Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value

Keith Negus, Michael J Pickering

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761970767, 9780761970750
• eBook ISBN: 9781446233238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

?There have been few critical engagements with the concept of creativity in recent years, so the authors provide an important contribution in drawing attention to what is arguably at the heart of much of what we most value in culture?

- Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles

?In this important book, Keith Negus and Michael Pickering challenge commonplace assumptions about creativity and casual invocations of genius. They give comfort neither to popular wisdom nor to academic convention. Drawing on the work of philosophers, sociologists, political theorists and economists, as well as artists, musicians and novelists, they raise profound questions about the very ideas which sustain our understanding of art and culture?

- Professor John Street, University of East Anglia

?It?s all too rare to read a cultural studies book that offers any real originality. This one achieves this, not only by addressing debates and sources neglected in the field, but also by traversing high and low culture, and all points between?

- Dave Hesmondhalgh, The Open University

Creativity has become a buzzword and key issue in debates about cultural policy, human growth and the media and cultural industries. It has also become a very misused term used to describe anything from musical and artistic genius, to shady financial accounting, to the teaching of children and the management of employees.

But what does it mean?

Negus and Pickering provide a clear and logical way of understanding what we describe as creative, and how this term has become central to attaching cultural value. Their book:

· Develops an approach which enables us to think of creativity as both ordinary and exceptional

· Focuses on creativity as a way of rethinking key concepts in the study of culture such as:

Convention; innovation; tradition and experience.

This book is useful to those studying Media and Cultural Studies who need to understand Cultural Production, Communication, Popular Culture and Cultural Theory.

1

Creation

A tangled web of meanings and associations has grown up around the word creativity. These threads link together conceptions of the elevated and the mundane, the exceptional and the ordinary. They are a legacy of the term’s etymological development which are usually ignored, but are highly significant. They are important elements in the range of characteristics that have been attached to the term creativity.

It has often only been either the elevated and exceptional, or the everyday and ordinary, which have been highlighted. One confers on the term a rarefied and occasionally mystical air, the other can make the word seem commonplace and even banal. Rarely have the links between both these senses of the term creativity been retained and explored.

We seek to recover the power inherent in the term for bringing the elevated and the mundane into conjunction, and for illuminating how the exceptional and the ordinary feed off each other. In this chapter we begin exploring these connections and tensions by tracing the changing meanings of the term creativity within an influential western trajectory of thought. In doing this, we highlight the legacies that are carried into contemporary discussions and the false dichotomies and practical dynamics they produce.

From Creation to Creativity

Although most religions have some type of creation myth, the contemporary western concept of creativity can be traced back through a Judaeo-Christian tradition of thought to ideas about the divine creation of the physical and human world (Boorstin, 1992; Williams, 1976). The strength of this tradition made the emergence of its secularised meanings a slow and protracted process. The term changed only gradually from its earlier, exclusively cosmological reference, as in divine creation, bringing the world itself and the creatures within it into being, with the ancillary term creature deriving from the same etymological stem. Expansion of the sense of the term began in the sixteenth century, particularly in relation to processes of making by people. Its modern meanings emerge from this new humanist emphasis, the earliest tendency to which can be traced in Renaissance theory. Nevertheless, the prior cosmological reference remained powerful enough for human artistic creation to be at times unfavourably compared with nature as the external manifestation of divine creation, or for the word to be used pejoratively to indicate falseness and contrivance.

Consequently, the transfer of the attribution of creative power from God to Man, with a characteristically male monopoly of reference to transgender human energies and abilities, was both hesitant, because of the obvious danger of blasphemy, and intermixed, as in the idea of the revelatory powers of art, disclosing to human wonder the hand of the Almighty, or of art as an allegory of divine inspiration. The span of this long transfer of meaning is suggested by Donne’s conception of poetry as ‘counterfeit Creation’ and, two hundred years later, Shelley’s stress, in his Defence of Poetry, on the capacity of poetry to ‘create anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration’. By the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s ‘poetic creativity’ could be explicitly named as such, given an expressivist gloss and described as ‘spontaneous flow’ (Ward, 1875, Vol. 1: 506), for these aspects of the term had by then become established and distinctively modern. They would not have been available to Shakespeare himself, who used the earlier form of ‘creation’ to denote something false, as in that ‘dagger of the mind’ proceeding ‘from the heat oppressed brain’ in Macbeth, or in the twinned questions posed in The Comedy of Errors: ‘Are you a God? Would you create me new?’ Such confinement of use was necessary because the modern sense of the word only began to gain in significance from the later seventeenth century onwards.

