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ShareIt’s just past lunch and I’m already full to the brim with pith. “Innovation is applied creativity.” “Being the best just doesn’t work.” “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
I’ve been at Creative Places & Spaces, Artscape’s “creative professional” confab for hours now and my notes already contain enough aphorisms to choke a dog. I’m starting to think in clichés.
Phrases become clichés because of their original utility or poetry. But now and then a phrase is born tiresome, like waking up drunk. Consider the one current here today: “360-degree thinking is going to change the world.”
What does that even mean? Perhaps the koan-like absurdity serves not to impart knowledge but to exhaust the discursive mind, leaving just enough energy for Twitter.
Judging from the scrolling tweets on mounted screens – some quoting speakers, some offering a river of poetically tinged insight – this condition is spreading.
Keynoter Ken Robinson, author of professional self-help tome The Element, offers in his speech at the Carlu that “technology is not technology if it happened before you were born.”
Enter Richard Florida, the author of The Rise Of The Creative Class. Florida’s fascinating – as a symbol, at least. He’s one of the last public figures still referencing Marx (even Marxists are skittish about doing that), but his thinking is in the service of creating a new upper class. He’s given “the artist” clout, but as a fetish object.
I came equally prepared to like or dislike him, but I’m disappointed on both counts. You could be a grassroots radical or a banker and easily believe he was speaking to you.
“The task ahead of us,” he tells the group, “is reinventing this system for mobilizing human intelligence, human talent, human creativity.”
I’m game. To what end? For him, our society’s “great resets,” epochal waypoints usually marked by traumatic structural change, represent the greatest mobilizations. “The first reset [in the late 1800s] moved people off the farms and into the factories, and began to provide simple education... so they could be involved in factory work.”
“Involved”? That’s one word for it. As Florida sees it, resets involve “what economists call a ‘geographic fix’” – a dramatic change in people’s relationships to space – and “are not only depressing periods... [but] periods when innovations that were backed up and couldn’t be capitalized come to the fore.”
Before, those farmers were just people. Take away their land? Hey, presto! They’re capital. Thanks, rural displacement!
In his mind, the current economic crisis triggered the latest reset, but by his own definition it really seems to have been started by the process of “globalization.” Does Florida see his own role in that?
As city after city brands itself as “creative” – Florida’s watchword – it’s easy to see what he terms a worldwide unlocking of imagination as a global panic over competing for ever more mobile corporate investment.
For some, this certainly opens up new “mobility.” But one person’s mobility is a thousand others’ precariousness. “We are moving to a society where people will pack themselves into smaller and smaller spaces.” Why? Poverty? Displacement? Ecological destruction? “Creativity.” Oh, right, creativity. Sorry, should’ve read the banner.
When Florida speaks of the need to involve everyone in generating wealth, especially workers, it’s perfectly genuine.
But can’t we do better than “wealth”? He relates a conversation with an executive from Toyota, which was opening factories in the Midwest while the Big Three were shuttering theirs. “’We harness the creativity of each of the workers on our factory floor,’” the exec told Florida, who elaborates: “The workers themselves form teams; they improve the process themselves without an engineer telling them what to do.”
In other words, new responsibility flowed downward. But I’ll bet you clunkers to cash that the new profits still flowed upward. That’s collaboration? In my day we called it exploitation. And we said it over the telephone. And the phone had a cord.
“What if we began to value the 45 per cent of people in Canada in what we call the service economy?” asks Florida. “How do we turn those jobs in coffee shops and nail salons into creative, collaborative jobs?”
I don’t know. Maybe someone could point me toward the session on prevention of union busting?
The last time I worked service, I couldn’t have cared less about a “collaborative” workplace. But I would have loved a more collaborative life: working less, earning more, spending more time doing that “creating” we keep talking about and less time serving folks like Sir Ken Robinson.
“Some people seem to think service is subservience,” Robinson says with a confused smile.
When Florida says “We need to take down the old institutions,’’ I believe he means it. I just don’t think he and I are referring to the same ones. For capital-C Creatives, it may be the schools that dragged their gentle spirits down to the level of those who work at bad jobs. For everyone else, it’s the company they’re working for.
