Cultures and Globalization

Cultural Expression, Creativity and Innovation

Helmut K Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, Helmut K Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781412920865, 9781412920858
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

?In the globalization ?game? there are no absolute winners and losers. Neither homogenisation nor diversity can capture its contradictory movement and character. The essays and papers collected here offer, from a variety of perspectives, a rich exploration of creativity and innovation, cultural expressions and globalization. This volume of essays, in all their diversity of contents and theoretical perspectives, demonstrates the rich value of this paradoxical, oxymoronic approach? - Stuart Hall, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University

Volume 3 of the Cultures & Globalization series, Creativity and Innovations, explores the interactions between globalization and the forms of cultural expression that are their basic resource. Bringing together over 25 high-profile authors from around the world, this volume addresses such questions as: What impacts does globalization have on cultural creativity and innovation? How is the evolving world ?map? of creativity related to the drivers and patterns of globalization? What are the relationships between creative acts, clusters, genres or institutions and cultural diversity? The volume is an indispensable reference tool for all scholars and students of contemporary arts and culture.

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PART 1 ISSUES AND PATTERNS IN CULTURAL EXPRESSION

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OVERARCHING ISSUES

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CHAPTER 1

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CREATIVITY: ALTERNATIVE PARADIGMS TO THE ‘CREATIVE ECONOMY’

Rustom Bharucha

Building on the premise that creativity is not the prerogative of any particular class, any more so than it can be mobilized equitably by the pseudo-democratic and instrumentalist agendas of the state, this chapter argues against the appropriation of creativity within the premises of the ‘creative economy’. In opposition to the profit-making propensities of the global market, it highlights creative principles like impermanence, ecology, and humility, drawn out of everyday cultural practices in the Indian context, notably floor-drawings. Complicating the argument, it does not rule out the possibilities of either the commodification or innovation of traditional artefacts through new modes of production and distribution, even as it upholds the need for context-sensitive economies. Highlighting alternative paradigms of creativity in the cultures of the ‘South’, the chapter concludes with a few reflections on how these paradigms can provide new directions for the shaping of a more dialogic cultural policy.

Against the growing discourse that has emerged around the ‘creative economy’ (Howkins, 2001), this essay reflects on ‘creativity’ through a web of intersecting concepts and practices. The ‘creative economy’ has been catalyzed by a series of theoretical interventions which have parasitically drawn on the ‘culture industry’ (Adorno, 1991), ‘cultural industries’ (Garnham, 2000; 2005), ‘creative industries’ (Caves, 2000; Hartley, 2004), the ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2002; 2005), and the ‘cultural economy’ (Anheier and Isar, 2008; Cunningham et al., 2008). Oscillating between ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’, ‘industry’ and ‘economy’, this nit-picking juxtaposition of terms has assumed discriminations and implications of power in policy-making and managerial services relating to the profit-making and social propensities of cultural goods and services. Increasingly, the dissemination of this discourse has assumed a global scale, which would seem to have increased in almost direct proportion to its media-driven and corporate hype. The purpose here is to work against this hype in order to highlight those particular modes and modalities of creativity in the cultures of the ‘South’ which do not lend themselves to the imperatives of the global economy, even as they seek out their own modes of sustainability within – and against – the logic of commodification.

Arguably, the ‘creative economy’ (and its concomitant ‘creative industries’ and ‘creative class’) have very little to do with the multi-dimensional complexities of creativity as it unfolds and manifests itself in a multitude of artistic and cultural practices. As used by a coterie of predominantly neo-liberal economists, the ‘creative’ component in the ‘creative economy’ is at best a catch-word, if not a logo, clubbing together distinct categories like ‘skill’, ‘talent’, and ‘innovation’,¹ which masquerade an affinity to the world of artists but with no real evidence of the labour and imagination that go into art-making.

At one level then, the thrust of my critique in this essay is leveled against the appropriation and decontextualization of ‘creativity’ from its diverse manifestations as well as the phenomenological processes underlying artistic and cultural expression. At another level, however, I am equally concerned with the singularization of the creative economy within the strictures of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘information society’, consolidated and driven by the technologies of ‘copyright, patent, trademark, and design industries’ (Howkins, 2001: xiii). This equation of creativity with intellectual property would seem to be totally indifferent to other cultural understandings of the economy, where the mechanisms of markets and trading practices may be mediated by the communitarian values of generosity, altruism, and sharing. These values complicate the neo-classical premises of economics regulating the transactions of everyday life cultures. Indeed, without this melding of cultural values and economic mechanisms, as I will demonstrate in the course of this chapter, a vast body of cultural expressions and rituals from diverse cultures in the global ‘South’ could not have survived over the years. In the process, the livelihoods of artisan communities and subaltern artists from the most downtrodden sectors of society would have been seriously jeopardized.

