As I prioritize Reckwitz’s theory of the creativity dispositif theory1 as an aesthetic-economic meta-framework, this chapter is solely dedicated to outlining this relatively recent theory of late-modern capitalism. In Reckwitz’s Die Erfindung der Kreativität (Reckwitz, 2014b) (English translation: The Invention of Creativity (2017b)), creativity is evidenced as credo, dogma, ideal and ideology across broad sectors of society. Creativity is defined as a product of the social (vs. innate human property), and a “very specific social and cultural constellation”, which he claims is hegemonial at this time (2014a, p. 23). The following outline will be concluded by placing the festive event into this theory and generating a few ‘working hypotheses’ about the festival as arranger, an experience-maker that can be represented by this theory. For brevity’s sake, I mostly suppress mention of the various works drawn on for evidence, restricting the account to the broader strokes of Reckwitz’s historically detailed genealogical narrative.
1 Of Norm and Desire: The Ideal of Creativity
Sensual-aesthetic perceiving encompasses the subject’s specific affectedness by an object or situation, sensitivities or agitation, and enthusiastic, concerned, or calm way of feeling.
reckwitz, 2014a, p. 28
Reckwitz maintains that the creative-aesthetic complex ‘does not reflect a particular institution or a particular function system, value or normative pattern respectively’, operating as a dispositif (Reckwitz, 2014b, p. 49). In this book, I will argue that Reckwitz provides strong evidence and impetus for further research on hegemonial tendencies of this dispositif,3 while not explaining what in essence stabilizes this dispositif or institutionally creates conditions for the maintenance of this network of practices.4
In my view, creativity-dispositif analysis provides a powerful way to theorize the experience-making qualities demonstrated by the crafting of immersive environments for the art worlds. Reckwitz discusses eventization and the parallel process of musealization as located in the ‘creative city’ and as relevant to
As I see it, there are four major structuring gambits to Reckwitz’s argument, especially the macrosociological construction of the argument in which the empirical study of experience-makers must be placed. Firstly, he provides discussion of four social processes (also called structural principles), which are aestheticization, economization, mediatization, and rationalization (aemr), by which he pinpoints the dispositif’s location in general societal theory. Secondly, he produces the historical account from secondary literature, focusing on three particular intense spaces where he recognizes the dispositif at work: aesthetic economy, creative city, and media/star system. Thirdly, he inserts a time line, identifying four phases of the creativity dispositif: ‘preparation’ from about the end of eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, ‘dispersed formation’ from 1900 until the 1960s, ‘crisis-driven densification’ in the 1960s and 1970s, and ‘hegemonialization’ starting in the 1980s (2014b, pp. 52–53). Finally, Reckwitz tells modern history by ideas of time and progress, capturing the rise of the dispositif in terms of three society-level regimes that impose a certain concept of what’s deemed ‘novel’. In the following, I will structure my outline of Reckwitz’s argument around these four major frames.
1.1 Aestheticization
Reckwitz reconstructs how modernity’s affect deficiency associated with industrial capitalism ‘reverses’ in ‘experience society’ (Schulze, 1992).5 The
Only in the postmodern art field the curatorial role evolves as a structural role, while artists take on the ‘performer’ role. For a theory of change that I see in Reckwitz’s account, the claim of a centrifugal postmodern art field is central, because in nearly all societal-theory it is the economy and polity that are ‘at the center’ of society. Here, however, it is the arts being a vast resource for other fields to interlock with the dispositif of creativity. Important to my engagement with Reckwitz’s theory is that he places emphasis on the ‘format’ as something that facilitates boundary transgression between fields driven by different logics. In Reckwitz’s account it helps to explain how art, which was once at the margin of (bourgeois) society, has become a major input in other fields as aforementioned. Art overwhelms, the formats of the postmodern art field providing an ‘aesthetic sociality’, which works like a blueprint (‘Grundriss’) that can be implemented elsewhere. The following Chapter 3 immediately inspects this proposition. The narrative of the art-field transformation provides detail on how the various aesthetic movements challenged the status of bourgeois art rules, how the field gradually loses its autonomy (and inter-field status achieved in bourgeois modernity), as well as on how the artist as a marginal identity metamorphoses into a versatile identity of a mundane, novelty-seeking, habitualized creative.
