Preface to the English Edition

The first German edition of this book appeared in 2012. This English translation provides the occasion to re-evaluate the book within the context of the Anglophone discussion around creativity and society that has been emerging since the beginning of the new millennium. An aspect of this re-evaluation is the question as to what degree the book reflects a specifically German context.

The role of creativity as a cultural blueprint and an economic factor in the formation of late modern society first emerged as an object of inquiry around 2000, particularly in Great Britain, North America and Australia, where it has remained prominent in discussion in sociology as well as in broader intellectual and political discourse. Two of these contexts are of particular note here. First, a mainly academic but also popular discourse has been taken up on the relevance of ‘creativity’ to the economic prosperity of contemporary societies, regions and cities and the emergence of a ‘creative class’ of producers and consumers. This discussion has also carried over into political consulting and urban planning.¹ Second, research areas have developed in sociology and cultural studies dealing with the so-called creative industries, which have been spearheading this economic and social transformation. These industries encompass the audio-visual, print and digital media, as well as the arts and crafts, film, design, music, architecture and advertising. The abundant research in this field has been concerned mostly with the detailed analysis of creative labour and the cultural markets, the structural transformation of consumption and the global spread of the creative industries. It has also critically studied the increasingly global phenomenon of the state subsidising of the creative industries.²

The Invention of Creativity takes a step back from these sociological and economic analyses of the creative economy of the present and takes in a more historical and theoretical view of society as a whole. The book regards today's creative industries as the tip of a much bigger iceberg, which conceals below the surface a more fundamental and historically far-reaching transformation of modern Western society. The main claim of the book is the following: late modern society has been fundamentally transformed by the expectation and desire to be creative. What is meant here by creativity is the capacity to generate cultural and aesthetic novelty. Modern society has become geared to the constant production and reception of the culturally new. This applies to the economy, the arts, lifestyle, the self, the media, and urban development. We are witnessing the crystallization of what I have called a creativity dispositif, which is increasingly determining the shape of late modern society.

The term dispositif signals a certain influence coming from Michel Foucault. The book undertakes a genealogical analysis. I reach from the present back into the past, through the twentieth century as far back as the late eighteenth. Creativity is taken not as a given but, rather, as an enigma, as sexuality was for Foucault. How did creativity come to be accepted as a desirable norm? In which heterogeneous complexes of practices and discourses has the dispositif of creativity gradually been developing? The genealogical approach avoids economic reductionism. The economy is certainly one of the main places where the culture of the new develops – a complex I refer to in the book as aesthetic capitalism. Yet the scope of the creativity dispositif extends beyond that of the economy. It also takes in the internal dynamics of media technologies and the human sciences, above all psychology, with its techniques of the self. Since the 1980s, the dispositif has also been propped up by state control in the form of what I have called cultural governmentality, urban planning being among the most conspicuous examples of this. Yet political reductionism must also be avoided. As such, the study undertaken here is not orthodoxly Foucauldian. It is concerned less with revealing the creativity dispositif as a new system of domination than it is with working out the internal dynamics and the internal contradictions of what can be called the society of creativity. For my line of argument, the following point is crucial: in modern culture, the orientation towards creativity began in romanticism in the marginalized niche of the arts. Ever since, it has been spreading to more and more parts of society. Sociology therefore has to take the field of the arts more seriously than it did in the past. The arts do not merely watch from the sidelines; instead, they are a structural blueprint for late modern society as a whole.

In this process, the tension between an anti-institutional desire for creativity and the institutionalized demand for creativity has continued to mount to the present day and has now become acute. For this reason, it is important to take seriously the affective dimension of the creativity dispositif, the importance of aesthetic practices in contemporary society, the existence of what I have termed aesthetic sociality, and the way the dispositif directs audiences’ sensuous, affective attention. These aspects have been left underexposed by the tradition following Foucault. Yet they need to be brought to light if we are to be able to take up a critical stance towards the society of creativity.

But we have still not answered the question ‘Is the book informed by a specifically German perspective or not?’ While it was being written, the question did not occur to me, but it comes up now as the book is presented to an Anglophone readership. I completed part of my studies in Great Britain in the 1990s, and my approach has since then been strongly influenced by the international, Anglophone and also Francophone discussion in social theory and cultural sociology. Moreover, the creativity dispositif embraces a diversity of phenomena that have assumed international dimensions, having become a major force shaping society, whether in London, New York, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Melbourne or Berlin. This internationalism tends to mute the specifically German accent of the book altogether. Nevertheless, there remains a certain German timbre which likely has three main sources.

