and God-the-Father, and that the whole theological conception of the creative subject is now in the process of collapsing in the Western world, and with it the humanist opposition of nature versus culture, human versus animal. Not only because psychoanalysis or deconstructive philosophy (Derrida ironizing the Cartesian trilogy of the centered, intentional, and conscious subject) or because artificial intelligence tends to call into question the supposed creative originality of the human being, but also and above all because Western subjects have begun to stop thinking of themselves as being at the center of the world. The work of anthropologists and philosophers of the living world then became audible when they challenged the very idea of human supremacy over the living world, along with this Western conception of creation. But, once again, the question I examine in this book is that of creativity as an open, non-strictly human process, and not that of creation as a result.
MR: Continuing on this question of interpretation—and of interpretation as a “power of instability, invention, creativity,” as you put it—I cannot help but think of Sontag’s call for an erotics, as opposed to a hermeneutics, of art. What does interpretation mean for you?
ÉG: Susan Sontag’s distinction is indeed an interesting one. She suggests that the true value of art lies in its ability to arouse emotions, provoke reflection and challenge social norms, rather than being reduced to mere interpretation. Yet everything depends on what we mean by interpretation. The hermeneutics that Nietzsche also criticizes are those of the priests of meaning and their intimidating effects, which block the direct apprehension of the work by ordinary people. But it would be too simple to oppose eroticism and hermeneutics. There is a joy in interpretation, provided that it is open, starry-eyed, that it does not limit the work by trying to close it in on a single meaning, but rather shrouds it in a halo of multiple meanings that enrich it and make it unstable. Interpretation is thus creative and erotic.
—
Évelyne Grossman is the former president of the International College of Philosophy and currently teaches at the University of Paris VII. The Creativity of the Crisis was first published in the original French by Les Éditions de Minuit in 2020. Its translation, by Rainer J. Hanshe, was published in 2023 by Contra Mundum Press. Her book The Anguish of Thought, translated by Matthew Cripsey and Louise Burchill, was published in 2017 and is available from the University of Minnesota Press.
Mia Ruf is a writer, editor, and translator based in Queens, NY.