Critique By Creating

OK, class. Let’s begin again at a beginning. With Entropy.?The natural breakdown of all things. Everything is in a constant state of decay. Every star in the heavens, every cell in your body, every molecule. All there is will eventually crumble. Every building, our bodies, anything in the physical world left unattended will eventually deteriorate and fall into disrepair. A powerful and inescapable truth of the universe.

Why would we think our thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and identity would be any different? All are facing constant, relentless breakdown naturally and through untruths both whispered and shouted. We simply forget. You know this. You feel this. Our reality is consistently broken down by people who are lost physically and spiritually due to the natural, unceasing decay of the created order; reality then must constantly be repaired.

I can prove it to you: listen close, I want to tell you something true: You are created, You are known, You are loved, You are seen, You are heard, You are enough…and don’t let anyone tell you differently, least of all yourself.

More than likely, not only will something inside you squirm and fight the hearing of these words, you will begin to forget their truth even before the end of this line. The voice in your head starts spreading doubt, insecurity and self-destruction. The images on the billboards tell you more lies. This is entropy at work in your perception of reality.

One of the ways we combat this breakdown is through our communications and by extension our art and media. In this way, we produce, maintain, repair and transform the ways we understand and experience reality, countervailing entropy’s psychic effect.

The great communications theorist, James W Carey puts it this way:

“Reality is a scarce resource. The fundamental form of power is the power to define, allocate, and display this resource. Once the blank canvas of the world is portrayed and featured, it is also preempted and restricted. Therefore, the site where artists paint, writers write, speakers speak, filmmakers film, broadcasters broadcast is simultaneously the site of social conflict over the real. What’s more, a critical theory of communication must affirm what is before our eyes and transcend it by imagining, at the very least, a world more desirable.”?~ James W. Carey

This is especially profound given entropy: Disorder, not order, is the fate of all there is unless a creative countervailing force is present. Therefore, we need to relentlessly speak true things into existence and into each others lives in an infinite variety of creative ways.

Don’t lament the breakdown. Expect it! What’s this world coming to? Nothing. Same as it ever was. But that does not mean things can’t be better, be rebuilt.

We all need to be at work in the repairing, rebuilding truer, better realities. Or more specifically, to re-vive. Meaning to “wake up!” That is what revival is — waking up to a better reality being made known. I am to keep at the unceasing work of rebuilding to the best of my small capacity confident I am a part of something infinitely, unstoppably greater than myself.

Entropy, disorder, the destructive confusion and lawlessness of a broken world is to be fought. Media artists are called and equipped to expose it for what it is. This is our critique of culture. We are to engage in the social conflict over the real through our creativity — this site where artists paint, writers write, speakers speak, filmmakers film, broadcasters broadcast.?We combat entropy through our creativity. We make a statement about what can and should be by our creating.

Put most simply: We critique by creating. Our critique of the breakdown of the world should be entirely creative.

In this way we make better thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and even our identity and reality possible by speaking them into existence, but more than that, through creativity we make something else vital possible: invitation.

See, unfortunately, our critique itself can devolve into mere criticism. Broadcasting your complaints about the world or statements of your own perceived “rightness” accomplishes little to nothing. In fact, it just makes things worse. Stop doing that.

A person (much less a culture) does not change because you explain in detail all the ways they are wrong or what you don’t like about another’s view. You could completely deconstruct my worldview, just wreck my world, but I still have to get through Tuesday.

Merely making someone feel wrong, lost, and less is to be an agent of entropy. I cannot change, a culture cannot change, without the invitation to put aside one way for a better way. This is culture making at it’s most basic:

Unfettered Creation, Invitation, and Inclusion. This is the rhythm of revival.

Without invitation — made possible by creating something to be invited and included into — critique becomes little more than useless complaint.

Creation, Invitation, and Inclusion. I made something, come and see, be a part of it. “Could it be true?” you ask. Come and see.

You are created, You are known, You are loved, You are seen, You are heard, You are enough…Come and see. Come and see.

Critique by creating.