Rethinking Creativity

Creativity seems to be the cure for whatever ails you. But there is reason to be cautious when invoking its name.

Photo by Johannes Schaefers on Unsplash

Good luck going anywhere today without running into a message about creativity.

I was going to say, "anywhere online," but really, it's just about anywhere. We get creative in the kitchen. Creative in our workouts. Creative in bed. And of course, creative at work.

Creativity is somewhat of a "cult object," as Samuel W. Franklin put it in his cultural history of creativity.

People even use religious language to champion creativity. Creativity coaches, advocates, and ardent practitioners discuss the notion in terms that feel existential, even transcendent. They often gesture toward "questions of ultimate value," which sociologist J.M. Yinger marks as a defining characteristic of religious institutions. "Creativity" often names a sort of essence—even soul or spirit—in the very heart of an individual's being. Creativity's core beliefs can easily be mapped onto the religious dimensions of ritual, myth, ethics, doctrine, and divine experience.

There is something that feels foundational, even timeless, about our fascination with creativity. Even Marx characterized our drive to produce and shape ourselves beyond basic needs as core to what makes us human.

However, the surprisingly short history of the creativity discourse belies cultural, political, and economic patterns that should make us cautious when invoking its name.

Over the last three weeks, I’ve explored the creator economy—and I’ll have at least two more installments in this series. But this week, I wanted to pause and consider how our contemporary understanding of creativity functions in culture.

Honestly, this is something I've been wanting to write about for a year now—ever since I read Samuel W. Franklin's book, The Cult of Creativity. The reason I haven't talked about it is that it feels like the third rail of the 21st-century economy. How could I possibly critique our fascination with creativity without upsetting people I care about and losing every member of my audience?

There is also part of me that wonders whether I'm being a bit autistic about the whole thing. As in, am I looking at "creativity" too literally? Am I missing the fact that no matter how we might define it, the concept of "creativity" is profoundly meaningful for many people? And that meaning is what really matters?

Well, here goes nothing.

In today's interlude, I examine how the emergence of creativity as an object of fascination coincides with economic, social, and political developments that should inspire us to rethink our devotion to it—at least without due care and caution.

A Surprisingly Short History

In its many splendors—playful yet profitable, extraordinary yet universally human, the driver of human progress and the thing that will save us from it—creativity is something of a cult object, something we project all of our desires and anxieties onto, imbued with almost mystical powers, and beyond rebuke.

Those were the first lines I highlighted in Franklin's book. But it was my second set of highlighted lines, right on page 5, that got my attention:

Strikingly, before about 1950 there were approximately zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, classes, encyclopedia entries, or anything of the sort dealing explicitly with the subject of “creativity.”

Of course, people have invented new ideas, solved problems, dreamed up gadgets, and expressed themselves in a variety of ways since the beginning. It seems only natural to describe Plato, Da Vinci, Beethoven, Emerson, and other beacons of white Western cultural significance as people possessed by a great creative spirit. However, it wasn't until the mid-20th century that creativity became a subject of intense research and an object of fascination for managers. Why?

Franklin points to a number of reasons for the creativity explosion.

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Four Factors Leading to Creativity's Ascendence

First, we were in the midst of the Cold War. "To win the Cold War," Franklin explains, "America would need to balance technological progress with individual freedom. Creativity was the answer." Scientists, engineers, and technologists leverage creativity as a tool for generating breakthrough after breakthrough. Architects and designers could harness creativity to showcase the abundance and variety of American culture. Artists, writers, poets, and musicians could express their own creative impulses without constraint. Creativity became the primary ethic of capitalist democracy.

Second, the economy was barreling towards its consumption-driven future. Creativity became a source of new goods and a motive for purchasing goods. The Mad Men-style advertising agency used creativity to provoke consumer desire and invent problems for which consumer products could be the solutions. Companies also needed creative people to come up with new products to sell and new markets to explore.

Third, record numbers of people were graduating from college and looking for jobs outside the manufacturing sector. They were primed to expect more from a job than a paycheck and a pension. If employers could market their job openings as creative opportunities, they could attract that talent—talent that would be less likely to unionize and more likely to work odd hours in an effort to maintain psychological distance from the working class.

Finally, as the Fifties rolled into the Sixties, people craved a way to differentiate themselves from mass-produced culture. Franklin writes, "All across American society, from the right to the left, from sociologists to novelists to feminists to black liberationists, postwar thinkers were united in a quest to recover the autonomous self from the morass of mass society." Creativity created mass-produced culture, and ironically, it could be a means of resisting mass-produced culture.

Or, as Mark Fisher put it in one of my favorite lines from Capitalist Realism, "‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream."

Culturally, economically, and politically, the conditions were right for society to take up creativity as a field of study and source of curiosity. Understanding this history is crucial as it directly influences how creativity is harnessed in today's economy, affecting everything from job roles to personal identity.

Creative Entanglements

All of these reasons for the explosion of interest in creativity point back to something pretty extraordinary: our contemporary understanding of creativity and the creative person cannot be separated from their political, commercial, and economic valance. Far from being an innate human essence, creativity as a concept is, then, shaped by systems of power. Our relationship to creativity as a concept is largely a reflection of our relationship to systems of power.

