Works of reflexive and synthetic creativity (prolegomines to a new kind of intellectual practice ‒ "creativistics")

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

         Introduction

On March 21, the next meeting of the seminar "Psychology and Practice of Art" was held at the Federal Scientific Center for Psychological and Interdisciplinary Research. Aida Aylamazyan, Director of the S.D. Rudneva Center for Musical and Plastic Development "Heptachor", made a report on "Personality Psychology: cultural practices of human potential development". In particular, she opposed the concept of synthesis of arts ("unity of arts", German. Gesamtkunstwerk) is an approach in which new works are created, the status and nature of which Aylamazian found it difficult to determine. If the concept of art synthesis assumes that separate types of art have already developed, for example, music and dance, and it is possible to create works where the expressive means of these types are used together by the artist creating new content, then in the second approach, for example, in the "musical movement" coming from the free dance of Isadora Duncan, the relationship between music and dance are different. Here, with the help of dance movement, music is listened to (and often very serious, for example, Bach, Chopin, Scriabin), which results in the construction of works and improvisations that are only partially similar to classical dance and music (the latter, for example, sounds completely new). Some features of both (musical movement as a new type of dance and music) are discussed in the articles by Aylamazyan and the author ^{[1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6]}.

The main part

Almost everyone discussing the synthesis of arts implies that the works created within the framework of this approach relate to art. And in the second approach, the position is almost the same. For example, the musical movement is referred to as "free dance", emphasizing its opposition to classical ballet and the improvisational feature of this type of dance art. But then why is the "musical movement", in this name, seems to be a shift from art to non-art? And in this lecture, Aida said that in the work of the type "musical movement" there is a shift towards the life of the individual, which raises the problem of the boundaries of art, its transition into life events. Aylamazyan's teacher, Olga Kondratievna Popova, also actually points to this turn from art to life. In particular, she writes: "we don't pretend that I dance exactly like Bach – yes, this will never happen in my life! I'm dancing my idea in Bach, right? Your experience. And at this moment, it seems, such states and moods are realized that otherwise I would have had in my soul forever. And they would gradually kill me. That is, it is clear that this activity is some kind of powerful breakthrough and a stream that I release from myself. Now I am deeply convinced of this. This is an opportunity to live" ^{[3, p. 227]}.

 Then maybe the works created in the creative work of the musical art type no longer belong to art, but to a new intellectual practice (let's call it "creativistics", and if we confirm the assumption made, we will leave this name)? I have already made a similar assumption, analyzing Guzel Yakhina's novel "My Children", Reza Negarestani's cult work "Cyclonopedia", the poetics of Meir Shalev's artistic works ^{[7, pp. 10-83]}. But then I started from the consciousness and creativity of the artist, contrasting the Aristotelian interpretation of art with the "phenomenological" artistic discourse. I wrote that "dealing with several different discourses (the story of the life of Bach and his children, the reconstruction of Stalin's actions, the life of the German colony of Gnadenthal, socialist reforms and collectivization, German fairy tales), Yakhina tried to connect these discourses through certain techniques. She has four such techniques: the Volga; coincidences (for example, Stalin visits the Volga colonies of the Germans or reflects on what kind of policy in connection with Hitler's policy should be built in relation to these colonies ^[12]); Bach, moving from one bank of the Volga to the other or visiting children in a boarding school; finally, literary techniques, for example, symbolization" ^{[7, p. 19]}.   

Giving an interview to Anastasia Skorondaeva, Guzel Yakhina, in particular, says. "The idea was this: to create a fictional story that ? like a mosaic ? would consist entirely of pieces of truth (authentic everyday life, authentic details, real facts and figures ...). Therefore, even the smallest elements of the novel "My Children" (and quotes from the Resolutions of the Central Committee, and the methods of traditional medicine of the Volga Germans, and recipes, and texts of the Schwanks, and swear words used by the colonists) ? all this is true, collected from newspapers of that time, memoirs, scientific works, books, museums.

