Getting ‘creative’ under capitalism: An analysis of creativity as a dominant keyword

Abstract

This article proposes a sociologically informed analysis of ‘creativity talk’ using an approach based on Raymond Williams’ ‘keywords’. Arguing that Williams’ perspective provides a helpful conceptual foundation, the discussion argues that the emergence of contemporary ideas circulating around creativity are rooted in material changes taking place within capitalism, the rise of humanistic psychology and the notion of the ‘creative city’/‘creative class’. Four discourses are proposed as potentially significant: austere creativity; liberatory creativity; analgesic creativity; and dissenting creativity.

Keywords

capitalism creative creativity keywords Raymond Williams

Introduction

What I will refer to as ‘creativity talk’ is now ubiquitous within a range of ‘fields’ (Bourdieu, 2003). Google’s ngram database of printed books reveals a steep incline in the use of the word since the 1920s, with a notably marked increase in usage since the 1960s. However, Reckwitz (2017, p. 2) argues that from a ‘sociological viewpoint, creativity is not simply a semantic phenomenon’, but ‘rather, a crucial organizing principle of Western societies over the last thirty years or so’. Since the 1970s, a ‘two-pronged advance of the creative urge and the creative imperative has been overstepping the confines of career, work and organization to seep deeper and deeper into the cultural logic’ of our times (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 3). Paradoxically, it is avowed by critics of this development, that ‘everyday life’ is so ‘saturated by a creativity rhetoric’ that it now actually discourages us from working ‘creatively’ (Mould, 2018, p. 15). Nevertheless, despite Mould’s provocatively titled Against Creativity, it is difficult – and rather pointless – to criticise or oppose ‘creativity’. This article will not stridently confront and debunk. Rather, the more modest intention is to sociologically explore the word.

First, I provide a brief theoretical foundation for the ensuing discussion by furnishing a truncated account of the work of Raymond Williams on keywords. The second section examines how contemporary ‘creativity talk’ may have emerged: what were, and remain, its main constituting components? To try and answer such questions there is a need to historically chart and situate the emergence and hyper-valorisation of creativity. Here, at least three elements are significant: material changes taking place within capitalism; the rise of humanistic psychology; and discourses dwelling on the ‘creative city’ and the ‘creative class’. The third part of the article suggests that a quartet of identifiable component discourses are important: creativity as a form of austere practice; creativity as liberation from a purportedly sterile public sector; creativity as a form of analgesic for jaded neoliberal subjects; and dissenting creativity that tries to locate ‘lines of flight’ beyond the imperatives of neoliberal capitalism (Virno, 1996; see also Garrett, 2019).

Creativity as a keyword

An interest in keywords was apparent even in the late nineteenth century, but Williams (1983) is the leading contemporary theorist associated with this form of scholarly analysis (Garrett, 2018). First published in 1976, his Keywords included 110 short essays on the words he regarded as important in social, cultural and political life in the mid-1970s. In 1983, the revised edition of the book incorporated an additional 21 words. More recently, a revival of interest in keyword theorisation has occurred (see, for example, Bennett et al., 2005; Garrett, 2018; Leary, 2018; MacCabe and Yanacek, 2018; Parker, 2017).

One of Williams’ aspirations was to counteract the common tendency to take the words we use for granted. For him, there were great social and political advantages accruing from subjecting specific words to sociological and literary scrutiny in order to illuminate how meanings, far from stabile, shift and change over time. A willingness to embark on this type of examination was vital, for those seeking radical political change, because there was a need to recognise how ‘keywords’ help to constitute, shape and bolster a particular view of the world. A heightened attention to such words, in the shifting contexts in which they are deployed, could help punctuate the dominant narratives of social and economic life ordinarily left unquestioned. In a more encompassing sense, Williams aspired to engender critical reflection and counter hegemonic strategies antithetical to capitalism. In short, keyword analysis was wedded to a wider intellectual and political project intent on sustaining a ‘long revolution’ that might result in the gradual construction of democratic socialism (Williams, 1965). However, he recognised the limitations of merely focusing on words. Such recognition was also echoed years later by Bourdieu (2000, p.2) who caustically criticised many educators and activists for erroneously regarding the ‘critiques of texts as a feat of resistance’ and for foolishly implying that ‘revolutions in the order of words’ amounted to ‘radical revolutions in the order of things’.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘creativity’ refers to the ‘faculty of being creative’ or the ‘ability or power to create’. Williams (1983, p. 82) identified how the word ‘create’ was formerly used in the context of the ‘original divine creation of the world’ from nothing. Within the belief system, promulgated by figures such as Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ce), creatures (human beings) lacked the power to ‘bring into being something new’ and to render the ‘absent present’ (Bröckling, 2006, pp. 513–514). As the biblical book of Ecclesiastes declared: ‘There is nothing new under the sun’. This perspective appears to have been the dominant understanding until the sixteenth century when ‘as part of the major transformation of thought’, occurring in the European Renaissance, the word began to encompass the possibility of humans’ creating. Williams (1983, p. 82) referred, for example, to the poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) who perceived God as ‘having made Nature but having also made man in his own likeness, giving him the capacity “with the force of a divine breath” to imagine and make things beyond Nature’. However, wariness and ambiguity continued to be hinder the notion of human ‘creation’. The cleric and poet John Donne (1572–1631) perceived ‘poetry as a “counterfeit Creation”, where counterfeit does not have to be taken in its strongest sense of false but where the old sense of art as imitation is certainly present’ (Williams, 1983, p. 82, original emphases). Amongst Elizabethan writers, such as William Shakespeare (1554–1616), pejorative uses were still, argued Williams, very much to the fore. Even today, phrases such as ‘creative accounting’ hint at fake and disreputable practices.

