Rethinking Creativity

Contributions from social and cultural psychology

Vlad Petre Glăveanu, Alex Gillespie, Jaan Valsiner, Vlad Petre Glăveanu, Alex Gillespie, Jaan Valsiner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317962229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Creative Ability in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Despite more than half a century of psychological research on creativity we are still far from a clear understanding of the creative process, its antecedents and consequences and, most of all, the ways in which we can effectively support creativity. This is primarily due to a narrow focus on creative individuals isolated from culture and society. Rethinking Creativity proposes a fundamental review of this position and argues that creativity is not only a psychological but a sociocultural phenomenon.

This edited volume aims to relocate creativity from inside individual minds to the material, symbolic and social world of culture. It brings together eminent social and cultural psychologists who study dynamic, transformative and emergent phenomena, and invites them to conceptualise creativity in ways that depart from mainstream definitions and theoretical models existing in past and present literature on the topic. Chapters include reflections on the relationship between creativity and difference, creativity as a process of symbolic transformation, the role of apprenticeships and collaboration, the importance of considering materiality and affordances in creative work, and the power of imagination to construct individual trajectories.

The diverse contributions included in this book offer readers multiple pathways into the intricate relationship between mind, culture, and creativity, and invite them to rethink these phenomena in ways that foster creative action within their own life and the lives of those around them. It will be of key interest to both social and cultural psychologists, as well as to creativity researchers and those who, as part of their personal or professional life, try to understand creativity and develop creative forms of expression.

Chapter 1

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Creativity out of difference

Theorising the semiotic, socialand temporal origin of creative acts

Vlad Petre Glăveanu and Alex Gillespie

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The invention of the Post-it^® Note tells the story of a solution in search of a problem. In the early 1970s, Spencer Silver, working in the 3M research labs, was trying to find an adhesive. By accident, he created a weak glue, a substance that would stick to objects but could easily be peeled off without leaving a trace. This weak but reusable adhesive puzzled both its creator and his colleagues, who could not imagine a good use for it. Some year later, another scientist from 3M, Arthur Fry, singing in the church choir, was faced with the practical problem of keeping his place in the hymnal. Usual bookmarks wouldn’t do the job as they often fell out. What he needed was something that could be stuck in place and removed without damaging the pages. And then he remembered Spencer’s strange invention! But he didn’t have an easy time convincing others of its utility. The first sticky notes to be produced by the company, called Press ’n Peel, did poorly on the market. It was not until free samples were offered that office workers realised the value of this new product. What followed, about a decade after its initial discovery, was the mass-production and distribution of what became Post-it£ Notes, today pretty much an indispensable office supply around the world.¹

This short history of an innovative product reveals some important things about creativity. To begin with, creative acts often start from a discrepancy between the goal or image of an invention and its actual realisation. There is a tension between a representation and the tangible object that is not always easy to bridge by the creator him or herself. This is where other people can become important for creativity. There are not only those who evaluate, use and, in this case, buy the product, but also those who can see it from a different perspective or in relation to a novel problem. Art Fry, again through a happy accident, was capable of imagining an original use for the new adhesive that its creator, Spencer Silver, did not. This difference in perspective between Art Fry and Spencer Silver proved in this case to be extremely consequential for the development of the invention. Finally, we need also to acknowledge the fact that creative acts do not end with an idea, or even with generating a product, they can have a longer duration that involves reinterpretation and appropriation into new uses. In the example above, it took about a decade between discovery and market release. Different states of the creation at different points in time drive the creative process in its uncertain path towards being finalised. These tensions, between objects and their meaning, between the perspectives of self and other, and between the present and the future are all core topics of research in cultural psychology.

In this chapter we seek to identify the roots of human creativity in the most fundamental cultural psychological processes of semiotically mediated activity. Expanding the basic mediational structure of self–other–object–sign, we suggest that creativity arises out of three main disjunctions or differences. Our understanding of these differences is relational (they are, in essence, the mark of relationships) and dynamic (developmental); in this sense, ‘difference’ is and should be understood as a non-linear, systemic process, that of ‘differentiation’. First, there is a difference between representation, the sign, and the world, or what is being signified. Action is guided by symbolic meanings of anticipated outcomes, but the outcomes of action are often surprising. Second, there is always a disjunction between the perspectives of self and other. Not only is the other never fully knowable, but the other also has a perspective on us which we are never fully aware of (Bakhtin, 1923/1990). This ‘surplus’ meaning being created which is in the mind of the other, can, if engaged, be a source of expansive insight. Finally, there is a difference between the new artefact (and its context) as it was in the past, exists in the present, and can potentially be developed and used in the future. Tomorrow will always have surprises. Bridging this ‘gap’, between what is and what will be or what could be, is where human memory and imagination intersect in creative improvisation. The aim of the present chapter is to show how these three fundamental differences, each demanding resolution but being, in essence, incommensurable, are the motor of creativity, keeping in creative tension the self, others, signs, objects, all within the flow of irreversible time.

