Creativity and other fundamentalisms

First, a flat world was created, on the sixth day, a creative person, and on the seventh, the ban on work was lifted. The book by the Belgian sociologist of culture Pascal Gielen, Creativity and Other Fundamentalisms (2012), is structured as an eight-day journey, taking place between the late 1980s and the early 2010s, in which Gielen examines the social context of creativity. How did creativity become a “requirement of the present” and can it not be emasculated in its own excess after it has penetrated the field of culture into economics and politics? In the book, Gielen discusses creativity at three levels: individual, institutional, and societal, and also enters into dialogue with Slavoj Žižek, Peter Sloterdijk, and Alessandro Baricco. Gielen seeks to provide the specifics of social situations to the apt metaphors with which these authors describe modernity.

“‘Creativity’ is a requirement of today. It is encouraged not only by artists, but also by business executives and political leaders. Even family therapists and conflict therapists advise looking for more creative solutions. In the modern world, creativity is consonant only with positive morality. Only positive things are expected from it. However, what will remain of meaning if everyone emasculates it like this? And where did this hunger for creativity come from? Doesn’t that fact indicate, first of all, that we are slowly losing it, the real one?” (fragment of the preface by Pascal Gielen)

The publication was implemented with the support of Flanders Literature and Andriy Bozhek.