Creativity and Cultural Improvisation

Elizabeth Hallam, Tim Ingold, Elizabeth Hallam, Tim Ingold

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000323689
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Personal Development
• Sous-sujet: Creativity

There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relationship between creativity and the perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself. Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression.

1 Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An Introduction

Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam

There is no script for social and cultural life. People have to work it out as they go along. In a word, they have to improvise. To introduce the themes of this volume, we want to make four points about improvisation. First, it is generative, in the sense that it gives rise to the phenomenal forms of culture as experienced by those who live by them or in accord with them. Second, it is relational, in that it is continually attuned and responsive to the performance of others. Third, it is temporal, meaning that it cannot be collapsed into an instant, or even a series of instants, but embodies a certain duration. Finally, improvisation is the way we work, not only in the ordinary conduct of our everyday lives, but also in our studied reflections on these lives in fields of art, literature and science. In the following paragraphs we expand on each of these points in turn.

Before we begin, however, we have an observation to make. The title of this volume, Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, was also that of the conference from which its chapters were drawn. Throughout the conference we heard a great deal about the concept of creativity. Its possible definitions, uses and abuses, and resonances in the contemporary world were discussed at length. The concept of improvisation, by contrast, was discussed hardly at all. Though slipped in every so often as a relatively unmarked term, it did not capture the attention of conference participants in the way that the concept of creativity did, nor was it perceived to be especially problematic or to call for the same degree of unpacking. Whereas ‘creativity’ appeared to conceal a cornucopia of meaning between its covers, ‘improvisation’ seemed like an open book.

Though this imbalance surprised us at the time, in retrospect the reasons for it are fairly obvious. As John Liep explains, introducing an earlier collection of anthropological papers on the topic, creativity is on everyone’s lips these days. Apparently we cannot have enough of it (Liep 2001: 5)! In a global commodity market with an insatiable appetite for new things, where every aspect of life and art is convertible into an object of fascination or desire to be appropriated and consumed, creativity has come to be seen as a major driver of economic prosperity and social well-being. A quick glance through the list of recent books with ‘creativity’ in the title, in any library catalogue, will reveal that the majority are in the fields of business or organizational management, where creativity is seen as the key to commercial success, and in education, which is supposed to produce the kinds of creative individuals who will go on to succeed in a knowledge-based economy.

Anthropology, Liep argues, cannot escape the processes in which it is enmeshed, of cultural commoditization and the consequent aestheticization of everyday life. Thus it is no wonder that the preoccupation with creativity affects the life and thinking of anthropologists as much as everyone else (ibid.: 4). Indeed Liep himself swims with the current, along with his fellow contributors, in associating creativity with the production of novelty as opposed to the ‘more conventional exploration of possibilities within a certain framework of rules’ (ibid.: 2; see also Schade-Poulsen 2001: 106). For the former he uses the term innovation - which he regards as a virtual synonym for creativity - while reserving the term improvisation for the latter. Though the improvisation that undoubtedly goes on everywhere and all the time in the course of quotidian life may appear to lend it a creative aspect, this, he tells us, is merely a ‘conventional creativity’, as distinct from the ‘true creativity’ that stands out here and there, marking unique moments of radical disjuncture. An anthropological approach to creativity, Liep contends, would do well to focus on the latter (ibid.: 12).

We disagree. In our view anthropology can best contribute to debates around creativity by challenging - rather than reproducing - the polarity between novelty and convention, or between the innovative dynamic of the present and the traditionalism of the past, that has long formed such a powerful undercurrent to the discourses of modernity. In this respect our approach comes closer to that of Edward Bruner, in his epilogue to a still earlier collection of essays on anthropology and creativity. As Bruner observes, people everywhere ‘construct culture as they go along and as they respond to life’s contingencies’ (Bruner 1993: 326). In this process they are compelled to improvise, not because they are operating on the inside of an established body of convention, but because no system of codes, rules and norms can anticipate every possible circumstance. At best it can provide general guidelines or rules of thumb whose very power lies in their vagueness or non-specificity. The gap between these non-specific guidelines and the specific conditions of a world that is never the same from one moment to the next not only opens up a space for improvisation, but also demands it, if people are to respond to these conditions with judgement and precision. ‘Improvisation’, as Bruner puts it, ‘is a cultural imperative’ (ibid.: 322).