Soon, however, ‘create’ and ‘creation’ were to take on the meanings we would come to share. During the eighteenth century both words acquired a ‘conscious association’ with art and were suggestive of ‘original and innovating’ endeavours. This development can be connected to the coining of the word ‘creative’. ‘Creativity’, first deployed in 1875 in an essay on the brilliance of Shakespeare, began to be used more frequently in the twentieth century and it usually referred to activity in art and thought (Hartley et al., 2013). Williams (1983, p. 83) noted the ‘difficulty’ which arose when words, such as these, ‘once intended, and often still intended, to embody a high and serious claim, [become] so conventional. . . . Thus any imitative or stereotyped literary work can be called, by convention, creative writing, and advertising copywriters officially describe themselves as creative.’ Such critical remarks take on greater resonance, with the banalising, hollowing out and impoverishment of such words in the twenty-first century. One of the problems today is the ‘credibility of creativity’ insofar as the ‘adjective form “creative” is liberally applied to products or works that involve negligible amounts of novelty’ (Hartley et al., 2013, p. 67). For example, despite commodities being ‘routine, frequently standardised and generally derivative’, corporate advertisements frequently allude to the producers and purchasers of commodities being marinated in ‘creativity’ (Hartley et al., 2013, p. 68).

Williams (1983, p. 84) concluded his exploration by remarking on the ‘magnitude and complexity of the interpretation of human activity which creative . . . embodies’. Because creativity is hard to define, metaphors have an illuminating function. Bröckling (2006) maintains that these metaphors can be situated within six different registers. First, creativity is associated with the artistic action and flair. Second, it is conceived in relation to production and here the activity of the ‘craftsman’ is the paradigmatic figure (see also Arendt, 1958/1998; Sennett, 1998). Third, creativity is perceived as ‘problem solving action’ with an emphasis on inventiveness and innovation (Bröckling, 2006, p. 516). The fourth ‘metaphoric field’ is one of revolution and here the stress is on liberation and the inauguration of a new political realm. The fifth evocation of creativity dwells on ‘life connected associations’ with the metaphors of birth and biological evolution to the fore (Bröckling, 2006, p. 516). Finally, the sixth creativity metaphor is that of play. Here the embodiment of the metaphor is the child. However, in recent times, it is possible to identify how creative ‘play’ and ‘fun’ are valorised within some workplaces (Fleming, 2005); a development that might partly be interpreted as infantilising adult workers.

Bröckling (2006, p. 516) states that contemporary appeals to creativity come in various forms implying: an ‘anthropological capacity’ (creativity is something everyone has); a ‘binding norm’ (creativity is something everyone ought to possess); a ‘telos without closure’ (creativity is something we can never have enough of); and a ‘learnable competence’ (creativity is something that can become achievable by recourse to instruction). Despite this delineation, there are rarely sociological explorations as to what constitutes creativity within mainstream and popular depictions. Rather, it is taken as ‘given’ and there is no attentiveness to social ambiguities and philosophical abstractions attached to the concept. Nevertheless, what ‘constitutes creativity has not been determined once and for all, but rather emerges from the various ways it has been attributed, evoked, and catalysed throughout history’ (Bröckling, 2006, p. 514). Martin (2009) and Hartley et al. (2013) highlight that the meaning of creativity is bound up with a number of complex philosophical considerations: does ‘creativity’ have to generate a tangible outcome observable and validated by another party or parties for it to be recognised as such? If recognised, does the recognition have to be instantaneous? (Clearly, this would hardly seem to be the case given that the work of authors such as Kafka were not lauded as magnificent works of ‘creativity’ until after their death.) Do most understandings of creativity – still rooted in residual, older notions preoccupied with the artistic, even the solitary artistic male ‘genius’ usually located in the Global North (Glăveanu & Sierra, 2015) – assume a certain specialness, despite quotidian and mundane actions invariably containing new, novel yet barely recognised ingredients or elements? Despite the fact that creativity privileges the new over the old, divergence over the standard, otherness over sameness (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 2), the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ dichotomy can be interpreted as somewhat misleading. This is because the former ‘lurks within everything new; the new builds on the old, modifies it, distances itself from it. The closer one looks, the more familiarly it stares back. Inversely, a moment of creative variation lurks within every repetition’ (Bröckling, 2006, p. 524).

