Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English
Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English
Article

Efficient” Creativity and the Residue of the Humanities

The humanities are having a hard time as a disciplinary field, increasingly having to prove themselves as necessary or useful. This reality occurs as the academy undergoes a neoliberal institutionalization, which involves the privileging of hard “proof” and the pressure to produce useful, valuable, and practical research—what Bill Readings in The University in Ruins (1996) calls “excellent” knowledge and what Alan Liu in The Laws of Cool (2004) calls “knowledge work.” The academy today operates at the intersections of information culture, the cultural dominance of technology, and capitalist craze. In this way, it resembles Neil Postman’s theory of the technopoly: founded on principles of industrial invention (42), technopoly favours progress over tradition with the belief that “what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value” (51). Shaping and controlling societies and institutions, technopoly informs contemporary neoliberalism; through the neoliberal restructuring of the university and its research, the technopological academy is realized.

The danger for humanities scholars and students with regard to meeting demands for useful, valuable, and practical research is that we perpetuate the larger, systemic conditions that shape such expectations and of which such expectations are symptomatic. Additionally, we ignore [End Page 19] that the humanities are being devalued for practising what they preach: for being theoretical, creative, reflexive, and humanist—characteristics that not coincidentally are polarized from technopoly.

Inherent in a technopological neoliberalism and the technopological academy is a capitalist drive that more and more espouses a “maximum productive performance” (Schumpeter 81). Coined by Joseph A. Schumpeter (1942) as “creative destruction,” this drive fosters the constant revolution of “the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one” (83), a cycle of growth that Alan Liu shows has reached a modern apex in the form of postcapital, postindustrial information culture.

In particular, Liu voices a concern over the creative destruction of historical consciousness in the humanities, arguing that with “technologies, techniques, and the efficiency of their alignment … [there is a] predetermined result that the contemporary almost always outmatches the past” (The Laws of Cool 302). Tradition becomes perceived as the opposite of progress, as with the technopological turn, which saw that there was “no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost” (Postman 45). As such, technopoly today and its drive of creative destruction performs instrumentalism, “eliminat[ing] alternatives to itself … It does not make them illegal … It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant” (48). The drive to create comes at the price of forcibly forgetting the past and, in doing so, culturally destroying it. In the same vein as postmodernist fears of weakening historicity, Liu observes that the humanities are being asked to prove the pertinence of historical thinking and historical consciousness in today’s research output (The Laws of Cool 5), being made to ask, “Why now? Why is this relevant now?”

Under such a treatment, history is useful only insofar as its relevance and application to current concerns can be proven, prompting Liu to argue that information culture and postindustrial society create a circumstance and style of thinking that is governed by the “eternal ‘now’ ” (The Laws of Cool 8). Invested in pragmatics of the present, the eternal “now” concurrently anticipates progress through change and is ready to become its own next stage. In this way, history, time, memory, and modes of thinking that use reflection—by which I mean acts of comparative thinking about that which exists in past and present moments—become engulfed in a “will be” condition. Lost is a regard for the future as a part of a process of history; information culture and postindustrialism pretend that there is no arc of trajectory, only “here,” the current position, and “there,” the goal that is to be reached. Our bodies have left our souls trailing behind. [End Page 20]

As the academy becomes institutionalized, we may anticipate a technopological rejection of “art for art’s sake” and an embrace of texts with productive outcomes—creative and critical works that perform knowledge work and that generate moneymaking research. And here is where the concern lies: the advance of production over creation forms a kind of creative thinking that is founded on standards of technological competence and performativity—a type of creativity that I would describe as efficient.

Efficiently creative texts may be characterized by the ways in which they impact creative and critical thought and praxis. The arts and humanities are changed through the encouraged collaboration with the sciences and engineering (The Laws of Cool 318), and our understanding of communication shifts as computer databases manage information in ways not previously possible. In addition, convergence and interactivity among different communication forms have caused us to adapt to reading and writing “through, with, and alongside media” (Hayles 1). Through these unsurprising shifts brought on by digital culture, the “logic of connectivity” inherent in digital media more easily enables intertextuality, appropriation, and sampling (Liu, Local Transcendence 2), thereby creating “palimpsests,” or assemblage texts (see Genette).

The assemblage text is rhizomatic, as it favours multiplicities and multiple avenues of connectivity, creation, and meaning-making. As such, the assemblage text can refer and pay homage to older cultural texts even as it forms an on-site memory that is created through the act of its being read. However, it becomes efficiently creative when it is fueled by the drive of creative destruction, the movement of which brings out a latent danger in rhizomatic behaviour to pursue multiplicities in a way that forgets at the same time that it creates (Deleuze and Guattari 9). By way of efficient creativity, the assemblage text consumes histories, memories, and identities so fast that it overshadows its sources. The on-site memory that is formed demands historical singularity and also anticipates connections to come; for example, this is possible (although not essential or unavoidable) in born-digital texts that perpetually regenerate through automated algorithms.