The biography of the teacher of German literature, Schulmeister Bach, can be read both as a realistic novel about the Germans of the Volga region, and at the same time as a mythological plot. The real story of German autonomy is hidden in this plot ? from its foundation in 1918 to its disappearance in 1941…

The main characters ? the schulmeister himself, his dumb daughter, and the Kyrgyz waif Vaska ? are invented. And the rest of the characters are copied from nature: the film archives have preserved the only film shot at the Nemkino studio; it is called Martin Wagner, was released in 1927 and tells about collectivization in the German Republic. Only three professional actors play in the film, and the supporting roles and extras are performed by residents of the Volga colony of Marienfeld — Soviet Germans.

When I was preparing to write a novel, I repeatedly reviewed the film ? studied the faces of the colonists. And then she described these faces in a novel. So the hunchback communist who came from Germany, and the fat chairman of the village council, and the mighty bald landowner, and his witch-like maid ? all these images are inspired by the faces of real Soviet Germans. <...> Now the first word of the novel is the main thing that united the German colonists with other peoples who lived in the neighborhood: Volga River. During a century and a half of living in the Volga region, Russian Germans fell in love with the Volga (as well as the steppe) ? I made this unexpected discovery for myself, studying their author's fairy tales, novels, diaries, and lyrics. The Volga is always present in action — visibly or invisibly. Volga becomes a portal for switching between storylines. Because for those who live on it, the Volga is the main natural essence, an object of worship, a nurse, an eternal companion and friend. I could call the novel "My Children" my explanation of my love for my native Volga" ^[9].

 From the point of view of traditional literary poetics, including the "Poetics" of Aristotle, an artist should describe real life, not what is in his head... but I would pay attention to that.. Currently, along with this tradition, a new one is emerging, it can be conditionally called "phenomenological"... As I wrote in Questions of Philosophy, a phenomenologist (not only a scientist or philosopher, but also an artist) dances not from the world opposing him, but from the personality itself. It sets the whole, the course of thought. Different approaches and methods are for him only the means of his work and movement. Of course, he uses them, but they do not define the whole. The whole is defined by its existential problems, by the experience actualized to answer these problems, by the very work of thought ^[8] …

  I can assume that if in her first novel Guzel Yakhina thought and worked within the framework of the classical paradigm of literary creativity, then in the second she thinks phenomenologically, and in no other way could the author of "My Children" realize her vision and solve the existential problems that worried her. Accordingly, we have a new artistic reality in front of us…

The question of clarity and the role of the reader in this process is not simple. A specific feature of the new, phenomenological artistic reality is the inhomogeneity of individual contents and themes, as well as the latent image of the author's personality, which is guessed behind this reality. Of course, the author of a "phenomenological work" should help the reader to see both. But he often does not know himself what he thinks and says as a phenomenologist, and does not know what in his novel can cause misunderstanding and difficulties for the reader. That is why Guzel Yakhina says: "The reader himself must understand what is really happening, and what is only in the imagination of the hero" ^{[7, pp. 19-23]}.

So, I was coming from the creativity and consciousness of the author of works of art. But now I am planning another course: to understand the works created in the second approach as belonging not to art, but to a new intellectual practice ? creativistics. It is within its framework that the phenomenological discourse is implemented, among other things. 

It is worth noting, of course, that this turn to a new type of practice that goes beyond the boundaries of art and science can be traced throughout the twentieth century, let's recall at least the "Game of Classics" by Julio Cortazar, "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco or "Schopenhauer as Medicine" by Irwin Yalom.  At the same time, one should not think that the authors of such works do not count on an adequate, close to the author's, understanding of readers, they assume this option. But I think at the same time they understand that many readers will understand their works in their own way, according to their creative abilities and life experience. 

