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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Contemporary society has seen an unprecedented rise in both the demand and the desire to be creative, to bring something new into the world. Once the reserve of artistic subcultures, creativity has now become a universal model for culture and an imperative in many parts of society. In this new book, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz investigates how the ideal of creativity has grown into a major social force, from the art of the avant-garde and postmodernism to the 'creative industries' and the innovation economy, the psychology of creativity and self-growth, the media representation of creative stars, and the urban design of 'creative cities'. Where creativity is often assumed to be a force for good, Reckwitz looks critically at how this imperative has developed from the 1970s to the present day. Though we may well perceive creativity as the realization of some natural and innate potential within us, it has rather to be understood within the structures of a very specific culture of the new in late modern society. The Invention of Creativity is a bold and refreshing counter to conventional wisdom that shows how our age is defined by radical and restrictive processes of social aestheticization. It will be of great interest to those working in a variety of disciplines, from cultural and social theory to art history and aesthetics.
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Preface to the English Edition
Notes
Epigraph
The Inevitability of Creativity
Notes
1: Aestheticization and the Creativity Dispositif
1.1 Aesthetic Practices
1.2 (De-)Aestheticization and Modernity
1.3 Social Regimes of Novelty
1.4 Creativity as a Dispositif
Notes
2: Artistic Creation, the Genius and the Audience
2.1 Art as a Social Form
2.2 The Regime of Novelty in Art
2.3 Dissolving Borders and Delegitimizing Art
2.4 The Bourgeois Artistic Field and the Cartography of Its Affects
Notes
3: Centrifugal Art
3.1 Namuth's
Pollock
3.2 Breaching the Inner and Outer Borders of the Artistic Field
3.3 Avant-Garde Creativity
3.4 Creativity in Postmodern Art
3.5 Postmodern Artist-Subjects
3.6 Art as a Blueprint of Late Modernity
Notes
4: The Rise of the Aesthetic Economy
4.1 Resolving the Paradoxes of the New
4.2 Pockets of Bourgeois Opposition Against Organized Modernity
4.3 Permanent Innovation as a Management Problem
4.4 The Establishment of the Creative Industries
4.5 ‘Management by Design’
4.6 The Aestheticization of the Economy and Affective Capitalism
Notes
5: The Psychological Turn in Creativity
5.1 The Inkblot Test
5.2 The Psychopathology of Genius
5.3 Creativity on the Margins of Academic Psychology
5.4 Creativity as a Psychological Necessity
5.5 Creativity as Norm: Psychological Theories of Creative Practice
5.6 Conducting the Conduct of the Creative Self
Notes
6: The Genesis of the Star System
6.1 The Mass-Media Regime of Attention
6.2 The Artistic Star as Performing Self
6.3 Creative Performance
6.4 The Expanding Star System
Notes
7: Creative Cities
7.1 ‘Loft Living’
7.2 The Functional City and the Cultural City
7.3 Critical Urbanism
7.4 Features of the Cultural City
7.5 The Governing of Culture
Notes
8: Society of Creativity
8.1 Affect Deficiency in Modernity
8.2 The Basic Structure of the Creativity Dispositif
8.3 Structural Framing Conditions: Economization, Mediatization, Rationalization
8.4 The Dissonances of the Creative Life
8.5 Alternative Aesthetic Practices
Everyday Aesthetic of Repetition
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
Preface
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright page
First published in German as Die Erfindung der Kreativität. Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2012
This English edition © Polity Press, 2017
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9703-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9704-8 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reckwitz, Andreas, author.
Title: The invention of creativity : modern society and the culture of the new / Andreas Reckwitz.
Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043495 (print) | LCCN 2016057624 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745697031 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745697048 (paperback) | ISBN 9780745697062 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745697079 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Cultural industries. | Creative ability. | Social sciences–Philosophy. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General.
Classification: LCC HD9999.C9472 R43 2017 (print) | LCC HD9999.C9472 (ebook) | DDC 338.4/77–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043495
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Preface to the English Edition
The first German edition of this book appeared in 2012. This English translation provides the occasion to re-evaluate the book within the context of the Anglophone discussion around creativity and society that has been emerging since the beginning of the new millennium. An aspect of this re-evaluation is the question as to what degree the book reflects a specifically German context.
The role of creativity as a cultural blueprint and an economic factor in the formation of late modern society first emerged as an object of inquiry around 2000, particularly in Great Britain, North America and Australia, where it has remained prominent in discussion in sociology as well as in broader intellectual and political discourse. Two of these contexts are of particular note here. First, a mainly academic but also popular discourse has been taken up on the relevance of ‘creativity’ to the economic prosperity of contemporary societies, regions and cities and the emergence of a ‘creative class’ of producers and consumers. This discussion has also carried over into political consulting and urban planning.1 Second, research areas have developed in sociology and cultural studies dealing with the so-called creative industries, which have been spearheading this economic and social transformation. These industries encompass the audio-visual, print and digital media, as well as the arts and crafts, film, design, music, architecture and advertising. The abundant research in this field has been concerned mostly with the detailed analysis of creative labour and the cultural markets, the structural transformation of consumption and the global spread of the creative industries. It has also critically studied the increasingly global phenomenon of the state subsidising of the creative industries.2
The Invention of Creativity takes a step back from these sociological and economic analyses of the creative economy of the present and takes in a more historical and theoretical view of society as a whole. The book regards today's creative industries as the tip of a much bigger iceberg, which conceals below the surface a more fundamental and historically far-reaching transformation of modern Western society. The main claim of the book is the following: late modern society has been fundamentally transformed by the expectation and desire to be creative. What is meant here by creativity is the capacity to generate cultural and aesthetic novelty. Modern society has become geared to the constant production and reception of the culturally new. This applies to the economy, the arts, lifestyle, the self, the media, and urban development. We are witnessing the crystallization of what I have called a creativity dispositif, which is increasingly determining the shape of late modern society.