Indeed, this perception shares an affinity with Williams’ nuanced perspective on social change and on how potent, if obscured, residues from the past impact on and shape the contemporary world – foreclosing some possibilities, but also opening up opportunities.

Making ‘creativity talk’

Changes within capitalism

A number of writers maintain that the contemporary fixation with creativity is connected to material changes occurring in how capitalism operates. Important here is the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation. With its emphasis on ‘regularity and standardization’, the former regime was dominant in much of North America and Northern Europe from the end of the Second World War until the mid-1970s (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 85). Throughout its ‘boom’ period, capitalism was perceived within the dominant imaginary as a ‘hyper regulated rational machine’ with an emphasis being placed on the standardisation of ‘elements (people, things, rules and habits of conduct)’ (Reckwitz, 2017, pp. 85–86). Moreover, the iconic figure associated with orchestrating the smooth running of workplaces was the ‘administrator and technician’, and the ‘accompanying personality type’ it both required and helped to constitute was the ‘disciplined, expert, unemotional professional’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 85). This form of economy and the cultural conformist imperatives it lauded were criticised by Frankfurt School theorists, such as Horkheimer and Adorno (1947/2002) and even some political philosophers, largely supportive of capitalism, such as Hannah Arendt (1958/1998).

In contrast, the current regime of capital accumulation, it has been argued, is one of post-Fordism and ‘disorganised capitalism’ (Lash & Urry, 1987). Here factory production is less significant and working lives become more ‘flexible’, dispersed and precarious. The economy has become one of ‘aesthetic capitalism’ laying more emphasis on creative novelty (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 2). Relatedly, employers ‘want more from employees than was typically demanded in factories of the industrial era’ and attempt to enlist workers’ ‘creativity and their relational and affective capacities. . . . Whereas Fordism demanded from its core workers a lifetime of compliance with work discipline, post-Fordism also demands of many of its workers flexibility, adaptability, and continual reinvention’ (Weeks, 2011, p. 70).

Prior to exploring this line of argument in a little more detail, a few clarifying remarks are important. First, this dichotomy between ‘Fordist’ and ‘post-Fordist’ regimes of capital accumulation can be too schematically defined: factory labour still exists, of course, and workers (in factories and offices) continue to be subjected to surveillance and performance monitoring which, albeit increasingly electronically mediated, characterised the assembly lines of Henry Ford. Moreover, the argument that a clean break has occurred separating the two modes of capital accumulation tends – even if it contains a measure of descriptive accuracy – to have greater explanatory purchase in North America and Northern Europe than it does elsewhere across the globe. Additionally, there is a need to be careful not to imply that before the mid-1970s, capitalism was – culturally – a wholly stultifying form of social and economic organisation intent on eradicating creativity. As Marx noted, capitalism has always been, even if destructively so, a creative project. For example, in a competitive market society, new commodities constantly have to be created to attract consumers. If consumption rates drastically fall, so does the rate of profit, and a systemic crisis is generated. As well as coming up with new products, and ‘improving’ existing ones, new ways to creatively lure ‘customers’ must be devised. This entails a stress on novelty, ‘fantasy worlds’ and the relentless marketing of commodities and services within affective registers offering the promise of better, more emotionally fulfilled, vital and joyful lives (Mouffe, 2013, p. 90).

The economic and social transformations occurring since the 1970s are clearly bound up with notions connected to creativity. Conceding the ‘idea of creativity’ was certainly not invented during this period, Reckwitz (2017, p. 4) asserts that, until then, it was still limited to particular ‘cultural and social niches’. However, he identifies domains in which creativity – or its purported absence – was a concern even during the period of Fordism and, preceding that, during time when industrial capitalism was beginning to achieve dominance. First, he refers to those, at the turn of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth century, who bemoaned the annihilation of the skills and crafts from earlier eras of slower, individualised and more creative production. In England, this strand of critique included figures such as John Ruskin and William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. In the US, into the late 1950s, the writings of Hannah Arendt (1958/1998) similarly expressed contempt for the labour practices characterising what she termed the ‘mass society’. Within her conceptual paradigm, ‘work’ (not ‘labour’) was a much meaningful endeavour. Second, Reckwitz argues that US management in the 1950s also became interested in ideas circulating around creativity because the embedding of ‘creative practices’ was a strategy to counteract lack of ‘motivation’ within corporate workplaces. The creative economies (fashion, advertising, design) were a third arena producing critiques of industrial capitalism’s lack of a creative aesthetic. Fourth, was the psychological turn to creativity in the 1950s.