Even better, the turn indicated here can be traced in the works of Meir Shalev. Take his 1985 work "The Bible Today." It is read with great enthusiasm, but it is almost impossible to understand what kind of creativity you are dealing with. A number of parts of this work are written as fiction novels, others refer to commentaries on the Bible and scientific research, others to the author's reflections on life, the fourth to the history of Israel, the fifth to modern life, the sixth, seventh, tenth refer to different types of creativity and knowledge. Here are just three fragments to make sure.

"My Bible is different. ? Shalev writes. ? It was not written by God, and its characters are by no means saints. It is inhabited by men and women of flesh and blood with ambitious thoughts, with cherished dreams, tying love affairs, plotting intrigues. The Bible is one of the most fascinating books in any library, and no other has had an equal impact with its political, philosophical, and moral ideas. The Bible is certainly modern, and the thought of it dominated me when I wrote this book.    <…>

Of all the biblical heroes, only one inspired me with envy ? Jacob, and not because he owned so many sheep, and not because he became the father of Twelve Tribes, no, I envy his first meeting with Rachel, his beloved, at the well in the land of the “sons of the East.” Any man who has experienced difficulties during the first date, of course, will understand my feelings. <…>

At that moment, a lovely shepherdess approached the well, and pointing to her, the shepherds explained to Jacob that she was his cousin Rachel. This is how Jacob first saw the young girl who became the great love of his life, and eventually his wife. (The story of Jacob and Rachel is undoubtedly one of the most touching love stories the world has ever known. By the way, Rachel is the only woman in the entire Bible whose beauty is described twice: "beautiful in form and beautiful in face.") But anyway, as soon as this charming girl came to the well, Jacob, in a daze, did what one would expect from Samson, but certainly not from him: “Jacob came, rolled a stone from the mouth of the well and watered the sheep of Laban, his mother's brother. And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice and wept.”

Where did Jacob get such powers? Among what we know about him, there is only one case when he showed the power of his muscles — in a mysterious wrestling match with an Angel of God at Jabok, but it happened many years later. Compared to his pugnacious brother and terrorist nephews, Jacob looks like a downright fragile creature, a peaceful antihero. And yet, one look at his charming cousin was enough to turn him into a strongman of strongmen. He playfully rolled off the heaviest stone, as if it were made of papier-mache.

Jacob's feat undoubtedly amazed all the eyewitnesses, including Rachel. Of course, she didn't know yet that this stunning stranger was her Aunt Rebekah's son from the Holy Land. Frozen in amazement, she only saw that an unknown handsome young man moved a stone without any difficulty, watered all her sheep, and then, before she had time to catch her breath, bent down and kissed her in front of all the shepherds. What an amazing start!"^[10]

Those who have read the Bible probably remember that Rebekah, the mother of Jacob, deceived her husband Isaac by giving him a blessing instead of the eldest son of Esau the younger, Jacob's beloved. Hence the further misadventures and vicissitudes of Jacob's life. Shalev has a wonderful novel, Esau, written six years after The Bible Today. His base, not hidden by Meir, is clearly a story from the Bible: two brothers again, but the truth is, twins, again deception (one brother stole another's beloved girl), the important role of Sarah's brothers' mother and many other analogies (names, events, deeds). However, "Esav" is still a work of fiction, the biblical background is just one of the aspects of Shalev's work, it is not declared as a factor that determined the content of the images of this novel; those who have read the Bible can guess, and those who have not read, still understand and perceive, but simply as a wonderful literary work.

The Bible Today is constructed completely differently: here different discourses are exposed precisely as different, they are not taken away into literary content and images, moreover, Shalev plays on their difference, due to which, surprisingly, the integrity of the work is created, which is perceived not as a mosaic, but a single reality. The question is, what is the reality of art, thinking, history, science? Both, and not the one, and not the other. This is the reality of the work and life of Meir Shalev and those who like his works, and there are quite a lot of them. By the way, in Wikipedia, the Bible Today is not classified as novels, but as "non-fiction" (not fiction), which, I think, is also not entirely accurate, because there is a lot of fiction in Shalev's work. 