The term dispositif signals a certain influence coming from Michel Foucault. The book undertakes a genealogical analysis. I reach from the present back into the past, through the twentieth century as far back as the late eighteenth. Creativity is taken not as a given but, rather, as an enigma, as sexuality was for Foucault. How did creativity come to be accepted as a desirable norm? In which heterogeneous complexes of practices and discourses has the dispositif of creativity gradually been developing? The genealogical approach avoids economic reductionism. The economy is certainly one of the main places where the culture of the new develops – a complex I refer to in the book as aesthetic capitalism. Yet the scope of the creativity dispositif extends beyond that of the economy. It also takes in the internal dynamics of media technologies and the human sciences, above all psychology, with its techniques of the self. Since the 1980s, the dispositif has also been propped up by state control in the form of what I have called cultural governmentality, urban planning being among the most conspicuous examples of this. Yet political reductionism must also be avoided. As such, the study undertaken here is not orthodoxly Foucauldian. It is concerned less with revealing the creativity dispositif as a new system of domination than it is with working out the internal dynamics and the internal contradictions of what can be called the society of creativity. For my line of argument, the following point is crucial: in modern culture, the orientation towards creativity began in romanticism in the marginalized niche of the arts. Ever since, it has been spreading to more and more parts of society. Sociology therefore has to take the field of the arts more seriously than it did in the past. The arts do not merely watch from the sidelines; instead, they are a structural blueprint for late modern society as a whole.
In this process, the tension between an anti-institutional desire for creativity and the institutionalized demand for creativity has continued to mount to the present day and has now become acute. For this reason, it is important to take seriously the affective dimension of the creativity dispositif, the importance of aesthetic practices in contemporary society, the existence of what I have termed aesthetic sociality, and the way the dispositif directs audiences’ sensuous, affective attention. These aspects have been left underexposed by the tradition following Foucault. Yet they need to be brought to light if we are to be able to take up a critical stance towards the society of creativity.
But we have still not answered the question ‘Is the book informed by a specifically German perspective or not?’ While it was being written, the question did not occur to me, but it comes up now as the book is presented to an Anglophone readership. I completed part of my studies in Great Britain in the 1990s, and my approach has since then been strongly influenced by the international, Anglophone and also Francophone discussion in social theory and cultural sociology. Moreover, the creativity dispositif embraces a diversity of phenomena that have assumed international dimensions, having become a major force shaping society, whether in London, New York, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Melbourne or Berlin. This internationalism tends to mute the specifically German accent of the book altogether. Nevertheless, there remains a certain German timbre which likely has three main sources.
First, German sociology is strongly characterized by a fundamental interest in theorizing modernity. This stretches from Max Weber and Georg Simmel to Jürgen Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and Ulrich Beck's work on the society of risk. The theory of modernity is also a key concern of the present book. A characteristic of this tradition is that it equates modernity a priori not with capitalism but rather with what it calls ‘formal rationalization’ and ‘social differentiation’. Underlying the book is a re-engagement with these two concepts: the late modern creativity dispositif pushes modernity's optimization imperative to the limit, while at the same time it is driven by a deeply anti-rational affectivity. Further, the sociality of creativity is manifest in a broad spectrum of heterogeneous, occasionally autonomous social spheres ranging from the arts to economics, human sciences and the mass media. In each case it manifests in different ways, yet always as part of the one overall structure.
Second, the discourse of the aesthetic in philosophy and the humanities, or Geisteswissenschaften, has also influenced the book. Since Kant and Schiller, German philosophy has been intensely concerned with the aesthetic as an autonomous sphere of social practice. More importantly, the interdisciplinary humanities in the German-speaking world since the 1980s have gone outside the narrow confines of these idealist aesthetics to bring to light the social importance of aesthetic practices and their mediality, as well as the way in which they structure perception and feeling, thus recognizing the power of aestheticization in late or postmodernity.3 Noteworthy in this context is also the prominence of German media theory. These newer branches of interdisciplinary German humanities (as distinct from what is generally understood in English as Cultural Studies) have significantly influenced the book's account of the creativity dispositif as a specific manifestation of aestheticization. One effect of this influence has been the reframing of the question of the relation between social modernity and aesthetic modernity.
The third German-language context from which the book originated is more difficult to outline because it is strictly contemporary. Since the mid-2000s, the members of a new generation of German social and cultural theorists have been working independently of one another to produce a series of studies adopting a new approach to the critical examination of late modern society and culture. Just as there has emerged since 2000 a new ‘Berlin school’ in German film, undertaking a uniquely sociological, microscopic inspection of the complexity of contemporary life,4 so too are emerging the contours of a ‘new German critical analysis’ in social and cultural theory, taking a macroscopic view of late modern culture. Ulrich Bröckling's The Entrepreneurial Self, Hartmut Rosa's Social Acceleration and Joseph Vogl's The Specter of Capital can be counted among this movement. I see The Invention of Creativity as also situated within it.5 These books are certainly distinct from one another thematically and methodologically. Yet they share in common an interest in critically penetrating to the deep structure of late modern culture and society, a task requiring an historically and theoretically informed optics. In the wake of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s, Germany has been increasingly pushed into a political and economic leadership role at the centre of Europe, a role it assumes with reluctance and hesitation. It is perhaps no coincidence that at about the same time German intellectuals began embarking on a fundamental meditation of the crises and contradictions of Western late modernity as a whole.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Steven Black for his precise and sensitive translation. I am also indebted to Daniel Felscher for his assistance in sourcing the biographical details and quotations. Finally, my thanks go to Geisteswissenschaften International, without the generous support of which this publication would not have been possible.
