The Creativity Complex: A Companion to Contemporary Culture 9783839445099

Table of contents :
Content
Introduction The Creativity Complex
Aesthetic Capitalism
Aestheticization
Affect Culture
Artist
Atmosphere
Capital
Coaching
Co-Creation
Color
Computer
Consumption
Creative Cities
Creative Crowd
Creativity Techniques
Critique
Curating
Deaestheticization
Design
Dispositif
Fashion
Genealogy
Guilt
Imagineering
Improvisation
Innovation
Museum
Naturalization
Organization
Performativity
Plasticity
Play
Pop
Product
Queer
Self-Generation
Stage
Valorization
Work
Postscript
Authors

Citation preview

Timon Beyes, Jörg Metelmann (eds.) The Creativity Complex Translated by Erik Born and Others

Cultures of Society  | Volume 36

Timon Beyes, Jörg Metelmann (eds.)

The Creativity Complex A Companion to Contemporary Culture

Supported by the Research Panel Fund and the Publication Fund of the University of St.Gallen and the European Haniel Program on Entrepreneurship and the Humanities.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Translations: “Atmospheres,” “Creative Cities,” “Dispositif,” “Fashion,” “Genealogy,” “Innovation,” and “Queer” originally composed in English. “Affect Culture” translated by Sophia Leonard and Juan-Jacques Aupiais. “Aestheticization” translated by Juan-Jacques Aupiais. “Artist,” “Co-Creation,” “Computer,” “Improvisation” translated by Jonathan Davenport. “De-Aestheticization” translated by Daniel Binswanger Friedman. “Stage” and “Performance” translated by Mariaenrica Giannuzzi. “Work” translated by Sophia Leonard. “Play” and “Self-Generation” translated by Matthew Stoltz. All other essays translated by Erik Born. Typeset by Francisco Bragança, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4509-5 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4509-9 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839445099

Content

Introduction The Creativity Complex Timon Beyes, Jörg Metelmann | 9

Aesthetic Capitalism Elena Beregow | 19

Aestheticization Heinz Drügh | 25

Affect Culture Jörg Metelmann | 31

Artist Heinz Drügh | 37

Atmosphere Chris Steyaert, Christoph Michels | 43

Capital Emmanuel Alloa | 48

Coaching Florian Schulz | 56

Co-Creation Björn Müller | 63

Color Timon Beyes | 70

Computer Claus Pias | 76

Consumption Dirk Hohnsträter | 82

Creative Cities Chris Steyaert, Christoph Michels | 87

Creative Crowd Paola Trevisan | 92

Creativity Techniques Claudia Mareis | 98

Critique Dirk Hohnsträter | 104

Curating Timon Beyes | 109

Deaestheticization Vincent Kaufmann | 114

Design Claudia Mareis | 120

Dispositif Sverre Raffnsøe | 126

Fashion Monica Titton | 131

Genealogy Sverre Raffnsøe | 136

Guilt Daniele Goldoni | 142

Imagineering Jörg Metelmann | 148

Improvisation Daniele Goldoni | 154

Innovation Monica Calcagno | 160

Museum Wolfgang Ullrich | 165

Naturalization Emmanuel Alloa | 171

Organization Timon Beyes | 177

Performativity Martina Leeker | 184

Plasticity Emmanuel Alloa | 191

Play Michael Hutter | 197

Pop Christoph Jacke | 201

Product Dirk Hohnsträter | 207

Queer Chris Steyaert | 212

Self-Generation Emmanuel Alloa | 217

Stage Maximilian Schellmann | 222

Valorization Michael Hutter | 228

Work Sophie-Thérèse Krempl | 232

Postscript The Society of Singularities and the Creativity Dispositif Andreas Reckwitz | 238

Authors  | 253

Introduction The Creativity Complex Timon Beyes, Jörg Metelmann

No matter where one looks, creativity can be found everywhere in contemporary society, from creative spaces and creative practices to creative subjects and creative organizations. To belong in contemporary society, everyone must satisfy the entry requirement of being creative, of being new, unique, and above all, different. An essential part of everyday work and daily routines, creativity is just as evident on social networks and technological platforms as in advertising and traditional mass media, and it even seems to have become a compulsory concern of school and higher education. As though taking a cue from the tradition of liberal arts colleges in the United States, the undergraduate program at the university where one of the two editors of this book currently works was recently described as “creative and inspirational.” In the German-speaking world, a creative and inspirational university would have long sounded like an oxymoron, and the notion of an institute of higher education providing for creativity would have only made sense for design and artistic programs even a few decades ago, and only then if the students were lucky enough to have Joseph Beuys as their teacher.1 In contemporary society, creativity can be found not only where one would most expect it: in the media sector; in the cultural and creative industries (Lovink/Rossiter 2007); or in the artistic field (White 1993), where the term nonetheless retains somewhat negative connotations (Loacker 2010; Rosler 2010/2011). Even where one might least expect it, traditional institutions have started capitalizing on the currency of creativity. “In an epidemic manner,” the 1 | See https://www.leuphana.de/news/meldungen/titelstories/2014/bachelor-studi​ um​-kreativ-und-inspirierend.html; on the short-lived “Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research” (Freie internationale Hochschule für Kreativität und interdisziplinäre Forschung), which was founded by Joseph Beuys among others, see http://pinakothek-beuys-multiples.de/de/glossary/freie-internationale-universitat​ -fiu/.

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term ‘creativity’ has made an “entrance into administrative and technocratic literature” (Wuggenig 2016: 12). In The Entrepreneurial Self, sociologist Ulrich Bröckling quotes a now-discredited educational theorist as saying, “Creativity is without doubt a, if not the, ‘salvational word’ of the present moment” (2016: 101, emphasis in the original). “Faith in the creative potential of the individual is the secular religion of the entrepreneurial self,” Bröckling concludes in the vein of this theological language (ibid). While defending the emancipatory potential of collective creativity, philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato observes that the ability to expressive oneself creatively is no longer merely in demand but is now a condition of employability. Hence, the neoliberal mottos “Be creative” and “Express yourself” have taken their place alongside the classic liberal economic standby “Make yourself rich” (2017: 175). Therefore, creativity in contemporary society is understood as both a “moral imperative” (Osborne 2003: 508) and a “central mode of post-Fordist subjectivization” (Raunig/Wuggenig 2016: 72; Raunig/Ray/Wuggenig 2011). Today, you can perhaps become different things, but you have to be creative. For this reason, creativity was untenable to cultural theorist Stuart Hall, the concept having been appropriated and corrupted by technological, commercial, and entrepreneurial practices (2010: x). Over two decades earlier, sociologist Niklas Luhmann glossed the growing presence of the term as a kind of “democratically-deformed ingenuity” (1988: 16). Like the concept of genius, creativity is indeed characterized by the temporal dimension of the new, the factual (or symbolic) dimension of the distinctive or the significant, and the social dimension of the surprising – albeit on more modest grounds. As Luhmann quips with typical irony, “Anyone who has the talent and makes the effort can turn that into creativity. The only requirements are patience and, of course, job openings” (ibid: 16). A related yet different critique of creativity has been developed by cultural theorist Angela McRobbie (2016), which focuses specifically on the precariousness and insecurity of contemporary work in the creative industries: ostensibly operating in the name of creativity, these industries have actually downgraded any engaged and collective commitment to creativity in favor of training urban middle classes for a workscape without proper job openings and social security. Of course, the discourse of creativity itself is fueled not only by the complaints about the unacceptability and corruption of the concept or the harmful consequences of its propagation, but also by any ironical or detached take on the concept, such as the reformulation of ‘creativity’ in systems sociology as the “ability to take advantage of opportunities” (Luhmann 1988: 17). The critical approach and the detached approach are both part and parcel of the same ‘creativity complex’. According to sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, this “multipart complex” of creativity is a “historically unprecedented manifestation belonging to the last third of the twentieth century” (2017: 6) – which, it should be added,

Introduction

continues to shape life, at least in Western societies, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In The Invention of Creativity, Reckwitz argues that the emergence of this complex is responsible for the “production” of creativity as a social and cultural phenomenon. Thus, the creativity complex gives rise to a concomitant desire “to think about our own creativity using quite demanding concepts […], to train it using appropriate techniques, and to form ourselves into creative subjects” (ibid; translation modified). This book is dedicated to thinking through the creativity complex with the aid of more or less demanding concepts. It does not provide drills for cultivating creativity, but rather reflects on the ascendancy of *Creativity Techniques. Nor does it include any guidelines for cultivating the creative self, but rather discusses the relationship between the imperative to be creative and the process of *Self-Generation. It will not offer any tips for designing creative and playful spaces, but inquiries into the aesthetic constitution of the creativity complex in terms of, for instance, *Atmosphere, *Color, *Improvisation, and *Play. The volume mobilizes nearly 40 concepts, from *Aesthetic Capitalism to *Work, for the exploration, investigation, and analysis of the constitution of the creativity complex and the proliferation of ‘creativity’. The conceptual range of the entries in this volume reflects the ubiquity and efficacy of creative topoi, which have also inflected social and cultural discourses in recent years. In this respect, the “currently most-cited works of individual scholarship” that “have the noun ‘creativity’ or the adjective ‘creative’ in the title” come neither from psychology or the newly-dominant discipline of cognitive science, nor from the once-dominant disciplines of philosophy and history, but from the social sciences – another symptom of the creativity complex (Wuggenig 2017: 174). Thus, the concepts addressed in each contribution to this volume identify and illuminate many of the empirical phenomena involved in the expansion of the creative. Taken together, they should also provide a conceptual apparatus for analyzing the creativity pandemic. In this sense, we would like this book to be understood as a handy, useful companion in the truest sense of a vade mecum: a theoretical handbook and a reflexive guide to the creativity complex.2 Given the contemporary significance of the creativity complex, this volume can also be understood as a textbook for the analysis of contemporary culture and the contemporary obsession with creative phenomena, processes, and subjects. Each chapter provides a different means of locating the key terms and concepts for comprehending the spread 2 | The subtitle of the German edition of this book is Vademecum. The fact that the vade mecum was initially used as a term for a genre of theological handbooks serves as a reminder of the deep theological layers still underlying the current call for creativity. It is a fact not lost on Luhmann (1988) among others and dealt with in this volume particularly in the entry on *Guilt.

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of the creative (and of creative people), whether from a social, cultural, economic, material, or technological perspective. To this end, the contributions are also tasked with negotiating the contradictions and limitations of creativity, which is at once a desire, a call, and a command. Learning to think through the multiple facets and ruptures of the creativity complex demands a wealth of empirical detail, explorations of unconventional conceptual territory, and even a somewhat experimental form. This companion or vade mecum, with its supply of short entries handy for consultation at the appropriate moment, seems to be the appropriate form.

The Invention of Creativity The present book would not exist without another: Reckwitz’s study of The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New (2017), which originally appeared in German with a slightly different subtitle Die Erfindung der Kreativität: Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung (2012). This original, influential, and much-debated study provided the basis and the springboard for our own experiment in the form of this volume. Generally proceeding from Reckwitz’s observations and arguments, the entries in our companion establish further connections, some in dialogue with Reckwitz more explicitly than others, and thereby continue the exploration and conceptual mapping of the creativity complex. At the same time, The Creativity Complex goes beyond The Invention of Creativity, with each of the contributions deepening, broadening, or pushing to the limits of what Reckwitz (as well as Angela McRobbie and Fabian Heubel, 2002) called the ‘creativity dispositif’. In keeping with this gesture, the last entry in this companion is provided by Reckwitz himself, who pushes the limits of his previous work in the form of a postscript written especially for this volume. In the *Postscript, Reckwitz puts his own theory of the creativity dispositif in dialogue with the central theory of his next book, The Society of Singularities: On the Structural Transformation of Modernity (2019), thereby interrogating their shared concepts including ‘aestheticization’, ‘culturalization’, and ‘the new’. At the same time, Reckwitz’s postscript also puts the constellations of concepts in this volume into conversation with the discussion about the role of creativity in the current structural transformation of modernity, thereby suggesting another avenue for future research. The Invention of Creativity not only provides evidence for the propagation of creative narratives and practices, and for the critique of their banality and corruption, but also an analytical approach to ‘doing genealogy’ in social theory. Like The Creativity Complex, Reckwitz’s genealogy of the creativity dispositif takes the phenomenon of creativity seriously as the result of social power relations and one of their driving forces. Taking creativity seriously as a social phenomenon entails a shift in focus from the individualistic qualities of crea-

Introduction

tive activity to the collective level of sociality. The decisive starting point for Reckwitz’s analysis consists in expanding two central dogmas of modernity theory – ‘formal rationalization’ (and the attendant processes of bureaucratization, marketization, and scientification) and ‘functional differentiation’ (and the accompanying distinctions among social systems or social fields) – so as to include practices and processes of ‘social aestheticization’. In the “Preface to the English Edition” of the Invention of Creativity, Reckwitz situates his project within the German sociological tradition of modernity theory stretching from Max Weber and Georg Simmel to Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck. His study seeks to redress the relative neglect of processes of aestheticization in the dominant categories of modernity theory, where aesthetics tends to appear in the guise of de-aestheticization (in the case of ‘formal rationalization’),3 and in the form of field- or system-specific aesthetic practices like those of the artistic field or the mass media (in the case of ‘social differentiation’). Hence, Reckwitz’s study reflects the further inheritance of a humanities-based tradition of thinking aestheticization in the German-speaking world (Rebentisch 2011). In this respect, it complements the major critical project of (not only German) sociology, which is a form of ‘social critique’ that opposes social inequality and disintegration, with a form of ‘aesthetic critique’ that seeks to provide no less than a “revision of the sociological perspective” (Reckwitz 2015: 21).4 As a third area of ​​influence, Reckwitz mentions the current (German-language) boom in the critical analysis of contemporary society informed by cultural theory and cultural sociology (e.g., Ulrich Bröckling, Hartmut Rosa, Joseph Vogl). In addition to this explicitly-cited German tradition, the more implicit influence of French and Anglo-American cultural sociology and social theory make The Invention of Creativity open to further connections beyond the German-speaking world (and provides one of the main reasons for the publication of parallel editions of this volume in English and German): One exemplary connection can be found in Reckwitz’s usage of a practice-oriented and pluralistic concept of ‘culture’; another in his book’s fruitful relation to Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s influential study The New Spirit of Capitalism (2007). To be sure, the rise of creativity could definitely be examined in the alternative terms of the mechanisms of rationalization involved in its scientification, marketization, or even bureaucratization. It could also clearly be approached 3 | The social-theoretical axiom of a generalized ‘de-aestheticization’ (Entästhetisierung) of society is not be confused with the *deaestheticization (Entkunstung) of artistic practices within the field of art since the 1960s. 4 | Reckwitz’s positioning of The Invention of Creativity can also be read as an attempt to more fully develop a theoretical program that can already be found in modernist sociology, e.g., in Georg Simmel’s sociology of the senses, fashion, and urban life, and in Gabriel Tarde’s sociology of imitation and innovation.

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through its differentiation in distinct societal systems or fields, where the most obvious candidates would be art, traditional mass media or its platform successors, and the recent cultural and creative industries. However, neither of these approaches would fully illuminate the defining characteristic of the creative turn: its aesthetic constitution. Therefore, the great social theory concepts of ‘rationalization’ and ‘differentiation’ need to be accompanied by a third term accounting for what the other two completely exclude, take with a grain of salt, or at best restrict to sub-sectors of society: ‘aestheticization’. In Reckwitz’s own words, “Modernity is not only a de-aestheticization machine but also an aestheticization machine” (2017: 19, emphasis in the original). In this modest revision of modernity theory, Reckwitz’s approach accounts for the sensuous, affective dimension of social forms and processes, which is also the only way of accounting for the unique “duality of the wish to be creative and the imperative to be creative, subjective desire and social expectations” (ibid: 2, emphasis in the original). In Reckwitz’s analysis, affective intensity and corporeal perception are the elementary components of social practice, and, with that, the objects and technologies that make social affects possible and influence sensory perception in the first place. In Reckwitz’s terminology, there are two different “modes of the aesthetic”: “aesthetic practices” refer to autotelic, self-referential conduct, devoid of any instrumental rationality, that is embodied and organized through the senses; aesthetic perception takes place in “aesthetic episodes” or events (ibid: 12-13). These two modes of the aesthetic provide the raw material for the rise of creativity as a social and quasi-theological order. “The social complex of creativity,” in one of Reckwitz’s succinct formulations, “territorializes the floating processes of the aesthetic according to its own particular pattern,” – namely, “the production and uptake of new aesthetic events” (ibid: 9, emphasis in the original).5 ‘Creativity’ is thus Reckwitz’s name for an aesthetic regime of the new, the distinctive, and the surprising, which relies on sensuous perception and affective intensity. In this sense, the astonishing spread of creative narratives and practices is symptomatic of the aestheticization of the social. While this process cannot be reduced to either economic or media-based mechanisms, it is interwoven with processes of economization and technologically-facilitated mediatization. The amalgamation of artistic and economic practices, the creation of one’s own self, the design and development of urban spaces primarily in cultural and atmospheric terms – all of these are 5 | Reckwitz’s understanding of the aestheticization of the social restricts ‘aestheticization’ and ‘aesthetic theories’ to the affective experience as a self-referential practice. Arguably, this is a narrowed-down (and perhaps individualized) approach to the aesthetic in relation to affective consumption; it avoids dealing with the aesthetics of particular (art) works or aesthetic theories of production and reception (Henning 2016: 311).

Introduction

part of the rise of social aestheticization in the guise of diverse practices and narratives of creativity.

The Creativity Complex: On the Genesis of the Book The analysis carried out in The Invention of Creativity ends in a sense with Reckwitz’s diagnosis of the imperative to be creative “in the form it has been assuming since the 1980s” (2017: 30). To study the emergence of processes related to creativity in different social fields and to track the diffusion of creative practices and episodes, Reckwitz draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘dispositif’. As Sverre Raffnsøe points out in contributions to this volume (*Dispositif, *Genealogy), the Foucauldian approach also allows Reckwitz to elaborate on the genealogy of the creativity dispositif. Reckwitz’s whole endeavor, in Raffnsøe’s reading, is an attempt to answer a central question posed near the end of the book: “How has the creativity dispositif managed to assert its power?” (ibid: 214) A similar, slightly more qualified question is posed in Reckwitz’s preface to the English translation: “How did creativity come to be accepted as a desirable norm?” (ibid: vii) In either case, Reckwitz’s recourse to Foucauldian dispositif analysis may provide a means of bracketing together a variety of practices under a single term, but it also puts pressure on his own argument. For Foucault, at least in Giorgio Agamben’s reading, a ‘dispositif’ responds to a socio-historical ‘urgency’ (Fr. l’urgence), an emergency, imperative, or necessity in ‘gouvernmentality’ (e.g., in sexuality, ​​ surveillance, or other forms of ‘biopolitics’). Thinking through the question-and-answer structure implicit in Foucault’s concept of the dispositif, Reckwitz formulates what is perhaps the book’s most far-reaching thesis: “What urgent problem is the creativity dispositif responding to? It is precisely the lack of affect in classical, especially organized, modernity” (ibid: 202; *Affect Culture, *Aesthetic Capitalism, *Organization). Thus, the historical end of Reckwitz’s genealogical study lends a renewed affective inflection to his seemingly neutral claims of revising sociological theories of modernity through the addition of *aestheticization. Presented as a response to a ‘lack of affect’, the very term ‘creativity’ already contains an emphatic dimension: In discussing something under the rubric of creativity today, then, we make it part of the longer history of emotions in Western cultures, most of which tended not to talk about feelings with such great intensity, following a first semantic climax around 1800, or to come up with concepts for emotions in such great variety until around the year 2000 (Frevert et al. 2011). Reckwitz’s thesis of ‘affect deficiency in modernity’, which could be read alongside his comments on the structural transformation of modernity in the Postscript to this volume, thus intervenes in a foundational narrative of transatlantic culture: the separation of mind and body, of intellect and feeling (cf. Metelmann 2016). It is

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this framework that creates the possibility of discussing the creativity complex not only with reference to various phenomena (e.g., *Coaching, *Consumption, *Co-Creation, *Pop), but also to axioms of (modernity) theory (e.g., *Aestheticization, *Deaestheticization, *Plasticity, *Guilt). The premise of the present book is that creativity’s configuration as a ‘complex’ makes its analysis pack a greater punch. Our emphasis on the ‘creativity complex’ is intended to expand the horizon of analysis (once again, following Reckwitz’s eye-opening study). Beyond the discussion of the ‘creativity dispositif’, the purview of the ‘creativity complex’ includes mapping a constellation of diverse and heterogeneous elements of our aesthetic present. What may be lost in terms of theoretical sharpness, in comparison to dispositif analysis guided by questions of “urgency,” should be gained through a sharper, because in itself more contradictory, relation to the present. In this respect, the concept of the ‘complex’ (which Reckwitz does not develop) lends itself particularly well to the study of creativity, including that the concept itself contains all sorts of playful and entertaining connotations. To start with a relatively callow pun, “The complex is complex.” Beyond its longstanding psychological associations with the ‘Oedipus complex’, the ‘Electra complex’, or the ‘Napoleon complex’, the term ‘complex’ also evokes society’s large-scale power formations, such as the ‘military-industrial complex’ or the current ‘security-entertainment complex’, and often contains a latent potential to provoke conspiracy theories (Martin 2003, Beyes 2019). As a productive figure of paranoid thought, the ‘complex’ also contains a reflexive dimension that applies well to the field of academic research: To what extent can academia (with this book explicitly included), which currently likes to conceive of itself as “creative and inspirational,” position itself productively within the current aesthetic regime, provided that, in principle, academia considers things in retrospect (i.e., is not new), publishes with a small or minimal impact (i.e., is not significant), and parses the world into footnotes (i.e., is not surprising)? In spite of these reservations, we have maintained great pleasure in coming to terms with the creativity complex in the years following an informal conversation with Andreas Reckwitz over dinner one night in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Based on our joint idea of ​​thinking through and beyond The Invention of Creativity, we organized two international symposia, which were supported by funds from the Haniel Stiftung within the framework of the Haniel Seminars and the European Haniel Program on Entrepreneurship and the Humanities. Following our initial meeting in April 2014, the first conference took place in Copenhagen, Denmark in October 2014, and the second in St. Gallen in October 2016. The contributions from the participants in these symposia formed the basis of our vade mecum, which was expanded through entries on other relevant concepts from scholars already working on similar topics. While the range of entries included in this volume does not claim to represent an ex-

Introduction

haustive collection, they should provide a representative constellation of the creativity complex and a serviceable map for its vast terrain. As is commonly the case with this kind of experimental constellation, readers are invited to jump in at any point, to leap ahead, turn back around, or remain in place. The use of *italics, as demonstrated in this introduction, should facilitate the process of making connections among the various entries, and create further paths for both non-linear reading and future studies of the creativity complex. We would like to thank Andreas Reckwitz and all of the participants at the symposia, and of course everyone involved in the creation of this volume. We are particularly grateful to the Haniel Stiftung, especially Rupert Antes and Anna-Lena Winkler, for making the symposia possible; to Morten Rishede Philipsen in Copenhagen and Sabrina Helmer in St. Gallen, for organizing them; and to the University of St. Gallen’s Publication Fund for supporting the production of the (German and English) volumes. Also, the creation of both books would not have been possible without the great support of Maximilian Schellmann in Copenhagen and Inga Luchs in Lüneburg. Thanks, too, to transcript and Annika Linnemann for the superb cooperation. Ultimately, this English edition would not exist without the felicitous translations (as well as comments, advice, and further edits) by Erik Born and, as indicated in the imprint, by JuanJacques Aupiais, Jonathan Davenport, Daniel Binswanger Friedman, Mariaenrica Giannuzzi, Sophia Leonard, and Matthew Stoltz.

References Beyes, Timon (2019): “Security and Entertainment: Organizing Media.” In: Timon Beyes/Lisa Conrad/Reinhold Martin, Organize, Minneapolis/Lüneburg: University of Minnesota Press/Meson Press (forthcoming). Boltanski, Luc/Chiapello, Ève (2007): The New Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Gregory Elliott, New York: Verso. Bröckling, Ulrich (2016): The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject, translated by Steven Black, London: Sage. Frevert, Ute et al. (2011): Gefühlswissen. Eine lexikalische Spurensuche in der Moderne, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Hall, Stuart (2010): “Foreword.” In: Helmut Anheier/Yudhishthir Raj Isar (eds.), Cultural Expression, Creativity and Innovation, The Cultures and Globalization Series 3, London: SAGE, pp. IX-XII. Henning, Christoph (2016): “Grenzen der Kunst.” In: Michael Kauppert/Heidrun Eberl (eds.), Ästhetische Praxis: Kunst und Gesellschaft, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 303-327. Heubel, Fabian (2002): Das Dispositiv der Kreativität, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

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Lazzarato, Maurizio (2017): Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age, translated by Arianna Bove et al. and edited by Jeremy Gilbert, Cambridge, US: MIT Press. Loacker, Bernadette (2010): Kreativ prekär. Künstlerische Arbeit und Subjektivität im Postfordismus, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Lovink, Geert/Rossiter, Ned (eds.) (2007): MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Luhmann, Niklas (1988): “Über Kreativität.” In: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (ed.), Kreativität – ein verbrauchter Begriff? Munich: Fink, pp. 13-19. Martin, Reinhold (2003): The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space, Cambridge, US: MIT Press. McRobbie, Angela (2016): Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Metelmann, Jörg (2016): Ressentimentalität. Die melodramatische Versuchung, Marburg: Schüren. Osborne, Thomas (2003): “Against ‘Creativity’: A Philistine Rant.” In: Economy and Society 32/4, pp. 507-525. Raunig, Gerald/Wuggenig, Ulf (2016): “Kritik der Kreativität: Vorbemerkungen zur erfolgreichen Wiederaufnahme des Stücks Kreativität.” In: Kritik der Kreativität, Vienna: Transversal, pp. 71-77. Raunig, Gerald/Ray, Gene/Wuggenig, Ulf (2011): Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’, London: MayFly. Rebentisch, Juliane (2011): Die Kunst der Freiheit. Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Reckwitz, Andreas (2015): “Ästhetik und Gesellschaft – ein analytischer Bezugsrahmen.” In: Andreas Reckwitz/Sophia Prinz/Hilmar Schäfer (eds.), Ästhetik und Gesellschaft. Grundlagetexte aus Soziologie und Kulturwissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 13-52. Reckwitz, Andreas (2019): The Society of Singularities: On the Structural Transformation of Modernity [2017], London: Polity (forthcoming). Rosler, Martha (2010/2011): “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part I-III.” In: e-flux Journal 21, 23, 25. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/21/67676/culture-class-art-creativity-urbanism-part-i/ [accessed on April 17, 2018]. White, Harrison C. (1993): Careers and Creativity: Social Forces in the Arts, Boulder, CO: Westview. Wuggenig, Ulf (2016): “Kreativitätsbegriffe.” In Gerald Raunig/Ulf Wuggenig: Kritik der Kreativität, Vienna: Transversal, pp. 11-69. Wuggenig, Ulf (2017): “Literaturhinweise zum Gebrauch des Kreativitätsbegriffs.” In: Kunstforum International 250, pp. 174-183.

Aesthetic Capitalism Elena Beregow

The notion that ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ form two distinct, even opposing, areas of society remains a powerful one, to this day. The concept of ‘culture’, especially in the German tradition of post-Kantian aesthetics, is usually associated with ‘high culture’, the fine arts, the sublime, and freedom from purpose (Zweckfreiheit). Hence, culture is a ‘soft sphere’, which is free from the iron-clad laws of the economy. While contemporary sociology rarely adopts this understanding of culture explicitly, many sociological diagnoses implicitly presuppose distinct spheres of culture and economy in their descriptions of the mixed logic resulting from the ‘economization’ of the social. The economy serves a hegemonic control function in these sociological diagnoses, which often turn out to be complaints, and spreads throughout supposedly non-economic areas, such as culture, aesthetics, and subjectivity. With the concept of ‘aesthetic capitalism’, Andreas Reckwitz effects a change of course in The Invention of Creativity (2017), moving away from the frequently invoked economization of culture and toward an *aestheticization of the economic. However, Reckwitz’s claim of providing a comprehensive social diagnosis emphasizes his ambition of providing more than a mere reversal of the economization thesis. For Reckwitz, the economy is only one component in a more comprehensive process of social aestheticization, including art, the media, and other sectors; analyzing these different large-scale processes together is what leads to his thesis about a ‘society of creativity’. The guiding assumption of Reckwitz’s study is that contemporary society is characterized by the reconfiguration and social intensification of aesthetic principles. Reckwitz’s main point is that sociology needs to examine capitalist economy not only as an object of aestheticization, but as its driving force. The economy is not only being aestheticized; it has highly aesthetic effects itself. The structural core of this process of aestheticization can be found in the creativity dispositif – a hybrid form of the aesthetic and the economic that blurs the boundaries between art and economy.

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Yet what does ‘aestheticization’ mean for Reckwitz? Starting from the concept of ‘aesthesis’, which lends an aesthetic accent to any kind of sensation, Reckwitz limits ‘the aesthetic’ to a very specific mode of sensory perception: “practices of self-dynamic sensuousness and affectivity freed of all rational purpose” (2017: 35). In other words, the distinguishing characteristic of the aesthetic is the self-referential character of the sensuous, whose only purpose is itself. We do not perceive things for any specific purpose but only for the sake of perception (ibid). In assuming that the aesthetic has its own dynamic character, Reckwitz follows the classical Kantian understanding of aesthetics as ‘disinterested pleasure’, and thus also draws a sharp contrast between the rational and the aesthetic. As a result, ‘aestheticization’, as a processual category, implies the social expansion and increasing complexity of a purpose-free aesthetic (ibid: 3435). Even if Reckwitz does not share the coupling of the aesthetic with the true, the good, and the beautiful in Kantian aesthetics, his reading of ‘classical social theory’ still raises the question of how capitalist modernism updated Kantian aesthetics – especially since he considers the main characteristic of modernity to be a decisive moment of de-aestheticization. Reckwitz’s reading of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim reveals a strikingly closed image of society: Capitalization, objectification, and functional differentiation are the driving forces in a process of de-aestheticization, which prioritizes instrumental rationality over sensual principles and systematically excludes the aesthetic. At work in this process are the “modernist dualism of the aesthetic and the rational” (ibid: 16), which is simultaneously a conceptual distinction that seeps in to sociology from classical aesthetics and a “real bifurcation” (ibid) with practical social effects. Against this process of de-aestheticization, Reckwitz claims to campaign for the hybrid forms that would reveal modernity to be a process also of parallel forms of aestheticization. To this end, he identifies five “agents of aestheticization” (ibid: 19-22): two ‘classical’ aesthetic areas, “the expansionism of art” (*Deaestheticization) and “the media revolution” (*Pop); “the rise of the subject,” (*Self-Generation) which addressed the individual, starting in the lateeighteenth century, as an equally reflexive and sensitive subject; “the expansion of the world of objects,” which led to the creation of a variety of novel artefacts in technology, architecture, and *design (*Atmosphere, *Color); and “the rise of capitalism,” which had previously been a marked sector of de-aestheticization in modernity and gets transformed into a driving force of aestheticization (*Capital). For Reckwitz, the explosive power of the aesthetic for capitalist economy can be found above all in a sensual and affective mode of action in the modern world of commodities (*Product). Since the 1920s, the pressures of expansion and redevelopment have “led capitalism, in two large historic waves, systematically to promote the production of such aesthetic consumer goods, signs and feelings by ‘immaterial labour’” (ibid: 21). Even in Fordism, there was already a creative (though not yet aesthetic) compulsion to innovate, even though its

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internal organizational structure also demanded standardization and the repetition of behaviors (ibid: 86-87). In the second half of the 20th century, this highly organized form of capitalism was reconfigured into something increasingly ‘disorganized’ – an earlier diagnosis formulated by Scott Lash and John Urry. In Economies of Signs and Space, Lash and Urry show that capitalism developed into a global symbolic economy due to its informational expansion and spatiotemporal compression (1994: 10-11). But since ‘postmodernism’ exceeds rational and cognitive modes of processing, it also increasingly needs to produce an aesthetic reflexivity drawing on the tradition of aesthetic modernity and extending it to everyday life with the help of ‘cultures of aesthetic experts’ for art, media, and pop culture (ibid: 54; *Valorization). Modifying the sociological diagnosis of ‘disorganized capitalism’, Reckwitz’s concept of ‘aesthetic capitalism’ always interprets the symbolic economy from the perspective of its inherent aesthetic effects. Hence, the structural core of contemporary capitalism can be found, according to Reckwitz, in the aesthetic economy, which made the development of the creativity dispositif possible and drives it forward (2017: 89). In the creativity dispositif, the driving forces of aestheticization in modernity crystallize into a new kind of regime of the aesthetically new. Two separate processes converge in the creativity dispositif: the principle of dynamic innovation, which had already been a distinguishing feature of organized capitalism; and the figure of the subject as creative producer modeled on the creative artist (ibid: 23). Once conceived of in aesthetic terms, “the new is understood not as progress or as quantitative increase but as aesthetic – i.e., as a perceived and felt stimulus” (ibid, emphasis in the original). While the new was reduced in rational capitalism to technical innovations, and thus also de-aestheticized, the aim of the aesthetic economy, of both its products and organizations, is the “permanent innovation” of “new signs, sense impressions and affects” (ibid: 89). This aestheticization of innovation would subsequently permeate all the individual processes of ‘aesthetic labor’ – not only the production of aesthetic goods and services in the creative industries (*Creative Cities), but the meaning of work itself. According to the “post-romantic aestheticization of work” (ibid: 95), labor becomes more fulfilling and rewarding through a commitment to creativity (*Work). Lastly, the creativity dispositif involves an aesthetically sensitive sphere of consumers, who are themselves depicted as “creative” in their engagement with affective goods and services (ibid: 91; *Consumption, *Stage). As Reckwitz freely admits, the characteristics of the aesthetic economy do not determine the entire economy in all its breadth and heterogeneity. However, according to his thesis, the aesthetic economy still becomes increasingly hegemonic and “gives a strong aesthetic bias to the focus on innovation” (ibid: 91). How might this development be explained? To answer this question, Reck-

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witz reconstructs several different origins of aesthetic economies at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In his argument, there were several different ‘innovators’ in the revision of economic rationalism: the bourgeois arts and crafts movement and the late-bourgeois discourse of the ‘entrepreneur’; the early creative industries and the creative economy in fashion, advertising, and design, which already had a firm place in the Fordist economy; and the early American management theory of the 1950s and the postmodern management discourse of the 1980s (ibid: 92; *Organization). This material spectrum, consisting of aesthetic avant-gardes, on the one hand, and management discourses, on the other, is related to Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s well-known thesis about capitalism’s appropriation of critique. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that the legacy of art criticism from the 1960s eventually found its way into the motivational structure of a “projective city” that made activity, i.e., the generation of new projects and contacts, into the main standard of value (2007: 103-163). By turning the artist into an exemplar of economic action, capitalism equipped itself with a cultural foundation of both legitimacy and motivation, which it could not otherwise generate on its own. Unlike Boltanski and Chiapello, Reckwitz does not assume that the field of art will necessarily spread throughout the entire economy, and instead localizes the development of the aesthetic economy “in and around the Fordist, formal-rational economy itself in the early twentieth century” (2017: 92). Although the creative industries and the arts and crafts movement exhibit many various links to the field of art, Reckwitz argues that the radical economic regimes of the new are not essentially oriented toward aesthetics. Early aesthetic economies, such as advertising and fashion, were actually prototypes of the aesthetic dispositif, i.e., of “institutional complexes for production, presentation and consumption” (ibid: 123). In these prototypes, there was, from the beginning, a mixture of aesthetics and instrumental rationality, such as wages and profit. According to Reckwitz’s critique, Boltanski and Chiapello neglect the specific techniques and skills of aesthetic work and thus “fail to capture the structure of the aesthetic economy in its entirety” (ibid: 125). In doing so, Boltanski and Chiapello overlook the important status of the public’s aesthetic sensibility, which had decisive effects on both the production of goods and the culture of work. Reckwitz’s recurring critique of selectivity also makes clear his own ambition to present a programmatic concept for the analysis of the contemporary economy in the form of ‘aesthetic capitalism’. In using the concept of capitalism as a diagnosis of temporality, Reckwitz implicitly joins a tradition associated with the *critique of political economy. The fact that Reckwitz is not concerned with the conditions of production and ownership, nor with their corresponding antagonisms, is clear throughout the book, especially when he attributes discord in a creative economy to “a dispersion of attention” (ibid: 212) and “the

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advancing aestheticization of social fields” (ibid: 213). Marxist, neoclassical, and cultural-theoretical approaches can often agree on a baseline understanding of ‘capitalism’, which takes its core to be the increase of capital through instrumental rationality (e.g., Boltanski/Chiapello 2007: 40). Were Reckwitz to proceed from this consensus, his definition of ‘the aesthetic’ as a process with its own internal dynamics and its own rational objectives would create a fundamental contradiction between two different ends in themselves – namely, capital and the sensuous. There is a good reason Reckwitz’s book contains only vague and isolated references to the characteristics of aesthetic labor as wage labor and the pressure to turn a profit, which also underlie aesthetic economies (for a Marxist critique of Reckwitz, cf. Loheit 2016). Extending the creativity dispositif to account for both the conditions of exploitation in a highly precarious creative economy and its effects beyond the urban middle class would not only be empirically valuable; it would also have cultural implications and theoretical consequences (*Queer). The concept of the creativity dispositif is made for more than a strict analysis of the economy. It crystallizes heterogeneous fields, such as art, the media, urban space, and the individual, into “aesthetic sociality” (Reckwitz 2017: 212). This broad range of applications informs Reckwitz’s decision to adopt Foucault’s concept of the ‘dispositif’, in order to grasp “a whole social network of scattered practices, discourses, systems of artefacts and types of subjectivity” (2017: 28). However, Reckwitz only adopts the Foucauldian analysis of power in an attenuated form, even though he points out that the “old, emancipatory hopes” put in creative work have turned into “frenetic activity geared to continual aesthetic innovation” (ibid: 7). Reckwitz even accuses Foucault of overlooking the affective and emotional dimension of social invocations (ibid: 28-30). For Reckwitz, the “affectivity” of aesthetic perception is the decisive criterion insofar as it forms the core of aesthetic processes along with self-referential sensibility (ibid: 23). From this perspective, aesthetic capitalism is a form of ‘affective capitalism’, which responds to the “affect deficiency in modernity” (ibid: 201) with a qualitative and quantitative increase in affectivity (*Affect Culture). For Reckwitz, the concept of ‘affect’ can be defined as “culturally moulded, corporeal intensities of stimulation or excitement” (ibid: 12), and is often synonymous with that of emotion. This definition is surprising since Reckwitz’s references to Brian Massumi locate the concept of affect in recent debates about affect theory connected to Deleuze and Spinoza. Their central insight is that affect does not function culturally or consciously, and always has de-individualization effects (cf. Massumi 1995). Even though Reckwitz conceives of the aesthetic not only as an “internal, psychological phenomenon” (2017: 12), but also emphasizes the role of objects, the bulk of his analysis ultimately remains on the affected (i.e., emotionally-involved) creative subject (ibid: 10).

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One contemporary field of aestheticization, which Reckwitz notes only in passing but could be examined further for the role played by affects in de-individualization, can be found on the Internet. The aesthetic economy of the Internet not only puts a new pressure to innovate on the classic creative economies, but also restructures the conditions of aesthetic perception. A considerable part of the Internet consists of images that are consumed in the Reckwitzian sense: They present the inherent dynamic attraction of the aesthetically new. In most cases, there is no greater purpose to clicking through series of images than a momentary sensual attraction; the activity may be guided by “sensuousness for its own sake, perception for its own sake” (ibid: 11), which does not become an emotion because every image is followed by another in rapid succession. Apps, algorithms, and recommendation systems produce a variety of such processes according to their own internal dynamics. The continuous production of ‘the new’ on the Net could be traced back, from the perspective of affect theory, to a form of creativity that emerges from random, contingent events – and not to a creative subject (*Computer, *Performativity).

References Boltanski, Luc/Chiapello, Ève (2007): The New Spirit of Capitalism [1999], translated by Gregory Elliott, New York: Verso. Lash, Scott/Urry, John (1994): Economies of Signs and Space, London: Sage. Loheit, Jan (2016): “Die Erfindung des ‘ästhetischen Kapitalismus’. Andreas Reckwitz und die Schicksale von Ästhetik und Sozialkritik.” In: Das Argument 315, 58/1, pp. 54-67. Massumi, Brian (1995): “The Autonomy of Affect.” In: Cultural Critique 31/2, pp. 83-109. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

Aestheticization Heinz Drügh

The creativity dispositif described by Andreas Reckwitz in his study The Invention of Creativity is intimately connected with a societal transformation which he calls the “aesthetic capitalism” of the present (2017: 2; *Aesthetic Capitalism). By this he means – to summarize – a consumption culture dominated by the media and by markets, by industries of entertainment and experience. Those trendy sneakers, that new must-see series on Netflix, that amazing vacation: these are ubiquitous phenomena within the lived experience of affluent Western societies. Since everybody relates to, even enjoys these phenomena, adopting a critical stance toward them is challenging. The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård gives a good description of this ambivalent situation in the final novel of his My Struggle series.6 “You find your own identity by buying mass-produced commodities,” reads one sentence, written in the standard idiom of consumption critique; yet Knausgård gruffly proceeds, “you should think it’s a joke.” But “the worst thing,” Knausgård writes, is that there seems to be hardly any possibility of critically engaging with this condition: “It just doesn’t work,” holds Knausgård . This is because “critique” has “by now become a cliché and thus irrelevant” – it has “simply been repeated too often” without generating any consequences (*Critique). Talk of “critical things” is cheap, but that fails to change the fact that “at the very same time” one eagerly “carries on living in the exact same way” one criticizes. That is to say: surrounded by consumer goods, pop music, and other products trafficked by mass media (Knausgård 2017: 233). What irritates Knausgård is what Hartmut Böhme has described in his study Fetishism and Culture as “commodity fetishism’s typical structure of com6 | Translator’s Note: The last book in this series had not yet appeared in the US at the time of translation, although it was available for pre-order. Archipelago Books appears not to give each volume a subtitle for the American market, so this one will be known simply as My Struggle: Book Six. Penguin UK will publish with the subtitle, The End. Neither of these correspond to the German title used above, Kämpfen.

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promise” (Böhme 2014: 266). One tends to be irked and overwhelmed by the world of commodities, and to some degree one is aware of their ecological or social costs. (Who is responsible for making the trendy sneakers, and under what working conditions? Who can afford to buy a pair?) Yet the fascination with commodities remains so great that one cannot help but fall under their spell (*Product). To disavow the human desire to consume or to allow it only under conditions of ideological enlightenment would nevertheless be the wrong path to follow. As Böhme has it: “By believing [fetishism] had been destroyed,” it was merely all the more effectively “suppressed in the collective unconscious” (ibid: 267). An urgent need emerges, therefore, for a more incisive analysis of the sphere of consumption and of societal aestheticization. To this end, Reckwitz opts for a historical perspective and maintains that cultures of objectivity and rationality, such as have shaped the work environments of both blue- and white-collar workers, have been repressed in the context of ever-advancing aestheticization (*Organization). In both blue- and white-collar work environments, the aesthetic has remained tied to only very few practices “which guide the production and reception of aesthetic events” (2017: 12) – to wit, the fine arts and their reception. Workers are willing or able to participate in this aesthetic sphere only to a limited degree. “Aesthetic episodes,” where “an aesthetic perception appears momentarily and unexpectedly” (ibid), remain exceptional occurrences. What we now understand as “aestheticization,” though, is the targeted production, “expansion, and intensification of the aesthetic” (ibid: 10) in the context of a culture where citizens first emerge as consumers – consumers with more free time and buying power at their disposal than ever before, who, at the behest of a whole new squad of experts in the fields of design, marketing, and media (the so-called creative professionals; *Creative Cities), have developed an alacritous interest in the production of surprise and novelty. Hannah Arendt saw this path of prosperity in affluent Western societies as a perversion of the Marxist promise of liberation. “The hope,” writes Arendt in The Human Condition, “that inspired Marx and the best men of the various workers’ movements – that free time eventually will emancipate men from necessity and make the animal laborans productive” (in the sense of being socially and politically engaged) – turned out to be specious given the evident appeal of consumption (1958: 133; *Work). As such, emphatic notions of autonomous aesthetics, as came to the fore at the end of the eighteenth century, have increasingly lost validity. Adorno cast aspersions upon this development, identifying in it a wholesale takeover of culture by consumption and decrying the increasing tendency in culture towards an “advertising character” (Reklamecharakter). What, then, does the “difference” of the aesthetic become vis-a-vis “practical life”? “Aesthetic semblance (Schein) turns into the sheen which commercial advertising lends to the commodities which absorb it in turn. But that moment of independence which

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philosophy specifically grasped under the idea of aesthetic semblance is lost in the process” (Adorno 1991: 61). Reckwitz, however, emphasizes, correctly, that the bourgeois artistic sphere has itself been complicit in the production of a consumerist regime of “novelty,” encompassing its own “programme for subjectivization [subjektivistische(s) Zuschreibungsschema]” in the form of an “aesthetics of genius” (2017: 41). In this regard the subjectivist moment does not in the first instance pertain to the genius producer who, as Kant wrote in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, autonomously “gives the rule to Art” (Kant 2000: § 46). It is far more taste, the receptive counterpart to genius, that counts as the decisive category. For it is at the behest of taste, after all, that genius fosters its “discipline”; taste closely “clips the wings” of genius when it flies, as is its wont, too high (ibid: § 50). Moreover, taste also fuses the essentially idiosyncratic inner sensation of pleasure experienced in perceiving an aesthetically appealing object with the ability to communicate it to others: for Kant, taste is that which “which makes our feeling toward a given representation universally shareable without the mediation of a concept” (ibid: § 40). Thus, the core question of the aesthetic, in Kant’s view, concerns the communicability of a feeling; it concerns community. Romanticism can be read as a prologue to ubiquitous aestheticization as well, and this, too, gives rise to a key theorem of the “programme for subjectivization.” Hence the sociologist Colin Campbell’s reading of Romanticism in his study The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, which dovetails with Max Weber’s delineation of modernity’s advancing tendency to objectivism. Romanticism participated in the construction of a machinery of the imagination which paved the way for the modern world of consumption (*Imagineering). Decisive for this development, in Campbell’s account, was the establishment of “daydreaming”: a kind of imagination central to subjectivity which, although trained through a cultivated intercourse with works of art and the aesthetic experience of nature, can in principle be extended to apply to any other object. For a consumer of Coca-Cola what is at stake in consumption is far more than the immediate sensory pleasure of drinking: the whole multitude of brand images constantly being produced and propagated through advertising (and of course also movies, pop songs, novels, and other forms of entertainment) are even more integral to what is being consumed. The self-enjoyment consumers derive through this imagination explains, in Campbell’s argument, why so many people in affluent societies spend their time on things whose direct practical value is at the very least questionable (Campbell 1987). The classical critique of consumerism, however, has seen in the aestheticization of goods, with little to no caveats, nothing but superficial glamour (*Consumption). The attraction of this aestheticization makes no claim to being widely shared: it sinks back to the level of mere “pleasantness,” which, according to Kant, is distinguished from the aesthetic in having only “private validity”

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(Kant 2009: § 9). The concepts usually bound up with autonomous aesthetics are widely supposed to undergo repression by catchiness and consumability; this includes the complexity and intensity of perception and emotion, or the resistance of the art object, which urges its perceiver to “think much” (ibid: § 49) without allowing that the perceiver should or could bring that thinking to a conclusion. Thus understood, aestheticization would indeed entail a quantitative proliferation of the aesthetic, but at the same time also a qualitative flattening. It is to be expected that the ensuing critical refusal of this flattening is often categorical. Art, or as Jacques Rancière writes without the former encumbrance of the term, “the Beautiful,” is exactly defined as “that which resists both conceptual determination and the allure of consumer goods” (Rancière 2008: 15). On the opposite end of the spectrum is the system of aesthetic categories which Richard Hamilton outlined in a 1957 note heralding the dawn of Pop Art. For Hamilton, *Pop means “Popular (designed for a mass audience) / Transient (short-term solution) / Expendable (easily forgotten) / Low cost / Mass produced / Young (aimed at youth) / Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business” (Hamilton 1982: 28). Neither complexity nor resistance is pivotal to this program – and intensity is at most a transient, soon-forgotten moment. But does this redefinition of the aesthetic for a post-Fordist world of consumable goods really entail its own bankruptcy? Or is what is at hand really an attempt to protect the aesthetic from ossifying in quotidian routines; indeed, to protect it simultaneously through a broadening of the analytical focus of cultural studies and a honing of the debate about the status of aesthetic judgment (*Deaestheticization)? Prima facie, engaging this expanding field of aesthetic objects enables a rediscovery of a huge archive of the “repressed aesthetic data of our lives” (Harris 2000: xi). That such an archive can be brought into the purview of cultural studies is beyond question, but is it really tenable to speak here of a domain of repression? Yes and no. Surely not, inasmuch as ubiquitous aestheticization in a hyper-commodified world dominates over lived experience; but indeed, as far as aesthetic theory goes. For mainstream aesthetic theory now abounds with positions, like Rancière’s, which preach asceticism when faced with the myriad forms of hybridization between ‘art’ and ‘consumption’ and then expect their salvation from concepts like the beautiful and the sublime. “If only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and the sublime,” laments philosopher J. L. Austin, “and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy” (Austin 1957: 8). Austin’s philosophical interest in “ordinary language” proceeds from the fact that it registers all of the distinctions and connections which generally matter to us. His view can be sharpened by recourse to Gérard Genette’s reflections on the praxis of aesthetic judgment: for Genette, the utterance “it’s beautiful,” counter-intuitively, is nothing other than an “undifferentiated appreciation.” It remains, because hackneyed, on the level of a merely subjective judgment

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of taste. Not so, however, for more unusual judgments like “it’s graceful” or “it’s powerful,” which in their unusualness are pithier and, as importantly, are grounded by appeal to a more precise explication. For “the appreciation is made more precise and, at the same time, motivated by way of a descriptive specification” (Genette 1999: 92). The most powerful call to aesthetic debate is made today using exactly those extraordinary and robustly descriptive aesthetic categories – categories which demand justification – that emerge in an aesthetics negotiating its own contemporary instrumentalization by capitalism. Susan Sontag’s concept of ‘Camp’ smartly flanks Pop Culture’s “witty, sexy, glamorous” – and she uses it to articulate a question about the possibility of aesthetic refinement in mass society: “How to be a dandy in the age of mass culture” (1966: 288). It is no longer possible, argues Sontag, by a strict abstinence from Pop Culture. Instead, both the “pleasures […] in the arts of the masses” and the “psychopathology of affluence” (ibid: 289) should have a voice in a dandyism of mass culture. The “ultimate Camp statement” is hence the hybrid perception: “It’s good, because it’s awful” (ibid: 292). Gradually these ideas are catching up with contemporary aesthetic debates. Faced with the societal realities of an expanding consumer society, with the dominance of the service and creative industries in a landscape of simultaneously deregulated and flexibilized labor, and with the state of being constantly connected to news or novelty through the mass-media, American literary critic Sianne Ngai speaks of “a complicated new set of feelings” characterized by ambivalence, by an ongoing oscillation between “pleasure/displeasure” (2012: 41). In Ngai’s view, the complexity of such a societal situation can no longer be adequately captured with classical aesthetic categories like ‘beautiful’ or ‘sublime’. Both categories imply an “extra-aesthetic power (moral, religious, epistemological, political)” (ibid: 22), which, she suspects, cling to trite habits of thought and action more than they illuminate the societal place of ‘art’. For this reason, Ngai privileges more unusual and ambivalent categories like ‘zany’, ‘cute’, and ‘interesting’. These respective categories are more tightly bound up with the realities of the labor market and its performative demands on individuals (‘zany’), or with consumption and its prettiness (‘cute’), or with media distribution’s dominion over our attention (‘interesting’; *Aesthetic Capitalism). Insofar as these categories carry their “own aesthetic weaknesses and limitations,” they not only issue a more insistent call for aesthetic debate than their established predecessors, but also offer a “more direct reflection” of the “relation between art and society” (ibid). Rather than deploring in stereotypical fashion the inflationary aestheticization of society, an implication to which the always somewhat claustrophobic and dead-end-fearing talk of a *dispositif can lead, one does better to treat this development with nuance and variegation when it comes to aesthetics.

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References Adorno, Theodor W. (1991): “The Schema of Mass Culture.” In: Jay M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, New York: Routledge, pp. 53-84. Arendt, Hannah (1958): The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Austin, John L. (1957): “A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential Address.” In: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 57, pp. 1-30. Böhme, Hartmut (2014): Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity, translated by Anna Galt, Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Campbell, Colin (1987): The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell. Genette, Gérard (1999): The Aesthetic Relation, translated by G. M. Goshgarian, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hamilton, Richard (1982): “Letter to Peter und Alison Smithson,” dated 16 January 1957. In: Collected Words 1953-1982, London: Thames & Hudson, p. 28. Harris, Daniel (2000): Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism, Boston: Da Capo Press. Kant, Immanuel (2000): Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press Knausgård, Karl Ove (2017): Kämpfen, translated by Paul Berf and Ulrich Sonnenberg, Munich: Luchterhand. Ngai, Sianne (2012): Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rancière, Jacques (2008): Ist Kunst widerständig? Berlin: Merve. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Sontag, Susan (1966): “Notes on ‘Camp’.” In: Against Interpretation and other Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, pp. 275-292.

Affect Culture Jörg Metelmann

Over the course of its first seven chapters, The Invention of Creativity summarizes a large amount of scholarship and develops many lucid insights, moving toward a somewhat grand thesis, at the start of the eighth and final chapter, in a section on “Affect Deficiency in Modernity.” At the end of the book, Andreas Reckwitz’s main thesis is even broader than that of ubiquitous *aestheticization: “What urgent problem is the creativity dispositif responding to? It is precisely the lack of affect in classical, especially organized, modernity. Modernity systematically supressed [sic] 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” (2017: 202). According to Reckwitz, this “suppression of affect within modernity” was not complete, since the establishment of aesthetic, religious and political “zones of affective concentration” (ibid: 204) made available alternative sites for creating social bonds out of emotional energies. However, modernity nonetheless itself created the need to react to this deprivation in the sense of Foucault’s concept of ‘urgency’. The notion of an “affect culture” therefore speaks to one – if not the – pivotal element of the creativity complex, which demands further critical reflection (*Atmosphere, *Color). I would like to develop this critical reflection by attempting to conceive of the “zones of affective concentration” as evaluative processes of understanding, which in the creativity dispositif remain insufficiently or even fully undefined. The point of departure for this investigation is a question of terminology. What exactly does ‘affect’ mean for Reckwitz, as distinct from ‘feeling’, ‘emotion’ or ‘mood’? In the context of contemporary theory, following Brian Massumi and Gilles Deleuze, ‘affect’ would probably designate the still unformed “eruptive-transitory,” a power that surges through all bodies and makes fixed constellations dynamic (Massumi 2010: 25-34). In fact, Reckwitz himself refers to Deleuze’s “call for an affect cartography” (Reckwitz 2017: 283, note 9), claiming that “Deleuze is right to encourage the drafting of ‘affect lists’ of social entities to analyse the affective relations, nodes and diffusions inherent

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to social constellations” (Reckwitz 2017: 54). However, this does not appear to be exactly what Reckwitz has in mind. By invoking figures like Norbert Elias (Reckwitz 2017: 204, note 7) and referencing Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and Critical Theory, Reckwitz evokes one of the major constellations of modernity: the separation of body and mind, reason and feeling, cognition and emotion. In this context, affect means the undomesticated, the irrational, the other with respect to the conceptual as well as to the material: “Industrialization, the rise of capital, formal objectification and the separation between human and thing would at first seem parts of a downright de-aestheticization machine. They cause the atrophy and inhibition of auto-dynamic sensuous perceptions and affects, albeit incompletely” (Reckwitz 2017: 17). Interestingly, Reckwitz grants the field of “perception” (and thus the “aesthetic”) primacy with respect to “affects.” This is significant – and I gained this impression especially from the concerning chapter on the “Society of Creativity” – insofar as it suggests that what is actually at stake is the opposition between instrumental rationality as a “mode of acting on the world” and the “mode of experiencing and working in or with the world involved in aesthetic practices” (ibid: 13, emphasis added, *Co-Creation). To wit, if Reckwitz’s primary goal is to mobilize resistance against the systematic instrumentalization of the world in organized modernity, then he seems to prioritize non-teleological aesthetics over undomesticated or transitory affects. This might also be the source of Reckwitz’s terminological indecisiveness with respect to ‘affect(s)’, which becomes all too apparent in some passages where he uses the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ almost synonymously (Reckwitz 2008: 178, note 4; 194). How else could we grasp the exact content of aesthetic, political, or religious “zones of affective concentration” or culturally ground them? How else could they be described, if modernity, “from its beginnings […] was armed with strategies for compensating its lack” (Reckwitz 2017: 204), other than as thickly-coded, historically meaningful, and open to intersubjective interpretation? If we understand the term ‘affect’ as a transitory field of forces, as the opposite of social codification – as would be suggested through recourse to Deleuze/Massumi and to some degree Elias – then the strategic theoretical position would remain, in my view, too weak, on account of being underdetermined. I rather think that the “zone of affective concentration” must be understood as nodes of emotions or a scenario of feelings, that is, as a field of feelings that each have a history and a context-specific *performativity. In her study Narrative Emotionen, Christiane Voss (2004) developed a consistent framework of analysis, according to which short narratives constitute the basic unit of emotions. In opposition to the generic term ‘feeling’, Voss defines ‘emotion’ as a “feeling of being moved (by something)”; this in opposition to “mood” which does not require an object (there is no by something). For Voss, understanding an emotion requires analyzing a) the object and its valuation, b) the behavior it triggers, and c) any concomitant bodily reaction (i.e.,

Affect Culture

physical change). With such an approach, Voss manages to mediate between naturalistic and culture-based affect theories by proceeding from the assumption of a transition between primary and secondary feelings, depending on the degree to which they are culturally formed through interaction with media and society. These interactions “which we are confronted with over the course of our lives through narratives, games, films, reports and, above all, personal encounters,” coalesce into an interpretive lens for our emotional experience as a whole (Voss 2004: 219). Media, in the broadest sense, thus play an important role in the formation of emotions, since they also provide us with “a conceptual understanding of terms for emotions that we may never have experienced first-hand” (ibid). This is justified and made possible by “the linguistic dependency of our emotional understanding,” as well as by our “capacity for imagination,” which has always tied us to “spaces of experience and understanding that exceed the subjective” (ibid). This picture is especially applicable, as Voss repeatedly stresses, to secondary or complex emotions like “jealousy, infatuation, envy, guilt, shame, pride, disappointment, vindictiveness, joy, sympathy, happiness, hate, resentment, boredom” or to “higher-level emotions, such as taking pride in sympathizing with someone or feeling guilty about envying someone” (ibid: 221). Unlike the currently dominant affect theories, Voss’s concept of ‘emotion’ would not construe these secondary or complex emotions as unconscious, unformed, or singular and transitory. By definition, ‘emotions’ are evaluative expressions of understanding in which “a personal, evaluative relationship to the world is represented and also experienced in a temporally limited way” (ibid: 222). My proposal would thus be that the fields of the aesthetic, the political, and the religious may be grasped more precisely as evaluative expressions of understanding than as what Reckwitz calls “zones of affective concentration.” What else are “aggressive millennialism” in the field of religion (Reckwitz 2017: 204) or “the hope of perfecting the social collective here on earth” in the realm of modern politics (ibid), if not ‘emotional scenarios’, which are highly tendentious (e.g., in the media) and thus also compatible in various ways (e.g., replicable, re-interpretable). How else did these emotional scenarios arise, if not out of a narrative core, “which fulfills our dreams or frustrates our imagined goals” (Voss 2004: 218)? Reckwitz himself gestures in this direction in a footnote relating the persistence of religious affects in modernity to Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘residual culture’: “There is reason to suppose that organized modernity, with its seemingly rationalist politics, was in fact contingent on patterns of intensive affect which erupted in the age of the ‘European civil wars’” (Reckwitz 2017: 283, note 11). One could also interpret the various forms of resentment that currently define Europe as this kind of “pattern of intensive affect,” i.e., an emotional scenario (cf. Metelmann 2017). One of the foundational insights in critical thinking

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about ressentiment, in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Scheler, is that aversion which is unleashed on some target, does not lead into resentment. According to Scheler (1955: 41), the impossibility of expressing an emotion is what leads to resentment, to a sense of impotence, to the personal humiliation that gets compounded with each doomed attempt at expressing the emotion over and over again. Hence, “re-sentiment” is a re-petition of the original offense. According to this logic, one common explanation for the resurgence of resentment in Europe is that silencing – i.e., is the prohibition against speech out of ‘political correctness’ – has continuously augmented the feeling of powerlessness within certain groups or classes, as many people believed they were no longer allowed to say what they thought. In this context, the recent tendency toward populism, culminating in Donald Trump’s journey of defamation into the White House, can be understood as a linguistic pressure valve, a mechanism for relieving built-up pressure, for dealing with feelings of impotence. Yet, ‘the powerless’ have nonetheless felt unable to vocalize their dejection, have felt unheard, and thereby also felt pressured to defend themselves. This sense of impotence is thus not only based on a belief in being prohibited from saying everything one might want to say; it is also nourished by the frustration that comes from remaining unheard even when one does speak out, from feeling, in essence, politically and socially ‘disconnected’, or left behind. One can easily recognize here Scheler’s observation that resentment develops especially among “those who serve, those who are dominated” (Scheler 1955: 41). This pairing of inclusion (being able to say something) and rejection (not being heard) is only one tributary in the broader societal current of emotion – one feels that one is no longer the master of one’s own house, even though one still feels like part of the majority. The pairing of inclusion and rejection reflects a foundational tension, according to which even the liberal, democratic subject, usually the emblem of tolerance, is now susceptible to resentment, since it must hold its ground against others within the existing constellations of power. In other words, people have to raise their own voices in order to transform the distress caused by being withheld recognition into something better; they have to position themselves, alone or with others, as both victim and rebel, entitled to their proverbial ‘piece of the pie’. Of course, this assumes that everyone has an equal claim to a piece of the pie, which would not have been the case for aristocratic societies prior to the French Revolution, but has very much been the case in post-1776 (or post-1789) egalitarian democracies. In this respect, Max Scheler already noted that resentment brings about “a certain equalization of the offended with the offender,” with the result that “more and more of this spiritual dynamite will accumulate, the greater the disparity is between legal status, as expressed in political constitutions or in customs, or the public esteem of various classes, and factual power relations” (Scheler 1955: 43, emphasis in the original). The problem in this kind of society is that “all individuals

Affect Culture

have a ‘right’ to compare themselves to everyone else, and yet the individual is ‘factually, incomparable’” (ibid). In the framework of this cultural theory, the liberal subject and universalism form one side of modernity, and the resentful subject and particularism the other, even though modernity was underwritten by a putatively universal claim to treat all differences equally, without any comparison. Simultaneously, however, it is necessary for modernity to negotiate various instances of legitimate claims that emerge out of one’s particular circumstances, which are often unequal and unjust – and this negotiation takes the form of comparing oneself with other social groups whose members turn out to have the very thing that one does not. Insofar as this is the case, there is no separation or opposition between patterns of rationality and patterns of affect. Instead, both strands are interwoven throughout the tensely-spun discursive tapestry of modernity. By splitting, in Cartesian fashion, the history of affects from that of rationalization and then having the creativity dispositif compensate, as if in revenge, for the “affect deficiency in modernity” (Reckwitz 2017: 201), Reckwitz constructs a constellation that sounds more like Critical Theory than anything truly Foucauldian. Foucault was not concerned with causality but with “urgency” (urgence as acuteness, emergency, necessity), which can never sufficiently account for subsequent behaviors. Reactions to “urgency” may strategically serve to manage a problem – for instance, by recruiting a mass of people – but they are not an effect trigged by a cause (Raffnsøe/Gudmand-Høyer/Thaning 2016: 286; *Dispositif, *Genealogy). A dispositif shows a way of ordering the future, not of explaining the past; it is concerned with solving a problem that will then give rise to other problems, such as, in the case of the creativity dispositif, the phenomenon of exhaustion, of getting ‘burned-out’ or ‘bored-out’ (*Coaching, *Guilt). If we were to interrogate the argumentative function of Reckwitz’s ‘dispositif’ methodology (i.e., How well does the “zone of affective concentration” satisfy the argument created by this “urgency?”), then we would come to understand the central imperative of the creativity dispositif differently – namely, “Be creative!” could be seen as the inverse of the ‘repression hypothesis’ in Foucault’s History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. In the first volume of this project, Foucault demonstrates that throughout the centuries sex has been subject to strict prohibitions, though far from resulting in mere silence, it has also provided a powerful stimulant to the discourse of sexuality. Applied conversely to the ‘creativity dispositif’ and putting it somewhat bluntly: We neither are, nor have to be, as creative as we obsessively tell ourselves with the repeated mantra of ‘creativity’, all along hoping that nobody notices how repetitive, uninspired, and unvarying the business of creativity can be in both private and professional contexts. In this sense, the creativity dispositif provides not only an answer to the presumed lack of affect within (organized) modernity, but also a deceptive

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alibi for the blockages in the circulation of ideas and futures endemic to our post-modern, neoliberal present (*Imagineering, *Creativity Techniques).

