Creativity in perpetual personal and cultural motion? (original) (raw)

2019, Theory & Psychology

… the demand to be creative is more unpredictable than other demands, since it is contingent on the fickle whims of the audience. Andreas Reckwitz (Kindle location 7603) Contemporary western society is now organized on principles quite different from those which brought us modernity. Expectations for ongoing creativity and affectivity have overtaken expectations for dispassionate, predictable, productivity central to the functioning of modern factories and bureaucratic institutions. Recognizing these expectations and how we got to them is the genealogical project of The Invention of Creativity, and its author, Andreas Reckwitz, a German sociologist. Creativity, of course, is not a recent "invention"; but its functioning as a primary organizing and animating principle for western society is portrayed as the case, by Reckwitz. This is a challenging yet rewarding book for those interested in well-argued links between macro-and micronotions of social constructionist theorizing, to how these might apply in social and psychological ways to our contemporary circumstances. For readers familiar with Foucault's genealogical projects (e.g., Birth of the Clinic, 1974; Madness and Civilization, 1988), Reckwitz's volume provides a related hermeneutic focus on being historically downstream from the cultural effects of particular ideas and practices. The social constructionist element of such genealogies is how much they rely on and develop from somewhat arbitrary and changing cultural meanings and values. The emotionally sterile rationality associated with the modernity premised on enlightenment science, for Reckwitz, never erased human needs for the affective spaces and experiences marginalized to spheres of life often associated with religion and art. In this book, Reckwitz turns particularly to art and creativity, tracing how it increasingly took centre stage to bring us what animates and organizes our personal experiences and contemporary western life. Central to Reckwitz's thesis is a story of how cultural aestheticization (i.e., how western culture came to put aesthetic values, activities, and experiences as primary) shifted