Shalev, like Guzel Yakhina, can be quite understandable. They are cramped in the genre of literature. They would like to realize themselves, are familiar with various interpretations of famous works of art, have read scientific and historical studies; why, one wonders, should they limit themselves to the conventions and poetics of fiction. So, Shalev, as a writer, wants to "tell an interesting story, write it well", images and plots of the Bible are knocking in his mind, he is captivated by female beauty and images, "without ceasing to dream of meeting", wants to understand the people who created Israel and tell about them, gets true pleasure, creating and discovering as a demiurge with the help of words and language, the whole world, expressing their thoughts and experiences in writing. In "Esava" he carried out all this while remaining in the field of art, and in "Bible Today" he allowed himself not to follow tradition and literary norms, he directly began to build a new reality that did not belong to any of the existing intellectual practices. In fact, he created a sample of a new practice, which I called "creativistics". He put it next to art, humanities, hermeneutics, semiotics, psychology, sociology.

The question naturally arises here: how do Shalev and Yakhina manage to create a complete work, a real new world, from completely different discourses and constructions (artistic, scientific, psychological, historical, etc.)? And they create it. To understand how, let's look at one example ? Shalev's novel "The Pigeon and the Boy". Here is a vivid example of "creativistics": integrity, including the touching love of the main characters (a boy, a Baby and a Girl), the history of the Israeli war of independence, the legend of the New Testament about the immaculate conception, the dove as a harbinger of salvation and life after the flood. How did Shalev connect these seemingly disparate plots? He built the following scheme-a metaphor. The boy participates in the War of Independence, providing communication between Jewish military units with the help of carrier pigeons. The girl he loves (and she loves him), breeds carrier pigeons and taught him all the subtleties of handling them. The boy is ambushed, he is seriously injured, he dies. At the very last meeting, the boy and the Girl decided to take the last step in order to conceive a child. But now he's dying. And then the boy, gathering his last strength, expels his seed into a test tube, ties it to the pigeon's foot and sends it to his Girl. The pigeon delivers sperm to the Girl, she understands everything and manages to do everything that is necessary. As a result, the Girl finds herself in the position of a boy and gives birth to a child, who acts as another main character in the novel.

"So, the four of them stayed here: the wounded Kid with his last surviving friend and the Girl's dove and death, waiting a little further away. The frightened dove and the bloody penis lay motionless, and death stretched out a cool and affectionate hand and touched the Baby again, just as he stretched out his hand and touched his bloody, naked flesh, and both hands not only touched and gently stroked, but also slightly pressed and crumpled, checking: has the fruit already ripened? Has the time come?..

Death, who had been patiently waiting for him all this time, wheezed angrily, realizing that she had been fooled. But the Kid was not up to the celebration. He turned slightly on his side to watch his last pigeon climb…Nothing depended on him now. Now he could only count on her…

The pigeon landed on the turntable shelf and burst into the compartment behind it. The girl met her with a gentle, experienced hand, brought fresh water and cannabis seeds, stroked and untied…

She took out the cork, sniffed, and?before surprise could replace the recent joy?her body suddenly understood everything and turned to stone, her mouth opened in a scream, the name burst out like a shot.

Her knees were shaking, but the fear of the drops in the test tube gave her strength and determination. Don't fall! Don't drop it! Forget about death and sorrow. Pull yourself together. Don't relax!..

She opened the test tube. With a careful and gentle finger, she helped the cloudy white liquid flow into the spoon and, with the same care, pulling out the plunger, sucked it into the syringe. How many of them are there? A few drops…

She took the syringe in her right hand, and brought the fingers of her left hand to her mouth, moistened it with saliva and put it into herself. Then she moistened it again and carefully smeared saliva all around and inside, to the very depths. She held her breath, inserted the syringe to the end and pressed the plunger hard. She pressed her hips tightly against each other, pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped them in both hands. All. She had nothing else to do. Now all that remained was to rely on his body. And on his seed ? so that it would find its way, so that it would descend, so that it would reach. So she lay with her eyes closed, listening to its flight ? down, down, here it goes and sinks somewhere inside her.

