Dario Vacirca
This article investigates transversal approaches to creativity as a means to transform hierarchical dichotomies, such as citizen/refugee, worker/slacker, man/woman, self/community, nation/globe, and human/non-human, into assemblages of difference. By examining creativity-resistance and nomadic-becoming as foundational to futurability, the research draws on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead to construct an ontology of creativity and difference. It introduces Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory of becoming and radical subjectivity as an affirmative ethics, along with Marco Checchi’s concept of resistance preceding power to form a politics of entanglement. The analysis extends to non-identity, ambient poetics, cultural hybridity, and the liberation of time from capital as key components in the field of radical cultural praxis. The work concludes by proposing critical dreaming as a transdisciplinary approach to contemporary political aesthetics that is simultaneously creative, critical, and transformative.
This work offers the observation that creativity is an approach, ethic, modality, and method to develop modes of enquiry through a process of meshing multiple interconnected fields of affect and thought. Stated simply: creativity is a powerful mechanism for bridging seemingly diverse fields, while opening us through aesthetic and performative devices to new knowledge, empathy, and, therefore, potentiality.
Creativity is the first and most general category of a metaphysics of process, difference, and relationality that connects diverse epistemologies. Creating is an active process continually negotiating with influences from various points of subjectivity and temporality. Theoretically,creative-process philosophy fuses the traditional dyads of material and ideal, into a dynamic process that connects surfaces and creates new perceptive actualities. These new possible-actuals, once brought to the surface of perception, continue to operate within the processual flow. This means the other which encounters this new form is affected by it and influencing it simultaneously.
With this dialogic entanglement in flux, the premises and properties of the world we have taken for ‘neutral and natural’ are disturbed and understood as false assurances of the sanctity of the static singular subject or object as a fixed identity over time. In this mode of thinking, difference is ontologically prior, and reality is formed through a process which is continuous, and in a constant exchange with other elements of (seen and unseen) processes which form new material (apparitions of reality) through their collision. Viewed through the lens of differential ontology, identity, or reality as I have called it above, is constructed from an ever-changing nexus of relations, not something with a self-contained nature, but which is secondary to the processes of differentiation.
This process is a creative force permeating all experience. For Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and their philosophical progeny, difference is the resistant (prior and always) plane of immanence, becoming new form and affect through a flow of nomadic transversal change. What connects the metaphysics of these thinkers is an understanding that “becoming, thinking and creativity are one”, and that this creativity “is an unlimited ‘One All, that differentiates itself into all that is”. That is not to say creativity is an eminent substance but is a process of differentiation resulting from a complex interaction of energy, thought, and perception over time. Deleuze and Whitehead aim not to rediscover the eternal or universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness). Their project locates the points where differentiation occurs, the events which give rise to creativity, and the conditions required for philosophy, art, and science to flourish. This process of differentiation is creative and affirmative. It is not a differentiation through negation.
Using this metaphysical ground as a lens to unfold-into-the-world-with, the creative practitioner is offered boundless opportunities to act within a cosmology of potential with others also affected by these potentia. As a mode of engagement, such creativity-difference informs a politics of entanglement that is important when forming actualities of common values - of labour, land, and subjectivity. Such an intersectional political ethics helps us perceive fundamental value (integration, connection, responsibility to other forms of life) and that which needs to be resisted (capital accumulation, border violence, militancy, oppression) through a methodology of differing, action, creativity, and care.
