Paradoxes of “creativity”: Examining the creative process through an antenarrative lens (original) (raw)

In this article, we point the importance of studying creativity as a dynamic and situated process while also taking account of the subject point of view. Thus, we propose a conceptual and methodological approach rooted in Vygotsky’s social constructivism (Vygotsky, 2004/1967), in order to understand the various determiners involved in this process, and this, with the collaboration of the subject, to explain created meanings. In this study, we focus on children. In order to identify the process promoting creativity, two models of creativity are put in perspective: the Narrative Activity Model (Decortis, 2001 ; 2012) and the Creative thinking spiral (Resnick, 2007).

Common understandings of creativity reduce it to a flash of insight or to a personal characteristic of a highly-gifted person. This paper develops an alternative way of understanding creativity departing from a series of interviews with local painters by conceptualizing creativity as a process of articulating and getting caught up in a “meshwork” of materials, places, spaces and social encounters. Using assemblage theoretical framework, my perspective examines how different elements (both human and non-human) are brought together in flows of connections. Looking at the art world this paper takes into account also the materiality of the creative process and inquiry into how the materiality of working materials (paint, coal, brushes etc.) and the materiality of the space affect and are affected in the creativity assemblage. As such, departing from an anthropocentric perspective on artistic creativity, that takes into consideration only the meanings attributed by people (especially the artist) to forms, social uses and trajectories of artistic objects.

Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska conclude their the introduction to Culture Machine’s volume 11 on the topic of ‘Creative Media’, with ‘an open invitation and an injunction - to keep inventing well, that is to say, creatively and critically, forms ever new’ (2010: 5). In this project, which finds a more thorough articulation in their subsequent book, Life after New Media (2012), the authors challenge us to think creativity not through its present-day attachment to the agenda of post-industrial capitalism, but rather through the ‘processes of mediation’ of ‘our being and becoming with the technological world’, that is, through ‘the acts and processes of temporarily stabilizing the world into media, agents, relations, and networks’ (2012: xv). But what is at stake when we are invited to invent well in this way and what might it mean in practice? While the project of Creative Media problematizes clear distinctions between ontology and epistemology, politics and ethics, my intention here is to deepen the project’s critical and analytical rubric by focusing on matters of ontology and, on this basis, explore the politics of ‘inventing well’.

The aim of this paper is to discuss different approaches to creativity and underline the cultural nature of its genesis. Biological genius (the “He-paradigm”) and psychological-individualistic (the “I-paradigm”) standpoints are contrasted with social and cross-cultural ones (the “We-paradigm”) and the cultural psychology of creativity is introduced and positioned. This emerging paradigm, drawing from both social accounts of creativity and the latest developments in cultural psychology and the theory of social representations, emphasises the contextual and generative nature of creative acts and employs a person (creator) – other (community) – object (artefacts) model. Creativity is conceptualized as a complex process that leads to the generation of new artefacts by working with “culturally-impregnated” materials within a representational space. This particular viewpoint highlights the meaning-oriented nature of creativity, its link to personal and group identities, and also calls for ecological research and situational interventions. One of the central issues addressed by the cultural psychology of creativity is the problem of “genesis” or how creativity is developed and manifested within cultural settings. The pioneer in this field is undoubtedly D.W. Winnicott who asserted at the beginning of the 70’s that creativity and cultural experience are twin-born. Children experiment culture creatively and they do so in the “third” or “potential” space, one that we can identify today with the social world of representations. In his view of ontogenesis the origins of creativity are found in the first forms of playing and are shaped by the nature of the mother – child relationship. The final part of the paper will develop further this account and show how creativity emerges from early childhood within a symbolic space where children “play” with artefactual resources, a space of dialogue between self and significant others, constantly alimented by social and collective systems of beliefs and practices, life experiences and communication. Key-words: creativity paradigms, the cultural psychology of creativity, representational space, genetic account, culture, artefacts, play

The present article addresses the question of ‘When can we say something is creative?’ and, in answering it, takes a critical stand towards past and present scientific definitions of creativity. It challenges an implicit assumption in much psychological theory and research that creativity exists as an ‘objective’ feature of persons or products, universally recognised and independent of social agreement and cultural systems of norms and beliefs. Focusing on everyday life creative outcomes, the article includes both theoretical accounts and empirical examples from a research exploring creativity evaluations in the context of folk art. In the end, a multi-layered perspective of creativity assessment emerges, integrating dimensions such as newness and originality, value and usefulness, subjective reception and cultural reception of creative products. Implications for how we understand and study creativity are discussed.

Recurrent, most recently Romantic, ideologies conceptualize creativity as the solitary, ex nihilo creation of products of self-evident and universal value—most emblematically in the field of art—by highly exceptional individuals. Such ideologies obscure the social dimensions of creativity that come into view via anthropological analysis: (a) the nature and ubiquity of creative processes as communicative and improvisational events, with real-time emergent properties, involving human and nonhuman agents in the context of pre-existing yet malleable genres and constraints; (b) the role of socialization in the making of creative individuals, implicating processes of social reproduction; and (c) the processes by which certain objects and individuals are recognized and constructed as exemplars of creativity and thus acquire their value. This review discusses these dimensions by synthesizing cultural and linguistic/semiotic anthropological research. It concludes by addressing the recent transformation of creativity into the neoliberal philosopher's stone and the potential contribution of anthropology to the demystification of this transformation.