The difference between improvisation and innovation, then, is not that the one works within established convention while the other breaks with it, but that the former characterizes creativity by way of its processes, the latter by way of its products. To read creativity as innovation is, if you will, to read it backwards, in terms of its results, instead of forwards, in terms of the movements that gave rise to them. This backwards reading, symptomatic of modernity, finds in creativity a power not so much of adjustment and response to the conditions of a world-information as of liberation from the constraints of a world that is already made. It is a reading that celebrates the freedom of the human imagination - in fields of scientific and artistic endeavour - to transcend the determinations of both nature and society. In this reading, creativity is on the side not only of innovation against convention, but also of the exceptional individual against the collectivity, of the present moment against the weight of the past, and of mind or intelligence against inert matter.

By harnessing our understanding of creativity to improvisation rather than innovation we propose a forward reading that would recover the productive processes that have been neglected in cultural studies due to their almost exclusive concentration on consumable products (Friedman 2001:48). The improvisational creativity of which we speak is that of a world that is crescent rather than created; that is ‘always in the making’ (Jackson 1996: 4) rather than ready-made. Because improvisation is generative, it is not conditional upon judgements of the novelty or otherwise of the forms it yields. Because it is relational, it does not pit the individual against either nature or society. Because it is temporal, it inheres in the onward propulsion of life rather than being broken off, as a new present, from a past that is already over. And because it is the way we work, the creativity of our imaginative reflections is inseparable from our performative engagements with the materials that surround us. In all four respects our focus on improvisation challenges the backwards reading of modernity.

We consider each below: roughly speaking, they correspond respectively to the themes of the four parts of this book. Then, in the penultimate section of this introductory chapter, we place alternative forward and backwards readings of creativity in their context in the history of ideas, showing how, following their long co-existence, the rise of modernity tipped the balance towards the latter. Finally and briefly, we map out the overall thematic structure of the volume as a whole, leaving it to the authors of separate introductions for each part to discuss the chapters it includes in more detail.

Improvisation is Generative

A famous modem architect designs a building, the like of which the world has never seen before. He is celebrated for his creativity. Yet his design will get no further than the drawing board or portfolio until the builders step in to implement it. Building is not straightforward. It takes time, during which the world will not stop still: when the work is complete the building will stand in an environment that could not have been envisioned when it started. It takes materials, which have properties of their own and are not predisposed to fall into the shapes and configurations required of them, let alone to stay in them indefinitely. And it takes people, who have to make the most of their own skill and experience in order to cajole the materials into doing what the architect wants. In order to accommodate the inflexible design to the realities of a fickle and inconstant world, builders have to improvise all the way. There is a kink, as Stewart Brand writes, between the world and the architect’s idea of it: ‘The idea is crystalline, the fact fluid’ (Brand 1994: 2). Builders inhabit that kink.

Why, then, do we not celebrate the creativity of their work, as we do that of the architect? And why, for that matter, do we not celebrate equally the creativity of those who subsequently use the building in the course of their own lives? For the reality is that no building remains - as the architect might wish - forever unchanged, but has to be continually modified and adapted to fit in with manifold and ever-shifting purposes. At the same time it is constantly buffeted by the elements, the forces of wear and tear, and the visitations of birds, rodents, arachnids and fungi, all calling for the equally improvisatory interventions of workmen of diverse trades - plumbers, joiners, window cleaners, roofing specialists and a host of others - merely in order to shore it up against the tide of destruction. Do they not also, along with inhabitants’ efforts to do-it-themselves, play their part in the building’s ongoing creation? As the distinguished Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza admits, he has never been able to design, let alone build a real house, by which he means ‘a complicated machine in which every day something breaks down’ (Siza 1997: 47).

A rather similar puzzle emerges if we turn from artificially built structures to organically grown ones. Wherever life is going on, solid, liquid and gaseous materials are binding in the formation of stupendously complex, organic tissues. Human beings are as much caught up in this process as creatures of any other kind. What can be more creative than the growth of a human infant - ‘knit together’, in the wonderfully poetic words of the biblical psalm (cited by Jeanette Edwards, this volume), in its mother’s womb? Most biologists, however, are remarkably reluctant to acknowledge the creativity of organic life. They are understandably nervous that any admission of creativity would attract charges of creationism. If they speak of creativity at all, it is with regard to the origin and diversification of species, that is, to evolutionary phylogeny rather than ontogenetic development. Evolution, they point out, is a result of natural selection, and the first thing to understand about natural selection is that it explains how creativity can occur in a world of living things, in the absence of a creator.