Berlin, summer 2016
Notes
1
Richard Florida,
The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life
, New York: Basic Books, 2002;
John Howkins,
The Creative Economy
, London: Penguin, 2002.
2
Angela McRobbie,
Be Creative
, Cambridge: Polity, 2016;
Terry Flew,
The Creative Industries: Culture and Policy
, Los Angeles: Sage, 2012;
John Hartley (ed.),
Key Concepts in Creative Industries
, London: Sage, 2013;
David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker,
Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries
, London and New York: Routledge, 2011.
3
Erika Fischer-Lichte,
The Transformative Power of Performance: a New Aesthetics
, New York: Routledge, 2008;
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,
Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey
, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004;
Gernot Böhme, ‘Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics’,
Thesis Eleven
, 36 (1993): 113–26.
4
Rajendra Roy, Anke Leweke et al.,
The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule
, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013.
5
Ulrich Bröckling,
The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject
, Los Angeles: Sage, 2016;
Hartmut Rosa,
Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity
, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013;
Joseph Vogl,
The Specter of Capital
, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
We could paint a picture …No, it's been done before. …We could do a sculpture too. Oh! But a clay or a bronze one? …But I get the impression that's been done before …We could even kill ourselves, but even that's been done before …Well, I thought that we could create an action without getting involved in it. Nooo. That's been done. …How about saying something? …Been done. To sell something right away, before you do it …That's been done. Done? And could we sell it again? That's been done, too. Done already? Twice? …
Grupa Azorro, Everything Has Been Done I, 2003
(Courtesy of Raster Gallery, Warsaw)
The Inevitability of Creativity
If there is a desire in contemporary society that defies comprehension, it is the desire not to be creative. It is a desire that guides individuals and institutions equally. To be incapable of creativity is a problematic failing, but one that can be overcome with patient training. But not to want to be creative, consciously to leave creative potential unused and to avoid creatively bringing about new things, that would seem an absurd disposition, just as it would have seemed absurd not to want to be moral or normal or autonomous in other times. Must not any individual, any institution, indeed the whole of society, strive towards the kind of creative self-transformation for which they would seem, by their very nature, to be predestined?
The extraordinary importance attributed to creativity as an individual and social phenomenon in our time is illustrated by Richard Florida's programmatic text The Rise of the Creative Class (2002).1 According to Florida, the main transformation that occurred in Western societies between the end of the Second World War and the present day is more cultural than technological. This transformation has been ongoing since the 1970s and consists in the emergence and spread of a ‘creative ethos’. The bearer of this creative ethos is a new, rapidly spreading and culturally dominant professional group, the ‘creative class’, busy involved in producing ideas and symbols, working in fields ranging from advertising to software development, from design to consulting and tourism. In Florida's account, creativity is not restricted to private self-expression. In the last three decades, it has become a ubiquitous economic demand in the worlds of labour and the professions.
Florida's study is far from being a neutral account. Instead, it endeavours to promote the very phenomenon it is discussing. Consequently, his view is selective. Nevertheless, there is much evidence to indicate that the normative model of creativity, accompanied by corresponding practices aimed at harnessing institutionally those apparently fleeting bursts of creative energy, has been entering the heart of Western culture since the 1980s at the latest and is now stubbornly occupying it.2 In late modern times, creativity embraces a duality of the wish to be creative and the imperative to be creative, subjective desire and social expectations. We want to be creative and we ought to be creative.
What does creativity mean in this context? At first glance, creativity has two significations. First, it refers to the potential and the act of producing something dynamically new. Creativity privileges the new over the old, divergence over the standard, otherness over sameness. This production of novelty is thought of not as an act occurring once only but, rather, as something that happens again and again over a longer period of time. Second, the topos of creativity harks back to the modern figure of the artist, the artistic and the aesthetic in general.3 In this sense, creativity is more than purely technical innovation. It is also the capacity to receive sensuous and affective stimulation from a new, human-made object. Aesthetic novelty is associated with vitality and the joy of experimentation, and its maker is pictured as a creative self along the lines of the artist. Creative novelty does not merely fulfil a function, like mere useful technological invention; it is instead perceived, experienced and enjoyed in its own right both by the observer and by the person who brought it about.