‘Humanistic’ psychology

Scientific and popular psychology, psychotherapy, applied psychology, psychiatry and psychological tests exerted a profound influence in amplifying the social and cultural centrality of creativity. Significant here was the evolution within psychology of a tendency, spilling over into other spheres of social life, to comprehend and articulate the modern self as creative subject (Reckwitz, 2017). More generally, since the 1960s, psychology and kindred fields of theory and practice contributed to ‘popular notions of what it means to be a well-balanced person and lead a satisfying life’ and within this mix of ideas creativity was increasing understood as ‘both a human default setting and an ideal’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p 130). No longer characterising the lives of merely the creative genius, the urge to become creative was universal and existed, albeit latently, in everyday lives. This reasoning was very much at odds with the psychiatry that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century that was more fixated with ‘abnormal’ forms of ‘deviant’ behaviour (Foucault, 2016). The task of the newer ‘psy professions’ was to aid individuals to pilot their lives, albeit within the fabric of capitalism, in such a way as to tap into potentially unlimited capacities for individual enhancement and fulfilment (Rose, 1998, 1999). Intensely ideological and entirely in tune with the ambiance of the Fordist ‘boom’, this orientation presupposed an innate ability to shape the self and the surrounding world.

Historically, Douglas McGregor (1960) was one of the ‘earliest “architects” of the “human resources”, “empowerment” approach’ which tried to direct individual desires toward ‘organizational objectives’ and reconcile disgruntled employees to the unpleasant realities of work (McRobbie, 2006, p. 106). This can also be related to the fact that one of the major obstacles in nurturing a compliant workforce is employers’ ‘limited access to the deepest human needs and motivations’ (Brouillette, 2013). Hence, particularly since the period between the two World Wars, there has been a constant ‘complicated and shifting interplay between adaptation to workers’ demands and efforts to construct and shape their needs and motivations so that they will be maximally amenable to management’ (Brouillette, 2013). So-called ‘postmodern’ management theory, in the 1980s and 1990s, was to grapple with this quandary by stressing that creativity was an essential element in an individual’s personal ‘brand’ (Peters, 1997).

Important, in this context, was the emergence of the psychology of ‘self-realisation’ and nostrums pivoting on ‘self-growth’. Not unreasonably, Reckwitz (2017, p. 138) argues that the ‘significance of self-growth psychology for the transformation of the popular vocabulary since the 1950s can hardly be overestimated’. At first a US-based movement, ‘operating also under the names of humanistic psychology, positive psychology and human potential movement, self-growth psychology developed the influential model of human psyche that wants, can and should attain self-realisation, chiefly by means of individual advice and therapy but also through education and business consultation’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 139). Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers were key figures (and skilful, popularising entrepreneurs) continuing to influence mainstream theory and practice. Particularly in the 1950s, within the US, these and other writers and practitioners intent on promoting self-growth psychology were successfully able to occupy a niche between ‘academic psychology, with the latter’s predominantly behaviourist bent, and therapy-orientated psychoanalysis’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 139). By the early 1960s, the movement had established its own professional association and academic journal. Later in the decade, the fixation with ‘self-actualisation’ and ‘self-growth’ also had certain affinities with an evolving ‘counter-culture’ because there was a shared valorisation of volition and personal choice and a united antipathy for social conformism and social adaptation. This further contributed to a deepening and embedding of these discourses (Marcuse, 1999). Despite largely losing its ‘counter-cultural status’ in subsequent years, they were to become the ‘spearhead of a new, dominant therapy practice catering broadly to the psychologically sensitized and educated middle classes’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 139; see also Furedi, 2004; Grogan, 2013; Nolan, 1998). By the mid-1970s, such ideas on the nature of human subjectivity had achieved ‘hegemony that has continued’ into the present day (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 139).

For Maslow (1968), for example, the ‘creative moment’ constituted one of a number of potential ‘peak experiences’. Similarly, for the psychologist John Curtis Gowan (1912–86), ‘failure to become creative’ was to ‘fall short of full development’ (in Reckwitz, 2017, p. 101). Intriguingly, many within the field of humanistic psychology were also keen to stress how the, seemingly, inherent US orientation toward creativity could be deployed to provide a competitive edge during the Cold War. Rogers avowed that, unlike the allegedly dreary USSR with its herds of conformists, the US required ‘freely creative original thinkers’ (in Hartley et al., 2013, p. 55). What is more, ‘international annihilation’ would be the ‘price’ the US would ‘pay for a lack of creativity’ (Rogers, 1961, p. 349). Maslow (1965, p. 263) shared the perception that creativity was a weapon which could be discharged against the Soviet enemy. The view of the esteemed US psychologist was that the outcome of the Cold War would ‘tip one way or the other’ in line with the ‘human products turned out by the Russian society and the American society’. Corporate management styles had the aim to produce a more rounded and ‘better type of human being’. This would be good PR and might, in turn, make Americans ‘more loved, more respected, more trusted’ around the world (Maslow, 1965, p. 262).