First, German sociology is strongly characterized by a fundamental interest in theorizing modernity. This stretches from Max Weber and Georg Simmel to Jürgen Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and Ulrich Beck's work on the society of risk. The theory of modernity is also a key concern of the present book. A characteristic of this tradition is that it equates modernity a priori not with capitalism but rather with what it calls ‘formal rationalization’ and ‘social differentiation’. Underlying the book is a re-engagement with these two concepts: the late modern creativity dispositif pushes modernity's optimization imperative to the limit, while at the same time it is driven by a deeply anti-rational affectivity. Further, the sociality of creativity is manifest in a broad spectrum of heterogeneous, occasionally autonomous social spheres ranging from the arts to economics, human sciences and the mass media. In each case it manifests in different ways, yet always as part of the one overall structure.

Second, the discourse of the aesthetic in philosophy and the humanities, or Geisteswissenschaften, has also influenced the book. Since Kant and Schiller, German philosophy has been intensely concerned with the aesthetic as an autonomous sphere of social practice. More importantly, the interdisciplinary humanities in the German-speaking world since the 1980s have gone outside the narrow confines of these idealist aesthetics to bring to light the social importance of aesthetic practices and their mediality, as well as the way in which they structure perception and feeling, thus recognizing the power of aestheticization in late or postmodernity.³ Noteworthy in this context is also the prominence of German media theory. These newer branches of interdisciplinary German humanities (as distinct from what is generally understood in English as Cultural Studies) have significantly influenced the book's account of the creativity dispositif as a specific manifestation of aestheticization. One effect of this influence has been the reframing of the question of the relation between social modernity and aesthetic modernity.

The third German-language context from which the book originated is more difficult to outline because it is strictly contemporary. Since the mid-2000s, the members of a new generation of German social and cultural theorists have been working independently of one another to produce a series of studies adopting a new approach to the critical examination of late modern society and culture. Just as there has emerged since 2000 a new ‘Berlin school’ in German film, undertaking a uniquely sociological, microscopic inspection of the complexity of contemporary life,⁴ so too are emerging the contours of a ‘new German critical analysis’ in social and cultural theory, taking a macroscopic view of late modern culture. Ulrich Bröckling's The Entrepreneurial Self, Hartmut Rosa's Social Acceleration and Joseph Vogl's The Specter of Capital can be counted among this movement. I see The Invention of Creativity as also situated within it.⁵ These books are certainly distinct from one another thematically and methodologically. Yet they share in common an interest in critically penetrating to the deep structure of late modern culture and society, a task requiring an historically and theoretically informed optics. In the wake of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s, Germany has been increasingly pushed into a political and economic leadership role at the centre of Europe, a role it assumes with reluctance and hesitation. It is perhaps no coincidence that at about the same time German intellectuals began embarking on a fundamental meditation of the crises and contradictions of Western late modernity as a whole.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Steven Black for his precise and sensitive translation. I am also indebted to Daniel Felscher for his assistance in sourcing the biographical details and quotations. Finally, my thanks go to Geisteswissenschaften International, without the generous support of which this publication would not have been possible.

Berlin, summer 2016

Notes

The Inevitability of Creativity

If there is a desire in contemporary society that defies comprehension, it is the desire not to be creative. It is a desire that guides individuals and institutions equally. To be incapable of creativity is a problematic failing, but one that can be overcome with patient training. But not to want to be creative, consciously to leave creative potential unused and to avoid creatively bringing about new things, that would seem an absurd disposition, just as it would have seemed absurd not to want to be moral or normal or autonomous in other times. Must not any individual, any institution, indeed the whole of society, strive towards the kind of creative self-transformation for which they would seem, by their very nature, to be predestined?

The extraordinary importance attributed to creativity as an individual and social phenomenon in our time is illustrated by Richard Florida's programmatic text The Rise of the Creative Class (2002).¹ According to Florida, the main transformation that occurred in Western societies between the end of the Second World War and the present day is more cultural than technological. This transformation has been ongoing since the 1970s and consists in the emergence and spread of a ‘creative ethos’. The bearer of this creative ethos is a new, rapidly spreading and culturally dominant professional group, the ‘creative class’, busy involved in producing ideas and symbols, working in fields ranging from advertising to software development, from design to consulting and tourism. In Florida's account, creativity is not restricted to private self-expression. In the last three decades, it has become a ubiquitous economic demand in the worlds of labour and the professions.