Florida has opened a doorway, and for that I’m thankful. I’d just rather someone else stepped through. “Collaboration,” it occurs to me, can only happen among equals. If I say I want to collaborate, aren’t I saying I want as many people as possible to be free to sit at the table with me?
Mr. Creative Class wants to talk about being creative. I’d rather talk about class, or have we finally replaced such words with “social network’’ and “friends list”? Everyone’s equal on Twitter, after all. Some twits are just more equal than others.
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The message I would liked to have read about is how creativity is inherent in all of us, and that we express it uniquely - for purposes of self expression related to meeting a need to meet with satisfaction - subsistence, leisure, participation, identity, understanding, creation, protection, autonomy, affection. (FYI these human needs, articulated by Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef are replacing the Maslow hierarchy as a systems approach, in that they occur simultaneously, save subsistence.)
There are many different kinds of creativity - evolutionary and revolutionary; male and female; age-stage, etc. and we can all use it to make our lives better, in whichever way we want and for whatever purpose that suits us, all things considered.
Is everyone creative? Psychologist Carl Jung identified creativity as a prime human instinct among hunger, sexuality, activity and reflection. What would be interesting to discuss is why creativity, a basic instinct has been held down for so long by those in power.
When we started World Creativity and Innovation Week April 15 - 21 back in 2001 (now celebrated in 40+ countries) our mission was to encourage people to and engage them in using their creativity to make the world a better place and to make their place in the world better too.
No agenda as to the content, just to unleash new thinking, new ideas and new decisions, simple and complex, whatever and at the same time do no harm. For everyone to rekindle their natural creative energy to reawaken their 'smarts' for working with all the changes we encounter daily and make a difference for the future.
Imagine our planet where everyone, during one week in April, is tuned into the creative vibe. A celebration not limited by sex, age, geopolitics, religion, education, vocation; one that is truly inclusive of all, for the purpose of making the world a better place and making our place in the world better too.
I believe it's possible, it's already underway.
I don't want more so-called public art, 'collaborative' capitalism or obnoxious poseurs talking about creativity. I want us - the collective us - to stop killing off three species an hour, halt strip mining the ocean floor and stop razing the forests. The world doesn't need more of our ideas in action. We need to fucking get over ourselves, and stop these wank-fests. We need to take it down a notch.
What might you define as patently not creative, in terms of activity, participation, production, or otherwise?
And to expand on your quote: "What would be interesting to discuss is why creativity, a basic instinct has been held down for so long by those in power."
Has it been advanced that those who are regarded as creative might themselves actually have power -- perhaps more power than that which they may be aware? If no, then are creatives wholly powerless? If so, then is it possible that creatives have power over those who do not (whether those people are or are not creative)? If so, what pragmatic outcomes could be deduced from this power relationship?
[These are not rhetorical questions.]
Increasingly, I tend to see Richard Florida as the Jim Cunningham of our day.
Having actually spoken to him in person, and having watched over time the way his tack is revised as the tide of global conditions shift so substantially as to render his creative class thesis inert, I have come to see little else in what he is saying beyond his cult factor that resonates with lasting substance. He stays a cultish figure by revising his thesis constantly. I happened to catch him speaking right when the global markets were tanking, and never have I seen someone sweat bullets and stammer through that talk the way he did. It was as if the global meltdown was completely undermining his advocacy of knowledge-based economies as the engines of future prosperity. And yet, it was the so-called "best and brightest" in the financial sector who were precisely those whose creative agency facilitated the magnitude of the financial collapse.
Rather than advancing a social planning idea (he is, after all, schooled as an urban planner), I have increasingly found that Florida dwells longer on those effects endemic to urban centres rather than identifing the causes behind why packaging those effects -- and how unpacking them in a different city which is trying to become a creative centre -- is not proving to be a demonstrably successful formula. It's kind of reminiscent to an excerpt in "Roger & Me", when the City of Flint built a huge hotel and shopping centre with the belief that these were the shot in the arm to revitalize the community with prosperity.
Creativity, I daresay, is our new buzzword for prosperity (Florida is, after all, the Martin Prosperity Institute's most prominent face). And with prosperity comes power.