Comparison of social forms pertaining to modern and late-modern art fields, based on (Reckwitz, 2014b, pp. 124–126)
Bourgeois art field |
Postmodern art field |
|
|---|---|---|
Autonomy |
Centrifugality |
|
Early-modern |
Late-modern |
|
Central subject |
Artist |
Creative, individual and collective |
Aesthetic objects |
Aesthetic objects |
Objects, spaces, and bodies |
Audiences |
Aesthetically educated |
Aesthetically activated |
Work |
Art objects |
Art objects, inter-object relations, events |
New |
Creative act as radical break or aesthetic innovation |
Rearrangements, appropriations, reinterpretations; relativization of new (novel) |
Attitude toward the aesthetically old |
Rejection or veneration |
Re-appropriation techniques (pastiche) |
Producer-recipient relationship |
Artist logic: l’ art pour l’art vs. audience logic: populism |
Logic of expectation of surprise; non-normative scandals |
Scandalization logic of the avant-garde |
Artist and audience as accomplices (regime of aesthetic irritation) |
|
Legitimacy |
Classification |
Dissolution of genre and media-format boundaries |
Boundary-making |
Exclusivity, hierarchy |
High tolerance toward simultaneous art styles |
In the first period, the consumer was “‘controlled’, ‘conditioned’, ‘manipulated’, ‘alienated’”, whereas in the second observed period, the consumer is “‘active’, ‘experienced’, ‘demanding’.
karpik, 2010, p. 103
Reckwitz’s genealogy is important because it emphasizes a change in the art-field configuration which enables co-creativity in the arts and the ever-widening imagined sphere of culture. In the blueprint of the postmodern art field, three structural roles coordinate their actions, all equally equipped with inspirational capabilities. These are the producer/’performer’, the audience, and the arranger. Festivalization, based on Reckwitz, means that eventive forms provide the frame for immersive environments so that the artists as ‘performers’ and co-creative audiences can meet in collectively and individually consumed experiences. Film festival organizations provide the rational-organizational framework for affective-aesthetic experiencing. Reckwitz emphasizes the value of performativity—therefore, of the eventive form—as a historical outcome of processes of normalization and the proceduralization of artistic processes as commanded and performed by aesthetic movements. When art becomes more performative, it also becomes more mobile; an object placed simply before an admiring audience will find practically
Bringing to attention the vast number of objects and the importance of immateriality and atmospheres (cf. ‘glamorous materials’ in Thrift, 2010), the account of the transforming art field also renders the insight that proceduralism and the making of object worlds are materials for experience-makers to design the ‘affective space’ (Reckwitz, 2012). The legitimacy of unfinished art works—an embrace of randomness and lack of perfection—and proceduralization enable the rise of curators who will design atmospheric environments assembled from formats.
Proceduralization contributes to the dispersal of creativity, by positively evaluating the competencies and practices of a creative producer while deflating notions such as innate creativity of genius and the gifted. It is an unchallenged assumption today that potentially any group of people (including those historically stigmatized as non-creative) can be creative.8 Through proceduralism, art also takes on the character of ‘work’ already in the 1960s and 1970s (2014b, pp. 90–93 and 97). Part 4 will discuss how notions of talent are mainstays of the philanthropic milieu which allow elites to restructure art worlds
1.2 Surprise Value in the Postmodern Art Field
Modernity is a cultural complex having its basis in anti-traditionalism, therefore being equipped with vocabulary that encourages novelty in “politically, economically, scientifically, technically, and artistically” ways and forms (2014b, p. 25). Paul de Man equated the core experience of modernity with the ‘interplay between deliberate forgetting and an action that represents a new origin’ (Quie, 2000, p. 280). Reckwitz’s incorporation of a typology of modern novelty is an important heuristic, which I present in the following table. Each depicted regime comprises concepts, beliefs, mythology and so on with respect to societal change. The idea of change, therefore, must be grasped in its historically specific formations.
