Visual Impairment and the Creative Process: Proposals for the Digital Age
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Keynote speech at Mary Kitzinger Trust Conference “Children and young people with visual impairment: identity, interaction and inclusion”
Date: 06/06/2006
Venue: Kingston University, Surrey, UK
Article
To consume is human; to create is divine. God, in whatever form she takes, is defined by the act of creation and is above the act of consumption; and although the notion of a personal God has become ever more marginalised in our culture - replaced by a lazy, spiritualist miasma - we have not thereby lost our anthropologically fundamental urge to create, to mimic, even metaphorically and incompletely, the divine attribute although, in using the word “incomplete” I acknowledge the Platonic paradigm which I personally reject.
Let me explain. There are two fundamental theories about creativity, the Platonic and the Aristotelian. Put simply, the Platonic theory says that every earthly object is an imperfect representation of a perfect object or archetype, a position which condemns all acts of creativity to inevitable shortcoming. The Aristotelian theory, on the other hand, may broadly be summed up in the maxim: "The whole is more than the sum of the parts" and, therefore, honours creativity, no matter how halting. In the nature of humankind, it is the Platonic challenge that has goaded creators to aspire to the perfect, to aspire to the divine, and, in doing so they have imposed a massive weight of expectation upon creativity itself. In this sense, creativity is viewed in this titanic, 'Romantic' perspective not as a self validating act but as a self conscious representational act where the artist personifies the culture and extends or disrupts the tradition; this might be best summed up in the idea that the poet is the ultimate legislator of society. It is the composer living in the shadow of Beethoven that must decide whether to extend symphonic rhetoric or find a new path; it is the novelist after Proust who must decide whether the novel as he wrote it can be extended or whether the only alternative is synoptic; it is the painters after Millet who must decide whether realism has reached such a conclusion that a break out into fundamentalist symbolism is the only route out of the impasse.
It was not always thus. Mediaeval architects and craftsmen did not autograph their work; composers like Telemann, Handel and Haydn thought of themselves primarily as paid journeyman musicians; and even Shakespeare had no aspiration to 'high art'.
It is my over-riding contention that the Platonic paradigm of creativity, heroic but tragically flawed, that still has an inordinate hold on our culture at the expense of what I might call Aristotelian constructivism and that this, in turn, has exercised undue influence on our education system in general and on special education in particular
What I propose to do is to take Margaret Boden's classic analysis [1] of creativity, look at it through a cultural perspective, using the Platonic and Aristotelian paradigms, before homing in on blindness and the creative process. This sounds rather ponderous but I will use more than half of this presentation to make constructive proposals.
Boden divides creative output into three kinds:
- Novel combinations of familiar ideas
- Exploration of the potential of already inhabited spaces
- Transformations.
The first classification - novel combinations of existing ideas - which, in musical terms, would involve devising a medley from a pool of all known tunes, is fundamentally non-Platonic but the assembling of fragments of already imperfect objects into a new object (what our contemporary culture calls bricolage) is a very Aristotelian idea; and it is one that is now very much part of our culture. In the digital age we are increasingly seeing creative artefacts as material rather than end products. Indeed, throughout the 20th Century many famous poets, composers and painters came to see all their work as provisional. The difference between then and now is that then the provisional works were still reserved for the creator's revision; but now we take other work and enhance it, comment on it, impose ironic inference and, in the elements we chose, use external material to make a public statement about our own personality.
Boden's second classification - exploring inhabited spaces - is easiest understood in terms of jazz. The chosen theme or space provides a framework, there are rules (in this case the available notes) which dictate what material can inhabit the space but the author is free to improvise the arrangement. This, too, is inferior in Platonic terms because the initial space is imperfect and so nothing perfect can emerge from its exploration. Again, however, in Aristotelian terms it is perfectly acceptable because the new whole is clearly more than its initial parts; you only have to think about the very different outcomes produced by Duke Ellington and Miles Davis from the same 'standards' material to see the point.
Boden's third classification, which involves effecting transformations, is, of course, the real thing in Platonic terms although still ultimately doomed compared with Aristotelian reception.
Let me now go back to my opening statement and develop it a little before making some positive proposals about creativity and the education of blind and visually impaired children.
“To consume is human; to create is divine”, I said, but there is a much more mundane formulation of which we ought to be aware. In a market economy, survival depends upon an individual balance between production and consumption; you need income in order to buy things. In an information-based economy, by extension, to consume content is not enough, you need to contribute by using the creative process.
