Symbolic Creativity - The Everyday Reader

1. Chapter 28: Symbolic Creativity
The Everyday Life Reader
Willis, Paul (1990) Common Culture:
Symbolic Work at Play in the
Everyday Cultures of the Young
Milad Hajiamiri
ID 501

2. Key words:
• The Everyday
• Symbolic Creativity
• Symbolic Work
• Symbolic Resource
• Necessary Work
• Grounded Aesthetic
• Cultural Commodity
• Consumerism

3. Contents:
• Editor`s Introduction
• Necessary work and symbolic creativity
• Commodities and consumerism
• Grounded Aesthetics
• Against post-modernist pessimism

4. “Everyday is full of activities which
although not recognized as Art,
share the same Symbolic Creativity
as art practices.”
Willis, Paul (1990)

5. EVERYDAY
NECESSARY WORK
SYMBOLIC CREATIVITY

6. SYMBOLIC CREATIVITY
• The necessary part of human activity
• Integral part of necessary work
• It has to be done Everyday
• It is not Extra but Essential of daily production and
reproduction

7. NECESSARY WORK
- What kind of necessary work do we talk?
- What is the role of Symbolic activity in the
necessary work?
Tools & Raw
Materials
Produce Goods
& Services
Satisfy Human
Needs
By wage
labor In order to

8. English Radical Tradition
William Morris:
Art = Work/Pleasure
Eric Gill:
Art is the Principle of Skill in making useful
things. Work is Holy. The daily reproduction
is Holy. The play of Symbolic Creativity in
these things make them Holy.

9. Modern Industry destroyed the
possibility of art in paid work.
Automatic production, takes Hand, Tool
and Body altogether out of workplace.
There is a necessary to reintroduce the
“Holy Work”

10. But there is another kind of humanly
necessary work.
Symbolic Work, is the application of
human capacities to and through, on and
with Symbolic resources and raw materials.
(language, texts, songs, films, images and
artefacts of all kind)
(Communication)

11. The basic elements of symbolic work:
• Language as a practice and Symbolic Resource. It is the primary tool that we
use to communicate and allow us to assess our impact on others and theirs to us.
It allows us to see ourselves as others.
• Active Body is a site of knowledge and set of signs and symbols. It is the
source of productive and communicative activity. (singing, symbolizing, feeling)
• Drama as a practice and Symbolic Resource. Communication is achieved
through rules, rituals and performances that we produce with others.( dancing,
singing, joke-making, story telling in dynamic settings and through performance.
• Symbolic Creativityis the product of these three raw tools and raw
materials. it transforms what is provided and helps to produce specific form of
human identity and capacity.
Being Human means to be creative in the sense of remarking the world
for ourselves as we find our own place and identity.

12. What exactly produce by Symbolic
Work and Symbolic creativity?
• Produce Individual Identity.
Who and what “I am” and could become.
• Place the Identities in larger wholes.
Identities do not stand alone above or beyond history. They are related to
time, place and things.
• Develop our active sense of our own vital capacities,
the power of self and how it may applied to the cultural world. it is the
dynamic and ,therefore, clinching part of identity. It is the expectation of
being able to apply power of the world to change it.

13. Commodities and Consumerism
The main material and resource used in symbolic work of
leisure are cultural commodities.
The raise of leisure is really the raise of commercialized
leisure.
But author believes that these things have always been
excited. we should not ignore the dynamic and living
quality of everyday culture and especially their
necessary work and symbolic creativity.
Consumerism has to be understood as an active, not a
passive, process. Its play include work.

14. - Consumption continuously reproduce
an image of selfishness an narcissism
in individualized consumption and
hedonism. But those tendencies are
now given features of our cultural
existence. Meanwhile a whole
continent of informal everyday
cultures has been recognized, opened
up and developed.

15. - Whereas the ideal model for the
worker is the good time kept, the
disciplined and empty head, the model
for the good consumer is the converse
– a head full of unbounded appetites
for symbolic things.

16. The basic point is; interpretation,
symbolic action and creativity are part
of consumption. they are involved in
the whole realm of necessary symbolic
work.

17. Grounded Aesthetic
Grounded aesthetics are the specifically creative
and dynamic moments of a whole process of
cultural life, of cultural birth and rebirth. To know
the cultural world, our relationship to it, and
ultimately to know ourselves, it is necessary to
merely to be in it but to change that cultural
world.
So, Can we see the effects and impacts of
consumerism as grounded aesthetic?

18. Against post-modernist pessimism
The very incandescence passes through
necessary symbolic work, changes and
enables it. The incandescence is not simply a
surface market quality. It produces and re
reproduces further forms and varieties for
everyday symbolic work and creativity, some
of which remain in the everyday and in
common culture far longer than they do on
the market.