It is necessary, therefore, to keep in mind that while the emergence of the ‘creative economy’ discourse goes back barely to the late 1990s, symptomatic of neo-liberal global capitalism and market-friendly New Labour policies, the temporalities of creativity encompass a much vaster history of time. I will provide a few glimpses of those creative practices whose legacies go back hundreds of years, testifying to the truism that ‘living traditions’ have fairly resilient economies or else they could not have survived and grown over the years.

While highlighting the endurance, reinvention and altered manifestations of traditional practices in the cultures of everyday life, I will also attempt to stretch their assumptions of creativity in relation to the more pragmatic possibilities of commodification and innovation. My purpose is not to demonize the commercial or marketing propensities of the creative economy, but to question their viability at material and social levels. Arguably, the mandate of the creative industries has not been fulfilled, and its attempt to formulate a ‘policy’, as pointed out by Andrew Ross, has been ‘mercurial’ rather than sustainable:

The carefully packaged policy of creative industries will not generate jobs; it is a recipe for magnifying patterns of class polarization; its function as a cover for the corporate intellectual property grab will become all too apparent; its urban development focus will price out the very creatives on whose labour it depends; its reliance on self-promoting rhetoric runs far in advance of its proven impact; its cookie-cutter approach to economic development does violence to regional specificity; its adoption of an instrumental value of creativity will cheapen the true worth of artistic creation. (Ross, 2007: 18)

The systematic failure of the creative industries is substantiated by the even more ‘mercurial’ transition from ‘the rise of the creative class’ (Florida, 2002) to the ‘flight of the creative class’ (Florida, 2005), all in a matter of three years. Richard Florida’s predictions indicate the ephemerality of this ‘class’, even as the statistical evidence of so-called ‘creative cities’ indicates that rumours of their economic productivity have been grossly exaggerated: the European Commission’s evaluation of 29 Cities of Culture discloses that ‘their principal goal – economic growth stimulated by the public subvention of culture to renew failed cities – has itself failed’ (Miller, 2007: 45). Even if these cities do manage to generate more jobs as Andrew Ross candidly points out, the ‘polarization of city life between affluent cores and low-income margins’ (Ross, 2007: 28) can only intensify. Florida’s euphoric notion of creativity as ‘everyone’s natural asset to exploit’ (2007: 28) is proving to be thoroughly unproductive and may even disappear in due course just as the bubble of the New Economy promoted by the advocates of New Labour in Britain has already burst.

Instead of pursuing this critique of the creative industries and economy,² my purpose in this chapter is to focus attention on the alternative paradigms of creativity to be found in so-called ‘traditional’ sectors of everyday life cultures in the ‘South’. As we will discover, the ‘traditional’ can also be deeply contemporary, not only in its registers of resistance to an obligatory globalization but also in its potentially disruptive and subversive affirmation of value-systems which counter the assumptions of the creative economy. Let me emphasize that I look upon this economy not as a threat but as a necessary provocation which compels me to be more circumspect about what I assume by ‘creativity’ in the first place.

Complicating the epistemologies of creativity

If one acknowledges that creativity is not an essentialized quality, or immutable property, but is better regarded as a faculty of imagination which catalyzes a process of interactions, we would still be relying on a thoroughly nebulous notion of creativity. The rigor in articulating creativity can begin to emerge only when this ‘process of interactions’ is contextualized within the specific disciplinary procedures of the arts, encompassing components like training, transmission, technique, and conditions of work, among other factors that go into the production and reception of any work of art. While these components appear to be abstract, they gain very concrete, if not tangible, manifestations within the vocabulary and grammar of specific disciplines. To spell out my position more clearly, the creativity of a musician – and not just any musician, but, let’s say, a cellist – would need to be recognized and accounted for in ways that would be quite significantly different from, say, that of a poet or potter or video artist. The terminology of art practices is, more often than not, a highly honed and textured field of critical discriminations which facilitates the evaluation of the creativity in question. This precision can border on the prescriptive, as we will examine later.