Creativity, big and little

There is currently a great consensus in the psychology of creativity that creative products are, at once, novel and useful (Plucker, Beghetto & Dow, 2004). To return to our example, the type of adhesive invented by Silver and its later use, discovered by Fry, where certainly novel in the 1970s and their value is demonstrated by the growing popularity of the brand. Of course, one may wonder if creativity itself should be considered a quality of a product (or a person) and if it is not, as demonstrated by the story of the sticky notes, a phenomenon that unfolds in time and engages multiple actors in a constant process of creating and resignifying what is being created. Nevertheless, in order to make creativity more ‘tangible’ (and, as such, measurable), a product definition is typically preferred despite the fact that it raises a number of important questions; for instance, how novel does the resulting artefact need to be in order to be considered creative? How useful should it be and for whom? In our case, are Post-it£ Notes original and useful enough to be called a ‘creative product’? Are we to consider them a great invention or simply a good idea? Or maybe Spencer Silver had a ‘little’ idea that only became a ‘big’ idea because of his links to 3M?

To answer these questions requires operating with a basic, and pervasive, dichotomy between higher-level, Big-C, historical (H) or revolutionary creativity on the one hand and lower-level, little c, personal (P) or everyday creativity on the other (see for example Boden, 1994, for a discussion of H and P creativity). Although creativity is typically claimed to exist on a continuum (Amabile, 1996), it is often the case that we turn the dichotomy above into an opposition and, more than this, focus in both scientific and lay representations on the higher ends of the presumed continuum, disregarding or downplaying the importance of more mundane acts of creation (Glăveanu, 2013). The obsession, at least in a Western context where much of the theory of creativity is being developed, with the image of great creators and revolutionary creations has the potential not only to skew our understanding of the phenomenon but also to obscure the importance of everyday acts of creativity. Moreover, it makes ‘Big’ and ‘little’ types disconnected from each other and, as such, masks the continuities between them and any ‘middle’ range forms of creation (for example, creativity as it takes place in community contexts, see Glăveanu, 2010; Jovchelovitch, Chapter 6 in this volume).

There have been some recent attempts to unpack this polarity and acknowledge the many differences between acts and products that are not revolutionary at a societal level. This is how, for instance, Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) proposed a four C model distinguishing between mini-c (the basic form of intrapersonal creativity), little-c (creativity leading to mundane products), Pro-c (professional-level expertise), and Big-C creativity (or eminent creativity). While this classification moves us a bit further towards acknowledging the ‘middle’ areas as well as pointing to a basic, mini-c form of creativity involved in action, perception, learning etc., we are still left wondering how the many types are connected and especially articulated sometimes by one and the same creative act. In an effort to transcend these dichotomies while keeping the idea (quite obvious in practice) that there are differences in the degree of novelty and value between creative artefacts, the first author proposed an integrated framework that distinguishes forms of creativity based on process rather than outcome. In this model, innovative creativity is embedded within improvisational creativity and both ‘grow’ out of a shared base of habitual creativity; as such, it is the continuities in creative expression rather than the differences that come to the fore (see Glăveanu, 2012a).

What is at stake in this debate is the fundamental question of whether great and mundane creations share a common base or process, a claim many psychologists agree with (e.g. Finke, Ward & Smith, 1992; Weisberg, 1993). And if this is the case, what exactly is this most basic unit of creativity? Is it, as many assume, a particular personality trait, thinking style or cognitive mechanism, or a neurological structure? We propose, drawing upon cultural psychology, that the minimal unit, the very ‘atom’, of creativity is a process of self–other–object-sign interaction (see also Wagoner, Chapter 2 in this volume). Specifically, we argue that the disjunctions, or differences, within this unit of social interaction produce novelty as each loop in the process returns to something new. How exactly (mini, little, Pro and Big-C) creativity emerges out of this dynamic configuration is explored in this chapter.