Reckwitz’s typology of the social regimes of novelty, based on (Reckwitz, 2014b)
N1 |
N2 |
N3 |
|
|---|---|---|---|
Structural kind of orientation toward the new as |
Stage |
Heightening and surpassing |
Stimulation |
Model of modernity |
Modernity of perfection |
Modernity of progress |
Aesthetic modernity (Modernity of surprise—a.v.) |
Normative aspect |
Rule and rights- oriented model |
Improvement as an infinite sequence |
Infinite improvement carries over, but value of novel becomes normatively neutral |
Social phenomenon of interest |
Political revolution |
Technological and business innovation |
Event (affect-laden and aestheticized) |
The dynamic production of an infinite sequence of new acts remains, whereas the value of the new ceases to be normative. The new does not gain its value by its integration into a sequence of progressive steps anymore, but by its current aesthetic stimulus, which is always getting supplanted by the ensuing sensual-affective quality. Not progress or superseding are now the matter of interest, but the movement itself—the sequence of stimulating acts.
reckwitz, 2014a, p. 26
If originality characterizes the art field, then the question is how ‘surprising’ goes beyond ‘being original’. The fine difference can be understood by focusing on uncertainty. Both N1 and N2 work in terms of structural breaks (that is, discernible stages or grades), which involves predictability. N3, however, appears to give up predictability of the novel in the production of surprise as central category (see also Wenzel et al., 2020). In this way, the aesthetic economy becomes what Karpik calls an economy of singularities, legitimizing ‘arrangers’ as experience-makers who create surprises. In fact, in a more recent book Reckwitz describes the same society for which he argued a creativity dispositif as a society of singularities and focuses his analysis on the ‘unique vs. the general’ (2020). In conventional anthropological and sociological theory (Sewell, 2005), structures allow us to make probabilistic assumptions, for example about careers; while switching trajectories are explained by claiming causality in events (such as illness affecting career success). Reckwitz’s aesthetic-capitalism theory thus describes a profound change, which I call eventization, and which is the tendency of acceleration in eventive forms over structural stabilization—but not necessarily over ‘order’, as I argue in Chapter 11. This allows us to formulate singularities—the core goods and
However, this is not only about the fabrication of goods and services. It concerns the social construction of identity to which I will return in Chapter 12, where I tackle the thesis of ‘culturalization’ (Reckwitz, 2020) with respect to cinema cultural policy. N3, legitimized by proceduralism as suggested action format, encourages (seemingly random, surprising) deviations from a standard. Such deviations are valuable when they can be comprehended as aesthetic surprise and appear as non-calculable in the sense a ‘permanent innovation’. In N3, what is new is normatively neutral—whatever the form in which novelty finds expression as a surprise. N3 can therefore encourage an infinite number of manifestations of aesthetic uncertainty encapsulated in apparently unique attempts at improvement—observed by many sociologists with respect to postmodern identities as ‘life project stylization’ (Röcke, 2021; Schulze, 1992), but also as the ‘infinite variety’ (Caves, 2000).
Reckwitz also provides a specification for the relationship between N3 and cultural forms—the form of ‘pastiche’. Postmodern theorists reject the human ability “to experience time as coherent and integrated totality” (Quie, 2000, pp. 272–273), rejecting knowledge that could secure the narrative of improvement. Frederic Jameson (1991) seminally formulates pastiche and collage as paradigmatic forms of postmodernism rejecting narration. Thus, pastiche is the answer to the avant-gardists ‘rhetoric of forgetting’, as in pastiche the past is collated from a vast collection of images –all styles of the past being potentially ‘open to allusion’. The postmodern pastiche also concerns the social emerging around notions of diversity and cultural pluralism. Just as pastiche is the major expressive format of creativity so is postmodernity’s ‘perpetual celebration of difference’. And, importantly, as noted by Reckwitz, even ‘failed revolutions’ (Elsaesser’s concerns regarding the unaccomplished mission of the film festival—see Chapter 1) can be re-used. Being botched attempts for change, they provide a significant reservoir of materials to produce novelties when future conditions are ripe for them. Locating pastiche in N3, Reckwitz offers a plausible argument as to why not only the mundane creativity productions that surround contemporary inhabitants of aesthetic capitalism exist and have the potential propensity to attain unique value, but also why social movements, identity politics, and justice campaigns follow a logic of the surprise and the ideal of performativity rather than being grounded in
