Oli Mould - Against Creativity

Oli Mould

First published by Verso 2018

Oli Mould 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-649-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-648-5 (EXPORT)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-647-8 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-646-1 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mould, Oliver, author.

Title: Against creativity / Oli Mould.

Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018018796| ISBN 9781786636492 | ISBN 9781786636461 (UK ebk) | ISBN 9781786636485 (export) | ISBN 9781786636478 ((US ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability Philosophy. | Creative ability Social aspects. | Creative ability Economic aspects. | Common good. | Individualism. | Neoliberalism.

Classification: LCC B105.C74 M68 2018 | DDC 153.3/5 dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018796

Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays

Contents

On a cold February night in New York City in 2012, I exited a Midtown bar with a friend, having just taken in a typical Broadway mega-musical. Before we had the chance to get our bearings, an unkempt man dressed in an ill-fitting bomber jacket and a New York Yankees beanie confronted us. My initial reaction was, Im ashamed to say, one repeated countless times in cities all over the world when tourists encounter the homeless: an attempt to dodge the situation as quickly as possible. However, before I could formulate an excuse, he broke into song. He had the most exquisite voice. It would not have sounded out of place in the show I had watched that night.

Having been perhaps a bit more inebriated than I would like to have been, I cant recall the exact words, but it started with the line Dont be bashful, dont be shy, / Dont be afraid of this homeless guy.of the price of a Broadway musical course in which he was going to be top of the class. I forget the rest of the song, primarily because I was too busy laughing and fumbling in my pockets for change. Could my money help him turn his life around and enter the magical and creative world of Broadway? Would his name soon be inscribed in neon above the bustling Manhattan streets?

I walked away from the encounter elated. Here was a guy down on his luck, sleeping rough in the streets, but possessing a talent for song, comedy and salesmanship. He had taken the situation he found himself in and capitalized on it artistically. He was engaging in music, dance and comedy, aping the stereotypical New York City street performer so ubiquitous in countless rags-to-riches stories. A homeless person becomes a street performer, becomes a Broadway extra, becomes the star, becomes rich and famous proof that anyone can make it. He was being very creative, wasnt he?

The more I thought about it, though, the answer I hit on was no. Talented? Absolutely. Creative? No. To my eternal regret, I didnt ask about his life, but his story cant have been unique: back in 2012, there were approximately 45,000 homeless people in New York City (a figure still rising today).

Today, the system that causes homelessness and the other related injustices: precariousness, racism and the emboldening of fascism, massive inequality, global health epidemics and the rest is the very same system that tells us we must be creative to progress. This is because capitalism of the twenty-first century, turbocharged by neoliberalism, has redefined creativity to feed its own growth. Being creative in todays society has only one meaning: to carry on producing the status quo. The continual growth of capitalism has become the prevailing order of life.

It has not always been this way. Creativity has been, and still is, a force for change in the world. It is a collective energy that has the potential to tackle capitalisms injustices rather than augment them. Creativity can be used to produce more social justice in the world, but it must be rescued from its current incarceration as purely an engine for economic growth. This book will expose how creativity is wielded for profit. It will outline the ways in which people and institutions are being told to be creative in order to proliferate more of the same. But it will also highlight the people and processes that are against this kind of creativity, in that they forge entirely new ways of societal organisation. They are mobilizing it in a different way. They are enacting a creativity that experiments with new ways of living, ways that conjure entirely new experiences that simply would not exist under capitalism.

A History of Creativity

Creativity has always been a slippery and nebulous concept. But strip away the millennia of etymological layering, and you are left with a kernel of truth: it is the power to create something from nothing. And it is a power rather than an ability. Being creative is more than the ability to create something from nothing in response to a particular need or lack. Nor is it simply an ability to produce a new product that the market has deemed necessary. Creativity is a power because it blends knowledge (from the institutional and mechanistic level to the pre-cognitive), agency, and importantly desire to create something that does not yet exist. Far from being reactive, it is proactive; it drives society into new worlds of living.

So rather than What is creativity? the more pertinent questions become Who or what has that power and desire? and What is the something that is being created? In ancient societies, this power was always a divine power, a God that made the Heavens and the Earth. From traditional Judeo-Christian views of the all-powerful Creator God and the story of Genesis, to Ptah the Egyptian demiurge who brought the world into being by simply thinking it, the act of pure creation has been beyond human agency. Mere mortals were imperfect sinful beings, subservient to an Almighty who had ultimate and unlimited powers to build something out of nothing.

But since the Enlightenment, Western civilization began to dominate, colonize and exploit the resources of our planet. Religions that preached the denial of the self and subservience to an external other creative power were incompatible with a need for a better, richer way of life. So people began to look inward for sources of creativity. According to the doctrine of the dominant faith of the Western world, Christianity, we were made in the image of God, and so we too had the power to create. Hence to separate ourselves from the rest of Gods creation, we imbued ourselves with the power to create.

During the Enlightenment, thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau saw that human imagination and creativity was the path to progress, not a blind genuflection to an all-powerful God. Science was the way forward, not faith. As Nietzsche proclaimed, God was dead, and we had killed Him. Humanity, not God, was creating something from nothing.

Whats more, artistic creativity and a broader appreciation of culture were marbled through everyday life; they were part of the commons. Music, poetry and art were not considered to emanate from creative genius or a higher