Recovery as an Act of Creative Resistance
As regular readers know, I have an interest in the relationship between creativity—especially as it occurs in writing—and recovery. I also have a growing interest in the relationship between recovery and the politics of resistance.
Even though politics are generally shunned in anonymous fellowships, I want to know if there is a possible link between personal recovery and the work of shaping a better world. Beyond our sobriety, is there something more we can give back to humanity? And, if so, could creativity and writing be useful to that work?
Thanks to an episode of Acid Horizon, I’ve been introduced to a pair of philosophical lectures that shed light on these questions, specifically regarding the link between creativity and resistance. In these lectures, Giles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben offer their perspectives on the associations among art, creativity, and politics. These perspectives provide insight into a possible understanding of recovery as an act of creative resistance.
Deleuze: Ideas, Information, and Control
In 1987, FEMIS film foundation invited French philosopher Giles Deleuze to give a lecture responding to the question “What is the Creative Act?” He began by comparing the work of filmmakers to the work of philosophers.
Philosophy and filmmaking, Deleuze observed, were both creative professions, meaning that both the philosopher and the filmmaker get ideas. Filmmakers get ideas for movies, and philosophers get ideas for new concepts.
Deleuze contrasted ideas with information. While he thought of ideas as “potentials” (i.e., things that don’t currently exist but could be brought into being), he saw information as control: “a set of imperatives, order-words. When you are informed, you are told what you are supposed to believe.” Furthermore, information itself—the totality of information in a society—”is exactly the system of control.”
As a metaphor for how information controls, Deleuze offered the example of the turnpike: “There you are not confining people, but by making turnpikes, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely without being confined while remaining perfectly controlled. That is our future.”
Rather presciently, Deleuze gave his lecture several years before the public launch of the World Wide Web—the “information superhighway” that has radically transformed human expression, culture, and politics exactly by expanding the domain of information thereby multiplying the means of control.
In the context of the emerging informational “control society,” Deleuze identified a “narrow” affinity between the work of art and acts of resistance: “A work of art [like an act of resistance] does not contain the least bit of information,” he said. Instead, they both anticipate, in their own ways, “a people that does not yet exist.”
Put simply: Creative acts do not aim to control beliefs. Instead they are ways of imagining who we might become together.
Agamben: Resistance, Potential, and Creative Not-making
Thirty years after Deleuze’s talk, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben delivered a lecture in response (reproduced in chapter 2 of this book). Noting that Deleuze never defined what he meant by “resistance,” Agamben worked to develop an understanding of the role that resistance plays in the creative act.
Beginning with the notion that ideas are potentials, Agamben offered the counterintuitive suggestion that this kind of potential “is essentially defined by the possibility of its non-exercise” (17), meaning that the potential possessed by a poet, for example, is not defined by the act of writing writing but instead by the act of not writing a poem. A poet is someone who is capable of not-writing poems.
Now, you might reasonably say “I can not-write a poem. Anyone can! I do it every day.” But there is an important difference between “not being able to” and “being able not to.” The kind of not-writing a poet does when they are practicing their trade is qualitatively different from the kind of not writing that non-poets do when they are going about their lives.
The difference, Agamben suggests, is one of resistance. The poet resists the act of writing as an essential aspect of the process of poem-making. This kind of resistance pushes back against the impulse to create in order to attend to the creative moment itself. In this way, resistance “exposes and contemplates potential first and foremost, a potential that does not precede the work, but accompanies it, makes it live, and opens it to possibilities” (27).
There is something almost meditative about Agamben’s concept. The person engaged in a creative act resists it by pausing, prolonging the act, attending to its potential, and allowing its possibilities to unfold. For Agamben, it is this pausing, prolonging, attending, and unfolding that defines human creativity, rather than impulsive acts of making.
Agamben’s view of resistance has more than a narrow affinity to politics. Because all creative acts require this kind of resistance, art and politics are simply two modes of the same process: “Politics and art are neither tasks nor simply “works”: they name, rather, the dimension in which linguistic and bodily, material and immaterial, biological and social operations are deactivated and contemplated as such” (27).
In short, resisting the flow of life—the flow of our thoughts and impulses, of history, of social processes, of our routines, etc.—is what allows us to exercise human creativity.
Recovery: Potential, Resistance, and Politics
Given these perspectives, how might we understand recovery as an act of creative resistance?
We can begin by asking: What idea do recovering people possess, or, to use Agamben’s phrase, in what way does recovery represent the “liberation of a potential”?
To answer this question, I find it helpful to acknowledge that recovery is not an individual process, meaning that it never happens only in and for an individual addict. Recovery may feel like a radically transformative and highly personal experience, but it is actually a social phenomenon.
When an addict recovers, the social fabric around them is radically rewoven. Some relationships are mended, others are let go. New connections are formed at previously impossible levels of depth and honesty. The addict enters new communities with a desire to be useful. Their families are relieved of chaos and gain a source of stability and care. Perhaps most importantly, the recovering addict becomes available to other, still suffering addicts as a means to their recovery.
In short, recovery happens not in individuals alone, but in families, in groups, in fellowships, in lines of sponsorship, in the “recovery movement,” and even in “society” as a whole.
Put in practical terms: My recovery is not for me. It is for others. It’s for other addicts. It’s for my family and friends. For my coworkers and acquaintances It’s even for strangers, anyone who has to interact with me for any amount of time. “My” recovery is meant to improve life for all of us.