Along with my initial contention that the education of our children has suffered from the Platonic paradigm, I also want to add, referring back to my predecessor speech to this one, which I gave in Birmingham, that since the advent of the world wide web and other digital technology developments, we have concentrated for too much on accessing and processing and not enough on creating.
Now let us return to Margaret Boden's classifications and see how far we can go.
First of all, to generate collage is the core creative activity of the lives of most people; we do not aspire either to be jazz musicians or composers but we can assemble a bunch of our favourite tunes, put them in some sort of coherent order, and, say, download them to our iPod. Most of us would get as far as assembling our favourite tunes and some of us might then be able to invent simple bridging passages to string together. We might also start singing one tune and seamlessly end up singing another unrelated tune. At another level we might take different fashion items from different cultures - a black velvet frock coat, a West African embroidered shirt and a pair of designer blue jeans - and put them together as an outfit. Of course, much of this kind of activity is imitative or repetitive but it is the basis for exploration. What it involves is a keen and subtle sense of sameness and difference that goes beyond rigid rules such as: "You never wear jeans at a formal dinner” or "You never wear a black velvet frock coat on informal occasions".
In other words, if people can get a firm grasp on sameness and difference and how the collage they assemble reflects themselves, either as conformist, heterodox, untidy or anarchist, you can begin to create. It is my suspicion that we do not explore this idea with children as fully as we should. If, for example, you take three typefaces and emboss each of them in stone, wood and brass, there are two kinds of sameness and two kinds of difference: the sameness of the material or the sameness of the typeface; and the difference of the material and the difference of the typeface. You can than ask a child to assemble a string from:
- The same typeface in the same material
- The same typeface in different materials
- The same material but different typefaces
- Different materials and different typefaces.
The last of these is the most challenging and important because it can either involve the deliberate breaking of rules or the statement that there are no rules. It also enables the creator to perform structurally significant tasks, such as assembling the material to:
- Reflect syntax or content
- Make aesthetically pleasing patterns.
Turning now to the second of Margaret Boden's classifications - exploring inhabited space - I have always thought that this plays to the real strength of blind and visually impaired people. Whereas collage partly depends for its effect upon the range of available material, exploration depends upon an intensity of understanding of the inhabited space. On this basis I have always been surprised by the small number of blind and visually impaired musicians who play jazz rather than simply learning consumed works by rote, which is much more difficult and less creative. The intense exploration of given form also, as I have implied, reduces the need for the assemblage of resources. In the media, for example, this kind of activity covers most of the main money-making genres: soap opera; sit-com; chat shows; phone-ins; criticism; reality TV. In other words, any form which is relatively fixed and where the key element, once the genre or theme is understood, is variation.
There is, of course, a contested territory between this form of creative variation and what Boden would classify as transformative. There is some kind of watershed in creative life between variation and transformation, as, for example, in the late symphonies of Mozart or the Beatles in Rubber Soul and beyond. This raises an interesting point about the necessary conditions for transformative creativity which almost always arises on the solid base of explorative enterprise: Shakespeare in 16th Century England; Beethoven in 18th Century Vienna; Proust in late 19th Century France; and perhaps, above all, Leonardo da Vinci in 15th Century Italy.
For almost all of us, our creative lives will be confined to Boden's first two classifications and we should not be ashamed of this; this is where almost all creative life is lived; and it is also where most money is made.
Let me, then, explore some creative solutions for blind and visually impaired children in addition to the simple analysis of sameness and difference I have already used as an illustration.
a) Heterodoxy. The one thing we most urgently need to do is to engineer an environment in which our children can be heterodox without doing themselves undue - and I use that word advisedly - harm. When seeing children learn to read they do so in the recognition that this is the road to rebellion; it will give them access to forbidden material, from rude words in The Bible to information on drugs. Whatever the content of magazines, seeing children will opt for those aimed at children older than themselves. They also recognise very quickly that visual imagery is subversive and that multimedia, such as television, can be ambiguous and contradictory (as the man tells the woman he loves her while his eyes tell the camera he does not). The development of the internet has made this heterodoxy ever more amenable and dangerous.
For blind children, on the other hand, learning to read is an act which reinforces conformity and therefore widens the gap between them and their peers, condemning them either to naiveté or anger.
Given the duty of care of teachers and care workers this is a difficult area; but my acid test would be something like this; a child must be able to:
- Protect herself from abuse
- Make a evidence based decision about drugs; but above all:
- Make deliberate statements about conformity and heterodoxy.
