Contemporary perspectives on creativity
The second part of this chapter provides an overview of ideas which have emerged across the fields of psychology, pedagogy, the creativity movement and the study of the mind; ideas which have contributed to the over-arching views of human creativity which currently predominates in Western-style democracies.
Approaching the concept of creativity has been a complex, multi-dimensional thought process through the ages. There seem to be no rules to follow in streamlining our definition of creativity’s design and purpose. Concepts like talent, genius and excellence, are directly dependent on cultural determinations of what should be considered valuable or intrinsically good. The more materialistically progressive a society becomes, the less ‘communal’, the higher value seems to be placed on individual creations in isolation from the milieu in which they were produced. The material results of creative exploration in the arts and sciences are then judged in terms of their marketability – what their resale value might be, how much the public can be charged to view them, how much status can be gained from owning a work, not to what they might mean to the communities they came from. In the case of much scientific exploration, the products and the “intellectual property” from which they emerge are corporately owned and do not belong to any individual “creator”. There are, however, many inconsistencies in the legal environment of arts and sciences – the product of both can be legally owned either by the originator or the individual or organisation which commissioned it or to which it is sold on. Furthermore the individual maker is often seen as a marketable product as well, a human artifact. Original cultural contexts can be easily upended, obscured or completely disregarded in such economically motivated, anti-creative milieus. There is very little room in an economy driven society for creativity for creativity’s sake. .
The ‘primordial progression’ (Eliade, 1973) seen in cosmological stories is apparent in the episodic unfolding of the theory of creativity as well. Our ideas about creativity (the dimension which enfolds our ability to create) have passed through a speculative phase, a ‘celestial’ epoch if you like, in which explorations are concerned with our place as intentionally creative beings within the whole of creation. In this conceptual phase the stories that are told about creativity focus on our nature as creative beings in dialogue with a creative world. Our ‘being’ in it (the primordial soup of potentiality, the time and space of it) is the concern, how energy and matter emerge from the chaos and give physical form to the contents of our imagination.Human creation is not seen as an individualistic enterprise. When describing to others how or why they work, many (probably most) professional artists tell their story of creation in metaphysical terms reflecting on the desire to make the ineffable visible, to express the inexpressible (Thomas Spence, 1998 in conversation), to delight in the mind ‘that penetrates nature and divines the spirit by which nature itself is animated (Rodin & Galerie Claude Bernard., 1963). This initial exploratory phase is concerned with the way we think about our creative ‘being’ and the ‘knowing’ that can be brought forth from the unformed ‘void’. While artists, generally, continue to remain connected to the ‘celestial’ perspective in some form or another, trans-disciplinary creativity theory has moved further and further away from this vantage point into an existential realm with ever more specific concerns.
Freud put a spanner in the metaphysical works, dispensing altogether with cosmogonic connections and bringing things right down to the nitty gritty of human psychology and unconscious motivations. The creative person, Freud deduced, was simply channelling the sexual energy of sublimated libidinous fantasies (unsatisfied desires) into art-making and bribing the audience into accepting the egotistical character of their day-dreams by offering “a purely formal, that is aesthetic, pleasure in the presentation of his fantasies.” (Freud et al., 1953, vol 9). Neurotic obsessions made manifest. Although, in Dostoevsky and Parricide, he did acknowledge, with uncharacteristic humility, that, “(b)efore the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms” (Freud et al., 1953, vol 11, p. 177). Even Jung’s resurrected archetypes, inhabiting a numinous collective unconscious, are an insufficient resource in the rescuing of the sublime. They take us part of the way there, linking the act of creation back to its primordial roots, but they don’t allow for the intentional nature, the deliberative aspect of being creative – the choice to go there, the making ready to go into creative space for a reason (something I consider crucial to the discussion).Jung’s archetypes are firmly in command it would seem (Jung, 1959), pulling us in, almost against our will, and supplying us with symbolic imagery to tell the story that they would have us tell. I think we have much more agency than this.
Much of the exploration of creativity emerging out of the twentieth centuries has been lodged in the field of Psychology. The research that dominated the field from the early nineteen fifties through to the seventies (Guilford, 1954;, 1959;, 1967) was based on the development of psychometric methods for testing individual levels of creative ability – notably as a tool to be employed in the selection of cold war warriors – the original objective of the United States military funders of twenty years of Guilford’s research (Guilford, 1954). These researchers were entirely single focussed – using factor analysis to create a ‘structure of intellect’ model, then devising tests to determine individual factors that would identify the ‘creative’ individual. Testing methods of this kind are still commonly in use in corporate recruitment. The emphasis then, as now, was on creative leadership rather than on creative environments stimulating collective creative responses.
