Thinking outside "outside the box"
Moving past antiquated, patriarchal definitions of creativity allows room for everyone to grow and flourish
This piece was originally published in Lens
Prompt: you are 10 different people in 10 different sentences representing 10 distinct universes.
You grow a flower in the garden behind your home. You are an art student painting a still life of a flower. You take a photo of a painting. You find a photo in the trash and hang it up in your bathroom. You find a photo in the bathroom and hang it up in a museum. You are a factory worker, printing photos on t-shirts for the museum gift shop. You write sentences describing factories to a computer that turns them into images. You are a computer that turns sentences into images. You start a company that teaches computers to turn sentences into images. You are a god who creates universes.
Which you is creative?
In “A Brief History of Creativity”, I argued that the story of creativity as we know it in the Western world is a story of divine power, a power that has been removed from some and granted unequally to others. Because of that, we should be suspicious, or at least not take it as a given, when certain people are called "creatives" and not others. Here, I propose six alternative templates that we can use to broaden and redirect the definitions of creativity in order to subvert these inequities.
1. Creativity as maintenance
We’re used to associating the act of creativity with an impossibly small moment of inspiration, a "spark" after which everything falls into place. The designer who has the idea for the machine is creative, but the person who tends to it, improves it, and makes sure it stays operational is not. But what if creativity could be stretched to include the maintenance of the thing that was created?
To many Christian philosophers, God's conception of the world extended far beyond the initial moment of creation. In The City of God, St. Augustine declared that if God were to “withdraw from created things His creative power, they would straightway relapse into the nothingness in which they were before they were created.” In other words, the world requires a constant divine creative force to keep it spinning.
What if we understood that, much like a world would cease to be a world without ongoing preservation, a bridge would cease to be a bridge if we allowed it to crumble and fall instead of actively reinforcing it? Would we spend our resources differently? What if we saw conservation not just as a matter of routine but as existentially creative? Perhaps then we might, for example, invest in maintaining our existing public transportation systems instead of funding Elon Musk’s failed magnet tunnels.
2. Creativity as mothering
In the anthology Revolutionary Mothering, Alexis Pauline Gumbs defines mothering not by gender, nor the identity of "parent," but as a concept that includes anyone who is engaged in “the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.”
Creativity derived its meaning from divine procreation, but over time its meaning has become severed from birth and motherhood. Bringing children into the world, we are to believe, has nothing to do with design. What would it mean for us to recast birth as the origin of all life? What would it mean to recast parenting as powerful? How would that change the value we assign to caring for children?
The feminist poet June Jordan connected the caring for children to cosmic creation in her essay “The Creative Spirit”:
I know of nothing more important, more difficult, and more purely loving than the nurture of children, be it as a parent, a teacher, or as an artist wishing to serve them well. Children are the ways that the world begins again and again.
3. Creativity as replication
Today, creative ability is thought to set us apart as humans; we invent things that didn't exist before, thereby demonstrating our superiority over other creatures. But for much of history, accessing nature and the rules that govern it was the entire goal of artistic creation, and any attempt to go beyond that would have been considered an outrage.
The Polish historian Władysław Tatarkiewicz described ancient Greek attitudes towards art as such:
Nature is perfect, and man in his activities ought to liken himself to it; nature is subject to laws, therefore he ought to discover its laws and submit to them, and not seek freedom, which will easily deflect him from that optimum which he can attain in his activities. The attitude of the ancients may likewise be expressed as follows: The artist is a discoverer, not an inventor.
Returning to this mindset requires a certain humility, an understanding that simply observing and paying attention to things that already exist and forming connections can be a worthwhile exercise in its own right.
It also involves reevaluating how we assign value to people's time: at what point did we decide that the person who draws a garment on the back of a napkin in five minutes is exercising creativity, but not the person who sits at the sewing machine for years repeatedly making that same garment? As a culture, we have chosen to make a distinction between creativity and the labor of reproduction. But what is reproduction if not the process through which nature creates itself?
4. Creativity as letting go of control
Returning to observation and nature as a source of inspiration comes with a risk of reinforcing a conqueror mindset, that our creative role is to overcome and control the world around us and wrestle it to submission. But if we resist that urge, we may unlock the wonder that comes with relinquishing control.
Evoking that wonder, the musician Brian Eno compared composers to gardeners:
One is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life. And that life isn't necessarily exactly what you'd envisaged for them. It's characteristic of the kind of work that I do that I'm really not aware of how the final result is going to look or sound. So in fact, I'm deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience. I want to be surprised by it as well. And indeed, I often am.
Recasting creators in this way also shifts the power dynamics typically associated with the maker-consumer relationship. If the primary aim of art is to shock us, we become incentivized to foster creativity even when we aren’t its originator. Poet and activist Audre Lorde put it this way: “we must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.”
5. Creativity as collectivism
The stories our culture tells about creativity almost always concern individuals: think Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Kanye West. These stories are tempting because they are simple, because they appeal to our veneration for individualism, because we love our heroes. We have very few models for storytelling that concern small groups of people, or entire communities, or with messy attribution. The more complex the producing system, the harder it is to assign credit, and our capitalist society typically balks at the inability to assign measurable value to people and their actions.
But just for a moment, imagine sitting in an audience only to realize that there is no stage, that the crowd is the orchestra—a network of creators creating with each other and for each other in a web of mutual care, benefitting from the success of the collective.
A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius—the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’—it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene.’ It is the communal form of the concept of genius.
In her book Essential Labor, the writer Angela Garbes mourns the privatization of modern life, and imagines a future that relies more on this collective creativity:
A lack of shared responsibility and interconnectedness makes it difficult to find solutions for needs more easily addressed in community, such as childcare, meal preparation, and household maintenance. It leads to isolation and an every-family-for-themselves mentality. It leaves parents feeling common domestic strains as personal problems rather than structural ones.
6. Creativity as destruction
Whether our society chooses to describe something as creative or destructive is at best in the eye of the beholder and at worst entirely deceptive. Communities, livelihoods, and ecosystems are routinely destroyed in the pursuit of so-called creativity. Creativity at Facebook arguably destroyed local news. Creativity in fast-fashion is catastrophic for the environment.
Jenny Odell, the artist and author behind How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, calls the process of creative destruction "manifest dismantling," citing a 2015 decision to tear down the San Clemente Dam in California as an example:
Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation. But this seeming contradiction actually points to a deeper contradiction: of destruction (e.g., of ecosystems) framed as construction (e.g., of dams). Nineteenth-century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. But if we sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction…. Seen through the lens of manifest dismantling, tearing down the dam is indeed a creative act, one that does put something new in the world, even if it’s putting it back.
When is it creative to tear down a statue? When is it creative to not start a company? When is it creative to throw sand in the gears of progress?
When is it creative to tear down a word and build it back up again?
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