2 Unassuming Positivity and Affective Governmentality
There is also a sociology of power and authority in Reckwitz’s theory of the creativity theory, which is grounded in Foucault’s classical work on governmentality (Bröckling et al., 2000; Burchell, 1991; Krasmann & Volkmer, 2007; Rose et al., 2006). Arguing against Foucault that all governmentality has an affective side, he still needs to explain the ‘seemingly unlimited positivity’ in the designs of subjective expression, experiences, admiration and stimulation that comes with a sense of entitlement (Reckwitz, 2014b, p. 330; 2017a, pp. 166, 251). Reckwitz presents as his explanans a cultural imaginary which creates positivity—in response to, or as victory perhaps over, rationalization, industrialization, objectification, and relentless technological progress (2014b, p. 31), and as outcome of a ‘release from affect deficiency’ for which the art-field transformation is a major historical condition. Using a sociological convention which grasps western capitalism as a sequence of bourgeois, organized, and disorganized formations, Reckwitz marks the trend at the level of three subjectivities corresponding somewhat with types of governmentality, such as the self-disciplined, ‘prudent and thrift’ self-made man (bourgeois phase), followed by the ‘normal biography’ of an individual oriented by peer-group of organized modernity, and which is in late-modern capitalism superseded by ‘the creative self’ (2014b, pp. 315–316).
Reckwitz follows Foucault quite closely in arguing that late capitalism has eliminated Weber’s ‘Berufsmensch’ (cf. Heubel, 2002), an issue that is reflected in the sociological debates about de-professionalization (Kurtz, 2005) and echoed by aesthetic scholarship on the replacement of critics by amateurs (McDonald, 2007). The ‘creative self’ can be understood in terms of a never achieved full-term rationalization of society (in my view, the potential completion of Weber’s Iron Cage as life form, although on a different note). Because even in highly organized modernity, aesthetic-affective elements have remained alive or even flourished in society’s many niches as counter-forces, which a dispositif can call on. This is possible when a dispositif is posited as a transversal, assembling itself from sources external to it (2014b, p. 49). Affect
Returning to Reckwitz’s critique of Foucault which highlights the latter’s omission of assigning ‘social affectivity’ to all governmentalities (a dispositif finds actors and causes passionately aligned with them, and forms provided by the dispositif having appeal), we can connect the work to earlier arguments about affordances (Gibson, 1977). Reckwitz seeks to describe the ‘cultural imaginary’ specific to the creativity dispositif that promises fascination and satisfaction in exchange for committed participation, and does by providing a powerful affective stimulus (2014b, p. 51).10 The cultural imaginary (Simonis & Rhode, 2014, p. 5) is not sufficiently discussed other than in terms of ‘corresponding concrete cultural artefacts’ that support the imaginary’s social efficacy and may be associated with what Reckwitz theorizes elsewhere as ‘affective spaces’ (2012). He also points to the development of a particular affect structure across the vast social territory with certain forms that can be reconstructed in historical analysis, all of which interconnect the dispositif into an assemblage that turns into an order. This affect structure, he maintains, is directed at ‘permanent activation’ to produce infinite instances of surprises and a compulsive dispersion of subjective attention.
Still, these formulations do not render a plausible explanation for why today people, actions, and objects are oriented to heightened affectivity produced in aesthetic form. In my view, Reckwitz basically fails to tackle the question of how an affective relationship is not only committal but also exuberant or optimistic. In extension, one must ask how the creativity dispositif eliminates critique, addressing among other things concerns over socio-psychological problems
Finally, there is a change in ‘regimes of attention’, which relate to the way the new is perceived by a society. Promoted by the regime of N3, experimentation, arrangement, and co-creative work result in short-term forms of art expressions, often escaping their own recording for longer-time appreciation or appreciation by outsiders. In dispersed attention (Reckwitz, 2014b, pp. 112–113), such as provided by immersive environments, time and objects come together in combinations which then provide for novelties to appeal to the senses (Burgess, 2020; Harbord, 2009). This also changes the mode of reputation accrual from slow to fast; recognized as process in the cinema field by the non-sociological concept of ‘buzz’ (Reckwitz, 2017a, pp. 160–165).