The ‘creative city’ and the ‘creative class’

Another very significant development contributing to the contemporary centrality of ‘creativity talk’ has been the evolution of urban policy and the omnipresent idea that, for cities to succeed, they must become ‘creative cities’ committed to attracting and retaining a ‘creative class’. Such notions are largely associated with Richard Florida (2002), who, for almost two decades, has been the primary definer and ‘cheerleader for the creative economy, advocating a business-school model comprising league tables and easily remembered catch-phrases’ (McRobbie, 2016, p. 45). The essence of Florida’s ‘message’, now largely hegemonic within urban planning, is that cities have to be more than merely functional, but must vaunt a cultural vibrancy, excitement, edginess, gritty glamour and unrelenting novelty. Across the western world and beyond, this has resulted in urban policies sharing the same vision laying an emphasis on acting as magnets for a mobile ‘creative class’. This has produced a competitive desire, amongst individual cities, to develop diverse entertainments, festivals and other ‘cool’ events throughout the annual calendar to attract visitors and to boost the cultural consumption of middle-class residents able to afford to purchase the multifarious urban distractions (McGuigan, 2009). Despite some of the most prominent ‘creative cities’ also being some of the ‘most racially segregated’ (Leslie & Catungal, 2012, p. 116), this heightened attention to ‘marketing’ the city can be connected to a rhetorical inclusivity, feigned cosmopolitanism and valorisation of ‘diversity’ (McLean, 2017). Cities ‘without gays and rock bands’, opined Florida (2002, p. 15), were ‘losing the economic development race’. Relatedly, he stressed the importance of nurturing ‘creative clusters’ of ‘start-ups’ oozing youthful, flexible and driven entrepreneurial talent, with Silicon Valley the dominant imaginary as the ‘creative cluster par excellence’ (Mould, 2018, p. 120).

Two core criticisms can be directed at Florida. First, despite the hype which envelopes his ideas, the lucrative fixation is not as new as his acolytes may believe. Some of his notions are redolent of the rhetoric helping to secure the governorship of California for Ronald Reagan in the mid-1960s. The future president of the US launched his campaign to become state governor, in 1966, with the proposal to create a ‘Creative Society to discover, enlist and mobilize the incredibly rich human resources of California [through] innumerable people of creative talent’ (in Miller, 2013, p. 81). Similar comments were made in his inaugural address as governor the following year (Reagan, 1967). Later Reagan asserted that the ‘Creative Society’ could extinguish – what was to become a familiar neoliberal bugbear – ‘welfare dependency’ (Reagan, 1968).

The second criticism pivots on the charge that Florida’s work is merely furnishing neoliberal orientated ‘solutions’ to perceived urban ‘problems which actually serve to make life worse for many people. Contributions from the US and elsewhere have illuminated how policies influenced by Florida have resulted in gentrification and the de facto expulsion of many low-income residents from inner cities and their replacements have tended to be the dismal figure of the ‘hipster’ (McRobbie, 2016, pp. 50–51; see also Denmead, 2019; Tissot, 2015). Processes in many cities also recall bell hooks’ (2000, p. 137) characterisation of urban renewal as a form of ‘state-orchestrated racialized class warfare’. Furthermore, Florida has a palpable lack of interest in the inclusion/exclusion binary within the city. Instead, he merely concentrates on how urban spaces can be ‘cleaned up’ and repopulated by ‘healthy, youthful-looking and self-reliant citizens’ (McRobbie, 2016 p. 50; see also Denmead, 2019). However, this is a very partial evocation of the neoliberal urban environment ignoring coercive ‘tough on crime’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies targeted at marginalised groups (Wacquant, 2009). One illustration of this dynamic was provided during the summer of 2019 when Cardiff – self-proclaimed ‘creative city’ and host of the ‘Creative Cities’ 2019 convention – set about the forced ‘removal’ of camps set up by the homeless (Marsh & Greenfield, 2019).

A coruscating critique of Florida’s oeuvre has been furnished by Peck (2005, p. 740), who lambasts this ‘new credo of creativity’. Whilst acknowledging the impact of Florida’s work, it is maintained that the ‘irreverent, informal, sometimes preachy, but business-friendly style is in many ways a familiar one, echoing as it does the lifestyle guides, entrepreneurial manuals, and pop sociologies’ of the neoliberal period (Peck, 2005, p. 741). Unsurprisingly, therefore, Florida largely neglects issues rooted in structural inequality and prefers to advocate for a form of ‘creative trickle-down, with the lumpen classes of noncreatives eventually learning what the overclass has already figured out, that “there is no corporation or other large institution that will take care of us – that we are truly on our own”’ (Peck, 2005, p. 759).