References Massumi, Brian (2010): Ontomacht. Kunst, Affekt und das Ereignis des Politischen, Berlin: Merve. Metelmann, Jörg (2017): “‘Das wird man ja wohl noch sagen dürfen’. Über Hass-Rede und Ressentiment als Gefühlsszenario.” In: Kodex 7. Zensur und Medienkontrolle in demokratischen Gesellschaften, edited by Ulrich Ernst Huse, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 143-157. Raffnsøe, Sverre/Gudmand-Høyer, Marius/Thaning, Morten S. (2016): “Foucault’s dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational research.” In: Organization 23/2, pp. 272-298. Reckwitz, Andreas (2008): “Umkämpfte Maskulinität. Zur Transformation männlicher Subjektformen und ihrer Affektivitäten.” In: Unscharfe Grenzen. Perspektiven der Kultursoziologie, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 177196. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Scheler, Max (1955): “Das Ressentiment im Auf bau der Moralen.” In: Maria Scheler (ed.), Vom Umsturz der Werte. Abhandlungen und Aufsätze, Fourth Edition, Bern: Francke Verlag, pp. 33-147. Voss, Christiane (2004): Narrative Emotionen. Eine Untersuchung über Möglichkeiten und Grenzen philosophischer Emotionstheorien, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Artist Heinz Drügh

Since postmodernism, Andreas Reckwitz writes in The Invention of Creativity, “a renewed affective investment in the figure of the artist” has become noticeable (2017: 75). The reason for this is that “artists” increasingly appeared as “mass media star[s]” (ibid: 76). More important than the fact “that the artist has produced a work” (ibid) became how “she permanently presents herself as an artist” (ibid, emphasis in the original) in a nearly “permanent public [self] presentation of the person” (ibid; *Performativity). Celebrity has become a central currency of the fine art market. Aesthetic judgments are frequently determined less by critics than by collectors and their buying habits, or by curators and other donors (*Curating). In this world defined by “enormous amounts of money,” even criticism as the display of a “spirit of opposition” is often reduced to a posture (*Critique), an “ornament” within the collector’s “self-display” (Ulrich 2016: 41, 129). Literature, of course, involves significantly less money. Great authors often subsist on government subsidies. Certainly, autographs of deceased stars have become something of a speculative financial investment. Take, for example, the auction of Franz Kafka’s letters, where literary archives could only outbid private collectors through a feat of financial strength. If money is made with literature it is usually only at the cost of aesthetic brilliance. Of course, there are exceptions – not even necessarily with respect to the creation of real value, but more in terms of a medial staging of value. In 1999, pop-authors Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre and Christian Kracht were interviewed by the weekly Die Zeit under the headline “We Wear Size 46” (*Pop). Kracht posed in a light suit and tie, with a neatly-parted steel blonde haircut, in front of a blue background; the caption reads: “I’m very rich.” That same year, both young authors posed as models for a banner ad for the department store Peek & Cloppenburg. That was clearly too Warholesque for a literary industry that cultivates a habitus of resistance and which dismissed them both as upstarts and posers. In the literary industry, distance from the everyday world, from brands, from markets, and from media often counts as a sign of quality (*Aesthetic Capitalism). Lack of

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economic success is not equated with a lack aesthetic value, but is considered proof of aesthetic autonomy and independence: “[the] loser takes all” (Bourdieu 1996: 21, *Valorization). Within the developing system of autonomous art around 1800 the modern artist type emerged as an individual who lives, feels, and thinks differently from others, and who, therefore, is precarious, constantly at risk, but turns this risk into a business opportunity. Consider, for example, the triumph of the star Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-part novel, My Struggle, a many thousand-paged behemoth of a text with long, often meandering accounts of everyday life. In his well-orchestrated self-presentation, the only thing that stands out more than Knausgård’s rock-star style reading performances are the portraits of the artist. Some of these, on closer examination, recall the iconic self-dramatization with which Gustave Courbet, for example, in his nearly life-sized self-portrait The Desperate Man, staged the inner conflict arising from internal doubt and extreme subjective aggrandizement or self-exaltation – fueled in no small part by his lack of public recognition as an artist. The concept ‘artist’ was established in the eighteenth century analogous to the collective singular ‘art’ for the ‘fine arts’. In his 1746 treatise, Les beaux-arts réduits à un meme principe, Charles Batteux had in mind arts that incite pure pleasure or demand subjective expression: music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance. Architecture and rhetoric were only considered hybrid forms of beauty and mechanical application. For many centuries rhetoric was, along with grammar and logic, a fixed component of the three artes liberales, of the liberal arts (in the plural), which stood at the center of academic education. The emerging discipline of aesthetics, and especially the concept of genius, shaped the image of the artist from the second half of the eighteenth century to today. Geniuses, writes Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, are “gifted by nature” blessed with a “talent,” which cannot be improved by “learning” nor through a “facility for learning” nor through “diligence.” The artist “himself does not know” how “ideas, which are fantastic and yet at the same time rich in thought” brew in his mind (Kant 2000 § 47). A certain je ne sais quoi finds its counterpart in that type of recipient who enjoys “much thought” (Kant 2002: § 49, translation modified) in their interactions with art, but never arrives at a fixed concept or secured interpretation. One immerses oneself in the object and thereby forgets oneself and one’s normal way of thinking and feeling, a process that Karl Philipp Moritz depicts in equally gentle and violent strokes: “The sweet wonder, the pleasant self-forgetting when contemplating a beautiful work of art” occurs by our granting beauty “a kind of temporary sovereignty over all our feelings”: “In the moment we sacrifice our limited, individual existence [Dasein] to a kind of higher existence [Dasein]” (Moritz 1981: 545, emphasis in the original).

Ar tist

Such intensity of aesthetic experience requires distance not only from one’s own normal composure, but also from everyone else: the final verses of Friedrich Hölderlin’s ode “Ganymede” read “[…] Der ist aber ferne; nicht mehr dabei. / Irr ging er nun; denn allzugut sind / Genien; himmlisch Gespräch ist sein nun” [But he’s far off; is no longer there. / Has gone astray; for all too good are / Genii; heavenly talk is his now] (trans. Michael Hamburger). According to Reckwitz, the artist is precisely not beckoned by “social recognition” in the bourgeois artistic field. Instead the artist embodies an alternative that is “resistant to general imitation, and fundamentally foreign to the prevalent culture” (Reckwitz 2017: 77). Of course, on closer examination, the matter is more complicated: “Bourgeois individualism and productivity find their secret idol in the artist. The bourgeois subject yearns for the artist, who he himself cannot become” (Reckwitz 2016: 188). We know what reading Schopenhauer did to Thomas Buddenbrook. “In its core practices of work and family, bourgeois modernity cannot rely upon aesthetic experimentalism, but develops itself through instrumental rationality and the formation of rules, standards, and norms. In the bourgeois context, the artist is thus promoted to an object of auratic admiration – and at the same time of violent rejection” (188; *Work, *Organization). However, the creative’s ascension to the social figure of post-Fordism leads to an imaginary amalgamation of the previously “hopelessly minor” artist with this, in an economic perspective, extremely important manifestation of creativity: “the artist is overturned into the creative” (ibid), Reckwitz pithily writes; “the postmodern artist is an ideal-ego that can be imitated” (Reckwitz 2017: 77, translation modified). What does this mean on closer examination? First and foremost, it means that the artist’s habitus, their persona, rubs off on people working in fields that are concerned less with art than with lifestyle and the persistent production of “symbolic and experiential novelties” (Reckwitz 2016: 189) in the consumer goods industry (*Product). Anyone who is under pressure to be both flexible and creative at work might also desire to consume in correspondingly hip ways (*Consumption). Moreover, it is worth noting that many artists do not come from the master classes of art academies, but from an applied arts milieu (e.g., the fashion designer Warhol or the applied arts lecturer Richard Hamilton). Could it be that our noble conception of aesthetics is less ‘overturned’ by than renegotiated under the very conditions of a creativity dispositif (*Aestheticization, *Improvisation)? To answer this question, I would like to look at a few telling reactions to the death of David Bowie. For example, on January 11, 2016 Madonna wrote on Facebook: “I found him so inspiring and innovative. Unique and provocative. A real genius.” Madonna’s remarks hardly confirm Reckwitz’s general diagnosis of the “disenchantment of the creative artist” (Reckwitz 2017: 79) in postmodernity. After all, all the familiar ingredients of aesthetic appreciation are present:

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uniqueness, rebelliousness, and ingenuity. Furthermore, David Bowie was a life-changing inspiration for Madonna: “I’m devastated. David Bowie changed the course of my life forever.” Why and, more importantly, how did he do so? “He created a persona and used different art forms within the arena of rock and roll to create entertainment.” Stereotypically postmodern: a citation game not only with identities, their abrupt abandonment and their recommencement, but also with art forms; a game that constantly crosses the boundary between art and entertainment. Is it therefore an example of what Reckwitz calls typically post-Fordist “variable semiotic vehicles for lifestyle groups” (Reckwitz 2016: 189)? If one takes Madonna’s assessment into account, then evidently not, or at least not only. In the case of Madonna, one couldn’t simply claim that artistic appeal easily translates into something completely different and, at bottom, economically controlled. Rather, it would be worth considering with Madonna, whether convincing artistry lies less in the artist distancing herself from the frills of mundane, everyday creativity imperatives, than – like The Thin White Duke – in wading through them, always consciously embodying these imperatives to an extent oneself. When he performed as Ziggy Stardust in 1976, David Bowie described the persona as a “mix of ballet and dollar store – ‘a cross between Nijinsky and Woolworth’s’.” Frank Kelleter sees in Bowie’s performance “the addressed possibility of achieving superhuman grace via the detour of cheap articles” (Kelleter 2016: 24-25). In other words, with a genuinely “Warholesque understanding of art,” Bowie’s pop exposes the “promise of authenticity in folk and rock” as “theater.” But Bowie’s art is also critical insofar as it “doubles and intensifies the theatricality of the pop industry so deeply, that one begins to see how fundamentally bizarre it all is” (ibid: 32). Consequently, according to Reckwitz’s understanding, Bowie too would be an artist whose work marks “the place where the creativity dispositif observes itself” (Reckwitz 2017: 83), precisely because he does not pretend to desire or even be able to act from its outside. One way to deal with the compulsion for innovation and glamor in the creativity dispositif is what Reckwitz describes as “profane creativity”: “a phenomenon already present in everyday practices and networks and therefore not dependent on an audience” (ibid: 230), these practices “are not professional, nor are they supported by the culturally interested middle classes” (ibid). This is associated with an “everyday aesthetic of repetition” (ibid: 232) “that favour[s] repetition over originality” (ibid: 233). A profanation of the image of the artist, as understood in light of such denials of “heroic creativity” (ibid: 231), is also perceptible in our artist icon Knausgård. Where else could one ever observe an artist, as persevering as prolix, while engaged in the daily routines of completely unglamorous acts as described in the sixth and last part of My Struggle – preparing breakfast for children, taking them to kindergarten, giving them a bath, doing their laundry, and going to the

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supermarket. What does it mean when these actions coincide with reflections on Martin Heidegger’s remarks on Ernst Jünger’s essay “Across the Line”? As Knausgård looks for the book on the bookshelf, his oldest daughter suddenly stands before him, exclaiming “Bath!.” He asks her to “speak in complete sentences.” “Bath!” she says again. (Knausgård 2017: 37). Does returning the creative impetus to the context of its surrounding everyday activities ground and thereby profane it? Or does precisely the opposite occur, as the critic Richard Kämmerlings claims: “Behind the supposedly ordinary attitude of the part-time author is the idea of the genius, pulling herself intellectually out of a material swamp” (Kämmerlings 2017). Maybe both are true: when, on the one hand, the star author cleans out the bathtub with “a bottle of Jif” cleaning product, before washing his children’s hair in the tub with shampoo adorned with an “image from the Pixar movie Cars” (Knausgård 2017: 39, 41), then not much of the supposed glamor of the entertainment or consumer goods industry remains in this immersion in the everyday. On the other hand, for many of his readers, the depiction of a literary star’s everyday activities glamorizes Jif, Cars, Ketchup, and Köttbullar. In this manner, a bottle of children’s shampoo with Pixar motifs can become just as distinguishing as an exquisite Manufactum product or a specialty item from an organic store. While there is no redemption here from the banality of everyday life and its sedimentation in material forms, artists do not lose themselves in it either (*Deaestheticization). The contemporary guise of the artist – the transposition of classical criteria for the artist’s work such as intensity, complexity, or autonomy – manifests itself not in renouncing supposed banalities but in confronting them.

References Bourdieu, Pierre (1996): The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kämmerlings, Richard (2017): “Mit ‘Kämpfen’ hat Knausgård sich selbst eingeholt.” In: Die Welt, May 23. Kant, Immanuel (2000): Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kelleter, Frank (2016): David Bowie. 100 Seiten, Stuttgart: Reclam. Knausgård, Karl Ove (2017): Kämpfen, translated by Paul Berf and Ulrich Sonnenberg, Munich: Luchterhand. Moritz, Karl Philipp (1981): “Über den Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten. An Herrn Moses Mendelssohn.” In: Werke, vol. 2, edited by Horst Günther, Frankfurt am Main: Insel, pp. 543-548. Reckwitz, Andreas (2016): “Der Kreative als Sozialfigur der Spätmoderne.” In: Kreativität und soziale Praxis. Studien zur Sozial- und Gesellschaftstheorie, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 185-194.

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Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Ullrich, Wolfgang (2016): Siegerkunst. Neuer Adel, teure Lust, Berlin: Wagenbach.

Atmosphere Chris Steyaert, Christoph Michels

In an ever-more populous planet, we find ourselves increasingly being part of large groups, crowds, and masses, becoming absorbed and affected by their concentration of feeling. Whether in crammed subways or trains on our way to work, rushing through congested airports or finding a break on one of the packed summer beaches, our emotional state or personal sense is colored by collective intensities called ‘atmospheres’. Atmospheres are the affects of the multitude (*Affect Culture). They accompany and alter us as we move through and visit everyday spaces, from the cocoon of our living room to the hustle and bustle of the morning market or the quietness of a library, from the to-and-fro of the open-plan office to the as-if experiences of festivities during carnival. We are always in the middle of atmospheres. It is no surprise then that the notion of ‘atmosphere’ figures as an important conceptual node in Andreas Reckwitz’s genealogical analysis of the creativity imperative. Atmospheres return to illustrate various processes of social *aestheticization, from the role of artefacts in minimal art to how *design became the general discipline of the creative economy (2017a: 65-69, 113-117). For instance, when Reckwitz zooms in on minimal art as a forerunner of postmodern installation art, he asserts that its main idea was to locate art objects – often produced by industrial means – in space for viewers to move around them. Rather than decoding the meaning of the isolated art object, viewers became activated as recipients and producers of affect in their own right. Minimal art was thus seeking an ‘affect-effect’ in the ways it was arranging its materials in space and involving a sensuous participation of its spectators. Another example concerns how design – together with *fashion and advertising – increasingly emphasizes the aesthetic value of commodities, promoting living as a consumer choice between design styles or between highly stylized brands (*Aesthetic Capitalism, *Consumption). Design is no longer limited to material objects; whole environments and atmospheres can become objects of design, particularly in the context of companies and institutions. Marketing research has been discussing ‘atmospherics as a marketing tool’ for almost fifty

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years in the context of shop design and today finds its ultimate expression in the seamless designs of luxury shops, such as those of Nespresso, Prada, or the Volkswagen factory in Dresden. In addition, the design of workspaces reflects how interior design meets top-notch architecture – something that has been ‘exhausted’ by companies like Google. In its Zurich location, Google offers its employees different atmospheric spaces ranging from Swiss-themed areas like an igloo or a ski-lift, through a room with plush sofas forming a comfy library, to fire poles, along which employees glide down to grab a coffee or have their lunchbreak. In this illuminating example, design forms “a paradigmatic practice for the methodical creation of emotionally satisfying all-round atmospheres, permeating increasingly into the sphere of management” (ibid: 117). Atmospheres thus offer rich potential for analyzing affects (Reckwitz 2012: 254), particularly so as to understand how a collective feeling of a space unfolds. Combining the Greek atmos (‘gas’ or ‘vapour’) and sphaira (‘sphere’ or ‘ball’), the word ‘atmosphere’ was invented in the seventeenth century to refer to the gaseous sphere that envelops planets such as the Earth (Chandler 2011: 558). However, by the nineteenth century, the notion had acquired a more figurative use to describe an ambient, spatial mood. Therefore, the German philosopher Gernot Böhme calls atmospheres “affective powers of feeling, spatial bearers of moods” (1993: 119). Whether you enter a football stadium or watch from the pavement a funeral cortege passing, it will be hard not to become drawn into a joint feeling of excitement or sadness. ‘Atmospheres’ – as ‘being-together-in-asphere’ – thus gives us an entry into the ways heterogeneous bodies – people, artefacts, buildings, landscapes – come together in a joint mood or affect. Another German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk (2004), has developed the notion of atmosphere in a philosophical trilogy, a three-volume spherology. This spherological project can alternatively be entitled Being and Space as it aims to provide a counterpart to Heidegger’s writing on the relationship between being and time. Reconnecting the ‘there’ and ‘together’ of Heideggerian ‘Dasein’, Sloterdijk conceives of atmospheres in the form of bubbles, globes, and foam, referring to ungraspable, still material qualities of space. In the third volume dedicated to ‘foam’, Sloterdijk compares social relationships in contemporary cities with bubbles collecting as foam: Citizens are seen as co-isolated, sharing cell walls with neighboring bubbles while being limited to communicate with each other. In the foam city, it seems as if we live with the curtains closed but still always hearing each other. As each of us lives in a bubble or an introverted micro-sphere, we are quasi-connected in a mountain of foam, where we are never in reach but also never in isolation. In this climatological understanding, atmospheres urge us to analyze the ‘air conditions’ of our living-together not only technically but also in terms of tempering “the ambience of there-being between the poles of heaviness and lightness” (2004: 723-724).

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The philosophical ideas of Böhme and Sloterdijk have provoked reflections especially on the role of architecture in generating ‘architectural atmospheres’. Being embedded in the socio-physical surroundings of foam, architecture has the ability to control and alter ‘air conditions’. This is understood not only as controlling either the quality and quantity of air that humans need for breathing or less graspable air qualities such as the quality of light or odors, but also as influencing the affective qualities of any space (*Color). For instance, the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor sees the architect’s task not in simply delivering functional spaces but rather in crafting the atmosphere of a building and in making the poetics of its architectural design resonant. Since Zumthor believes music to be the master of how to create atmospheres, he compares architectural design to that of ‘composing’ spaces: “Listen. Interiors are like large instruments, collecting sound, amplifying it, transmitting it elsewhere. That has to do with the shape peculiar to each room and with the surface of materials they contain, and the way that those materials have been applied” (2006: 29). The breadth of variation within Zumthor’s compositional practice and how it affects the body can probably best be experienced when bathing in the composition of light, stone, and water at the thermal baths in the Swiss mountain village of Vals – a building that is regarded not only as the architect’s seminal design work but also as a key reference for the architectural design of atmospheres. Equally, atmospheres are at work in ‘less sensuous’ environments such as classrooms or football stadiums: in the former case, students and teachers are drawn into and co-compose specific moods of learning; in the latter, atmospheres emerge from the encounters of teams and their historic rivalries, fans and their flags, the timing of the competition and the weather of the specific day, and many more things that are coming together in the space of a stadium. In these examples, buildings – and the way we use them – can serve as elaborate tools for regulating or even managing atmospheres. The rows of tables and chairs (sometimes screwed tightly to the floor) in a classroom or the design of terraces in stadia are some of the many ways in which architecture presents the possibility of aesthetic manipulation and of how the design of space can promote specific affective states. Therefore, Reckwitz sees architecture as a privileged place for making atmospheres, arguing that “[a]ffective relations between subjects or between subjects and single objects are never isolated from such larger spatial arrangements, but are always embedded in them, be it street fights, romantic love or the contemplation of a painting by a visitor in a museum” (Reckwitz 2017a: 254-255). However, architectural spaces and the artefacts they encircle are not mere producers of affect but rather become appropriated by participants’ bodies and their capacities of sensing and relating. Therefore, an atmospheric analysis traces the material-affective practices to understand how the cultural change of affective structures is realized through the emergence of new artefact-space complexes and how they can change spectators’ affective

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habitus (Reckwitz 2012; 2017b). Here Reckwitz (2017a) points to the important role of the atmosphere manager who can be effectuated by both artists and curators, roles that resemble each other gradually (ibid: 74-75; *Artist, *Curating). For instance, the artist-curator assembles and arranges texts, objects, and bodies in a series of spaces to induce affects and to affect the members of the audience as they walk through and co-produce these performative events. However, atmosphere-making is not limited to cultural spaces, art festivals, or temporary exhibitions, but becomes part of how the whole urban space can be targeted for transformation through designscapes (ibid: 197-198). In the context of urban policy and planning, cities have embraced the process of aestheticization to redraw specific neighborhoods and urban areas along culturallyoriented scripts (*Creative Cities). Designscapes form urban spaces after being reshaped through design management centering around semiotically and atmospherically coherent experiences. Examples are cities like Barcelona, which has re-shaped its access areas to the sea, as open-air platforms for consumption, entertainment and ‘a bit(e)’ of culture: In a single day, you can combine a few hours on the beach with a nice lunch, drop by a cultural or media center, and after some late afternoon shopping, join the party-crowd for happy hour. The winners in this kind of designed scenario are the cosmopolitan tourists and the affluent elites – however, as we all know, its consequent excess has made the Barcelonese locals protest against this wave of tourism and develop a true tourism-phobia. Their slogans and graffiti messages (López Díaz 2017) – ‘tourist, you are the real terrorist’ or ‘all tourists are bastards’ – reveal nothing but strong emotions, not just frustration or irritation but also infuriation and hatred. These affective tensions are further infused with the Catalan struggle for independence making the city into a political hotbed of hostile, yet passionate affects. The clearly designed idea of Barcelona as a cultural and design capital has been overturned into a much more heterogeneous affective landscape (*Queer). Researching, analyzing, and writing on atmospheres requires more than just representing them from the outside. One needs to engage with them from within, and live with their inherent tensions, tracing some of the material components and being alert to the momentous process of becoming-intense with all the fragile excess this brings along. Turning to non-representational methods, scholars have to be on the lookout for the emergence of atmospheres when “something throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation, a something both animated and inhabitable” (Stewart 2007: 1). Writing then becomes sensitive and evocative, inducing the intrusive, yet ungraspable affective moments of everyday, shared impact, a shudder that is felt by all those around, just for a short instant. In summary, our lives resonate with the affective atmospheres we inhabit, pass by, or visit. Atmospheres attend to our joint feeling of being-affected, and

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are not reducible to the individual bodies in which they resound. These can be smaller reverberations we often are not aware of, but we can all take part in larger collective affects that have the taste of a revolutionary atmosphere of crisis, danger, and hope. Whether we took part in the fall of the Berlin Wall or its commemoration, joined the protest marches for women’s rights, or enjoyed one of the large summer music festivals, we experienced atmospheres that reflect or alter specific social and political orders. Atmospheres touch us as they resonate with grander moments charged with threat, melancholia, or euphoria, with boredom, depression, or ecstasy, with an almost inexhaustible list of qualities that animate the background sense of life, uncanny moments that make our lives fragile, yet surprising. We feel this when we get tears in our eyes, when our skin is covered in goosebumps, or when our voices falter for a short moment.

References Böhme, Gernot (1993): “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” In: Thesis Eleven 36, pp. 113-126. Chandler, Timothy (2011): “Reading Atmospheres: The Ecocritical Potential of Gernot Böhme’s Aesthetic Theory of Nature.” In: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18/3, pp. 553-568. López Díaz, Almudena (2017): “A Spaniard gives an insight into why anti-tourist sentiment is rife in the city.” In: The Independent, August 9. Reckwitz, Andreas (2012): “Affective Spaces: A Praxeological Outlook.” In: Rethinking History 16/2, pp. 241-258. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017a): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017b): “Practices and their Affects.” In: Allison Hui/Theodore Schatzki/Elizabeth Shove (eds.), The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners, London: Routledge, pp. 114-125. Sloterdijk, Peter (2004): Sphären 3: Schäume, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Stewart, Kathleen (2007): Ordinary Affects, Durham, NY: Duke University Press. Zumthor, Peter (2006): Atmosphären, Basel: Birkhäuser.

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Capital Emmanuel Alloa

“Money is not capital, but ability is capital” (Beuys 2000: 399). Joseph Beuys’ statement gets to the heart of Andreas Reckwitz’s anatomy of contemporary capitalism: There has been a fundamental change in the concept of capital, which has been emancipated from its strong ties to money and property; the human factor is more neuralgic than ever before, and personal competency is made into the object of strategic investment; ‘options trading’ now means speculating, quite literally, on possibilities, which often trump reality by a longshot. In this new market economy of potentiality, creativity has clearly ascended to the status of a key competency. However, it was not always a foregone conclusion that creative, inventive, or artistic skills would come to be seen as economic factors, since there is no inherent relation between the categories of art and capital. For an artist like Joseph Beuys to reclaim the concept of capital, one would rightly expect it to take the form of a hostile takeover. However, the emancipatory program originally accompanying Beuys’ project Das Kapital (1970-77) appears in an entirely different light under the contemporary conditions of production. In 1972, when Beuys proclaimed “everyone an artist” (Beuys 2007: 9) at documenta 5 (*Artist), his statement was understood as a demand on society. In the years since, it has become a requirement of the workforce. While an expanded concept of art once stood for a more liberal model of society, creativity now presents an unavoidable imperative for the new kind of worker (*Work). In retrospect, Beuys’ actions and slogans from the 70s turned out to have had a visionary character, even though his vision was of a future radically different than the present. “Creativity = Capital = Art” – Beuys’ tripartite equation is more than the idiosyncratic metaphysics of a provocative artist. In an age of *aesthetic capitalism (Reckwitz 2017), for which creativity provides the fundamental impulse, art is no longer the opposite of capital. Instead, art and capital are much more interconnected, or at the very least, economic value chains have appropriated many of the unique selling points once associated exclusively with artistic praxis.

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Capitalism has always been concerned with maximizing value, which necessitates a permanent search for new possibilities. Anyone who follows the beaten path can only expect mediocre results. A creative approach entails taking risks and testing out new, unexpected connections. In most cases, the figure of the risk-taking entrepreneur remains that of an outsider, an audacious pioneer. This was true of what is perhaps the earliest treatment of the figure, novelist Daniel Defoe’s “Essay upon Projects” (1697), which introduces the idea of the ‘projector’, a figure that kept being updated well into the twentieth century. When Joseph Schumpeter celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit in his Theory of Economic Development (1911), he was well aware that innovation was reserved for the elite members of an avant-garde (*Deaestheticization, *Innovation). Today, all that has changed, as the paradoxical imperative, “Be creative!” continues to spread across every sector of the economy, and beyond. However, the flexibility of contemporary employment in the age of ‘Me, Inc.’ continues to transform the common desires for innovation, imagination, ingenuity, and independence into external constraints. Creativity is now a competitive edge, a duty. “We want to be creative and we ought to be creative” (Reckwitz 2017: 2, emphasis in the original) – the two blur together into a normative telos, which of course can be never be reached (*Naturalization). Which is also where the paradoxical logic of creativity comes from. Creativity is commonly taken to be a resource, which individuals already have access to (‘everyone is creative’), and a regulative ideal, which they still need to achieve (‘be creative!’). The ‘always already there’ is combined with a ‘still to come’, a certain anthropological Rousseauianism with a liberal concept of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Foucault; Rose; Bröckling). Still, there is another way of understanding the paradoxical double bind of creativity (‘Free yourself from every imperative!’) – namely, in a more Nietzschean manner (*Genealogy). If everyone has some dormant creative potential, then one’s life-long task would consist in developing a capacity one already possesses. ‘Become what you are’ – namely, creative. The Nietzschean or Beuysian metaphysics of the artist has long since arrived in every human resource department: Employees are now expected to assess their own personalities, to test their own aptitudes, and to invest in their own latent abilities. To make more of themselves – the self as an investment option. However, issuing artistic abilities as a new form of capital dissolves not only the conventional boundaries of the concept of art, but also those of the concept of capital. When Beuys’ installation Das Kapital Raum (1970-77) was installed as a permanent exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the museum’s director, Eugen Blume, explained that Beuys wanted to return the concept of capital to its literal meaning – namely, the Latin caput, the ‘head’. Whoever might venture forth on a quest to find the one true capital wagers on finding creativity in the one true palace – namely, “the palace of the mind” (Beuys).

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Creative labor is, to use one of the most banal terms, ‘mental labor’. In this respect, Beuys anticipated the development of the knowledge-based society in late modernity: the tendency toward the ‘immaterialization of labor’ (André Gorz), ‘mental workers’ and the globalized cognitariate (Franco Bifo Berardi), ‘mental capitalism’ (Georg Franck) and what post-Fordism calls ‘general intellect’. The mental labor of new capitalism applies less to the calculating and calculable aspects of intellectual activity – precisely what is being automatized and handed over to algorithms, which are much more efficient – and more to its connective and affective aspects. The competencies that are in particular demand in the tertiary or service sector are increasingly spreading across the other sectors of the economy; ‘relational capital’ is becoming more and more central. As if following in Spinoza’s tracks, there has been a renaissance of affect (*Affect Culture, *Atmosphere). According to the theorists of Italian postoperaismo, Antonio Negri and Maurizio Lazzarato, digital labor, in spite of all its digitality, is, above all, emotional labor. In the process, there has been a redefinition of the concept of capitalism itself. In fact, this concept has always been connected to the ‘head’: in Latin antiquity, the term capita was used for the precise ‘headcount’ for a herd of cattle (similar to the ancient Greek world, where kephalaion (from kephalos, ‘head’) was used to quantify the ‘main sum’ of a loan). In modern languages, there are still traces of these origins in tenant farming. Among words for capital, there is good reason for the proximity between the French cheptel and the English cattle (each refer to tenant livestock), just as everything pecuniary can ultimately be traced back to pecus (‘cattle’, ‘money’). The words pecunia and capita indicate a headcount and, with that, wealth. However, one would be wrong to presume that the practice of taking numerical stock of an inventory contains the core of the classical concept of capital. In this sense, ‘capital’ does not represent a mere arithmetic category, but an almost entirely generative category. The history of the concept of capital reveals that it was never thought to be static. Wherever one looks, one will find the expression used for assets that are constantly increasing, rather than staying the same. When the concept of the stock market established itself in the eighteenth century, it maintained at least one direct connection to the conception of ‘live stock’ in the early modern cattle market. At the time, the English term stocks, which Adam Smith preferred to use, was gradually exchanged for the Latin term capital. Still, the latter term retained the former’s connotations of active, living, vital generativity: Capital always needs to be conceived of as ‘live capital’. This archaic connection was already attested to in Greek antiquity: Livestock was conceived of not only in terms of the current headcount (the archaia), but also in terms of potential ‘casts of the dice’. In this respect, the term tokos stood for the act of bringing forth something new in the sense of both a ‘biological litter’ and ‘economic interest’, both input and output. Both cases bring into play the same concepts of

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temporality, since the value of each respective stock is determined not only by the present, but also by the horizon of some possible future. Capital is always concerned with potentiality and fruitful opportunities, and even intellectual capitalism would not forget this connection – a ‘brainchild’ is still a child. Hence, there is an inherent paradox to capital, as an interest-bearing economic variable, in always being worth more than it covers at the moment. In the pre-capitalist period, there was a distinction between two main kinds of excess created by the ‘art of acquisition’: the kind of excess that flows back into the natural, domestic cycle and keeps it alive (Aristotle calls it oikonomia); and the kind of self-referential excess whose only purpose consists in its own endless incremental change (the pleonexía, or avarice, which described an unnatural art of acquisition known as “chremastistics”). In Christian doctrine, the practice of collecting interest was condemned for similar reasons, and usury was usually cited as the official reason for the ostracization, expulsion, and persecution of Jews in much of medieval Europe. Only in the early modern period was the notion of stocks that could increase of their own accord rehabilitated on a large scale, and the first internal distinctions in the concept of capital were only made over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The classic field of economics consolidated these various attempts to create a definition of capital – for instance, with Adam Smith’s distinction between circulating capital (the object of transactions) and fixed capital (the equivalent value of investments). In the early nineteenth century, David Ricardo made a groundbreaking attempt to conceive of the value of capital in terms of the amount of work involved in its creation. Ricardo’s concept of capital as accumulated labor served as the model for Marx’s distinction between living and dead labor: If capital can be increased through investments, this is clearly a form of activity, though it remains a sterile one. For Marx, capital is creative insofar as it is able to exploit itself. To the extent that capital creates surplus value out of itself, it represents an ‘automatic subject’. In this respect, the creativity of capital remains profoundly limited, since it is only capable of increasing itself in numerical terms, a kind of monetary parthogenesis, which is able to extract even more out of itself. In the end, however, self-generation remains sterile, which is why Marx spoke of ‘dead labor’. Unlike Joseph Schumpeter, who wanted to understand capitalism as a living, creative process. Against the theory of general equilibrium in neo-classical economic analysis, Schumpeter proceeded from the assumption that the creation of economic value depends on ‘weathering the storm of creative destruction’, making it through crises, breaches, and drastic leaps. For Schumpeter, there was a need to abandon conventional methods of production and test out novel connections, which always held out the possibility of failure. The Schumpeterian entrepreneur embodies something like the creative avant-gar-

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de, an experimenter who is ready to take risks and whom the rest of the entire value creation system would then follow in the sense of “carrying out new combinations” (*Valorization). Only then would the deviation from established patterns actually count as successful *innovation. Apart from Schumpeter, there was another important theorist of creative capital, though there is never any mention of him in this context – Friedrich Nietzsche. In Human, All Too Human, the process of artistic creation is presented as a form of energy management, which after the accumulation of enough reserves will eventually create an unexpected excess. In this respect, energy management represents something like a capital stock in the absence of which any form of inspiration remains powerless. For Nietzsche, an artistic experiment never takes place in a vacuum, but rather presupposes work that has already been accumulated: “If productive power has been blocked for a time and prevented from flowing out by an obstruction, there occurs in the end an effusion so sudden it appears that an immediate inspiration without any preliminary labour, that is to say a miracle, has taken place. This constitutes the familiar deception with whose continuance the interest of all artists is, as aforesaid, a little too much involved. The capital has only been accumulated, it did not fall from the sky all at once.” (2004: 83)

While Schumpeter appears as the quasi-mastermind of the creative moment in economic processes, Nietzsche provides valuable clues for the economic explanation of experimental artistic movements. Where the one paves the way for the experimentalization of the economy, the other encourages the economization of the experimental (*Guilt). Two paradigms come into contact here, and they would continue to encounter each other again and again over the course of the twentieth century, restructuring the relations between economy and experiment, capital and creativity (*Organization). On the one hand, there is the breakdown of a rigid understanding of the economy based on the predictable rationality of homo oeconomicus, which creates room for the dimensions of play, the social, and the experimental. (It is reminiscent of Dewey’s statement that “the acquisitive instincts of man were exaggerated at the expense of the creative”). On the other hand, there is the increasing economization of those sectors, which had long been taken to be impossible to objectivize – namely, the dimensions of sociality, emotionality, imagination, and creativity. The rise of the “creative class” (Richard Florida), creative industries (*Creative Cities), the creative economy, and the new *aesthetic capitalism all belong to the first paradigm; concepts like ‘intellectual capital’, ‘social capital’, and even ‘human capital’ belong to the second paradigm. The economization of abilities and the marketing of ‘soft skills’ is by no means the exclusive reserve of the end of the twentieth century, and can be traced

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back through a longer philosophical tradition. In classic British empiricism, we already find the premises of an expanded concept of capital for individual and social skills, which the subject could count on and exchange for material goods. In the nineteenth century, the concept of human capital was used explicitly by economists including Jean-Baptiste Say, Leon Walras, and Friedrich List. In his 1821 courses, Say explains that man is to himself ‘a capital’; in 1841, List sketched out a theory of ‘intellectual capital’; and in Economie politique et la justice (1860), Walras attempts to work out the unique laws of human capital (capital humain) in contrast to both the rules of art and the laws of nature. While the idea of human capital may not be anything new, it would only become a systematic concept in the second half of the twentieth century. The concept of human capital is particularly associated with two figures connected to the Chicago School of Economics, Theodore William Schultz (e.g., “Investment in Human Capital” [1961]) and Gary Becker (e.g., Human Capital [1964]), each of whom would later win a Nobel Prize in economics. By contrast, the concept of social capital is primarily associated – as should come as no surprise – with two sociologists, Robert D. Putnam in the American context and Pierre Bourdieu in the European. In general, Putnam and Bourdieu wanted to make capital into a useful description for other forms of capitalization, beyond the immediate sphere of economic capital. With his redefinition of the concept of capital in the 1980s, Bourdieu went quite far in differentiating among its diverse forms: economic capital as the quantifiable possession of financial resources; social capital as the activatable network of intersubjective relations; symbolic capital as the probability of acquiring recognition and gaining prestige; and cultural capital, which was divided further into the internalized cultural capital of education and socialization, externalized cultural capital like artworks and other objects of distinction, and institutionalized cultural capital like titles and posts. It should be emphasized here that Bourdieu’s concept of capital should be understood within the broader context of his theory of practice, where training, physical exercises, and habitualization into practices all play a decisive role. Bourdieu holds on to the concept of capital because it involves variables that are at once accumulable and exchangeable (e.g., to one’s heirs). However, this also presents a problem and perhaps even suggests a limit to the otherwise endless extension of the concept of capital: Skills and abilities are not easily transformed into capital, and they can only be objectivized to a limited extent, even if they are converted into flesh and blood. Furthermore, skills and abilities are opposed to the classic conception of property. Whoever might be said to “possess” some particular social or emotional capital does not lose it by sharing or passing it on to others. Quite the contrary, doing so tends to increase the collective stock of social, emotional, or symbolic capital. Conversely, the very concept of social and cultural capital often presupposes a vast machinery of

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internalization. In an era marked by the imperative to be authentic, signs of belonging and fetishes of distinction are no longer enough. To be credible, an individual must also appropriate immaterial capital and make it habitual (the same problem confronts those who inherit things and the nouveau riche). For this reason, the rhetoric of “raw creativity” should be taken with a grain of salt. To some extent, however, creative capitalism still offers a suitable framework for turning creativity into capital – and here the two paradigms dovetail. One might think of the practice of patenting ideas or concepts (e.g., one of the newest developments in the artworld is for curators to patent their exhibition concepts, thereby safeguarding their sovereignty over future attempts to rework them, whether in public museums or private institutions; *Curating). New monopolies are emerging, which touch not only on the monopolization of the means of production, as in the classic Marxian sense, but also on the immaterial economy of branding and conceptual engineering. Successful concepts can yield massive dividends over night, and some are able to make enough from the attention economy to retire. In the wake of industrial capitalism, there are new forms of attention-based capitalism. While Max Weber portrayed capitalism as a ‘de-aestheticization machine’, which had ridden itself of emotion, one can today observe the onset of a new ‘aesthetic economy’. Capitalism has mobilized the counterculture of the 60s into a comprehensive aesthetic: What once counted as a subculture has been elevated to the status of mainstream culture, and the ideals of the historical bohemian world have become the backbone of a post-Fordist culture of productivity (*Deaestheticization). In their weighty study of The New Spirit of Capitalism (2007), Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello demonstrate the extent to which the ideal type of worker is increasingly oriented toward previously marginal job profiles, above all, that of the artist. With their detailed empirical analysis of the (French) job market in the 70s and 80s, especially in the form of management handbooks, Boltanski and Chiapello show the power of late capitalism to appropriate every form of *critique and turn it into a permanent self-correction mechanism for the entire system. In doing so, Boltanski and Chiapello also demonstrate the remarkable mutability of capitalist ideology, proceeding from Weber’s thesis that capitalism requires not only a particular material infrastructure but also a particular ‘spirit’ to keep the machine going and to invoke the ‘specter of uselessness’. History has disproven Marx’s belief that capitalism would eventually fail on its own, as every potential threat to capitalism has been converted into an instrument for its optimization. This applies especially to the form of critique Boltanski and Chiapello call ‘artistic critique’, which would denounce the repression, standardization, or commodification of creative energy. Against this admittedly patchy background, it is worth revisiting Joseph Beuys, whose utopia of a society based on creativity now leaves behind a more ambivalent impression. On November 20, 1985, two months before his death,

Capital

Beuys appeared at the renowned Munich Kammerspiele in a lecture series called “Talking about One’s Own Country: Germany.” Near the end of his career, the shaman of the Federal Republic attempted to clarify his most famous concept: “The slogan ‘Everyone is an artist’, which generated a great deal of excitement and is still misunderstood, refers to [the] re-shaping of the social body in which every single person both can and even must participate so that we bring about that transformation as quickly as possible” (Beuys 1986: 39). To clarify the slogan, Beuys again championed the equation of art and capital, and sketched out the basic contours of a market economy based on pure creativity: “CAPITAL is at present the work-sustaining ability. Money is not an economic value though. The two genuine economic values involve the connection between ability (creativity) and product. That explains the formula presenting the expanded concept of art: ART = CAPITAL. Human creativity is the true capital” (ibid: 48; last sentence added to omission in the original translation excerpt). If creativity is deemed to be the new form of capital, this reveals at least as much about capital’s own creativity.

References Beuys, Joseph (1986): “Talking about One’s Own Country: Germany” [1985]. In: In Memoriam Joseph Beuys: Obituaries, Essays, Speeches, Bonn: Inter Nationes, pp. 35-55. Beuys, Joseph (2000): Das Geheimnis der Knospe zarter Hülle. Texte 19411986, edited by Eva Beuys, Munich: Schirmer und Mosel Verlag. Beuys, Joseph (2007): What is Art? Conversation with Joseph Beuys [1986], translated by Matthew Barton and Shelley Sacks, and edited with essays by Volker Harlan, West Hoathly, UK: Clairview Books. Boltanski, Luc/Chiapello, Ève (2007): The New Spirit of Capitalism [1999], translated by Gregory Elliott, New York: Verso. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2004): Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits [1878], translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

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Coaching Florian Schulz

The pursuit of creative self-transformation is a central component of contemporary capitalism, of *aesthetic capitalism. This form of capitalism is oriented toward not only the continuous production of social and technical innovations that conform to the market, but also the creation of a sensory and affective state of excitement associated with the creative process (Reckwitz 2017: 2). Such dynamics, which are oriented toward creative potential, cast a spell over individuals, institutions, and entire societies, and transform their practices and fields of knowledge (ibid: 5). The subject’s experience of these transformation processes is not only passive, consuming and perceiving them in the form of a reorientation of subjective desires. Since the aesthetic dimension is increasingly understood as an essential part of individual productivity, it comes to be actively called for and demanded. This appears clearly in the service-oriented labor sector: Contemporary management theories place creativity at the center of value creation, and they propagate forms of *organization promoting and demanding creative performance (ibid: 121 ff.). This transformation can be traced by focusing on ‘coaching’ in relation to aesthetic capitalism. Through sketching the historical process that has allowed coaching to place psychotherapeutic interventions in the service of late capitalist discourses of performance, I argue that the formation of a psycho-managerial complex represents the basis for the wide spread of coaching in the workplace (*Work). The understanding of coaching as a practice of aesthetic self-transformation is the most recent but most successful variant of this development (*Self-Generation).

The Propagation and Status of Coaching in Contemporar y Work Contexts While ‘coaching’ was mostly associated with horse-drawn carriages or sports trainers only thirty years ago (Stec 2012), the term is now used primarily as a synonym for a service intended to foster some positive change or development.

Coaching

While coaching services can be found for almost any vital issue, coaching has its greatest influence in the context of the working world. In management literature, coaching has been regarded as an influential phenomenon for around two decades and has seen a steady rise in interest, especially in recent years. Coaching services have become standard in medium- and large-sized organizations, which is reflected in the formation of a billion-dollar coaching industry that exhibited a 20 percent growth in Germany alone in 2015 (Gross/Stephan 2015: 19). At this point, an elementary but hardly trivial question arises: What is coaching? It should be noted that ‘coaching’ represents a form of intervention that has been poorly defined in theoretical terms and barely evaluated in empirical studies. Despite numerous attempts to find an integrative definition of coaching, there is little consensus about its basic goals, practices, theoretical foundations, or areas of application. One frequently cited reason for this lack of consensus is that coaching is not a regulated profession and anyone can call themselves a coach. The lack of a professional code, training standards, and control over entrance criteria for coaching services means that coaching can follow the opportunities of the market without restraints. New topics and target groups are constantly being added to the coaching canon. Even if coaching is understood in the narrower sense of a work-oriented conversation between a paid coach and a coachee, there is still a confusing range of potential target groups, topics, and concerns: self-leadership coaching for employees with “high potential,” emotion-focused coaching for those who act unprofessional (i.e., show unwelcome emotions), and work-life balance coaching for burnt-out managers. Optionally, subjects are to be supported, accompanied, developed, directed to reflection, led, trained, cared for, or even disciplined by means of coaching. The professional identity constructs of coaches are therefore fragile and incoherent, and it turns out that they have to be legitimized on an ongoing basis. Even coaching research has not been able to change this condition. Although coaching research is driven by the interests of coaching practitioners, it has not made any progress for nearly 20 years. This is because there is still a lack of studies with sound methodologies for describing the practices, evaluating the effects and, in particular, discussing the critical aspects of coaching.

Coaching in Social and Historical Context Given the diffuse identity of coaches and the unsatisfactory research on coaching, it may come as a surprise that companies and private individuals are ready to pay an average of 260 euros for a single coaching session (Gross/Stephan 2015: 20). How can we explain the success of coaching? A nuanced understanding of coaching requires considering it in its social and historical context. It

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is clear that the historical development of coaching exhibits parallels to the genealogy of aesthetic capitalism described by Reckwitz. The term ‘coaching’ has proven to be extremely versatile over the course of its almost 500-year history (for a detailed account, cf. Stec 2012). The word originated in the Hungarian town of Kocs, where closed horse-drawn carriages were built in the fifteenth century. The name of the town became a synonym for the carriages, and semantically similar sounding words spread throughout the sixteenth century to many European languages, such as the German Kutsche, the French coche, and the Italian cocchio, all of which are still in use today (ibid: 335). Starting in the eighteenth century, the English word coach referred to both the carriage and the coachman, i.e., the man who harnessed and drove the horses in front of the coach (ibid: 335 ff.). Then, in the early nineteenth century, the term was established in English university sports as a name for sports instructors who were probably taken to spur athletes, like horses, on to a greater performance. Sport played a decisive role in the further development of coaching. After the mediatization and commercialization of sport in the nineteenth century made the athlete’s competitiveness into a valuable commodity (*Valorization), sports coaches explored additional possibilities for increasing the athlete’s performance. In addition to the targeted optimization of motion sequences and the improvement of training plans, sports coaches eventually started turning to humanistic motivation theories in the 1970s. One milestone for coaching in *pop culture was the international bestseller The Inner Game of Tennis (Gallwey 1974). The book argues that in order to have a successful life and be able to show their full performance, both on and off the tennis court, a person needs to overcome obstacles like self-doubt, anxiety, self-criticism, and difficulties to focus. The goal of this kind of coaching is to support athletes, and other service providers, to win their ‘inner game’ and thus to overcome performance blocks. The book, which sold over two million copies worldwide, can also explain a whole series of translation processes that paved the way for the spread of coaching. First of all, it reveals how self-help books have been responsible for the spread of psychological concepts. The book marks the start of a triumphal procession of psychological discourses (Illouz 2008), which captures an entire society and puts the activation of positive emotions at the center of economic interests. The success of the book was based at least partly on the turn away from (extrinsic) disciplinary regimes and toward (intrinsic) motivational measures. While the former attempted to influence the subject through rewards and punishments, the latter attempted to create more long-term motivation by linking performance goals to personal beliefs, values, and desires. The shift from discipline to intrinsic motivation was initially based on humanistic psychology (Reckwitz 2017: 139), but soon became part of management theory (ibid: 99 ff.). What is significant, however, is the way the original psychological theories

Coaching

were trivialized, exaggerated, and transformed. While Carl Rogers understood self-development as an emancipatory dynamic that was contrary to prevailing ideologies, the goal of self-realization in Gallwey’s book was geared toward the goal of achieving the greatest possible performance. It is this association of ‘coaching’ with ‘high-performance’ that helped the concept find its way into the vocabulary of international networks of management elites by the end of the 1970s. This translation was accelerated by the fact that top managers loved to invite successful sports coaches to talk about topics related to motivation and performance. In parallel to this development, more and more managers hired a personal coach on the side, who was supposed to enable them to perform better. Coaching, as understood in this context, had become a form of person-centered personnel development. Crucially, the need for this kind of individualized action needs to be understood as a response to changing demands on the working subject in “the new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski/Chiapello 2007), which required entrepreneurial virtues like charisma, spontaneity, and self-management. However, the continuing success of coaching cannot be reduced to its coupling with late capitalist discourses alone. If coaching had not been able to produce effective practices of self-transformation, it would not have been able to gain a foothold in the highly competitive consulting and training market (*Creativity Techniques). Doing research on these practices, one inevitably encounters the influence of psychotherapy on coaching, which is corroborated by the analysis of specialist literature, training curricula, and real coaching discussions (Schulz 2013). In the coaching landscape, one can find practices and assumptions from all four psychotherapeutic mainstreams: psychoanalysis, behavioral therapy, humanistic psychology along with conversation and Gestalt therapy, and systemic approaches. In coaching, isolated psychotherapeutic practices are often extracted from this heterogeneous repertoire in an eclectic and atheoretical manner. In the course of being translated into management, the practices were also detached from the original psychotherapeutic discourse of sickness and cure and replaced by performance-oriented discourses. Equipped with the tools of psychotherapy, which authorize an intensive processing of thinking, feeling, and acting, coaching was able to distinguish itself from far less individualized forms of training. What has played out in the form of coaching since the mid-1980s can be understood as the formation of a psycho-managerial complex (Schulz 2013), which links psychological theories of post-disciplinary motivation to the capitalist discourses of performance that are dominant in the working world (*Work, *Organization). The clever entanglement of these discourses in turn forms the basis of legitimacy for coaching services and has proved to be a very successful marketing strategy, which works most effectively when the mechanisms of coaching are not analyzed too closely. However, the

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translation of coaching into practice shows that its intimate conversational setting and practices of intervention can be assigned to the field of psychotherapy. The development of coaching in the 1990s makes apparent that it has become a wide-reaching phenomenon whose influence extends far beyond the realms of sport and work to the private life. Eventually, this transformation resulted in the inflated use of the term described above. One important reason for its ascent can be found in the spread of late-modern capitalism and its demand that even the intimate and affective realms of human existence should be put in the service of productivity. While the central concern of this complex was originally on overcoming blockades, it is now more on intensifying experiences that create positive emotions. In fact, starting in the 2000s, coaching has been staged as the way to a dream job, a dream partner, a dream figure, or the attainment of the next stage in human evolution. In recent years, the psycho-managerial complex has been increasingly oriented toward creativity, since performance is increasingly understood as aesthetic performance (*Performativity). In addition to the creation of innovative ideas, creativity also includes the production of individualized experiences, charged with positive emotions for customers. The subject of aesthetic capitalism, as Reckwitz points out, is called upon to be constantly innovative, to improve its creative competencies, to outperform and upgrade itself (2017: 328). In coaching, the aims of expansion are related to increasingly popular ‘systemic approaches’, which have become the strongest current in the coaching market. At present, this approach is so prominent that coaching itself is frequently equated with the systemic attitude. Initially stemming from psychoanalysis and family therapy, this approach to intervention is based on assumptions from cybernetics, constructivism, chaos theory, and narrative theory. It emphasizes that effective human change does not occur in a linear fashion, but only by rearranging the homeostasis of psychosocial systems, introducing new basic assumptions, and deconstructing and reconstructing narratives involved in identity creation (*Imagineering). The role of the systemic coach is to facilitate alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving by irritating the coachee’s dominant assumptions. The coach is a “sparring partner” – another sports metaphor – for new ideas and perspectives. In other words, coaching is a process accompanying that of aesthetic transformation, centered on the self and how it fits with the environment. It was in this way that coaching found its role in aesthetic capitalism.

Coaching in Aesthetic Capitalism The embeddedness of coaching in various cultural and historical contexts complements Reckwitz’s genealogy of aesthetic capitalism with a specific practice of self-transformation. Coaching has succeeded in positioning itself as a peo-

Coaching

ple-centered set of measures for optimizing performance: early on, as a disciplinary practice for motivating athletes; later on, as a measure of self-optimization for professionals; and finally, as a practice of creative self-transformation for anyone. It did not replace older historical practices, but subsumed them under an expanding term. In this sense, coaching was able to expand not in spite of its diffuse identity but because of it. Its unique selling point lies in a psycho-managerial complex, which was able to make an entire spectrum of psychotherapeutic practices accessible to questions and concerns of the working world. Accomplishing this maneuver required splitting off the practices of psychotherapy from their associations with weakness and disability in the psychotherapeutic cure, and connecting them to discourses of managerial performance. The metaphorical assimilation to sport was instrumental in this process. Since coaching is now omnipresent, it is increasingly expected that one has to undergo coaching in order to meet the demands of late capitalist discourse. Coaching contributes to the naturalization of the imperative to aesthetic selftransformation through intensive work on the self. If people lack the strength to innovate, or a positive mood, or a general sense of excitement, they are encouraged to seek out coaching services. In some companies, coaching measures are not always voluntary; they are sometimes used to “fix” employees who do not meet the company’s performance requirements. The unregulated application of psychotherapy practices in the workplace under the pretext of coaching is not without dangers to the subject. The unqualified penetration into the most intimate areas of human existence for the purpose of performance enhancement can be experienced as a psychological displacement of boundaries and it can establish new forms of compulsion. Therefore, it is essential to develop a critical perspective on coaching, and it seems high time to show the negative effects of this kind of designer ‘psy-technology’ (Rose 1998).

References Boltanski, Luc/Chiapello, Ève (2007): The New Spirit of Capitalism [1999], translated by Gregory Elliott, New York: Verso. Gallwey, W. Timothy (1974): The Inner Game of Tennis, New York: Random House Inc. Gross, Peter-Paul/Stephan, Michael (2015): “Der Coaching-Markt.” In: Coaching – Theorie & Praxis 1/1, pp. 15-24. Illouz, Eva (2008): Saving the Modern Soul, Berkeley: University of California Press. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Rose, Nikolas (1998): Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Schulz, Florian (2013): The Psycho-Managerial Complex at Work: A Study of the Discursive Practices of Management Coaching, Doctoral Thesis, St. Gallen, Switzerland: University of St. Gallen. Stec, Deryk (2012): “The Personification of an Object and the Emergence of Coaching.” In: Journal of Management History 18/3, pp. 331-358.

Co-Creation Björn Müller

Nowadays diverse “co’s” populate creative discourses and practices: “accomplices” and “communities” involve “co-working,” “collaboration,” and “co-creation.” In this contribution, co-creation stands for a structural transformation of creative practice and therefore of the basic relations of subjects, objects, technology, localities, and temporalities. Co-creation thereby magnifies some of the central ambivalences of creative practice. Two related dissonances come into focus when considering co-creation. First, the specific social form of co-creation – taken not from the artistic blueprint (*Artist), but rather from participatory *design and engineering practice – simultaneously professionalizes creativity and makes it mundane. In experimental settings, professional instructors and frameworks allow for ‘rule-governed games’ and experiments of a heterogeneous group of amateur participants and players. Second, the peculiar dynamics of increasing creative efforts – “there is at once too much and not enough novelty” (Reckwitz 2017a: 226) – are questioned from a socio-critical perspective: How do creative efforts that co-creation brings into increasingly distant fields of work and life relate to the far-reaching political and social insecurity, apathy, or future indifference in an apparently “absolute present” (Quent 2016) with no alternative? The phenomenon of co-creation demonstrates how the future relies upon these communal games in multiple ways. ‘Future-making’ in the form of collective talk as well as ‘future practices’ [Zukunftspraktiken] can help shape actuality and the future in the very here and now. Ideas of the future can nurture communities, produce collective expectations, emphasize specific possibilities, and guide action (*Imagineering). Different discourses and imaginaries of the future thus also create different presents. The following analysis of the phenomenon of co-creation seeks to clarify this power with examples of two paradigmatic co-creative formats: the “Design Sprint” and the “Social Lab.”

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Co-Creation as Format and Mode of Creative Action The discourse of co-creation knows three distinctive approaches. Co-creation is characterized by two different formats as well as a fundamental work and development process. First, as an economic marketing and design format, cocreation is manifest in the example of “Design Sprints,” a multi-faceted design process originally developed by Google Ventures. It primarily involves “value co-creation,” i.e., a value-creation process, in which new products, services, and service offerings arise from the co-operation of the supplier and the consumer. This process is guided by the underlying assumptions of “Design Thinking”: problems can be solved better if interdisciplinary participants work together in a creative and playful environment in order to identify a relevant design challenge, take the customers’ needs and motivations into account, and then develop ideas that are repeatedly tested with potential consumers (*Consumption). In addition to the results, the process is supposed to enable a broader structure of responsibility within organizations by involving many stakeholders. Second, co-creation means a communally oriented form of innovation (open innovation) combined with a network-like logic of value-creation (*Valorization). It occurs at the borders of science, entrepreneurship, the private sector, civil society, art, and politics. With the help of heterogeneous actors from these fields, something is supposed to be created communally, which could not be possible independently. Examples include what are known as “Social Labs” (Hassan 2014) for practice-oriented problem-solving processes in which diverse stakeholders tackle social challenges (*Organisation). Again, mostly rule-based design principles provide for mutual learning and decision-making processes between actors. New solutions to the problems of our time are supposed to emerge from this playful and affective encounter between different actors and their consequently diverse ideas, perspectives, and experiences. To sharpen and distinguish co-creation, we can compare it with coordinating, cooperative, and collaborative work and social forms. Networking, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration can be imagined along an increasing scale of interactively integrated activities and goals. One activity is the building block of another: coordination furthers networking; cooperation furthers coordination; collaboration furthers cooperation and thus subsumes all other forms of co-work. The degree of communal goals, commitments, and resources applied to the communal undertaking increase along this continuum. The decisive, qualitative jump is from cooperative to collaborative modes of creative practice. Dillenbourg (1999) distinguishes between cooperation as a fixed, vertical division of labor – the individual completion of various partial aspects and their cumulative aggregation – and collaboration as a dynamic, horizontal division of labor. Collaboration across different professional tiers involves the joint formation of this working relationship. Here both the working

Co-Creation

environment (Reckwitz 2017a: 117) and the mode of cooperation itself need to be designed. The “co” of collaboration thus also comprises non-human actors – the work environment shaped through objects, technologies, *atmospheres, and spatiality is itself frequently considered as constitutive. The experimental system of collaboration is supposed to take shape along the evolving progress of working together. A collaborative form of work is highly demanding. According to its fundamental principle, it takes place in an “in between,” a scarcely defined space in which institutional and personal boundaries, motives, and mandates are initially unclear. It takes time, space, and tolerance for frustration to develop mutual understanding, reduce unrealistic expectations, and deal with political dynamics. For these reasons, many collaborative attempts fail or provide unsatisfactory results.

