Creativity

What does creativity mean here? First of all, creativity has a double meaning.

On the one hand, it refers to the ability and the reality of dynamically producing something new. Creativity favors the new over the old, the deviant over the standard, the different over the same. This bringing forth of the new is not thought of as a one-time act, but as something that happens again and again and in perpetuity.

On the other hand, creativity refers to a model of the "creative" that ties it back to the modern figure of the artist, to the artistic and aesthetic as a Whole. It is about more than a purely technical production of innovations, but about the sensual and affective excitement through the produced new.

The aesthetically new is associated with vitality and experimentation, and its producer appears as a creative self analogous to the artist. The new in the sense of the creative is then not merely present like a technical achievement, it is sensually perceived, experienced and enjoyed as an end in itself by the viewer and also by the one who brings it into the world.

From a sociological perspective, creativity is not just a semantic surface phenomenon, but the center of a set of social criteria that has increasingly become a defining force in Western societies over the past thirty years.

This development proves to be particularly remarkable, first of all, in the economic-technical heart of capitalist societies, the sphere of work and profession. What Andreas Reckwitz will call the "aesthetic capitalism" of the present is based in its most advanced form on modes of work that have left behind the long familiar pattern of routinized blue-collar and white-collar work, its standardized and objectified handling of objects and subjects. In their place have come activities in which the constant production of novelty, especially of signs and symbols (texts, images, communications, procedures, aesthetic objects, body modifications), before an audience interested in Originality and Surprise, has become the most important requirement: in the media and in design, in education and in consulting, in fashion and in architecture.

Consumer culture expects these aesthetically pleasing, innovative products, and the creative industries strive to provide them. The creative person as a professional in this creative economy now denotes a social figure of considerable cultural appeal even beyond a narrower occupational segment. However, the orientation toward creativity affects not only work practices, but also organizations and institutions themselves. These have subjected themselves to an imperative of permanent innovation.

Business organizations in particular, but meanwhile also other – political or scientific institutions have restructured themselves in such a way that they do not only permanently establish the fabrication of ever new products, but also permanently renew their internal structures and processes in order to thus remain "responsive" in a constantly changing organizational environment.

Beyond the professional, work, and organizational worlds, the dual of creativity desire and creativity imperative has seeped ever more deeply into the cultural logic of the private lifestyles of the postmaterialist middle class (and beyond) since the 1970s. It would fall short of the mark to assume that their late-modern selves are essentially striving for individualization. This individualization takes a particular form: it aims at a creative shaping of subjectivity.

Creativity here refers less to the making of things than to the shaping of the individual himself. It is – as Richard Rorty paraphrases it – a culture of "Self-Creation".

One cannot stress enough that these self-development and self-realization pursued by the late modern subject should not be misunderstood as universals. Rather, they derive from a historically exceptional vocabulary of the self from around the Psychology of Self-Growth, which in turn manages a Romantic legacy. Only against its background is the self concerned with a quasi-artistic, experimental further development in all its facets, in personal relationships, leisure formats, consumption styles, and physical or psychological self-techniques. The orientation towards the creativity of the self is thereby regularly connected with a striving for originality, for a distinctiveness of the self.

Finally, the social orientation toward creativity stands out in another area: in the transformation of the urban, in the transformation of the built space of the major Western cities.

Since the 1980s, many of the metropolises between Barcelona and Seattle, between Copenhagen and Boston, have been in the process of reinventing themselves aesthetically via the path of spectacular architecture, the restoration of neighborhoods, the reestablishment of cultural institutions, and targeted work on appealing atmospheres. It is no longer enough for cities to fulfill their basic functions of providing housing and workplaces, as was the case in the classic industrial society. Instead, they are expected to permanently renew themselves aesthetically, capturing the attention of residents and visitors again and again – they want to and should be Creative Cities.

The creative work, the innovative organization, the self-developing individual, the creative cities – they all participate in a comprehensive cultural ensemble that makes the production of the new permanent and feeds the fascination of the creation and perception of novel, original objects, events and identities.

Basically, all this is most strange. One only has to take a step back historically to become aware of the strangeness that is easily obscured in the face of the current universalization of creativity, its fixation on a seemingly alternative-less and universally valid structure of the social and the self.

To be sure, the idea of creativity is certainly not an invention of our post- or late-modern age. From a sociological perspective on the genesis of modernity as a whole, however, it has been essentially confined to cultural and social niches from the last third of the eighteenth century to the second third of the twentieth. It was the artistic and aesthetic movements since the Sturm und Drang and Romanticism that pushed in ever new spurts the conviction that the world and the self were to be shaped creatively.

Directed against the bourgeois and post-bourgeois establishment, against their morality, rationality of purpose and social control, they defined and celebrated non-alienated existence as a permanent state of creative reinvention. This was true of the Romantics at the beginning of the 19th century as well as of the aesthetic avant-gardes and vitalist movements of the Lebensreform around 1900, and finally of the Counter Culture of the 1960s, which proclaimed the "creative age" as an age of aquarius. In these artistic and countercultural niches, creativity has been positioned as an emancipation hope that would overcome the seemingly repressive occidental rationalism of bourgeois gainful employment, family, and education. For the dominant everyday rationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries, against which the creativity desire of these minorities was directed, a generalized creativity imperative would have been completely unthinkable.

What has been taking place in late-modern culture since the 1970s is now a remarkable reversal: ideas and practices of former countercultures and subcultures have flipped into hegemony. The ideal of creativity of the seemingly hopelessly marginal aesthetic-artistic countermovements has seeped into the dominant segments of contemporary culture, into its forms of work, consumption, and relationships, and yet has not remained the same.