From a sociological viewpoint, creativity is not simply a superficial semantic phenomenon but, rather, a crucial organizing principle of Western societies over the last thirty years or so. This development was initially most noticeable at the economic and technical heart of capitalist societies in the sphere of labour and the professions. What will be referred to here as contemporary ‘aesthetic capitalism’ is based, in its most advanced form, on forms of work that have long since moved beyond the familiar model of the routine activities performed by labourers and office workers, with their standardized, matter-of-fact ways of engaging with objects and people. These older forms of labour have been replaced by work activities that demand the constant production of new things, in particular of signs and symbols – texts, images, communication, procedures, aesthetic objects, body modifications – for a consumer public in search of originality and surprise. This applies to the media and design, education and consultation, fashion and architecture. Consumer culture has generated a desire for these aesthetically attractive, innovative products, and the creative industries are at pains to supply them. The figure of the creative worker active in the creative economy has become highly attractive, extending beyond its original, narrower professional segment.4 The focus on creativity is, however, not restricted to work practices but extends also to organizations and institutions which have submitted themselves to an imperative of permanent innovation. Business organizations in particular, but increasingly also public (political and scientific) institutions, have been reshaped in order to be able not only to generate new products on a constant basis but also ceaselessly to renew their internal structures and procedures, honing their responsiveness to a permanently changing outside environment.5
Since the 1970s, the two-pronged advance of the creative urge and the creativity imperative has been overstepping the confines of career, work and organization to seep deeper and deeper into the cultural logic underlying the private lives of the post-materialist middle classes – and it has not stopped there. The late modern incarnations of these classes strive above all towards individualization. However, this tendency has assumed the particular form of the creative shaping of the individual's subjectivity itself. This is what Richard Rorty has described as a culture of ‘self-creation’.6 The aspects of self-development and self-realization implied in the late modern striving for self-creation cannot be understood as universal human qualities. They originate rather in a historically unique vocabulary of the self emanating from the ambit of the psychology of ‘self-growth’. This psychology is in turn the preserver of a romantic heritage. It is within the context of this psychology that the concern originally arose to develop, in an experimental, quasi-artistic way, all facets of the self in personal relations, in leisure activities, in consumer styles and in self-technologies of the body and the soul. This preoccupation with creativity is often construed as a striving for originality, for uniqueness.7
Finally, there is another area where the social orientation towards creativity is readily apparent: in the transformation of the urban, in the reshaping of built space in larger Western cities. Since the 1980s, many metropolitan cities, from Barcelona to Seattle, from Copenhagen to Boston, have been re-creating themselves aesthetically with the aid of spectacular building projects, renovating whole quarters, establishing new cultural institutions and striving to generate appealing atmospheres. It is no longer enough for cities to fulfil their basic functions of providing living and working space as in earlier industrial society. Cities are now expected to pursue permanent aesthetic self-renewal, constantly seizing the attention of inhabitants and visitors alike. Cities want to be, and are expected to be, ‘creative cities’.8 Creative work, innovative organization, self-developing individuals and creative cities are all participants in a comprehensive, concerted cultural effort to produce novelty on a permanent basis, feeding the desire for the creation and perception of novel and original objects, events and identities.
In principle, this is all extremely curious. We need only take a small step backwards to become conscious of the strangeness of all this creativity, of the commitment to the idea of creativity as an unavoidable and universally valid blueprint for society and the self. It is the current omnipresence of this very commitment that obscures what a strange development this is. The idea of creativity was certainly not first invented by our post- or late modernity. However, from a sociological point of view, creativity was present in modernity yet was essentially limited until around the 1970s to cultural and social niches.9 It was the successive waves of artistic and aesthetic movements starting with Sturm und Drang and romanticism that engendered the conviction that both the world and the self were things that had to be creatively formed. Rearing up against the bourgeois and post-bourgeois establishment, opposed to its morals, its purposive rationality and its social control, these movements defined and celebrated non-alienated existence as a permanent state of creative reinvention. This is true in equal measure of the early nineteenth-century romantics, the aesthetic avant-garde, the vitalist, lifestyle reform movements around 1900 and, finally, the 1960s counter-culture proclaiming the Age of Aquarius as the age of creativity. In these artistic and counter-cultural niches, creativity was deployed as a promise of emancipation. It was seen as capable of overcoming a repressive Western rationalism based on paid labour, the family and education.10 The dominant, everyday rationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to which these minority movements opposed their desire for creativity, would never have been able to conceive of an imperative for everyone to be creative.
Developments in late modern culture since the 1970s represent a remarkable reversal of this state of affairs. Ideas and practices from former oppositional cultures and subcultures have now achieved hegemony. The creativity ideal of the once marginal, utopian, aesthetic-artistic opposition has percolated up into the dominant segments of contemporary culture to condition the way we work, consume and engage in relationships, and it has undergone a sea change in the process. From a functionalist perspective, the aesthetic and artistic subcultures can be seen as resembling those ‘seedbed’ cultures that Talcott Parsons saw in ancient Greece and Israel, in Greek philosophy and the Jewish religion11 – hotbeds of alternative and at first marginal cultural codes exercising a delayed revolutionary effect on the mainstream. Daniel Bell's insightful study The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) already brought to light the unintended repercussions of the artistic opposition movements on the present, especially in contemporary consumer hedonism. In the spheres of work and organizations, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's more recent analysis of management discourse The New Spirit of Capitalism (2007) has traced ideas from the artistic counter-culture that have tipped over into the current ‘new spirit’ of the network economy. The formerly anti-capitalist ‘artistic critique’ from 1800 to 1968, the critique of alienation in the name of self-realization, cooperation and authenticity, is already built into the current project-based way of working and to the organizations with their flattened hierarchies. The tradition of artistic critique thus seems to have been rendered superfluous by becoming an omnipresent reality in the economy.12
Yet the coupling of the wish to be creative with the imperative to be creative extends far beyond the fields of work and consumption. It encompasses the whole structure of the social and the self in contemporary society. We have not even begun rightly to understand the process by which previously marginal ideas of creativity have been elevated into an obligatory social order, gradually solidifying into a variety of social institutions. The yet unanswered question of how this has come about is the point of departure for the present book. The claim is that what we have been experiencing since the late twentieth century is in fact the emergence of a heterogeneous yet powerful creativity dispositif. This dispositif affects diverse areas of society, from education to consumption, sport, professional life and sexuality, and conditions their practices. All these fields are currently being restructured according to the creativity imperative. The current study is an attempt to contribute to our understanding of the origins of this creativity complex, to retrace its composite, non-linear prehistory. This is not a history of the idea of creativity. Instead, it will be a reconstruction of the contradictory process by which techniques and discourses emerged simultaneously in different social fields, causing social practices and the agents performing them increasingly to reshape themselves in terms of a seemingly natural and universal focus on creativity. This has taken place in the arts, in segments of the economy and the human sciences, in the mass media, and in the planning of urban space. The once elitist and oppositional programme of creativity has finally become desirable for all and at the same time obligatory for all.
