The creativity of undergoing

Bibliographic Data

ID5816063
AuthorsTimothy Ingold (University of Aberdeen, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume22
Issue1
Pages124-139
Publication date2014-12-31
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePragmatics & Cognition (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0929-0907 • E-ISSN: 1569-9943
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/pc.22.1.07ing
OpenAlexW2223636660
LanguageEN
Citations received23
References cited17

Creativity is often portrayed as an X-factor that accounts for the spontaneous generation of the absolutely new. Yet the obsession with novelty implies a focus on final products and a retrospective attribution of their forms to unprecedented ideas in the minds of individuals, at the expense of any recognition of the form-generating potentials of the relations and processes in which persons and things are made and grown. In these processes, practitioners are characteristically called upon to copy the works of past masters. However, though they may be guided by a script or score, every practitioner has to improvise his or her own passage through the array of tasks the performance entails. With examples from music, calligraphy and lace-making, I show that the wellsprings of creativity lie not inside people's heads, but in their attending upon a world in formation. In this kind of creativity, undergone rather than done, imagination is not so much the capacity to come up with new ideas as the aspirational impulse of a life that is not just lived but led. But where it leads is not yet given. In opening to the unknown - in exposure - imagination leads not by mastery but by submission. Thus the creativity of undergoing, of action without agency, is that of life itself

Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience · Embodied and Extended Cognition