izzy walter

This is the script for a lecture given
for the Interdisciplinary Visual Studies Group
at Oxford University in 2024.

lecture script: consent and creativity

drawing on post-internet art theory and psychogeography to imagine new frameworks for consent and answer feminist dissatisfactions with current sexual ethics

CREATIVITY AND CONSENT

How art theory in a post-digital visual landscape might converge to assist in the calibration of radical new frameworks for sexual ethics.

In his Oxford lecture last year, Tim Ingold suggested a new conception of creativity – one that does not figure as a punctuated moment in time, nor a singularity that arises from nothing (creatio ex nihilis), nor a ‘golden nugget of genius’, as Linda Nochlin puts it. By illuminating the indexicality of creativity’s definition, Ingold offered an alternative idea of creation, one that seeks to assist new ways of being in our contemporary Anthropocene / Chthulecene. He described it as a ‘ceaseless upspringing’, temporally stretched and affective. Previously as an undergraduate I explored how radical understandings of creativity work to destabilize notions of masculine artistic genius and how, in the age of digital reproduction, they offer alternatives to the fixed notions of originality underpinning commercial-capitalist processes.

In this talk, I would like to speculate how these arguments might be generatively applied to sexual ethics. Over the last decade, a growing consensus has arisen among contemporary feminists that consent as a cultural construct is simply not working, and the dialogue for alternative frameworks is well under way. Current definitions of consent are understood to be underpinned by a dyadic moment of permission-giving, a moment that is firmly rooted in patriarchal, heteronormative, and colonial perceptual processes. I would like to consider how new, temporally stretched, and affective understandings of creativity might assist in dethroning this idea of consent as a punctuated moment in time. How can we figure sexual intimacy, not as a singular act of creation or permission, but as an ‘upspringing’, a process more readily mapped onto sexual encounters? The post-digital landscape of art and the age of the prosumer (the act of co-creating the content you consume) is picking away at the belief that creativity can be isolated to a hermetic moment, choice or individual in time, a narrative that has, realistically, always been fantasy. By deconstructing the indexicality of creation and permission, how can we call on consent to meet the correspondingly complex demands of sexual ethics?

I have structured this talk in three parts:

I will first consider creativity . . .

Then consider consent . . .

Then consider how these discourses might generatively converge. . .

CONSIDERING CREATIVITY

Having introduced my intentions, I would like to begin with considering creativity. In his March 2023 lecture at Pembroke College Creation beyond Creativity, Tim Ingold traces the idea’s indexical history back to antiquity. Lucretius and Aristotle both conceived of a ‘creatress’, some classical iteration of what some might call mother earth. They figured creativity as a process of begetting and renewal: nothing is made from nothing but rather everything comes from the unification of form and matter. The idea that something is created from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) was originally a Biblical construct, a theistic reaction against Parmenides’ antecedental and opposing belief in ex nihilo nihil fit (which means nothing comes from nothing).

Creatio ex nihilo can partly be understood as an evangelical effort to evidence and hermetically seal off the power of an omnipotent Christian God. Indeed, what is more powerful, awe-inspiring and terrifying than creating our known reality from so-called ‘oblivion’?

The notion was formatively reiterated through the individualist lenses of J. Guildford and K. Sawyer, late 20th century psychologists. They felt that composition was impossible without an initial disintegration, and drew on notions of creation that continued to originate from a site of oblivion, destruction, and ‘negative’ space. certainly, they deploy this logic to a lesser extreme than their distant biblical predecessors but the logic is latently present nonetheless. Their logic was also anthropocentric and cartesian, they sought to locate the impetus for creativity in the human mind, specifically in certain ‘thought combinations’ and here we can observe just how human-focused this notion of creatio ex nihilo is, how human originality is steeped in this covert understanding that something can be made from nothing, temporally siphoned and distilled from the rest of reality.

The actual notion of creativity, as supposed to creation is a relatively recent construction. Alfred North Whitehead is often credited with the seminal devising of creativity in his 1926 publication Religion in the Making (distinct here from the punctuated acts of creation figured by creatio ex nihilis). If the fact that creativity is such a historically recent construction, surprises anyone else as much as it did me, I hope that can point to the way in which our highly indexical cultural beliefs about creation are concealed in their religio-political fantasies of universality and timelessness.

