Vilém Flusser: An Introduction

7. On Creativity: Blue Dogs with Red Spots and Dialogic Imagination

On Creativity: Blue Dogs with Red Spots and Dialogic Imagination 131 7| In one of his pivotal essays, “Exile and Creativity,” Flusser proposes to view “exile as a challenge to creativity”: Here is the hypothesis I propose. The expellee has been torn out of his accustomed surroundings, or has torn himself out of them. Custom and habit are a blanket that covers over reality as it exists. In our accustomed surroundings we only notice change, not what remains constant. Only change conveys information to a person who inhabits a dwelling; the permanent fixtures of his life are redundant. But in exile everything is unusual. Exile is an ocean of chaotic information . . . . Because exile is extraordinary, it is uninhabitable. In order to be able to live there, the expellee must first transform the information swirling about him into meaningful messages , that is, he must process the data. This is a matter of life and death. If he is not able to process the data, he will be swamped and consumed by the waves of exile breaking over him. Data processing is synonymous with creation. If he is not to perish the expellee must be creative. (FM, 81) 132 | on creativity Flusser compares his particular aesthetic, that is, how we perceive and digest the world around us, to a blanket, which he describes in greater detail later: Habit is like a fluffy blanket. It rounds off all corners and damps all noise. It is unaesthetic (from aisthestai, perceive) because it prevents us from perceiving information such as corners or noises. Habit is felt as pleasant because it screens out perceptions, and because it anesthetizes. . . . Discovery begins as soon as the blanket is pulled away. Everything is then seen as unusual, monstrous, and “un-settling” in the true sense of the word. To understand this one merely has to consider one’s own right hand and finger movements from the point of view of, say, a Martian. It becomes an octopus-like monstrosity. (FM, 82–83) At this point of the expellee discovering that he or she must be creative and the in-habit-ant realizing that his hand might be anything but familiar and is therefore exiled from his body, according to Flusser, dialogue becomes possible, and we can become creative: At the outset I stated that creating is synonymous with data processing. What I meant was that the creation of new information depends on the synthesis of prior information. Such a synthesis consists in an exchange of information, and storing this information in individual memory or various memories. One can therefore speak of creation as a dialogical process, in which either an internal or external dialog takes place. . . . When such internal and external dialogs resonate with each other, not only the world, but the settled inhabitants and expellees as well are transformed creatively. That is what I meant when I said that the freedom of the expellee on creativity | 133 consists in remaining foreign, different from the others. It is the freedom to change oneself and others. (FM, 86) Creativity, arguably Flusser’s most central philosophical concept, lies at the basis of all communication, dialogue, and life because the aesthetic experience lies at the center of human perception. Dialogism in Art The dialogic principle within the realm of critical theory invokes, first and foremost, Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossic approach to literature and philosophy, specifically his theory of the novel. It hints at Martin Buber’s 1923 I and Thou, published in 1937, and is echoed in Bakhtin’s early essay titled “Art and Answerability” (although dialogism marks the entirety of Bakhtin’s oeuvre). According to Eduardo Kac, who credits Flusser with being one initiator—if not the initiator—of biogenetic art, it refers in the visual arts to “interrelationship and connectivity” in “dialogic artworks”: “The dialogic principle changes our conception of art; it offers a new way of thinking that requires the use of bidirectional or multidirectional media and the creation of situations that can actually promote intersubjective experiences that engage two or more individuals in real dialogic exchanges . . . that I call ‘multilogic interactions.’”1 The ubiquity of the term and its approximate equivalents— dialogicity, polyphony, intersubjectivity, connectivity—signify a shift in Western aesthetic, philosophical, sociopolitical, and ethical stances that helped bring about new fields, including postcolonialism . As Jeffrey T. Nealon points out, “dialogic intersubjectivity , understood in terms of an impassioned play of voices, has displaced the dominant modernist...