2.1 Field Boundaries and the Role of Formats
It helps to live around interesting people, and not necessarily people who do what you do. I feel a little incestuous when I hang out with only writers and artists, so I enjoy the many filmmakers, musicians, and tech geeks who live in Austin. Oh, and food. The food should be good. You have to find a place that feeds you—creatively, socially, spiritually, and literally.
kleon, 2012, p. 96
This passage from Kleon’s book illustrates a prevailing convention of the artist (Sherwood & McCormick, 2016, p. 96), while alluding simultaneously to the transgressive character of the postmodern art field, including culinary services and high-tech sectors of society. The creative subject calls on the imagery of experience-seeking to gain more experiences and to seek social capital as a major resource in creative pursuits. In the management texts examined by Boltanski and Chiapello’s theory of a third spirit of capitalism (discussed in Chapter 7), the predisposition to optimize social encounters and investing in social ties is reflected in phrases such as “being a radar” and a “plunderer of ideas” (2005b, p. 113). The passage also emphasizes another aspect of the transformation that the art field underwent, namely the liberation of the artist from a marginalized or niche position, either pathologized, tolerated, and rejected as a provocation to the manners of bourgeois society. The normalization of the postmodern artist-subject started with the bohemian’s modification into the creative class (Friebe & Lobo, 2007; Shkuda, 2016; Weston, 2019). The bohemian as a transgressive phenomenon has been formulated by Bourdieu (1999, p. 96), as an identity originating in France at the end of the eighteenth century and
Reckwitz asserts that the creativity dispositif flattens the boundaries between fields and their institutions and that the format plays a role in this process. As a reminder, formats of aesthetic sociality are presented as basic building blocks of the social. The notion of format refers to ‘aggregate forms of the social’, by which he means practices, discourses, artefact systems or subject-object constellations, as well as subjectivization modes (2017b, pp. 205–207). Furthermore, formats take on networks of heterogeneous practices and discourses and homogenize those (Reckwitz, 2014b, pp. 49–50 and footnote 43). While keeping it short, Reckwitz in my view makes an incredibly challenging claim which he requires for the assertions of the centrality of the art field as well as the hegemonial form of creativity. Format diffusion is offered as an understatement while actually being argued as a crucial mechanism in inter-fields exchange processes calling for further investigation. As he focuses on the art field, Reckwitz’s own analysis of format and boundary transgression belong to the internal art field. However, taking three environments (economy, city, and media system) into his historical narrative, he can also show the high translationality between forms as seemingly different as a creative worker and a gentrified neighborhood. In the following, I illustrate this versatility of the creativity format with ‘slam poetry’ (a postmodern art) which has enabled poetry to enter the area of science.
Poetry slam started in the club and bar culture of the 1980s in large US cities. Already shaped as a competitive performance, it eventually diffused to other artist spaces as format of interactive art and co-creative audience juries. Historically significant for the hegemonialization thesis is the transfer of eventive poetry to the university sector, as poetry slam became the format in which science would find new expression. Science slams do a number of things for academic institutions, most importantly coping with information overload by
2.2 Postmodern Experience-Making and the Arranger
An arranger is a result of the proceduralization of art, legitimizing ‘unfinished’ art, and open space for co-creation and affective experiencing in atmospherically charged creative zones. As my book is concerned with the organizations rather than their directors, I apply the concept of the arranger mainly to the organization. The arranger enters the art field on equal terms; it can perform a brokering relationship between artists and audiences. Impresario, arts administrator, and arranger are individual and collective roles (see also Peterson, 1986).
In my investigation, I see festivalization reflecting important dimensions of this postmodern condition of art, and the festival being ‘in charge’ of creating ‘show value’ (Böhme, 2017). To demonstrate this claim, I use Reckwitz’s dispositif as meta frame for analysis, synthesizing and extending where necessary. To look at the specific aesthetic sociality in the cinema field, the organizational reality of a particular historical version of experience-making still has to be broad into the framework of what Reckwitz calls structural principles (aemr).