Philosopher, Marco Checchi, expands on this creativityness, problematising notions of agency, revolution, and becoming through his pivotal 2021 The Primacy of Resistance, which reassesses the relationship between resistance and power. He articulates a conceptual framework of resistance as being prior to power, flipping the standard definition we have of resistance as against, and arguing for it as an-always process “of creative and transformative potential that appeals to becoming.” Indeed, it is power which is responsive to the affirmative, creative processes of resistance. In this radical reading, resistance is the force of openings, whereas power is one of closures. Checchi writes: “To each closure, there are an indefinite multiplicity of openings, creative trajectories oriented towards a future that is already present.” These futures are already present because they are an-always potential in the drive of resistance. The formation of these present-futures is dynamic and subject to change, but is already resistant matter to power. This existent reality forms an ‘against’ (through stasis) to limit the boundless expansion of possibilities. According to Checchi, these present-material-futures of resistance are already in motion, prompting power to respond by absorbing their energy and cutting off their progression.
Checchi’s thesis opens a new way to understand struggle, framing it not as a deficiency, as viewed through the lens of the victor or static (state) power, but as a productiveforce experienced by those who resist. Key to Checchi’s concept is an understanding of immanence and becoming indebted to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. For these thinkers, immanence is the inhering of life-force in all matter, and becoming is a way of understanding these micro and macro life processes as engaged in constant change. For Checchi the history of becoming is a series of closures and new openings. These new openings are creative, continuous, and unstoppable.
Checchi’s framework of resistance advances the understanding of difference and creativity as material functions that shape subjective reality. His framework makes sense of the history and politics of struggle. This tension serves as a central focus in research-creation practice, oscillating on the dial of personal-subjective experience, and collective, active resistance to generate alternative visions and ways of living. This resistance process is a creative and complex energy, operating both autonomously (within individuals) and collectively. It is at this nexus where transformative creative praxis thrives.
Rosi Braidotti’s thinking on creativity, difference, and becoming is most clearly articulated her 2011 book Nomadic Theory, where she developed a conceptual framework and method prior to the new materialist posthuman philosophy for which she is now renowned. Nomadic Theory explores the importance of a double-edged vision that combines creativity and criticality as necessary to transform the conditions of the contemporary subject. Braidotti’s ‘creative critique’ evolves with feminist and queer theories, pushing into ecosophical and posthumanist (‘post-manthropocentric’) thought. Feminisms are critical because they define a break in the Western philosophical canon, and they are creative because, through this break, new concepts and modes of subjectivity are made possible.
As a method this allows thinking-through-subjectivity toward dynamic modes of becoming, and transposing these across disciplines. Braidotti advocates for the Humanities to match the Sciences in decentring the human, seeing this work as vital for the continuation of interconnected planetary species. Her philosophy proposes that humans transform (from their anthropocentric view) by engaging in radical compassion and empathy for the (human and non-human) other. Her ethics involve the transformation of institutions into non-profit, collective, relational, viral (de)centres that empower creative alternatives and value the oscillation between theory and practice. These ideas are integral to a contemporary world view wrestling with a palimpsest of crises brought on by centuries of violence through patriarchal empire and the narrow hermeneutics of philosophical and religious texts which value competition before collaboration, see scarcity before abundance.
A key focus of my research is on the critical re-imagining of human relational systems through radical nomadic arts practices and thinking. I share Braidotti’s concern and passion for radical alterity and the transformation of systems of power and static notions of the subject through nomadic and creative processes of becoming and how these can be harnessed toward a better world for all living beings. In saying this, however, my work challenges an aspect of Braidotti’s critique that she proffers in various texts, namely that the subject’s own story is not an important part of decentring. In this thinking, personal experiences of trauma, identity formation, and other phenomenological expressions need to necessarily be decamped in order to open to a radical reformation with the other. I don’t entirely agree: Braidotti’s position here is inconsistent with her overarching view of the nomadic subject as a “transversal entity: a folding in of external influences and simultaneous unfolding out of affects.” The story or affects which require unfolding are as essential to the project of radical resistance and becoming as is giving over and interplaying with the river of forever others. Their material reality is as affective as any other; it cannot be ignored. It is in the consistent and perpetual interplay of these processes that radical change occurs. Without an understanding of the personal or an engagement with its affects, we are doomed to perpetuate the failed histories of revolutionary movements. This is not to say the specificity of our stories and traumas and personal attributes are important to resistance itself, but that an engaged process exists in how the surfaces of these phenomena as encounter others and connect to our experience of life, which requires attention. In other words, without an engagement with the affects and phenomena of identity, while embracing an ethics of non-identity, it is difficult, nay, impossible to sustain an externality of resistance. This reading of nomadic subjectivity harnesses the affirmative ethics which Braidotti is positioning, while avoiding the pitfalls of shaming the attributes of memory work and deconstruction. These loci are necessary to the evolution of the revolutionary subject when engaged from a position of a non-identarian nomadic self.
