CMBC LECTURE | Raphaël Julliard "The Creative Engine and the Sense of Rightness"

“The Creative Engine and the Sense of Rightness” My research operates at the intersection of anthropology, the psychology of creativity, and micro-phenomenology. It is driven by a central question: in the uncertainty of the creative act, how do creators know when it works? While traditional approaches often rely on retrospective reconstruction, my work focuses on the "creative engine": the real-time feedback loop between Action (what the maker does) and Affect (how the emerging form acts back upon the maker). I posit that creativity is not a cognitive planning process, but a navigational skill steered by a pre-reflective affective criterion—a felt sense of fitness we conceptualize as "Rightness"—guiding the artist between the risks. To study this, I have moved from historical analysis to experimental ethnography, developing a novel methodology—The Researcher-As-Obstacle (RAO)—designed to investigate the creative mind in action. My goal is to establish a rigorous anthropology of this na