This approach to what can be called the creative ethos of late modern culture does not frame the rise of creativity as the result of individuals and institutions being released from oppression and so finally being free to be creative. From within the viewpoint of post-structuralist ontology of the social, we are justified in assuming that social, psychological and organic structures in general consist in continuous processes of emergence and disappearance, ceaselessly reconstituting and dissolving.13 Even when we begin with individuals and their everyday practices, we can presuppose as a general rule that their conduct, regardless of how routine it is, nevertheless contains unpredictable, improvised elements. Yet it would be rash to characterize this becoming and disappearing of social forms and the incalculability of individual behaviour as creativity, with all the specific cultural baggage the notion implies. This book is concerned not with the ontological level of becoming and passing away, the constant emergence of novelty as such in the world, but rather with a much more specific cultural phenomenon characteristic of our time. We are concerned with the social creativity complex as an historically unprecedented manifestation belonging to the last third of the twentieth century, in preparation since the late eighteenth century and accelerating markedly since the early twentieth century. This multipart complex has the effect of suggesting to us the necessity of reflecting on our own creativity with the aid of culturally charged concepts. It makes us desire creativity, gets us to use appropriate techniques to train it, to shape ourselves into creative people. As such, creativity as a social and cultural phenomenon is to a certain degree an invention.14 The creativity complex does not merely register the fact that novelty comes about; it systematically propels forward the dynamic production and reception of novelty as an aesthetic event in diverse domains. It elicits creative practices and skills and suggests to the observer the importance of keeping an eye out for aesthetic novelty and creative achievement. Creativity assumes the guise of some natural potential that was there all along. Yet, at the same time, we find ourselves systematically admonished to develop it, and we fervently desire to possess it.
Sociological analysis has tended to relegate to the margins one particular social field which is of central significance to the genesis of the creativity dispositif. This is the field of art, the artistic and the artist. The emergence of the aesthetic creative complex is certainly not the result of a simple expansion of the artistic field. Further, creativity as an historical model appears at first glance not to be restricted to art; it has developed elsewhere as well, above all in the area of science and technology.15 From the point of view of our current historical situation, however, it is precisely art that turns out to assume the role of an effective, long-term pacemaker, imposing its shape on the creativity dispositif in a way that surely runs counter to many of the intentions and hopes associated with art in modernity. In the end, the dominant model for creativity is less the inventor's technical innovations than the aesthetic creation of the artist. This role model function of the artist contributes to a process of social aestheticization.
The process by which the creativity dispositif crystallizes can be observed and dissected with cool equanimity. But, in the context of the culture of modernity, creativity and aesthetic are too laden with normative judgements and feelings actually to allow value-free judgement. In the last two hundred years, the access to untapped human resources of creativity has become one of the main criteria for cultural and social critique. Consequently, this book was written in a state of oscillation between fascination and distance. Fascination is elicited by the way the earlier counter-cultural hope for individual self-creation has assumed reality in new institutional forms, by how elements of former aesthetic utopias could be put into social practice against diverse forms of resistance. This fascination rapidly turns into unease. The mutation of these old, emancipatory hopes into a creativity imperative has been accompanied by new forms of coercion. We are thrown into frenetic activity geared to continual aesthetic innovation. Our attention is compulsively dissipated by an endless cycle of ultimately unsatisfying creative acts.
The principal methodological aim guiding the work on this book has been to interlock social theory with detailed genealogical analysis. The investigation seeks, on the one hand, to uncover the general structure of a society that has come to be centred on creativity. The systematic analysis of this dispositif of creativity as the specific form of a process of social aestheticization is concentrated in chapters 1 and 8, which thus make up a pair of theoretical flanks bracketing the book. At the same time, however, the book attempts to trace the genealogy of the creativity dispositif by studying in detail several particularly important complexes of practice and discourses. Consequently, chapters 2 to 7 are concerned with a series of very different specific contexts and their respective genesis: the development of artistic practices (chapters 2 and 3), techniques of economic management and the ‘creative industries’ (chapter 4), psychology (chapter 5), the development of the mass media and the star system (chapter 6) and, finally, the changes in the design of urban space and urban planning (chapter 7). In each of these chapters, the concern is to show how in each field, with its contradictory and conflicting configurations, a cultural focus on creativity and a corresponding process of aestheticization were gradually set in motion by illuminating the most important stations of these developments. The analyses cover the twentieth century, with the exception of chapter 2, which systematically investigates the field of art extending back into the eighteenth century. The different social fields are in no way harmoniously coordinated. Each has its own dynamic, yet they are all interconnected. Accordingly, these chapters constitute not so much a logical progression as a series of approaches to the growth of the culture of creativity from different angles. Together, these separate attacks form a mosaic, built up of individual elements, each with their own peculiar character, corresponding to the various main features of the dispositif of creativity and coalescing as a totality into its portrait.
Notes
1
Richard Florida,
The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life
. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
2
On this question, see Gerald Raunig and Ulf Wuggenig (eds),
Kritik der Kreativität
, Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2007;
Peter Spillmann and Marion von Osten (eds),
Be Creative! Der kreative Imperativ
, Zurich: Museum für Gestaltung, 2003;
Ulrich Bröckling,
The Entrepreneurial Self
, London: Sage, 2015 (chapter 6: ‘Creativity’, pp. 101–17).
3
On the concept of creativity generally, see Günter Blamberger,
Das Geheimnis des Schöpferischen oder: Ingenium est ineffabile?
, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1991;
Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht (ed.),
Kreativität – ein verbrauchter Begriff?
, Munich: Fink, 1988.
On the history of the idea of creativity as imagination, see James Engell,
The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
4
See Angela McRobbie, ‘“Jeder ist kreativ”: Künstler als Pioniere der New Economy?’, in Jörg Huber (ed.),
Singularitäten – Allianzen: Interventionen
11, Vienna and New York: Springer, 2002, pp. 37–59;
Cornelia Koppetsch,
Das Ethos der Kreativen: Eine Studie zum Wandel von Arbeit und Identität am Beispiel der Werbeberufe
, Konstanz: UVK, 2006.