Obviously leadership is of primary concern in a war-time military environment where individual human sensibilities and moral structures must be over-ridden, for example the natural survival instinct in relation to oneself, the healthy abhorrence for taking the life of another, maiming innocents, or wilfully destroying property and devastating landscapes. None of these violations come naturally to the healthy balanced person. Soldiers must be taught techniques to assist them to override their natural tendencies and maintain strict discipline. “Success in combat requires that infantry soldiers control their fear and behave in a predictable manner, no matter how tired they are or how uncertain the situation is. In order to elicit this behavior, commanders attempt to build high performing, cohesive, and confident units by clearly defining roles and jobs, keeping soldiers informed, conducting realistic and demanding individual and group training, and providing strong leadership and competent supervision.” (Panel on Human Factors in the Design of Tactical Display Systems for the Individual Soldier, 1997, p. 21). The responsibility for operational decisions rests with commanding officers, thereby relieving a degree of moral responsibility from the shoulders of the rank and file. The post World War II American administration in the grip of cold war tensions and under the threat of continuing nuclear proliferation confronted new challenges in leadership. They were willing to spend millions of dollars over two decades to find fool proof ways of determining which intelligent individuals would also be creative strategists capable of thinking ‘outside the square’ and envisioning an emerging theatre of war.
In the early nineteen sixties, spurred on by the anti-war movement and a growing commitment to individualism, a second strand developed, gaining inspiration from the rapidly growing field of cognitive theory. This group of researchers (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Feldman et al., 1994; Gardner, 1982), (particularly members of the Project Zero group based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education which began in 1967) were highly critical of the factor analysis approach and became interested in exploring the psycho-biographies of major creative thinkers and practitioners across a broad range of disciplines. They saw creativity as a transforming activity that brought about significant change to a field of endeavour. They were interested in the close study of individuals – scientists, artists, technocrats, philosophers – and in individual achievement and creative processes. Other studies focussed on divergent thinking and personality assessment (Barron, 1979), gifted children (Milgram, 1991; Milgram, Dunn, & Price, 1993, Milgram, Subotnik, Kansan, Summers and Waster), lateral thinking (De Bono, 1977), problem finding and solving (Runco & Albert, 1990), institutional nurturing of creativity, particularly in education (Isaksen, 1987; Treffinger & National Association for Gifted Children (U.S.), 2004), the anthropology of creativity (Dissanayake, 1988; Lavie, Narayan, & Rosaldo, 1993; V. Turner, 1969; V. W. Turner, 1974;, 1988,) the psychology of the ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Virtually none of these studies other than the anthropological studies, those of the complexity theorists Lewin, and Csikszentmihalyi, pay significant attention to what I consider to be the most important quality of creativity – its spatial and temporal nature.
Creativity theory had, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, bounced around several disciplines without finding a permanent home or becoming a field in its own right – as semiotics had. We had a science of signs, a science of cognition, a science of the cosmos – but no science for the mechanism that was responsible for bringing all of these sciences into being.
There have been enthusiastic attempts to give creativity its own theoretical home. Lynn White asserted in 1963 that ‘the analysis of the nature of creativity is one of the chief intellectual commitments of our age’ (White, 1963, p43). In 1990 Istvan Magyari Beck went a step further at the International Conference on Creativity in Buffalo, proclaiming “creatology” as a unique discipline (Weiner, 2000). This term has not been broadly accepted – possibly for the simple reason that it doesn’t roll readily off the tongue, sounding, perhaps, a little ancient and crusty. Academics might find some difficulty in identifying themselves as “creatologists”. I am in sympathy with these folk, but also with anyone frustrated with the idea that a phenomenon of such fundamental importance to all aspects of human endeavour remains, primarily, the province of the field of psychology and the concern of industry-based research into innovation and excellence. These concerns may well be quite valid and the resulting research very useful for understanding highly specific human needs and attributes, but they don’t help us in understanding the phenomenon of creativity itself, or our place within it. Rather than establishing a new discipline, however, to counter limitations in focus, I would prefer to see creativity become a genuinely trans-disciplinary concern, with research supported across all the human sciences.
Creative processes in humankind are, according to Emeritus Professor of Physics David Bohm, not merely linked to the creative processes of nature. Rather they are of the same intrinsic nature as the creative forces of the universe at large; a demand for coherent wholeness; perceiving a new set of essential differences from which arise a new relationship of similarity, and thus a new order of space and time.