Co-Creation as an Independent Format and Mode of Creative Practice Like collaboration, co-creation seeks to create syntheses and something “more” out of work processes than the mere sum of their parts. However, the specific social logic of an eventful, relational performance distinguishes co-creation as an autonomous mode (*Performativity). In a peculiar combination of professionalization and the mundane (Reckwitz 2017a: 229 ff.), co-creation introduces a differentiated social model for creativity. In contrast to Reckwitz’s central thesis (7), the social model for creativity is not that of the artist’s aesthetic creation, with its strong separation of the producer from the audience. On the contrary, the designer’s and “inventor’s technical innovations” (7) within experimental, iterative, and co-creative formats are authoritative (*Innovation). Under professional guidance, producers and audiences are now integrated as “participants and co-players” (ibid: 230, emphasis in the original) in structured, mundane creativity processes, which try to activate creativity as a “public good always already available in ready amounts” (ibid: 231; *Naturalization). “Something” is supposed to happen in the mostly rule-bound, playfully performative interaction with human and non-human others. The crucial point in (jointly-)designed and designing *work is the value and status of ‘doing things together’ as a means and an end in itself. Songs of praise to creatively playful social forms are thus usually swan songs for the social logic of the classical division of labor. The effective synthesis of parallel creative work is paramount, rather than the diachronic fragmentation of work into increasingly efficient steps (*Computer). I would like to turn now to the specific peculiarities of co-creation as a mode of creative action in reference to the two formats “Design Sprint” and “Social Labs.”

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As “unity of the exceptional” (Reckwitz 2017b: 200), co-creation formats are alluring in their collective eventfulness and singularity. While collaboration is usually a long-term investment, “Design Sprint” and “Social Labs” are restricted to just a few days. They are the ultimate expression of creative work as a ‘culturalized’ event: temporary affective units aiming at the eventful production of the future. The proper moment of co-creation is thus the playful present. Time and time again, something (special) is supposed to take place “right now” through the meeting of different actors. The sociality of co-creation is the enthusiastic, anti-bureaucratic “breeding ground” – it makes all those involved complicit in some “common cause.” This ‘inter-objective’ structure of affective relations does not follow the model of the classical artist collective (Reckwitz 2017a: 75-84, 208), but the model of entrepreneurial design agencies (Design Sprint) or participatory activist projects (Social Labs). Correspondingly, co-creation takes place in labs, studios, workshops, and garages as well as other temporary meeting places of the ‘in-between’ (*Stage). In the performative-affective short circuit between production and consumption, co-creation is self-referential and combines collective value-creation and intrinsic value. For the creative self, participation in such formats seems to offer manifold rewards (*Self-Generation). Unlike long-term collaborations, the context and mode of interaction are in frequently prescriptive and moderated formats such as “Design Sprint” (more) and “Social Labs” (less) already predetermined. Due to their established framework, the frequently frustrating insecurity about the “how” of working together subsides. We find here a prime example of the creativity dispositif’s vital culture of positive affect (*affect culture): the “seemingly unlimited positivity found in acts of forming, experiencing, and admiring, in inspiration, facility, and licence” (Reckwitz 2017a: 212) turns into an aesthetic and affective end in itself, while at the same time increasing the participants’ social and cultural *capital. Thus, co-creation serves the “conformist non-conformism” (Bröckling 2012: 129) of a post-social, singularized creative society. For an intensified, short time we can feel as a collective, enlivened by the creative forces of individuals. The theatrical *stage of co-creation populated by “innovative entrepreneurs” can thereby be seen as a double bind, especially in the format “Design Sprint.” The protagonists of the singularity-based superstar economy of the twenty-first century experience the artistic dilemma of the nineteenth century: the claim to an intrinsic value of creative work is at odds with the contextualization of this claim in competitive market structures (Reckwitz 2017b: 216f.; *Creative Crowd). Working creatively on the world and betting on the future are common to all formats of co-creation. In this respect, it is worth taking a look at co-creation’s mostly unquestioned methods and principles, e.g., of Design Thinking. Implemented in user-friendly tools, checklists and flow charts, co-creation here

Co-Creation

presents itself as a mode of goal-oriented, rule-bound ‘world-handling’ (*Creativity Techniques). The design principles sometimes known as “human-centered design” thus address private users and consumers in a world of changing commodity aesthetics and the convenience economy (*Aesthetic Capitalism). In its playful-sensory creation of differences, co-creation then appears as a mode of ‘world-processing’. The systematized and ‘empirically’ propagated orientation to the needs and desires of consumers seems to suggest something as simple as it is economically attractive: ideas are no stroke of genius; they can be developed quasi-formulaically in interaction with users. The uncertain future is drastically reduced or even abolished. From this perspective one can ask, to what extent co-creation has a cathartic effect, possibly as a “gigantic substitute behavior […] to increase the feeling of security” (Hornuff 2017). The offspring of a ‘design economy’ that demands constant change and dynamic growth, co-creation in the Design Sprint format produces reduced futures: in its world-handling and processing mode, co-creation mostly serves the ‘tyranny of an intended and proximate novelty’. In this way it contributes to the preservation of a politically problematic ‘absolute present’ that appears without alternative; the new reduces itself to a game of producing either aesthetic differences for consumers constantly searching for something special, or the next user-friendly app. The growth economy demands increasingly productive forms of worldprocessing whose difference-forming dynamic nonetheless gambles away the future – for it actually stands in the way of ‘world-making’. The orientation towards ‘intended novelty’ – seemingly deduced from the “pains” and “gains” of users addressed as consumers – gives away the possible potential of co-creation as playful and open engagement with an uncertain future (and present).

Co-Creation as World-making? While fictional expectations and imaginary futures drive the economy within the unquestioned framework of market fundamentalism, large parts of society seem to have lost any political and social phantasy. In this regard, co-creation appears in the guise of open innovation, e.g., in Social Labs, as a possible solution since it promises collective world-making. More modus vivendi than modus operandi, a liberal democratic sense of communality and the creation of a (‘real’) future are supposed to be able to come together and exponentiate each other. For co-creation to be able to ‘risk’ the future as an unforeseeable field of possibilities, it must be critically questioned (*Critique): How can co-creation emancipate itself from the dual heritage of consumer orientation and a literally spectacular allure? How does a (sustainable) future emerge from momentary events? How open is the “co” of creation?

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In its search for eventfulness, co-creation frequently creates new asymmetries and disparities. The search for desired novelty demands special places, supposedly special individuals, and eccentric practices – even if diversity is a principle, not everyone is eligible. The danger of co-creation is that it becomes a kind of lifestyle work for a privileged innovation-elite imbued with social and cultural capital. Examining co-creation also forces the question of sustainability. The eventful character of many formats allows forgetting that frequently “ideas are not the problem.” What actually happens with the daily mountains of Post-it notes that are being scribbled throughout the country? The conversion rate from cocreation to sustainable change is not statistically documented, but could well be low. This also has to do with the kind of solutions and their underlying theories of change that emerge in the course of co-creation. Bound to a tradition of Design Thinking, co-creation easily veers towards market-based product and service solutions. In more open formats, participants fall quickly back on their own, mostly individualistic and cognitive theories of change. Therefore, cocreation needs a variety of methods and a situationally adequate reflection upon theories of change drawn from design research as well as the social sciences and humanities. This reflection includes co-creation learning to interrogate the innovation mantra “new equals better.” Often there is no lack of ideas – their implementation, scaling, and dissemination yet certainly need sustainable and often comparatively dry forms of work. The eventful character of co-creation and its aspired positive affectivity can hinder this kind of sustainable work. World-making takes time, care, and a practiced manner of dealing with differences beyond any quick brainstorming. Still the experimental mundanity of creativity in co-creation brings potentially diverse social stakeholders together. Grown out of design and engineering practices, the professionalization of co-creation so far constructs its target groups as ‘private’ users and consumers. What if instead of a consumer-oriented design, a ‘citizen-centered design’ would orient understanding and action in co-creation – in both Design Sprint and Social Labs formats? In this sense, co-creation definitely has the potential to be a lively, democratic practice. In contrast to most problem-solving formats, two further design tasks would then be key: As a first step, the gamble for the future would need to be invented collectively and, as in every game, the rules of the game would need to be adaptable. The field of play would be a field of possibility surrounding a socially relevant concern. Second, in this process, the participants would not, or not merely, be addressed as private consumers, but also as citizens: as bearers of an emancipatory social project. Perhaps both a world and a future may be ‘won’ in this game, even if (or precisely because) they turn out differently. In any case, such a game of co-creation would have already transformed the present.

Co-Creation

References Bröckling, Ulrich (2012): “Die Tyrannei des Neuen. Ulrich Bröckling über ‘Die Erfindung der Kreativität. Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung’ von Andreas Reckwitz.” In: Texte zur Kunst 88, pp. 128-131. Dillenbourg, Pierre (1999): “What do you mean by collaborative learning?” In: Collaborative-Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches, Oxford: Elsevier pp. 1-19. Hassan, Zaid (2014): The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach to Solving Our Most Complex Challenges. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Hornuff, Daniel (2017): “Lasset uns denken! Wie Teamwork zum Dogma wurde.” In: Brand Eins, September 20. Quent, Marcus (ed.) (2016): Absolute Gegenwart, Berlin: Merve Verlag. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017a): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017b): Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten: Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne, Berlin: Suhrkamp.

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Color Timon Beyes

Any social theory that takes the aesthetic seriously will be faced with phenomena that have a marginal or secondary status in conventional social research. Andreas Reckwitz’s historical investigation of the rise of creativity takes “sense perception in the broadest possible understanding” to be the “starting point” for its theoretical analysis (Reckwitz 2017: 10). Phenomena of sensual perception have remained marginal because social relationships, processes, and structures are supposedly more difficult to pin down in terms of colors, sounds, smells, and embodied experience than in terms of actions, communications, and cultural norms or codes. To be sure, “a sociological account of the senses could take a magnifying glass to the social modularization of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, bodily motion and the spatial localization of the self in different cultural settings and in their historical transformation” (ibid: 11). Nevertheless, Reckwitz’s support for this thesis, in the form of references to Walter Benjamin, philosopher Gernot Böhme, and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, demonstrates that we are on the fringes of the social sciences (of course, one could also mention Reckwitz’s occasional references to Georg Simmel). The orthodox reading of the social usually does not take it to be an aesthetically attuned phenomenon, or, if so, the phenomenon is sequestered to the field of the arts. In addition, any reference to affective, sensory complexes runs counter to the well-established thesis about a general process of de-aestheticization in modernity, which is inscribed variously into large-scale analyses of formal rationality, the capitalist logic of exploitation, and the functional differentiation of modern society. Furthermore, affective, sensory complexes are not susceptible to falsification and, to some extent, are resistant to differentiation, which spells poison for the formation of systematic theories: What would be the antithesis of ‘sense perception’? Phenomena related to sense perception remain secondary in conventional social research because, under these conditions, they appear, at best, to be eye-catching, and, at worst, a smoke screen. At best, sense perception is regarded as a symptom and consequence of what is taken to be the primary means of production of the social; at worst, it is seen as a class-specific

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taste or as the fashionable color of the moment, a construct based largely on communicative trends and marketing strategies for which the actual color itself remains entirely irrelevant. If the establishment of the creativity complex, as Reckwitz explains, can be accounted for by the propagation of self-referential aesthetic practices and a corresponding increase in the potential of the affective register, then the starting point for its study needs to be different from conventional social research. There can no longer be any way of getting around the processes and circumstances involved in the mobilization of the senses – and in the material of their mobilization. It is relatively obvious, owing to Reckwitz’s genealogical approach, that The Invention of Creativity attempts to present a large sociotheoretical arc for the processes and circumstances involved in this mobilization of the senses, captured in Reckwitz’s distinction between “aesthetic practices” and “aesthetic episodes.” The material itself (i.e., the mobilization of the senses) usually remains at a distance and, at times, is channeled through writings of others. This can be read as an invitation or challenge to somehow materialize the study of the creativity complex. I would like to show this, in the following, with a sketch of the phenomenon of color.

Polymorphous Insubstantial Substance The world given to perception is permeated with color. In Walter Benjamin’s (2011: 211) early analysis, it is “something winged that flits from one form to the next,” and thus a volatile medium of change. Color is neither a mere property of an object, even if it is occasionally assumed to be in chemical terms, nor something merely in the eye or brain of the beholder, even if cognitive science attempts to prove this in neurobiological terms. Understood as a social force, color can be located in-between; as an unstable ‘medium’, it both shapes and is shaped by perception. Colors “embody and transform social relations,” writes the cultural and postcolonial theorist Natasha Eaton (2012: 62). Ultimately, color remains a “polymorphous magical substance” (Taussig 2009: 40), which is difficult to grasp and theorize, as anthropologist Michal Taussig puts it in one such attempt drawing on Benjamin’s and Goethe’s theories of color. For social research, these would be unconventional formulations. Their imprecision, appropriate to the subject matter, might make it easier to understand why there is still a conspicuous absence of social theoretical investigations into this omnipresent phenomenon. Even Benjamin contrasted the fluidity and volatility of color with the objectivity of a form of vision guided by concepts. Hence, color can never be adequately pinned down in conceptual taxonomies. Polemically, some scholars have even pointed out that Western intellectual history is characterized by a veritable ‘chromophobia’, a fear of color for its illegibility and uncontrollability (Batchelor 2000). Chromophobia is by no means just

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the epistemological problem to which I reduce it here: It drives and is driven by racist and cultural stereotypes. Even the ‘material turn’ seems to have done little to rectify the neglect of what color does or can do. Although objects and technologies are being investigated in various terms of their agency, the peculiar “insubstantial substance” of color (Taussig) is hardly mentioned or studiously overlooked. This too can undoubtedly be read as a symptom of the enduring anti-aesthetic orthodoxy in thinking about society and the social.

The Raw Material of the Creativity Dispositif Apart from a handful of references to artistic practices involving colorful materials, the concept of color appears in only one passage in The Invention of Creativity, though it is an important one. To provide a more theoretical basis for his original intuition of making sense perception into the starting point for a social theory, Reckwitz distinguishes between a general sense of the aesthetic, involving “all processes of sense perception,” and a narrower sense of “auto-dynamic perceptions, which have broken loose from their embeddedness in purposive rationality” (2017: 11, emphasis in the original). It is impossible to derive the rise of creativity from the fact that sense perception is always at work in every aspect of human life. Rather, the rise of creativity has to do with the proliferation of a specific type of aesthetic practice: self-referential episodes or practices whose only purpose is themselves; whether undertaken consciously or unconsciously, they must have some affective dimension. In a sense, this definition provides the praxeological foundation for Reckwitz’s larger thesis about the ‘affect deficiency’ in modernity (*Affect Culture). The potential for affective excitement increases in proportion to the amount and the size of these aesthetic practices related to auto-dynamic sense perception. In a footnote supporting these claims, Reckwitz refers to “a simple and tangible example” borrowed from philosopher Martin Seel: “The way pedestrians wanting to cross the road take note of traffic lights is sensuous and perceptive but not aesthetic. The perception becomes aesthetic when they are struck by the different colours as a play of lights” (ibid: 239, note 7). The note demonstrates the suitability of color as a material phenomenon for both the explanation of aesthetic practices and, more broadly, the implementation of the creativity dispositif. As Reckwitz emphasizes, “the aesthetic” is “never merely an internal, psychological phenomenon. It operates in a social space made up of people and objects in which new percept-affect relations are continually coming into being” (ibid: 12). This statement sounds similar to the conception of color cited above: flexible matter that modulates and shapes perception, while also being modulated and shaped by it, without being able to be reduced to specific objects or subjective apparatuses of consciousness.

Color

Color is thus the elusive, multifaceted, ephemeral substance of the rise of creative practices and episodes, perhaps even its ideal type of raw material. To name only a few examples, color has played an important role in artistic experiments and the development of the artistic field, which is the pacemaker of the creativity dispositif (*Artist, *Deaestheticization), as well as the diversity of colors characteristic of the counterculture whose practices shaped the creativity dispositif. Ever since the publication of Richard Nelson Bolles’ highly-regarded guide for job-seekers, What Color Is Your Parachute? (1970), it has been impossible to avoid the commonplace and nebulous reduction of specific colors to the vulgar psychological promotion of an individual’s creative capacities. Blue is marketed as promoting creativity, or green, or how about even purple: Pantone’s choice of “ultra violet” as Color of the Year in 2018 was based on its perceived symbolism of experimentation, non-conformity, and its ability to inspire individuals to push creative boundaries. According to Taussig (2009: 244), “Color provides, it seems, a license to be stupid, willfully so.” One could just as easily refer to the colorful designs of “creative spaces,” especially in the creative industries and tech-based founder cultures (*Creative Cities). Or to the digital color palette, which far exceeds human perception (*Performativity), and the association of everyday creative practices with the hues, contrast, brightness, and sharpening of everything from social media to PowerPoint presentations. An entire color industry is inscribed into the creativity complex; aesthetic capitalism is characterized by a form of color management.

Color as Affective Force Color, then, is the raw material for a creativity dispositif whose exercise or reproduction requires aesthetic substances. If one were to let things stand, one would run the risk of undercutting the complex materiality of color and its unstable social force, which appeared above in the comments from Benjamin, Eaton, and Taussig. To resist this simplification, I would like to present, within the constraints of this space, a conceptual argument and a historical one, which are related to each other. As for the conceptual argument, Reckwitz’s example of traffic-light colors may be illuminating for his distinction between merely registering something through sense perception (in the broader sense) and experiencing it (in the narrower sense) as an aesthetic affect. However, this distinction becomes unstable in light of the affective force of color. As Gilles Deleuze wrote in his book on the painter Francis Bacon (Deleuze 2005), color should be understood as a pre-subjective affective force (an argument similar to that made in his books on the “arbitrary spaces” of cinema). Reducing the affective dimension of color to the awareness of its purposeless play, in the sense of post-Kantian aesthetics, fails to recognize its uncanny aesthetic power to affect human bodies before and regardless of whether they consciously perceive its

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impact. Colors always affect us; regardless of whether an individual perceives this interaction as an aesthetic event. This insight would destabilize Reckwitz’s distinction between the common, negligible act of “taking note of” something in “sensuous and perceptive” terms and that of “being struck by” something in “affective” terms. For the creativity dispositif, there would be a particularly important consequence: In an age of “atmosphere management,” there are a variety of aesthetic practices, which act on human bodies and human bodies act in, but do not aim at aesthetic perception as an end in itself (*Atmosphere). In an age when collective affects are designed for urban, consumerist, and medial atmospheres, the tendency of colors (and other materials for atmospheric control) is to create aesthetic regulation, control, and feedback loops. This “aesthetic normalization” (Reckwitz 2017: 27) does not necessarily put the public – audiences, consumers, or citizens – into conscious states of excitement. In the end, the case of color renders Reckwitz’s distinction between self-referential affect and everyday sense perception problematic, insofar as the latter is also an aesthetic realm of normalized social relations, of societal order and unrest. In addition, instrumental rationality can no longer function as an antithesis of the aesthetic, but must itself be regarded as aesthetically coded and produced through aesthetic practices.

Color as an Agent of Aestheticization The more one considers the history of color production and distribution, the more the thesis of a fundamental de-aestheticization in modern society seems like a myth of modern sociology. Accounting for color reveals the “de-aestheticization machine” (ibid: 17) to be an “aestheticization machine” (ibid: 19) as well. Even the history of colonialism and world trade cannot be understood apart from the desire and hunt for natural colors, which were equally fascinating, intoxicating, and frightening to the emerging European world powers. Color, Eaton and Taussig claim, was the coke of empire. The birth of the chemical industry was bound up with the production of chemical colors that were supposed to provide the colonizers with their own “native” variety of artificial colors surpassing those of the colonized. In the nineteenth century, there were already color books and color charts for selecting and combining the hues to be used in the design of one’s own home. And the rise of the US model of merchandise and consumption has recently been told as the history of a revolution of color, as the fundamental aestheticization of a society engaged in creative practices of composing tasteful colors (Blaszczyk 2012) – a kind of democratization of profane, consumer-oriented creativity on the basis of contrasting and matching colors (*Consumption, *Product). Even this admittedly cursory review indicates further possibilities for working out another *genealogy of social *aestheticization qua color expansion,

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which appears to start earlier and proceed in different ways than Reckwitz’s prehistory of the creativity dispositif. To take up one of Reckwitz’s well-phrased terms, color should be understood as one of the “agents of aestheticization,” which is at work but not entirely absorbed in “the expansionism of art,” “the media revolution,” “the rise of capitalism,” “the expansion of the world of objects,” and “the rise of the subject” (2017: 19-22). Ultimately, color should retain its right, in Benjamin’s sense, to tell its own material and media history.

References Batchelor, David (2000): Chromophobia, London: Reaktion Books. Benjamin, Walter (2011): “A Child’s View of Color” [1914]. In: Early Writings, 1910-1917, translated by Howard Eiland and Others, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, pp. 211-213. Blaszczyk, Regina Lee (2012): The Color Revolution, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bolles, Richard, N. (1970): What Color Is Your Parachute? New York: Ten Speed Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2005): Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by D.W. Smith, London: Continuum. Eaton, Natasha (2012): “Nomadism of Colour: Painting, Technology and Waste in the Chromo-zones of Colonial India c. 1765-c. 1860.” In: Journal of Material Culture 17/1, pp. 61-81. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Taussig, Michael (2009): What Color is the Sacred? Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Computer Claus Pias “You can create art and beauty on a computer.” The Hacker Ethic

Hardly anywhere is more fraught with the phantasm and reality of the creativity complex than the 20-mile long industrial region of Northern California commonly known as “Silicon Valley.” This name has been used since the early 1970s for trading a globally exportable model of creativity, (self)-entrepreneurship, heroic counterculture, and the California Ideology. Depending on one’s perspective, it is capable of producing either the brightest or the darkest fantasies of our future (Barbrook/Cameron 1996; *Imagineering). If one wanted to invoke an icon of the fusion of the creativity imperative and its media-technological equipment, then perhaps it would be the “Think different” campaign, in which artists and “alternative thinkers” like Albert Einstein, Maria Callas, Martin Luther King, Amelia Earhart, John Lennon, Martha Graham, Buckminster Fuller, Muhammad Ali, and Mahatma Gandhi promoted the creativity enhancing power of Apple products from 1997 to 2002 (*Pop, *Product). By this time, early concepts of the personal computer were already twentyfive years old. The media-historical thesis developed here is simply that the imagination and emergence of the ‘personal computer’ presents one of the decisive scenes in a “genealogy of the creativity complex.” The “digital revolution of computers and the Internet” is not solely an aesthetic “transformation of the patterns of sense perception and feeling” (Reckwitz 2017: 20). Rather, questions about creativity, *innovation, *play, and forms of subjectivation themselves form the media and cultural theoretical focal point for the emergence of the concrete technical development of the personal computer capable of materializing and generalizing these practices across all its applications. In other words, developers considered the PC not as an epiphenomenon of a previous “complex,” but as a media-technological argument whose redefinition of the play/non-play boundary is a prerequisite for a future “creativity dispositif.”

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Reading McLuhan Marshall McLuhan’s writings had an early and decisive significance for this perspective. McLuhan’s media theory of the 1960s not only dispelled any reservation concerning what could be seen as a ‘medium’; he simultaneously made an unbounded concept of media capable of distinguishing entire epochs, which obtain their respective unity through the mentality-shaping effects of ‘dominant media’ in specific historical periods (e.g., book printing). Media could thus be defined in historical and philosophical terms as the ultimate driving force of societies, economies, arts, or the history of mentalities – as their medial a priori. Around 1970, McLuhan’s thesis was already woven deeply into the discourse of the ‘post-industrial’ age (e.g., Daniel Bell, Zbigniew Brzezinsky, Alain Touraine, Jean-François Lyotard), which took digitalization to be the key technology for the future of western economies and societies. At the same time, however, McLuhan was enthusiastically read by a certain generation of young computer scientists, who today are counted as “pioneers” (e.g., Alan Kay, Seymour Papert, Ted Nelson). McLuhan’s theses on the medial a priori of entire cultures and epochs were so attractive because around 1970 they allowed for the propagation of an innovation whose meaning the contemporary computer industry did not yet believe in – namely, the PC. The personal computer movement no longer conceived of the computer (as the preceding generation of cyberneticists had) as an “electronic brain,” “thought machine,” or “massive calculator,” but (grâce McLuhan) as a “medium.” Experimenting with civilian (though often apparently meaningless) applications of the computer could now be articulated as “media theory.” Just as Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain suddenly realizes that he has always spoken in prose, so the PC apologists realized that they had been dealing with a medium all along. And they found themselves in the flattering, powerful position of designing the mentality of the coming media epoch. In any case, the theoretical grounding of the computer as a medium allowed certain pedagogic, political, aesthetic, or epistemological views on an emerging postmodern computer culture to combine with the design of concrete hard- and software as their a priori.

Child, Creativity, Play This computer culture, for which the PC was supposed to form the medial a priori, was imagined to be an eminently ludic culture, and consequently its main concepts were “child,” “creativity,” and “play.” The (playing) child was not only the user model and test subject of the future PC, which was explicitly addressed by Alan Kay and Ted Nelson to “children of all ages.” There was also a transfer of developmental psychological theory into early computer science (e.g., Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Jean Piaget,

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Jérôme Bruner). Kay designed his famous Dynabook (a predecessor of today’s laptops and tablets) with explicit reference to Montessori as an “environment of powerful epistemology” and integrated Bruner’s stage model of cognitive development in the interface design. For Piaget’s student Seymour Papert, Piaget’s theory of the interplay between assimilation and association became the basis of the programming language LOGO. And for Nelson, the PC enabled individual self-instruction in the playful handling of information, which was supposed to disempower curricula and lead to a pluralistic worldview as well as life-long learning. In these examples, the child functions as a figure of an innocent, auto-didactic, playful, adventurous, emancipated, and self-responsible user. Or in Nelson’s words, which were directed against “computer-aided instruction” (CAI) as the then prevalent form of e-learning: “The educational system serves mainly to destroy most people. […] Nothing in the universe is intrinsically uninteresting. […] There are no ‘subjects’. […] There is no natural […] order of learning. […] Anyone […] can learn anything practically on his own, given encouragement and resources” (Nelson 1974: 18). The corresponding publications (e.g., Kay/ Goldberg 1977) illustrate this almost exclusively with creative activities: drawing and painting, making and composing music, learning and writing were supposed to constitute the decisive fields of application for the coming PC. In other words, everything that had recently been considered meaningless and uneconomical or at best had been practiced in the preserve of experimental hacking or early media art. The tacit reference for these epistemological insights into creativity and play was Arthur Koestler’s 1966 philosophical-psychological non-fiction work, The Act of Creation, which – building upon Bergson and Freud’s concepts of laughter and jokes – provides a unified theory of creativity for the domains science and art.

Creative Computing It therefore only seems logical that one of the first magazines that appealed to PC-users was called Creative Computing. The subtitle of the magazine described it as “a non-profit magazine of educational and recreational computing.” Creative Computing contained an uninterrupted call for creative interaction with the new medium. The texts they published were extremely heterogeneous and included all possible fields and applications of personal computing, from video games and programming examples through “classroom activities” and “social commentary,” to general “ideas.” The “joke” of creativity consisted in inventing the PC culturally and integrating it into meaningful practices, and that meant inventing new, innovative, personal uses through “playing around,” that were unthinkable with then-contemporary computers – regardless of whether these applications were to be artistic, scientific, or bureaucratic.

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This indicates a widespread shift in the established, culturally negotiated demarcations between play and non-play, or play and *work. In the eyes of its developers, the PC was a universal playing machine that deconstructed the very difference between play/non-play. As a medium that can potentially integrate all other media, there was a new common denominator for all applications, whether “serious” or “playful”: creative use and the imperative to “do your own thing.” Faithful to McLuhan’s doctrine, this deconstruction of play/non-play resides in the medium and its properties alone. Therefore, in a sense, it was a “constructed” deconstruction that was supposed to develop its mentality-shaping power in the PC’s universal dissemination, and then spread contagiously into aesthetic, scientific, work-based, and subjectivizing forms.

Play/Non-Play: Creativity and Computerization One might say that the deconstruction of play/non-play in the name of some ‘general creativity’ presents a productive paradox. It consists in the implicit meta-statement explored by Gregory Bateson in the message, “This is play,” which means, “these actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote. The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (1987: 139). Within the realm of creativity, working with a PC simultaneously denotes both work and non-work, both play and non-play. This deconstruction, which one could also call the “epistemic phase” of personal computing, was not destined to last for long. Due to the success of its own ideology, the fading difference between play/non-play was reintroduced and reinforced as a market choice between “playful” home computers and “legitimate” PC’s, between “creative” Apple and “bureaucratic” IBM-compatible PC’s. Rather than an interface enabling an omnipresent, hybrid practice of play/non-play, games now refer to a booming market of individual, self-contained computer game products. What remained was the creativity hypothesis with a medial a priori. “Gamification” has been booming for about 15 years as a diagnosis of contemporary journalism, marketing, management, healthcare, and science. The penetration of work, recreational, educational, and everyday contexts with methods, metaphors, attributes, and aesthetics from the world of (computer) games is interpreted not only as an engine of comprehensive *aestheticization of the social, but also as a central constellation of neo-liberalism. On the whole, recent diagnoses of “ludification” (Jost Raessens), “ludefaction” (Graeme Kirkpatrik) or “exploitationware” (Ian Bogost) presume that playful elements precede and are only subsequently applied to far removed fields – for the purposes of labor motivation, customer loyalty or acquisition,

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or learning. Whether out of a critical or an affirmative intent, their narratives grow around the gesture of an innovative border crossing, in which playful elements are grafted into non-playful contexts. Media history would have replied that gamification is not subsequent to but coincident with the emergence of personal computing itself, insofar as gamification is a central figure of thought for an idea of creativity that is implemented in the form of media technology. Notions of creativity and play have not only participated in the conceptualization and development of the PC. They are reflexively embodied in it as a built-in media theory – and even in anticipation of the computer’s significance in the history of mentalities for digital cultures to come. With respect to a genealogy of the creativity dispositif, the phase of “crisis and concentration” (Reckwitz 2017: 37) can also be viewed in a media (technological) historical manner. The benefit of this observation is that it does not focus solely on human actors, but can show how “creativity” was conceived as an emergent effect of an interaction, designed in material terms, between humans and a historically new type of machine – namely, the personal computer as a haptic and intellectual toy for the dawning post-industrial society (*Performativity). This interaction was pioneered in the 1960s by authors like Joseph C. Licklider or Douglas C. Engelbart, who introduced terms like human-machine “symbiosis” and the “augmentation” of intelligence. However, while forms of efficiency and intelligence augmentation were prioritized, as they were necessary to gain an edge in “the technological race between superpowers,” the PC movement of the 1970s adapted a generally “human” and firmly “artistically” coded creativity. Their media theory thereby claimed not only that human-machine networks could and should be more creative, but also suggested that everyone should acquire the necessary technical media equipment. In this respect the mass computerization of households in the 1980s is at least complicit with the beginning of the “domination” phase (Reckwitz 2017: 30, emphasis in the original) of the creativity dispositif and was thereby elevated to the status of a growth industry without equal.

References Barbrook, Richard/Cameron, Andy (1996): “The Californian Ideology.” In: Science as Culture 6/1, pp. 44-72. Bateson, Gregory (1987): “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” In: Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, Northvale, NJ: Aronson, pp. 138-148. Kay, Alan/Goldberg, Adele (1977): “Personal Dynamic Media.” In: Computer 10/3, pp. 31-41. Koestler, Arthur (1966): The Act of Creation, New York: Penguin Books.

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Nelson, Ted (1974): Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Self-published. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

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Consumption Dirk Hohnsträter

It only makes sense to speak of “the inevitability of creativity” (Reckwitz 2017: 1), the diagnosis at the start of Andreas Reckwitz’s study of The Invention of Creativity, provided that it also applies to an area that has hardly ever been associated with the active production of the new – namely, consumption. In fact, Reckwitz not only takes the position that the culture of modernity has been transformed in a manner that “overturns the status of consumption in modern life, and shifts consumption from the discredited periphery to the center of the modern lifestyle,” but also that consumer culture has itself been subject to a transformation toward creativity (2008: 221). In late modernity (1970-present), the dominant figure, at least in Western countries, has been “the active consumer pursuing an individual lifestyle with diverse symbolic goods rather than devoting themselves to Fordist mass consumption” (Reckwitz 2017: 89), and thus is no longer subjected to the “societal control of normalcy” in earlytwentieth-century employee culture (Reckwitz 2008: 230). The old type of consumer, who remained satisfied with acquiring seductive, mass-produced commodities, gets supplanted by a new type of consumer, who furnishes things for sale “with multiple meanings, imaginations, and ego ideals,” and hopes on top of that “to transform [their own identity] through these objects charged with symbolic and affective meaning” (Reckwitz 2008: 220; cf. Ullrich 2006: 13). In what sense do Reckwitz’s claims about the creativity dispositif permit any notion of creative consumption, and what obstacles might there be to including consumption in the creativity dispositif? In this entry, I will first spell out the rhetoric of creative consumption, and then point out some counter-tendencies within contemporary consumer culture. In doing so, the aim of this entry is to clarify the locus of consumption within the creativity dispositif. In a chapter on “The Rise of the Aesthetic Economy,” Reckwitz makes two important statements about “new consumers,” which are closely connected to each other. First, “new consumers are interested less in material goods than in goods and services providing sensuous and affective experiences” (2017: 91; *Affect Culture, *Aesthetic Capitalism). Second, consumers are addressed “as

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creative, as people not merely buying and using goods but actively producing meanings, experiences and emotions and melding them together into an individual lifestyle” (ibid). In his depiction of these new, creative consumers in late modernity, Reckwitz does not always clearly distinguish between ‘culturalization’, ‘aestheticization’, and arguably even ‘creativity’. While his account of these concepts in The Invention of Creativity is not entirely compelling, Reckwitz would provide a more precise notion of culturalization in his subsequent book, The Society of Singularities (2019). As a general rule, every instance of culturalization does not necessarily imply an instance of *aestheticization (in the strong sense of the prevalence of the aesthetic), nor does every instance of aestheticization necessarily go hand in hand with the generalization of creativity (*Postscript). This can easily be shown for the sphere of consumption. The declining importance of use value for product choices does not necessarily mean that design is now the most important criterion for consumers’ purchases; ethical factors could easily be responsible for tipping the scales. Similarly, while it may be plausible to call attention to the far-reaching aesthetic- and event-based value of commodities, rather than viewing the late-modern consumer in mere terms of status-based symbolic values, it hardly follows that the subjects of consumption are addressed as creative actors. Aesthetic products do not automatically make those who purchase them creative; rather, their stimulating effect may remain limited to triggering preformed images of creativity (*Color). Conversely, the capacity of consumers for innovation can also show up in inventing new use values for things without disrupting their aesthetic dimension or their experiential value. With these qualifications in mind, I still agree with Reckwitz’s general diagnosis that contemporary consumption can be described as creative in many respects. In my analysis, there are three main types of creativity in consumption: appropriation, curation, and co-production (Hohnsträter 2016: 7-13). By ‘appropriation’, I understand the way consumers, as users, repurpose and redesign the things they buy – in the sense described in Anglo-American cultural studies, the New Ethnology, and Michel de Certeau’s (1984) theory of everyday life. Appropriation is a clever and resourceful way of handling commodities involving idiosyncratic adoption practices, whose subversive gesture occasionally contains counter-cultural remnants. One example is the modification of the Apple logo on a user’s device, which amounts to consciously sacrificing the prestige of the premium brand in favor of individual appropriation. (Depending on the milieu, this “mod” can create an even stronger, secondary prestige, though the fact that the company has long since incorporated this consumer practice into its own promo clips raises doubts about its efficacy.) ‘Curation’ in consumption is intended to describe a practice Reckwitz draws on heavily: the choice of individual products and their surprising combination, which consumers perform more or less creatively for the purposes of stylistic

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distinction and symbolic self-presentation (*Curating). This approach shows a conspicuous affinity to the “artist as arranger” (Reckwitz 2017: 73) and is the most likely to confirm the thesis of consumption in the creativity dispositif. The third type of creative consumption, which I call ‘co-production’, extends far into the sphere of production, and refers to the involvement of consumers in product design – for instance, in the framework of what is known as ‘mass customization’. As early as 1980, Alvin Toffler introduced the concept of the ‘prosumer’ to describe people who use products they have created themselves (Hellmann 2010). Over the course of digitization, Toffler’s term acquired further connotations, encompassing practices ranging from individual product configurations in online retailing to the participation of players in the collaborative design of computer games (*Product). At the initiative of consumers (or prosumers), goods and services can “be changed to such an extent in terms of their nature, their manner of use, and their appearance that one can no longer speak of ‘consumption’ in the classical sense” (Hellmann 2010: 29). Tim Brown, president of the IDEO design agency, gets to the heart of this new constellation: “In the past, companies developed new products and presented them to customers. Today, we have the opportunity to work together with customers to develop something new and even to create a platform on which consumers design products all by themselves” (2012: 102). What Brown describes solely in terms of progress also reflects the double structure of “subjective desire and social expectations” (Reckwitz 2017: 2), or consumer wishes and demands, which are characteristic of Reckwitz’s creativity dispositif (*Dispositif, *Genealogy). The alleged freedom of creative consumption can also be interpreted as the ingenious exploitation of customers’ *work and time, their energy and imagination. There is no consensus in the academic debate about creative consumption (Hellmann 2010), which currently centers on two particularly contentious questions. How creative are the practices described with the label ‘creative consumption’, in reality? And what portion of contemporary consumerism does creative consumption actually account for? Even Reckwitz qualifies the creativity dispositif’s claim to totality, conceding that “other individual segments of late modern society evade aestheticization” (2017: 22) and emphasizing that “the economy is too heterogeneous to be understood as an aesthetic economy through and through” (ibid: 89). Similarly, instead of being purely post-Fordist, “the aesthetic economy is driven by a specific set of expanding forms of work, the market and consumption”, which accelerates “the production of new signs, sense impressions and affects”. Furthermore, Reckwitz’s concluding remarks on the “everyday aesthetic of repetition” (ibid: 232-235) provide nuance to the otherwise grand narrative. Normalcy and routines determine consumption patterns to a striking extent, and not only as the residue of cultural history but still following the lo-

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gic of excess (*Naturalization). In many cases, consumption amounts less to creation, curation, and self-stylization than to reliance on particular forms of relief, which have proven to be reliable in the past. Since it would be practically impossible to personally examine each offer in an abundant range of products, consumers tend to prefer a reliable product to a new one, a familiar product line to the search for a new one, and they will remain loyal to a brand rather than experimenting with a new one. Consumers trust the merchandise mark ‘Made in Germany’, the brands ‘Manufactum’, ‘Miele’, and ‘dm’, the consumer safety group ‘Stiftung Warentest’, and the EU label for organic food. A weekly visit to the farmer’s market or the gourmet delicatessen is an expression of comforting repetition, a release from the pressure of novelty and the overwhelming choices characteristic of normal consumption. The majority of consumers, perhaps not those with the greatest say but still enough to support the economy, want the same shoes Michael Jordan wears, the same fish Friedrich Liechtenstein eats, and the same ‘customer journey’ everyone makes at Aldi. In short, customers want it all – excerpt for the effort required to re-invent themselves (*Self-Generation). Admittedly, one might object that the value of the experience of relief remains dependent, ex negativo, on social expectations of creativity, and thus confirms the dominance of the creativity dispositif. In response, I would point out that precisely where creative consumption has become an established phenomenon, internal correctives are constantly developing. The website of the Bavarian startup Mymuesli, for instance, confronts visitors with the imperative to “be creative.” According to their count, customers can create over 566 quadrillion different variations of muesli out of 80 different organic ingredients. However, the company also exploits these consumer-created variations to create more and more pre-made mixtures based on the most popular ingredients (“It’s not easy to know where to start”), one-size-fits-all versions marketed as the “Favorite Muesli.” Apparently, there were enough customers who did not want to take the trouble to re-invent their breakfast every morning. Is contemporary consumption, then, the incarnation of the “dominant cultural form embraced by the modern individual” (Reckwitz 2008: 221), the flagship case of the creativity dispositif? Beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no meaningful way of denying the centrality of consumption as an arena of communication, self-expression, and aesthetic experience. Furthermore, there is no question that the modern consumer, in addition to being stubborn in appropriation, imaginative in curation, and co-productive in prosumption, is a creative subject. Nevertheless, the logic of (too much) excess also gives rise to instances of relief, which counter the imperatives of the creativity dispositif.

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References Brown, Tim (2012): “‘Wir müssen mehr Wissen preisgeben’. Interview with Tim Brown by Lothar Kuhn and Michael Leitl.” In: Harvard Business Manager, May 2012, pp. 100-103. Certeau, Michel de (1984): The Practice of Everyday Life [1980], translated by Steven Rendall, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hellmann, Kai-Uwe (2010): “Prosumer Revisited. Zur Aktualität einer Debatte.” In: Kai-Uwe Hellmann/Birgit Blättel-Mink (eds.), Prosumer Revisited. Zur Aktualität einer Debatte, Wiesbaden: Springer-Verlag, pp. 13-48. Hohnsträter, Dirk (2016): Konsum und Kreativität, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Reckwitz, Andreas (2008): “Das Subjekt des Konsums in der Kultur der Moderne. Der kulturelle Wandel der Konsumtion.” In: Unscharfe Grenzen. Perspektiven der Kultursoziologie, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 219-223. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Reckwitz, Andreas (2019): The Society of Singularities: On the Structural Transformation of Modernity [2017], London: Polity (forthcoming). Toffler, Alvin (1980): The Third Wave, New York: Bantam Books. Ullrich, Wolfgang (2006): Habenwollen. Wie funktioniert die Konsumkultur? Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag.

Creative Cities Chris Steyaert, Christoph Michels

Let us zoom in on Sydney, one creative city that put itself on the map of attractive cities with the Summer Olympics event of 2000, and has boosted its creative potential ever since. Each time the fireworks above Harbor Bridge have faded out on New Year’s Eve, it is for a month-long summer time in the city of Sydney with art festivals, open-air cinema, family picnics and barbecues, and tons of tourists coming and going through the automated gates at Kingsford Smith International Airport. At the iconic opera house, spectators are nipping a drink before they attend Puccini’s La Bohème, always a crowd-pleaser. Their conversations pause as they watch through the wall-high windows a colossal cruise ship making a tricky maneuver to turn backwards out of the harbor. After this spectacular, almost impossible-looking operation, the ship glides slowly by, and for a short moment, waving passengers on the ship’s decks are eye to eye with the opera-aficionados who, as the bell starts to ring, hastily finish their champagne and rush to their seat for a star-struck, yet totally uninteresting adaptation of this nineteenth-century story about bohemian life. In this snapshot, many elements that constitute the concept of the ‘creative city’ come together: spectacular architecture and renovated harborscapes, cultural festivals and open-air events, consumer spaces and tourist gazes (*Consumption). Of course, the scene comes with its own contradictions: the opulence of culture, consumerism, cruise traveling, and champagne is at odds with the performance on stage where we are reminded of the material hardships and struggles with health that artists were confronted with while they would never give up their belief in art and love. In the nineteenth century, the bohemian artistic counter-culture formed subcultural scenes in cities like Paris, Berlin, and New York. These artistic scenes were urban microcosms mixing economic precariousness with a sensuous and voluptuous lifestyle and a non-conformist self-stylization, marking a symbolic distinction to other, more bourgeois lifestyles (Reckwitz 2017: 46-48; *Work, *Artist). Importantly, the creative city comes with references to bohemian culture, which would become a qualification of the “creative class” in Richard Florida’s (2002) so-called “Bohemian index”,

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where creativity derived from artistic lifeworlds is extended into a generalized collective urban lifestyle. Creativity as a crucial organizing principle of Western societies over the last thirty years has thus been nowhere as influential as on the urban plane (Reckwitz 2017: 1-7, 173-200; *Organization). Both the wish and the imperative to be creative has been projected on the urban context and the notion of ‘creative cities’ – to which Reckwitz dedicates the entire seventh chapter of The Invention of Creativity. This should not come as a surprise. In the ‘double entendre’ of creativity as wish and demand, the culturalization of urban space has been embraced by policy-makers and government officials as an economic imperative, overwriting and distorting earlier emancipatory hopes for urban creativity. Examples of cities that jumped on the creative city bandwagon are numerous, from Barcelona to Dubai, from Brisbane to Singapore. The concept refers to the script where cities pursue permanent aesthetic self-renewal as they invest in spectacular building projects, renovate whole neighborhoods, and organize a whole range of cultural events, from open-air cinema to music festivals. In Reckwitz’s view, this form of culturalization refers specifically “to a reflexive stance to urban culture that began to be adopted in the 1970s by city dwellers and visitors, as well as by the urban economy and public planners. This reflexive stance is geared to consciously increasing, intensifying and concentrating signs and atmospheres in the city” (179-180, emphasis in the original; *Atmosphere). Insofar as a government inscribes creativity in its planning and policies, Reckwitz underlines that the culturalization of urban space marks a political turn in the genealogy of the creativity dispositif. This culturalization of urban space thus became systematic through interventions from government planners aiming to transform various places into a creative city. Creativity became an object of government control, infused with discourses, tools, and programs developed by urban planning advisors. These city consultants (the most notorious being Charles Landry and Richard Florida) have further scripted and materialized the idea of the ‘creative city’. Landry who coined the term ‘creative city’ combines the language of innovation management and strategic consultancy with a vast belief in conceptual tools and the use of creative methods to transform cities into creative ones (*Imagineering). Understanding creativity as the lifeblood of cities, Landry sees his book, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators, as a call to action, because the twenty-first century is the century of cities forming the *stage of modern life for the majority of citizens. What can change the drama of urban change is his conceptual toolkit for urban innovation: “The Creative City argues above all that changes in mindset can generate will, commitment and energy which allow us to look afresh at urban possibilities. A range of approaches and methods to ‘think creatively’, to ‘plan creatively’, and to ‘act creatively’ are described [*Creativity Techniques]. In their entirety, they provide a new way of addressing urban

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planning” (Landry 2000: xv). Obviously, purpose and method are one and the same in Landry’s program: creative tools for creative urban development. On the other side of the Atlantic, Florida launched a similar message on the role of creativity for urban regeneration in The Rise of the Creative Class, but this time based on a vast statistical analysis (and anecdotal evidence), calculating cities’ creativity and other indices and comparing them in rankings. Indeed, as if it were a football match, marathon, or dance contest, cities started to compete to become ‘the most creative city’. More importantly, in the aftermath of the ‘creative class’ publication, Florida launched “The Creative Class Group,” a global advisory firm composed of expert researchers, academics, and business strategists. Thus the concept of the creative class comes with gigantic consultancy machineries including popular publications, keynote speeches at fancy conferences, expensive advice contracts, online creativity diagnoses, and city-branding campaigns. All of this materializes “a cultural governmentality of the city […], promoted by the state and endeavouring to establish the ‘creative city’ as a place for the permanent production of aesthetic novelty” (Reckwitz 2017: 180). Notwithstanding these global consultancy tours, something seems to have gone wrong. In a recent book on The New Urban Crisis (2017), “the intellectual rock star,” as Florida is called in its promotional materials, seems to confront winner-takes-all capitalism and the urban elites he has been promoting for almost two decades. In his new diagnosis, emphasized in the book’s subtitle, Cities are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class. In this “flawed book” (Danny 2017), Florida offers rushed claims and solutions in the form of seven pillars which are “unsubstantiated and unbelievable,” even if the overwhelming self-branding might give him further consultancy assignments. In the last twenty years or so, cities and creativity have thus been associated and ‘branded’ into a strong partnership. Nevertheless, is the term ‘creative city’ not a pleonasm? Should we not disconnect the terms and speak of ‘cities’ and ‘creativity’? What ways can we propose to re-describe the connection between the two? Can we zoom in on another kind of creativity that flows through urban spaces and makes the urban flow (*Queer)? How can we interrupt the masternarrative of the ‘creative city’ and disrupt its utopian aspirations? To answer these questions, we need to interrogate the narrative structure, ‘that now is the time for creativity to rescue our cities and boost their development’. This kind of historic myopia only serves to underline the urgency of this consultancy plot. Instead, we should undermine it and consider whether cities have not always been spaces where new things were possible because of their diversity and heterogeneity. We only have to refer to the late Peter Hall’s urban epos, Cities in Civilization, a historic review that documents how specific cities have formed creative crucibles and innovative sites at specific times. Ever since Athens or Rome, early examples of the city as creative platform, cities like Amster-

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dam have experienced their Gouden Eeuw (golden age) or like Paris their Belle Époque. However, history has its turns, and cities might lose their creative edge, something that cannot be regained by hasty and flawed measures. More importantly, Hall emphasized that creative urban milieu, as diverse arenas, come with social and intellectual turbulence, and are thus not comfortable places at all. Creativity requires tensions and engagements between fluid ‘classes’ rather than the rise of a new elite, creative class. Nearly twenty years ago, on the eve of Florida’s and Landry’s studies, Hall formed a strong inspiration for and gave academic respectability to the ideas of the creative city and its policies of hope and optimism. Eventually, Hall, who had written the preface to Landry and Biachini’s book The Creative City (1995), jumped on its bandwagon, and argued that “[t]he central question, now, is precisely how and why city life renews itself, exactly what is the nature of the creative spark that rekindles the urban fires” (Hall 1999: 23, emphasis in the original). Thus, a (modernist) historical perspective needs to be transformed through a meta-reflexive repositioning and a different social-theoretical understanding of cities and creativity. Recently, an interdisciplinary group of scholars has opted for contextualizing and historicizing the ways in which cities and creativity have become related, aiming to problematize the main ideological and epistemological grounds on which the city–creativity nexus is built (Van Damme/De Munck/Miles 2018). As they break with an overtly deterministic, ahistorical, and essentialist approach to this nexus, the concept of the ‘creative city’ no longer appears as something ‘stable’ but as more ‘fluid’ through “a complex, heterogenic process of becoming” (ibid: 2). Drawing on actor-network theory and a neo-materialist understanding of urban life, they call the agency of cities, with Bruno Latour and others, “a well-worked out black-boxed macro-structure” (ibid: 17), and document the processes through which cities historically became recognized as natural agents of creativity: “Thus, by defining and studying the city as a reified and discernible human ecology, […] the idea that cities have agency, that they do things, and that one of their important aspects is engendering innovation, creativity and change, gradually came to be accepted as common knowledge in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (ibid: 16-17). The creative city as the effect of a shifting and unstable urban assemblage thus requires a focus on the singular and particular everyday practices of urban life. We might zoom in on areas other than Sydney’s famous opera-harbor bridge site, and dive deeply into the vast range of its neighborhoods. Adopting Michel de Certeau’s idea of letting go of a panoptic view on the city – as he looked upon New York from the 110th floor of the then World Trade Center – we might let go of the elevated views practiced by city planners and consultants that have declared cities to be creative. Instead, we might join the “ordinary practitioners of the city [who] live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which

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visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an ‘urban text’ they write without being able to read it” (de Certeau 1984: 93, emphasis in the original). Walking endlessly through the streets, we might come to be in touch with the creative modes through which urban practitioners concoct and craft their lives. Urban creativity will then be lifted from its pedestal, but not disappear. It will re-appear in a vernacular version, infused with the affects and atmospheres that make up the movements of our everyday lives.

References Certeau, Michel de (1984): The Practice of Everyday Life, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Dorling, Danny (2017): “The New Urban Crisis by Richard Florida Review – ‘Flawed and Elistist Ideas’”, in: The Guardian, September 26, 2017. Florida, Richard (2002): The Rise of the Creative Class, Cambridge, MA: Basic Books. Florida, Richard (2017): The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class – and What We Can Do About It, Cambridge, MA: Basic Books. Hall, Peter (1999): Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order, London: Phoenix Giant. Landry, Charles (2000): The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators, London: Earthscan. Landry, Charles/Bianchini, Franco (1995): The Creative City, London: Demos. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Van Damme, Ilja/De Munck, Bert/Miles, Andrew (2018): Cities and Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present, London: Routledge.

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Creative Crowd Paola Trevisan

Ever since the cultural and creative sector started occupying a sizeable sphere of economic discussion, there has been an interest in the concept of the ‘creative class’. It is no surprise that Andreas Reckwitz refers to the term right at the beginning of The Invention of Creativity in the very first reference of the book (2017: 1). The term derives largely from Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) and related work by Charles Landry (*Creative Cities). In his bestseller, the American urban studies theorist attributes a city’s development potential to its ability to attract what he dubs the ‘creative class’. For Florida, the creative class is defined in relatively broad terms, encompassing not only *artists, poets, musicians, and actors, but also scientists and engineers, architects and designers, and many other kinds of professionals. It even includes a colorful group of knowledge-based workers he calls the ‘thought leadership’ of contemporary society, the analysts, researchers, columnists, and others employed in a wide range of fields, from technology to financial services. What unites the members of the creative class, in Florida’s analysis, is their reliance on an individual’s gift for invention and talent for *innovation in order to generate meaningful new forms. Two lessons that are supposed to be gained from reading Florida’s book are that it is advantageous for cities to gain this kind of profile, and that entry into the creative class is fundamentally open to all – and desired by all (*Capital). If creativity is actually perceived as a characteristic of human existence and “it is impossible not to be creative,” (Reckwitz 2017: 1, emphasis in the original), then every individual already belongs to the creative class (at least potentially). In reality, however, the creative class includes only those individuals who are ambitious, determined, and successful enough to be paid for their creativity (*Co-Creation). Accordingly, the creative class represents a group made up of talented and motivated individuals who are able to express their ingenuity freely and autonomously, who are extremely ambitious and believe in values like ​​ performance and individuality, who seek to escape from static ways of life and the monotonous rhythms of work in exchange for independence and flexibility,

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and to follow their intuitions with their whole hearts. When faced with this list of characteristics, certain biographies will immediately come to mind. In fact, the figure of the creative class marches every day further into our daily lives – namely, through all the stories of those who have “made it”: all the Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerbergs who represent something like a fulfilled promise that was addressed to each and every one of us. Of course, Florida’s frivolous use of a term as meaningful as ‘class’ was destined to provoke critical responses, and his one-sided evocation of values ​​like freedom and self-realization has been countered by considerations of power, oppression, and inequality. Critics of the concept of the creative class include scholars like Andy Pratt and Rosalind Gill (2008), who have emphasized the flip side of the coin in terms of a new capitalism expressed in the form of creative enterprise and extreme individualism (*Aesthetic Capitalism, *Critique, *Queer). In pursuit of the promise that everyone can become part of this ‘class’, a ‘critical mass’ of creatives moves in some direction, or, they are pushed into a precarious state accompanied by a denial of fundamental rights and the ability to protest (*Work). As in the past, “the defrauded masses today cling to the myth of success still more ardently than the successful” (Adorno/Horkheimer 2002: 106). So much so that the concept of the creative classes calls for an opposing concept: that of the ‘creative masses’. But what exactly is this creative crowd under the precepts of today’s cultural industry? Without immediately resorting to the names of important thinkers who used the terms ‘crowds’ and ‘masses’ for their various political and philosophical projects in the past, I would like to try to focus on the present and on real practices in the contemporary culture/ creative industry. My following example from Italy links up with a central claim made by Andreas Reckwitz – namely, his thesis that the imperative to be creative applies to “individuals and institutions equally” (2017: 1) – and specifies this claim with regard to the culture industry that Reckwitz treats primarily in terms of the “star system” (ibid: 154-172).

On the Search for the Creative Masses My train of thought here is based on a comprehensive study of contemporary Italian opera houses, the core of the creative industry, and more specifically on a series of observations I made at one of these theaters between 2014 and 2015 (Trevisan 2017). Unlike opera houses in Germany and Central Europe, the Italian tradition is tied to a system of strongly seasonal productions. This means that the title of each season is understood as an independent project, which different artistic personalities work on together for a manageable amount of time (i.e., limited to the duration of the project). The peculiarity of this kind of system, which treats every opera performance as an independent project, is that each respective ensemble is constantly reassembled, and is hired on an ad

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hoc basis for a single project, rather than making the members of the ensemble permanent employees of the opera house. In fact, there is not a single opera house in Italy dedicated to directors or soloists. Each opera house has its own relatively large casting office, which is responsible for maintaining relationships with various agencies, conducting auditions, and preparing the contracts for the artists working on each individual production. The only permanently employed artists of the opera house are the members of the orchestra and the choir. The expression ‘artistic masses’ (masse artistiche) was coined for these permanent employees – not only in operatic jargon, but also in official documents. The concept of the creative masses presented here starts with this empirical case study and extends beyond it. In opera houses, creativity is not a privilege reserved for musicians and soloists. For members of the artistic masses, the status of the artist is institutionalized through specific training and certified through academies and conservatories. Art, however, is a “collective action” (Becker 1974), and anyone who analyzes art cannot help but analyze the necessary division of labor that makes it possible. While, on the one hand, there are artists, on the other, there are a number of subjects who also support the artistic project and whose participation is essential for it to become a reality. At the same time, the boundary between forms of work that demand a certain artistic touch and those that can do without it (and consequently also between workers who are seen as artists and those who are not) is neither selfevident nor meaningful apart from particular social and temporal contexts, but rather depends strongly on the norms and conventions in each specific artistic field. My case study at La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy showed that a wide range of job profiles in the technical unit, especially in the scenery and costume workshops, claimed a share of the project’s creative dimension. Admittedly, the technical unit receives their guidelines from set and costume designers, and then implements them. But, as they put it, unlike related job profiles in the classical branches of industrial and artisanal product design, they are tasked with cultivating ‘the beautiful’. The stage sets need to do more than endure on stage, the costumes more than be cut to the singers’ figures, and the lighting more than merely function – they are also expected to be beautiful. Combining functionality with beauty, implementing the visionary ideas of stage or costume designers in concrete form and without sacrificing their artistic intuition – that alone is already a creative act. In the opera, the creative crowd includes the artistic ensemble (orchestra and choir) as well as the technical department, and the cultural production (i.e., the performance of the opera) arises only by virtue of this careful division of labor. Operas only succeed insofar as their masses are both technical and artistic, only insofar as they prove themselves to be capable of understanding and interpreting conductors and directors’ artistic visions and bringing them

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to the stage. What is demanded of the members of the creative crowd thus corresponds less to giving free rein to individual talents and creativity, and more to acting in concert and getting a project off the ground, which requires all the participants to contribute their own technical skills and artistic sensitivities to a collective endeavor (*Co-Creation). The orchestra, for instance, needs to play the scores that have already been written rather than creating new ones; what is important is that their interpretation be unique and that they all remain in tune with each other during the performance, without any individuals creating a distinct profile for themselves. Something similar happens in the technical department, where the motto is “Everyone is important, but no one is indispensable.” Under the conditions studied at the opera house, then, an individual may be highly qualified, but their work only makes sense through cooperation with others. At this point in my study, it is clear that the creative subject is to be found not in the individual (*Curating) but in the ensemble – in the collective, or as suggest calling it, in the creative crowd. To generalize, the creative mass can be an orchestra, an editorial department, a fashion house, a team of computer developers, and much more – any name in the singular that stands for a form of *organization where the creative crowd carries out its activity. The creative crowd would then be the site where novelty is generated through aesthetic practices: aesthetic events as something new, unique, and (for a moment) incomparable in their ability to move people, to enrich their experience, or to undergird their affective sphere (Reckwitz 2017: 12; *Affect Culture). In this sense, the creative crowd believes in collective values ​​of cooperation, modesty, respect for other human beings and their labor, the ability to compromise, equality, and justice. One’s own effort (i.e., the individual creative talent that each member of the creative crowd puts into a common project) reassures everyone that their contribution will not count for more or less than that of anyone else. It is motivated by their confidence in the quality of the project and the emotions it creates (e.g., a musician, out of love for the opera, strives to find a place in a suitable orchestra; or, the contributors to this book hope to make a modest contribution to the overall understanding of creativity). Self-realization is based less on something like ‘autonomy’ and ‘freedom’ than on the desire to make one’s life into a project consisting of new experiences, new meanings, and new forms (*Co-Creation).

Toward a Creative Crowd free from the Creativity Complex My case study of Italian opera houses serves as a reminder that we only have opera performances thanks to the interplay of orchestra musicians, choir singers, and various technicians, rather than individual composers, conductors, and sopranos. However, my study also showed that some musicians still per-

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ceived being part of the mass, rather than being allowed to rise to the class of soloists, as a stigma or character flaw. After years of practice and sacrifice, at the dreamed-of end of a career modeled on their role models, it is even worse for some performers to remain an excellent orchestral musician than to become a bad soloist. Another factor that follows from my case study is that the creative industries are structured like companies and, as such, are guided by principles like efficiency, entrepreneurial spirit, and turning a profit. Nevertheless, it also became clear that the application of purely marketing-oriented strategies created a conflict between art and economics in both the technical unit and the artistic crowd. In short, unlike Florida’s classic concept of the creative class, where the emphasis is on the individual as a creative subject, my notion of the creative crowd serves as a reminder that art, culture, and creative production always contain both a relational component (which can only be realized if autonomy and individual freedom of expression at least partly recede in favor of a common project) and an organizational or entrepreneurial one (which presupposes finding a compromise between creativity as a value per se and the economic and financial objectives of organization). These characteristics serve to create frustrations among the members of the creative crowd: the frustration of not being able to stand out from the crowd; the frustration of not being able to realize one’s own potential as a “soloist”; the frustration of not being able to decide how one’s own creativity is implemented, if one must constantly “sell” oneself according to entrepreneurial precepts. The creativity complex can be cured, if perhaps only in some small part, by freeing the creative world from the rhetoric of the creative class. This would not only mean finally recognizing the relational and organizational component in aesthetic economics and in art, creative, and cultural production. It would also mean awarding dignity to the members of the creative masses who are too often trapped between the myth of success and the illusion of completely unbridled creativity, by upholding the kind of basic principles mentioned in the previous paragraph.