At root, you cannot conform or rebel unless you know about sameness and difference; and in spite of highly idealistic statements, most of the way we reach self understanding is through comparison; but, more fundamentally for our purposes, you cannot create without a deep understanding of keeping and breaking rules; and we spend too much time on the first and not enough on the second. There is a certain amount of money to be made out of producing rule-based products but increasingly these are being made by machines.
b) Objectivity. One of the problems if you can't see is that it is difficult to see yourself from the outside. By this I do not mean that our children should conform to outside expectations, not least because these are usually stereotypical and domineering, but that assigning objective value to what we are and do is a necessary precondition for creativity. Achieving this can be terribly painful and it is particularly difficult if you have limited or no vision; but the venture must be undertaken with firmness and sensitivity, leading people to play to their strengths and keeping some kind of control (no more than that) over their weaknesses.
c) Collaboration. As I have said elsewhere, the National Curriculum which places such emphasis on the autonomous achievement of standard tasks is a disaster for disabled children who can only survive, like most of the rest of us but to an even greater extent, as collaborators. This involves an understanding of other people which allows us to negotiate. My major criticism of our mainstreaming strategy is that it doe snot put enough emphasis on empowerment and negotiating skill but is too mechanically oriented; is it more important to learn independent long cane mobility or how to cadge a lift? Most of our lives, from the bedroom to the board room, involve trading and collaboration and this is a fundamental part of modern, democratised, mass cultural creativity but too often these skills are not developed until children leave school for further training.
d) Self Esteem. At root, at the very foundation of my thesis, however, is the concept of developing self esteem. You cannot collaborate, develop objectivity or even be constructively, as opposed to negatively, heterodox, without self esteem; and one very strong element of self esteem is the ability to create. So here we have a symbiotic, dynamic relationship between self esteem and creativity, you cannot have one without the other.
e) Therapy. There is one other word which I need to say before beginning to draw some practical conclusions. Being a blind or visually impaired child in a seeing word is hard work, frequently miserable, and often bleak. We do well to help children steer a course between lassitude and anger; and in trying to do this we must not let the system strangle initiative. One key objective for us all must be to help children to be more happy than they are. Happiness is as natural a state as unhappiness and we must learn the meaning of both. Even if what we create is of no economic or social use but simply gives us pleasure, in some cases that is enough.
Now let me finally turn to some practical matters:
- First, children with severe visual problems should have access to the best multi media technology that the world can produce. That means big, flat screens, high quality sound, broad band wireless and haptic feedback.
- Secondly, they should also have access to the maximum range of digital data consistent with a safety regime which should be light touch. There should be ample opportunity for serendipity and automated diagnosis of difficulty or task completion failure. In this respect teachers and carers need to recognise that there is a time to be pastoral and a time to be non-judgmental; a time to be a teacher and a time to be a librarian, a time to be a protector and a time to be a facilitator. This is tough stuff but we have to confront it.
- Thirdly, this kind of learning has to involve people other than ICT and art teachers. We have tended to take the medical model of the doctor/patient relationship and transfer it to skills training; if we do not learn about ourselves in society we will never be ourselves and never be an effective part of society.
- Fourthly, the way we think about mainstreaming should be far more richly textured than simply seeing that the means are available for children to comply with curricular requirements.
- Finally, we need to think about blindness and visual impairment in a much more multi faceted way than simply concentrating on visual acuity. We need to develop an approach which sees disability as a basket of potential or actual exclusion from social norms. A post-modern, reflexive, self ironic society places very different demands on people than those which a traditional, stable and conformist society once imposed; the visual acuity is relevant but there is much else to think about. You might want to argue that, in our contemporary society, making a statement about what you are through what you wear, carry and own, is more important than what you can do; but that is not a statement that you could have made convincingly half a century ago. We might regret that celebrities have taken over from heroes, that style has substantially superseded content and that the ephemeral commands more attention than the timeless; but that is where we are.
Fortunately, most children survive in our radically uncertain environments in spite of the innate conservatism of their teachers but blind and visually impaired children have less flexibility of outlook and fewer choices. That means that the choices they have should be explored in more radical ways and that, in turn, means providing an environment where risk is rewarded and where children have a licence to make mistakes, knowing that they will be supported and not adversely criticised.
My understanding of love, for what it is worth, is that it is the unconditional creation of space by the lover for the beloved; perhaps we feel that we cannot go quite this far but that should be our direction of travel.
[1] Boden, Margaret A.: Creativity and Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence 203 (1998), 347-356