Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

After Creativity (a fragment, full chapter forthcoming in a book I’m editing with Niina Koivunen)

Creativity, After the Ball
Can creativity keep its luster? In five or ten or fifteen years, will we still sing the same praises? The contemporary fascination for the concept, coupled with an almost religious belief in policy circles as to its magic powers – powers through which there mere reference to the ‘creative economy’ can instantly revive ailing regions and create bohemian utopias out of crumbling urban areas – has pushed the discussion into a well-known territory, that of buzzwords and hype. We have seen this show before, with the fad for Japanese management, with the notion that ‘quality’ would prove to be an organizational panacea, with the belief in knowledge as the sole engine of economic development. We have loved and later lost, been both bewitched and sorely disappointed. Concepts that once seemed to carry all the promise of a better day have later been put to rest, gone fallow. Creativity seems ominously well-positioned to take its place in this rather tattered hall of fame foregone. Still, creativity seems to be something else, something more powerful. The ever-returning, the hallowed, the Phoenix arising from its own ashes. Creativity is something more than a buzzword, even if it is used as one now. But exactly what more than a buzzword?
The key issue, for me and in this chapter, is the one of how the concept of creativity can remain meaningful in a situation where a number of well-meaning adherents have done their darndest to neuter it and turn it into a Disneyfied version of itself. Where creativity is meant to represent a force that continuously challenges and questions, a number of contemporary understandings have reduced it into little more than grist for the same old corporate mill or worse still, into a tool for policy-makers and EU-bureaucrats. This obviously is a question of power, i.e. how a concept can lose power by being subjected to hegemonic forces that domesticate it, and how we are to analyze the prevailing ideology of creativity, specifically if we are interested in how creativity as a conceptual field can develop in the future. Rather than holding on to the promise of creativity and our faith therein, we must see to the possibility of abandoning the concept if it loses its potential to bring radically new effects into our thinking.
Note that this is not meant as an attack on creativity, nor an attack on the notion of a creative economy. Rather it is an attempt to ask what needs to be done in order to save a successful concept from itself. By introducing notions of power, ideology and a form of conceptual resistance into the discussion I am not trying to claim that contemporary theories of creativity are irredeemably compromised or naïve, but instead posit a series of questions as to what creativity theory needs to overcome, what might supplant the creative economy, and what kind of critique is needed in order to keep up the promise and potential of creativity itself.

A Note on the Historiography of Creativity
The story of creativity has been a varied one. In the beginning, creativity came from the gods, imbued the chosen with an energy to do great things, yet in a way that made the creators merely a vessel within which the divine will could deposit creativity. Later, gods were taken out of the equation, and creativity was recast as a spark of humanity at its finest, the light of genius. Later still, creativity was the domain of everyman, could she just find it within herself. Today, creativity is presented as a permanent presence as well as a permanent lack. Media and the sciences present everything from gardening to biotech-engineering as positively infused with the creative possibilities, laud economies that utilize and reinforce the creative industries, and make heroes out of those who manage to best live up to the image of the true creative.
We can in this capsule history, as well as in creativity writing more generally, find an overarching theme where creativity is inextricably linked to progress, and where the different tropes through which creativity is presented serve as a narrative through which humanity continuously improves. We could question this optimist history by asking whether this march of progress can be proven or if it is a creation after the fact, but we shall here refrain from such analyses. The important thing is that the creative economy today is normally narrated as the pinnacle of a long development, where the agrarian was overtaken by the feudal, the industrial by the knowledge society, and now the creative economy stands tall as a conqueror, albeit in bohemian drag.
But whereas the history of creativity has been written as a saga of continuous victory, where every age has had its proper creative genius, this writing of our contemporary history shows something else. Now creativity is not just something that is lauded, but also something we fear we do not have enough of. In a grand modernist gesture we have proclaimed the end of creative history in order to posit ourselves in a post-industrial paranoia, where the triumph of the creatives has led to a situation where the economy is built on a permanent lack. Where the previous economic revolutions all built on the notion of more effective utilization of resources, and the possibility to replicate or otherwise create these, the discourse of the creative economy shares an odd resemblance with the politics of an agrarian economy, and odder still, a kinship with the thinking of the physiocrats. Where the latter argued that the limits to how much land there was would always dominate all other economic matters, the creatocrats are now locked in an anguish regarding whether any system has ‘enough’ creativity. We can find this new angst at its purest in the writings of Richard Florida (2002, 2006), where the creative class is portrayed as a truly limited resource which must be mollycoddled much like rare orchids, and which when mistreated will wilt, die, and leave behind a barren landscape.
This obsession with the lack, which has led to calls for tax breaks, better understanding among managers, a plethora of attempts to create creative hotbeds, also signal how the most fundamental aspect of writings on creativity is in fact their fear that the creativity will run out. The sometimes obsessive way in which e.g. management and organization studies has lauded creativity could then be read not so much as a glorification of a dimension of humanity, but a strict resource-based analysis of the world. Creativity has become a conceptual weapon in the econo-political sphere, where the fear of not having enough, of not being able to generate enough, in short, to not be able to amass and gather, drives this new logic in a way that we can recognize from the old analyses of capitalist accumulation.
So in our current age, where the creative industries are touted as the most dynamic, most rapidly growing sector of the economy, and where the creative economy itself is presented as a force unto its own, one could in the vein of Meghnad Desai (2002) or critical management studies more generally say that might be seeing an intensification of the capitalist process, a colonization and effectivization of an area previously less exploited. In such an analysis, the grim possibility of creativity being sucked dry becomes a possibility, pointing towards a particular kind of economic endtimes where every human endeavor finally becomes commodified, commercialized, and market-priced. If even opera can be counted into the machinery of the capitalist engine, what is there left to do but grease its wheels and despondently look towards the time when every single thing is perfectly monetized and marketized? Such a grim view might seem like the pessimistic condemnations of a particularly despondent post-marxist (in other words, like Theodor Adorno on a bad day), but it can also be seen as an antidote to the sometimes absurd claims that are made in the name of creativity and the potential of the creative economy.