Leslie and Catungal (2012, p. 115) dwell critically on the neoliberal assumption underpinning the whole ‘creative class’ literature, implying an ‘unparalleled mobility amongst workers’. Such reasoning is deeply flawed because – particularly given the contemporary and racialised emphasis placed on immigration and border policing – ‘uneven geographies of mobility’ are still materially significant (Leslie & Catungal, 2012, p. 115). They conclude that assuming ‘otherwise suggests a problematic post-racial and post-national construction of the mobile creative free agent. It still matters where engineers, architects and other creative workers come from, since their mobility is tempered by increased controls over national borders’ (Leslie & Catungal, 2012, p. 115). Issues pertaining to mobility are also, of course, gendered in that women tend, more than men, to be tethered to a particular place because of the dynamics of social reproduction and associated responsibilities related to caring for others (McLean, 2014).

Despite such criticisms, this constellation of factors, related to changing patterns of capitalist accumulation, humanistic psychology and the ‘creative city’/‘creative class’, helped to shape new hegemonic and ‘common sense’ understandings (Crehan, 2016). It will be suggested, in what follows, that there may be four, even more specific, types of ‘creativity talk’ currently constituting engagement with the theme.

Creativity and contemporary ‘common sense’

Austere creativity

A survey of over 1000 social workers by the UK trade union UNISON (2019) highlighted the fact that many are no longer able to do their jobs effectively because the years of cuts have produced a deep crisis in the sector. The survey found that an overwhelming proportion (95%) felt they could not adequately perform their jobs due to the combined effects of reduced services and the social conditions created by ‘austerity’. More than nine in ten (92%) stated that budget cuts had resulted in plummeting staff morale. However, at the core of austere creativity is the assertion that social services, charities and other third sector institutions are failing not because their funding has been drastically cut, but because they are insufficiently creative (Mould, 2018).

Shifting attention away from the deleterious impact of budget cuts on these organisations, the cynically instrumental emphasis is on the shortcomings and lack of imaginative and innovatory activity amongst staff. In this sense, creativity is the necessary response to dealing with shortages and the enforced rationing of resources. Implicitly, this discourse functions as an interpellation aiming to summon forth a worker endowed with particular attributes: one who is an ‘innovative’ fixer of problems, ‘flexible’, willing to uncritically embrace ‘change’, personally resourceful and creatively committed to plugging ‘gaps’ in welfare state provision. The ‘trick’ of austere creativity is to ‘convince us that you can only be creative by looking to your own agency. . . . Any semblance of the social has collapsed into and onto the individual’ (Mould, 2018, p. 61). On account of this framing, creativity is ‘stripped of any oppositional or transgressive aspects’ (Forkett, 2016, p. 11).

Since the 2007/8 ‘crash’ there are countless instances of this form of ‘creativity talk’ being put to work. For example, in the UK, food bank use is up almost ‘four-fold since 2012, and there are now about 2,000 . . . up from just 29 at the height of the financial crisis’ (Alston, 2018, p. 17). Food hunger now stalks the streets of ‘first world’ countries. In the US, in 2016, 15.6 million households (12.3% of households) were food insecure (United States Department of Agriculture [USDA], 2016). However, why this situation has arisen is discursively and ideologically marginalised when food banks are encouraged to simply ‘Get Creative’ in order to respond to this politically and economically generated human catastrophe (Move for Hunger, 2016).

Another example relating to the deployment of this variant of ‘creativity talk’ concerns public libraries, which were formerly accessible and not subject to charging policies. They also furnished congenial social locations enabling users to read books they could not afford to purchase and gain access to the Internet. However, given the embeddedness of neoliberal reasoning, public libraries have been subjected to severe financial retrenchment. In the UK, between ‘2010 and 2016 more than 340 libraries closed and 8,000 library jobs were lost’ (Alston, 2008, p. 13). This is the material context in which, moreover, austere creativity discourse proposes that public libraries should be run as enterprises by creative and enthusiastic volunteers (Forkett, 2016).

Liberatory creativity

This strand of ‘creativity talk’ orbits the central idea that the public sector is irredeemably blighted by stultifying work and fails to satisfy human beings’ desire for fulfilment and self-actualisation. Only one way exists for this to be achieved and it entails leaving ‘rigid’, ‘inflexible’ public sector ‘bureaucracies’ to finding employment in the private and quasi-private sectors: the bird must flee the rusty ‘iron cage’ and, in this sense, this particular variant of creativity discourse can be interpreted as a neoliberal fable. It can also be perceived as an ideology only serving to promote an ‘unworkable fantasy’ and can be viewed as a facet of what Berlant (2007, p. 300) refers to as ‘cruel optimism’, because this creative freedom is largely unachievable, for most of us. In a US context, Denmead (2019, p. 2), for example, has illuminated the duplicity lying at the core of urban discourses that narrate the ease of the transition from ‘troubled youth’ to ‘creative youth’. More generally, despite the relentlessly upbeat vibe of ‘creativity talk’, the prevailing institutionalised social order remains one which has a ‘systematic tendency to create unsatisfying work’ (Bellamy Foster, 1998, p. ix).