But if we pause to inquire what has been created, the answer turns out to be not the organism itself but a design for the organism, supposedly encoded in the materials of heredity. Indeed one of the ironies of the current spat between Darwinian evolutionary biologists and the advocates of so-called ‘intelligent design’ is that if there is one thing that both sides take for granted, it is that such design exists, at the heart of every organism and expressed in its development. The issue at stake is merely whether the intelligence of this design is that of Science reflected in the mirror of nature, or of Theodicy reflected in the mirror of God. Only a hair’s breadth separates the two positions. Either way, it is assumed that organic form issues directly and unproblematically from the pre-created design. To account for the form, all you have to do is to ‘read back’ to the design of which it is supposed to be the expression, albeit modulated by environmental circumstances. And just as with the building, what this leaves out are the myriad tactical improvisations by which actual living organisms co-opt whatever possibilities their environments may afford to make their ways in the tangle of the world. Neither natural selection nor an intelligent designer can build a real organism, any more than the modem architect can build a real house.

The belief that in the building of a house or the growth of an organism - or more generally, in the activities by which living beings of all kinds, human and non-human, sustain themselves in their environments - nothing is created that was not designed in advance, pre-existing in virtual form the processes that give rise to it, is deeply rooted in modem thought. It is this belief that leads us to look to innovations in design as the source of all creation. We are inclined to say that something is created only when it is new, meaning not that it has been newly produced, but that it is the manifest outcome of a newly concocted plan, formula, programme or recipe. Everything else is a copy. Notwithstanding the effort, attention and even problem-solving that goes into reproducing an existing model, the process of copying - by this logic - cannot be creative. It can only replicate what is already there. A fundamental opposition is thereby set up between creativity and imitation. We challenge this opposition, as do many of the contributions to this book.

Copying or imitation, we argue, is not the simple, mechanical process of replication that it is often taken to be, of running off duplicates from a template, but entails a complex and ongoing alignment of observation of the model with action in the world. In this alignment lies the work of improvisation. The formal resemblance between the copy and the model is an outcome of this process, not given in advance. It is a horizon of attainment, to be judged in retrospect. Indeed the more strictly standards are observed, the greater are the improvisational demands placed on performers to ‘get it right’. Precision - as Felicia HughesFreeland shows in her study of Javanese dance, and Fuyubi Nakamura in her account of Japanese calligraphy - demands a heightened responsiveness which, for practitioners who are truly skilled, can be truly liberating. That is why there is creativity even and especially in the maintenance of an established tradition. Just as a building that is not kept in repair soon disintegrates, so traditions have to be worked at to be sustained. The continuity of tradition is due not to its passive inertia but to its active regeneration - in the tasks of carrying on.

For this reason the metaphor of transmission has to be used with great care. In a loose sense we can of course speak of generations passing on their skills and knowledge to successors. There has been a tendency, however, to interpret the metaphor much more literally, as though in the performance of tradition people do not so much emulate their predecessors by copying their actions, as act out, or ‘convert into behaviour’, prototypical schemas that have already been copied into their heads by a prior process of replication (Sperber 1996: 61). Some anthropologists and psychologists have even taken to calling these schemas ‘memes’, information-bearing nodules that are supposed to inhabit the mind as genes inhabit the body, whence they control the carrier’s thought and behaviour. Creativity, for meme-theorists, lies not in what people do but in the potential for mutation and recombination of its memetic determinants (Aunger 2000). However, just as natural selection can no more build a real organism than can an architect build a real house, so no amount of meme-juggling, intentional or otherwise, can build a real human being. Real people, as the living organisms they are, continually create themselves and one another, forging their histories and traditions as they go along.

Improvisation is Relational

We are talking here about the process of social life. By this we mean the life of persons in those mutually constitutive relationships through which, as they grow older together, they continually participate in each other’s coming-into-being. We do not mean the life of some hypostatized, superorganic entity - namely ‘society’ - as it unfolds over and above that of the solitary individual. It is this latter view that, in classical social theory, sets the freedom of the individual on a collision course with the external determinations of society, and it is reproduced every time the exercise of creativity is associated with individual talent and expression.

The creative individual, it is commonly supposed, is one who is prepared and able to make a break with socially imposed convention. This can sometimes lead to the paradoxical results that Judith Scheele observes in her study of the political rhetoric of revolution in Algeria. For where collective identity is defined by revolutionary commitment, ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An Introduction
• 2 Improvisation and the Art of Making Things Stick
• Part I Modes of Creativity in Life and Art
• Part II Creative Appropriations and Institutional Contexts
• Part III Creativity and the Passage of Time: History, Tradition and the Life-course
• Part IV The Creativity of Anthropological Scholarship
• Epilogue
• Index