This specifically modern significance came about through its consciously validating association with art. By the time of the Romantics, the term’s positive human value was assured, though strong threads of its earliest meanings were retained, with artistic activity carrying with it associations of something magical or metaphysical, and with creativity exclusively manifest in the poet as, in some guises, a sort of messenger from God or, in others, an intensely perceptive spirit able to elevate our seeing to a superior plane of reality. For example, the German Romantic poet and novelist, Novalis, valued artistic creation for being ‘as much an end in itself as the divine creation of the universe, and one as original and as grounded on itself as the other: because the two are one, and God reveals himself in the poet as he gives himself corporeal form in the visible universe’ (cited in Taylor, 1985: 230). This is a view which easily slides into pantheism, as a metaphysical reconciliation of God, world and human beings, but it is through ideas of poetic and artistic inspiration that the older meanings of the word ‘creative’ have proved resilient, even as the terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’ have themselves been more radically changed. The earliest example (1728) of an explicit connection of imaginative human creation with a noumenal source, in the mythological personification of an artistically inspiring goddess, mingles earlier and later senses together in one rolling phrase: ‘companion of the Muse, Creative Power, Imagination’ (Williams, 1976: 73). The reference to imagination is a specifically modern emphasis, while its companion connects back to the idea of some otherworldly assistance in the creative process.

The idea of a transcendent muse has for a long time seemed decidedly dated, with all the resonance of a mannered literary conceit, yet the conception of divine inspiration in the act of writing poetry remained a remarkably strong, even if less than central, element in modernism. The characteristic effect has been to play down the act of writing itself, as a deliberately learned and practised craft. This is a point to which we shall return but, as an example, it can be detected in Yeats’s description of the act of poetic creation – ‘I made it out of a mouthful of air’ – as if his own shaping mind had been absent from the activity of composition. A poem for Yeats was ‘self-begotten’. It would be wrong to suppose that this way of accounting for the act of poetic creation is merely an enchanting legacy of the Celtic Twilight. Throughout the twentieth century, when the term ‘creativity’ became established as denoting the faculty to which the verb ‘create’ relates as a process, these earlier associations continued to be invoked as a very active and more than residual sense of the term. In his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire wrote of the way in which, for the ‘true artist’, the ‘ideal execution’ becomes ‘unconscious’ and ‘flowing’ (1972: 407–8). Similarly, John Lennon distinguished between the songs that he composed simply because a new album had to be produced, and the ‘real music…the music of the spheres, the music that surpasses understanding…I’m just a channel…I transcribe it like a medium’ (Waters, 1988). The composer, John Taverner, uses the same metaphor, and refers to ‘auditory visions’ when he feels that music is being dictated to him (Barber, 1999).

These descriptions of creative inspiration derive from the conception of it that grew to prominence during the Romantic period. This accommodated both the notion of being spoken through, used as a mouthpiece of the muse, and an emphasis on individual imagination and feeling, for it was through such faculties that authentic self-expression was felt to flow. More significantly, it was through imagination and feeling that the artist connected with the impulse of Nature, with the spirit, as Wordsworth felt it, that is deeply interfused in all living things and impels all objects of our thought. Allowing this impulse, this hidden current of life, to speak through us came to define the human act of creation for Romantic thinkers, with the artist become an emissary of the divine. The creative artist looked inward for a sense of providential order, harmony and moral significance, and strived to be in tune with Nature in order to experience life to its fullest and most complete. The connection backwards was with the sense of creation involving some metaphysical force, as in the divine ordination of the world and all in existence within it. But this force was now located within the individual human being, becoming the object of personal spiritual search for those seeking the wellspring of truth and beauty.

This organicist notion of creativity has had a powerful influence over the whole modern period, including among those who broke with Romanticism or developed aesthetic values counter to its central tenets. It distinguishes the artist as someone whose ‘inner’ voice emerges from self-exploration, and whose expressive power derives from imaginative depth. Artistic creativity has become synonymous with this sense of exploration and expressive power. As a form of radical subjectivism, it neglects other modes of creativity, such as the creativity sparked by dialogue and collaboration, or the creativity inherent in popular cultural traditions. Its influence over the development of the trend towards subject-centredness in modern culture, along with the accompanying ideal of authenticity, should not be underestimated.