… in creation one perceives a new fundamental set of similar differences that constitutes a genuinely new order – not merely a relationship between two or more orders that are already known (Bohm & Nichol, 1998, p. 15).
There are, of course exceptions to the severing of creativity from its cosmological roots and it is my intention in this thesis to provide a much broader perspective and much more lively environment in which to consider what creativity contributes to human flourishing.
But what do we really think of creativity, individually and collectively? There seems to be a discrepancy between individual and cultural views about the phenomenon itself as opposed to views about its products – whether they are material or living artifacts. Everyone seems to want access to some (creativity) for themselves, at the same time as recognising that their own creative production doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with society’s expectations, or their own, of material excellence. The phenomenon and any resulting product are valued according to different criteria. The motivation for day-to-day creativity seems to boil down to an individual and collective need to tell world-creating, place defining stories in one medium or another.
In 2000, as a result of a spirited informal discussion, I conducted a verbal interview with twenty-three young people (14 to 19) involved in a youth theatre project. My role in the project was as assistant director and scriptwriter. I was curious as to what they thought about the concept of creativity – indeed whether they had clearly formulated views (or culturally inherited ones) and asked them a range of questions – what they thought about creativity generally, what they thought it was, what it meant to them, what it felt like when they were experiencing it, what part they expected it to play in the rest of their lives. The difficulty of expressing ideas about creativity as a phenomenon was evident as it is with most adults. It became easier once the questions focussed on the ‘doing and being part’. Every one, without exception said that creativity was one of the most important things in their lives. This is not a surprising response from young people voluntarily involved in an arts project being questioned by a person they would have assumed had a commitment to creative process. Their enthusiasm and energy was evident, however, as they talked about the ‘total buzz’ they got from doing it, that they would probably die if they were denied the right to do it, and that it was part of being alive. At the same time many wanted to extend beyond this common sense expressiveness and joyful participation. They wanted stardom – something they quite curiously and, in my view, wisely separated from the creative act. The two were not seen as the same thing, or one emanating from the other. Stardom, it seemed, had to do with luck, personality and Contacts (with a capital C) and celebrities were not necessarily seen as creative. Those who envisioned living their lives as professional artists were less interested in the idea of celebrity than those who had made other choices.
Adult popular culture – television, magazines, film, the internet – indicates a preoccupation with two streams of creative endeavour based on the unquestioned acceptance of a perceptual divide between ‘creativity’ as a self-transformative ‘tool’ and ‘creativity’ as the inspired source of world-changing discovery and artistic production. Type the word ‘creativity’ into any search engine of the internet and thousands upon thousands of sites will flood the screen, the vast majority of them to do with discovering your ‘inner Leonardo’, promoting sure-fire programs for recreating oneself as a resource rich success story of individual achievement, fully realised intellectual capacity and self assurance supported by exponential growth in bank balance and social status. The strong assertion that creativity is anyone’s transformative territory reference (provided one follows the prescribed techniques offered by the expert) goes hand in hand with the view that its worthwhile products still remain in the domain of the lucky, talented individual.
Cosmogonic artifacts
Salisbury Cathedral interior, photo by Geoff Doré
Creativity as a concept is not culturally based in the sense that some cultures have a concept for it and some don’t. Looking back to the original creation stories, it is clear that all cultures have stories to describe the creation of the universe as a whole and a people’s ancestral heritage in particular. The variety of texts that retain and transmit those stories reflect (and change along with) the needs and concerns of the cultures they emanate from and which they, in turn, help to form.
Biblical manuscripts, sacred printed texts, the pictorial cosmogonies of Australian Aboriginal dot paintings, Buddhist and Navajo sand paintings and the windows of Salisbury Cathedral all exist as means to transmit defining stories, as do the liturgy, hymns, songs, and dances of Christian, Jewish or Muslim congregations, Whirling Dervishes or Warlpiri Corroboree. All these modes of transmission are cosmogonic ritual artifacts. In that sense, all art-making, pictorial, sculptural, performance or bio-tech is cosmogonic, motivated by the need and the intention to construct a theory or account of creation in a form that can communicate and contain its essence. The same basic need and intention applies to children exploring their own defining stories in a youth theatre project, or a scientist developing a potentially world-changing hypothesis. They go to the same place to ‘do it’ and experience the same deep satisfaction in having been there and completed their world-creating work, mythologies of the living self.
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