FASHIONING CREATIVITY

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The thesis

In this chapter I clarify and expand my theoretical approach to the topic. In summary– and ignoring the human actors – my thesis is founded on the following assumptions. From the late 1990s, in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, neoliberal models of education governance (Fitzsimons, Peters, & Roberts, 1999; Olssen, 2004; St. George, 2006; Strathdee, 2003) began to be construed as dysfunctional and unable to deliver the “traits and attributes expected of citizens in a knowledge economy” (Sidhu, 2006, 45). At the same time, liberal humanist notions about creativity as one of the vital grounds of the self, and the practices of creativity as a means of expressing that self, gained a renewed significance as a result of new ways of ‘thinking culture and economy together’.

An apparatus of creativity

Foucault’s work set me thinking about the proliferating discourses of creativity as a dispositif or apparatus, in much the same way that sexuality was put into discourse during the 18th and 19th centuries (Foucault, 1990). As with sexuality, a dispositif of creativity now provides a grid of interpretation that is immanent in many of the regulatory practices that govern contemporary social, economic and cultural relations. To underline this point, and needing some light entertainment, I found that Google currently indexes 77,100,000 pages on ‘creativity’, whereas ‘sexuality’ has only 65,300,000. ‘Creative performance’ also outdoes ‘sexual performance’ by more than three to one in web presence.

Hypothesis of constraint

In his introduction to The History of Sexuality, Foucault aimed to oppose the repressive hypothesis not by showing it to be mistaken, but by “putting it back within a general economy of discourses on sex in modern societies since the seventeenth century” (Foucault, 1990, 11). He saw the repressive hypothesis as being rooted in a juridico–discursive understanding of power in Western societies in which: …power is seen to constrain freedom by repression and prohibitions, such that the power of truth and knowledge can be seen to challenge power in the name of greater freedom or sexual licence. This model is attractive because it benefits those intellectuals and protesters who speak out against power and domination in the name of a universal truth or reason, and it bolsters the understandings of power in liberal democratic regimes (Howarth, 2000, 74).

A history of creativity

A very brief narrative about the origins of the concept of creativity can be strung together from the literature as follows. Firstly, ‘creativity’ as an abstract noun was not recorded in English until 1875 (OED, 2004; Pope, 2005, 1; Weiner, 2000, 89). In the beginning, creation had been the prerogative of the divine, but by the 18th century creative imagination was beginning to be discussed as part of debates about the social and political significance of individual freedom (Albert & Runco, 1999; Pope, 2005; Williams, 1988). During this period the category of Fine Arts emerged as a strategic accommodation to new publics, themselves the unintended consequences of the financial revolutions that established capitalism. The development of Fine Arts was part of these 18th century shifts in definition of public, private, genius, individual, citizen and freedom. How was this contestation of meaning implicated in the eventual construction of a creative subjectivity?

Problematising creativity

So creativity has become part of the “regulatory grammar” of a liberal society, one of the everyday “minute disciplines” that seem so fundamental that we cannot imagine a viable society (or nation) without it (Foucault, 1995, 223). As we have seen, from the 1950s, the creative imagination, a non-intellectual form of behavior and hitherto sacrosanct aspect of the human soul, began to be the focus of considerable research and attention. It was “rendered into thought, disciplined, normalized and made legible, inscribable, calculable” (Rose, 1990, 147) through technologies of psychological observation, measurement and intervention, in order to become a ‘teachable’ technology of the self (Fendler, 2001, 123).

Contents :

• ABSTRACT
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• CHAPTER 1: THE CREATIVITY EXPLOSION
  • Introduction
  • Background
  • The Industry Context ‘The Creative Age’
  • Education And Training Policy
  • Neoliberalised Creativity?
  • Methodology
• CHAPTER 2 : CREATIVITY IN EDUCATION
  • All Our Futures
  • What Is Neo-Liberalism?
  • The Creativity Explosion And Its Technologies
  • Making Up ‘Choice’
  • Educational Problems
  • Knowledge-Based Economy
  • After Neo-Liberal Problems
• CHAPTER 3: FASHIONING CREATIVITY
  • “Poor Deluded Darlings”
  • Fashion Education: Thinking Culture And Economy Together?
  • Linking Creativity To Culture
  • It Doesn’t Seem Like Work To Me ‘Learning And Doing’ In Fashion
  • Better By Design
• CHAPTER 4: QUEERING CREATIVITY
  • The Thesis
  • An Apparatus Of Creativity
  • Hypothesis Of Constraint
  • A History Of Creativity
  • Problematising Creativity
  • The Parable Of The Horse
  • Techniques Of The Creative Self
• CHAPTER 5: CREATIVITY AS GOVERNMENTALITY
  • Governmentality
  • Creative Identifications
  • An Experience Of Becoming Creative
  • The Creative Quarter
  • Rhetorics Of Creativity And The Humanist Subject ‘Theory’ Versus Teaching
• CHAPTER 6: CREATIVE SUBJECTS
  • Interviews ‘Art Stars’ Or ‘Creative Girls’?
  • Individuals, Persons, Subjects
  • Two Concepts Of Subjectification
• CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSIONS
  • Tying It Up
  • Creativity Divides
  • Reviewing The Thesis
  • The Uses Of Theory
  • Moving Forward?
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Creative Girls: Fashion design education and governmentality