CONSIDERING DIGITAL ART

Monodirectional media consumption (e.g: reading a book, watching a film) figures as a binary that is framed by the notion of originality and creative singularity. The arrival of the digital age and the invention of the ‘prosumer’ immediately problematizes this paradigm. however the mainstream artworld has been strikingly reticent to explore the issue. Claire Bishop has challenged the contemporary art market for avoiding the direct addressal of our digital landscape. She points out the stark absence of contemporary artworks that deal directly with the digitized human experience, despite technology intervening in most every process behind even the most analogue- presenting artworks. Bishop designates the phenomena a ‘disavowal’ and the presence of digital media as ‘subterranean’, a ‘shaping condition’ of contemporary processes, ‘perpetually active but apparently buried’.

This strange paradox is most evident in art’s preoccupation with analog media. Bishop draws a direct parallel between the rise of retro-techniques in the 1990s and the rise of ‘new media’, she cites film’s persistent preoccupation with unwieldly projection technology of decades past as well as the clunky tactility of ‘assemblage sculpture’. She argues that ‘the continued prevalence of analog film reels and projected slides in the mainstream art world seems to say less about revolutionary aesthetics than it does about commercial viability’. For Bishop, these express commercial motivations and anxieties around reproduction, desperately ‘asserting subjectivity and tactility against the sealed, impregnable surface of the screen’.

Where a digital film can be perpetually reproduced, by entangling an artwork in physical technology of the past you protect it, to an extent, from the commercial threat of reproducibility, you protect its ‘core’, what Walter Benjamin called its ‘aura’ which he conceptualised in his text the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media For Benjamin the ‘aura’ is a special essence that derives from a works authenticity, its uniqueness, and its physical and cultural locality. He writes ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’.

However, it would be wrong to reduce this dynamic down to one of physicality and materiality. This is not just the contained corporeal artistic process being brought face to face with the seemingly infinite network of virtual nebules. Indeed, Culture has a long-standing relationship to the intangible virtual imaginary (in the form of literature for example) but the strong semantic links that have now been forged between the ‘virtual’ and the digital have skewed our understanding of virtual reality into a connotatively post-internet experience. It would also be wrong to dismiss the material networks behind digital knowledge. Seeing the digital world as totally ‘virtual’ erases the staggering ecological impact of data storage, when we describe our data as living in the ethereal, elusive oblivion of the ‘cloud’, we’re actually playing into a very clever, highly effective marketing strategy by tech companies that has worked to mystify and ambiguate the titanic, ongoing environmental damage created by data centres. To put this in perspective, The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint that the airline industry and a single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. (I’m getting a little of track here, but I just think that statistic was so mind blowing I really wanted to shoe - horn it in).

INGOLD

I’d now like to look at Tim Ingold and how his approach to creativity can help demystify this fantasy of oblivion. Ingold calls for an embodied version of creativity that dethrones cartesian anthropocentrism. In his definition, creativity is something that a person undergoes but cannot do. Every doing is also an undergoing and a ‘ceaseless upspringing’ (In the word of henri Bergson). In the artistic process this constitutes a landscape where the undergoing overflows the doing and the solution overflows the problem – we are creatures of our own continual self-fashioning. For Ingold art is crescent rather than created.

This philosophy feels far more congruent with the practical experience of artistic process. For most artists, no work is ever finished, and even ostensibly completed works are inevitably threaded into the next project – expressions of a process rather than a singular outcome of thought. The creative process is a perpetual becoming. This idea also resists commercial, capitalist processes of anatomization and accumulation. COmpleted works are more readily ripe for monetization and hermetic ideas are better for legal transactions, and the idea of individual genius. All of this makes for excellent marketing. However, Ingold’s idea incorporates a nebulosity that is not concerned with protecting the commercial subject-object dualism underpinning the individualist continuations of Guildford and Sawyer, Benjamin’s ‘aura’ or the motivated power dynamics inherent in creationism.

It is worth mentioning that this also poses difficulties for Art History, with its discursive investment in the monodirectional aesthetic gaze, concerns with tracing provenance and obsession with the tangible object. What does it mean to dethrone the art object and foreground the art process? What does it mean to understand art objects as temporally stretched art processes all along?