The Romantic poet’s spiritual communion with Nature co-existed of course with physical energies and carnal pleasures, with ritual worship at the shrine of the sexual body. In a line that runs from Rousseau to 1960s counterculture, sensuality was valorised as a source of spiritual fulfilment, so reinforcing the puritanical distrust of artists as morally suspect, if not already damned. The greatest influence of the Romantic conception of artistic creativity has nevertheless been through its strong sense of expression as conjuring something forth, giving form to what is inchoate, and bringing an inner voice or vision into being. When this happens, expression involves a much fuller realisation of human potential, and so produces a defining moment in our lives. Our individual lives are shaped and fulfilled by such moments, in what is taken as a realisation of the particular originality lying within us.

Changing ideas about creativity have thus become integrally wrapped up in the modern sense of individuality. This is perhaps why the term creativity is invariably used in the singular, for the highest form of creative practice is generally assumed to be realised in the individual artist, rather than in any openly manifest form of collective production. Throughout the modern period, art has been regarded as the consummate expression of individual selfhood, shaping and bringing into shape a distinctive sense of the world and of the artist within it. In its particular manifestations, this is what critics understand and praise as the achievement of artistic vision. Such achievement illustrates how, in its modern, secularised conception, creativity retains key links with notions of spirituality and spiritual life that are far from being merely residual. Art in this non-mimetic formulation becomes a locus of spirituality that is alternative to formal religion yet cognate with it. Indeed, in some versions it becomes a substitute for religion in recompense for loss of faith or materialist values which are thereby disavowed.

From the Romantics onwards, loss of religious faith or antipathy to the values of industrial capitalism could generate a need for escape from the realities of material life. The sense of artistic creativity offered a spiritual alternative to what was seen as an aesthetically debased, socially hostile, money-grubbing world where goodness, love and beauty were fleeting. So, for example, William Morris wrote of young men of his generation having grown up during a period of dull bourgeois philistinism and so being ‘forced to turn back on ourselves’, for ‘only in ourselves and the world of art and literature was there any hope’ (Thompson, 1977: 14). Art and literature remained a continuing source of refuge from the mundane realities of the street, the factory and the counting house. It is the opposition between them that underlies the pathos of Yeats’s lines of retrospective self-assessment:

Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

The tension between mystical ideal and mundane life – or put another way, between poetic representation and prosaic reality – is central to modern conceptions of art and creativity. Indeed, it is the contrast between the metaphysical and the material, the elevated and the profane, which make the concept of creativity both fascinating and frustrating.

We want to argue that an informed understanding of this can be reached by attempting to reintegrate both the exceptional and pervasive meanings of the term. Three sets of issues accompany this attempt. Each of them follow, in different ways, from the inherited meanings and associations of the term which derive from its historical development.

First, any effort to articulate the experience of the creative process pushes us to the edge of what words can say. It inevitably involves having to bridge the gap between the sensational experience of creating – whether a song, poem or painting – and the necessity of translating an understanding of that experience into language that can be communicated to others. The endurance of this gap is perhaps unavoidable, since those acts of creativity in which someone is immersed and at one with the act itself are quite distinct from subsequent, relatively self-conscious efforts to describe what the creative process involves. This is why we often look to metaphorical forms of expression in referring to the phenomenological experience of creating and it is why certain creative experiences are rendered in a pseudo-religious or non-rational manner. Yet because creativity is always achieved within quite specific social, historical and political circumstances, we should at least be cautious about making or accepting any grand generalisations about this or any aspect of the creative process.

A second issue concerns the opposition between that which is felt to be merely produced and that which is experienced as truly inspired, which in turn informs the valuation of the creative product itself. For example, some novels, films and popular songs have enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success that has subsequently proved ephemeral, whilst others, often less recognised initially, have endured and become ‘classics’. The novels of Zola, the recordings of Robert Johnson, and the soundtracks to 1970s blaxploitation movies are cases in point, where their methods of production have retrospectively been re-assessed as more creative and inspired than had been recognised in contemporary judgements of the time, or where an earlier local recognition of their creative character has subsequently become more universally acknowledged. Regardless of the processes through which these shifts occur, the reasons for its occurrence and the evaluative principles applied are what generally go uninspected. The emphasis has been far more on certain kinds of art which possess a transcendental quality, any reference to which is generally the point at which analysis begins to evaporate.