The arranger is a postmodern artist-subject. Historically earlier, in Reckwitz’s account, the ‘performer’ is represented as a de-differentiated artist-subject. The performer has a synthesizing task: initiating atmospheres and assembling a ‘total work of art’ (the Gesamtkunstwerk) (Reckwitz, 2017b, pp. 71–73).13 The arranger results from further de-differentiation of the performer, emerging as structural role during the 1970s, reflecting the rising dogma of performativity and active co-creation, which demands that artists stage themselves.14 A contrast with earlier formulations of art-support roles—perhaps signs of emerging interest in arranger functions—such as Howard Becker’s ‘impresario’ (1982) and Richard Peterson’s ‘arts manager’ (1986) can help illuminate the specificity of the arranger. Becker’s impresario is an entrepreneurial role in the performing arts, typically an art dealer and gallery owner—an individual who “invests time, money, and energy in assembling materials and bringing them to potential audiences” (Becker, 1982, p. 119), but this role is mainly conceived of in business and technological terms and specific to the small art production. Peterson contrasts the impresario with the arts manager, emerging around the 1960s in tandem with the institutional complex that involves nonprofit organization, specialized funding organizations, tax legislation, and formal accountability as an instituted norm (1986, pp. 166–171). In my view, Reckwitz’s postmodern arranger is neither entrepreneur nor non-profit bureaucrat. He focuses this role on a specific part of the division of labor in the arts. The arranger, firstly, collaborates and competes with the artist while, secondly, also working to combining, modifying, and presenting the art and the artist to media and arts supporters. The arranger’s skillset is broader than that of the ‘performer’, as it ought to produce a ‘spatial, atmospheric, and intellectual pattern’ which should ‘spill over’ into the performance’s environment (Reckwitz, 2014b, pp. 115–122).
3 Festivalization of Media, Urban and Market Spheres
Interestingly, Reckwitz mentions eventization as typical of the postmodern creative city, where it competes with the more permanent art forms and is part of what he terms the process of ‘aesthetic and semiotic culturalization’ (2014b, p. 270). This process marks a well-established research area on the transformation of cities (Böhme & Engels-Schwarzpaul, 2017; Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020; Ho & Hutton, 2012; Sassen, 1991; Zukin, 1995). Reckwitz does not take up eventive forms when addressing opportunities for immaterial labor as previously formulated (Hardt & Negri, 2001; Lazzarato et al., 2017). Given all the work the arranger does, it is surprising that this creative subject is not reflected as structural component in Reckwitz’s aesthetic economy. Eventive forms can also be detected in the media/star system. Reckwitz essentially treats postmodern media as eventive.
Overall, the convertibility between different star types and creative types as transfers of creative competencies from and to other fields make the exploration of the media/star system interesting (Reckwitz, 2014b, p. 265). Stars, using media, stage themselves as surprises, working as ‘work star’ and performing their creativity (Reckwitz, 2014b, pp. 239–2452), which always involves the goods and services of the aesthetic economy. The media/star system highlights the significance of boundary transgression (via formats) possible in the ‘age of’ creative aestheticization. A cinema star, for example, can enlarge her status by adopting different creative formats in the sense presented by Kleon’s self-help bestseller. She can enlarge her aura as star who can also cook, be charitable with starving children, or be in the center of important societal topics
4 Festivalization and the aemr Model
Aestheticization, economization, mediatization, and rationalization—aemr—are ‘non-aesthetic principles’ (large social processes). emr can put limits around aestheticization when dominating, such as for example in times of modernity’s affect deficiency or in particular pockets of industrial production where aestheticization has not placed its hold (my Chapter 4 elaborates this point). Economization denotes development according to historically specific market and capital models; mediatization denotes the diffusion of media-technological formats; and rationalization the spread of instrumental-rational behavioral models. Reckwitz argues homological relationships for A—M and A—E. For A—R, he argues that these can only be complementary phenomena. Reckwitz leaves undefined E—R, E—M, and M—R. In the following, I try to ‘insert’ the arranger in the aemr scheme.
