Creativity

Theory, History, Practice

Rob Pope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134273522
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Creativity: Theory, History, Practice offers important new perspectives on creativity in the light of contemporary critical theory and cultural history. Innovative in approach as well as argument, the book crosses disciplinary boundaries and builds new bridges between the critical and the creative. It is organised in four parts:

• Why creativity now? offers much-needed alternatives to both the Romantic stereotype of the creator as individual genius and the tendency of the modern creative industries to treat everything as a commodity
• defining creativity, creating definitions traces the changing meaning of 'create' from religious ideas of divine creation from nothing to advertising notions of concept creation. It also examines the complex history and extraordinary versatility of terms such as imagination, invention, inspiration and originality
• dreation as myth, story, metaphor begins with modern re-tellings of early African, American and Australian creation myths and – picking up Biblical and evolutionary accounts along the way – works round to scientific visions of the Big Bang, bubble universes and cosmic soup
• creative practices, cultural processes is a critical anthology of materials, chosen to promote fresh thinking about everything from changing constructions of 'literature' and 'design' to artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.

Rob Pope takes significant steps forward in the process of rethinking a vexed yet vital concept, all the while encouraging and equipping readers to continue the process in their own creative or 're-creative' ways. Creativity: Theory, History, Practice is invaluable for anyone with a live interest in exploring what creativity has been, is currently, and yet may be.

Part 1 Why creativity now?

Creativity is of immediate interest to just about everyone: Am I creative? How creative am I? Can I become more creative? But no one can think or talk about it for long without getting into highly involved issues: about whether only certain special people are creative or everyone is potentially creative in some way; and whether some activities – or cultures or periods – are more creative than others. What is creativity anyway? Is it the same as genius or talent or originality? Or had we better use other terms entirely – such as invention and discovery and innovation? Arguments around creativity are hardly surprising. The concept has an ancient and continuing past rooted in notions of divine creators and mythic moments of creation; a more recent, specifically human history framed chiefly in terms of creative arts and artists; and current applications that range from advertising and public relations (‘creating the right image’) to business studies and education (‘creative management’, ‘creative problem-solving’). Computer programmes ask us to ‘Create File’, and ‘creative accounting’ has become the regular euphemism for what used to be called ‘cooking the books’.

It tends to amaze people, therefore, that the first recorded use in English of the abstract noun ‘creativity’ is as recent as 1875 (see OED ‘creativity’). Certainly, cognate forms such as ‘creation’, ‘creator’ and ‘create’ were around much earlier, first with religious and then with artistic senses. But what do we actually mean by ‘creating’ and ‘being creative’ nowadays? How much has the more or less human and secular notion of ‘creativity’ taken over from the earlier divine and sublime senses of ‘creation’? What are we to make of all the various claims on ‘creativity’ staked by artists and advertisers, educationists and entrepreneurs? Does it really matter whether we talk of ‘producing’ or ‘generating’ – rather than of ‘creating’ – everything from ideas and images to wealth and health? And how is contemporary critical theory at last coming to terms with a concept that it studiously suppressed for so long? Part 1 sets about framing these issues at length, and points to some fresh and perhaps surprising possibilities.

1 Creativities old, new and otherwise

‘Renault – Créateur d’automobiles’ versus ‘Citroën Picasso’

(Rival car advertising campaigns 2002– )

These days, information technology, communications, and advertising are taking over the words ‘concept’ and ‘creative,’ and these ‘conceptualists’ constitute an arrogant breed that reveals the activity of selling to be capitalism’s supreme thought.

(Deleuze 1995: 137)

The above epigraphs help set the contemporary scene. The first is from rival car campaigns waged on UK television and throughout Western Europe at the beginning of this century. The second is from an interview with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze towards the end of the last century. Both prompt fundamental questions about what may or may not be meant by ‘creativity’ nowadays. And both, in context, gesture backwards and forwards to images of creativity that have existed or may yet exist. Neither presents a complete picture, but taken together they help establish some initial terms of reference.