This kind of distinction has at times been confounded with another of a much longer lineage, being manifest, for example, in the different aesthetic appreciation of poetry in Plato and Aristotle. The retention of an opposition between the claim that art represents a ‘superior reality’ and the denigration of it as ‘mere romance’ or ‘inferior’ fiction (pulp, trash or whatever) is, as Raymond Williams pointed out, a logical development of the theory of art as imitation, which can be traced back to its appearance in the ancient Greek classics (Williams, 1961: 27). The disparagement of artistic or literary work as social or historical observation is, by contrast, specifically modern, and from the nineteenth century was tied up with the development of positivism in the social sciences and of objectivism as a major aim of historiography. These negative evaluations run in counterpoint to the expressivist conception of creativity, as a sort of shadow inheritance. A sceptical regard of the use of literary sources still applies in professional historical practice, despite the insightful explanatory uses to which they have been put, and the recent attention paid, in meta-historical commentary to the use of rhetorical devices, tropes and narrative emplotments in actual historical writing.

A third and related point, following from the previous ones, is the way in which the idea of creative activity has retained an integral distinction between a type of inspired, ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ creativity and a more routine, self-conscious, manipulative and false sense of the term. This dichotomy is apparent on the one hand in the appeal to the spontaneity of creativity in reference to Shakespeare’s work or in Lennon’s reflections on his ‘transcription’ of ‘real music’, and on the other in its contrast with material produced as a result of the contractual obligations to deliver a new dramatic script or songs for the next album. It can be found, formulated in different ways, throughout the history of the concept and its gradual process of secularisation, or quasi-secularisation. This process led to the shift of emphasis onto human capacity, with its accompanying transfer of originality, of bringing into existence, from God to the human imagination.

Between Enlightenment and Romanticism

Though it was only realised in retrospect, the full accomplishment of this transfer of the capacity for creation marked a decisive break. Among its various repercussions, the relation between creativity and selfhood, and the rise of innovation as a distinct cultural value, are of enormous significance. They are both connected with the sense of originality, and with the realisation of a way of seeing, making or saying that is recognised as different from what has come before. Ideas about creativity have become integral to a modern sense of individuality and subjectivity, innovation and newness.

At the heart of these conceptions lies another dichotomy, one which becomes manifest in the conflict between imagination and reason. Romanticism’s identification of the source of human creativity in the imagination was a reaction against the Enlightenment’s championing of reason as the supreme human faculty. For the Romantics, the Enlightenment’s claims for the sovereignty of reason raised the prospect of an instrumental secularity lacking in the moral or spiritual dimension necessary for personal fulfilment and cultural nourishment. Romanticism located this dimension in the creative imagination. The free, wakeful play of the imagination, it was felt, provided a life-enhancing presence in the process of being that would provide the appropriate balance to a secularised, utilitarian society, a force that would break the cold, clinical fetters of rationalism and instrumental approaches to knowledge.

The creative imagination became exalted as a human and aesthetic value precisely because the faculty of self-making and its perceived relation to self-produced cultures was felt to be inhibited, at the start of the modern period, by the newly established stance of intellectual disengagement, neutrality and calculation. It was because this stance was seen to lend vital support to scientific rationality and the means-end rationale of industrial capitalism that the creative imagination became revered as a way of realising a ‘heightened, more vibrant quality of life’ (Taylor, 1989: 372).

During the nineteenth century, the value assigned to the creative imagination in western societies gained in strength as a response to a crisis of faith and the gradual decline of religion as a significant source of meaning, insight and belief. Yet neither Nature as the external world nor the sense of ‘nature within’ have been able to offer a replacement of this source in the way the Romantics believed. The Romantic argument has been that science has de-spiritualised Nature as the external world, robbing it of its mystery and magic, while industrial capitalism has tamed and now threatens to destroy it. While we can no longer be innocently attuned to Nature as a source of unquestionable moral good, an enduring spiritual need for art and art-making runs parallel to the desire for an integrated relationship to the natural world. It is partly because of this that ecological and environmental issues have become a rallying point of recent social movements. At the same time, Nature, construed in either sense, is no longer the locus of the creative imagination in the same way as it was for the Romantic movement.

The locus may have changed, but the value hasn’t. The creative imagination continues to exert a strong pull against rationalistic modes of thought and action. It is commonly recognised that the twin traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism have guided us in quite contrary directions. What is not so commonly recognised is that their profound influence over the past two centuries lies also in attempts somehow to reconcile them, to draw on the powers of both disengaged reason and the creative imagination. So much of modern culture swings back and forth between them, but moving towards ways of resolving the tensions between them is also characteristically modern, even if the impetus towards such a reconciliation comes originally from Romanticism.

The Romantic vision of integration and wholeness conceived of spiritual and intellectual fu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Creation
• 2 Experience
• 3 Industry
• 4 Convention
• 5 Tradition
• 6 Division
• 7 Genius
• Bibliography
• Index