“Creativity” is a word that excites and dazzles us. It promises brilliance and achievement, a shield against conformity, a channel for innovation across the arts, sciences, technology, and education, and a mechanism for economic revival and personal success. But it has not always evoked these ideas. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly. Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary K-12 education, and even modern electoral politics. Ultimately, The Creativity Complex asks how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling.
Shannon Steen is Associate Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and American Studies at UC Berkeley.
AcknowledgementsIntroductionThe Creativity Complex1. How We All Became CreativeCreative ImperativesThe Individual and the ImaginationCreativity, Intelligence, and the NationAnti-Authoritarianism and Cold War IndividualismRomanticism’s Afterlife2. The Creative Society: Reagan and the California CrusadeDogwhistle TunesCreativity’s Institutional Complex3. Creativity in the Classroom: Maker Education and Labor PrecarityA Minute on Maker EducationWho are Makers?Makers in the ClassroomMaking the Future4. Discarded Creativity: Libertarian Mythologizing and Steampunk NostalgiaPunking VictorianaNostalgia and Yesterday’s TomorrowsLibertarianism and the Theaters of Rugged ConsumerismArcheologists of the Present5. Creativity’s Monsters: Frankenstein at 200Bridging “The Two Cultures”Self-Fulfillment as Social PerilEthical Romanticism6. Creative Futures: The Pacific Century, the Creative CenturyCreative ChinaAmerica’s Creative FailureThe Pacific Century and Creative DemocracyEpilogueFrom the Ruins: Reconstructing Creativity
“What has made creativity a ‘seductive idea’ for decades, if not centuries? The Creativity Complex demonstrates that the history of creativity is just as fascinating as its future. Steen’s writing does justice to the complexity of both creativity and its evolution and will be a key resource for anyone interested in art, tech, education, and the creativity of tomorrow.”