5
The theme of flexible specialization was treated early in Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel,
The Second Industrial Divide. Possibilities for Prosperity
, New York: Basic Books, 1984;
on organization innovation, see Andrew H. Van de Ven,
The Innovation Journey
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
6
See Richard Rorty,
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 96ff. (chapter 5: ‘Self Creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche and Heidegger’).
7
See Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker,
The New Individualists: The Generation after The Organization Man
, New York: HarperCollins, 1991;
Daniel Yankelovich,
New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down
, New York: Random House, 1981.
8
On this term see Charles Landry,
The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators
, London: Earthscan, 2009.
9
The concept of
modernity
refers to the social formation that has developed and reproduced itself since the latter half of the eighteenth century, at first in the West and then globally. The prefix
late
is not intended to suggest that modernity is about to reach its end. On these concepts, see also Peter Wagner,
A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline
, London: Routledge, 1994.
10
Regarding these aesthetic opposition movements, see Andreas Reckwitz,
Das hybride Subjekt: Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne
, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2006, pp. 204ff., pp. 289ff., and pp. 452ff.
On the term
counter-culture
, see Theodore Roszak,
The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and on its Youthful Opposition
, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
11
See Talcott Parsons,
Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives
, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
12
Daniel Bell,
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
, New York: Basic Books, 1976;
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello,
The New Spirit of Capitalism
, London: Verso, 2005 (especially chapter 7: ‘The Test of the Artistic Critique’, pp. 419–82).
13
On post-structuralist ontology, see among others Bruno Latour,
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005;
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
For a contrasting account, see Hans Joas's attempt to develop a philosophical anthropology of human creativity:
The Creativity of Action
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996;
and, in a similar vein: Heinrich Popitz,
Wege der Kreativität
, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997.
14
This perspective on creativity is inspired by Michel Foucault's view of the genealogy of modernity. Foucault himself, however, never took account of this phenomenon. He tended instead to see the aesthetic on the model of the antique aesthetic of existence as the other or the alternative to the dispositifs of modernity. For a critical take on Foucault's notion of aesthetics and creativity, see Fabian Heubel,
Das Dispositiv der Kreativität
, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002.
15
On various models of creativity in early modernity, some outside of art, see Joas,
The Creativity of Action
, chapter 2, ‘Metaphors of Creativity’, pp. 70–144. Also noteworthy in addition to the aesthetic model of expression are the production, revolution, life and intelligence models.
1Aestheticization and the Creativity DispositifThe Social Regime of Aesthetic Novelty
The creativity dispositif is closely bound up with processes of social aestheticization but is not identical with them. Aesthetic practices and processes of aestheticization can be found in modernity and elsewhere, assuming diverse guises and following different tendencies. The creativity dispositif is one specific mode of aestheticization. The dispositif couples aestheticization with specific, non-aesthetic formats, or complexes of practices (such as in the context of economization, rationalization or mediatization), imposing on them a structure dominated by one narrowly specific aspect. The aesthetic is thus understood here as a broader context, of which the creativity dispositif is one specific form.1 The social complex of creativity territorializes the floating processes of the aesthetic according to its own particular pattern. It moves in such processes already at work, transforming them in its own specific way, distinct from other trajectories and modes of aestheticization that have existed in the past and will presumably continue to exist in the future. The peculiarity of the creativity dispositif is that it intensifies an aestheticization process focused on the production and uptake of new aesthetic events. Now, modern society has from the start been organized to promote novelty, in politics and technology as well as in aesthetics. The difference is that the creativity dispositif reorients the aesthetic towards the new while at the same time orienting the regime of the new towards the aesthetic. It thus constitutes the intersection of aestheticization and the social regime of novelty.
1.1 Aesthetic Practices
What is the aesthetic and what is aestheticization? What do they have to do with modernity and with the creativity dispositif? The adjective ‘aesthetic’ entered philosophical discourse in the mid-eighteenth century in parallel to the development of art as a social field and has been undergoing career changes ever since. In some respects, the term is so ambiguous and so normatively charged that not a few authors have recommended doing without it. Paul de Man points to the existence of an ‘aesthetic ideology’,2 particularly in Germany. From a sociological viewpoint there seems even more reason to avoid the notion of the aesthetic, with its apparent vagueness and remoteness from everything social. However, a socio-historical study of the creativity dispositif cannot afford to ignore it, since it has been responsible for bringing about a process of aestheticization. The society of late modernity is, in its own way, an aestheticized society. Analogous to the more customary, traditional sociological terms for historical movements of increase and intensification (rationalization, differentiation, individualization, etc.), the term aestheticization designates a force shaping society and postulates of this force that it is expanding and increasing in complexity. This force is the aesthetic. Talk of aestheticization therefore presupposes at least a basic notion of the aesthetic, a notion with sociological signification.