References Becker, Howard S. (1974): “Art as Collective Action.” In: American Sociological Review 39/6, pp. 767-776. Florida, Richard (2002): The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books. Gill, Rosalind/Pratt, Andi (2008): “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work.” In: Theory, Culture & Society 25/7-8, pp. 1-30.

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Horkheimer, Max/Adorno, Theodor W. (2002): “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In: Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (ed.), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 94-136. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Trevisan, Paola (2017): Reshaping Opera: A Critical Reflection on Arts Management, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Creativity Techniques Claudia Mareis

The imperative ‘to be creative’ no longer pertains exclusively to individual actors in art, *design, or architecture, at least not since the 1950s, and has risen to the position of a foundation for late modern society on the whole. According to Andreas Reckwitz, this “creativity dispositif” cuts across almost every social class and every field of activity in contemporary society. It takes the form of a normative “regime of the new” (Reckwitz 2017: 9) whose constitutive characteristics are not only perpetual marketing and consumption, but also the demand for the permanent production of innovative objects, subjects, and affects (*Affect Culture, *Innovation, *Consumption). Creativity techniques play a central role in the establishment and stabilization of the dispositif described by Reckwitz, because they contain the promise of systematizing unbridled creative processes and making the potential for implicit knowledge productive. Against the background of post-Fordist knowledge economies, entrepreneurial self-optimization, and neoliberal deregulation, the influence of seemingly trivial creativity techniques should not be underestimated, since the economic value of cognitive capital, in knowledge or creativity, is increasingly gaining in significance (Reckwitz 2017: 88-89). The playful ease and the casual habitus accompanying creativity techniques conceals the fact that the competition to create the best ideas and designs is no longer a matter of mere enterprise and is now an entire social and corporate survival strategy (*Imagineering).

Systematization ‘Creativity techniques’ refers generally to methods and practices that are conducive to the focused, systematic creation of innovative ideas, solutions to problems, and designs or products. These include techniques for making combinations, creating associations, and asking questions; techniques for recording and visualizing information; and techniques for structuring problems, creating scenarios, and role playing. At present, the most well-known creativity techniques include brainstorming, Synectics (a moderated, group-based process for

Creativity Techniques

generating ideas), the morphological box (a combinatorial procedure for creating varieties of solutions to a problem), and mind maps (associative visualizations of cognitive landscapes). According to the logic of creativity techniques, innovative ideas and insights cannot be generated unintentionally or without a plan; they require a system and advance announcement. The main hypothesis behind optimizing the creative process is that optimal creativity or productivity will occur in a space of experimental thought or action, which can only be created by following specific rules and procedures. Of course, there is also the related factor of control: “the theory [of cognitivist creative psychology] was forced to distinguish between desirable and dubious types of creative new ideas, since unreservedly demanding ‘divergent thinking’ of any kind could turn out to be dangerous” (Reckwitz 2017: 145). Thus, conforming to nonconformity can be seen as an essential element of creativity techniques (*Naturalization). In addition, the constitutive characteristics of many creativity techniques include the iterative interplay of spontaneity and systematicity, of control and chance, of following the rules and breaking them. As Ulrich Bröckling puts it in one particularly apt formulation, “Creativity training standardizes breaking with standard solutions […] It normalizes deviation from the norm and teaches people not to rely on what they have learned […] Being creative means hard work, yet also demands the ease of a game” (2010: 94; *Play). Creativity techniques differ from methods of pure trial-and-error, as well as from ad hoc strategies based on situations or individuals, in terms of their claim to address the problem of creativity in two different senses of rationalization. Creativity techniques are supposed to make the process of generating ideas and solving problems “more rational” in the sense of both “more logical” and “more efficient.” Creativity techniques are based on the promise of creating appropriate ideas and solutions to problems with a higher probability than would be the case without them. In the initial phase of generating ideas, the sheer quantity of ideas is commonly preferred to their quality due to a statistical rationale: large quantities of ideas, especially those generated by multiple people in a group, increase the possibility of stumbling across one “brilliant” idea, which turns out to be particularly appropriate and productive for the need at hand. Creativity techniques frequently operate with a utilitarian understanding of creativity, which measures the value of creative ideas and products primarily through their social or economic utility (*Valorization). In this reading, which has gotten out of hand since the immediate postwar period and has become characteristic of what Reckwitz describes as the creativity dispositif, the distinguishing features of creativity are found less in nonconformity or in surprising, imaginative ideas, and more in the relevance and efficacy of creative *products. In contrast to taking a piecemeal approach to a problem, brooding over it for weeks or even months and thereby losing valuable working time, creativity

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techniques are supposed to help produce the greatest possible number of ideas in the shortest amount of time possible, as though “on the assembly line.” In this sense, the Taylorist logic of efficiency and standardization created for industrial production processes still resonates with the understanding of creativity in the service- and organization-based economy of post-Fordism (Mareis 2018; *Organization). The concept of ‘innovation’, which is closely connected to that of ‘creativity’ but is more burdened by the mythology of socioeconomic exploitation, emphasizes only the utilitarian regime of valuation, which the creativity dispositif measures in terms of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and creative work (*Innovation).

Epistemolog y Creativity techniques derive their legitimacy from the belief that a person’s creative potential can be increased through appropriate training. This conviction is based on the assumption that creativity is a skill or competence that, at least to some extent, can be learned and optimized through targeted training and repeated application of specific procedures, methods, and techniques. In this respect, creativity techniques clearly differ from the notion of an unpredictable, inexplicable creatio ex nihilo; against the myth of an exclusive creative genius, they put forward a relatively rational, democratic concept of creativity, though it also a utilitarian, entrepreneurial one. This view of creativity owes a large debt to the US psychology of creativity, which focused on the creative potential of mass society after World War II and elevated creativity to the status of a widespread economic resource (cf. Reckwitz 2017: 143; *Coaching). Usually, creativity techniques address a particular category of complex problems known as ‘wicked problems’, and thus operate in the epistemic gray area of risk and uncertainty. Their main application contexts can be sketched out very generally with the keywords design, project, invention, coming up with ideas, solving problems, and managing innovation. Frequently, it is difficult to draw clear boundaries between the techniques used to solve a problem, to make a decision, and to create a new idea or product. The inherent methodological openness of creativity techniques allows them to be applied to many different contexts. They are found not only in creative, artistic working environments, but also, and perhaps even predominantly, in technical, organizational, pedagogical, and psychological contexts. In the context of technical or organizational working environments, creativity techniques are recommended specifically for solving complex problems whose structures do not permit progress through routine or logical action alone. In this respect, they stand in close proximity to heuristics, which are also primarily applied to vague problems and situations of limited knowledge. Like heuristics, creativity techniques make it possible to feel one’s way forward, step-by-step, when confronted with novel, unknown

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situations or uncertain problems. In allowing one to repeat and retrace one’s steps, they also ensure a minimum of rationality, methodology, and systematicity. Although neither heuristics nor creativity techniques provide a guarantee of solving a problem, they seem to increase the prospects of doing so considerably, thanks to their adherence to ‘best practices’. By attempting to influence the design of future developments, creativity techniques also create a temporal relation between the present and the future. In other words, they lay claim to an anticipatory, projective dimension, which makes them particularly attractive for applications in design projects, in future and trend research, or in political planning (*Co-Creation). These preliminary observations already indicate that the praxis of creativity techniques has to do with different forms of knowledge and ability, of not knowing and of managing uncertainty. First of all, the handling of creativity techniques requires an abstract methodological knowledge of the planned course of action and the rules that need to be observed for these kinds of techniques. Likewise, the execution of any creativity technique further involves routines, individual experiences, implicit knowledge, and subjective expectations or assumptions, all of which decisively shape the process and its result. Creativity techniques should thus be understood as cultural techniques and techniques of the body, which have been inherited through tradition and eventually become habitual. As “actions of a mechanical, physical, or physico-chemical order,” creativity techniques require the interaction of media, instruments, and the body, “man’s first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means” (Mauss 1973: 75). Creativity techniques appeal to an implicit, naturalistic notion of creativity, and they propagate the kinds of cultural techniques “that should lead back to the same nature supposedly buried under the process of cultural formation” (Bröckling 2010: 91). In precisely this context, Ulrich Bröckling speaks of a “unity of description and prescription,” which corresponds to a paradoxical structure of temporality that consolidates the “always already” with the “still to come” (ibid). Lastly, creativity techniques demonstrate the social dimensions of knowledge and practice, and they perpetuate them. For instance, the participants in a brainstorming session are often aware of their different social roles or of belonging to different levels in a professional hierarchy. For this reason, it is not likely for each participant to have an equal say in the group, in spite of the formal rules of participation governing a brainstorming session, nor for everyone to participate in the commercialization of an idea in an equal manner. The concept of technique, which essentially defines the term ‘creativity technique’, refers not only to the ability of a procedure to be learned and systematized, but essentially to the interdependent, incommensurate interplay between medium and technology, knowledge and writing tool, imagination and visualization (Wittmann 2018; *Computer). The concept of technique also

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calls attention to the relative stability of technical procedures and systems of media technology. Thus, written records, such as notes or sketches, can take on different functions and meanings over the course of processes involving creativity techniques. During a concept meeting, they serve to stimulate ideas visually, to fix statements in material form, and to document the attribution of ideas to their individual creators. After the completion of the creative process, these written records can be transformed into particular storage media, which are able to archive ideas that were once noted down, and to convey their original context without having to reproduce it entirely in all of its complexity. As a result, creativity techniques should not be understood as “pure” cognitive techniques or mental methods for stimulating ideas, since they invariably play out at the nexus of bodies, media, and instruments.

Genealog y The genealogy of creativity, as with that of other human skills and practices, does not represent a straightforward, linear process. Rather, the concepts of creativity and originality are variable and downright contradictory depending on their historical or cultural context. Likewise, creativity techniques are situational constellations of subjects, knowledge, media, and practices, which are dependent on space and time. While some inventive processes, such as combinatorics or the mnemonic and retrieval techniques of the rhetorical tradition, can be described as part of the centuries-old tradition of ars inveniendi, many of the creativity techniques in use today only rose to prominence in the midtwentieth century. The entire business of techniques for unlocking creative potential was already flourishing by the 1940s at the latest (Reckwitz 2017: 138143), when US psychologists began to pursue research on creativity under the pressures of the Second World War (Guilford 1950), and eventually proclaimed creativity a “more efficient” form of intelligence. While the creative potential of one individual may not be higher than average, creativity in the aggregate represents an almost inexhaustible reservoir of capital for social and economic production. The heightened interest in creativity techniques like brainstorming, Synectics, or the morphological box starting around 1950 was directly related to the period’s military, psychological, pedagogical, and entrepreneurial aspirations. At the time, there were many attempts to systematize and normalize creativity as cognitive capital embodied in individuals. Like a weak muscle, one’s individual abilities seemed to be waiting only for the proper training and techniques for them to be activated for creative behavior (*Plasticity). Flanking the systematic promotion of creativity, the period around 1950 witnessed a synchronization of individual creative power and the collective forces of production, which Ulrich Bröckling describes with the following remark: “What society needed as

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a whole was simultaneously supposed to be where individuals would actualize themselves” (Bröckling 2010: 91; *Imagineering). This conception of postwar society redefined creativity, changing it from a rare commodity into a widespread economic resource. Creativity was ripped out of the realm of abnormal, pathological behavior and normalized for the purposes of a “managed world” (Adorno). During the Cold War, the USA, like many other countries, bet on the power of methodical, systematic ‘lateral thinking’ to win the race for military and technological supremacy. In this context, creativity was understood not merely as a useful resource, but as a much more essential social quality, which was even necessary for survival. Throughout the Cold War, creativity was the standard for measuring the products that resulted from it, whether these were “poems, patents, buildings, or bombs” (Cohen-Cole 2009: 241). In this context, creativity techniques were ultimately seen as therapeutic methods for re-activating one’s latent creative potential. In the postwar period, therapy “was not focused as previously on healing patients but, rather, on the qualitative improvement of the average” (Reckwitz 2017: 140), and thus made a fundamental contribution to the dissemination and normalization of the concept of creativity, as Reckwitz has aptly described and problematized with his concept of the creativity dispositif.

References Bröckling, Ulrich (2010): “Über Kreativität. Ein Brainstorming.” In: Christoph Menke/Juliane Rebenstich (eds.), Kreation und Depression. Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus, Berlin: Kadmos, pp. 89-97. Cohen-Cole, Jamie (2009): “The Creative American: Cold War Salons, Social Science, and the Cure for Modern Society.” In: Isis 100/2, pp. 219-262. Guilford, Joy P. (1950): “Creativity.” In: American Psychologist 5/9, pp. 444-454. Mareis, Claudia (2018): “Brainstorming. Über Ideenproduktion, Kriegswirtschaft und ‘Democratic Social Engineering’.” In: Jeannie Moser/Christina Vagt (eds.), Verhaltensdesign. Technologische und ästhetische Programme der 1960er und 1970er Jahre, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 193-210. Mauss, Marcel (1973): “Techniques of the Body” [1934]. In: Economy and Society 2/1, pp. 70-88. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Wittmann, Barbara (2018): Werkzeuge des Entwerfens. Ein Abecedarium des kreativen Handelns, Zürich: Diaphanes.

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In what sense can there be any critique in or of the creativity dispositif? To answer this question, we need to draw a distinction between Andreas Reckwitz’s own conception of sociology as a (potentially) critical science; and the meaning of ‘critique’ as an object of sociological analysis. While the former addresses the extent to which Reckwitz conceives of himself as a critical thinker, the latter aims to work out the role of critique in modernity. In the introduction to The Invention of Creativity, Reckwitz claims that the genealogy of the creativity dispositif “can be observed and dissected with cool equanimity. But, in the context of the culture of modernity, creativity and aesthetic[s] are too laden with normative judgements and feelings actually to allow value-free judgement,” which would be necessary for sociology to attain the ideal of objectivity (2017a: 7). “Consequently,” Reckwitz’s “book was written in a state of oscillation between fascination and distance” (ibid). This position, which Reckwitz only briefly outlines, is problematic for several reasons. Indeed, one might argue that the author’s temporal distance to historical events would enable him to construct a *genealogy of the creativity dispositif “with cool equanimity,” though the same distance would not be possible for an analysis of the contemporary situation. On the other hand, one might also point out that the historical development of the creativity dispositif extends far into the present, which would make it difficult, however, to understand how retrospective observers might succeed in overcoming their own affects. Alternately, Reckwitz’s “oscillation between fascination and distance” might be described as a mode of self-reflexive analysis rather than a form of critical intervention. In fact, even the more ‘critical’ passages in Reckwitz’s study are characterized by their restraint, their tendency to ask questions with readers rather than to make demands of them. In his subsequent book, The Society of Singularities, Reckwitz would state his position on the critical content of sociology more precisely (2018: 21-23), and develop it further in a debate with Hartmut Rosa (Reckwitz 2017b). In the book, Reckwitz calls for “critical analysis” in the tradition of Bourdieu and Foucault,

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which would work out “significant fields of tension, unintended consequences, and new mechanisms of exclusion” (2018: 23). Instead of creating normative precepts, this form of sociological analysis would leave the ethical consequences to “the judgement of readers as well as political negotiations” (2017b). Nevertheless, it might still be deemed critical, since it would make non-topical, assumed orders and dynamics in social practice transparent, and indicate their susceptibility to change. Without evaluating itself, the aim of critical analysis is to provide potential connections with ethics, politics, and reflections on one’s own way of life. Three objections might be addressed to Reckwitz’s proposed model of critical sociology. First, many of its exponents may not actually adhere to the ideal of the ‘cold gaze’, since even reserved intellectuals will express more heated opinions in certain media contexts. Second, and more importantly, this type of critique may not even be possible, in principle, since implicit norms, which remain hidden behind careful formulations instead of being reflected on explicitly, may actually form the basis of the ambiguities to be worked out in analyses. Lastly, a purely diagnostic public appearance may make things too easy, insofar as it first creates – or at least strengthens – a public need for orientation but then withdraws from discourse. With these objections in mind, it is completely understandable for the public to expect intellectuals, who have become experts in their material and thus proven their intellectual abilities, to provide recommendations for solving problems. Systematically, there is nothing wrong with this situation, provided that public intellectuals do not present their recommendations in an apodictic gesture, and that a clear line is drawn between (historical) analysis and (critical) proposals. An intellectual’s references to the reservoir of historical alternatives or to overlooked contemporary practices, rather than more straightforward appeals to a rigid distinction between descriptive and normative authorities, may be entirely compatible with critical analysis, though they would make the intellectual in question both more controversial and more vulnerable. The type of critique that tends to raise objections and voice dissent is the very subject of Reckwitz’s sociological analysis. In the creativity dispositif, the function of critique is to drive the transformation processes of modernity. The concept of ‘transformation’ at work in the creativity dispositif should be understood in a double sense – on the micro- and on the macro-level. On the one hand, creativity describes the permanent individual and institutional pursuit of “creative self-transformation” on a relatively small scale (2017a: 1). Creativity, in this sense, refers to the permanent transformation of subjects and structures, and thus gives preference to the new over the rapidly obsolete (*Capital, *Naturalization). As Reckwitz emphasizes, in this orientation to the new, “the dominant model for creativity is less the inventor’s technical innovations than the aesthetic creation of the artist” (ibid: 7; *Innovation). On the other hand, the concept

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of transformation at work in the creativity dispositif also suggests a transformation of society on the whole – that is, a “great transformation” (Polanyi 1944; *Imagineering). This genealogical perspective on modern history postulates a fundamental sociocultural shift in the dominant episteme of modernity, from objectification to aesthetics, from instrumental rationality to creativity (*Aestheticization). In a paradoxical coincidence, modern society transforms into permanent transformation. Applying this formation to his own study, Reckwitz raises the question, in the conclusion to The Invention of Creativity, of whether late modernity’s fixation on creativity is “not creative enough” to circumvent the “idling cycle of the regime of novelty” in an “ecological” manner (2017a: 235; *Dispositif, *Genealogy). Hence, Reckwitz’s understanding of transformation on the macro-level raises the question of the relationship between transformation and critique in two different respects. On the one hand, Reckwitz makes clear that modernity owes its reorientation toward creativity to the success of countercultural impulses, which moved from the periphery of society to its center and “have now achieved hegemony” (2017a: 4). On the other hand, Reckwitz expresses an anxiety in the closing pages of the book about the transformation of an emancipatory utopia of creative expression into an obsessive-compulsive relation to innovation. This transformation further indicates the difficulty of finding any fixed points of stabilization within a highly dynamic culture, which would neither bring with them an exit from the creativity dispositif nor fail as merely ephemeral aesthetic attractions to develop their power to create corrective bonds. How, then, should the relationship between ‘critique’ and ‘transformation’ be conceived of in the creativity dispositif? One pioneering economic study of this relationship, which was also important for Reckwitz’s sociological approach (2017a: 227-229), can be found in Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s work on The New Spirit of Capitalism. The authors proceed from the assumption that “anti-capitalism is in fact as old as capitalism” (2007: 36), and that the latter makes demands on the former even against its intentions. Boltanski and Chiapello draw a distinction between two forms of critiques of capitalism: “the artistic critique, which elaborates demands for liberation and authenticity, and the social critique, which denounces poverty and exploitation” (2007: 346, emphasis in the original). In the exemplary case of critiques of consumerism, artistic critique would denounce the standardization of commodities, whereas social critique would be geared primarily toward the conditions of production for consumer products (*Consumption, *Artist, *Product). (In this respect, the latter form might more appropriately be called ‘socioecological critique’, since it also takes into account arguments against wasting resources and producing waste.) In the end, Reckwitz emphasizes that “social critique, in this broad meaning of the term, can hinder the overstretching of aestheticization” (2017a: 228), but “the social critique of over-aestheti-

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cization does not negate aestheticization” itself (ibid: 229). For Reckwitz, “the taming of the creativity dispositif would depend on forms of critique going beyond traditional political and social critique to advance new aesthetic criteria” (ibid: 234). In building on Boltanski and Chiapello’s argument, Reckwitz inherits their assumption of a genealogical narrative, which describes processes of aestheticization as a success story and brings in social critique as a variant of critique after the fact. However, the relationship between ‘critique’ and ‘transformation’ can be considered in an entirely different manner, at least in the field of the economy – namely, a form of consumption that has become creative does not represent a general tendency, but rather a special case of a more largescale dynamic of transformation in the modern economy. In spite of the different history of each strand of critique, we can observe that both artistic critique and social critique indeed had a serious effect on the economy, in general, and consumer culture, in particular. For instance, the process of standardization accompanying industrial mass production eventually gave way to individualized product offers, while products subject to organic and fair-trade principles eventually responded to critiques of the exploitative conditions of production related to human beings and the natural environment. Boltanski and Chiapello speak of a “commodification of difference” (2007: 441) and discuss the attendant problems of consumer trust. What is essential is that this difference can be related to both forms of critique, and one must speak of a double transformation in modern consumer culture, consisting in the integration of creativity, on the one hand, and the ‘moralization of the markets’ (Stehr/ Henning/Weiler 2010), on the other. Socioecological critique and not only “the tradition of artistic critique,” as Reckwitz suggests, “thus seems to have been rendered superfluous by becoming an omnipresent reality in the economy” (2017a: 5). In this broader framework, creative *consumption turns out to be part of a more large-scale transformation of consumer culture through a form of critique that incorporates ethical elements, even though these ethical elements probably occupy a quantitatively smaller part of the critique of consumer culture than that related to creativity. In contrast to the hegemony of creativity, the transformation of political protests into products and consumer practices cannot be captured under the catchword of the ‘aesthetic economy’. For, as much as phenomena like ‘greenwashing’ and ‘conscious consumption’ may be described in sociological terms of distinctions, signs, and experience, this kind of reduction still indicates a methodological neglect of materiality, which ultimately leaves a door open for the aestheticization thesis (*Color). Seeing in ethical consumption a sensitivity toward sensory singularities misses the special character of alternative consumption, which is not in the first instance a matter of internal practices, but rather of material interventions in the external world, of choices concerning

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flows of goods and energy, socioeconomic collateral effects, externalities, and increasingly, codes. The incorporation of socioecological critique into consumption also differs from the economy’s appropriation of artistic critique in terms of periodization. The former is not primarily a late modern phenomenon, but rather can be shown to have proceeded in various phases with various intensities and in various ways since the beginnings of modern consumer culture. Ultimately, this also makes clear that the economy’s “adoption” (or, depending on one’s point of view, “appropriation”) of critique is not final, but rather occurs in the form of a permanent dynamics of transformation. The revolving chain of objections, whether in the form of critiques of growth or of digital consumption, will never come to an end, and will permanently create new forms out of previous blind spots. In the end, there are good reasons to doubt that aesthetic capitalism will spell the end of the ongoing transformations characteristic of modernity.

References Boltanski, Luc/Chiapello, Ève (2007): The New Spirit of Capitalism [1999], translated by Gregory Elliott, New York: Verso. Polanyi, Karl (1944): The Great Transformation, New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017a): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017b): “Auf dem Weg zu einer Soziologie des gelungenen Lebens?” Soziologische Revue 40/2, pp. 185-195. Available at: https:// soziopolis.de/beobachten/kultur/artikel/reckwitz-buchforum-10-die-ge​ sellschaft-der-singularitaeten/ [accessed August 15, 2018]. Reckwitz, Andreas (2018): Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Stehr, Nico/Henning, Christoph/Weiler, Bernd (eds.) (2010): The Moralization of the Markets [2007], New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Curating Timon Beyes

Even more than the *artist, the curator appears to be the ideal type of social figure in the creativity complex. There is at least a hint of this thesis in Andreas Reckwitz’s comments on the “postmodern artistic subject” in The Invention of Creativity (2017: 73-78). Ever since the 1970s, Reckwitz observes with reference to the influential exhibition organizer and impresario Harald Szeemann, the boundaries have blurred between artist and curator. The “artist-curator” signals the emergence of “an artist-subject of the second order” (ibid: 74): a hybrid subject composed of the arranger of aesthetic theories and processes; the director of cultural events and atmospheric interventions; and the coordinator, mediator, and networker of different actors – artists, patrons, critics, representatives of the media, and the audience. The fall of the artist-subject, understood in terms of the aesthetics of genius and auratic practice, seems to coincide not only with the rise of the curator as an “atmosphere manager” (ibid: 74; *Atmosphere). According to Reckwitz, curatorial practices merge with artistic practices into a new amalgam of artistic-creative work that has more to do with the creative economy than with the former conditions of artistic practice: “The bearer of an artistic ‘skills profile’ replaces the exclusive figure of the original artist. This skills profile, combining symbolic, affective, intellectual and media competencies, resembles structurally the competency profile of professionals in other ‘cultural industries’ […] Art is therefore a micro-reflection of the characteristics of the more general, professional, creative subject performing aesthetic labour” (73; *Artist, *Performativity). To put more of a point on Reckwitz’s finding, the figure of the curator represents the paradigmatic creative subject.

“The Fabled Persona of Contemporar y Art” This observation coincides with the recent diagnosis of a “curatorial turn” in the globalized field of the arts (O’Neill 2012). We live, one reads, in the age of the curator, this “fabled persona of contemporary art” (Lee 2011: 194). In the age of the curator, there is a veritable star cult around “independent” curators,

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i.e., those not or only partially tied to any art institution. The prototype of this persona can be found in two Swiss curators: historically, Szeemann, and, currently, Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Even today, however, curators still do not receive the same degree of recognition as the best-known contemporary artists working around the globe (Munder/Wuggenig 2012). More interesting than the status of individual figures is the hybrid practice of curating, which has witnessed an astonishing ascent in the contemporary arts and culture scene. What started out as a practice of organizing exhibitions behind the scenes of the art world, and gradually evolved into a form of storytelling based on guiding the viewer through an arrangement of objects in a specific narrative order, eventually became a bundle of skills and processes including empowering, making public, teaching, analyzing, criticizing, theorizing, editing, and staging. Having left behind rigid definitions of professional conduct, the practice of curating now combines the roles of artist, classical curator, museum educator, public relations, interdisciplinary researcher, critic, and theorist. In keeping with Reckwitz’s larger sociological thesis of the functional de-differentiation of society through aesthetic practices – i.e., the blurring of clear boundaries between different social fields through their *aestheticization – curating works with forms of action and knowledge from various social areas (Reckwitz 2017: 81). Accordingly, ‘curatorial studies’ are taught as a hybrid form of artistic and scientific methodologies, techniques, and formats. The epistemic knowledge field of curation provides a meta-perspective on the field of curatorial knowledge, thus generating another level of curating knowledge about curation. As is the case with the establishment of any new research area or training course, especially in the art world, the rhetoric of curatorial studies tends to be overblown: “The curatorial,” according to Irit Rogoff, “seems to be able to think everything into the event of knowledge in relation to one another” (Rogoff/von Bismarck 2012: 23). The investigation of “everything” that goes into an “event of knowledge” in terms of its “relation[s] to one another,” now known as proper object of “the curatorial,” used to be called ‘dialectics’.

The Curatorial Turn The rise of curating in the artistic field, starting in an almost ideal fit with Reckwitz’s genealogy of the creativity dispositif (*Dispositif, *Genealogy) in the late 1960s and taking off in the late 1980s (O’Neill 2012), can be read as both a symptom of crises and a response to these crises. In this respect, Helmut Draxler (2012) distinguishes between three main crisis moments: The first describes the difficulties faced by the institutions of the classical bourgeois art establishment in reacting to the blurring of boundaries in contemporary art starting at the end of the 1960s, which is what created a space for independent curators in the first place. The second refers to the potentially conflict-laden relationship

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between artists and curators, insofar as the latter went from being exhibition organizers to autonomous, influential actors who could act as authors, producers of meaning, or even artists. This moment of crisis indicates that the aforementioned diagnoses of a fusion of artistic and curatorial work may be a little premature; they remain in critical tension. The third crisis was one of artistic production itself, which was unable to maintain the degree of originality and innovation in modernist art, and turned to a “secondary mode” of reflection, appropriation, recycling, and arranging historical forms. To adopt Reckwitz’s terminology again, artistic production developed into a kind of “atmosphere management.” Indeed, the boundaries between artistic and curatorial practice have blurred, and it is therefore not surprising that artists increasingly act in curatorial forms and that curating is becoming an artistic form of expression. As an ‘art of incorporation’, a term coined by curator Dieter Roelstrate (2012), the curatorial can be understood as a response to moments of crisis in the field of art, as a means of testing out new ways of collecting objects, actors, and discourses, which were sometimes critical of institutions, in part collective, and potentially emancipatory. The incorporation of various roles, concepts, and techniques into the practice of curating is thus the organizational counterpart to art’s blurred boundaries (*Organization) – and, as Draxler writes, many of the most interesting art projects today have a curatorial character.

The Curatorial’s Twofold Blurring of Boundaries What makes curatorial practice the ideal type of action in the creativity complex is, however, its blurring of boundaries along two different trajectories: within the field of art, and into other social realms. Having long since crossed the porous boundaries between art and non-art, the notion of curating has settled in to a broad field of cultural and social production. There is thus not only a ‘culture of curating’, but a ‘curating of the cultural’ (O’Neill 2012). The field of art, in this interpretation, remains one of experimentation, providing impulses for aesthetic practices that encroach on economics, urban development, digital culture, and the shaping of one’s own self. However, the aesthetic mobilization of creative industries and design economies, the pursuit of the label of the creative city (*Creative Cities), and the work on the creative self – these all necessarily correspond to the curatorial’s second trajectory in the blurring of boundaries. Restaurants have food experts curate their menus; department stores curate their merchandise; conferences are no longer organized, but curated; and social media platforms invite everyone to curate their own profiles. With its opaque masses of big data, the digital Curation Nation, to borrow the title of one bestseller (Rosenbaum 2011), makes consumers simultaneously into constant creators, and curatorial competence into a sine qua non for (online) business. It is easy to foresee that leadership seminars will soon offer the art of curating as

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the most appropriate form of management for the present, a requisite bundle of competencies for the contemporary ‘organization (wo)man’. The proverbial organization man, after all, denoted the (predominantly male) employees of large Western corporations who were considered to be loyal, conformist, and by no means creative or obliged to the project of creativity. These days, on the other hand, the organizational (wo)man curates his or her skills profile and combines various practices and forms of knowledge to become the creativity complex’s subject of work (*Work). In sociological and organizational research, there is ample documentation of the correspondence between these developments and the increasing tendency toward temporary, project-based employment in largescale organizations whose main demand of their employees is no longer adhering to routines but demonstrating creativity. Precisely because of this twofold blurring of boundaries, however, it makes sense to retain the distinction between the social figures of the artist and the curator, at least for the time being. In spite of curators who act like artists and artists who become curators, the hybrid figure of the ‘atmosphere manager’ should be read as a symptom rather than the empirical realization of the *deaestheticization of art. The thesis of the ‘end of art’ through its dissolution into non-art seems constitutive to the artistic field rather than its end. The blurring of artistic practice into the everyday may have contributed to the artistic field’s loss of “its exceptional status as a space of exclusive practices and identifications, while its disenchanted incarnation rises to become the paradigm of late modernity’s focus on creativity” (Reckwitz 2017: 56). However, the artistic subject still exhibits elements of aura, the non-everyday, and of genius – though possibly with different valences and hardly as a pathological figure anymore (*Artist). Even if the autonomy of art is always contested and can only be understood in its respective social context, it remains a major force in artistic practice. The curator, on the other hand, appears as a genuine figure of the functional de-differentiation of society through aesthetic practices that succeed in and beyond the field of art. To be sure, the rise of this figure was initially tied to developments in the field of art: the propagation and profanation of artistic practices and positions for which no material, even the most mundane, any longer seems foreign; as well as the associated factors of “the dissolution of the borders” for “aesthetic objects” (ibid: 59-60) and “the readdressing of the audience as an equal partner” (ibid: 62) and “co-creator” (ibid: 78; *Co-Creation). In the meantime, however, the curatorial is no longer bound to the artistic field; its mundane omnipresence extends far beyond the call for artistic creativity. In this respect, the figure of the curator exhibits ideal features of the contemporary creativity complex. That “everyone is an artist” may be easy to say, but it can hardly be generalized into a thesis for the creativity complex; that everyone

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develop curatorial skills, or at least curate their own profile, seems closer to a basic requirement. Besides, the “affective field of combat” represented by bourgeois art (Reckwitz 2017: 55) continues to offer various kinds of friction and potentials for resistance, on account of the artistic subject’s connotations of genius and deviation, which are less available in the broader fields of the creative industry and ubiquitous curating. As shown by the public debate or perhaps even culture war over the directorship of the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, artists are still able to differentiate themselves from the model of the curator as atmosphere manager, and even to fight it publicly, and with a broad support of the audience. In the public’s perception, the newly appointed (and later dismissed) director of the Volksbühne, Chris Dercon, the curator and former director of the Tate Modern, embodied the model of the atmosphere manager in contrast to the (astonishingly diverse) understandings of theatrical practice and the role of an urban theater house that were mobilized against him (*Stage). Even if there is no cure in the creativity complex for the social figure of the curator or for the spread of curatorial practices, attempts to find one can be expected from the field of art itself.

References Draxler, Helmut (2012): “Crisis as Form: Curating and the Logic of Mediation.” In: Beatrice von Bismarck/Jörn Schafaff/Thomas Weski (eds.), Cultures of the Curatorial, Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 53-60. Lee, Pamela M. (2011): “The Invisible Hand of Curation.” In: Armen Avanessian/Luke Skrebowski (eds.), Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 193-205. Munder, Heike/Wuggenig, Ulf (eds.) (2012): Das Kunstfeld. Eine Studie über Akteure und Institutionen der zeitgenössischen Kunst, Zürich: JRP Ringier. O’Neill, Paul (2012): The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Roelstrate, Dieter (2012): “Art Work.” In: Texte zur Kunst 86, pp. 151-163. Rogoff, Irit/von Bismarck, Beatrice (2012): “Crating/Curatorial.” In: Beatrice von Bismarck/Jörn Schafaff/Thomas Weski (eds.), Cultures of the Curatorial, Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 21-38. Rosenbaum, Steven (2011): Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers Are Creators, New York: McGraw Hill.

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Deaestheticization7 Vincent Kaufmann

The contribution of various avant-garde movements, especially that of those groups who carried out their theoretical and practical projects in the 1960s, should not be underestimated in the development of what Andreas Reckwitz has described as the “society of creativity.” Even if the contribution of the avantgarde might be classified as paradoxical, it points towards a central paradox within the invention of creativity itself. As Reckwitz notes, “the once elitist and oppositional programme of creativity has finally become desirable for all and at the same time obligatory for all” (2017: 4). This development goes fundamentally hand in hand with what Adorno, in a 1953 essay on jazz, termed deaestheticization. That being said, here we are not concerned with a conception of deaestheticization in line with Adorno whose origins can be traced to the industrialization of culture and, as such, can be interpreted as the opposite of creativity, but rather with a “democratic” deaestheticization whose horizons remained the communist ideal of many avant-garde movements during the larger part of the twentieth century. Put another way, this conception of deaestheticization can be understood as an ideal to be strived for in confronting cultural artifacts democratically. In line with the highly regarded French avant-garde poet Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), known as “Comte de Lautréamont,” poetry should be created for all, and, one could even substitute here, by all. What exactly is meant by such a claim? Through a retrospective assessment of historical avant-garde traditions (from Dadaism through Surrealism, up to Situationism and beyond) one can ultimately adopt two main perspectives. On 7 | Translator’s Note: For the translation of Entkunstung, I follow Robert Hullot-Kentor’s translation of Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. In a footnote, Hullot-Kentor explains “Entkunstung – Literally, the destruction of art’s quality as art” (Adorno 1997: 368, note 3). Editors’ Note: This notion of deaestheticization is thus distinct from the social-theoretical axiom of a generalized ‘de-aestheticization’ (Entästhetisierung) of society (*Introduction, *Aesthetic Capitalism, *Capital,*Organization, *Postscript).

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the one hand, it is clear that in such authoritative fields as art or literature the various strands of the avant-garde have become established as classic and are now more or less devoutly celebrated. One could be content with such an achievement, one might even welcome the notion that, just like all other artists and authors, many avant-garde movements have meanwhile found their own places within art and literary history. Or, as Peter Bürger (1974) held, this type of success, which also entails the inevitable normalization of the avant-garde, is proof that the avant-garde has fundamentally failed with respect to its revolutionary demands and principles. On the other hand, one could also attempt to measure the “legacy” of the avant-garde not simply through their recognition in *museums and libraries, nor to interpret this as evidence of its failures. One might then examine the avant-garde’s unique ability to shift the boundaries between “Art” and “Non-Art,” or to express this through the terminology of Chantal Mouffe (2007), its ability to conjoin exogenous fields. Which of these two perspectives should we ultimately prefer? If one truly thinks through the problematic at hand, it becomes clear that such a binary question should not even be posed. The relics of the avant-garde preserved in museums fascinate us above all as traces of a mythological, lived “poetry” that could only come to fruition by breaking away from traditional conceptions of art or literature; at least, that is the thesis being put forward here. On the one hand, avant-garde movements are themselves unthinkable without the vector of deaestheticization or exogeneity, while on the other hand, they are also thoroughly conceivable without the necessity of the existence of concrete cultural artifacts, as the examples of Dadaism and Situationism demonstrate. This essay is ultimately concerned with avant-garde movements, which either did not create any “works” over long periods of time or defined their output in terms of an explicit stance against the creation of concrete cultural artifacts; many of these groups have achieved a mythical aura through this act of renunciation. In this vein, it is central to the understanding of the avant-garde that one proceed from the assumption of exogeneity, from an axiomatic of deaestheticization, which would presumably lead to a better understanding of both the dynamic of creativity and its conditions of possibility. This systematic approach to the avant-garde can be broken down into the following six axioms: 1. Anything can be conceived of as art. This is the foundational axiom of “democratic” deaestheticization in the history of the avant-garde, as can be traced from Duchamp’s urinal to the “Fluxus” collective. The effects of this axiom can be observed in the current cultural politics of many nations, especially in France, where since 1981 Cultural Minister Jack Lang’s project of democratizing cultural politics has legitimized all possible forms of “low-art” (e.g., comics, rap-music, breakdance) as “high-art”; just like how millions

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of artists and authors upload the products of their creativity on the vast number of available digital platforms such as YouTube or Wattpad (*Pop). For many in the avant-garde this claim still carried traces of provoking bourgeois art institutions. For example: Guy Debord (1931-1994), the onetime leader of the Situationist International, explains in his 1978 film In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Ignir: “I am just proud to be able to make a film with anything” (Debord 2006: 1349, emphasis in the original). Such a statement can be understood as a provocation that gets lost with the transition into a hegemony of creativity as such. Furthermore, this “anything” corresponds to a someone, anyone. As the vox populi says, “Anyone can paint a Picasso.” And for some time now this is no longer just heard in connection with Picasso but appears as a claim about the not-yet-fully institutionalized form of “anything.” “You call that art? No, that would be going too far, and anybody can do that anyways.” This is, however, precisely the presumption that makes possible the current significance of creativity. Anybody can do it, thus no one should hold back (*Artist, *Curating, *Creative Crowd). 2. Intellectual property, copyrights, etc. must be done away with. Just as communism principally requires the abolition of private property, many avant-garde movements articulate the need for the disappearance of bourgeois authorship and all the privileges bound up with it (e.g., intellectual property, royalties, copyrights). The goal is to exercise resistance against the bourgeois culture of exclusion and exclusivity characterized by its confiscation of cultural goods. To be sure, many of the figures of the avant-garde scene were not in any rush to fully relinquish this conception of authorship. Nevertheless, this also points toward a central axiom of avant-garde conceptions of deaestheticization reflected in the numerous proto-Maoist groups that formed out of “workers” and “intellectuals” (or writers) in and around May 1968 in France. In this regard, Guy Debord’s Situationalist International was also decisive, in that they explicitly did away with any and all forms of copyright; this naturally led to the large number of “illegal” editions and translations of Situationist writings. Taking up Isidore Ducasse once more, the Situationist International in general held onto an aesthetic of theft that was conceived of as an aesthetic of productive plagiarism. The Situationists took on the role of the Robin Hoods of bourgeois culture, a stance that was widely appropriated in the 1960s, even if in less radical forms at that time: Both Roland Barthes’ famous essay “The Death of the Author” and Foucault’s well known “What is an Author?” fall into the category of criticism of the bourgeois conception of authorship and the rights attributed to it as such. 3. The third axiom is a direct consequence of the second, and as such can be understood as the collectivization of authorship. The history of the avantgarde can be read not only as the history of specific, more or less structured

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groups (having begun through what Reckwitz termed the Bohème (Reckwitz 2017: 46), but also as the history of attempts to collectivize avant-garde artistic and literary practices or the history of attempts to overcome individual (bourgeois) practices. Dadaism’s performances, Surrealism’s collective games, Situationism’s theory of the dérive, and the centrality of (ritual) theater in the 1960s all stand as but a few of the vast numbers of instances of a joint, community-based creative practice and demand (*Stage, *Queer). From the collectivization of art and creative practices the avant-garde hopes for the re-founding of society which can also be observed in the motif of the Gesamtkunstwerk. At the latest since Wagner, and even up through the Situationists who presented May ’68 as a collective total work of art, the motif of the total work of art was a red thread throughout the history of the avant-garde, building a horizon whose realization must be necessarily collective: A total work of art is created for all and by all for the re-founding of a new society (Kaufmann 1997). The Situationist would say, “This can only be achieved when everyone participates together, through one unified creative approach.” As such, in the 1960s, collective creativity was built into the “cultural” revolution as a condition for its very possibility; and fifty years later it is still available, even if now lacking its revolutionary character (*CoCreation, *Organization). 4. From this, we arrive at the at the next axiom in an almost natural, even logical manner: the participation of the reader or viewer. From Brecht through Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty” to the ritual theater of the 1960s, from Russian Formalism to the Nouveau Roman, from Eisenstein to Godard, the avantgarde calls for the activation or participation of the reader or viewer. They should refuse the role of the consumer which has been attributed to them by bourgeois, industrial culture and become co-producers of works of art (*Consumption). If one coherently follows this demand, then there are in fact no more traditional works of art and the notion of autonomous works of art should dissolve in favor of a state of permanent creativity. This is exactly the point of the Situationist refusal of works of art that are always fundamentally classified as spectacular as soon as people are present in order to read or view something they did not play an active role in creating. If we understand this process in the 1960s as one in favor of revolutionary daily practices, then the same dynamic of re-valorized participation can be understood as leading to today’s celebration of creativity. 5. The fifth axiom relates specifically to texts and print culture, and can be understood as a breaking open of the boundaries of what constitutes a book as the representative medium of a work. The avant-garde is marked by an “unbounding” of works, described by Umberto Eco as the “open work.” Literature is written through and from one book to the next, is never completed, was always in a state of beginning, consists of a comprehensive inter- and

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hyper-textuality that everyone continues to take part in writing. This stance is above all pit against the production of cultural artifacts or “products” defined by the entertainment industry (*Product). 6. A sixth axiom can also be observed and can be read as the cause or consequence of the previous five: the (auto)biographical character of the avant-garde that ultimately corresponds to a dynamic of incarnation. Art and literature must collide with, or transition into, life, they must be experienced; they are no longer simply a question of the requisite technical and professional abilities, but rather one of experience and of experiential capacity. Here the Bohème signals a decisive turning point. In the autobiographical character of the avant-garde, we find probably one of the oldest and most widespread capacities of art’s tendency toward exogeneity. To express this once more in Mouffe’s terms: with the transition of art into life a deaestheticization takes place, a breaking open of the boundaries of art, which of course does not always lead to a subversion or revolutionary practice but still might open the door to a more general and collective creativity. That summarizes the axioms of the avant-garde. The fact that the deastheticization resulting from the avant-garde also determines the conditions of possibility for creativity in our contemporary society is confirmed by the fact that the axioms observed above continue to correspond one-to-one with the rapidly developing digital culture whose contemporaneity and affinity for creativity is more than apparent (*Computer, *Performativity). It was ultimately a question of time: With a delay of just a few decades, the necessary technological conditions have finally arrived for a deaestheticization in line with these avant-garde conceptions. Now, all of these dreams may be possible, are possible, and what is possible can be realized: We call it creativity. From the perspective of the historical avant-garde, the radical democratization of our relationship to art and literature remained only a horizon and could be classified as a vector toward, and dependence upon, a still not yet realized “communist” ideal. Thus it can also be understood as a vector toward the central myth of the avant-garde to which it owes its mythical aura, as should be the case with myths: the aura of the utopian engagement for Kunstkommunismus, i.e., “man-made communism” or “communism in art.” Yet, thanks to Web 2.0 we have arrived at precisely this horizon. We live within it and it is no longer simply a horizon; and correspondingly the central tension between art and utopia at the core of a conception of the avant-garde has dissolved into creativity.

Deaestheticization

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1997): Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Bürger, Peter (1974): Theorie der Avantgarde, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Debord, Guy (2006): Œuvres, Paris: Gallimard. Kaufmann, Vincent (1997): Poétique des groupes littéraires. Avant-gardes 1920-1970, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Mouffe, Chantal (2007): “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” In: Art & Research Journal 1/2. Available at: http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/ mouffe.html [accessed August 15, 2018]. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

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Design Claudia Mareis

In the field of design, which would seem to embody the ‘creativity dispositif’ (Reckwitz 2017) more than any other, there is a conspicuous absence of any critical concept of creativity. Even though numerous studies (e.g., Julier 2017) confirm the general intersection of aesthetics and economy examined by Andreas Reckwitz for the specific case of design, critical reflection on the phenomenon of creativity in the field of design remains the exception rather than the rule. In design education and practice, concepts of creativity still oscillate frequently between affirmative views of its naturalness and wholesale dismissals of its incoherence or lack of relevance. In the end, the effect of these polarizing tendencies is that hardly anyone talks about the topic of creativity in design, let even alone studies its significance for the discipline from a critical or historical perspective. In the affirmative conception, ‘creativity’ serves as shorthand for a “natural” talent or an immanent component of the design process, which seems to render any further historical consideration unnecessary. The dismissive view, which is equally common, consists in discrediting creativity as a trivial category, which is simply not worth talking about in the context of design. More specifically, the dismissive view has often been directed, at least in the German-speaking world, against the concept’s status as yet another postwar American cultural import, which was reproached for trivializing and commercializing the meaning of creativity. Remarkably, there was a nearly identical critique in the German-speaking world for the concept of design, which was also imported from the USA during the postwar period. The concept of design was also imputed with trivialization, aesthetic arbitrariness, and commercial utilitarianism, which led to a preference for the German term Gestaltung over the English design. It should be noted at this point that the concept of creativity triggered many negative reflexes in the field of design, which can be read as symptoms of a more general anxiety about changes in individual creative practice related to alienation, disenchantment, or collectivization (*Artist).

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A characteristic statement of the ambivalence and discontent bound up with the topic of creativity in the field of design can be found in the entry for ‘creativity’ in Michael Erlhoff and Tim Marshall’s Design Dictionary: “‘Creativity’ has been an ambiguous term for designers and design academics and, since the 1980s, has been increasingly viewed as problematic” (2008: 92). According to Erlhoff and Marshall, “designers in many specialisms, with fashion being a notable exception, are avoiding using terms such as ‘creative’, ‘imaginative’, or ‘inspired’ to describe their processes” (ibid: 93). At the same time, “there is an emerging appreciation of the value of creative processes in business settings,” and creativity “is now more properly seen as indispensable to design-based innovation” (ibid). With these statements, Erlhoff and Marshall are addressing a crucial tension: In Reckwitz’s diagnosis, the concept of creativity has increasingly acquired a social and, above all, economic meaning; many practicing designers, on the other hand, have been more and more reluctant to conceive of themselves and their professional activities as an intrinsic part of this creativity dispositif. Hence, design practice can be seen as a seemingly hopeless balancing act, tasked with maintaining the positive connotations of creativity as an exclusive, individual, productive act in the face of its more negative associations with economics and social levelling.

Implicit Knowledge and Repressed Histor y One strategy that lends itself well to defending design practice against the presumed threats of trivializing creativity and allowing it to be infiltrated with utilitarian concepts – both of which, according to Reckwitz, have already long since taken place – consists in shifting the discursive front. There has been a trend in both design education and design research toward speaking primarily of ‘knowledge’ rather than ‘creativity’. More specifically, the current trend is to speak of design practice in terms of implicit knowledge. Ever since the push in the 1960s to make the discipline of design into a science, the discourse of design increasingly plays out under the signs of methodology and epistemology. Debates center on the process of design, which, according to the main hypothesis, can generate not only innovative ideas and products, but also new insights and information – that is, new knowledge. While the main focus of debates about knowledge in the 1960s was still clearly on the rationalization of the design process and its objective presentation, the direction of these debates has changed significantly in the years since. The dominant concepts of knowledge at the center of more recent debates aim to account for the implicit knowledge and experience-based skills of the design process. The shift from explicit knowledge to implicit ability in the discourse of design is reflected in paradigmatic concepts like “tacit knowledge” (Michael Polanyi), “reflection in

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action” (Donald Schön), “designerly ways of knowing” (Nigel Cross), “design thinking” (Peter Rowe), and “research through design” (Christopher Frayling). The main characteristics of this kind of design-specific knowledge are usually said to be the conception and realization of new things; the negotiation of the future and the conception of alternative possibilities through models and scenarios; dealing with complex, ‘wicked problems’ through a re-orientation toward finding practical solutions; and the development of nonverbal (e.g., material, visual) forms of communication (Cross 2006: 1-12). Although it is definitely worth considering the notion of positioning design as a third culture of knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, one that is more directed by practice (ibid: 1), this approach still runs the risk of both dismissing broader historical and social contexts – namely, the interplay of design and economy in the framework of the creativity dispositif – and of laying the groundwork for a further mystification of creative practice within the framework of an “epistemology of the unspoken” (Mareis 2012). The more design is touted as an epistemic, knowledge-based process – as has particularly been the case (though not only now) for many art scholars in the wake of the Bologna Process – the less necessary does it seem to submit this process to a (re)reading of stereotypes about creativity from a historical or critical perspective. Combining the discourses of design with those of knowledge not only ennobles the discipline (ibid), but also encourages the suppression of historical contexts and perpetuates the lack of contextualization for both design practices and design cultures within the economic logics of production and the market economy. Recently, design theorist Clive Dilnot has criticized the increasing hype around design research and design thinking for contributing to the disappearance of any historical consciousness in design, which was already weak to begin with: “History has all but disappeared from thinking design, and certainly from ‘design research’ – which today acts as if it is in a permanent state of forgetfulness about what actually constitutes and forms ‘design’ historically as we receive it (the forces, powers and relations determining it)” (2015: 150, emphasis in the original). For Dilnot, this problem arises partly from the fact that design research is increasingly oriented toward a simplified model of “research” based loosely on the natural and technical sciences, and partly from the fact that design research is primarily concerned with finding easy definitions and superficial solutions to problems without considering them in any larger historical context (ibid: 151). In other words, design research does not call into question the discipline’s understanding of itself, nor the allegedly “design-specific” methods and practices for determining and addressing so-called “design problems” (which are often created by design in the first place). The change in concepts and perspectives, which is supposed to create a bridge between design paradigms based on creative work and those based on knowledge work, can scarcely conceal the fact that the activity of design re-

Design

mains subject, more strongly than ever before, to a normative “regime of the new” (Reckwitz 2017: 9), which works toward the routine creation of innovative objects, subjects, and affects (*Aesthetic Capitalism, *Innovation). The topos of design as “essentially” creating novel, innovative things has not only survived attempts to turn the discipline into a science over the course of the twentieth century virtually unscathed; it has even been strengthened by them. Currently, the topos of the new lives on under a changed sign especially in the model of practice-led design research. The most important objective of this research approach is said to be creating innovative knowledge, oriented toward problems and practices, using the methods and resources of design practice. The concept of an ‘application context’, for which knowledge can be designed efficiently and with a perfect fit, reflects not only a changed understanding of design as an epistemic practice, but also indicates a problematic economic, utilitarian understanding of knowledge and science. Meanwhile, under the programmatic catchword of a ‘design turn’ (Schäffner 2010), the concept of design has also arrived in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the technical sciences, and provides them with a model for processes of creating and producing scientific knowledge from the perspective of design. In the context of interdisciplinary research institutes, some of which are known in German as Wissenslabore, there has recently been as much discussion of the concept of design with respect to developments in nanotechnology and those in synthetic biology. Hence, the concept of design has been transformed from a paradigm of industrial production into an elementary epistemic concept, arriving at the heart of research. To put more of a point on it and to think it through further with respect to Reckwitz’s argument, the increasing mixture of design with knowledge production merges not only the dimension of aesthetics, but also that of epistemology, which is increasingly the logic of production in the creativity dispositif.

The Neoliberalization of Design In his book Economies of Design, design historian Guy Julier (2017) demonstrates how the interplay of design and economy can be studied critically against the background of capitalism and neoliberalism. In the book, Julier traces the further differentiation of the design profession in the last decades, whereby more and more spheres of society have become the object of design. If the most common applications of design in the 1970s were still graphic design, industrial design, and fashion design, further specializations and broader fields of activity came about over time, such as interaction design, strategic design, usercentered design, sustainable design, political design, and social design (Julier 2017: 5). The increasing movement of goods and information on a global scale, and progressive digitalization and networking through mobile technologies –

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each did its part in steadily enlarging design’s sphere of influence (ibid: 6). In short, design has expanded from a Western industrial phenomenon into a global neoliberal one. Characteristic of how design tends to dovetail with neoliberal economic policy is the fact that the term ‘design’ applies not only to manufactured consumer goods, but even more to the comprehensive design of entire processes, services, brands, institutions, or strategies of sales and *consumption. In this context, the promise of design to create value in the future plays a significant role: “[I]n many contexts design has taken up a role not just in providing goods and services to satisfy current requirements, but has increasingly functioned to indicate sources of future value” (ibid: 6; *Valorization). According to Julier, the very existence of design in the context of the neoliberal system serves, on a symbolic level, to present and represent things in potentia; design materializes the possible and thereby plays an important role in making investments and intended changes appear to be rational and feasible (ibid: 3). As outlined above, there is a growing tendency, in both epistemic and economic contexts, to describe design as a culture of knowledge oriented toward problems and practices, which works toward conceiving of and realizing things that do not yet exist with the aid of scenarios, models, and simulations. In short, design is commonly said to operate in “demo mode.” According to this reading, design is the adaptive mode of managing the future par excellence, which can also be used for the production of goods and knowledge. This expectation is further strengthened by the fact that design methods and design logic, such as the ‘design thinking’ approach, are praised as particularly suited for dealing with crises, complex problems, and situations with limited knowledge. It is precisely this diffuse mixture of attributes and expectations that makes it possible for the concept of design to be used today just as easily for neoliberal efforts to market future risks and chances, as for resilient design and crisis management. According to Robert Cowley, the concepts of resilience and design are similarly distinguished by their conceptual vagueness and openness (Cowley 2018). Furthermore, both concepts constantly blur the boundaries between object and process, between the activity of problem-solving and its result. Ultimately, according to Cowley, both concepts reclaim a competency in dealing with complex problems and crisis situations, which amount to a state of constantly adapting to perpetual crisis (ibid: 4). Currently, the convergence between design and resilience is particularly virulent, since the neoliberal regime’s optimistic promise of resilience increasingly turns out to mean normalizing insecurity and economizing perpetual crisis (*Naturalization). The objects of economic speculation are not only properties and commodities but also future social and environmental crises. Against this background, design methods and creativity methods – most notably, design thinking – do not merely promote “social innovation,” as is com-

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monly suggested, but rather work more toward the economic exploitation of perpetual crises. To the extent that uncertain futures are projected as design problems, there is also a growing interest in turning this uncertainty into a potentially marketable “resource” (*Imagineering). Ultimately, the current trend in framing crises, transformations, and uncertain futures as “design problems”, which should then be solved using creativity methods (*Creativity Techniques), makes the virulence of the creativity dispositif especially clear.

References Cowley, Robert (2018): “Resilience and Design: An Introduction.” In: Resilience 6/1, Special Issue: “Forum: Resilience & Design,” pp. 1-34. Cross, Nigel (2006): Designerly Ways of Knowing, London: Springer. Dilnot, Clive (2015): “History, Design, Futures: Contending with What We Have Made.” In: Tony Fry/Clive Dilnot/Susan C. Stewart (eds.), Design and the Question of History, London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 131-271. Erlhoff, Michael/Marshall, Tim (2008): “Creativity.” In: Michael Erlhoff/Tim Marshall (eds.), Design Dictionary: Perspectives on Design Terminology, Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 92-93. Julier, Guy (2017): Economies of Design, London: Sage. Mareis, Claudia (2012): “The Epistemology of the Unspoken: On the Concept of Tacit Knowledge within Contemporary Design Research.” In: Design Issues 28/2, pp. 61-71. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Schäffner, Wolfgang (2010): “The Design Turn. Eine wissenschaftliche Revolution im Geiste der Gestaltung.” In: Claudia Mareis/Gesche Joost/Kora Kimpel (eds.), Entwerfen – Wissen – Produzieren. Designforschung im Anwendungskontext, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 33-46.

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Dispositif Sverre Raffnsøe

In The Invention of Creativity, Andreas Reckwitz diagnoses “the emergence of a dispositif of creativity as a specific mode of social aestheticization” in the following manner: “In the form it has been assuming since the 1980s, the creativity dispositif encompasses processes and complexes of practices developed independently of one another in different social fields before gradually forming networks and mutually interpenetrating. It draws on such diverse phenomena as aesthetic subcultures and the artistic field, post-industrial labour, fashion and experience-oriented consumption, psychological discourses of human creativity, philosophical vitalism, developments in media technology, ‘cultural regeneration’ in urban planning, and political measures for fostering creative potential.” (2017: 30)

Consequently, the notion of the ‘dispositif’ can be said to constitute one of the most (or maybe even the most) essential concept in The Invention of Creativity. The notion designates the overarching methodological approach that Reckwitz makes use of in order to grasp and portray not only the creativity complex in its actual full-blown form, but also to articulate the protracted historical development and establishment of the turn to creativity (*Genealogy). As indicated above, Reckwitz borrows and refines a notion developed by Michel Foucault. Beginning to query his own earlier primary focus on language and discourse (e.g., in The Order of Things [1966]), Foucault in his 1973-74 lectures at the Collège de France on psychiatry in the nineteenth century began to indicate how the notion of a “dispositif of power” should now serve as a methodological point of departure for a “radically different analysis” permitting the elucidation of patterns of behavior without privileging the level of representations (2006: 13; Raffnsøe/Gudmand-Høyer/Thaning 2015: 191-207). To articulate and make sense of his analysis of discipline in Discipline and Punish (1975), in which panoptical surveillance is described as the diagram of the disciplinary dispositif, Foucault (2008; 2009) retrospectively developed the notion of the

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dispositif more systematically towards the end of his life as a general analytical contrivance in his lectures at the Collège de France 1977-79. Foucault’s ambition was to map out a systematicity that not only cuts across knowledge and discourses, institutions and architectural forms, what is said and what is done, but also exerts a determining influence on what is said as much as the unsaid, what is done as much as what is forborne and constitutes a misfire (Raffnsøe/ Gudmand-Høyer/Thaning 2016: 278). On various occasions, Gilles Deleuze subsequently drew attention to the centrality of the notion of the dispositif as a retrospective unifying feature in Foucault’s work. Reckwitz’s work possesses the cardinal virtue of making productive use of the Foucauldian notion of the dispositif in a new and original way that remains congenial with Foucault’s original approach. In other contexts, the dispositif has been conceived as a diagnostic tool that permits one to grasp transversal, overarching and widely disseminated, mutual guidelines as they become established in and leave an indelible mark on interaction, and, what is more, without eradicating freedom as an important driver of the internal dynamics of the dispositif (Raffnsøe/Mennicken/Miller 2017). In dispositif analysis, freedom figures as an unavoidable condition of possibility for social interaction not only insofar as the dispositif develops, buds, mutates, and disseminates as a result of freedom and insubmissiveness but also insofar as the dispositif has the capacity to affect participants in the social game to the effect that they become prone to behaving in certain ways, rather than determining what they do (Raffnsøe/Gudmand-Høyer/Thaning 2016). In his analysis of the ‘creativity dispositif’, however, Reckwitz lays bare a normative systematicity where freedom is recognized not only as an implicit crucial drive. In the context of the creativity dispositif, moreover, the call and the drive to overcome obstacles and limitations in order to emancipate oneself and create ‘the new’ explicitly begins to figure prominently as the very nucleus that social organizing seems to center on and revolve around (*Organization). As a result, the creativity dispositif concludes in an oxymoronic “imperative to be creative” (Reckwitz 2017: 2), or in the at-first-glance paradoxical imperative or obligation to create freely and innovate. The creativity dispositif results not only in the institutionalization of freedom, but reaches its apotheosis in the propagation of an institutionalized aspiration and obligation to become free. In this manner Reckwitz also manages to shed a very illuminating light on what he terms a very present and prevalent “duality” (ibid): “the coupling of the wish to be creative with the imperative to be creative […] encompasses the whole structure of the social and the self in contemporary society” (ibid: 5, emphasis in the original). At a very basic level, Reckwitz’s dispositif analysis thus also lays bare that a new level of existence seems to have assumed a pivotal role in social organizing. He does not establish social order by referring to the state of the factual with

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its already given common measures that we must submit to, or to the utopian state of the counterfactual, an imagined contrast that we anticipate and try to measure up to (*Imagineering). Instead, we may, according to Reckwitz, have begun to articulate a binding social order at an intriguing intermediate level. This is the social bond in the shape of a future as it is always already arriving in the process of an ongoing disruption and transformation of the present, the past, and the future, which implies that reality is reconfigured just as our capacities and dispositions to act are modified (*Co-Creation). Not simply to be conceived of as the possible, this level of existence is the virtual as it is present as a force (virtus), making itself felt as something that acts in and through the given (Raffnsøe 2013: 249-250). This prescriptive level of the dispositif is continually effective in and through what is observable, as it causes the present to transcend itself and unfold in certain determinate directions that dispose us to act, think, anticipate, and experiment in certain new ways. By choosing a particularly well-suited analytical approach to articulate this new kind of social order, Reckwitz thus displays shrewd judgment and implicitly takes dispositif analysis to the next level. Concomitantly, he manages to demonstrate how dispositif analysis with its focus on freedom and creativity as an unavoidable condition of possibility permits a sweeping and promising analysis of the propagation of the “concerted cultural effort to produce novelty on a permanent basis” (Reckwitz 2017: 4) in a number of dispersed contexts such as modernist art, postindustrial processes of *work and value creation (*Valorization), and disruptive developments in media technologies (*Computer, *Performativity). Yet, as Reckwitz’s analytical approach and the subject matter of his analysis converge, to such an extent that freedom and the disposition to create freely begin to appear in and of themselves, new intriguing lacks and shortcomings begin to stand out to such an extent that they become pressing issues worthy of further exploration. How is one to account for the persistent and unremitting attraction of the creativity dispositif? How is it that the creativity dispositif has not only the power to continuously affect people in order to make them behave in ways they would not otherwise behave, but also the capacity to make them actively and unremittingly re-affirm the dispositif? How and in what manner is the duality of obligation and wish to be conceived as binding? How and by virtue of what is the creativity dispositif able to exert a determining influence as a binding social order upon the way people act, feel, and even imagine the future? Initially, it may feel odd to raise these questions, insofar as they seem to have been answered already. As a matter of fact, one could read the entire historical trajectory described in Reckwitz’s book as an attempt to account for the attraction and binding force of the creativity dispositif. In retrospect, Reckwitz

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may thus construe his endeavor as attempting to answer the question: “How has the creativity dispositif managed to assert its power?” (Reckwitz 2017: 214). On closer inspection, nonetheless, Reckwitz’s ‘genealogy’ of the creativity dispositif first and foremost focuses on the how questions, as is often the case in genealogical accounts (*Genealogy). Here he manages to describe how various elements of the creativity dispositif arose and spread in conjunction with, in opposition to, and to compensate for other crucial traits of modernity. As a result, in Reckwitz’s comprehensive and detailed account of the ongoing propagation of the creativity dispositif, questions concerning the wherefores and the whys tend to recede into the background. Frequently, it remains a riddle, what drives or motivates the ongoing, widespread “colonization of the non-aesthetic […] a devaluation of alternative social practices in favour of the one-dimensional criteria of the aesthetic” (ibid: 227; *Aestheticization), as historical development transitions from one level to another, both in general and in particular at the present stage. Thus, Reckwitz’s account of how “the creativity dispositif managed to assert its power” as a natural and inevitable arrangement, yet also continues to maintain and re-assert itself as an ever-present and inescapable force, may time and again seem to take an inescapably closed circular and self-referential form. What in retrospect can be perceived and certified in historical development are the antecedents and the confirmation of the present experience of an unremitting enforcement and democratization of creativity. Equally, what can be perceived and certified in the present is above all an incontestable confirmation of the creativity of the new whose genesis has been evidenced and experienced in history. Accordingly, the relationship of the diagnosed creativity dispositif to its previous history as well as its not-too-distant and remote future is predominantly characterized by inertia. Implicitly, its presupposed natural tendency seems to be to continue uniform motion in a straight line, unless changed by another external force. Yet, especially since dispositifs in general are continuously affected by freedom and the creativity dispositif in particular places freedom and disruption at the very center of social ordering, the relationship of the present to the past and the future can hardly be fully “explained” by an implicit ‘Humean’ presupposition of custom or habit as the great conductor of human behavior. Instead of presuming a natural inclination to reiterate identical procedures, dispositif analysis – as an analysis of the conduct of conduct – articulates a differential structure. With its focus on the diagnosis of the present, dispositif analysis makes manifest, in the words of William Faulkner, that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Rather than a dead weight that we carry with us or leave behind, the past here figures as a force that persistently deactivates the existent as it pushes us towards a yet-unachieved ‘not yet’. What causes surprise and calls for explanation is thus the perpetual inclination to repetition. Why is

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it that the present as well as history may equally tend to become, in the words of René Char, “a long succession of synonyms for the same vocable,” – especially since the expression and creation of the new is honored as a crucial monumental undertaking?