The intensely ideological assertion that the private sector, never presented as one of precarious working and insecure employment, can provide an escape route into more creative practice does not tend to be embellished with compelling supportive evidence. What is more, liberatory creativity is a component nested within a narrative crudely seeking to siphon off and deflect leftist and libertarian oppositional critiques of the welfare state and public sector arising from the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Forkett, 2016). One of the more sustained theoretical explorations of this dynamic in recent years is that of Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), who highlighted how capital continually attempts to appropriate creativity and vibrant lifeworld elements it lacks in order to try and bolster and legitimise its own dominance. It also needs, as Fleming (2009, p. 5) observes, to nullify any potentially ‘dangerous counter-logic to its own axiomatic principles’. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) revealed that contemporary private sector management literature – often rooted in a lexicon including words such as autonomy, spontaneity, excitement, openness, novelty and, of course, creativity – seeks to conjure a ‘new spirit’ ‘taken directly from the repertoire of May 1968’. In this context, job security – associated with status, hierarchy, bureaucracy – is denounced not only as an obstacle to capital accumulation; it also functions as a barrier stopping workers from transforming themselves into truly human and self-actualised. Only within the private and quasi-private sectors, do workers have the opportunity of becoming members of the ‘creative class’.

The emphasis on public sector social work, for example, as a potentially creative profession needing to free itself from the dead hand of state ‘bureaucracy’ is apparent in a number of quarters even if this message is not always explicitly conveyed. Creativity – along with its collocates such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘liberation’ – tap into the profession’s root values in order to try and shape new subjectivities (International Federation of Social Workers [IFSW], 2014). This discourse also feeds on the ambiance of the ‘liberation management’ of the early 1990s which flirted with a ‘peculiar kind of anti-authoritarianism’ (Fleming, 2009, p. 3). An example of how liberatory creativity functions is the literature on social work practices (SWPs). Crafted to replace public provision for ‘looked after’ children, these private and quasi-private structures were presented as an unequivocally better alternative. Thus, keywords constituting part of the legitimating apparatus for SWPs (included in, for example, Le Grand [2007] and other parts of the promotional literature) featured reference to the opportunities provided for practitioners to have ‘autonomy’, to be a ‘champion’, ‘committed’, ‘creative’, ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘free’, ‘independence’, etc. In contrast, working alongside children and families in the public sector was portrayed by a dismal cluster of keywords such as ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘bureaucratic control’, ‘burn-out’, ‘crisis situations’, ‘depersonalisation’, ‘deprofessionalisation’, ‘high caseloads’, ‘job dissatisfaction’, ‘managerial control’, ‘paperwork’ and ‘stress’.

Analgesic creativity

Emerging in recent years, what I am terming analgesic creativity posits the idea that creativity and creative endeavours – perhaps like voguish ‘mindfulness’ training in Kinman et al. (2019) – might function as a painkiller or even form of preventive health care for jaded neoliberal subjects. Although rather vague in respect of the precise dosage needing to be calibrated, the BBC (2019) reported that even ‘a small amount of creativity can help’ all of us cope with what is ambiguously referred to as ‘modern life’. Hence, the onus was on individuals to ‘Get Creative’. The same report stated that, in May 2019, a study of almost 50,000 people undertaken in partnership with the prestigious University College London was to begin to find out how ‘creative activities can help us manage our mood and boost wellbeing’. The ‘Great British Creativity Test’ emphatically revealed that there were three main ways we can ‘use creativity as coping mechanisms to control our emotions’; namely as: a distraction tool (using creativity to avoid stress); a contemplation tool (using creativity to give us the mind space to reassess problems in our lives and make plans); and a means of self-development to face challenges by building up self-esteem and confidence (BBC, 2019). More generally, when ‘we’re facing hardships in our lives, creative activities are particularly beneficial for our emotions’ (BBC, 2019).

Despite recourse to creative practice having some utility for particular individuals, it is unlikely to substantially counter the plethora of anxieties engendered by the institutional order nurtured by neoliberal capitalism (Taylor, 2014). For example, transformations impacting on the world of work have resulted in an array of interrelated – and avoidable – ailments including ‘exhaustion, burn-out, alcohol and drug-related problems, premature heart attacks and strokes, and a whole host of mental and emotional problems related to anxiety and depression’ (Gill & Pratt, 2008, p. 18). Not infrequently, mental health problems are also gendered, with one report on the impact of ‘austerity’ by the Liverpool Mental Health Consortium (2014, p. 27) highlighting that its women respondents were having to deal with ‘sleeplessness, stress, anxiety, worry, depression, and feeling overwhelmed, isolated and suicidal’. It is difficult to comprehend, therefore, how merely ‘getting creative’ can adequately address the mass psycho-pathologies rooted in toxic forms of contemporary neoliberal subjectivity (BBC, 2013; Birardi, 2009).