Florida's study is far from being a neutral account. Instead, it endeavours to promote the very phenomenon it is discussing. Consequently, his view is selective. Nevertheless, there is much evidence to indicate that the normative model of creativity, accompanied by corresponding practices aimed at harnessing institutionally those apparently fleeting bursts of creative energy, has been entering the heart of Western culture since the 1980s at the latest and is now stubbornly occupying it.² In late modern times, creativity embraces a duality of the wish to be creative and the imperative to be creative, subjective desire and social expectations. We want to be creative and we ought to be creative.

What does creativity mean in this context? At first glance, creativity has two significations. First, it refers to the potential and the act of producing something dynamically new. Creativity privileges the new over the old, divergence over the standard, otherness over sameness. This production of novelty is thought of not as an act occurring once only but, rather, as something that happens again and again over a longer period of time. Second, the topos of creativity harks back to the modern figure of the artist, the artistic and the aesthetic in general.³ In this sense, creativity is more than purely technical innovation. It is also the capacity to receive sensuous and affective stimulation from a new, human-made object. Aesthetic novelty is associated with vitality and the joy of experimentation, and its maker is pictured as a creative self along the lines of the artist. Creative novelty does not merely fulfil a function, like mere useful technological invention; it is instead perceived, experienced and enjoyed in its own right both by the observer and by the person who brought it about.

From a sociological viewpoint, creativity is not simply a superficial semantic phenomenon but, rather, a crucial organizing principle of Western societies over the last thirty years or so. This development was initially most noticeable at the economic and technical heart of capitalist societies in the sphere of labour and the professions. What will be referred to here as contemporary ‘aesthetic capitalism’ is based, in its most advanced form, on forms of work that have long since moved beyond the familiar model of the routine activities performed by labourers and office workers, with their standardized, matter-of-fact ways of engaging with objects and people. These older forms of labour have been replaced by work activities that demand the constant production of new things, in particular of signs and symbols – texts, images, communication, procedures, aesthetic objects, body modifications – for a consumer public in search of originality and surprise. This applies to the media and design, education and consultation, fashion and architecture. Consumer culture has generated a desire for these aesthetically attractive, innovative products, and the creative industries are at pains to supply them. The figure of the creative worker active in the creative economy has become highly attractive, extending beyond its original, narrower professional segment.⁴ The focus on creativity is, however, not restricted to work practices but extends also to organizations and institutions which have submitted themselves to an imperative of permanent innovation. Business organizations in particular, but increasingly also public (political and scientific) institutions, have been reshaped in order to be able not only to generate new products on a constant basis but also ceaselessly to renew their internal structures and procedures, honing their responsiveness to a permanently changing outside environment.⁵

Since the 1970s, the two-pronged advance of the creative urge and the creativity imperative has been overstepping the confines of career, work and organization to seep deeper and deeper into the cultural logic underlying the private lives of the post-materialist middle classes – and it has not stopped there. The late modern incarnations of these classes strive above all towards individualization. However, this tendency has assumed the particular form of the creative shaping of the individual's subjectivity itself. This is what Richard Rorty has described as a culture of ‘self-creation’.⁶ The aspects of self-development and self-realization implied in the late modern striving for self-creation cannot be understood as universal human qualities. They originate rather in a historically unique vocabulary of the self emanating from the ambit of the psychology of ‘self-growth’. This psychology is in turn the preserver of a romantic heritage. It is within the context of this psychology that the concern originally arose to develop, in an experimental, quasi-artistic way, all facets of the self in personal relations, in leisure activities, in consumer styles and in self-technologies of the body and the soul. This preoccupation with creativity is often construed as a striving for originality, for uniqueness.⁷

Finally, there is another area where the social orientation towards creativity is readily apparent: in the transformation of the urban, in the reshaping of built space in larger Western cities. Since the 1980s, many metropolitan cities, from Barcelona to Seattle, from Copenhagen to Boston, have been re-creating themselves aesthetically with the aid of spectacular building projects, renovating whole quarters, establishing new cultural institutions and striving to generate appealing atmospheres. It is no longer enough for cities to fulfil their basic functions of providing living and working space as in earlier industrial society. Cities are now expected to pursue permanent aesthetic self-renewal, constantly seizing the attention of inhabitants and visitors alike. Cities want to be, and are expected to be, ‘creative cities’.⁸ Creative work, innovative organization, self-developing individuals and creative cities are all participants in a comprehensive, concerted cultural effort to produce novelty on a permanent basis, feeding the desire for the creation and perception of novel and original objects, events and identities.

In principle, this is all extremely curious. We need only take a small step backwards to become conscious of the strangeness of all this creativity, of the commitment to the idea of creativity as an unavoidable and universally valid blueprint for society and the self. It is the current omnipresence of this very commitment that obscures what a strange development this is. The idea of creativity was certainly not first invented by our post- or late modernity. However, from a sociological point of view, creativity was present in modernity yet was essentially limited until around the 1970s to cultural and social niches.⁹ It was the successive waves of artistic and aesthetic movements starting with Sturm und Drang and romanticism that engendered the conviction that both the world and the self were things that had to be creatively formed. Rearing up against the bourgeois and post-bourgeois establishment, opposed to its morals, its purposive rationality and its social control, these movements defined and celebrated non-alienated existence as a permanent state of creative reinvention. This is true in equal measure of the early nineteenth-century romantics, the aesthetic avant-garde, the vitalist, lifestyle reform movements around 1900 and, finally, the 1960s counter-culture proclaiming the Age of Aquarius as the age of creativity. In these artistic and counter-cultural niches, creativity was deployed as a promise of emancipation. It was seen as capable of overcoming a repressive Western rationalism based on paid labour, the family and education.¹⁰ The dominant, everyday rationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to which these minority movements opposed their desire for creativity, would never have been able to conceive of an imperative for everyone to be creative.

Developments in late modern culture since the 1970s represent a remarkable reversal of this state of affairs. Ideas and practices from former oppositional cultures and subcultures have now achieved hegemony. The creativity ideal of the once marginal, utopian, aesthetic-artistic opposition has percolated up into the dominant segments of contemporary culture to condition the way we work, consume and engage in relationships, and it has undergone a sea change in the process. From a functionalist perspective, the aesthetic and artistic subcultures can be seen as resembling those ‘seedbed’ cultures that Talcott Parsons saw in ancient Greece and Israel, in Greek philosophy and the Jewish religion¹¹ – hotbeds of alternative and at first marginal cultural codes exercising a delayed revolutionary effect on the mainstream. Daniel Bell's insightful study The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) already brought to light the unintended repercussions of the artistic opposition movements on the present, especially in contemporary consumer hedonism. In the spheres of work and organizations, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's more recent analysis of management discourse The New Spirit of Capitalism (2007) has traced ideas from the artistic counter-culture that have tipped over into the current ‘new spirit’ of the network economy. The formerly anti-capitalist ‘artistic critique’ from 1800 to 1968, the critique of alienation in the name of self-realization, cooperation and authenticity, is already built into the current project-based way of working and to the organizations with their flattened hierarchies. The tradition of artistic critique thus seems to have been rendered superfluous by becoming an omnipresent reality in the economy.¹²

Yet the coupling of the wish to be creative with the imperative to be creative extends far beyond the fields of work and consumption. It encompasses the whole structure of the social and the self in contemporary society. We have not even begun rightly to understand the process by which previously marginal ideas of creativity have been elevated into an obligatory social order, gradually solidifying into a variety of social institutions. The yet unanswered question of how this has come about is the point of departure for the present book. The claim is that what we have been experiencing since the late twentieth century is in fact the emergence of a heterogeneous yet powerful creativity dispositif. This dispositif affects diverse areas of society, from education to consumption, sport, professional life and sexuality, and conditions their practices. All these fields are currently being restructured according to the creativity imperative. The current study is an attempt to contribute to our understanding of the origins of this creativity complex, to retrace its composite, non-linear prehistory. This is not a history of the idea of creativity. Instead, it will be a reconstruction of the contradictory process by which techniques and discourses emerged simultaneously in different social fields, causing social practices and the agents performing them increasingly to reshape themselves in terms of a seemingly natural and universal focus on creativity. This has taken place in the arts, in segments of the economy and the human sciences, in the mass media, and in the planning of urban space. The once elitist and oppositional programme of creativity has finally become desirable for all and at the same time obligatory for all.

This approach to what can be called the creative ethos of late modern culture does not frame the rise of creativity as the result of individuals and institutions being released from oppression and so finally being free to be creative. From within the viewpoint of post-structuralist ontology of the social, we are justified in assuming that social, psychological and organic structures in general consist in continuous processes of emergence and disappearance, ceaselessly reconstituting and dissolving.¹³ Even when we begin with individuals and their everyday practices, we can presuppose as a general rule that their conduct, regardless of how routine it is, nevertheless contains unpredictable, improvised elements. Yet it would be rash to characterize this becoming and disappearing of social forms and the incalculability of individual behaviour as creativity, with all the specific cultural baggage the notion implies. This book is concerned not with the ontological level of becoming and passing away, the constant emergence of novelty as such in the world, but rather with a much more specific cultural phenomenon characteristic of our time. We are concerned with the social creativity complex as an historically unprecedented manifestation belonging to the last third of the twentieth century, in preparation since the late eighteenth century and accelerating markedly since the early twentieth century. This multipart complex has the effect of suggesting to us the necessity of reflecting on our own creativity with the aid of culturally charged concepts. It makes us desire creativity, gets us to use appropriate techniques to train it, to shape ourselves into creative people. As such, creativity as a social and cultural phenomenon is to a certain degree an invention.¹⁴ The creativity complex does not merely register the fact that novelty comes about; it systematically propels forward the dynamic production and reception of novelty as an aesthetic event in diverse domains. It elicits creative practices and skills and suggests to the observer the importance of keeping an eye out for aesthetic novelty and creative achievement. Creativity assumes the guise of some natural potential that was there all along. Yet, at the same time, we find ourselves systematically admonished to develop it, and we fervently desire to possess it.

Sociological analysis has tended to relegate to the margins one particular social field which is of central significance to the genesis of the creativity dispositif. This is the field of art, the artistic and the artist. The emergence of the aesthetic creative complex is certainly not the result of a simple expansion of the artistic field. Further, creativity as an historical model appears at first glance not to be restricted to art; it has developed elsewhere as well, above all in the area of science and technology.¹⁵ From the point of view of our current historical situation, however, it is precisely art that turns out to assume the role of an effective, long-term pacemaker, imposing its shape on the creativity dispositif in a way that surely runs counter to many of the intentions and hopes associated with art in modernity. In the end, the dominant model for creativity is less the inventor's technical innovations than the aesthetic creation of the artist. This role model function of the artist contributes to a process of social aestheticization.

The process by which the creativity dispositif crystallizes can be observed and dissected with cool equanimity. But, in the context of the culture of modernity, creativity and aesthetic are too laden with normative judgements and feelings actually to allow value-free judgement. In the last two hundred years, the access to untapped human resources of creativity has become one of the main criteria for cultural and social critique. Consequently, this book was written in a state of oscillation between fascination and distance. Fascination is elicited by the way the earlier counter-cultural hope for individual self-creation has assumed reality in new institutional forms, by how elements of former aesthetic utopias could be put into social practice against diverse forms of resistance. This fascination rapidly turns into unease. The mutation of these old, emancipatory hopes into a creativity imperative has been accompanied by new forms of coercion. We are thrown into frenetic activity geared to continual aesthetic innovation. Our attention is compulsively dissipated by an endless cycle of ultimately unsatisfying creative acts.

The principal methodological aim guiding the work on this book has been to interlock social theory with detailed genealogical analysis. The investigation seeks, on the one hand, to uncover the general structure of a society that has come to be centred on creativity. The systematic analysis of this dispositif of creativity as the specific form of a process of social aestheticization is concentrated in chapters 1 and 8, which thus make up a pair of theoretical flanks bracketing the book. At the same time, however, the book attempts to trace the genealogy of the creativity dispositif by studying in detail several particularly important complexes of practice and discourses. Consequently, chapters 2 to 7 are concerned with a series of very different specific contexts and their respective genesis: the development of artistic practices (chapters 2 and 3), techniques of economic management and the ‘creative industries’ (chapter 4), psychology (chapter 5), the development of the mass media and the star system (chapter 6) and, finally, the changes in the design of urban space and urban planning (chapter 7). In each of these chapters, the concern is to show how in each field, with its contradictory and conflicting configurations, a cultural focus on creativity and a corresponding process of aestheticization were gradually set in motion by illuminating the most important stations of these developments. The analyses cover the twentieth century, with the exception of chapter 2, which systematically investigates the field of art extending back into the eighteenth century. The different social fields are in no way harmoniously coordinated. Each has its own dynamic, yet they are all interconnected. Accordingly, these chapters constitute not so much a logical progression as a series of approaches to the growth of the culture of creativity from different angles. Together, these separate attacks form a mosaic, built up of individual elements, each with their own peculiar character, corresponding to the various main features of the dispositif of creativity and coalescing as a totality into its portrait.