The Citroën ‘Picasso’ advert is the kind of playful, parodic and highly finished media product we have come to expect from the contemporary ‘creative industries’. It offers an amusing narrative of a fully automated car assembly-line in which ‘naughty’ robots indulge themselves by spray-painting the cars in wavy patterns and wild colours. Eventually they are brought to order and paint the cars as they should – but not before they have signed each with a multicoloured flourish: Picasso (the logo of this particular model). Meanwhile, Citroën’s competitor, Renault, continues to present itself corporately as Créateur d’automobiles. At least three things are worth noting. One is that both the advertising agencies and their employers, the car companies, clearly reckon it worthwhile to trade on the arty image of being ‘creative’: whether the quasi-divineimage of being a ‘creator of automobiles’ or the genius of the wayward artist. This is in preference, presumably, to presenting themselves as, say, ‘car manufacturers’ or ‘producers’. Another key feature, especially important in a UK English-speaking context, is the appeal to the comparative exoticism and cosmopolitanism of the French slogan and the ‘bad-boy’ reputation of the Spanish artist. Both are sufficiently recognisable and stereotypical to have an immediate impact. The third significant aspect relates specifically to the mini-narrative developed in the Citroën Picasso advertisement. The opposition and transition between a kind of carnivalesque chaos at the beginning (the robots being wildly expressive) and the sober order that is almost imposed at the end (they settle to painting the cars properly, retaining just a flash of free expression in the signed logo) give a clear overall message: these cars offer machine-like dependability but with a human touch, automated technology spiced with artistic technique. In short, like Renault, Citroën does not just produce cars – it creates them. In claiming to do so, both these multimillion-dollar international business corporations assume a kind of god-like power and artistic prestige. What’s more, they do this with all the resources of the modern multimedia and the ready currency of popular culture at their disposal.

In their witty, knowing ways these campaigns offer potent images of what creativity has come to mean in the postmodern world. Above all this is a matter of ‘creating the right image’. To achieve this, all and any of the other readily available images of creativity, notably those of God the Creator and the artist as creator, may be pressed into service. This is also image creation in the service of a fantastically enhanced and largely illusory vision of industrial production. It works by glossing over the human labour and material resources involved in car production and, in their place, offering a humorously humanised vision of playful yet super-serviceable automata. ‘Creating the right image’ also involves completely cutting out the ‘wrong’ image: negative aspects of the consumption and use of cars in the modern world, from road accidents to pollution. Other car advertisements do this by showing their product performing in wide-open, car-less spaces such as mountain roads and deserts, or miraculously evading the pressures of urban traffic by some cunning ruse.

Gilles Deleuze (second epigraph) will have nothing to do with this conception of creativity. It is precisely the appropriation of the terms ‘concept’ and ‘creative’ by ‘information technology, communications, and advertising’ that he sees as a pressing contemporary problem and it is to counter such a perverted image of creativity that he urges the claims of his own discipline, philosophy. For Deleuze, ‘The function of philosophy, still thoroughly relevant, is to create concepts’; further, ‘Philosophy [. . .] is by nature creative or even revolutionary because it is always creating new concepts’ (Deleuze 1995: 136). There are several things that need to be said about Deleuze’s conception of creativity – and of philosophy. Firstly, he has a very distinct vision of the specifically creative function of philosophy, and it is not one to which all philosophers would subscribe or with which all readers will be familiar. (The issues and figures will be revisited later, but, basically, Deleuze writes in the radically politicised tradition of Nietzsche and Foucault where knowledge is a form of power, and, more generally, in the pragmatic tradition of James, Dewey and Bergson where ‘truths’ are made, not just found.) To get a preliminary idea of Deleuze’s ‘creative’ conception of philosophy we may turn to What Is Philosophy? (1991), the last major work he co-authored with the psychotherapist and political activist Felix Guattari. As their English translators put it, this book is a kind of ‘manifesto produced under the slogan “Philosophers of the world, create!”’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994: vii). Crucially, for Deleuze and his co-writer, creation is recognised as taking place in all areas of life, not just art narrowly conceived or even philosophy broadly conceived.