The efficiently creative text therefore eats up the cultural past, intensifying Fredric Jameson’s theory that the cannibalization of former cultural texts and styles is a cause of weakening historicity in postmodernity (17). The lack of reference to source becomes problematic when the chance to reflect on the present and past is destroyed, the comparison between y and x. Without reflection, the opportunity to identify difference is [End Page 21] destroyed, and it is a lack of difference that brings this discussion back to technopological rejections of tradition. Efficient creativity nullifies historical reflection, while the humanities cherish reflection as that which enables theoretical comparison and understanding of, with, and through that which comes before. One task for today’s humanities scholars, then, is to reconcile acts of reflection with the efficient practice to create, destroy, and recreate. I propose to examine the humanities through a reflective lens, inquiring into its state during and after it is made into something unwanted, into “dirt,” by way of a destructive, technopologically informed devaluing.

So long as there is reflection, even that which is destroyed can linger as a memory. I think of Liu’s argument that the “job” of literature and the arts today is history, albeit “a special, dark kind of history … of things destroyed in the name of creation” (The Laws of Cool 8). He posits that each act of contemporary creativity as innovation creates a dark lobe (The Laws of Cool 307), like a shadow; I wish to further this theory by placing greater focus on these shadows as spaces and substances of the residual, spaces that represent what is destroyed and forgotten. My interest in the residual is in its value as a site of remembrance of an excess that is brushed aside and left behind. Its unwanted presence—and also its instrumental absence—possesses the same value that Georges Bataille establishes of excrement and excremental culture: as having the power to call attention to that which is dirty, unwanted, and rejected in a mode or system of thought (92).

Residue threatens the system of technopoly and its drive of creative destruction by identifying, and identifying as, their dirty laundry. It is therefore residue that we require in the form of remnants of the past, which provide histories and sources of comparison and difference. Difference enables dialectic, begets discursivity, and encourages heterogeneity in contexts of creation. My question, then, is whether or not we can create difference in a culture of information. How do we pile up dirt, conjure up shadows, and reveal the presence of excess as residue? And in doing so, can we re-introduce reflection?

A system that proffers multiplicities of creation, while being dangerous if it enables the destruction of reflection, at the same time possesses the potential to turn that multiplicity into an avenue and presence of difference—a line of flight in the rhizome through which one may break away from the system and view its texts as systemic products and reflections (Deleuze and Guattari 9). If the technopological system and its drive of creative destruction are represented as a churning cycle called y, [End Page 22] then its constant residual threat is that which is destroyed, a fuel of history called x. To remember these histories is to revisit the residual and, in revisiting, to re-introduce it through the act of remembering. The points at which one may break from the system may be understood as spatial gaps between nodes, cycles, or points of time.1 The time it takes to “go” from one node to another functions as a crucial contemplation, an act of reflexivity and remembering; it occurs as a weight and wait, the moment of suspension when a gap in y is created and a line of flight to another node, a point of x, is created.

In actively remembering, I am not so much suggesting that we focus on individual texts and case studies that embody modes of knowledge in the humanities that are theoretical, creative, reflexive, and humanist. Rather, the objective is to remember ways of thinking that are fulfilling in and for what they are—precisely theoretical, creative, reflexive, and humanist—and to remember these approaches as having critical legitimacy and value in their own right. It is the humanities that I want to reclaim as being good enough, without having to subject them to the test of whether or not they can make money. I want to reclaim a humanities that is precisely unwanted by technopological and neoliberal standards, standards that overcast the humanities at the price of singed ends of threads of history. The reclamation of this residue requires that we pull up from rigid and rhizomatic structures some fistfuls of Bermuda grass, exposing their roots.

Lai-Tze Fan
York University
Lai-Tze Fan

Lai-Tze Fan is a doctoral candidate in Communication and Culture at York University and Ryerson University, where her research examines comparative media, with a focus on intermedial narrative in digital media and the print novel. In 2013–2014, Fan served as President of accute’s Graduate Caucus.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Monique Tschofen, Art Redding, and Sean Braune for their suggestions during the development of this essay.

Footnotes

1. Alan Liu refers to a similar idea: fissures, slippages, or slack that “opens up between the ethos and counter-ethos of postindustrial information work” (The Laws of Cool 296).

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. “The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. 1985. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. [End Page 23]
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1987. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Jameson, Fredric. “The Cultural Logic of Capitalism.” Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke up, 1991.
Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
———. Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Postman, Neil. “From Technocracy to Technopoly.” Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard up, 1996.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. “The Process of Creative Destruction.” Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 1943. London; New York: Routledge, 1994. [End Page 24]

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Footnotes

  1. 1. Alan Liu refers to a similar idea: fissures, slippages, or slack that “opens up between the ethos and counter-ethos of postindustrial information work” (The Laws of Cool 296).