We often think of crisis and creativity as related states, as seemingly polar opposites that can reverse polarity at any time, transforming one into the other. Crisis can give rise to creativity just as creativity can provoke a crisis in the creator. Think, for example, of Giorgio de Chirico’s illness and state of depression as he sat in Florence’s Piazza of Santa Croce, which left him susceptible to the insight that led to the stunning metaphysical paintings of 1910-1918. From crisis came creativity. Now think of the causal arrow running in the opposite direction, as happened with Surrealism’s early practice of induced trance and automatic writing. These activities produced work of startling imagery, but pushed some of the participants to the edge of psychological breakdown. We move from crisis to creativity; from creativity to crisis: an alternating cycle of reversible poles.
Évelyne Grossman’s short essay The Creativity of the Crisis, originally published in France in 2020 as La Créativité de la crise and appearing now in Rainer J. Hanshe’s English translation, sets out to convince us to reconsider our way of conceptualizing the relationship between creativity and crisis. She does this with examples drawn from psychology, literature, and philosophy, with a particular focus on the work and lives of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Samuel Beckett, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, and others.
As editor of Artaud’s work, Grossman is well-positioned to look into the sometimes uncomfortably intimate connection between creativity and crisis. Early on she quotes from a 1924 letter Artaud wrote Jacques Rivière in which the former announced his state of being as consisting in a “central collapse of the soul, a kind of erosion, essential and at the same time fleeting, of thought, [and] an abnormal separation of the elements of thought.” It is a vivid description of what it is like to experience a crisis in which creativity seemingly cannot escape the gravitational pull of an inner abyss, one in which the normal processes associated with the sense of self are effectively negated.
Provocatively, Grossman suggests that the negation of self may in fact be the critical event from which creativity can arise. Reaching back to the first experiments with automatic writing undertaken by André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Eluard, Grossman argues that it was precisely the neutralization of the participants’ sense of self that opened up previously undisclosed imaginative worlds. The suspension of their individual “genius” and “talents,” as prescribed by Breton’s 1924 manifesto, was the precondition for what Grossman describes as the “liberation of the creative energy peculiar to language,” or what Breton later characterized as the upsurge of “another kind of sense, a compelling and divinatory one, [that] guides man to where he wants to go without knowing it.” For Grossman it was the impersonal that was the creator; in support, she cites Blanchot’s assertion that
The work demands of the writer that he lose all “nature,” all character, and ceasing to relate … to himself by the decision that makes him an “I,” he becomes the empty place where impersonal affirmation is announced.
Creativity is like passion, which Grossman quotes Foucault characterizing as an “unstable moment” in which “being oneself no longer makes sense.” Like passion, in other words, the creative act depends on one’s capacity to achieve an ek-stasis, a putting of oneself outside of oneself. Grossman suggests then that it is precisely when one “think[s] of oneself as a subject, endowed with a fixed identity, with a fixed intention to work” that produces a crisis of creativity: it arises “when the creative process becomes immobilized in a subject.” The upshot is that the recognition of the impersonal within oneself, epitomized by language which belongs to no one in particular, and the concession to it of one’s creative impulses, implicates creativity in both a crisis of identity—who exactly is creating what “I” seem to create?—as well as a critique of identity: how do I not conclude that, as Rimbaud claimed, “ ‘I’ is another”? Crisis and creativity really are inseparable, then, albeit in a way that differs from the conventional notion of their interchangeability. Instead, Grossman asserts that they are held together in an “unstable oscillation of anguish and joy.” They are like a binary star system maintained in place by an unresolved and unresolvable tension. A question that arises, though, is how sustainable this tension can be. Grossman is honest enough to offer the caveat that it is not something that everyone can be expected to cope with. And indeed, two of the figures she discusses at length—Artaud and Nietzsche—went mad.
It may be that ultimately the impersonal and personal represent two moments within creative activity. For example, it’s worth considering that the creative potential inherent in the ostensibly impersonal material of language may be grounded in something like the individual language user’s semantic underworld—the complex network of affective and aesthetic associations and correspondences that pervade words and forge what Breton called their “secret affinities”—which is itself the product of the language user’s history and experiences, temperament and idiosyncrasies, memories and desires, and so forth. What the impersonal creative impulse may bring forth, in other words, may be content of a highly individual nature, albeit content that can only show itself when conscious control, overseen by explicitly subjective judgments, is let go of. It may be that the impersonal creative impulse represents the initial moment of the creative work and that the subsequent moments that complete it will have to involve the “fixed intention to work.” Think, for example, of Robert Motherwell’s idea of “plastic automatism,” according to which the raw material of a work arises spontaneously but is then subject to formal development according to the artist’s judgment. Much of the painting associated with Surrealism was produced this way.
To be sure, the phenomenon of human creativity is, and probably will remain, something of a mystery. Grossman’s essay provides a stimulating perspective for thinking about it, and for situating it in relation to the psychic life of the creator.
The Creativity of the Crisis, by Évelyne Grossman. Translated by Rainer J. Hanshe. New York, New York: Contra Mundum Press, September 2023. 146 pages. $18.00, paper.
Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer, and writer in the Washington, DC area. He writes on the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century, and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021). Website: danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.
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