The point that I’m trying to make here, and that Ingold’s theory offers a solution to, is just how this understanding of creation as creatio ex nihilo, is very widespread. The idea that something can be created from nothing lies dormant in capitalist, commercial and colonial processes just as it lies dormant in the fantasy of male genius that constructs the cannon of art history. Indeed, the two are inextricably knotted, and its effects are damning. The idea that we print off a photo downloaded from our icloud account, producing an object that seems to have been beamed down from some sort of heavenly ether, rather than it having a tangible relationship with a three-dimensional data server that is draining our planets resources at an exponential rate. The idea that Vasari’s celebrities of the renaissance sublimated intangible, cerebral divine inspiration into material paint, and in doing so took seismic solitary steps on behalf of human progress. The idea that matter can be hermetically sealed, into unique, finished, and authentic packaging before its sent off into the commercial circuit, spinning the doors of the revolving accumulation mindset. The colonial concept of Terra Nulius, (meaning land belonging to no one) that legitimized and justified the dispossession, dispersal, and inhumane treatment of first nations peoples in Australia by British settlers and which only overturned in 1992.

I would argue that all these examples survive on a fiction of ‘nothingness’, on some idea of ‘oblivion’ from which matter is divinely spawned. As I hope to have demonstrated so far, this is a fantasy that vindicates and naturalizes, covertly and explicitly, patriarchal, capitalist, colonial processes.

LINK

there are many different directions to take here, all using the covert indexicality of creation’s definition as a starting point.

In this talk, however, I am interested in speculating how this discourse can assist with the ongoing project of sexual ethics that seeks to recuperate ‘consent’.

Part of the logic of creatio ex nihilo is this construct of temporal singularity. That eureka moment, that ‘golden nugget of genius’ (as Nochlin puts it), that punctuated moment in time, or indeed a series of violently punctuated moments in time where inspiration strikes, an idea is formed, thoughts are combined, and there you go, something is created. Specifically, some ONE (human) has created and laid claim to some THING.

My argument here is that the temporal punctuation, or the temporal singularity that figures in ideas of permission and originality, is a colonial, capitalist process that has seeped into the field of sexual ethics as much as it has into the landscape of visual art. In both cases, hinging the creative act on a punctuated moment in time does not map onto the lived experience in practise. artistic nor sexual encounters can be explained or made ethical in this way,

I will now delve a little further into this . . .

Starting with the origins of consent

Consent was originally borrowed from medicine’s notion of ‘informed consent’ and came into use at the start of the 20th century, when rape in marriage became illegal and new language was required to navigate this new stage in recognising women’s autonomy, both socially and legally.

In medicine ‘informed consent’ arose in order to cultivate an autonomy based physician-patient relationship. This was an alternative to the more traditional beneficence model, which denied patients of their agency, and certain rights such as disclosure of information or confidentiality, all on the basis that ‘doctor knows best’. I’m not looking to make a point here about medical ethics (it’s not really my area) but am trying to point out that consent originates from a regulatory term for the physician-patient context. It was intended to constitute the formal recognition of a steep power imbalance and somehow position that imbalance ethically in bureaucratic, legal and sometimes, commercial settings.

A crucial part of consent’s semantic history, the one that problematically hitchhiked its way into the sphere of sexual ethics, is permission. The idea that sexual autonomy can be exercised through the moment of obtaining permission, a punctuated moment, often thought to be realized as speech, that ‘green lights’ a sexual encounter.

And this is the crux that troubles a lot of contemporary feminist thinkers right, because we can see how the power imbalance inherent in a physician – patient dynamic is replicated in the heterosexual narrative that sex is something where the man requests or solicits sex from the woman (to the traditional roar of homosocial approval). The patient, assigned the role of inherent need and lack, weakness and vulnerability ‘consents’ to treatment, in the way that a woman is seen to agree to a sexual encounter. This duality transposes into feminine archetypes that figure as either withholding, leveraging or handing over sex. We can see it repeatedly and corrosively reproduced in the archetype of the ‘temptress’ who withholds or leverages her sexuality to control the masculine protagonist. Working in this framework the woman is given the fantasy of agency – the choice between firstly: withholding (to maintain her purity) secondly: leveraging (to coerce various forms of capital from the ‘neutral’ man, AKA God if we are referencing Donna Haraway’s theorizing of the ‘God Trick’) or thirdly: giving (up) her sexuality. Simultaneously and immediately she is denied agency, as she is fixed in the cage of erotic object, her only way forward is the quote unquote “choice” between these three archetypal options, all of which proceed in this singular moment of permission.