Dissenting creativity

Marx (1857–8/1981, p. 611) avowed that individuals can find ‘self-realisation’ and ‘real freedom’ in work. Here, the main obstacle is that, under capitalist conditions, work practices become alienating, cheapened, de-skilled and subject to intensified modes of surveillance and ‘performance management’. As the ‘repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases’ or wages fail to keep up with the rise in prices for essential commodities such as food (Marx & Engels, 1848/2017, p. 18). More fundamentally, forced to furnish labour power, the worker ‘surrenders . . . creative power . . . for a mess of pottage’ (Marx, 1857–8/1981, p. 307). Under this system of exploitation, the worker ‘impoverishes’ her/his self because the ‘creative power’ of labour ‘establishes itself as the power of capital, as an alien power’ (Marx, 1857–8/1981, p. 307).

This tendency is inherent to capitalism and its deleterious impact can be seen, beyond traditional blue-collar labour, across a range of professions. Given this set of circumstances, are the possibilities for creativity entirely extinguished within the workplace? Acknowledging the ‘constraints of a neoliberal market driven economy’, some human services educators detect that practitioners and pedagogues are, nonetheless, ‘able to find places and spaces to exercise diverse ways to innovate and create’ (Maidment et al., 2016, p. 1). Indeed, Bourdieu referred to a paradoxical situation in which the ‘rigidity’ of neoliberal bureaucratic institutions is such that it can ‘only function . . . thanks to the initiative, the inventiveness, if not the charisma of those functionaries who are the least imprisoned in their function’ (Bourdieu in Bourdieu et al., 2002, p. 191).

Dissenting creativity can be theorised in a number of ways. For example, Jacques Rancière (2012, p. 8) charted historical efforts by individual workers to find the time to be creative and to ‘dream of another kind of work’. Within the Marxist tradition, Autonomist Marxism placed emphasis not so much on the power of capital as on the ‘autonomy and creativity of labour, and labour’s power to bring about change’ (Gill & Pratt, 2008, p. 5). In this sense, autonomy refers to the collective capacity of workers to resist capital’s hierarchy of value rooted in the production of surplus value and to act outside this stultifying imperative. Within this overarching conceptualisation, the stress is on combating a system entirely constructed on the subordination of life to work and the ‘alienation of creative capacities’ (Weeks, 2011, p. 97). In order to promote this type of society, one tactic promoted is ‘engaged withdrawal’ (Virno, 1996, p. 196, original emphasis). This involves dissidents embarking on generative ‘lines of flight’ so as to create and nurture autonomous spaces in which people can arrive at a sense of worth and self-valorisation as an alternative to capitalist valorisation (Virno, 1996, p. 203; see also Turner, 2004). In more contemporary terms, this can occur when, for example, public sector workers and students collectively organise carnivalistic demonstrations opposing attempts to cut wages (Cuskelly et al., 2014; Trade Union TV, 2014).

Conclusion

Influenced by Williams, this article has suggested that the emergence of contemporary ideas about creativity are inseparable from material shifts taking place with capitalism, the ascendancy of humanistic psychology and, more recently, the popularity of the ‘creative city’/‘creative class’ discourses. Turning to ‘creativity talk’, it was suggested that four strands are significant: austere creativity; liberatory creativity; analgesic creativity; and dissenting creativity. The first three have a certain affinity in that each of them can be interpreted as constituting part of a wider and politically distracting ‘screen discourse’ deflecting attention from issues related to capitalism, economic exploitation and a differential distribution of power (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2001, p. 4). Following Gramsci, these three components of creativity rhetoric might also be viewed as ‘artillery’ being used in a ‘war of position’ aiming to incrementally dismantle the social democratic state and to extinguish movements aiming to defend it (Hoare & Nowell Smith, 2005). For example, it has been posited that ‘creative education in social work’ can counter a, seemingly, misguided commitment to ‘social justice and social action’ on many training courses (Wise, 2018).

With dissenting creativity, however, it may be possible to identify the contours of projects aspiring to genuinely break free from the logics, imperatives and governing rationality of neoliberal capitalism (Mouffe, 2013, Ch. 5). This may be feasible because creativity can be perceived, to ‘varying degrees’ as one of those keywords into which ‘different sets of actors can pour multifarious meanings, from the hegemonic to the counter-hegemonic’ (Eagleton-Pierce, 2016, p. 144). Indeed, the persistent call for all us to become more creative might harbour a socially progressive dimension that might prompt real transformations. Expressed slightly differently, ‘articulations of creativity’ can, perhaps, become ‘separable from capital’ (Brouillette, 2013). The key question remains this: how can oppositional, dissenting and imaginative creative practices be shaped and enacted to help challenge neoliberal capitalism?

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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