Creativity as intra-action: theorizing creativity as relational becoming


Kevin Naimi, Université Laval

The purpose of this paper is to theorize creativity as a relational process of becoming. Using Barad’s concept of intra-action (Barad, 2007), I will ague for an understanding of creativity as an affective intra-active relation. The concept of intra-action was coined by Barad to highlight the ways in which entangled agencies co-construct one another in the process of becoming. In this paper, I will adapt Barad’s concept to argue for a relational understanding of creativity highlighting the mutual constitution between human and nonhuman actants in processes of creation. An intra-active view understands creativity as central to everyday life and everyday process of becoming. In advancing this argument, my goal is to challenge an individualized and individualistic understanding of creativity that views creativity principally as an elite property or gift of individual minds. This individualized view of creativity serves to generate a theoretical inattention to the constitutive and cumulative processes that are central to creation but that often remain veiled under the labels of talent and giftedness. From a relational approach to creativity the focus is displaced from the individual and their internal processes, to focus instead on the ways in which creativity emerges from the affective intra-active constitution of human and nonhuman actants. This transition from an internalist to a relational theorizing of creativity can be understood as part of the shift from a psychological to a sociological theorizing of creativity. By focusing more overtly on the mutual constitution of the person and the material/discursive mediums within which creative action takes place we are given the ability to more fully understand how creativity emerges through ongoing and sustained affective relations that are not necessarily driven by human intention alone. To make this argument, this paper will start by outlining key elements of new materialism and posthumanism and their important implications for reconceptualizing creativity. Working from an animate ontology (Ingold 2006, Sheets-Johnstone, 2009), I will argue for a reconceptualization of materiality as active and forceful, a reconceptualization which seeks to restore the nonhuman as a forceful and central actant in processes of creation and becoming. This reconceptualization of materiality entails an equally significant repositioning of the human and a reimagining of the nature of the relationship between human and nonhuman. Building on these theoretical preliminaries, I will develop, using Barad’s concept of intra-action, a thoroughly relational understanding of creativity. I will argue that from an intra-active perspective, creativity takes place as a process of affective attunement between a person and a structured medium (or materiality). Significantly, this process of attunement works both ways in the creative intra-action meaning that both the person and the material medium actively and forcefully fashion one another. This relational and intra-active approach to creativity therefore entails a radical reconceptualization of the affective force of materiality in the creative process as well as a displacement of the individual as the as the sole ‘agent’ of creation. Ultimately, by foregrounding processes of attunement and accommodation, this relational approach to creativity sheds a clarifying and correcting light on the conventional black box theories that otherwise explain creativity in terms of some inborn and ineffable gift or talent. Creativity, I argue is not principally a gift or an ability localized in individualities, but rather an intra-actional relation of attention, attunement, and becoming that implicates human and nonhuman in a constitutive relation. This view cast creation in a very different light that that prominent in the modernist view which situates creativity as an elite ability.

This paper will be presented at the following session: