Reckwitz, A. (2017). The invention of creativity : Modern society and the culture of the new. Polity Press. Excerpts by Ricardo Sosa, PhD

1. THE
INVENTION
CREATIVITY
ANDREAS
RECKWITZ
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.
Reckwitz, A. (2017). The invention of creativity : Modern
society and the culture of the new. Polity Press.

2. “The normative model of creativity
has been entering the heart of
Western culture since the 1980s at
the latest and is now stubbornly
occupying it.
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.”

3. “The topos of creativity harks back to
the modern figure of the artist, the
artistic and the aesthetic in general.
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.”

5. “contemporary ‘aesthetic
capitalism’…[is] a crucial
organizing principle of
Western societies over the
last thirty years or so.

6. “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.”

9. “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.”

10. “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… [in the
past] 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. [Today]
Ideas and practices from former
oppositional cultures and subcultures
have now achieved hegemony.”

12. “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.”

13. “Three modern regimes, three modes of
structuring the focus on novelty, the
newer taking over from the older ones
without the latter disappearing entirely:
the new as stage (novelty I); the new as
heightening and supersession (novelty II);
and the new as stimulation (novelty III).
These regimes of dynamism correspond
roughly to three different models of
modern society: modernity as perfection;
modernity as progress; and aesthetic
modernity.”

14. “The first regime of novelty
strives to overcome older
structures, replacing them once
and for all with new, more
progressive and rational ones.
Here, novelty is total and
revolutionary.”
“The second regime of novelty,
the new as heightening and
supersession, has the different
goal of the permanent production
of novelty stretching into an
infinite future. The characteristic
trait here is the model of
progress in the natural sciences
and technology, but also in
economic market innovation, the
supersessions of the artistic
avant-garde and psychological
self-optimization.”

15. “The third regime of novelty, characteristic of the
creativity dispositif, is also centred on the dynamic
production of an infinite series of new acts, but it views
particular novelties with equanimity, their value
determined no longer by their place in a progressive
sequence extending into the future but by the momentary
aesthetic, sensuous, affective stimulus they provide in
the present before it is replaced by the next. The object
of concern is not progress or supersession but rather
the movement itself, the series of stimuli. The new is
determined here purely by its difference to previous
events, as otherness, as a welcome relief from the
usual. It is as such the relatively new event. It does not
mark a structural rupture. In the context of the regime of
aesthetic novelty, it locates the new in the same
semantic field as the interesting”

17. Design

18. “Design encompasses any
activity in which everyday
objects are made primarily or
secondarily for their aesthetic
qualities. As such, it is a form
of aesthetic labour performed
with various materials and
therefore a prime example of
aestheticization. Design turns
previously non-aesthetic
entities into aesthetic ones.”

20. “Design as craftwork occurred in the modern era
most prominently in the service of aristocratic
culture, but the beginnings of modern design
proper are to be found in the arts and crafts
reform movement, with its critical stance on the
loss of aesthetic qualities as a result of industrial
production. In the early 20th century, two broad-
based design movements entered into mutual
rivalry, both employing industrial production
methods. Ornamental art deco faced off against
anti-ornamental modernism and functionalism. A
programme of aesthetic and technical reform,
modernism was boosted by the Bauhaus before
launching into international cultural hegemony
from the USA as the international style in the
1930s.”

21. “It was the 1960s and 1970s counter-culture that
made the decisive change: In this period of
transformation, radical design was driven by
three tendencies. The first was the discovery of
the public. Second, after the collapse of the
modernist hegemony there emerged a play of
differences, a florescence of new aesthetic styles,
an exploration of the endless possibilities for
combining disparate elements from high and
popular culture. Third, design expanded its scope
to incorporate the transformation of the entire
world of artefacts. It was no longer understood as
a niche within product design and now pursued
the political project of reshaping the whole
human environment to fulfil sensuous and
practical needs.”

22. “Design has in this way become
a paradigmatic practice for the
methodical creation of
emotionally satisfying all-round
atmospheres, permeating
increasingly into the sphere of
management. This merging of
management and design and the
rise of a design economy is the
last phase in the spread of the
aesthetic economy.”

24. “The aesthetic economy built on the blueprint
from the arts transverses the old front that
once separated the economic and the
aesthetic. The economy is no longer geared
solely to the production of standardized
goods; it is aesthetic labour, creative work
for producing aesthetically new and singular
things. Whether the objects produced are
material or immaterial, what is of primary
importance is their sensuous and emotional
value, which transcends both their use value
and their status value.”

26. “Aesthetic apparatuses:
institutional complexes for
production, presentation and
consumption, hybrids of aesthetic
and non-aesthetic practices, the
main purpose of which is to
produce aesthetic events”

28. “The paradigm of this aesthetic
economy is the design economy.
Design then comes to encompass
the strategic construction of
arrangements of objects, ways of
thinking, signs, sense impressions
and affects for aesthetically
cultivated users. The organizational
form that provides the supporting
framework for this kind of activity
is aesthetic management.”

30. “In the economy as in art, affection
is an inter-objective rather than an
intersubjective relation, a relation
between people and things rather
than between people, associated
with the production of fascinating
objects and their use by fascinated
people.”

32. Society of Creativity

33. “What urgent problem is the creativity
dispositif responding to? It is precisely
the lack of affect in classical, especially
organized, modernity. Modernity
systematically supressed the affects
which would otherwise have furnished
those it socialized with motivation and
fulfilment. The aestheticization processes
embodied by the creativity dispositif are
the attempt to overcome this
suppression.”

35. “Bourgeois modernity: the set of
practices pertaining to the
economy, the state, the family,
science, and other areas
developed in the 18th century
against aristocratic society and
agrarian traditionalism, and
which determined the structure
of European and US society in the
19th century. Its characteristic
features were the market
economy, parliamentary
democracy, scientism and the
patriarchal nuclear family. Its
cultural foundation was the
bourgeois form of life.”
“Organized modernity: the result
of the deep transformation of the
economic and government
practices that were formative for
society in the first decades of the
20th century. It opposed liberal
bourgeois modernity, intensifying
control, coordination and
planning both within economic
cooperation and by the state. In
contrast to bourgeois class
society, organized modernity was
built on broad social inclusion
and a mass consumer culture
promising prosperity for all.”

37. “The problem of organized modernity
and also of bourgeois modernity,
which continued to hold sway into the
early 20th century, was that it
systematically produced a dearth of
emotion. Aestheticization, and now the
creativity dispositif, has been
promising to alleviate this lack.”

39. “The creativity dispositif presents
itself as having permanently
overcome the lack of affect in
modern culture, a promise which
religion and politics had been
unable to fulfil thoroughly enough.
Nietzsche's fundamental intuition
that the aesthetic is the proper
social alternative to the Western
rationalist and moralist traditions
proves to be both insightful and
accurate”

41. “The particularity of aesthetic
sociality consists of the way it
conjoins four elements: subjects
as creators, an aesthetic
audience, aesthetic objects, and
an institutionalized regulation of
attention. These constituents form
the four pillars of the creativity
dispositif.”

43. “The aesthetic form of the social
passes through three different states
in the development of the creativity
dispositif: it goes from being a niche
to a counter-culture and from there
to being a form of social control:
• The arts and crafts movement
• The counter-cultures in the 1960s
• Aesthetic or cultural
governmentality can be found in
creative psychology and in the
urban planning of the creative city.”

44. “The creativity dispositif may be comprehensive,
but it does not exclude other structural features
of modernity already familiar to sociology such
as the formal rationalization of the social. It
applies also to the economization of the social,
understood as the assimilation of social
interaction to the models of the market and
capital. It applies lastly as well to the
mediatization of the social. Within the framework
of a social theory of late modernity, the
aestheticization of the social can be identified as
one corner of a square of which the three other
corners are occupied by formal rationalization,
economization and mediatization.”

46. “The creative dispositif is in no way
opposed to rationality. Nor is it anti-
economic or anti-technological. On the
contrary, it could not have become so
expansive without recourse to
typically modern forms of
rationalization.”

48. “Participation in economic
processes first becomes
appealing when both work and
consumption are coupled with
aestheticization processes.
Aestheticization provides
economization with motivational
fuel. Economization, with its
inclination towards objectification,
would have been hard put to
provide this fuel on its own.”

49. “Within the creativity dispositif,
creative action is not a happy
incident, an idiosyncratic escape or
a random episode but, rather, an
essential social desire and a social
norm. No longer a random event,
creativity counts as something
everyone is obliged to achieve.”

50. “The present moment is devalued
in favour of future events
promising more novelty and
surprise. As a result, no event can
fulfil its promise of satisfaction.
Aesthetic pleasure shrinks to
become the mere anticipation of
pleasure. Surrounded by ever new
stimuli, this promise of deferred
pleasure threatens to replace real
aesthetic enjoyment.”

52. “The creativity dispositif
contains a contradictory
source of dissatisfaction. It
seems there is at once too
much and not enough
novelty.”

54. “The creativity dispositif is not identical with
aestheticization as a whole but is one specific version
of it among many past, present and future varieties.
The alternative aesthetic practices would have to
provide an alternative to the producer– recipient
constellation and to the radical regime of novelty. This
question leads in two directions. First, to creative
practices that are not directed at an audience and
consequently find themselves situated outside of the
attention market and the logic of heightening. These
practices can be termed practices of profane
creativity. Second, an aesthetic of repetition is called
for, incorporating aesthetic practices not actively
involved in the regime of novelty but oriented instead
towards routine and repetition.”

56. “Profane creativity: a form of creativity that
has liberated itself from the audience, from
comparison and from heightening… a
phenomenon already present in everyday
practices and networks and therefore not
dependent on an audience. Found in
everyday, isolated, seemingly banal actions
which can be performed without an
audience, such as occur in interpersonal
practices where, crucially, the producer–
recipient divide is surmounted by a meeting
of participants and co-players”

58. “Creativity is not a scarce commodity
competing for attention but a public
good always already available in ready
amounts, present in every musical,
culinary, craft or communicative act. In
this example, the distinction between
creative acts and routine practices thus
breaks down. We can distinguish
between four forms of profane
creativity: improvisation, experiment,
idiosyncrasy and the hermeneutic web.”

60. “The practice of profane
creativity is neither a social
expectation nor an internalized
desire. Instead, in profane
creativity, social recognition and
self-esteem are independent of
expectation and desire.”

61. “Alternative aesthetic models
situated outside of the regime of
novelty have already been
elaborated and applied in non-
Western, non-modern cultural
contexts.”

63. “We should not make a blanket declaration of war
on the aesthetic and the regimes of novelty and the
audience, because we would then run the risk of
moral fundamentalism, anti-modern conservatism,
or the idyll of the private self. The aim will be to
counter over-aestheticization by locally reinforcing
the ethical and the social, responding to the idling
cycle of the regime of novelty by cultivating
tranquillity and concentration while sidestepping
the constant audience observation and the demand
for originality by multiplying the chances for
withdrawal from the gaze of the other. Perhaps we
have been too fixated on our creativity and at the
same time not creative enough.”

64. THE
INVENTION
CREATIVITY
ANDREAS
RECKWITZ
Excerpts by Dr Ricardo Sosa ricardo.sosa@monash.edu