In this way, the “idea” of recovery—the potential that recovery liberates—is not limited to a single clean and sober addict. It is not even limited to the whole network of millions of recoveries. Instead, this potential is the “widening circle of peace on earth and goodwill to others” represented by the cumulative social transformations effected by people in recovery.
Collected together, every amends, every act of sponsorship, every moment of kindness, or charity, or truth telling that people in recovery perform—in short, the entire mass of social “reweavings” that clean and sober addicts are responsible for—that is the “idea” of recovery. That contagion of “life bettering” is its liberated potential. Our life’s mission, as recovering people, is to play a role in that creative process.
This brings us to a second question: In the process of liberating recovery’s potential, where and how do recovering people resist?
As a reminder, “resistance,” in the sense we mean here, does not mean “rejection,” as when a newcomer sits in their first meeting and decides that recovery is not for them. “Resistance” is also not synonymous with “rigidity,” as when an alcoholic refuses to admit they have a problem or need help. Finally, “resistance” does not indicate “repression,” as when we push down thoughts we don’t want to deal with, or, from a position of power, we push down people and ideas we don’t like.
Instead, this kind of resistance is a productive one, essential to the creative liberation of potential. It takes the form of pausing, prolonging, attending to, and unfolding the possibilities of an idea.
So, where do recovering people do that?
One place to find this kind of resistance is in prayer and meditation, for these are the methods by which recovering people set aside a few moments each morning to resist the inertia of their personal history and trauma in order to attend to their emergent potential and discover new possibilities for the day.
The specific method of prayer or meditation seems of less practical importance than whether the addict sincerely and open-mindedly seeks possibilities for themselves that are more honest, loving, unselfish, and pure than what their personal inertia would have produced otherwise.
And so, this act of prayerful resistance—of pausing, prolonging a moment, attending to our emergent potential, and allowing its possibilities to unfold—is a creative act. It creates us as recovered people. And, to the extent that we then contribute to the “widening circle of peace” that is recovery’s potential, our acts of prayerful resistance are also social acts.
In other words, just as my recovery is not for me, my morning meditation is not for me, either. This practice does make me feel better—more relaxed and ready for the day. But the value of a “me who is more relaxed and ready for the day” is most fully realized not in my own experience but in the lives of others.
However, resistance in recovery is not limited to morning prayers, etc. It happens all the time, throughout the day, each time we pause, notice our inertia, attend to other possibilities, and act differently. In fact, every single recovery practice directs us toward moments like this. When we make a surrender, write inventory, make amends, help others, or do anything else associated with recovery, we are guiding ourselves to resist the flow of our lives, see its potential differently, expand our possibilities, and change. Recovery practices are creative precisely because they perform interventions at the level of imagination in the form of this type of resistance.
Just as the poet must not-write in order to write, as addicts in recovery, we must not-live in order to live.
This brings us to a final question (for this post anyway): What affinity does the creative potential of recovery share with politics? In other words, how might our recoveries anticipate a people that does not yet exist?
One answer to this question is already contained in the discussion above: When we recover—when we resist our lives in order to live them more fully—we also reweave the social fabric of which we are a part. We realize better possibilities in our lives precisely by improving the lives of those around us. This activity is the embodiment of a people that does not yet exist, meaning that it works toward a better life for all.
A second possible answer to this question would examine the idea of “group conscience,” understood as the equivalent of prayer and meditation at the level of the group in anonymous fellowships. The group is meant to pause, prolong its decision-making, attend to its potential, and allow possibilities to unfold for better group behavior.
However, the actual practices of groups often undermine this idea, and deliberations can come to resemble something more like “control” or even “discipline” in the sense of regulating behavior by means of an institution and its norms. For example, if a group feels guided to serve food or provide housing to struggling people as part of its mission, such a project can be halted by objections that it violates institutional norms (i.e., “the Traditions”) in one way or another.
Resisting the discipline/control of normative group behavior and attending to new possibilities for anonymous fellowships is precisely the work of resistance in recovery. It is the most practical way we can anticipate a people that does not yet exist. Such work will inevitably be met by rejection, rigidity, and repression in various forms, for that is how social change always plays out in any institution. Anonymous fellowships are not exceptional in this way.
There is also a third answer to this question—the question of what affinity the creative potential of recovery shares with politics—and this answer points to the ways in which the whole world is in desperate need of recovery. In my last post, I pointed to overconsumption (as opposed to “addiction”) as a concept that enables “addicts” to place their recoveries in solidarity with a politics of ecological renewal. We are collectively addicted and must therefore collectively recover. It is so easy for the logic of “addiction” to prematurely halt our progress at the personal level instead of realizing our recovery’s potential as an agent of change within a sick and sickening world.
This third answer is also a question: How can we realize recovery’s potential in light overconsumption?
What might recovery practices look like if we recognized that the inertia we are resisting—the inertia of impulse, of trauma reactions, of “bad attitudes”—is exactly our internalization of a sickness that affects humanity on a global scale? What new potentials for our groups and fellowships could such an awareness liberate? What possibilities for service or amends might unfold from the realization that all humans are suffering from this “disease”? As addicts in recovery, how can we imagine a people who does not yet exist and take action toward their liberation? How might we not-live with the hope that we all might live again?