On the Creative Nature of Creativity
In another context I, together with Christian De Cock (De Cock & Rehn 2008), have commented on the peculiar ontological position of creativity. While the concept might seem easy to grasp, even self-evident, the nature of creativity is such that it is exceedingly difficult if not impossible to define. If creativity is about going beyond what it, this clearly creates a problem when trying to pin the concept down. Namely, if creativity is breaking out of pre-defined boxes, this same principle must logically apply to creativity too. Any definition of the concept would seem to be contradictory, as they all simultaneously say that creativity is the thing defined, and that creativity is about breaking with the prevailing (which would include the definition). In other words, creativity will logically always deconstruct itself. Any attempt to limit or define it will fall pray to the logical necessity of the definition not covering all the potential uses of the concept. This paradoxical nature is not a flaw, but as our thinking to a great extent is geared towards causal explanations, the openness of creativity to new forms of expression makes it exceptionally difficult to fit into a theoretical scheme with anything close to completeness. Instead, the amorphous nature of the concept will always escape totalizations.
Following this, we could ask if not the creative economy might not be best understood through the concept of decay, so that every move towards establishing a limited economy of the creative will by necessity empty out the very condition of its creation. The creative economy can, in a sense, only exist if and only if it is prepared for annihilation. Whatever creativity is inherent in the starting of an economic endeavor, this will become part of the normal, natural makeup thereof, thus slowly losing the energy that was the original driving force. This is of course something that we know well from the literature on entrepreneurship, but taken on a more general level this questions whether there can be such a thing as a stable foundation of the creative economy.
Every time we bring in a creative move into the structure of management, this will position it in a way that subtly moves away from creativity through the process of structuring/standardizing knowledge, introducing regimes of effectiveness and pricing, and commoditization. This argument should be well known from critical theory, but my use of it here can easily be misinterpreted. I am not arguing that the process through which creativity is brought to the market is unethical, amoral or inhuman, as the ethical aspect of the market economy do not interest me here. Rather, I am interested in how writings of creativity and management or the creative economy are in fact setting up knowledge regimes around creativity, and thus lessening it. As Michel Foucault (1980) pointed out, any form of knowledge contains within it a procedure of repression and control, and we must pay strict attention to structures of power/knowledge. Yet, in the discourse of creativity and economy such aspects are strangely absent, and if they come into fore it is usually to point out that there will be power-games between managers and ‘the creatives’, not that creativity in and of itself might contain power-dimensions. With regards to the previously mentioned implicit resource-view of creativity, this omission becomes doubly strange.
Another way to put this is to point out that the point “after creativity” alluded to in the title of this text can be read in at least two ways. It can be read in a limited fashion, one where the time after creativity would be one where creativity has run out, either due to exploitation or due to insufficient support and attention. This in a resource-based view. However, I want to contend that regardless of how one reaches this conclusion, such a reading is built on a limited view of creativity, the one referenced to in the issue regarding whether creativity can be defined or not. Another reading would emphasize that any word/concept will always become tainted by the ideological context(s) that amass around it, and in order to free ourselves (becoming creative) we need to go beyond the word itself. Staying wedded to a singular interpretation or singular theorization of a concept such as creativity will by logical necessity become highly un-creative, and it is in fact necessary to look for a point after or post- if the concept is to retain any meaning.
In yet other words, is it creative to assume that the creative economy is important? In an age where every single politician and bureaucrat is more than willing to embrace such a statement, would not the creative thing to do be to renounce the creative economy, to proclaim that creativity is no longer interesting? Obviously such moves are difficult to make, as we are caught up in webs of language and ideology, but the question is nevertheless intriguing.

[Continued in the book "Creativity and Contemporary Economy" that I'm editing with Niina Koivunen.]