Integral to this theory and how it relates to art and creative praxis is the interplay between the radical subject and the normative world it encounters. The subject (self) is part of a nature-culture continuum, a transversal multiplicity in non-hierarchical relationship to others and the world. In this view, there is no ontological difference, in terms of categories between any kind of living entity. This flattening of hierarchies leads the nomadic thinker-doer into radical acceptance of the other as being constituent, and an extension of ‘self’. When embodied, this idea necessitates an ethic of care, responsibility, and friendship that sees the world, and us within it, as kin. This idea is not unique in contemporary philosophy, sharing a lot of touchpoints with object-oriented ontology and new materialism. These other frameworks do not encompass the dynamism, openness, breadth, intensity, and, most importantly, clarity of the Nomadic Theory and method. In the practice of art, these ethics of care and responsibility can be extended into relations between materials, whether they are ideas, objects, systems, institutions, buildings, or people.
These affirmative ethics can influence efforts to change normative systems through radical counter-propositions. Instead of approaching these systems in a combative or antagonistic manner, change is explored through alternative transversal offerings, presenting a counter-intensity to the status quo. This approach aims to shift ideologies or alter the conditions in which ‘subjects’ can redefine and re-determine their positions. The subjective experience of each individual, and in relation to others, is central to understanding the world. Therefore, subjective experience itself is key for attempting to change the world through various modes of resistance, whether through art, activism, direct action, politics, or other means. Shukatis and Graeber narrate:
What we perceive as fixed self-identical objects are really processes. The only reason we insist on treating objects as anything else is because, if we saw them as they really are, as mutual projects, it would be impossible for anyone to claim ownership of them. All liberatory struggle therefore is ultimately the struggle against identity.
These ideas foster empathies from diverse interactions connecting to an ‘extimatic’ force that seeks to flatten hierarchical thinking and action. Extimacy is the translation of extimité, a Lacanian neologistic blend constructed from exterior and intimacy. It is understood as the externalisation of the interior, and vice versa, and relates to the Lacanian concept of the mirror stage and the position of the other never being situated in one place, always out of reach, yet informing who we think we are. I use it here to articulate the dynamics at play in the intersubjective relationships of the artistic experience as well as that of the relationship between the artist, the artwork, the world, and specifically how the practice of art is always sharing the internal externally, with the exterior being experienced intimately.
This flattening of hierarchy does not suggest there is a compression of meaning or a sameness which permeates such experiences. On the contrary it expands difference and meaning, and is unafraid of non-identity. This ‘non-identarian difference’ is a concept shared by many, often divergent, philosophical schools of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Where these ontologies of difference agree is in the radical acceptance of the other, as paramount to the foundation of the one.
Embodying this knowledge necessitates a radical politics of difference. This requires developing a praxis that opens a deep empathic awareness and care to those others who, though not yet recognised as part of us, can begin to be heard through struggle. Artistic practice, especially of the radical kind, takes this struggle seriously. It may be one of the last places left to criticise and re-evaluate the identarian structures of power, both personal and collective, we hold as natural and true.