Then again, the power to believe in an idea -- in this instance, creativity -- bestows power to the authority of that idea. This, perhaps more than anything else, is why Richard Florida is as influential as he has become. When we watch municipal mayors and even premiers leap headfirst into adopting his ideas by transforming local geographies into creative incubators, it begs the question as to whether this is sound reasoning or inspired faith in a promised land aesthetic.
Once upon a time, we also believed that monocultural, postwar suburban development was a social panacea to the problems bedraggling our cities. If we now recognize that those planners might have misstepped slightly, is it not unreasonable to posit that Florida's creative class panacea for the urban node might also be misstepping in ways we won't see until the undesired outcomes are all too known?
See more, my full response on my blog link posted above! http://hiddenground.wordpress.com
"What might you define as patently not creative, in terms of activity, participation, production, or otherwise?"
My point of view: creativity is an expression of the human spirit to improve the future. Accessing it may involve using knowledge, imagination and evaluation to generate new ideas and make new decisions that alter the status quo. To attribute activities as being creative or non-creative is besides the point because it is about the people involved in the activities, and the scope of options they access from which they make new decisions that matter in their context, and the processes, including production, used to actualize the desired future.
"And to expand on your quote: "What would be interesting to discuss is why creativity, a basic instinct has been held down for so long by those in power.""
Rather than having support and encouragement to engage one's natural energy, curiosity, tinkering, etc. many are dissuaded from accessing their creativity because it is perceived not to serve society. In my final undergraduate year, before entering the masters program in Creative Studies, I asked my anthropology professor to describe creativity from her perspective. Her response? Creativity is bad manners. Imagine doing something creative at the dinner table, she said, and what happens? You get your hand slapped. That's what creativity is.
Too many have been given the 'handslap' repeatedly throughout their lives. Rather than having their hands shaken with congratulations for experimenting with new ideas, notions, configurations, challenging the status quo even if the suggested change is incremental or revolutionary, the response is typically an automatic no. Wouldn't it be nice if instead, new suggestions were met with an Angel's advocate rather than a Devil's advocate approach as in, "What I like about the idea is..." followed by... "Here are some obstacles or challenges the idea presents..." followed by "How might we overcome those obstacles..." or "Here's another idea that springs from what you said..."
Today, creativity is being touted as a must-have skill or capacity. This notion flies in the face our enculturation as being good citizens who don't upset things. Many are confused as to when it's okay to 'be creative' and when it isn't. In organizations people want to advance new ideas and at the same time can fear putting those ideas forward lest they lose their job, lose face or become alienated from their peers.
So many believe that they (or their boss, local leader, etc) do not have a creative bone in their body. This is so untrue - we all do, and we express our creativity uniquely. We often say others aren't creative when they are not creative in our way, the way we would like.
There is very little general learning/knowledge/practice available to encourage engaging the energy, affirm its contribution, allow its expression that also provides structures, processes and avenues for refining raw ideas into value-laden worthwhile solutions that in turn become innovations.
Associating creativity with prosperity is a good beginning notion, and at the same time, it may be limiting. The purpose for getting new ideas, using imagination and making new decisions is to improve quality of life. Money is one aspect. There are others, depending for which need or needs an individual, group, team, business, organization, city, society, are seeking satisfaction. Improved communication, better relationships, peace at home, inspired leadership, beautiful environs, healthy food, air, water, etc provide examples. In today's recessionary times, we are all influenced to do more with less - and this requires creative thinking in many arenas.
"Has it been advanced that those who are regarded as creative might themselves actually have power -- perhaps more power than that which they may be aware? If no, then are creatives wholly powerless? If so, then is it possible that creatives have power over those who do not (whether those people are or are not creative)? If so, what pragmatic outcomes could be deduced from this power relationship?"
The relationship between creativity and power is a potent one, an new area that I have only begun to investigate. In short, yes, those who create are unleashing the power of their imagination. (I hesitate to affirm 'those who are regarded as creative' because in my worldview, everyone has the capacity and uses it to some extent.) Creativity belongs to us all, we share it, and when we use it, we do so to benefit the species, the planet, our collective quality of life.
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