Since the mid-twentieth century the concepts ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ have become increasingly significant within a host of fields, such as education, medicine, engineering, technology and science. Moreover, such terms appear to have become ubiquitous, if not hegemonic, within the contemporary discourses that inform debates that surround the allocation and cultivation of the social capital that is native to education, both tertiary and otherwise. Given that the thinking of creativity appears increasingly to be possible only within the contemporary logics of utility (...) and productivity that inform the discussion of the ‘knowledge economy’, the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze are perhaps now more vital than ever, at least insofar as he is able to provide the possibility of approaching an ‘otherwise’ to the contemporary thinking of ‘creativity’. This paper discusses the possibility for Deleuze's discussion of rhythm – as can be located in his text A Thousand Plateaus and his work on the twentieth-century painter Francis Bacon – as providing the means for better posing the question of the conditions for the emergence of a fundamentally creative approach to teaching creativity to be conceptualized within our present situation. (shrink)

This paper will explore both the ways in which the practices of self-care, specifically related to mental health, have emerged as responses to the increasingly precarious status of life after the economic shocks of the Global Financial Crisis, whilst also looking to the work of Silvia Federici and Kathi Weeks to propose models for immanent critique of these practices. Although it cannot be taken as a pure origin, post-GFC mental health discourse has increasingly seen mental health discussed as a form (...) of resilience to precarity. Furthermore, practices of self-care, and psychological forms of treatment such as cognitive behavioural therapy have become vehicles for the intensification of personal resilience in the face of systemic crisis. If self-care involves an inward looking and depoliticised subject, surely political emancipation lies elsewhere. The possibility of some alternative to our present state of affairs, where self-care increasingly appears as a form of ‘voluntary servitude,’ that is to say, a form of self-subjugation with serious political risks, must surely be taken as a continual project for those engaged in critical inquiry. Then again, to suggest that those engaging in self-care are simply reproducing neoliberal subjectivity would surely miss the ways in which such forms of self-preservation might appear as unavoidable for the individuals in question. Through an engagement with their work—and one that draws parallels between their strategic critiques of reproductive labour broadly speaking, and the more specific area of mental illness and neoliberal governmentality—the question of the “necessity” of self-care will be brought into alignment with the possibilities of its practicality. (shrink)