We live in an era where this work of change is increasingly critical. Now that systemic problems of capitalism and post-colonial geo-politics are so apparent, ‘change’ is explored across industries. From medical to military sectors, workers, not only managers, are engaging in ‘leadership’ courses asking them to ‘re-imagine’ the way we work. This may lead to insight and promote collaboration, but it is still within a system that remains hierarchical, tied to power corruptions and continuing for-profit effects on the planet. These industries are beholden to specific tasks they need to achieve which means they can only go so far in questioning the fundamental flaws of their economy. Art does not have this restriction, because, when it is free of teleology and emancipated of its object, it can undermine itself and reimagine an-order of relations that values self-determination, time sovereignty and free association — leading to further creativity-resistance (change).
Articulating the ontological and epistemological complexities of difference and non-identity shapes an understanding of creativity and its significance in the world. This perspective underscores why much art production gravitates toward liminal spaces of difference, treating these as sites for creating new meaning with audiences. Whether this dynamic oscillation is achieved at any specific point in the art is less relevant. It is the intensity of the struggle, empowered by difference and non-identity (becoming), which drives change. In other words, the process of becoming-artist, of undertaking the works themselves, of doingcultural practice, is the ultimate goal.
Indigenous cosmologies develop as systems of interrelations between all life forms. Points of connection between the appearance of one and another are continuing acts of culture acknowledging this relationality: singing, speaking, writing, drawing, painting, dancing, tilling, sharing, caring, and kinning worlds into existence. Inherent in this way of being is a continuous tie to all forms of life in an everlasting creativity process of becoming. These ideas are critical and could be the framework from which we redesign our economies of land; from that of proprietary to that of kin and custodianship. This necessitates an ethics of care and fundamental shifts in ideology that lead us to radical acts of commoning. Worldviews create worlds.
For some Indigenous scholars, however, this ‘ontologising’ from Western academics can be seen as another form of colonialism. Without future imaginaries being led from a feminist Indigenous perspective embedded in its land and ancestry, we run the risk of superimposing a Westernised interpretation of this lore and using it to reinforce our right to be in the centre of the conversation. I agree with the resistance in this approach and the opportunity it affords Indigenous women to use their knowledge and power to lead discourse and action. From my perspective as a dual identity, Western-male born and identified, with a privileged upbringing interconnected into global cultural opportunities, I would add that embodied practices that oscillate between internal (psychological, mythological) and external (systems, others) are integral to unlocking the potential of heterogeneous communities embedded in kinship relations to each other and country. In my argument, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but require each other to make a difference in the worlds of relationality and discourses of power toward forms “of collectivity outside of government-imposed strictures of clanship or land ownership” as described by Aboriginal film collective, Karrabing.
This dual approach of regrounding claims to connections and alliances between different constituencies is taken up in the research and work of critical theorist and filmmaker, Elizabeth Povinelli, especially through her collaborations with the Karrabing. In this work we start to approach a method which belies the prevailing methods of relationality and discourse through alternative transversal experiments in story-telling and social praxis. In her critical anthropology, Povinelli constructs four axioms of existence to describe a theory addressing the ontological, social, political, and historical knotting of Western provincial epistemologies.
Povinelli’s four axioms are: 1. Entangled existence (knotting of self is actually outside); 2. Unequal distribution of effects of power (to knot) and the power to affect a terrain of existence (to unknot); 3. The multiplicity of the event and the end of the event; 4. Provincial nature of western ontologies and epistemologies (postcolonial, critical race, queer theory). She unpacks active methodologies that confront contemporary repression stemming from layers of contemporary and historical violence. Povinelli develops new parameters to engage in acts of radical collaboration, between the seat of her own family’s displacement in northern Italy, and with the Karrabing, her long-term friends and collaborators.
