Илья Марголин – The First Quarter Of My Century (страница 9)

History provides ample confirmation: forms of creative work carried out outside institutional demand tend, in the long term, to transform the disciplinary field itself. A paradigmatic case is the French mathematician Évariste Galois, whose work on group theory was rejected by the French Academy of Sciences as «illogical» and «unsuitable for application.» Yet it was precisely his work that determined the future structure of modern algebra. His writings were published only fourteen years after his death, but from that moment on they became foundational for understanding symmetry as a universal category.

A similar pattern can be observed in the history of the arts. Paul Celan’s writing and poetic rhythm were long dismissed by literary critics as not constituting «real poetry.» However, by the 1980s, the structure of his language had become normative for the philosophy of language, particularly in the later works of Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida.

Such cases demonstrate that creative intervention, unsupported by the immediate demands of its environment, can nonetheless reconfigure the very system of evaluative coordinates within which it was initially judged excessive. This is not an exception; it is a rule that operates with delay. And it is precisely here that the specificity of creative action lies: it does not rely on recognition, yet over time it produces a new structure of recognition.

Such intervention introduces ontological noise into a normative system that operates through reproducible units. Within the philosophy of technology, this corresponds to the notion of a «contingent malfunction» introduced by Gilbert Simondon: a subject who crosses the boundary of permissible functional action embeds into the system an irreducible module that necessitates the reconfiguration of the entire network.

In stable systems – scientific, administrative, cultural – predictability is valued. This is linked to the need for repeatability of processes, controllability of outcomes, and formalizability of procedures. Yet such systems are prone to internal exhaustion. Repetition devoid of divergence gradually erodes the distinction between actions. The form remains intact, but it ceases to generate meaning. At this stage, a need arises for a structural disruption – for an action that breaks reproducibility not for the sake of rejection, but for the sake of recalibration.

Creativity should not be understood as an expression of personality. It is not synonymous with «self-expression» or «uniqueness.» A creative act begins with the detection of a functional dead end. This may take the form of a technical limit, an ethical opacity, or a lexical exhaustion. In each case, the subject registers a discrepancy between action and result. The entry point into creativity is the point of overload of the norm, where existing means of action no longer provide sufficient precision or significance.

In mathematics, this situation was articulated by Kurt Gödel in 1931 in his Incompleteness Theorem. In systems sufficiently powerful to express arithmetic, there will always exist statements whose truth cannot be proven within the system itself. The implication is clear: any sufficiently developed system requires a point of exit beyond its own boundaries. This point constitutes the zone of possible creative action. The subject working within it does not reject the system, but reproduces its limit as a problem that demands a new apparatus.

Creativity is a way of identifying the boundary of applicability of rules and formulating an operation that functions beyond that boundary without destroying the whole. It does not require provocation; it requires conceptual discipline, in which the new does not oppose the old but compels it to function differently. In the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn described this structure of action in his conception of scientific revolutions as paradigm shifts – not as hostility between theories, but as the impossibility of continuing within the previous register.

At the level of everyday practice, the same pattern can be observed in any intellectual or artistic work that alters not so much the result as the structure of expectations. When Le Corbusier designed the «house as a machine for living,» he was not pursuing architectural aesthetics. He restructured the question itself: not how housing should look, but how it should function given specific constraints of function, density, and temporal velocity. After him, architecture could no longer be described in the same language – even when it continued, visually, to replicate traditional forms.

These examples show that creative work does not require a dramatic breakthrough. It requires precise calculation under conditions where previous calculations no longer yield results. It is neither a random gesture nor a deviation. It is a form of re-centering – at the level of the problem, not of style. The individual who performs it acts neither for attention nor for image. Their behavior is rational within the bounds of a task that cannot be solved within older coordinates.

This implies that creativity is not reproduced as linear progression, but as a local intensification of structure, in which it becomes evident that norms previously regarded as universal are in fact historically contingent. Proof is unnecessary; a functioning alternative suffices. Once such an alternative emerges, the system is compelled to respond. Sometimes through resistance, more often through incorporation. In either case, the response confirms the essential point: the prior structure has changed irreversibly.

Such a structure does not permit training by model. Creativity cannot be taught. One can only work within a field where the necessity of precise action renders automatism inadequate. In this field, a person either begins to search independently for a new means, or continues to execute prescribed operations while remaining unaware of their redundancy. The former is productive; the latter stabilizes.

The dissemination of creativity, therefore, is not the dissemination of knowledge. It is the dissemination of a threshold of tolerance for the unresolved. A single individual operating at a new level raises the irritability of the entire environment. They make insufficiency visible – not through critique, but by demonstrating that another mode of action is possible. After this, inertia becomes a weaker justification.

As Hans Blumenberg observed, «every new beginning arises not from opposition, but from the impossibility of continuation.» Creativity, in this sense, is not a choice, but a necessity for sustaining action at the moment when a rule no longer produces results. Such a position demands not talent, but the capacity to perceive the boundary of applicability – and the readiness to act beyond it.

And Yet

In this text, I examine the word and yet not as a rhetorical turn, but as a philosophically significant structure that allows a person to preserve inner continuity after events that disrupt biographical sequence. My focus is neither linguistics nor the psychology of adaptation, but the minimal forms through which a person continues to think and act after a break – not by compensating, not by nullifying, but by incorporating destruction into a new structure. I argue that and yet performs both a logical and an ethical function: it connects incompatible segments of a life into a line that can be continued without denying what has occurred. In conditions where purpose and order have been lost, such a form of holding becomes necessary.

In every biography there are moments that cannot be explained and cannot be rationally integrated into the general order of life. These are not pauses or temporary gaps, but points of rupture. Failure, loss, separation, exclusion – events that cannot be continued within the logic that preceded them. Such a rupture is always destructive. It breaks the linkage between previous action and the possibility of further choice. What arises is not simply a feeling of loss, but a structural break: former grounds are withdrawn, while new ones have not yet emerged. Without internal means of traversing such zones, life disintegrates into a sequence of disconnected fragments.

In such situations, a person cannot rely on external help. No institution can restore lost continuity. The core problem here is not what happened, but the loss of the form in which life could proceed. The inner task is not to «get over» the event, but to preserve access to sequence itself. Without this linkage, a person ceases to be the subject of their own life.

The structure of and yet is one of the few instruments through which inner continuity can be restored. It is neither an expression of hope nor a psychological consolation. It is a way of linking two segments of time between which no obvious bridge exists.

Formally, and yet is a simple connective. Functionally, it is an act of thinking. A person who uses and yet does not deny what has happened, does not soften it, does not reinterpret it as positive. They insert the point of rupture into a structure that allows further action. It is an act of holding a line when the line has been broken.