And the seed, as if listening to her, hurried and descended. Home. Lower and lower. From the heaven of death to the abyss of life, from the cold outside to the warmth inside, after a whistling flight under the sun ? into the silent darkness of the abyss" ^[11].

Reading a novel, it is sometimes difficult to hold back tears, it is so cool and masterfully written, but at the same time you realize that everything is composed and all the coincidences and amazing events are skillfully arranged by Shalev. Moreover, you perfectly understand all the conventions and analogies: with the Bible, with the history of Israel, with the immaculate conception, with Shalev's desire to identify the construction and formation of Israel with the creation of a new world. Understanding the artificiality of the constructed metaphor scheme, it turns out, does not interfere in any way with the reader's natural experiences, faith in the possibility of all these amazing events. But, of course, not only metaphors work, but all expressive means: drama, themes, rhythm, melody, images, meanings, speech and language constructions.  

Now about the features of creativistics. First, the creative artist does not hide the different discourses and grounds he uses, moreover, he often points them out to the user either in the form of preliminary explanations or by characterizing the concept of the work. A necessary condition for such an approach is a more or less deep reflection on one's own creativity. That is why in the table of contents the work of creativistics was called "reflexive-synthetic". The second feature is due to the difficulty for the user to understand the reality of a creative work: he easily recognizes individual discourses, but since they are different, and often outwardly opposite, the user cannot grasp and assemble the whole, understand what events he encounters, how they are interconnected.

As I show in the work "From the analysis of works of art to the understanding of the essence of art", the solution to this difficulty may partially consist in the user trying to understand the creator of the creative work, to understand what problems he was worried about, in which direction and how he began to solve them. Of course, this requires a higher culture and additional work from the user, but this is modern creativity. However, I understand that it is not enough just for the user to reconstruct the consciousness of the creator of the work, because the user wants to understand what the creator presents to him in terms of the outside world, because not only his consciousness.

The situation is more complicated here, because creativistics is just taking shape, and the reality of her works has not yet been thought out by the philosophers and creators of these works. My preliminary thoughts on this matter are as follows. Such a reality is "popularized" (multiple), which implies its interpretation by the user. It is anthropomorphic and humanitarian, since it is set by the attitudes and values of the creator of the creative work. This reality is eventful and temporal. It is often culturally and socially conditioned (for example, this is clearly visible in Shalev's work). Finally, creativistic reality is characterized not only by a natural modality, but also by an artificial one, i.e. it is constructive.

By suggesting the identification of a new practice other than art, I am, of course, stepping on slippery ice, because the question may arise whether the cases cited by the author and their interpretation are simply examples of bad art or inadequate understanding and experience of artistic works. Well, the artist failed to synthesize different expressive means and forms (this happens), or the reader could not assemble the themes and events expressed in the work into a whole artistic reality, and therefore, instead of catharsis, he experienced disappointment (this also happens). It is difficult to object to this, since one of the central criteria for the formation of a new type of practice is the personality and taste of individuals. In addition, as a rule, new types of practices are initially rejected by the majority until they are examined, thought through, and compared with established and familiar practices. I admit that I may be wrong, but so far the considered turn explains a lot to me.    

Conclusion

The conducted research, in our opinion, allows us to separate the concept of the synthesis of arts and the formation of a new intellectual practice, "creativistics". The latter is a natural result of the modern development of culture, which has brought to the fore, along with thinking, art and science, the creativity of the individual. Within the framework of creativistics, the creator uses discourses and representations belonging to different approaches and discourses, and openly and demonstratively, inviting the user to think and act polyphonically. Creativistics appeals both to the consciousness of the creator and the user, and to a new reality that has features of popularity, eventfulness and constructiveness.