Deleuze and Guattari distinguish three main domains or ‘intersecting planes’ in which creation can occur: (i) philosophy, in so far as it is primarily involved in the creation of concepts (abstract systems of virtual worlds); (ii) art (including literature), in so far as it is primarily involved in the creation of affects (sensory embodiments of possible worlds); and (iii) science, in so far as it is primarily involved in the creation of percepts (sensory embodiments of functional worlds) (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994: 163–99). The key words here are ‘in so far as’ and ‘primarily’, for in any given instance, especially the most significant and valuable (i.e. the most ‘creative’), what we actually encounter is an overlapping of domains: ‘the three modes of thought intersect and intertwine’ such that ‘a rich tissue of correspondences can be established between the planes’ (pp. 198–9). Deleuze and Guattari coin the term heterogenesis for this multidirectional and multidimensional activity of creation (from the Greek for ‘varied’ plus ‘birth’; cf. ‘heterogeneous’). The crucial aspect of such a creatively ‘varied-birth’ is that it involves kinds of intricately interdependent but strictly unpredictable ‘becoming’ (‘being still to come’). As a result, even if the various inputs are known, the precise outputs cannot be foreknown. Deleuze and Guattari summarise their complex conception of creation thus:

[N]one of these elements can appear without the other being still to come, still indeterminate or unknown. Each created element on a plane calls on other heterogeneous elements, which are still to be created on other planes: thought as heterogenesis.

(Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994: 199)

A more general term they use to describe the process is chaosmos. This they take from the novelist James Joyce, who coined it in Finnegans Wake, and they define it as ‘a composed chaos’ (p. 205). Umberto Eco also features the term in his The Aesthetics of Chaosmos (1989), observing elsewhere that ‘Chaosmos [is] a word invented by James Joyce in which you have this sandwich between cosmos, which means ordered structure, and chaos’ (Eco in Kearney 1995: 78). We shall pick up the term, too, because it neatly catches the paradox of many visions of creation and versions of creativity, both ancient and modern: the ways in which kinds of order (cosmos) emerge from kinds of apparent disorder (chaos), and, conversely, the tendency of kinds of apparent order to dissipate into disorder, which in turn may dissolve or resolve into yet other forms of chaos and . . . or . . . as . . . cosmos. In short, chaosmos. The term also resonates with debates in contemporary theory, most obviously those to do with chaos, complexity and emergence, but also with analogous processes explored in other areas. These debates are treated at length in Chapters 4 and 7 of the present book, but we might here cue by a series of questions their potential significance for a fundamentally reconfigured conception of creativity:

• Chaos, complexity and emergence theories share a concern with emerging orders and dissipative structures ‘on the edge of chaos’, and lead to an understanding of complexity in terms of substantially regular but strictly non-predictable transformations. Areas of application range from patterns of bird migration to fluctuations in international money markets.
• So is creativity in some way peculiarly ‘chaotic’, ‘complex’ or ‘emergent’? investigates the origins and ends of the universe, even
• Cosmologyinvestigates the origins and ends of the universe, even to the point of projecting ‘parallel universes’ and a ‘multiverse’. It involves exploring various kinds of singularity, perhaps beginning with the ‘Big Bang’ and ending with the ‘Big Crunch’; but also recognising that there may be universes between as well as beyond. To what extent is creativity about absolute beginning and endings, or is it rather about the ongoing construction of parallel or multiple ‘universes’ in the middle?
• Evolutionary biology and genetics are filling in and substantially redrawing the Darwinian picture of evolution of species by natural selection, through work on the replication and mutation of genes. Genetically modified foods and the cloning of animals or people are the more publicised aspects of issues that reach even deeper. Is creativity a natural and necessary aspect of all life, or peculiar to humans? What happens when the ‘creature’ gets to ‘create’ itself, too?
• Neuro-science, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence are leading to a radical rethinking of the apparently ‘mechanical’ aspects of human consciousness and the potentially ‘living’ aspects of computer ‘intelligence’, through the crossing of computing and communications with life sciences. Is creativity the sole prerogative of humans or does it extend to (other) machines?
• Quantum mechanics and theoretical physics also continue to work through the implications of fundamental insights into the nature of the physical universe. A beginning list includes: (i) the capacity of mass to transform into energy, and vice versa; (ii) an understanding of matter/energy as both a continuous wave and a stream of distinct particles; (iii) the realisation that the observing subject, the observational apparatus and the observed object all play a part in the observation and that the resulting ‘measurement’ is a product of the relations among them; (iv) the recognition that time and space are intricately interconnected and ultimately interchangeable, and that the resulting ‘space-time’ may be best imagined ‘curved’, ‘folded’ or full of ‘holes’.
  With so much potential for change and transformation, what’s so special – or common – about creativity anyway?

