The Invention of Creativity

Modern Society and the Culture of the New

Andreas Reckwitz, Steven Black

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780745697048, 9780745697031
• eBook ISBN: 9780745697079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1
Aestheticization and the Creativity Dispositif
The 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 organi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface to the English Edition
• Epigraph
• The Inevitability of Creativity
• 1: Aestheticization and the Creativity Dispositif
• 2: Artistic Creation, the Genius and the Audience
• 3: Centrifugal Art
• 4: The Rise of the Aesthetic Economy
• 5: The Psychological Turn in Creativity
• 6: The Genesis of the Star System
• 7: Creative Cities
• 8: Society of Creativity
• Index
• End User License Agreement