The Creativity Complex

Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-0-472-05627-9
Verlag: University of Michigan Press

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

“Creativity” is a word that excites and dazzles us. It promises brilliance and achievement; it is a shield against conformity, a channel for innovation across the arts, sciences, technology, and education, and a mechanism for economic revival and personal success. But it has not always evoked these ideas. Once a term reserved for the ultimate power of the divine, and later associated primarily with the work of the artist, creativity has become attached to ideas about economics, politics, and the self in particular ways. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly.Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of the cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary K-12 education, and even modern electoral politics. Along the way, the book turns to a set of art works—from mobile steampunk sculptures to bicentennial adaptations of Frankenstein to a musical about the 2016 US Presidential election—that ask how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Creativity Complex
1. How We All Became Creative
Creative Imperatives
The Individual and the Imagination
Creativity, Intelligence, and the Nation
Anti-Authoritarianism and Cold War Individualism
Romanticism’s Afterlife
2. The Creative Society: Reagan and the California Crusade
Dogwhistle Tunes
Creativity’s Institutional Complex
3. Creativity in the Classroom: Maker Education and Labor Precarity
A Minute on Maker Education
Who are Makers?
Makers in the Classroom
Making the Future
4. Discarded Creativity: Libertarian Mythologizing and Steampunk Nostalgia
Punking Victoriana
Nostalgia and Yesterday’s Tomorrows
Libertarianism and the Theaters of Rugged Consumerism
Archeologists of the Present
5. Creativity’s Monsters: Frankenstein at 200
Bridging “The Two Cultures”
Self-Fulfillment as Social Peril
Ethical Romanticism
6. Creative Futures: The Pacific Century, the Creative Century
Creative China
America’s Creative Failure
The Pacific Century and Creative Democracy
Epilogue
From the Ruins: Reconstructing Creativity