References Foucault, Michel (2006): Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973-74, translated by Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave. Foucault, Michel (2008): The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, translated by Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave. Foucault, Michel (2009): Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, translated by Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave. Raffnsøe, Sverre (2013): “Beyond Rule; Trust and Power as Capacities.” In: Journal of Political Power 6/2. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/21583​ 79X.2013.809216 [accessed August 15, 2018]. Raffnsøe, Sverre/Gudmand-Høyer, Marius/Thaning, Morten S. (2015): Michel Foucault: A Research Companion, Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137351029 [accessed August 15, 2018]. Raffnsøe, Sverre/Gudmand-Høyer, Marius/Thaning, Morten S. (2016): “Foucault’s Dispositive: The Perspicacity of Dispositive Analytics in Organizational Research.” In: Organization 23/2. Available at: https://doi.org/​ 10.1177/1350508414549885 [accessed August 15, 2018]. Raffnsøe, Sverre/Mennicken, Andrea/Miller, Peter (2017): “The Foucault Effect in Organization Studies.” In: Organization Studies. Available at: https://doi. org/10.1177%2F0170840617745110 [accessed August 15, 2018]. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

Fashion Monica Titton

Like many scholars before him, Andreas Reckwitz acknowledges the centrifugal forces that fashion exerts on modern society. In The Invention of Creativity, fashion comes into view as a creative practice, as a motor of consumer culture, and as a perpetual source of novelty. He argues that since the 1980s, “the fashion industry [has been] absorbed into the aesthetic economy as a whole at the melting point between fashion, art, the star system and commercial activity” (Reckwitz 2017: 110). At the same time, Reckwitz theorizes the ‘cultural city’ as the ideal ecology for the aesthetic economy. Cities offer spaces for people to encounter each other, for creative scenes to be established, and for lifestyles and consumer practices to thrive (*Creative Cities). Fashion, with its rich production of collective media representations, has played a significant role in constructing cityscapes as both real and imaginary settings for the creative subjectivity analyzed by Reckwitz. Throughout the twentieth century, the city emerged as a significant spatial site for fashion, both as an aesthetic reservoir for the construction of fashionable identities and as a real socio-spatial system bringing together economies, creative actors, and city dwellers willing to partake in the consumption and spectacle of fashion. To use a textile metaphor, fashion weaves together modes of subjectivity, creativity, novelty, *consumption, and the metropolis (*Stage, *Plasticity). In recent years, the figure of the street style photographer has come to embody the agent of urban “culturalization” (Reckwitz 2017: 186) par excellence. In the past decade, the rise of digital fashion media has re-arranged power hierarchies within the fashion industry: Bloggers and social media “influencers” have established themselves as new tastemakers by embracing the model of creative self-entrepreneurship. On blogs and on social media like Twitter and Instagram, street style photography is one of the most beloved genres – it oozes coolness, trendiness, and contemporariness. Street style blogs concentrate on the documentation of collective (yet individualized) metropolitan fashion practices and are, essentially, digital collections of pictures of “fashionable” or

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“stylish” people photographed in urban settings. Thanks to its revival in digital fashion media, street style photography has been re-affirmed as an established aesthetic space within the collective fashion imaginary. Street style blogs and Instagram accounts forge a positive relationship between cities and contemporary fashion practices and styles: The images of cities like Paris, New York, London, and Milan as fashion centers is due not only to the fact that these cities are real commercial hubs of the fashion industry, but is also the result of their ongoing representation as arenas of style in fashion media and popular culture (*Curating, *Pop). A look at the historical emergence of street fashion photography reveals the importance of the city as both a cipher of modernity for the collective fashion imaginary and a paradigmatic site for the enactment of contemporary creative subjectivity. By the late nineteenth century, in cities it was no longer possible to “decode” a person’s social standing based solely on their dress because urban life had produced new and more complex social codes, “for in the metropolis everyone was in disguise, incognito, and yet at the same time an individual more and more was what he wore” (Wilson 2005: 137). It was first and foremost the experience of metropolitan life that animated contemporaries like Baudelaire, Simmel, and Benjamin to write about fashion’s fascinating ability to negotiate the tensions between individuality and uniformity, and to think about fashion’s mysterious properties of disguising and dissimulating. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the modern metropolis emerged as the quintessential scene and ideal domain of fashion and inaugurated the progressive decline of fashion’s “aristocratic model” (Barthes 1990: 290). At a time when theorists like Benjamin and Simmel pondered the reality of urban life and its consequences for culture, society, and the self, pioneers of street photography like Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, August Sander, and Jacques-Henri Lartigue used their cameras to document the facets of life unfolding in fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century cityscapes (Scott 2007). Photography became a cultural technique in its own right, on the one hand serving the urban bourgeoisie’s need of representation and, on the other hand, nurturing the artistic and narrative aspiration of street photographers. In the twentieth century, the pulsating metropolis became the backdrop against which both the genre of studio portrait photography and the genre of social-documentary street photography unfolded their potential to chronicle modern subjectivities. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, street photographers like Atget, Sander, and Stieglitz portrayed the poverty of the urban proletariat and the desolation of peasants, prostitutes, criminals, and other “outsiders” in the transforming urban landscapes of Paris and Berlin (Scott 2007). At the same time, particularly Lartigue, but also Stieglitz and Sander, directed their came-

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ras at the flamboyant lifestyle of the wealthy and documented their fashionable attire in the intimacy of their studios and increasingly in urban settings. While street photographers observed the reality of city life and en passant documented the role of fashion in the self-representation of city dwellers, fashion photographers were still concerned with the construction of a fictional world. Until the early 1930s, fashion photography was confined to the walls of the photographic atelier, where photographers created sophisticated fantasy settings and cityscapes appeared – if at all – as exaggerated studio props. Fashion magazines constructed fashion as the expression of an aristocratic, aspirational life-style within which the reality of the city was transmuted into a fictionalized complement to the photographic narrative. However, in the 1930s and 1940s, fashion photographers like Erwin Blumenfeld began to stage their photographs outside of the studio in the real spaces of the city. The cityscape of fashion cities like Paris, New York, London, or Rome was integrated into the symbolic geography of fashion photography, and thus, subordinated to the aesthetic regime of fashion. The 1940s and 1950s saw an increasing professionalization of photography through the establishment of professional associations and photographic agencies (e.g., Magnum, founded in 1947), a development which led to a major shift within the field of photography (Vettel-Becker 2005: 4). Many amateur (street) photographers decided to turn “pro”: Some maintained a regular occupation (e.g., in advertising) that provided them the financial basis necessary to maintain their “true” passion of street photography. Other aspiring photographers were able to make a living by taking on assignments as portrait photographers, as crime photographers, as press photographers, or as occasional fashion photographers (ibid: 87). It was precisely the involvement of street photographers who constructed their careers in fashion photography that initiated a gradual aesthetic cross-pollination between street photography and fashion photography (ibid) and eventually led to the birth of street style photography a few decades later. In the 1960s, fashion photographers colonized the city as fashion’s emblematic social arena – the new futuristic fashion had to be represented in a setting that signified the period’s hopes of a better future. Fashion photographers like William Klein, David Bailey, and Terence Donovan staged their photo shoots on the very same streets of London, New York City, Rome, or Paris that street photographers like Joel Meyerowitz and Diane Arbus scavenged for photo-worthy moments. Fashion photographers appreciated the city as a blank slate, as a setting that enhanced the visual presence of people’s clothing, and transformed models into incarnations of female urbanity. The different instrumentalization of the urban space in fashion and street photography pinpoints the aesthetic polarity between these two photographic genres. Street photography aestheticizes the ordinary – the city, the old, the

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disfigured, the outsiders, the rich and poor alike – and exposes their “human” side to the viewer. Fashion photography does the opposite, aestheticizing the aesthetic – the already beautiful model, the already beautiful dress – and capitalizes on novelty, on forms of architecture, and on urban landscapes (*Aesthetic Capitalism, *Aestheticization, *Creative Cities). Street style photography, arising in the late 1970s, was the synthesis of this polarity. Street style photographers seek out the ordinary but they also want to unravel the beauty of the extra-ordinary. They look for fresh and new, yet still quotidian, everyday styles that can be easily inserted into the canons of fashion iconography. The proximity of fashion photography to urban documentary photography and street photography began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a development that would eventually pave the way for today’s street style photography. Two approximately contemporaneous developments led to the formation of the genre and its most recent renaissance in digital media. The first development began in the early 1980s, when the genre of street style photography appeared in independent style magazines in the UK and in the US. In the UK, London-based magazines like i-D, The Face, and Blitz mixed fashion spreads with sections on dance, film, music, and politics, inspired by the eclectic content of punk fanzines. Street style appeared in the first issue of i-D in August 1980. The magazine’s “straight-up” section showed images of young, fashionable people, shot in natural light, against a simple backdrop of walls or house fronts, and the photographs were dramatically different from the images in conventional fashion magazines. Simultaneously, American photographer Amy Arbus started to publish a monthly street fashion column, entitled “On the Street,” in the New York-based indie newspaper The Village Voice. The second development that had a considerable influence on establishing the genre of street style photography in fashion was the work of photo reporter and society photographer Bill Cunningham. From 1978 until his death in 2016, Cunningham contributed candid street fashion photographs to the New York Times’ Sunday paper. In his column “On the Street,” each week he would document a different trend or fad he had captured on the streets of New York City, preferably in midtown Manhattan. Cunningham saw his work as a testimony to fashion, himself as a chronicler of dress history, and he consciously situated his work in a historical context. Cunningham combined the documentary intention of street photography with the aesthetic intention of fashion photography and the social voyeurism of society photography. Street style photography was meant as a critique of the elitist self-image of conventional fashion magazines and represented a rupture with the conventions of glossy fashion magazines. However, during the late 1990s, fashion magazines like Elle and Vogue began to produce their own street style sections, modelled on the photo shoots originally proposed by the alternative style ma-

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gazines of the early 1980s and the work of street fashion photo reporters like Cunningham and Arbus. Over the course of the past decade, street style bloggers have accessed established spatial narratives about fashionable urban spaces in fashion photography and thereby re-instituted a correspondence among cities, nations, and specific fashion practices through the faces and bodies of their photographed subjects (*Atmosphere). The fascination exerted by street style blogs and their endless stream of pictures rests in the depiction of fashionable individuality in the midst of the chaotic metropolis. The cityscapes of hip fashion districts, gentrified neighborhoods, old imperial parks, and financial districts presented on street style blogs indicate the integration of the geography of fashion into a global financial geography, within which global cities emerge as sites of post-industrial production, financial power, networks and infrastructure (Sassen 1996: 126). In a global economy where, as Sassen writes, “place is seen as neutralised by global communications and [the] hypermobility of capital” (ibid: 207), street style bloggers claim that there still are identifiable, “authentic” and site-specific identities, fashions, and styles. With their vast chronicles of urban fashion practices, street style photographers produce taxonomies of agents of cultural urbanization and hence partake in constructing fashionable representations of the creative subjectivity described by Reckwitz.

References Barthes, Roland (1990): The Fashion System, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Sassen, Saskia (1996): “Whose City is it? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims.” In: Public Culture 8, pp. 205-223. Scott, Clive (2007): Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson, London/New York: I.B. Tauris. Vettel-Becker, Patricia (2005): Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Wilson, Elizabeth (2005): Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: I. B. Tauris.

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Genealogy Sverre Raffnsøe

Genealogy plays an overarching role in Andreas Reckwitz’s The Invention of Creativity. Starting from “the claim […] that what we have been experiencing since the late twentieth century is in fact the emergence of a heterogeneous yet powerful creativity dispositif ” (2017: 5, emphasis in the original; *Dispositif ), the book addresses how “previously marginal ideas of creativity have been elevated into an obligatory social order” (ibid: 5). Accordingly, the overall aim of the book is to contribute to our “understanding of the origins of this creativity complex, to retrace its composite, non-linear prehistory” (ibid). Reckwitz analyses the creativity dispositif’s “genesis” or “emergence” (ibid: 6) resulting in a “social orientation towards creativity” (ibid: 3) that makes it impossible not to want to be creative and innovative (*Naturalization). Initially, Reckwitz indicates that the bulk of the book (Chapters 2-7) will be devoted to the “detailed genealogical analysis” (ibid: 7) of the history leading up to the present “hegemony” (ibid: 4). On closer inspection, however, the smaller remainder of the book (Chapters 1 and 8) can equally be said to contribute to the historical examination of the continuous constitution of the creativity dispositif as a binding social order. Reckwitz does not specify whether ‘genealogy’ refers to the historical processes through which the creativity dispositif is installed, to a particular historical mode of investigation, or to the historical genesis that appears as a result of this particular investigation of history. Nor does he clearly develop the notion of genealogy conceptually or systematically. Nevertheless, Reckwitz emphasizes that “the genealogy does not presuppose [methodologically or ontologically] specific structures of the social but, rather, traces the historical paths along which the corresponding elements have assembled and concentrated” (ibid: 29). In doing so, “the genealogy replaces why questions with how questions: How can we trace the emergence and spread of a cultural pattern in social and historical contexts?” (ibid: 30) The genealogical approach permits Reckwitz to examine a protracted, complex and antagonistic, historical process, spanning more than 200 years, to

Genealogy

systematically reconstruct its overall pattern in an impressive and persuasive manner, and to shed light on how “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” (ibid: 2, emphasis in the original). Collecting an impressively vast amount of historical material to piece together an original, sweeping, and complex, overarching system, Reckwitz’s genealogy concomitantly indicates avenues to explore as well as further issues to be discussed. For example, the genealogy brings up the question concerning the relationship between the starting point and the end product of the genealogy, or between its first preparatory and its fourth hegemonic phase. What precisely is added at later stages to the initial aesthetic blueprint as it is rendered in “the modern figure of the artist” (ibid: 2) and to modern art as “an exemplary blueprint or ‘format’ for the creativity dispositif as a whole” (ibid: 81; *Artist, *Curating)? In addition to these interpretative issues, the lines of development drawn in Reckwitz’s genealogy leave room for further discussion. Even though his thesis of an overall trend towards rationalization, desensitivization, and affect deficiency in modernity is couched under the influence of other prominent authors including Max Weber and Theodor W. Adorno, one might question both the validity of his diagnosis as an all-encompassing characterization and the localization of *aestheticization as an opposing and compensatory trend within an overall context where affect is increasingly repressed (*Affect Culture, *Color). If Reckwitz’s view of developments in terms of a bifurcation and isolation of polar opposites seems too crude, an analysis in terms of an ongoing transformation of the relationship between affectivity and forms of rationality might seem more promising (e.g., Loren/Metelmann 2013). Eventually, an analysis might be made in terms of shifts of emphasis and/or mutually enforcing entanglement. Likewise, one might also question Reckwitz’s positioning of art and the aesthetic around the turn of the eighteenth century as the sole and privileged blueprint for the contemporary wish and obligation to continually create the new. Another important forerunner is the pledge to the Enlightenment, in particular in Immanuel Kant’s exhortation “sapere aude,” to “have the courage to use your own understanding,” voiced in “What is Enlightenment?” (1784). Furthermore, Reckwitz’s claim to have replaced “why questions” with “how questions” does not necessarily imply that the former can simply be disregarded as irrelevant for a genealogical investigation. Rather, an examination laying bare “how things were and came to be” makes additional investigation of the wherefores and the whys of the described historical events all the more pressing. This is particularly evident in light of the work of the two most important instigators of genealogy as a comprehensive method of historical investigation: Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche.

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Reckwitz does not explicitly state what prompted him to use the term ‘genealogy’ to characterize his historical investigation aiming to shed light on the genesis of the creativity dispositif. Nonetheless, an educated guess would be his reading of Foucault, since he uses the term extensively in the context of his discussion of Foucault’s notion of the *dispositif and includes Foucault’s most detailed discussion of ‘genealogy’ in references (Foucault 1997). Moreover, when Reckwitz claims that “creativity as a social and cultural phenomenon is to a certain degree an invention” (2017: 6), he specifies in a footnote that “this perspective on creativity is inspired by Michel Foucault’s view of the genealogy of modernity” (ibid: 238, note 14). Thus, Reckwitz’s genealogy of the creativity dispositif in general seems inspired by Foucault’s conception of genealogy as an approach that illuminates how a presently overarching dispositif is slowly pieced together, established, and further developed in a composite, non-linear prehistory and a reconstruction of the contradictory process by which techniques and discourses emerged simultaneously in different social fields. However, Foucault perceives genealogy not only as an investigation searching for the “provenance” of major, established arrangements that are currently imposing on what previously seemed trifling and insignificant, minor practices. Rather, genealogy is first and foremost regarded as an investigation of historical development intended to shed light on the present as a movement of the not-yet-known. For Foucault, we are still very much implicated in, rather than just the creators of this movement. A historical investigation can thus be said to dig out and investigate actual historical events and leftovers, albeit to focus on how they attest to a “virtuality which cannot be ignored” (Foucault 1984: 686). This momentum and driving force (virtus) is not only contained and expressed in material events in new ways at each historical transition; it is still present in the form of a persisting dispositionality. As a consequence, the question concerning the driving or motivating forces, the examination of the wherefores and the whys acting in and through history, can be said to be implicitly, yet ubiquitously, present in Foucault’s genealogy of historical as well contemporary development. To the extent that Reckwitz unequivocally aims to replace “why questions” with “how questions” (2017: 50), he seems to leave the question of the driving force of genealogical development in and through both history and the present entirely out of the picture in order to focus on a detailed examination of how it happened. The question concerning the wherefores and the whys of historical and present development plays an even more perspicuous and decisive role in Nietzsche’s understanding of genealogy. In fact, Nietzsche laid the groundwork for Foucault’s genealogical approach (Foucault 1997), as he elevated the study of origins or ancestry from an auxiliary discipline to a general approach to history (Raffnsøe 2007: 17). Towards the end of his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche felt that a very important question still remained, which he tried to address in the

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very last paragraph: Why is it that Western morality and metaphysics is not simply a very important historical phenomenon that has affected our past and even our most recent past? How are we to understand the fact that Western metaphysical morality is resuscitated, re-actualized, and re-applied, continually reimbued with force, to such an extent that it dominates our present and shapes the way we are able to conceive our future? And what does this repetitiveness, this ‘eternal return of the same’ (or the similar) tell us about our present state and way of life? What is the question to which this state of affairs, conceived as a response, is the answer? What is the question, the challenge, or the force that makes us keep repeating the “answer” and the supposed “solution”? Nietzsche’s attempt at an explanation was, at first, of a rather circular genealogical character. He indicated that Western morality basically had the status of a “faute de mieux par excellence” (Nietzsche 1996: 136). Metaphysics and morals were repeated for the lack of better alternatives insofar as history showed how it was developed and that it was the best and most sufficient answer that had been given so far. This somewhat circular account would correspond to the level of explanation attained in Reckwitz’s genealogy of the creativity complex, insofar as it focuses exclusively on the how of historical development: This is what happened because it was the way it happened. At another level of investigation, however, Nietzsche did not simply content himself with the explanation that metaphysics and morals was only the relatively-best aleatory filling of a constitutive lack or absence. According to Nietzsche, the human is an unnatural being, which must constantly live with physical pain and existential suffering. For this very reason, it is also a being that constantly needs to face the problem and the question of how an existence can be justified that is condemned to constant suffering and, ultimately, disappearance. Thus, morals and metaphysics may be conceived as the hitherto most satisfactory answer to a constant contemporary problem of justification. They are continuously resuscitated since they permit people not only to indicate the whys and the wherefores of human existence but in this manner even to affirm it. Providing human existence with a justification and sense of direction, metaphysics and morals enable the transcendence of a lack of meaning and direction in human existence, along with its suffering, and thus re-affirm human existence and human will in a new way (Raffnsøe 2007: 141-46). Reckwitz’s illuminating genealogy can be said to prompt a parallel quest to Nietzsche’s investigation. In Reckwitz’s case, however, the genealogy no longer raises the question concerning the whys of morals, metaphysics, ascetic religion, and cognition. Rather, the inquiry concerns the wherefores of the creativity dispositif and the turn towards aesthetics: How are we to conceive and understand the fact that a turn to the aesthetic and the creation of the new repeatedly takes place, historically and in the present, so decisively that it

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profoundly shapes the way we are able to conceive our existence and imagine our future? In continuation of both Nietzsche’s and Reckwitz’s genealogy, one could venture the suggestion that a powerful attraction of the aesthetic, contributing greatly to its reiterated hegemonic status in the creativity dispositif, is not only its ability to stimulate the senses and produce affects. Rather, the wherefore and the why of aesthetic creativity is that it is able to provide human existence with a sense of direction, a wherefore and a why, in a new, advanced, and committed manner (*Aestheticization). Whereas traditional morals and metaphysics provided existence with a sense of direction through adherence to established and binding values, the turn to aesthetics provides a sense of direction through a persistent transgression of previously established values and commitments. In this manner, the ‘aesthetic turn’ permits and forces the vindication of human existence through a transgression of and renegotiation of the very same existence in its hitherto given form. With the generalization and the ubiquity of aesthetics, self-transformation is no longer simply relegated to the confines of a particular aesthetic sphere (Raffnsøe 2019). Rather, the fictionality of the aesthetic attains the status of a generalized end in itself. By reaffirming and vindicating an ongoing transgression of existence in its given form, the aesthetic turn saves and justifies the human ‘will to will’ in and of itself, without committing it to will something in particular. As a consequence, the creativity dispositif may also be regarded as the hitherto most recent “purebred” offshoot of metaphysics. With The Invention of Creativity, a purified metaphysics of the will assumes a heightened, fleeting and intense, continually reiterated expression of an ongoing commitment to transgress given forms of social co-existence and create new values. The commitment to transform and transgress provides new opportunities for self-expression and a sense of liberation. As an obligation to transgress oneself continually, however, the aesthetic regime concomitantly takes the form of a challenging ethical commitment to creativity and freedom, which is not easy to avoid (*Self-Generation). In turn, the ethics implicit in aesthetics and the aesthetic turn arouses grave ethical concerns as to its devastating effects on human existence and the ethical yardsticks that would permit people to relate adequately to these effects. While sweeping and complex, the genealogy of the creativity dispositif thus not only raises further questions as to the wherefores and the whys driving and justifying genealogical development in the past, in the present, and where they seem to lead in the future. Equally, the genealogy of an aesthetic turn forces us to further ponder the ethical effects and challenges of inherited dispositionality. How does the predisposition to aesthetic behavior affect us? How can one develop appropriate and responsible responses to this present predicament and

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a form of critique that could affirm and help us gauge and assess where we are going?

References Foucault, Michel (1984): “What is Enlightenment?” In: Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 32-50. Foucault, Michel (1997): “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, translated by Robert Hurley and others. In: James D. Faubion (ed.), Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, New York: The New Press, pp. 369-391. Loren, Scott/Metelmann, Jörg (2013): Irritation of Life: The Subversive Melodrama of Michael Haneke, David Lynch and Lars von Trier, Schüren: Marburg. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1996): On the Genealogy of Morals, translated and edited by Douglas Smith, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Raffnsøe, Sverre (2007): Nietzsches ‘Genealogie der Moral’, Paderborn: Fink Verlag. Raffnsøe, Sverre (2019): The Aesthetic Turn, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

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“The main assumption here is that creativity is not exclusively an innate gift. Everyone is creative in some way or another, and can learn to use his/her creative potential.” This quotation is not from a philosopher, but from an online European Commission green paper called “Unlocking the Potential of Cultural and Creative Industries.” This programmatic document does not provide a trivial assertion but a crucial assumption – namely, that a lack of creativity makes one drop out of the “human race” (*Capital, *Creativity Techniques). The fact that the economy needs to assume the appearance of ontology, if it wants to be a political economy, is cause for further thought. In The Invention of Creativity, Andreas Reckwitz states that creativity has become both a wish and an imperative: “We want to be creative and we ought to be creative” (2017: 2). Creativity represents a dispositif, which capitalism uses to react to critical challenges. The previous form of capitalism (i.e., Fordism), which was based on a concept of ‘instrumental rationality’ (Max Weber), has lost its dominant position in society. Hence, conventional analytic categories can no longer capture the contemporary economy, since its core consists less of rational processes and more of “sensuous and emotional value” (ibid: 123). The absence of emotion, or Weberian ‘affect deficiency’ (ibid: 89, 201-205), has been replaced by an aestheticization of the economy as well as an aestheticization of the social (*Affect Culture, *Aestheticization). Reckwitz’s genealogy of the creativity dispositif succeeds in working out the diverse and quite heterogeneous factors that contributed to its establishment over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While The Invention of Creativity provides an extensive and articulate analysis of the contemporary situation, it also raises a series of questions. The first would be to clarify the role of art in the creativity dispositif. In the book, Reckwitz argues that the transformation of Fordism into *aesthetic capitalism was based on new modes of work, forms of the market and consumption, management techniques, organizations and institutions, as well as transformations of urban areas (ibid: 2-8). ‘Art’ played a relevant role in all

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of these processes (ibid: 6-7, 33 ff.). For Reckwitz, the ideals of originality and creativity, originally an antagonistic demand of 60s counterculture, developed into dominant principles, insofar they were “built-in” to the new economy. As a result of their incorporation into capitalism, these once-critical ideals lost their subversive value (ibid: 5), their power. Thus, it could seem that the subject and the power carrying the creativity dispositif is none other than capitalism itself. However, things sound different in other passages. For instance, Reckwitz freely admits that “the creativity dispositif is certainly not held up by the economy alone” (ibid: 89); and that aestheticization can be attributed to other factors. Are the origins, in the archeology of the creativity dispositif, to be sought elsewhere (*Dispositif, *Genealogy)? If ‘art’ represents one exemplary field of the creativity dispositif, how was it possible for particular aesthetic concepts and particular artistic practices to be so easily “built in” to the economy? Is ‘aesthetics’ fundamentally predisposed to economization? Was it merely a coincidence that aesthetics and political economy flourished at roughly the same time? Or can their emergence be located in a shared prehistory?

From Religion to Aesthetics What does ‘aestheticization’ consist in? Reckwitz distinguishes it from the ‘aesthetic’ (ibid: 11 ff., 16 ff.; 121 ff.) and this from the creativity dispositif. Reckwitz’s general, neither historically- nor geographically-situated concept of aesthetics, encompassing any “sense perception” and “affect” that is an “end in itself and refers to itself” (ibid: 11), seems too broad to be fruitful for analysis, if not questionable for even including the “appropriation of Eastern meditation by Westerners” (ibid: 18). I would argue that ‘aesthetics’ was born and affirmed mainly in reaction to dualistic rationalism (cf. ibid: 25 ff., 79-81), by means of a unification of internal and external factors, thanks to creative subjectivity. A genealogy of its aura was recognized by Walter Benjamin (2008) in ancient religious cults. He diagnosed in Fascist regimes an “aestheticization of politics” as an attribution of an aura of “creativity” to the social and technical renewal action of the leader and the masses. Today, the aura has extended to the “creative” changes of capitalism. A genealogy of religion allows us to understand the subjective intensity of modern aesthetic experience, and how creativity could become an imperative to be novel as continuous subjective social production (*Work). “Affective intensity” (Reckwitz 2017: 54) can be traced back to diverse varieties of Protestantism. For Baptists, dogmatic faith gives way to the commandment to “await the spirit,” which then gives rise to a whole series of concepts, such as rebirth, revival, and justification (Weber 2005: 169). Democracy in the United States indirectly derived its Puritanical spirit from these concepts

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(ibid: 171, note 146) – namely, as a kind of synthesis between self-reliance and self-renewal as a ‘primal act’ of ‘genius’. Emerson fostered this concept, which would become so characteristic of North American culture and increasingly take hold in Europe, especially in recent decades. In this religious genealogy, a certain Protestant morality connects with the philosophical ideal of Empfindsamkeit (from Shaftesbury to Klopstock, from Lessing to Hemsterhuis and Herder) and Kant’s aesthetics. For Kant, there was still a difference between the ‘originality’ of an aesthetic-artistic feeling, its communicative dimension (i.e., taste), and the technical-practical nature of knowledge (Critique of Judgment, Introduction). For Schiller (via Fichte), however, the ‘aesthetic’ would become a constitutive aspect of politics. And in Hölderlin’s Hyperion, the poet would ultimately “feel” the “spirit of the world”: feeling here takes the place of belief and becomes a condition of possibility for both knowledge and political action.

From the Aesthetics of the Living to the Economy of Life From a current perspective, the opposition between emotion and instrumental rationality appears to be a historical one, which was only able to claim validity at a particular historical transition to modernity (*Affect Culture). Whoever calculates the effects of an action, does so for some purpose, but also for the ground of ‘certainty of the act’. Friedrich Nietzsche recognized this shift, as evident in his ascription of the value of art to the ‘artist’ himself. Insofar as the ‘artist’ is understood as free from any specific medium and any specific technique, he can put the creativity of his life into his work (*Artist). Life, for Nietzsche, is the will to power, which “is the primal form of affect”; “all other affects are only configurations of it [i.e., the will to power],” which is experienced as an “ecstatic feeling of power and fullness” (Nietzsche 1972: 92, 327). Perspectives, hierarchies, and instrumental rationality are only effects of the same thing – affect, reality. (Nietzsche shows how it is it that modern man wants to be creative). However, the all-too-human will still depends to a great extent on one’s own desires, and thus sympathy and ressentiment obstruct the life-long process of becoming. For this reason, the Übermensch – defined for good reason as a ‘creator’ – can be his ‘own worst enemy’, since he constantly needs to renew himself: “Whatever I may create and however I may love it – soon I must oppose it and my love, thus my will wants it” (Nietzsche 2006: 90). For Nietzsche human existence is spontaneously guilty – and indeed, in its very tendency to depend on things. For this reason, there is need for “redemption,” which for Nietzsche consists in “eternal recurrence” (ibid: e.g., 177-178, 184-185). One might think that Nietzsche is speaking the language of Christian theology, when he speaks of redemption. In fact, however, he uses this manner of speaking to break it down: tragic art, eternal return, the critique of the agenda behind “previous psychology” and its concept of free will all serve as a “ham-

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mer” (Nietzsche 1972: 93, 99-102, 4-5). At the same time, Nietzsche’s words still retain an echo of the very history, or story, they are intended to destroy. If one can no longer believe in God, then man becomes the ab-solute, bereft of every cause, end, and meaning (i.e., nihilism). If life no longer has meaning, it should at the very least be felt with the greatest possible intensity. The imperative to have intense experience inherits the theological doctrine of justification. Life, will, affect and emotional intensity, awakening, redemption and (self-) creation all blend into each other and mingle. Divine creation and modern creativity are entangled to the point of being unrecognizable (*Plasticity). Echoes of this history can still be perceived in Nietzsche, whose words thus become an ambiguous sign of the times. In a kind of anticipation of Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’, Nietzsche foretells the economic success of aesthetic art. To multiply, life must first be fragmented, cut up into pieces (Dionysius!). In this respect, fragmentation is no longer intended to be understood in the sense of Taylorism, no longer the segmentation of external, mechanical processes, but rather as the segmentation of emotions in the age of emotional marketing.

Debt, Belief: When Economy Takes on Religious Traits Proof of the theological genealogy of the contemporary imperative to be creative can be found in the fact that creativity is always about freeing oneself from guilt. The creativity dispositif is first and foremost a legitimation dispositif – in fact, to the extent that being creative serves to justify the singularity of existence. What is theological about this is that it updates the basic idea that existence is not good in itself. Modern man “would rather feely guilty than feel bad for no reason” (Nietzsche 1972: 24); therefore he experiences his existence as a form of penance. To the extent to which ‘rebirth’ can only be felt, as Weber puts it, “in taking spiritual possession” of salvation (2005: 93), self-renewal needs to be continuously repeated at every moment (*Naturalization, *Self-Generation). Contemporary society demands that the reason for anyone’s existence be measured in “objective” terms of creativity. There are obvious difficulties here. Ultimately, merit never appears in the form of a proof. The constitutive contradiction is manifest in the fact that creativity is defined as an internal quality of the subject but one that can only be proven a posteriori, provided that the creative act is successful. Subjective euphoria is no more than the result of a successful creative act, and by no means a hallmark of creativity. In the end, there are many other potential reasons for its success. However, the concept of creativity remains persuasive, even if it does not provide any proof, because it connects two things and attributes them to the same source – namely, the success of a particular innovation, on the one hand, and the legitimizing selfrenewal of singularity, on the other. The binding force of creativity consists in this synergy, which is all the more effective if its mechanism remains hidden.

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For this reason, one does not comply with the creativity dispositif due to economic constraints, but rather completely “spontaneously,” “passionately.” One enjoys the feeling of being unique, of challenging oneself with real dangers (e.g., economy, sports, criminality, war) or with simulated ones (noir, thrillers, sci-fi, war games; *Pop). In all of this, the new economy, whether material or immaterial, seizes the same power once reserved for the church. It guards the sacred mystery of the connection between economics, politics, and self-creating individuality, i.e., what Hegel called the ‘objective spirit.’ The new economy codifies the mystery of creativity and watches over its cult; its high priests are those who now make the political and economic decisions. Just as, according to the decision of the Council of Trent (the principle ex opera operato applies) Catholic clergymen could administer the sacrament validly independent-of being in a state of grace or in sin, economic decision makers are today the exception that confirms the rule. Whether in the transnational administration of capital, of state debts, of military resources, or of communication networks, the decision makers always stand above the rules that they impose on the rest of the population. Given this kind of rules, few are successful. Unlike the act of confession in the Catholic Church, the economic high priests offer no forgiveness. Subjectively, these tendencies do not seem very far removed from the doctrine of predestination: All are called but few are chosen. Does ‘creativity’ as such really exist? This question seems to require an act of faith (and a feeling), and, in its absence, there will inevitably be feelings of guilt. “You did not believe enough in your own creative potential!” one might accuse oneself (*Coaching). The feeling of guilt confirms the belief. The widespread belief in creativity is constantly renewed by economic constraints and by the creativity dispositif. Subjectively, the belief only makes sense so long as one thinks that existence is fundamentally lacking something. But this was and is not always the case. While the aesthetic imperative to be “original” belongs to the “elements” of the dispositif, other arts were and are differently oriented. One thinks of chance instead of intention in John Cage, L.M. Young, and “experimental music”; improvisation by Terry Riley, P. Oliveros, F. Evangelisti, C. Cardew, MEV; psychedelic music; these are ethics and poetics less concerned with the innovation of natural life than with emancipation from the imperative to have to justify one’s life through work, consumption, and technical productivity (Goldoni 2015; 2017). In this respect, they also differed from a certain cult of the ‘new’ in the European avant-garde (*Deaestheticization, *Improvisation). Upon closer inspection, there is little if anything in common with the contemporary aestheticization of the economy and of society, even though the presence of one’s own body, one’s own existence, of transition, were also important topics at the time. The search for awareness and wonder is not “aestheticization”

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(Reckwitz 2017: 18, 26-27, 83), because it belongs to ancient and contemporary (Wittgenstein) philosophies, and to ethical Western and Eastern practices. Those practices are examples of an ongoing and ambivalent movement beyond the modern distinction between ‘aesthetics’ and ethics and beyond the “new.” Therefore, despite ambivalences due to the figure of the ‘artist’ and the fact that some of them had been devalued and misunderstood (ibid: 231, note 75) by the “ascent of the creativity dispositif,” his judgment that they are “agents” of the dispositif (ibid: 83-84) is unconvincing. The genealogical ‘elements’ of a dispositif are not the same as what is “built-in.” Indeed, Reckwitz names among “alternative aesthetic practices” (I am in doubt about the use of the term ‘aesthetic’) improvisation, attention to every­ day life, repetition, no boundaries between art and audience, and the “Eastern” awareness of time: most of these belong to theories and practices of the 60s (ibid: 227 ff.; cf. 232-234 and note 87 on Cage; 231, note 75 and 71, note 49 on “Neo-Dada in music”) and are still practiced in many shared places in the world. The distant gaze on contemporary life might first see communication, money, and business (*Critique); but from those practices another light on the world appears.

References Benjamin, Walter (2008): The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [1935], translated by J.A. Underwood, London: Penguin. Goldoni, Daniele (2015): “A Musical-Philosophical Approach to Creativity. An Ethical Turn.” In: Augsto Cusinato/Andreas Philoppopoulos-Mihalopoulos (eds.), Knowledge-Creating Milieus in Europe: Firms, Cities, Territories, Berlin: Springer. Available at: https://link.springer.com/chapter/ 10.1007%2F978-3-642-45173-7_2 [accessed August 8, 2018]. Goldoni, Daniele (2017): “The Religion of Creativity: A Destructive Justice.” In: PuntoOrg. Available at: http://www.puntoog.net/it/english/a-c-2/danielegoldoni-2 [accessed August 8, 2018]. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2006): “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None” [1883-85], translated by Adrian Del Caro. In: Adrian Del Caro/Robert Pippin (eds.), Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1972): Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887-1889, edited by Giorgio Colli/Mazzino Montinari, Berlin: de Gruyter. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Weber, Max (2005): The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1905], translated by Talcott Parsons, New York: Routledge.

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In The Invention of Creativity, Andreas Reckwitz provides a cultural history of contemporary Western society in late modernity in terms of the meteoric rise of the imperative to be creative, which serves as the guiding star in the constellation of the globalized post-Fordist world of work: “If there is a desire in contemporary society that defies comprehension, it is the desire not to be creative. It is a desire that guides individuals and institutions equally” (2017: 1). But it does not seem to guide society as a whole, at least not insofar as it works on the joint project of shaping a desirable, livable, and viable future capable of sustaining human life. In terms of visions of the future, the opposite is true. In parallel to the rise of the creativity dispositif, there has been a decline in the collective imagination since the last third of the twentieth century (*Deaestheticization). With respect to the prospects of living together, we do not seem to be capable of imagining anything new that would also be both attractive and engaging for our senses (the two main criteria of creativity in Reckwitz’s analysis). In a pointed summary of this lack of collective creativity, Richard Barbrook states that “contemporary reality is the beta version of a science fiction dream” (2007: 9). The cultural imaginary appears to be empty, society to lack the imagination, emotion, and solidarity required to break through, meaningfully and emphatically, to any shared future. While various technological promises and material desires continue to be fulfilled, there is a lack of ideas about how cities, countries, and entire continents might live differently in the face of climate change, social inequity, advancing (financial) capitalism, and mass migration movements. As social psychologist Harald Welzer observes, “the great anarchist utopias about the general end of hierarchy and domination, the communist ones about the end of alienation, the situationist ones about a fusion of art and life – they all belong to the nineteenth and twentieth century. The twenty-first century has still not produced any great utopias” (2018: 8). Whereby ‘utopia’ does not seem to be the quite right word, since this model of a “non-place” is, by definition (Gr. οὐ ‘not’), not oriented toward reality or feasibility, even though that is precisely what would be important. Rutger

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Bregman captures this tension in the title of his bestseller Utopias for Realists. A more accurate term would be ‘eutopia’ (i.e., the positive imagination of the future, as opposed to the plentiful dystopia) or ‘heteropia’, the term Michel Foucault develops in “Of Other Spaces” (1986; *Stage). These “real places” (24), found in every society, consist of practices, images, and relations that differ from the familiar (spatial) image of utopia; nevertheless, they exist, are present, or, in the case of scenarios of the future, can be described in terms of the path that would lead to their realization. Attaining these “images of the future” (the name for Harald Welzer’s initiative Bilder der Zukunft) requires new techniques of imagining the world (*Innovation, *Co-Creation, *Critique). The ‘creative society’ needs a new kind of social ‘imagineering’, to borrow the registered trademark of the Walt Disney Company.

Critique of Invisibility Almost twenty years ago, Tom Holert also borrowed the concept from the megacorporation for the title of the anthology Imagineering: Visual Culture and the Politics of Visibility, a polyphonic critique of the power of images and their engineers. Based on the ambivalence of images – their tendency, in the wake of the ‘pictorial turn’, to become at once more meaningful and less credible – Holert focused on the function of images in concrete contexts and the corresponding abilities required of recipients who have to deal with the increased pressure of visibility. In comparison to the situation around 2000, there has been a radical change in the situation today. The processes of power and capital have become almost invisible, from the NSA through Silicon Valley’s surveillance capitalism to many other (national) variations. From a critical perspective, the current desideratum appears to consist less in dealing with the wealth of visual culture than in reflecting on the invisibility of big data and addressing Google & Co.’s creation of revenue through surveillance capitalism – a new kind of ‘imagineering’. To adapt Bertolt Brecht’s famous assessment of the photographic image, “the actual reality” of production and value creation has only now properly “slid over into a functional dimension.” In Brecht’s lifetime, a visit to the factory could still provide at least some experience of mechanical and material exploitation, even if it was hidden from an external view. Today, on the other hand, a visit to a server room no longer reveals anything of the sort.

Critique of Bureaucratic Control To explain this changed reality of value creation, David Graeber has developed a strong thesis rooted in his own frustration that, even at the age of 50, he is still unable to ride in a flying car, even though, as a boy, he believed that this would certainly be possible by the year 2000. The reason, for Graeber, consists

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in the change from a poetic technology to a bureaucratic one. Ever since the 1970s, the resources that had been dedicated in the previous decade to things like space exploration with the goal of establishing a colony on Mars – i.e., to the transformation of the world according to a robust vision of the future – have been invested in disciplining work and improving social control (Graeber 2016: 120; *Organization). For Graeber, the fact that the lion’s share of public support and funding, such as that for robotics, has passed through the hands of the NSA makes it easier to understand why the world has witnessed rapid advances in drone technology but not, for instance, in mining operations. The “dark” explanation for this imbalance, Graeber speculates, may be that the USA wanted to secure a “total victory” over the USSR, which would have required not only the technological and military defeat of the external enemy but also the elimination of the “enemy within the gates,” i.e., putting an end to every possible critical social movement in the USA (ibid: 128). Even beyond this speculative dimension, Graeber’s anthropological finding is that the computerization of society may open up a multitude of possibilities (*Computer), though these have not led to the liberation of workers, but only to unbridled financial capitalism, flexible and precarious employment, and, of course, a massive expansion of surveillance (ibid: 129). Users may have constituted a potential revenue stream because they are able to always point to things, to order things, or to work on them, but they pay for it with the high price of their data (*Perfomativity).

Critique of Aestheticization Why they do so is aptly explained by Lewis Randolph’s concept of the ‘funopticon’: it is simply too much fun to be able to do everything online, even if it makes one completely transparent. Each new update, every new app, each new variant on Siri brings users closer to the best possible design of their valuable time and society a little bit closer to the reality of artificial intelligence predicted for at least the past sixty years. Thus, the present serves to demonstrate the potential of the future, and the future to legitimize the present: “The present already contains the future and the future explains the present” (Barbrook 2007: 8). This horizontal presence of contemporary algorithmic consumption (*Aesthetic Capitalism, *Consumption) can also be read as an effect of the aestheticization of social processes described in the original German subtitle of Reckwitz’s Die Erfindung der Kreativität: Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung (*Aestheticization). The creativity dispositif is the form of the medium of aestheticization, and “reorients the aesthetic towards the new while at the same time orienting the regime of the new towards the aesthetic” (Reckwitz 2017: 9). Aestheticization always means sensory activity and affectivity (*Affect Culture,

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*Color); from a “practice-oriented concept of the aesthetic,” these can be differentiated into “aesthetic episodes and aesthetic practices” (ibid: 12). Anyone who has ever tried to catch a glimpse of a concert stage through all the smartphones held in the air, or, when on a hike, needed to dodge the bikers armed with GoPros on the downhill trail, already has a pretty good idea of the way forms of aesthetics have been shaped and re-shaped by affective experience (of nature and of one’s own body), thrill-seeking and the desire for the new, and rapidly improving technology (in combination with social media as the publication organ for the self). Of particular interest in the present context are the following questions: If aesthetic freedom, following Friedrich Schiller’s conception, provides the bourgeois subject with (anticipated) enjoyment of political freedom, then in what ways would it change when aestheticization becomes ubiquitous and the pressure to always experience the new becomes an imperative? (In Reckwitz’s analysis, this is precisely what the creativity dispositif does; *Genealogy.) How can ‘self-purpose’ or an ‘end in itself’, the defining characteristic of aesthetic experience, be translated into the complex social dynamics of (self-)representation, production, and marketing without changing the concept of aesthetic experience itself (e.g., in terms of the power of the imagination and its social embedding)? One starting point for answering these questions at the intersection of aesthetics, society, and the politics of the future is certainly Jacques Rancière’s reflections on the ‘distribution of the sensible’ and the potentials that can result from a ‘change of perspective’ in the very concrete sense (which recalls Holert’s critical practices in the pictorial space). “The reference to the aesthetic [...] is intended to ward off the inherent dangers, in Rancière’s conception of politics, of stabilization, party formation, and policing; and, instead, to view aspects of contiguity, de-identification, and potentialization in terms of the emergence of new possibilities, to act on them, to speak of them, and to place them in the foreground” (Klammer 2010: 201). These new possibilities of being together, of negotiating among equals amount to nothing other than a form of ‘imagineering’ in the socially sustainable sense presented above. However, these processes of opening up understanding depend centrally on the practical conditions of the production of equality, and Rancière operates far too vaguely, lumping together aesthetic and political potentials in his double movement of “the emancipation of aesthetics – the aesthetics of emancipation” (ibid: 207210). Reading these phenomena with Reckwitz (whom Rancière does not cite), one would have to ask how the imperative to be creative not only informs the aesthetic by directing it toward the new, but also deforms it by turning the aesthetic into signs of novelty and distinction capable of being marketed and expressed in discourse (thus, no longer making the aesthetic an end in itself).

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“The Land of Greater Knowledge” The question of the collective forces of imagination can also be put in the following terms: Why haven’t the numerous creativity techniques developed since the 1950s, which have produced not only Walt Disney Imagineering but many other tools with far-ranging effects (e.g., brainstorming, *Creativity Techniques), also produced a corresponding number of social ‘eutopias’? A preliminary answer might be that these creativity techniques are intended for individuals and teams (*Co-Creation) working within the framework of relatively concrete applications, which would feed the knowledge gained from the creative process in a relatively narrowly fashion back in to its implementation from a technical point of view. Hence, this relatively narrow and concrete feedback loop would not work for a vision of another possibility of social coexistence, which would need to be more complex. Another answer, based on the argument above, would be that the creativity dispositif, as the concretization of *aesthetic capitalism, can only generate ideas that are shaped by the market, which is to say portioned out into products and innovations. In this respect, art (*Deaestheticization, *Artist, *Curating) could offer an interesting stimulus to these methods, thereby providing a path for advancing toward a (e)utopia of the twenty-first century – bearing in mind the (canonical) hierarchies, mentioned by Rancière, that affect the production of social equality with respect to affects, sensory impressions, and the reception of art. While Paul Klee is certainly a canonical painter of the twentieth century, his reflective text called “Journey to the Land of Greater Knowledge” provides a different kind of stimulus than toward the study of his paintings. Klee’s description of his work along with his presentation of a theory of imagination, published for the first time in the 1920 anthology Creative Confession, begins with the following words: “Let’s create a topographical map and take a little journey to the land of greater knowledge.” Klee’s text then describes walking through a landscape, creating it as both a personal impression and as a pictorial event: “Bypassing the dead point, we find the first mobile action (the line)” (Klee 1920). In this manner, Klee develops a textual movement that is the mirror image of the experience of a “real” landscape. In giving oneself over to the image, imaginatively and emotionally, one proceeds from symbols (i.e., textual signs) to concrete sensory images. Thus, the bodily and perceptual processes involved in walking through a real landscape are always already abstractions, which provide information about ‘space’ and ‘time’. Counterintuitively, Klee points out that his “topographical map” is not some other thing that would precede his action, but rather the path itself: Carrying out the travel plan is indistinguishable from the map; the viewer is really located on the imaginary line, is really in the imaginary landscape. Klee’s landscapes, which present imaginary places in a sensual manner, “oscillate [...] between two poles: between an active, mobile, immersive

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vision without any object, and a form of vision that wants to cling to the image, change it into a solid state. However, theory and energy can only be found in the first state, the one that results in action and not in the formation of objects” (Söffner 2018: 124). Klee’s approach to vision appears to avoid the imperative contained in many of the creativity techniques described above to turn things into objects, and could therefore be taken as a starting point for a collective update. ‘Imagineering 4.0’ would develop Disney’s credo, “If you can dream it, you can do it,” through Klee’s text and other art manifestos, going beyond the creativity dispositif, into a more complete, because more social, globally networked future. In Söffner’s words interpreting Klee, “A landscape is where you can hike. You are in it – it is not in front of you or only in your head” (ibid: 123). In my words, a future landscape is a world of movement and action: Its visualization must be moving and active.

References Barbrook, Richard (2007): Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village, London/Ann Arbor: Pluto Press. Foucault, Michel (1986): “Of Other Spaces,” translated by Jay Miskowiec. In: Diacritics 16/1, pp. 22-27. Graeber, David (2016): The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, London/New York: Melville House. Klammer, Markus (2010): “Jacques Rancière und die Universalität der Gleichheit.” In: Drehli Robnik/Thomas Hübel/Siegfried Mattl (eds.), Das StreitBild. Film, Geschichte und Politik bei Jacques Rancière, Vienna/Berlin: Turia+Kant, pp. 195-212. Klee, Paul (1920): “Schöpferische Konfession – Paul Klee.” In: Kasimir Edschmid (ed.), Tribüne der Kunst und der Zeit. Eine Schriftensammlung, Band XIII, Berlin: Erich Reiß Verlag, pp. 28-40. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Söffner, Jan (2018): “Landschaften.” In: Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy (ed.), Paul Klee – Landschaften, Kochel am See/Munich: Hirmer, pp. 119-125. Welzer, Harald (2018): “Wo geht’s nach Utopia?” In: 3Sat TV- & Kulturmagazin 2, pp. 7-9.

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If one understands musical improvisation – either in a solo or in the course of a performance – as playing something that is not fully predetermined, then this practice can be found in many of the world’s musical traditions and throughout the history of Western music: in Greek antiquity, medieval and Baroque music, flamenco, many Western folklore traditions, blues, rock, and jazz (Bailey 1993: 1-58). In these various traditions, improvisational and compositional elements go hand in hand, or, at least would not be strictly opposed, as was the case in twentieth-century western music, especially after the 1940s. In this period methods and theories of improvisation and ‘indeterminacy’ flourished and sometimes took on radical forms. “Free” improvisation constantly differentiates itself from fully prescribed compositional forms and scores as well as generally from any pattern of jazz, classical music, or the rigid seriality of the Darmstadt school. Predominantly black, the free jazz and free improvisation scene in the USA – e.g., Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Cecil Taylor, AACM, Anthony Braxton – shared their quest for musical and political freedom with European circles and groups: e.g., Franco Evangelisti (Nuova Consonanza), Cornelius Cardew (AMM), MEV, New Phonic Art, Instant Composers Pool, Music Improvisation Company, Karlheinz Stockhausen (Aus den Sieben Tagen). There are even compositions that require improvisation, from Earle Brown to Terry Riley, from Karlheinz Stockhausen through Bruno Maderna to Sylvano Bussotti. In free group improvisation, there is neither score nor composer nor conductor. Each can freely propose their own musical invention in the present (cf. Cardew 1971; *Co-Creation). This does not mean that one can perform anything arbitrarily. Most improvisational practices and poetics involve communal listening, a dialogical attitude (not for G. Scelsi), and a broad knowledge of musical material and compositional competence. To improvise thus requires serious preparation (cf. Evangelisti 2013; Bailey 1993: XII, 109 ff.) The purpose of this musical practice is to pay attention to the present and the content’s continuous transformation instead of the work as a whole, unfol-

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ding from start to finish according to plan. This presence is not to be confused with the instant-now [nun] of metaphysics (from Aristotle to Kant and Hegel): a point on a line that connects the past to the future. The present of improvisation looks neither into the future nor into the past. It lies in the immanence of a reality that is neither determined nor complete: in this reality (as in life), there are many traces and clues that one can follow in many different directions. There are therefore no external measures of temporality or external values in improvisation. A sound that could only be a detail in a composition’s overall strategy, can pave the whole path in improvisation. This is the constant wonder of improvisation in a time founded purely by a presence without expectations. This is not a chronometric concept, but an ethical attitude. Cornelius Cardew (freely) cites Wittgenstein’s proposition: “If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present [Gegenwart]” (Notebooks 1914-16, 8.7.16: quoted in Cardew 1971: 6). Musicians, freed from the weight of expectations, beyond their subjective, individual intentions, “become music.” Recording an improvisation can help the improvisers recognize partial aspects of what they played, but their performance thereby follows a different musical logic. Because it has become text, with a beginning and an end, it is no longer an improvisation and involves a separate phenomenon (cf. Cardew 1971; Bailey 1993: 103-104). Likewise recording threatens to codify improvisation and in turn to develop an authoritative model and rules to be followed, even the formation of a veritable cult of personality around the improviser – as has often occurred. John Cage, La Monte Young, Earle Brown, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros and many others invented, or rather practiced a kind of “experimental music,” which was characterized by guidelines for performance meant to have an “indeterminate” realization (cf. Nyman 2011: 9-11). The goal of this ‘principle of indeterminacy’ was to eliminate prejudices and expectations from listening as much as possible, and to draw attention to the sound. Cage’s efforts to create a perceptible space-time out of non-coordinated events correspond to his project of presenting the spirit’s emancipation and respecting all the chance, coincidence, and instability of life. Classical causal chains disappeared from the musical process while the present in its mutability became the focus of attention. At the same time, various means became available beyond (Cage’s understanding of) chance: open scores (Brown), repetitions (Young), “deep listening” (Oliveros), the unforeseeable interaction of sound modules (Riley), and others. In these musical practices, indeterminacy partially converged with free improvisation, despite Cage’s critical opposition to improvisation, seeing in it yet another afterlife of the expressive artistic personality and still too much intentionality. Free improvisation and the principle of indeterminacy, which Cage and other experimental musicians practiced, had a common feature: the

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emancipation of singularity, i.e., the emancipation of the facticity of life, in its groundlessness and unpredictability (*Dispositif, *Genealogy). The singularity of existence is not to be confused with the individual subjectivity of modern philosophy, politics, and economics.

Ethical and Political Implications Indeterminacy and the practice of free improvisation were alternatives to a model of musical order in which the division of labor between composers, performing artists, and audience had become increasingly rigid, not least through “structuralism,” synonymous with the work’s foreclosed authorship. That music is only the performance of a text conceived by others – the author – would be comparable to a linguistic situation in which one may say only what others have already prescribed. There is even a model for such a text in Western culture: Holy Scripture, administered by the church. By contrast, the purpose of free improvisation was to express one’s own voice, whereas experimental practice called the concept of authorship in question and rejected the audience’s reduction to passive listening. It did not involve denying defined role assignments or special qualifications but emphasized that roles and qualifications should remain porous and mobile. The differences were slight in nature. In some cases, the personal aspect predominated, others foregrounded the ethnic or social aspect, as in the AfricanAmerican tradition, while social elements prevailed in the communal project of MEV (cf. Nyman 2011: 128). Both practices exhibited – in the medium of music – political possibilities against the background of beat culture, the hippies, as well as the psychedelic, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and “anti-disciplinary” (Deleuze/Guattari) counterculture that united a common antiauthoritarian attitude, and later influenced the movement of ’68 and the 70s.

E xecutives and Psychologists interested in the “Creativity” of Improvisation The transformation that took place at the end of the 1970s, in which the Western economy and society transitioned from a disciplinary-Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of production, shifted the attention of organizational theorists, such as management theorists and psychologists, to the “creative” aspects of practice, especially in the arts (*Organization). Musical improvisation was now presented as a new art of business, and is considered today as a model for creative and strategic intuition in management (e.g., Lewis/Piekut 2016, vol. 1: 385-395). On this occasion, the specific role of investigating the art of improvisation fell to cognitive psychologists, viz., determining how musicians succeed at playing with rules without being thereby limited, or how they arrive upon new

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rules. The most popular test cases were those in which the movements of soloists were taken as extractable form variables that one paired with simple and defined rules, such as the chord cycle in swing and bebop (Charlie Parker considered as the prime example) as well as in hard bop. Ultimately this problem was translated into computable algorithms (e.g., by the cognitive psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird). From this idea, computer programs intended to simulate improvisation and interact with musicians in person were developed (see, for example, the IRCAM program developed in Paris) (*Computer). This reduction to rules and exceptions reveals a misguided view of what improvisation is. Of course, it requires means and conventions, but what it is cannot be calculated with external rules: improvisation remains an immanent experience of the present.

The Avant-garde and the “New” This mistake can also be attributed to a certain ambivalence concerning improvisational practice within the contemporary Western avant-garde (*Deaestheticization). The “new” is a key term of modernity adopted by most avant-gardes, as Andreas Reckwitz has again shown in detail in The Invention of Creativity (Reckwitz 2017: Chapter 1). The task of anticipating and constructing the future also applies to music. Composers should be revolutionaries (according to Wagner) or at least progressive (according to Adorno). Futurism (e.g., the manifesto L’improvvisazione musicale) and Surrealism ascribed to improvisation a higher creativity than the composed work. Many improvisers of “creative music” of the 1960s and 70s appear to think so too. This idea is convincing if “creativity” is interpreted as free play in the present (as, e.g., in D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality). But if creativity is understood as *innovation, then the present of improvisation risks being consumed by the future and what, in the dominant view of modern composition, is considered “new.” And the new ages quickly. In fact, some ambivalence inhered in some improvisational practices of the avant-garde in the 1960s and early 70s (differently from experimental music: cf. Nyman 2011: 26-30). Many prejudices were deconstructed by an anti-repetition compulsion and a programmatic challenge to every cliché, which was in constant search of new languages, culminating in D. Bailey’s search for the non-idiomatic (cf. Bailey 1993: XI ff.). But, over the course of time, these also gave rise to a new conformity. If originality consists in the development of new forms and languages or playing newly and differently, whether through pitch, tempo, dynamics, timbre, accentuation, or other factors (the so-called “sound parameters”: an analytic concept of the compositional process), then it can also give rise to new stereotypes whose language is adopted by subsequent improvisers. The music recording industry has transformed the most “original” and

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“ingenious” improvisations of “creative music” into interesting and sometimes wonderful sound texts (i.e., compositions), which have since spawned infinitely many imitations (if not copies) in relevant schools and autodidactic contexts.