Povinelli’s practice as a philosopher and artistic collaborator is grounded in her background as an anthropologist. Her ideas transcend geographical and conceptual space, zones, and concepts of time, and critical cultural ‘placedness.’ These ideas and approaches resonate with my own interests and projects that examine a personal history of displaced ancestry and how this relates to the historical and contemporary violence of geo-politics. This practice articulates the resonance I feel on the country in which I was born, but with which I do not have intergenerational cultural history. For Povinelli and me, this ‘displacedness’ is explored through artistic investigations that intervene on the impossible in-betweenness of such cultural identities. By forging new connections to each liminal location, new strains of culturally hybrid identity are formed. These threads become traces articulated in practice. Importantly, these investigations, wherever they occur, continue to act critically in their analyses of power and oppression. New cultural formations and critical analysis are constantly in play and at play.
To achieve this level of engagement with the struggle of history as it interplays with one’s personal imaginary, involves layers of privilege to which many do not have access. One of these privileges is, of course, money. Another, and perhaps even more important, and not always tied to money as I argue below, is access to freed time.
As all creative people—all people—know, time is not money. Yet, as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi notes, modernity has been “structured by the semiotic code of Economics”, and through this “time was priced and mathematically measured as the source of value.” The control of labour under industrial capitalism and rent under financial capitalism has radically shaped the way humans relate to a core fundamental property of the universe: time. This has structured individual and collective worldviews and concomitant effects on systems of relationality, namely governance, family, self, and work. We are shaped, indeed, instrumentalised, by the dynamics of financial capital. We become agents of its dispersal. Our identities are forged by contemporary capitalism’s flows and striations, and our bodies are therefore distorted in its image.
This economics and its affective-reality is best countervailed by a particular amalgam of creative modalities, namely poetic sensibility, creative resistance, radical proposition, and self-reflexive, free time. These devices allow us to oscillate on the threshold between hegemonies, and, importantly, unlike other sectors in the creative industries, from music to architecture, are hard to ‘mine’ and turn into products of accumulation and consumption. I contend that this is because the creative modalities described above—poetics, resistance, radicality—cannot be compartmentalised, atomised, and standardised, and this is due to their creative, fluid, and extimatic sensibilities; processes always on the threshold of resistance and becoming. According to Berardi, it is at these thresholds where:
A schismogenetic process can begin. Not a revolution, not a new political order, but the emergence of a new organism that is different to the old organism. This is, properly speaking, the space of poetry: the activity that shapes the new dispositions of sensibility.
It is at the confluence of these creative approaches where a new critical and active aesthetics emerges, oscillating between the fields of direct intervention, aesthetic translation, and embodied poetics. Where else but in this new aesthetics is time-itself freed, allowing us to experience the joy and weirdness of the cosmic, geological, spatial, nature-culture continuum? To Berardi again:
Exceeding the self is the core of the sexual drive: highlighting a desire to be traversed by the flows of the other, to inhale the other, to smell the flavour of the other, to lick the skin of the other, to become the other.
The field of mediation studies asks us to consider how acts of creativity and aesthetic translation can help us in the struggle toward knowing and becoming with others outside our knowability. Eugene Thacker explores in his study on the paradox of ‘excommunication’ how “one communicates with or connects to that which is, by definition, inaccessible.” In other words, the other is unreachable, obscure, alien, until we know and learn about it through mediation.
This other can be data, algorithm, biological life forms, robots, bunnies, alternative cultural practices, or things, matter and lifeworlds that are immediately alien to us and which require mediation to comprehend when we encounter them. Thacker and his co-writers, Wark and Galloway, ask us to confront what mediation is, not what it does, but what it is and why. For the authors, the impossibility of communicating that which is alien to our immediate understanding is the necessary struggle of media and art. Engaging with this challenge reveals the potential of perceiving the world of objects and interactions as both autonomous and interrelated. Through our engagement in these acts of mediation, of listening and speaking simultaneously, like Berardi’s analogy of sex, not for the proliferation of the species, but for the sake of knowing the other, we can cultivate an empathic artistic praxis leading to the creation of new connections and possibilities for creativity.