A—E refers to an emerging structural homology of the social form of the market and the aesthetic sociality identified for postmodern art fields. What they have in common, according to Reckwitz, is that they place central emphasis on objects presented to an interested audience the attention of which they seek. In the creativity dispositif, marketization and aesthetic sociality are coupled and supportive of each other, as market objects become primarily aesthetic objects and are subjected to aesthetic innovation, or the manufacturing of surprises. Modern markets contribute to the proliferation of aesthetic sociality. Retailers such as the well-known ikea, for example, strategically resource from the postmodern art field to provide ‘experience offers’ (Schulze, 1992); commercial cinema markets proliferate contemporary art produced as experience and surprise goods. Both markets and art spaces exhibit, and both provide for suggestive experimentations that motivate consumers to engage in
A—M, too, denotes a structural homology. Mediatization “delivers the technical means for a sequential production of bundles of signs—i.e., for texts, images, etc. over times” (Reckwitz, 2017b, p. 217), which promise novelty in form of synchronic and diachronic occurrences, thereby defining what becomes the past. While media novelties can be purely cognitive, the A—M homology describes the shift from cognition or information-centered communication to affective-sensual experience, such as illustrated for the ‘science slam’ in education news. A heightened surprise format is the so-called ‘breaking news’. Media practically stimulate the interest in aesthetic events and also provide outputs that are consumed primarily as aesthetic experiences.
A—R is argued to be a ‘structurally incommensurable’ relation, simply because, for all that’s been outlined in this regard, aesthetic practices are opposite of ‘rules and purposes’. The latter marginalize sensuality, having no use for audience and novelty. Reckwitz also maintains that the A—R antagonism “begins to break down in the creativity dispositif”: “Rational purposive formats develop which attempt to create the systematic preconditions for aesthetic labor and aesthetic experiences” (Reckwitz, 2017b, p. 218). This ‘aesthetic rationalization’ is presented as A—R’s ‘reciprocal support’, generating institutional stabilization of the aesthetic, while the aesthetic provides a new motivational force for the making of more formal structure (2017b, p. 219).
As mentioned, Reckwitz suppresses arguments for E—M, M—R, and E—R in his account. To start with the last, E—R seems to be met by Weber’s theory of capitalist markets (‘Versachlichung’). Similarly, M—R may be argued to capture ‘organized modernity’ and standardized news as part of standardized culture. E—M expresses a shared similarity in the competition for attention. Festivalization then provides for the investigation of processes that go beyond these unaffected social forms and relationships.
‘Aesthetic rationalization’ appears to capture well the location of the arts-nonprofit organization. Nonprofits are rationalized social forms of collective arts activity and formal bureaucracies, while at the same time providing a ‘vessel’ and formats for the type of creativity elaborated by Reckwitz as profoundly postmodern. In this compelling ‘sequel’ to the theory of the creativity dispositif
This is why in extension of the creativity dispositif theory, the logic of philanthropy at the heart of this dispositif must be shown in this study of ‘festivalization’. Film festival research presented in Chapter 1 has only asserted the marketization of the festival (A—E) and a specific version of A—R, i.e., ‘managerialization’ (including but not theorized the ‘professionalization’ of the rather informally or, in some of the organizational cases, market-sanctioned role of the festival curator).
Overall, I will argue that philanthropy (as an order of worth in the perspective of a sociology of conventions, see Chapters 10–13) provides a major stimulus for the stabilization of late-modern creativity presented by Reckwitz as hegemonic dispositif. Its logic catalyzes the social construction of individual and collective positivity, and the practices of philanthropy grounded in its peculiar logic of wealth redistribution and societal progress ideology arguably blend with the aesthetic sociality described by Reckwitz, taking precise strategic form in the A—R relationship, attaching itself to the media/star system, which provides the space for inter-field elite connections and resource for legitimacy claims, as well as the economy for creative innovation, entrepreneurialism, and formats of market competition. To conclude, a theory of the culture of creativity needs to be incorporating the historical process of the rationalization of charity (Hwang & Powell, 2009), adding also a working conception of the grants-economic relationship which is the resource of A—R in the case of festivalization.
The creativity dispositif can rely on particular affect structures, especially those developed in discourses of contemporary civil society (see Chapters 11 and 13), therefore marking potentially boundary transgression. One key observation of late-modernity is that the grants economy is an enlarging area of economic activities and that economic and cultural policy are initiators of grants-economic processes. For this, Reckwitz provides no description, possibly
According to Foucault, the dispositif is a ‘heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’ (Foucault & Gordon, 1980).
