Non-Lethal Weapons Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

For many years I have been interested in creativity and creative thinking in the most varied of areas, such as art curation, the study of literacy issues, artistic and musical aesthetics. Several years ago I established a permanent seminar on creativity, open to input from all backgrounds. I wrote a text proposing a hypothesis of the relationship between living spaces, individuality, and childhood, in which, using mostly an overview of the history of theatre and the analysis of some emblematic works (Oresteia, Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Seagull), I sought to identify the complexity of motives of modern and contemporary creativity. The thesis proposes that without individual spaces there is no private individual psyche, and, as such, no particular form of interiority to allow for the creative processes as they exist in the modern epoch. I propose that the fundamental motives of creativity, at least in our culture, have psychological origins that have been correctly interpreted by certain psychoanalytic authors and which refer on one hand to the basic instincts of sexuality and aggression (Melanie Klein, Otto Kernberg, and – in the field of evolutionary biology – Geoffrey Miller), and, on the other hand, to social motives relating to the asymmetric and unequal distribution of both economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu). In other words, a correlation exists between private individuality and solidity of the structure of the ego. This strength enables the creative process to be fully realised by way of an integration of sexual and aggressive drives through a process of sublimation, avoiding an overly severe diversion. Reducing the influence of the regressions in basic assumptions (Bion) and applying the concept of group work to the individual, it reduces the compulsion to conform to social norms thus promoting originality. This theoretical base allows for various forms to practice. Drastically reducing the motives of the possible forms of creativity, a slighty unintuitive resulting consequence is that, on the one hand, we can consider the cultural forms as morphogenetic fields dynamically structured around cultural, social and individual "points of view", and, on the other hand, we can identify the lines of deformation of these seemingly incompatible fields thus allowing them to communicate through a continuum within which new objects can be conceived. For example, in the military field, the concept of a non-lethal weapon introduces an adjustable variable in the way in which the strength of a device is applied to a target: this introduces a strong component of variability in the application of force. If the range of capabilities of a weapon is not limited merely to hurt or to kill, one can think of the weapon as a device which attaches, or perhaps that the assignment is not the actual penetration of the target body. Shall we then say that the task of the weapon is to intervene on the perceptual abilities of the individual (considering the potential of penetration of the weapon as a capacity to provide a deep perception of the target, along a continuum that connects the penetrative and non-penetrative potential of the weapon itself). The task of the device would be to cause a certain degree of sensory overload (or, on the contrary, of sensory deprivation) such as to induce a regressive state in the target (an individual or a group of individuals). The above definition is also perfectly applicable to another class of artifact that our culture categorises under the definition of "works of art". By accepting this hypothesis we are in possession of a theoretical tool that enables us to consider an alternative class of theoretical object (for example, concerning the use-of-force doctrine in the different situations of war and non-war) and concrete objects (for example, devices that produce perceptual-but also "cultural "-innovative effects, redesigning the targeting concept, as much in art as in war). Accepting these assumptions we are in possession of a theoretical tool that establishes a continuum between two different linguistic fields, the field of art and the field of military: a line along which they can rise to an unpredictable number of theoretical tools and devices.