A Shift in Society and in the Use of Music In the meantime, disciplinary society transformed into a control society. The economy was deregulated, and, at the same time, the creativity imperative, as aptly described by Reckwitz, entered into economic production processes. Since then much of the improvised sound material produced by “creative music” has been re-used for soundtracks, background music, and generally for consumption in the form of music to be played back over and over again (whether as record, CD, or stream). This consumption is no longer actually “popular.” The expression “popular music” was apt up to the end of the 1980s, when recorded music provided another interface for collective-popular social uses, such as dancing or festivals (*Pop). Musical enjoyment today corresponds more to the shift in the concept and practice of what is considered individual ‘experience’: it is a private moment of emancipation, emotion, and excitement – at the bar, while running or swimming, in traffic, and other situations. But that does not preclude those who practice music, improvisation, and indeterminacy with a certain ethic (cf. Cardew 1971) from using new media to experience life musically.

From Compulsor y “Creativity” to Emancipation The compulsion to be creative functions as the secularization of a religion based on the idea of original sin (*Guilt). Its essential feature is that life must be justified or, rather, saved through the negation of its own natural condition and its continued self-renewal. The compulsive efforts of a certain (not exclusively musical) avant-garde to create the new and to differentiate it from what would be merely pleasant or “beautiful,” can be attributed to the genealogy of a hidden yet highly efficacious theology. To sing or dance simply for pleasure or joy would be banal, even “regressive” (such is Adorno’s verdict). Not only the quickness but also the slowness, not only the need to change and to forget, but also to repeat: all of this is ‘original’ because it originates in life. One improvises to sing of this life in view of the freedom granted precisely not to adhere to what already has been sung, if one does not want to, or, in view of the freedom to do so, to imitate, to repeat what has already been done, if such is one’s desire. In life, too, much is repeated, and yet repetition repeats itself differently everyday: Why should it not be so in music? When improvising together, or experiencing the fundamental indeterminacy of improvisation, one repeats indeed, but one never repeats the same. So, too, is it in life.

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References Bailey, Derek (1993): Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, New York: Da Capo Press. Cardew, Cornelius (1971): “Towards an Ethic of Improvisation.” In: Treatise Handbook, London: Edition Peters, pp. xvii-xx. Evangelisti, Franco (2013): Musik Konzepte 43-44, Hofheim am Taunus: Wolke. Lewis, George/Piekut, Benjamin (2016): The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, 2 volumes, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nyman, Michael (2011): Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond [1974], Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

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In an age of aesthetic economy, the rationalist paradigm of the *organization is substituted with that of a sensuous organism (Reckwitz 2017), its values residing more in signs and symbols than in functions and technical knowledge. In this context, the perceived need to search for a state of permanent innovation leads creativity to become a wish and imperative, highlighting an area of closer interaction between business and art. Following Reckwitz, creativity has two dimensions: “First, it refers to the potential and the act of producing something dynamically new. […] This production of novelty is thought of not as an act occurring once only, but rather as something that happens again and again over a longer period of time. Second, 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.” (2017: 2)

This definition emphasizes the interplay between creativity and innovation, referring to the artistic as the field where innovation is realized at its highest degree, exceeding the complexity of technical innovation. Even though the interplay between creativity and innovation has been widely analyzed and the process of artistic creation is generally recognized as a privileged field of experimentation, the very nature of the process through which creativity becomes innovation remains ambiguous (*Artist).

Competence-based vs. Market-based Perspectives Introduced in the economic sense as a trigger of change, innovation was traditionally seen as a source of invention and “creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1934), a wave of usually technologically driven change that weakens the position of incumbents while creating opportunities for newcomers. From the beginning, then, the concept of innovation identified a combination of creation

Innovation

and destruction as opposite and complementary processes, connected implicitly with the idea of creativity as originating from technical inventions. Looking at innovation from today’s relevant perspectives in the economic field (Bergek et al. 2013) – competence-based and market-based – offers a different definition of the classical, binomial distinction between radical, potentially disruptive projects and incremental, accumulating ones. From a competence-based perspective, disruption begins when technological change destroys the knowledge base of consolidated companies that are using previous technologies to control the market (*Computer). Thus, incumbents lose their leading role, while newcomers exploit emerging knowledge to grow their position. The subsequent classification of modular and architectural innovations further reinforces this perspective. In the mid-1990s, the consolidation of a strong technical perspective supported the decomposition of the understanding of innovation into its conceptual or conceived part(s) and its physical or engineering part(s). As a result, modular and architectural innovations (Henderson/Clark 1990) are defined in terms of changes either affecting single, separate elements of a product (hence modular approach) or changing the relationship between two or more of its elements (hence architectural approach). This revised classification emphasizes the technical nature of innovation, explaining its managerial organization as a consequence of choices made in terms of the product’s conceptual architecture (*Product). The competence-based perspective thus coheres with a scientific approach to management, recognizing the supremacy of technical knowledge over the organizational and human dimensions of the process of innovation. From a market-based perspective, the degrees of radicalness and disruption caused by technological change are defined in terms of the performance attributes valued by the market. Disruptive innovations are defined as those able to change market preferences, establishing and catering to a new segment of users and dismantling the position of previous market leaders. As a consequence, newcomers generally drive the process of disruption by entering the market from below, eroding the position of incumbents thanks to the satisfaction of low-margin market segments that typically had been unaddressed. Starting from these initial offerings, newcomers will reinforce their efforts by introducing new levels of performance to develop market segments with higher margins, definitively eroding the position of incumbents. This market-based framework is completed by identifying innovation strategies that supposedly provide for ongoing change. Though the competence- and market-based perspectives focus on different dimensions – one can be said to be internally driven, the other externally driven – they both view innovation as a technical process managed by a group of

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professionals in the organization, thus adhering to and confirming the “management-oriented strand of innovation” (Reckwitz 2017: 99). The impact of innovation here depends on the capability to introduce discontinuity in a state of equilibrium, creating more or less radical changes that might result in a Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’. Quite interestingly, radical, even disruptive innovations are defined not in terms of creativity but as competence- or market-destroying weapons. Creativity thus remains in the background, analyzed initially as an individual process embodied by the entrepreneur, who is recognized as the agent of creative change, “the creator of unpredictable novelty” (Reckwitz 2017: 96). Even when Amabile (1988) defines creativity as a process that starts with a creative actor and ends with a result that must be new and valuable, the concept remains ambiguous in many respects. Who are the creative agents involved at various stages in the process? How is the result of the process evaluated as a novel and useful product? (*Valorization) Is it just a question of market success?

Innovation and Creativity in Artistic Creation The most recent literature on managing innovation has paid much more attention to the question of creativity, focusing on new actors, such as designers and creative professionals, and progressively widening the list of who is considered to ‘be creative’ (*Co-Creation). As Reckwitz (2017) underlined, everybody is now urged to act creatively, generating novel and useful ideas and potentially developing products or services, or even startups. In this context, and on first sight strangely enough, the world of art becomes an ideal field of investigation for management scholars. Creative urgency and the passionate dedication to art for art’s sake appear to be coherent with the idea of the artist as a kind of creative hero producing radical innovations (*Improvisation). But, once again, the risk is that a rhetoric is chosen that obscures a considerably more complex substance. The emergence and consolidation of radical innovations in artistic history resulted from an interplay of individual and collective choices, with creative processes embedded in social and cultural contexts characterized by rules, aims, and institutional roles. The history of artistic innovations thus offers a complex and meaningful setting to analyze and interpret the strategy of those actors – the artists and the artistic system – to promote what could be considered radical innovations and enable high levels of creativity. A good example is represented by the emergence of Cubism as a radical innovation in the artistic language of the twentieth century (*Deaestheticization). This innovation resulted from the interplay of three different dimensions (Sgourev 2013): individual creativity of individual artists, such as Picasso and Braque, who led the movement; the collective action of all those professionals

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involved at various levels in the artistic process of producing, distributing, and promoting the paintings; and social changes in the context of painting in Paris. The co-evolution of these three levels enabled the process of radical innovation, supporting a trajectory of artistically radical and commercially successful change. More specifically, two dynamics emerging from the study of Cubism can add useful insights to the relationship between creativity and innovation. The first dynamic relates to the level of ambiguity and fragmentation that characterized painting in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. These dimensions favored the artistic independence and experimental approach of Picasso and Braque, which facilitated the emergence of a radically new language. These two artists benefited from the proliferation of aesthetic positions, nurtured by a high level of “protected” isolation where their work could follow new ideas and personal purposes without being influenced by the need to stay in the market. Their protection took the form of a guarantee: a number of dealers bought their paintings in advance. Thus, “[a]s the costs of experimentation were suddenly reduced and dealers began to assume the risk of failure, the preconditions were created for the pursuit of art that was not simply different, but radically so” (Sgourev 2013: 1612; *Museum). The second dynamic relates to the relationship between the management of collective processes of innovation and the resistance these encounter from established and conservative actors. In traditional contexts of technological innovation, radical projects discard existing positions and meet resistance from an establishment (incumbents and their networks). In the case of Cubism, the absence of clear guidelines from the most prominent artists (Picasso and Braque, who preferred to work in isolation and even at a certain distance from Paris) gave more space to other artists to experiment, adapt, and combine convergence and divergence with greater freedom. As a result, the growing number of artists recognizing themselves in the new movement represented a difficult, moving target to identify or resist (*Creative Crowd). The lack of strong opposition thus increased in those artists the possibility to experiment with processes of divergence, which are traditionally involved when creativity and radical innovation are enacted. The story of Cubism offers some interesting insights on the relationship between creativity and innovation, confirming that the radicalness of the innovative process depends on the interplay between and dynamic co-evolution of individual, collective, and socio-cultural dimensions. In this way, ambiguity, fragmentation, diversity, and loosely coupled coordination increase the possibility of reaching high levels of innovation while reducing the social control of incumbents. At the same time, innovation – whether radical and disruptive or incremental and sustaining – has a double aim to be both novel and useful (and consequently to gain success in the market). Where one of these aims is missing, creativity remains merely rhetorical. This confirms the model of *aesthe-

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tic capitalism, in which the artist is poised to become the most meaningful representative of a new generation of super consultants for the creative company.

References Amabile, Teresa M. (1988): “A model of creativity and innovation in organizations.” In: Barry M. Staw/Larry L. Cummings (eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Bergek, Anna/Berggren, Christian/Magnusson, Thomas/Hobday, Michael (2013): “Technological discontinuities and the challenge for incumbent firms: Destruction, disruption or creative accumulation?” In: Research Policy 42, pp. 1210-1224. Henderson, Rebecca/Clark, Kim B. (1990): “Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms.” In: Administrative Science Quarterly 35, pp. 9-30. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1934): The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest and the Business Cycle, 7th printing, 1961, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sgourev, Stoyan V. (2013): “How Paris Gave Rise to Cubism (and Picasso): Ambiguity and Fragmentation in Radical Innovation.” In: Organization Science 24/6, pp. 1601-1617.

Museum Wolfgang Ullrich

Andreas Reckwitz defines the present as an epoch under the control of a “creativity dispositif” (2017: 9) whose “formational phase, a time of incubation” was in “the period from around 1900 to the 1960s” (ibid: 31). In fact, there is ample evidence for this claim. At the start of the incubation period for the creativity dispositif, there is Leo Tolstoy’s programmatic prediction, pregnant with Christian Socialist ideology, that in the future “[artistic activity] will become accessible to every simple person” (1995: 151). Formulated in his treatise “What is art?”, Tolstoy’s prediction and his anti-elite understanding of art remained largely inconsequential at the time. At the end of the incubation period for the creativity dispositif, however, another Christian Socialist vision would become rapidly popular in the form of Joseph Beuys’ dictum, “Everyone is an artist” (*Capital, *Artist). Within the course of a generation, the image of mankind propagated by Beuys was accepted without nearly any resistance. Reckwitz immediately makes up the balance with the first sentence of his book: “If there is a desire in contemporary society that defies comprehension, it is the desire not to be creative” (2017: 1, emphasis in the original). The phrase “everyone is an artist” could serve as the motto for the creativity dispositif whose new ideals are democratization and the empowerment of the individual. These new ideals are so successful because they suit the growing economization of nearly every area of contemporary life: being creative promises not only being able to have an authentic and unalienated experience, even as an individual; it also means having a chance of success in a competitive society oriented toward performance, since the creative type is supposedly faster, more original, and more surprising than others. Ever since creativity has become a general requirement, people have increasingly gone on the search for its sources of inspiration. Since many are not able to discover a sufficient amount of the postulated creative potential in themselves, they increasingly rely on finding creativity in other sources. They fear that they do not have enough ideas, that they are not flexible enough, spontaneous

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enough, or cool enough, that they come across as boring and unimaginative in the competition with others. For those who have this experience of being uncreative, it can be important and reassuring to imagine creativity as a free-floating resource, which they would be able to acquire and somehow incorporate (*Coaching, *Creativity Techniques, *Naturalization). This also means that creativity is a consumer product. Whoever does not have enough of it will look for any possible opportunity to procure the appropriate stimulants and to create the right atmospheres. In recent decades, it is apparent that consumer culture has even become one of the most intensive cultures of inspiration in history (*Consumption). Today, entire sectors of industry offer commodified inspiration to put people in a creative mood. However, no one is thought more capable of producing and reallocating creativity than the *artist. Many people who feel put under pressure by the imperative to be creative, see the artist as an authority figure who is in control of ‘creative resources’ and capable of redistributing them. For this reason, the creativity dispositif also has significant consequences for art museums and exhibition spaces, which are currently undergoing the most striking change of function in their more than two-hundred-year-long history. This change consists in the fact that visitors no longer attend only because they admire the creations of others – the masterpieces – but because they also want to have the experience of being creative themselves. What Reckwitz describes in general terms for the field of art happens most clearly in the museum: “We know that in the bourgeois field of art an extreme asymmetry reigned initially between the artistic genius and the receptive audience. However, in the long run, the distinction between the two proves to be unstable” (2017: 24). At the same time, this change of function also means a valorization of the art museum, which is no longer suspected of being a mere luxury establishment for a small clientele consisting of the educated middle-class. Instead, the museum takes over the almost existential function of providing the greatest possible amount of inspiration to the greatest possible number of visitors. At the very least, the museum is supposed to relieve people from the common anxiety that they are themselves uncreative. What might be described as the museum’s “palliative” function is complemented and surpassed by its “stimulant” function. To reduce both of these functions to one clear concept, which would also emphasize their difference to the conventional conception of museums, we might call the new museum the ‘creativity agency’. The new task of museums lurks behind the concept traditionally known as “art education.” While the museum may be responsible for imparting knowledge and furthering visitors’ understanding of artists and works, it stands primarily in the service of the public, which is supposed to receive inspiration from specially-treated works and thus have the experience of being creative, of experimenting and engaging with creativity. Art education is thus an in-

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stitutionalized service of providing a pre-fabricated muse – museum services as muse services. It is directed above all at those who have little training in getting into a creative mood – that is, those for whom being in the proximity of art alone would not suffice. Art teachers like to describe their work as that of a “midwife,” which should motivate visitors “to become active designers and content creators” (Meyer-Eggenschwiler 2008: 79). This motif appeared in the earliest texts on art education, even in the incubation period of the creativity dispositif. When the American businessman Albert Barnes developed weekly courses for his employees using a large art collection specially curated for them, he was working with constellations in which the proximity among completely different artefacts would create inspiring associations. According to Violette de Mazia, one of his long-standing colleagues, who was responsible for the course schedule, “the student’s curiosity is usually aroused by the unorthodox grouping throughout the gallery of apparently disparate paintings and other works of art” (1978: 140). Furthermore, looking for similarities among different artefacts would provide the student with “a stimulus to creative work of his own” (ibid). By motivating museum visitors to become more sensitive, to develop their own ideas, and to express their own experiences in more sophisticated terms, art education takes over the tasks of society and politics. At the same time, however, the museum is distancing itself from its original purpose of providing a space where artworks, once detached from economic and instrumentalizing factors, could be perceived as something superior, thereby tapping into their contents. If the traditional curator stood in the service of artists and works and perceived the public to be a disturbance, the contemporary art educator is more of an advocate for the public (*Curating). Systematically, art educators conduct the business of turning visitors into active creators, thereby ennobling them. In order to gain sufficient self-confidence, the visitors need encouragement: museum initiatives that affirm their own creativity. At the initiative of art educators, for instance, it has become customary to integrate artefacts that arose in workshops into exhibitions for other visitors – often to the point that these objects are presented in the same display, so that there is no hierarchy among the contributing ‘artists’. More than ever, social media are being used to give visitors a more active role and to conceive of appropriation as a creative reaction to artworks. For instance, museums call on visitors to follow hashtags, and to use their smartphones to take photographs of themselves in front of artworks so that it looks like the protagonists of the images were themselves taking a selfie. For museums, it can be useful that nearly all visitors have smartphones, which not only provides them with a camera, but also connects them to social media for the duration of their visit. In other words, visitors do not pass through the rooms on their own, but rather remain in constant contact with friends, followers, and communities. For this

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reason alone, visitors are more active than ever before, in different and more diverse ways, though they are also all the more motivated to demonstrate their creativity (*Performativity). Accordingly, museums are pleased to receive proposals for all the things that could potentially be made or done there. The contemporary situation is reminiscent of early museums where some visitors would draw and paint actively as part of their training in artistic practice. Originally, these copyists and art students were one of the main reasons for establishing museums. The idea was that great art would have the most decisive effect on the most gifted members of generations to come. At the time, there was already an alleged power of inspiration, though only for a small minority. Today, by contrast, it has become routine for museum visitors to imagine themselves as fundamentally active and creative. The dominant idea today is that the positive forces of art can only possibly have an effect on an active, creative viewer, and not on a passive recipient. Already in 2009, the artist Hito Steyerl described the contemporary museum as a factory: as a place of production, where “even spectators are transformed into workers” (Steyerl 2009). In 2015, the art critic Hanno Rauterberg summarized the contemporary museum situation as follows: “If it was long important for museums to be spaces of seclusion and singularity, they have lately been doing a lot to open up their own holdings to the digital sphere with Twitter partys or Instawalks. At one time, photography was strictly prohibited; now, viewers are encouraged in many places to promote themselves, the art, and the museum on social media with so-called ‘art selfies’. In a medium range of time, what a collection shows will no longer be the only matter of importance. What there is to see beyond the museum – the images circulating on the Net – will be just as important. In that case, however, the museum will no longer be a viewing space; it will become a space of production.” (Rauterberg 2015)

The changing role of the visitor addressed here, which is also changing the demands on museums, would not be possible without art education. As museums are transformed into creativity agencies, art education can be expected to acquire a place at another site of institutional labor. If curators were long considered an onerous accessory and educators were usually subordinate to exhibitions – indeed, only becoming active once the exhibition was already up  – educators are increasingly involved earlier in the exhibition process and can thus also exert an influence on their staging and choice of topics. Hence, the changing function of museums is manifest more now than ever before, and testifies to the paradigm shift of the creativity dispositif. Were these changes totally complete, they would signal a somewhat alarming development in their one-sidedness. Instead, we should recognize that both the old museum paradigm, which centered on the artist and the work, and the new paradigm,

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which assigns the key role to the public, are legitimate. In one case, public funding is justifiable because it is a matter of conserving human artefacts, which have been identified as singular, and making available those artefacts with an attested power to create meaning and to shape identity. In the other case, public funding is warranted because museums support people from different milieus in having the experience of being active and successful, which, in turn, can strengthen existing social forces. Since both paradigms formulate important tasks, it is not appropriate to play them off against each other or to claim a complete paradigm shift. Instead, the future of art museums might consist in a division of labor, following from the insight that the evolution of this institution has arrived at a point where two branches are separating from each other and developing further on their own. In one sense, a museum is a space for keeping alive and sharpening historical consciousness as well as caring for and processing collections. In another sense, it is a space that understands itself as an institution with a primarily sociopolitical mandate, conceiving of art as a starting point and an occasion for initiating projects, creating communities, developing creative skills, and providing an antithesis to places where people feel stressed or burdened. Of course, this kind of binary division is a construct. Still, it still seems plausible that the museum of the future will not necessarily deal with everything. Instead, there will be a variety of subspecies of museums, which arise over the course of the emergence of this type of institution. Why should the same museum conduct innovative provenance research and take care of social crises? Why should the same house contain restoration technologies and creative workshops? Or, to put it another way, what other institution, apart from the museum, would be expected of fulfilling such a broad spectrum of tasks, stretching from historical research to contemporary inclusivity? For more than two centuries, the museum has been amassing a large collection, not only of exhibits but also of expected tasks and public demands, and now that everything is bursting at the seams, there will need to be a transitional phase involving the division of labor. The creativity dispositif provides the strongest argument for this change.

References De Mazia, Violetta (1978): “An Experiment in Educational Method at the Barnes Foundation” [1942]. In: John Dewey et al. (eds), Art and Education: A Collection of Essays [1954], Merion, PA: Barnes Foundation Press. Meyer-Eggenschwiler, Yvonne (2008): Kunst erleben durch Kunstvermittlung. Projekte und Methoden zum Thema Kunstvermittlung und Museumspädagogik, Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag.

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Rauterberg, Hanno (2015): “Unser drittes Auge.” In: Die Zeit 46, 2015. Available at: http://www.zeit.de/2015/46/fotografie-smartphone-kunst-selfiesmuseen/komplettansicht [accessed August 15, 2018]. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Steyerl, Hito (2009): “Is a Museum a Factory?” In: e-flux 7, June 2009. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/07/61390/is-a-museum-a-factory [accessed April 30, 2018]. Tolstoy, Leo (1995): What is Art? [1898], translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York: Penguin.

Naturalization Emmanuel Alloa

By and large, naturalization describes a process which consists in making something natural that was not originally natural in and of itself. In other words, naturalness is not innate, but rather has to be acquired. One of the oldest formulations of this thought can be found in Michel de Montaigne’s writings. Natural scientists, Montaigne explains, “artificialize nature” (2010: 85; artialisent la nature); conversely, the challenge for the writer is to “naturalize art” (ibid: 84; naturaliser l’art). The semantics of the ‘creativity dispositif’ suggest that creativity is less a matter of an inimitable “natural gift of genius” (Immanuel Kant) than a complex phenomenon that cannot be detached from its embeddedness within a specific social and normative setting. Against a long tradition of the aesthetics of genius, the creativity dispositif denies the spontaneity of creative work: Creativity is not a given, but rather always already represents the result of normative pressure. Andreas Reckwitz’s recourse to Michel Foucault’s concept of dispositif refers to these kinds of patterns of the formation of creativity, and also to a very particular historical constellation, which Reckwitz intends to be understood in connection to the creativity dispositif. Dispositifs are specific arrangements of what is visible and what is sayable, which inform what can be perceived and what can be done (*Dispositif ). In addition, however, there is also a constraint on subjectivity, which channels and organizes the expected ways of thinking and acting; a dispositif ‘disposes’ subjects toward what to do. But dispositifs, in turn, are themselves symptoms of particular historical configurations, to which they represent an answer. “By dispositif,” Foucault explained in an interview, “I mean a sort of, let’s say, formation, which, at a given historical moment, had the major function of responding to a pressing demand” (1994: 299). In this respect, dispositifs are the conveyer belts from psychogenesis to sociogenesis, since they bundle together forces and channel them in a particular direction on the level of both the individual subject and that of society. Whenever creativity is regulated, whether for individuals or for organizations, the question arises of how it can be cultivated (*Organization). This

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paradox can be seen in the very rhetoric of “creativity as a new norm”: While norms usually have the characteristics of authoritative universals, creativity is classically defined in terms of deviation from some standard. If deviation from the norm itself becomes the norm, there is a new degree of meta-complexity: The creation and reception of the new becomes the object of simulations, planning, and forecasts. The dominant expectations in the creativity dispositif are those of a second order, which privilege the element of surprise. As a matter of fact, deviation from the norm applies not only to the consumer world but also to other individuals (*Consumption). If eccentricity combines with efficiency, then differentiation becomes the paradoxical new imperative. Differentiating oneself, setting oneself apart, standing out from the crowd – these distinction mechanisms are no longer reserved for a sociocultural elite, but rather intervene in every sector of society (*Creative Crowd). This process is reflected in the march of a new economy, which stands under the sign of the “mass original” (Jörg Metelmann): unique items that are mass-produced for the “conforming nonconformist” to stand out from the rest. The situation presents the subject with the alternatives, “Be distinct, or extinct!” – as Tom Peters, one of the central names in the discourse of self-marketing, put it in his Brand You Survival Kit (qtd. in Bröckling 2015: 172). Admittedly, the problem is easier to identify than to solve. In spite of the meteoric success of self-help literature, workshops on *creativity techniques, and innovation coaching (*Coaching), there are limits on the extent to which ingenuity can be learned. To date, there is no universal recipe for creativity. Planned creativity is a questionable concoction, as we know from all the attempts of the avant-gardes to make something like programmatic – and hence ultimately programmed – art. Hence, the thesis of the normalization of creativity is ambivalent, since satisfying the burden of proof required to demonstrate creativity’s new power to create norms would require departing from the normalization of creativity. Creativity is hardly trivial, and will always remain anything but self-evident. It is only ever possible to determine which ideas, products, or behaviors count as “creative” in retrospect. The complaint, “Anybody could do that!” which many contemporary artworks are forced to hear from their viewers, merely confirms that real innovation always consists in the realization of possibilities that have been overlooked but in the end remain open to everyone (*Museum). Only afterwards does it become apparent what should have been known the entire time. The retrospective logic at work in the accreditation of the new also makes clear why there are limits to creativity techniques from the start. In the history of science, it is well known that the greatest inventions have been made accidentally: A researcher happens to stumble on some alternative path (also referred to as ‘serendipity’, i.e., the happy accidents that only come when you are not looking for them).

Naturalization

Serendipity is a neglected aspect of the discourse of creativity. Beyond the conception of creativity as the spontaneous performance of an individual’s will and that of creativity as a normative target, we need to think about the acquisition of creativity by rote. Naturalization plays an essential role in this process, since something only counts as ‘creative’ insofar as it happens at least partly in passing, randomly. In addition, the routinization of creativity represents a decisive solution to the problem of how the potential to be creative can be perpetuated and maintained in the long run. To come to the point: as an internalized property, creativity is supposed to become one’s ‘second nature’. Let’s look at the argument step by step. At first glance, the notion of ‘creativity by rote’ seems contradictory, since creativity is commonly associated with the ability to get out of the same old groove and stop being stuck in the same rut. In this respect, ‘habitual creativity’ must sound like a contradiction in terms. Explorative behavior, the ability to change one’s mind, and a talent for improvisation – characteristics associated with creativity do not really fit within the sphere of habit (*Improvisation). And yet any creative action faces the challenge of maintaining its effects in the long run. Again, not every deviation from the norm can necessarily claim for itself the power of the new. Absolute deviation can even turn out to be the consummate form of following the rules, as every dialectician is well aware. In other terms, exceptionality alone does not guarantee a subversive potential. On the contrary, the only deviations that can aspire to the “creative” seal of approval are those recognized to be innovative after the fact. In general, the economy of creativity needs novelty as a selling factor, but faces the problem that novelty is hardly ever recognized right away (*Valorization). In short, it is difficult to advertise, and even more so to announce novelty. What’s more, in order for a creative act to be converted into economic or symbolic capital (*Capital), it is not only necessary for it to be identified as such, but also for it to remain identifiable in the long run. For long-term security, creativity needs to be woven into some habitual experiential context, in which the recognition of creativity also contains the danger of its trivialization. (For example, good *design is the kind that is adopted by all the competitors and no longer constitutes a unique selling point. In this sense, the best inventions are those that eventually seem completely natural.) What applies to the consumer world applies (*Consumption), with some qualifications, to its subjects. Innovations need to establish themselves, and experiences need to settle down. ‘Sedimentation’ (to use Edmund Husserl’s concept) applies similarly to products and to actions, which is also the reason why the classical dichotomy between innovation and automatism does not go nearly far enough. Traditionally, we proceed from an assumption of responsibility based on the division of labor: creativity, on the one hand, as *play, a “free” activity, intentional unintentionality; automatization, on the other hand, of all the processes that take place in the background and no longer need to be kept

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specifically in mind. (Incidentally, there are good reasons why we do not pay more attention to the mechanics of habit, as Elias Canetti once wrote: “Anyone who would take note of their own habits would no longer know who they are.”) The thought of a necessary division between unconscious processes and conscious creation already informed fin-de-siècle psychology, including the work of William James: “There would be no chance of learning a new fact or mastering a new action, were it not that the automatic action of habit takes care of all old and familiar experiences, and thus leaves conscious and purposive actions free” (1967: 103). As much as James emphasizes the contrast between automatic habit and exploratory research, he also indicates the tight connection between them. If creativity should not be taken to represent a ‘black box’ in the depth of a beautiful soul, if the creative act should not be taken to mean creatio ex nihilo, then there needs to be more to say about the moments immediately preceding and following a surge of creativity. In other words, explaining the emergence of the new requires a theory of the habitual. The tradition of pragmatism, following James, called particular attention to the need for a theory of the habitual. For John Dewey, creativity usually manifests itself in habit rather than against it. In most cases, creativity is less a matter of a different practice and more of a habitual practice carried out differently, in a new way. This situation confronts the subject with the new challenges of having to invent answers for questions one didn’t know one even had. This is true for completely unknown contexts and for everyday situations: One might be capable of doing certain things (practicing a certain sport, a given instrument) but acting out this capacity requires adapting to circumstances that will be each time different (running in a new environment, playing on someone else’s instrument, etc.); in this respect, there is always a certain degree of potential creativity in every habit. Hence, Dewey suggests distinguishing between rote habit and intelligent habit: “All habit involves mechanization […] But mechanization is not of necessity all there is to habit” (1982: 50). In Dewey’s example, brilliant violinists hardly reinvent their style on stage every night, but their artistry is not limited to the virtuosic mastery of the instrument. On the one hand, musicians have embodied know-how at their disposal, and can call it up blind; on the other hand, their interpretations of a Bach violin concerto can be reevaluated by the public as highly expressive or even radically novel. These two forms of performance practice are interconnected, which is why Dewey can come to the conclusion that “True spontaneity is henceforth not a birth-right but the last term, the consummated conquest, of an art” (ibid: 352). In other words, spontaneity is the result of a habit, which has been separated off and made autonomous, and not the other way around. In this respect, the project of naturalization, which pragmatism wrote on its banners, can be read in two completely different ways: as a return to an anti-representational understanding of reason (cf. Dewey’s idea of the “naturalization of intelligence”); on the

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other hand, as an incorporation of involuntary reflexes. The open-ended and unbiased relationship between skillful doing and critical pausing must itself become ‘second nature’, a second-order habit, which is continuously optimized through perpetual self-correction and critical reference back to one’s own actions. In this respect, there are further connections between the naturalization of creativity and second-order cybernetics – particularly, the notion of a system that could regulate itself using feedback loops but still remain fundamentally open (*Computer). There is good reason why natural organisms provide the model for successful self-control in cybernetics: Unlike machines, biological systems can actually produce innovative system changes, since they functionalize the difference between self and environment in a completely different manner, and they continuously re-define themselves in the sense of autopoietic *self-generation. Mindlessly following the rules is replaced by a variable, dynamic behavior characterized by contingency, recursion, and emergence. The evolutionary process ensures the successful development of innovative traits among the entire species and their maintenance for perpetuity. In any case, ever since the 1960s, biological models have had an increasing influence on innovation research (*Innovation), which is equally apparent in what is known as “psychocybernetics” (cf. Maxwell Waltz’s bestseller) and in organizational theory (*Organization). During the postwar period, the paradigm of a hierarchical structure of work was replaced by an organic network metaphor, and decentralized, self-governing cycles took the place of externally-controlled processes. In a sense, this was also a form of naturalization, since self-controlling organic systems were taken to be the model: Culture itself needs to be thought as a “nature that has been produced” (Gilbert Simondon). To conclude, the naturalization of creativity rejects both aesthetic individualism and normative universalism. Creativity is neither spontaneous nor can it follow some prescribed formula; it must be made “natural” – for instance, in the form of tacit knowledge and internalized competence. In other words, creativity should not seem “unnatural” or insincere; the acquired needs to appear innate. To borrow Adorno’s terms, thesis needs to pass as physis. Ultimately, creativity is not natural – it must become natural.

References Bröckling, Ulrich (2015): The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject, London: Sage. Dewey, John (1982): Human Nature and Conduct [1922], vol. 14 of The Middle Works: 1899-1924, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

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Foucault, Michel (1994)  : “Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [Michel Foucault’s Game], Interview with D. Colas, A., Grorichard, G. Le Gaufrey, J. Livy, G. Miller, J. Miller, J.-A Miller [1977]. In: Dits et Ecrits, vol. 3, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 298-329. James, William (1967): The Early Works: 1882-1887, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 2: Psychology, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Montaigne, Michel de (2010): “Upon some Verses of Virgil,” translated by Charles Cotton. In: William Carew Hazlett (ed.), Essays of Montaigne, vol. 8 [1910], New York: FQ Books, pp. 11-133. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

Organization Timon Beyes

Without organization, according to a standard formula of organization studies, there cannot be any socially relevant, because collectively binding, decisions (Luhmann 2000). In this sense, systems, social fields, and dispositifs do not make decisions themselves (“the economy” does not speak); they can be reconstructed in terms of systems logic, fields of action and communication, or orders of power. The decisions made by individuals may reproduce a system, conform to a field, or be traced back to a dispositif; beyond that, however, they usually remain irrelevant without organized conduct. The creativity complex is then dependent on organization. This is all the more true, insofar as the rise of creativity is tied to the social expansion of aesthetic episodes and practices, to a form of economy based on stimulating senses and affects rather than the usual stimulus packages (Reckwitz 2017: 124; *Affect Culture). This stimulation and modulation of the senses needs to be organized. It needs organizational forms and processes that respond to the expansion of the visible, the audible, the tangible, and the sayable, and which produce aesthetic episodes and practices. Were this not the case, Andreas Reckwitz’s diagnosis of a radical aestheticization of the social would be curiously inconsequential. With his claim that “the social complex of creativity territorializes the floating processes of the aesthetic according to its own particular pattern” (2017: 9), Reckwitz raises the question of organization. How can it be answered even if only in a brief sketch?

Organized Capitalism In The Invention of Creativity, Reckwitz addresses ‘organization’ as an operator and a lubricant, as a condition and effect of social aestheticization, primarily in the context of the “aesthetic economy” (2017: 85-126). This may be due to the field-specific distinctions that provide the structure of the book. According to this field-specific logic, Reckwitz associates ‘organization’ with ‘the economy’, and distinguishes the latter from the field of urban space or *creative cities, the

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field of art, the field of creative techniques of the self, and the field of mass media, even if creativity needs to be organized in all of these fields. In addition, Reckwitz’s study seems to resonate with the influential study of The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski/Chiapello 2007), according to which the aestheticization of the social (and its precursors in varieties of ‘artistic critique’) degenerates into the legitimizing regime of the economy (*Capital, *Critique). Organized capitalism, which is itself increasingly aestheticized, becomes the driving force of aestheticization (*Aesthetic Capitalism). But this creates a problem: How do the large-scale processes of *aestheticization and economization, which are discussed in The Invention of Creativity in terms of the tension between them, coincide in the question of organization? At the level of organizing and organization, it appears as though there was a need to balance out the rise of sense-based, self-referential practices with their use and exploitation by instrumental rationality. In all of this, there are echoes of Max Weber’s epoch-making and consequential foundation of organizational research with a focus on instrumental rationality and de-aestheticized bureaucratic structures – even if bureaucratic instrumental rationality does not represent a unique selling point of economic structures. Thus, the “old” culture of the economy is depicted with the image of a non-sensuous machine largely devoid of affects, which would only become open to aesthetic practices or aesthetic labor starting with the emphasis on creativity primarily in the 1970s and 80s (Reckwitz 2017: 90). ‘Organization’, in this older tradition, meant a stable internal structure, routine decision-making procedures, and largely clear relationships of hierarchy and membership, whether in universities, companies, nonprofits, or state administrations. In this tradition, there appears to have been no room for an emphasis on creativity and self-referential aesthetic *play. There is indeed indisputable evidence that modern society, at least in the twentieth century, should be regarded as an ‘organizational society’ in the sense of these kinds of formalized organizational relations: Formal organizations determine social life from the cradle to grave. However, if the “social creativity complex” should be understood as a “historically unprecedented manifestation belonging to the last third of the twentieth century, in preparation since the late eighteenth century and accelerating markedly since the early twentieth century” (Reckwitz 2017: 6), then it would be necessary to examine the transformation of organizational forms and processes during this period. After all, Reckwitz’s concept of ‘aesthetic capitalism’ is based, in its most advanced shape, on forms of work that have long since moved beyond the familiar model of the routine activities performed by labourers and office workers, with their standardized, matter-of-fact ways of engaging with objects and people” (ibid: 2; *Work).

Organization

A Genealog y of Organization Beyond supposedly stable forms and criteria of organization and its reduction to the economic field, the question of organizational practices and processes makes empirical and analytical conditions start to flounder. One piece of evidence for this difficulty is the fact that there is a certain contradictoriness, or at least a pronounced heterogeneity, inherent in the concept of organization, which actually makes the concept fruitful for the closer examination of the forms and functions of the creativity complex. Without being explicitly spelled out in theoretical terms, the phenomenon of organization appears in Reckwitz’s material analysis of the rise of the aesthetic economy on at least three different levels: in formal terms of organizations and their internal relations; in the form of entrepreneurial and artistic counter-movements; and in the creative-economic amalgamation of aesthetic practices and instrumental economic orientation. On the first level, there is the aestheticization of established organizations – the perspective that offers the best fit with Weber’s understanding of organization as a machine of formal rationalization and its bureaucratic structures. Along these lines, Reckwitz considers the Fordist system to be “a prototype of society as a well-ordered organization into which the individual is fitted like a part in a machine” (2017: 88). However, according to Reckwitz’s diagnosis, there is a shift toward ‘post-bureaucratic forms of work’ even in these kinds of “well-ordered organizations.” The pre-history of this shift can be found in the mid-twentieth century approach to employee motivation, which was already being discussed and treated as an aesthetic problem; along with what was increasingly perceived to be a pressure to innovate, which was still conceived primarily in terms of technological *innovation. Undoubtedly, this shift led to the rise of network-based and project-oriented forms of work, which modeled working people as creative subjects (at least for the purposes of organization), and eventually to the paradoxical image of the ‘intrapreneur’, as the figure responsible for creative destruction with respect to an organization’s well-ordered sociality (ibid: 88-89). Reckwitz’s claim would be further supported by the “spatial turn” and the “aesthetic turn” in conventional organizational research, which brackets out the questions of communicative rationality and formalized decision-making processes in order to focus on the spatial, aesthetic, and affective structure of organization (Beyes 2016; *Atmosphere). However, whether the “bureaucratic structure of repetition inside the company” (Reckwitz 2017: 91) actually eroded along with the aestheticization of everyday organizational life, remains questionable. Reckwitz’s claim draws perhaps a little too much on the empirical material of discourse analysis, which refers to the kind of management theory and scholarship whose normative focus on “decision makers” often cuts them out of empirical organizational contexts. For instance,

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anthropologist David Graeber (2015) recently referred to “the iron law of liberalism,” according to which the supposed movements toward deregulation and de-hierarchization reliably produced more bureaucracy in the form of rules and controls, procedures and official forms. One could write a whole book about this tendency in the context of the everyday organization of universities. In the context of established organizations, more consideration therefore needs to be given to the ways in which bureaucratic processes and structures feed off an increasingly aestheticized working world dedicated to the creativity imperative. On the second level, Reckwitz brings together the British arts and crafts movement and the entrepreneurial discourse of the early-twentieth century into a genealogical strand of “bourgeois counter-movements” whose affirmation of decidedly aesthetic work, on the one hand, and permanent innovation, on the other, represent early forms of contemporary aesthetic capitalism (Reckwitz 2017: 92; translation modified). What both of these early forms of aesthetic capitalism have in common is that they require understandings of ‘organization’ that differ radically from the orthodoxy of formal organizations and the relationships governing membership and decision-making processes. The arts and crafts movement, which was for the most part adverse to industry and critical of capitalism, would be easier to reconcile with theories predicated on affect, embodiment, and materiality than with Weber’s premises of de-aestheticization and instrumental rationality. If, as Reckwitz suspects, the emergence of aesthetic capitalism depended on this kind of creation of an influential experimental and imaginative space, then there would have to be a search for more unorthodox premises of organizational research. The same applies to the alternative, non-artistic genius-subject, the late-bourgeois ‘divinatory entrepreneur’ as a figure of creative destruction. From the perspective of organizational theory, this “exclusive and emotionally charged figure” (Reckwitz 2017: 98) can be addressed through a procedural understanding of ‘organization-creation’, which focuses on invariably affective practices of organizing rather than on encoded and routine relationships governing membership and decision-making processes (Hjorth 2013). On the third level, located between formal, instrumental kinds of organization and sense-based or symbol-oriented practices of organizing, there is Reckwitz’s pre-history of the specific economy focused not primarily on products but on symbols and sensory perceptions: the creative and/or culture industries. Reckwitz identifies *fashion, advertising, and *design as early, genuinely creative industries, which paved the way for aesthetic capitalism. Far from the supposedly obsolete bureaucratic and de-aestheticized structure of repetition, the organization of these branches is characterized by their orientation, both internally and externally, toward affective intensity and aesthetic innovation. The vanishing point of the aesthetic economy in this organizational milieu is most likely the structural similarity of “economic and artistic practices,” according to

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which “economic rationality was subordinated over time to its apparent cultural other – that is to say, to the aesthetic, to the affective logic of creative production and aesthetic reception” (2017: 93).

Creativity as an Organizational Complex Reckwitz’s thesis of the subordination of economic rationality to the self-referential processes of creative design and sense-based affect contains an explosive potential. It would have to be reflected in organizational processes that have little to do with the characteristics of the formal organization that shaped organized capitalism in the twentieth century. What needs to be questioned and empirically investigated, therefore, are the contexts, mechanisms, and extent to which creativity has become the ‘organizing principle’ of social organization (*Co-Creation, *Creative Crowd). In this context, Reckwitz leaves things with a reference (in scare quotes) to “disorganized capitalism” – or, ‘disorganizations’, as British sociologist Scott Lash (2002) quite strikingly described the primarily affect-driven and mobile force field of organizing, which, or so he argued, would increasingly take the place of the dying social form of “modern” (formal) organizations. One of the shortcomings of organization theory continues to be starting from ontological assumptions that determine ‘organization’ – usually, in terms of formal organizations – in order to be able to confirm what was assumed, or at most to be moderately surprised (Luhmann 2000). A more cautious approach, committed less to the rhetoric of epochal ruptures, might help move beyond the binary distinction between rigid formal ‘organization’ and free-floating ‘disorganization’, and provide a better account of the different levels of organization already laid out in Reckwitz’s genealogy of the aesthetic economy. By subsuming the aestheticization of the economic under the concept of the “aesthetic apparatus,” Reckwitz in more cautious words describes “institutional complexes for production, presentation, and consumption, hybrids of aesthetic and non-aesthetic practices, the main of which is to produce aesthetic events” (2017: 123). The figures of the ‘apparatus’ and the ‘complex’ provide a more multi-layered image of various forms and processes of organization, which would not otherwise appear in the dualism of conventional instrumental rationality and disorganized intensities of affective excitation as the two dominant principles of organization. According to architecture and media theorist Reinhold Martin (2003), the mid-twentieth century US military-industrial complex needs be understood as an organizational complex. According to Martin, organizational networks and organizational processes were what brought about the aesthetic expansion and technological concretization of the military-industrial complex (2003: 3-4). Organizational subjects were shaped by the architectures and workspaces of

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companies and large organizations during the post-war period, as well as by cybernetic theories and technologies. Far more than alienated cogs in the system, these subjects started to understand themselves as individualized and partly self-organized actors. Rather than a mere “structure of repetition and reproduction inside the organization” (Reckwitz 2017: 88), which supposedly characterized ‘organized capitalism’ into the 1970s, Martin develops an image of an organizational landscape oriented toward both aesthetics and technology, which connected processes that had already been standardized to a decentralized room to maneuver and the postulate of self-regulation. In the phenomenon of organization, then, there seems to have been complementary traces of the kind of *genealogy, which Reckwitz pursues in The Invention of Creativity with respect to the emergence of the ‘aesthetic economy’. Today, the image of the organizational complex contains elements of “aesthetic economic practices that had already been developing in and around the Fordist, formal-rational economy itself in the early twentieth century” (ibid: 92) – indeed, in large corporations, the epitome of organized capitalism for their routinized, standardized, and allegedly de-aestheticized organizational relationships. One important aspect of this development, with respect to cybernetics, is that a technological understanding of organization was established as early as the mid-twentieth century, departing from the one-dimensional “model of technology” formerly presented by scientific management and the theory of bureaucratic economic culture (Reckwitz 2017: 88). To deal with forms of self-regulation and cybernetic feedback loops, the new model of organization involved the reflection and design of spatial and media aesthetics, and explicitly promoted creative thinking and action (Martin 2013: 127; *Creativity Techniques, *Computer). In addition, the theory of the organizational complex presented here would avoid the restriction of organization to “the economy.” If the creativity complex requires organization, then its forms and processes are hardly to be found in the economic field alone. Even the large public corporations of the post-war period, Martin’s study suggests, are to be understood as nodes within a technological and aesthetic network encompassing governmental actors as well as forms of knowledge and design from the academic and artistic fields. The Invention of Creativity invites further inquiries into the question of organization to address the task of constructing these kinds of alternative genealogies.

References Beyes, Timon (2016): “Art, Aesthetics and Organization.” In: Barbara Czarniawska (ed.), A Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 115-125. Boltanski, Luc/Chiapello, Ève (2007): The New Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Gregory Elliott, New York: Verso.

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Graeber, David (2015): The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Hjorth, Daniel (2013): “Public Entrepreneurship: Desiring Social Change, Creating Sociality.” In: Entrepreneurship & Regional Development 25/1-2, pp. 34-51. Lash, Scott (2002): Critique of Information, London: Sage. Luhmann, Niklas (2000): Organisation und Entscheidung, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Martin, Reinhold (2003): The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

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Performativity Martina Leeker

‘Performance’ and ‘performativity’ are central components of Andreas Reckwitz’s theory of the creativity dispositif as a discursive regime, typical of contemporary culture in late modernity, oriented to self-performance and the always new (Reckwitz 2017; 2016) – a double structure of performativity that Reckwitz describes through the exemplary case of “Namuth’s Pollock” (2017: 57-60). At the center of Reckwitz’s analysis is Hans Namuth’s 1951 film Jackson Pollock 51, which documented the artist’s work with drip painting. On the one hand, Namuth’s film, in Reckwitz’s interpretation, develops a concept of ‘unleashed performativity’. This concept refers to the fabrication of a work of art through the agential power of the performative action itself, through chance and arbitrariness. This performative power appears in Pollock’s methods of dripping, drizzling, or splashing colors on a canvas lying on the floor, and undermines rigorous models of a modern (i.e., autonomous and intentional) subject. On the other hand, however, the film contributed to Pollock’s image as an ‘art star’, who is generating himself cleverly and with full control as a ‘creative subject’ by performing action painting (*Artist). What looks at first glance like a paradoxical doubling, for Reckwitz discloses the meaning of performance and performativity in the creativity dispositif: the ‘unleashing’ of performativity in action painting normalizes art in a form that anyone can do it (*Deaestheticization, *Naturalization). This normalization of art is, first of all, a condition of possibility for making art into a compulsion to be creative. Second, the artistic subject becomes the adequate model subject for the regime of creativity. This model of subjectivation, the ‘performing self’, continuously inventing itself anew, shapes a contemporary “star system” with many different types of self-inventions all worthy of imitation and to some extent available to everyone (Reckwitz 2017: 159-162). This double figure of the performative plays a central role even beyond the discourse of creativity, for instance, in debates about performativity in digital cultures (Leeker/Schipper/Beyes 2017). Since the 1960s, the figure of the performative has tended to be paradigmatic in discourses on, and practices of,

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‘digitalization’ in the artistic world. In the years since, the agency of technical things – namely, in performances and installations – has always been considered as a performance, and the artist as its controller and facilitator. In these circumstances, Reckwitz’s theoretical model of the performative represents the chance to reconstruct an important piece of a genealogy of digital cultures. On yet another level, his double scheme of the performative also uncovers a subversive moment of performativity in digital cultures.

Pollock Revisited: Between Self-Performance and the Production of Images The case of Namuth’s Pollock raises some additional aspects of the performative, which Reckwitz does not emphasize. In a further analysis, it becomes clear that his model of the performative in the creativity dispositif participates in the creation of a posthuman, or more-than-human, performativity in digital cultures. For Reckwitz, there is an implicit premise in Namuth’s film on Pollock’s painting qua performance (i.e., action painting): the artist acts both automatically and unconsciously, and thereby without control of his actions. As the colors move toward the canvas on the floor, the materials, the art of performance, and, of course, the power of gravity each have their own dynamic – this is what actually determines the work and the act of artistic creation. In both the process of formation and the activation of a perceiving audience who completes the work in the act of observation, “Pollock shows up less as the creator of something completely new than as an arranger of found objects” (Reckwitz 2017: 59). On the other hand, the artist also becomes responsible for the creation of *atmosphere. Pollock’s performances certainly have other facets, which fall out the frame of Reckwitz’s understanding of performativity – namely, Pollack made intentional interventions in the performances showing the creative process of his work (Klammer/Neuner 2016). For instance, Pollock hung the work in progress on the wall in order to view it on a vertical plane and from an observer-oriented distance, so that he could plan its further development and take control over the action again. He also painted over the painting, or over parts of the painting that did not seem to fit well enough. In other words, what takes place in Pollock’s performances is a mediation of positions in the image, which happens during the performance of the action painting; and a mediation of positions in front of the image, which allows a reflection of its performativity. Conspicuously, Reckwitz develops his concept of performativity by eliding Pollock’s interventions. In doing so, as an archeology of performativity in digital cultures would show, Reckwitz simultaneously creates a quasi-post-human

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performativity of things, actions, and physicality, to which human agency is subordinate. A second conspicuous aspect of Reckwitz’s model of performativity can be found in the concept of subjectivity in the creativity regime. In spite of demythologizing the model of the modern artistic genius, valid from the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, Reckwitz nevertheless sketches Pollock in the shape of a creative subject. Consequently, the figure of Pollock is staged not only as an extraordinary and non-generalizable artistic personality, the “lonely man” (Reckwitz 2016: 198). He is also dressed in heavy working boots, littered with colors, and presented in the dancing movements of dripping paint, possessed by the work in a less heroic, yet daily, routine. Nevertheless, this normalization does not trouble his status as a subject. Instead, Pollock stands for the paradigmatic transition to a new “postmodern artist-subject” (Reckwitz 2017: 73-78). Reckwitz’s conception of an independent creative subject is also notewor­ thy for its functions in enabling subjectification in both digital and unleashed performativity. His crucial gesture consists in decoupling the creativity of the subject from the emancipated performativity of things. Separating the performativity of things – in the context of which the subject is only the submissive ‘arranger’ – from the self-performance of an independent subject, is what allows the formation of the latter. Against this background, the Reckwitzian subject does not use its agency to tame things, since one would submit, in this way, to the side of posthuman performativity. Rather, the Reckwitzian subject eagerly allows the performativity of things to take their own course, and directs agency toward the establishment of an independent performing self. The invention of this self was able to pave the way for the technological conditions of digital cultures by making headway against the illusion of an agential subject in complete control (*Self-Generation). If the topic of the algorithmic, statistical subjectivity involved in social networks or proactive shopping suggestions of contemporary digital cultures is taken into account, then it shows how the subject dissolves in interconnectivity with technical environments and loses control over its own actions. Human agents are not subjects of interest anymore; rather they are targets of data collection. Reckwitz’s attempt to restrict the concept of performativity and his assumption of a subject with agency are not only fitting for analyzing the argumentative logic of the creativity regime. They can also be read as part of the pre-history and discursive practice of sociotechnological conditions of digital cultures.

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Connecting to Namuth’s Pollock: Deep Dreaming in Data Performances Posthuman performativity and digital cultures present a continuation of the case of Namuth’s Pollock, exemplified by the data performances of the DeepDream software. Alexander Mordvintsev and other software engineers at Google, developed the software, initially released in 2015, for recognizing patterns in images. What the materials and the act of creation once did for Pollock – namely, creating a work – has been taken over by databases and algorithms in digital creative processes. The neuronal network DeepDream is not only supposed to learn how to recognize and classify images, so that it can identify cats or dogs after adequate training. The software is supposed to be creative. If the trained network receives images without dogs or cats, it goes through them in different phases (i.e., iterations) with its own data sets, and generates some of its own images using its own “knowledge” – that is to say, by adding new images, e.g., dogs or cats, to the image. Ever since the source code of the software was made public in 2015, a vast number of strange images has been produced through a supposed cooperation between human agents, who start the iteration, and the software, which carries it out. The resulting images are a bustle of, let’s say, paintings of Vincent van Gogh or portraits of Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, together with strictly realistic as well as heavily processed eyes, animals, or buildings. The images appear to be in continuity with the ‘remix’ technique, which Reckwitz describes as the nucleus of postmodern creativity after Pollock with variation replacing creation. For Reckwitz, remix opens up creativity to everyone – or, if one follows the example of DeepDream, everything, even machines. In the discursive murmuring surrounding DeepDream, these images are either described as the expression of data dreams or compared to images of an LSD trip. The category of posthuman, algorithmic performances encompasses not only the technical automatization of things and the role of chance in the performance, as in the case of Namuth’s Pollock. It also presents an interesting reversal of Pollock’s production process in action painting: While Pollock increasingly distanced himself from figurative painting, DeepDream identifies fantastic animals embedded in abstract images and makes them visible, as in the DeepDream version of Pollack’s first experiment with drip painting.8 Deciphering this reversal of performative aesthetics requires considering how the mechanical recognition of figurative patterns is detached from every semantic understanding (Esposito 2017). 8 | See for example Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948, #inceptionism, #deepdream, by @brdskggs (Brad Skaggs), 19:02, July 3, 2015: https://twitter.com/brdskggs/status​ /617151522321862656 [accessed August 15, 2018].

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This peculiar constitution is concealed by the discursive enchantment of images described above. What is taken to be the psychedelic, paranoid, and apophantic “deep dreaming” of the software – its celebrated ability to recognize allegedly existing colors, lines, reflections of light, or the rhythm, patterns and figures of Pollock’s visual composition – is actually a mere ability of the human observer. By contrast, the machine works on the levels of correlation, selfreferential inputs, and processing data sets. Only in this ambivalent humanmachine process of signification does the posthuman performativity of digital cultures come to reality (*Computer). Its central trajectory is to conceal – for the purpose of realizing a techno-anthropologic bond – that human agents are attributed little equality in the supposed cooperation with more-than-human creative processes. Enabling an attribution of creativity to automatic recognitions of images and staging their reception as jag-like experience is a double gesture that inscribes humans in data operations and binds them to these technical operations. This is necessary because human agents no longer represent a subject of interest in digital cultures, but are still essential, as data providers, to the maintenance of these smart, technical environments. In other words, automatic and psychedelic creativity function as an allure for human adjuncts every time occasions of recognition and interpretations are made, or sentiments of pleasure are felt. Because connectivity and cooperation function more effectively (and should be easier to maintain) in a paranoid and apophantic interpretation – and thus in the apposition of the figurative world into the abstraction – the figurative takes over the function of abstraction in posthuman performativity after Pollock. Re-conceiving of Reckwitz’s reflections on unleashed performativity as a contribution to the pre-history of this posthuman performativity makes it clear that the former is what first makes it possible to view data-operations such as DeepDream as meaningful performances, and to engage in deciphering them. In other words, Reckwitz’s concept of performativity is machine-compatible. Insofar as it stems from action painting and is bundled with a belief in a performing self, the concept should make it easier for human agents to act in digital cultures, acquiring a taste for the downgrading of the human and the new tasks of interpreting data. In this respect, the cherished illusion of the agency of the subject and the ideal control over anthropotechnical performativity may be a great help. From this perspective, digital performativity takes the place of a ubiquitous regime of creativity that tends to coincide with a ubiquitous lifestyle, and creates a regime of ubiquitous, posthuman cooperation and connectivity. Reckwitz’s concept of performativity is less a description of a postmodern society, than an active contribution to the discursive fabrication of posthuman, techno-anthropological connectivity.

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Anti-Performance and Anti-Subjects for Digital Detox We can also derive subversive strategies for dealing with posthuman performativity from Reckwitz’s model of twofold performativity, especially from his analysis of the case of Namuth’s Pollock. This requires reconsidering the history of “Namuth/Pollock” as a case of anti-performance. According to legend, Pollock returned to figurative techniques, after the film, to regain control over his painting and interrupt the process of de-individualization and dehumanization. After two years of abstinence, he had apparently lapsed back to alcoholism, and was no longer able to work in the field of art again. Ultimately, the story of unleashed performativity and the case of Namuth’s Pollock ended on August 11, 1956, when driving under the influence of alcohol in Long Island, Pollock caused a fatal car crash. Developing subversive strategies for dealing with algorithms and big data from Pollock’s dramatic anti-performance and corresponding anti-subjectivity should not be taken to mean an attempt to escape from it through death and alcohol addiction. The main locus of resistance in digital cultures is no longer associating data with the human agents, which – as exemplified by the case of DeepDream case – would cut to core of digital connectivism. Pollock’s fight against the performance of action painting is a symbol of this situation, because he opposed posthuman performativity and referred back to anthropological capabilities – for instance, when turning his images vertical. Lastly, Reckwitz’s maintenance of the presence of the human subject in the concept of the performing self is of interest because it is more than an adaptation to digital cultures, creating the illusion that human agents are important and still have agency. Relating Reckwitz’s concept back to the emancipated performance of things and tying it back into Pollock’s return to anthropological capabilities reveals a ‘performing self’ that is more resistant and procrastinating. This alternative performing self creates a gap within the struggle between self-assertion and the risk of being engulfed in the dispositif of performing (*Queer), and challenges us to grasp, to reflect, and always to adjust to the interplay of autonomy and techno-anthropological appropriation.

References Esposito, Elena (2017): “Artificial Communication? The Production of Contingency by Algorithms.” In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 46/4, pp. 249-265. Klammer, Markus/Neuner, Stefan (2016): “Bildfeld und Blickfeld. Figurationen der Abstraktion bei Jackson Pollock.” In: Josef Helfenstein/Nina Zimmer (eds.), Der figurative Pollock, Munich: Prestel, pp. 39-63. Leeker, Martina (2016): “Theatre and Engineering: Kontrolle und Macht in medialen Umwelten in den 1960er Jahren, und heute?” In: Friedrich Balke/

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Maria Muhle (eds.), Räume und Medien des Regierens, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, pp. 198-217. Leeker, Martina/Schipper, Imanuel/Beyes, Timon (2017): Performing the Digital: Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Reckwitz, Andreas (2016): Kreativität und soziale Praxis. Studien zur Sozialund Gesellschaftstheorie, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

Plasticity Emmanuel Alloa

Every creative act depends on some material, which is designed, fashioned, shaped, molded, and at times even created in the very act of creation. This formulation also applies to an expanded concept of creativity, such as the one promoted by Joseph Beuys in the 1970s. Instead of making art dependent on particular qualities (e.g., beauty) or notions of authorship (e.g., the artist), Beuys wanted every creative act that might lead to a change in human relations to count as ‘artistic’. Regardless of whether the act was done by an *artist or not, whether it created some particular material object (e.g., a work) or remained physically intangible (e.g., an event) – the guiding principle for the future would be creativity. However, even this expanded concept of creativity still remains dependent on some material. For Beuys, the material that creativity operates on under the sign of an expanded conception of art had a particular name: ‘social plastic’. Beuys’ neologism is eye-opening because it makes creativity inextricably bound up with sociality. While most would agree that creativity should be emancipated from the image of the lone genius, Beuys would go even further: Creativity is not only a socially distributed act; it works exhaustively on sociality itself, which is then supposed to represent both actor and material. It is impossible to imagine ‘subject cultures’ (Reckwitz) without corresponding subject sculptures. Here, the twofold meaning of creativity takes effect: Activities and materials can both be described as plastic (from the Greek plassein/plattein); what is plastic is then Bildung, on the one hand, the act of educating someone or giving something a form; and Bildbarkeit, the capacity to be educated or to take some form, on the other. Beuys’ concept of plastic needs to be understood in this twofold sense, and less in the traditional generic sense of the plastic arts. ‘Plasticity’ is not about the properties of an object, such as three-dimensionality or sculpturality, but rather about these two aspects of creative activity – formation and formability – and its elastic medium. Plastic is ‘social’ insofar as society provides both the transformative agents and the material to be transformed in the process of creation. To the extent to which artistic work would then need

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to be measured in terms of its ability to bring about social change, the creative potential of all people serves as both an end and a means (*Deaestheticization). Beyond Beuys’ concept of social plastic and his related artistic agitprop, the twofold meaning of plasticity can be found in quite diverse fields. In the field of art, the ‘plastic arts’ have always stood for more than making sculptures, and the phrase has been used as a near synonym for any art form involving the creation of material forms. The term ‘plastic arts’ emphasizes the active aspect of modeling something, of giving it a form. However, plasticity stands not only for a particular creative activity, but also for the quality a material must exhibit in order to be able to be used in creative activity. Next to giving something a form, plasticity also describes the ability to be formed – in short, a particular ability to be sculpted or modeled. Many diverse materials can count as plastic in this second, passive sense: natural materials (e.g., wax or clay) as well as synthetic materials (e.g., gelatin, silicon, and the wide range of organic polymers, including nylon, polyethylene, and polyvinyl chloride, commonly known as ‘plastics’). Artistic modernity has experimented repeatedly with these plastic materials, whether for their archaic connections (e.g., Degas’ wax, Duchamp’s plaster), for their startling reinventions (e.g., Beuys’ famous addition of fat to the inventory of plastic materials), or for their repurposing and reclassification (e.g., Alan Resnais’ filmic hymn to industrial synthetics in Le chant du styrène [1958]). To Roland Barthes, industrially manufactured plastic was the most modern material, because it was the most able to be transformed, a materia prima that embodied “less a substance than the idea of its endless transformation” (*Color). Mutability, pliability, adaptability – the qualities of plasticity no longer apply only to machine-made materials; they have long since been transferred to neural processes. In current research on the brain, there is talk of the plasticity of the central nervous system, of plastic synapses, or of neural plasticity in general, which merely confirms that both aspects of plasticity – active and passive  – are at work once again. The notion of a fundamentally dynamic order of the brain is increasingly taking the place of neural determinism, emphasizing the brain’s ability to adapt to particular, functional conditions, which themselves feed back into its structure – for instance, when the functions of entire areas of the brain are remapped following particular lesions on the level of the cortex. Most neurologists tend to believe that cognitive processes shape synaptic connections, which, in turn, structure cognitive processes; the actual act of cognition forms the brain, which, in turn, determines cognition. Synaptic plasticity depends on experience, though it also structures the very possibilities of experience. What contemporary neuroscientists are reclaiming for the brain has precursors in psychology (e.g., ‘resilience’ after psychic trauma) and the life sciences (e.g., the regenerative structures of organisms).

