‘Creativity and innovation’: beyond the comfort zone (Four Stories) John Caughie

Story 1: What’s in a name? 1996-2004, Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) funded research in Arts and Humanities, operating as a company limited by guarantee, registered with the Charity Commission, responsible to a Board of Trustees representing Higher Education Funding Councils, Department of Education and Skills, and Department of Culture, Media and Sport. In 2005, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) became one of the seven Research Councils, responsible first to the Office of Science and Innovation of the Department of Trade and Industry; more recently to the Department for Innovation, Universities, Skills In 2004, the Arts and Humanities Research Board proposed to Research Councils a cross-Council programme on ‘Creativity and Culture’. In 2005, the proposal came back to the Arts & Humanities Research Council retitled as ‘Creativity and Innovation’

So what? a ‘symptomatic’ reading Implicit within the shift from ‘creativity and culture’ to ‘creativity and innovation’: A shift from ‘creative values’ to ‘the value of creativity’ A shift in the language from ‘creative imagination’ to ‘creative skills’ and ‘creative industries’? A shift from ‘critical enquiry’ to ‘instrumental research’? A shift from ‘creative iconoclasm’ and the possibility of ‘transgressive creativity’ to ‘pro-social’ and ‘economic’ creativity

The tension DIUS (Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills), Strategic Priority no. 1: ‘To accelerate the commercial exploitation of creativity and knowledge, through innovation and research, to create wealth, grow the economy, build successful businesses and improve the quality of life.’ Antonin Artaud (Surrealist apostate): ‘We are not free. The sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all.’ We ignore either side of the tension at our peril

Story 2: Adorno and the myth of Odysseus Odysseus, ‘the seigneur’, tied to the mast, hears the beauty of the siren’s song, but cannot act. His men, their ears stuffed with wax, are able to act and row to safety, but only because they cannot be distracted by the beauty of the song. (The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944) Adorno’s pessimistic dialectic traps him in a radical and hostile separation between ‘genuine art’ and ‘the culture industry’. His response is to withdraw into the ‘difficult’ dissonance of Schoenberg rather than engaging with the ‘easy’ harmonies of Benny Goodman How to negotiate that dialectic - ‘creative values’ and the instrumental ‘value of creativity’, the pleasures of critical enquiry and the demands of public value - is the research challenge for the arts and humanities and for this programme.

Story 3: Benjamin and the angel of history (Thesis on the philosophy of history, IX) ‘A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is moving away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’

The Angel of History What happens to Benjamin’s thesis on history if you replace ‘progress’ with ‘innovation’? What happens when creativity and innovation are disconnected from history?

What is to be done? The research challenge of the ‘Creativity and Innovation’ programme for the HERA community may be posed as How to hold the terms together? How to keep faith with the terms of creative values while investigating the value of creativity? How to embed the terms in which creativity is now valued while investigating and reframing creative values? How to keep faith with critical enquiry while remaining open to other methodologies and agenda? How to complicate instrumentalism while addressing the questions which instrumentality asks? How to use the skills, knowledge and values of research in arts and humanities to add value to the terms in which the debate has been conducted?

Creative communities Substantial literature, mainly US: The Gift, Lewis Hyde (1979 and 2006) Artscience: Creativity in the post-Google Generation, David Edwards (2008) The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music drive New York City, Elizabeth Currid (2008) The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida (2002) Anecdotal instead of empirical; written in the tradition of the 19th-century self-help manuals. The language of consultancy rather than of academic research But raises some real research questions. We need a more critical, more ‘sociological’, more humanistic, more European literature on the creative city, the creative community, the creative class. We also need to understand it from the perspective of the creative community - creative artists, performers, writers, designers - rather than simply from the outside looking in.

Story 4: an obituary Philip Hobsbaum, teacher, critic and poet, born 1932; died 2005. Student of F.R. Leavis at Cambridge in the 1950s. Taught in N. London comprehensive. Lecturer in Queen’s University, Belfast in early 1960s. Lecturer and subsequently Professor at Glasgow University from 1965 till retirement in 1998. ‘Inspired’ Ken Livingston at school in North London ‘Inspired’ Seamus Heaney in Belfast ‘renaissance’ in 1960s ‘Inspired’ Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Liz Lochhead in Glasgow in 1980s Three urban locations, each significantly ‘regenerated’ by culture. How do you measure the economic impact of Philip Hobsbaum?

Creativity and innovation: some final questions As well as the role of economics, funding, legislation, government policy, ideas laboratories, in the formation of creative communities, what is the role of the creative artist or the scholar passionately committed to creative values? What happens when technical innovative capacity is disconnected from the humanistic values of creativity, imagination and engagement? How do we address these questions as research questions, using the language of critical analysis rather than simply telling stories about them?