And yes we’ve come a long way from the early 20th century, but its still the same connection between consent and a temporally punctuated moment of permission. ‘Consent’ has gone from

First the absence of a no that was then transformed into the presence of a yes, the latter is of course preferrable but it still mirrors the logic of its predecessor, a logic that erases the fact that speech and choice are not in and of themselves liberating acts, and that the voices of marginalized groups, within the grouping of ‘women’ and ‘femmes’ are denied various levels of authority. Th sexuality of women of colour is still often perceived through colonialist and orientalist fantasies that have deep roots in 18th century classifications of human difference, and continue to exact a fetishizing and hypersexualising gaze today. For example, recent studies on America suggested that juries are more likely to convict a white woman’s attacker than that of a black woman.

‘enthusiastic consent’ attempts to remedy this issue of singular permission giving, but feels more like a beligerant labouring of an act that is so heavily knotted in colonial, patriarchal scripts.. it doesn’t map onto actual sexual encounters and It certainly doesn’t reckon with the fact that plenty of ethical sexual encounters, particularly but not always between long term partners, proceeds through communication that is largely non-verbal, through haptic, sensory and emotional cues.

There’s also a comparison to be made here about the effect of bureaucratizing temporally stretched experiences. I have discussed how the artistic process undergoes a commercial incentivized hermetic sealing, one that allows it to then circulate into economies of accumulation. Correspondingly, consent can be understood as an attempted hermetic sealing of sexual encounters, one that allows them to be distilled down singular act of permission that are then able to circulate into the bureaucracy of legislation.

This raises another issue with consent, how knotted it is in a legal discourse. Ellie Anderson complains how ‘laws are poor analogues for ethical negotiation, especially when subtle power dynamics are at work’ and compares it to a traffic light system. Joseph Fischel’s influential publication ‘Screw Consent’ argues that, whilst something akin to consent is a necessary paradigm for legislation, its overbearing presence in erotic encounters stunts our ideas of desire, pleasure and harm. And there is an important distinction to be made between how non-coercive sex is understood legally and how it is understood ethically and phenomenologically.

Ellie Anderson touches on this here . . .

Sexual consent as permission-giving is a legal fiction. It relies on misconceptions about consciousness, embodiment, and the perception of others. But, in spite of its infelicity, this fiction permeates public discourse, where sexual consent is codified as a verbal and affirmative form of permission-giving in university brochures and sex education’ and ‘As it has gained traction in the public imaginary, this fiction may also increasingly hold sway over individuals’ experiences’

This sealing of bodies feels regressively cartesian and totally incongruous with the inherently intercorporeal nature of intimacy, putting pressure on individuals, specifically women to ‘perform a confident sexual self’.

The full quote . . .

Katherine Angel describes how ‘consent, and its conceit of absolute clarity, places the burden of good sexual interaction on women’s behaviour – on what they want and on what they can know and say about their want; on their ability to perform a confident sexual self in order to ensure that sex is mutually pleasurable and non-coercive. Woe betide she who does not know herself and speak that knowledge’

What I’m seeking to demonstrate here is how the use of post-digital Artistic processes as an analogue for sexual encounters, can a provide us with generative portal to steady the discourse of sexual ethics, one that isn’t the ruthless, clinical cartesianism of legislation, or a medical perspective on patient autonomy.

I’m by no means the first person to conceive of something along these lines, in particular Ellie Anderson’s redefinition of consent as continual erotic perception has greatly influenced this talk. However, I have found the discourse tend towards the overly philosophical and rhetorical. I struggle to see how the concepts could ever be properly transposed into the cultural psyche.

I wonder what it would mean to be present with sex as a collaborative artistic process and how that practise of perception might manifest as culture and habit. Something where past and present and future experiences are recognised as shifting coproducers in a temporally stretched event that is not hermetically sealed through a start or an end, let alone through the act of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’. What would it mean to understand sex, not as a cartesian conundrum, where individuals sign away their bodies in the permissive act and are pressured to perform fictional sexual personas who know exactly what they want and how they want it, but instead as Ingold’s ‘ceaseless upspringing’.

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