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In sum, plasticity contains both an active and a passive part, and functions as both a structural factor and a principle of transformation. If something is plastic, the possibility is always lingering that something else will emerge, though this change is not unbounded, since it always affects a particular, prestructured medium. In this sense, the concept of plasticity can be differentiated from the notions of unconditional creativity and of materialistic determinism. As a third term, plasticity stands for a dynamic in which what is formed always codetermines the process of giving it that form – even if only on account of its texture and inner constitution. Against this backdrop, returning to Joseph Beuys’ concept of ‘social plastic’ helps better understand what is at stake in his peculiar conception of creativity, and more generally in his broader conception of social existence and subjectivity. Insofar as ‘social plastic’ evokes the ability of human beings to give a new form to their own lives and social life on the whole using the powers of imagination, it reflects much older views, which need to be reconstructed genealogically. There is a long prehistory to the concept of the human as a plastic being. In ancient medicine, for instance, Galen spoke of a dynamis diaplastikè. This ‘formative power’, in Latin the virtus formatrix, haunted premodern thought, from Lucretius through Nicholas of Cusa and Paracelsus to Johannes Kepler. In most cases, it was a general cosmological principle of animation, which Galen also defined as ‘artistic’ (technikè) insofar as it involved the functions for sustaining life. In the seventeenth century, Ralph Cudworth would bring into play the metaphor of a “Plastick Life of Nature.” In Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, there was already a connection between biological plasticity and artistic activity in certain concepts of the human. Paradigmatically, in The Enneads, Plotinus compared the ideal of ethical ‘work on one’s self’ with that of the sculptor: “Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.” (2009: 46)

In late antiquity, the idea of the human being as a mass that could be kneaded or shaped was already anticipated by some authors like Plotinus, but it would only truly flourish in the Renaissance. Most notably, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola introduced a concept of plastic self-formation from a Christian per-

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spective, which seemed dangerously close to the heretical idea of self-creation (*Self-Generation). If human beings are truly created in God’s image, Pico asks in the Oration on the Digity of Man, then why shouldn’t they have also inherited God’s creative abilities? Predominantly, the ability to make something out of oneself. Still, Pico’s concept of artifex sui does not so much carve potentiality out of itself like the sculpture would obtain a form out of marble; the artifex sui is much more Proteus-like. Human plastic is based on an a priori plasticity. As Pico puts it in a rhetorical question, “Who then will not look with awe upon this our chameleon” (1956: 9)? Emerging between the conception of autogenesis, which was scandalous for Christian doctrine, and the more acceptable axiom of perfectibility, the Renaissance ideal of self-formation was based on a particular image of humanity  – namely, that of the human as an incomplete being. Self-fulfillment and self-perfection – these early modern models, which were developed in the writings of Montaigne or Juan Luis Vives, cast a long shadow on the conception of the human in modern philosophical anthropology as a being who enters into existence lacking the proper equipment. What Friedrich Nietzsche characterized with his famous formula of the human being as a “not-yet settled animal” (noch nicht festgestellte Tier) leaves open the extent to which the “self-settlement of man” (Sich-Selbst-Feststellen des Menschen, Heinrich Popitz) occurs individually or socially. In Germany, the concept of Bildsamkeit, the ability to be formed or educated, was of central significance to the conception of becoming an individual subject in Early Romanticism and German Idealism. Novalis celebrated the free play of the imagination where the subject would come into his own because he had formed his own life. To describe this process of creation and formation, Novalis chose the phrase ‘plasticizing’ (Plastisieren). Every science, according to Novalis, “should be self-plasticized” (1929: 123). Johann Gottlieb Fichte developed a similar train of thought when he emphasized the “Bildbarkeit” of the subject. Still, plasticity would not remain the exclusive reserve of transcendental philosophy. Johann Friedrich Herbart was largely responsible for making the concept into one of the foundational principles of modern pedagogy. In his Allgemeinen Pädagogik (General pedagogy, 1806), Herbart argues that the ability to learn is boundless (in recent scholarship, this ability has been recategorized, following a general trend, as the ‘competence’ for learning). In the first phase of growth in modern education, there was a need for new methods to direct the bourgeoisie to this new self-image. At the same time, the traditional concepts of upbringing and schooling needed a new, more flexible concept of identity. Instead of the purely external influences of correction and coercion, there was an increasing emphasis on a balance between heteronomy and autonomy. According to Pestalozzi, an educational process, which the subject does not support, ignores the nature of individuals and cannot be

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emancipatory. For this reason, the human being is creator and creation in one, and must learn, as it were, to form what forms it. In doing so, human beings not only realize their authentic nature, but also epitomize the plastic essence of nature in general. Alfred North Whitehead provides the warrant for assigning human beings this special place within nature: “It is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man. Mankind is that factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of nature. Plasticity is the introduction of novel law” (1967: 78, emphasis in the original). In this context, one aspect of plasticity needs to be particularly emphasized – namely, the desire for plastic self-definition. The desire for self-creation, as a form of ‘coinage’ in both senses of the term, would figure not only in the classical pedagogy of a Pestalozzi, but also in certain branches of economic theory. In his Theory of Economic Development (1911), for instance, Joseph Schumpeter would emphasize the role of ‘joy in creation’, which is taken to represent a driving force for market innovation on par with economic self-interest. While Schumpeter’s ideas were still able to cause a stir around a century ago, they have come to seem self-evident in the era of the creative worker. Markets are now refineries for human resources, and the participants in these markets are called on to cultivate the unused wasteland of their own abilities. Living knowledge is the main source of value and profit – the concept of social work no longer describes a particular job profile, but rather characterizes all work. Slowly but surely, niches are being closed up, either through normalization or therapeutics (*Coaching). While industrial workers once had to scrape away time for themselves, the workers at creative companies are explicitly encouraged to make time for themselves – to the point where some Silicon Valley giants allow their employees to devote up to a quarter of their work hours to developing their own projects. Maximal flexibility is the new commandment. In the process of socialization in late modernity, the subject learns how to appropriate this general flexibility, to personalize it, and, above all, to make it productive; the subject also learns to want what one is supposed to want. Is flexibility no more than another name for plasticity? This reading, it should be mentioned, has been vehemently contested by Catherine Malabou. Starting with her earliest books, the French philosopher has made a decisive contribution to the critical contours of these two concepts and repositioned them not only in terms of social ontology but also those of the philosophy of life. In What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2008), Malabou argues that the problem of capitalism consists in mistaking plasticity for flexibility. For Malabou, flexibility refers to boundless adaptability, but every transformation leaves behind traces. Plastic substances are able to take on particular forms because they already have some sort of basic inner ordering, some loose structure, which the process of formation will either overrule or strengthen. In this sense, then, plasticity stands not only for unlimited elasticity, but also for resistance.

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If plasticity should, in fact, mean more than a raw material made available, then there needs to be more room to maneuver in conceptions of what forms subjects externally, beyond the pretenses of autonomy and social determinism, and more in terms of co-determination. For Malabou, the heart of the matter involves recovering particular options for action, as well as redefining plasticity in terms of variable environmental conditions, which would not fall victim to the illusion that changes can be carried out painlessly and without any trace. Malabou reminds us that plastic materials can make particularly good explosives (in French, plasticage refers to an assassination attempt with a plastic bomb), thereby reminding us that dynamic instability can have a creative side and a destructive side. In short, there is an explosive aspect of plasticity – an idea, which Joseph Beuys would probably not have disagreed with. There are several conclusions to be drawn from this brief genealogy of plasticity for the creativity dispositif. On the one hand, the *genealogy of the creative subject reaches back much further than the Romantic period, and the notion of plastic formability should be correlated with a tradition of humanism, which has yet to be taken adequately into account. On the other hand, plasticity was not related exclusively to the individual subject and its ability to be modelled, even in the twentieth century, but rather always already contained a social dimension. Ultimately, there are limits and setbacks to the promise of the infinite durability of plastic materials. Plasticity must be acknowledged not only as an infinite dynamic principle, but also as potentially destructive one. In short, the creativity dispositif is shot through with plural, counteractive forces, which are often not sufficiently taken into account.

References Malabou, Catherine (2008): What Should We Do with Our Brain?, translated by Sebastian Rand, New York: Fordham University Press. Novalis (1929): Schriften, vol. 3, edited by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut. Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1956): Oration on the Dignity of Man [1486], translated by A. Robert Caponigri, Chicago: Gateway. Plotinus (2009): The Six Enneads [250 CE], translated by Stephen Mackenna and B. S. Page, Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Whitehead, Alfred North (1967): Adventures of Ideas [1933], New York: The Free Press.

Play Michael Hutter

“In aesthetic episodes,” writes Reckwitz, “an aesthetic perception appears momentarily and unexpectedly. Someone is affected by an object and so breaks through the cycle of instrumental rationality; then the event subsides” (2017: 12). How do such events achieve their own value? How do they have a successful effect on the subject, and how is the relation between the subject and the object altered by the aesthetic event? One answer to the question of influence could begin with a passage found two pages later in Reckwitz’s book, which describes semiotic forms that have the capacity to stimulate the subject’s senses and emotions (*Color). For Reckwitz, “the point is then not that the signs [in aesthetic events] have ‘real’ referents; instead, the play of significations, the production of fictional meaning and alternative narrative worlds come to the fore” (ibid: 14). Thus, Reckwitz offers three variants of the successful affect, which, for the subject, is a form of pleasure free from purpose. I argue that all three of these variants manifest the idea of “play.” To the first of these three variants, Reckwitz directly applies the concept of play. Here play signifies indeterminacy. This can result from play and counterplay, as in a sports competition, or from the possible variations of signifiers in forms of artistic play, as in the rhyme schemes of lyric poetry, or in the play of movement, as in dance performances. If this element of indeterminacy is absent, then play becomes pointless. The “fictionality of meaning production” designates yet another facet of play, namely, the distinction between seriousness and mere play. In play, imagination alone creates meaning. However, for Johan Huizinga (1949), as well as for digital observers of video games, play can clearly be distinguished from the earnestness of life (*Computer). The literary historian Jacques Ehrmann, by contrast, expands the scope of play by universalizing its functions: “The distinguishing characteristic of reality is that it is played. Play, reality, and culture are synonymous and interchangeable” (1968: 56). One supporting point for this assertion is that meanings in fictive games can become so important

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to some players – touching them to such an emotional extent – that they even realign their real, serious lives. Also, one must imagine the concept of “production” differently when it is a question of meanings of play in art and not one of providing marketable goods. The precise translation of “pro-ductio” means a per-formance in which the play of imagined meanings is staged in an eventful way (*Imagineering). The third manifestation of play are the “alternative worlds of narrative.” The closure of these worlds corresponds to that of play. This idea reaches back to the sociology of Erving Goffman (who, in turn, referred to the work of Gregory Bateson). According to Goffman, play imposes frames of interpretation, or semantic frames around sequences of events. This way, they delimit how stories can be told successfully. In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) describes this kind of play as “language game” (Sprachspiel). Countless instances of codes, rules, and transgressions bring closure to these games. The “social worlds,” explored by Howard Becker and other members of the Chicago School, offer rich examples. With the combination of all three variants – the unforeseeable mobility, the forceful power of the imagination, and the virtuoso handling of the conventions of play in worlds of meaning – aesthetic events succeed in touching the subject in a sensory-affective manner. Looking at events as play-based events allows one to immediately access a rich terminology: events come to be seen as moves in play, carried out and observed by players of the game, Events might also be seen as entire game series, played out over a period of time. In game-based events, active players are carefully trained to make use of the objects in the game, through which they keep the course of play indeterminable and exciting. In this kind of play, there is joint engrossment, which according to Goffman triggers joy among the other players. In Homo Ludens, a classical text in the theory of play, Huizinga describes the essential quality of play as follows: “[…] ‘what actually is the fun of playing? Why does the baby crow with pleasure? Why does the gambler lose himself in his passion? Why is a huge crowd roused to frenzy by a football match?’” (Huizinga 1949: 2) This intensity of, and absorption in, play finds no explanation in biological analysis. Yet in this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play” (Huizinga 1949: 3). Even the rules of the game are subordinated to this playfulness. Whenever external circumstances change, so do the rules, but the playfulness remains the same. The heuristic application of the concept of play also passes the test when we turn to the question of the changed relations between the subject and the object. Reckwitz offers a helpful distinction, namely, that between profane and original creativity. The criterion for Reckwitz’s distinction is the difference between teammates and spectators (*Stage). The actions of profane creativity “can be performed without an audience,” since there are only “participants

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and co-players” (2017: 230). On the other hand, the “pronounced constellations of recognized original production” always occur in front of an audience (ibid: 231), thereby becoming an aesthetic event that can make players and spectators ‘great’. Reckwitz already operates with the figure of the spectator in two earlier passages in the book. The “aesthetic public” is part of his sketch of the “regime of the new in art.” Spectators discover themselves in the subject positions of the user, recipient, and social observer. Over the centuries, they have acquired “skills of aesthetic concentration” (ibid: 41). Reckwitz’s discussion of the subject “watching” an aesthetic object immediately suggests a material interpretation of the object as in the visual work of art. As a result, the fundamentally playful process, for instance, in music and theater performances, is pushed into the background. A shift in observation towards these kinds of aesthetic episodes would demonstrate more decisively that the spectators, not to mention the performing actors, encounter an instrument of play as a temporally extended, multi-variable object, which they can affect and change according to all of their subject positions (*Queer). A second passage can be found in Reckwitz’s interpretation of aesthetic strategies, which the modern avant-garde used after 1900 and postmodern art since the 1960s (*Deaestheticization, *Performativity). In parallel to “the creative procedure and dissolving the borders holding in artistic objects,” described in the previous paragraph, the “active recipient” emerges. “The audience was regarded […] as a collection of individuals as self-reflexive and affected as the *artists themselves, equally unpredictable in their legitimately autonomous reactions. The audience thus became the artist’s accomplice” (ibid: 68). The decisive role of the spectator of play had been noticed at least since the aesthetic-philosophical discourse of the 1950s. At the time, Hans-Georg Gadamer referred to the spectator as “an essential element of play itself, which we call aesthetic” (1986: 133). Friedrich Georg Jünger recognized that the “transformation of the non-play into play” opens up an immeasurable realm within aesthetic play, and he added, “the transformation into play is achieved by representing the actor. This representation alone would not suffice; it only becomes sufficient by observing the observer” (1953: 104). The audience can therefore gain power over the aesthetic events, can determine certain qualities and make others disappear. At the same time, the games, for their part, gain power over their subjects. Being engrossed into worlds of aesthetic play, music, poetry or even video games, generates the aforementioned intensity, but also demands that they relinquish their individual freedom to the rules and logic of the game while accepting the potential difficulties associated with fierce competition (*Self-Generation). Günther Ortmann points out that Nietzsche commented on the aims of Greek artists: “‘Dancing in chains’, which burdens the play of movements while advancing the delusion

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of lightness – this is the artwork as they want us to see it. As early as Homer, one finds a wealth of inherited formulas and poetic rules which he had to dance within, and he himself established new conventions for the next generation of artists” (2016: 237, emphasis in the original). In the aesthetic event of play, the loss of options for action becomes a precondition of aesthetic pleasure for the both the performing artists and the audience, whether present or, in the case of technical media, ‘switched on’. Is play, then, more than a metaphor that connotes indeterminacy? Is the aestheticization of society perhaps only a conglomeration of noisy, joyful, disputatious players and spectators? These kinds of ideas flare up in the Reckwitz passages cited above, and they help illuminate the potential of an emerging theory of social play and games.

References Ehrmann, Jacques (1968): “Homo Ludens Revisited.” In: Yale French Studies 41, pp. 31-57. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1986): Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit und Methode, Tübingen: Mohr. Huizinga, Johan (1949): Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jünger, Friedrich Georg (1953): Die Spiele, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Ortmann, Günther (2016): “Innovation. In Ketten tanzen.” In: Werner Rammert et al. (eds.), Innovationsgesellschaft heute, Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 237-250. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953): Philosophical Investigations, London: Basil Blackwell.

Pop Christoph Jacke

The study of pop music culture, as an inter-disciplinary and ideally trans-disciplinary research project, benefits from research on creativity – and vice versa. This is equally evident in studies of creative classes (*Creative Crowd), *creative cities, and creative industries, as in those of the role of creativity in making, producing, and writing about pop music (including DJing and remixing), as well as its active fanbase. Just as the development of social *aestheticization in terms of the wish and desire to be creative certainly had an impact on the culture of pop music, pop, for its part, certainly influenced this social transformation. There are great benefits to reading ‘popular cultures’, especially those centered historically and structurally on music, through the lens of Andreas Reckwitz’s creativity dispositif (2017). At the nexus of art, *design, *fashion, literature, journalism, advertising, public relations, games, sports, and information technology (*Computer), pop (music) culture exhibits many power structures typical of the creativity dispositif, illustrating diverse attempts to control creativity and providing a reminder of its ultimate uncontrollability. Like the creativity dispositif, pop is characterized by an interplay of construction and deconstruction, *innovation and tradition, progression and regression, and, most significantly, inclusion, exclusion, and everything ‘in between’. In the German discourse, the developments of creative industries and industrial creativity analyzed by Reckwitz (2017; 2018) have also been observed in connection with the areas of society mentioned above, in general, and in popular (music) cultures, in particular. There are many shared concepts, such as the ‘society of creativity’ (Reckwitz 2017) and the mass media’s construction of expressive individuality in the context of star systems, or the ‘economization of culture’ (Reckwitz 2018), superstar economics, and creative stars. Each provides a means of plugging in to the analysis of pop, and can also serve as part of a grid for observing the interface of popular figures and persons in the form of celebrities and stars.

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Pop ‘Pop music’ and ‘pop culture’ are used here in contrast to other concepts synonymous with the popular and popular culture to emphasize their belonging to a commercial social sector. This sector industrially produces and mediates topics that are then adopted by large groups of people and processed further into new products. For academic studies, the communicative process involved in pop music can be analyzed and structured further into the fields of production, distribution, reception/usage, and further processing, each of which plays its own, though at times overlapping, role. ‘Pop music’ arises only as a result of this communicative process, which is based on different supporting cultures with different relations to each other. In addition, within any media-dominated pop music culture, there are further subcultures for various movements and genres, which either expand generic borders or seek to change them, progressively or regressively, thereby working on that culture’s mainstream. This is an amusing and playful game (*Play), which consists of constructing and consolidating identity according to very specific rules, usually played by children and teenagers as a hobby or part of other free time. Pop often amounts to “entertainment” in the sense of both communication and pleasure. It was an early object of commercialization because of its effectiveness, aestheticization, and emotional marketing. For generations socialized in pop cultures, the game can last an entire lifetime, albeit in a weakened form. Everyone connected to the exploitative music and media industries – and even the media observing them, especially journalists, advertisers, public relations, and various kinds of artists – has long reacted to the artistic field. In the aesthetics and economics of pop music, which constitutes a central space of the trans-global economy of culture, there have long been intra- and intercultural dynamics and hybridizations of once-separate spheres, such as the current alignment of music rights with other branches of the entertainment industry including film, television, advertising, and gaming. For markets, there has long been a clear industrial significance to the dialectics of pop, whether internal (pop, anti-pop, anti-pop pop) or external (pop, non-pop, society), on account of their ability to attract attention and to have an effect on the masses. In recent years, these dynamics have even reached a stage of social relevance and media-saturated visibility that has made pop music into something apparently worthy of preservation and institutionalization, a cultural heritage. Pop is a driving force in both cultural differentiation and dedifferentiation. It forms social groups that, in turn, can make people social or asocial through further practices of inclusion and exclusion. The pleasurable – and, in part, cultural – conflicts and combinations in pop music provide a seismograph of more general social developments, if not also social unrest. Pop’s ability to foment disquiet is often due to its principle accessibility and openness

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to connections: participation is the decisive factor of the popular, whether in large groups or small ones. Participation contributes, on the one hand, to a latent social critique, and on the other, to social solidarity, both of which contrast with paranoid societies, articulated in various forms of populism, which can be influenced by popular cultures, too. Hence, following Reckwitz and other like-minded sociologists, popular music cultures are no longer taken to be something opposed to or outside of society, but one of its integral parts. We might even discuss whether pop music will remain the dominant form of media culture in future generations, signifying the ‘aestheticization’ and ‘economization of culture’ in Reckwitz’s sense and thus basically including the entire category of ‘pop culture’ and/or ‘pop music’ in the established social and cultural canon at least in part due to an expanded notion of the culture of canon itself.

The Creative and the Uncreative “Creativity is generally a form of morphogenesis or ‘order from noise’, an effect of boundaries and discontinuities, and thus an ephemeral, time-dependent phenomenon. The ability to be creative is becoming more and more important in systems that are highly complex and can no longer be centrally controlled, such as brains and societies. Apparently, we are unable to make ends meet without creativity; it is a form of cognitive, cultural, and economic capital, as well as a problem-solving device of the first degree.” (Schmidt 2017: 127)

Creativity has also become an indispensable form of capital in every aspect of pop, which not only creates “order out of noise” but also noise out of order (e.g., ‘creative destruction’), all the while testing limits, relocating them, breaking them down, and at times even dissolving them entirely. Following Schmidt, effecting change through innovation is not a matter of fashion but a structural requirement of functionally differentiated societies. As pop thrives on ‘difference’ and ‘displacement’ (Jullien 2017: 35-43), these are often discussed, constructed, and, above all, deconstructed, e.g., with respect to the category of gender (*Queer). Over time, the content changes but the principle remains the same, which is why it has long been fashionable to be creative, and in the meantime has become fashionable to be uncreative: “If there is a desire in contemporary society that defies comprehension, it is the desire not to be creative” (Reckwitz 2017: 1). This very desire can be observed in the half-playful, halfserious, mostly pleasurable enjoyment of peace, nature, idleness, country life, escape from the city, daydreaming (*Aestheticization), or simply sleeping. In the past few years, this phenomenon, which has been evident not only in pop, but also in work environments (e.g., the “work-life balance,” *Work), seems to be a re-action to the negative implications of the imperative to permanently have the ability and to be creative, such as fear, anxiety, fatigue, illness, and depression

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(*Coaching). Basically, ‘creative action’, following Schmidt, means acting and redesigning – creating order from noise: “Paradoxicality not only has to be ‘kept in check’; it needs to be made productive on the basis of a conscious tolerance of ambiguity, thereby reinterpreting observer perspectives, inventing new differences or dissolving existing ones, taking advantage of coincidences to create order, deconstructing expectations, and making uncertainties tolerable” (2017: 129). Going beyond Schmidt’s argument, Hans Ulrich Reck claims for creativity a certain sensitivity to inexplicable, pre-communicative situations that are manifest in aesthetic experience. Therefore, according to Reck, in a society of experience and of creativity as norms it is important “to make possible counterfactual realizations (i.e., against evidence and the facts)” (Reck 2018: 146); at least in the arts. The tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes described by Reckwitz for twenty-first century working cultures (Reckwitz 2018: 218-223) can be recognized at an earlier historical stage in popular music cultures. In dialogue with Reckwitz’s theoretical work, there could be further historical studies of whether this social sub-sector between the artist’s dilemma and the superstar economy, between acculturation and marketization first developed as a blueprint for ‘doping one’s own blood’ (Diedrich Diederichsen) not only in pop but in other even larger spheres of work, such as the creative industries and beyond.

Stars, Anti-Stars, Anti-Star Stars In popular cultures, subjects are expected to be creative in the sense of Reckwitz’s ‘creative subject’ (2017: 154-172), and creativity is their ‘norm’, whether in the sense of industry or that of formatting (*Naturalization). These structures can be recognized at every level of the communicative process in pop music cultures, from production and distribution through reception/usage to further processing. Just as people who act creatively are necessary to both stabilize and change cultures, they establish a ‘cultural’ ground against which other figures can stand out: “Only a select few from very specialized professions are capable of becoming stars. They tend to be characterized by strong ‘expressive individualism’. Their apparent uniqueness and cultural productivity can be realized and expressed both in works and in the presentation of a public image.” (Reckwitz 2017: 154) The work makes one’s entire image, particularly in pop with all its historical and structural roles, texts, paratexts (Genette 1997), hypertexts, and contexts. Singers can be read and experienced in their star images, songs, sounds and lyrics, music clips, Internet platforms, press conferences, pictures and photos, performances and appearances, and occasionally in less professional coverage, from music journalism through PR to amateur and fan blogs. In the creativity

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dispositif’s economy of attention, the cult of genius gets smuggled back into discourse through concepts like ‘lighthouse project’, ‘unique selling point’, and ‘excellence initative’. The making of stars and the management of difference and singularity (e.g., among scholars, project managers, or pop music stars) are turned into an object of the media and the economy, particularly evident in casting scenarios and “celebreality” shows. At every level of pop, there are stars, anti-stars, anti-star stars, and even meta-stars. In this vast universe of stars, the categories of economic success, audience size, media publicity, and (non-) compliance with values are (necessarily) used to measure system-related performance and popularity. The superstar economy is evident, above all, in the media’s thematization of pop music icons with terms like ‘top’, ‘super’, ‘mega’, and ‘hyper-star’, which also display a certain kind of informal compulsion to be more and more creative.

Conclusion For further studies, the benefits of developing these short references to Reckwitz’s concepts of the creativity dispositif and the society of singularities can be seen for popular media and music cultures in three main areas. First of all, pop connects to everything. Therefore, theoretically, the word ‘pop’ could be added as a prefix or suffix to all the other entries in this book for further analyses. Not everything is necessarily pop, but anything can become pop; whether that is morally and aesthetically satisfactory is another discussion, which would itself belong to pop. This ability – and thus the competency of those acting, reacting, and interacting in pop – also explains its compatibility and attractiveness for *aesthetic capitalism. Second, pop is here to stay. It is neither intrinsically against society (pop as a subversive “popping”) nor intrinsically for society (pop as the mass quotidian), since ordinariness can be good and popping bad. Pop is at once complex, differentiated, and omnipresent, and thus no longer explicitly ‘singular’ in Reckwitz’s sense (2018). Pop may be the norm in Reckwitz’s imperative of constant, homeopathic deviation in certain areas of society, but it is neither obsolete nor ineffective. It cannot be located completely in either the creativity dispositif itself (in which case pop would be “uncreative”), nor in the latent attempt to escape from it (in which case it would be “creative”). Third, the comprehensive effects of the creativity dispositif and the society of singularities can be found in pop itself. They are straightforward, either permitted or counteracted (consciously or unconsciously) by actors in the artistic sector, the media, and the market. This is where stability and change emerge in equal measure. While creativity appears to be hardly susceptible to total planning, control, or even negation, the opposite seems to be the case with commercial and artis-

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tic success, and thus stardom, which is predictable in the case of pop. Strictly speaking, any pop music song or star that can be interpreted is no longer a pop music song or star. And creativity means keeping open the possibility of interpretation through Leerstelle, the empty spaces requiring the imposition of meaning from an implied reader. These empty spaces, which are difficult or even impossible to calculate from every level and every perspective in the network-like creativity dispositif, can actually be described as creative spaces. Is there a ‘beyond’ for the creativity dispositif, or is this beyond perhaps not right here in the empty space in the middle of pop?

References Genette, Gérard (1997): Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, translated by Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jacke, Christoph (2017): “Popmusikkulturen. Entwicklung und Verständnis.” In: Claus Leggewie/Erik Meyer (eds.), Global Pop. Das Buch zur Weltmusik, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, pp. 67-75. Jullien, François (2017): Es gibt keine kulturelle Identität, Berlin: Edition Suhrkamp. Reck, Hans Ulrich (2018): “‘Die Verpflichtung der Kunst auf das Schöne ist Selbstbetrug’. Sechs Fragen und Antworten zu Sinn und Bedeutung von Kunst.” In: Kunstforum International 253, April/May 2018, pp. 143-147. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Reckwitz, Andreas (2018): Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Schmidt, Siegfied J. (2017): “Kreativität produziert Kreativität.” In: Kunstforum International 250, October/November 2017, pp. 126-133.

Product Dirk Hohnsträter

The *aestheticization of modern society, in general, and the establishment of creativity as the cultural core of late modernity, in particular, occurs especially in the field of the economy. Between 1920 and 2000, according to Andreas Reckwitz’s diagnosis, *fashion, advertising, and *design developed into “an exemplary blueprint for the creativity dispositif as a whole” (2017: 81). This transformation emerged out of stylistic impulses from the sixties counterculture and spread throughout the rest of society in the seventies. In the 1980s, design acquired “the status of a general discipline of the creative economy,” and ever since, “the aesthetic worth of an increasing number of products has gone from being a marginal aspect to becoming their most conspicuous feature” (ibid: 116). In this entry, I argue that the shift from the functional aspects of consumer objects to their semiotic and event-based aspects, from their use value to their symbolic and experiential value went hand in hand with the semantic recoding and *valorization of the word ‘product’. One initial point of reference for this change can be found in Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s observation that “over the last twenty years the ordinary use of the term ‘product’ has undergone a major expansion, and that we commonly speak today of ‘financial products’, ‘travel products’, ‘property products’, referring not to material objects, but to specific assemblages of services” (2007: 476, note 63). What implications for the contemporary discourse of economics might be hiding behind the conspicuously attractive concept of product? Why was this concept preferred to the older concepts of ‘goods’, ‘wares’, or ‘commodities’? As Boltanski and Chiapello point out, the term ‘product’ refers not only to material goods, but can also encompass services and even scientific paradigms (ibid). However, this explanation is somewhat tautological, since it attributes the concept’s success to its widespread usage. A more productive starting point can be found in Reckwitz’s thesis about the impact of countercultural impulses on the transformation of the modern economy. One particularly revealing document of this transformation process can be found in the so-called “Lost Interview” (Sen 2012), which journalist Robert

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X. Cringely conducted with Steve Jobs in 1995 and retrieved from the archive in 2012. In 1985, Jobs was forced to leave the company he had co-founded following several internal power struggles, and only returned a decade later, eventually transforming the company, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, into what it is known for today, a global player capable of “disrupting” entire markets. The 70-minute interview, which took place two years before Jobs’ return to Apple, contains an extraordinarily lucid description of the aesthetic economy, which warrants a closer look. At first, Jobs seems impressed by the commercial success of his competitor, Microsoft, only to continue along the following lines: “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. […] In the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product” (Sen 2012). Jobs’ statement crystallizes the core aspects of the creative economy: the amalgamation of the economic with the aesthetic (the category of “taste”); the clarification of this thought by reference to the production of the new (“original ideas”); and the culturalization of goods (“culture into […] product”; *Aesthetic Capitalism). To support this position, Jobs provides the example of typography and claims that companies have the responsibility to educate the public’s taste. Over the course of the interview he even gives his remarks a countercultural spin. At one point, Jobs emphasizes that many members of the original Macintosh team were musicians, poets, artists, and scholars “who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world” (ibid). According to Jobs, these bohemians brought a Hippie attitude to their work, going beyond conventional careerism and searching for creative expression: “It’s the same thing that causes people to wanna be poets instead of bankers […] and I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I think that that same spirit can be put into products. And those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit” (ibid). At one point during the interview, Job even corrects himself, substituting the word ‘things’ for ‘products’. This subtle semantic shift is crucial for understanding the aesthetic economy: Products are no longer mere goods, i.e., purely commercial objects, as they emerge from the spirit of industrial production and provide a moderate use value (in Jobs’ example, Microsoft’s office software); nor do they exist outside of commercial circulation like artworks in museums (Jobs emphasizes that his fellow employees are creative types; *Museum). Instead, a product, in the context of the creative economy, is any item containing culturally-charged values that can be bought or sold. In other words, products represent for the postindustrial economy what commodities were for the industrial economy. Since the concept of commodity only covers the commercial and functional aspect of merchandise, it has been losing significance and is increasingly replaced by that of product. While Jobs’ presentation of himself in the “Lost Interview” indexes this change in emphasis, his understanding of products remained relatively one-

Product

sided in a way that undermines a full understanding of products as culturallyconditioned goods. At first glance, the postindustrial entrepreneur’s statements appear to be strikingly paternalistic. In the interview, Jobs describes the *computer as a “tool” and software as an instrument or “enabler” of socioeconomic growth, though he is primarily interested in marketing and development: “products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit” (ibid). If the concept of product is construed in this manner, merely purchasing a device can be taken to mean participating in creative difference – an objection that forms the core of Evgeny Morozov’s critique of Apple’s version of the Californian Ideology: “Apple’s most incredible trick […] is to allow its customers to feel as if they are personally making history […] No wonder that the counterculture fizzled in the early 1980s: everyone was promised they could change the world by buying a Macintosh” (2012). For Morozov, Apple’s design philosophy is based on the elitist assumption of the designer’s quasi-Platonic insight into the essence of future products: “there is a way for the rest of us to participate in the truth upon which the design is based, and to rise to the human level of the designers themselves: it is to buy an iPhone or an iPod” (ibid). As a result, Apple’s magic devices are fetishized in a classic Marxist sense, for their seamless form and their pure whiteness, as though they were no different than the goods of the industrial era. Given this conception of products, the digital creative tool remains a ‘consumer product’, an object for passive acceptance. Whoever can understand – and afford it – will have a share of the creativity dispositif; whoever cannot deserves their place, so the rhetoric goes, among the unfortunate consumers wedded to large gray corporations like IBM and Microsoft. As Morozov puts it, “That Jobs could launch a campaign against capitalism by using capitalism’s favorite weapon – and get away with it! – was truly remarkable” (ibid). Still, an emphatic concept of the product would not stop with the creativity of its design and its implementation in various forms. It would also come to include the adoption of the product and its adaptation by individual users. As early as 1980, Michel de Certeau was already speaking of “consumer production” (1984: xii). For Certeau, the phrase referred to “another production, called ‘consumption’” that “does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products” (ibid: xii-xiii, emphasis in the original). While Certeau draws a distinction between the primary “production of the image and secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization” (ibid: xiii), he still emphasizes that both take place in one and the same order. For Certeau, then, cultural difference can only be found inside society and not in some privileged, folkloric, countercultural outside. In this respect, an expanded concept of products can also include what consumers do with the things they buy. Analytically, we might draw a distinction between ‘goods’, which are defined by their use and exchange value, and ‘products’, which encompass all the aspects of their culturalization: their symbolic value, their affordances, and

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any activities that, in Bruno Latour’s sense, cannot be separated from the ‘object’. Certeau puts a political and ethical spin on the concept of ‘consumer production’, conceiving of practices of secondary production as a counterweight to the disciplinary mechanisms of technocratic societies. Whereas most “products leave no room where the consumers can mark their activity” (1984: 31), the counter-practice of inscribing an activity into a product creates room to counter the imperatives of rationalization. In doing so, Certeau invokes a second aspect of products, which was missing with Jobs – their morality. Calling Jobs’ attitude “decidedly pre-political,” Morozov states that “Jobs himself was never shy about the value that Apple products were to embody: it was liberation – from manual work, from being limited to just a few dozen songs on your music player, from being unable to browse the Internet on your phone.” However, these values ignored “civic externalities,” including the conditions of production for gadgets and their ecological effects (Morozov 2012). A concept of products that would cover not only the specific *aestheticization of goods but also their culturalization in a broader sense cannot neglect this moral aspect. All the more so because, along with the establishment of a creativity dispositif, the sociological diagnosis of our times also describes a complementary ‘moralization of the markets’ (Stehr/Henning/Weiler 2010). According to this description, there has been a rise, within affluent societies since the late twentieth century, in both consumer choice and the general level of education, whereby consumers have acquired more agency and started a trend toward acquiring goods with a moral content. The focus on “doing the right thing,” in normative terms, is not only a matter of “business ethics” (ibid: 6); rather, “norms, values, and world-views become increasingly important when one tries to understand the modern market society. To put it simply, as people become more and more affluent, they can afford to be and purchase what they perceive to be morally right” (ibid: 2). In contrast to Reckwitz’s genealogy of the creativity dispositif, Stehr’s analysis of the contemporary moralization of markets only touches on its historical precursors in passing and thereby neglects the fact that, in the debates on quality around 1900, the “moralization of things [was] attached to these things themselves: the negotiation of their shape, their material, their form” (König 2009: 48). Taking account of the external conditions and ramifications of goods, which would eventually become “built-in” attributes of products, is only one half of a movement toward culturalization, which can be traced back to the beginnings of modern consumption. The other half is aestheticization (*Color). “Merchandise is not merchandise,” Latour writes (1993: 38), and he is right, provided that ‘merchandise’ is taken to mean ‘products’ in the sense of hybrid ensembles of intersecting materials, qualities, uses, meanings, values, possibilities, and changes in form, and not merely functions and prices. More precisely, the success of the term ‘product’ in Reckwitz’s creativity dispositif de-

Product

pends on its ability to include those very aspects of things, which escaped from the spirit of industrial rationalization in the concept of commodities – namely, aesthetics and ethics.

References Boltanski, Luc/Chiapello, Ève (2007): The New Spirit of Capitalism [1999], translated by Gregory Elliott, New York: Verso. Certeau, Michel de (1984): The Practice of Everyday Life [1980], translated by Steven Rendall, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. König, Gudrun (2009): Konsumkultur. Inszenierte Warenwelt um 1900, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. Latour, Bruno (1993): We Have Never Been Modern [1991], translated by Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morozov, Evgeny (2012): “Form and Fortune.” In: The New Republic, February 22, 2012. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/100978/form-fortu​ ne-steve-jobs-philosopher [accessed August 16, 2018]. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Sen, Paul (dir.) (2012): Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, New York: Magnolia Pictures. Stehr, Nico/Henning, Christoph/Wiler, Bernd (eds.) (2010): The Moralization of the Markets [2007], New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

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Queer Chris Steyaert

In his genealogical analysis of the creativity imperative, Reckwitz does not relate the creativity ‘dispositif’ to the position the LGBTQ-community is claimed to play in this formation; nor does he enter into dialogue with queer critiques of the creative city. This could have been an important trace to follow, since Reckwitz considers Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class as a programmatic text for explaining the spread of the creative ethos throughout society through the emergence of a new, rapidly growing, and culturally dominant professional group, the so-called “creative class.” As is well known, Florida co-opts gay and lesbian people as empirical support for his thesis in his model of the three T’s (Talents, Technology, and Tolerance), an ambivalent status they share with artists, bohemians, and immigrants. In this lemma, I would like to follow up on this missed opportunity as I believe that queering the relationship between creativity and city life would reveal not only a different kind of *critique, but also an altered view on urban and queer creativity, one that better documents the resistance to and transgression of the imperative to be creative. In Florida’s analysis, cities either are, or are supposed to be, creative centers where innovative people flock to more for their quality of life than for simple job opportunities (*Creative Cities). To guarantee economic development through *innovation and technological development, these “creative cities” attempt to attract young, talented people that are eager to move to these cities for their tolerant, diverse, and vibrant *atmospheres: computer scientists, video game designers, architects, think-tank researchers, digital media professionals, filmmakers, thought leaders, and entrepreneurs, all of whom belong to the “super-creative core.” Florida ranks creative cities and correlates them with measurements of their openness and tolerance in the form of various indexes including the “Gay Index,” “Bohemian Index,” “Melting Pot Index,” and “Composite Diversity Index.” Various minority groups are thus dealt a central role in urban regeneration, but this is not without some questionable side effects. With regard to gays and lesbians, Florida argues that “to some extent, homosexuality represents the last frontier of diversity in our society, and thus a place that

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welcomes the gay community welcomes all kinds of people” (2002: 256). His calculations also aim to confirm this claim based on the positive relationship between the Gay Index and the Creative Class index – referring, for instance, to regions where many high-tech industries are located. In this logic, “creative people are attracted to, and high-tech industry takes root in, places that score high on our basic indicators of diversity – the Gay, Bohemian and other indexes […]. Why would this be so? It is not because high-tech industries are populated by great numbers of bohemians and gay people. Rather, artists, musicians, gay people and the members of the Creative Class in general prefer places that are open and diverse” (ibid: 250). While the empirical constructions of Florida’s studies have been criticized from various perspectives over the years (e.g., Peck 2005), one of the earliest critiques was launched from a queer perspective. David Bell and Jon Binnie pointed out that Florida relies on census data about gays and lesbians in same-sex relationships to calculate his correlations between the presence of gay people and creativity. Therefore, they call Florida’s Gay Index “an index of respectability, of nicely gentrified neighbourhoods” (2004: 1817). Everyone who is not in a relationship recognized by the US census is left out of Florida’s statistical calculations, implying that the diversity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other queer people becomes streamlined and normalized in a model of stable, straight-like relationships. As a consequence, gays and lesbians find themselves inscribed in a very ambivalent position. On the one hand, they are awarded a prominent place to represent and re-engineer cities as desirable destinations for tourists, consumers, and an elitist group of creative professionals. On the other hand, many aspects of queer lifestyles, which are usually seen as less desirable and even referred to as “perverse,” are left out in a cleaned-up, public version of gay cultures. Through this mainstreaming, the diverse and antagonistic public sphere of the LGBTQ-community gets reduced to a narrow consumerist and commodified culture (*Consumption, *Aesthetic Capitalism). This ambivalent position is also clear in urban policymaking, which often forms a problematic entanglement with queer politics. Florida and many other mainstream urban policy advisors popularly argue that successful cities within the global economy are the ones that are “gay-friendly.” They put queer people on the spot – for instance, calling gay people the “canaries of the creative economy” (qtd. in Peck 2005: 745) – since they are taken to signal a diverse and progressive environment that fosters the creativity and innovation necessary for success in a high-tech industry. The promotion of queer people in the publicity of gay-friendly cities may not be something the entire LGBTQ-community would dislike, insofar as it increases representation and raises awareness. But it comes at a price, insofar as this type of policymaking implicitly favors a narrow and mainstreamed form of gay life. Therefore, Bell and Binnie argue that the incorporation of ‘sexual others’ into urban governance strategies of creative and

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entrepreneurial places has actually had the opposite effect than that intended, and “has meant tightening regulation of the types of sexualized spaces in cities” (2004: 1818). The promotion of creative cities thus comes with a sexual restructuring of urban spaces that actually reduces the possibilities of queering city life. In a nutshell, the places that were once used for experimental and alternative sexual lifestyles have been wiped out in favor of more glorified, gentrified apartment sites trying to attract a subgroup of respectable and well-to-do gay couples. In this sexual restructuring of the city, Bell and Binnie identify a new homonormativity that is part of “a broader ideological project tied to the logic of assimilationist sexual citizenship” (ibid). Notwithstanding this prescient critique, the LGBTQ-community has continued to be enlisted as a core part of entrepreneurial governance, as even more urban spaces and practices have been commodified with an impact on local neighborhoods, leisure spaces, tourist destinations, and political activities of the LGBTQ-community. Many more cities have embraced the ‘pink economy’ and declared themselves a gay-friendly travel destination, whether to attract those on a ski trip or a summer holiday, or to compete for events like the Gay Olympics, EuroPride, or Mr. Gay World. Even typical queer events like Sydney’s yearly Mardi Gras are currently under siege by similar commodification processes. Commentators have pointed out that Mardi Gras has evolved – in a manner similar to many pride marches and summer festivities across the globe – from being a radical street protest to an internationally branded event emphasizing its economic value instead of its social and political significance. Indeed, many of these spectacular events seem to be very distant from the everyday and political problems of sexual minorities. What use is another Gay Olympics in Amsterdam if it makes us forget the violent assaults on its LGBTQ-population regularly reported in the press in recent years? Even more importantly, many of these events marginalize the systematic discrimination, violence, imprisonment, and killing of LGBTQ-people on an everyday basis in vast parts of the world. It is important to keep in mind that the LGBTQ-community are not cultural dopes unable to resist their inscription in the cultural imperative of the creative city. Even in the most repressive systems, LGBTQ-people keep fighting for their social, political, and legal rights, as well as their right to maintain their lifestyles. Therefore, it is crucial to keep highlighting counter-narratives that document the centrality of urban creativity for LGBTQ-emancipation. In this regard, David Harvey suggests looking in the direction of social movements when he asks the following question in Rebel Cities: “Can urban-based social movements play a constructive role and make their mark in the anti-capitalist struggle?” (2013: 128) For instance, I would refer to the excellent (and still too rare) empirical work of the American queer activist and scholar Benjamin Shepard (2010; 2011) who in a two-volume study undertook an analysis of how playful activities

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of social movements have both enabled the emancipation of the LGBTQ-community and contributed to a more diverse city. One of the central movements in Shepard’s study is ACT UP, an international advocacy group whose carnivalesque and often situationist strategies made it possible in the 80s and 90s for the AIDS-epidemic to be regarded as a force of queer emancipation rather than repression and violence. Shepard offers different stories of creativity by documenting how activists like ACT UP mobilize play and pleasure to “steel out, and rise above” the daily despair and death that came with AIDS, and the accompanying political drawbacks. Shepard’s focus on ludic political practices relates well to the concept of the ‘ludic city’ that Henri Lefebvre proposed through his ideas that “[A] renewed fête [is] fundamentally linked to play, [to] subordinating to play rather than to subordinate play to the ‘seriousness’ of culturalism” (1996: 171; *Play, *Improvisation). In Shepard’s analysis, the many parties, parades, and pride-marches – in spite of constant efforts to inscribe them into urban branding campaigns – are central to a tactical, embodied response to a normative urban scene. They are references to the ludic city in the form of the “festival” or “collective games,” which can be seen with Lefebvre as the ultimate expression of social revolution: the desire to “restitute the fête by changing daily life” (ibid: 168, emphasis in the original). Play and creativity are here linked to the rights of citizens to claim a different participatory citizenship enacted in a ‘renewed fête’ that turns to the diverse desires that cross and make urban flows. In conclusion, a genealogical analysis needs to look at the cracks and fissures through which a concept like (urban) creativity can emerge. In the case of the creativity dispositif, the critical perspectives of feminism and queer theory have figured as some of the most productive critiques of Florida’s position, in particular, and the creativity imperative, in general (*Genealogy). What Florida and others did was nothing less than take away the many genuine urban spaces that played a crucial role in LGBTQ-emancipation, and catapult them in a story of consumerism, commodification, and clichés. To oppose these potential effects of the creativity imperative, the city needs to be comprehended, now more than ever before, as a significant terrain for struggles over sexual equality and justice. In this pursuit, the following question needs to be raised: Can people from the LGBTQ-community and all those that opt for a more “queer” form of life obtain a different “location,” rather than figuring as commodified personages in gentrified neighborhoods who live together with their affluent and “tolerant” neighbors? The ease and smoothness with which the LGBTQ-community has been enrolled in the glorified scripts of re-engineering urban policies raises another series of vital questions: What rights to the city do each of us have? Where can queer bodies live and move in the creative city? And to what extent can queer subjectivities open up other spaces that make cities – without being exclusive and excluding – indeed more open, tolerant, and perhaps even rebellious? As Henri Lefebvre urges, we need to keep telling other stories of

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urban creativity that bypass the script of the creativity imperative, so that “[t]he urban becomes what it always was: place of desire, permanent disequilibrium, seat of the dissolution of normalities and constraints, the moment of play and of the unpredictable” (1996: 129).

References Bell, David/Binnie, Jon (2004): “Authenticating Queer Space: Citizenship, Urbanism and Governance.” In: Urban Studies 41/9, pp. 1807-1820. Florida, Richard (2002): The Rise of the Creative Class, Cambridge, MA, Basic Books. Harvey, David (2013): Rebel City: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, London: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri (1996): Writings on Cities, Oxford: Blackwell. Peck, Jamie (2005): “Struggling with the Creative Class.” In: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29/4, pp. 740-770. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Shepard, Benjamin (2010): Queer Political Performance and Protest, New York: Routledge. Shepard, Benjamin (2011): Play, Creativity, and Social Movements: If I Can’t Dance, It’s Not My Revolution, New York: Routledge.

Self-Generation Emmanuel Alloa

In “aesthetic capitalism” consumers are not only addressed with respect to their purchasing power and consumer needs; they are also courted as subjects who are themselves aesthetically oriented (*Aesthetic Capitalism, *Consumption). *Design is not therefore limited to commodities to be purchased but includes an associated lifestyle: Aside from securing the individual’s access to commodities, values, or services, they also shape the individual’s relationship to these things in a customized way. Fantasies of Taylorist control have now become worn out by standardized norms, giving way more and more to individualized targeting. Not only are things bought and used, but also meaning, affective associations, and emotional coloration are actively produced, which in turn combines to form an individual style. In other words, creativity is not limited to merely the inventive organization of things or goods. It also includes, perhaps, above all, the design of individuals themselves. This customization of purchases involves a process of creating distinctions, out of which a personality is formed. In many respects, as Reckwitz argues, a certain post-romantic tradition lives on within aesthetic capitalism, which is manifest in the fact that self-fashioning has become a regulative ideal. Whether traveling or pursuing a hobby, whether in romantic or professional partnerships – it is always a matter of selfinvention. As early as the 1970s, Richard Rorty spoke of the post-romanticism of the present, in which he was able to attribute the newly emerging culture of “self-creation” to the rhetorical labor of non-alienated “self-growth” (Maslow). This romantic genealogy helps to avoid confusing self-invention with economic paradigms of the subject as either “entreployee” (Voss; Pongratz) or “enterprising self” (Foucault; Rose; Bröckling). Alongside the projects of self-governance and self-marketing, we need to reconstruct the genealogy of a project of selfproduction, which is metaphysically coded throughout. According to Reckwitz, it is not for nothing that the “autopoiesis of one’s own self” (Autopoiesis seiner selbst, 2017: 152; modified translation) is attributed to the capacity of the creative subject. The dream of self-generation is added to the process of subjectification.

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In the creativity dispositif subjects are not only the impresario of themselves; they are at the same time able to demand copyrights for themselves: fabricando fabricamur – we produce ourselves in the process of production (*Creativity Techniques). The concept of self-generating or autopoietic processes (Lat. auto ‘self’ and Gr. poiein ‘create, generate, produce’) has been described repeatedly in the humanities. In fact, however, the concept of autopoiesis is generally associated with the Chilean biologists Huberto Maturana and his student Francisco Varela, who pointed out that the self-replication of cells was a basic principle of life, and thus coined the term “autopoiesis.” Yet the apparent clarity of the concept conceals the fact that it can designate very different things. Thus, even with the ideal of creative self-generation, various trains of thought converge, which are by no means synonymous and should be kept apart. Spontaneity, autonomy, and recursiveness represent three such instances.

Spontaneity When Maturana and Varela introduced the concept of autopoiesis to the theory of life systems, Aristotle’s concept of poiesis was a source of inspiration, as they themselves later explained. It is not a question of doing (praxis), which is implemented into action, but rather about the production (poiesis) of a product, which goes beyond the process. Poietic acts are acts insofar as they give rise to something that would not otherwise exist naturally. Unlike natural processes of physis, poiesis concerns the field of technè; or, to use the Latin terms, unlike that which thrives on “nature” (nativus), it must proceed artificially ( facticius). But the point behind the concept of autopoiesis is that the gap between culture and nature is in some way closed since it is a matter of poietic generations, which are self-implemented. This biological concept then finds its counterpart in a certain classical aesthetic and the associated ideal of spontaneity (sponte fit, ‘self-made’). In the twentieth century traces of this concept can still be found in psychosomatic self-help theories (e.g., Feldenkrais 1985).

Autonomy A slightly different understanding of self-generation places less emphasis on the fact that something originates from itself than the fact that something originates out of itself – a generation from one’s own means, as it in the case of causa sui. Self-generation is close to the ideal of autonomous self-creation. The human being is artifex sui, ‘the creator of one’s self’ as it is described by Pico della Mirandola’s work On the Dignity of Man (De humani dignitate, 1486). In Herder, we find that “the nature of man is art” (2002: 117), which means that man should make of himself what he can. Transcendental philosophy is about

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the self-legislation of subjects and Fichte’s writings on the topic are about selfdetermination and the “self-construction” of man. The claim to autonomy is not only reserved for persons, but also applies to groups and systems. Systems that assign themselves their own rules have to be taken as autonomous. Incidentally, such rules do not just place a limit on creativity, they also challenge it. This phenomenon is recognized in situations of political censorship (for example, one could consider the fate of creativity in Iranian cinema). In fine arts and music, the phenomenon is also easy to comprehend in the concept of style: a style is not formed in the absence of formal rules or as a replacement of them, but rather as their interpretation or elaboration (*Improvisation, *Fashion). If rules and regulations are imposed, it is necessary to find one’s own way of configuring them; in this way a style emerges. One’s own sense of style does not appear where all rules have been suspended, but where they have been reinterpreted in a singular way. For example, in new music a composition lacking in structure can often create surprising effects that render the music ephemeral and irrelevant.

Recursivity Self-generating systems are not only self-referential, but also recursive in the sense that they use parts of themselves to create something new. It is no surprise that biology was the inspiration for the concept of autopoiesis, above all that it articulated a certain conception of what organisms are. Organisms exhibit a unity that is not imposed on them from the outside; rather, their unity is the result of immanent patterns of ordering. That such systematic unities appear closed does not mean that they are impervious to outside influences. Quite the contrary, they maintain their internal unity by constantly balancing and renegotiating inside-outside dynamics, selecting mechanisms, etc. Such biological models have also been used in cybernetics – for instance, in feedback loops in processes of self-regulation (*Computer). In Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, autopoiesis refers to the recursive structure of self-organizing systems, in which all elements evolve by means of self-generating processes, a theory that adopts, more generally, the concept of autogenesis as a means to justify a given social order. Cybernetic models have also been used in other sciences, such as the modeling of markets. Here the economic system is based not only on the reproduction of its own elements (in this case currency), but also on the self-generation of rules (in this case prices). To sum up, self-generation assumes different functions in the research on creativity, whether in self-referential creative processes in the realm of culture, in the emphasis on spontaneity, in the autonomous law of innovation, in the self-managing of individual development, or in the generation of new rules, which are gradually adopted and stabilized. However, the appearance of se-

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amless mechanics should not overlook the fact that the ideal of self-generation has a broad reach and that it is the result of a certain narrative. No matter how much one uses scientific or mathematical models, one must first believe, as with the famous episode of Baron Munchausen, in the narrative of the selfmade man. An analysis of the rhetorical trope of self-generation and its implied promise of autonomy and self-determination illustrates why this cyclical process is rarely perfect. This much is evident from Richard Rorty’s (1989) conclusion regarding the motif of self-creation in modern times. According to Rorty, the project of self-fulfillment is a story about self-literalization: Given that the “self” can never be objectified and the view from one’s own shoulder remains unavailable, self-narration and self-literalization will remain an infinite task. Since there is no right, conclusive description of the self, with respect to the insights into the radical contingency of identity, there is a perpetual need for self-description. Thus, each self-description is always already a self-definition, whereby every manifestation of self-description reflects the simple fact that there is no ultimate criterion of verification. However, such divergent theoretical views do not just add up to skepticism, especially as far as the ideal of a self-grounded self-generation is concerned. From the perspective of capitalism, cautious analysis is in order, when it comes to the stylization of united, free work design. What was once considered an ideological liberation for a particular generation of post-68ers, namely, the idea of permanent reinvention and the endless possibilities for differentiating ways of life, has long been an unwritten law for *aesthetic capitalism. While Guattari’s schizo-analysis concept dreamed of subjects as “poles of differentiation,” the idea of differentiation and singularization became central to the mechanisms of the marketplace. “To surrender,” as Guattari puts it, boundless autopoiesis to a “continual creation, which does not have the benefit of any preestablished theoretical support” (1995: 71) can hardly possess the same critical direction as today’s ultra-flexible conditions of production. After all, the autonomous structuring of one’s own activity is precisely what is needed of employees with incomplete or relational contracts. If flexibility can no longer be distinguished from precarity and differentiation only testifies to successful adaptability, then the demand for self-managed work loses its appeal (*Work). In the creativity dispositif the subject is addressed as an aesthetic subject, who is expected to possess not only a post-romantic urge for self-formation and self-stylization, but who also experiences this kind of urge as an imperative (*Naturalization, *Coaching). Objects are not the only things that want to be designed; so too does life seek design and not far from this new imperative of ego design is the splendor and misery of the creativity dispositif. In passing through the various aspects of self-production (spontaneity, autonomy, and recursivity), it is apparent that the creativity dispositif, in spite of all its anti-normative rhetoric, is still shot through with a strong normativity whose effects

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are increasingly felt in contemporary forms of society, all the more so in their pathological outgrowths.