This ‘becoming-other’ is imperative for radical cultural practices that use nomadic methodologies to transform systems of personal and collective normativity. One of the techniques of this method is to practise creative repetition from different angles to produce new empathies and meaning, leading to the possibility of further creativity and care to those seemingly outside our established sense of identity. Through these repetitions and remediations, we become aware of the creative possibility of beings we have not previously considered in our realm of importance as artistic agents. We effectively become each other through this process, together forming a new subject and art object.
These relational processes connect ideas of radical futuring with what else is possible given contexts, materials, flows, and sites beyond individual control. Working within these new relational systems shapes experiences that, in turn, open further relationships to new materials and contexts. Both resistance and becoming are radical in that they consistently open toward the new, creatively offering possibilities to the world that are then confronted by static forces of power and authority. Resistance will always continue to surface, for it is a fundamental flow akin to process, creativity, and difference. Due to its primacy, resistance necessitates a philosophy of becoming, framing acts of resistance as positive, creative, and multiple. These new modes of subjectivity affect both the person we think we are, and crucially our relationship to otherness.
The overlapping and bifurcating themes explored here - of resistance and becoming, criticality and critique, aesthetics and ethics, speculation and action, personal and political perception, constitute the fabric of my creative arts-research practice, which I call critical dreaming.
Critical dreaming is a theoretical and practical method emerging from the intersection of crisis and creativity, engaging in vital pursuits that speculate future/new modes of relationality. Both ‘critical’ and ‘dreaming’ hold multiple and layered meanings: Criticalis both critique of power, systems or other texts, and a sense of urgency. Some collective contemporary crises and urgencies are: sanctity of private property; border mentality and neo-liberal competitive ideology; addiction to work-identity; protectionist collective structures such as the nuclear family and racial/national sectarianism; and extractive capitalism resulting in the destruction of the living earth for the accumulation of wealth and power.
Dreaming refers to imagery, symbolism, and narratives that arise from unconscious and preconscious states, influencing and inspiring arts practice in both hypnagogic and waking conditions. It also encompasses dreamingas an active, imaginative process of envisioning alternative futures, such as “I am dreaming of a better way to redistribute common wealth”. While each term carries multiple meanings individually, new layers of significance emerge when they are brought together.
Here, dreaming is not a fantastical, disengaged unconscious-only process. Instead, when combined with critical, it is understood as the constituent force of our personal, collective, and institutional lives. How we live our lives and understand our relationships to each other every day is informed by the ideas - the language and ideologies and symbols we use and which use us - embedded in the material of our social organ. To critically dream, therefore, is to confront the norms and modes of subject and power with something transversal. Dreaming is a necessary, and, indeed, crucial form of resistance. Dreaming is not a mere by-product of the brain or a waste of time; it is a force of creativity that precedes and supersedes stasis and normative reality. When using this method, being radical is not about doing or even critiquing politics or social change but involves acting critically in one’s dreaming toward acts of becoming and modes of agency in the world which open new spaces for further differentiation.
Opening these new spaces of potential liberates further creativity and care to those seemingly outside our established sense of identity, whether that is of artist, scholar, activist, family person, or self. It is important to remember that these continuous openings must remain critical, and that dreaming is a constantly unfolding and dynamic process. Otherwise, we will face the self-defeating issue that has undermined revolution throughout history, denying ‘difference’ and enforcing a power, which soon, simply becomes hegemony. Instead, we must embrace, as Deleuze defines it, the “poet, who speaks in the name of creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterises eternal return.”
Community-building work frequently encounters the challenge of acting within a mode of creativity and resistance that remains unswayed by power. This power arises from various sources, including commercialism and State inaction, both of which attempt to restrict the creative flow of self-determined communities. The tension between maintaining openness and avoiding enforced closures, while simultaneously fostering conditions for a sustainable and impactful creative practice, presents a continuous challenge. This can be addressed through an evolving form of critical creativity that prioritises autonomy of practice alongside a steadfast ethics of care for relational entanglement.