From a functionalist perspective, the aesthetic and artistic subcultures in the history of modernity can then seem like those seedbed cultures that Talcott Parsons identified in ancient Greece and Israel, in Greek philosophy and Jewish religion: Hotbeds of alternative and initially marginal cultural codes that, with a time lag, revolutionize the mainstream.

The unintended effects of artistic countermovements on the present were brightly identified by Daniel Bell as early as 1976 in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, who identified them in particular in contemporary consumer hedonism.

With regard to the world of work and organization, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello traced the tipping movement of ideas from the artistic countercultures into the current "new spirit" of the network economy in their analysis of management discourses a few years ago under the title The New Spirit of Capitalism: The former anti-capitalist "artist critique" from 1800 to 1968, the critique of Alienation in the name of self-realization, cooperation, and Authenticity has already been built into current project-oriented work and organizations with their flat hierarchies. Apparently, then, the tradition of artist critique has made itself superfluous through its widespread economic realization.

The double of creativity desire and creativity imperative, however, reaches far beyond the fields of work and consumption. It encompasses the entire structure of the social and the self of contemporary society. What the process looks like in the course of which the minoritarian ideas of creativity are transformed into a binding social order and gradually institutionalized in various social fields, we have not yet really understood. That is the initial question of this book.

What has been taking place since the last quarter of the century just past – according to Andreas Reckwitz's guiding thesis – is in fact the formation of a creativity dispositif that is as heterogeneous as it is powerful. This affects a wide variety of social sectors and their practices - from education to consumption, from sports to professions and sexuality. All of them are currently being reshaped according to the imperatives of creativity.

This book aims to contribute to clarifying the genealogy of this creativity complex, its impure and uneven prehistory. It is not about a history of ideas of creativity. Rather, it aims to reconstruct the contradictory process in the course of which techniques and discourses have emerged in different social fields over the same period of time, which have increasingly lured social practice and its subject in the direction of an apparently natural and universalized orientation towards creativity and shaped it: in art, in individual segments of the economy, in parts of the human sciences, in the mass media, in the political planning of urban space. In the end, the once elitist and oppositional orientation toward the creative has become universally desirable and at the same time binding for all.

Such a perspective on what can be called the creative ethos of late modern culture presupposes not understanding it as the result of a liberation of individuals and institutions from constraints, so that they are now finally allowed to be creative. From the perspective of a general poststructuralist ontology of the social, one can rightly assume that social as well as psychic and organic structures are quite generally in a constant Process of Emergence and Disappearance, of reweaving and dissolution. Even if one starts with the individuals and their everyday practice, one can generally assume that in their behavior, despite all routine, there is always already something unpredictable and improvised.

To describe this becoming and passing of social forms and the incalculability of individuals as creativity, however, would be to make hasty use of a special cultural vocabulary. In this book, Andreas Reckwitz is not concerned with this ontological level of becoming and passing, the constant emergence of the new in the world per se, but with a much more specific cultural phenomenon that characterizes our present: the social creativity complex as a historically exceptional phenomenon of the last third of the 20th century, prepared since the end of the 18th century and especially since the beginning of the 20th century. This many-limbed complex suggests us to think about and desire our creativity in very presuppositional terms, to practice it in appropriate techniques, and to shape ourselves in the direction of creative subjects: Creativity as a social and cultural phenomenon has been invented, as it were, in this context.

The creativity dispositif does not simply register the emergence of the new; it systematically promotes the dynamic production and reception of the new in all possible areas, and indeed of the new as an aesthetic event. It lures out creative practices and subject competencies and suggests to the social spectator to look everywhere for the aesthetically new and for creative performances. Creativity seems to be always already present as a natural potential, but at the same time it is systematically encouraged to be developed, and at the same time it is longingly desired to be creative.

For the genesis of the creativity dispositif, a certain social field is of central importance that has otherwise been readily marginalized by social analysis: art, the artistic, and the artist. Certainly, the emergence of the aesthetic-creative complex is not the result of a simple expansion of the art field. Nor, at first glance, does creativity as a cultural model appear to have been historically limited to art, but to have been developed elsewhere as well, especially in the realm of science and technology. Based on our current situation, however, it turns out that it is precisely art that has the role of a pacemaker with long-term impact, whose structural outline – in ways that certainly contradict in many respects the intentions and hopes that art had harbored in modernity – is imprinted in the creativity dispositif. In the end, it is not the technical innovation of the inventor but the aesthetic creation of the artist that provides the social model for creativity. This thus contributes to a process of social aestheticization.

The crystallization of the creativity dispositif can be coolly observed and dissected. But creativity and aesthetics are too normatively and affectively charged in the horizon of the culture of modernity for value freedom to be possible. Recourse to unexploited creative potentials of the human being provides a common standard of cultural and social criticism in the last two hundred years. The fundamental attitude in which Andreas Reckwitz has written this book is then also that of a vacillation between fascination and distance.

On the one hand, there is fascination that the formerly countercultural hope for a self-creation of the individual seems to have become reality in new institutional forms, that elements of former aesthetic utopias could apparently be translated into social practice against all odds.

The fascination, however, quickly turns into unease: that the transformation of these old, indeed emancipatory, hopes into an imperative of creativity has brought with it novel constraints of an activism of permanent aesthetic innovation and a compulsive dispersion of subjective attention in the never-ending, never-satisfying cycle of creative acts.

The methodological guiding idea of the work on this book was to interlock social theoretical considerations and genealogical detailed analysis. On the one hand, the book aims to elaborate in general terms the structures of a social formation that has placed the orientation toward creativity at its center. […]

RECKWITZ, Andreas, 2013. Die Erfindung der Kreativität: zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung. 3. Auflage. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1995. ISBN 978-3-518-29595-3. page

What is creativity? (Iba, „An Autopoietic Systems Theory for Creativity“.)

⇒ Creative Systems Theory