References Feldenkrais, Moshe (1985): The Potent Self: A Guide to Spontaneity, San Francisco: Harper. Guattari, Félix (1995): Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herder, Johann Gottfried (2002): “Letters on the Advancment of Humanity.” [1793] In: Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Michael N. Forster, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1998): On the Dignity of Man [1486], translated by Charles Glenn Wallis, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Rorty, Richard (1989): Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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A central component of the new Apple complex is the Steve Jobs theater where the company’s newest products are presented (*Product). Up to 1000 spectators can gather in this underground space, and their gaze be directed toward the stage. The show, featuring the company’s latest creative and aesthetic innovations, is staged according to an almost sacral logic. It is no surprise that Apple decided to create its own staging space: The company’s “efficacy” in product design, *innovation, and marketing activities exemplifies the creativity imperative diagnosed by Andreas Reckwitz, and represents the emergence and persisting success of a design economy. At the same time, the parallels between the presentation of products and the logic and rhetoric of theater and performing arts, are relatively conspicuous: A stage is necessary to provide the mise en scène for (supposedly) constant creative output, the celebration of the victory of the new over the old, by and for the audience, all with a guaranteed round of applause at the end. At the beginning of his book on The Invention of Creativity, Andreas Reckwitz refers to Michel Foucault’s concept of the dispositif, in this case, a dispositif of the always-new, of sensory and aesthetic creation. The focus of Reckwitz’s study thus lies, in the sense of Foucault’s notion of ‘emergence’, on “the entry of forces; it is their eruption, the leap from the wings to center stage, each in its youthful strength” (qtd. in Reckwitz 2017: 29). At the start of Reckwitz’s study, then, there is the stage, a theatrical space that reveals the efficacy and strategic meaning of a dispositif, insofar as its forces have to cross this stage in order to have an effect. Nevertheless, the concept of the stage itself plays a perhaps justifiably subordinate role in Reckwitz’s texts, whether the stage on which the creativity complex is unfolded, or tries to unfold, or is organized with the aim of being unfolded. This subordination of the question of space, of the “where,” is based in ontological and epistemological terms on its localization in the Foucauldian *dispositif, which requires a variety of stages. In the sense of “a heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything” (Agamben 2009: 2), a complex looks for

Stage

and finds its efficacy in and through a variety of material places and immaterial spaces, or stages. Hence, the efficacy of the creativity complex involves a variety of places, spaces, dispositions, discourses, practices, and modes of thinking. The notion of a leap onto the open stage from some invisible place in the scenery – to develop Foucault’s metaphor – determines the concept of the stage in both the metaphorical sense of spatiality and the literal sense of acting, or counteracting, the creativity imperative in concrete politics. However, the metaphor of the stage both exhibits and dissolves the actual, real, determinable spaces in which the creativity imperative functions, occupies, and even creates. In accordance with the Foucauldian dispositif, actual spaces play an incidental role in comparison to their historicity or their heterogeneous efficacy. This is especially true of the space that created the stage and that can rightly claim to be its true home: the theater. Although the theater has been the form, the place, and the institution where the art has been practiced and performed for over a thousand years, a history of both tradition and crisis, it assumes a subordinate role in The Invention of Creativity. In Reckwitz’s narrative, the theater appears either in the form of empowering (theatrical) stages through performance art (e.g., Marina Abramović), or in that of schematizing a vast repertoire of examples of the creativity dispositif’s efficacy (e.g., fine arts, music, *museums, concerts, and theater; *Performativity). This is all the more surprising, since the theater could be a testing ground for central concepts in the creativity dispositif: In the landscape of theater, one should also find Reckwitz’s diagnosis of the reorientation and transformation of the relationship between the audience and the artist (or work of art), as well as the creation of purely aesthetic and sensory affective experiences (*Atmosphere). For this reason, it is even more important to discuss the spaces of theatrical work, because it would require consideration of the changed relations between the audience and the work of art, above all, in the changing design, use, and new conception of staging spaces. The main question would be whether theatrical stages are metaphorical spaces or whether any space can be potentially transformed into a stage for creative practices. Once again, it is no surprise that the question of spaces – i.e., the question of the ‘emergence’ of the creativity complex – plays a fundamental role in The Invention of Creativity, despite the absence of a concept of the stage. For instance, Reckwitz describes in detail how urban spaces exercise and make creative practices and discourses useful without developing a concept of urban space (*Queer). In this exact context, however, Reckwitz still treats the question of the stage as a platform for the exercise and empowerment of creative practices and discourses, referring to urban spaces as “stages” at the start of the chapter on *creative cities: “A decisive feature of this artistic class is the type of space which acts as its stage” (Reckwitz 2017: 188). Historically, the culturalization of the city has gone hand in hand with the use of urban spaces as stages – not through

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the much-discussed but still vague concept of the ‘artistic milieu’, but rather the practical utilization and appropriation of actual theater stages as urban spaces: “In the 1960s, performers everywhere in the Western world started moving out of the buildings representative of the theater, a tendency that continues today. The theater started to appropriate spaces that were not made for performances, such as empty warehouses, closed down mines, former train deposits, slaughterhouses, shopping malls, underground garages, streets, squares and parks, or even ateliers, apartments, garages, and basements” (Fischer-Lichte 2010: 133). Even if the appropriation of the city as a space for the stage is hardly an invention of the second half of the twentieth century, Fischer-Lichte’s analysis corresponds to Reckwitz’s description of this historical moment and of the conquest of new spaces in the emergence of the creativity dispositif. The appropriation of urban spaces as spaces for shows constitutes not only a spatial break with what are perceived to be the confines of theater buildings, but also a reorganization of the traditional relations between art producers (i.e., actors, actresses, directors, and stage designers) and consumers (i.e., spectators). This new order is geared toward “making possible new communities of actors and spectators” (Fisher-Lichte 2010: 133). The transformation of urban spaces into stages for a variety of creative practices and orders both enlarges and changes the institutions that previously offered an exclusive space for them. Recent examples of these reciprocal shifts can be found in the work of the theatre companies and groups around Christoph Schlingensief, She She Pop, Milo Rau, and Rimini Protokoll (cf. Reckwitz 2017: 75, 252, note 56). In the project “Remote X” staged by Rimini Protokoll, for instance, “a group of 50 people equipped with headphones sets off throughout the city. They are guided by an artificial voice, like those that we know from navigation systems. […] 50 people observe each other, make individual decisions, and yet remain part of a group. […] The project moves as a mobile research lab from city to city. In this context, every new site-specific version builds on the dramaturgy of the previous city [or ‘sub-urbs’, Vor-Stadt], and continues writing the piece on and on” (Rimini Protokoll 2018). Hence, nobody even enters the real stage – the theater. In its place, there are the arbitrary meeting places of random cities, which position spectators and observers next to people like them rather than in front of a group of actors. At one point in Rimini Protokoll’s piece, the 50 participants are asked, together as a group, to occupy a lively urban space, such as a subway station, very crowded square, or train station. Together, they have to observe the scene happening on the stage in front of them. The voice of the artistic intelligence requests that pedestrians and travelers observe the action in and out the space, and the performance of the actors and actresses before them. At the same time, the action of the 50 participants changes the place that they observe, and thus the group itself becomes part of a performance in the public space, which pe-

Stage

destrians may observe, photograph, merely notice, or simply ignore. There is an oscillation between the space of the stage and that of the audience, between the agent and the observer. Urban space works in the form of stage from Berlin through Denver to Jerusalem. And at the end, all of those who more or less participated applaud each other. Thus, the stages on which the creativity complex becomes visible are, in the sense of any dispositif, multifarious and eclectic. This must be the case when the concept of dispositif encompasses “a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient […] the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings” (Agamben 2009: 12). When Foucault locates the main task of a dispositif in its response to a state of emergency, the concept refers to those properties that, in Agamben’s interpretation, are part of a strategy. In the case of the creativity complex, the state of emergency can be considered, following Boltanski and Chiapello (2012), to be an immanent crisis of capitalism; and its presumed solution and overcoming to depend on the application of heterogeneous, strategic forms of creativity (*Affect Culture). In other words, the tools and aesthetics of what Boltanski and Chiapello call ‘artistic criticism’ discloses and grounds the state of emergency. If the theater is the locus classicus for the logic and material condition of the stage, a representative and pioneer of the historical development of creative practices, then it can help disclose further aspects of the creativity complex. (And by ‘theater’ I mean everything this order both supports and determines in a very broad sense: the space of the audience, the building in which the play happens, a location in an urban space, the division of a space for speaking, the arrangement and division between spectators and visitors.) In the words of the Berlin-based theater producer René Pollesch, “The box must still be good for something” (2012: 8). One possibility, in the context of creative practices, would be to understand theater as a potential heterotopia, since “it does not just represent a social and public space, but rather, as a heterotopia, can be located in some outside, which makes possible other rules and conditions” (Wihstuzt 2010: 72). In other words, the theater presents an opportunity to use the stage (temporarily) as ‘another space’ and ‘space of the other’ for questioning social practices and, at the same time, showing and practicing other possible modes of action, thinking, and interpretation (*Imagineering). This opportunity is even more significant, because the stage provides the possibility of answering the very questions that occupy and shape contemporary society. As Pollesch again puts it, “All the great theater topics, like ‘greed’, now have something to do with the universalization of ‘creativity’. Flexibility, mobility, creativity – these concepts, which were only used in the short epoch of interactive theaters, still do not have the same power as greed, revenge, love. Spoken loudly and openly, they were demands to reform capitalism” (2012: 8, emphasis in the original). The problem is not, in fact, that

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the audience would be called to be greedy, but rather that they would be required, just like the people and institution of the theater, to show some constant creativity output. In the best-case scenario, then, the stage, still in ownership of its theatre boxes, can make a show out of the creativity imperative – or, even better, make it into a discussion or something at everyone’s disposal. The stage can do so particularly well, because neither the audience nor the actors can escape the logic of the dispositif. “Nobody wants to see the surviving members of Nirvana getting fat. It’s not enough. Something’s missing,” is one of the lines in Pollesch’s Kill your darlings. It touches precisely on the constant preference for the new to dominate over the old, which is both placed on and shaped by all those participating in the show for an evening. At the end of the play, the following happens: Actor Fabian Hinrichs is ready to receive a final round of applause, after the expected ending had already been interrupted twice, since it produced too much beauty at every moment and neither the audience nor the performers could stand it. Those were not the endings. What, then, was the ending? “This evening was not for you,” the actor says to the audience. “We did it for ourselves.” And then shouts twice, three times, addresses the audience directly with the imperative: “Do it for yourself.” The theater as heterotopia is the space that is still able to switch off the light and turn off the music when everyone outside is creating and shouting for “more value” (and this value is present in both the creativity dispositif and in the aesthetic, sensory, and affective experience of Pollesch’s theatrical evening). What can be seen on the stage of the theater, therefore, is a grey gym, which also makes the imperative of uninterrupted creativity visible: The stage can become a space for presenting, revealing, and interrogating the creativity dispositif, along with all the “beliefs, rules, and rites that in a certain society and at a certain historical moment are externally imposed on individuals” (Agamben 2009: 4). In this case, aesthetic critique can coincide, in and on the stage, with social critique – a form of *critique that targets “forms of the social” not opposed to aesthetic practices, but with them (Reckwitz, 2017: 214). Disclosing and interrogating the creativity imperative, on the stage, with the very tools of creativity – it’s nice to imagine.

References Agamben, Giorgio (2009): What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boltanski, Luc/Chiapello, Ève (2012): “Die Arbeit der Kritik und der normative Wandel.” In: Kreation und Depression. Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, pp. 18-37.

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Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2010): “Politiken der Raumaneignung.” In: Erika Fischer-Lichte/Benjamin Wihstuzt (eds.), Politik des Raums. Theater und Topologie, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 133-150. Pollesch, René (2012): “Kreativität ist kälter als die Gier.” In: Theater heute, Jahrbuch 2012: Das Theater mit der Kreativität, Berlin: Der Theaterverlag, pp. 8-9. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Rimini Protokoll (2018). Remote-X. Available at: http://www.rimini-protokoll. de/website/de/project/remote-x [accessed May 1, 2018]. Wihstuzt, Benjamin (2010): “Anderer Raum oder Raum des Anderen.” In: Erika Fischer-Lichte/Benjamin Wihstuzt (eds.), Politik des Raums. Theater und Topologie, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 59-76.

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Valorization Michael Hutter

“Novelty does not exist as an objective fact,” claims Andreas Reckwitz. “It depends on the requisite attentiveness and evaluation to distinguish it from the old and prefer it over the old” (2017: 23). To this end, the eighteenth century created “a communicative space for the observation and evaluation of art” (ibid: 42) in which “the direction of attention is influenced mainly by the expert critics who systematize and judge the body of new and old artworks” (ibid). Ever since modernity made the audience into an authority over observation, however, “the rivalry between the producer logic of genius, the audience logic and the logic of scandal established a permanent tripartite struggle over the valid determination of aesthetic novelty” (ibid: 46). The topic of the valorization of the new appears again in Reckwitz’s sketch of an emerging “society of creativity” at the end of the book. In this context, “the social certification of novelty” (ibid: 213) plays out in “two forms of attention management: short-term attention for events perceived as novel, interesting and original in their immediacy and long-term valorization of aesthetic novelty as culturally valuable” (ibid: 212-213, emphasis in the original). In the short term, attention is impulsive, unconscious, and directed toward noteworthy events, which make all other contemporary aesthetic objects recede into the background. In the long term, the “valorization of aesthetic novelty” declares the new itself to be “culturally valuable.” While short-term attention depends primarily on individuals, “the long-term certification of aesthetic novelty is conditional on a collective assessment, primarily by experts, subjecting the object to comprehensive comparisons with both present and past alternatives, testing its claim to novelty, leading perhaps to a canonization and recognition of the object as ‘classic’” (ibid: 213). Among the two forms of attention management, the main target of Reckwitz’s contribution is short-term attention rather than long-term valorization. Valorization and devalorization play a central role in Groys’ book-length essay On the New (2014). For Groys, there is a clearly demarcated “value boundary” between the heights of the “cultural archive” and the depths of the “profane

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realm” (2014: 69). Hence, valorization means elevating the new to the higher level, and devalorization means reducing what was once-valuable to the lower level. In Groys’ account, these processes of valorization and devalorization remain unclear, apart from one suggestive passage where he claims that “a museum can be also be described as a kind of bank for cultural values that keeps these values in constant circulation and has to exchange them for profane things in order to guarantee their market value, just as money would lose value if it were left in a bank account and were never put into circulation” (ibid: 160; *Museum, *Capital). Whether valuing the new refers to short-term attention or to long-term valuation, the actual practices of valorization remain unexplored. There would be much to learn from the ‘pragmatic’ school of French sociology. Luc Boltanski (2010) interprets the deployment of critique as a strategy rather than an attitude or a position. Lucien Karpik (2010) connects the production of unique, singular products with complex regimes of ‘judgment devices’. Antoine Hennion (2015) studies the unique practices of wine tasters and music lovers. Michèle Lamont (2012) notes the difference, in the growing field of expert reviews for academic and artistic productivity, between evaluations, which follow external criteria, and valuations, which aim to increase or decrease the social value of certain aesthetic objects. Fabian Muniesa (2011) draws distinctions, in complex ‘practices of valuation’, among the application, negotiation, determination, and classification of values. All of these authors make references to the fundamental tenets of pragmatic philosophy, especially the work of William James and John Dewey (*Naturalization). One idea these two pragmatic philosophers had in common was that concrete practices of valuing are worth observing because the indeterminable status of aesthetic events demands perpetual negotiation of opposing views about the social value of aesthetic objects. In his Theory of Valuation, for instance, Dewey drew a distinction between two different meanings of the word ‘valuing’: “prizing, in the sense of holding precious, dear […] and appraising in the sense of putting a value upon, assigning value to” (1938: 5, emphasis in the original). There are two main structural characteristics of this sociology of valorization, an emerging field sometimes known as “valuation studies.” The first is to draw a distinction on the basis of the role of participants. Observers of a creative performance will judge things differently than its active participants; as will experts, another kind of observer, made into participants through training, experience, and specialization in their area of observation. What counts as “culturally valuable” emerges only through the rivalry within each group and the competition between them. The second main characteristic of the sociology of valuation will be outlined in greater detail. In general, three main modes of valuation can be distinguished.

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The first mode of valuation involves attributing a value to aesthetic objects. This can occur spontaneously as in the intensity and length of applause, or in reflexive actions, as in the awarding of prizes and in the judgment of peers and experts. Often, the object of valuation is set into relation to other items that have already been recognized to be of high value, whether famous works or ideal qualities esteemed in a particular aesthetic play. Effects that exceed evaluators’ expectations result in praise, disappointments result in critique. Praise and critique are given special consideration when they come from experts who have a record of predicting the rise and fall of social values. Praise and critique can also come from the creators of objects, and from all kinds of possible participants, from passionate fans and detached tourists. There is a remarkably small degree of difference between the purely semiotic act of putting symbolic value on a new object by various participants and the actual positioning of aesthetic objects, spatially or temporally, with other objects of more or less attributed value. This is how art collections and publishing programs are made. Often, it is difficult to differentiate between attributing and pushing the value of some-thing. Creators, sponsors, and other promoters are immediately suspected of exaggeration, and the credibility of other participants depends on their ability to demonstrate their freedom from conflicts of interest. The term ‘valorization’ is frequently used exclusively for this active mode of pushing and pulling the value attribution of aesthetic objects and events. The second mode of valuation involves estimating the value of an object. According to accepted criteria, the valorizations of an object are recorded using numbers or an ordinal scale of “more or less,” which can then be compared with the numerical scores or positions of other creative works. At one end of the spectrum of practices, the human senses are deployed in an immediate way: the new must be seen, heard, touched, smelled, tasted. However, the criteria for this practice of evaluation are still anchored in the mind and are frequently controlled by experienced experts alone. Hence, at the other end of the spectrum, there are controlled tests for estimating the value of an object. Increasingly, numerical scores are combined and weighted using algorithms to arrive at a succinct conclusion. The results are rankings, a numerical sequence of whole numbers that gives the impression of an unambiguous, proportionate, and definitive range of value. The practices of evaluating academic and artistic organizations also involve rankings, though the sensory basis of observation expands here to include the evaluators’ on-site visit. Apart from these developments, communication over digital networks has popularized an uncomplicated ordinal scale, the “fivestar” rating system. These ratings are useful to others because a large number of individual valorizations is aggregated into a compact indicator. The third mode of valuation involves determining equivalent money values for the acquisition of an object. Fungible values – in most cases, sums of money – are given up for aesthetic objects or for securing access to aesthetic events.

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There are two ways of giving up money – through purchasing and through gifting. Purchase leads to immediate rights of disposition regarding the object. Gifts relate either to the future, when valuable performances are expected, or to the past, when earlier accomplishments are honored. Rights of disposition and definitions of accomplishments are easier for physical objects than for soundand text-based works. Those can be copied at low cost, with little loss of quality. There is an entire legal sector for enforcing claims on “intellectual property.” Practices of selling the kinds of cultural objects and events that Reckwitz and Groys have in mind can pass through many specializations (*Aesthetic Capitalism, *Product). Exchange without the mediation of money, direct bidding at auctions and various forms of rebates, options, and access privileges are employed. Gallerists are specialists in using them to deal with their circle of collectors. Modern forms of gifts include grants, stipends, residencies, and endowed prizes. The effectiveness of these three modes is due to their dissimilarity: putting a value on an aesthetic object is presumed to be an expression of an actual experience of appreciation; estimating the value of the object is based on the purported neutrality of rating systems; and establishing equivalent monetary values allegedly provides evidence of the “real” value of something. Hence, participants combine and intertwine all three modes in the ongoing contest of valorization, and they do so in different ways, depending on their position in the game. Given this complexity, and the relentless stream of value judgments flowing through the creativity society, the study of Reckwitz’s ‘social certification of novelty’ affords considerable challenges.

References Boltanski, Luc (2010): Soziologie und Sozialkritik, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Dewey, John (1938): Theory of Valuation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Groys, Boris (2014): On the New [1992], translated by G. M. Goshgarian, New York: Verso. Hennion, Antoine (2015): “Paying Attention: What is Tasting Wine About?” In: Ariane Berthoin Antal/Michael Hutter/David Stark (eds), Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 37-56. Karpik, Lucien (2010): Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities, translated by Nora Scott, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lamont, Michèle (2012): “Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation.” In: Annual Review of Sociology 38/1, pp. 201-221. Muniesa, Fabian (2011): “A Flank Movement in the Understanding of Valuation”, in: The Sociological Review, 59 (2), S. 24-38. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity.

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Michael Glawogger’s documentary Workingman’s Death is a genre picture of the present and future of global labor. The film follows workers in illegal mines in Ukraine, sulphur workers in Indonesian volcananic areas balancing very heavy baskets of sulphurous rocks on their shoulders; day laborers in Pakistan who cut ramshackle cruise ships into pieces, preparing them for disposal waste; Nigerian butchers on open land saturated with blood; Chinese steel workers whose blast furnaces look like the ones at that time when they were shut down in Europe. The film’s epilogue is composed of spectacular shots of the amusement park that emerged from the smeltery in Duisburg-Meiderich that had been put out of service in 1985. Workingman’s Death narrates the transformation of work’s other space and of its second reality. Hard, physical labor in Indonesia, Pakistan, China, Ukraine and Nigeria, where dead animals can be seen being grilled over old tires from European trucks, is the analog of Europe’s past with respect to its present, which operates in a future mode that has become permanent (*Imagineering, *Co-Creation). The film documents labor as the West’s very subsistence, the archaic character of which though has largely disappeared and been replaced by forms of work that we attempt to grasp under the rubric of ‘subjectivation’ and ‘social aestheticization’ by means of the ‘creativity dispositif’ (Reckwitz 2017; 2019; *Aestheticization). If we want to understand work more precisely at the beginning of the digital age, then this global principle must be grasped as part of local perspectives since it illustrates one of its essential features: physical stress, suffering, pain, effort, unparalleled energy consumption sometimes leading to exhaustion or even death. This global principle constitutes the core of our definition of work, even though the industrial age has come to an end: a necessity for extracting, protecting and maintaining livelihood enforced by the principles of environment in order to satisfy elementary needs, in order to secure subsistence. This kind of work is characterized by two main features: the repetitive inescapability that forces one to carry out the same task over and over again without possessing room for freedom of action or alternative routes; second, its use- and

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purpose-oriented nature, which cannot know any other purpose than to secure one’s subsistence. Industrialization led to a unification of both into the use-oriented routine of work flows, which generated the efficiency and separation of work as the answer to the question of how we could reach the same purposes while expending less energy and how we could multiply the benefit of our labor (even for an ever increasing group of people). The historical arc of the systematization and organization of industrialization runs from Adam Smith through Frederick Taylor and ends with Henry Ford. Their common basis is the use- and purpose-oriented principle that shapes the industrial organization of labor. Here, the working method determined the human being and its social role. Since the radical change into the postindustrial age, the organization of labor is also undergoing a process of transformation, which turns this around: The human being determines the significance of work and searches for models in order to adapt working processes to this significance. Value is no longer determined with respect to society as a whole, but in terms of intrinsic value with respect to the individual subject; organization is oriented toward scales of value, not use, and transforms labor from an instrument of economical production into the producer of meaning in life (*Organization, *Valorization). This is not only a technological change; it is a transformation of paradigms of work and its dispositifs, which have been held as valid until now (*Dispositif ). The conception of labor in the Early, Middle and Late Capitalist Age, as well as in the Industrial Age, is rooted in a polarized, Aristotelian view of the lifeworld that has equally shaped and structured modern thought and the logic of motivation behind the economy. According to this view, all action is evaluated with respect to whether it enables self-worthy, meaningful action that does not serve any secondary purpose (since we work in order to then have leisure time; Aristotele 2011: 1177b). Luther’s invention of the “profession” marked a milestone within the transformation towards a capitalist organization of society. This one word entangles the Aristotelian dispositifs of necessity and leisure, and forms the beginning of a relativization with serious socio-philosophical and socio-historical consequences. It connected and entangled the distinct dispositifs of leisure as meaningful action and work as purpose- and use-oriented action. It invalidates Aristotelian teleology, which aspires to an equalizing middle (doctrine of the ‘mean’): the entanglement, not the equalization, of oppositions shapes this new causal logic. According to Luther’s doctrine, it is precisely because of its distressful and painful character that labor contributes to the Christian moral mode of human self-perception; the creation of value and meaning occur especially in purpose- and use-oriented activity. Thus, labor becomes a moral duty: In order to furnish it with meaning, it will be accredited through the service to god – a secretive early materialistic theodicy (*Guilt).

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What is revolutionary about this change is that the discourse of evaluation infiltrates ethics, and with this, ultimately establishes economy. Formerly, moral doctrines did not operate through evaluations of actions, but in a dichotomy based on standards from commandments and forbiddances. With the metaphysical revaluation of labor, a form of instrumental purpose, and with that evaluation, enters into the realm of morals. (The question is no longer “Is this action good?” but “How good is this action?”). It also turns labor into a religious instrument for the construction of meaning. Luther’s ethos of work as profession is the precondition for Max Weber’s analysis of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: the moralization of labor is responsible for the capitalist economic system’s success and for people being “oriented to acquisition as the purpose of life; acquisition is no longer viewed as a means to the end of satisfying the substantive needs of life” (Weber 2009: 72). The market, money, and the abstract human connection to the multiplicity of products enabled one to see the actual purpose of one’s work as possessing meaning through its fulfillment of a purpose. Hence, labor preserved its measurability in a manner that made its value into an intrinsic one, while again being profaned in the context of capitalism: A profession turns into its own vocation, work into a generator of meaning. Hannah Arendt tries to suspend this process of internalization and turns the tables on Aristotle, expanding what work means in a way that it can still be distinguished from other spheres of activity. Arendt’s anthropology preserves the distinction between the purpose-oriented nature and the potential to create meaning as a human aptitude. Arendt’s concern is to protect a public space, in which the encounter of socialized citizens, who can negotiate their conditions of living independently from their interests, is possible by means of communication. Action that is independent of one’s own goals and constraints would therefore be proof of the human talent for freedom (Arendt 1958) and only unlocks the area of moral action, which would be the only human action with which one can construct meaning. The liberal sphere begins where self-determination cannot be affected by goal-determined contexts, with work constituting the primary one. But history has put an ironic spin on Arendt’s attempt to unify Kantian ethics with Marxist social doctrine. The postmodern conception of work follows Marxist anthropology as it internalizes all spheres of life and profession; work as “self-consciousness,” “realization,” or “man’s act of self-genesis or self-objectification” (Marx 2007, 165–66) is ascribed meaning precisely because it is purposefully and purposely (re)usable. Labor no longer requires a metaphysical medium of legitimation in order to provide society’s structure, nor to produce meaning, precisely under the paradigm of usefulness. If the modern, industrial idea of work and labor has produced entanglements, then the postmodern, industrial one transforms ‘objective’ goals (products of labor) into their ‘subjectivation’ (their subjective meaning for the wor-

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ker and his own responsibility). In a spiral form, the postmodern notion of work increases the level of their interdependency: work as self-realization tailors labor itself to the needs (and capacities) of the worker; the conditions of labor can be organized in a manner that work achieves a satisfaction comparable to the creative act; and the product of work and labor no longer simply fulfills a purpose, but becomes the expression of a meaningful action. The creativity dispositif, which Reckwitz (2017) identifies as a consequence of ‘affect deficiency’ in modernity (*Affect Culture), crystallized as the new imperative arising from motivational catchphrases that propagate work under the primacy of a production of meaning. It focuses, with respect to the organization of labor, on the creative, the inventive, and especially the principle of self-determination and autonomy, which shapes the image of creativity and the creative type par excellence: the artist (*Artist, *Curating). It is the dominant medium of new constraints and the provisional superlative for describing the condition of the requirement to work. This development abolishes old dispositifs of labor organization like purpose, function, collective, class and solidarity, and propagates a notion of unlimited work (*Creative Crowd). However, the higher the degree of self-realization, the higher the risk of social arrangements being broken and of not fulfilling the functions of the dispositif. While this risk was formed through the two-party relation of exploitation and furnished with a ‘twofold’ alienation in the industrial age (Marx 2007, 62 ff.), the meaning of work in the postindustrial age has internalized these dispositifs: today alienation is called ‘over-identification’, exploitation ‘burnout’ (*Coaching). If one were to place the Aristotelian dichotomy of meaning and purpose in the creativity dispositif, it would make clear that with the realization of these postulates of the creative, there is also the emergence of new, systematic constraints, contradictions and aporias: Admittedly, the model of deriving meaning from work is in fact independent of whether or not the artist type is the role model of society (*Artist), whether a claim of creativity and self-realization extends over all areas of life, and whether sense, meaning, individuality, particularity and intrinsic value replace old dispositifs, which used to be shaped by the fact that labor occupied one portion of time so that workers remained able to determine the other portions of time for themselves. However, the same model claims to be able to replace solidarity, social integration, and recognition with self-realization, autonomy and creative freedom, and to replace references to functionality with references to meaning. Since the internalization of meaning into purpose establishes a paradox – namely, the ability to invent new things in a repetitive form – ultimately this characteristic of labor is preserved. Yet the paradigm of meaning builds its logic of effect upon this paradox of the repetitiveness of creation, and makes this contradiction economically fruitful by opening new frameworks of utilization from the creativity dispositif. With the dispositif of creativity and aesthetic

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practice (i.e., activity aimed at something independent from its function), any and every activity is or can become work (*Aesthetic Capitalism). What matters is which functional contexts the dispositifs of activity are situated in (cf. Krempl 2011: 284 ff.); for irrespective of how self-determined, inventive, and creative the organization of work might be, its action, under economic conditions, will result in a product usable for the market. The repetitiveness of labor takes functionality by the horns of the desire for recognition and hides it beneath the red cape of meaning while the whole world watches. However, this further intensifies the contradiction within the subjectification of work. The larger the prospects of freedom within work (i.e., the more dominant the creativity dispositif), the more work becomes the central occupational competency in contemporary society (and the smaller areas become, for which this principle is not valid), and the more difficult it becomes to maintain and develop social standards. Reckwitz diagnoses this situation as a “crisis of the general” (Reckwitz 2019), which manifests itself in a crisis of recognition, a crisis of self-realization and a crisis of the political, as Arendt predicted 50 years ago. Labor and work are no longer supposed to be the purpose of, and thereby a tool directed towards freedom, but rather shows bitter, cynical traits in the realization of its own freedom and self-purpose. Arbeit macht frei now means work frees you from work itself; the postulate underlying the paradigm of deriving meaning from work claims to revalue labor, no longer valuing it as work but as that which formerly was its opposite – meaning, and in its utmost completion, art. Thus, this “crisis of the general” is not a crisis of meaning, but a crisis of purpose. This kind of crisis is then at work when clear solutions are derived from contradictions: Under the rule of a dispositif of meaning, subjectification, and creativity, work is no longer merely society’s decisive social mode of access, which regulates the equality of social recognition; under the dispositif of meaning, work demands recognition of itself, and disposes the individual to be contented with work. Here, Marxism again ironically outwits history, as the paradigm of meaning turns labor, and work as a concept, into a “human condition of existence independent from all forms of society” (Marx 1977: 132). The more it becomes possible to evaluate work in subjective time – and under the imperative of the creativity dispositif, this reaches a maximum – the more compulsory the necessity to work becomes, and the less free are those who search for liberation by means of labor. However, precisely this contradiction calls for appropriate organization. The more centrally a society positions and validates its mechanism of integration, the more accessible it has to be. The conditions of labor relations must live up to the moral standards that the model of giving meaning to one’s life through an imperative of the creativity complex makes on work as an inclusive

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and ultimate performance of human activity. Only in this manner can it cope with the contradiction of assuming validity in excess of the purposiveness of labor, and therein satisfying two different interests. For as long as the foundations of creative labor are products of an instrumental nature we will not be able to rid ourselves of the remains of a dichotomous definition. In this case, however, these conditions of working society would include those parts of the globalized society of labor, which we do not take into account in national efforts to provide social structures. This would be the precondition for changing the current situation (*Critique).

References Arendt, Hannah (1958): The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Aristotele (2011): Nicomachean Ethics, translated and edited by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Krempl, Sophie-Thérèse (2011): Paradoxien der Arbeit, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Marx, Karl (1977): Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage. Marx, Karl (2007): Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, translated and edited by Martin Milligan, Mineola, NY: Dover. Reckwitz, Andreas (2017): The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New [2012], translated by Steven Black, London: Polity. Reckwitz, Andreas (2019): The Society of Singularities: On the Structural Transformation of Modernity [2017], London: Polity (forthcoming). Weber, Max (2009): The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West, translated by Stephen Kalberg, New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Postscript The Society of Singularities and the Creativity Dispositif Andreas Reckwitz

It is not always easy to establish a relation between books even if one has written them oneself. One’s first reaction might be: This is a task best left to others. One’s second: It might still be worthwhile as a means of clarifying certain issues and making connections. There is clearly a thematic relation between my books The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New, which first appeared in German in 2012, and The Society of Singularities: On the Structural Transformation of Modernity, which was originally published five years later, around the time of the first book’s translation into English, and is currently forthcoming in various translations. Taking the ‘creativity complex’ to be an experiment or trial run, the question would then be the extent to which the second book widens the first’s perspective and shifts its dominant concepts; and, at the same time, whether the formulation of the problem of the ‘creativity dispositif’ and its analytical framework retains its own weight. At first glance, these appear to be two independent books that carry out their own investigations and stand on their own. Generally speaking, I am not interested in manufacturing a unified ‘work’ through my writing, in developing a consistent and unchanging system of concepts over the course of many individual books that could then be applied to various objects. For me, this actually seems like a rather boring way of researching and writing, which would eliminate the possibility of being surprised. The idea that authoring a book is a matter of simply running through some ‘program’ that has been developed once and for all, is off-putting. As if the author would be entirely unaffected by current theoretical developments in an intellectual field, by shifts in their own areas of interest for biographical reasons, by real social developments that happen in the interim, and finally by the surprises and unpredictability attendant on the object of any study, once one starts to really get into it. In this respect, the form of academic writing developed by Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour seems much closer to me than that of Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas:

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writing that truly gets into new problems and thus does not work as a deductive application of theory. In this sense, the concerns were different in The Society of Singularities and in The Invention of Creativity. In the latter book, I was concerned with genealogy and, in this respect, engaged in detail with particular historical contexts and their long-term influence up to the present. Hence, its point of departure was a contemporary concern: After a long prehistory, the creativity dispositif turned out to be a comprehensive and influential social complex of contemporary society. I was guided by the basic assumption that the originally utopian and countercultural promise of ‘being creative’ was transformed in the course of its establishment into a catalog of expectations that confronts individuals with new rules and structures, models of desire, social asymmetries, ambivalences and exclusions. My main question, however, was how this remarkable process came to pass. To address this question, I tracked the emergence, redefinition, and diffusion of different formats of the creative through various historical contexts that were initially independent from each other: the artistic field, economic management and the emerging creative industries, the discourse of psychology, the mass media’s fabrication of stars, and finally the political governmentality of creative cities. In the end, these formed a network that enabled the emergence of the creativity dispositif. The book depended therefore on the precise reconstruction of the genesis of heterogeneous discourses and practices in these individual fields. At the core, the book was a work of cultural sociology. At the same time, it provided a conceptual framework for the analysis of the dispositif: the ‘regime of the new’; ‘aesthetic practices’ or ‘aestheticization’; and ‘aesthetic sociality’ or the ‘constellation of creator and audience’; these are the nodes of this heuristic. The Society of Singularities works differently as a book. My main concern was not to provide an exact historical genealogy, but to make an argument in terms of social theory, to contribute to the critical theory of late modern society. In this book, I started out with the systematic development of a conceptual apparatus based on the distinctions between a social logic of the ‘general’ and that of the ‘particular’ (i.e., of ‘singularities’), and a ‘rationalization’ of the social and its ‘culturalization’. Building on this conceptual apparatus, I systematically examined the most important social fields responsible for stabilizing and expanding late-modern structures of singularization or culturalization: the post-Fordist economy of ‘cultural capitalism’ (as a sphere of goods, markets, and forms of work); digital technologies, social structure, and lifestyles (with the key significance of the new middle class); and finally the sphere of politics. The main motivation for the book was to grasp the fundamental structural transformation of Western societies from industrial to late modernity. Its core idea was that shifting the dominant social logic toward the extensive structural primacy of singularization would be key to understanding this transformation.

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Of course, it was not a matter of the one social logic simply replacing the other, but rather of a rebalancing in their relationship: from the old, industrial social dualism between the master process of ‘doing generality’ and a contrarian and minority process of singularization; to a new duality combining structures of singularization in the foreground and the continuation of ‘doing generality’ as an infrastructure in the background. In general, the book was about working out how the society of singularities unintentionally brings about structures of social polarization – among goods, working subjects, lifestyles, regions, and in politics – and thereby steers society toward crisis-based constellations. Despite the fundamentally different approach of the two books, it would still make sense to ask whether their investigations can be translated into one another on a fundamental conceptual level. Generally speaking, I would maintain that the creativity dispositif can be understood as a central hub within modern and late-modern processes of the singularization and the culturalization of the social. This would mean that processes of singularization – which often take the form of processes of culturalization – overlap with the creativity dispositif. But they also encompass processes that – in a manner still to be determined more precisely – are not directed at the creation of the new in the strict sense, and do not take the form of an aestheticization of the social alone. Conversely, this would mean that focusing on the creativity dispositif permits a closer look at one specific structure of singularization and culturalization, central to which is the interconnection of aestheticization and the regime of the new. To clarify this connection, I need to go into more detail about the terminology of The Society of Singularities and The Invention of Creativity.

The Society of Singularities: The Singularization and Culturalization of the Social My starting point in The Society of Singularities was that in modern society there have been two contrary kinds of social logic (i.e., forms of structuring the social), and they have competed with each other from the outset: the logic of the general and that of the particular. ‘Doing generality’ is usually bound up with processes of formal rationalization (and objectification), ‘doing singularity’ with processes of culturalization (and the intensification of affect). Both kinds of social logic refer to how subjects, things and objects, spatial units, temporal units, and collectives are socially ‘fabricated’. In the social logic of the general, these entities are systematically made as exemplars of general types: for instance, the industrial production of bulk commodities, the creation of subjects with functional roles, the serial planning of urban development, the emergence of a temporality characterized by an infinite repetition of the same, and the formation of formal administrative bodies like organizations that function everywhere according to the same patterns. This kind of ‘doing generality’

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occurs in different kinds of practices: creation, reception, observation, and evaluation. Particularly in modernity, it usually also means what Max Weber called ‘formal rationality’: a fabrication of elements that are not ends in themselves but means to an end. The large-scale implementation of this social logic of the general is characteristic of modern society in many respects. Frequently praised and just as frequently blamed, it reached its peak in twentieth-century industrial modernity in the form of large-scale processes of standardization. Alongside the logic of the general, however, there has always been an alternative, even contradictory, logic of the social – that which revolves around the fabrication of the particular, the singular. In classical sociological discussions, one would usually say ‘individuality’ and ‘individualism’. However, I prefer the new and more precise concepts of ‘singularity’ and ‘singularization’, which are not limited to human subjects. According to the social logic of the particular, subjects, objects, and things, spatial and temporal units, as well as collectives are produced, received, observed, and evaluated as particular, as singular, unique and non-fungible. In other words, it is a process of singularization, of ‘doing singularity’. In this sense, things like artworks, design objects, brands, and photos become singular; subjects (even stars and charismatic leaders) are formed, and form themselves, not as the bearers of roles but of individuality; and in the course of singularization, spatial units become recognizable places, temporal units unique events, and collectives non-fungible communities or projects. Objectively, singularity is never simply a given. Rather, entities are only “made” singular in the process of social fabrication. This presupposes the recognition of their own complexity and “thickness,” which cannot be subsumed under any general parameters. To some extent, singular units are accorded a certain “originality.” At the same time, there is a strong, qualitative difference in singularities: externally, what appears to be singular is perceived as “different,” as incommensurable with other entities. Incidentally, singularity is not necessarily the same thing as ‘existing only once, or in only one copy’.9 Of course, there are singularities of the latter type, such as unique things or events, but elements that appear in several or many material forms can still be singular: Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey remains a singular (einzigartiges) work of art regardless of its number of screenings; Apple remains a singular brand on the basis of its distinctive design regardless of its quarterly sales num-

9 | In German, there is a distinction between Einzigartigkeit (uniqueness) and Einmaligkeit (existing only once, or in only one copy or version), which is lost in translation if both terms are rendered as ‘uniqueness’. Singularity here entails uniqueness in the sense of Einzigartigkeit, but it does not connote Einmaligkeit, hence the paraphrase of ‘existing only once, or in only one copy’.

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bers; Venice remains a singular city regardless of the number of tourists who go there every summer. The process of singularization is often (but not always) also a process of culturalization: ‘doing singularity’ and ‘doing culture’ go hand in hand here. I use the concept of culturalization in the specific sense of value theory. From this perspective, ‘culturality’ is the antithesis to ‘formal rationality’. In the course of ‘doing culture’, various entities – things, subjects, places, events, collectives – are charged with a ‘value’ in the strong sense of the word: neither value-free nor means to an end, entities appear to be valuable ‘in their own terms’. They are valued in the strong sense of ‘valorization’, which in turn depends on social criteria. Like singularization, valorization can be controversial and conflict-laden to a very high degree: what counts as singular and valuable is an object of negotiation, at least under modern conditions, and of sophisticated methods and techniques that attempt to determine this status. At the same time, I interpret ‘culturalization’ in terms of affect theory: If something appears to be ‘valuable’ in the strong sense, then it also has an affective force – in contrast to something that is standardized, which mostly has a neutral affect. In what ways, then, are entities culturalized? I would distinguish here between five main aspects or ‘qualities’ of culturalization. The first, that of the aesthetic, is relatively obvious: in the process of aestheticization entities appear to sense perception as an end in themselves; they acquire an intrinsic value for the senses. However, culturalization also takes place in the register of the ethical (or social): an intrinsic ethical value is attributed to entities; they appear in some sense to be ‘holy’, inviolable, worthy of protection. Under the aspects of the ludic and the creative – both of which are close to the aesthetic – entities are accorded an intrinsic value for play, or the act of creation appears to be something valuable in itself. Lastly, entities can be valorized in terms of a narrative (or hermeneutic) aspect: their story, their symbolic meaning, from the perspective of social participants, is what lends a thing, a place, or a community a value beyond function or utility. In modernity, the field of the arts has always been a nucleus for the social logic of singularization and of culturalization. The same applies to sociocultural artistic movements like that of Romanticism. In classical modernity, the logic of singularization long formed a kind of insular counterpart to the dominant logic of standardization and rationalization. In late modernity, however, there has been a change to this relationship ever since the 1970s or 80s: The social logic of singularization has expanded enormously, forming its own, comprehensive structures, while the logic of rationalization has taken on the position of an enabling background structure. Responsible for the rise of the singularization-culturalization complex are three main societal factors, which mutually reinforce each other: the transformation of the economy from ‘industrial capitalism’ to ‘cultural capitalism’ and ‘aesthetic capitalism’; the digital

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revolution and its ‘culture machine’; and the rise of a highly-qualified middle class, which wants more than economic status and standards of living and strives to achieve self-development and a life full of valuable singularities. In the 1970s, there was a crisis of saturation in the Fordist, industrial economy. One response was the establishment of large segments of a form of cultural capitalism whose goods (things, services, events, media formats) promised values, beyond utility and function, related to affect, authenticity, and singularity. The spearhead of cultural capitalism was the creative industries (the most expansive sector being the digital economy). However, cultural capitalism went far beyond this sector, quickly encompassing tourism, real estate, health, sports, and other sectors, and, in the long term, re-shaping the entirety of consumer goods. The culturalization of the economy has been an expansive process: In the end, the only things that have proven capable of ensuring demand and inciting the desire of consumers in the late-modern economy of prosperity are goods that appear to be singular and valuable (even if they are actually mass-produced and have the material character of fast fashion, fast food, and fast design). While the old, industrial economy was based on standards and functions intended to satisfy the needs of the masses for provisions and comforts, the post-industrial, “immaterial,” and cultural economy is based on what goes beyond these basic needs: the charm of the precious and the gratification of the particular. The second key determinant for processes of singularization and culturalization is the technological transformation that has engulfed society as a whole and its contemporary lifeworlds since the 1990s: the digital revolution. Of course, at a fundamental level, the technological complex of computing, digitality, and the Internet is a form of ‘doing generality’ in technology itself – the dominance of computational algorithms, the convertibility of various media, the universal communications space of the Internet. However, on the basis of this infrastructure, digitization also enables the converse form of ‘doing singularity’ on a large scale. It provides for the emergence of a global, transportable culture machine that surrounds the late modern subject and saturates everyday life. As a culture machine, the Internet offers an enormous amount of constantly new, constantly changing images, videos, films, texts, and games. These have a function beyond that of mere information; they affect the user, and have an aesthetic, narrative, ethical, ludic, or creative value. The Internet generates the space for a gigantic, mobile economy of attention: the creation of visibility on the Net requires marking qualitative difference and creating qualitative affects. Thus, there are digital markets for singularity, whether commercial or non-commercial, in which the only thing that succeeds is what seems to be particular, unconventional, or noteworthy. On the Internet, subjects also learn to present themselves as non-fungible individuals through their singular profiles, which give them status and narcissistic satisfaction.

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The driving economic and technological factors of singularization and culturalization can only be effective by dovetailing with a third factor: the revolution of authenticity in the new middle class. Post-industrial capitalism, which has also meant the rise of a highly-qualified knowledge economy, goes hand in hand with the rise of the class that supports this economy: the academically-educated middle class (in this sense, the “new” middle class in contrast to the “old,” non-academic middle class), which has benefited from educational expansion. Central to this new middle class’s way of life is a value structure that can be expressed through the formula ‘successful self-actualization’. As the main group supporting the turn toward post-materialistic value after 1968, which entailed the replacement of compulsory and accepted values ​​with those of self-actualization, the new middle class strives not only for standards of living, but also for quality of life. This has meant a consistent culturalization of every part of life – from parenting to traveling, from professional activity to personal nutrition. Everyone is involved in ‘doing culture’ and the fabrication of and search for the singular and the “authentic,” which is precisely what seems not to be standardized or rationalized but rather particular. In the end, the singular and the valuable is what also guarantees status and prestige, and thus social success. Taken together, cultural capitalism, the culture machine of digitization, and the new middle class’s way of life, which is influential in both cultural and economic terms, thus form the interlocking mechanisms that have enabled the social logic of culturalization to establish itself in late modernity. At the same time, they are also the central social fields and complexes of practices in which these processes of singularization take place. One could speak here of a ‘culturally-creative complex’, which would also include segments of politics (e.g., neoliberalism), education (e.g., ambitious schools), and urban development (e.g., cultural regeneration and the competition among metropolises to be the most attractive). Does the singularization and culturalization of the social in late modernity take place exclusively within this culturally-creative complex? The answer is no. Certainly, this is the dominant form of singularization in Western societies, but it is hardly the only one. There are other formats that make everything singular in a different manner. The differences between the two most important formats can be understood as two contrary forms of late-modern culturalization: On the one hand, at the center of this society, we can observe culturalization in terms of a mobile hyperculture. This is the place of the culturally-creative complex, of cultural capitalism, of the new middle class, and of the digital culture machine as a whole. On the other hand, more at the peripheries of society, we can recognize a form of culturalization in terms of an identitarian cultural essentialism (or communitarianism), which is supported in particular by the sociocultural “losers” of liberal hyperculture. In recent years, this peripheral

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form of culturalization has been challenging the political power of the center. Versions of this kind of cultural essentialism can be found especially in religious fundamentalism, in communities that divide themselves into different ethnicities, and in nationalist, identitarian, or right-wing populist movements. It is worth noting that the opponents of the culturally-creative complex are themselves influenced by culturalization, though they give it a different form. While the culturally-creative complex starts out from a global circulation of mobile cultural elements, which are selected by individuals for values based on self-expression and are then appropriated in hybrid forms, cultural essentialism draws strict borders around various cultures as collective communities, which then determine the in-group and the out-group. Once cultural essentialism secures an internal collective identity, anything outside of it easily becomes an object of devaluation. While anything can potentially become culture in the case of hyperculture (hence, hyper), valuable entities appear to be fixed in cultural essentialism (hence, essence). While the culturally-creative complex continues to produce novel cultural entities and to feed them into cultural circulation, even to the point of accelerating fashion cycles and memes, cultural communitarianism unequivocally favors the old, i.e., that which stems from history and tradition and is sacralized again and again. On the whole, the culturalization of identitarianism is at the same time a singularization project of a specific kind. While the practice of singularization in the culturally-creative complex is fundamentally based on a heterogeneity of various singularities, which constantly compete for recognition, the practice of cultural communitarians is to singularize their “own” culture as something unique, above all, through references to their history, their ethos, or even their shared space: the circle of their chosen ones, the uniqueness of their own nation, the singularity of their völkisch or ethnic community.

The Creativity Dispositif as a Regime of the Aesthetically New The creativity dispositif, whose genealogy and structure I analyzed in The Invention of Creativity, presents itself as a hub of the social logic of singularization and culturalization in late modernity. This applies primarily to the culturallycreative complex, which is hypercultural. But cultural essentialism is hardly immune to the mechanisms of the creativity dispositif, such that even identitarian and fundamentalist movements avail themselves of ‘creative’ methods, as when they partake in digital culture or when it comes to attracting attention and recruiting followers. At its core, however, communitarian culturalization or singularization is a practice that is not aimed at the generation of the new, but at the specification and fixation of the old. In this respect, cultural essentialism is in fact a counterculture in that it is based on a social regime of the old, whereas the culturally-creative complex and the structural core of modernity it-

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self are based on one of innovation. The aim of the social regime of the old is to safeguard “tradition,” which still needs to be created, ritualized, and interpreted time and time again in the sense of an ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm). In addition, the primacy of the aesthetic, as found in the creativity dispositif, does not exhaustively characterize the form of culturalization practiced by cultural essentialists. To be sure, elements of the aesthetic play a role in cultural communitarian practices, for instance when it comes to the performance of collective rituals or the veneration of iconic objects or places. However, the first three aspects or qualities of culturalization (i.e., the aesthetic, the ludic, and the creative) are less foundational in the case of cultural essentialists than the last two (i.e., the ethical and the narrative). For cultural essentialists, the narration of historical stories and the safeguarding of a collective ethos take precedence over any aesthetic, ludic, and creative elements. To put it bluntly, the culturallycreative complex essentially forces a “postmodern” aestheticization of the social, whereas cultural essentialists, turning against the ostensibly permissive culture of postmodernism, pursue an ethicalization of the social guided by strict moral regulations for a community. The late-modern creativity dispositif is therefore primarily located inside of the still-dominant hypercultural form of singularization, which is supported above all by cultural capitalism, the digital culture machine, and the new middle class. The term ‘culturally-creative complex’ therefore seems quite appropriate. But what would it mean for the one to be located “on the inside” of the other? Are the structures that I attributed to the creativity dispositif completely absorbed by those found in the society of singularities? As a reminder, the structure of the creativity dispositif arises, in my analysis, at the intersection of a social regime of the new and processes of aestheticization. Conversely, this intersection means that there always have been and still are forms of a regime of the new, which is not oriented to the aesthetic; there always have been and still are forms of aestheticization, which are not coupled with a regime of the new. The creativity dispositif connects the two to each other. The social regime of the new means a form of structuring social practices, which unequivocally prefers the “new” over the “old.” The regime of the new is thus based on a valorization of the present and the future, and a devaluation of the past. This is not only a question of semantics and discourses that glorify things like progress or innovation; in particular, it involves the practical logic governing the selection and retention of events. While a traditionalist regime of the old is suspicious, on principle, of new events, ideas, and other things that seem surprising and different, and generally weeds them out as soon as they appear (or even tries to inhibit their very formation), a social regime of the new promotes both the emergence and diffusion of novel elements, albeit never without qualifications and always dependent on criteria of what is legitimately new.

Postscript

In sociology, it is well known that modern society has been based since its emergence on implanting regimes of the new in nearly every social field, whether in technology, economics, politics, or the arts. In this sense, modern society is a society of innovation. However, the regime of the new can take several different forms. The new (I) is about taking the definitive step from tradition to progress in the manner of a political revolution; by contrast, the new (II) is based on the idea of a gradual, never-ending intensification in the manner of technological development; whereas the new (III) dispenses with any connotations of progress and aspires for a sequence of ever-new, ever-surprising affects in the manner of originality in the artistic field. The regimes of the new (I) and the new (II) are characteristic of industrial modernity, whereas the new (III) forms the structure of late modernity. In the late-modern regime of the new, the orientation toward novelty overlaps with the process of aestheticization, which can be understood as a process in which practices, objects, events, places, and collectives no longer appear as means to an end, but rather as objects of sensory perception, which contains its end in itself. Aestheticization is therefore a subform of what was introduced above as culturalization: the formation of entities in the world as bearers not of a utility or function but of a value that they apparently carry within themselves. Cultural value, in this case, is an aesthetic quality. As is familiar from various forms of society, however, aestheticization does not necessarily mean placing a premium on the new: in ancient East Asia, for instance, aestheticization was a matter not of innovation or originality but of the repetition of the classical and perfect form. To some extent, aestheticization was linked in this context to a social regime of the old, whereas the creativity dispositif in (late) modernity attaches aestheticization to the regime of the new. The blueprint for this regime of the aesthetically new has been art, which since the end of the eighteenth century is no longer based on the reproduction of perfected rules, but on originality, surprise, and breaking the rules. The creativity dispositif is thus shaped by what I call an ‘aesthetic sociality’. This provides the specific contours of the social consisting of four main elements: producers, on the one hand, who are the “creators” of the aesthetically new; the audience, on the other, who are its “recipients” (and can also become co-creators); between them, aesthetic objects in the broadest sense; and all three framed by institutional structures, which structure attention with respect to the aesthetically new and its valorization. Aesthetic sociality is precisely what is characteristic of the form of the social in the creativity dispositif. It would be incomprehensible in classical models of the social, which present sociality in the manner of rational, goal-oriented exchange or in that of normatively-regulated intersubjectivity. By contrast, aesthetic sociality involves creators, on the one hand, i.e., instances of the ‘creation’ and ‘production’ of objects in the broadest senses, and an audience, on the other hand, that perceives these objects and can

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be affected by them. At the core of aesthetic sociality in the creativity dispositif are thus processes of creating, perceiving, and affecting – ultimately, a performance in front of an audience. The analytical tools of the creativity dispositif can help examine a considerable segment of late-modern ‘singularization as culturalization’ more closely. The causes and basic conditions that I have cited as part of the process of culturalization in late modernity also apply to the rise of the creativity dispositif: the changeover from industrial capitalism to cultural (and aesthetic) capitalism; the digital revolution; and the rise of a new middle class that values self-expression and thus also creativity. The Invention of Creativity and The Society of Singularities emphasize different features: the former brings to the fore practices of production and creation and their ‘creative subject’; the latter accentuates structures of attention and the public’s practices of valorization in cultural markets or on the Internet. The decisive conceptual difference is that ‘aestheticization’ is the guiding concept for the former and ‘culturalization’ for the latter; on the one hand, there is the regime of the new, on the other, the social logic of the particular. What follows from these conceptual differences? As should be clear, the relationship between aestheticization and culturalization can be explained quite simply. ‘Culturalization’ is the broader term, ‘aestheticization’ the narrower. If necessary, the concept of aestheticization could be extended to include the qualities of the ludic and the creative discussed above. However, even the narrative quality of culture is difficult to subsume under aesthetic practices. After all, narrative practices are not primarily about the intrinsic value of the sensuous, but about the intrinsic value of making sense, of creating meanings and narratives that go beyond mere information and cognition, whether in the narrative valorization of cities, consumer goods, rituals, outstanding personalities, or ethnic communities. The concept of the aesthetic encounters its absolute limit in that of the ethical, which, strictly speaking, is not a matter of the intrinsically beautiful but the intrinsically good. Crucially, however, culturalization also occurs from an ethical perspective; this applies to modernity as a whole and especially to late modernity. Ethicalization can be found not only in cultural essentialism and its ethos of the community, but also within cultural capitalism. In this case, an ethicalization of consumption appears alongside the aestheticization of consumer objects, and charges things, services, and events with ethical values ​​of the good (e.g., the sustainable, the socially conscious, the perfection of the self-serving). Digital communication, too, deals not only with aestheticization – especially at the level of the image – but also with lending communication an ethical charge. Finally, the field of politics represents a form of culturalization in the sense of ethicalization, as in the liberal politics of diversity, cultural heritage, or the identity-based rights of individuals and collectives. In my view, it is still appropriate to identify processes of aestheticization at the center of the creativity dispositif, keeping

Postscript

in mind that the processes of culturalization in late modernity, on the whole, are not directed exclusively to aesthetic qualities, but encompass narrative and ethical ones. Valorization – that is, the attribution of an intrinsic ‘value’ in the strong sense of the word – is what makes all of these processes into forms of culturalization.

The New and the Singular What, then, is the relationship between the singular and the new? Do singularization and the regime of the new constitute two inseparable aspects of the same thing? This is a complicated question. At first glance, what the two phenomena may seem to have in common is that – contrary to the common perception of actors in the social field – they do not exist in objective terms, but depend on categories of observation: What counts as new and what as a reproduction of the old, what counts as unique and what as a reproduction of a type, is not fixed once and for all, but arises only in the course of social observation and evaluation. There is a ‘doing newness’, just as there is a ‘doing singularity’. Generally speaking, one can state provisionally that, in social events, the new – regardless of whether in the form of the new (I), new (II), or new (III) – provisionally has the character of the singular. By definition, the new can no longer be grasped with the parameters of the old, which means that it no longer “fits” the parameters of what was once universally valid. Hence, political revolutions and regime changes, technical inventions and avant-garde artworks are all singular. My suspicion, however, is that the regimes of the new (I) and the new (II) were differentiated from that of the new (III) in the further course of the process of singularization. The new (I) and new (II) appear to be based on the fact that entities lose their singular character and change from the register of the particular to that of the ‘general’, in the sense that they acquire a general validity for everyone. Thus, the October Revolution and the subsequent upheavals were at first singular; however, the new structures it created gained universal validity for the Soviet territory – the goal was even universal validity around the world (which communism has not achieved in actuality). What is central, however, is that the new (I) in the modern sense always aspires to implant a universally valid structure, which one can no longer fall behind. In another sense, this also applies to the regime of the new (II): Even a technical invention, such as the telephone or the desktop computer, is at first something singular and, in that respect, surprising, or even fascinating. However, as soon as the invention achieves a state-of-the-art status in a society, its status changes to that of a general infrastructure, which can in turn become obsolete and useless, so that its elements are replaced by other, better inventions. The particular status of the regime of the new (III) would then consist in the fact that the singular does not cross over to the register of the general in the

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long term. Instead, there seem to be two other possibilities: Either the element in question remains singular in the long run, or it disappears as quickly as it appeared. One can recognize these possibilities particularly well in the modern artistic field. When a work of art appears, it makes some claim to originality (i.e., singularity), and if the artwork succeeds (i.e., if it receives the appropriate attention and valorization), its claim appears to have been fulfilled: the work of art becomes singular. However, a modern work of art does not raise a universal claim, nor could it realize this kind of claim. It cannot attain the universal ‘validity’ of a political reform or a widespread technical invention. Rather, the artistic field operates with the play of difference and complexity where singularities remain singular. Thus, the regime of the new (III) differs from that of the New (I) or (II) not only in its culturalization or aestheticization of the new, but also in its potential institutionalization of a social logic of singularization. However, there are two different forms of singularity within the social logic of singularization that correspond to two different temporal structures. On the one hand, there are the kinds of singularities that exist only briefly and disappear in the course of time. These are one-of-a-kind novelties in their being of the moment: YouTube videos, one-hit wonders, a season’s bestsellers, all the hyped travel destinations, politicians, and restaurants that only survive for a short period of time. Generally speaking, these are all trend-based phenomena. Something new will acquire the status of singularity in the short term, will appear to be valuable, aesthetically attractive, or to have a strong affective dimension, and then “burn out” again. However, it cannot sustain the status of singularity in the long term and is replaced by new novelties, which are fascinating and unique in their own turn. At this level, there is an endless cycle of ever-new novelties. On the other hand, there are the kinds of singularities that succeed in maintaining their status of uniqueness (their singularity capital) in the long term. These are novelties that achieve the status of a classic in the course of time. They are valued beyond any short-term attraction or initial attention-grabbing. In the process, they do not lose their singular character or enter the register of the general: literary classics, design classics, travel classics, canonical residences or sites, famous historical personalities, festivals or universities with a high symbolic value. These cases reproduce singularity and maintain it in the long term (which still does not guarantee permanence or eternity). One might wonder whether the second form of singularity, that of longterm accumulation in contrast to short-time novelty, should still be understood as part of the creativity dispositif. The answer would depend on whether one takes the concept of the social regime of the new in a narrow or a broader sense. Of course, in a strict sense, the social regime of the new would no longer cover forms of long-term singularity, which would clearly no longer be a matter of the new but rather of the old. Understood in this sense, the mechanisms of cultural

Postscript

singularization are more comprehensive than those of the creativity dispositif, which would then comprise only a complex in which one novelty replaces the next. Conceiving of the dispositif in this way, however, would artificially separate the two parallel temporal structures of the short- and long-term. Since their duality is actually what shapes the cultural sphere, this analytical gesture would be unwise. Instead, we should take a closer look at the means for dealing with the formation of classics in the regime of the new. In fact, the regime of the new is in no way superseded by one of the old, as in the case of cultural essentialist movements, which place a premium on the old per se (e.g., the origins of tradition, the ‘fundamentals’ of a religion) and take the new to be superfluous or pernicious. In the culturally-creative complex of (late) modernity, on the other hand, there is a premium not on the old but on the new as the singular. If the singular is recognized as such in the long run, it is only “old” in name, while remaining the once-new, the new of the past. To some extent, the fascination with an entity in the present still contains traces of the singularity that appeared when it was once new and that singularity was first “discovered.” Caravaggio and Thomas Pynchon, Brasilia, and the Rolling Stones – their current status of singularity in the present implies that they were considered radically “novel” at the time of their emergence. Thus, even from the perspective of the present, they still appear as anything but firm traditions, and much more as creative achievements, as creations of the new. The fact that they age does not diminish the potential to recognize their creativity. Through this conceptual lens, the social logic of singularities provides a sharper image of the temporal duality of moment and duration, of novelty in the past and in the present, which shapes the late modern creativity dispositif. The exact relation between the short- and long-term in the creativity dispositif is an empirical question and depends very much on the respective social field: some (e.g., digital culture with all its texts and images) live on the extreme short-term; others (e.g., the fine arts or the Anglo-Saxon university system) on the accumulation of singularity capital over very long periods of time. In The Invention of Creativity I presented the strong thesis that short-term orientation toward novelty plays a much stronger role in the culture sphere of late modernity than it did in bourgeois modernity. In late modernity, the contributing factors are not only the digital revolution and cultural capitalism; even in the field of the arts (which is actually now part of cultural capitalism), there is a growing significance to the short-term mobilization of attention (e.g., temporary exhibitions, special exhibitions, festivals, changes in the book market). Nevertheless, in a parallel tendency that should not be overlooked, there is the persistence of a long-term logic of singular goods, which I have examined in more detail in The Society of Singularities. Even more than mere persistence, the classics of singularity, which are always appropriated anew, the past novelties surrounded by a

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cloud of originality, play a central role for cultural capitalism and the way of life characteristic of the new middle class (and the new upper class) in the curation of one’s own lifestyle as something satisfying and prestigious. Especially in light of the creativity dispositif’s efficacy at diffusing present novelties, the creative achievements of the past promise to supply a particular value in the future.

Authors

EMMANUEL ALLOA, Dr., is Research Leader in Philosophy at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. ELENA BEREGOW is Research Assistant for General Sociology and Sociological Theory at the University of Hamburg, Germany. TIMON BEYES is Professor for Sociology of Organization and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany, and at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. MONICA CALCAGNO is Associate Professor at the Department of Management at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. HEINZ DRÜGH is Professor for the History of Literature of the 18th and 19th century and for Aesthetics at Goethe-University Frankfurt (Main), Germany. DANIELE GOLDONI is Professor of Aesthetics of the Arts at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. DIRK HOHNSTRÄTER, Dr., heads the Consumer Culture Research Center at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. MICHAEL HUTTER is Professor Emeritus for the Theory of Economy and a former Director at the Berlin Social Science Center (WBZ), Germany. CHRISTOPH JACKE is Professor of Theory, Aesthetics and History of Popular Music at Paderborn University, Germany. VINCENT KAUFMANN is Professor of French and of Media and Culture at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland.

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SOPHIE-THÉRÈSE KREMPL, Dr., is a philosopher and social scientist and currently head of communication at Konzert Theater Bern, Switzerland. MARTINA LEEKER, Dr., is a theatre scientist and media theorist and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. CLAUDIA MAREIS, Prof. Dr., is the director of the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Culture at FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, and the founder of Critical Media Lab, Switzerland. JÖRG METELMANN is an Associate Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. CHRISTOPH MICHELS, Dr., is a Research Assistant at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Liechtenstein. BJÖRN MÜLLER, Dr., works as an academic, entrepreneur, and international consultant and currently conducts postdoctoral research at the Research Institute for Organizational Psychology at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. CLAUS PIAS is Professor of Media Theory and the History of Media at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. SVERRE RAFFNSØE is Professor of Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. ANDREAS RECKWITZ is Professor of Cultural Sociology at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. MAXIMILIAN SCHELLMANN is Research Assistant at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. FLORIAN SCHULZ, Dr., is Head of Psychological Counselling Services and postdoctoral researcher at the Research Institute of Organizational Psychology at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. CHRIS STEYAERT is Professor of Organizational Psychology at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. MONICA TITTON, Dr., is a sociologist, fashion scholar and culture critic living and working in Vienna, Austria.

Authors

PAOLA TREVISAN, Dr., is Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. WOLFGANG ULLRICH, Dr., is a freelance author and cultural scholar living and working in Leipzig, Germany.

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