Affects are evolved survival mechanisms. Psychology treats emotions as more complex and socialized (see also Chapter 11).
Reckwitz also rejects the older label of ‘cognitive capitalism’ (see on the concept Moulier-Boutang, 2012) because ‘symbol production’ has not included affect.
Neither Reckwitz nor Fabian Heubel provide an account for how ‘aesthetic rationality’ inserts itself into the realm of instrumental rationality. Heubel merely cites, as condition for interpenetration (I borrow this term from Talcott Parsons (cf. Beckert, 2006a)), aesthetic rationality’s capacity to intensify social phenomena. I argue in Part 4 that this intensification is legitimized by the diffusion of the culture of philanthropy and its institutionalization as alternative to the welfare state.
A reader familiar with Gerhard Schulze’s work on the experience society will realize quickly that Schulze’s milieu of ‘self-realization’ is essentially the creative class’s social space. Reckwitz, however, does not restrict his dispositif theory to a particular class, even if seeing the creative class (Florida, 2002) at its core. Reckwitz and Schulze are d’accord, however, where they think of this particular historical creativity as boundary-transgressing because Schulze records the milieu’s expansion as starting in the 1990s, concluding that it cannot be called a coherent group any longer. In a reprint of 2005, he maintains maturation of the self-realization milieu (Schulze, 1992, p. 493), which can be read as congruent with Reckwitz’s hegemony assertion.
Reckwitz and Schulze, each providing seminal comprehensive general theory on the creative eocnomy and its society, reject Bourdieu’s high/low-semantic of an art field. For Schulze, this value order is still relevant to the ‘Niveaumilieu’, its social groups using high-art to distinguish themselves (1992, pp. 142–150). A study about Norwegian students demonstrates that the relationship between ‘high class’ and ‘high-brow culture’ still exists among young people, but performs more as a strategy to command social recognition rather than evidencing a strong belief in superior types of art (Gripsrud et al., 2011).
In the theory of the enrichment economy, the incorporation of permanent collection and eventive performance format represents an intersection between what its authors call the ‘collection form’ and the ‘trend form’ (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020).
Aesthetic-philosophical discourses become the material for the psychological and pedagogical models of the creative self in the 1950s. The bohème serves as inspiration for the life-stylizations of several social groups of the 1960s’ counter culture and more recent generations.
This perspective resonates with the conception of ‘risk society’ and statistical knowledge on the dynamics common to the postmodern economy (e.g., Adam et al., 2000; De Vany, 2004; Menger, 1991; Taleb & Ochman, 2019).
In the original German version: “Damit es [das Dispositif—a.v.] sozial angenommen wird und sich durchsetzt, ist neben reinen Herrschaftseffekten entscheidend, dass es ein kulturelles Imaginäres aufspannt und die Teilnahmen an ihm Faszination und Befriedigung, das heisst einen dauerhaften affektiven Reiz, verspricht” (Reckwitz, 2014b, p. 51). This thought resonates with the general ‘historical spirit’ idea developed by Boltanski and Chiapello, who formulate the spirit in terms of commitment.
The Affective Turn captures the situation of “heightened interest in the non-verbal, non-conscious dimensions of experience” as “a re-engagement with sensation, memory, perception, attention and listening” (Blackman & Venn, 2010).
Later, Reckwitz (2020) associates today’s secluded artist idiosyncrasy, e.g., the particular disposition of so-called ‘nerds’, which is socially legitimate only when idiosyncrasy serves to display singularity. This description finds it’s a plausible empirical representation in the social ascent of the software engineer to the peak-role of creative entrepreneurship (see also Chapter 4).
The goal of Gesamtkunstwerk is attributed to Richard Wagner and the famous Bayreuth music festival (Fischer-Lichte, 2010); for an example in exhibition architecture and on Bruno Taut see (Gutschow, 2006).
A novelist might be validated as creative subject by her peers, but a traveling book presentation which performs the book and its creator has higher legitimacy and, in fact, commercial use value. This seems to suggest anti-contemplative ideology, which Reckwitz rarely discusses. I suggest that anti-intellectualism should be investigated as immanent to the postmodern art field rather than, as suggested by many scholars, as a destructive influence solely attributable to market forces.