What is considered creative, who is considered creative, and how creativity is leveraged are determined by class, race, gender, education, and disability. There are creative fields that bring status and considerable financial compensation, and there are fields in which creativity is used to suppress pay and extract surplus commitment. Creativity is not a universal experience but one that's mediated by our circumstances.

Again, I don't want to tell you that your relationship with creativity is necessarily tainted or wrong. That really isn't the point.

What I do want to say is that our cultural understanding of creativity is entangled with many of the systems we try to resist, and any invocation of creativity brings those entanglements with it. If capitalism is a system that constantly reproduces itself by appropriating that which resists it, then the invention of "creativity" is a profound development in that process. Creativity not only provides the means for that reproduction, it offers a new identity—a fresh complication in our understanding of class and labor relations.

Meet The Creative

The emergence of the concept of creativity also birthed a new form of subjectivity—the creative person, or simply, "the creative." As Franklin astutely observes, to identify as a creative is to see yourself as a "producer in a world of consumers." This self-identification sets the creative apart from the masses who are content with mere consumption, elevating them to a higher echelon of both moral and economic value.

However, this distinction between the creative and the consumer elides the role the creative plays in consumption. The creative consumes, too (of course). In fact, from the clothing they wear to the houses they live in to the music they listen to, the creative consumes as a means of performing their identity. What you buy, watch, or read—in the ways those products are both like and not like mass culture—helps to distinguish you as a creative.

Further, the distinction between creative and consumer obscures an inconvenient truth. The creative, like the average consumer, is a worker. The creative may be paid better, have more autonomy on the job, and may even really enjoy what they do—but they're still a worker. In this way, the creative's unique economic status undermines a basic solidarity with other workers.

Just as managers were convinced they had more in common with owners than workers, creatives have been convinced they have more in common with entrepreneurs than order-followers. In their position, managers have both ideological and practical imperatives. They must evangelize efficiency, organization, and value while ensuring that the people they manage are working at peak efficiency, giving their all on behalf of the company, and creating the most value possible.

Similarly, creatives have both ideological and practical imperatives. They evangelize consumption as self-expression and work as a labor of love while producing the means for maximizing consumption and generating the passion and purpose that can be duly extracted as profit.

The creative brought us, as McLuhan called it, the mass age. Creatives brought us new technologies, scientific breakthroughs, and evolutions in art. Creatives also came up with new ways to productize and advertise those innovations. They invented problems we didn't know we had and offered solutions we didn't know we needed.

And as that economic tide reached its high water mark, new forms of production came to the fore.

Introducing The Creator

Now, the emergence of the creator economy births another new subjectivity—the creator. The identity of the creator doesn't yet have the cultural heft of the creative, but if history repeats itself, it's only a matter of time before it does.

The creator and the creative share all the same entanglements and much of the same hierarchical baggage. However, the innovation of "the creator" is its individual entrepreneurial orientation. The creator is a lone wolf, a ronin, perhaps even a prophet. Choose your own metaphor of culturally approved rogue. The creator may build a community, but they are not part of the community. They may influence culture, but they are (somehow) beyond culture.

The creator may be capital's greatest creation to date—the worker who doesn't believe they work, the consumer who produces more consumption, the ultimate rugged individualist who believes they have all they need to take care of themselves as long as they stay creative.

Franklin observes that the "new economic order" in which the creative becomes the creator brought with it a change in values: "Where once society prized dependability, loyalty, expertise, and teamwork, this new order preaches entrepreneurship, flexibility, going against the grain."

Creativity Can Still Be a Source of Power

Here is the specter haunting every breathless mention of creativity, the creative spirit, or creative self-expression:

The notion of creativity allowed people to interpret career and lifestyle preferences as expressions of innate personality traits rather than as exercises in class distinction; to imagine a direct link between personal and economic growth. It allows us to see late capitalism as a natural consequence of human beings striving to express themselves as opposed to the result of a decades-long series of political choices.

I'm not here to steal your definition of creativity or your identity as a creative or creator. The way you make meaning out of creative practice and expression is yours to relish.

However, I do invite you to think critically about how you define creativity, identify as a creative person, and make meaning out of creative practice. Our personal conception of a thing is never independent of its social, political, or economic conception.

If you do find profound meaning in creativity and your identity as a creative, don't take it for granted. Your version of creativity—the one that might awaken you to injustice or inspire you to work with others to solve real big problems—can be a source of power. The status quo might have stumbled on a way to placate our revolutionary spirits for a time, but it also gave us a powerful tool.

Franklin concludes that there is no reason to reject the concept of creativity. "I'm rather attached to it," he concedes (one assumes with a smirk).

Yet he also challenges us to imagine how we might "reorganize our conceptual universes" if we valorized communication, care, or maintenance in the same way we valorize creativity. Even this act of imagining is creative in its own way. We're just working with different raw materials. Instead of prioritizing the new and disruptive or the individual and their aspiration, we might use other values to rebuild our world.

Creativity can be one tool among many for building a social, political, and economic world that works for all of us.

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