The concept of the aesthetic has been developing in philosophy since Alexander Baumgarten and Edmund Burke. It has had a decidedly anti-rationalist thrust, generating a variegated semantic field spanning sensibility, imagination, the incomprehensible, feeling, taste, corporality, creativity, the purposeless, the sublime and the beautiful.3 We are dealing here with a discursive phenomenon all of its own, which will have to be inspected more closely in connection with the formation of the field of art in modernity. The aesthetic was reactivated towards the end of the twentieth century as a term in the humanities, often in distinction to idealist aesthetics. It would come to be expanded and accorded new functions – for example, in the aesthetics of the performative, aesthetics of presence or ecological aesthetics.4 Despite this heterogeneity, the aesthetic always retained aesthesis as its common conceptual core, in the original meaning of sense perception in the broadest possible understanding. We should return to this original meaning as our starting point. The concept of the aesthetic shifts our attention to the complexity of the perceptual sensibility built into human conduct, the many-layered character of which undoubtedly makes it particularly relevant to sociology and cultural history. A sociological account of the senses could take a magnifying glass to the social modularization of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, bodily motion and the spatial localization of the self in different cultural settings and in their historical transformation.5 Within the context of such an all-embracing concept, the aesthetic would be identified with sense perception in general – but in the end the concept would thereby become superfluous. Processes of aestheticization in particular are difficult to account for accurately using so broad a notion of the aesthetic, since aestheticization implies the expansion and intensification of the aesthetic at the expense of the non-aesthetic. However, equating the aesthetic entirely with sense perception robs it of an opposing term, since every human activity mobilizes the senses in one way or another. The result would be that entirely non-sensuous acts would be mere anomalies.
On the one hand, an analysis of the changing culture of the human senses – i.e., of aesthesis in the broadest meaning of the word – provides an indispensable background for any reconstruction of processes of aestheticization. But, on the other hand, a more specific concept of the aesthetic is required in order to understand these processes. Yet again, it must be a concept that seeks to avoid idealistic narrowness. This more sharply defined concept can fall back on another basic intuition from classical aesthetics that has remained relevant to the present day. In its narrower sense, which we will be reviving here, the aesthetic does not encompass all processes of sense perception; it embraces only those perceptual acts which are enjoyed for their own sakes – auto-dynamic perceptions, which have broken loose from their embeddedness in purposive rationality. Aesthetic perception in particular can then be distinguished from the broader realm of aesthesis, as the totality of sense perception.6 The defining characteristic of aesthetic perception is that it is an end in itself and refers to itself; it is centred on its own performance in the present moment. When we speak here of the auto-dynamics of sense perception, what we mean is precisely this sensuousness for its own sake, perception for its own sake.7 Relating the aesthetic to purpose-free sensuousness in this way follows an impulse from the classical discourse of modern aesthetics originating in Kant's notion of ‘disinterested pleasure’. At the same time, a contemporary understanding of the aesthetic must free itself from the traditional attachments to good taste, reflexivity, contemplation and the notion of art as an autonomous sphere. Decisive for aesthetic perception is not whether the object being perceived appears beautiful or ugly, whether the experience is harmonious or dissonant, whether the attitude is introverted and reflexive or joyful and enraptured. The decisive feature of aesthetic perception distinguishing it from mere processing of information towards rational ends is that it is an end in itself.
The phenomenon of the aesthetic incorporates a further dimension. Aesthetic perceptions are not pure sense activities. They also contain a significant affectivity. They involve the emotions. They are therefore always made up of a coupling of ‘percepts and affects’.8 Aesthetic perceptions involve being affected in a specific way by an object or situation, a mood or stimulation, a feeling of enthusiasm, of calm or of shock. The domain of the aesthetic does not consist therefore of perceptions directed to objective and instrumental, affect-neutral knowledge of matters of fact; rather, it comprises sensuous acts distinct from end-oriented action, acts that affect us emotionally, touch us and alter our moods. Affects can here be understood as culturally moulded, corporeal intensities of stimulation or excitement, while aesthetic affects in particular can be understood as such intensities attaching to sense perceptions taken on their own terms.9 Again, aesthetic affects should here be distinguished from non-aesthetic affects – i.e., from affects entirely subservient to pragmatic concerns of action. Life-world affects such as fear of danger or joy at success have a subjective and intersubjective signal and communication function. In contrast, aesthetic affects involve affects for their own sake (such as the fear felt watching a horror film or the enjoyment of nature) in which the individual probes her emotional possibilities. On the perceptual and emotional levels, the aesthetic presupposes the existence not only of human subjects perceiving and being affected, but also of objects being perceived and stimulating affects. Conglomerations of such objects can create whole environments replete with their own aesthetic atmospheres, presenting themselves to people and drawing them in. The aesthetic in this sense is therefore never merely an internal, psychological phenomenon. It operates in a social space made up of people and objects in which new percept–affect relations are continually coming into being.
Many of these relations are one-offs, disappearing immediately, but there exist also more durable socio-cultural practices, which at once promote and inhibit, stimulate and moderate the growth of different types of perception and feeling. A sociological understanding of sense perception and affectivity calls for a practice-oriented concept of the aesthetic – that it to say, a concept in the framework of a theory of social practices, within which two modes of the aesthetic – aesthetic episodes and aesthetic practices – can be distinguished. In aesthetic episodes, an aesthetic perception appears momentarily and unexpectedly. Someone is affected by an object and so breaks through the cycle of instrumental rationality; then the event subsides. Meanwhile, in aesthetic practices, aesthetic perceptions or objects for such perceptions are produced repeatedly, routinely or habitually. If practices can be understood in general as repeated, intersubjectively intelligible and embodied forms of behaviour, occasionally in interaction with artefacts, involving the processing of implicit knowledge and always organizing the senses in a specific way, then aesthetic practices are practices in which self-referential sense perceptions and affects are shaped on a routine basis. At the heart of such practices is the eliciting of aesthetic perceptions in oneself or in others.10 Aesthetic practices therefore always entail aesthetic knowledge, cultural schemata, which guide the production and reception of aesthetic events. As practices, they are therefore, paradoxically, not at all free of purpose. They are as teleological as any other practice. Their telos, or purpose, is to generate purpose-free aesthetic events.
