From: ssliwinski-AT-accel.net (Sharon Sliwinski)
Subject: Deconstruction/creativity (again!)
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 00:30:45 -0500


John wrote:

>What has deconstruction created? (I know this is an old question on this
>line, already)  To my ears, it has yielded the conceptual tools necessary
>for an ethics of radical singularity and, perhaps most importantly, it has
>done so without a naive relation to history.  The notion of creativity,
>however, seems exceptionally problematic.  After Hegel, how can one think of
>creation purely, without contamination, without co-optation?  What could it
>mean to create without repetition?  The primary position of the sign and the
>sign's success/failure at carrying meaning condemns creativity to a sort of
>pure modernist idea.

As I understand it, creativity is the action that steps outside of
repetition. It, like Cixous describes, is that action which "forsees the
unforseeable". Deleuze talks about this. He says things like we have to see
creation as the tracing of a path between imposibilities... "A creator is
someone who creates his own impossibilites, and thereby creates
possibilites. It's by banging your head on the wall that you'll find an
answer. You have to be liquid or gasous, precisely because normal perception
and opinion are solid, geometric... For style definitly doesn't come about
by putting words together, combining phrases, using ideas. You have to open
words, rend things, to free Earth's vectors..." ("Mediators"). This is not
modernism talk at all, but it's not quite deconstruction either is it? But
enough of that argument. 

This delicate time that we're in -- between reaction and action (creation)
-- is what I'm trying to get at. Many of you have described your taste for
feminist performances that challenge phallocentric tradition as well as
"invent" new styles. Escapes, etc. Right on! But there's a very delicate
line between truly stepping outside the possibilities and simply "bending"
the old ones into new metal, no? It seems to me, imitation is a very
dangerous thing at present. Perhaps not so dangerous fifteen, twenty years
ago, and perhaps not so dangerous fifty or sixty years ago, but now, now
when we're in that precarious "in between", it seems ultimately dangerous
("Inbetween" phallogocentrism and ... the dark continent??? that is). 

sharon