[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Kevin Hamilton]

Hello all - 

Thanks to Simon for framing this discussion so well. Starting with ontology over epistemology is a great place to go, so I look forward to the coming month.

For now, I'll just contribute a few quotes and examples in response to the threads so far.

First - in relation to comments about religion - one might just as readily look to the process of secularization when looking for creativity's problematic heritage. For the 2007 MyCreativity conference in Holland, Marion von Osten described creativity's modern emergence as a social obligation,  linking it to individual freedom as a compulsory part of living in a capitalist economy:

"On the one hand, then, creativity shows itself to be the democratic variant of genius: the ability to be creative is bestowed on everyone. On the other hand everyone is required to develop her/his creative potential...The subjects comply with these new relations of power apparently by free will. In Nikolas Rose’s terms, they are ‘obliged to be free’, urged to be mature, autonomous and responsible for themselves.." (http://eipcp.net/transversal/0207/vonosten/en)

Where religions situated creativity within ritual and processual fantasy, secularism gave us individual compulsory creativity as an economic instrument - complete with mechanisms for reflexivity. Collective creativities are just as susceptible to this. Growing interest in collective creation is as likely as any a sign of modern subjectivity's transformation during late capital. Newfield and Rayner wrote about the growing interest in collectivism and self-organization among management theorists:

"In the idealised view of its advocates, the learning organisation is a mobile, self-deconstructing system, perfectly suited to the unstable environments of “post-industrial” or “informational” capitalism....The practical question for contemporary management and human resources (HR) theorists is how to create the kinds of workers that are capable of accumulating tacit knowledge and using it in the service of the organisation." (http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/newfield_rayner.html)

So how do we attend to creativity's ontology as a condition of being social, without ending up with just another form of instrumentalized "freedom?"

I find some hope in looking to the role of ontology in epistemologies of individual creative action. Sociologist Norbert Elias provided one of my favorite descriptions of creativity:

"The pinnacle of artistic creation is achieved when the spontaneity and inventiveness of the fantasy-stream are so fused with knowledge of the regularities of the material and the judgement of the artist’s conscience that the innovative fantasies emerge as if by themselves in a way that matches the demands of both material and conscience. This is one of the most socially fruitful types of sublimation process."

I love this description because it accounts for fantasy/desire, the limits of perception, and the fact that the material into which we work is just more regular than we are. Translate this into a discussion of group creativity, and things get very interesting.

It's also why I keep hacking at the tired rhetoric of creativity in my institutional home. Where I used to roll my eyes and wait for the meeting/lecture to be over (ever sat through a talk by Daniel Pink?), I now look for the inevitable limits against which the fantasies of neoliberal creative economies must hit. The Floridians don't know their material - they are bad craftspeople, and the stakes are higher than they know. We can make sure to be there to assert other fantasies, to contribute to their limited sensoria, to remind them of the walls against which they will hit, hopefully before more people get hurt.

Kevin Hamilton