This understanding of the aesthetic accentuates an aspect of social practice that has long been marginalized by rationalist philosophy and sociology. The term opposed to that of the aesthetic as auto-dynamic sense perception and affectivity is that of rational, purposive and rule-guided activity. This binary allows us to set up an ideal distinction between, on the one hand, a mode of rationally acting upon the world that covers goal-directed and normative action and, on the other hand, an aesthetic mode of experiencing the world through sense perception. At one extreme, social practice can assume the form of an activity guided by interests or norms. This kind of practice is largely non-aesthetic, though naturally not entirely devoid of sense perceptions, and follows normative or technical rules. Here, perception is subordinated to cognitive processing of information, which assumes the function of a means to some end of action. Emotive, stunned or libidinous responses to objects, to other people or to environments are then subordinated to the technical or normative context, which on the ideal definition is emotionally neutral. This is the ideal type of activity traditionally presupposed by sociology.
This rational mode of acting on the world is opposed to the mode of self-referential experiencing and working in or with the world involved in aesthetic practices. In aesthetic practices, the proportion of end-directed or norm-oriented action is reduced to a minimum. These acts of sense perception – by the visual, aural, tactile and olfactory senses, whether alone or in combination – are self-steering processes that do not merely serve the effective regulation of action. The perceptions are joined to corresponding affects, meaning people are emotionally affected in specific ways by perceptions of objects, other people or environments. In general, these perceptions and affects are not acts of pure, immediate experience or feeling but, rather, entail the use of implicit schemata, patterns and criteria of selection, and culturally acquired skills. These kinds of practices of aesthetic perception and feeling include the cultural manifestations of Kantian ‘disinterested pleasure’ in the observation of an artwork but extend also far beyond it, ranging from the ecstasy of collective effervescence observed in archaic rituals by Émile Durkheim to the ‘aesthetic of blandness’ found by François Jullien in Chinese calligraphy; they embrace the aestheticization of politics in fascist mass rallies observed by Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire's metropolitan flâneur.11 Aesthetic practices are performed on a visit to Disneyland or in Jackson Pollock's drip-painting, when playing theatre or attending theatre; they are performed by the enthused onlookers in a football stadium and in courtly dance.
Two components of human action – the body and the sign – assume special functions in aesthetic practice. They are employed differently in rational, end-oriented and normative action than in aesthetic practice. In the rational context, the body serves the attainment of a goal, with the consequence that it ceases to appear, although it is the bearer of all the requisite skills. Language and other sign systems are here the means to attaining a maximally unequivocal conceptual grasp of the world, to gathering information and assuring communication. Meanwhile, in aesthetic practice, the body figures as the site of a performance sensually perceptible to others. The body is then no longer primarily the means to an end but rather an end in itself; its sensibility and perceptibility are self-referential and process-oriented. When aesthetic practices employ language or other sign systems, the main purpose is not to transmit information but to exploit the signs’ polyvalence and their capacity for producing narrative, iconographic and other entities able to stimulate the senses and the emotions. The point is then not that the signs have ‘real’ referents; instead, the play of significations, the production of fictional meaning and alternative narrative worlds come to the fore.12
The ideal opposition of purposive, end-directed action and aesthetic perception is first and foremost a heuristic aid in acquiring a precise conception of the aesthetic. However, it is a dualism that should be handled with care. The strict opposition remains infused by a classical aesthetics dating from Winckelmann and Baumgarten that has often incited attempts to cut off the aesthetic completely from the rational in order to ensconce it in the safe, autonomous reserve of what is sensuous, emotional, beautiful, sublime, non-conceptual and purpose-free. By making this distinction, classical aesthetics performs what it appears merely to describe from a neutral vantage point: it exiles the aesthetic from rationality, factuality and morality in response to the inverse exiling of the rational from the aesthetic in the corresponding utilitarian, cognitivist or moralistic discourses. Bruno Latour has studied these modernist efforts at purification, the aim of which is to create clear distinctions between humans and things, culture and nature, culture and technology.13 A comparable modern technique of separation can be found in the relation between aesthetics and rationality.
When this dualism is viewed historically in this way it becomes clear that, in fact, there has frequently been a mixing together of rational, teleological or normative moral practices with aesthetic practices. Purely rational, purposive and rule-guided forms of practice devoid of aesthetics and emotions, on the one hand, and purely aesthetic activity oriented exclusively on the senses and the emotions, on the other, represent the extreme poles of a continuum. If we accept the existence of impure combinations, then we can see the aesthetic occurring not only in exclusively aesthetic practices but also in mixed social fields and mixed practices in which instrumentality and normativity are combined with relatively autonomous acts of perception and feeling. Religious ceremonies, for example, can contain traces of the aesthetic without being aesthetic through and through. Craftsmanship and trading in shares also incorporate aesthetic elements, auto-dynamic percepts and affects associated with engaging materials or being stimulated by the game of financial speculation. Analogous cases include belligerent activities, friendly interactions, moving in public space or gardening. In all these cases, perception and emotion need not be entirely subordinate to the pursuit of rational ends but can operate in part auto-dynamically and self-referentially. In effect, the whole history of culture can be reconstructed as a history of different forms of aesthetic activities or products that go far beyond what modernity understands as purpose-free art and are incorporated in diverse practices, such as the making of artefacts, communication, politics, religion and spirituality. A distinction can therefore be made within the totality of aesthetic practices between purely aesthetic practices and mixed, aesthetically permeated practices, whereby here too the two types are part of the one continuum.
Against the background of this understanding of the aesthetic, the phenomenon of aestheticization becomes more sharply contoured.14 Aestheticization is a precisely definable transformation of society. In processes of aestheticization the segment of aesthetic episodes and aesthetically oriented or permeated practices expands within society in general, at the expense of exclusively non-aesthetic practices. This aestheticization can assume extremely diverse cultural and historical forms and orientations. Such processes can be concentrated within
