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What Did the Savage Detectives Find? 253 WHAT DID THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES FIND? 253 WHAT DID THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES FIND? Gabriele Guercio and Christopher S. Wood oday the concept of creativity has an unprecedented reach, both within and beyond the artistic sphere. Definitions of the creative have become inextricable from definitions of who we are or who we Tare becoming. Creativity no longer designates a special capacity detached from everyday routine. For many people it is the key to getting along in the world, even surviving. Creativity reveals itself as an essential human asset, both symbolically and economically, on the levels both of the individual and of the species. Our aim is to assess the advantages and the predicaments of a state in which everything and everyone is creative. We have associated this essay with the novel The Savage Detectives (1998; English translation 2007) by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), imagining our own in- quiry as an extension of the quest of that book’s protagonists. This allows us to condense our questions into a single formula, the question that Bolaño left unanswered, or encrypted, in his novel. We begin by suggesting that the contemporary detachment of creativity from any particular expertise, which we characterize as “generic creativity,” raises again the question of the ontology of creativity. For the disorienting aspects of the contemporary situation, whereby creativity loses its anchorage in any particular subject or object, remind us that if creativity has in the past been understood as a skillful or technological manipulation of the given, it has also been understood as an adding to reality, generating a novum that 254 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 59 WHAT DID THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES FIND? 255 could not have been foreseen. It was this underivability of the product that domain transcending nature, including human nature, creativity can easily gave poetry and art their rarefied quality. be naturalized. It can be regarded as a capacity allied with the species’s inher- In order to test the hypothesis that contemporary generic creativity might ent tendency to adjust itself inventively to the environment. Such a dynamic reveal something valuable about the relation of creativity to being, we con- procedure may sustain scientific research as well as artistic practice.5 Inquiries sider the place of poetry in modern life, which is the subject of Bolaño’s into the mechanisms of creativity thus offer a way of breaking disciplin- novel as well as of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963), one of the key models ary boundaries and of discovering a non-specialized ground shared by epis- for Bolaño. Both books recognize a binarism between what we call “roman- temology and aesthetics. It is equally noteworthy that creativity underpins tic” and “classical” conceptions of creativity: on the one hand, an adding to the dialogue among cognitive sciences, philosophical phenomenology, and the world, and on the other hand, a recombination of the already at hand. Buddhist meditative psychology, in which the creative interplay of body and This traditional way of framing the question would seem to be suspended by mind is described as embodied experience and as a co-origination of things the contemporary concept of generic creativity, which resembles an undis- and persons through ungrounded co-dependency.6 ciplined version of romantic creativity. Poetry, the anachronistic pursuit of The renewed interest in creativity suggests a growing awareness that hu- Bolaño’s modern urban protagonists, symbolized in the novel an attempt to man beings adapt their capacities to invent, make, and perform to a variety understand the nature of creativity in terms other than those offered by the of specialized activities. For some time now the creative disciplines per se— romantic and classical models. The detectives’ path led to a wordless picto- ranging from crafts to all the practices that in the eighteenth century were gram which appeared to satisfy them, although they never say why. We will isolated and exalted as the beaux-arts, namely, painting, sculpture, poetry, try to interpret the pictogram. music, architecture, and gardening—have been less concerned with their own distinctiveness and self-definition. We can register a clear retreat from the AMBIVALENCE rarefied, even elitist, idea of creativity that in the West has sustained claims he term “creativity” has recently resurfaced in a range of discursive for the uniqueness and originality of artistic work from Dante to Heidegger. contexts. Creativity provided the theme of the XX German Philo- Instead, a view of creativity as a pervasive and limitless force has emerged, sophical Congress in 2005.1 Psychologists and linguists have succeed- one that may bear indifferently on artistic and non-artistic dimensions. Ted in demonstrating the interdisciplinary applications of the concept.2 The But the concept of creativity may have overcome one form of mistrust— theme of creativity plays a key role in political theories arguing for the rejec- suspicion of elitism—only to be delivered to another. For the new concept of tion of alienating modes of labor in capitalist society via the autonomization creativity has also become a facile, even cynical, slogan in corporate and en- of creative forces and the realization of alternative forms of life.3 In the early trepreneurial culture.7 Job advertisements in the back of the weekly magazine 2000s the term was used to name a socioeconomic category of workers, a The Economist routinely list “creativity” as a desirable quality in an applicant. “creative class” amounting to about thirty percent of the U.S. workforce and Creativity sells, as the recent flowering of so-called creative industries attests; including a wide range of occupations (e.g. science, engineering, education, industries, namely, that seek to maximize the inventiveness of producers and computer programming, research), with arts, design, and media.4 Unlike the consumers: cinema, television, communications technology, fashion, video modern notion of spiritual freedom, which seems to trust in the reality of a games, advertising.8 The current interest in creativity might well be viewed against the back- 1 Kreativität. XX. Deutscher Kongress für Philosophie (26-30 September, 2005), edited by Günter Abel (Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU, 2005). 5 As Paolo Virno has indicated, this “naturalization” was one of the key aspects of Emilio Garroni’s 2 The Nature of Creativity: Contemporary Psychological Perspectives, edited by Robert J. Sternberg insightful essay (1978) on creativity. See Garroni, Creatività (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2010), and (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); The Origins of Creativity, edited Virno’s preface “Per una storia naturale della creatività,” ibid., pp. 9-37. by Karl H. Pfenninger and Valerie R. Shubik (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Margaret 6 Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleonor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science A. Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (1990; London and New York: Routledge, and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1991); Francisco Varela and 2005). See also Stefano Bartezzaghi, L’Elmo di Don Chisciotte: Contro la Mitologia della Creatività Jonathan Shear, eds., The View From Within. First Person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness (Bari: Laterza, 2009). (Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 1999); Natalie Depraz, Francisco J. Varela, and Pierre Vermersch, 3 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., and Lon- eds., On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Ben- don, 2000); Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (2002), trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James jamins Publishing Company, 2003). Cascaito, and Andrea Casson, foreword by Sylvère Lotringer (Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e), 7 Kreativität ohne Fesseln: über das Neue in Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Kultur, ed. Gerhart v. Grae- 2004); Maurizio Lazzarato, Les Révolutions du Capitalisme (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en venitz and Jürgen Mittelstrass (Konstanz: UVK Universitätsverlag, 2008). Andreas Reckwitz, Die rond, 2004). Erfindung der Kreativität: Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2012). 4 See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Com- 8 John Hartley, ed., Creative Industries (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005); Henry Jenkins, Convergence munity and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006); 256 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 59 WHAT DID THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES FIND? 257 ground of broader transformations affecting the realm of labor. The last two against the status quo, hoping that a recovery of the lost anthropological decades especially have witnessed an increasing recruitment of the psycho- matrix of art might mark out a third way between communism and capital- physical energies of individuals to the cause of capitalism as demanded in its ism, Koons indicates that he is happy with the way things are. In appealing post-Fordist and multinational phase. The result is that today one is expected to the common audience’s preferences, he not only endorses an economy that not so much to develop a specific expertise or follow a vocation, but rather commercializes almost every aspect of human life, but also overtly presents to cultivate and market a creative flexibility.
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