Clearly, what is at stake is a much enlarged and enhanced conception of creativity. Equally clearly, such investigations reach far beyond the vistas of our car advertisers, for, as Deleuze observes, ‘the activity of selling is capitalism’s supreme thought’ (Deleuze 1995: 136). As a philosopher, his response is to argue for the kind of radical ‘concept creation’ represented by such terms as heterogenesis and chaosmos. But he is also mindful of the crucial part to be played in this joint project by the affects of art and the percepts of science. Some of these last are represented in the sketch of contemporary sciences above. Others, we shall see shortly, come from the arts and aesthetics as traditionally conceived and as radically reconfigured. All provide powerful alternatives and antidotes to the kind of commodity aesthetics that dominate the contemporary cultural scene. To be more precise, all offer ways of viewing and valuing – and constantly re-viewing and re-valuing – creative processes in so far as these exceed the commercial value of the created product alone.

It will come either as little surprise or a great shock, then, that ‘creativity’ has not been a favoured term in literary and cultural theory of the past twenty or thirty years. In fact, during the closing decades of the twentieth century, almost anything to do with ‘creators’, ‘creation’ and ‘creating’ was roundly attacked, to the extent that the rejection of ‘creativity’ can be seen in retrospect as one of the founding acts of an array of oppositional critiques (Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, etc.). Now that these approaches are themselves established, we might usefully revisit their founding moments and weigh what may have been lost or misrepresented, as well as asking if critics might since have found ways of accommodating creativity on their own terms.

What follows, then, is a kind of ‘ground-clearing’ to establish the basis upon which an enhanced and extended reformulation of the concept of creativity might flourish and to clear up some current misconceptions and misrepresentations. Whether the term ‘creativity’ is revived is another matter and of lesser importance, as we shall see throughout the book.

Creation v production

Remarkably, almost none of the current standard dictionaries of literary and cultural theory has an entry dedicated to ‘creativity’. (The significant exception is Keywords (Williams 1983), to which we shall return.) Where one of its cognates such as ‘creative’ or ‘creation’ does make an appearance, it tends to be set up as a ‘traditional’, rather old-fashioned concept to be demystified and dismissed then replaced by other terms. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton’s entry on ‘creation’ in A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms is characteristic in these respects (Fowler [1987] 1990: 45–6):

The metaphor of creation has traditionally dominated discussions of literary authorship, with strong implications of the mysterious, possibly transcendental nature of such activity. [. . .] Viewing such an idea as a fundamental mystification of the process of writing, Marxist criticism (in particular the work of Pierre Macherey) has preferred to substitute the concept of literary production, which suggests the essentially ordinary, accessible nature of fiction-making.

Thus, taking Eagleton’s cue and turning to Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production ([1966] 1978) what we find in Chapter 11, ‘Creation and Production’, is precisely a summary dismissal of the former term and its complete replacement with the latter. Macherey begins by assuming that ‘[t]he proposition that the writer or artist is a creator belongs to a humanist ideology’, then proceeds to his central assertion that ‘[t]he various “theories of creation” all ignore the process of working: they omit any account of production’. He concludes by insisting that ‘in this book, the word “creation” is suppressed and systematically replaced by “production”’ (Macherey [1966] 1978: 66–8). We can take issue with Macherey on several counts here. One is his contention that ‘the writer or artist as cre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• . . . before the beginning
• Part 1 Why creativity now?
• 1 Creativities old, new and otherwise
• Part 2 Defining creativity, creating definitions
• 2 Defining creativity historically
• 3 Creating definitions theoretically
• 4 Alternative terms, emerging debates
• Part 3 Creation as myth, story, metaphor
• 5 Re-creation myths, ancient and modern
• 6 New sciences for old
• Part 4 Creative practices, cultural processes A critical anthology
• 7 Rewriting creativity The case of ‘literature’
• 8 Transforming culture An open invitation
• after the end . . .
• Further reading by topic
• Bibliography