Creativity, singularity and techne: The making and unmaking of visual objects in modernity

Creativity is the release of singularity captured in form. According to Jean-Luc Nancy, a singularity is “that which occurs only once” (41), a unique event that reveals a field of contiguities and interconnectivities, and offers potential for new kinds of assemblages and the creative production of new kinds of differentiated objects.A singularity is not a particular (particulars are the individual elements belonging to a plan) but that aspect of particulars which refuses to be resolved into “good form”. As Nancy writes, a singularity is “a unique property that escapes appropriation” (41), a resistivity lodged at the heart of particulars. In this article I discuss creativity as the practice of releasing singularities from the formal properties (the particularity) of visual objects.Creativity bears a special relation with techne and the technical, as that which reveals techne’s (false) grounding in nature, and instead shows the way towards an ungrounding of the nature-techne relation as an experience of aura, or the uniqueness of the object as work of art (Heidegger, Benjamin, Steigler). Modern objects are auratic when read as singularities—as resistive affects of fading originariness, a glimmer at the edge of the object’s connection to the world. As an engagement with techne, creativity works from the inside of knowledge production, but only by allowing the outside in. Creativity is thus inherently interfacial, working on surfaces, as planes of affect (Deleuze and Guattari). All objects in modernity are works of art, when read in terms of their singularity as resistive affect (Deleuze and Guattari 164).In this discussion, I undertake a reading of two images. The first of these, a painting by the nineteenth century English landscape artist J.M.W. Turner, will demonstrate how creativity can be understood as the destabilisation of trained techniques—a kind of untrained training—and the release of singularity as the formlessness of the “becoming pure” of colour. The second reading is of a nineteenth century photograph of Lewis Paine, codemned to death for his part in the assassination of US president, Abraham Lincoln. The reading will exemplify a way of describing images creatively, which “opens up an irreducible strangeness” of singularity (Nancy Being Singular Plural 6). The techne of photography, like the techne of visual art, produces a “false” connection with the real—a connection predicated on mediation, where the real as originary is something produced and not something present as such. A creative reading of the image will reveal the falsity of this connection as access to its originariness, and thus offers potential for a renewed vision of the past, as the image of a future yet to come.I argue that this descriptive analysis of visual objects and their mode of appearing (as percepts) can be considered as a technique of creative reading to counter the emergence of another formulation of creativity currently gaining ground in the academy, as the production of knowledges within what has been termed “creative industries” (Flew). Creativity cannot be the subject of knowledge production. Rather, it is that which de-knowledges knowledge, and hence puts at risk all that knowledge and its attendant power apparatuses want us to know and practice. Creativity, as that which reveals and articulates singularities, critiques the techne of any knowledge production activity, and challenges knowledge to rethink its origin as technologically produced.