Creativity and agency

The excerpt below is from an essay I wrote called ‘Excuses’. This essay is part of a collection about what being creative means for the time poor. You can find it here.

Agency: n., 4. the state of being in action or of exerting power. 5. a mode of exerting power; instrumentality. – The Penguin Macquarie Dictionary

‘There’s no such thing as excuses!’

I believe in excuses. Indubitably.

For there to be literally no such thing as excuses, a world would have to exist in which every single one of us had complete agency over everything in our lives all the time. This is impossible, of course. In order for us to live together we all have to experience a fluid state of give and take, of diminishing and expanding agency, throughout our lives.

So, what exactly is agency? An example of limited agency was playing out as lived experience while the first draft of this note was written. Melbourne was undergoing its sixth lockdown, requiring its citizens’ compliance with strict regulations around isolating ourselves at home and wearing masks the two hours a day we were allowed to leave. None of us liked this. But lockdowns did work in mitigating the rise of infection in an unvaccinated population; most of us complied. A minority bucked the rules and gathered in little crowds to have fun, spreading the coronavirus as they went. The rest of us despised them for this, furious at their sense of entitlement. Although most of us did not want to give up the freedom to move about our city, we gave up agency over things we were free to do pre-2020 and allowed our state government to dictate why and when and how far we could go from our homes. This would have been an unimaginable set of constraints prior to Covid. The things we had control over, things we were empowered to make decisions about, had dwindled to home arrangements and the minutiae of life in lockdown: what to eat, what Netflix series to binge watch. People supervised home schooling, and / or worked from home which meant that their ‘own’ time was cut into, and therefore the ‘own time’ where they were free to make autonomous choice dwindled even more.

‘Do it in your own time.’

I just wrote ‘own time’. We grow up hearing about being able to do things in our ‘own time’, as if time is something which can be possessed. And I suppose this is true, in an odd way and now I come to think about it, given that employers buy parcels of time designating amounts of labour from us. As children we are told that we can do what we want in our own time once released from the demands of school, homework, and chores. Our own time was when we were allowed to play, to muck around, to ‘waste’ time daydreaming, fiddling, making a mess.

As adults our own time is what happens after work and then after parenting, caring, and house working. For many people, the little bit of time left is the time they have to devote to being creative, if everything else has left them the energy and enthusiasm for it.

This owned time, our possessed time, is the time when we can exercise more agency. When we are empowered to decide to direct our attention and efforts to wherever we like without intrusion from the concerns of others.

Agency is to do with choice making, but it is not quite the same as merely deciding. Agency is when you feel empowered to choose from a range of good choices and then to act on your choice. Sociologist Ruha Benjamin once made an excellent point that agency is also made manifest in ‘informed refusal’ – the state of empowerment where you make an informed decision to turn something down, to not be involved, to not be required to spend your energy.

So, when we are talking about our own time – time that is “mine”, that is clutched hard to one’s chest like a valuable thing – we are talking about the instrumentality of agency, of the ability to gain knowledge, weigh up options, to make choices, to accept risk, to follow a course of action and to see where that leads us.

None of us have perfect agency over everything all of the time. In fact, most of us live with constraints on our agency most of the time. Our sense of agency ebbs and flows depending on the context: we are all more or less empowered depending on the state of our personal and professional lives and the conditions under which those lives are lived.

For years now I have considered creativity to be about making choices. In the actual creating of a piece of artwork (from any art form), artists are constantly faced with choices: this colour or that? This inflection of tone or that? This dance movement or that? Professional artists look as if they are working in a state of flow – and, sometimes, they are – but that is just because they are practiced at this choice making and are doing it at the speed of instinct and informed by refined intuition.

Creative practice, by which I mean the regular making of work, is about choice making too: When is the best time for creative work? Where I should set up my desk or easel? Can I write in a café? Should I join a writer’s group? Should I join an improvisation workshop? When should I ask for feedback? Should I collaborate or should I work alone?

Should I write my blog on the day when the kids are at soccer or at night after they’ve gone to bed?

Should I spend my money on hiring an editor to help me with my self-published manuscript or should I put it towards upgrading my laptop?

Should I ask my brother to step up more to help care for our aged mother so I can have more time to spend on my painting? Or would that be selfish?

In other words, creativity has a lot to do with agency. Of being asked to make choices that enable the making of creative work and which affect its quality. Choices that affect, too, your experience of this: can you learn from your process? Can you sustain effort? Can you take joy from it, deriving inspiration and momentum that can help you move onto future projects?

This experience of being creative is inflected by agency – how much you have and over what areas of your life. When it comes to choosing how you spend your time alone, how much of your ‘own’ time do you possess? Are you in a position to dictate or negotiate many or some of the day-job conditions that will inform the way in which you live for this time? What agency can you exercise in the way you respond to whatever conditions with which you are contending? Are you abundantly resourced or bedevilled with hard decisions over how to stretch a tight budget? What obligations do you owe to dependents, partners, bosses, colleagues, comrades, friends, or family?

And this is why there is such a thing as excuses.