Let me provide at this point some evidence of the ‘texturality’ of creativity, drawing on my own affiliation to the performing arts. For my evidence, I turn to a few creative categories from the ancient Indian tract of the Natyasastra (circa first century BC–second century AD), one of the earliest encyclopedias of performance in the world. What concerns me here are not the minutiae of technicality relating to the micro-movements of eyes, neck, chest, hands, hips, legs, feet, down to the most infinitesimal signs of psychophysical expressivity. The terminological virtuosity of the Natyasastra in Sanskrit would be somewhat out of place in this chapter; it would also be misleading because the sheer knowledge of all these hundreds of movements and micro-movements does not necessarily ensure the ‘creativity’ of the performance. Rattling off the minute categories can be an act of pedantry, but where creativity counts is in the actual embodiment or expression of these movements. Therefore, while the fingers in one hand or both can be positioned in any number of combinations to create hastas (hand-gestures), denoting a vista of objects and phenomena and emotional registers, it is hasta-prana which makes the gestures come alive through the infusion of breath (prana). (In a sense, this is not very different from that excruciatingly beautiful line attributed to Emily Dickinson when she asked, ‘Do my poems breathe?’)

In this embodiment of emotions through breath, one is alerted to the enormously subtle, if not evanescent dimensions of creative expression in performance. Even when dealing with the practicalities of dramaturgical structure, it is telling how the primary ingredients of creativity appear to be elusive, beginning with kama (desire), bija (seed), and bindu (drop), which dilate and catalyze a chemistry of actions constituting the plot of the play. This play, however, only begins to make sense when the entire process is received – or more specifically tasted – by the spectators through the experience of rasa (literally, ‘juice’). I realize that I am merely sketching the mutations of one of the most complex aesthetic categories from the Indian subcontinent, but for my purpose here, I would stress that creativity is not an inherent category, but more of a relational process in which the thing perceived is shared through a transpersonal exchange and abstraction of emotions.

Who shares? Is it the actor or the spectator or both? Or some other third entity that emerges out of the imaginary of the experience in which the actor, character, fictional situation, reception, and the suspended historical moment of time, are all immersed in one transcendent moment of bliss? While the philosophical intricacy of such questions cannot be answered within the framework of this chapter, they indicate that creativity is not just the agency of the so-called creator, it also encompasses the capacity to receive – and induce – the process of creativity through the imaginative inputs of the spectator/listener.

Creativity is, therefore, a deeply participatory process, which at one level can be linked to the more current vogue for ‘interactivity’, as in video games (one of the most lucrative multi-billion products of the creative industries). The difference, however, is that the images of the video game, more often than not linked to raging battles and galactic missiles in outer space or terrorist zones, have already been created by the designer(s), whose creativity is patented and branded. While these images can be manipulated by the reflexes of those who are playing the game, the images themselves are already fixed, though reassembled, quite unlike the emotions and sensations shared in the exchange of rasa which are not spelled out in advance. Rather, they can exist only in the process of their evolution in an imaginary space, where the pleasure of the aesthetic experience is at once ‘disciplined’ and ‘trained’ through specific protocols, and yet free of these constraints in the actual moment of enjoyment.

The problem of exclusivity

Returning to my broader purpose of attempting to assess the modalities of creativity in the contemporary world, I would acknowledge that there are at least two difficulties with the invocation of rasa (or, other such traditional aesthetic categories like hana, or ‘flower’, as formulated by Zeami in the context of Noh theatre). One problem could be that these categories are far too refined and, almost inevitably, they are at once exclusionary and exclusivist. They demand specific modes of enculturation which are, more often than not, linked to the privileges of class and a particular education of the senses. Representing a more heightened form of ‘distinction’ than Bourdieu (1984) could have imagined in his examination of social and cultural capital in a predominantly bourgeois milieu, one should acknowledge that the acquisition of rasa (as a discourse rather than a lived practice) can result in a brahmanical assertion of cultural supremacy, which exudes violence in its regimentation of the senses passing as authentically ‘Indian’.

One caveat needs to be added here to qualify the argument. Exclusivity, I would argue...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Stuart Hall
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• List of boxes, figures, photos, plates and tables
• Introduction
• Part 1 Issues and Patterns in Cultural Expression
• Part 2 Indicator Suites
• References: Data Suites & Digests
• Index