Ideology and creativity: poststructuralism, abundant difference, and plastic production

The central problem that I address in my thesis is how to define the relationship between ideology and creativity without either reducing them to an opposition or making one subordinate to the other. In the revival of ideology studies, ideology is either conceptualised as the limit to creativity, or creativity is merely a tool of ideology. What is missing is an examination of the paradoxical relationship between ideology and creativity. Creativity is used to critique ideology, ideology is used to dampen creativity, to be creative is to be ideological, and ideologies are creative. To explain this paradoxical relationship, I centre my analysis on the rejection of the concept of ideology by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. The pair are critical of the concept of ideology because it is premised on a will to truth and a distortion of meaning. I identify three strands of contemporary political theory that reject Foucault and Deleuze’s claims about ideology: the ontological, praxis, and poststructuralist critiques of ideology. These critiques concur with Foucault and Deleuze that ideology cannot simply be the distortion of true meaning. Instead, they conceptualise ideology as that which produces incomplete meaning. However, these critiques are flawed as they still rely on the argument that ideology distorts meaning. I thus go on to develop a new concept of ideology that does not conceptualise ideology as the distortion of meaning or, consequently, rely on a will to truth. I argue that the ideological produces meaning, where differences are organised in such a way that they are understood as non-different. This is necessarily creative, as ideological production is a novel transformation of meaning. By reading Foucault and Deleuze together with Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity, I theorise production as comprised of the relationship between the forces of power, desire, the ideological, and creativity. The plastic relationship between positive ideological and creative forces produces meaning. I subsequently theorise ideological production as a site of normative critique grounded in the contingency of meaning. Thus, I utilise the ideology-creativity paradox to conceptualise ideology as a tool to critically evaluate politics without relying on a will to truth or a distortion of meaning.