Looking for the cultural psychological
‘atom’ of creativity

Cultural psychology is a discipline that concerns itself with the relationship between mind and culture as reflected in acts of semiotic mediation, social interaction and human activity, all developed over socio-, onto- and micro-genetic time (see Valsiner & Rosa, 2007; Cole, 1996). In order to capture the socially and culturally mediated relation between person and world, cultural psychologists often employ the visual metaphor of the triangle that includes typically a combination of the following elements: self, other, object, sign (for more details, see Zittoun, Gillespie, Cornish & Psaltis, 2007). The basic idea is that self–other–object relations become internalised, through developmental processes, to form signs, which in turn mediate those self–other–object relations. Initially other people mediate the child’s relation to the object, and then signs come to mediate the growing child’s relation to those objects. Thus, from this Vygotskian perspective, any mediation by signs is by definition intersubjective (Gillespie, 2009; see also John-Steiner, Chapter 3 in this volume), and thus the acting and thinking human is never ‘alone’, as the difference between self and other becomes internalised into a self-reflective loop (Vygotsky & Luria, 1932/1994).

There is little doubt today that the symbolic function and its development play a crucial role in all forms of creative expression. Indeed, the ‘birth’ of creativity coincides with the capacity of the human child, around two years of age, to detach itself from the immediacy of the environment and use substitute objects or images that acquire a sign function (the most clear example here being an increased mastery over the use of language). This achievement is facilitated by decentration, in Piagetian terms, an ability to understand not only that the self is separate from others but that others may hold another view of the world. A fundamental difference is thus created between self, other and the environment that can be bridged only through symbolic means. Winnicott (1971) was explicit about the fact that creativity and cultural experience are twin-born within such an emerging ‘third’ or symbolic space (in-between the internal and external world) and both find their first expression in children’s play (see also Jovchelovitch, Chapter 6 in this volume). In the words of Gardner (1982, p. 170) as well:

Unlike other animals and unlike the infant during the first year of life, the child of two has clearly entered the realm of symbolic activity. No longer carrying out an action (like feeding himself) just for practical ends, he can use other objects or elements including himself to enact various roles, produce various actions, secure various consequences. He may eat symbolically, using pretense gestures and pretend food. Moreover, such symbolic enactments are carried out seemingly for the sheer enjoyment of representational activity. [ … ] Needless to stress, this achievement of symbolic activity is enormous – in a sense, the greatest imaginative leap of all.

All these ideas, fundamental for a cultural perspective on human psychological development, point to an essential aspect of creativity. They argue first of all that creative expression is not possible within an undifferentiated world of self, other and object, where symbolic mediation would be unnecessary (Zittoun, 2008). Furthermore, while this ontogenetic process of differentiation is crucial for the development of higher mental functions (Vygotsky, 1997), it is particularly important for our understanding of creativity. In a basic sense, signs and sign systems are themselves creations that mediate the person’s relation to others and oneself. While, as discussed before, their formation would be considered by main-stream theory under mini-c creativity, we argue here that the internally fractured unit of self–other–world–sign is the generative core of all forms of creativity, from mini-c to Big-C. In fact, it is within the meditational triangle discussed by cultural psychologists that we can find the ‘origins’ of creative expression if we focus not so much on its elements as on the relations between them: the disjunctions or differences existing between self and other, self and object, sign and object, etc. In Figure 1.1 we propose an expanded meditational model, drawing also on the work of Werner and Kaplan (1963), who advanced the addressor–addressee–object–symbol framework of symbol formation (see also Wagoner, Chapter 2 in this volume). In our depiction, the temporal dimension is made visible, opening a last important type of difference, that between past, present and future.

What Figure 1.1 indicates are three different and yet deeply interconnected disjunctions or sources of difference that necessarily prompt creative expression and are, in this sense, creatogenetic. First, there is a difference between sign and object, between the symbolic construction (a representation, word or image for instance) and its referent in the world (an object, process or phenomenon). Note that we are using here a simplified model compared to Peirce’s (1931) distinction between sign vehicle (its physical form), sign object (aspect of the world) and interpretant (the meaning of the sign for a symbolic frame of reference). Creativity emerges thus from the open and dynamic relation between objects and signs (and their meaning) in which one and the same object can be described by multiple signs and vice versa. This basic source of divergence is fostered by the various subject positions included in the model (i.e. self and other(s), where the latter can refer to a person or more, a group). One’s view and interpretation of an object or phenomenon is permanently confronted by numerous (creative) alternatives. Finally, the dy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Contributor biographies
• Preface: The sociocultural approach to creativity
• Editors’ introduction: entering into the Creativity Zone, on the border between the mundane and the monstrous
• 1 Creativity out of difference: theorising the semiotic, social and temporal origin of creative acts
• 2 Creativity as symbolic transformation
• 3 Creative engagement across the lifespan
• 4 Canonical affordances and creative agency
• 5 Life-creativity: imagining one’s life
• 6 The creativity of the social: imagination, development and social change in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas
• 7 Creativity and the generative approach to culture and meaning
• 8 The socio-materiality of creativity: a case study of the creative processes in design work
• 9 Discussing creativity from a cultural psychological perspective
• Index